The other came in view. It was an animal head: a man with the head of a wolf. “I be but a servant o’ our cause: to save Phaze from being ravished. Hast brought the seed?”
“Aye.”
“Give it here, and follow.”
Flach, assuming human form, reached to take the seed from Sirel’s mouth, and carried it to the wolfman. The wolfman took it and turned to walk into the gloom at the far end of the chamber. They followed, Alien assuming human form. Sire! retaining bitch form. Flach wasn’t certain what was coming, and knew the other two were as nervous as he.
Soon they arrived at a deeper, brighter chamber, where a group of animal heads stood. Prominent among them was an elephant head. “Eli!” Flach exclaimed. Then he had a second thought. “Or be it thee? Thou dost look older.”
“We be all older,” Eli said. He used the language of the animal heads, which was a mixture of those sounds common to most of them; Flach understood it because he had learned a number of animal languages when he mastered the animal forms. Eli had helped his father Mach train in table tennis, before Flach’s birth, for an important game with his other self; the elephant head held the paddle with his trunk, and played marvelously well. Flach had come to know him in the past year, and liked him. “We be ten years in this den, preparing for thee.”
“But I saw thee nigh three months ago!” Flach protested. “With my sire, the Rovot Adept. Dost not remember?”
“I remember. But much o’ a month ago in thy time, we descended to this realm and fashioned o’ it the Pole Demesnes, that we might train thee and make the decoys. That be ten years, our time, and aye, we be older.”
“But thou must get out, then, before thou dost age too far!” Flach exclaimed, horrified. “Thou and thy companions!”
“Nay, Adept, not so! Our lives be as long as e’er, in our terms; we feel not the loss. We have been constructively busy, and now the region be nice for thee and thy companions. For thou must remain with us a time.”
“But came I here only to deliver the Hec seed! Needs must I do one more errand before I rest, so save the planet.”
“Aye. But this be part o’ thine errand. Thou must be trained here, three years.”
“Three years!” Flach exclaimed. “But the Magic Bomb will ravage the planet within six weeks! Five weeks.” For a week had passed since he had stood at the North Pole with wonderful Icy. Ah, the demoness-Don ‘i get distracted! Nepe snapped.
“Three years our time,” Eli clarified. “One week, outside. We be at gross velocity: an hundred and forty-four times norm. Well we know the outside limit!”
Flach looked at his companions, appalled. But as he did so he realized that their presence here was part of the plan, whose nature he did not understand. Certainly he had no reason to distrust EH.
“I must trust thine information,” he said. “We be at thy service.”
“First must we take thy companions to the laboratory,” the elephant head said.
“The laboratory?” Flach asked, upset again. “That be a science notion!”
“Aye, lad! We have rovots and computers here and the rest o’ science, but the wolf and bat must needs be fresh for our purpose.”
“What purpose?” Flach demanded. “I can suffer no ill to my friends!”
“Nor shall there be ill to any,” EH reassured him. “We but need tokens from their bodies, that we may craft what be needful.”
“Tokens?”
“We may not tell thee more now,” EH said. “For thou must go out again amidst the enemy, and the secret be not secure there. But thou shallst see they be not harmed. Now do the two o’ you come w’ me, while Flach takes his leisure at thine apartment. The wolf will show thee there, Adept.”
Sirel assumed girl form. “It be all right, my Promised,” she said to Flach. “We knew we came not here for naught. We will see thee presently.”
Flach watched them go with dismay. This was not at all what he had expected.
The wolf head guided him down another tunnel to a chamber that turned out to be very much like a Proton room. There was a video screen and a bed and a machine for dialing food. “I thank thee,” he said shortly to the wolf head, dismissing the creature. He felt like a prisoner.
Alone, he turned on the screen. It did not have any input from outside, unsurprisingly; the time barrier stopped that. It did have an assortment of canned entertainments and educational programs.
He turned it off, lay on the bed, and pondered. The North Pole must have been a similar warren, that he had never before his trip there known of or suspected; the elders were good at keeping secrets when they wanted to. That had been slow time, so if the Green and Black Adepts had gone there at the same time the animal heads came here, it would have seemed like only a few minutes, perhaps, though a month passed outside. Meanwhile, here, it had been ten years! Plenty of time to get it in shape for company.
But what were they going to do with fresh “tokens” from Sirel and Alien, and the Hectare seed? He had hoped to have the answer to prior riddles once he got here, but instead he was encountering only greater mysteries.
Disgruntled, he lay there for a time, and then he slept.
He woke as Sirel and Alien returned, both in human form. “See, we be fine!” she exclaimed. “It were but a bit o’ tissue from each, and we be done.” She changed to wolf form, and back, so that he could see she hadn’t changed.
“But we be captive here, for three years,” he reminded her.
“Whate’er it takes to free our realm,” she said brightly. She looked around. “This be like Proton!” She became Troubot, in straight machine form. “Exactly like Proton,” the robot said from a speaker grille.
Alien became his Proton self, ‘Corn, fully human. “Yes, it is true.” He returned to his Phaze self. “But methinks I prefer to sleep hanging from a rafter.” He reached up, took hold of a convenient plank, and became the bat. He flipped neatly over and caught the wood with his feet.
“And thee?” Flach asked Sirelmoba. “Dost thou be similarly satisfied?
“Aye,” she said. “Because I be with thee.”
His bad mood eased. It could indeed have been worse.
She joined him in the bed for the night, evidently feeling naughty, because in neither her machine nor wolf aspects did she use a bed. She tickled him, and the rest of his bad mood dissipated. She wasn’t exactly Icy, but she was his Promised, and in due course that would be far more significant than anything he had done with the demoness.
The three of them were kept so busy they hardly had time to be bored. They were subjected to a full program of education in all the things of Proton and Phaze, but especially in music. This amazed Flach again. He liked music, for in his unicorn form he was a natural musician, with the sound of the recorder. But why were they all being trained to be expert in different instruments?
“There must be reason,” Alien said philosophically, and Sirel agreed. Indeed, the two, who had not associated with each other much before, were turning out to be surprisingly compatible. Flach was the odd one out.
So, increasingly, for the classes, he turned the body over to Nepe, who was more patient about such things. That had another advantage: it attracted Alien’s attention, for he had always been sweet on Nepe. Thus Nepe was the center of attention, because Sirel’s other self Troubot liked her too.
One of the things they learned in detail was the scientific nature of Proton. For this all three of them assumed their Proton identities, because it was mind-bendingly complex in some aspects.
Proton seemed like a planet orbiting a star, but it was not. Not exactly, anyway. It was a black hole companion to the star, far smaller and denser than it seemed. The light from the star touched its shell and whipped around it to depart at right angles, leading to strange optical effects. The globe rotated on an axis pointed to the star, so that the South Pole should have been unbearably hot and the North Pole unbearably cold. They were hot and cold, respectively, but not to the degree they might have been, because of the bending of the light; the south got less and the north more than otherwise. The hemispheres of day and night were east and west, clearly demarked at the North and South Poles, where the line of their contrast actually crossed. That was what Flach had seen as a shadow over half the North Pole. That shadow slowly turned counterclockwise, with the clockwise rotation of the globe. At the South Pole the shadow would seem to turn clockwise. There was a complex explanation for just how the light of the sun appeared to be coming from above the equator when actually it was whipping around the tiny black hole inside the planetary shell, but they didn’t pay much attention to this. After all, magic made all kinds of illusions seem real. So at night they looked at the stars, not caring what devious route their glitters took. There was a chamber whose ceiling was one-way invisible, so that they could see the day and night skies, though no creature on the surface could see down into the Pole Demesnes. That was enough.