He floated bodiless in space. The stars swirled about him, moving
endlessly in their orbits. This was death, he knew. But it was a
strange form of death, for here and there he could recognize familiar
constellations, saw nebulae and galaxies that he knew.
_This is not Noorlythin!_
The voice swirled about him, rumbling out of the black stretches of
space itself. The McCanahan could feel eyes on him, hidden eyes that
probed at him, lancing through him with the remorseless certainty of a
surgeon's electroniscalpel.
_This is a Terran. A man named McCanahan. He is frightened!_
_He was within the tower. Only Noorlythin could live in that trap of
hell. I do not understand!_
Something touched him, as gently as a Spring breeze off the sea. And
with the touching, the eyes of Kael McCanahan came open to the robed
figures that floated between the stars. He tried to see their faces,
but only a blinding whiteness returned his stare, under the low hoods
of the robes.
_Seek not our faces, Terran. To you, we are as the sun!_
His tongue was thick and swollen. He mumbled. He swallowed, as if to
clear his throat.
"Where am I? Who are you? I walked into the tower and--"
What had happened to him on that yellow floor? His knees had buckled
and he had gone down with an intangible force crushing him. Kael shook
his head.
_We are the Doyen. An ancient race, a race of once-men who have lived
out the span of our lives a million centuries. In that time, we
changed. Our bodies evolved upward from their primal shape, striving
always to progress to that last, final shape of all._
"Noorlythin? He is one of you?"
_Once he was. But Noorlythin could never forget the adoration that was
showered on us by the sfarri. He hungered to be worshipped as a god,
as once he was, many eons ago. Noorlythin turned his back to us, the
Doyen. He has gone back, resuming the primal shapes of the men whose
race is young._
Fear came to McCanahan there among the stars. It crept in through the
unspoken words of the robed things, clutching at his mind with frozen
fingers. He shook uncontrollably before he could assert himself.
"This Noorlythin. You seek him?"
_He has broken the Doyen law. He has become as an animal. With his
powers, he can be a god to any primal race. No primate can stand to
him, and well he knows it. When he is ready, when he has used the
sfarri to conquer all the primal races of the galaxy, he will ascend
into the living sacristy of the Temple of Sharrador. There, once again,
he will be worshipped with living sacrifices, with orgies that only a
primal race can conceive and execute._