“How can you force her?” Sawyer asked. The mask swung toward him, smiling. Alper’s impatient voice was incongruous behind it.
“You give me the Firebird,” he said, “and I’ll release you from the transceiver. There, isn’t that fair enough? I’ll get to Nethe and put it on her. After that she’ll do as I tell her.”
Sawyer had his private doubts about this, but he did not voice them, for Zatri was demanding explanations. Rapidly Alper gave them. Zatri spoke to Klai, who led Sawyer forward so Zatri could examine the transceiver clamped to the crown of his skull. But when Sawyer tried to speak, Alper brushed him aside impatiently:
“Don’t waste time now. Will you or won’t you? You want to get rid of the transceiver. I’ll take the Firebird back to Earth with us, and after that I won’t need to make trouble at Fortuna. Klai can come too, if she wants. All we have to do is get the Firebird and get to Nethe with the transceiver. She opens the door for the four of us and we go through with the Firebird. All we have to worry about is getting to her before the Ceremony starts.”
Zatri asked a question. Klai did not translate, but Alper shrugged and said, “You can’t. You’ll have to trust me. I—here, wait!”
He pulled the mask from his face and thrust it at Sawyer.
“You put it on. He trusts you. Persuade him, Sawyer. What if the Temple is dangerous? Is it any safer here? Tell him he’s got to get us to Nethe.”
Sawyer looked dubiously at the mask.
“The last time I wore something you gave me, I got the transceiver,” he said. “Somehow I don’t like the idea of putting this thing over my face. It might turn me into a horned toad, for all I know.”
Alper snorted with impatience. “It’s perfectly safe. I wore it, didn’t I? It’s a communication prosthesis. You’ll see—the masks convey form, the way I’ve figured it, plus impinging form to give it meaning. Between the Isier it’s practically telepathy, but between you and the Khom, there wouldn’t be enough memories in common. The masks convey a series of impressions. The human mind’s built like a telegraph type of repeater; it triggers kappa wave relays that create new, sharpened, screened impressions. The brain’s alpha rhythm may be the carrier wave, using its sweep like a scanning process. I don’t know—I’m guessing. But communication’s a cortical process, like sight, dependent on form perception, and if necessary an interpreter, like these masks. Language isn’t the only form of communication, you know. What about animal communication by scent, a chemical sense? The atomic structure of a chemical scent can be rearranged very easily into a hormone structure, which is simply another language of communication within the body itself. You see?”
“No.” Sawyer grinned suddenly. “That’s why I’m convinced, maybe.”
He ducked his head and fitted the mask over his face. It was smooth and cool, and it clung firmly once he had got it seated well back over his ears. He opened his eyes, looked out through the oval holes…
And instantly something very strange happened. The stable around him leaped into sharp, glorious vividness. He had not seen such clear colors since he was a child. And odors—the smell of hay was a pungent ecstacy, the oil of the swinging lamp sweeter than any incense he had ever smelled. He felt an extraordinary sense of Tightness, of location and position—super-orientation, so to speak. Wave motions? The mask must be a booster too, then, a transformer, heightening the impressions it conveyed to the wearer. Naturally, he thought. The faint kappa waves of the brain, the wave-motions of thought, far beyond sensory perception, would have to be transformed to a higher voltage. No wonder Zatri had started and gone rigid when he put on the mask!
And no wonder the Isier thought themselves gods!
He saw Zatri’s keen blue eyes looking at him through the opposite mask, out of the white, smirking Isier face.
“Do you understand me?” he asked the old man.
Zatri spoke through his mask. The words were Khom. But what Sawyer heard, felt, sensed was quite different. It was like perceiving an instantaneous building up of shades and patterns, light and sound and meaning, form and scent, indescribable things gradually fading off into peripheral distances where—snap—a gap was leaped, a familiar form took shape in emptiness, and gradually clarified, defined, became more understandable as the semantic periphery of form shaped into—communication. Not gradually. Zatri’s echoed words still hung on the air; he had said in perfectly understandable Khom:
“Klai has told me about this man Alper. Do you trust him?”
“Certainly not,” Sawyer said. “The question is, how much choice do we have?” He nodded toward the noise of howling outside. “It isn’t safe anywhere. If the Isier don’t break in on us and arrest Klai, the Sselli may break in and kill us all. You have no weapons against them? No explosives, for instance?” He wondered how clearly the words got through to Zatri, how the mask was translating them into the thought-images of the Khom.
“We have a few hoarded explosives,” Zatri said. “Illegal, of course. What they would do against the Sselli I don’t know. But can you imagine the Isier letting any weapons exist that would harm the Sselli, when they are equally vulnerable? There is one weapon the Isier could use, however, and I think they’ll have to, very soon. But it means danger to the Isier too, so naturally they hesitate. They—”
He broke off at the sound of tapping on the door. A Khom put his head in, murmured something and withdrew. Zatri glanced away and then back to Sawyer.
“The Temple towers are beginning to glow,” he said. “That means the Ceremony is starting. It must mean Nethe has already entered the Hall of the Worlds and will never come out again—as Nethe. The Goddess will kill her or die. If Nethe wins, the Mask and Robe will be sealed on her, and she’ll be the Goddess herself. So you see your friend’s plan is useless. Only as a sacrifice could a human being enter the Hall of the Worlds now.”
He glanced uneasily at Klai. Sawyer glanced too, and was half stunned by the incredible loveliness the mask lent her pretty face. He looked at Alper, and was relieved to notice that the old man’s beauty was not noticeably enhanced. He relayed what Zatri had just said. Alper snorted impatiently.
“Nethe needs the Firebird,” he said. “There must be some way to get within sight of her and hold it up where she can see it. Once that happens, I guarantee she’ll break up any ceremony and jump for the Firebird. Without it she’s bound to lose the contest with the Goddess. Just get me to Nethe, with the Firebird. She’ll do as she’s told. She’ll open the Gateway and we’ll all go through, back to Earth.”
Klai had been translating this in a murmur to her grandfather, he eyes watchful on Alper’s face. Zatri said irresolutely, “The Gateway you speak of is too dangerous. Too uncertain. I don’t—”
“Klai went through it, didn’t she?” Alper demanded angrily when this was translated to him.
Zatri said, speaking to Sawyer, “I sent Klai after Nethe through the Gateway. It was a terribly dangerous thing, but the only way I knew. I hid her deep down underground, waiting for Nethe to come to a place where I knew she went sometimes to work her—magic.”
“And what happened?” Sawyer asked.
“I wish I knew. I’ve watched Nethe many times when she didn’t know. I’ve seen her make fire spring out between her fingers and open a—a whirling spiral in the air. I didn’t know about the Firebird then. But I knew she went through the spiral and out of the world. Sometimes she was gone a long time. I thought there might be hope for Klai elsewhere, for I knew there was none here.”
“I remember—a little,” Klai put in. “I remember Grandfather pushing me through, and how fast Nethe went, and how I fell on the ground in a strange, dark place. Then Nethe made fire spring out again in her fingers—that was the Firebird, I know now—and another spiral opened, and—” She shook her head. “I woke in the uranium mine, not knowing anything except my own name.”