The Hour of the Gate (33 page)

Anyway, Clothahump's urgency indicated that there was little time left now either for finesse or fine tuning.

Just get me to that computer, he thought furiously. Just get me mere safely and I'll find some way to destroy it. Even pulling a few wires would do it. Eejakrat couldn't repair the damage with magic… could he?

And if he was killed and the attempt a failure, what did it matter? Talea was dead and so was much of himself. Yes, that was the answer. Crash whatever carries you and yourself into the computer. That should do it.

Time was the first crucial element. Though he did not know it, he was soon to learn the other.

Time… that was the key. He needed to move fast and he didn't have
time
to fool with machines that might or might not work, might or might not appear. Time and flight. What song could possibly fill the need?

Wait a minute! There was something about time and flight slipping, slipping into the future.

His fingers began to fly over the strings as he threw back his head and began to sing with more strength than ever he had before.

There was a tearing sound in the sky, and his nostrils were filled with the odor of ozone. It was coming! Whatever he'd called up. If not the sung-for huge bird, perhaps the British fighter nicknamed the Eagle, bristling with rockets and rapid-fire cannon. Anything to get him into the air.

He sang till his throat hurt, his fingers a blur above the strings. Reverberant waves of sound emerged from the quivering duar and the air vibrated in sympathy.

A deep-throated crackling split the sky overhead, a sound no kin to any earthly thunder. It seemed the sun had drawn back to hide behind the clouds. The fighting did not stop, but warmlander and insect alike slowed their pace. That ominous rumble echoed down the walls of the Pass. Something extraordinary was happening.

Vast wings that were of starry gases filled the air. The winter day turned warm with a sudden eruption of heat. Hot air blew Jon-Tom against the rampart behind him and nearly over, while his companions scrambled for something solid to cling to.

Atop the wall the remaining warmlander defenders scattered in terror. On the cliffsides the Weavers scuttled for hiding places in the crevices and crannies as a monstrous fiery form came near. It touched down on the mountainside where the emaining half of the wall was worked into the naked rock, and twenty feet of granite melted and ran like syrup.

“W
HAT HAVE YOU DONE
!” roared a voice that could raise a sunspot. The remaining stones of the wall trembled, as did the cells of those still standing atop it. “W
HAT HAVE YOU WROUGHT, LITTLE HUMAN
!”

“I…” Jon-Tom could only gape. He had not materialized the plane he'd wished for or the eagle he'd sung to. He had called up something best left undisturbed, interrupted a journey measurable in billions of years. It was all he could do to gaze back into those vast, infinite eyes, as M'nemaxa, barely touching the melting rock, fanned thermonuclear wings and glared down at him.

“I'm sorry,” he Finally managed to gasp out, “I was only trying…”

“L
OOK TO MY BACK
!” bellowed the sun horse.

Jon-Tom hesitated, then took a cautious step forward and craned his neck. Squinting through the glare, he made out a dark metallic shape that looked suspiciously like a saddle. It was very small and lost on that great flaming curve of a spine.

“I don't… what does this mean?” he asked humbly.

“I
T MEANS A TRANSFORMATION IN MY ODYSSEY; A SHORTCUT
. L
ITTLE MAN BENEATH THE STARS, YOU HAVE CREATED A SHORTCUT
! I
CAN SEE THE END OF MY JOURNEY NOW
. N
O LONGER MUST
I
RACE AROUND THE RIM OF THE UNIVERSE
. O
NLY ANOTHER THREE MILLION YEARS AND
I
WILL BE FINISHED
. O
NLY THREE MILLION, AND
I
WILL KNOW PEACE
. A
ND YOU, MAN, ARE TO THANK FOR IT
!”

“But I don't know what I did, and I don't know how I did it,” Jon-Tom told him softly.

“C
ONSEQUENCE IS WHAT MATTERS, CAUSATION IS BUT EPHEMERAL
. E
MPYREAN RESULTS HAVE BEEN ACHIEVED, LITTLE MAN OF NOTHINGNESS
.

“A
S YOU HAVE HELPED ME, SO I WILL HELP YOU. BUT I CAN DO ONLY WHAT YOU DIRECT. YOUR MAGIC PUTS THIS SHIELD ON MY BACK, SO MOUNT THEN, GUARDED BY ITS SUBSTANCE AND BY YOUR OWN MAGIC, AND RIDE. SUCH A RIDE AS NO CREATURE OF MERE FLESH AND BLOOD HAS EVER HAD BEFORE NOR WILL HENCE!”

Jon-Tom hesitated. But eager hands were already urging him toward the equine inferno.

“Go on, Jon-Tom,” said Caz encouragingly.

“Yes, go on. It must be the spellsong magic that's protecting us,” said Flor, “or the radiation and heat would have fried all of us by now.”

“But that little lead saddle, Flor…”

“The magic, Jon-Tom, the magic. The magic's in the music
and the music's in you.
Do it!”

It was Clothahump who finally convinced him. “It is all or nothing now, my boy. We live or we die on what you do. This is between you and Eejakrat.”

“I wish it wasn't. I wish to God I was home. I wish… ahhh, fuck it. Let's go!”

He could not see a barrier shielding the streaming nuclear material that was the substance of M'nemaxa, but one had to be present, as Flor had so incontrovertibly pointed out. He cradled the battered duar against his chest. That barrier had momentarily lapsed when M'nemaxa had touched down, and a thousand tons of solid rock had run like butter. If it lapsed again, there would not even be ashes left of him.

A series of stirrups led to the saddle, which was much larger up close than it had appeared from a distance. He mounted carefully, feeling neither heat nor pain but watching fascinated as tiny solar prominences erupted from M'nemaxa's epidermis only inches from his puny human skin.

It was little different in the saddle, though he could feel some slight heat against his face and hands.

“Just a minim, guv',” said a voice. A small gray shape had bounded into the saddle behind him.

“Mudge? It's not necessary. Either I'll make it or I won't.”

“Shove it, mate. I've been watchin' you ever since you stuck your nose int' me business. You don't think I could let you go off on your own now, do you? Somebody's got t' watch out for you. This great flippin' flamin' beastie can't be ‘urt, but a good archer might pick you off ‘is back like a farmer pluckin' a bloomin' apple.” He notched an arrow into his bowstring and grinned beneath his whiskers.

Jon-Tom couldn't think of anything else to say: “Thanks, Mudge. Mate.”

“Thank me when we get back. I've always wanted t' ride a comet, wot? Let's be about the business, then.”

The serpentine fiery neck arched, and the great head with its bottomless eyes stared back at them. “C
OMMAND, MAN
!”

“I don't know…” Mudge was prodding him in the ribs. “Shit… giddy up! To Eejakrat!”

Whether the message was conveyed by the word or the mental imagery connected with it no one knew. It didn't matter. The vast wings seared the earth and a warm hurricane blasted those who were beneath. Those wings stretched from one side of the canyon to the other, and the Ironclouders, seeing it race toward them, scattered like gnats.

A swarm of dragonfly fighters rose to meet them, the Empress' private aerial guard. They attacked with the mindless but admirable courage of their kind.

Mudge's bow began its work. The soldiers riding the dragonflies fell from their mounts and none of their arrows reached the sun riders. Those that were launched impacted on the body or wings or neck of M'nemaxa and were vaporized with the briefest of sizzling sounds.

“Fly past them!” Jon-Tom ordered. “Down, over there!” He gestured toward the blunt butte rising fingerlike near the rear of the Pass. Beyond lay the mists of the Greendowns.

Jon-Tom's attention shifted to concentrate on a single figure standing before a pile of materials and a semicircle of metal forms. Dragonflies and riders tried to break through to do battle with swords, but wings and hooves touched them, and their charred remnants fell earthward like so many sizzling lumps of smoking charcoal.

The imperial bodyguard sent a storm of arrows upward. Not one passed the belly of that flaming body. Jon-Tom was watching Eejakrat. He held his own spear-staff tightly, ready to pierce the sorcerer through.

Then his attention was diverted. In the air above the computer floated two faintly glowing pieces of stone. They were so tiny he noticed them only because of their glow. Behind the sorcerer danced the fearful, iridescent green shape of the Empress Skrritch.

What devastating magic so terrified the imperturbable Clothahump? What was Eejakrat about to risk in hopes of winning a lost war?

“Down,” he ordered M'nemaxa. “Down to the one surrounded by maggots and evil, down to destroy!”

A whispery sorceral mumbling, rapid and desperate, sounded from the crest of the butte. Eejakrat had panicked. He was rushing the incantation, as others had done before him, though he knew nothing of them. The two glowing shards of stone moved through the air toward the onrushing spirit fire and its mortal riders, and toward each other. Stones and spirit would meet at the same point in the sky.

They were no more than fifty yards from it and as many more from the butte's summit when M'nemaxa suddenly gave forth a thunderous whinny. The infinite eyes glowed more brightly than the stones as the two came almost together a couple of yards in front of them.

There was a faint, hopeless scream from Eejakrat below, a desperate croaking Jon-Tom deciphered: “Not yet… too near, too close, not
yet!”

Then the world was spinning farther and farther below them like a flower caught in a whirlpool.

Gone was the Troom Pass. So too was the butte where Eejakrat had gesticulated frantically before the Empress Skrritch. So were the milling mob of Plated Folk plunging to war and the insistent battle cries of the warmlanders.

Gone were the mists of the distant Greendowns and noisome distant Cugluch, gone too the mountain crags that towered above insignificant warriors. Soon the blue sky itself vanished behind them.

They still rode the spine of the furiously galloping M'nemaxa, but they rode now through the emptiness of convergent eternity. Stars gleamed bright as morning around them, unwinking and cold and so close it seemed you could reach out and touch them.

You
could
touch them. Jon-Tom reached out slowly and plucked a red giant from its place in the heavens. It was warm in his palm and shone like a ruby. He cast it spinning back free into space. A black hole slid past his left foot and he pulled away. It was like quicksand. He inhaled a nebula, which made him sneeze. Behind him Mudge the otter seemed a distant, diffuse shape in the stars.

He breathed infinity. The wings and hooves of M'nemaxa moved in slow motion. A swarm of motile, luminescent dots gathered around the runners, millions of lights pricking the blackness. They danced and swirled around the great horse and its riders.

Where the world had no meaning and natural law was absent, these too finally became real. Gneechees, Jon-Tom thought ponderously. Only now I can see them, I can see them.

Some were people, some animals, others unrecognizable; the afterthoughts, the memories, the souls and shadows of all intelligent life. They were all the colors of the rainbow, a spectrum filled with life, both mysterious and familiar.

He began to recognize some of the forms and faces. He saw Einstein, he saw his own grandfather. He saw the moving lips of now dead singers he had loved, and it was as if their music swelled around him in the ultimate concert. He noted that the faces he saw were not old, and showed no trace of death or suffering. In fact the famous physicist's eyes glittered like a child's. Einstein had his violin with him. Hendrix was there, too, and they played a duet, and both smiled at Jon-Tom.

Then he saw a face he knew well, a face full of fire and light. He concentrated on that face with all his strength, trying to pull it into his brain through his eyes. The face was distinct and warm; it seemed to float toward him instinctively. His whole being glowed with love as it neared him, and suddenly when it touched his lip a flame ignited inside him and he almost lost his seat. It was the Talea gneechee, he knew, and he surrounded it with his entire will.

“We must go back. Now!” he roared at the fiery stallion.

“Y
OU MUST KNOW THE WORDS, LITTLE MAN, OR REMAIN WITH ME UNTIL THE END OF MY JOURNEY.”

What song? Jon-Tom thought. There seemed no music equal to the immensity of space and stars all around him. Every song he had ever heard dried up on his tongue.

The Talea gneechee seemed to stir someplace deep inside him, and he looked out at the cold blue distance ahead. It was time to go back where he belonged. He couldn't be specific, but he suddenly had a real sense of where he belonged in life and he knew he could get there.

His mouth opened and his fingertips caressed the duar. A new sound rose, a new voice came both from the duar and from his mouth, and though he had never heard it before he knew it was, finally, his true voice.

Stars spun faster around him, the universe seemed wrenched for an instant. His head throbbed and his throat burned with the strange wordless song that poured from him like a river a million times stronger than any earthly river.

Now blue sky hurried toward them, then the snowy caps of mountains. The boundary was back—the luscious, palpable limit of existence. He felt more alive than he had ever in his life.

“Cor, wot a friggin' ride!” Mudge's joyous voice came from behind him.

“Love you, Mudge!” screamed Jon-Tom, ecstatic to hear that familiar sound.

“You're crazy—where the 'ell we been?”