Chapter Twenty-six

North was the Matrix. His mind flowed through the shattered pathways like melt-water dancing down the rocks of a cataract. He was all the knowledge in his universe, and it was freezing him.

With the skill of long experience, North's consciousness sifted the rush of chilling, killing data, but there was too much. . . .

A party of Lomeri, riding triceratops and carrying energy weapons, herded long-necked sauropods through a forest of conifers. The trees overtopped even the giant dinosaurs by scores of meters.

Humans in armor powered by energy differentials within the Matrix arrayed themselves outside a port city. It would be a major battle with hundreds of warriors on either side. Hovering over the field, just out of phase with the combatants, was a leash of North's own Searchers. The hard-faced women were ready to transfer the brain patterns of dying warriors into their data banks and bring them back to North.

Crystalline machines stumbled ceaselessly over the barren wastes of a world so old that it forever kept the same face to the huge red sun it circled.

A slave-stealing expedition of androids, as disparate in appearance as a necklace of pearls and broken fragments of oyster shell, poised beside one of the discontinuities between planes. The androids were heavily armed. Across the veil of the discontinuity was scrub woodland and crumbled rockpiles which once had been chimneys. The raiders would have to go far to find human habitations.

Rao took leave of Ngoya. He looked awkward and dismayed at the concern his wife could not completely hide after so many repetitions of the event. He was fully armed, and the vessel in which he would pursue raiders across the Open Lands was a battleship on the scale of a tank. The one human servant who would accompany Rao watched his master with mingled fear of the coming task and impatience to get it over with.

Eisner in the form of Penny braced herself against her desk. She had wrapped her legs around Rolls so that her heels forced him deeper into her.

The people in the common area of a village on Diamond looked up in horror and surmise. A child began to cry but shushed as his mother picked him up. The whole crowd stood, linking hands. Someone began to sing in a quavering voice; the whole park joined in a hymn to love and growth and the sun that follows the rain.

The shadow that fell across Diamond was not from a cloud. There was a subtle shift of energies as molecular vibrations elsewhere in the Matrix changed phase—and reverted, so that sun streamed into the park again, while the uniformed populace of Ruby frowned and checked weapons and tensely watched a sky boiling with auroral discharges.

Ruby snapped fully into vibrational phase with Diamond. The common area went red, then black. Ruby soldiers pounded one another on the back and shouted in triumph, but as black blurred to nothingness, there was no sound except the fading memory of a hymn to life. . . .

North rose from the Matrix in the usual gasping terror of a man bobbing to the surface through icy waters.

"Dead," he whispered. "Killed." His face was terrible.

His last vision from the Matrix was the sight of a tank curvetting in the cloud of red dust its fans raised. It was painting the sky with blasts from its weapons.