Collected short fiction, p.833
Collected Short Fiction, page 833
“Ride the road.” Derek shaded his eyes to stare along it into blue-hazed distance. “See where it takes us. Learn what we can. Look for Lupe if we find a clue. Get back home with proof of where we’ve been. Do the best we can. The pot’s too big to lose.”
“Lupe?” Ram blinked at him. “Is there a chance?”
“We can hope, and do what we can.” Derek opened his backpack. “Let’s look at the cards we hold.”
He laid his notebook and camera out on the flat curb of the road. His canteen. A chocolate bar he’d bought when we stopped for fuel at Gabes. Finally the stone hand axe and the Clovis point.
“And there’s a sweater, a change of underwear and two pair of socks.” He grinned. “I used to be a Scout.”
All I could lay out was a bag of dried dates from Gabes.
Ram spread empty hands.
“Never mind.” Derek shrugged. “We’ll share what we have. Live off the land if we can.”
He glanced up at the dark mountain wall, suddenly pointed.
“See those green streaks!”
He went back to study a stone with his pocket lens and found his camera to take a close-up shot. Back with us, he opened his notebook to make an entry in rapid shorthand.
“One puzzle solved.” He nodded in satisfaction. “The source of those Saharan megaliths. This mountain has the same fine grain and the same green veins. They must have been quarried here and carried out to Earth.”
“If we’re really off the Earth—” Ram squinted at him. “Where could we possibly be?”
“The big question.” Derek nodded. “But there are things we know. Or things I think we know.”
“Tell us what.”
“First of all, the trilithons.”
Frowning in speculation, he opened the notebook to write again. I saw the words DAY ONE lettered above his neat shorthand.
“I think they are, or were, sort of terminal.” He spoke as he wrote, as if dictating the note. “They seem to connect seven planets. An interstellar empire with no space rockets. The terminal world, under that red sun, has to be somewhere out of our solar system. The severe location is a puzzle.”
“A death trap!” Ram muttered.
“We got through.” He grinned. “If it was selected to limit access, we passed the test. The skeletons we found didn’t come from the builders. Men using stone axes and Clovis points weren’t roving space.”
He closed the notebook and looked up at us.
“What about the Salisbury Stonehenge?” ! asked him. “Is it another gate?”
“A problem for Lupe.” He frowned and shook his head. “I heard her mention other megalithic sites scattered across Western Europe. Whoever the builders were and whyever they left, they could have left an influence on our own evolving cultures.”
“Lupe’s hat!”
Ram pointed across the crawling pavement. I saw her field hat moving down that red central strip. Her sandals came behind it, one by one, and then the skulls and bones we had collected, still wrapped in my nylon jacket. Ram ran out to recover the jacket and brought it back to me. Squatting by the curb, he shivered and watched the hat and sandals and skulls carried on down the road and finally out of sight.
“Could she be still alive?” he whispered.
“Could be,” Derek said. “We’ll learn what we can and do what we can.”
“Learn what we can?” Ram was bitterly mocking. “And never get back to tell anybody?”
“Trust our poker luck! It’s running high.”
Ram sat for a time in moody silence, and abruptly spoke again. “I can’t help thinking of home.” He paused to sigh. “Last summer I went back to see my kin in Mombassa and Nairobi. They’re in a bad way. Bad government, poverty, sickness. Not much I could do for them, but I met a woman.”
I saw the shadow of a smile.
“At the Leakey Museum. We got to talking. She was white, but color didn’t bother her. She let me buy her a beer. She was born in South Africa, trained in biology at Cambridge, now employed by a big pharmaceutical outfit in Switzerland.
“She was there with a tour group, anxious to learn more than the guides could tell her. Her company was testing an AIDS vaccine and she wanted to see more of the need for it. She let me show her around the city and translate for her. We got on well. She left her group and we spent two weeks together.”
His smile grew wider.
“Weeks I won’t forget. We took a camera safari through the Masai Mara. We climbed Kilimanjaro. We rode a hot air balloon over the Serengeti. Two wonderful weeks, over in a minute “Wryly, he shrugged. “I hated to let her go, but she had to get back to her job and the new vaccine. I had to get home and finish my doctorate. We promised to get together when we could. Maybe try to do something for Africa.
“But now—” The wistful smile evaporated. “I’ll never see her again.”
“You might.” Derek grinned and clapped his shoulder. “Look on the bright side. If we do get back with all I hope we might, we can do great things. For Africa. For all the world.” He nodded at the road. “Let’s get moving.”
“Not so fast.” Ram shook his head. “You’re a dreamer, but let’s get real. The things that built the trilithons and the road may have been great engineers, but I think they’re dead. I don’t want to meet what killed them. Before we get too far off, I want to look for any way back home.”
We looked.
On either side of the road, the sliced-off mountain rose sheer from the grass. We took off the oxygen gear and left the heavy cylinders on the sidewalk, piled against the curb and covered with the smoke hoods. We went north. Ram tramped ahead along the wall, searching for any opening. Derek studied rocks and plants and the whole landscape. We found no break in the slick black stone.
Two or three miles out, we came to the end of the wall, our path blocked by great piles of fallen scree, with rough boulder slopes above. The grass gave way to thorny thickets, with no hint of any opening. The sun was down behind the mountain before we got back to the road.
I felt hungry and tired, but Ram led us stubbornly across the road to search in the other direction. All we found was that topless barrier of dark, emerald-veined stone, its seamless surface hardly marred by all the ages it must have been exposed.
“Ten thousand years?” Derek narrowed his eyes, speculating. “Or a hundred thousand? I’d like to know.”
Night had fallen. We picked our way back to the road by flashlight and tried to sleep on the grass beside it. For me it was a night of misery that seemed to last forever. I shivered with cold and ached in every joint. My shins itched where brush had scratched them. Insects crawled on me and sometimes bit.
I felt ashamed to complain.
Derek lay on his back, happy with by what he saw in the sky. The stars seemed brighter than I remembered, the constellations strange. He found something he thought might be the Pleiades, though smaller and far to the south.
“We’re many thousand light-years from Earth.” That seemed to elate him. “Farther than any conceivable spacecraft could go.”
“Too far.” Ram’s voice was a croak in the dark. “With no way back.”
A strange half moon hung at the zenith, far brighter and three or four times larger than any moon on Earth. Never moving, it grew. By midnight it was an enormous disk, so bright that Derek could find his notebook and set his observations down. It was ice-white at the poles, most of it blue, patched here and there with brown and green, scattered with wisps of hazy white he said were clouds.
“It’s no actual moon at all!” He was excited with discovery. “I think we’re on a double planet, both members Earth-like.
You see the ice caps. The blue would be water, the green vegetation. That big brown spot could be another Sahara.”
“If it’s a planet,” Ram asked, “why doesn’t it move?”
“The rotations of both are locked, like our own moon is. They rotate as a unit, keeping the same faces together. Now at midnight here the sun’s shining past us to make it noon on the sister planet. If I’m right, we’ll see it eclipsed when the shadow moves across it.”
We saw the eclipse. Darkness bit into that enormous disk and slowly swallowed it.As its light grew dim, Derek jotted another note and stowed the little book in his backpack. I shivered and tried to find a fit for my body in the rough ground under me.
“I’m freezing,” Ram muttered in the dark. “I wish we’d never seen the damned trilithons.”
“The sun will rise and warm us up,” Derek promised him. “We’re alive, with a royal flush to play. I feel like Marco Polo did, when he got to China.”
“Okay. Let’s ride the road. It’s the only chance we’ve got.”
6.
Ram and Derek stood over me when I woke, their backpacks on.
“Ready for the road?” Derek was calling.
A cup of hot coffee was all I felt ready for, after the long night on that hard bed, but we had no coffee. I slung my pack on and stumbled after them to the wide red strip at the middle of the pavement. It swept us steadily toward the rising sun, into the unknown east.
Derek estimated our rate of motion at twenty or thirty miles an hour. I shivered in the wind of it. The mountain shrank behind us to a thick black stump. The core of a long-extinct volcano, Derek called it. It gave no hint of the trilithons somehow hidden inside it or beyond it.
I stared back at it, wistful for any way back to Eastern, back to my old brown brick on First Street and the library of English literature I had spent so many years collecting. Ram squatted on the pavement, rubbing at the birthmark on his forehead. Uneasily, he pulled the emerald pendant out of his shirt and squinted at the crown of worlds above that hieroglyphic script.
“Strange!” he muttered. “The mark has been itching ever since we came through.” He frowned at Derek. “What could that mean?”
Derek shrugged. “Quién sabe, Lupe would say.”
He shaded his eyes, scanning the landscape ahead. Tall grass covered the flats. Green trees were clumped on the hills and along the streams. It might have been somewhere in Eastern Kansas before the settlers came with axe and plow.
“Don’t let the unexpected you down.” He turned to grin at Ram. “Think of Marco Polo on the Silk Road into China, nine hundred years ago. He discovered a vast and ancient empire, unknown to Europe. The Chinese had invented paper, printing, the magnetic compass, gunpowder. He learned a lot and came back rich.”
“How long was he gone?”
“Twenty-four years.” Derek looked back at the mountain. “But we’re somehow moving faster than his ships and horses did.”
He raised his camera for a shot of the mountain behind us and turned to get another of a water hole we were passing. Stilt-legged flamingos were feeding in it, and animals filing in to drink. I recognized warthogs, impalas and zebras. Half a dozen elephants ambled toward it behind a long-tusked bull. A dark-manned lion lay watching from a little hillock. Far off, a giraffe was browsing the top of a tree. Derek opened his notebook and asked Ram to identify a few animals he didn’t know: high-shouldered wildebeest, eland, a long-horned Thomson’s gazelle.
“That could be Kenya, if I saw Kilimanjaro.” He shivered and blinked at Derek. “Are we crazy?”
“Explorers,” Derek said. “With wonders to explore.”
Ram turned to stare at a strange tree standing alone on a rocky hill. Its trunk was enormously thick, the branches gnarled and bare, a vulture perching in them.
“A baobab,” he muttered. “How did it get here?”
“We’re not crazy.” Derek took a shot of the tree. “We’ve simply hit a mother lode of problems, with a grand chance to look for answers.”
Ram waved at the water hole and the tree. “If this isn’t Earth, what’s your answer to those?”
“We’re still looking.” Derek shrugged and reached for his notebook. “Evolution does create similar forms to fill similar niches, but it doesn’t repeat itself. Not so this exactly. Could be—” He shrugged. “Could be they got here from Earth the way we did.”
Ram blinked at him. “Brought by men from Earth?”
“Not likely.” He shook his head. “Nobody on the early Earth was skipping around the galaxy or building roads like this.”
He opened the notebook and made a quick entry. Ram stood frowning at the baobab and the animals around the water hole till they were gone behind it.
“Angalia!”
He gasped and pointed. Looking, I found one of those giant hoppers in the sky above the mountain, red wings spread, gliding down toward us. Sunlight flashed on its great silver head. It landed on the pavement a mile behind us, crouched and jumped again. In panic to hide, I started toward curb. Derek raised his camera. On the center strip, they pulled ahead of me.
“Come on,” Ram called back. “It has us if it wants us.”
I stepped back on the red strip and ran to overtake them. We stood watching. The hopper jumped and jumped again. Landing a few hundred yards behind us, it sank to the pavement and crouched there watching us.
Derek walked a little toward it to take another shot.
“Don’t!” Ram whispered. “Please!”
He took the shot and came back to us.
“We need a record.” He grinned at Ram. “It hasn’t hurt us yet.”
It sat there, never moving. The road swept us on through flat green plains and deep cuts in wooded hills. Overhead the long silver blade of the moon shrank and disappeared.
“Our sister planet.” Derek frowned at his watch and nodded in satisfaction. “Lost in the shadow of ours. The crescent should come back reversed.”
He watched the sky until it did.
“A useful observation.” He scribbled some quick calculation. “The shadow shows that the two planets are nearly the same size. We know from the gravity that they’re about the size of Earth. The trilithon builders must have looked a long time to find this system.”
Saving food and water, we fasted till sunset. The hopper did better for itself. It soared off the strip, vanished over a wooded ridge, and came back with a full-grown wildebeest kicking in its claws. Back near us, it ripped its prey apart with metal jaws and devoured it, skin, bones, and guts. I heard a deep humming from it, which rose and fell and finally ceased.
“It looks half machine,” Derek said. “And acts half alive.”
“Alive or not,” Ram muttered, “I don’t like it watching us.”
“We’re watching it.” Derek dug into his pack for a tiny tube that was both microscope and telescope. He focused it on the creature for half a minute. “Something nature never made.” He shook his head. “I want to know what it is, how it got created, and what it did with Lupe.”
He studied the creature again, while a thin chain of geometric bits came out of its underbelly to clean the blood from its bright metal face. Nervous under its fixed stare, we drank a few swallows from what was left in our canteens. Cooler than I was, Derek broke three equal pieces off his chocolate bar. I counted out five dried dates for each of us, but ate with little appetite, my mouth so dry I had to drink again.
Darkness fell. The hopper shuffled closer, but stopped again. It huge black eyes became red headlamps, fixed on us. In spite of that merciless glare, Derek said we must take turns sleeping, with one man awake to watch. The pavement seemed smoother and warmer than the bare ground had been. I dozed and woke from nightmares of the hopper ripping off our limbs.
Derek stayed awake most of the night, watching sunlight creep across the seas and landmasses of our sister world and longing for the binoculars we had left in our tent in the erg. The great moon grew so bright that the hopper dimmed its headlamps. They blazed again when the shadow of our eclipsed it. Derek looked at his watch and announced that the double planet’s day, measured from eclipse to eclipse, was a little less than twenty hours.
The last time I woke, the sun had risen and the hopper was gone. Derek stood with his pocket telescope, scanning the road ahead.
“Something odd.” He gave Ram the telescope. “See what you think.”
Ram stared. “It looks like the tops of two big black marbles, one of them half buried on each side of the road.” He shrugged and gave me the glass. “A crazy world.”
It took me a moment to focus the little instrument. The road ran straight toward a mountain ridge ahead. I saw eroded cliffs and steep boulder slopes scattered with pine-like evergreens, but no black marbles.
“Lower,” Derek said. “Look at the gap.”
I found two brown domes, each streaked with a narrow black mark from the ground to the top. They were identical and huge, the road a thin line between them. I shook my head and handed back the telescope. He put it in his pocket and reached for his camera.
The objects grew as we glided on, as tall as the hills beyond them. Their sheer dark walls closed in on us, blotting out the morning sun. The road swept us through the gloomy canyon between them. Derek picked up his pack when we were back in sunlight.
“Let’s get off. We’ve got to look.”
Ram and I grabbed our packs and followed him off the road to a rocky slope beside it and stood there with him craning up at the dark masses of the domes. They still blocked out half the sky. A rocky bank of detritus had washed down against them from the hills beyond.
“There!” Ram pointed. “Is that some kind of tunnel?”
The wall had the look of long-eroded iron. We climbed to what he had seen, a narrow archway banked high with rubble. I saw no pathway through the weeds and dust that clogged it. The hoppers had seemed half alive and the road still moved, but the domes hit me with a sense of death and desolation.
“Let’s get on,” Ram said. “I’ve seen enough.”
But Derek clambered over the rocks and through the brush. He stood a moment peering though the archway, found his flashlight, and climbed inside. He was gone so long that Ram finally looked at his watch.
“Give him another thirty minutes. If he doesn’t get back, we’ll have to go after him.”
But he came back at last, bleak-faced and breathing hard.
“It’s a fortress.” Blinking at the sunlight, he wiped at his dust-grimed face and sat down on a rock to get his breath. “Most of it’s underground. I followed a sort of gallery that runs all the way around the dome. There’s a dark pit under it, so deep I couldn’t see the bottom. I heard water running somewhere below, and far echoes when I yelled.
