The Stolen Sun Read online

  Ahead of him—Manala.

  We must not linger, he told Kulta. There is no time for dreams. -

  Quickly he assembled the plowshare and hitched the golden animal to it. While he did so he sang to Ukko, songs Wainomoinen had taught him in the howling night. One glance down at the gray-misted fen was sufficient. One whiff of the nauseous odor of putrefaction mingled with blinding acids was enough and more. He held his breath, not to rack with coughs and pukes.

  Easily. Slowly. Softly. With never a back-glance at the bright spring-sung meadow he was leaving, he set Kulta's course down into the mists. He must be hard on himself and on others, if he was accomplish his purpose. Hard as a diamond and as cruel as stillbirth. Even Varjo…

  It seemed as if Kulta herself shivered when she flung them down the steep bare hill like a golden cannon's ball. The sharp blades of the plow thrust deep into the occasional tufts of weed at the fen's edge, before the ground began to quake and stir beneath them as if moved by some subterranean giant's hand.

  The Worms woke within the purple-black fog. - A thousand hungry repulsive heads writhed out from picker-holes like crimson mouths. A thousand serpent throats began their monstrous hissing roulade; it grew and grew into^a hurtful sibilance of obscene anticipation.

  I must not look down. I must, not look at them.

  An army of slavering ropes lashed the noisome fen. Wayne dropped some heartbeats on the way. One thing he knew. He must not falter. He must believe in the Power. He must never for one single eyeflick release his grip on the belief that Ukko's Power would bear Kulta up, send him flying in golden shuttles across the hissing and the corroding venom and the fangs and the mind-tilting stench.

  I must believe in the Power.

  I must not look down.

  I must trust.

  These litanies he repeated over and over, keeping a firm steady grip on the reins and guiding Kulta in straight sure lines across the marshes. That first tearing horror was gone, now, and so long as he didn't look down and actually see them, writhing and leaping and drooling venom…

  Back and forth. Like a nemesis with a single purpose to her existence, Kulta's fleet muscles of gold carried Wayne and the plowshare on its destructive path. Wayne didn't even know, at first, when the task was finished. His mind, his will, each separate cell of his body, was so concentrated on being an apex of the Power, that he didn't let go, not until Kulta reared up on her hind legs, uttering a single scream of triumph. Only then did he let go of the Power. And when he did let go his long body sagged, lurched, weaved, then fell on the grassy hillock in a faint as deep as death.

  XII

  The emotion that flashed across those small hell's windows in Louhi's contorted face was dismay. Or at the very least, annoyance. Annoyance at seeing Wayne before her throne again. Alive.

  "These were all I could harvest," Wayne told her, flinging a hopsack filled with snakes heads before her. "I trust they will do. But the Worms of Manala are dead, all of them."

  Louhi pinched her deepsunk eyes at them, and mumbled something virulent and unflattering. She fondled her fanged stick's head impatiently.

  "Now what task shall I—"

  "You promised me that I could see Varjo," Wayne reminded.

  "Nün." She turned to scream at the red-clad brutes guarding the entrance to the throne room. "Bring the wench in!" She turned to Wayne and gave a shrill brief cackle. "You shall see how busy I have been while you have been prancing and idling about, Look now!"

  His first sight of the new Varjo brought a gasp of wonder. Could this really be the raggedy little waif with the mouse-eyes who stole game out of his snares? This radiant spectacle? For Varjo was superb, astonishing, lipsmacking! Not only was it the sheer opalescent gown that floated behind her as she moved across tide black floor like a Babylonian queen, nor the silver girdle and the halter that webbed out her special charms in a pattern of shimmering diamonds, nor the crystal slippers on her once-bare feet, nor the tiara set in her high coiffed flame of auburn hair, with the tinkling silver bells set in it to match the emerald-set ones dangling from her shell-pink ears; no, it was the new lapis-lazuli iridescence in her eyes, the bint of color that wasn't rouge, the fullness of bosom, the lacquered coral at her fingertips when she moved a hand gracefully to her jeweled throat.

  She moved toward Wayne with a glad cry. Wayne felt his pulses sing in his temples. His loins ached with want. Moving to crush - her in his arms he ran smack into an invisible wall. Varjo, too.

  "Hey!" He .whirled on the witch. "Am I not allowed even one embrace? One kiss?"

  Louhi was the prudish duenna again. "Do I not know what just one kiss can lead to? Eipa. Take the girl out! Out! You have had your look, Starman." When Varjo vanished, after a last yearning look at Wayne, a look with rapturous promise in it, Louhi cackled, "This is to spur you on, Starman. To whip you into a froth of even greater effort." Her scowl was a storm. "I have pondered and pondered on the third and final task which you shall undertake. It seems that I must outreach myself in the selection this time. If I am to be saddled with a sly fox of a starman, I—"

  "A fox sly in your behalf, Grandmother!"

  "So you say. Quiet, while I move into the Silence and think!"

  Her furrowed eyepockets pinched shut; her toothless gums began to mumble, as if appealing to unseen beings for their dark council.

  Wayne sucked in a painful breath before he spoke.

  "May I suggest?"

  She snarled before the hell's windows opened on him. "You? I am so senile that I will let you outfox me in this?"

  "Just a suggestion." Wayne shrugged, humbled. "I heard you mention one Vipunen."

  "Vipunen!" Her wild cackle woke the corbies on the rafters. "You think in your starman's bragging swash that such a wart as you may dare to move out among the Isotl"

  "I know nothing of Vipunen. I only toss it out for your consideration."

  Louhi blinked her Hüsi's eyes at him for a long moment Then she began to cackle; her ghoulish merriment grew and grew until the rows of black-winged elementals above them screamed and echoed her glee to the highest towers of the Castle. She drubbed her snake-stick on the green bones of her throne and roared still louder.

  "Very well," she cackled. "You have set your own task. So be it. Seek out Vipunen the Infinite. Find the star-eaterl Address yourself to Vipunen. Lose yourself in the labyrinths of the Isot, but first, say farewell to all that has limit and boundary and sanity—for you can never returnr

  The Witch Louhi herself must lead him down the twisted cave-path below the dungeons and across the sky-island, for she alone had dared to have dealings with Vipunen the Infinite. She alone knew the insane path that would lead him where even she had never dared journey. By the nebulous light of a lantern filled with light-worms she led him through mindless labyrinths to a great black hole, like the hole in the bottom of space.

  Wayne teetered on the brink, crying out in immeasurable terror.

  "No! No! I've changed my mind! I don't want—"

  "Fall, Starman! Fall into Vipunen!"

  Louhi's snake-stick jabbed the small of his back viciously; Wayne toppled with a forlorn cry, while the dissonance of her cackling died away in a rush of rustling wind and he fell.

  Vipunen.

  Vipunen the Infinite. Vipunen the Unthinkable. Waino-moinen had sidestepped the legends of Vipunen, among all the others he had related to Wayne in the howling dark. Vipunen, of all the wild beings that infest that-which-lies-beyond-the-knowable, was the least containable in human thought. It was impossible to imagine him for long without the soothing comfort of madness.

  Feeling the rush of eternity fan his falling body, Wayne tried not to think where- he might be falling. He must not think where or he would go mad. And that must not happen!

  Ukko! Be with me!

  He fell fefl feU feU feU feU fell feU feU feU feU

  There was no end to his faU, for Vipunen was infinite.

  Yet, even infinity must fold back on itself eve
ntuaUy; Wayne permitted himself to wonder which part he would land in. It was useless to consider the whole organism. Which part, then? An organ? A gland? A section of thumb-cells, presuming that Vipunen had thumbs?

  A gelatinous bounce terminated his fall. It was pitch dark. Wayne tried to stand up but sticky digestive substance clung to him in threads and the surface under him pulsed and undulated gently. From somewhere below him there came a rumbling thunder of sound and he found himself fighting off oozing waves of odd-smelling glandular outflow. He danced to keep on his feet.

  The secretion stung when it touched his flesh. It wanted to digest him. This must not happen! The mindless cells that functioned around him were but doing their duty, but that duty would all too quickly remove Wayne from existence and change his energy into theirs. Still, this fumbling intruder was a puny ort, unworthy of much effort. The energy in it was feeble to nonexistent. The glands relaxed.

  When other things moved on him Wayne whipped out Wainomoinen's pukko (Louhi had avoided its magic, indeed, much of that magic was lost by the taint of theft) and stabbed at these wandering biotics until they decided he wasn't worth their attentions. The whole functional process of the area he had landed in moved sluggishly, infinitely slow by human measure, at a god's pace.

  But where? Where was he?

  The darkness panicked him, yet the gulf above his head was so vast, his esper's senses told him, that he felt no acriphobic horror of confinement.

  Where? What part?

  Crouching, sucking in the warm fetid air, something happened that told him where. From far, immeasurably far, to his right, and way up, came light. Light and a windy torrent of air, together with a violent bellow of sound that tore his eardrums. And a lethargy, god-slow shudder of movement. As if—

  The movement sent him tumbling against a wall, hands over ears to shut out the tormenting bellow. The light reflecting down on him as he lay blinking and shivering cold sweat, was red. Blood-cell red. And there was something about the wide arching curve of wall that implied an answer to his question.

  The long drifting reddish light was the clue.

  He was in Vipunen's mouth. Vipunen was yawning.

  He took advantage of the light, and the semblance of sanity restored by his new knowledge, to clamber up on his feet and blink widely around him, to study the terrain, as it were. The lingering halflight showed a sky overcast with swirling pink mists. The torrential gale and the thunder had diminished to a spanking breeze that plucked his wide-sleeved blouse; his eardrums were immune to any sound for the time, from the beating they had taken. Slowly the light began to fade as Vipunen returned to his slumbers. The dark was fearsome but—

  Good. The organism was supine, sleeping. Innumerable things were going on within the infinitude of Vipunen's carcass; Wayne could not begin to imagine what shape that incredible carcass might be. It was foolish to even try. But now that he had a peg to hang his racing thoughts on, he would take it from there.

  He rummaged through long unused drawers in his cranium for things he had learned as a boy, about anatomy, about biological function, about cellular and arterial and organic processes. Vipunen was not human. The old Vanhat legends made him an oversized man-type, but this Wayne believed to be an error from the hints Wainomoinen had provided. The Vanhat, fiercely simple, rendered their legends into terms which they could best understand. So Vipunen was a "giant," an ageless giant with ageless knowledge to impart, if crafty old Wainomoinen in his later years could force it from him…

  In the fire-songs Wainomoinen had done just that, dared to seek out Vipunen and prowl his bowels literally, to wrest this ancient knowledge from the giant. Roused from a few centuries' sleep, famished, piqued by Wainomoinen's flea-scratches and bawlings for him to wake up, swallowed the wizard. As a matter of fact, he enjoyed him. Never had he such a dinner, such a morsel, was the way he put it.

  The wizard did not share his enthusiasm.

  "Now destruction falls upon mer he cried out in Vipunen's belly. (He likened it to Hüsi's darkest dungeon.)

  So, before the juices could begin the process of assimilation, Wainomoinen fashioned himself a boat…

  Wayne's mental flounderings among his early vid-lessons in animal biology led him nowhere. He was completely lost in a bewildering maze of veins and glands and islets of Langerhans. Besides, some innate conviction born out of his esper's and emper's talents told him that Vipunen was utterly unlike any form of Me he had studied in his lessons or encountered in his years with the Fleet. Vipunen was beyond space, as human minds were able to conceive it. He was of the Isot, the Big Ones, those Outside. And Vipunen (for all the legend) did not eat meat. No.

  Vipunen lived on pure energy.

  Louhi herself had provided him with a clue. She had made that one slip when she said, "Maybe I will relent a little. Maybe I will ask Vipunen—"

  This could mean but one thing.

  Somehow, with her thousands of years of brash witchery to back her up, splashing out in all directions and times, always on the alert for bigger and better wickedness to feed her boredom and her fanatical passion for evil, Louhi of Pohyola had touched minds with Vipunen, here in his incredible Outworld beyond normal space. She had found the bunghole to this other Space and uncorked it. There was nothing supernatural about it, actually. Nothing was "supernatural." It was simply a random discovery of a heretofore unguessed-at phenomenon. And it took a witch's impudence and illogical acumen to discover it!

  Perhaps Vipunen was amused, perhaps curious. Perhaps he had always been vaguely aware, in his star-browsings, of another microcosmic world existing far below him, with spaceships darting about its stars like so many minnows in a tiny pond. To him Mankind represented neither a boon nor a threat. If he destroyed any accidentally it was like a man stepping on ants during his daily constitutional.

  Louhi had made him aware of them. And the wily witch had actually used Vipunen to her purpose. By perverse mind-magic she had pointed out to him a certain delectable star for him to eat. This one, she wheedled, was especially delectable. Never had he tasted such a delightful tidbit. His palate would be simply ravished!

  And then she had proceeded to guide his tongue-tentacle through the bunghole so that he could suck out the energy from that small sun; not all of it, mind you, but the way a child sucks most of the juice out of an orange, but not every drop. There would be enough left for the feeblest land of light that was scarcely light at all, and enough residual star-energy to keep the hated Vanhat on her green-forested satellite from dying all at once…

  It was a makeshift thing, was Wayne's boat, a craft which any self-respecting Vanhat would have hooted into kingdom come. But it was^the best he could do with the soggy materials at hand and nothing but his pukko to hack them off with. His spacer's lighter had provided just enough illumination to finish his task and haul it to the stream that gurgled upward, as judged by the yawning gap. The best strips came Jxom a glutinous gristle fiber beyond a chasm between where he had fallen and the wall. It was tricky hauling them across, but he managed. Leukocytes began to give him trouble; he staved them off with his pukko, then went back to gluing the strips together with the sticky substance that lay thick and malodorous on the creature's spongy tongue.

  Working, Wayne sang the Old Songs of Power. A chilling thought possessed him suddenly. Would any of the Otavan magic serve him in this Outworld of the Isot? Was he not even beyond Ukko's Power? He shuddered and kept on singing. He must not lose hope or he was lost…

  The boat, or raft, as it might more properly be called,

  (Wainomoinen had built a boat, so Wayne, too, termed his ill-fashioned effort) moved so fast onto the rushing upstream that he had barely time to snatch up his improvised tendon-fiber oar and leap on it before the swirling arterial flow carried him forward into the great benighted caven like a chip bobbing on a roaring spring torrent out of mountain snows in sudden thaw. His intention was to let the oar serve him as tiller, but the seeming sluggishness of the aortal upflow
of Vipunen's strange blood turned out to be so rapid here in midstream that the best he could do was to cling to the raft fibers with both hands, and try to keep his head above water, at least most of the time. When the churning rapids increased to bubbling top-froth at junctions in the mainstream, Wayne gulped for air from under.

  But Ukko or happy chance was with him and the rushing stream led him always upward where, he had decided when he built the raft, he must go.

  To Vipunen's seat of consciousness. To Vipunen's brain.

  In his mind he saw the infinite creature much as Wainomoinen had first seen him. Lying down on some inconceivable bed, sleeping. And how Vipunen could sleep! Mil-lenia fled by while Vipunen snored away, in his god's time-concept. One of his minor worries was that he would not be able to awaken him, to make mental contact with the giant. In the old legend Wainomoinen had plagued Vipunen unmercifully to make him regurgitate him, besides making him divulge the secrets the wizard sought. He had given the giant the bellyache of all bellyaches, jabbing him with his pukko, tormenting him as well out of his wizard's box of tricks. He had Vipunen calling him a "Dog of Manala," beseeching him to quit his liver, unhand his heart, and untwist his spleen.

  All of this byplay, Wayne knew now, was based on the basic understanding which the singer's listeners had of human biological function, and no doubt brought out many a knee-slapping guffaw at some of the rawer innuendos of Wainomoinen's peregrinations through the giant's innards.

  But Vipunen was not really like that. The Vipunen of the legend was couched in terms the farmers and fisherfolk could grasp. There were Vipunens and Vipunens. The name was only a semantic effort to give form and substance to a phenomenon of shattering proportion.

  This Vipunen was Infinite.

  This Vipunen had eaten Terra's Sun!

  XIII

  Wayne was able to use his oar, saved under his body, now. The capillaries into which the cell-feeding flow had thrust the raft moved more slowly now and he was able to select his own liquid road whenever he reached a fork. He prayed to Ukko and strained his extrasensory capacities to the utmost; just what he was aiming for was foggy-dim, but it all boiled down to one basic must. He must make contact with Vipunen on a mind-level and the place to do it was here—in Vipunen's brain.