The Star Virus

XI

At one galactic diameter, the sight permitted to few blazed across the sky in a torrent of light.

The straggling wheel of Thiswhirl, seen end-on at only a small angle, was blinding, and gave such an impression of immensity that the mind simply gave up trying to encompass it. On the other side, the spiral majesty of Andromeda floated like a smaller balance wheel. Otherwise, the blackness was dotted only with smudges of light, the distant galaxies, or with occasional hard points that were extragalactic stars.

Whatever had transpired in the struggle of microbes in the Hub of Thiswhirl was now in the past. Centuries in the past, and Rodrone had ceased to think about it. The vision of extragalactic space interested him much more.

The Stator had made good time. Its silent, almost mystic drive unit—which Rodrone now learned not only involved no reaction mass but also involved no expenditure of energy —was bearing them steadily towards the space-time barrier surrounding the galaxy, and beyond which they knew they could not go.

At times all the deadliners, Jermy, Feeldonet, Krat, Pim, Jublow and the others, came together to the control gallery to see Rodrone, but mostly they wandered listlessly through the cold, dismal ship, amusing themselves with childish games. For the duration of the voyage Rodrone had forbidden them to tamper with the nuclear reactor supplying power to the Stator, thus spoiling their favorite pastime, but they obeyed with less grumbling than he had anticipated.

A signal beeped. Feeldonet came through from the drive room.

“We must be getting close to the Barrier, Captain.”

“How do you know?”

“The drive is behaving a little peculiarly.”

This was interesting. Normally the proximity of the Barrier would show first of all on the ranging instruments, in that the distance traveled would not correspond to the drive force expended. So far, the range finder showed little discrepancy.

“Our drive would be unusually sensitive to space-time anomalies, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s true, Captain.”

“Hmm.” The first ships to attempt to cross to Andromeda had bravely forged their way ahead past the point of no return and finally had disintegrated. More cautious followers had turned back when danger threatened before their fuel reserves ran out.

“Keep on going into the Barrier,” he ordered. “Don’t stop until I tell you.”

“Sure thing, Captain.” Feeldonet seemed pleased at the prospect. Perhaps he was becoming proud of the Stator’s unusual engine and wanted to test it to the full. Or perhaps it was the idea of disintegration that attracted him…

Rodrone cut the connection. Briefly he glanced over the chilly control gallery at the star-display which now showed Thiswhirl and Andromeda together like twin Catherine wheels, and at the mattress and heap of rags in the corner where once Gael Shone—and now he—slept. He had ordered Feeldonet to continue on regardless to see whether the drive would produce any new surprise, but if it came to it, well, disintegration in the wall surrounding the world—why not? Where, he wondered, would that leave the lens?

Already he had guessed one fact: that the galactic barrier and the force-field lining the rim of the lens were related phenomena. What, he wondered, was the reason for them both? Was it to guard the galaxy from intrusion, to make sure that events within it developed without interference from outside?

He gave Feeldonet orders to inform him of any changes, and waited.

Days passed. Rodrone gave himself up to watching the lens. It had been hard to put a finger on the quality of its stories since they left Thiswhirl. If anything they became wilder, more extravagant, and many of them he failed to comprehend altogether. Some of them seemed purely abstract, like an exercise in mathematics. Could this be the result of the defeat of the Streall?

But one story followed its course with predictable inevitability. The monk and his army continued to ravage the now defenseless city. Tower after tower crashed amid clouds of dust and nibble. The inhabitants—not all of them human—were killed, raped, driven from the city and on to the plain to survive as best they could. In the end, not one wall was left standing. The monk, climbing to the top of the highest heap of rubble, stood there, laughing and laughing.

The black shadow beneath his cowl swelled into close-up, larger, larger, until it occupied all of one half of the lens. Disquietingly, all other pictures in the lens faded out. Then, with an energetic movement, the monk threw back his cowl to reveal his face. The face was Rodrone’s own.

Involuntarily he jumped to his feet, flinging back the chair on which he sat. Deep down, he had always known that this was so, that the story of the monk was spinning out to him his own story. With a feeling of horror he remembered how it had forecast his betrayal of friends, his unleashing of destruction on a realm of peace and order. The lens itself, he realized with a start, was symbolized by the silver trumpet. Always its message had been in symbols and homologue, so that he could read its message if he really wanted to, but not if he wanted to deceive himself.

But could he have done anything differently, he asked himself, staring as if in a mirror at his sullen visage. Was the lens rebuking, him? Did it blame him?

The communicator bleeped. “Chief,” came Feeldonet’s voice, “something’s happening!”

“What?”

“I don’t know. We’ve stopped!”

“Stopped? Don’t be crazy! How can we stop?” He glanced down at the lens. It was then that the first impossible transformation took place. One instant he was standing in the control gallery looking down at the lens on the floor. Then everything was reversed. The lens had become about a mile across. He, the control gallery, everything was inside the lens, which contained them all as if they were frozen into an iceberg.

“The lens!” Rodrone howled wildly, feeling his sanity slipping. “The lens!”

Then just as suddenly things were back to normal again. “Chief, don’t you see?” Feeldonet’s voice resumed. “The lens is in resonance with the galaxy’s field. We’re trying to remove it from that field—there’s no telling what will happen!”

“No telling what will happen,” Rodrone repeated. The words seemed to turn into solid objects and hang thickly in the air before him. NO TELLING WHAT WILL HAPPEN. NOOO TELLING WHA-A-AT WILL HAP-PEN.

NOOO TEELLING WHA-A-A-A…

Rodrone, Jermy, Pim, Krat, Feeldonet and an indistinct gathering were standing in a corridor that was apparently endless in both directions. Rodrone remembered a rushing sensation, a feeling of having scooted an impossible distance; but now everything was quiet.

“Are you in this trip?” said Jermy to Rodrone.

“Get out of my dream,” groaned Krat.

“It’s no dream,” Rodrone told him. “This is for real.”

There was no opportunity for further exchanges. The corridor alternately telescoped and elongated with bewildering speed, separating them as it did so. It seemed to be shuffling them like a pack of cards. Rodrone glimpsed his companions strung out at intervals in the distance. Then he saw them no more. He was being rushed forward. The corridor vanished. He was being impelled across an infinite space.

With that, he was plunged into a nightmare of cosmic proportions, peopled by giant intelligences that merely to sense struck terror into his soul. It was not through malevolence that they were terrifying; their dreadfulness came through their very neutrality, their indifference to the fate of any conscious being. Rodrone felt as if hot pokers of fear plunged into his being as he whipped past their presence like a fly.

But out of this nameless, formless realm there gradually emerged images. Rodrone saw the superintelligent beings who had made the lens.

From this point on he realized that the image-forming capacities of the human mind were inadequate to the task of perceiving what was presented to him. His mind’s interpretation was perforce partly symbolic, analogous. He continued to be carried through a vast, formless space, as if on a ride on a cosmic carousel. The makers of the lens appeared to him as vast figures like the pictures from ancient tombs of gods and heroes. Their faces were not human; yet they were not alien. They were merely detached, magnificent, evoking feelings of worship.

And they danced. A ritualistic, stiff dance. Sometimes the light that flashed from their adornments would have filled a million galaxies; sometimes they would all have fitted into the space of an atom. In this realm, it seemed, there was no such thing as relative size, no large or small. The dancing ceased, and Rodrone became aware that the beings were engaging in certain operations, as it were carrying out experiments on a vast workbench. Energies and odors drifted up from the bench, filling the universe with mind-blowing perfumes. Then one of the beings lifted up what looked like a giant horn, and tipped it. From the mouth of the horn spilled millions upon millions of inhabited worlds!

The carousel upon which Rodrone rode spun faster until everything was blurred. When he could see again, it was to perceive a realm of desolation. The stupendous experiments were over; the makers had vanished.

Instinctively, he understood. The makers of the lens did not create the sidereal universe which was Rodrone’s universe, but they had meddled with it, experimenting with it as human scientists might experiment with inanimate matter. Now the makers were dead; they had been destroyed billions upon billions of years ago, but their stupendous experiments still continued blindly, meaninglessly, and the lens, an instrument of one of those experiments, had somehow found its way into the realm of space-time. Dizzyingly the imaginary carousel speeded up. Automatically Rodrone reached out for something to hang on to, but there was nothing—then his hand grabbed at something. He was holding the handle of a cupboard fitted near the control desk in the Stator’s control gallery. Everything came abruptly back into focus: the chilly gallery, the broken hum of outworn scanner equipment. The ride on the cosmic carousel was over. Rodrone’s knees felt weak and he pulled a stool under him. His experience had been no hallucination, no dream. It had possessed the texture of reality, the undeniable clarity of something that actually existed. He looked around at the lens, wondering at the instrument that could do such a thing to him; but even as he looked, the lens was gone, crumbling into a fine white powder. With a cry he fell to his knees and scooped up a handful of it. It was so fine that it barely touched him, like something halfway between water and air. And even as he touched it, the powder all dissolved, like candy floss in the mouth.

For some moments he knelt there, staring at the empty space where the lens had been. Suddenly the voices of the Stator’s crew came crackling over the communicator, echoing from different parts of the ship.

“Get a load of that!” Jermy was saying intensely and eagerly. “That’s a kick I’ll repeat any time!”

Rodrone guessed that it was the horror of it all that appealed to Jermy. Not all the deadliners had enjoyed their trip as much. Jublow was moaning painfully. Others argued in tight, frightened voices.

A far different, more collected response came from Feeldonet.

“Captain! The Barrier is down!”

“What did you say?” Rodrone snapped.

“There’s nothing holding us back any more. It shows up on the drive. We’re in free space, symmetrical in all directions—we can go as far as we like!”

It took some time for the fact to sink in. But it was a logical outcome: with the dissolution of the lens, the hermetic seal around Thiswhirl was gone too.

“Did you hear that, you trash?” Rodrone shouted exultantly. “Do you know where we’re going? Andromeda! Andromeda!”

A stunned silence followed his words. Jermy croaked, “Is it true, boss?”

“Damn you all for scum, of course it’s true!”

“Andromeda!” Jermy echoed disbelievingly.

Infectiously the others took up the cry, echoing it all around the Stator’s iron galleries.

“ANDROMEDA! ANDROMEDA!”

With a sourness he could not quite dispel, Rodrone wondered whether it was true after all that mankind was the dangerous “star virus” that the Streall believed it to be. If so, then the damage was done and it was irreparable, for all constraints on man’s actions had now been removed. The virus was about to spread to other bodies.

Silently the Stator put herself in motion to cross the immense sea between the galaxies.