"Electromagnetism is no less important. While it is gravity that holds us down, it is electromagnetism that stops us from falling through the floor. Weak and strong nuclear forces are of equal and fundamental importance as all the others."

  Nodding approvingly, Maccan said, "Gravity can be described in geometrical terms as a curvature of four-dimensional space time while the other three forces are described in terms of symmetries or an abstract internal space, which has nothing to do with ordinary space time as you understand it

  "And what the hell does that have to do with why you invaded our home and killed our people?" Kane demanded in a half snarl.

  Maccan regarded him with a sad smile. "Imagine that for each type of ordinary particle there is a separate mirror particle. That is, not only do we have photons, electrons, positrons and protons, but we also have mirror subatomic particles. In nature's mirror not only space is reflected but also atoms, molecules, cells. Do you understand now?"

  Before Kane could either deny or confirm his comprehension, Brigid stated matter-of-factly, "I think I do, Maccan. The relationship between ordinary matter and mirror matter is somewhat like the relationship between the letters b and d. So, while neither b nor d is symmetric together they are in fact mirror symmetries, with the two letters interchanging in the mirror image.

  "Therefore the properties of the mirror particles would turn out to be very similar to ordinary particles. For example, the mirror particles must have the same mass and lifetime as each of the ordinary particles— otherwise the mirror symmetry would be broken."

  As she spoke, Kane mentally reviewed what they had all learned about Maccan's people over the past couple of years. Obviously the Danaan deeply understood the indivisibility of space and time and of matter and energy. They knew all of them were interchangeable, one turned into the other and vice versa, according to the application. The deeper the Danaan scientists probed into the very composition of matter—the building blocks of material objects—the more they found energy and complexities of energy at the bottom of everything.

  Thousands of years earlier the Tuatha de Danaan had mapped all the quantum pathways, the vortex points on Earth. According to a priestess of the Priory of Awen, the Danaan bolted into the vortex points and scattered themselves. The Celtic cup-and-ring markings, as well as the knot patterns, were one-dimensional depictions of multidimensional geometries. He grudgingly admitted the Danaan had earned the right to take pride in their accomplishments. Nor was it completely their fault that primitive Tennis regarded the lordly Tuatha de Danaan as gods from the stars.

  "So," Kane ventured, "the Danaan came from a mirror universe, a reflection of this one, not from another planet in this galaxy."

  "Yes," Maccan said.

  "How?"

  "I thought that would be obvious to you by now, Kane." Maccan gestured all around them. "This pyramid is not just a structure, but a vehicle which, for thousands of years, permitted access to this universe that coexisted with mine. My people isolated a technique for translating the reality of one universe into its reflection. We brought our entire culture, our whole race here."

  "'Backward and forward and sideways did she pass," Brigid quoted quietly. "'Making up her mind to face the cruel looking glass.'

  Maccan threw her a fleeting, appreciative smile. "You are not far wrong. This structure is a kind of transportation device, a giant interphaser or contiguity which was originally built to pass backward, forward and sideways through the two universes."

  Kane inhaled a deep breath. "And now you want to go back through the looking glass, to return from this reflection into another one."

  Maccan nodded, pointing to the interphaser, the dais and then to the crystal hanging over the platform. "Yes. By tying in your interphaser with the primary power conduit, the necessary energy will progress through the resonance shaft to form a single conclusionary flow at the apex. The energy flows in a helix spiral pattern exactly opposite and of equal frequency and the intensity on each side of the vortex at any given point will trigger a quantum induction shift by vibrational resonance."

  He gestured to the Celtic knot on the floor of the platform. "The shift will then feed into the propagation medium, which will expand the field influence and—"

  Grant rudely cut into the torrent of technobabble by demanding, "Why?"

  Maccan stopped talking and arched a quizzical eyebrow. "I don't understand the question."

  Gesturing to the enormous chamber with both hands, Grant stated flatly, "You left your home universe to come to its reflection. You've been here for thousands of years. There must have been a reason why the rest of the Danaan returned through the— what did you call it, the contiguity?—and abandoned you here without a way to rejoin them."

  Maccan's eyes lightened by a shade. "I was not abandoned."

  Grant made a wordless utterance of scorn. "You could've fooled me, Mac."

  “Do not presume too much," Maccan replied. "You stand there now, only because I am indulging a whim. Do not provoke me into changing that whim into wrath."

  Brigid chuckled lowly. "The mad god's wrath."

  Maccan's reply was sibilantly soft with menace.

  "And you believe your sex will keep you safe from it?"

  "Answer Grant's question, why don't you?" Kane snapped angrily. "Why did the Danaan leave you in this reflection?"

  Maccan's eyes acquired a yellow shimmer as his temper rose. "You ignorant savages could not understand our reasons."

  "Right." Lakesh spoke in a curiously guttural, contemptuous drawl. "You freely chose to remain here, a magician, a scientist, a prince among ignorant savages. We're not buying it, Maccan."

  "Do you wish to share the fate of George Neukirk?" Maccan asked, his voice trembling slightly with the effort to control himself. "He suggested this undertaking to me and as you witnessed, I dealt with his treacherous nature, not his scientific knowledge or devotion to me."

  Kane snorted. "So, you betrayed him without a second thought—no big surprise." He swept a hand toward Shayd, Raschid and the transadapts all still waiting on the ledge. "Will you reward their devotion the same way?"

  Raschid and Shayd heard his question over their helmet UTEL comm links, but unless they possessed the ability to lip-read, Maccan's response would be a mystery to them.

  As it was, Maccan refused to be baited further. Coldly he said, "I do not propose to engage you in a debate as to my motives."

  "Fine," Lakesh announced, moving quickly around the dais and locking arms with Brigid Baptiste. "We'll just be on our way. We'll leave you to whatever activities you wish and you can have the interphaser—"

  "No," Maccan stated unemotionally.

  "No what?" asked Grant impatiently. "No, you don't want the interphaser or no, we won't be on our way?"

  "No, you won't be going anywhere. Except with me."

  Kane eyed him first speculatively, then suspiciously. "What the hell does that mean, Mac? I thought you were taking a trip back through the mirror."

  "I am," replied Maccan. "I will activate the contiguity and translate all of us into the reflection of this world."

  "You want us to go with you?" Grant demanded, voice thick with disbelief. "What the fuck for?"

  Maccan turned toward him, lifting his gauntleted hand, little bursts of energy flaring between the fingers, energy shimmering within the lens. "Have a care, Grant. My reasons are—"

  "Very basic," Brigid broke in, a sneering laugh underscoring her words. "That's why we couldn't figure them out. Maccan, you wanted to extinguish the Sun with the accelerated entropic gradient produced by the DEVIL platform. You wanted to kill yourself, but in your infantile egomania, you couldn't picture the world, the universe, going on without you. So you decided to take millions of lives with you, like an old pagan god who measured the degree of his divinity by the number of lives sacrificed in his name"

  Brigid turned to her companions. "Don't you get it? This sick bastard couldn't figure out an appropriately apocalyptic way of committing suicide, one that's worthy of his stature, so he's changed his mind...now he's taking his toys and going home. In this case, we're his toys. He still needs worshipers and the handful we represent is a pretty pitiful testament to ten thousand years of strutting around being adored by simple clanspeople—but he'll take what he can get. He probably thinks we'll provide him with more by breeding with one another."

  Kane stared transfixed at Maccan, almost overwhelmed by astonishment. He heard himself husk out, "She's right, isn't she, Mac? The reason you never tried to make the transition back to where you came from is because there are no worshipers there. Hell, there might not even be any of your own people there anymore!

  "You wouldn't be a god there, and that's probably the same reason you didn't return to Earth after you were resurrected from stasis on the Moon. The people on Earth wouldn't be impressed by the idea of becoming agrarian peasants, kissing the ass of a god who throws temper tantrums every time the barometric pressure changes."

  "Is that it?" asked Lakesh hoarsely. "This entire operation—the attack on Cerberus, all the killing, the abduction of myself—isn't so much the desire to go home again as to feed your insane hunger to be worshiped?"

  Grant shook his head incredulously. "Is your plan to settle us in the mirror-universe Ireland? To force us into a simple pastoral life where we sacrifice goats to you whenever we want it to rain?"

  Maccan regarded them all expressionlessly from beneath lowered brows. "You are all very bright and resourceful." His voice was a barely audible rustle. "You have skills and knowledge that would be useful in building a new world. I found your courage, camaraderie and humor intoxicating...reminders of why I loved humanity so much at one time "

  Then his eyes seemed to burst into flame, lighting his face with eerie, hell-hued streaks. Lifting both hands, he curved the fingers into talons. "Why do you seek to oppose me?" he shrieked. "Why defy me, Maccan, Angus Og Bhrogha, prince among the Danaan, killer of the Formori, conqueror of the Fir Bolg, sorcerer, warrior, a legend even in the old days of the Danaan empire?"

  Lips curled back over his teeth, he roared words in an unintelligible, consonant-heavy tongue, and the blazing fury of his eyes hammered at Kane who fought the urge to flinch away. Reverting to English, he bellowed, "I reigned in the dim lands ages before your White Christ was born! I died, but not as men die! I slept and awoke again and all the old empires had crumbled to dust or were drowned by the sea! I lived on! What are you humans anyway but shadows in the eyes of the gods? And your arrogant, barbaric race thinks it can survive without its ancient masters?"

  Maccan thrust out his arm, the fingers of his gauntleted hand spread wide, energies pulsing and throbbing within the lens. "You will follow me, dung- dogs, or you will die in screaming agony—aye, and all whom you love will perish 'neath my hand as well. Choose!"

  Chapter 23

  Lakesh surprised them all by inquiring nonchalantly, "And what is it like on your side of the mirror, Mac? Better or worse than this side?"

  "Worse," Maccan bit out, not lowering his hand. "Much, much worse."

  "How so?" Lakesh still affected a mild, inoffensive tone, as if he hoped to deflect Maccan's rage by changing the subject. The tactic seemed to work.

  Maccan declared flatly, "You think your planet was devastated by war, but our entire universe was dying. Long, long ago it was much like yours. That was when we of the Tuatha de Danaan rose to grand civilization and glory. The scientific powers of our race so expanded we were able to spread out and colonize the worlds of many stars. It was an age of high technology, of discovery and exploration.

  "But that was aeons ago. The inexorable laws of entropy took effect, and as the suns of our universe burned out, we had no choice but to migrate, to retreat. Eventually we realized there was no place to retreat to and save our civilization. But our retreat went on for millions of years, withdrawing from our colonies. A universe does not die overnight."

  "Then why return to it?" Brigid asked.

  Maccan's lips curved in a bitter half smile. "The laws of entropy will reverse themselves when the cooling of our stars reaches a critical point."

  "That's only a theory," said Lakesh, still as calm as if he were having the discussion in the Cerberus dining hall and not on Mars with certain death only inches from his face.

  "Human physicists might have believed the second law of thermodynamics was immutable," countered Maccan, "that the flow of energy into lower forms is a one-way, irreversible process. Even your own Einstein admitted that cosmic laws were immutable in appearance only."

  Brigid said thoughtfully, "So you postulate the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty might rule in cosmic, as well as atomic physics."

  "Yes," Maccan said, slowly lowering his gauntlet. "I'm pleased you understand."

  "If indeed the curvature of four-dimensional space collapses," murmured Lakesh, "the immense amounts of free radiation compressed into a small sphere of space time would build rapidly into new nebulae, suns, even planets!'

  Maccan nodded. "And if I can keep my race alive in some fashion until the critical point is reached, and perhaps it has already been reached, then the Tuatha de Danaan will be reborn."

  "For what?" Grant's question came out as a harsh rasp of anger. "So another cycle of gods and worshipers, masters and slaves can begin again?"

  "I don't think you need our help to re-create a universe like that," Brigid said smoothly. "Nor do you need the pleasure of our company."

  "I will be the one to make that determination," Mac- can retorted imperiously.

  She shook her head inside her helmet. "Uh-uh. You're wrong again."

  Her hand darted forward and struck the enter key on the interphaser keypad. Almost immediately a glowing funnel of light fanned up from the metal apex of the pyramid. It looked like a diffused veil of flame and it expanded into a swirling borealis several feet above the dais.

  At the same time, on the far edges of his hearing, Kane sensed a distant, muffled roar, a sound he couldn't focus on or even really be sure he heard.

  Maccan cried out in wordless fury, backing away from the interphaser.

  Kane instantly grasped Brigid's strategy—the pyramid obviously occupied a vortex node, a naturally occurring geomantic interphase point of the Martian electromagnetic grid. Activating the interphaser without encoding a parallel set of transition coordinates was tantamount to kicking open a door in a submarine. Energy flooded in to fill the entire cavity within the pyramid.

  Maccan shouted something at Brigid, a curse or a command or both. He shifted the pulsing lens of his gauntlet toward her. Moving with a speed surprising for a man his size, Grant's hand shot out and closed around Maccan's slender right wrist from underneath. He wrenched his entire arm upward.

  Infrasound leaped from the lens in a rippling flow, striking and engulfing the crystal cluster suspended overhead. The ripple splashed back, striking the lens on the gauntlet. Shrieking in agony, Maccan tried to tear himself free of Grant's grip, his face demonic with rage. A halo of coruscating light surrounded the glove, and Grant guessed the blow back overloaded the gauntlet's delicate circuitry.

  Everyone's helmet suddenly filled with a series of painfully loud squeals, pops and the hashy hiss of static. Grant's fingers loosened in reaction to the onslaught of sound, and Maccan yanked his arm free. He launched a kick at Grant's stomach, his boot landing solidly. Pain streaked through Grant's torso and he staggered backward. He would have plunged from the platform if Kane hadn't caught him

  The volume of the cacophony blasting into their helmets through the UTEL transmitters faded to a strange, whispery echo. The crystalline mass changed color, shifting through all the hues of the spectrum. A twisting tendril of softly shimmering light poured down from one of the points to wrap the apex of the interphaser.

  The throbbing, echoing whispers swelled louder and all of them felt a corresponding vibration build in their bodies, from the bones outward.

  Lakesh shouted, "We've triggered a feedback pulse, some sort of resonant power surge. There's no place for the buildup to disperse, so it'll keep bouncing back—"

  The rest of his words were cut off by a hand-clapping concussion from the interphaser. A parabolic shock wave bowled all of them, off their feet, sent them rolling to the edge of the platform. A great gust of sound battered at their senses, followed by a maddening hum that scratched at their nerve endings. Smoke billowed thickly from the interphaser, streaming from every seam. The dais itself glowed red-hot, plasma crackling in dazzling blue skeins all over the metal surface. Maccan's cloak was on fire, and he shouted shrilly as he beat at the flames enveloping it.

 

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