The Stolen Sun Read online

  Vipunen was asleep and that didn't help. Awareness was dormant and so was the capacity for telepathic communication. One thing helped, though. Up here in Brain the cells glowed with a land of pulsing gray fire. Wayne thought: it must be Vipunen's diet. The star-energy the giant lived on gave his infinite brain an inner light, even in sleep.

  Wayne brought the raft to a bank and climbed onto the spongy shore. The shore and the cavernous network of definable cells all throbbed with that same inner consciousness-glow.

  He sank down to his knees; then flopped, face down. He lay there a long time, exhausted, hungry, thirsty. The rhythmic pulsing of Vipunen's brain cells under him was oddly comforting. He yearned for oblivion, for sleep. But the tormenting thought of the Vanhat villages and a planet slowly turning into a ball of ice because the energy it needed had been sucked away by this Outspace thing called Vipunen, would not permit him more than a few moments's inactivity.

  His thirst was physical torture. He lifted; then, on impulse, he ran to the edge of the stream, cupped up some of the turgid liquid, drank it. At least it was wet and—

  Yes!

  He wasn't wrong! It did help! Not only did it quench his ravenous thirst and relieve the rasping parch in his mouth and throat, but the ingested energy in the arterial flow thrust vitality and new life into his cells. After all, Vipunen took his energy straight. It was only a matter of land and size.

  Restored, refreshed, Wayne's agile mind went to work. As he had with Lady, he thrust his consciousness up and around him, up and down and around—in radiating circles, striving to find some key-point in the enormous mass where he could empathize and then make mental contact.

  It was a long time before the vibrating light began to intensify, subtly, very slowly; then he felt Vipunen's half-wakened mind-presence encircling him, studying him.

  What are you what are you what are you what are you what…

  There was no stentorian voice, no sound at all, only the soft gurgling of the capillary stream and the faint pulsing of the brain tissue. Wayne felt his muscles stiffen up, his heartbeat thunder over the other sounds. Vipunen was waking! Wayne's mental radiants were waking the giant!

  There were no words, only thoughts, but Wayne was used to that. Only this time the sleepy-casual question moved on him from all sides, imploding in his brain. Vipunen was not much concerned yet. He was grouchy with sleep, for one tiling. The intelligent consciousness needling his brain was like a pinprick. He would erase it in a moment. Meanwhile…

  Who are you who are you who are you who are you who are you

  This time the reiteration implied an admission of a life form that recognized itself as such.

  In the instant that followed, Wayne knew. He knew. He knew why Wainomoinen of the Copper Boat had called him down out of the stars. Wainomoinen of the Copper Boat must have known that it would take someone like Wayne, with his special empathic talents, to make contact; just as Wainomoinen the Younger must have sensed Wayne's purpose in stealing his scared pukko and running off with Varfo. It had to be him. No other could have persuaded Louhi that he was with her; he was a Destroyer, trained to ravish and kill…

  He could have wept.

  While his thoughts scrambled and seethed hopefully, the self-light in Vipunen's brain cells brightened. Grudgingly. Vipunen pushed languid probes into this life-molecule that had intruded his brain and scooped out bits of information about it.

  "Who are you? What are you doing in my mind?"

  Now the questions were clear-cut and acid pungent. Vipunen was annoyed.

  "I am of the Vanhat!" Wayne forgot himself in his anxiety and yelled aloud. "We live in a microscopic universe far below you, O Vipunen! I come to beg a boon!" He put Jiumih'ty into his shout and a tincture of reverence. It seemed fitting to speak to the Outspace giant as to some manner of deity. Besides, it might help. Vipunen's body was amass with destroyers.

  Silence. The light converged, intensified on Wayne so that he had to clap shut his eyes or go blind from it. Vipunen was reading him further.

  "What is this boon?" Vipunen thundered, as if he already knew or guessed.

  Wayne breathed in deep for courage. This was his moment. And by his moment hung the future of nine planets and an Empire. That it must have happened so as to produce Wayne Panu and his moment, paradoxically, did not signify. Wainomoinen had said it: Ilmatar weaves many patterns.

  He was suddenly engulfed by a shuddering sense of insignificance that included the whole of his universe. Of what possible importance could this be to Vipunen? What he had to say? The green valleys. The killing cold. The descending wall of ice. His sudden vertigo dizzied him to his knees.

  "Give us back our sun!" he blurted.

  Vipunen was still tired. His rest had been interrupted. He was cranky, bristly as a bear whose hibernation has been cut short by a persistant flea.

  "Give us back our sun!" Wayne shouted again. "You drained out the energy from it. Put it back before it is too late!"

  The light receded, abruptly.

  Other factions of Vipunen's infinite brain were involved with other problems, more important ones. The twilit wait was agony. Wayne's arms and legs went numb with cramp. He dragged to his feet and paced the high gloomy cavern and the river's edge in hopeless frenzy. How had he dared? How could he possibly hope to win out against a creature like Vipunen?

  Even Louhi hadn't believed him. Not quite. The whole thing about Wayne performing three great deeds to win Varjo was a charade to her, too! She was not that easily fooled. He had tried to fool her by falling in with what-ever tasks she set. Killing Hüsi's Elk. Plowing off the heads of the Worms of Manala. Leering over Varjo, poor lost gamine that she was…

  "Die, Starman!" He could almost hear her cackling about it now, as he had telepathed her small slips. "Perhaps you think that by marrying Varjo you will lord it over Pohy-ola after I am gone? Is that it? I will never be gone! I'm eternal and Pohyola is eternal! It is you who will be gone and the sooner the better. You with your miserable pretensions, your single feeble life-span! Thus do I destroy all heroes who suck on the paps of the Power! Ai! Even Ukko himself cannot overcome Louhi of Pohyola!"

  Vipunen must have gone back to sleep, damn him!

  Rage possessed Wayne now. A passion of white-hot rage. The monstrous ape! Going around gobbling up stars like gumdrops, never stopping to consider what havoc he was bringing to whole civilizations! The Fleet, with their planetary all-kill, were appalling. But this—this—!

  "Vipunenl" he screamed. "Wake up! Fetch our sun out of your hideous belly and put it back where it belongs! Damn your infinite hide!"

  He fisted out the sacred pukko and jabbed the side-wall, over and over. It was as nothing, but it was all he could do.

  Slowly the light increased, pulsing circles that had their concentric apex in Wayne.

  "I know what it is that you want me to do. I know. And I could do it if I wanted to. It has not yet been assimilated. It is stored down in my tissues."

  "Then do it! Nowl" Wayne raged.

  "Why? Why should I bother? The crafty little mite-mind that urged me to take it promised me the rarest of treats. It was hardly that. Very second-rate, in fact."

  "Wouldn't you like to get back at the witch?" Wayne prompted. "Do her in the eyes for putting you to all that trouble for so little?"

  Vipunen yawned. "It would give me mild pleasure, yet the trouble I would go to in returning the energy to your puny star would only be compounded. No. I think not. Go away, thing."

  Wayne's brain exploded. He must persuade the giant at all costs. Vipunen appeared to be a self-centered snob and a sufferer from incredible ennui, but he had to have a weak point and Wayne must find it. Wayne went into a passionate plea for Terra, describing in detail the wondrous beauty of the wide1 shaggy forests, the thundering seas, the people, the—

  Halfway, he stopped. No good. Vipunen was drowsing again.

  "Go away, thing. Go away and let me sleep."

  "I can't! Not until I
get what I came for!"

  "I am offering you your life. Go away, before I am forced to flick out your existence."

  Wayne leaped about as despair began to overwhelm him. He screamed curses at the giant. He begged, pleaded, cajoled. Then he ranted and swore at him some more.

  "Away, thing," Vipunen said. "I have had an exhausting millenium and I am very weary. And I am beginning to become vexed with you, thing."

  "How—how long will you sleep?" Wayne gasped.

  "A few centuries more, by your reckoning." 't

  "Centuries!"

  Wayne's heart and soul dragged the slimes of Manala. Vipunen the Infinite's time schedule was in ration to its size; his days were Terra's light-years.

  "Please—!" he bawled. "Listen to me!"

  "I have listened. And I have refrained from allowing my anti-virus armies to kill you, as they are eager to do. You have bothered me far too long already. Goodbye, thing."

  The light dimmed. Vipunen slept, and from the capillary river Wayne heard a multitudinous wave of approaching sound. Vipunen's white blood-armies were moving toward the viral bit of existence that was irritating the giant's brain cells, moving in for the kill.

  XIV

  The white killers, always on the lookout for microbal and viral intrusion, seethed up hugely out of the capillary in a chittering surge of determination. They were like a bubbling surf moving on him. Wayne stared in a fascination of terror. There were millions of them. Millions of infection fighters, all to rid Vipunen or one infinitesmal scrag, one organic driblet, one ort, one thing.

  Wayne backed away from the cleansing surf and into one of the great caves of sharply defined cells. He was sweating in every pore from the sudden heat. The leukocytes were like luminous protean flames, like a fever, bearing down on him to shrivel him into nonexistence.

  What could he do?

  He turned and ran deep into the cave. He ran, his breath tearing out of his lungs in rasps, until he struck a blank rubbery wall. He was trapped. On they came.

  The Power!

  The Songs of Power!

  If only he could think straight. He had to, or all of his cunning and his flaying efforts were for nothing.

  "UKKO!"

  He wailed the name while the pale seething mass of luminous gray shapes filled the cave and neared.

  "UKKOr

  Almost without volition words began to pour out of him.

  Wainomoinen's Invocation of the Power. A plea to the Valmis who were part of everything, even Vipunen.

  "Valmis!" he cried. "Have pity on those of your people who are not ready! Take from the Power—beseech Ukko— give us this boon!"

  They were bubbling toward him, closing him in, smothering him with their numbers. But now they stopped. Something invisible yet palpable stopped them!

  Wayne saw this but distantly. His totality, his very genes, the ions of the molecules of his cells, his ALL, was straining to hold on to the thread of Power that Ukko and the Valmis had tossed him. He must not lose it. The axiomatic truth was:

  One: He must believe in the Power, utterly.

  Two: He must force every molecular part of his being to perform his directed act.

  Three: He must know the pinnacle point, the precise moment for the bursting-out of the Power.

  "NOW!" He gathered the whole thing into a microcos-mic-macrocosmie unit to split time and eternity wide open.

  "NOW!"

  Vipunen's brain-cave swirled suddenly with Presence. They were with him, or the part of them which could help. They. The Valmis. All here to save their backward cousins from extermination. They made a wall through which Vipunen's blood soldiers could not pass. It was the first step.

  Wayne waited for the second.

  It was the ancient who had sidestepped Time to save his people from Louhi: it was Wainomoinen of the Copper Starboat. First a rainbow slash across the dark, like a pukko cutting Space, then the boat was there, hovering, glinting jauntily, its rainbow oars poised.

  White-bearded Wainomoinen wearing his tattered blue wizard's robes, stepped down. Wayne was rooted to the spongy floor, so the wizard must go to him and release some of his concentration so that he could move.

  "Is it—will they make him give us back our Sun?" Wayne cried.

  Wainomoinen's craggy face was one illuminated smile. "Yes, my son. You have done it!"

  "Me! But I couldn't do anything with the giant!"

  "They can, now," Wainomoinen chuckled. "But don't underrate yourself. You brought them here. You were the vessel. Remember, they have no existence as we know it. They can only act when someone close to the Power, like you, has keyed his belief and his strength to the highest possible pitch; then they draw on Ukko's Power and things happen. But it was you, my son! You battled your way here to force a change in Ilmatar's weaving. Everything had its reason. Even the loathing you had for your Destroyer's task."

  Wayne blinked hard. Even Varjo …

  "Yes, Varjo. She was lost, long before you ever met her. Her love for you helped, too, as did yours for her. Jo. Remember the girl in the Astro drinking tavern? The one who cozened you out of your three-months' starman's pay by her pathetic story and her appearance of woe?"

  "Um. Yeah. I was wondering who Varjo reminded me of."

  "Nun. And the revenge you would take on this girl was, after a fashion, taken on Varjo."

  "What does that makes me?" Wayne asked bitterly.

  "It makes you human, my son. And more. Every facet of ypur being, every breath you have taken, all has been woven on Ilmatar's tapestry toward this moment. The good and the bad. The noble and ignoble. Ai! Ilmatar makes use of many strange strands in her intricate weaving. Yours is stout and strong and spun from fine gold!"

  He plucked Wayne's sleeve, pulling him toward the boat.

  "But—our Sun!" Wayne protested.

  The hoary face crinkled. "As to that, you think that a man can lift up a star in his hands and replace it in the firmament bodily? Ei. Only Ukko can do that, by forcing Vipunen himself ^o return what he drained off. Only Ukko himself can reseal the gap that Louhi opened—after we are back in the spaces in which we belong." His skeletal fingers curled a beckon. "Come!"

  Wayne took his seat next to the old man. He marveled again at the deft way those bony hands thrust into the gyrating rainbows and kneaded them, sending the copper starboat streaking up and out of a Vipunen who diffused to make them a tunnel. Wayne thought to ask about the rainbow controls and the oars, but why? He wouldn't understand, anyway. Wainomoinen sang softly to himself; conscious of gnawing hunger, Wayne helped himself to bread and cheese from the shelf, washing his simple meal down with kallia from the foaming vat.

  "Where are we headed?" he asked, chomping.

  "To get you back to your ship, young Waino."

  Wayne felt a sharp swift hurt. "Then I must go back to-"

  "To your destiny. Yes. To take your proper place in Ilmatar's many-dimensional pattern." He grinned jovially. "After all, I only borrowed you."

  "Will I find the way back?"

  "Why not? Lady knows the way."

  The thought of Lady lifted the darkness a little. "What if I don't go back? I don't think I could do those things any longer. Destroy. All-kill."

  "You must go back or—"

  "Die. That's what I tried to do after Chuck .. ."

  Wainomoinen nodded gravely, then a smile quirked up the white-beard on one side and his eyes crinkled. "Per-haps things will be different, now. Perhaps you will help make them different."

  Wayne considered. Yes. It was possible. Man had at last met his match in the Mephiti; and Wayne had touched minds with one of their young. Just a hint, but a hint that could open the door to a whole new millenium. The Mephiti were not evil, any more than Man was evil. They killed for the same reasons and, their equality would force a change:

  And Wayne Panu might crack open that door.

  He shivered on the side of the drifted white mound that contained Lady. The trembling strength of Wain
omoinen's farewell embrace was still on him, like a cloak to warm him forever. "Hyva von!" Wainomoinen quavered at him through the rock-crystal window, before the starboat lifted into the dawn, became an amber moon, a winking star, then a nothing.

  Dawn.

  Yes. The horizon was bright glimmering sunglow. Wayne gaped at it and his eyes streaming. It was the low morning breeze, he said, shrugging away the wet. The wonder of itl Ukko had completed what Wainomoinen of the Copper Starboat had started and in which Wayne had played his part. Marveling, gulping back the lump in his throat—then whooping in sudden joyful delirum—he watched the first fingers of the taken-for-granted light steal across the endlessly white arc. The white was tinged with blue from. a clean clear sky. Now the recovered treasure of daybreak splashed liberally, carelessly, rapturously. New light. New energy. New hope. Pure gold.

  Wayne was a prideful pillar bending only slightly to the west wind. He waited for wb.at would not happen. No. It would not happen. Wainomoinen of Imari would not come tramping and bellowing from around the snowy hummock, as before. That brown-beard was probably drinking with his hero comrades, Lemminkainen and Ilmarinen, drinking and boastings that he and he alone had brought back the stolen sun. Which, in a way, he had.

  Wayne thought of Varjo and pushed the thought away. What would happen to her? What had already happened…

  Taking a leaf from old Wainomoinen, roving the stars alone across Ilmatar's multi-dimensional tapestry, Wayne forced down the mallard's egg that kept rising up in his craw; he sang, he sang loudly, one of the old songs. And while he sang he went to work scooping away the drifted rime from the manship's hatch. It would take a while to warm up Lady's electronic arteries and the journey ahead of him was long, long, long.