Collected Short Fiction, page 779
“I’ll take the wheel.” Andersen studied the crevasse. “It’s hardly two meters wide. With the legs extended to full span, I think I can drive us—”
He stopped, with an odd sound in his throat. His lanky body jerked and stiffened. Eyes strangely glazing, he stood rigid for an endless minute, staring at the tower.
“Take . . . wheel . . . now . . .” He caught a wheezy breath. His voice had slowed, his loud words stranger than his blind and glassy eyes. “Drive . . . back . . . tower . . .”
“Andy?” Cruzet shrank from him “What’s hit you?”
“Take . . . wheel . . . drive . . . tower . . . now . . .”
FOUR
¡MUERTO!” Mondragon shrank from that glassy glare. “Un mueito.”
“Now!” Andersen’s stiffened arm lifted convulsively, as if to strike him, and the dead voice came again.
“Tower . . . now!”
“Okay.” Silent for a dozen heartbeats, Cruzet nodded quietly. “Okay, Andy. Anything you want.”
With a dazed shrug, he returned to the controls and drove them back to the tower. Mondragon crouched away from Andersen, feeling sick with pity and dread. A brave and able man of science, a friend who never seemed to care that he was only an illegal polizon aboard the ship without rights or place—
What was Andersen now?
Something too strange to be human, he stood without motion, as if the ice gods had turned him to a man of ice. His breath was a slow, labored rasp.
His blind stare fixed on the tower ahead, he said nothing else until Cruzet stopped them beside that mountain of broken stone.
“Lock . . .” His strange loud groan came again. “Out . . . now!”
Moving with clumsy awkwardness, he climbed down into the air lock. Following uneasily, Mondragon heard the hum and thud of the opening valve and saw Andersen clamber into it, bareheaded.
“¡Pare, Señor!” he shouted. “You require your helmet.”
Andersen froze.
“Hel?” He labored with the word. “Hel-met . . . now!”
Cruzet came down to help him seal and lock the crystal shell. Climbing into the bubble, they watched him stalk unsteadily out of the heat lamp’s glow. Reeling at first as if he had no sense of balance, he rounded the rubble pile and disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel.
“¡Una máquina!” Mondragon whispered. “No longer a man.”
“My friend,” Cruzet made a bitter face. “Since high school. We came looking for a better world than Earth. Came a thousand light-years for this!”
“Perhaps we should follow?” Mondragon frowned uncertainly. “To see what happens? Help him if we can?”
“He wouldn’t want us taking such a risk.” Cruzet shook his head. “Our duty is still to get word back to the ship.”
And to la rubia, though word of this would bring her no cheer.
“Voy—” His own voice unnerved him, but the duty was plain. Cruzet could carry the news with no aid from him. He gulped and began again. “Voy a ir. El Señor Andy was kind to me. Perhaps he needs me now.”
Cruzet had been another man of science, who spoke the language of mathematics, lived in the vast cosmos where worlds were only atoms, and who sometimes spoke of mankind as only one more species in danger of extinction. Yet his voice broke now, and tears filled his eyes.
“If you would—” he whispered hoarsely, and paused to frown in thought. “He will be in trouble when his air cell fails. It’s already had seven or eight hours of use. You might follow with a spare.”
“¡Hecho! Hecho. Anything I can.”
Cruzet found the spare and showed him once more how to fit it to the airskin. Carrying it slung over his shoulder, he left the scout and followed around the rubble and into the tunnel. That eroded metal barrier showed no damage when he reached it, but Andersen had gone on beyond the ragged gap the blast had tom in the stone. Climbing through the gap, he stabbed his light into blackness beyond.
“¡Señor!” He tried to shout, but the weight of darkness and lapotencia of the ice gods had crushed his voice to a rusty quaver. “Donde—? Where are you?”
No answer. He called again, listened again, pushed on again, trying to shut his mind to el miedo y los demonios of the dark. The tunnel here sloped sharply upward. Shivering from something more than cold, from the dead stillness of many billion years, he listened and climbed again until a tiny square of blue light glowed and brightened far ahead, Andersen’s angular frame outlined for a moment against it.
Breathing faster, he pushed to the top of the slope and came out of the tunnel into a space so great that the shock of wonder stopped him. The floor was a wide field of some dull gray stuff, a full kilometer long. The walls towered sixty meters high. They were pocked with row on row of dark triangular pits. Hundreds of small holes, thousands, rising in row after row. The ceiling was an endless arch, shining with the cold blue glow.
Andersen was lost for a moment in that dim vastness. Tiny in the distance, he was already halfway down the endless floor, stalking stiffly on toward a wide stair that led up to a long platform against the far wall.
“¡Señor!” His shout was a hoarse bark. “¡Umomentito! ¡Un momentito porla humanidad!”
Andersen lumbered on, ignoring him. Mondragon tried to run, and lost his breath. A yellow light flashed in his helmet, and he heard the computer’s urgent female voice: Warning! Cycler overload. Reduce air demand.
He stumbled on, but Andersen reached the stair two hundred meters ahead, climbed it to the great stage, and marched on toward a huge black cylinder half embedded in the wall. It revolved as he approached. A deep niche moved into view. Andersen reeled into it. The cylinder turned again, and the platform was empty before Mondragon reached it.
A doorway? Into what?
He waited, hoping it would open again for him, or perhaps to let Andersen return. It didn’t open. He set his helmet radio to its greatest power and called again. No response. He hammered his fists against the cylinder’s slick black face. As useless, he thought, as pounding on a steel bank vault.
“¡Socorro!” he appealed to los santos y la Madre sagrada. “Make them set El Señor free, and I’ll believe forever.”
Did he expect his mother’s useless santos to rule los demonios de hielol He tried to laugh and blundered blindly around the empty platform till a red light flashed in his helmet. A gong rang, and he heard the anxious female voice. Warning! Air cartridge low. Terminate activity.
He could only clench his fists. His time here was up. Andersen was gone. Hinch was dead. The gods of ice had left them nothing. Nothing except the duty to carry their report back to the ship. Yet what could they report? No good news for la rubia. Only that they had found the ice gods as unknowable and implacable as all gods were, using dreadful powers to protect the secrets of their temple.
The best he could do was to leave the spare cell where Andersen could find it, if they ever let him out. Mondragon laid it outside the door. Time to go, yet still he waited, calling with his helmet radio at the cylinder’s blank black face and listening to the dreadful stillness until the red light flickered again and the computer chirped with its synthetic concern: Warning! Terminate activity now!
He walked back down the stair but stopped to look at those thousands of holes in the walls. They were a meter wide at the bottom, nearly twice as high. Each held a little pile of oddly shaped objects half buried in fine gray dust.
Curious, he reached for a narrow strip of something like plastic or thin glass. It was nearly two meters long, curved and tapered to a point at one end. Dully translucent when he held it toward the glowing ceiling, it had a faded amber color like nothing he had ever seen. He laid it back to inspect the one beside it. Its mirror image.
¿Que es?
Frowning, he dug others out of the dust. They came in pairs, he saw, right and left. Parts of things that had been alive? Squinting into the dark at the back of the pits, he saw that each held something round and yellow-white, a little larger than a human skull.
¿Craneos?
Skulls of the ice gods? Too far back for him to reach, they stared out of the dimness with hollow cavities that looked to be the empty sockets of huge and wide-spaced eyes. Smaller openings toward the sides might have been for ears or nostrils, though he saw no jaws or teeth.
Feeling a sudden chill, as if a billion years of frozen night had gotten into the airskin, he reached again for one of those long, translucent shells. A wing cover, perhaps, if the creature had been able to fly? Stirring the dust, he found brittle, thin-walled tubes that ended in hinge-like joints. Bones of arms or legs? Shivering, he laid them in the dust where they had been and backed away to frown again at the endless rows of holes in the walls above him, crypts for many thousand beings.
The necropolis of the ice gods?
Or had they been gods at all?
Warning! The red light had flickered again, and the computer voice trilled its digitized alarm. Air cell near exhaustion. Terminate activity now.
He looked back across that high stage. An altar to the absent gods? Whatever they had been. The black cylinder had not turned again. He called once more, and listened to the silent centuries. His mother had dreaded fantasmas, the evil ghosts of the dead, and he shuddered to a sudden sense that the tower was una tumba embrujada, a haunted tomb.
Had these dead creatures lit that spectral beacon to lure them across the frost to join them in death? He had always wanted to laugh at his mother’s fears of bruias, of los ojos malos y demonios de la noche, but suddenly now the airskin felt cold with his sweat.
Breathing hard, he tried to hurry, tramping back across the acres of gray and empty floor beneath the graves of the dead ice gods, and on down the sloping tunnel. It seemed to stretch longer now, the choking darkness thicker. Fighting for breath, he stumbled giddily and stopped to wonder why he should hurry.
He was back in Chihuahua, lost at night on the hills above the village. He thought he saw lights below, but they were far off and the life was gone from his knees. Panting, he found no air. He fell, and did not try to stand. His father would surely find him when the sun came up, and he thought he could already smell the tortillas de maíz y cabrito con chile his mother would have ready for them at la casa.
Sleeping, he dreamed that he was on another world, far off among the stars. A strange world at first, because of the terrible winter. The sky was gray and dark. The sun was low in the east, an enormous dull-red ball that gave no heat. A bitter wind blew out of the north, drifting masses of broken ice across the sea beneath him.
He was numb and aching with the cold, yet his task absorbed him. He was riding a square block of dark stone. It was twenty times his height, yet he had learned the skill how to steer it. Keeping it safely above the ice, he guided his flight toward the sun and felt a thrill of pride when he saw the great walls they were building. Un monumento that should endure forever.
His gente were busy all about the island. He waited in the air till he saw el amo flying up to show him where the block must be set. When that was done, he could eat and rest and warm himself. He could sleep until el amo sent him back to the quarries—
“Carlos?” El amo’s voice came faintly from somewhere far away. “Can you hear me?”
He didn’t want to wake, because he was still cold and stiff and aching.
“Are you okay?”
El amo’s voice had changed. He groaned and stretched and opened his eyes to find himself in a strange little box. A strange creature had seized the wing that was no longer a wing.
“Carlos, can you speak?”
Too cold and weak to move, he lay staring blankly around him till suddenly he knew that the box was the cabin of the scout. The creature was El Doctor Cruzet. His head ached, and his throat felt dry and painful. He fought for air till he found breath enough to speak.
“How—” He tried to sit up and sank back to breathe again. “How did I get here?”
“You came reeling out of the tower like a dead man.” Cruzet bent closer, peering into his eyes as if he had been a dangerous stranger. “I helped you through the lock. Got your airskin off. Hours ago. I thought you were really dead.”
“I think—I think I died,” he whispered. “Yet they saved my life. Gracias a Dios. I don’t know why. I don’t know how.”
“We don’t know them.” Cruzet shrugged, still frowning at him. “I’m not sure I want to know them.”
He slept again, with no dreams. Stronger when he woke, and no longer shivering, he sat up to sip at the bitter syncafe Cruzet offered.
“Una pesadilla.” He shrank from Cruzet’s questions. “A nightmare of evil I do not wish to remember.” Yet he tried to tell what he could. “I never overtook El Señor Andy,” he finished. “That strange door received him, and never let him out. I waited for him. Waited too long. My air failed. I fell and dreamed.
“Un sueño muy extraño. I dreamed I was one of them, a creature that had wings. I was transporting great blocks of stone, riding them from some far-off quarry to build a tower. It seemed like this tower, though in another world. I flew above an ocean, toward an island. A strange sun was low in the east. Enorme, but red and very dim. It gave no heat—”
“I think you had more than a dream.” Cruzet slowly nodded. “I think you saw this world as once it was.” He frowned, thinking. “The sun must have seemed larger then, before tidal drag had pushed the planet so far out.”
“El Señor Andy—”
“My friend.” Cruzet swayed to a tired and bitter shrug. “Dead by now—”
“Pot verdad, Señor, he is alive.” Mondragon whispered the words, surprised at them. “He will return to us.”
Cruzet squinted. “How do you know?”
“Yo no sé. But I am sure.”
“If you are—” Cruzet stood back from him, eyes narrowed in thought. “I don’t like what we’ve met here.” He spoke at last, very calmly. “Something that has survived on this ice a billion years and more. Something that sensed us a million kilometers out. Something that shakes the planet like a bowl of jelly. And works men like puppets. It’s beyond my comprehension.”
“They frighten me.” Mondragon shuddered. “Perhaps they defend the bones of their ancestors. Perhaps they don’t. They killed El Señor Hinch. I think they saved my life. El Señor Andy—¿Quien sabe?
“We haven’t seen them, but they face us with a difficult predicament.” Cruzet’s steel calm surprised him. “A circumstance we must accept.” His lean jaw jutted. “I’m going in, to look for Andy.”
He got into his airskin.
“I’ll take the holocam,” he said. “We’ll need pictures for Glengarth, if they’ll let me take pictures. Give me twelve hours. If you don’t see us coming out by then, try to get back to the ship.”
“¡Que Dios te bendiga!” Mondragon stood up to stare through a window at the red-lit rubble and tall black shadow of the tower. “They are nothing we can understand.”
“Pray for Andy,” Cruzet begged him, “if you believe in prayer.”
Breathing deep and thanking los santos for good air, he helped seal Cruzet’s helmet and let him through the lock. “Sagrado Jesus y los santos . . .” He used to laugh when his mother wanted him to come with her to mass, but he was murmuring the old prayers he could recall as he watched Cruzet pick a way out of the heat lamp’s glow and vanish into the tunnel.
Climbing into the bubble, he watched the tower and watched the stars, sadly thinking that la rubia’s dream of terraforming would have to die. Groggy at last from watching, groggy for sleep, he brewed more syncafe and jogged in place and fought to stay alert. Six long hours had gone before Cruzet limped wearily out of the tunnel.
“No sign of Andy.” Peeling his airskin off, he made a dismal shrug. “Except that something has taken the air cell from where you said you left it.”
“He will come back.” Mondragon filled their mug with hot syncafe. “We must wait.”
“If you can tell me what they are—” In the bubble again, Cruzet stared up at the tower’s topless shadow and turned back to stare at him. “Tell me what they want. Why they lit the beacon for us. And what they want.”
“Yo no sé.”
“We must write up what we know.” Cruzet tossed his shoulders in the manner of his own, and stood a moment squinting into the dark before he turned to the keyboard. “For whatever use it may be if we never get back.”
Tapping the keys, he spoke aloud.
“The creatures were evidently bipedal, though half of them had at least vestigial wings. A sex difference, or perhaps the young had wings, shed as they aged? Skeletal features suggest that they originated as marine creatures or amphibians. To judge from the brain cases, they must have been as intelligent as we are. Smarter, perhaps, or they would never have survived.”
“Or did they?” Mondragon shuddered. “Los huesos . . . The bones looked so very dead.”
“One thing I do know.” Cruzet rubbed at his reddened eyes. “I’m famished and dead for sleep.”
When the log entry was typed, they made sandwiches of soyamax between omninute wafers and shared a bar of precious Earth chocolate they found in Hinch’s bag. Taking turns, they watched and rested till Cruzet rolled out of his berth and reached for his airskin.
“One more look,” he said. “Before we have to give him up and try to get back.”
Gone only half an hour, he plodded heavily back from the tower and took a long time getting through the lock. Out of his airskin, he blinked at Mondragon in a dazed way before he spoke.
“They’ve shut us out,” he said. “Sealed up Hinch’s hole in the wall.”
Mondragon followed him forward. Reaching for the wheel, Cruzet stopped to stare blankly back at the tunnel mouth, his face as pale as if the frost had got into his bones.
“The seal’s something like a dark concrete, “he muttered as if to himself. “Smoothed even with the stone. Which means they must have come outside to finish it, though they didn’t bother to clean up the debris from the blast.” He shrugged and gripped the wheel. “I guess it means they’re though with us.”
