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  And so, although man and the galaxy have their intelligence in common, it is doubtful that they would ever find any common ground for communication. And in any case, the galaxy is quite unreachable. It is not curious. It is totally involved with matters which are beyond the comprehension even of lesser beings which live on the cosmic time scale. It is a unique creature.

  The common factors which the galaxy shares with a man, it also shares with Planet Despair. But Planet Despair is as different from the galaxy as the galaxy is from a man.

  CHAOS’S STORY CONTINUED

  As I came near to the spot which was my destination, my step quickened, and my mind sprang to life with a tremendous sensation of wrongness. Tension was building rapidly, and I could not understand why.

  But there was something wrong, and when I took the final well-known bend in the road the wrongness materialized into walls which loomed oppressively high above me. I could feel them rather than see them. Tiny slivers of light shone from half a hundred slit windows, but failed to illuminate the precise shape or size of the building. But it was all too clear that it was not the right building.

  I stood still, peering without seeing into the cloying darkness, searching for angles and lines in the pencil thin beams which shone from die tiny windows. At first there was more bewilderment than fear, and then came the rush of nightmarish confusion.

  I had walked home along a winding road which I could hardly see by the light of the stars. I had walked with confidence and assurance, with every single step of the way known to me. Every inch of it was carried in my mind. Every turn and every slope was registered there. And at the end of that road, I knew, was a small, pleasant villa on a hillside.

  But there was no villa. Instead, there was a vast castle, hideous and archaic in design. It was a horrible, mocking anachronism, an imitation of something eleven thousand years out of place. It was a deliberate parody of a medieval fortress, but in the darkness at least it looked more than half-serious. It was a living ruin—but it was inhabited by real people.

  There were long seconds when I could only stand there, not understanding. My mind refused to work. It was presented with two absolutely contradictory sets of facts. There was nothing it could do. I looked, but I did not see. Nothing was as it should be; my sight was telling lies— lies built of solid stone.

  I began to search for explanations. I tried to dig deep for the memories which had betrayed me, the memories that were simply not there. I had not a single memory of Aquila. It was all a matter of knowing that certain things were, that certain things had happened. I wondered what could possible have happened to me on Calypso’s world, but slowly came to realize that this whole thing must have begun long before that—perhaps before the beginning of the Beast war. I looked for the oldest memory which I did have, but I could not identify it. No matter how much I had forgotten, the failure in my mind was not merely one of memory. It was one of delusion. I had believed things which were not true. I had been sure of the lies, but only because there had been no truth with which to compare them. I looked at the shadowed walls, helpless and not knowing what to do.

  I clenched my fists and forced my mind to think sensibly. But no matter how cold and analytical my logic, there was no conclusion to be drawn. The facts were wrong.

  I listened intently, and I heard faint noises from within the great building. I watched the slit windows carefully and could see some sort of movement behind them, although they were too narrow for me to make out anything more than the mere fact of movement.

  I walked forward, no longer knowing the way, no longer trusting the path which my feet were following because of something which had been planted in my mind by madness or self-deceit. Hesitantly, I began to walk round the castle. I moved cautiously, not trusting myself for a second. I put out my right hand to trace a line along the castle wall, and after a few yards, I returned it to lay on the hilt of the dagger which was the only weapon I carried.

  The castle was approximately square, with thin, tall turrets at each comer, whose high tops I could make out by the occulting of the stars. There were only rough stone walls, and windows. It was so ridiculous that I had an impulse to laugh. But I didn’t laugh. The form of the building might be absurd, but the all-important thing was that it stood where no such edifice should stand. It was a stranger to my world, an enemy to my mind.

  I searched for somewhere where one of the slit windows was near enough to the ground to allow me to look through, but I could find no such place. The owner of the castle— or its designer—apparently had exaggerated ideas about the value of privacy. But I still wanted to look inside, and the fact that the slits were too high only tantalized me. I stopped beneath one and looked up at it contemplatively. I had seen no one and no one had detected my presence. The fortress was only a mock fortress, it seemed, with no sentries mounted on the battlements. There was nothing but silence and darkness on top of the walls.

  I did think of knocking at the door, but abandoned the idea immediately. For some reason, the strategy of stealth was the only one which recommended itself .to me. The simplest course seemed to be outside the scope of the situation. This castle was an invader in my past. It was an enemy, trespassing in my mind. The idea of treating it in a normal, everyday fashion was quite inappropriate. I was thinking in terms of confrontation, of fight and defeat. The castle had no right to exist. I suppose I was slightly disturbed.

  I took that dagger out of its sheath, and scraped the big wooden door of the castle with the point. It was a meaningless act of aggression, but it reflected my frame of mind.

  I moved along the wall again the same way that I had gone before, but keeping much closer this time, running the point of the blade along the uneven face of stone. Before I came to the angle which marked the turret, the blade caught on something fairly strong and extensive. I put the knife away, and felt the growth with my hands. It was some kind of woody climbing plant and it clung tight with the tenacity of long endurance. It seemed easily capable of bearing my weight, at least for six or seven feet upward.

  The woody stems were twisted and ran all over the place. They provided perfectly adequate handholds and footrests. I began to climb up and was startled by the loudness of the scraping of my boots on wood and the falling of a considerable amount of dirt. The crevices in the bark were choked with soil and dust of undoubted antiquity.

  But no one heard. The climb was not difficult, but it was arduous. I was forced to use both hands to haul myself laboriously upward. I was very tired and not particularly fit, but what really made the climb difficult was the mental association.

  I still remembered with dreadful clarity the terrible climb up the chasm on Calypso’s world. I couldn’t help thinking of it now, and I found the thought upsetting. I could feel myself getting dizzy, although I was no more than eight or nine feet up in the air, and I had to swallow hard to fight back nausea while I went doggedly higher.

  My breath was coming in long rasps, and the beating of my heart felt both unusually distinct and very strained. I fought hard to control myself, and kept driving upward, measuring progress in inches rather than feet.

  The slit of light had seemed fairly close while I was on the ground, but I was a long time reaching it. It must have been on the first floor—there appeared to be no ground floor windows unless they had some very high ceilings. I suppose it was all part of the imitation. A castle liable to be besieged and beset by primitively armed savages would obviously allow as little access to enemy missiles as was practical. But I was slightly annoyed by the fact that this was Aquila, and the time was now.

  When I eventually reached the window, I found to my further annoyance that I could not grip the sill from below. The outer aperture of the window was much wider and deeper than the slit itself, with a sharp inward slant that defied handhold. I suppose I had no right to be annoyed. The sensible thing to do would have been to enter in the normal way, through the door.

  I pulled myself up against the window—whic
h was, in fact, quite large when one got really close to it. The builder of the castle had compromised between imitation and comfort sufficiently to put glass in the window. From beside the window I could, see only a section of bare wall, and I worked my way in closer. The window was as tall as me, and a little wider, which made the outer aperture considerably wider. Hopefully, I stretched my foot round into the slanting edge of the slit, and was fortunate enough to find a cranny into which I could safely, if not very comfortably, wedge my foot. I kept both hands on the stems of the climber, but steadily worked sideways until my handhold was right above the window. Then I swung my body sideways, round the corner and into the slit. The position was uncomfortable, but I now had a perfectly clear view of the room within.

  The resemblance to a castle had not been carried to the lengths of interior decoration, at least, not with respect to the room into which I was looking. Its walls were painted and polished, its floor richly carpeted. It was a fairly small room, and I could see everything except what the angle of the wall hid from me. Beside one wall was a series of cabinets and drawers, and a seat in front of a large and decorative mirror. In front of the mirror was a woman, tidying her hair.

  All I could see of the woman from my present position was the back of her head. But I could see her face in the mirror. No doubt she could also have seen me, even though I was out in the darkness looking into the light. But she was too intent upon her own face to see anything else.

  I stared hard at the reflection, trying desperately for some kind of recognition, although I hardly know why. But the face meant nothing at all. The glass held the image of a woman clinging hard to dying youth, maintaining it with cosmetics and fostering the illusion by her expression and manner. Her eyes were bright blue, and the lines of her face were painted to highlight their brightness and color, as though color was the monopoly of youth…The neatly curled hair might not have been her own. Her complexion was certainly artificial—it looked almost glossy without the minor tensions of the subcutaneous muscle, and mask-like because of the elimination of pores and follicles.

  I gazed steadily at the face, still hoping to find an echo in it of someone I might have known ten years ago.

  All of a sudden she turned. A thrill in my fingers warned me that I would be seen, but I was wrong. She was still intent on her own thoughts and turned toward me only so that her bright eyes could seek out something so near the outer wall that it was beyond my field of vision.

  Even though the alarm was false, the thrill lingered and was suddenly reinforced by a burst of recognition. I was convinced that I knew the woman. Seen right way round, not mirror reversed, her face suddenly triggered off a reaction. A thought struck me with dizzying violence—a crazy, unprompted thought. I knew the face, I knew the woman.

  But at the same time, a rush of cold reason warned me against the thought. It had been planted, ready to be triggered by sight. I did not remember the woman. I could put no name to her, could not see her as she would have been ten years ago. The burst of thought was a lie. Where-ever my supposed knowledge of Aquila was coming from, it was not from my memory. How much, I wondered, did I actually remember? How much of what I carried in my mind was actually based on experience, and how much on these twisted fragments of deceptive knowledge?

  I began in the same instant to question all the things which I knew for certain, things so absolutely beyond question that they had no need to be supported by memory. Things like knowing where my home was, like knowing who I was.

  My mind reeled suddenly and my precariously wedged foot lost its grip. I tried to swing outward, to gain a foothold in the plant, but my attempt failed, and I began to swing back again. There was a moment of unstable equilibrium, and then my reflexes took over.

  Unthinking, not even trying to think, I plunged forward, my feet coming up to steady me and stop me swinging. They went clean through the slender pane of glass, and when I finally found a foothold, it was on the inside of the window ledge. My hands were already losing their grip, and the only alternative to falling was to go through the window.

  I don’t know how I kept my balance while I scrambled through, but somehow I managed it, forcing myself into the room to land in a confusion of ripped clothing and lacerated skin, all in a heap on a carpet of shattered glass.

  PLANET DESPAIR

  Planet Despair is a weird and awesome entity, presenting many different faces. It revolves around a purple sun, itself one of the strangest stars in the galaxy. Its sky is a gigantic kaleidoscope of swirling colored cloud. Its surface has a darkside and a brightside, each with its own unique features. On the brightside, there is the land of fire, where everything radiates harsh red light, and the somber chasms extending deep into the body of the planet. In the twilight zone, extending both into the darkside and the brightside, there is the River of Tears. Despair is the adopted home of Darkscar the collector, a refugee from a future that can no longer come about.

  But there is much more than that. Planet Despair is incredibly old and originated somewhere else than in the galaxy. It was old before the galaxy began its term of existence. Before the stars condensed, it was a wanderer, and only as the galaxy endured the stages of its infancy did it become an invader. The galaxy reacted, but it was the passive, defensive reaction of an entity unsure of its strength. Like an oyster sheathing a grain of sand with pearl, the galaxy clothed Despair with the Time Gap. Content, balanced once again, the galaxy continued its growth. Planet Despair induced no further reaction, but simply existed inside the Time Gap, waiting.

  Planet Despair is a highly complex being. It is not alive, but it is reactive, it is sentient, and it is intelligent. As well as its physical manifestation as the satellite of an unusual sun, it has another body altogether. The second body exists only in hyperspace, and exactly where it is in hyperspace is difficult to say. It is a body which extends into more and stranger dimensions than the galaxy’s.

  The mind of Planet Despair, where the intelligence and sentience are located, is totally a product of hyperspace. It spans the dimensions of hyperspace, has all the characteristics of hyperspace, and is very much involved with hyperspace. In this respect also, it is different from the galaxy. Its mind can encompass everything, possess anything it wishes, or nothing at all. It is a mind which can retain an identity and a sense of individual position where no distances separate all the other positions. But it is bound by neither its identity nor its position. In hyperspace, at least, Planet Despair is far less restricted than the galaxy, even though in space it is trapped like a fugitive or a parasite within the prison of the Time Gap. The precise whole relationship between the galaxy and Planet Despair is too complex to be understood or even described.

  Although Darkscar has lived on Despair for several years, he knows nothing of its true nature. Mark Chaos has encountered both spatial and hyperspatial aspects of the entity, but has not, as yet, connected them in his own mind.

  CHAOS’S STORY CONTINUED

  There was a scream which went on and on. It wasn’t loud, and it held more surprise than fear. But for the moment, that didn’t matter. I felt like a living fountain of blood, with the pain of every cut clamoring for individual attention. I didn’t have time to think, I just let my reflexes take over. I got to my feet, reeling a little. My right hand groped for my knife but couldn’t seem to grip it. My left was busy plucking bits of glass which had embedded themselves in my skin.

  In actual fact, there was no substantial damage done, but the sight of what appeared to be a lot of blood, the shock of the fall, and the noise and the pain all combined to drive me into a panic. My mind was jumping furiously, and I couldn’t think at all. I leaped for the door and hurled it open. I didn’t look back, just dived through and began to run. The screaming died away, but I don’t know why.

  Once I was running, it was so easy to keep on and so hard to stop and think. I was hardly aware of where I ran. the interior of the castle seemed suddenly full of hundreds of dingy, curving corridors and shor
t staircases, but that might just be the impression I got. I was taking very little notice at all. I remember cannoning from wall to wall, hurting myself and bringing tears into my eyes. There was blood in my eyes too, leaking from a cut above the eyelids. I could hardly see. I kept running through a crazy, disturbed series of corridors, convinced I was going in circles but unable to get out The whole thing started to seem like a dream.

  There were sounds coming from all directions, but there was nothing which I could construe as pursuit.

  I ran into a wall with a sickening impact. My head rang, and all I could see was something spinning—a distorted shape like a crooked wheel. I remembered Hyla, and what I had seen while I was there, but I could only keep going. As on Hyla, it was as though I was drugged. I was not under my own volition.

  As though to reassure me, the crooked wheel faded away, and I felt sure that it had only been imagination. I was in no state to care greatly. I couldn’t slow down and give myself time to think. I was busy scrubbing at my eyes with both fists, trying to clear away the haze, but I met with little success.

  There was a sudden loud cry of “Look out!”

  I slammed into a hard wooden surface as someone I couldn’t see opened a door into my path. I went down and the door bounced away. A silhouette was lurching away, sagging at the knees and waving its arms in a comical attempt to stay erect. Blinding fight flooded the dim corridor, and I was trapped by it, surrounded by faces which the blood in my eyes stained red.

  I crouched there, one hand searching for and finding the dagger, leaking blood on the floor, staring up with bloodstained eyes. There was a kind of buzz compounded of small movements, gasps, people talking and swearing. I couldn’t make anything out. All the words were just gibberish.