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Behind these two-in-one, the rest of us a single unit now.
Paynter and Murray hammer and anvil!
Topaz and Letta Essen incomparably resourceful, evading the counter-attack.
I with my single mind, holding fast to the solidity of the normal universe,
standing like a wall behind the others, holding open the gates in that wall
through which we had come, through which the power of the Face of Ea poured to
help us.
The power of the nekron flowed through us, channeled by Belem and De Kalb. It
emptied, drained like a falling ocean into us. But we were not vulnerable,
now. It could not feed upon us.
Water, changing to steam, must expand, find room to accommodate its physical
change. The process must be completed. But this monstrous change could not be
completed in any way normal to the nekron. It had not drained its force into
us by choice Belem had drawn and channeled it.
Now its normal release was blocked.
We were battered back beneath the onslaught of that terribly concentrated
power. But we held.
Somehow we held the multiple minds of two civilizations, chosen and tempered
by the last, greatest science of all.
Then it exploded.
There is no other word. It expanded tremendously, through us and beyond us,
and that frightful concentration of alien force was gone. The disincarnated,
dissolved units of the nekron expanded seeds of the death beyond death but
helpless in this single moment beyond time, no longer a functioning unit
capable of planned action.
We could never kill it but we had it helpless for the first instant in the
history of the universe. One moment outside time was all we had but one moment
was enough.
The burning suns reeled around us again. They blurred-time blurred and space
and the incredible infinite complexity of the universe shuddered and was
divided. That was the end.
The suns flickered out around us. We were sinking into a dimness that
swallowed up our senses as the darkness swallowed the light. But I could not
quite let go. There was trouble somewhere a question unanswered.
"Have you finished with us now?" I wondered in the darkness. "Are you sending
us back, double-
minded, into worlds where only a single body can dwell? It was you who
destroyed our bodies "
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The great calm Face that was the composite of so many faces took shape before
my mind's eye, perhaps tangibly before us in the thickening dark. The great,
quiet voice said, "If Belem could divide matrices and I universes, do you need
to doubt that your bodies can be divided too and each be duplicated exactly
from a single matrix?
It was done once, in Eden, before the first civilization rose. It shall be
done again, by the power of tEis last civilization of all. Sleep, now sleep."
In the dimness that followed upon the darkening of the suns and the stilling
of the voice I
remembered Genesis, and Adam's words. Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. . .
.
The Face that watched drew further and further away, grew tinier and tinier in
red-lit distances down a vista of diminishing temporal lanes. ...
I knew now that we must have swung far off around that other pole of time, the
beginning, the wellspring of life and space and duration. We must have moved
forward along the unchanging temporal axis toward our own world.
In which there was no nekron now, had never been, never would be.
But there were not even dreams in this slumber to hint at the stations of that
journey.
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So we returned, So we woke.
It was Topaz whose eyes met mine when I sat up dizzily after that tremendous
nightmare and found the rough walls of the cavern intact around us. Topaz?
No and yet not Letta Essen either. She smiled and it was Topaz's smile-but the
long, long eons had changed her.
Letta Essen's slumbering ego in the doubled body of the girl Topaz had wrought
subtle alterations, pulling back that flexible flesh into a more fitting body
for the woman who had been Letta Essen.
It was an older and wiser Topaz, a younger Letta Essen, who met my first dazed
glance when I
awoke.
Murray was sitting up dizzily. De Kalb had already risen and was trying the
flashlight that lay in the entry to our cavern, his face bewildered. I knew
why. It seemed incredible that the battery should still be working after such
millennia.
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