RIDING THE TORCH
                        Norman Spinrad
                              I
   Flashing rainbows from his skintight mirror suit, flourishing a swirl of
black cape, Jofe D'mahl burst through the shimmer screen that formed
the shipside wall of his grand salon to the opening bars of Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony. The shimmer rippled through the spectrum as his flesh
passed through it, visually announcing his presence with quicksilver
strobes of dopplering light. Heads turned, bodies froze, and the party
stopped for a good long beat as he greeted his guests with an ironic
half-bow. The party resumed its rhythm as he walked across the misty
floor toward a floating tray of flashers. He had made his entrance.
   D'mahl selected a purple sphere, popped the flasher into his mouth, and
bit through an exquisite brittle sponginess into an overwhelming surge of
velvet, a gustatory orgasm. A first collection by one Lina Wolder, Jiz had
said, and as usual she had picked a winner. He tapped the name into his
memory banks, keying it to the sensorium track of the last ten seconds,
and filed it in his current party listing. Yes indeed, a rising star to
remember.
  Tapping the floater to follow him, he strode through the knee-high
multicolored fog, nodding, turning, bestowing glances of his deep green
eyes, savoring the ambience he had brought into being.
   D'mahl had wheedled Hiro Korakin himself into designing the grand
salon as his interpretation of D'mahl's own personality. Korakin had hung
an immense semicircular slab of simmed emerald out from the hull of the
ship itself and had blistered this huge balcony in transparent plex, giving
D'mahl's guests a breathtaking and uncompromising view of humanity's
universe. As Excelsior was near the center of the Trek, the great concourse
of ships tiaraed the salon's horizon line, a triumphant jeweled city of
coruscating light. Ten kilometers bow-ward, the hydrogen interface was
an auroral skin stretched across the unseemly nakedness of interstellar
space.
    But to look over the edge of the balcony, down the sleek and brilliantly
lit precipice of Excelsior's cylindrical hull, was to be confronted by a vista
that sucked slobbering at the soul: the bottomless interstellar abyss, an
infinite black pit in which the myriad stars were but iridescent motes of
unimportant dust, a nothingness that went on forever in space and time.
At some indefinable point down there in the blackness, the invisible
output of Excelsior's torch merged with those of two thousand and
thirty-nine other ships to form an ethereal comet's tail of all-but-invisible
purplish fire that dwindled off into a frail thread which seemed to go on
forever down into the abyss: the wake of the Trek, reeling backward in
space and time for hundreds of light-years and nearly ten centuries, a
visible track that the eye might seemingly follow backward through the
ages to the lost garden, Earth.
   Jofe D'mahl knew full well that many of his guests found this prime
reality visualization of their basic existential position unsettling,
frightening, perhaps even in bad taste. But that was their problem;
D'mahl himself found the view bracing, which, of course, justifiably
elevated his own already high opinion of himself. Korakin wasn't
considered the best psychetect on the Trek for nothing.
   But D'mahl himself had decorated the salon, with the inevitable
assistance of Jiz Rumoku. On the translucent emerald floor he had planted
a tinkling forest of ruby, sapphire, diamond, and amethyst
trees—cunningly detailed sims of the ancient life-forms that waved
flashing crystal leaves with every subtle current of air. He had topped off
the effect with the scented fog that picked up blue, red, and lavender tints
from the internally incandescent trees, and customarily kept the gravity at
.8 gs to sync with the faerie mood. To soften the crystal edges, Jiz had
gotten him a collection of forty fuzzballs: downy globs in subdued green,
brown, mustard, and gray that floated about randomly at floor level until
someone sat in them. If Korakin had captured D'mahl's clear-eyed core,
Jofe had expressed the neobaroque style of his recent sensos, and to
D'mahl, the combined work of art sang of the paradox that was the Trek.
To his guests, it sang of the paradox that was Jofe D'mahl. Egowise,
D'mahl himself did not deign to make this distinction.
   The guest list was also a work of art in D'mahl's neobaroque style: a
constellation of people designed to rub purringly here, jangle like broken
glass there, generate cross-fertilization someplace else, keep the old
karmic kettle boiling. Jans Ryn was displaying herself as usual to a mixed
bag that included Excelsior's chief torchtender, two dirtdiggers from
Kantuck, and Tanya Daivis, the velvet asp. A heated discussion between
Dalta Reed and Trombleau, the astrophysicist from Glade, was drawing
another conspicuous crowd. Less conspicuous guests were floating about
doing less conspicuous things. The party needed a catalyst to really start
torching up lights.
  And at 24.00 that catalyst would zap itself right into their sweet little
taps—the premiere tapping of Jofe D'mahl's new senso, Wandering
Dutchmen. D'mahl had carved something prime out of the void, and he
knew it.
  "—by backbreeding beyond the point of original radiation, and then up
the line to the elm—"
   "—like a thousand suns, as they said at Alamagordo, Jans, and it's only
a bulkhead and a fluxfield away—"
  "—how Promethean you must feel—"
   "Jof, this nova claims he's isolated a spectral pattern synced to organic
life," Dalta called out, momentarily drawing D'mahl into her orbit.
  "In a starscan tape?" D'mahl asked dubiously.
  "In theory," Trombleau admitted.
   "Where've I heard that one before?" D'mahl said, popping another of
the Wolder flashers. It wriggled through his teeth, then exploded in a
burst of bittersweet that almost immediately faded into a lingering smoky
aftertaste. Not bad, D'mahl thought, dancing away from Trombleau's open
mouth before he could get sucked into the argument.
   D'mahl flitted through the mists, goosed Ami Simkov, slapped Darius
Warner on the behind, came upon a group of guests surrounding John
Benina, who had viewpointed the Dutchman. They were trying to pump
him about the senso, but John knew that if he blatted before the premiere,
his chances of working with Jofe D'mahl again were exactly zip.
   "Come on, Jofe, tell us something about Wandering Dutchmen," begged
a woman wearing a cloud of bright-yellow mist. D'mahl couldn't
remember her with his flesh, but didn't bother tapping for it. Instead, he
bit into a cubical flasher that atomized at the touch of his teeth, whiting
out every synapse in his mouth for a mad micropulse. Feh.
   "Two hints," D'mahl said. "John Benina played one of the two major
viewpoints, and it's a mythmash."
   A great collective groan went up, under cover of which D'mahl
ricocheted away in the direction of Jiz Rumoku, who was standing in a
green mist with someone he couldn't make out.
  Jiz Rumoku was the only person privileged to bring her own guests to
D'mahl's parties, and just about the only person not involved in the
production who had any idea of what Wandering Dutchmen was about. If
Jofe D'mahl could be said to have a souler (a dubious assumption), she
was it.
   She was dressed, as usual, in tomorrow's latest fashion: a pants suit of
iridescent, rigid-seeming green-and-purple material, a mosaic of planar
geometric forms that approximated the curves of her body like a medieval
suit of armor. But the facets of her suit articulated subtly with her tiniest
motion—a fantastic insectile effect set off by a tall plumelike crest into
which her long black hair had been static-molded.
   But D'mahl's attention was drawn to her companion, for he was
obviously a voidsucker. He wore nothing but blue briefs and thin brown
slippers; there was not a speck of hair on his body, and his bald head was
tinted silver. But persona aside, his eyes alone would have instantly
marked him: windows of blue plex into an infinite universe of utter
blackness confined by some topological legerdemain inside his gleaming
skull.
  D'mahl tapped the voidsucker's visual image to the banks. "I.D.," he
subvoced. The name "Haris Bandoora" appeared in his mind. "Data brief,"
D'mahl subvoced.
  "Haris Bandoora, fifty standard years, currently commanding
scout-ship Bela-37, returned to Trek 4.987 last Tuesday. Report
unavailable at this realtime."
   Jiz had certainly come up with something tasty this time, a void-sucker
so fresh from the great zilch that the Council of Pilots hadn't yet released
his report.
  "Welcome back to civilization, such as it is, Commander Bandoora,"
D'mahl said.
   Bandoora turned the vacuum of his eyes on D'mahl. "Such as it is," he
said, in a cold clear voice that seemed to sum up, judge, and dismiss all of
human history in four dead syllables.
   D'mahl looked away from those black pits, looked into Jiz's almond
eyes, and they cross-tapped each other's sensoriums for a moment in
private greeting. Jofe saw his own mirrored body, felt the warmth it
evoked in her. He kissed his lips with Jiz's, tasting the electric smokiness
of the flashers he had eaten. As their lips parted, they broke their taps
simultaneously.
  "What's in that report of yours that the Pilots haven't released to the
banks yet, Bandoora?" D'mahl asked conversationally. (How else could you
make small talk with a voidsucker?)
  Bandoora's thin lips parted in what might have been a smile, or just as
easily a grimace of pain. D'mahl sensed that the man's emotional
parameters were truly alien to his experience, prime or simmed. He had
never paid attention to the voidsuckers before, and he wondered why.
There was one beyond senso to be made on the subject!
  "They've found a planet," Jiz said. "There's going to be a blanket
bulletin at 23.80."
   "Drool," D'mahl said, nuancing the word with most of the feelings that
this flash stirred up. The voidsuckers were always reporting back with
some hot new solar system, turning the Trek for a few months while they
high-geed for a telltale peek, then turning the Trek again for the next
Ultima Thule just as the flash hit that the last one was the usual slokyard
of rock and puke-gas. The voidsuckers had been leading the Trek in a
zigzag stagger through space from one vain hope to another for the better
part of a millennium; the latest zig was therefore hardly a cosmic flash in
Jofe D'mahl's estimation. But it would be a three-month wonder at least,
and tapping out a blanket bulletin just before the premiere was a prime
piece of upstaging, a real boot in the ego. Drool.
  "The probabilities look good on this one," Bandoora said.
  "They always do, don't they?" D'mahl said snidely. "And it always turns
out the same. If there's a rock in the habitable zone, it's got gravity that'd
pull your head off, or the atmosphere is a tasty mixture of hydrogen
cyanide and fluorine. Bandoora, don't you ever get the feeling that some
nonexistent cosmic personage is trying to tell you something you don't
want to hear?"
   Bandoora's inner expression seemed, to crinkle behind his impassive
flesh. A tic made his lower lip tremble. What did I do this time? D'mahl
wondered. These voidsuckers must be far beyond along some pretty
strange vectors.
   Jiz forced a laugh. "The torch Jof is riding is all ego," she said. "He's
just singed because the bulletin is going to bleed some H from his
premiere. Isn't that right, Jof, you egomonster, you?"
  "Don't knock ego," D'mahl said. "It's all that stands between us and the
lamer universe we have the bad taste to be stuck in. Since my opinion of
myself is the only thing I know of higher in the karmic pecking order than
my own magnificent being, my ego is the only thing I've found worth
worshiping. Know what that makes me?"
  "Insufferable?" Jiz suggested.
  "A human being," D'mahl said. "I'm stuck with it, so I might as well
enjoy it."
   "A bulletin from the Council of Pilots." The words intruded themselves
into D'mahl's mind with a reasonable degree of gentleness, an
improvement over the days when the Pilots had felt they had the right to
snap you into full sensory fugue on the spot whenever the spirit moved
them. "Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . ." D'mahl pulled over a green
fuzzball and anchored the floating cloud of particles by planting his
posterior in it. Jiz and Bandoora sat down flanking him. "Six . . . five . . .
four . . ."
   Whichever guests were standing found themselves seats; there was no
telling how long one of these bulletins would last. The Pilots have a grossly
exaggerated sense of their own importance, D'mahl thought. And what
does that make them?
  ". . . three . . . two . . . one . . ."
  Human beings.
  D'mahl sat on a bench at the focus of a small amphitheater. Tiered
around him were two thousand and forty people wearing the archaic blue
military tunics dating back to the time when Ship's Pilot was a
paramilitary rank rather than an elective office. D'mahl found the
uniformity of dress stultifying and the overhead holo of the day sky of an
Earthlike planet banal and oppressive, but then he found most Pilots, with
their naive notion of the Trek's existential position, somewhat
simpleminded and more than a little pathetic.
  Ryan Nakamura, a white-haired man who had been Chairman of the
Council of Pilots longer than anyone cared to remember, walked slowly
toward him, clapped him on the shoulder with both hands, and sat down
beside him. Nakamura smelled of some noxious perfume designed to sim
wisdom-odors of moldy parchment and decayed sweetness. As an artist,
D'mahl found the effect competent if painfully obvious; as a citizen, he
found it patronizing and offensive.
  Nakamura leaned toward him, and as he did, the amphitheater
vanished and they sat cozily alone on an abstract surface entirely
surrounded by a firmament of tightly packed stars.
   "Jofe, Scoutship Bela-37 has returned to the Trek and reported that a
solar system containing a potentially habitable planet is located within a
light-year and a half of our present position," Nakamura said solemnly.
  D'mahl wanted to yawn in the old bore's face, but of course the
viewpoint player hunched him intently toward Nakamura instead as the
Chairman blatted on. "The Council has voted 1,839 to 201 to alter the
vector of the Trek toward this system, designated 997-Beta, pending the
report of the telltale."
   D'mahl sat midway up in the amphitheater as Nakamura continued
formally from a podium on the floor below. "It is our earnest hope that our
long trek is at last nearing its successful completion, that in our own
lifetimes men will once more stand on the verdant hills of a living planet,
with a sky overhead and the smells of living things in our nostrils. We
conclude this bulletin with brief excerpts from the report of Haris
Bandoora, commander of Bela-37."
  Behind the podium, Nakamura faded into Haris Bandoora. "Bela-37
was following a course thirty degrees from the forward vector of the Trek,"
Bandoora said tonelessly. "Torching at point nine . . ."
   D'mahl stood on the bridge of Bela-37—a small round chamber rimmed
with impressive-looking gadgetry, domed in somewhat bluish plex to
compensate for the doppler shift, but otherwise visually open to the
terrifying glory of the deep void. However, one of the four voidsuckers on
the bridge was a woman who easily upstaged the stellar spectacle as far as
D'mahl was concerned. She wore briefs and slippers and was totally bald,
like the others, and her skull was tinted silver, but her preternaturally
conical breasts and shining, tightly muscled flesh made what ordinarily
would have been an ugly effect into an abstract paradigm of feminine
beauty. Whether the warmth he felt was his alone, or his reaction plus
that of the viewpoint player, apparently Bandoora himself, was entirely
beside the point.
   "Ready to scan and record system 997-Beta," the stunning creature
said. D'mahl walked closer to her, wanting to dive into those bottomless
voidsucker eyes. Instead, he found his lips saying, with Bandoora's voice:
"Display it, Sidi."
   Sidi did something to the control panel before her (how archaic!) and
the holo of a yellow star about the diameter of a human head appeared in
the geometric center of the bridge. D'mahl exchanged tense glances with
his crew, somatically felt his expectation rise.
  "The planets . . ." he said.
  Five small round particles appeared, rotating in compressed time
around the yellow sun.
  "The habitable zone . . ."
  A transparent green torus appeared around the holo of 997-Beta. The
second planet lay within its boundaries.
   There was an audible intake of breath, and D'mahl felt his own body
tremble. "The second planet," Bandoora's voice ordered. "At max."
  The holo of the star vanished, replaced by a pale, fuzzy holo of the
second planet, about four times its diameter. The planet seemed to be
mottled with areas of brown, green, blue, yellow, and purple, but the holo
was washed out and wavered as if seen through miles of heat-haze.
    A neuter voice recited instrument readings. "Estimated gravity 1.2, gs
plus or minus ten percent . . . estimated mean temperature thirty-three
degrees centigrade plus or minus six degrees . . . estimated atmospheric
composition: helium, nitrogen, oxygen as major constituents . . .
percentages indeterminate from present data . . . traces of carbon dioxide,
argon, ammonia, water vapor . . . estimated ratio of liquid area to solid
surface 60-40 . . . composition of oceans indeterminate from present data.
. . ."
   D'mahl felt the tension in his body release itself through his vocal cords
in a wordless shout that merged with the whoops of his companions. He
heard his lips say, with Bandoora's voice: "That's the best prospect any
scoutship's turned up within my lifetime."
   D'mahl was seated in the amphitheater as Bandoora addressed the
Council. "A probe was immediately dispatched to 997-Beta-II. Bela-37 will
leave within twenty days to monitor the probe data wavefront. We
estimate that we will be able to bring back conclusive data within half a
standard year."
   D'mahl was an abstract viewpoint in black space. A huge hazy holo of
997-Beta-II hovered before him like a ghostly forbidden fruit as the words
in his mind announced: "This concludes the bulletin from the Council of
Pilots."
   Everyone in Jofe D'mahl's grand salon immediately began babbling,
gesticulating, milling about excitedly. Head after head turned in the
direction of D'mahl, Jiz, and Bandoora. D'mahl felt a slow burn rising,
knowing to whom the fascinated glances were directed.
  "Well, what do you think of that, Jof?" Jiz said, with a sly knife edge in
her voice.
  "Not badly done," D'mahl said coolly. "Hardly art, but effective
propaganda, I must admit."
  Once again, Bandoora seemed strangely stricken, as if D'mahl's words
had probed some inner wound.
  "The planet, Jof, the planet!"
  Fighting to control a building wave of anger, D'mahl managed an arch
smile. "I was paying more attention to Sidi," he said. "Voidsuckers come
up with planets that look that good from a distance much more often than
you see bodies that look that good that close."
  "You think the future of the human race is a rather humorous subject,"
Bandoora said loudly, betraying annoyance for the first time.
  D'mahl tapped the time at 23.981. His guests were all blatting about the
prospects of at last finding a viable mudball, and Wandering Dutchmen
was about to begin! Leaping to his feet, he shouted: "Bandoora, you've
been out in the big zilch too long!" The sheer volume of his voice focused
the attention of every guest on his person. "If I were confined in a
scoutship with Sidi, I'd have something better than slok planets on my
mind!"
  "You're a degenerate and an egomaniac, D'mahl!" Bandoora blatted
piously, drawing the laughter D'mahl had hoped for.
   "Guilty on both counts," D'mahl said. "Sure I'm an egomaniac—like
everyone else, I'm the only god there is. Of course I'm a degenerate, and so
is everyone else—soft protoplasmic machines that begin to degenerate
from day one!"
  All at once D'mahl had penetrated the serious mood that the bulletin
had imposed on his party, and by donning it and taking it one step
beyond, had recaptured the core. "We're stuck where we are and with
what we are. We're Flying Dutchmen on an endless sea of space, we're
Wandering Jews remembering what we killed for all eternity—"
  A great groan went up, undertoned with laughter at the crude bridge to
the impending premiere, overtoned with sullenness at the reminder of just
who and what they were. D'mahl had blown it—or at least failed to entirely
recover—and he knew it, and the knowledge was a red nova inside his
skull. At this moment of foul karma, 2,4.000 passed into realtime, and on
tap frequency E-6—



   You are standing at the base of a gentle verdant hill on whose
tree-dotted summit a man in a loincloth is being nailed to a cross. Each
time the mallet descends, you feel piercing pains in your wrists. You stand
in an alleyway in ancient Jerusalem holding a jug of water to your breast
as Jesus is dragged to his doom, and you feel his terrible hopeless thirst
parching your throat. You are back at Calvary listening to the beat of the
mallet, feeling the lightnings of pain in your wrists, the taste of burning
sands in your mouth.
   You are on the quarterdeck of an ancient wooden sailing ship tasting
the salt wind of an ocean storm. The sky roils and howls under an evil
green moon. Your crew scurries about the deck and rigging, shouting and
moaning in thin spectral voices, creatures of tattered rags and ghostly
transparent flesh. Foam flies into your face, and you wipe it off with the
back of your hand, seeing through your own flesh as it passes before your
eyes. You feel laughter at the back of your throat, and it bubbles out of
you—too loud, too hearty, a maniac's howl. You raise your foglike fist and
brandish it at the heavens. Lightning bolts crackle. You shake your fist
harder and inhale the storm wind like the breath of a lover.
   You look up the slope of Calvary as the final stroke of the mallet is
driven home and you feel the wooden handle and the iron spike in your
own hands. The cross is erected, and it is you who hangs from it, and the
sky is dissolved in a deafening blast of light brighter than a thousand suns.
And you are trudging on an endless plain of blowing gray ash under a sky
the color of rusting steel. The jagged ruins of broken buildings protrude
from the swirling dust, and the world is full of maimed and skeletal people
marching from horizon to horizon without hope. But your body has the
plodding leaden strength of a thing that knows it cannot die. Pain in your
wrists, and ashes in your mouth. The people around you begin to rot on
their feet, to melt like Dali watches, and then only you remain, custodian
of a planetary corpse. A ghostly sailing ship approaches you, luffing and
pitching on the storm-whipped ash.
   The quarterdeck pitches under your feet and the skies howl. Then the
storm clouds around the moon melt away to reveal a cool utter blackness
punctuated by myriad hard points of light, and the quarterdeck becomes a
steel bulkhead under your feet and you are standing in an observation
bubble of a primitive first-generation torchship. Around your starry
horizon are dozens of other converted asteroid freighters, little more than
fusion torchtubes with makeshift domes, blisters, and toroid decks
cobbled to their surfaces—the distant solar ancestors of the Trek.
   You turn to see an ancient horror standing beside you: an old, old man,
his face scarred by radiation, his soul scarred by bottomless guilt, and his
black eyes burning coldly with eternal ice.
   You are standing in an observation bubble of a first-generation
torch-ship. Below, the Earth is a brownish, singed, cancerous ball still
stewing in the radiation of the Slow Motion War. Somewhere a bell is
tolling, and you can feel the tug of the bellrope in your hands. Turning, you
see a lean, sinister man with a face all flat planes and eyes like blue coals.
His face fades into fog for a moment, and only those mad eyes remain
solid and real.
  "Hello, Dutchman," you say.
  "Hello, Refugee."
  "I'm usually called Wanderer."
  "That's no longer much of a distinction," the Dutchman says. "All men
are wanderers now."
   "We're all refugees too. We've killed the living world that gave us birth.
Even you and I may never live to see another." The bite of the nails into
your wrists, the weight of the mallet in your hand. Thirst, and the tolling
of a far-off bell.
   You are the Dutchman, looking out into the universal night; a
generation to the nearest star, a century to the nearest hope of a living
world, forever to the other side. Thunder rolls inside your head and
lightnings flash behind your eyes. "We've got these decks under our feet,
the interstellar wind to ride, and fusion torches to ride it with," you say.
  "Don't whine to me, I've never had more."
  You laugh a wild maniac howl. "And I've got plenty of company, now."
  You are the Wanderer, looking down at the slain Earth, listening to the
bell toll, feeling the dead weight of the mallet in your hand. "So do I,
Dutchman, so do I."
   The globe of the Earth transforms itself into another world: a
brown-and-purple planetary continent marbled with veins and lakes of
watery blue. Clad in a heavy spacesuit, you are standing on the surface of
the planet: naked rock on the shore of a clear blue lake, under a violet sky
laced with thin gray clouds like jet contrails. A dozen other suited men are
fanned out across the plain of fractured rock, like ants crawling on a bone
pile.
  "Dead," you say. "A corpse-world."
  Maniac laughter beside you. "Don't be morbid, Wanderer. Nothing is
dead that was never alive."
   You kneel on a patch of furrowed soil cupping a wilted pine seedling in
your hands. The sky above you is steel plating studded with overhead
floodlights, and the massive cylindrical body of the torchtube skewers the
watertank universe of this dirtdigger deck. The whole layout is primitive,
strictly first-generation Trek. Beside you, a young girl in green dirtdigger
shorts and shirt is sitting disconsolately on the synthetic loam, staring at
the curved outer bulkhead of the farm deck.
   "I'm going to live and die without ever seeing a sky or walking in a
forest," she says. "What am I doing here? What's all this for?"
  "You're keeping the embers of Earth alive," you say in your ancient's
voice. "You're preserving the last surviving forms of organic life. Some day
your children or your children's children will plant these seeds in the living
soil of a new Earth."
   "Do you really believe that?" she says earnestly, turning her youthful
strength on you like a sun. "That we'll find a living planet some day?"
  "You must believe. If you stop believing, you'll be with us here in this
hell of our own creation. We Earthborn were life's destroyers. Our children
must be life's preservers."
  She looks at you with the Wanderer's cold eternal eyes, and her face
withers to a parchment of ancient despair. "For the sake of our
bloodstained souls?" she says, then becomes a young girl once more.
  "For the sake of your own, girl, for the sake of your own."
   You float weightless inside the huddled circle of the Trek. The circular
formation of ships is a lagoon of light in an endless sea of black
nothingness. Bow-ward of the Trek, the interstellar abyss is hidden behind
a curtain of gauzy brilliance: the hydrogen interface, where the combined
scoopfields of the Trek's fusion torches form a permanent shock wave
against the attenuated interstellar atmosphere. Although the Trek's ships
have already been modified and aligned to form the hydrogen interface,
the ships are still the same converted asteroid freighters that left Sol; this
is no later than Trek Year 150.
   But inside the circle of ships, the future is being launched. The Flying
Dutchman, the first torchship to be built entirely on the Trek out of
matter winnowed and transmuted from the interstellar medium, floats in
the space before you, surrounded by a gnat swarm of intership shuttles
and men and women in voidsuits. A clean, smooth cylinder ringed with
windowed decks, it seems out of place among the messy jury-rigging of the
first-generation torchships, an intrusion from the future.
  Then an all-but-invisible purple flame issues from the Dutchman's
torchtube and the first Trekborn ship is drawing its breath of life.
  Another new torchship appears beside the Flying Dutchman, and
another and another and another, until the new Trekborn ships
outnumber the converted asteroid freighters and the hydrogen interface
has more than doubled in diameter. Now the area inside the Trek is a vast
concourse of torchships, shuttles, suited people, and the dancing lights of
civilized life.
    You are standing on a bulkhead catwalk overlooking the floor of a
dirtdigger deck: a sparse forest of small pines and oaks, patches of green
grass, a few rows of flowers. Above is a holo of a blue Earth sky with fleecy
white clouds. Dirtdiggers in their traditional green move about solemnly,
tending the fragile life-forms, measuring their growth. Your nostrils are
filled with the incense odor of holiness.
   And you sit at a round simmed marble table on a balcony cafe halfway
up the outer bulkhead of an amusement deck sipping a glass of simmed
burgundy. A circle of shops and restaurants rings the floor below,
connected by radial paths to an inner ring of shops around the central
torchtube shaft. Each resulting wedge of floor is a different bright color,
each is given over to a different amusement: a swimming pool, a
bandstand, a zero-g dance-plate, carnival rides, a shimmer maze. Noise
rises. Music plays.
  Across from you sits the Wanderer, wearing dirtdigger green and an
expression of bitter contempt. "Look at them," he says. 'We're about to
approach another planet, and they don't even know where they are."
  "And where is that, Refugee?"
  "Who should know better than you, Dutchman?" he says. And the
people below turn transparent, and the bulkheads disappear, and you are
watching zombies dancing on a platform floating in the interstellar abyss.
Nothing else lives, nothing else moves, in all that endless immensity.
  Manic laughter tickles your throat.
  A planet appears as a pinpoint, then a green-and-brown mottled sphere
with fleecy white clouds, and then you are standing on its surface among a
party of suited men trudging heavily back to their shuttleship. Hard
brown rock veined with greenish mineral streakings under a blue-black
sky dotted with pastel-green clouds. You are back on your balcony
watching specters dance in the endless galactic night.
  "Great admiral, what shall you say when hope is gone?" the Wanderer
says.
  And you are down among the specters, grown ten feet tall, a giant
shaking your fist against the blackness, at the dead planet, howling your
defiance against the everlasting night. "Sail on! Sail on! Sail on and on!"
   "No more ships! No more ships! Soil or death!" You are marching at the
head of a small army of men and women in dirtdigger green as it bursts
into the amusement deck from the deck below, bearing crosses wrapped
with simmed grape leaves. Each chanted shout sends nails through your
wrists.
   And you are leading your carnival of ghosts on a mad dance through a
dirtdigger deck, carelessly trampling on the fragile life-forms, strewing
gold and silver confetti, flashers, handfuls of jewels—the bounty of the
fusion torch's passage through the interstellar plankton.
  You are in a droptube falling through the decks of a ship. Amusement
decks, residential decks, manufacturing decks, sifting decks—all but the
control and torchtender decks—have been rudely covered over with
synthetic loam and turned into makeshift dirtdigger decks. The growth is
sparse, the air has a chemical foulness, metal surfaces are beginning to
corrode, and the green-clad people have the hunched shoulders and
sunken eyes of the unwholesomely obsessed. The vine-covered cross is
everywhere.
   You are rising through a lift-tube on another ship. Here the machinery
is in good repair, the air is clean, the bulkheads shiny, and the decks of the
ship glory in light and sound and surfaces of simmed ruby, emerald,
sapphire, and diamond. The people are birds-of-paradise in mirrorsuits,
simmed velvets and silks in luxurious shades and patterns, feathers and
leathers, gold, silver, and brass. But they seem to be moving to an
unnatural rhythm, dancing a mad jig to a phantom fiddler, and their flesh
is as transparent as unpolarized plex.
   You are floating in space in the center of the Trek; behind you, the
Trekborn ships are a half-circle diadem of jeweled brilliance. In front of
you floats the Wanderer, and behind him the old converted asteroid
freighters, tacky and decayed, pale greenery showing behind every blister
and viewport.
  "Your gardens are dying, Wanderer."
  "Yours never had life, Dutchman," he says, and you can see stars and
void through your glassy flesh, through the ghost-ships behind you.
   Two silvery headbands appear in the space between you in a fanfare of
music and a golden halo of light. Large, crude, designed for temporary
external wear, they are the first full sensory transceivers, ancestors of the
surgically implanted tap. They glow and pulse like live things, like the gift
of the nonexistent gods.
  You pick one of the headbands, laugh, place it on the Wanderer's head.
"With this ring, I thee wed."
  Unblinkingly, he places the other band on yours. "Bear my crown of
thorns," he says.
   You stand on the bridge of a torchship, the spectral Dutchman at your
side. Beyond the plex, the stars are a million live jewels, a glory mirrored
in the lights of the Trek.
   You kneel among tiny pine trees in a dirtdigger deck beside the
Wanderer, and they become a redwood forest towering into the blue skies
of lost Earth, and you can feel the pain of the nails in your ghostly wrists,
hearing the tolling of a far-off bell, feel the body's sadness, smell the
incense of irredeemable loss.
   You rise through a lift-tube, the Dutchman's hand in yours, and you
hear the hum of energy as you pass through deck after jeweled and
gleaming deck, hear the sounds of human laughter and joy, see crystal
trees sprouting and rising from the metal deckplates. The flesh of the
spectral people solidifies and the Dutchman's hand becomes pink and
solid. When you look at his face, your own Wanderer's eyes look back, pain
muted by a wild joy.
   You float in the center of the Trek with the Wanderer as the ships
around you rearrange themselves in an intricate ballet: Trekborn and
converted asteroid freighters in hundreds of magical pas de deux,
reintegrating the Trek.
  You are droptubing down through the decks of a dirtdigger ship,
watching green uniforms transform themselves into the bird-of-paradise
plumage of the Trekborn ships, watching the corrosion disappear from the
metal, watching crystal gazebos, shimmer mazes, and bubbling brooks
appear, as shrines to sadness become gardens of joy.
   And you are sitting across a round simmed marble table from the
Dutchman on a balcony cafe halfway up the bulkhead of an amusement
deck. The central torchtube shaft is overgrown with ivy. The pool,
bandstand, shimmer mazes, dance-plates, and carnival rides are laid out
in a meadow of green grass shaded by pines and oaks. The bulkheads and
upper decking dissolve, and this garden square stands revealed as a tiny
circle of life lost in the immensity of the eternal void.
  "We're Wanderers in the midnight of the soul," the Dutchman says.
"Perhaps we're guardians of the only living things that ever were,"
  "Flying Dutchmen on an endless sea, perhaps the only gods there be."
   And you are a detached viewpoint watching this circle of life drift away
into the immensity of space, watching the Trek dwindle away until it is
nothing more than one more abstract pinpoint of light against the galactic
darkness. Words of pale fire appear across the endless star-field:



                 WANDERING DUTCHMEN
                           by Jofe D'mahl


   There was an unmistakable note of politeness in the clicking of tongues
in Jofe D'mahl's grand salon. The applause went on for an appropriate
interval (just appropriate), and then the guests were up and talking, a
brightly colored flock of birds flitting and jabbering about the jeweled
forest.
  ". . . you could see that it had well-defined continents, and the green
areas must be vegetation . . ."
  ". . . oxygen, sure, but can we breathe all that helium?"
   Standing between Jiz Rumoku and Bandoora, Jofe D'mahl found
himself in the infuriating position of being a vacuum beside the focus of
attention. Eyes constantly glanced in their direction for a glimpse of
Bandoora, but no gaze dared linger long, for at the side of the void-sucker,
D'mahl was sizzling toward nova, his eyes putting out enough hard
radiation to melt plex.
  But Bandoora himself was looking straight at him, and D'mahl sensed
some unguessable focus of alien warmth pulsing up at him from the
depths of those unfathomable eyes. "I'm sorry the Pilots' bulletin ruined
your premiere," he said.
   "Really?" D'mahl snarled. "What makes you think your precious blatt
has so much importance?" he continued loudly. There was no reason for
the guests not to stare now; D'mahl was shouting for it. "You dreeks
expect us to slaver like Pavlov's dogs every time you turn up some reeking
mudball that looks habitable until you get close enough to get a good whiff
of the dead stink of poison gas and naked rock. Your blatt will be a
six-month nova, Bandoora. Art is forever."
  "Forever may be a longer time than you realize, D'mahl," Bandoora said
calmly. "Other than that, I agree with you entirely. I found Wandering
Dutchmen quite moving." Were those actually tears forming in his eyes?
"Perhaps more moving than even you can imagine."
   Silence reigned now as the attention of the guests become totally
focused on this small psychodrama. Some of the bolder ones began to inch
closer. D'mahl found that he could not make out Bandoora's vector; in this
little ego contest, there seemed to be no common set of rules.
   "I'd like to atone for interfering with the premiere of a great work of
art," Bandoora said. "I'll give you a chance to make the greatest senso of
your career, D'mahl." There was a thin smile on his lips, but his eyes were
so earnest as to appear almost comical.
   "What makes you think you can teach me anything about senses?"
D'mahl said. "Next thing, you'll be asking me for a lesson in voidsucking."
A titter of laughter danced around the salon.
   "Perhaps I've already gotten it, D'mahl," Bandoora said. He turned,
began walking through the colored mists and crystal trees toward the
transparent plex that blistered the great balcony, focusing his eyes on
D'mahl through the crowd, back over his shoulder. "I don't know anything
about sensos, but I can show you a reality that will make anything you've
experienced pale into nothingness. Capture it on tape if you dare." A
massed intake of breath.
  "If 1 dare!" D'mahl shouted, exploding into nova. "Who do you think
you're scaring with your cheap theatrics, Bandoora? I'm Jofe D'mahl, I'm
the greatest artist of my time, I'm riding the torch of my own ego, and I
know it. If I dare! What do you think any of us have to do but dare, you
poor dreek? Didn't you understand anything of what you just
experienced?"
   Bandoora reached the plex blister, turned, stood outlined against the
starry darkness, the blaze of the concourse of ships. His eyes seemed to
draw a baleful energy from the blackness. "No theatrics, D'mahl,"
Bandoora said. "No computer taps, no sensos, no illusions. None of the
things all you people live by. Reality, D'mahl, the real thing. Out there.
The naked void."
  He half turned, stretched out his right arm as if to embrace the
darkness. "Come with us on Bela-37, D'mahl," he said. "Out there in your
naked mind where nothing exists but you and the everlasting void.
Wandering Dutchmen speaks well of such things—for a senso by a man
who was simming it. What might you do with your own sensorium tape of
the void itself—if you dared record it through your own living flesh? Do
you dare, D'mahl, do you dare face the truth of it with your naked soul?"
  "Jof —"
  D'mahl brushed Jiz aside. "Simming it!" he bellowed in red rage. "Do I
dare!" The reality of the grand salon, even the ego challenge hurled at him
before his guests, burned away in the white-hot fire of the deeper
challenge, the gauntlet Bandoora had flung at the feet of his soul. I can
face this thing, can you? Can you truly carve living art out of the dead
void, not metaphorically, but out of the nothingness itself, in the flesh, in
realtime? Or are you simming it? Are you a fraud?
  "I told you, Bandoora," he said, hissing through his rage, "I've got
nothing to do but dare."
  The guests oohed, Jiz shook her head, Bandoora nodded and smiled.
Jofe D'mahl felt waves of change ripple through his grand salon, through
himself, but their nature and vector eluded the grasp of his mind.



                                     II
   As he flitted from Excelsior to Brigadoon across a crowded sector of the
central Trek, it seemed to Jofe D'mahl that the bubble of excitement in
which he had been moving since the premiere party had more tangibility
than the transparent shimmer screen of his voidbubble. The shimmer was
visible only as the interface between the hard vacuum of space and the
sphere of air it contained, but the enhancement of his persona was visible
on the face of every person he saw. He was being tapped so frequently by
people he had never met in senso or flesh that he had finally had to do
something 180° from his normal vector: tap a screening program into his
banks that rejected calls from all people not on a manageable approved
list. He was definitely the Trek's current nova.
  Even here, among the bubbled throngs flitting from ship to ship or just
space-jaunting, D'mahl felt as if he were outshining the brilliance of the
concourse of torchships, even the hydrogen interface itself, as most of the
people whose trajectories came within visible range of his own saluted
him with nods of their heads or subtle sidelong glances.
  It almost made up for the fact that it wasn't Wandering Dutchmen that
had triggered his nova but his public decision to dare six standard months
with the voidsuckers—away from the Trek, out of tap contact with the
banks, alone in his mind and body like a primitive pre-tap man. Waller
Nan Pei had achieved the same effect by announcing his public suicide a
month in advance, but blew out his torch forever by failing to go through
with it. D'mahl knew there could be no backing out now.
   He flitted past Paradisio, accepted the salutations of the passengers on
a passing shuttle, rounded Ginza, throttled back his g-polarizer, and
landed lightly on his toes on Brigadoon's main entrance stage. He walked
quickly across the ruby ledge, passed through the shimmer, collapsed his
bubble, and took the nearest droptube for Jiz Rumoku's gallery on
twelvedeck, wondering what the place would look like this time.
   Thanks to Jiz's aura, Brigadoon was the chameleon-ship of the Trek;
whole decks were completely done over about as often as the average
Trekker redid his private quarters. Fashions and flashes tended to spread
from Brigadoon to the rest of the Trek much as they spread from Jiz's
gallery to the declcs of her ship. Recently, a motion to change the ship's
name to Quicksilver had come within fifty votes of passage.
   Dropping through the decks, D'mahl saw more changes than he could
identify without tapping for the previous layouts, and he had been on
Brigadoon about a standard month ago. Threedeck had been living
quarters tiered around a formalized rock garden; now it was a lagoon with
floating houseboats. Sixdeck had been a sim of the ancient Tivoli; now the
amusements were arranged on multileveled g-plates over a huge
slow-motion whirlpool of syrupy rainbow-colored liquid. Nine-deck had
been a ziggurat-maze of living quarters festooned with ivy; now it was a
miniature desert of static-molded gold and silver dust-dunes, latticed into
a faerie filigree of cavelike apartments. Fluidity seemed to be the theme of
the month.
   Twelvedeck was now a confection of multicolored energy. The walls of
the shops and restaurants were tinted shimmer screens in scores of subtle
hues, and the central plaza around the torchtube shaft was an
ever-changing meadow of slowly-moving miniature fuzzballs in blue,
green, purple, yellow, and magenta. The torchtube itself was a cylindrical
mirror, and most of the people were wearing tinted mirror-suits, fogrobes,
or lightcloaks. It was like being inside a rainbow, and D'mahl felt out of
sync in his comparatively severe blue pants, bare chest, and cloth-of-gold
cloak.
   Jiz Rumoku's gallery was behind a sapphire-blue waterfall that
cascaded from halfway up the curved bulkhead to a pool of mist spilling
out across the floor of the deck. D'mahl stepped through it, half expecting
to be soaked. Mercifully, the waterfall proved to be a holo, but with Jiz,
you never knew.
  "You who are about to die salute us," Jiz said. She was lying in a
blushing-pink fuzzball, naked except for blinding auroras of
broad-spectrum light coyly hiding her breasts and loins. The pink fuzzball
floated in a lazy ellipse near the center of the gallery, which was now a
circular area contained by a shimmer screen around its circumference
that rippled endless spectral changes. The ceiling was a holo of roiling
orange fire, the floor a mirror of some soft substance.
  "Better in fire than in ice," D'mahl said. "My motto." They cross-tapped,
and D'mahl lay in the fuzzball feeling an electric glow as his body walked
across the gallery and kissed Jiz's lips.
  "Voidsucking isn't exactly my idea of fire, Jof," Jiz said as they
simultaneously broke their taps.
   "This is?" D'mahl said, sweeping his arm in an arc. Dozens of floaters in
sizes ranging from a few square centimeters to a good three meters square
drifted in seemingly random trajectories around the gallery, displaying
objects and energy-effects ranging from tiny pieces of static-molded
gemdust jewelry to boxes of flashers, fogrobes, clingers, holo-panes that
were mostly abstract, and several large and very striking fire-sculptures.
The floaters themselves were all transparent plex, and very few of the
"objects" on them were pure matter.
   "I cog that people are going to be bored with matter for a while," Jiz
said, rising from the fuzzball. "After all, it's nothing but frozen energy.
Flux is the coming nova, energy-matter interface stuff. It expresses the
spirit of the torch, don't you think? Energy, protons, electrons, neutrons,
and heavy element dust from the interstellar medium .transmuted into
whatever we please. This current collection expresses the transmuta-tional
state itself."
  "I like to have a few things with hard surfaces around," D'mahl said
somewhat dubiously.
   "You'll see, even your place will be primarily interface for the next
standard month or so. You'll put it in sync."
   "No I won't, oh creator of tomorrow's flash," D'mahl said, kissing her
teasingly on the lips. "While everyone else is going transmutational, I'll be
out there in the cold hard void, where energy and matter know their
places and stick to them."
  Jiz frowned, touched his cheek. "You're really going through with it,
aren't you?" she said. "Months of being cooped up in some awful
scout-ship, sans tap, sans lovers, sans change. . . ."
  "Perhaps at least not sans lovers," D'mahl said lightly, thinking of Sidi.
But Jiz, he saw, was seriously worried. "What's the matter, Jiz?"
  "What do you actually know about the voidsuckers?"
  "What's to know? They man the scoutships. They look for habitable
planets. They live the simplest lives imaginable."
  "Have you tapped anything on them?"
 "No. I'm taking a senso recorder along, of course, and I'll have to use
myself as major viewpoint, so I don't want any sensory preconceptions."
  "I've tapped the basic sensohistory of the voidsuckers, Jof. There's
nothing else in the banks. Doesn't that bother you?"
  "Should it?"
  "Tap it, Jof."
  "I told you —"
  "I know, no sensory preconceptions. But I'm asking you to tap it
anyway. I have, and I think you should." Her eyes were hard and
unblinking, and her mouth was hardened into an ideogram of resolve.
When Jiz got that look, D'mahl usually found it advisable to follow her
vector, for the sake of parsimony, if nothing else.
  "All right," he said. "For you, I'll sully my pristine consciousness with
sordid facts. Voidsuckers, basic history," he subvoced.
   He stood in an observation blister watching a scoutship head for the
hydrogen interface. The scout was basically a torchship-size fusion tube
with a single small toroid deck amidship and a bridge bubble up near the
intake. "Trek Year 301," a neuter voice said. "The first scout-ship is
launched by the Trek. Crewed by five volunteers, it is powered by a
full-size fusion torch though its mass is only one tenth that of a
conventional torchship. Combined with its utilization of the Trek's
momentum, this enables it rapidly to reach a terminal velocity
approaching .87 lights."
   D'mahl was a detached observer far out in space watching the
scout-ship torch ahead of the Trek. Another scoutship, then another, and
another, and finally others too numerous to count easily, torched through
the hydrogen interface and ahead of the Trek, veering off at angles ranging
from ten to thirty degrees, forming a conical formation. The area of space
enclosed by the cone turned bright green as the voice said: "By 402, the
scoutships numbered forty-seven, and the still-current search pattern had
been regularized. Ranging up to a full light-year from the Trek and
remote-surveying solar systems from this expanded cone of vision, the
scoutship system maximized the number of potential habitable planets
surveyed in a given unit of time."
   Now D'mahl sat on the bridge of a scoutship looking out the plex at
space. Around him, two men and a woman in blue voidsucker shorts were
puttering about with instrument consoles. "In 508, a new innovation was
introduced." A small drone missile shot slightly ahead of the scoutship,
which then began to veer off. "Scoutships now dispatched telltale probes
to potentially habitable planets, returning at once to the Trek."
   D'mahl was a viewpoint in space watching a stylized diorama of the
Trek, a scoutship, a telltale, and a solar system. The scout was torching
back to the Trek while the telltale orbited a planet, broadcasting a red
wavefront of information Trekward. The scout reached the Trek, which
altered its vector toward the telltale's solar system. The scout then left the
Trek to monitor the oncoming telltale wavefront. "By turning the Trek
toward a prospective system, then returning to monitor the telltale
wavefront by scoutship, our fully evolved planetary reconnaissance system
now maximizes the number of solar systems investigated in a given time
period and also minimizes the reporting time for each high-probability
solar system investigated."
   D'mahl was aboard a scoutship, playing null-g tennis with an attractive
female voidsucker. He was in a simple commissary punching out a meal.
He was lying on a grav-plate set at about .25 g in small private sleeping
quarters. He was a female voidsucker making love to a tall powerful man
in null-g. "The scout's quarters, though comfortable and adequate to
maintain physical and mental health, impose some hardship on the crew
owing to space limitations," the neuter voice said. "Tap banks are very
limited and access to the central Trek banks impossible. Scout crews must
content themselves with simple in-flesh amusements. All Trekkers owe
these selfless volunteers a debt of gratitude."
  Jofe D'mahl looked into Jiz Rumoku's eyes. He shrugged. "So?" he said.
"What does that tell me that I didn't already know?"
  "Nothing, Jof, not one damned thing! The voidsuckers have been out
there in the flesh for over half a millennium, spending most of their lives
with no tap connection to the Trek, to everything that makes the only
human civilization there is what it is. What's their karmic vector? What's
inside their skulls? Why are they called voidsuckers, anyway? Why isn't
there anything in the banks except that basic history tape?"
  "Obviously because no one's gone out there with them to make a real
senso," D'mahl said. "They're certainly not the types to produce one
themselves. That's why I'm going, Jiz. I think Bandoora was right— there's
a beyond senso to be made on the voidsuckers, and it may be the only
virgin subject matter left."
  A little of the intensity went out of Jiz's expression. "Ego, of course, has
nothing to do with it," she said.
  "Ego, of course, has everything to do with it," D'mahl replied.
  She touched a hand to his cheek. "Be careful, Jof," she said quite softly.
   Moved, D'mahl put his hand over hers, kissed her lightly on the lips,
feeling, somehow, like an Earthbound primitive. "What's there to be afraid
of?" he said with equal tenderness.
  "I don't know, Jof, and I don't know how to find out. That's what scares
me."



   Jofe D'mahl felt a rising sense of vectorless anticipation as the shuttle
bore him bow-ward toward Bela-37, a silvery cylinder glinting against the
auroral background of the hydrogen interface as it hung like a Damoclean
sword above him. Below, the ships of the Trek were receding, becoming
first a horizon-filling landscape of light and flash, then a disk of human
warmth sharply outlined against the cold black night. It occurred to him
that Trekkers seldom ventured up here where the scoutships parked, close
by the interface separating the Trek from the true void. It was not hard to
see why.
  "Long way up, isn't it?" he muttered.
   The shuttle pilot nodded. "Not many people come up here," he said.
"Voidsuckers and maintenance crews mostly. I come up here by myself
sometimes to feel the pressure of the void behind the interface and look
down on it all like a god on Olympus." He laughed dryly. "Maybe I've
ferried one voidsucker too many."
   Something made D'mahl shudder, then yearn for the communion of the
tap—the overwhelmingly rich intermeshing of time, space, bodies, and
realities from which he was about to isolate himself for the first time in
his life. The tap is what we live by, he thought, and who so more than I?
   "Jiz Rumoku," he subvoced, and he was in her body, standing beside a
fire-sculpture in her gallery with a chunky black man in a severe green
velvet suit. "Hello, Jiz," he said with her vocal cords. "Hello and good-bye."
  He withdrew his tap from her body, and she followed into his, high
above the Trek. "Hello, Jof. It's sure a long way up." She kissed his hand
with his lips.
   "Take care," his voice said. Then she broke the tap, and D'mahl was
alone in his flesh as the shuttle decelerated, easing up alongside Bela-37's
toroid main deck.
  "This is it," the shuttle pilot said. "You board through the main
shimmer." D'mahl gave the pilot an ironic salute, erected his voidbubble,
grabbed his kit and senso recorder, and flitted across a few meters of
space to Bela-37's main entrance stage.
   Stepping through the shimmer, he was surprised to find himself in a
small closetlike room with no droptube shaft in evidence. A round door in
the far bulkhead opened and a tall, pale voidsucker stepped inside. "I'm
Ban Nyborg, D'mahl," he said. He laughed rather humorlessly. "This is an
airlock," he said. "Safety feature."
  Automatically, D'mahl tapped for a definition of the new word:
double-doored chamber designed to facilitate ship entry and exit,
obsoleted by the shimmer screen. "How quaint," he said, following
Nyborg through the open door.
   "Lose power, lose your shimmer, this way you keep your air," Nyborg
said, leading D'mahl down a dismal blue pastel corridor. "Radial
passageway," Nyborg said. "Leads to circular corridor around the
torchtube. Five other radials, tubes to the bridge and back, that's the
ship." They reached the circumtorchtube corridor, done in washed-out
blue and yellow, walked 60 degrees around it past some instrument
consoles and an orange radial corridor, then another 60 degrees and
halfway up a green radial to a plain matter door.
    Nyborg opened the door and D'mahl stepped into a grim little room.
There was a g-plate, a blue pneumatic chair, a tall simmed walnut chest, a
shaggy red rug, and beyond an open door, toilet facilities. The ceiling was
deep gray, and three of the walls were grayish tan. The fourth was a holo
of the interstellar abyss itself—pinpoint stars and yawning blackness—and
it faced the g-plate.
  "Bandoora's quarters," Nyborg said. "He's doubling with Sidi."
  "Charming," D'mahl grunted. "I'm touched."
   "Ship's got three tap frequencies: library, communications, external
visual. Bridge is off limits now. You can tap our departure on external."
Nyborg turned, walked unceremoniously out of the little cell, and closed
the door behind him.
  D'mahl shuddered. The walls and ceiling seemed to be closing in on him
as if to squeeze him into the reality of the holo. He found himself staring
into the starfield, leaning toward it as if it were pulling him down into it.
   He blinked, feeling the strangeness of the sensation, which drew his
attention away from the holo and to his senso recorder. Ought to get all
this down. He turned the recorder on, dropped in a hundred-hour pod of
microtape, keyed it to his own sensorium. But the initial moment of
vertigo had passed; now he was just in an excruciatingly dull little room
with a big starfield holo on one wall.
  D'mahl set the g-plate for one tenth g, just enough to hold him in place,
and lay down on the padding. He found himself staring into the starfield
holo again from this position. Did Bandoora actually like being sucked at
by that thing?
  Bandoora tapped him, audio only: "Welcome to Bela-37, D'mahl. We're
about to torch through the interface. Perhaps you'd care to tap it."
   "Thanks," D'mahl tapped back through the scout's com frequency, "but
I'd rather record it in the flesh from the bridge."
  "Sorry, but the bridge is off limits to you now," Bandoora said, and
broke the tap.
  "Drool!" D'mahl snarled to no one, and irritably tapped the scout's
external visual frequency.
   He was a disembodied viewpoint moving through the silent friction-less
darkness of space. It was like being in a voidbubble and yet not like being
in a voidbubble, for here he was disconnected from all internal and
external senses save vision. He found that he could tap sub-frequencies
that gave him choice of visual direction, something like being able to turn
his nonexistent head. Below, the Trek was a jewel of infinitely subtle light
slowly shrinking in the velvet blackness. All other vectors were dominated
by the hydrogen interface, a sky of rainbow brilliance that seemed to all
but surround him.
   It was a moving visual spectacle, and yet the lack of the subtleties of full
senso also made it pathetic, filled D'mahl with an elusive sadness. As the
rainbow sheen of the hydrogen interface moved visibly closer, that sadness
resolved along a nostalgia vector as D'mahl realized that he was about to
lose tap contact with the Trek's banks. The interface energies would block
out the banks long before time-lag or signal attenuation even became a
factor. It was his last chance to say good-bye to the multiplex Trek reality
before being committed to the unknown and invariant void beyond.
  He broke his tap with the scout's visual frequency, and zip-tapped
through the multiplicity of the Trek's frequencies like a dying man
flashing through his life's sensorium track before committing it to the
limbo banks.
   He stood among the crystal trees of his own grand salon. He was Dalta
Reed punting across Blood Lake on Lothlorien and he was Erna Ramblieu
making love to John Benina on his balcony overlooking Sundance Corridor
on Magic Mountain. He watched Excelsior being built from the body of a
welder working on the hull, and he flashed through the final sequence of
Wandering Dutchmen. He riffled through his own sensorium
track—making love to Jiz five years ago in a dirtdigger deck, moments of
ten parties, dancing above a null-g plate as a boy, cutting Wandering
Dutchmen at his editor—realizing suddenly that he was leaving the world
of his own stored memories behind with everything else. Finally, he
flashed through Jiz Rumoku's body as she led the man in the green velvet
suit past a holoframe of the Far Look Ballet dancing Swan Lake in null-g,
and then his tap was broken, and he was lying on his g-plate in Bela-37,
unable to reestablish it.
   He tapped the scout's visual frequency and found himself moving into
the world-filling brilliance of the hydrogen interface behind the auroral
bubble of Bela-37's own torch intake field. The lesser rainbow touched the
greater, and D'mahl rapidly became sheathed in glory as Bela-37's field
formed a bulge in the Trek's combined field, a bulge that enveloped the
scoutship and D'mahl, became a closed sphere of full-spectrum fire for an
instant, then burst through the hydrogen interface with a rush that sent
D'mahl's being soaring, gasping, and reeling into the cold hard blackness
of the open void beyond.
  D'mahl shook, grunted, and broke the tap. For a panicked moment he
thought he had somehow been trapped in the abyss as his vision snapped
back into his flesh staring at the holo of the void that filled the wall facing
him.



   The lift-tube ended and Jofe D'mahl floated up out of it and onto the
circular bridge of Bela-37-. The bridge was a plex blister up near the bow
of the torchtube encircled by consoles and controls to waist level but
otherwise visually naked to the interstellar void. Bow-ward, the ship's
intake field formed a miniature hydrogen interface; stern-ward, the Trek
was visible as a scintillating disk behind a curtain of ethereal fire, but
otherwise nothing seemed to live or move in all that eternal immensity.
  "Isn't there any getting away from it?" D'mahl muttered, half to himself,
half to Haris Bandoora, who had watched him emerge from the lift-tube
with those unfathomable eyes and an ironic, enigmatic grin.
  "You people spend your lives trying to get away from it," Bandoora said,
"and we spend our lives drenching ourselves in it because we know there is
no real escape from it. One way or the other, our lives are dominated by
the void."
  "Speak for yourself, Bandoora," D'mahl said. "Out there is only one
reality." He touched a forefinger to his temple. "In here are an infinity
more.
  "Illusion," said a woman's voice behind him. D'mahl turned and saw
Sidi—conical bare breasts, hairless silvered skull, tightly muscled body,
opaque voidsucker eyes—a vision of cold and abstract feminine beauty.
  D'mahl smiled at her. "What is," he said, "is real."
  "Where you come from," Sidi said, "no one knows what's real."
  "R éalit é c'est moi," D'mahl said in ancient French. When both Sidi and
Bandoora stared at him blankly, failing to tap for the reference, unable to
tap for the reference, he had a sharp flash of loneliness. An adult among
children. A civilized man among primitives. And out there . . . out there . .
.
   He forced his attention away from such thoughts, forced his vision away
from the all-enveloping void, and walked toward one of the instrument
consoles where a slim woman with a shaven untinted skull sat in a
pedestal chair adjusting some controls.
  "This is Areth Lorenzi," Bandoora said. "She's setting the
sweep-sequence of our extreme-range gravscan. We automatically scan a
twenty light-year sphere for new planeted stars even on a mission like this.
We can pick up an Earth-massed body that far away."
   The woman turned, and D'mahl saw a face steeped in age. There were
wrinkles around her eyes, at the corners of her mouth, even a hint of them
on her cheeks; extraordinary enough in itself, but it was her deep, deep
pale-blue eyes that spoke most eloquently of her years, of the sheer volume
of the things they had seen.
  "How often have you detected such bodies?" D'mahl asked
conversationally, to keep from obviously staring.
  Something seemed to flare in those limpid depths. She glanced over
D'mahl's shoulder at Bandoora for a moment. "It's ... a common enough
occurrence," she said, and turned back to her work.
   "And finally, this is Raj Doru," Bandoora said with a peculiar hastiness,
indicating the other voidsucker on the bridge: a squat, dark,
powerful-looking man with a fierce mouth, a sweeping curve of a nose,
and bright brown eyes glowering under his shaven brows. He was
standing, hands on hips, regarding D'mahl scornfully.
   "What is, is real," Doru said acidly. "What do you know about real, Jofe
D'mahl? You've never confronted the reality of the universe in your whole
life! Cowering behind your hydrogen interface and your tap and your
mental masturbation fantasies! The void would shrivel your soul to a
pinpoint and then snuff it out of existence."
  "Raj!" Bandoora snapped. Psychic energy crackled and clashed as the
two voidsuckers glared at each other for a silent moment.
  "Let's see the great D'mahl suck some void, Haris, let's—"
  "Everything in its time," Bandoora said. "This isn't it."
  "Raj is an impatient man," Sidi said.
  "A peculiar trait for a voidsucker," D'mahl replied dryly. These people
were beginning to grate on his consciousness. They seemed humorless,
obsessive, out of sync with their own cores, as if the nothingness in which
they continuously and monomaniacally wallowed had emptied out their
centers and filled them with itself.
  D'mahl found himself looking up and out into the starry blackness of
the abyss, wondering if that eternal coldness might in time seep into his
core too, if the mind simply could not encompass that much nothingness
and still remain in command of its own vector.
  "Patience is an indifferent virtue out here," Areth said. It did not seem a
comforting thought.



                                    III
  What do these people do with themselves? Jofe D'mahl wondered as he
paced idly and nervously around the circumtorchtube corridor for what
seemed like the thousandth time. A week aboard Bela-37 and he was
woozy with boredom. There was a limit to how much chess and null-g
tennis you could play, and the ship's library banks were pathetic—a few
hundred standard reference tapes, fifty lamer pornos, a hundred classic
sensos (four of his own included, he was wanly pleased to note), and an
endless log of dull-as-death scoutship reports.
   "Patience is an indifferent virtue out here," Areth Lorenzi had said. To
D'mahl, it seemed the only virtue possible under the circumstances, and
his supply of it was rapidly running out.
   Up ahead, he heard footfalls coming down a radial corridor, and a
moment later his vector intersected that of Sidi, striding beautifully and
coldly toward him like a robot simmed in flesh. Even his initial attraction
to her was beginning to fade. Inside that carapace of abstract beauty she
seemed as disconnected from any reality he cared to share as the others.
 "Hello, D'mahl," she said distantly. "Have you been getting good
material for your senso?"
   D'mahl snorted. "If you can call a pod and a quarter of boredom footage
interesting material," he said. "Bandoora promised me something
transcendent. Where is it?"
  "Have you not looked around you?"
  D'mahl nodded upward, at the ceiling, at space beyond. "Out there? I
can see that from my own grand salon."
  'Wait."
  "For what?"
  "For the call."
  "What call?"
  "When it comes, you will know it," Sidi said, and walked past him up
the corridor. D'mahl shook his head. From Doru, hostility; from Bandoora,
lamer metaphysics; from Nyborg, a grunt now and then; from Areth
Lorenzi, a few games of nearly silent chess. Now brain-teases from Sidi.
Can it be that that's all these people have? A few lamer quirks around a
core of inner vacuum? Nothing but their own obsessiveness between them
and eternal boredom? It might make a reasonably interesting senso, if I
could figure out a way to dramatize vacuity. He sighed. At least it gave
him a valid artistic problem to play with.



  "All routine here," Ban Nyborg said, bending his tall frame over the
readout screen, across which two columns of letters and numbers slowly
crawled. "Star catalog numbers on the left, masses of any dark bodies
around them on the right."
  "A simple program could monitor this," D'mahl said. “Why are you
doing it?"
  "Computer does screen it, I'm just backing up. Something to do."
  D'mahl shook his head. He had wandered into this comp center by
accident — none of the voidsuckers had even bothered to mention it to
him. Yet here was much of the equipment at the heart of the scoutship's
mission: the ship's computer and banks, the gravscan readout, and a
whole series of other instrument consoles he would have had to tap for to
identify. But the dull gray room had a strange air of neglect about it.
  "You sound almost as bored as I am, Nyborg," he said.
  Nyborg nodded without looking up. "All waiting, till you get the call."
  "The call? What call?"
  Nyborg turned, and for the first time in nearly two standard weeks,
D'mahl saw animation on his long face; fire, perhaps even remembered
ecstasy in his pale eyes. "When the void calls you to it," he said. "you'll see.
No use talking about it. It calls, and you go, and that's what it's all about.
That's why we're all here."
   "That's why you're here? What about all this?" D'mahl said, sweeping
his hand in a circle to indicate the roomful of instruments.
  He could visibly see the life go out of Nyborg's face; curtains came down
over the fire in his eyes, and he was once again Nyborg the cyborg.
   "All this is the mission," Nyborg grunted, turning back to the readout
screen. "What gets us out here. But the call is why we come. Why do you
think we're called voidsuckers?"
  "Why?"
  'We suck void," Nyborg said.
   "You mean you don't care about the mission? You're not dedicated to
finding us a new living world?"
   "Drool," Nyborg muttered. "Scoutships don't need us, can run
themselves. We need them. To get us to the void." He deliberately began to
feign intense interest in what he was doing, and D'mahl could not extract
a syllable more.



   "Just how long have you been on scoutships, Areth?" Jofe D'mahl said,
looking up from his hopeless position on the chessboard.
 "About a century and a half," Areth Lorenzi said, still studying her next
move. As always, she volunteered nothing.
   "You must really be dedicated to the mission to have spent such a long
life out here in nowhere," D'mahl said, trying to get something out of her.
Those eyes hinted of so much and that mouth said so little.
  "I've always heard the call."
  "What's this call I keep hearing about?"
  "The void calls, and for those who are called, there is nothing but the
void. You think our lives are sacrifices for the common good of
humanity?"
  "Well, aren't they?"
   Areth Lorenzi looked up at him with her ancient crystalline eyes. “We
man the scoutships to reach the void, we don't brave the void to man the
scoutships," she said. "We sacrifice nothing but illusion. We live with the
truth. We live for the truth."
   "And the truth shall set you free?" D'mahl said archly. But the reference
blew by her since she had no way to tap for it.
   Areth dropped her gaze. A note of bitterness came into her voice. "The
truth is: No man is free." She moved her rook to double-check D'mahl's
king and queen. "Checkmate in three moves, D'mahl," she said.



   D'mahl found Haris Bandoora alone on the bridge looking stern-ward,
back toward where the Trek had been visible until recently as a tiny bright
disk among the pinpoint stars. Now the Trek, if it was visible at all, was
nothing more than one point of light lost in a million others. Bela-37
seemed frozen in a black crystal vastness speckled with immobile motes of
sparkling dust, an abstract universe of dubious reality.
   A tremor of dread went through D'mahl, a twinge of the most utter
aloneness. Even the presence of the enigmatic and aloof Bandoora seemed
a beacon of human warmth in the dead uncaring night.
   "Overwhelming, isn't it?" Bandoora said, turning at the sound of
D'mahl's footfalls. "A hundred million stars, perhaps as many planets, and
this one galaxy is a speck of matter floating in an endless nothingness."
There was a strange overlay of softness in those dark and bottomless eyes,
almost a misting of tears. "What are we, D'mahl? Once we were bits of
some insignificant anomaly called life contaminating a dust-mote circling
a speck of matter lost in a tiny cloud of specks, itself a minor contaminant
of the universal void. Now we're not even that. . . ."
  "We're the part that counts, Bandoora," D'mahl said.
  "To whom?" Bandoora said, nodding toward the abyss. "To that?"
  "To ourselves. To whatever other beings share consciousness on planets
around whichever of those stars. Sentience is what counts, Bandoora. The
rest of it is just backdrop." D'mahl laughed hollowly.
  "If this be solipsism, let us make the most of it."
  "If only you knew . . ."
  "If only I knew what?"
  Bandoora smiled an ironic smile. "You will know," he said. "That's why
you're here. We can't be alone with it forever."
  "What —"
  "I've heard the call, Haris." Raj Dora had risen to the bridge, and now
he walked rapidly to Bandoora's side, his brown eyes feverish, an
uncharacteristic languor in his posture.
  "When?" Bandoora asked crisply.
  "Now."
  "How long?"
  "Twenty-four hours."
  Bandoora turned and followed Doru toward the droptube. "What's
going on?" D'mahl asked, trailing after them.
  "Raj is going to suck void," Bandoora said. "He's heard the call. Care to
help me see him off?"



   At the round airlock door, Raj Doru took a voidbubble-and-flitter
harness from the rack, donned it, took a flask of water and a cassette of
ration out of a locker, and clipped them to the belt of his shorts. His eyes
looked off into some unguessable reality that D'mahl could not begin to
sync with.
  "What are you doing, Doru?" he asked.
  Doru didn't answer; he didn't even seem to notice D'mahl's presence.
"Put on a voidbubble and see," Bandoora said, taking two harnesses off
the rack and handing one to him.
  D'mahl and Bandoora donned their harnesses, then Bandoora opened
the airlock door and the three men stepped inside. They erected their
bubbles, Bandoora sealed the door behind them, then the three of them
walked through the shimmer screen onto the scoutship's entrance stage.
   Out on the narrow metal shelf, D'mahl found himself utterly
overwhelmed by the black immensities, the infinite hole in which the
scout-ship hung precariously suspended. This was utterly unlike the view
from his grand salon, for here there was no concourse of ships or even
torchtube wake to ease the impact of the abyss upon the soul. Here there
was only a tiny ship, the abstract stars, three small men—and an infinity
of nothing. D'mahl reeled and quaked with a vertigo that pierced the core
of his being.
   "Twenty-four hours, Haris," Doru tapped on the com frequency. He
spread his arms, turned on his g-polarizer, and leaped up and out into the
blackness of the interstellar abyss.
   "What's he doing?" D'mahl shouted vocally. He caught himself, tapped
the question to Bandoora as Doru began to pick up velocity and dwindle
into the blackness along a vector at right angles to the ship's trajectory.
  "He's going to suck void for twenty-four hours," Bandoora tapped. "He's
answering the call. He'll go out far enough to lose sight of the ship and stay
there for a standard day."
   Doru was already just a vague shape moving against the backdrop of
the starfield. As D'mahl watched, the shape fuzzed to a formless point.
"What will he do out there?" he asked Bandoora quietly, a shudder racking
his body.
  "What happens between a man and the void is between a man and the
void."
  "Is it ... safe?"
   "Safe? We have a fix on him, and he's still inside the cone of our
interface. His body is safe. His mind . . . that's between Raj and the void."
   Now D'mahl could no longer make Doru out at all. The voidsucker had
vanished . . . into the void. D'mahl began to catch his mental breath,
realizing that he was missing the only prime senso footage that had yet
presented itself to him. He tried to tap Doru through the ship's com
frequency, but all he got was a reject signal.
  "I've got to get this on tape, Bandoora! But he's rejecting my tap."
  "I told you, what happens between a man and the void is between that
man and the void. The only way you'll ever bring back a senso of this
reality, D'mahl, is to experience it in your own flesh and tap yourself."
  D'mahl looked into Bandoora's cool even eyes; then his gaze was drawn
out into the black and starry depths into which Doru had disappeared. To
which Doru had willingly, even ecstatically, given himself. Fear and
fascination mingled inside him. Here was an experience the
contemplation of which caused his knees to tremble, his heart to pound,
and a cold wind to blow through his soul. Yet here too was an experience
whose parameters he could not predict or fathom, a thing he had never
done nor dreamed of doing, the thing that lay at the core of what the
voidsuckers were. The thing, therefore, that was the core of the senso for
which he was enduring these endless months of boredom. A thing,
therefore, that he must inevitably confront.
  "Why do you do it?" he tapped, turning from the abyss to face
Bandoora.
  "Each man has his own reason," the voidsucker tapped. "The call has
many voices." He smiled a knowing smile. "You're beginning to hear it in
your own language, D'mahl," he said.
  D'mahl shivered, for somewhere deep inside him, the opening notes of
that siren-song were indeed chiming, faraway music from the depths of
the beyond within.



   Standing on the bridge watching Bandoora disappear into the void,
Jofe D'mahl felt like a hollow stringed instrument vibrating to yet another
strumming of the same endless chord. Doru, Nyborg, Areth, Sidi, and now
finally Bandoora had committed themselves to the abyss in these past
three weeks, Areth and Nyborg twice apiece. Each of them had refused to
let him tap them or even to discuss the experience afterward, and each of
them had come back subtly changed. Doru seemed to have much of the
hostility leached out of him; Nyborg had become even less talkative,
almost catatonic; Areth seemed somehow slightly younger, perhaps a bit
less distant: and Sidi had begun to ignore him almost completely. He
could find no common denominator, except that each succeeding voidsuck
had made him feel that much more isolated on Bela-37, that much more
alone, that much more curious about what transpired between the human
mind and the void. Now that the last of them was out there, D'mahl felt
the process nearing completion, the monotonous chord filling his being
with its standing-wave harmonics.
  "Are you hearing it, Jofe D'mahl?" the quiet voice of Areth Lorenzi said
beside him. "Do you finally hear the call?"
  "I'm not sure what I'm hearing," D'mahl said, without looking away
from the immensities outside the plex. "Maybe what I'm hearing is my
own ego calling. I've got to get a voidsuck on tape, or I've wasted all this
time out here."
   "It's the call," Areth said. "I've seen it often enough. It comes to each
along his own natural vector."
  With ah effort, D'mahl turned to face her. "There's something you
people aren't telling me," he said. "I can feel it. I know it."
   Now it was Areth who spoke without looking at him, whose eyes were
transfixed by the overwhelming void. "There is," she said. "The void at the
center of all. The truth we live with that you deny."
   "Drool on all this crypticism!" D'mahl snapped. "What is this cosmic
truth you keep teasing me with?"
  "To know, you must first taste the void."
  "Why?"
  "To know that, you must first answer the call."
   A wordless grunt of anger and frustration exploded from D'mahl's
throat. "You think I don't know the game you people are playing?" he said.
"You think I don't know what you're doing? But why? Why are you so
anxious for me to suck void? Why did you want me here in the first
place?"
  "Because of who you are, Jofe D'mahl," Areth said. "Because of
Wandering Dutchmen. Because you may be the one we have sought. The
one who can share the truth and lift this burden from our souls."
  "Now it's flattery, is it?"
   Areth turned to face him, and he almost winced at the pain, the
despair, the pleading in her eyes. "Not flattery," she said. "Hope. I ask you,
one human being to another, to help us. Bandoora would not ask, but I do.
Lift our burden, D'mahl, heed the call and lift our burden."
   Unable to face those eyes, D'mahl looked off into the star-speckled
blackness. Bandoora could no longer be seen, but something out there was
indeed beckoning to him with an unseen hand, calling to him with an
unheard voice. Even his fear seemed to be a part of it, challenging him to
face the void within and the void without and to carve something out of it
if he had the greatness of soul to dare.
  "All right," he said softly—to Areth, to Bandoora, to all of them, and to
that which waited beyond the plex blister of the bridge. "You've won.
When Bandoora comes back, I'll answer your damned call. As I once said,
I've got nothing to do but dare."
  But the man who had said it seemed long ago and far away.



   They were all out on the entrance stage in voidbubbles to see him off.
"Eighteen standard hours, D'mahl," Bandoora tapped over the com
frequency. "Remember, we've got a fix on you, and we can come right out
and get you if it becomes too much. Just tap."
   Inside his own bubble, D'mahl nodded silently. He fingered his water
flask and his ration cassette. He tapped the time at 4.346. He could not for
a moment draw his eyes away from the endless black sea into which he
was about to plunge. Millions of pinpoint stars pulsed and throbbed in the
darkness like needles pricking his retinas. A silent roaring pulsed up at
him from out of the abyss, the howl of the eternal silences themselves. His
body seemed to end at the knees. The void appeared to be a tangible
substance reaching out to enfold him in its cold and oceanic embrace. He
knew that he must commit himself to it now, or in the next moment flee
gibbering and sweating into the psychic refuge of Bela-37.
  "See you at 22.000," he tapped inanely, activating his g-polarizer. Then
he flexed his knees and dived off the little metal shelf into the vast
unknown.
   The act of leaping into the abyss seemed to free him of the worst of his
fears, as if he had physically jumped out of them, and for a while he felt no
different than he had at times when, flitting from one Trek ship to
another, he had temporarily lost sight of all. Then he looked back.
   Bela-37 was a small metal cylinder slowly dwindling into the starry
darkness. The five tiny figures standing on the entrance stage hovered on
the edge of visibility and then melted into the formless outline of the
scoutship. Nothing else existed that seemed real. Only the shrinking
cylinder of metal, one single work of man in all that nothing. D'mahl
shuddered and turned his head away. Somehow the sight of the pure void
itself was less terrifying than that of his last connection with the things of
man disappearing from view into its depths.
   He did not look back again for a long time. When he did, his universe
had neither back nor front nor sides nor top nor bottom. All around him
was an infinite black hole dusted with meaningless stars, and every
direction seemed to be down. His mind staggered, reeled, and rejected
this impossible sensory data. Polarities reversed, so that the entire
universe of stars and nothingness seemed to be collapsing in on him,
crushing the breath out of him. He screamed, closed his eyes, and was lost
in the four-dimensional whirlpool of his own vertigo.
   By feel, he turned off the g-polarizer, whirling inside the vacuum of his
own mind, sucked spiraling downward into meaningless mazes of total
disorientation. Half whimpering, he opened his eyes again to a new
transformation.
   It was as if he were imbedded in a clear, motionless, crystalline
substance englobed by a seamless black wall onto which the stars had
been painted. Nothing moved, no event transpired, time could not be said
to be passing. It was the very essence of tranquillity; calming, eternal,
serene.
  D'mahl sighed, felt his constricted muscles relax and his mind drift free.
He floated in the void like an immortal embryo in everlasting amnion,
waiting for he knew not what. Nor cared.



  Time did not pass, but there was duration. D'mahl floated in the void,
and waited. Thirst came and was slaked, and he waited. Hunger came; he
nibbled ration, and waited. He grew aware of the beating of his own heart,
the pulsing of blood through his veins, and he waited. The kinesthetic
awareness of his own bodily functions faded, and he still waited.
   Nothing moved. Nothing lived. Nothing changed. Silence was eternal.
Gradually, slowly, and with infinite subtlety, D'mahl's perception of his
environment began to change again. The comforting illusion of being held
in crystalline suspension in a finite reality enclosed by a painted backdrop
of stars and blackness began to fade under the inexorable pressure of
durationless time and forced contemplation. The clear crystal substance of
space dissolved into the nothingness whence his mind had conjured it,
and as it did, the stars became not points of pain on distant walls but
motes of incandescent matter an infinity away across vast gulfs of absolute
nothingness. The overwhelming blackness was not the painted walls of a
pocket reality but an utter absence of everything—light, warmth, sound,
motion, color, life—that went on and on without boundaries to give it
shape or span to give it meaning. This was the void and he was in it.



   Strangely, D'mahl now found that his mind could encompass this
mercilessly true perception of reality, however awesome, however
terrifying, without the shield of perceptual illusions. Endless duration had
stripped him of the ability to maintain these illusions, and between
gibbering terror and a cool, detached acceptance of the only reality he
could maintain, his mind chose detachment.
   He was, and he was in the void. That was reality. He moved, and all else
was static. That was real. He could hear the sound of his own breath, and
all else was silence. That was inescapable truth. He could perceive his
body's shape as the interface between his internal reality and the
nothingness outside, and all else was formless forever in space and time.
That was the void. That was the universe. That was prime reality. That
was the reality from which men fled—into religion, dream, art, poetry,
philosophy, metaphysics, literature, film, music, war, love, hate, paranoia,
the senso and the tap. Into the infinity of realities within.
  Outside the realities of the mind there was nothingness without form or
end, minutely contaminated with flecks of matter. And man was but the
chance end-product of a chain of random and improbable collisions
between these insignificant contaminants. The void neither knew nor
cared. The void did not exist. It was the eternal and infinite nonexistence
that dwarfed and encompassed that which did.
  D'mahl floated in this abyss of nonbeing, duration continued, and the
void began to insinuate tendrils of its nonself into his being, into his pith
and core, until it was reflected by a void within.
   Jofe D'mahl experienced himself as a thin shell of being around a core
of nothingness floating in more nonbeing that went on tunelessly and
formlessly forever. He was the atom-thin interface between the void
without and the void within. He was an anomaly in all that nothingness, a
chance trick knot whereby nothingness redoubled upon itself had
produced somethingness—consciousness, being, life itself. He was nothing
and he was everything there was. He was the interface. He did not exist.
He was all.



   For more timeless duration, Jofe D'mahl existed as a bubble of
consciousness in a sea of nonbeing, a chance bit of matter recomplicated
into a state it was then pleased to call life, a locus of feeling in a
nothingness that knew neither feeling nor knowing itself. He had passed
beyond terror, beyond pride, beyond humility, into a reality where they
had no meaning, where nothing had meaning, not even meaning itself.
  He tried to imagine other bubbles of consciousness bobbing in the
everlasting void—on Bela-37, on the ships of the Trek, on unknown planets
circling those abstract points of light contaminating the sterile perfection
of the abyss. But out here in the true void, in this endless matrix of
nonbeing, the notion that consciousness, or even life itself, was anything
but the improbable product of a unique and delicate chain of random
interactions between bits of recomplicated nothingness called "matter"
seemed hopelessly jejune and pathetically anthropocentric. One possible
chain of unlikely events led to life and all others led back to nothingness.
One misstep on the part of nonexistent fate, and the unlikely spell was
broken.
   The wonder was not that life had arisen so sparsely, but that it had
arisen at all.
  D'mahl floated in the blackness of the abyss, in the sea of timeless
nonbeing, clinging to the life-preserver of one incontrovertible truth. I am,
he thought. I exist, and every thought I've ever had, every reality that ever
existed in my mind, also exists. This may be prime reality, but everything
that is, is real.
   Coldly, calmly, almost serenely, Jofe D'mahl waited in the silent
immobile darkness for the recall signal from Bela-37, the call to return
from the nonbeing of the void to the frail multiplexity of the worlds of
man.



   They were all out on the entrance stage in voidbubbles to greet him.
Silently, they conveyed him inside the scoutship, their eyes speaking of the
new bond between them. With a strange ceremoniousness, they escorted
D'mahl into the ship's commissary. Bandoora seated him at a short side of
one of the rectangular tables, then sat down across its length from him.
The others arranged themselves on either long side of the table. It would
have been a moot point as to who was at the foot and who the head were it
not for another of the scoutship's endless holos of space forming the wall
behind Bandoora. This one was a view of the galaxy as seen from far out in
the intergalactic emptiness, and it haloed Bandoora's head in Stardust
and blackness.
  "Now that you have confronted the void, Jofe D'mahl," Bandoora said
solemnly, "you are ready to share the truth."
  Petty annoyance began to fade the reality of D'mahl's so recent
experience from the forefront of his consciousness. This was beginning to
seem like some kind of ridiculous ceremony. Were they going to treat his
experience out there as an initiation into some ludicrous religion? Replete
with incantations, tribal secrets, and Bandoora as high priest?
   "Say what you have to say, Bandoora," he said. "But please spare me the
formalities."
   "As you wish, D'mahl," Bandoora said. His eyes hardened, seemed to
pick up black flashes of void from the holo of space behind him. "What
happened between you and the void is between you and the void," he said.
"But you felt it. And for half a millennium our instruments have been
confirming it."
  "Confirming what?" D'mahl muttered. But the quaver in his voice would
not let him hide from that awful foretaste that bubbled up into his
consciousness from the void inside.
  "We have instruments far beyond what we've let you people believe,"
Bandoora said, "and we've had them for a long time. We've gravscanned
tens of thousands of stars, not thousands. We've found thousands of
planets, not hundreds. We've found hundreds of Earth-parameter planets
orbiting in habitable zones, not dozens. We've been lying, D'mahl. We've
been lying to you for centuries."
  "Why?" D'mahl whispered, knowing the answer, feeling it screaming at
him from the holo behind Bandoora's head, from the voidsucker's opaque
eyes, from the void beyond.
  "You know why," Doru said harshly, "Because they're nothing but dead
rock and gas. Over seven hundred of them, D'mahl."
   "All of them should have been teeming with life by any parameters our
scientists can construct," Areth Lorenzi said. "For centuries, we hoped
that the next one or the one after that would disprove the only possible
conclusion. But we've not found so much as a microbe on any of them. We
have no hope left."
  "Gets as far as protein molecules sometimes," Nyborg grunted. "Maybe
one in eighty."
  "But the telltale probes can't—"
  "Telltales!" Doru snorted. "The telltale probes are more illusion to
protect you people! We've got microspectrographs that could pick up a
DNA molecule ten light-years away, and we've had them for centuries."
  "We already know that 997-Beta-II is dead," Sidi said. "We knew it
before we reported to the Council of Pilots. This whole mission, like
hundreds before it, is an empty gesture."
  "But why have you been lying to us like this?" D'mahl shouted. "What
right did you have? What—"
  "What were we supposed to say?" Bandoora shouted back. "That it's all
dead? That life on Earth was a unique accident? That nothing exists but
emptiness and dead matter and the murderers of the only life there ever
was? What are we supposed to say, D'mahl? What are we supposed to
do?"
  "For over two centuries we have lived with the conviction that our
mission is hopeless," Areth said softly. "For over two centuries we have
been leading the Trek from one false hope to the next, knowing that hope
was false. Don't judge us too harshly. What else could we have done?"
   "You could have told us," D'mahl croaked. "You could have told us the
truth."
  "Could we?" Areth said. "Could we have told you before you yourself
confronted the void?"
   Anger and despair chased each other in a yin-yang mandala at Jofe
D'mahl's core. Anger at the smug arrogance of these narrow lamer people
who dared treat all of human civilization as retarded children who could
not be told the truth. Despair at the awful nature of that truth. Anger at
the thought that perhaps the voidsuckers were hiding their true reason for
silence, that they had kept the Trek in ignorance so that they wouldn't risk
the termination of the scoutship program and with it the one act that gave
their lamer lives meaning. Despair at the treacherous thought that the
voidsuckers might be right after all, that the truth would shatter the Trek
like radiation-rotted plex. Anger at himself for even thinking of joining the
voidsuckers and sitting in such arrogant judgment.
  "You lamer drool-ridden dreeks!" D'mahl finally snarled. "How dare you
judge us like that! Who do you think you are, gods on Olympus? Living
your narrow little lives, cutting yourselves off from the worlds inside, and
then presuming to decide what we can face!"
  His flesh trembled, his muscles twanged like steel wire tensed to the
snapping point, and adrenaline's fire pounded through his arteries as his
hands ground into the edge of the table.
  But the voidsuckers sat there looking up at him quietly, and what he
saw in their eyes was relief, not anger, or reaction to anger.
  "Then you'll do it, D'mahl?" Bandoora said softly.
  "Do what?"
  "Tell them in your own way," Areth said. "Lift the burden from us."
  "What?"
   "When I tapped Wandering Dutchmen, I felt you might be the one,"
Bandoora said. "You sensed the edges of the truth. You seemed to be
looking at the void and yet beyond. You know your people, D'mahl, as we
do not. You've just said it yourself. Tell them. Make a senso that tells
them."
   "All this . . . this whole trip ... it was all a trick to get me out here ... to
tell me this ... to drop your load of slok on me. . . ."
  "I promised you the chance to make the greatest senso of your career,"
Bandoora said. "Did I lie?"
  D'mahl subsided into his chair. "But you didn't tell me I was going to
have to succeed," he said.



                                        IV
   The scoutship came in tail-first on a long shallow arc over the hydrogen
interface, still decelerating. Tapping Bela-37's visual frequency, Jofe
D'mahl saw the ships of the Trek suddenly appear in all their glory as the
scoutship passed the auroral wavefront, as if the interface were a rainbow
curtain going up on a vast ballet of motion and light.
   Thousands of shining cylinders hung in the blackness, their surfaces
jeweled with multicolored lights. The space between them coruscated and
shone with shuttle exhausts and a haze of subtle reflections off thousands
of moving voidbubbles. The thin purple wake of the Trek cut an ethereal
swath of manifested motion and time through the eternal immobile
nothingness.
  The Trek seemed larger and lovelier than even D'mahl's memory had
made it during the long sullen trip hack. Its light drove back the
everlasting darkness, its complexity shattered the infinite sameness of the
void; it danced in the spotlight of its own brilliance. It was alive. It was
beautiful. It was home.
   Bandoora had calculated well; as Bela-37 passed stemward of the Trek,
its relative velocity dwindled away to zero and it hung in space about
twenty kilometers behind the great concourse of ships. Bandoora turned
the scoutship end-for-end and began to ease it toward the Trek, toward its
eventual parking slot just behind the hydrogen interface. D'mahl broke his
tap with the scout's visual frequency and lay on the g-plate in his room for
a long moment staring into the starfield holo before him for the last time.
   Then, like a lover reaching for remembered flesh after a long parting,
like a man rising out of a long coma toward the dawning light, he tapped
Jiz Rumoku.
   He was sitting at a clear glass table sipping an icy blue beverage out of a
pewter mug, washing down a swallow of lavender sponge. Across the table,
Varn Kamenev was pouring himself another mugful from a matching
pitcher. The table was on a disk of clear plex, floating, like dozens of
others, through what seemed like a topless and bottomless forest of ivy. He
didn't recognize the restaurant, but didn't bother to tap for it.
  "Home is the hero," he said with Jiz's throat and lips, feeling her body
warm to his presence.
  "Jof! Where are you, what happened, let me tap—"
  "Wait for the flesh, Jiz," he told her. "I'll be in your gallery within two
hours. I wanted you to be the first, but I've got to zip-tap my way back to
realities before I die of thirst."
  "But what was it like—"
  "Miles and miles of miles and miles," he said, feeling a surge of
exhilaration at the thought that he was with someone who could and
would tap for the reference. "Next year in Jerusalem," he said with her
mouth. He kissed her hand with her lips and broke the tap.
  And zip-tapped through the changes like a random search program for
the phantom tapper.
   He was Para Running, soaring naked in a low-g dive into a pool of
fragrant rose-colored water heated to body temperature. He watched
Bela-37 pop through the hydrogen interface with himself aboard from the
sensorium track of the shuttle pilot, then watched it arrive back at the
Trek on the news-summary frequency. He stood in his own grand salon
glaring through the party's mists at Haris Bandoora, then tapped it in
realtime—the bare emerald floor, the darkened crystal trees, and, beyond
the plex, the great concourse of ships shining in the galactic night.
   He was in John Benina's body, looking down on Sundance Corridor.
Vines crawled up and down the sheer glass faces of the apartments now,
and pines grew around the faceted mirror in the center of the square,
subduing the usual brilliance. He tapped a fragment of Let a Thousand
Flowers Bloom, a senso by Iran Capabula that had been premiered during
his absence: bent over under a yellow sun in a clear blue sky, he was
weeding an endless field of fantastically colorful flowers, soaked in their
incenselike perfume. He danced a few measures of Starburst as male lead
for the Far Look Ballet. He made love for the first time on a hill of blue fur
in Samarkand, for the last time at Jiz's, and a dozen times in between. He
edited Blackout, his first senso, and Wandering Dutchmen, his latest. He
dined amidst colored clouds on Ariel and at the shore of Blood Lake on
Lothlorien and a dozen other meals between. He tapped random
sequences of every senso he had ever made.
  And when he was through, he was one with the D'mahl that had been,
he was back in the universe of infinite realities that he had left; he was
whole, and he was home.



  Brigadoon, as D'mahl had expected, was totally transformed. But the
nature of the current flash was hardly anything that he would have
expected, and something about it chilled him at the core.
   Twodeck was a sim of an ancient Alpine Earth village—simmed wooden
houses, grass growing on synthetic loam, pine trees; even the bulkheads
were hidden by a 36o-degree holo of snowcapped mountains under a blue
sky. The amusements of sixdeck had been cut down and ludicrously
simplified to fit into an American county fair motif: Ferris wheel,
merry-go-round, dart-and-balloon games, a baseball diamond, even
mechanical sims of prize cattle, sheep, dogs, and pigs. Once again, the
deck was enclosed in a 36o-degree holo, this one of fields of corn waving in
a breeze. Eightdeck, a residential deck, was a simmed African
village—thatched huts in a circle, a kraal containing mechanical cattle and
antelope, lions and hyenas slinking about the holoed veldt that enclosed it.
Tendeck had actually been made over into a functional dirtdigger deck:
row after row of pine tree seedlings, thickly-packed vine trellises, beds of
flowers, people in dirtdigger green bustling about everywhere.
   It wasn't so much the theme of the flash that appalled D'mahl—
Brigadoon had gone through nature flashes before—but the monomania
of its application, the humorlessness of it all, the sheer lack of brio. This
latest transformation of Brigadoon seemed so deadly earnest, an attempt
to accurately sim old Earth environments rather than to use them to ring
artistic changes.
   Twelvedeck, Jiz's deck, the epicenter of all of Brigadoon's waves of
transformation, appalled him most of all. Everything was wood and trees.
The shops and restaurants were constructed of simmed logs with rough
bark on them; the windows were small square panes of plex set in wooden
grillworks. The furniture in them was of simmed rough-hewn wood. The
paths were flagstone. Huge simmed chestnut and eucalyptus trees were
everywhere, towering to the ceiling of the deck to form an almost seamless
forest canopy, and dwarfing and almost crowding out the modest
neoprimitive cabins. The air had been made redolent with the odors of
burning leaves and moldering loam; birdcalls and vague animal rustlings
burbled continually in the ear.
   Jiz Rumoku's gallery was a single large room carved out of the simmed
stump of what would have been an enormous redwood tree, with her living
quarters a rude lean-to atop it. Inside, the walls and floor were simmed
redwood planking, the ceiling was ribbed by heavy wooden beams, and an
orange fire flickered and roared in a red brick fireplace. Elegant simmed
oak tables and chests in the clean, severe Shaker style served to display
representational woodcarvings, clay pottery, blue-and-white ceramic
dishes, simple gold and silver jewelry, wickerwork baskets and animals,
neohomespun clothing. Cast iron stoves, scythes, tools, and plowshares
were scattered around the gallery.
  Jiz stood behind a low table wearing a clinging, form-fitting dress of
red-and-white checked gingham, cut in bare-breasted Minoan style. She
was drinking something out of a clay mug.
   "Jof!" she shouted, and they cross-tapped. D'mahl felt the scratchiness
of the dress against her skin as his body kissed her lips and his arms
hugged him to her. He tasted the remnants of the drink in her
mouth—something sweet, slightly acrid, and vaguely alcoholic. His own
lips tasted hard and electric by comparison.
  "I don't know where to begin!" she said, as they broke the tap. "Let me
tap your sensorium track of the trip!"
  "Not in the banks yet," D'mahl said. "Remember, I was cut off."
  "That's right! How bizarre! Are you actually going to have to tell me
about it?"
   "I'll tap the recordings into the banks soon enough," D'mahl mumbled,
wondering whether he was lying. "But in the meantime, what's all this,
talking about bizarre?"
   "That's right," Jiz said, "you have been out of touch. How strange! The
transmutational flash didn't last quite as long as I had expected, mostly
because it began to seem so artificial, so out of sync with our future
vector."
  "Future vector?"
  "Eden."
  "Eden?"
  "Our coming new home, Jof. We couldn't keep calling it 997-Beta II,
could we? We had a referendum and 'Eden' won, though I preferred
Olympia. I've always found the Greek mythos more simpatico."
  Chimes of nausea rolled through D'mahl's being from a center of
nothingness below his sternum. "Don't you think all this is a bit
premature, Jiz?" he said.
  "That's the nature of my game, Jof, you know that," Jiz said, touching
the tip of his nose with a playful fingertip. "But this time, I'm doing more
than creating flash. I'm helping to prepare us for the transformation."
  "Transformation?"
   She flitted around the gallery, touching wood, brick, clay, wicker, iron.
"Oh Jof, you said it yourself in Wandering Dutchmen! Flying Dutchmen
on an endless sea, that's what we've been too long. Eternal adolescents
low-riding our faerie ships through the night. And now that we've got a
chance to grow up, to sink new roots in fresh soil, we've got to sync our
minds with the coming reality, we've got to climb off the torch we're
riding and get closer to the ground. Wood, brick, iron, clay, growing
things! Planetary things! We're preparing ourselves to pioneer a virgin
world."
   "Slok," D'mahl muttered under his breath. "Dirtdigger slok," he said
aloud. Something like anger began simmering toward nova inside him.
  Jiz paused, a butterfly frozen in mid-dance. "What?"
   D'mahl looked at her, bare breasts held high over red-and-white
gingham, proudly presiding over the synthetic primitivism she had
created, over the vain and pathetic dream that would never be, and for a
long moment she seemed to be made of thin clear glass that would shatter
at the merest sound of his voice. The gallery, twelvedeck, Brigadoon, the
Trek were clouds of smoke that would dissipate at a careless wave of his
hand. Beyond and within, the void gibbered and laughed at poor wraiths
who tried so hard to be real. How can I tell her? D'mahl thought. And to
what end? To what damned end?
  "Nothing," he said lamely. "I guess I just don't like the idea of growing
up. I've got too much pan in my peter."
   Jiz giggled as she tapped the triple-reference pun, and it enabled the
moment to slide by. But D'mahl felt a distancing opening up between
himself and Jiz, between himself and the Trek, between reality and
illusion. Is this what it feels like to be a voidsucker? he wondered. If it is,
you can torch it to plasma and feed it to the converter!
   "But you've been out there, Jof," Jiz said, moving back across the gallery
toward him. "You've read the telltale wavefront, you've looked inside the
gates of Eden." Her eyes sparkled, but beyond that sugarplum glow D'mahl
saw only the lurking void. "Are there oceans with fish and skies full of
birds? Is the grass green? Do the plants flower?"
  "A gentleman never tells," D'mahl muttered. What do I say, that the
green grass is copper salts and the oceans are blue with cyanide and the
skies full of poison? He began to feel more sympathy for the voidsuckers
now. How could you make a life out of telling people these things? How do
you like being the angel of death?
  "Jof!"
  "I can't say anything, Jiz, I promised not to."
  "Oh come on, how could the voidsuckers or the Council squeeze a
promise like that out of you?"
  With enormous effort, D'mahl painted a smug smile across his face; the
creases in his skin felt like stress-cracks in a mask of glass. "Because that's
the quid I'm paying for their pro quo, ducks," he said.
  "You mean . . . ?"
  "That's right. You didn't think I'd spend all that time out there and let
some dry-as-Luna bulletin from the Council upstage me, did you? No
bulletin—997-Beta-II—Eden—is my next senso."
  Jiz bounced up, then down, and kissed him on the lips. "I cog it'll be
your greatest," she said.
   D'mahl hugged her briefly to him, his eyes looking through her mane of
hair to a set of plain clay dishes on an oaken chest beside the brick
fireplace. He shuddered, feeling the void inside every atom of every
molecule of matter in those simmed projections of a past that was dead
forever into a future that would never be. He was committed to doing it
now, the way through was the only way out, and he had taken it upon
himself to find it.
  "It had better be," he said. "It had damned well better be."



   D'mahl stood in Aric Moreau's body amidst solemn people in their
loathsome homespun wandering drool-eyed through tightly packed rows
of pine seedlings jamming a dirtdigger deck on Glade. There was no
attempt to sim anything here; the dirtdiggers were force-growing a forest
for transplantation to the nonexistent fertile soil of Eden, and, as with the
other dirtdigger decks he had tapped, aesthetics had been gobbled up by
function. Angrily, he made excrement rain from the sky, turned the
fashionable neohomespun garments to filthy denim rags, and threw in a
few wrathful lightning bolts for good measure.
   He ran the segment of Bela-37's report where the holo of 997-Beta-II
hung like an overripe fruit in the center of the scoutship's bridge and
made a tongue and mouth appear at the equator, giving a big juicy
raspberry. He floated in the void, falling, falling, eternally falling into an
infinite black hole dusted with meaningless stars. He caused the stars to
become crudely painted dots on black paper, and punched his way out of
the paper-bag continuum and into—the abyss.
   He tapped a newstape from 708, the year 557-Gamma-IV had been the
light that failed, and watched Trekkers in Biblical-style robes moping
about a dirtdigger deck crammed with overgrown flower beds and the
reek of rotting vegetation. He exaggerated the sour expressions into
ludicrous clown caricatures of themselves that melted slowly into
pumpkins, and Big Ben chimed midnight. He stood poised on the entrance
stage of Bela-37, reeling and quaking, utterly overwhelmed by the black
immensities in which the scoutship hung precariously suspended.
   He snorted, took the effects ring off his head like a discarded crown,
and sat in the cocoon chair staring moodily at the microtape pod turning
futilely on the output spindle of his editor. He pressed a blue button and
wiped the pod. The slok I've been laying down these three days just isn't
worth saving, he thought. I'm just diddling with the banks and the effects
ring; it doesn't add up to anything.
   And time was growing short. Everyone knew that Bela-37 had returned,
and everyone knew that the reason there had been no bulletin was that
Jofe D'mahl was going to release the news in the form of a senso. Jiz in her
innocence and Bandoora in his cowardly cunning had seen to that. The
longer it took for the senso to appear, the more cosmic import it took on,
and the more certain people became that the only possible reason for
releasing the scoutship report in this bizarre manner was to do karmic
justice to the greatest and most joyous event in the history of the Trek, to
write a triumphant finis to man's long torchship ride.
   So the longer he sat here dead in space like a ship with its torch blown
out, the farther people would travel along hope's false vector, the worse the
crash would be when it came, the harder it became to conceive of a senso
that could overcome all that dynamic inertia, and on into the next turning
of the terrible screw. Now D'mahl understood only too well why the
voidsuckers had chosen to lie for half a millennium. The longer the lie
went on, the more impossible it became to dare to tell the truth.
  And what was the way out that the voidsuckers took? They ignored the
asymptotic nature of the Frankenstein Monster they had created and gave
themselves over to the void! For them, the ultimate reality was the
greatest escape illusion of them all.
  D'mahl slammed both hands angrily down on the edge of the editor
console. All right, damn it, if the void is where all vectors lead, then the
void has to be the core'! It's the best footage I've got anyway. I'll go to the
center, and I won't come back till I've got the heart of this senso beating in
the palm of my hand.
   He fitted the pod of his voidsuck onto the editor's auxiliary playback
spindle and programmed continuous-loop replay. He started to program a
twenty-four-standard-hour limit, then changed his mind. No, he thought,
I want the power in my hand, and I want this to be open-ended. He
programmed a cut-off command into the effects ring bank, threw blocks
across all other effects programming, and put the ring on his head.
  Now he would confront his void footage as if it were the original naked
reality, with only the power to break the loop, without the reality-altering
powers of the editor. And I won't use the cutoff until I can come back with
what I need, he promised himself as he opened his tap to the voidsuck
pod. 1 won't come back until I can come back riding my own torch again.



    He was an immortal embryo floating free in the eternal amnion of the
universal abyss, and the millions of stars were motes of incandescent
matter an infinity away across vast gulfs of absolute nothingness. The
overwhelming blackness was an utter absence of everything—light,
warmth, sound, color, life—that went on and on without boundaries to
give it shape or span to give it meaning. This was the void and he was in
it.
   But to his surprise, D'mahl found that his mind now immediately
grasped this mercilessly true perception of reality without illusion, and
with only the residual somatic vertigo and terror recorded on the
sensorium tape. Even this soon faded as the tape's memory caught up with
the cool clarity of mind it had taken him an unknown duration of
disorientation and terror to achieve in realtime.
  He was, and he was in the void. He moved, and all else was static. He
could perceive his body's shape, the interface between his internal reality
and the nothingness outside, and all else was without edge or interface
forever in space and time. Outside the realities of his own mind was void
without form or end, minutely contaminated with flecks of matter, and
man was but the chance end-product of a chain of random and
improbable collisions between these insignificant contaminants. The void
neither knew nor cared. The void did not exist. It was the eternal and
infinite nonexistence that dwarfed and encompassed that which did.
D'mahl experienced himself as a thin shell of being around a core of
nothingness floating in more nonbeing, a trick anomaly of somethingness
lost in timeless and formless forever. Nothing had meaning, not even
meaning itself. The wonder was not that life had arisen but once in this
endless matrix of nonbeing, but that it had arisen at all.
   Black void, meaninglessly dusted with untouchable stars, the internal
churnirigs of his own flesh, the utter knowledge of the utter emptiness
that surrounded him, and timeless duration. Once you have reached this
place, D'mahl thought, then what? Once asked, the question became
ridiculous, for here in the void there was nothing to address any question
to but himself. There was nothing to perceive but the absence of
perception. There was nothing to perceive. There was nothing. There
wasn't.
   D'mahl floated in physical nothingness and mental void waiting for the
transcendent revelation he had sought. Waiting for the revelation.
Waiting for. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.



   Games chased themselves through his mind as he waited in the absence
of event, in the absence of meaningful perception, in the absence of
measurable time, in the total absence. He counted his own pulsebeats
trying to reestablish time, but soon lost count and forgot even what he had
been doing. He tried to imagine the nature of what it was he sought, but
that immediately tangled itself up in tautological feedback loops: if he
knew what he sought, he would not have to seek it. He tried to speculate
on what lay beyond the infinite nothingness that surrounded him in order
to establish some frame of metaphysical reference, but any such concept
hovered forever in unreachable realms of mathematical gobbledygook. He
tried to immerse himself in the nothingness itself and found he was there
already.



  Games evaporated from his consciousness, and then the possibility of
games, and he became nothing but a viewpoint trapped in a vacuum of
nondata. The blackness of space could no longer be perceived as anything
like a color, and the stars became no more than mere flecks of retinal
static. Vision and hearing were becoming forgotten concepts in this utter
nonreality where the only sensory data seemed to be the noise in the
sensory systems themselves.
   Thought itself began to follow the senses into oblivion, and finally there
was nothing left but a focus of ache in the vast and endless nothing, a
bonging mantra of boredom so total, so complete, so without contrast tliat
it became a world of universal pain.
  No, not even pain, for pain would have been welcome relief here.
  Something somewhere whimpered. Something nowhere whimpered.
Nothing nowhere whimpered. Why? Why? Why? it cried. Why? Why?
Why? Why is this happening to me? Why is this not happening to me?
Why doesn't something happen? Happen . . . happen . . . happen . . .
happen . . . happen . . . happen . . .
  A mental shout shattered the void. "Why am I doing this to myself?"
   And there was mind, chastising itself. And there was mind, chastising
itself for its own stupidity. There was mental event, there was content,
there was form.
  There was the mind of Jofe D'mahl floating forever in eternal boredom.
And laughing at itself.
   You are doing this to yourself, you silly dreek! D'mahl realized. And
with that realization, the meaningless patterns on his retinas resolved
themselves into a vision of the galactic abyss, speckled with stars. And in
his mind, that vision further resolved itself into microtape unreeling
endlessly on a pod in his editor in his living quarters on Excelsior near the
center of the Trek.
   You're doing it all to yourself, cretin! You control this reality, but you
forgot you control it. There isn't any problem. There never was a problem.
The only problem is that we refused to see it.
   "Cut," D'mahl tapped, and he was sitting in his cocoon chair bathed in
his own sweat, staring at the console of his editor, laughing, feeling the
power of his own torch coursing through him, crackling from his
fingertips, enlivening his exhausted flesh.
  Laughing, he cleared the blocks from his effects banks. Who needs
planets? Who needs life beyond the germ we carry? Who needs prime
reality at all?
  "R éalit é, c'est moi," D'mahl muttered. He had said it before, but hadn't
savored its full meaning. For on his brow he wore not a crown of thorns
but the crown of creation.
   He ran back a few feet of the tape and floated once more in the empty
star-dusted blackness. He laughed. "Let there be light," he tapped. And
behold, the firmament shattered, and there was light.
   "Cut," Jofe D'mahl tapped. And sat hovering over his editor. And began
to carve another segment of his own meaning out of the void.



   A bright golden light fills your vision and a delicious warm glow
suffuses your body. The light recedes until it becomes something no naked
human eye could bear: the plasma heart of a torchtube, which seems to
beat and throb like a living thing. And now you are straddling this
phoenix-flame; it grows between your legs and yet you are riding it
through a galaxy preternaturally filled with stars, a blazing firmament of
glory. As you ride faster and faster, as the warm glow in your body builds
and builds with every throb of the torchtube, letters of fire light-years high
appear across the starfield:



                      RIDING THE TORCH
                           by Jofe D'mahl


   And you scream in ecstasy and the universe explodes into crystal shards
of light.
   An old man with long white hair, a matted white beard, dressed in an
ancient grimy robe, sits on a fluffy white cloud picking his red, beak-like
nose. He has wild-looking pop eyes under bushy white brows and a shock
of lightning bolts in his right hand. On the cloud next to him sits Satan in
a natty red tuxedo, black cape, and bow tie, with apple-green skin and a
spiffy black Vandyke. He is puffing on the end of his long sinuous tail,
exhaling occasional whiffs of lavender smoke that smells of brimstone. You
are watching this scene from slightly above, inhaling stray Satanic vapors.
They are mildly euphoric.
  "Job, Job," Satan says. "Aren't you ever going to get tired of bragging
about that caper? What did it prove, anyway?"
  "That my creatures love me no matter how much crap I dump on
them," the old man says. "I don't see them building no Sistine Chapels to
you, Snake-eyes."
 "You really are a sadistic old goat, aren't you? You ought to audition for
my part."
  "You think I couldn't do it? You think you're such a red-hot badass?"
The old man stands up, scowling thunders, brandishing his lightning
bolts. "By the time I got through with those yucks, they'd be drooling to
you for mercy. Either way, I am the greatest. Remember how I creamed
those Egyptians?"
  Satan blows lavender smoke at him. "Ten crummy plagues and a
drowning scene. Strictly amateur stuff."
  "Oh yeah? Oh yeah?" the old man shouts, flinging random lightning
bolts, his eyes rolling like pinwheels. "I'll show you who's the tail-torcher
around here! I'll show you who's Lord God Allah Jehovah, King of the
Universe!"
   "Oh, really?" Satan drawls. "Tell you what, you want to make it double
or nothing on the Job bet?"
  "Anytime, Snake-eyes, anytime!"
   "Okay, Mr. I Am, you dumped all you had on Job and he still crawled on
his hands and knees to kiss your toes. If you're such a hotshot, let's see you
break them. All of them. Let's see you make the whole human race curl up
into fetal balls, stick their thumbs in their mouths, and give up. That's the
bet, Mr. In the Beginning. I'll take them against you."
  "You gotta be kidding! I run this whole show! I'm omniscient,
omnipotent, and I can deal marked cards off the bottom of the deck."
  "I'll give you even money anyway."
   The old man breaks into maniacal laughter. Satan looks up into your
face, shrugs, and twirls his finger around his right temple. "You got a bet,
sonny!" the old man says. "How's this for openers?" And with a mad
whoop, he starts flinging lightning bolts down from his cloud onto the
world below.
   You are standing in a crowded street in Paris as the sky explodes and
the buildings melt and run and the Eiffel Tower crumples and falls and
your flesh begins to slough off your bones. You are a great bird, feathers
aflame in a burning sky, falling toward a wasteland of blowing ash and
burning buildings. You are a dolphin leaping out of a choking bitter sea
into sandpaper air. You stand beside your orange orchard watching the
trees ignite like torches under a sky-filling fireball as your hair bursts into
flame. You lie, unable to breathe, on an endless plain of rubble and gray
ash, and the sky is a smear of cancerous purples and browns.
   You are watching Satan and the wild-eyed old man drifting above the
ruined ball of the Earth on their fleecy clouds. Satan looks a bit greener
than before, and he sucks nervously on the end of his tail. The old man,
grinning, flings occasional lightning bolts at small islands of green below,
turning them to more gray ash and purplish-brown wasteland.
   "Zap!" the old man giggles, flinging a bolt. "How's that, Snake-eyes? I
told you I was omnipotent. They never had a chance. Fork over, Charley!"
He holds out the palm of his left hand.
  "I've got to admit that tops your Land of Egypt number," Satan says.
"However . . ." He takes his tail out of his mouth and blows a pointed
arrow of lavender smoke upward past your nose. Following it, you see
dozens of distant silvery cylinders moving outward into the starry
blackness of the galactic night.
  "Oh, yeah?" the old man says, cocking a lightning bolt at the fleet of
converted asteroid freighters. "I'll take care of that!"
  "Hold on, Grandpa!" Satan drawls. "You can't win your bet that way! If
there are none of them left to give up, then I win and you lose."
  Trembling with rage, the old man uncocks his throwing arm. His eyes
whirl like runaway galaxies, his teeth grind into each other, and black
smoke steams out of his ears. "You think you're so damned smart, do you?
You think you can get the best of the old Voice from the Whirlwind, do
you? You think those shaved apes have a chance of making it to the next
green island in their lousy tin-can outrigger canoes?"
  "There's a sweet little world circling Tau Ceti, and they've got what it
takes to get that far," Satan says, throwing you a little wink on the side.
  "Don't tell me about Tau Ceti!" the old man roars. "I'm omnipotent, I'm
omniscient, and I can lick any being in this bar!" He snaps his fingers and
you, he, and Satan are standing on a rolling meadow of chartreuse grass
under a royal-blue sky scudded with faerie traceries of white cloud. Huge
golden fernlike trees sway gently in a sweet fragrant breeze, swarms of tiny
neon-bright birds drift among beds of huge orange-, emerald-, ruby-, and
sapphire-colored flowers, filling the air with eldritch music. Red velvety
kangaroolike creatures with soulful lavender eyes graze contentedly, leap
about, and nuzzle each other with long mobile snouts.
  "Here's your sweet little world circling Tau Ceti," the old man snarls.
"Here's the new Eden those monkeys are making for, and it's as good a job
as I did on Earth, if I do say so myself."
  "Maybe better," Satan admits.
  "Is it?" the old man howls with a voice of thunder. And his eyes rumble
and he flings a handful of lightning bolts into the air, and his face turns
bright red with rage as he screams: "Turn to slok!"
   And the sky becomes a sickly chemical violet veined with ugly gray
clouds. And the chartreuse grass, the golden fern trees, and the bright
flowers dissolve into a slimy brown muck as the birds and red velvet
kangaroos evaporate into foul purple mists. And the brown muck and
purple mists mingle and solidify. . . .
  And you are clad in a heavy spacesuit, standing on an endless plain of
purplish-brown rock under a cruel dead sky, one of a dozen suited, men
crawling over the planetary corpse like ants on a bone pile.
  You are watching Satan and the old man hovering over the converted
asteroid freighters of the Trek as they slink away from Tau Ceti V into the
galactic night. A gray pall seems to exude from the ships, as if the plex of
their ports and blisters were grimed with a million years of despair's filth.
  "Take a look at them now!" the old man crows. He snaps his fingers and
the three of you are looking down into a primitive dirtdigger deck from a
catwalk. The scudding of green is like an unwholesome fungus on the
synthetic loam, the air smells of ozone, and the dirtdiggers below are gray
hunchbacked gnomes shuffling about as if under 4 gs. "It won't be long
now," the old man says. "It's a century to the next live world I've put out
here. None of them are going to live to see it, and boy oh boy, do they
know it!"
   He snaps his fingers again and the three of you are standing by the
torchtube in a first-generation residence deck: grim blue corridors, leaden
overheads, ugly steel plating, row after row of identical gray doors. The
people plodding aimlessly up and down seem as leached of color and life as
their surroundings.
   "And before their children can get there, they're going to start running
out of things," the old man says. "Carbon for their flesh. Calcium for their
bones. Phosphorus for their life's juices. Iron for their blood." The light
begins to get dim, the walls begin to get misty. The people begin to slump
and melt, and you can feel your own bones begin to soften, your blood
thinning to water; your whole body feels like a decomposing pudding.
"They're going to turn slowly to slok themselves," the old man says, leering.
  He snaps his fingers once more, and you are an abstract viewpoint
beside the old man and Satan as they hang over the dimming lights of the
Trek.
  "Well, Snake-eyes, are you ready to pay up now?" the old man says
smugly, holding out his palm.
  "They haven't given up yet," Satan says, dragging on the tip of his tail.
  "You're a stubborn dreek!" the old man snaps irritably.
   Satan blows out a plume of lavender smoke that seems endless. It
billows and grows and expands into a great cloud of mist that completely
envelops the fleet of converted asteroid freighters. "So are they," he says.
  And when the lavender mist clears, the Trek has been transformed.
Where there had been scores of converted asteroid freighters slinking
through space in their own pall of gloom, there are now hundreds of new
Trekborn torchships coruscating like a pirate's treasure of jewels against
the black velvet of the night, promenading through the abyss behind their
own triumphant rainbow shield, the hydrogen interface.
   Satan laughs, he cracks his long sinuous tail like a whip, and the three
of you are standing beside the great circumtorchtube coils of a sifting
deck, amid recovery canisters, control consoles, and a Medusa's head of
transfer coils. You can feel the immense power of the torch in your bones,
through the soles of your feet. Satan points grandly from canister to
canister with the tip of his tail. "Carbon for their flesh," he mimics in a
croaking parody of the old man's voice. "Calcium for their bones.
Phosphorus for their life's juices. Iron for their blood. And all of it from
the interstellar medium itself, which you can't get rid of without shutting
down your whole set, Mr. Burning Bush! They're not turning to slok,
they're turning slok to themselves."
   He breaks into wild laughter, snaps his tail again, and the three of you
are standing in a small pine forest in a dirtdigger deck beneath a holoed
blue sky inhaling the odors of growing things. "Lo, they have created a
garden in your wilderness," Satan says, doubling over with laughter as the
old man's face purples with rage. Another crack of the tail and you are
floating above a grand promenade in a particularly brilliant amusement
deck: restaurants in gold, sapphire, and silver, diamond tables drifting on
null-g plates, gypsy dancers twirling weightless in the air, rosy fountains,
sparkling music, and the smell of carnival. "And a city of light in your
everlasting darkness."
  Yet another snap of the tail and the three of you are drifting in the
center of the Trek, surrounded by the great concourse of bright ships,
under the aurora of the hydrogen interface. Satan holds out his palm to
the old man. "Does this look as if they're going to give up, Mr. Have No
Others Before Me? All they'll ever need, and all from pure slok! They can
go on forever. Cross my palm with silver, Mr. Creator of All He Surveys.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command."
  The old man's face turns from purple to black. Fire shoots out of his
nostrils. The hairs of his beard curl and uncurl with a furious electrical
crackle. "For I am a god of vengeance and wrath," he roars, "and I am
going to smite them hip and thigh."
  "You're wasting your dingo act on me, cobber," Satan drawls, puffing
out lavender smoke rings. "They've got you by the short hairs."
   "Oh, have they, sonny? Wait till they get to their next Ultima Thule!"
The old man snaps his fingers with a peal of thunder and the three of you
are standing in a forest of immensely tall and stately trees with iridescent
green bark and huge sail-like leaves at their crown that roll and snap
ponderously in the wind. A thick carpet of brownish mosslike grass covers
the cool forest floor, punctuated with red, blue, yellow, and purple fans of
flowery fungi. Feathered yellow and orange monkey-size bipeds leap from
leaf to leaf high overhead, and fat little purplish balls of fur roll about the
brownish grass nibbling on the fungi. The air smells of cinnamon and
apples, and the slight overrich-ness.of oxygen makes you pleasantly
lightheaded.
  "Let me guess," Satan sighs, sucking languidly on the tip of his tail.
  "Turn to slok!" the old man bellows, and his shout is thunder that rends
the sky and the forest crystallizes and shatters to dust and the brownish
grass hardens to rock and the feathered bipeds and purplish furballs
decompress and explode and you are standing on a plain of mean brown
rock streaked with green under a blue-black sky soiled with green clouds,
and the air reeks of chlorine.
  "You're slipping, Mr. You Were," Satan says. "They don't need your
gardens any more, for theirs is the power and the glory forever, amen."
   "Oh, is it?" the old man says, grinning. "They don't need the old Master
of the Universe any more, do they? You've been the Prince of Liars too
long, sonny. You don't understand how these jerks have been
programmed. For thus have I set them one against the other and each
against himself. It's the oldest trick in the book."
  He snaps his fingers and the three of you are pressed up against the
outer bulkhead of an amusement deck as a wild-eyed mob of dirt-diggers
surges through it, smashing crystal tables, toppling fire-sculptures,
brandishing crosses wrapped with simmed grape leaves, and chanting:
"No more ships! No more ships! Soil or death!"
  "They don't need my gardens any more, do they?" the old man gloats. "I
can play their minds like harpsichords, because I created their universe,
outer and inner." He snaps his fingers. "Look at your masters of energy
and matter now!"
   And you are standing in a corroding dirtdigger deck breathing sour air.
The pine trees are stunted, the grass is sickly, and the dirtdiggers' eyes are
feverish and shiny as they bow down to the vine-covered cross. "Groveling
on their hands and knees where they belong," the old man says. "The old
guilt routine, it gets 'em every time." He snaps his fingers again, and you
are falling through a droptube through the decks of a well-maintained
ship. The air is sweet, the lights clear and bright, the metallic and jeweled
surfaces clean and sparkling, but the peacock crowds seem ridden with
fear, whirling at nothing, jumping at shadows. "And if the right don't get
them, the left hand will," the old man says. "Each man is an island, each
man stands alone. What profiteth them if they gain the universe as long as
I hold the mortgage on their souls?"
   "Ah, but what profiteth them if they forsake your cheapjack housing
development and gain their souls?" Satan says, blowing chains of smoke
rings into each passing deck. The rings of lavender smoke alight on the
brows of the people and turn into silvery bands—the first full sensory
transceivers, ancestors of the tap. "Behold the tap!" Satan says as the
transceiver bands melt into the skulls of their wearers, becoming the
surgically implanted tap. "The Declaration of Independence from your
stage set, O Producer of Biblical Epics! The bridge between the islands!
The door to realities into which you may not follow! The crown of
creation!"
   Satan turns to you as the three of you leave the droptube in a quiet
residential deck: walkways of golden bricks wandering among gingerbread
houses of amethyst, quartz, topaz. He blows a smoke ring at you which
settles on your head and then sinks into your skull. "What about it, man?"
he asks you with a cock of his head at the old man. "Is Merlin the
Magnificent here the Be-All and End-All, or just another circus act?"
   Satan breaks into mad laughter, and then you are snapping your tail,
laughing madly, and blowing lavender puffs of smoke at the old man, who
stares at you with bugging pop eyes.
  "Where did he go?" the old man says.
  "Allow me to introduce myself," you say.
  "The Lord is not mocked!" the old man shouts.
  "Behold the master of space beyond spaces and times beyond time," you
say, sucking on the tip of your tail.
   You bounce one of the purplish furballs on your hand under huge
iridescent green trees. You stand on the Champs Elys ées in fair Paris on
lost Earth. You dance in Jofe D'mahl's grand salon and pop a flasher into
your mouth which explodes in a flash of pink velvet that transforms you
into a woman making love to a golden man on black sands on the shore of
a silver lake under blue and orange moons. You ride a surfboard of
emerald light in the curl of a wave a mile high that rolls across an endless
turquoise sea. You soar singing into the heart of a blue-white sun, burning
yet unconsumed.
   You are a viewpoint beside Satan and the old man rising through a
lifttube in a torchship transformed. Somber dirtdigger shorts turn to
cloaks of many colors. Trees, ivy, and flowers sprout from metal
deck-plates. Corrosion melts from the bulkheads of dirtdigger decks, the
vine-colored crosses evaporate, and sour-smelling gloomings become
fragrant gardens of delight.
    Anger boils through the old man. His red face dopplers through purple
into ultraviolet black as sparks fly from his gnashing teeth and tiny
lightning bolts crackle from his fingertips. "They've . . . they've . . . they've .
. ." He stammers in blind rage, his eyes rolling thunders.
   "They've eaten from the Tree of Creation this time," Satan says with a
grin. "How do you like them apples?"
  "For eating of the Tree of Good and Evil I drove these drool-headed
dreeks from Eden with fire and the sword!" the old man roars with the
voice of a thousand novas. "For this will I wreak such vengeance as will
make all that seem like a cakewalk through paradise!"
   And he explodes in a blinding flash of light, and now you can see
nothing but the starry firmament and an enormous mushroom pillar
cloud of nuclear fire light-years high, roiling, immense, static, and eternal.
"For now I am become the Lord of Hosts, Breaker of Worlds! Look upon
my works, ye mortals, and despair!"
   And you are watching Jofe D'mahl flitting from a shuttle to the
entrance stage of Bela-37. You watch him emerge from a lift-tube onto the
bridge of the scoutship. And you are Jofe D'mahl, staring back through
the plex at the Trek, a disk of diamond brilliance behind the rainbow
gauze of its hydrogen interface. As you watch, it dwindles slowly to a point
of light, one more abstract star lost in the black immensities of the
boundless void.
   "Overwhelming, isn't it?" Haris Bandoora says, moving partially into
your field of vision. "A hundred million stars, perhaps as many planets,
and this one galaxy is a speck of matter floating in an endless nothing.
Once we were bits of some insignificant anomaly called life contaminating
a dust-mote circling a dot of matter lost in the universal void. Now we're
not even that."
  "We're the part that counts," you say.
  "If only you knew."
  "Knew what?"
   "I've heard the call, Haris." Raj Doru, fever in his fierce brown eyes, has
risen to the bridge and walked to Bandoora's side.
  You are standing in a voidbubble on Bela-37's entrance stage with Haris
Bandoora and Raj Doru. Your field of vision contains nothing but the tiny
ship, the abstract stars, the two men, and an infinity of nothing. You reel
with vertigo and nausea before that awful abyss.
   Doru spreads his arms, turns on his g-polarizer, and leaps up and out
into the blackness of the void.
  "What's he doing?" you shout.
  "Sucking void," Bandoora says. "Answering the call. He'll go out far
enough to lose sight of the ship and stay there for a standard day."
  "What will he do out there?" you ask softly as Doru disappears into the
everlasting night.
  "What happens between a man and the void is between a man and the
void."
  "Why do you do it?"
  "Each man has his own reason, D'mahl. The call has many voices. Soon
you will hear it in your own language."
  And you are standing on the scoutship's bridge watching Haris
Bandoora himself disappear into that terrible oceanic immensity.
  "Are you hearing the call, Jofe D'mahl?" says the quiet voice of Areth
Lorenzi, the ancient voidsucker now standing beside you like a fleshly
ghost.
  "I'm not sure what I'm hearing," you say. "Maybe just my own ego. I've
got to get a voidsuck on tape, or I've wasted my time out here."
  "It's the call," she says. "It comes to each of us along his own natural
vector."
  "There's something you people aren't telling me."
  "There is, but to know, you must first taste the void."
   You stand in your voidbubble on Bela-37's entrance stage, knees flexed,
looking out into the endless abyss into which you are about to leap;
millions of needlepoint stars prick at your retinas, and the black silences
howl in your ears. You inhale and dive up and out into the unknown.
  And you float in clear black nothingness where the stars are motes of
incandescent matter infinities away across the empty purity of the abyss.
Nothing moves. Nothing changes. No event transpires. Silence is eternal.
Time does not exist.
  "What is it that the voidsuckers know?" you finally say, if only to hear
the sound of your own voice. "What is it that they hear out here in this
endless nowhere?"
   And an immense and horrid laughter rends the fabric of space, and the
firmament is rent asunder by an enormous mushroom pillar cloud
light-years high that billows and roils and yet remains changeless, outside
of time. "You would know what the voidsuckers know, would you, vile
mortal?" says the voice from the pillar of nuclear fire. "You would know a
truth that would shrivel your soul to a cinder of slok?"
   And the mushroom cloud becomes an old man in a tattered robe, with
long white hair and beard, parsecs tall, so that his toenails blot out stars
and his hands are nebulae. Novas blaze in his eyes, comets flash from his
fingertips, and his visage is wrath, utter and eternal. "Behold your
universe, upright monkey, all that I now give unto thee, spawn of Adam,
and all that shall ever be!"
  You stand on a cliff of black rock under a cruel actinic sun choking on
vacuum. You tread water in an oily yellow sea that sears your flesh while
blue lightnings rend a pale-green sky. Icy-blue snow swirls around you as
you crawl across an endless fractured plain of ice under a wan red sun.
Your bones creak under 4 gs as you try to stand beneath a craggy
overhang while the sky beyond is filthy gray smeared with ugly bands of
brown and purple.
   "Behold your latest futile hope, wretched creature!" the voice roars.
"Behold Eden, 997-Beta-II!" And you stand on a crumbling shelf of
striated green rock overlooking a chemically blue sea. The purplish sky is
mottled with blue and greenish clouds and the air sears your lungs as your
knees begin to huckle, your consciousness to fade.
   And once more you float in a void sundered by a galactic mushroom
pillar cloud that becomes a ghastly vision of an old man light-years tall.
The utter emptiness of the interstellar abyss burns with X-ray fire from
the black holes of his eyes, his hair and beard are manes of white-hot
flame that sear the firmament, his hands are claws crushing star clusters,
his mouth is a scar of death across the face of the galaxy, and his rage is
absolute.
   "Slok, stinking microbe!" he howls with a voice that blasts ten thousand
planets from their orbits. "It's all slok! That's what the voidsuckers know.
Lo, I have created a universe for you that goes on forever, time and space
without end. And in all that creation, one garden where life abounded, one
Earth, one Eden, and that you have destroyed forever. And all else is
slok—empty void, poison gas, and dead matter, worlds without end, time
without mercy! Behold my works, mortals, behold your prison, and
despair!"
   And his laughter shakes the galaxy and his eyes are like unto the nether
pits of hell.
   You shake your head, and you smile. You point your right forefinger at
the ravening colossus. "You're forgetting something, you lamer," you say.
"I created this reality. You're not real. Evaporate, you drool-headed
dreek!"
  And the monstrous old man begins to dissolve into a huge lavender
mist. "I may not be real," he says, "but the situation you find yourself in
sure is. Talk your way out of that one!" He disappears, thumbing his nose.
   And you are watching Jofe D'mahl, a small figure in a shiny mirror-suit
standing alone in the eternal abyss. He turns to you, begins to grow,
speaks.


"Have thou and I not against fate conspired,
And seized this sorry scheme of things entire?
And shaped it closer to the heart's desire?"


  D'mahl's mirrorsuit begins to flash endlessly through the colors of the
spectrum. Lightnings crackle from his fingertips and auroras halo his
body like waves of hydrogen interfaces. "Let there be light, we have said on
the first day, and there is light."
   You are D'mahl as the entire jeweled glory of two thousand and forty
torchships springs into being around you. "Let there be heavens, we have
said on the second day," you say, and you are standing on a meadow of
rolling purple hills under a rainbow sky in a dancing multitude of
Trekkers. "And Earth." And the multitude is transported to Erewhon,
where the dirtdiggers have combined three whole decks and created a
forest of towering pines and lordly oaks under an azure sky.
   "Let there be matter and energy without end, we have said on the third
day," you say, and you feel the power flowing through your body as you
straddle a naked torchtube, as you become the torch you are riding. "And
there is matter and energy everlasting."
  "And now on the fourth day, we have rested," you say, floating in the
void. "And contemplated that which we have not made. And found it
devoid of life or meaning, and hopelessly lame."
  "And on the fifth day," D'mahl says as you watch him standing in the
blackness in his suit of many lights, "we shall give up the things of
childhood—gods and demons, planets and suns, guilts and regrets."
  D'mahl is standing in front of a huge shimmer screen overlooking the
grass and forest of a dirtdigger deck. "And on the sixth day, shall we not
say, let there be life? And shall there not be life?"
  Bears, cows, unicorns, horses, dogs, lions, giraffes, red velvety
kan-garoolike creatures, hippos, elephants, tigers, buffalo, mice,
hummingbirds, shrews, rabbits, geese, zebras, goats, monkeys, winged
dragons, tapirs, eagles come tumbling, soaring, and gamboling out of the
shimmer screen to fill the forest and meadow with their music.
  And you are D'mahl, feeling the power of the torch pour through your
body, flash from your fingertips, as you stand in the center of the Trek,
awash in light and life and motion, saying: "And on the seventh day, shall
we not say, let us be fruitful and multiply and fill the dead and infinite
reaches of the void with ships and life and meaning?"
    And you stretch out your arms and torchships explode into being
around you as the Trek opens like an enormous blossoming mandala,
filling the blackness of the abyss with itself, immense, forever unfolding,
and eternal. "And shall not that day be without end?"