The power was starting to ebb. If he faltered now, the rock would rematerialize with all the crushing force that bound its particles together. Gathering his remaining strength, he passed his hand slowly sideways, causing the rock to part before and reconstitute itself behind, flowing over him as if it were water, until his hand emerged unscathed from the other side of the pillar. The glow flickered and died. Exhausted but ecstatic, Thrax stood while Shingen-Hu placed across his shoulder a sash bearing the emblem of the purple spiral. He then moved to take his place among the new adepts on one side of the circle.
Later, when the rites were over, the new adepts sat facing the Master across a hearth of stones in which a fire had been lit. From the night sky above, Nieru looked down upon his own. A few filaments of currents traced their lines toward it—Thrax had learned to see them by now. In earlier times, the longer-established monks said, to the eyes of an adept the entire vista of the skies had writhed and twisted in fantastic patterns of glowing currents.
"What shall we find in Hyperia?" one of the novices asked the Master. Shingen-Hu had seen the visions borne by the currents.
"It will happen suddenly," Shingen-Hu answered. "You will emerge as a new being, a being born to the ways of Hyperia. All will be new and strange."
"Is it true that madness lurks to afflict the unwary?" another asked.
"There are risks. You will be tested. The being which thou art must subdue the being which thou strivest to become. Madness indeed lies in wait for those who ride up on the currents, but whose training is not complete. Beware those of divided minds, whom the conflict rages within. Seek strength from Nieru when troubles assail."
"What?" Thrax queried. "Does Nieru exist, then, even in the world beyond Waroth, also?"
"Seek his sign of the purple spiral," Shingen-Hu replied. "For that shall be the sign under which his followers gather. Know then that these are thy kind, and let that be the source of thy strength."
"And will they teach us of the Hyperian magic?" the next asked.
"Hyperia will teach you its own magic."
"Magical laws?" Thrax said. "Artifacts that repeat? Objects that spin?"
"Artifacts beyond your wildest imaginings," the Master answered.
"Everywhere? So does Hyperian magic extend over the whole world?"
"The whole world . . . and places far beyond, and across the voids between. Hyperians journey among many, magical worlds."
Ayultha, the leader of the Jevlenese cult that called itself the Spiral of Awakening and used the device of a purple spiral as its emblem, had come to Shiban. It was the same Ayultha who had led the demonstration in the city of Barusi on the southern continent, which had led to Garuth's calling Hunt.
The SoA had been founded over two hundred years previously by a woman called Sykha, a hitherto unheard-of office clerk who had undergone an abrupt personality change. The sect's basic creed was an involved doctrine of reincarnation, which held that the individual developed through a series of "phases" of existence on successively higher planes, each one representing a step farther along a transition that progressed away from the purely material and mechanistic, and toward the spiritual and willful. The series of lives experienced in this universe, or plane, therefore added up to merely the preparation that was necessary to proceed to the next phase. Everybody had thus lived in other, lower phases in other forms before emerging into the realm of existence as presently perceived, and after a number of cycles at the human level, which could vary and depended on how diligently the SoA's teachings were attended to and practiced, they would go on to enter higher ones. The early theoreticians of the movement had given it all a scientific-sounding basis by tying it in to the transitions of physical particles between h-space and normal space as described by the physics of the Thuriens.
The initial appearance of Ayultha to the faithful at the start of his tour of the Shiban area would also be the first event to be held in the arena of a just-completed sports complex, west of the city, next to the three-level highway connecting the center to the spaceport at Geerbaine. The complex had been built at their own initiative by a combination of public and private Jevlenese agencies since the Ganymean takeover of the planet's administration. Thus, it had come to symbolize the policy of self-help that the Ganymeans were trying to encourage.
To insure adequate public recognition of the success of the venture, a formal opening ceremony had been scheduled to precede the commencement of the Spiral of Awakening rally. However, because of a sudden illness resulting from a toxic mold that was found unaccountably to have contaminated the cheese in a salad served for his lunch, Shiban's chief of police would not be attending as planned. Instead, his place would be taken by his deputy, Obayin.
On the day before the opening, a gray limousine pulled off the high-level throughway and halted on an unfinished access ramp overlooking the approaches into the sports complex.
Scirio, who ran the syndicate's operations on the west side and in Shiban center, motioned with a hand to indicate a slender, two-lane, flying bridge curving away from the midlevel trafficway below and connecting into a delivery area on one side of the two main buildings at the front of the complex, between the arena and the dome housing the gymnasium.
"It works like this," he said to Grevetz, the regional boss, who was sitting next to him in the rear compartment. "Ten minutes before he gets here, a truck breaks down on the main ramp up to the front entrance."
"They're not gonna be letting any trucks up through there," Grevetz declared. "Not when the big names are due to show up. It'll be sealed off."
"Special delivery of stuff they'll need for the born-again concert that's starting afterward," Scirio said. "We've got a pass for the driver. And just to be sure, the captain who'll be in charge of traffic duty tomorrow has been fixed to make sure it's let through. He's on the payroll."
Grevetz nodded unsmilingly. "Okay. Then what?"
Scirio pointed. "The other front ramp up from ground isn't finished yet. So he'll be diverted up to the middle level and routed over that bridge. It's the only other way in from this side right now."
"Okay."
Scirio shrugged. "The job was done in too much of a hurry. The Ganymeans were more interested in getting nice pictures in the papers instead of letting the contractor concentrate on getting the job right." He indicated the center section of the bridge, which was of metal construction, supported by cantilevers projecting from pylons on one side. "Tonight some people are gonna make a few changes underneath there. The wrong kind of some sorta pins that they use got ordered, and only half of 'em were put in. So that whole section comes unstuck." He waved a hand at the drop below, which went down past the ground-level trafficway and into the cutting where a ramp emerged from a cross-tunnel. "It's over a hundred feet straight down onto concrete. Plus he'll be going down in the middle of a hundred tons of junk. There won't be enough left of him to fill his shoes. Everyone writes it off as just another screwup."
Grevetz studied the layout in silence for a while. "How are you going to stop some other bozo from going across there first?" he asked at last. "The opening isn't due until ten-thirty. Whoever does the job will have to be out by six at the latest. That's four and a half hours."
"The Ramp Closed sign will be lit from midnight on. A tech down a hole turns it off just before Obayin gets there. Plus there'll be a construction barrier set up across the entry until he's on his way."
Grevetz nodded that he was satisfied.
Later that day he met with Eubeleus, the Deliverer, at a house in Shiban that the Axis of Light owned, and went over the plan with him. "It is going to be busy there tomorrow morning," he warned. "More people could get hurt."
"Most of whom will be purple," Eubeleus replied. "So if a few of them are in the wrong place, Ayultha should be grateful to us. We'll be giving him some martyrs."
So much had been new and strange. It seemed impossible to the
Vishnu
's Terran passengers as they passed through the ship's docking bays to board the surface lander that only two days had passed since they had come aboard and seen their first views inside the Thurien starship. They had reentered normal space something like twenty Earth hours previously, five thousand million miles from Jevlen's parent star, Athena, and were now riding in high orbit above the planet itself. Kalor and Merglis, the two Thurien officers who had met the UNSA group on their arrival, reappeared to see them off. Hunt and his group had taken up their invitation to visit the
Vishnu
's command center after breakfast on the second day.
The craft that carried them down to the surface was a silent, flattened, gold ovoid, with an interior more like a hotel lounge area than a passenger cabin—nothing that the Thuriens did took much heed of conserving space. Alan, one of the marketing executives from Disney World, sat across from Danchekker for the descent. "That visar system is something else," he said, making conversation. "It's incredible. We ought to think about getting something like that into DW."
One of the schoolchildren from Florida, a girl of about twelve, with freckles and braces, was listening from a seat nearby. "It can make you think you're as small as an ant and see everything from that size," she told them.
"Yeah. It's real neat," the boy next to her opined.
"You see. The kids really go for it," Alan declared.
"Hmm." Danchekker considered the suggestion. "Well, as long as you don't try and make the world simply the way it is at our level, but merely scaled down in size," he conceded. "I presume the intention would be to inform rather than mislead."
"How do you mean?" Alan asked, frowning.
Danchekker took off his spectacles and examined them. "Simply by the fact of getting smaller, an object's volume, and hence its weight, decreases much faster than its area," he explained. "Hence its bulk becomes a negligible factor, and its surface properties rule the style of its existence—an elementary fact, but one which is apparently beyond the ability of our illustrious creators of popular movies to grasp."
"That's a good point," Bob, the teacher, said from somewhere behind. "See, kids, we're getting something useful out of this trip already."
"I don't get it," the girl said.
"It's the reason why insects can walk up walls and lift many times their own weight," Bob told her. "There's nothing miraculous about it."
"At such sizes, the gravitational force which dominates at our level of perception is insignificant," Danchekker said, always ready to deliver to any audience. "One's experiences would be shaped entirely by adhesion, electrostatic charge, and other surface effects. So if you were reduced to such a size and wore a coat, for example, you wouldn't be able to take it off. Walking would be entirely different because of the negligible storage of energy in momentum. Hammers and clubs would be quite useless for the same reason." He looked at Alan. "I trust you take my point?"
"Er . . . yes," Alan said. "I guess we'd have to give that some thought."
Hunt was sitting by Gina, who had been unusually reticent since breakfast. She seemed disturbed or confused about something.
"Some people do things in style," he commented, although his attempts all morning at being sociable had met with little success. He put it down to a delayed reaction to the stress and the strangeness after three days of her not having a moment to think. "The first time I went on an extraterrestrial trip, it was just a hop across the backyard to Jupiter.
You
get to go light-years."
A smile flickered across Gina's face but didn't stay put. "Well, you know us Americans: always going to extremes."
They landed at the spaceport of Geerbaine, which adjoined a regular airport on the western outskirts of Shiban. The reality of actually setting foot on another world seemed to dispel whatever had been hanging over her, and her spirits revived. She said farewell to the two Thuriens who had escorted them down, and stood with Hunt for a while, staring back through a glass wall in the disembarkation ramp at the shining, half-mile-high tower of the
Shapieron
, which they had glimpsed from afar the day previously, through visar.
"Just imagine, that was traveling between stars before our kind even existed," Gina said. "It's one thing to read about it and see pictures of it. But to stand this close and know it's really out there . . ." She left it unfinished.
"You sound as if you're feeling more yourself again, anyhow," Hunt said. "I was starting to get a bit worried."
She sighed. "I suppose I have been a bit weird all morning. Everything's all so new, I guess. I'll get over it."
Hunt looked around and across the arrivals area, where groups and individuals were milling around. Danchekker, Sandy, and Duncan were standing near the Florida school party, talking to two hefty, clean-cut, broad-shouldered men in gray suits who put Hunt in mind of Dick Tracy. A short distance away, a woman in a maroon tunic with gold trim and buttons seemed to be collecting together a party that already included Alan and Keith from Disney World, the directors from the Denver corporation, a honeymoon couple that the UNSA team had met at breakfast, who were celebrating their third remarriage to each other, and the Russian psychologists. "I think that's probably the woman from your hotel," Hunt said to Gina.
Best Western hotels had displayed more of best American entrepreneurial initiative by acquiring premises at the core of what was rapidly becoming a Terran enclave at Geerbaine. Since Gina was not officially with UNSA and would have no obvious reason for going to PAC, she had made a reservation there under her own name as an independent journalist. She and Hunt would get together again somehow later.
Hunt walked across with Gina and made sure that her name was on the list that the agent from Best Western was checking, and that there were no problems. That completed the party, and the woman began shepherding her flock toward an escalator going up to what looked like a shuttle tube. Hunt turned away and began walking over to rejoin his own group, but was intercepted by Bob, the teacher from Florida.