Collected short fiction, p.853
Collected Short Fiction, page 853
“Sorry,” he said. “It surprises me.”
Ram caught his breath, staring at the little image. Derek and Lupe leaned to see. The woman was young and very blonde. She looked much like Sheko in the colossi we had seen on Delta, almost like Celya Crail herself.
“Amazing!” Lupe turned to Derek. “Is she an Omegan?”
“Maybe.” He shook his unkempt head. “More likely an Omegan creation, engineered to populate the new worlds. Maybe a cousin of our own. I’d like to know.”
Kenleth pressed another point, and the image was gone.
“A holographic projector,” Derek said. “We saw a rack of things like it in the octagon, but I never learned much about them.”
“We’ve seen a thousand artifacts we didn’t understand.” Lupe nodded. “Enough to fill a museum if we could get them back to Earth. All of them perplexing. Enough to keep a hundred scholars busy for the next hundred years.”
Derek grinned. “Certainly enough to keep us busy here.”
I wondered if we could ever get back to Earth with anything at all.
Derek offered his juleps again. Ram took one and sat sipping it slowly, staring at Kenleth and Ids toy. Thinking of Celya, I imagined. I declined the julep and asked for more about the Omegans and Planet Alpha.
“It gets me. That black sky with no sun. The frozen air. The dead city. Earth so far away. I feel terribly lost.”
“So did we.”
Derek nodded at the robot still at the airlock door. It stood rigidly motionless, but its eye disks seemed to follow when he moved. A slow pulse of dim green and orange light beat from its head down through the crystal bits that made its body.
“The cybroids gave us rough times. They guard the gates. We had to pass tests to convince them we’re human. Lupe did it first, of course. She helped me through.”
“Stiff tests,” Lupe said. “But the cybroids were never vicious. And I had a bit of good luck. The bad luck of an Arab who died a thousand years ago, back when he must have been carrying Islam across North Africa. He blundered on the Sahara gate, and a hopper picked him up. He flunked the tests and never got beyond Beta, but he left useful clues for me.”
“Poor guy.” Derek grinned. “He must have thought they had him in hell.”
“I found a few useful items in the octagon,” she went on. “Things I guess his followers left there as an offering. Weapons, a few gold coins, a manuscript of the Koran that a true believer would die for. The cybroids learned a little Arabic in the course of his interrogation, and they don’t forget. I have a smattering of Arabic, enough to help me get past the hurdles.”
“Enough to get us here to Alpha, just a few weeks ago.” Derek shook his head in awe. “It’s a wonderland! I wish we had a telescope. The seeing would be splendid.”
He saw me shiver.
“It’s no tropic paradise.” He grinned as if amused at me. “That’s because we’re outside the galaxy. Outside a globular cluster. I think our Milky Way is hidden behind it. It’s probably older, formed before the galaxy was. Not the best place for life to begin, because the cluster stars are poor in the heavy elements it needs, yet Omegan life was born here.”
“Here?” Ram turned to stare at him. “On this dead planet?”
“It’s a graveyard now.” Derek nodded. “The tomb of the Omegans. But it was somewhere in the cluster then, with suns enough to warm it.”
“How did it get out here?”
“Ejected.” Derek paused to gaze at Kenleth, who had laid his magic toy aside and moved to snuggle up to Lupe. “Stars are crowded in a cluster. Chaotic gravitational forces can toss a planet out.”
“And cold killed its people?”
“Not the Omegans.” He shook his head. “Rather, it forced their evolution. We don’t know what they knew, but their history must have been an epic. They had to change with the changes in their world. They invented the science and the high technology that kept them alive—and finally let them send the cybroids out to explore the galaxy and build the trilithons.”
He sighed and shook his head.
“I’m sorry they died.”
“What killed them?” Ram stared at him. “After they’d hung on so long?”
“We hope to find the answer here. Or maybe in the city, if we can ever get back to Earth and return with a team and equipment to begin an excavation.”
“I hope to!” Lupe’s lean face lit. “I’ve spent my life digging for our own prehistory. In Asia, Chile, Kenya, New Mexico. But Omega City! It’s incredible! Whole buildings there under the frozen air that look still intact.”
“A wild dream.” Derek grinned and shook his head at her. “Imagine the problems. Working here so far from Earth, in high vacuum at absolute zero.”
“Problems.” She nodded. “But I think the Omegans left us solutions, if we learn enough of what they knew.”
“Just suppose.” He shrugged, laughing at her. “Suppose we learn it all. We might make ourselves immortal. We might restore the Grand Dominion. We might make ourselves the lords of Earth and turn it into a real utopia.”
“We dream.” She smiled at him fondly, with a wry little quirk of her lips. “We do collide with awkward realities, but the hopes and visions us keep going. And what we’re learning is wonderful enough.”
“I’ve still got questions.” Ram frowned. “If the Omegans were really immortal, how come they’re dead?”
“A paradox.” Derek nodded. “But look at the logic of it. Immortals can’t afford to replicate themselves. Their progeny would supplant them. They have to stop reproduction. I think the Omegans conquered death. I think that did them in.”
“Tell me how.”
“I can guess. I think they’d lived as long as they wanted to. The cold hadn’t hurt them. Their cybroids had found warmer worlds where they might have gone. They chose to stay, chose to die. If they left any records of the reasons why, we haven’t read them.” He shrugged and grinned at Lupe. “If they’d learned everything and done everything, perhaps they were simply bored with everything and saw no reason to go on.
“Or maybe—”
He stopped to study Kenleth, who was absorbed again with the images and symbols flickering in his crystal pyramid.
“Or maybe they are still alive in us.”
Ram blinked and his eyebrows lifted.
“We are their children,” he said. “We know they were genetic engineers. We know the cybroids picked up prehuman hominids and brought Homo sapiens back to Earth. You’ve had a glimpse of the new arrivals, there in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. I think the Omegans left their own genes in us.”
Ram stared, shaking his head.
“The answer to an old question in human evolution.” Lupe nodded. “Early hominids had small skulls. The sudden enlargement of the brain has been a puzzle. Maybe the Omegan genetic engineers were simply making room for gifts our own forebears had never needed. Language, art, abstract thought. We may be the new Omegans.”
36.
“We’re frustrated.”
Derek’s shoulders sagged to a weary shrug, but he brightened in a moment.
“The Omegans may be dead, but the cybroids are still with us and now we’re on the road to wonderland. I think the cone above our heads is an interstellar signal tower in instant touch with all the trilithons. It must have been the nerve net of the Grand Dominion.”
Looking out at the mosaic enigmas on the tunnel wall, he seemed to see beyond them.
“They knew the Grand Dominion would never be eternal. They left a more lasting record here, a gift to whatever future they hoped for. Here outside the galaxy, the planet’s a deepfreeze that ought to be perpetual. A fabulous bonanza—if we could get at it.”
He looked at Lupe and waited for her silent sigh.
“We can’t.” His voice fell. “There are tunnels filled with what must be libraries and museums. Enormous halls filled with artifacts that stump us. Miles of mosaic print we can’t read. The whole place is the riddle old Egypt was before Young and Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone.”
Behind the unkempt beard, his face set tight. “We’ve found no Rosetta Stone.”
“Let’s look at the site,” Lupe said. “If you want to see our problems.”
Derek raised his hand to signal the robot. It made no sound, but its eye disks flickered and the pulse of light quickened through its limbs. Moving with a swift economy of action, it uncoupled the crawlers.
Leaving ours there in the dome, Derek drove us farther down the corkscrew curves. Huge yellow glyphs blazed out of the wall ahead, changed slowly to others in blue, changed and changed again, faster and faster until they became a shimmering sun. That winked out, replaced with waves of rainbow light that hurt my eyes and left me giddy.
“A message.” He stopped the crawler to grin at me. “Can you read it?”
“Can you?”
“Not yet. A tough nut to crack.” He frowned. “I’m not even sure we have the right senses to get the full signals. Or the minds to read them if we did. Our brains were shaped to make specific responses to specific challenges in our own environment. To find food, defend territory, defeat rivals, win mates, interact with others. Not to mesh with anything Omegan.
“You might object that we can also do higher math or write symphonic music or build the Hubble telescope. Those are wonderful serendipities, harder to account for. Maybe gifts of the genes the Omegan planted in us. But we aren’t Omegans. Evolving in their own very different environment, they had to cope with another set of challenges. They must have had different brains.”
He gestured at the mosaics we were passing.
“Those must be symbolic of what the Omegans knew and felt and believed, but we weren’t evolved to grasp them. We’ll never think like the Omegans did.”
He sighed again and drove us on. Those perplexing images gave way to panel after panel that shone with lines of symbols like those in Ram’s e-book.
“That’s their writing.” Derek frowned. “A code without a key. We hope to find that by analysis of repeated patterns. See those symbols in red?”
He stopped the crawler to point to a blank space on a green-lettered panel with a line below it set in tiny ruby-colored stones.
“The text is in sections, separated by breaks like that. Each one has that sort of centered heading. Maybe, just maybe, those repeated symbols could be chapter numbers.”
“They are.” Kenleth looked up from his toy. “That’s two hundred and seven in Omegan numbers. It would be a bigger number for us. The Omegans count to eleven instead of nine before they come to ten.”
“So they used base twelve?” Derek stared at him. “Instead of base ten?”
“Ken!” Lupe blinked. “How do you know?”
“I’m taking lessons.” He held up the crystal tetrahedron. “I’ve learned the numbers. I’ve begun the easy words. Water sounds like scheeth, though I can’t say it quite right. A river is en-scheeth. A sea is ru-scheeth.”
“The language may be simplified,” Derek said. “To make it easier to decipher.”
“That’s amazing!” Lupe hugged Kenleth and leaned to look for herself into the crystal pyramid. “If you’ve found a Rosetta Stone—” She hugged him closer. “You’re a hero!”
He beamed at her, tears of joy gleaming in his eyes.
She and Derek were instantly ecstatic, the secrets of Omega almost in their grasp. But not quite. They tried the tetrahedron themselves and had to give it up.
“Kids are born with a gift for language,” Derek said. “It fades with time. We’ve lost too much of ours. Kenleth hasn’t.”
They began to study with him, copying the glyphs, taking notes, debating rules of Omegan grammar. They kept the robot busy, sending it outside with an Omegan relic, a sort of video camera, to get pictures and collect artifacts. They invented a jargon of their own to discuss every clue to Omegan science and history.
I felt left out. Though I rejoiced in their delight, it was hard for me to share. Even coupled together, the two crawlers gave us a very tiny living space. We had room enough to sit, to eat, to sleep, but not much else. I felt shut in, cramped, useless.
Ram sat alone for hour after hour, brooding, I thought, over all he had lost. Kenleth was as restless as a monkey in a cage. He roved every nook of the crawlers and tested every gadget, but always came back to huddle over the tetrahedron, watching the flickering enigmas inside it, listening to the strange heads that sprang out of it, learning alien phonemes.
For me, the confinement became intolerable. I had nothing at all to do. The effects of the fever were still in me, and I could never shake off my dread of the eternal bitter night that held us there in prison. I longed for change, for space, sunlight, people, Earth, my Eastern friends and colleagues, my old house in Portales.
I couldn’t help asking when we might go home.
“Don’t think about it!” Lupe was almost shocked. “This is too exciting. We’ve found a key to dreamland. We can’t quit now.”
“Look at it, Will.” Derek begged me, very soberly. “Of course we’re going back home, but we can’t do it now. We’d get a cold welcome. What we’re finding would upset too many apple carts. Ten thousand experts in everything from archaeology to zoology would unite to defend their territories from anything so new.
“Without evidence they can’t deny, they’d laugh us off the Earth. We’ll have to have artifacts, photos. Maybe robots. Or a giant hopper! One if them ought to persuade everybody.” He grinned at the thought, and grew grave again. “Don’t rush us. Getting solid getting proof enough together will take time. We can’t afford to fail.”
I sat there dumb, blinking at them, tears blurring my vision. I loved them.
The Four Horsemen. We’d worked and played together half our lives, even before we found the Stonehenge gate. I didn’t want to leave them, yet I felt trapped and miserable.
“You’re disappointed, Will?” Lupe gave me a searching look. “You really want to go?”
My throat aching, I felt more than I could try to say.
“We could send the two of you.” Derek turned to Ram. “If you want to go. If you can learn to work the cybroids and the trilithons.”
“Can I go?” Kenleth appealed eagerly to me. “Will you take me?”
I’d thought of that. I’d come to love him, the child I’d never had. Life on Earth would be lonely if I ever did get back alone. Awkward, too, with too many questions I could never answer. I would need him, miss him terribly.
I’d weighed the possibilities. He would be illegal, but illegals are common in New Mexico. Perhaps I could adopt him. Put him though school. Watch him play in Little League. Help him find his place on Earth. It could be a great adventure for him, a world as new as his had been for us.
“Of course,” I told him. “I’ll love to have you with me.”
“Thank you!” He came to put his arms around me. “I’d love to see your world.”
Lupe looked at Derek and shook her head. Half a minute passed before she caught her breath and spoke.
“Kenleth, we need you here to help us learn the Omegan language. Your tetrahedron could be our key to all the mysteries of Omegan science and history. We need you to teach us how to use it. Won’t you please stay, long enough at least to put us on the road?” He wiped his eyes and looked at me. “I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I think you ought to stay.”
“Then I will.” His voice was choked, and he had to wipe his eyes again. “But I’ll always love you, Ty Will.” He put his quivering arm around me and looked at Ram. “I’ll miss you too, Ty Ram, if you go. I hope you’ll both be happy back on Earth.”
“I’ve been thinking.”
Ran stood up to face us with an expression of austere decision I had never seen before. Muscular and tall, the crown of world shining on his forehead, he was suddenly magnificent, a reminder of the colossal figures of Anak we had seen on Delta.
“Thinking a lot.” His voice seemed deeper, and I heard a sudden ring of confidence. “I don’t belong here. There’s nothing for me on Earth. I had a bad time on Delta. I guess I ran away, but now I think I ought to go back there.”
He looked at Derek.
“Can you send me?”
“If you want.” Derek nodded. “If you warn to go.”
“I want to know if Norlan’s still alive.” Absently, Ram fingered the glowing crown of worlds. “Ships were sunk to save it. Maybe it escaped. And Celya—” Pain bit his face. “Her mother came from there. Her sister’s there on Norlan now, teaching history and prehistoric antiquities at a college in Glacier Bay.”
He shook his head, frowning out at a dancing glyph.
“Celya talked about her. They were close. Letters to each other in every mail boat. I can try to find White Water. Find if he can get me on to Glacier Bay. I need to tell her what I can about the last days Celya and their parents. Maybe take her whatever I can find at their old place that she might like to have.”
He shrugged unhappily.
“But Norlan’s a long way off.”
37.
It hurt to be abandoning my closest friends amid all the hazards I could imagine here, but they had to stay.
Derek and Lupe were in Omegan heaven. Kenleth was elated, suddenly able to open the secrets they longed for. I felt sorry for Ram, saddened because I knew no way to help him or any of them.
“Back to Earth?” He shook his head. “Not now. Maybe never. I don’t know what to do.”
Though the aftermath of the illness was still in me, my own spirits rose with the hope of escape from this narrow prison cell and all the black and frigid death around it. I felt stronger day by day as we planned the trip, with a fresh appetite for the meals Kenleth served from the dispenser. Lupe offered to pack a collection of Omegan artifacts to help me prove my story, but I decided not to take them. I wanted no controversy.
“You’ll be getting back with no passport,” Derek reminded me. “Nothing to prove who you are. You’ll need money.”
He found a handful of what he thought were Omegan coins, heavy little metal doughnuts ringed with Omegan script. They looked like gold. In time to come they might be priceless, but I couldn’t explain them now. I left them with him.
