Collected short fiction, p.836
Collected Short Fiction, page 836
The window was too large and too near. The floor under us was glass, or something like glass. Rising in front of us and curving overhead, it filled me with a dread of falling off my narrow perch into a deepening abyss. Chilled with a sudden sweat, I had to shut my eyes.
Gripping the arms of the seat, I tried to think of the adventures of Marco Polo or the syllabus for my seminar on Shakespeare’s history plays. Anything except that awful gulf. Ram asked if I was sick. I could only swallow hard and shake my head.
We were already high before I dared to open my eyes, so high that my panic fright was gone, though it had left me shaken and ashamed. Ram was sweeping the world below with the little telescope, Derek aiming his camera at the mine pit, which had shrunk to a little dimple.
“The cable took a lot of metal if it’s any kind of metal,” he was saying. I imagine most of it came from there.”
The trilithons were already too small to see, the floor under them a tiny a small white dot. I thought I could trace the road, a thin dark line running straight toward the misty horizon in what must be the west. I found clouds, bright little puffs of cotton, already far below. The sky had darkened, fading into purple.
“Chakula!” Ram sniffed and came to his feet. “Food!”
I caught a scent like the fragrance of baking bread. We followed him into an inner room. Tables and chairs were spaced around a thick cylinder that I thought must be a shield for the cable.
We sat at a table. The robot attendant came to stand over us, speaking again in that quick sharp voice.
“It wants our orders.” Derek pointed at hieroglyphs on the tabletop. “The menu, maybe?”
He set his forefinger on a line of script. The robot clucked and fixed those crystal eyes on Ram. He made a stab at the symbols. So did I. The robot glided away. It came back with a glass of water for him, a slice of a ripe papaya for Ram, a cup of very good coffee for me. We tried and tried again. It brought me a bowl of something so bitter I spit it out, and then a basket of some strange green fruit, but we kept on till Ram hit the code for a platter of steak and scrambled eggs.
“Synthetics, I guess.” Derek shrugged and speared another slice of meat. “Not that I care.”
We ate half a dozen platters clean.
When Derek got up to look for a bathroom, the robot did more than show him the way. He came back looking like another man, his weeks of stubble shaved, his sandy hair neatly cut, wearing a trim jacket of something like silk with intersecting circles woven into the breast. Derek and I followed him.
The sunward windows had been darkened when we returned to our seats. I felt that we were floating in a gulf of darkness, above and below and all around us, until my eyes adjusted and stars blazed out. The same constellations we had seen every night on the moving road, but turned strange with a million more stars, a universe of diamond points more splendid than I had never imagined.
I don’t know how many hours we spent in space. Even Derek was too busy to watch the time. He swept the stars with his tiny telescope and longed for a lens with greater power. He scanned the powdered fire of the Milky Way, trying to guess where we were in the galaxy. When Ram wanted to know the direction of Earth, he could only shake his head.
A gong sounded. The attendant came to stand beside us. Seat restraints folded around us. Suddenly we were falling. The starry cosmos tipped and swung around us. I felt a moment of vertigo and clutched at my seat until our weight came slowly back. I caught my breath, swallowed hard, and felt secure again.
“Midpoint,” Derek said. “We’re falling now, toward our destination.”
Still famished from our long hunger march, we returned to the inside room and devoured another banquet. When I dozed, the attendant came silently to recline my seat and spread a blanket over me. Ram and Derek woke me with their excited voices.
“Pangaea!” We were coming down to the sister planet. Its globe was already vast, half ocean blue, half shaded with greens and browns and grays. Derek was scanning it with his little telescope. “Earth might have looked like that a billion years ago.”
He gave Ram the telescope while he shot a photo and took it back to study our destination.
“A city,” he said, “with green parks around it. No bomb craters or signs of devastation I can make out. All we’ve seen is death, but perhaps it escaped the war.”
“My Little Mama came from off the Earth, or said she did.” Frowning, Ram touched an absent finger to the crown of worlds on his forehead. “My father never believed her, but we’ve seen a lot that fits what I heard her say when she was down with the fever. She must have left people alive.”
“A riddle if she didn’t.” Thoughtfully, Derek fingered his freshly shaven jaw. “We saw what happened to the canyon bridge. We saw the wrecked war machines under the simulation. Wherever she came from, it wasn’t from there.”
The other planet, now overhead, had dwindled to a narrow sickle, still so bright it dimmed the stars around it. Derek tipped his camera for a final shot and took the telescope to scan the city again.
“It lies along an ocean coast,” he said, “between the shore and a wooded mountain range. Maybe twenty miles of it stretched along the coast, but only three or four between the beach and the hills. A lot of trees along the streets, and nothing like a shantytown. It looks alive. The climate should be fine. A pleasant place to live.”
Ram took the telescope to sweep it again.
“I don’t know.” He made an uneasy grimace. “It looks too empty. No vehicles moving on the streets. No ships off the beach. I’m afraid it’s dead.”
The black sky turned purple and finally blue. A white dot at the bottom of the cable stretched wider. Slowing, the skycar gave us time to survey the city. Three wide avenues ran the length of it, parallel to the sea. Cross streets ran down to a wide white beach that looked like coral sand.
In the hills to the west, I saw a dam in a canyon, with a long blue lake behind it and snow-crowned mountain peaks in the distance. The top of a tall black butte behind the city had been carved into two colossal nude figures, a man and a woman, seated on a throne.
“You should have connections here.” With an ironic glance at the crown of worlds, Derek handed Ram the telescope. “If this is your Little Mama’s heaven, you may have people here. You may have been marked for some noble destiny.”
“Destiny!” Ram snorted. “All I want is to get back home.”
I leaned to look down the cable. A white dot at its foot was swelling. The city streets rushed away. I was falling with nothing under me. Nausea shook me, and a sudden sweat chilled me. I gripped the arms of the seat and shut my eyes till I heard Derek’s voice and knew we were down.
“Seven gates!” He spoke to Ram. “Gates to the seven worlds in your crown.”
I swallowed hard and caught a long breath. We were safely down on the safely solid pad. A black shadow fell across us, cast by the immense square columns that hid the sun. The great circle inside the trilithons was empty now. I saw no motion anywhere.
The door of the skycar slid open. The robot stood beside it, silently bowing. We picked up our packs and shuffled out. Three little piles of bright metal crystal lay before us on the floor. Lazily, they stirred as we stepped down. They formed three thick coils that lifted and morphed.
In a moment they were three caricatures. A fantastic mockery of Ram, a tiny white crystal flashing on his forehead. Derek, with a two-fingered hand holding something like his telescope, craning to scan the cable. A smaller figure, stooped under a bulging backpack, that had to be me.
They bowed, quacked at us, and stood motionless.
“Waiting for orders,” Derek said. “If we knew the language.”
We didn’t.
After half a minute, they bowed again and sank back into three glittering serpents. A hole yawned open in the floor beyond them. They crawled into it, and it shut behind them. We were left standing there on the vacant floor at the foot of the cable, the tall black trilithons towering around us.
I felt terribly alone.
11.
The skycar left us alone at the cable foot. We watched it climb, shrink to an insect, disappear. A seagull soared past the cable, but I heard no human sound, saw no human movement.
“If this is anybody’s heaven,” Ram muttered, “not many got here.”
“Empty or not, it’s something new to see.” Derek frowned at his birthmark. “Your Little Mama came from somewhere. She must have left people alive. We’ve a chance to find them here.”
“If we knew which way to go.” Ram shrugged uneasily. “Or what we’ll meet on the way.”
We stood uncertainly peering around us. The great black trilithons stood far apart. Though the gaps between them I saw wide avenues walled with a magnificent architecture. Stately buildings several stories high, most of them stone. Slender minarets, a golden dome, a towering white obelisk, a magnificent arch.
I looked up the cable after the skycar, already wistful for the meals and the bath, wondering if we should have stayed aboard. Derek hitched his backpack higher and nodded toward the morning sun.
“The ocean’s that way. Let’s see the city.”
We walked around the trilithon to the broad avenue. Derek stopped to shake his head at the pavement. Color-striped like the road we had ridden, it was flowing in two directions, with a stationary strip between. We stopped at the curb, looking up and down it. As far as we could see, nobody was on it.
I tried to picture the city as it must have been, people riding the pavement, bustling about their business, living in the houses. But who had they been? What had they worn? What had they cared for or feared, worshiped or believed? What had they done for a living? I had to give the effort up. This world was too strange.
Ram had turned uneasily to Derek.
“The people? Were they human?”
“They must have been.” Derek frowned and nodded. “Those we saw in the virtual world looked as human as we are. The skulls on the battlefield were human. Your Little Mama’s people were human, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t get it.” Ram blinked at the empty avenue. “Machines are still running. I don’t see any damage from the war. What became of the people?”
“One more riddle.” Derek shrugged. “With luck we’ll get the answers.”
Ram shrugged, gripped his spear, and led us on.
We got on the moving pavement. Two blocks down, it divided to flow around an island that held a colossal monument. Nude figures of a black man and a white woman sat side by side on a golden throne, holding hands and smiling at each other. Both foreheads wore the crown of worlds.
“That’s you!” Derek gave Ram a quizzical grin. “You’ve come home.”
Ran shook his head, and something pinched his face.
Farther on, we stepped off the pavement to stare at a white marble temple. It was another Acropolis, on a somewhat larger scale, the white columns perfect, the architrave and roof intact.
“Are we crazy?” Ram shook his head at Derek. “Did the old empire reach to Greece?”
Derek found his pocket telescope to scan it.
“Lupe thought we might be kin,” he said. “The bones she found at the old waterhole are evidence of that. As she said, the Salisbury Stonehenge could go to show a cultural influence from somewhere off the Earth. She’d be crazy to research a monograph about the interstellar culture, if we hadn’t lost her.”
He studied the temple again.
“The architrave shows no Greek mythology. These images could tell a very different story, if we knew how to read it. There’s your holy family at the center, with your crown of worlds above them.” He grinned at Ram and pointed. “That’s a rocket ship in flight. We’ve seen no rockets, but the invention of the gates would have made them obsolete.”
He frowned again at the architrave.
“They had a great civilization. They commanded amazing technologies. They were exploring space, planting life on dead planets, building magnificent cities, till something went terribly wrong. Now they’re gone without as trace, as if some Pied Piper had carried them away. I’d like to know where—
“But look at that!”
I saw a figure on the pavement avenue, gliding toward us fast. Another cellular robot, when it was close enough to let me see. It stood by a cart loaded with broken tree branches and scraps of junk, a dead seagull on top of the pile.
“Maybe that’s why we find no skeletons, no trace of the people. The robots haven’t forgotten their duty. They keep the city clean. If some pandemic killed it, they would have removed the cadavers.”
We wandered on into what must have been a business center. There were no skyscrapers, but the massive facades rose several stories tall. They looked oddly half familiar. Polished granite, shining metal, spotless glass, they might almost have stood in New York or Hong Kong.
Wide show windows fascinated us. Handsome brown-skinned models were nude enough to appear convincingly human. They offered gems that looked precious, garments in styles that might merely have looked exotic at home, but most of the displays were nests of riddles.
Ram tried the doors, but they were locked. He tried his emerald pendant. Nothing opened. Derek shot photos and we walked on to a black-pillared trilithon that loomed above the roofs ahead.
It towered at the center of a wide green park, the grass around it neatly mowed. A moving pathway carried us toward banks of seats that rose on either side of it. The seats were empty, the floor around the pillars bare. I saw no movement till Ram pointed at a line of huge green hieroglyphs crawling across the great black lintel stone.
“What do you think?” He looked at Derek. “Was it another gate? Some kind of theatre?”
“Ora temple?” Derek shrugged and grinned. “They did gather here. Could be to worship your ancestral gods.”
Ram winced from his ironic tone but said nothing.
“Tired?” Derek looked at me. “Let’s sit down and decide what to do.”
Tired of walking, tired of too many enigmas with no answers, I felt grateful for a chance to rest. We went on to front row seats facing the vacant floor between the vast black columns. The moment we sat, the silence was broken. Strange chords pealed from nowhere, and slowly died away. The columns and the seats beyond them flickered and vanished. We sat at the brink of a black and empty void, so close to us that my stomach heaved.
Giddy, I caught Ram’s arm. He was frozen, watching bright golden hieroglyphs swimming though the darkness. They faded. Stars came out, but not the alien stars we had seen from the skycar.
“Orion!” I heard Derek gasp. “There’s Rigel, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix. It’s taking us home, back to our own galactic neighborhood.”
The stars swam apart to leave a single faint fleck alone in the void. It grew brighter, brighter, brighter, until it was nearly blinding. It drifted away, leaving a dim white point where it had been. That swelled into a bright blue globe, patched with spiral storms.
It was suddenly Earth, so near it knotted my stomach with a sense that we were falling toward it. I saw the blue Mediterranean, the shape of North Africa, more green than brown. We came down beside the twin pillars of a lone trilithon. This should have been the Sahara and the Great Erg, but I saw no sand.
Beyond the columns, instead, lay a landscape of grassy meadow and unfamiliar trees. Warthogs stood in a water hole near us. Impalas and zebras grazed toward it. Two tall cellular robots came lumbering from it toward us, carrying something in a cage.
They vanished before I could see what was in the cage. Strange music rose and fell. Strange voices quacked and trilled. Glowing hieroglyphs raced through a dim blue haze that faded into blackness. When sunlight returned the pillars still stood sand had piled high around them and the lintel stone had fallen.
I found our little tent in the hollow in the dune where the water hole had been. Lupe Vargas, in her wide-brimmed field hat, was on her knees in the dig, cataloging her collection of bones. His trousers down, Ram squatted, Ram beyond the ridge.
“Angalia!”
Sitting on the seat beside me, he yelled and pointed. The sand around those buried columns was exploding. That gigantic hopper burst out of it and stood up on its long metal legs to look across the dunes. A strange thing, its slender body green and yellow, its great head silver-bright, it was half alive and half machine, monstrous and somehow magnificent. It found our tent, with Lupe beside it, crouched flat, sprang into the air.
The light flickered, and we were seeing though the hopper’s eyes. We soared high above the sand, glided down on Lupe. We saw her look up, shock and terror on her face. We saw the hopper’s arms reaching for her, saw its long black claws snatch her up, saw Ram pull up his pants, wave his arms, and run back over the ridge.
The hopper jumped. Ram and the tent fell away. Lupe’s struggling body jerked and sagged, swollen as the claws drew her close. The dune below her swelled and shrank as the hopper rose and glided, swelled and shrank. The half-buried pillars expanded and vanished.
Alien music rolled again. Alien voices squealed. The desert faded into blackess, glowing hieroglyphs flying through it. When light came back, we were looking into a small, white-walled cell with closespaced bars across the front. A folded blanket and an empty dish lay on a shelf along one wall. The toilet was a hole in the floor.
Lupe lay on the floor, naked, doing push-ups. Her hair was wild, her face gaunt and thin, but set in grim determination. Abruptly she looked toward the door.
“Huh?” Beside me, Derek gasped. “Look at the devils!”
The barred door was sliding open. A thick snake of bright geometric bits slithered inside. It split into glittering piles. On her feet, fists clinched, she watched them grow into two cellular robots. I saw her lips moving, but heard no sound.
“Damn!” Ram whispered. “Not a thing we can do.”
They stalked toward her, reaching for her with gleaming two-fingered hands, their crystal eyes blazing red. She flickered before they touched her, and they all were gone, fading into a rosy mist filled with trains of shining symbols. Unearthly music echoed from the pillars. Unknown voices spoke and died. The rosy fog brightened into sunlight. Once more we were staring through the empty gateway at the empty parkland and the empty avenue beyond.
