realized that he was tiny, infinitesimal, that the titanic mortared
blocks that dwarfed him must themselves be small, so small
that . . .
He jabbed at the porous stone with a raking flex of his
foreclaw. It was solid, solid with a weary durability that had
waited out uncaring eons, painted with the feeble dust of huge
groaning machinery run past the point of uselessness into an
utter exhaustion of grit.
He could smell the age of it, even feel it as a kind of pressure,
a kind of dread. It was massive, unyielding, and he thought
suddenly of water. Water moving at high speed was as hard as
steel. His mind rocketed off, then, and he thought of the identity of speed and substance, the kinetic energy of atoms giving form to hard stone, stone which was empty space. It was all abstract structure, ageless form, level after level, emptiness permeated by disturbances of emptiness, waves, quanta. He became aware of fine detail within the stone, the surface suddenly no more than frozen smoke, a hard fog petrified by captive eons. Below the surface a finer level, detail on obsessive detail in an ever-recessive web. . . .
He was attacked. The enemy was on him. He felt a sudden
ghastly rending as claws tore into him from above, the alien pain
garbled in translation, cramming his brain with black nausea
and dread. He flopped in death-stricken convulsion, his face
slid apart in a nightmare extrusion of razored mandibles, and he
caught a leg and sheared it off at the joint; he smelled hot
hunger and pain and the bright hot radiance of his own juices
bursting, and then the cold, the seeping, the bright spark fading
to become one with the old stone and the age and the dark. . . .
The exterior microphones of his helmet caught Constantine's
voice and fed it through his nerves. "Abelard."
Lindsay's throat was full of rust. "I hear you."
"You're alive?"
The nerve block in his neck half dissolved and he felt his own
body, as insubstantial as warm gas. He groped for the strip of
dermadisks beside his hand: the perforated plastic felt as thin as
ribbon. He peeled off another disk with his fingers and pressed
it raggedly against the base of his thumb. "We must try again."
"What did you see, Abelard? I must know."
"Halls. Walls. Dark stones."
"And gulfs? Black gulfs of nothing, bigger than God?"
"I can't talk." The other dose was hitting him, language was
collapsing, a tangle of irrelevant assumptions shattered by sudden doubt, wads of grammar mashed beneath the impact of the drug. "Again."
He was back. He could feel the enemy now, sense his presence as a weak distant tingling. The light was clearer, gigantic radiant washes seeping through masses of stone so rotten with age that they were thin as cloth. Fastidiously, he ran his foreclaws
through the polyps around his mouth, cleansing them of damp
grime. He felt a sense of hunger so overwhelming that the scales
equalized, and he realized that the urge to live and kill was as
huge as the vaults around him.
He found the enemy crouched within a cul-de-sac between a
harsh decaying bridge and its supporting beams. He smelled the
fear.
The enemy's position was wrong. The enemy clung to the wall
in a false perspective, perceiving the endless horizon as a shattering abyss. The gulf below was an eternal one, a chaos of walls, chambers, landings, self-replicating, built from nothing, a terrifying ramification of infinity.
He attacked, biting deep into the back plates, the taste of hot
ooze driving him into frenzy. The enemy slashed back, digging,
pushing, pale claws scraping the rock. His jaws ripped free from
the enemy's back. The enemy struggled to push him away, to
shove him backward into the horizon. For a moment he was
gripped by the enemy's own perspective. He knew suddenly that
if he fell he would fall forever. Into the abyss, plunging into his
own terror and defeat, endlessly, through the self spinning labyrinth, mind frozen in boundless anguish, a maze of unending experience, unending fright, implacable walls, halls, steps, ramps, crypts, vaults, passages, always icy, always out of reach.
He skidded back. The enemy was desperate, scrabbling convulsively, galvanized with pain. His own claws were slipping. The
stone was rejecting him, becoming slicker. Suddenly the break-
through came, and he saw the world for what it was. His claws
slid in, then, with phantom case, stone slipping aside like smoke.
Then he was anchored. The enemy pushed at him helplessly,
uselessly. He tasted the sudden gush of despair as the enemy
turned to flee.
He ran him down at once, caught him, and rended him. A
miasma of dust and terror burst from the enemy's flesh. He
ripped him free from the wall, held him out in an orgasm of
hatred and victory-and flung him into the gulf.
Part Three
MOVING IN CLADES
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE NEOTENIC CULTURAL REPUBLIC: 17-6-'91
The dreams were pleasant, dreams of warmth and light, an animal's
life, an eternal present.
Consciousness returned in tingling pain, like blood seeping into a leg long numbed. He struggled to unify himself, to assume the
burden of being Lindsay again, and the pain of it made him claw the
grass, spattering his naked skin with dirt.
Chaos roared around him: reality in its rawest form, a buzzing, blinding confusion. He sprawled on his back in the grass, gasping. Above him the world swam into focus: green light, white light, a brown framework of branches. Solidity returned to the world. He saw a living spray of branching leaves and twigs: a form of such
fantastic beauty that he was overwhelmed with awe. He heaved
himself over and slithered toward the tree's rough trunk, hauling
his naked flesh through the sleek grass. He threw his arms around
the tree and pressed his bearded cheek against the bark.
Ecstasy seized him. He pressed his face against the tree, sobbing in frenzy, torn with deep visionary rapture. As his mind coalesced he burned with insight, a smoldering oneness with this living being. Helpless joy pervaded him as he joined its serene integration.
When he called for help, two young Shapers wearing hospital
whites answered his broken cries. Taking his arms, they helped him
stagger across the lawn through the arched stone doorway of the
clinic.
Lindsay was afflicted by language. His thoughts were clear, but the words wouldn't come. He recognized the building. It was the
mansion of the Tyler clan. He was back in the Republic. He wanted
to speak to the orderlies, ask them how he had returned, but his
brain couldn't shuffle his vocabulary into order. The words waited
agonizingly on the tip of his tongue, just past his reach.
They took him down an entry hall crowded with blueprints and
glass-topped exhibits. The left wing of the mansion, with its suite of
bedrooms, had been stripped down to the polished wood and filled
with medical equipment. Lindsay stared helplessly into the face of
the man on his left. He had the smooth grace of a Shaper and the
riveting eyes of a Superbright.
"You are- " Lindsay burst out suddenly.
"Relax, friend. You're safe. The doctor's on her way." Smiling, he draped Lindsay in a broad-sleeved hospital gown, tying it behind
him in an easy flurry of knots. They seated him under an overhead
cerebral scanner. The second orderly handed him an inhaler.
"Whiff up on this, cousin. It's tagged glucose. Radioactive. For the scanner." The Superbright whacked the curved white dome of the
machine affectionately. "We've got to look you over. I mean right
down to the core."
Lindsay sniffed obediently at the inhaler. It smelled sweet. The