It appeared that the blade really was steel, after all.
My eyes were incongruously focused on the twisted expression of sorrowful ferocity on the Japanese warrior’s masklike face. It seemed to be saying, “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” Not the most reassuring message to be sending. Just in case, I began to reach with my one remaining hand for my gun….
“Shit, that animal nicked my blade,” I heard him say, and then I relaxed, though in disbelief. The mysterious samurai was none other than Old Man Slovoban. No one else could have made himself comfortable in armor of those dimensions. I put aside for later the inevitable question of how he’d rescued himself from the massacre of the Estrella Rom. “A work by Masamune himself, a dai-katana worth more than its weight in platinum, and to bring it here and mess up the blade like an idiot on the spine of a creature like this… ” and he kicked the fallen Colossaur with fury. Only then did he seem to notice my presence. He bent down, picked up my detached arm, which still grasped the maser in its hand, and passed it to me with his own hand, long and fine as the claw of a bird of prey despite the armor in which it was encased. “Are you all right, pozzie? You couldn’t have thought I’d miss the final showdown with Makrow. I’m sorry I didn’t get here earlier. I was so close, in Module 15, but Makrow’s and Vasily’s powers made things… a little difficult for me. That must be what’s slowing down your friends now, I suspect. Anyway”—and he kicked the defeated Colossaur again—“one less. I’m afraid we’ll never even learn his name. Now we’re three against one. Things are looking up, aren’t they, buratino? I admit, my idea had been to help El Afortunado first, but since you seemed to be in deeper trouble…. Besides, for now the kid looks like he’s holding up pretty well, don’t you think?” He calmly pointed over his shoulder. “In any case, I don’t think it would be easy to get close enough to lend a hand. Honestly, pozzie, don’t you notice anything odd?”
I took the hand he offered me and stood up—after first prying back my own fingers (not a very pleasant experience) and retrieving my weapon. The ancient Romani’s hand turned out not to be the limp squidlike thing I had expected; on the contrary, it seemed to be pure bone and tendon. I understood then that the samurai suit was not mere armor but a full exoskeleton. Without the help of servomotors, with his jellied bones and almost complete lack of muscles the Old Man would have found it impossible not only to handle a sword as expertly as he had done, but even to walk under gravity.
Makrow and Vasily were still facing off. But now they had abandoned any illusion of taking cover and stood literally face to face. Neither was firing at the other anymore, however. Either they had finally realized that it made no sense to try, regardless of how they aimed, or else they had mutually disabled each other’s arsenals with their Psi powers.
I had seen a couple of holovideos of duels between Psis, and what we saw here did look a little like a battle between telepaths. If you squinted, you could also catch a glimpse of the tremendous mental energies at play—something like thin colored veils swirling around the contenders. Psi fields.
It looked to me like Vasily’s field was navy blue, almost black, while Makrow’s was pinkish white—which for some reason I found almost shocking. Wasn’t the purest color supposed to be for the good guy? It’s hard to put any credit in archetypes after a surprise like that.
It also reminded me a little of a battle between psychokinetics. All sorts of objects were flying around the two rivals: broken boxes, an arm torn off from a victim of the human-bombing, a number of hats (including my own badly damaged fedora). None of it ever so much as touched either of them, though.
But the real, absolute novelty was the other thing. And I mean, a genuinely new thing. New to me, to Slovoban, and I imagine to almost every living creature in this universe. After all, it isn’t every day that two such statistically rare Psis fight face to face.
Revolving slowly around Makrow and Vasily and spreading out over the veils of their Psi fields, a structure of translucent blades was spreading, widening as the blades grew from the double center where they were being generated. And on those blades….
No. It wasn’t anything you’d like to watch. I don’t know what sort of effect it had on the hardened old Romani, but as for me, for once in my existence I felt that if I had any hair, it would be standing on end.
Destruction. Crowds of wrathful Grodos scuttling about the Burroughs destroying everything in sight. War. A contingent of Colossaurian assault troops disembarking on Earth. Chaos. A hail of missiles annihilating a Cetian ship on approach to the hyperspace portal. Mind-boggling visions of a space station falling to pieces, abandoned, a thousand years in the future. A depopulated Earth. The perfect, cerulean, malevolently inexpressive face of Makrow on a thousand holograms throughout the galaxy. Fierce unfamiliar monsters with insectoidal spikes and mandibles taking over interstellar trade. My own end, torn apart by the claws and mandibles of a kinsman of the criminal Colossaur that Slovoban had just carved in two.
What kind of shit was all that?
A terrible thought came to mind. I didn’t know much about the effect of Psi synergy between two dueling Gaussicals (of course, neither did anyone else), but it wasn’t written anywhere that it couldn’t produce a sort of collateral clairvoyance. So were these visions glimpses of the future? Advance notices of our inexorable defeat and Makrow’s victory, in spite of it all?
I hesitated, I admit. For one terrible instant, everything I had been fighting for seemed stripped of meaning and the cold tentacles of defeat and dismay gripped me tight. Nothing but chaos, destruction, war, death? Was there no way out? After all we’d been through? After Slovoban’s last-second lifesaving intervention, after he’d kept himself alive through I don’t know what miracle?
Then I noticed that, emerging from the whirling blades, between scenes of chaos and death were other images, less distinct: a human delegation touching down on a planet that I knew from its heavy, rough landscape and overwhelming illumination to be Colossa, even though I’d never seen it before; a string of megastations like the Burroughs spread across the entire Solar System, all operated and occupied by humans; my own gilded face in a silver holographic frame; the Trade Confederation Council awarding a recognition to Old Man Slovoban, who wore a dress uniform that must have consumed more fabric than the sails of a brigantine.
Perhaps all was not lost yet.
“I know what you’re thinking, Raymond.” For the first time, the Old Man had called me by my name. “I also think those are possible futures,” he said thoughtfully, verbalizing my intuition. “In fact, though I’m no expert in Psi, I’d dare to hypothesize that a Gaussical’s power consists in being able to select among them all through some unconscious means, or something of the sort. Take a good look, buratino. If we survive, we’ll have been eyewitnesses to one of the most mysterious forces in the galaxy.” He lifted his mask, his wizened and misshapen face twisted into a caricature of attentiveness. “But really look. I think things are changing. Maybe Vasily isn’t getting the best of it after all. What do you think?”
Silently, I had to agree: judging from the simple proportion between visions of hypothetical bright tomorrows in which we were triumphant and dark ones where Makrow had won, the Cetian was prevailing. In the blades of light, the alternatives in which Vasily, Slovoban, and I managed to muddle through somehow grew progressively smaller and fainter, while there were more and more visions of chaos, death, war, Makrow as emperor of the universe, the end of the Trade Confederation and of life on Earth, the bizarre spiny insect-lizard creatures laying waste to the universe….