Collected Short Fiction, page 832
We ate a quick meal and set out for the megaliths. Ram led the way, grimly silent under the smoke hood. I plodded after him, sweating, half sick from the stink of the smoke hood, thinking wistfully of spring registration, only two weeks away.
Derek was exuberant.
“Don’t count the odds. Win or lose, this is the greatest game men ever played.”
Ram went ahead, eyes on the hoppers’ footprints. They looked like the tracks of gigantic two-toed birds, pressed deep into the sand and spaced perhaps forty yards apart. He stopped us near the megaliths, pushed ahead to inspect the sand around them.
“The things came out on the west side,” he said. “Went back on the east. No tracks go anywhere else. They did take her through.”
He stood between us at the end of the hopper trail, the setting sun a blinding glare on our goggles. My heart was pounding. He seized my arm.
“Moja.” He whispered the Swahili numbers. “Mbili. Tatu.”
He gripped my arm so hard it hurt.
“Nenda! Go!”
We stepped forward together. The sun was gone. My ears clicked. The sand crumbled under me. The sudden surge of gravity dragged me down into darkness.
4.
For a few seconds the darkness was total. Feet first, I slid down a rubble slope that melted under me. Light came back, a dull red gloom. I came down hard on flat stone. Ram let go my arm. Under the weight of the oxygen cylinders I staggered for balance and tried to get my breath. I felt nauseated with the smoke hood’s plastic reek.
“Wapi?” Ram gasped. “Where are we?”
I turned to look back. The two great megaliths stood where they had been. Or were they really still the same? Giddy for a moment, I wondered. They were far taller, the sand gone from around them. The fallen lintel stone lay back in place. Beyond them, sand dunes and sunlight had vanished. Instead I saw a dark creation of fire and violence. Flame-red clouds hung low over dead black lavas.
We all huddled close together, shut in by the seven great trilithons. Towering all around us, they felt like the walls of a nightmare prison. The lavas beyond were a black-fanged desert, flows of it frozen on older flows, twisted into monstrous gouts, cut with bottomless crevasses. Great boulders scattered it, and shattered ejecta from volcanic explosions. Jagged mountains in the distance rose into a roof of fire-colored cloud.
I felt wrenched with a sick distress for Lupe when I tried to imagine what she must have felt when that nightmare thing snatched her out of the dig. Dazed by the shock of it, I longed for the campus, the classroom, for anything familiar. All I saw was Little Mama’s hell. Derek stood a long time scanning it, and finally raised the little camera slung from his neck.
“A waterless world.” Cooler than I was, he spoke as if dictating research notes. “No water in sight. No river channels. No sign of water erosion.” He snapped a picture. “The atmosphere is likely nitrogen, maybe mixed with carbon dioxide and sulfur gases. Can’t guess what the clouds are, but they don’t make rain.”
He grinned at Ram.
“We’re a long way from Nairobi.” He frowned again at that dark wilderness and turned to me. “Without water there’s no green life. No photosynthesis to liberate free oxygen. If this is really the sort of inter-world terminal I think it must be, the site may have been selected to make a trap for trespassers. Nobody gets through without the right gear.”
“My Little Mama made it through. I don’t know how. Others have failed.”
Ram was pointing across the thick dark dust on the floor inside the trilithons. I saw the white gleam of a human skull. He kicked at a ridge and stooped to pick the long horn of an oryx. Stirring the dust with that, he uncovered bones. An impala’s skull with the graceful horns still attached, the skeleton of what he said had been a dog or wolf, the remains of something larger, perhaps a lion.
“We need Lupe with us.”
He picked up the human skull.
“She would know, but this must be Cro-Magnon. An unlucky guy that fell into the trap maybe thirty thousand years ago.”
Careful with it, he laid it back in the dust. Derek pushed ahead to find another skull that Ram said was Neanderthal, and then a third that looked more modem. Ram dug into the dust around it and uncovered a bit of flint that he studied under the lenses of his smoke hood.
“A Clovis point!” His head shook under the smoke hood. “Like those from our own Black Water dig. It’s the right length for a spear point. Double-edged. Fluted from the base to hold the haft. Beautiful work!”
He held it for us to see.
“Clovis?” Derek was incredulous. “How did it get here?”
“Lupe would die to know. She’d wonder if the first Americans came through here.”
“That’s hard to believe.” Derek peered at it. “It’s a far hop from here to Alaska.”
“A farther hop back to New Mexico.” Ram stood a moment gazing around us at the great trilithons and the dark desolation beyond them. His voice fell. “If we do get back.”
We walked on, till Ram stopped to look at a long pile of older, stranger bones, buried under a thicker blanket of dust. Rib cages, backbones, leg bones, most of them puzzling even to him. Empty eye sockets mocked us from a sharp-crested skull the size of a car. A white thighbone was four feet long.
I felt chilled with a sense of the trilithons as a vast temple of death, dead and abandoned for many millennia. Could Lupe’s kidnappers be its custodians, somehow here to haunt it? Shivering from too many those cold unknowns, I longed for the little riddles of Shakespeare’s life, for Christopher Marlowe, Boswell and Dr. Johnson, even the dull toil of freshman comp.
I jumped when Ram caught my arm again.
“Tracks!” He pointed across the dust and shouted at my ear, his voice muffled in the hood. “That way!”
I found the great two-toed footprints, running straight toward the opposite trilithon.
“Here!” We had come upon Lupe’s wide-brimmed field hat and then her sandals. “She was alive. She tried to get away.”
He’d found the prints of her naked feet. She’d run a dozen yards before her captor snatched her up again. We followed the trail to its end, between the two great columns of the trilithon. Beyond them, all I saw was that jungle of tortured lava where I thought nothing had ever walked.
“Another gate,” Ram said. “It carried her through.”
We huddled uncertainly there.
“Well?”
Derek looked inquiringly at Ram and me.
“She’s alive,” Ram said. “We must go through. If we can.”
Once more we stood close together, side by side at the end of the trail. I gripped Ram’s muscular arm. He counted again, this time in ringing American English. I caught my breath, stepped forward with them, felt nothing at all. No change in air pressure. No tug or lift from another planet’s gravity.
Ahead of us the dead black lavas were still frozen into the same grotesque monsters. The bleak landscape beyond sloped down into the same dark canyon. I saw no possible path ahead. Behind us the trilithons stood where they had been forever, enormous against the low red sky, the only evidence that anything alive had ever been here.
What sort of life had the builders been? I felt almost afraid to know.
“If that’s another gate, that’s the wrong key.” Derek made a dismal shrug. “We’ll never find her.”
We stumbled back inside the trilithons, as if they could offer any shelter from that dark hostility. Derek stopped to peer at us through the smoke mask.
“What now? What do you think?”
“Let’s get out.” Ram crouched away from the empty gateway where the trail had ended. “While we can.”
“Not yet.” Derek glanced at his oxygen gauge. “We have time left. What we’ve found is a fabulous pot if we get back with it.”
I was looking back the way we had come. He frowned at me anxiously.
“Can’t you get what it means? Not just for us. Not just for Lupe. It’s new science. It’s a new universe I don’t understand. We’ve got to get back with every fact we can.”
“We could lose it all.” Muffled in the smoke mask, Ram’s voice was grim. “In half a minute, if those monsters come back.”
“Or even if they don’t.” Derek had sobered. “We need Lupe’s expertise to interpret what we’ve found. Her reputation to land another grant. If we get back without her—” His head shook. “We could be accused of inventing the whole story to cover something up.”
Ram shrugged. “I see no way to go on.”
“Okay.” Derek turned back to the bones. “But we’ve got to take what we can to convince anybody.”
“Get at it quick,” Ram muttered. “Something else could be collecting our own bones ten thousand years from now.”
Watching the oxygen gauges, we got at it. Derek photographed us standing in the trilithons to prove their size. He photographed the red-lit lava-scape around us. He photographed the long pile of skeletons. He made us pose beside that monstrous skull and that huge leg bone.
Ram tried to hurry him.
Scratching in the dust around the human skeletons, we found an odd-shaped stone Ram said was a hand axe, and shards of a pottery vessel that could have been a water jar. He brushed the dust off the Neanderthal human skull and then an egg-shaped shell about the same size. A pale yellow color, it had two short horns and two empty hollows that could have been eye sockets.
“Nothing human or even kin to human.” He turned it in his hands and shook his head. “Silicon, I think. Like what Lupe called an exoskeleton. Maybe from one of the things that built the place?”
He grinned and handed it to me.
“Can you carry it? It ought to start a real debate if we get it out.”
He stowed the hand axe and the flint point in his backpack. With nothing else to contain the bones, I dug the jacket out of my backpack and we wrapped what we had collected in that. Derek was still not done. He found a steel tape in his backpack and measured the base of one of the columns. He had me walk straight across the circle and count my paces to get dimensions for his notes. He drew diagrams of the site.
Finally, he wanted photos from outside. We left his collection piled near where we had entered and followed him back along the trail and let him lead us out again, back through the passage where the great tracks vanished. The trilithons stood on a flat stone shelf. We walked out across it to the edge of that dead lava ocean. Derek took several careful shots, and made us stop twice on the way back to pose with the trilithons in the background.
“Let’s go!” Ram squinted into the thickening gloom. “It’s getting dark.”
“It is.” Derek nodded at the crimson sky. “I’d guess we have a red giant star for a sun, setting now. I wish we had time to estimate the planet’s rate of rotation.”
“We don’t.”
Ram caught his arm to hurry him but froze between the columns, his hand raised to stop us. Ahead of him I saw a thing out of nightmare. Its body was narrow and long, splotched with pale green and orange. Bright metal covered most of its great head, but I saw a yellow crest, like the saw-toothed crest on that huge skull. Lean lever-like legs held it tall as some ancient saurian. It was following our footprints, its whole body tipping and tipping again to bring its huge red-glowing eyes closer to the floor. It stopped in the middle of the circle.
“Freeze!”
Ram gripped my arm. I thought the thing had seen us, but Ram was pointing at something running down from its body. A strange chain, sliding out of a dark opening, it was made of odd silver-bright objects clinging together. Large and tiny, they were balls and cubes, disks and cylinders, star-shape crystals transparent as glass, and shapeless gray lumps.
It dangled there, twisting back and forth. A thin ray of red light shone from a crystal star at its tip. Searching the dust, it found the trail and followed it toward us. I shivered from a cold certainly that it would find us, but it stopped on Lupe’s field hat.
Detaching itself from the monster, it sank down into snake-like coils, glittering in the dust. After a moment it rose again, its bright metal bits flowing into a fantastic parody of something human. Bits bunched themselves into a head, two stars glowing like alien eyes. Forming arms and hands, it bent to pick up Lupe’s hat. It came on toward us, and stopped for her sandals. Stalking closer, it found our little pile of relics and formed two more arms to gather them again in my jacket.
Derek raised his camera.
“Don’t!” Ram whispered. “Please!”
The thing lumbered back to the monster. The knobby head dissolved itself into a rope that climbed back to the opening in the great body. It anchored itself there, contracted, and pulled itself and its burden out of sight. The opening closed. The monster bent its great legs, sank close to the dust, and sprang. It heard Derek’s camera click, but was already high, spreading stubby crimson wings. It dived straight at us, red eyes blazing.
I stood fixed with dread till Ram caught my arm.
“Hide! Let’s hide!”
We darted out of its path and ducked into the next trilithon. Blackness flashed. The ground rocked under me.
5.
Something shoved me. My ears clicked. The ground slid under my feet. I staggered for my balance till Ram caught my arm. Bright sun blinded me. I rubbed my eyes and staggered again. Around us, that black jungle of frozen lavas was gone, but the Sahara dunes had not returned.
We stood on a wide pavement that ran straight into infinite distance. The whole circle of trilithons had vanished. A solid stone wall towered behind us now. I saw no opening at all. Still swaying for my balance, overwhelmed with the shock of too much that made no sense, I was confused, uncertain of anything.
I was giddy, my stomach uneasy. Where was this? How had I got here? Was I sick? Had I had an accident? Groping for anything real, anything I knew, anything sane, I felt a homesick yearning for the easy security of the old brick house back in Portales, where I’d lived with my mother till she died. I longed for her patient smile and her gentle voice when she used to read the plays of Shakespeare to me before I was old enough for school. I needed the comfortable permanence of my father’s law library, which she’d kept as he left it as long as she lived.
“Will?” Ram voice was hollow and strange in the smoke hood, but it was real. “Are you okay?”
I felt a wave of gratitude. He and Derek stood beside me, staring down that road that ran forever into hazy distance. They were fellow Horsemen. Reality returned, the radar image, the erg and the old water hole, the megaliths under the sand.
“Hey!” Ram yelled and pointed. “That wall’s moving!”
We had stood close to it. It was now a dozen yards away. Ram ran back to it. I saw no doorway, but he snatched the emerald pendant off his neck and tapped it frantically against the spot where we had come out. Nothing opened. He kept trying for half a minute, running to stay there as the pavement flowed under him out of the wall.
Still groping for myself, for something sane, I studied the pavement. Perhaps thirty yards wide, it was striped with the pale colors of a double rainbow, red down the center and fading through all the hues of the spectrum toward dark stripes along the sides. I felt no vibration, heard no sound of anything, but the wall pulled steadily away.
Derek lifted the side of his smoke mask, sniffed, and slipped it off, breathing deep. I took mine off. The air was fresh and cool, with a sweet scent of life. With better vision, I looked around again. The wall behind us was the side of a mountain, cut as smooth as if a giant’s knife had sliced the rest away. It rose sheer for many hundred of feet. Rugged mountain slopes above it climbed still higher.
Sliding silently, the pavement swept us steadily into what I felt was the east, through an empty landscape. Tall green grass rippled in a gentle breeze. I saw a flight of birds, black specks wheeling far away, and a white thundercloud building over distant mountains.
“Another world.” Derek caught my arm. “Let’s wait for Ram.”
He had fallen far behind. We ran across the road, staggering for balance as it slowed toward the edge, strip by strip. The motion stopped on the black strip along at the side. We stood there until Ram came down the red center strip to overtake us.
“Crazy world!” He was trembling, breathing heard. “My Little Mama called it hell.” He shivered. “Maybe it is.”
“With a warm sun shining?” Derek grinned at him. “Air we can breathe? You want gravy on your bread?”
“Your feel good about it?”
“Fortunate.” Derek seemed curiously elated. “We’re the luckiest men alive!”
“Lucky?” Ram shook his head at the receding mountain. “I don’t see how.”
“Let’s keep cool and think about it.” Derek sat down on the curb and slipped off his backpack. “Did you ever hear of serendipity?”
Ram looked blank.
“We’ve just defined it. We came here looking for rocks under the sand and stumbled into what has the look of a high-tech interstellar empire. Think of Cortes when he got to Mexico. Galileo when he saw the moons of Jupiter. I think we’re luckier.” Soberly, he added, “I hope we can leave a better legacy.”
“I don’t get it.” Ram crouched away from that topless wall. “Where do you think we are?”
“Somewhere off the Earth.” Derek paused to scan the green landscape before us. “It has to be, though a lot looks familiar. I’ve seen grass like this on my uncle’s West Texas ranch. But how we got here—” He shook his head. “If we can’t turn back, we’ve got to go on. The story of the trilithons could change the world, if we get back with it.”
“And how do you hope to do that?”
“No idea.” Derek shrugged. “Let’s leave that till later. Right now we’ve dealt ourselves a royal flush. Let’s play it out. If we win the pot, it can outweigh all the gold old Pizarro found in Peru.”
“If we play it like a game, what’s our next move?”
