Yissil Froon glared down at me, his head trembling from side to side as if in the grip of a seizure. Drool oozed from his mouth and sprayed my face as he gave a clacking laugh and exclaimed, “It’s better than I ever hoped! This world of yours is filled with so many minds! So many! And all consumed by panic and antipathy! It’s positively . . . delicious!”
He looked up to the heavens and flung his arms out.
“I will have it!”
The fringed outer lips of his mouth stretched so wide they tore at the corners. His face receded into the shell of his head. The front seam of his ruined body split open and red tentacles writhed out of it.
He screamed, “I am Yissil Froon! I am Yissil Froon.”
A network of cracks snaked across his exoskeleton. Wet flesh bulged through them.
“And I . . .”
I felt something solid on the ground beside my hand and curled my blood-wet fingers around it.
“Am . . .”
Yissil Froon’s carapace fractured and fell away as a horribly malformed Mi’aata burst from within it.
“God!”
Instead of four eyes, it had seven, varying in size but all burning with madness; its limbs were of differing thicknesses, the suckers and spines distributed irregularly along their twisted length; its torso was contorted and stretched over with patchy, discoloured skin; it was monstrous; it was pathetic; it was still Yissil Froon.
The devil looked down at me and whispered, “Worship me.”
“In all honesty,” I replied, “I’d rather not.”
I swept the object in my hand up and into the side of its head. The crunching impact sent the creature reeling sideways. I pushed myself away from it, jumped to my feet, and put my full weight behind a second blow. Tentacles wrapped around me but their grip was loose, the strength already draining from them.
I clubbed Yissil Froon again and again—and there was no wrath, no lust for vengeance, and no red mist before my eyes. I knew exactly what I was doing, and I did it without hesitation or regret. I smashed his head to a pulp, destroyed his sick brain, and wiped him from existence. Then I teetered, fell to my knees, and looked at the thing I was holding.
It was crusted with dried mud and smeared with gore, but it was recognisably the Webley-Pryse revolver given to me by the London Missionary Society so long ago.
They’d told me the life of a missionary is sometimes perilous.
°
12. WAR
Even now, it seems absurd to me that a structure which spans the vast distances between planets is yet so sensitive that one end of it will follow a crystal no bigger in size than a cigar. Inevitably, my incredulity draws my consideration from the macroscopic to the microscopic, and I think of that which my own species has achieved, and stand aghast at the unprecedented destruction wrought two years ago by the splitting of an atom.
If something so inconceivably small can destroy Hiroshima, why not a crystal shift the end of a fold in space?
My account is almost done.
Five years have passed since my return to Earth.
With my bare hands, I buried the corpse of Yissil Froon in the Koluwaian jungle. His Mi’aata body had been as horribly distorted as his mind, due, no doubt, to his excessive drinking of Dar’sayn. In effect, he’d been consuming his own kind, so I suppose it only fitting that his remains are now rotting on an island where cannibalism was practised.
When I descended the hill and emerged from the undergrowth, I found Koluwai transformed. The tree houses were gone and the town of Kutumakau, though vastly expanded, was almost completely destroyed. What remained of its inhabitants were diseased, half-starved, and many of them badly wounded. I recognised no one, and none showed any interest in me.
After two days, during which I subsisted on fruit, nuts, and berries, I learned from an elderly man that a vicious war between Australia and Japan was raging throughout Melanesia. Koluwai had been, for the space of one catastrophic week, a battleground.
It took a further three days before I was able to persuade a fisherman to sail me to Futuna. From there I made my way with painstaking slowness northwestward past Vanuatu, through the Solomon Islands, and on to Papua New Guinea. The scars of conflict were obvious throughout the region—the smoking hulks of battleships, burning towns, ravaged farms, and, everywhere, the dead.
While approaching Port Moresby, I encountered actual combat for the first time. By now, I knew the