Collected short fiction, p.852
Collected Short Fiction, page 852
“Breakfast!” Kenleth shouted. “And then we’re going into the mountain!”
He and Ram were busy with a little device that dispensed hot drinks and crisp little cakes. We ate. Ram studied the navigation screen and shook his head at the rock wall ahead, his birthmark glowing. He fumbled under his white jacket for the emerald pendant, put it to his lips, and murmured a few Swahili words to his Little Mama.
“Ready?” He looked around at Kenleth and me. “Tayari?”
“Ready!” Kenleth shouted. “Go!”
He touched something. The machine lurched ahead.
34.
Black midnight fell. The rock-carved trilithon was gone, the dull red sun, the lurid sky. Ram stopped the machine. The pale green glow of the instrument lights went out. The crown of worlds shone golden on his forehead, but I saw nothing else. We sat lost in suffocating darkness.
“What happened?” Kenleth whispered. “Are we dead?”
“Not yet,” Ram said.
We sat there while our eyes adjusted to the dark. Star came out. One faint blue spark low in the east, a white spark to its right, a dim red point below it. More and more came behind them, rising so slowly I thought they were never really moving, all low in the east, none overhead or north or south or west.
“Strange!” Ram shook his head. “We’ve seen half a dozen skies from planets wide apart, but all somewhere in the galaxy. They all had our own Milky Way. But none like this.”
Hours passed. My legs cramped from sitting too long. Ram turned on the inside lights. Kenleth worked the dispenser to bring us cups of a tart amber drink and a tray of crisp almond flavored biscuits. With the lights out and our eyes adjusted again, we found a star cloud in the east; thousands of stars, bright and faint, a luminous haze behind them.
“Look!” Kenleth caught Ram’s arm. “Your birthmark!”
I saw an odd constellation. A compact cluster made a level bar. Brighter stars made an arc above it. They formed the crown of worlds. I turned to stare at the glowing pattern on his forehead.
“The same!” I couldn’t stop myself. “What does it mean?”
“Nothing.” Ram shrugged. “Nothing I like. Derek said it had to be a genetic artifact created by the trilithon builders. Maybe it is. I don’t know. I was born with it, but I never wanted any special destiny written in some strange sky.”
We sat in silence till I heard Kenleth’s awed whisper.
“My mother thought you were born to be a god.”
“No!” The word exploded in the dark. “I’m no god!”
He moved abruptly to turn the headlamps on. Blazing ahead, they flooded a flat wasteland, white as new snow. Nothing broke it, as far as I could see. Not a rock, not a building, not a tree, not anything at all.
“Where?” Kenleth’s voice was hoarse and hushed. “Where is this?”
“I’d like to know.”
Ram started the crawler again, turning to let the headlights sweep all around us. There was no trilithon, nothing but that flat white waste. I shivered, as if its dead desolation had crept into the machine.
“Let’s take a look,” he said. “A look outside.”
He went back to the airlock. The door thumped and sealed behind him. Air hissed. We waited a long time until at last it hissed again. He stumbled dazedly back, shaking his head.
“We’re stuck,” he muttered. “The outside hatch won’t open. A safety lock, I guess. I can’t be sure how to read the instruments, but I think they show air pressure zero and outside temperature close to absolute zero. That would mean the planet has no sun.”
His face turned harder in the birthmark’s glow.
“If Derek and Lupe got here ahead of us, I’m afraid they’re dead.”
Kenleth looked at me, his eyes huge. “Will we die?”
All I could do was put my arm around him.
Ram was peering into the pool of light ahead of the crawler.
“See that!” Suddenly he was pointing. I saw a faint gray trace across it. “Derek and Lupe did get here. They left a track in that white stuff, which I guess is frozen air. A trail I think we can follow.”
We set out along it, the machine crawling a little faster than a man could walk. Ram let me take my turns in the driver’s seat, but the faint gray trail ran straight forever, with never a turn or a break, and the machine drove itself.
“A frozen world.” Ram hunched his shoulders as if he felt its bitter chill. “Frozen nearly forever, but it must have been alive. With air until it froze. Water and weather, to wear the surface smooth. How long ago—” He shook his head. “I can’t imagine.”
Fascinated with the food and drink dispenser, Kenleth served our meals. The strange textures and flavors turned me off at first, but hunger was a great appetizer.
“Synthetics.” With a grin of relish, Ram finished a chocolate-colored bar. “I’ve had worse.”
Very slowly, the crown of worlds rose higher in what we came to call the east. Crowded constellations followed it. Hot red stars. Cold blue giants. Stars white as our own sun. Crowded closer and closer together till half the sky blazed with diamond fire.
“Imagine Derek!” Ram shook his head at the sky and the faint trail ahead.”
“If he’s okay. He taught an astronomy course back at Eastern, with a little telescope of his own. Discovering this should drive him wild.”
By my watch, twenty hours of Earth time had passed by then.
“A lazy planet,” Ram said. “The day maybe eighty hours. The ages must have slowed it down.”
The machine crawled on and on. We slept, stretched out on seats that folded flat. We ate when we were hungry. We scanned that great swarm of stars rising out of the east, climbing till it covered all the sky and flooded that empty white infinity with starlight brighter than our own moon had been.
Nothing changed it until Kenleth, sitting at the joystick, cried out.
“There! See!”
It was hard for me to see, but at last I found a saw-toothed break in the straight horizon. Hour by hour it stretched longer, and the tiny teeth became towers, climbing higher and higher against the bright mosaic of varicolored stars.
“A city?” Kenleth was enchanted. “Have we found a city?”
It had been a city. A wall had stood around it, broken now with gaps that let us see the buildings. Climbing as we neared them, they became magnificent and strange. Slender pyramids stabbed spear-like toward the star-packed zenith. Hexagonal columns clustered among domes and spires and soaring shapes I knew no names for. Their splendor awed us into silence.
Ram stopped the machine.
“A ruin!” he whispered. “I wish we could have seen it whole.”
Half of it was gone, reduced to stumps and rock piles and bare foundations. Deep canyons yawned between rubble mountains. All of it was shrouded under hills of frost-white dust.
“Dead!” Ram shivered. “Dead before our world was born.”
“Were they people?” Kenleth whispered.
“The doors are human-sized,” Ram said. “That’s one sign.”
“What killed them?”
“A falling meteor?” Ram shook his head. “A missile? Or maybe merely time? It happened very long ago.”
We sat there a long time before he moved the machine again.
“A field day for Lupe!” Ram swung the headlights to scan the way ahead.
“She was wild for anything prehistoric. Just imagine her here!”
The trail was hard to follow. They had gone through a gap in the wall and onto a magnificent avenue. A ridge of toppled masonry had turned them back. Our own tracks were laid over theirs until we lost then altogether. We ourselves were lost.
A dozen hours were gone before we found a gap that took us back out of the wall. With the constellations for a compass and starlight over the ruins, we picked up the trail. Again the faint gray track ran straight into a world dead forever. Frost crystals flashed and vanished in our headlights, but we saw no other change.
The star clouds covered all the sky with diamonds and set in what we called the west. Again we crawled on and on and on, with only the headlights to show the trail. We took turns at the joystick, turns at staring into empty darkness, turns asleep. We ate again and still again. I asked Ram how long he thought our supplies might last. He didn’t know.
Another day of starlight dawned at last, the crown of worlds climbing again out of the east.
“There!” Kenleth pointed ahead. “What is that?”
His eyes were shaper than mine. I saw nothing until an hour later, when the starlight was strong enough to show me a tiny pyramid on the horizon. Ram woke to watch it with us. It grew until I saw that it was no pyramid at all, but a cone-shape instead, towering alone out of infinite flatness.
“A mountain?” Kenleth asked. “Is it a mountain?”
“Not here.” Ram shook his head. “Not likely, though it’s tall enough.”
It was a thousand feet high, he guessed, half a mile across, the surface sloping smoothly up. Kenleth made out a spiral path that wound around from the ground to a railed platform at the top.
“Something built,” Ram said. “Likely when the city was.”
Like the city, it was buried under frost and dust.
“Can we climb it?” Kenleth was eager. “To the top?”
“If Derek and Lupe did,” Ram said. “We’ll follow till we find them.”
They hadn’t climbed, we found, but had gone down instead. The track took us past a long ridge of frozen air that had been bulldozed to clear a wide space around the cone. I saw a dark archway in the foot of it. Light flickered there, and a long crystal robot crawled out to meet us.
It reared in front of us. The little cubes and disks and pyramids and cones and shapeless masses morphed into a glittering image of Lupe in her jeans and field jacket and even something like her wide-brimmed field hat. The round eyes flashed orange, and it beckoned us to stop.
“Lupe Vargas!” Ram stopped the crawler and sat gaping at it. “We’ve found them!”
“Found what?” Kenleth goggled at it.
Its eyes flashed again. Ram moved abruptly to answer with our headlights. It eyes shone green, and it stepped aside to beckon us through the arch. Ram drove us past it into a wide tunnel that sloped gently down. The walls were high and our headlamps glinted red and gold on tiles that made intricate patterns of interlocking rosettes.
“A paradise for Lupe!” Ram whistled. “What a culture to explore!”
The tunnel curved, always sloping down. We followed for several miles, finally out into a cavernous space with a circular floor. A blue dome arched it, softly luminous. We saw no exit. Ram stopped the machine. We sat there waiting.
Kenleth fidgeted, staring uneasily around at the featureless dome.
“What’s this—”
It flickered before he could finish, and became a bright blue sky with a warm sun rising in the east. The crawler sat on a grassy plain with clumps of trees around us. Smoke climbed from a brown lava cone on the north horizon. A small stream ran past us toward a distant water hole. Far off to the south, a lone mountain peak towered above the clouds to a cap of white.
“Kenya!” Ram gasped. “We’re on the rim of the Rift.” He shook his head and pointed south. “That’s Kilimanjaro.”
“Where’s this?” Kenleth gaped at me. “What happened to us?”
“It’s a picture,” Ram told him. “A living picture of the world where I grew up.” He caught his breath and turned to stare at me. “But how did it get this far from Earth?”
I had no idea. We sat there drinking it in. A little herd of zebras was grazing near us, a few impalas among them. A pair of giraffes browsed treetops beyond. A great, white-tusked elephant ambled around a clump of the trees, half a dozen more behind it. Ignoring us, they stopped to drink from the stream. A dark-maned lion lay on a rocky hill, its great head lifted, watching sleepily.
“People!”
Kenleth gestured. They came toward us, wading the stream in single file. Naked and hairy, but walking erect, they were certainly human. In the lead were three or four black-bearded men, carrying long spears and stone axes in rawhide pouches slung over their shoulders. One had an impala hindquarter over his shoulder, still in its hide. Another had a little boy with a missing foot astride his neck.
Two of the women carried babies, one a full water skin. A tall girl had golden fruit in a fiber bag. A younger girl led her little sister by the hand. A wisp of smoke drifted from a little pile of ashes in a bird-nest of mud and woven grass on an older woman’s head.
She was the keeper of fire. Two boys had slings and bags of pebbles. One ran to the front, whirled a rock around his head, and let it fly. The other darted to look for what it might have hit.
Kenleth blinked at Ram. “Who are they?”
“Us,” Ram said. “The way Lupe thought we were two hundred thousand years ago, when somebody brought us back to Earth from wherever we were evolved or engineered.”
They vanished. The dome around us was smooth and blue again. A door slid open ahead of the crawler to reveal another wide tunnel mouth ahead. A vehicle glided out, a crawler like ours, perhaps a little larger. I glimpsed the man at the joystick.
Derek Ironcraft.
35.
The machine crawled closer. Derek waved a greeting. I found Lupe in the seat beside him. In an odd white outfit like Ram’s and Kenleth’s, she was almost a stranger. Her field hat was gone. Her hair hung behind her shoulders in a long black braid. Derek had grown a thick beard and long bronze hair secured with a red headband.
“Derek?” Ram bent over the instruments and pulled out a knob that looked like a microphone. “Lupe? Do you hear me?”
Derek waved again, but I heard no answer. Lupe shaded her eyes to see us. Ram shook his head and edged us closer. Derek gestured for us to stop. He backed away and turned his machine to bring the doors together. The air locks thumped and hissed. Suddenly Derek and Lupe were coming through, a gleaming metal and crystal robot gliding behind them.
“We were hoping.” Derek gripped my hand. “A relief to see you safe.”
Lupe hugged us. I introduced Kenleth. Lupe gave him a smile. He burst into tears.
“I—I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “You look like my mother.”
She put her arms around him. Ram beckoned them into the seats. He huddled against her, gazing up at her face in instant adoration. Derek studied me sharply and asked how I was.
“Okay,” I said. “Since we’ve found you.”
“We’re all better now,” Ram said. “I thought we’d lost you forever.”
We asked a thousand questions. Where had they been since the hoppers picked them up? What was this place? How had they found their own way here? How did they control the robots? What had they learned about the builders of the trilithons, the frozen city, the towering cone above us?
“Big questions.” Derek shrugged them off. “We’re looking for answers and always finding more to ask. Most of what we have is guesswork. You’ve seen the cybroids. That’s what we call the hoppers and the robots. You’ve seen the empty sky. And Omega. That’s Lupe’s name for the city. You know as much as we do.”
“You got here,” Ram said. “All we’ve done is follow.”
“We want to know how you managed that.”
“A long story.” Ram’s face went bleak. “It wasn’t easy.”
Lupe worked the dispenser and brought us a plate of little lemon-flavored cakes and yellow globes with the taste of ripe peaches. Derek opened a cabinet and came back with a tray loaded with pitchers, glasses, and a bowl of ice.
“Not quite the Kentucky bourbon we used to drink on poker nights.” He held a bottle of amber liquid up to the light. “But the cybroids make a fair mint julep when you can teach them what you want.” He filled our glasses. “Here’s to Planet Alpha and the Omegans.”
“To the Four Horsemen!” Lupe waved her glass. “Together again!”
I sipped cautiously. It wasn’t bourbon, but it had a hint of mint and a fiery bite. Kenleth wanted a taste. Derek gave him a little of it, mixed with water. He sipped and made a face.
“You’ve been on Delta?” Lupe said. “What’s it like?”
“Delta?” Ram shook his head. “We never knew a name for it.”
“Our own tags,” Derek said. “In the order in which we think the Omegans reached them. They must have evolved here, which makes this Alpha. The octagon’s on Beta.”
Ram summed up our story.
“Delta had a high-tech culture once, when it was part of the interstellar empire the natives call the Grand Dominion. That collapsed long ago. It’s pretty primitive now, but still inhabited by two races, black and white.”
His voice grew hoarse and slow when he came to the slave rebellion, our captivity, the blood rot pandemic, our escape with White Water up Blood River. He broke it off with not a word about the Crails.
“Celya?” Kenleth said. “Don’t forget her.”
Ram’s face went hard. He gulped and said nothing.
“She was a beautiful woman,” Kenleth told Lupe. “We lived in her home.”
“She was white.” Ram spoke at last, his voice quick and sharp. “We fell in love. She’s dead. I can’t talk about her now.”
Kenleth sat playing with his crystal tetrahedron while we talked. Lights flashed in it, sometimes a shining hieroglyph, sometimes a shape that baffled me, sometimes a human-seeming face. Now and then an identical tetrahedron sprang from of one of its faces and vanished again, a second pyramid of golden light with some momentary image inside it.
Once a chord of strange music pealed out, so loud it startled me, and I saw the tiny image of a woman’s head, fair-haired and entirely human. She was singing to the music, the rhythm strange, her voice loud and clear. He pressed a point that muffled it to a whisper.
