Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the slide was worse than you think and they’re all dead in there from shock or something,” Cross suggested. “That’d make Jerry happy. He could sell the first alien DNA.”

“Then why, if they went to so much trouble to get it here, didn’t anybody come looking for them? No, it doesn’t make sense.”

“Well, maybe someday somebody can come here with all the right diplomatic and translation moves and ask them,” An Li said, reclining on a bunk and yawning. “Me, I don’t give a damn unless it’s worth money to know or it’s something that might impact me.”

Randi just hoped that the answer didn’t impact them. They were, after all, now stuck down here surrounded by barely dormant volcanoes on a lava plain of uncertain thickness for the duration of a howling storm.

Had they been able to see through the storm all the way to the cliff face, and particularly whenever the cliff face was struck by lightning, they would have worried a bit more, for then they’d have seen the entire obsidian cliff throb like some living thing, some beating heart, with a glow that pulsed like a beacon in a swirl of terrorizing winds and rain.

One by one, each of the five in the C&C began to feel tired and dizzy, and almost without thinking more about it they either reclined in chairs or went to their bunks to let things pass. Randi Queson did have a fleeting thought that this might be some effect of the electrical storm and the stored Magi’s Stones, but before she could grab hold, announce it, and perhaps act to do something about it she, too, passed into a kind of nether sleep.

Randi Queson tried to mentally hold on, to at least keep steady against the onrushing hallucinations, but she could not. None of them could.

She was flying, flying through some strange, alien greenish sky with pink and yellow clouds .

Although it was clearly a point in some kind of atmosphere, she could see through it to the stars beyond, the whole starfield laid out before her, but not in the usual visual spectrum but through some other means. It was almost as if she were viewing some kind of photographic negative of the sky, an alien sky she’d never seen before filled with all the stars and formations of a globular cluster, but where light was dark and black was a kind of bright, soft pink.

Looking below, she saw a vast world that was heavily developed but long past its prime. Great domed cities stretched in uncounted number to the horizon, encapsulating ancient and dying masses whose shape and other details could not be determined from this height.

It would have been awesome if she hadn’t felt permeated with a sense of awful hopelessness, a feeling that all those billions plus billions down there were in total despair, creating so much unhappiness that it collected and beamed from every individual and every dome and perhaps every centimeter of the planet, and beyond, going to and right through Randi Queson. She felt tremendous sorrow for them, all the more because she knew that she could not help them in any way, only watch their decline into despair and death.

The others were all with her. She could feel them, sense them in a hundred inexpressible ways, yet she could not see her companions. They were wraiths, flying over a planet of the dead, but they were still wraiths, as helpless as any specter.

And now they were off the world, and into the strangely inverted and bizarrely colored void.

There were others out here as well. Many others, but wraiths just like themselves, able to witness but only to witness, as they went from world to world, system to system, in a flash of darkness, instantly going from world to world and finding only the feelings of horror, despair, and death.

There were Others, as well, on some of those worlds, and going between them. It was no more possible to tell anything else about them than it had been to tell details of the first and subsequent civilizations, but this was a different realm, a different sort of sensory perception, and they were clear as could be.

These were the Bringers of Despair, hatching from the dark, hidden places and wrapping themselves around the worlds they found and helplessly sucking the life out of them. The ones the Others attacked wanted to fight back, wanted to push back this horror, but they could not. Once attacked, they progressively lacked the energy to push against this overwhelming darkness, a darkness that seemed both infinitely collective and yet of one mind and attitude.

An Li had finally met Him.

They veered off, swallowing pride, running for their lives, flying through holes and folds in space one after the other, throwing off the pursuer or pursuers. All thought was gone; there was suddenly only panic, only fear, and a sense that they must return together.

And then it was all emotions, rising up like a giant wave and crashing down, washing over them, bathing them in a range so intense they could not bear it.

Inside the C&C module, as the storm still raged, only Eyegor was unaffected. The robot watched what the humans were doing with total confusion in its logical mind, but unable to determine anything about the cause except that it had to have something to do with the storm outside.

It nonetheless was watching and even recording scenes of sudden and complete human madness.

When they woke up, they were as confused and as physically and emotionally drained as they had ever been.

There were groans, and then attempts at rising, and finally one, then another, managed to sit up and look around.

The place stank. The smell of sweat and bodily fluids mixed with the acid smell of urine and the overwhelming scent of human excrement. One by one, awareness returned, and with it shock.

“My god! I’m bleeding! ” Randi Queson exclaimed, looking down at herself. There were several wounds and quite a large number of ugly-looking bruises, but none of the wounds looked deep or in dangerous territory unless the surroundings infected them.

What was more startling was that she was mostly naked except for her boots and one part of her work shirt on her left arm. The material, tough synthetics that looked like denim but was much, much tougher, appeared to have been ripped off.

Jerry Nagel was further forward, but he neither looked nor sounded much better. He had his pullover shirt on, soaked with perspiration and stained here and there with blood but otherwise intact, but no pants. His body had a number of clawlike scratch marks that stung like hell, some still bleeding slightly, and he felt like he’d bitten his tongue half through. His balls ached as well, as if they were one big massive bruise.

He looked around, shook his head in bewilderment, and then caught sight of the nearly nude body of Lucky Cross lying draped, head down, over one of the chairs. There were more bloody wounds and the start of some nasty bruises on her backside, but none looked more than superficial. Still, she didn’t move at all, and he rushed over, worried that Cross was dead. He turned her over and almost did more damage as the heavy woman fell limply from the chair onto the floor, the heavy gravity making it even harder to cushion her fall. She looked worse in front than in back, and there were a number of wounds that would need attention—good god! Were those teeth marks? More like bites that had drawn blood, but he could see some movement and could tell that she at least was still alive.

Leaving her for the moment, he looked around the interior of the C&C module for the others. He found Queson rather quickly, but she was just sitting there, vacantly staring, shaking a little off and on. She looked up at him with a mixture of surprise and shock, but did and said nothing else.