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“No!” Worm wailed. “No, no, no, no—”
“Hush,” the whisper thundered. “ Worm—worm, they call you. Do you know, Worm, what that is? For shame, Paul, to give him a name like that.”
“Kepta?” Paul asked. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” it said. “Of course I am. Come here.”
They reached the great hall, the noded dark. Things gibbered as they ran, voices howled through the overhead, chittered, roared like winds where no winds existed. Rafe kept ru
His ghosts stayed with him. Perhaps Marandu was one: he could not tell. There was no light but their bodies, no guidance but their hands that reached impotently to help his weakness. “Where?” Rafe Two asked him, “where now, Rafe?”
“Hallway,” he gasped, “third to the left of ours—”
“This way,” Rafe Two said, at home in dark, or not truly needing eyes. Rafe gathered himself, sucked a pain-edged breath and ran, staggering with exhaustion.
A Jillan-image materialized in the dark ahead, blazing gold. “Stop!” she/it said. An arm uplifted in a gesture human as the image and as false.
Rafe Two slowed; Rafe ran, experienced nothing but a flare of light and image, stumbled his way on blind in the dark of the passage, reeling from wall to wall. A glow passed him, gave him fitful light, became Jillan before it faded out.
He sprawled, hard, in the shimmer of insubstantial arms that tried to save him; he clawed his way up, sobbing, and kept going. His ghosts were with him again, Jillan, all; they went about him, a glowing curtain, a cloud. He fell again, a third, a fourth time on the hummocks of the floor. He tasted blood, was blind, phosphenes dancing in his eyes.
“Look out!”Jillan cried and waved him off, her body out in front of him. He reached out his hands, facing darkness beyond her.
White, sudden light blazed from the ceiling nodes. It lit the room of knives, arms that moved, snicked in unison toward him all attentive, in the lumpish barren plastic of the center he had sought.
“Kepta!” he shouted, backing, for things that gripped and things that cut were still in drifting motion toward him, traveling in extension he had not guessed. “ Kepta!Stop!”
They kept coming. More unfolded out of recesses of the wall.
“Kepta!”
Jillan-shape materialized there among the knives, flung up arms, opened its mouth and yelled something a human throat did not well stand.
Knives stopped then, frozen in mid-extension, a forest of metal, perilous limbs in which Jillan-shape stood immaterial.
Rafe stood shivering, perceived a dance of light as his own ghosts hovered round him as close as they could get, demolishing themselves on his solidity and reforming.
“Tell Kepta I want to talk with him,” Rafe said.
“Kepta won’t,” Marandu said. His female hands tucked up again like paws. “Go back.”
“Because I’m substance? Because I’m alive, with hands to touch this place?”
“Substance,” said Marandu among the knives, “is dealt with here.”
“Rafe,” Paul pleaded with him. “Rafe— stay alive. Get out of here.”
“It’s threatened,” Rafe said. He was shivering. They could not feel as much, but the shivers ran through his limbs. O God. It’s going to hurt—“I’m standing here, Kepta—hear me? I’m not moving. I’m not going to move.”
“Kepta advises you,” Marandu said—and Marandu’s eyes were far-focused, vague and full of dark—“advises you—”
The thing loomed up, serpentlike, seductive in its implacability, the serenity of Rafe-face become unassailable and vast.
“Lie,” Worm cried, and writhed and looped its wounded coils aside. “Lie, lie—”
“Are you lying?” (Paul).
“Examine me,” it said, this thing with Kepta’s name. It extruded a shape from its side, the agglomeration of Paul One. Paul One wailed, writhed as Worm had done. A glowing coil materialized and took it in again. “Come close. See me as I am.”
“Go to hell,” said Jillan Murray-Gaines, through the amalgam of their lips. “Or are you already in residence?”
“Humor,” it said. “Hell. Yes.” It laughed, gentle as a breath. “I appreciate the reference. So would the passengers. I’m Kepta. There are dozens of us. We create one another—in endless cycles.” It slid closer, and it seemed dangerous to move at all now; but Rafe-mind did, veteran of the docks. They slipped backward together.
“Do you understand?” it asked again. (Another gliding move. Rafe-mind moved them back, but not far enough. It gained.) “Dangerous,” it said, “to move without looking. Where’s Ca
“Don’t look,” Paul whispered, shivering in their heart. “Don’t be tricked.”
“You’ve been ill-advised,” Rafe-voice urged, smooth, so very smooth. “Even death—can be remedied. Your copies are exact, down to the very spin of your particles. Your cellular information. Would you be reconstituted? I can do that much.”
Paul caught the breath he did not have, felt limbs that were not real—instincts yearned after life and breath, after humanity—
“No,” Rafe said. Just— no, unreasoning, suspicious. He was twelve again, dockside; the hand held out the coin, too large a coin for simple charity.... No—from Jillan-mind, brittle-hard, plotting how to run. Nothing’s free; not from this thing—”
“Look out!”cried Paul.
The serpent-shape was quicker. Its vast body slammed down in front of them, turning about them, surrounding them with its coils.
“You just lost your chance,” it said.
“Lost,” Marandu whispered, fading. “They’ve failed.”
“Let me go to them!”Paul cried. “Let me try!”
“Against a Kepta-form?” Marandu drew itself away, retreating in its dimness. And then it stopped, turned, gazing at them with Jillan’s calm face. “Bravery. Yes. I know.”
It shimmered out.
“Paul!”Rafe cried.,
Then all his ghosts were gone.
Marandu with them. And the lights went out.
Disaster. <> had felt it, not unanticipated. <> felt <^>’s fear. It shivered through that portion of <^>self that remained partitioned outside Jillan-shape. There was irony in this: Jillan-mind was darkly stubborn, and <^> was trapped in that fierceness.
</> discovered that too. Discovered other things.
“O God,” Rafe Two murmured, arrived on that darkling plain. “What isthat thing?”
“The others called it Worm,” Marandu said.
It came snuffling and limping toward them, tattered and missing legs among its segments. “Run,” it called to them multi-voice; and in other voices: “Fight.”
Then they saw the other thing, a thousand times its size.
“My friends,” it saluted them like thunder, rearing up to stare down at them with Rafe’s haggard face.
“Friends, hell,” Jillan said.
“It will take you,” Marandu said, a faint and fading voice.
“Damn you,” Rafe yelled at Marandu, snatched to hold it by the arm. “Don’t leave us—”
Marandu steadied, grew brighter then. “I’m very old,” it said, as if that were some grounds for its desertion. “Oldest of all but one.”
“So fight it,” Jillan said. “Where’s your guts?”
And Paul: “Help us. We don’t know what to do.”
There was silence. The serpent-glow flowed closer. It had Rafe’s voice, a whisper that murmured like the sea, but spoke no human tongue.
“Run! Fight!” Worn gibbered; but it did neither. Worm stayed, limping aimless circles on missing legs. “Help! Help! Help!”
“Marandu!” Paul cried.
The slim Jillan-body shuddered, once. “I will take you in,” Marandu said. “Partitioned—I can’t—”
Jillan-shape broke apart in shimmer. A larger glow appeared, folded about them, an order, a structure, a body vaster than their own.
Worm was in it, snuffling.
Move, the impulse came, or something very like the command to legs and limbs.