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Chapter 1 Contact Tran DF sfo P rm Y e Y r B 2 B . 0 A Click here to buy w w m w co .A B BYY. by Piers Anthony Mode Book 3 CHAPTER 1 CONTACT It was the strangest creature Darius had seen. "Uh-oh," he heard Colene say. The four of them stood by the anchor, gazing out onto the world it showed, and the thing that hovered in the foreground. The world was ordinary: a gently rolling countryside, patches of flowering bushes, and trees beyond. In the distance were blue-gray mountains. He had seen many realities like this. But the Tran DF sfo P rm Y e Y r B 2 B . 0 A Click here to buy w w m w co .A B BYY. creature was something else. It was about the size of a calf, maybe the weight of two solid men, and roughly oval in cross section. At the top was what looked like a stout elephant's trunk, but it connected to no elephant's head. Instead it seemed to thicken, and then condense into another trunk pointing the other way. Two or three projections sprouted from its center, moving sinuously, as if snakes were poking their heads out of small tunnels. The double trunk might as well have been the snout of a dragon, ready to belch fire fore and aft. The main body was odder yet. It was covered with stubby projections and with holes. Air was being sucked into those holes and evidently blown out below, because— Because the thing was floating just above the ground. He stared, but saw no sign of legs or feet. Yet it did not seem to be magically levitating. Instead the body was hovering on a cushion of air. Its base seemed to be a curtain to enclose that air, and sections rippled as gusts moved out. Its mind is blank to me. Darius became aware of his companions. Beside him on the right stood Seqiro, the massive horse. He was their most intimate companion, because of his powerful telepathy. With him, all of them seemed to speak the same language, and could share feelings directly if they wished to. It was Seqiro who had spoken—or rather, who had projected his thought. "It is an alien creature," Darius said. "It will take time to fathom its mind." He spoke in his own language, but knew that the others heard it as their own, because of the linkage. Colene had set out across the Virtual Mode to join him, and he had set out similarly to join her. They had met more or less in the center, where they had encountered complications. But she had met the horse first, and that had turned out to be a wonderfully unifying thing, because of the ambience of their shared thoughts. Now, with fair luck, they would resume their trek across the Modes and reach Darius' reality. There they could settle down to a satisfying existence. If they didn't get stuck along the way. If they could work out their personal problems. If a thousand likely things did not happen. "It's our new anchor person," Colene said. "It has to be, because here we are facing a new reality, and there it is facing us. So we'd better talk to it fast, before it decides we're its next meal." She nudged Darius. "Can you do your thing with it?" "Transfer?" he asked. He had the ability, in his own reality and in some others, to drain the emotion from a person, and then to broadcast it to everyone in the vicinity. That was his job, at home, as the Cyng of Hlahtar. Or, as Colene put it in her idiomatic thought, King of Laughter. He made people happy. But he hadn't been able to do it in Julia, the Mode they had just left. Each reality seemed to have its own mysterious rules of magic, science, or whatever. "I can try. But who—" "Not with me!" Colene protested. "I'm full of depression. That thing's depressing enough, without adding to it." That was of course her tragedy. Instead of being a vessel of joy, she was a vessel of dolor. Except when she was close to him; then her love blotted out the pain. Their shared thoughts revealed it all. It was one of those problems they had to work out. "But Nona is the only other human person here," he said. Tran DF sfo P rm Y e Y r B 2 B . 0 A Click here to buy w w m w co .A B BYY. Colene thought of the way he drew emotion, and he followed her thoughts to their inevitable conclusion. He had to get as close as possible to the other person, and that other person was Nona. That was disaster, as Colene saw it. "Skip that for now," Colene decided. She faced Nona, the fourth member of their party. "What about you? Can you work your magic here?" Nona considered. She was verging on eighteen years old, and absolutely beautiful in face, feature, and mind. Her thick cloud of brown/black hair framed her head and shoulders and full bosom in a manner that was endlessly becoming. Darius knew that Colene feared she would never be able to match that sort of appeal. All this and magic too! Nona gestured. Nothing happened. She concentrated, her face as lovely when frowning as when smiling. "My magic has no effect," she reported. "I can not levitate, or move objects, or transform them to other forms or substances. I am not in a position to attempt healing, and I am not yet sufficiently adept at changing my own shape to know whether I can do that here. There does not seem to be sufficient magic power here for me to draw on." "How about illusion?" Colene asked. "Oh, that's not magic," Nona protested innocently. "Anyone can do that." "Anyone in your Julia set," Colene said wryly. "The rest of us can't." Nona concentrated again. A faint haze appeared above the horse. That was all. "What about a familiar?" Darius asked. "That's not physical magic." "But for that I must touch an animal." Colene looked at the monster floating patiently before them. "Is that an animal?" "I couldn't touch that!" Nona exclaimed, horrified. "Well, we have a choice, here," Colene said, exhibiting some of the qualities that made her a much more significant person in her own right than she believed: intelligence, initiative, and courage. She was only fourteen, but much like a full woman in some respects. "This has to be our new anchor person, and it has to have had a really good reason to latch on to our Virtual Mode. So chances are it's either a scientist or a felon. We can't shut it out from our Mode. So either we try to ignore it, or we try to come to terms with it. Me, I'd rather know something about it before I relax." She nerved herself. "So I'll go touch it. If it eats me, the rest of you get away from here in a hurry." Nona smiled ruefully. "I will touch it, Colene. Perhaps I can indeed tame it as a familiar." She stepped forward. Colene thought to protest, but Seqiro's thought restrained her. I will work with her, as I have before. Perhaps together we can relate to it. Nona's magic and the horse's powerful telepathy. They could indeed work well together. Seqiro could help Nona without getting in range of the weird creature. "Thanks, horseface," she said, reverting to one of her immature facets. The irony was that she appealed to him this way, too. He loved her as she was, with her internal conflicts and all. Nona approached the creature somewhat diffidently. Seqiro suppressed her natural fear, so that she could be objective. Seqiro could if necessary take over a person's body, if the person let him, and make him or her do things impossible to manage alone. Probably he could enable Nona to leap away from the Tran DF sfo P rm Y e Y r B 2 B . 0 A Click here to buy w w m w co .A B BYY. creature with inhuman speed and strength. If she needed to. So this was not quite as risky a procedure as it might seem. The creature quivered on its cushion of air. Two of the upper stalks twisted to orient on her. "Eyes!" Colene exclaimed. "It's a BEM!" "A what?" Darius asked. "A bug-eyed monster. It's focusing its eyes on Nona." "Those look more like snail eyes to me," Darius said. But he had to agree that they were orbs of some sort. As Nona came close to the thing, they saw that knobs poked out from its rim, each on a rod, like the antennae of sea denizens. But these didn't look quite like antennae. They looked like blind terminals, in Colene's imagery. Darius lacked sufficient experience to understand the nature of the reference, but he accepted it because he had no better image of his own. He had had some limited experience with machines, while crossing the realities of the Virtual Mode, and gathered that this was a machine analogy. Nona stopped beside the creature. Air from the thing's outflow stirred the turf by her feet. The stalked knobs reached out farther, wiggling. Now Darius saw something else.
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