CHAPTER V
The Signal
The stars were glittering rayed circles of colored fire in the night sky. Miller lay staring for what seemed a long while, wondering vaguely what had wakened him. The wall before his bed was clear glass through which the night sky seemed to look in at him with its countless silver eyes. He had never seen the stars before, he knew now.
With his other eyes, they had been only dots of brilliance, without pattern. Now he could see that there was indeed a pattern to their arrangement—one too vast for even his augmented mind to grasp but something he could recognize as being there, even though it lay outside the range of human understanding.
He could see colors change and glitter in the discs of light that had been only points without dimension to his old sight. He could even make out dimly the shapes of continents on one or two of the planets. And there was a strange, distant, ringing music, almost inaudible, circling through the dark vault above.
He knew now that it was no legend which told of the music of the spheres and the stars that sang together. Light-waves and sound-waves blended into a melody that was neither one nor the other, neither sight nor sound, but a beautiful medley of both.
“Men in the old days must have heard it,” he thought to himself, half-asleep. “Maybe in ancient times they were still close enough to—this state—to catch the echoes of the old music. . . .”
Deep in the center of his drowsing mind a thought stirred that was not his own. “Miller, Miller, are you awake?”
He framed the answer with an eerie feeling of double-mindedness. “Yes, Llesi. What is it?”
“I want to talk to you. I’ve gathered enough strength now to last me awhile. What’s been happening? Are you safe?”
Miller let a ripple of amusement run through his mind. “Thanks to you. Can you tell from my thoughts that I didn’t know what I was bringing into your castle? I didn’t mean to attack you.”
“I believe that—with reservations. Does Orelle?”
“She thought I was Brann. She may still think so though I hope I’ve convinced her.”
“I can’t read your mind. But I must trust you—no more than I can avoid! Get up, Miller, and look toward Brann’s castle. I have a feeling of danger. I think that was what roused me. Something evil is coming our way.”
Conscious of a slight chill at the gravity with which Llesi spoke, Miller rose. The floor was ineffably soft to his bare feet. He stepped out into the little glass bay that formed one side of the room. From there he could look down over the valley he had traversed that day. Far off lights glimmered at the height of a sheer cliff—Brann’s castle.
“Why—I can see in the dark!” he exclaimed in surprise, staring out at the soft, dim landscape that seemed to be lit by a soil of invisible starshine so that details were delicately visible as they had never been before.
“Yes, yes,” Llesi’s mental voice said impatiently. “Turn your eyes to the left—I want to see that wall of the valley. There—now right. . . .”
The commands, couched in mental terms that took only a flashing fraction of the time words would have taken were almost like reflex commands from Miller’s own brain.
“I think you’d better dress and go down to the Time Pool,” Llesi said at last. Miller could feel the profound uneasiness stirring in the disembodied mind that his own brain housed. “Hurry. There’s no guessing what unnatural thing Brann may have shaped to attack us. He wants you, Miller. Your coming brought our war to a climax and I know now he won’t stop until he gets you—or dies. It depends on you and me which thing happens.”
There was a guard at Miller’s door—or the glass wall that melted like a door when he approached it. Llesi’s mental voice spoke and the guard nodded and followed down the long sloping ramp of the glass castle, through great, dim, echoing rooms, along corridors behind which the people of Orelle’s dwelling slept.
They came out at last into a garden in the heart of the castle. Circled by glass walls, it lay dim and fragrant around the broad shallow pool in its center. Starlight shimmered in changing patterns on the water that rippled slightly in the wind.
Miller found himself glancing up toward the wall-top without being sure whether the impulse was his own or Llesi’s. In a moment he knew, for there was a whispering rush and in obedience to some command from his own brain—and from Llesi’s—a domed roof of glass moved across the garden, closing it in.
Now the starlight fell in prismed rays through the dome. It struck the pool in somehow focused patterns and the water seemed to respond to that unimaginably light pressure.
Circles formed where the rays struck, formed and spread outward in interlocking rings that seemed to gather momentum instead of losing it, so that they were seething together in a very short time, breaking over one another in tiny waves, tossing up bubbles and foam. The pool boiled in the cool starlight.
And among the boiling rings there were reflections. Pictures moved chaotically through one another, so rapidly and so bewilderingly that Miller grew dizzy as he watched. Once he thought he saw Tsi’s face with the rainbow hair disordered, streaming in the wind.
Once he had a glimpse of himself, seen confusingly from the back, struggling against something that seemed to tower and stoop above him but the vision rolled under again before he could focus on it and the faces of strangers floated among bubbles to replace it.
“Is it real?” he asked Llesi inaudibly. “Is this the future?”
There was an impatient movement in his own mind. Llesi, who had been studying the pictures in the profoundest silence, said, “No—yes—partly. These are the likeliest futures. No one understands fully, but the theory is that somewhere in hyperspace all possible futures work themselves out from any given point.
“And the light-rays—the pictures of all that happens—move on out into space endlessly. When the glass dome is closed starlight, falling through the moving rays, projects these pictures back into the pool for anyone to read who knows how. Men from time everlasting have tried to read the future in the stars but you can see from this how difficult it is and how unreliable even a trained mind can be when it has only this to work from.
“One decision may alter all probable futures. And those are unstable, shifting and changing—no man can know the future with any certainty. But it’s possible to see dangers, sometimes, and prepare for them—though that may mean facing a worse peril later on. Wait—”
In the pool a ripple took form at the impact of a reflection and began to spread. It showed the picture of a shifting, cloudy mass moving against the translucent water—but moving with a directive purpose, Miller thought. The background took form. He saw himself and Orelle in miniature with the cloud no longer shifting but swooping purposively above them.
Another ripple collided violently with the first and the picture vanished in a burst of bubbles. But it took shape again in the next moment, though different now, with a shift in background. The ripples raced over that image and washed it out with another, like a not-quite-identical copy. Then he saw the castle in which he stood and it was, he thought, collapsing into ruins.
That changed. He saw himself in tiny reflections, facing Tsi— And then a ripple washed across the pool in which he saw his own face and Slade’s and there was something inexplicably terrible about both.
Shaken, he asked Llesi a mental question. Llesi answered him briefly.
“If part of what you just saw happens, other parts can’t happen. But you saw that cloudy pillar? It appeared too often against too many backgrounds to be very far off in space or time. Brann is sending a warrior against us. Not a human warrior. I think we can expect the cloudy thing we saw quite soon, in one or another of the versions we’ve been watching.”
“But what is it?”
“I don’t know. Something dangerous—that much you can be sure of. I think we can defeat it, once we discover what it is. So far we’ve always been able to defeat Brann’s warriors, no matter what form they had.”
“So far?” Miller asked. “And then someday—what?”
Mentally Llesi shrugged. “Who knows? I, who read the future, realize better than most men that I have no way of guessing what is to come. I can see the possibilities here in the pool, I can foresee the worst dangers and prepare against them—but beyond that I can’t go. No. I don’t know what the outcome will be between Brann and me.”
Miller said with abrupt decision, “You’ve looked too long in the Time Pool! You’ve been depending on what you see there to tell you what to do. Why not take the future into your own hands?”
There was a curious stillness in his brain at that, as if Llesi were suddenly wary and watchful. Finally the voice that shared his mind spoke cautiously.
“What do you suggest?”
“Someday, if I understand you, Brann may succeed at last in creating a kind of warrior you can’t overcome. I saw this castle falling in one of those pictures in the pool, so I know it’s possible—no, even probable, that this thing he’s sending, or maybe the one after it, will be the one to destroy you. It that right?”
Still caution and distrust ruled Llesi’s mind, but there was reluctant interest in the mental voice that said, “Go on. What are you thinking about?”
“Brann wants one thing—the Power. Is that right?”
“The Power and yourself, now. Yes,” Llesi answered.
“So he’ll keep on attacking until he gets one or both. Why haven’t you attacked him first?”
“Do you think we haven’t tried? Brann’s castle is invulnerable. We’ve failed and failed and failed again to force any entry by any means we know. But Brann’s failed, too, against us. It’s stalemate.”
“It needn’t be. I have an idea.” Miller hesitated. “I won’t tell you now. You wouldn’t accept it. Later on, if things go wrong, maybe you’ll be willing to listen. Maybe—”
From across the Time Pool, in the dimness of the garden, Orelle’s mental voice said clearly, “Don’t go on, Miller. Or are you really Brann?”
Miller had the curious sensation in his brain that both he and Llesi had actually moved in the center of his skull, as he spun toward the dark tree where she stood watching.
“How long have you been here, child?” Llesi said.
“Long enough. I saw the cloudy thing coming in the Pool. I know what we’ve got to face—but not with treachery to make it even worse than it is. Oh, Llesi, won’t you let me kill him?”
“Not yet,” Llesi said with a deadly sort of practicality. “Not yet, because you need me in the fight, and I’m helpless without this man. Nor am I wholly sure he can’t be trusted, Orelle.”
“I heard what he was trying to suggest. Something treacherous—some way to help Brann win at last. Llesi, I’m afraid! This isn’t safe. I—”
A flash of soundless white light without warning illumined the garden and the whole castle around it, so that every figure stood out in abrupt silhouette against the whiteness. As suddenly as it came, it went out, leaving momentary blindness behind it.
Orelle caught her breath and said, “The signal! Llesi—hurry! Whatever it is, it must be almost here!”