Collected Short Fiction, page 780
Mondragon climbed into the bubble, watching the tower as Cruzet backed away and started down the slope to the frozen beach. Before they had gone a kilometer, he felt a sharp jolt. Cruzet stopped the scout and climbed into the bubble.
“What did you see?”
“Nada, Señor.”
“Too many quakes.” Cruzet’s iron control gave way to a shiver. “On a planet too old to quake. I don’t like it, but we’ve got to try again.”
He returned to the controls. Before they had rolled a dozen meters, another quake rocked them.
FIVE
THEY WERE sitting in the bubble, watching the tower and alert for anything, when Andersen came limping back around the rubble mountain. He stopped, staring as if the darkness confused him, and stumbled on toward them.
“¡Gracias!” Mondragon breathed. “Gracias a todo de los santos.”
He was waiting to help Andersen out of the lock.
“¿Señor? ¿Como stá?”
Swaying unsteadily, Andersen looked pale and drawn. He stood frowning through the stubble of red beard as blankly as if Mondragon had been a stranger, but the clumsy stiffness of la máquina mala was gone.
“Señor,” Mondragon whispered. “¡Somos amigos!”
“Thank God!” he murmured at last. “Thank God you waited.”
“Andy?” Cruzet came down from the wheel. “What did they do to you?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged and stumbled toward his berth. “But we had a conversation.”
“How—” Cruzet searched for words. “Tell us.”
“Dead on my feet.” He sank down to his berth. “Too groggy to talk, but they’re letting us go. We can start back now.”
Mondragon saw his haggard eyes fix on the syncafe machine and filled a mug for him. He gulped it down, held the mug out for more, and dropped it, asleep where he sat. Mondragon eased him down to the berth, pulled his boots off and spread a blanket over him.
“You heard him?” Cruzet whispered. “He said we can go?”
“Si,” Mondragon murmured uncertainly. “I think.”
“We’ll try.”
He turned the scout and drove cautiously away. No quake stopped them. Driving faster, he crossed the old beach and followed their track back toward the ship. Mondragon stood a long time over Andersen. His breathing was heavy. Once he stiffened and shouted incoherently in that dead voice, but seemed to relax when Mondragon spoke.
The tower was lost in the starlight behind when Mondragon went forward for his turn at the wheel. All he could see was stars and frost and their track, a thin dark scar stretched across the starlit flat infinity to the flat horizon. He watched the track and watched the stars and wondered what Andersen would say of los demonios del hielo.
A sudden jolt rocked the him.
“Carlos?” Cruzet shouted from the cabin. “Another quake?”
Frowning into the starlight, he found a dark and jagged mark across the track just ahead. He stopped the scout.
“Un otro tenemoto, yo cieo.” Climbing down the steps, he found Andersen sitting up on the side of his berth. “I think they want to keep us till they kill us. Like they killed Señor Hinch.”
“Not so.” Andersen stood up, yawning and stretching. “They promised not to harm us.” He shuffled into the toilet to relieve himself and wash his face. He came back grinning at a water bottle and a dish of omninute wafers that Cruzet had set on the shelf at the end of the berth. “Though I thought they were going to starve me.”
“Señor, there was another quake,” Mondragon protested. “I see a split in the ice ahead of us.”
“But not to stop us.” He gulped water and sat back on the berth. “They were closing that crevasse that caught Hinch, so that we can leave. They’re with us now.”
“If you’re that sure—” Cruzet squinted sharply at him. “What are they? What do they want?”
“I’m famished.” He picked up a wafer and laid it back. “But their story won’t take long to tell. They is the wrong word, really. We were dealing with a single mind that has survived. A singular mind. Our scales of time never quite meshed, but it chills you through to know how old the planet is. I believe the last of them died before our Earth was born.”
He stopped, staring at the bulkhead.
“So?” Cruzet urged him. “If they’re all dead—”
“You can imagine the problem they faced at the end.” He hunched his shoulders and pulled his arms against him, as if a cold wind had struck him. “Their sun and their planet were dying young. They’d hoped and worked to survive, but events conspired against them. They knew other worlds existed, but they’d failed to invent wavecraft or anything equivalent. What they did was to create an AI. An artificial intelligence designed to preserve the best of their civilization, a culture that must have been as advanced as our own—”
“Just a computer?” Cruzet interrupted him. “Playing its funny games with us?”
“A very serious game.” Andersen shook his head. “It’s nothing quite alive, as we define life, but it has been able to maintain and defend itself though all these ages. As it still intends to do. It tried to warn us away. It put a stop to Hinch when he became a threat. But now, since it learned about our wavecraft, it has accepted us. That gives it hope, if hope is the word for any AI. It sees a possibility that we can facilitate its program.”
“Program?” Cruzet leaned to face him. “What’s that?”
“Survival.” Andersen paused, gazing off as if at something far away. “They are dead, but the AI is programmed to keep their culture alive. And I think something more than that. Call it their racial mind.”
“It cares about us?”
“If an AI can care.” He nodded, looking again at the wafers.
“I got it to understand our predicament here. Marooned on a world too cold for us, with no technology really adequate to keep us alive or get us away. I believe it intends to give us the science and resources we may need.”
“And in return?” Cruzet stiffened, eyes narrowed doubtfully. “What does it want?”
“It asks for nothing.” A quizzical shrug. “Except for us to learn their culture and their science. To become a new vehicle for the mind of their race. I don’t get all the implications, but it’s giving us time to learn what it wants us to know. It’s used to taking time.”
“That’s all?” Cruzet sat down on the opposite berth, staring at him. “Really all?”
“Enough. Quite enough, when you think about it.”
He reached for the wafers.
“¿De veidad, Señor?” Mondragon shook his head. “¿Truly, hay no demonios?”
“Only a program in a machine.” The haunted eyes came to rest on him.
“Yet I think it should be called a mind.”
“¿Que es la nigromancia mala? The evil magic that raised a wall of ice to stop us and opened that pit to swallow Señor Hinch?”
“Magic to us. Science to them.” He leaned for another wafer. “I inquired. Toward the end, they tried to escape the cold by going underground. They built heat engines to use the heat left in the planet’s core. Cooling finally shrank it, causing tectonic stresses that had to be controlled. They learned to stop quakes and make quakes. Cold as the surface is now, there’s still core heat left they can tap in emergencies such as our arrival.”
“Muy extraño,” Mondragon whispered. “More than I can understand.”
“And I.” Andersen shrugged. “We’ll all have enough to learn.” He got to his feet. “I’m getting some breakfast,” he told Cruzet. “But we can be driving on.”
“¿La raja, Señor? That crack in the ice?”
“They promised to close it for us. Perhaps with the shock we felt.”
“Bien, Señor. Muy bien, if that is true.”
It was true. La iaja was only a narrow mark across the frost when they reached it. Driving on, he followed their track toward the ship and groped for entendimiento.
“Will the science of los mueitos allow the wavecraft to be launched again?” he asked Cruzet. “Perhaps to find the better world we hoped for? Or will La Doctoia Rima be enabled to terraform the planet as she wished?”
“Who knows?” Cruzet shrugged and turned to stare across the frost ahead. “We’ll be learning. Learning quite a lot.”
“When I was a child,” Mondragon said, “my mother used to tell of three wise kings who came with gifts from the east. They never came to Cuerno del Oro with anything for me, but now I think we may become los ties hombies sabios of this dark world.”
“Why not?” Smiling, Cruzet nodded. “The future they have promised is a richer gift than I ever imagined.”
Los mueitos had touched him, he thought, when they saved his life. Touched him with the edge of their wisdom. That had made him something more than el pobie mojado he had been.
1996
The Death of a Star
Bones!”
Back from the cave and out of his airskin, Andersen tossed a yellow plastic bag on the cabin floor.
“Bones of predators and bones of prey. Big bones and baby bones. Fish bones and worm bones. Round amphibian skulls and dagger-jawed monster skulls.”
“But none of them human.” Cruzet was wryly sardonic. “Not yet.”
“The flying predators nested in the cave,” Andersen went on. “Nothing else could reach it. The history of the planet must be written in the bones, if we knew how to read them.”
Kip saw no bones, however, when he upended the sack. The thing that rolled out looked like a black honeycomb.
“Beads?” Cruzet squinted at them. “If the amphibians wore beads.”
“I found one with every skeleton.” Andersen leaned to look. Andersen nodded. “But I’ve no idea what they are. Harder than diamonds. Sticking together like magnets, with no magnetism in them. Unchanged, I think, by all the ages since the planet froze.”
The honeycomb was a mass of six-sided prisms stuck together, side by side and end to end. He pulled one of them off, polished it. on the leg of his yellow jumpsuit, and peered at it through a pocket magnifier. “Still a riddle,” he muttered. “I hope for answers on the icecap.”
“If anything survived,” Cruzet said, “a billion years in this deepfreeze.”
“The amphibians, maybe. The beads and that old temple are evidence enough of a high civilization.”
“No species lives forever. Back on Earth, ours must be over.”
“But we’re here.” Andersen polished the bead on the sleeve of his jumpsuit “And something on the ice did flash that signal.”
“Warning us off?”
“Or inviting us to land?” Andersen fitted the bead to his head just behind his ear, and tossed the one he had worn at the plastic sack. “The flash panicked Stecker. Our coward for a captain—”
“Let me look.” Day had been asleep on the berth behind the curtain. Pushing past Kip, she snatched one of the beads and stuck it to her head. Kip cringed away from her. His little sister, or at least she had been. The beads turned her into something that, frightened him. They glazed her eyes and changed her voice and gave her ideas he didn’t understand.
“Me Me!” Her voice was shrill and strange, not at all her own. “She’s lost and freezing on the icecap, with the black things after her. We must help her.” Her tone was suddenly commanding. “Drive us on.” His little sister, only five years old.
“Andy!” Kip caught at the sleeve of Andersen’s jumpsuit. “Dr. Cruzet! Please! She’s crazy with the beads. Don’t, listen—” Andersen didn’t seem to hear. He and Cruzet had seemed almost human while she was asleep, but, she was commanding them now. Feeling sick about her, helpless to do anything about it, Kip could only watch. He saw a black bead fall and skitter across the floor as Cruzet picked up the plastic bag and stowed it in a locker.
“There’s one.” He pointed at it. “Don’t you want—”
They weren’t listening. Not to him.
“Come!” Day called to Andersen, her voice cold and strange. Nodding for him to follow, she led the way forward to the pilot bay. Cruzet went down to the power bay. The turbine hummed. The spider lurched and glided on across the starlit frost.
aboard with Day and their mother, just a few weeks or maybe a billion years ago—the time paradoxes still bewildered him.
It flew as a virtual quantum wave at the speed of light. Time stopped aboard, leaving the crew no control. Only a powerful gravity field could reverse the drive field and end the flight. They had hoped for the field of a sunlike star with some friendly planet they might reach.
It had been the black star instead, and they had come down on this frozen planet, dead since Earth was born. Digging through the permafrost to make a habitat where they might stay alive, Dr. Singh had found the first, beads—if they were beads—buried with the bones of amphibian creatures that perhaps had worn them. She studied them till they killed her.
They had taken his sister next. Convinced her that Me Me had followed her from Earth. A crazy notion. Me Me was the panda doll she had to leave back at White Sands because it exceeded her weight limit. Believing that the doll was lost on the ice, she had come aboard the spider, walking in her sleep and bent, on rescue. Kip had followed her, trying to wake her. The beads had not let her go.
Left alone in the cabin now, he climbed the narrow steel stair into the transparent bubble. The heat lamp, high on its mast was a dim red sun among the stars overhead. It made a pale red glow around the spider. Beyond that, the starlit frost reached out to the midnight sky, unbroken by anything.
He sat down at the narrow navigation table, listening to the turbine’s steady hum, watching the faint track the tires left behind, wondering about, the bones. Were the amphibians still alive? Guarding the planet, and flashing keep-off warnings? More likely, he thought, those giant flying predators had killed them MI before the planet froze.
Cnizet mid Andersen wanted answers. At least when Day was asleep and they were almost, themselves. What she wanted, or what the beads wanted, he had no way to know. His head ached from wondering.
He wanted his Game Box and its exciting adventures with Captain Cometeer. None of them was quite so strange as this drive to the icecap, but they were thrilling enough, and he could always hit the exit key. The box was back on the ship, and he had no key to take the beads away.
The spider rolled on. The turbine hummed. All he could see anywhere was the empty ice ahead, the faint track the tires left behind, and the blaze of strange constellations overhead. Half asleep, he stumbled out of the navigator’s chair when Cruzet came up the steps. Without a word, or even seeming to see him, Cruzet sat. at the desk and picked up the binoculars to sweep the ice horizon.
Feeling uneasy there, he went, back down the stairs and looked into the pilot bay. Andersen stood at the wheel, stiffly straight, watching the compass and the gauges. Day sat on the monitor beside him, as still as a doll, her glassy eyes fixed on the frost ahead.
“Andy, I’m hungry.” Andersen didn’t answer, and he raised his voice. “Can’t we stop to eat?”
“Broken ice ahead.” It was Day who spoke, in that cold toneless voice that wasn’t, really hers. “Steer twenty-two degrees right for the next two hundred kilometers to get around it.”
His little sister. I low did she know there was broken ice two hundred kilometers ahead? Of course she didn’t Tire bead behind her ear was talking. Shivering, he went back to the cabin. There was nothing he could do about the beads, but he still felt hungry. Looking in the food locker, he found a box of soyamax crackers and a cim of citrajuice powder. He mixed a cup of juice and ate the dry crackers with it.
They were almost good. He felt, sleepy again. Keeping as far as he could from the black bead under the curtain, he crawled onto the narrow cabin berth and lay there with his back to it. He tried to forget, it, but it was always there. He lay a long time wondering what was waiting on the icecap ahead, until he finally slept.
HE WOKE WITH A JOLT.
Something had happened to him. Somehow, the cabin was gone. He lay out in the open, with no airskin. He was numb with cold. His whole body felt strange, so stiff he could hardly lift his head, yet somehow he was still breathing. Stars shone in the west, but the sky was brighter toward the east, purple-blue overhead and blood-red around the sun.
The sun—
No longer black, swollen to three times its size, it glowed like red-hot iron. It was mottled with ragged dark splotches that made an ugly face. He lay shivering under its heatless glow.
Too cold and clumsy to stand, he got, his anus beneath him and raised his head. He found himself sprawled face down on something flat, and hard. Metal, maybe, though the color was an odd yellow-green. It. floated in a pool of dark water rimmed with a jagged wall of ice that glittered dimly from the crimson in the east.
Pushing higher to look beyond the wall, he saw a fiat field of ice that reached is far as he could see. Turning stiffly toward the west, he found a square black shape far off across the frost—
Skygate!
The place of the changers.
He had been confused for a moment, feeling lost and out of himself, but the sight of Skygate cleared his head. Certainly he was growing old and stiff and clumsy, but at least he knew where he was. He had always known Skygate. The holiest place. It stood empty and abandoned now, since ice had closed the ramp, but ten thousand generations had come here to change in the ages before the ice. He had never been closer, but. his father had stopped to see it after he changed, and came back amazed with its wonders.
The vast ramp where so many millions had come out. of the water to shed their sea skins. The tall mosaic walls set with gemstone pictures of the metamorphosis. The balconies where the skylers could perch and the high windows where they could enter the temple. The vast, black stone blocks of the rear wall, deeply carved with skylers trying their new wings, and the monstrous blackwings diving to kill them.
The skylers had brought the raft when the ocean froze. Its feeble heat was enough to thaw the ice around it A sloping ramp on one end helped the changers climb out of the water, and a high perch at the other end let, them spread and preen their wings before they tried to fly.
