George Martin - Aces High

She saw the entrance of some kind of church-no, a temple, definitely not a church. She saw it. but she wasn't there, couldn't have been there; this was a time before she'd been born. Her disembodied presence scanned a nighttime street and then floated up the temple steps past the man on the door who seemed to be frozen. She had a glimpse of a great room aglow with candles, two columns, and a man on a platform, wearing'some kind of gaudy red and white thing over his front, just before the screams began.

Not just screams but screams, SCREAMS, ripped from the throat of a soul gone forfeit. The sound stabbed into her. There was time for her point of view to swing around cameralike so she could see it was the little man screaming, the Astronomer, staggering into the hall. Then there was a fast jumble of pictures, a jackal face, a hawk's head, another man, his wide face pale; light glinting off the little man's glasses and then some kind of a thing, a creature-thing-slime-massdamned-thing-thing-thing.

She found herself sitting up in bed, her arms thrown up in front of her face.

"TIAMAT." Unbidden, the word came to her, and unwanted it hung there in the darkness. She rubbed her face with both hands and lay down again.

The dream returned immediately, dragging her under with horrible strength. The little man with the enormous head was smiling at her-no, not at her, she wasn't there and she was glad; she didn't ever want anyone to smile at her that way. Her point of view drew back and she saw that he was now standing on the platform, and around him she saw several figures-Roman, the red man, and the oriental woman, a thin wreck of a man with the feel of death about him, a woman with regret so etched into her features that it hurt to look at her (somehow she knew the woman was a nurse), a young albino man with a prematurely old face, a creature male, she thought-that might have been an anthropomorphic cockroach. There but for the grace of God, she thought.

God is still out on coffee break, little girl. She was looking into the face of the man who had brought her here, the one they called Judas. He was the only one who could see her. It's just the luck of the draw, babe, and you were lucky. And so was I. Blackjack!

Everything went dark. There was a sensation of incredibly fast movement. Something was propelling her toward a tiny point of light far ahead in the blackness.

And then suddenly she was there; the light swelled from a pinpoint to a fiery mass and she hit going full-out at the speed of thought. The light shattered and she was tumbling softly on the mossy floor of a forest. She rolled over once and came to rest gently at the base of a large tree.

Well, she thought, this is more like it. I must have missed the White Rabbit, but the Mad Hatter ought to be around here somewhere. She shifted position and found she had to grab hold of a large root to keep from floating away.

Look, whispered a voice very close to her ear. She turned her head, her hair floating around her as though she were underwater, but she saw no one. Look. Look! Look and you'll see them!

A puff of mist blew between two larches in front of her and disintegrated, leaving behind a man dressed in the height of eighteenth-century finery. His face was aristocratic, his eyes so piercing that she caught her breath as his gaze rested on her. But she had nothing to fear. He turned; the air beside him shimmered and a strange machine melted into existence. She blinked several times, trying to see it clearly, but the angles refused to resolve themselves. Try as she would, she couldn't tell whether it was large and sharp-cornered or small and molded, sculpted in marble or nailed together with wood and rags. Something glimmered and detached itself from the machine. She marveled; a part of it had just gotten up and walked away.

No. What she thought was part of the machine was a living being. She wanted to pull her gaze away just for a moment but she couldn't. It wouldn't let her. Alien. Reminiscent of certain other aliens she'd seen on the news in the attack. Jumpin' Jack Flash. The thought was neatly shoved aside.

The alien turned to the man and stretched out an arm, or some appendage. Now it began to look more like living matter than part of a machine. The alien smoothed into something roughly bipedal though it seemed to be holding the form only by sheer will-the ergotic hypothesis (where had that come from?). The appendage touched the machine and melted into it. A moment later something protruded from the side near the man. He took hold of it and very carefully removed it. The alien sank a little, diminished. She realized it had expended a great deal of its life-force to give the man-what?

The man held the thing to his lips, his forehead, and then lifted it high overhead. Briefly, it took on the form of a human bone, a club, a gun, then something else.

Shakti, whispered the voice. Remember this. The Shakti device.

I'll never forget it, she thought. The floating feeling was starting to leave her and she grew afraid.

Now, look. Look up.

Unwillingly, she raised her head and looked up at the sky. Her vision shot up, racing through the sunlight, through the blue, through clouds, until it left the Earth entirely and she was looking at the naked stars. The stars dispersed before her until she was staring into the blackness of space, and still her vision was traveling.

Something was there ahead of her, invisible in the blackness. Something… it was so far away she could not begin to conceive of the distance. It was on its way to Earth. It had been this far away in 1777, when that man (Cagliostro, said her mind and she didn't wonder how she knew) had accepted the thing-Shakti-from the alien and then-and then-went on to perform many feats seen as miraculous including mind reading, levitation, transubstantiation, amazing all those in the courts of Europe while passionately recruiting for the Egyptian Freemasons..

She struggled to absorb the information pouring into her from the dream. Not that it mattered, because when she woke up she wouldn't remember any of it. That was the way it was with dreams. Wasn't it?

… because he wanted an organization that would keep the Shakti device safe and hand it down from generation to generation, to only the most trusted people, until its mysteries could be unlocked and completed, when it would be needed for the arrival on Earth of-

Something writhed in the darkness ahead of her. Or perhaps the darkness itself was writhing in agony at having to contain this thing, this- for the arrival on Earth of-

It burst upon her without warning or mercy, far worse than it had been when she touched it in the Astronomer's mind. It was the gathering, the congealing, of the highest, lowest, most developed, polished, and refined forms of evil in the universe, evil that made the greatest human atrocities seem petty by comparison, evil she could not understand except with her gut, evil that had been rushing toward this world for thousands of years, swallowing anything in its path, evil that would be arriving any day now, any day.

She woke up screaming. Hands were on her and she fought them, twisting, striking out. Water poured over her, thickening the air, soaking the bed and the rug.

"Sh, sh, it's all right," said a voice. Not the voice from her dream but a female voice. The oriental woman Kim Toy was there, trying to soothe her as though she were a delirious child. A light went on; Kim Toy enfolded her in a calming embrace. She let herself be held and willed the water flowing over both of them to stop.

"I'm okay," she said when she could speak. Her wet hair dripped into her eyes, mixing with her tears. The whole bed was drenched, but she saw with a little relief that she had spared the rest of the room.