to enfilade the avenues nearby. The first explosives had been used, and the casualty list had topped the hundred mark.
Between eleven and twelve the technicians responsible for discriminating down to Lyken’s Tacket Number and locating his franchise completed their preparations and turned their machinery on to warm up.
And at midnight precisely every building in the complex that was Lyken’s base blew up with a thunder of collapsing stone.
Where the white tower juts checkerboarded with light out of the unsleeping city, technicians turn with thoughtful expressions to the newly unsealed numbers locating Lyken’s franchise. They study them. They have already fed power to their machines. Six or seven hours’ work, and they will have opened a portal to the world which was sold to Ahmed Lyken with its animals, its vegetation and even its people. Then they will strive to take it away from him.
This is not right, say some of those who subscribe to the cults of this city; there is One, they maintain, who has power to say to a man, “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” They say it is arrogant of man to do this; nonetheless, the Directors ready their angels with flaming swords to drive Lyken from his Garden of Eden.
Some of the technicians have heard that Lyken has blown up his base. This is singular, unprecedented. They nod over the news and go on working.
Where the wind leans mightily against the redwood tree, in the land of the people called G’kek, strange sounds pierce the night. Fearmaster crouches by a forest trail and listens to them, his entire body seeming to become an ear. He is thirty-four years old, strong, tall, brave, besides being possessed of skills in leadership and organization beyond any other of his nation. Therefore the nation follows him. He has slain catamounts and ridden wild buffalo; he has defied the elements even to the god voice of the thunder. Therefore the nation reveres him.
Yet he can still tremble. He does tremble when he thinks of those who come with a leader called Lanchery. Possibly they are gods greater than the thunder gods even though they scorn propitiation. Any sensible man would obey their commands.
But he does not understand what they are making the people do. Gods, he knows, are capricious and unpredictable, and truck with them is best left to the experts. Yet he is the expert among his nation when it comes to Lanchery and his followers.
The penthouse apartment where Jome Knard now sleeps fitfully is too far above the clamorous rioting streets for much of the racket to have reached it. The thunder of Lyken’s base collapsing into rubble makes its fabric rattle. Barely below the surface of sleep, Knard turns a little on the air cushion which is his bed, and the bed adjusts with tireless automatic precision to his altered weight distribution. The noise of the explosion blends into the dream which is disturbing him.
Allyn Vage does not sleep in her cocoon. There are no fatigue products in her bloodstream—they would hinder thenever-stopping process of regenerating her body. Only, her energy is somewhat debased, artificially, to conserve the subtle unconscious rhythm of night and day; this is necessary from a psychological point of view, to assure a further link with reality in the isolation of her mind.
Beneath her seat, the perceptor supplies her with news. She has often found it impossible to describe to Knard the sensation of using the perceptor. The closest she has been able to come is to say that she experiences a series of white or colored threads, having personal associations and extending through a grey medium as dense and resistant as deep water. Somehow the threads parallel reality, or reality parallels them.
But the inability to describe what she experiences troubles her not at all.
She
knows about it, and that is enough.
And it is possible, she has found, to play on these
Between eleven and twelve the technicians responsible for discriminating down to Lyken’s Tacket Number and locating his franchise completed their preparations and turned their machinery on to warm up.
And at midnight precisely every building in the complex that was Lyken’s base blew up with a thunder of collapsing stone.
Where the white tower juts checkerboarded with light out of the unsleeping city, technicians turn with thoughtful expressions to the newly unsealed numbers locating Lyken’s franchise. They study them. They have already fed power to their machines. Six or seven hours’ work, and they will have opened a portal to the world which was sold to Ahmed Lyken with its animals, its vegetation and even its people. Then they will strive to take it away from him.
This is not right, say some of those who subscribe to the cults of this city; there is One, they maintain, who has power to say to a man, “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” They say it is arrogant of man to do this; nonetheless, the Directors ready their angels with flaming swords to drive Lyken from his Garden of Eden.
Some of the technicians have heard that Lyken has blown up his base. This is singular, unprecedented. They nod over the news and go on working.
Where the wind leans mightily against the redwood tree, in the land of the people called G’kek, strange sounds pierce the night. Fearmaster crouches by a forest trail and listens to them, his entire body seeming to become an ear. He is thirty-four years old, strong, tall, brave, besides being possessed of skills in leadership and organization beyond any other of his nation. Therefore the nation follows him. He has slain catamounts and ridden wild buffalo; he has defied the elements even to the god voice of the thunder. Therefore the nation reveres him.
Yet he can still tremble. He does tremble when he thinks of those who come with a leader called Lanchery. Possibly they are gods greater than the thunder gods even though they scorn propitiation. Any sensible man would obey their commands.
But he does not understand what they are making the people do. Gods, he knows, are capricious and unpredictable, and truck with them is best left to the experts. Yet he is the expert among his nation when it comes to Lanchery and his followers.
The penthouse apartment where Jome Knard now sleeps fitfully is too far above the clamorous rioting streets for much of the racket to have reached it. The thunder of Lyken’s base collapsing into rubble makes its fabric rattle. Barely below the surface of sleep, Knard turns a little on the air cushion which is his bed, and the bed adjusts with tireless automatic precision to his altered weight distribution. The noise of the explosion blends into the dream which is disturbing him.
Allyn Vage does not sleep in her cocoon. There are no fatigue products in her bloodstream—they would hinder thenever-stopping process of regenerating her body. Only, her energy is somewhat debased, artificially, to conserve the subtle unconscious rhythm of night and day; this is necessary from a psychological point of view, to assure a further link with reality in the isolation of her mind.
Beneath her seat, the perceptor supplies her with news. She has often found it impossible to describe to Knard the sensation of using the perceptor. The closest she has been able to come is to say that she experiences a series of white or colored threads, having personal associations and extending through a grey medium as dense and resistant as deep water. Somehow the threads parallel reality, or reality parallels them.
But the inability to describe what she experiences troubles her not at all.
She
knows about it, and that is enough.
And it is possible, she has found, to play on these
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