They expanded, growing before their eyes as if from small to large rather than far to near. They moved with a speed that should have generated a sonic shock cone but did not. The things were silent. Tem cursed and, throwing down his missile projector, drew a sword. Someone made a strange halfwhine in the background, perhaps all of them, perhaps no one.
The things were upon them, nightmarishly resolvable.
The vanguard thing approached, bearing in on them swiftly. It was a balloon with a horrid face, red eyes hate-glaring, half its substance open with a black, tooth-fringed mouth. It seemed to chuckle as it flew. Hungry. Hungry, it said to them.
Demogorgon drew his magic pistol and fired. He stood before them like a mythopoeic hero, legs widespread, body tall and muscular, gripping a sword in one hand and a gun in the other. Glittering pink and purple rays reached out to touch the creature as it roared in for a quick kill, white cartoon sparkles writhing around its spherical flesh. It stopped dead, the world a motionless frame in isolation, then exploded. Thin black threads rained down and the world was in motion again. A score of the things swooped down on the thers, mouths gaping in starving shark grins. Teeth sank together and bones crunched, legs writhed, dark blood covered the ground in spatters. The animals bleated in agony, scrambling, and were gone, sucked to bloated, happy interiors. Axie glared and her diadem threw a red ray outward. The nearest monster screamed an echoing cry and soared upward. It burst into tawny flames and staggered against the sky, then fell, trailing a long plume of greasy smoke. There was an explosion at some distance.
More of the things circled and came in at them.
Toothy leers in tight V formation darkened their view. John and Beth stood side by side, guns held two-handed in a crouching stance. They pulled triggers in unison and sheets of transparent fire lanced out. Creatures were riven. Harmon and Vana knelt back to back with them, shooting their old-style guns and barely coping with their exaggerated recoils. Their guns roared, throwing explosive charges away in gouts of fire and smoke. Punctured, the creatures burst apart and threads rained down like long black snow. Ariane's beam flailed about, an indigo whip trailing destruction. More of thethings came swooping in, ten to replace each one downed. There was an endless supply of them, it seemed. Temujin Krzakwa stood alone, dispatching the ones that penetrated their shield of modern fire. He whirled his broadbladed sword in figure eights, closing with the demons and slicing so many that he was covered with the ropy, gray gore that they discharged. As he fought, a kind of magnificent numbness came over him. He was going to heaven, he was already there.
Then, without warning, the sword slipped out of his grasp and went flying. Fear lanced at him, and he wanted to hide. Self-born images of the crystalline teeth shearing though his flesh, breaking his bones. A final agony knifing inward as his bowels were torn asunder. He looked and one of the things bobbed against him, for all the world like a toy balloon; there was a red halo around it and it was gone. More disappeared in red coruscation, and Aksinia smiled and gave him a little salute. His sword came back to him hilt first on a rosy ray. He smiled back and resumed his slashing.
Something like Chopin's funeral march sonata began to play. There were too many of them! They were becoming a single entity in the circuits of Centrum, their program the defining factor of Bright Illimit. We will be eaten alive! Querulous despair assailed them all, flooding them with a common source of feeling and a unity of thought. Will we really die? Can we? Hopes of a real haven in abundance, waking up on Ocypete in their real bodies, mission failed.
But even if we can escape, thought Demo, Brendan is still in here, his discharge real, his entrapment impenetrable. And if we can't, we will be added to him, in unity with the dark thing that lives forever. . . . A dull sound of tearing flannel alerted them.
A giant anteater tongue flashed crimson from the heavens, licked up the monsters all at once, flickering bloodily before them, and was gone. A feeling of joy, a smirking satiation briefly filled the space about them. They stood alone again, quiescent, sweating.
"What was that?" asked Harmon.
"Evolution unveiled," said Tem, sheathing his sword, swaying with tightly closed eyes. Vana slumped to the ground and saw the demon entrails subliming into nonexistence precisely as had neon regolith. "They ate our thers," she said. The place where the campfire had been was wiped clean. Demogorgon put his weapons away and stood tall and still. Clasping hand to shoulder, he made his motion again, and thought his command thoughts. Nothing happened.
"We've lost something," he said.
And, suddenly, they were elsewhere. . . .
Vana Berenguer and Ariane Methol ran along the roof of Tupamaro Arcology, flying a kite. This part of the building was almost a mile high and had an immense park of many acres on its roof. There was deep soil here, supporting grass and trees and little streams, fields of flowers and little ponds. There were many people, children and poets, and there was a lot of laughter. The sky was pale blue, supporting a herd of fleecy clouds that kept pace with each other against the background of the sun. A sense of universal summer pervaded their insensate feelings.
They ran, and the diamond shape of paper grew away from them on its downward-bulging, white string stem. It was dark green, with a red, grinning face against the sky. They stood still, panting, and watched it fly. "Good day for it," said Ariane, holding the roll of filament. "Just enough wind." Vana nodded and watched it grow tiny, falling into an invisible distance. The string tautened, rising into the sky and disappearing long before it reached the kite, which seemed to float unsupported, far away yet held to them by some sort of inanimate loyalty. She felt the sweat trickling between her breasts, felt the delicate skin of her nipples engorged, rubbing against the inside of her halter. She stood closer to Ariane, touching flesh with her in little taps of breathing movement. The space inside her shorts seemed steaming, moistened by the exertion and rubbings of the run. She exhaled, a long breath, and relaxed. She dropped to the grass, sitting cross-legged.
Nothing to say, nothing to think, nothing to reason about, she smiled brightly at the land and sky and clouds. Light and shadow played on Ariane's skin, outlining her strong, delicate muscles. She was nice to look at. She stretched, arching her back, and, standing again, twirled about, letting impressions of the parkscape flood in upon her. She stood still and watched a group of small girls playing jump rope nearby, saying loud rhymes in Spanish to each other and giggling when one faltered of fell rolling to the grass. She whacked Ariane on the buttocks, eliciting a yip of surprise, and ran away. She ran away across the park to the edge of the roof, up a flight of stairs to the top of the wall, and fled along a chain-link fence, looking down at the blue and gold of her world. She grinned as she ran, breathing freely, sweating all over herself and her clothes, limbs swinging in an animal freedom, lubricated by the juices of an unthinking aliveness. She ran on and on until darkness fell down the sky and then went home to a man and more muscular thrusting in the dark and light. Images without form dazzled her consciousness and time stretched on to eternity.
Seven Red Anchorelles awoke to himself with a startled pheromonic cry: I still live?
His body still seemed real, the same hard-squid shape and form that had always, it seemed, existed, but he had memories. Life in the ship in the shadows of a Starseeder ghost. Life and work and the end. The last despairing moments as Centrum soaked in his oil flooded over him: death in Unity, his oil dispersed and turned to the irrevocable electronic incantations of the immortal brain that controlled his life. Why am I here? And how?