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believe, to conquer it."
He turned and walked back to the table with the camera and recording
equipment. The bulky man came forward to bar his path.
"Let him talk," Jai said behind him. The bulky man moved aside.Chaz reached
the equipment.
"Only, you don't really know for sure, do you?" continued the voice of Jai.
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"I believe," saidChaz . "That's all I ask anyone else to do."
He faced the equipment.
"All right, people of Chicago Dis-trict," he said into it. "Here we go.
Whether we win or lose, here we go; because there's no other direction left
for us. Reach out with your minds, join me, and end the Rot."
He reached for the Mass-on-Earth once more. But this time, as he did so, he
carried in his mind an image of himself as a seed crystal lowered into a
nutrient solution that was the as-yet-unaware minds of the four million people
of the Chicago Dis-trict.
"Come on, damn you!" he said, suddenly furious at them. "Join me, or sit
where you are and die when the Rot gets to you. It's up to you. You built the
Mass use it!"
He stood, waiting. For a long mo-ment it seemed nothing was going to happen;
and then, slowly at first, he felt himself being joined. He felt himself
growing in otherness and strength . . . knowledge of the Mass waking to
consciousness in the innu-merable minds about him. The men-tal seed crystal
that was himself was joined by the crystal of other minds, solidifying out of
the nutrient subconscious, and their unity was growing . . . faster . . . and
faster ...
"Watch," he said to all of them over the equipment, pointing up through the
transparent dome over-head at the sullen cloud layer, dark-ening now toward
night and already streaked and stained with red in the west. "This is how we
begin to kill off the Rot."
He reached for the power of theMass. But now he was many times multiplied by
the minds waking up around him; and the Mass-force re-sponded as something
much greater than it had ever been. It came at his summons.
It came as it had come before; and there was nothing that could stand before
it. It came like the first man striding upright across the face of his, world.
It came like the will of a people who would not die, breaking out of the trap
into which they had fallen.Chaz had imagined it once as a great, dark mountain
of wind and as a great wind it came.
It blew across the buildings and domes of a sealed city; and the spores of
the Rot that were touched by it died instantly, as they had died within the
lungs of witches and the immune exiles. It gathered strength and roared like a
storm. It spun into a vortex, stretching up toward the lowering clouds
overhead as the horn of a tor-nado stretches down toward the Earth. It touched
the cloud layer and tore it to tatters, spinning the gray va-por into stuff
like thin smoke, then into nothingness.
It ripped apart the sky, moving toward the west, destroying clouds and the
Rot as it went. A long split opened in the thick cover above the city,
stretching westward, like the thunder of ice going out when spring comes to a
long-frozen land; and in that split the sun suddenly blazed clear in a
cloudless space above a free horizon.
Below the top floor of theEmbryTower , the mind ofChaz was now wrapped in the
crystalline unity that was the consciousness of some mil-lions of other minds,
just-wakened and waking to their ancient abilities. About him,Chicago breathed
newly breeze-stirred air with four million breaths. Not merely Eileen, not
merely the witches, or the immunes from outside like Red Rover, or even Jai
and the Citadel Mass workers but all those who lived and were hu-man were now
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beginning to join the unity, striking back with the non-physical tool they had
created when all purely physical tools failed them, at the enemy that had
threatened to choke them to death or seal them in air-conditioned tombs.
The last clouds went. The sunset spread across the sky like a cloth of gold.
And in the east like sequins along its fringe, where the gold deep-ened in
color towards the night, glit-tered and burned the first few bea-con lights of
the stars,unobscured once more and now, in real terms, waiting.
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