Jack L. Chalker - QM 3 - Ninety Trillion Fausts

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NINETY TRILLION FAUSTS

PRINTING HISTORY

Ace hardcover edition / October 1991 Ace mass-market edition / November 1992

Cover art by Darrell Sweet.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

ISBN: 0-441-58103-X

Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

The name "ACE" and the "A" logo are trademarks

belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

e-book ver. 1.0

For the late and much underrated

Mark Clifton,

one of whose books convinced me that anything was possible,

and, of course,

a special tip of the hat to

the late, great Eric Frank Russell,

as always.

SPIRAL SINISTER

THEY HAD ENTERED THE STRANGE ALTERNATE Universe of the demons in full e-suits

with supplies, weapons, and communications, and they had fought each other and

faced down demons in amber, some of whom offered them almost anything for

escape, while others had simply laughed at them. Now, at the end of their long

journey, they were naked, essentially defenseless, and still at one another's

throats.

There were now far fewer of them than had started out, too. The Exchange was

essentially reduced to Jimmy McCray, a small, sandy-haired Irishman with a hint

of a brogue, a sample of a culture whose homeland, and, indeed, home planet,

he'd never really seen, and Modra Stryke, a fiery redhead on a near constant

emotional roller coaster. True, there was Molly McCray as well, but Molly was a

syn, a synthetic life form created to perform in surrealistic roadshows for

distant and far-flung Terrans, with an upper body made for Terran sex and a

lower torso much like a blue goat's terminating in wide, almost cow-like cloven

hooves, but she had a genetically engineered limit on her I.Q. and the permanent

mind of a small and innocent child.

The Mycohlians, whose ruling superculture was the only one of the Three Empires

who had a favorable view of demons in their mythologies and religion, were down

to three as well. These included the dark, somewhat brutishly handsome yet

arrogant hypno, Josef; the once incredibly beautiful Kalia, whose left side was

now scarred and burned, presenting a wonderful profile from one side and a

hideous one from the other, and" the Julki, Tobrush, a creature vaguely

resembling a Terran-sized snail with a leathery rather than hard shell, who

could extrude thousands of wire-like tendrils from all points of its body, each

under complete control, and send various chemicals and poisons through them as

well.

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The Mizlaplanians, mostly by being last most of the journey, had fared the best.

Their leader, a bird-like Stargin, was the hypno Morok the Holy Ladue, Holy

Father to the Arm of the Inquisition and its chief. Next was the dark-skinned,

athletic Terran, Krisha the Holy Mendoro, who'd been forced into the priesthood

against her will and who now believed that withstanding the temptations offered

on this odyssey had cleansed her of all sin. Manya the Holy Szin, a gnome-like

Gnoll, a fanatic who believed that the demon universe confirmed all of her

beliefs, and whose racial ability to cloud the minds of others so that they

could not see her for brief periods had come in handy, also remained, as did the

one non-priestly member of the team, the Terran captain Gun Roh Chin, a null

immune to the powers of paranormal talents like telepaths, hypnos, and empaths,

and whose loyalty and support of his culture and Empire were based on a

pragmatic belief that he'd seen no better elsewhere.

All now, save only Chin and Molly, had had their paranormal abilities magnified

tremendously by the demon cave where the great crystals they used for transport

grew; now all were telepaths, and empaths, and possibly hypnos as well,

violating all the known rules of one talent to one individual, but each only

master or mistress of the talent they'd grown up with.

All, again save Chin and Molly, had experienced an out-of-body experience in the

crystal cave, and a perception of a great path lined with evil at the end of

which was a

magnificent circular city. Now, at last, they were approaching that city in a

more concrete way, if only they could solve a labyrinthine maze of hedgerows,

and the evil statues and idols that lurked within to snare them at the end—and,

possibly, avoid each other's team as well.

<. . . maze gobble gobble based gobble gobble obtuse mathematical factor . . .>

<Yes, gobble stronger, as well.>

"How do you stand it, Jimmy?" Modra asked as they sat and took a break in the

midst of the maze. "I'm having trouble just keeping nine other minds at bay,

with only some success—sometimes I feel like I'm talking or walking one place

when I'm in another, other times I have the oddest thoughts and can hardly tell

if they're mine or somebody else's. How do you block them out in a whole city?"

"I'll admit it's more of a problem here than in a big city, at least before," he

told her. "The problem is that telepathy conveys basically leading, or forward

thoughts, both words and pictures, and does so with no emotion or inflection. It

sets everybody else apart, and that's the first step in blocking. With the

addition of the empathic sensations, we're all receiving the emphasis and

feelings of the other as well. The only thing that's keeping any of us from

going completely bloody bonkers is that we're all thinking in different

languages. Where there's a holographic correlation, our own minds hear most or

all of the thought as if we were thinking it. Otherwise, it's garbage. Take the

Terran woman whose feet hurt. So do yours, and mine, so that comes through as a

single hologram, a concept. The common things—the maze, the idols, appeal to

deities, and the like—come through. The more abstract things don't. That's why

it's harder to make sense of any of the abstractions of the Stargin, Julki, or

Gnoll than the Terrans. On the other hand, they practice far more around us

Terrans than we do around them, so they get more from us than we get from them."

<No, I find gobble very interesting gobble gobble. >

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Jimmy sighed. "Always the critics. It's like being at a telepath's training

class."

She sighed and shook her head slowly from side to side. "I think I'd go mad if I

went back—like this. If it weren't for the idols breaking concentration, I think

I'd go nuts even here. I let my mind wander back there, and so did somebody

else—God knows we're all exhausted!—and suddenly I felt like I was in a man's

body and I got suddenly confused as to not only where but who and what I was.

Only lasted a second or two, but it was scary."

He nodded. "I caught it in your mind, and his. Perhaps there's a reason why

people don't have multiple talents. Or, maybe some do—but they're all the ones

who go quickly mad. What happens when two empaths have sex? Don't both of you

have problems with identity there as well?"

She chuckled. "I never would have sex with an empath. You can't fake anything.

Don't telepaths have the same problem?"

"Empath sex best sex," put in the empathic Molly firmly.

"I suppose it would be even worse," he admitted. "I don't know—never tried it

myself. When two telepaths are close and emotional and all blocks are down, your

innermost thoughts and feelings, not just the surface stuff, are wide open as

well. You risk what we call a merger, when the two minds become so intertwined

that they become one. That's what you briefly experienced back there, due to

fatigue, but that kind is never serious. I had that a lot while growing up and

learning to handle it."

"It was pretty scary," she admitted. "What—what happens if two people do come so

together they can't get apart?"

"The mind's simply not equipped to be in two places at the same time. Together,

they'd have to be institutionalized. Even when separated, worlds apart, which is

the normal procedure, each mind is faced with conflicting memories, backgrounds,

tastes, standards, likes and dislikes. The result is that you get a totally

split personality—sometimes they're totally their old selves, the other totally

the other person."

She found the idea both fascinating and chilling, now that she was something of

a candidate for such a threat. "Have you ever seen it?"

"Twice, but only with people of the same sex, and that was bizarre enough. When

you add male and female in there, I'd think the result would be really

unsettling. I begin to wonder if what the old legends and tales call demonic

possession isn't something like that. Suppose you had a merge with these

Quintara? The potential was really there when I faced down that first pair. If

it hadn't have been for Grysta ..."

He stopped, and she felt his odd sense of loss. He had hated the small parasite

that had ruled and ruined much of his life for so long, but, in some weird way,

he'd loved her, too.

"What would you do if you had to face down another one—alone?" she asked him,

worried about the idea. "Or me, either."

"If it happens, .give me your mind. Just let go and concentrate on me. It's a

chancy sort of thing, since the threat of a merge is always there, but if I can

combine our wills and build a mutual block, rather than combining the memories

and personalities, we can hold them. The individual demons don't really seem any

stronger than a strong telepath; I couldn't withstand a pair, but Grysta and I

did."

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"They launched an empathic attack at me," she reminded him. "And, come to think

of it, when Molly added herself to me, we broke free."

-He stared at her seriously. "What's required is absolute trust. I trusted

Grysta because her fate was my fate; you trusted Molly because she was so

innocent and basic and certainly no threat. You and I trusting each other to

that degree will be far more difficult, but we've got to be willing to do it.

Become the Red-Headed Will. Uh—by the by, I never asked you. You're not Irish,

but any chance?"

She shrugged. "I have no idea. Like most people, all I know is that I come from

a long line of dirt farmers on Kryion. There was never any attempt to trace the

family beyond a few generations, let alone back to pre-empire days."

"Well, my old home is a pre-empire world," he told her.

"Settled almost entirely by a single culture devoted to preserving, some say

locking in stone, an ancient culture. Ancient Gaelic was the only legal

language, and the only other one taught was Latin, a language dead long before

the first Terrans left Mother Terra."

"You've mastered other tongues well," she noted.

"All telepaths are linguists, for the reasons I told you. All you need do is

spend a fair amount of time on a world that speaks one language and you'll speak

it like a native, no teaching or heavy learning required."

She nodded. "The basic problem with being an empath is that you have very few

friends," she told him. "That's also its biggest advantage, though—you always

know who your friends really are." She paused a moment, then reached over and

squeezed his hand. "You are my friend, Jimmy. I'll trust you."

He gave her a smile and a wink and squeezed back, but in the back of his mind,

where telepaths had the advantage of privacy, he wondered if he was really up to

it.

<Well, I wouldn't trust him, or any man, > Kalia sent from somewhere over the

hedgerows.

The maze itself was quite large but. not very difficult to navigate; it was

clearly more of an ornamental than challenge maze, and the only thing that

slowed all of them, other than its sheer size, running as it did for several

kilometers, was the idols.

They ran the gamut from huge, bestial, squatting bipeds with bull-like heads,

sharks' teeth, and bulging stomachs, to large and somewhat disturbing creatures

like no others ever seen, even for people from a galactic quadrant spanning more

than four hundred races. The problem wasn't the idols themselves, no matter how

comical or disturbing they might appear, but the fact that they were far more

than that.

For all the danger and the near certainty that they would not survive to return

home, those from cultures who understood what they were seeing to some degree

were nonetheless excited by the glimpses they already had been offered.

Virtually all ancient religions and many modern ones had idols of gods and

demons alike; it appeared an inflexible rule of nature that, after reason came

to a people, the sense of something beyond and more powerful than they also

developed. Most of the idols in the maze were bizarre and unfamiliar, yet, now

and then, there would be one very like a statue one or another of the parties

had seen before, somewhere, on some other, distant world.

The Mycohlian Julki, Tobrush, was as taken by the excitement as the more

mystical Jimmy McCray.

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"We always laugh at the idol worship of primitive cultures," it commented to

Josef. "Now, k appears that, like everything else in various mythologies, it has

a real basis in fact. We've known of the existence of parallel universes for

some time; it's the basis of our interstellar drives. The problem is, while we

can use the principles involved, we have no way of perceiving them. When we

spent that night in the crystal cave, with those countless crystals resonating,

each, perhaps by accident of nature, a tesseract, our minds were somehow able to

perceive such a medium. The denizens of that parallel universe, so totally alien

to anything, mentally or physically, that we can comprehend, have the same

problem in reverse. Somehow, possibly having to do with some sort of geometry,

focused through or within the idols, a weak point is established between there

and here, a lesser version of what we do to travel between the stars. The idol

gives them some sort of shape or form in this world allowing interaction."

"But how could primitive people stumble on such an exact geometry?" Josef

wondered, not totally convinced.

"The universal constant is mathematics," Tobrush reminded him. "It's possible,

even likely, that only groups who stumble upon the correct geometry embodied

within their own idols get any sort of results. Still, we use the parallel

principle for space flight. That means, even though we can't and don't perceive

it, for some periods we are within that other plane. Those with

talents—telepathy, empathy, and the rest—are the descendants of spacers and

often spacers themselves. Our one night's experience with the pure thing

increased our own powers and gave us added talents. Clearly interaction causes

change, as if it were some sort of radiation, mutating us to a degree. Among all

the races with talents, though, there is a tradition of some weak

form of them well before they went into space or were even technological

cultures. Some radiation from the other plane came to those places at some

point, and we see only shadows of the result, weakened by thousands of years of

breeding."

"But some races have no pre-space tradition of talents at all," he pointed out.

"Exactly. I would love to run a correlation between those who had such a

tradition and those who did not with demon legends. I would wager that there is

a strong correlation in the two."

Josef saw the pattern Tobrush was weaving now. "Of course! We know now that the

demons once traveled all over the place, in the distant past, using the

stations—the giant crystals." He chuckled. "They used to burn people with

paranormal powers as witches in many cultures," he noted. "Even though those

people were generally ignorant of the evil religions they were accused of being

in, there might well be truth to it. And those who succumbed to some degree to

the enormous power those other-plane creatures represent, who somehow

accommodated it to some degree, became the servants of what were regarded as

truly evil religions."

"Precisely. The idols give shape and form to those who have no shape or form as

we understand the concepts, and allow some interaction with our own plane. There

is a whole new physics here, a key to unlocking the greatest mysteries of

intelligent cultures. It also, of course, makes these damned idols incredibly

dangerous."

Josef nodded. "It explains a great deal, certainly, but only on the side of raw

power."

"Eh?"

"Where are the gods?" he asked. "Where are the ones who battle the forces of

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