Deathstalker 08 - Deathstalker Coda

minute. How were you able to find me?”
    “Few things are hidden from the Illuminati,” said Lucifer. “You shine so very brightly in our minds, like a part of ourselves we had forgotten. Follow me.”
    It unfurled its great butterfly wings, flapped them like huge sails, and a shining silver tunnel appeared in space below it, dropping endlessly away. Lucifer dived into it, and after a quick mental shrug, so did Owen. If nothing else, a meeting with these Light People should be interesting. He was pretty sure the Ecstatic named Joy had mentioned them once. And then, as suddenly as he’d entered the silver tunnel, Owen was out the other end, and dropping through open air towards a great green lawn. He landed easily, and the Illuminati drifted down to settle beside him. The silver tunnel had already disappeared.
    It was a bright sunny day, and Owen took a deep lungful of good clean air. Natural sounds swept over him from all directions, a happy contrast to the cold and empty silence of space. Even the sun felt warm and refreshing. He smiled broadly, and looked around him.
    He was standing in a great open park, surrounded by a city. There were lawns and trees, carefully arranged and sculpted hedges, and even a decorative bridge over a clear, sparkling river. Beyond the park, graceful air cars soared between tall towers, all silver and gold and rocket trims.
    Darting in and around and between these wonderful cars were men and women wearing some kind of antigrav backpack. Their happy laughter echoed down to the streets below. The air was pure and clean, the sky a dazzling blue without a cloud in sight, and everything seemed to Owen to be gloriously bright and new.
    The buildings were steel and silver, with huge mirrored windows, all of them built in strict straight lines, all of them exactly the same, with no room for style or individuality or character. They marched away in long rows, tall and imposing and strictly functional. The best that could be said of them was that they had a solid presence, a certain majesty of scale.
    No people walked the polished and gleaming streets—only robots, carrying packages or running errands or obsessively cleaning things. They were roughly humanoid in shape, cast in gleaming steel, but they had none of the style or artistry of the Shub robots. These were clearly just machines, designed to perform tasks. They were actually sort of clunky, Owen decided; unfinished-looking.
    Also moving up and down the streets, giving the robots plenty of room, were crowds of assorted animals. All of them without any obvious owner or master, all of them moving with perfect assurance. There were horses and dogs and cats, and other creatures Owen didn’t recognize, though he thought he might have seen pictures of them in certain very old texts.
    “The robots aren’t very efficient,” said a warm, cheerful voice behind him. “But I guess we just like having them around. We always dreamed of creating robots, so now that we can build them, we do.”
    Owen looked round. Standing beside him was a woman of a certain age, smiling calmly, dressed in a sparkling metallic tunic. It was a sign of how engrossed Owen had been in this strange old world that he hadn’t even heard her arrive. He made a mental note not to let that happen again. Just because a place looked . . . clean, didn’t mean it was necessarily friendly to strangers. He smiled back at the woman. She had an ordinary, dull, but determinedly happy face. The kind of woman who was always doing things for others, usually without thanks. She took Owen’s offered hand, and gave it a brief but emphatic shake.
    “You must be Owen,” she said. “I’m Hellen Waters. The Illuminati have talked of nothing but you ever since they discovered you in orbit, appearing suddenly out of nowhere. They all listened in to your little chat with Lucifer. And yes, I’ve tried telling him about that name, but he won’t listen. The Light People can be almost willfully blind to concepts they don’t want to understand. I’m their human contact. Pretty much their only human contact, these days. I try to protect them, and run interference for them when government busybodies come sniffing around, because . . . well, because somebody’s got to. They’re very like children, in some ways, the Illuminati. They understand about big things, like the Terror, but the small everyday cruelties and evils of human thinking seem to go right over their heads. So, Owen, who are