THE MAGIC LABYRINTH

Burton sat with Loga's weapon across his lap. His first question was how it was operated. Loga indicated the safety lock and the trigger, the use of which Burton had figured out for himself.

"Now," he said, "I think it best that we start out at the begi

"Pardon me for interrupting," the Moor said. "We should establish one thing right now. Ah Qaaq... Loga... you must have a private resurrection chamber in the tower?"

"Yes."

The Ethical hesitated. "It wasn't just for me. Tringu also used it. He was my best friend; we were raised together on the Gardenworld. He was the only one I could trust."

"Was he the man called Stern who tried to kill Firebrass before the Parseval took off the tower?"

"Yes. He failed, as you know. So, when I saw that Firebrass was going to get into the tower ahead of me... and Siggen was too, I had to kill them both. Siggen had not told Firebrass who I was. She believed me when I told her that I'd abandon my plans and throw myself on the mercy of the Council. But only after we'd gotten to the tower and the Council was resurrected. She never would have agreed if I'd not lied, not told her that I'd put an inhibit on communication with the computer and that only I could break it. She said she wouldn't tell Firebrass about me until we were in the tower. But she then made arrangements to be in the tower ahead of me with Firebrass. She meant to check up~«n the truth of what I'd told her. Also, I was afraid that while she and Firebrass were in the helicopter on the way to the top of the tower, she'd change her mind and tell Firebrass. So... I set off the bomb I'd planted in the copter just in case..."

"Who's Siggen?" Alice said.

"My wife. The woman posing as Any a Obrenova, the Russian airship officer."

"Oh, yes," Alice said as tears ran down Loga's cheeks.

"It's obvious that your people found your private resurrector and deactivated it. Otherwise, you'd have killed yourself and been translated to the tower. Have you reactivated your resurrector?"

"Yes. Actually, I have two. But both were located and deactivated."

Burton said, "Then if we'd killed you just now, you'd have escaped us. Why didn't you let us do it? Or kill yourself?"

"Because, as I said, I may need you. Because I'm sick of this violence. Because I owe you something."

He paused. "I'd set up an inhibition in the general lazarus machinery long ago. It'd be activated at my signal, the same signal which would kill all within the tower, the underground chambers, and in the area of the sea. But Tringu and I had our private lines. One of them was in the room at the base of the tower. Sharmun, the woman in charge in Monat's and Thanabur's absence, told me that the two rooms had been found. She said that it would do no good to commit suicide in the hope that I could rise in the tower and continue my evil deeds. Me! Evil!"

"This is getting confusing," Burton said. "Start at the very begi

"Very well. But I'll have to be as brief as possible. By the way, where is Gilgamesh?"

Burton told him.

The Ethical said. "I'm sorry."

He paused, then said, "Like his mythical counterpart, he failed to find the secret of immortality."

Loga rose, saying, "I just want to see the screens. I won't go near them."

They kept their weapons trained on him while he limped to the edge of the revolving platform. It was useless to keep him in their sights, Burton thought. He could elude them at any time by making them kill him if he was telling the truth.

Loga limped back to his chair and eased himself into it.

"We may be able to do something. I don't really know. We do have some time, though. So..."

He began in the begi

When the universe was young, when the first inhabitable planets had formed after the explosion of the primal ball of energy-matter, evolution brought about a people on one planet who differed from those on other planets.

"I don't mean just in physical construction. All the sentient peoples have either bipedal or centaurine bodies, hands, stereoscopic vision, and so forth. They were intelligent but had no consciousness of self, no concept of the I ."

"We speculated on that!" Frigate said. "But..."

"You must interrupt as little as possible. I'm telling the truth when I say that all sentient beings throughout the universe were without self-awareness. As far as we know, anyway. I know it's very difficult for you to believe. You can't conceive of such a state. But it was and is true—with exceptions now.

"The people who differed did not differ in their lack of self-awareness in the begi

"Nor did they have a concept of religion, of gods or of a God. That comes only with an advanced stage of self-awareness.

"Luckily for these people, called by those who followed them The Firsts, one of their scientists had accidentally formed a wathan during an experiment.

"It was the first indication The Firsts had that there was such a force as extraphysical energy. I use the term extra-physical to avoid any confusion with paraphysical, with such evidently existing but usually uncontrollable and elusive forces as telepathy, telekinesis, and other extrasensory perception phenomena."

Burton forebore saying that it vas he who'd coined the term ESP on Earth, though he'd called it extra-sensuous perception.

"The wathan may be a form of this, but, if so, it's the only one that's controllable. This nameless scientist who accidentally generated a wathan from the extraphysical forces did not know what it was. He or she continued to experiment and generated more. I say generated because the equipment he was using formed the wathan from the extraphysical energy. Shaped it or perhaps plucked it from the field that exists in the same space as matter but usually doesn't interact with it.

"The first wathans probably attached themselves to the living beings in their proximity."

"All living creatures?" Nur murmured.

"All living individuals. Insects, trees, starfishes, all. After millions of years of experiments, we still don't know why the wathans are attracted to life energy. One of the hundreds of theories is that life itself may be a form of extraphysical energy. An interface, rather."

The effect of the attachments was not immediately noted. The wathan was the source and genesis of self-awareness. But it could not develop this except through living entities, and these had to have highly developed nervous systems if the potentiality for self-awareness was to be realized.

"But that also can't be realized if the wathan attaches itself to a human entity beyond the initial zygote stage. Beyond the fusion of spermatozoon and ovum. Don't ask me why. Just believe me when I say that it's true. Apparently, there is a hardening in the entity, a resistance to the interface."

The machine spat out billions of wathans during the experiments. Millions attached themselves to the zygotes of the sentients. And, for the first time in the universe, as far as anybody knew, self-awareness was born. Infants grew up with this, and neither the older nor the younger generation could understand that this was unique and new. Self-aware children and youths have always had difficulty understanding the adults, but never before had there been such an empathy gap, such lack of comprehension.

"Eventually, the unself-conscious people died out. It wasn't until twenty-five or so years after the first wathan was formed that the reason for self-awareness was discovered. Then it became a matter of necessity to keep producing wathans."

Centuries passed. Space flight via rockets came. After several centuries, a new form of propulsion was discovered. Interstellar flight became possible at speeds unheard of before when a method of sidepassing matter was invented. Even so, it took seven days of Earth-time to go a lightyear.