Collected Short Fiction, page 835
“That’s odd!” He pointed to a bright silver thread between them. “A skywire?”
“What’s that?”
“A cable way between the planets. That’s possible. They’re locked in rotation, always facing each other. It takes a strong material, but back on Earth we already have carbon nanotubes a hundred times as strong as steel.”
“If they were all that smart—” Ram squinted at the globes and shook his head. “How come they couldn’t save themselves?”
“That’s the question.” Derek shrugged. “We’re looking for the answer.”
The more urgent question for Ram and me was how to find something to eat. In a world of nothing we could touch, nothing we could taste, we followed Derek through worktables and wallboards and busy kids that might have been in schools back in Portales. Nobody saw us.
We went on to a village that almost might have been Middle America, except for the hieroglyphic street signs. In an open square at the center of it, farmers were offering ripe fruit and fresh vegetables. The smoke of meat grilling on a charcoal brazier looked so real that I had to turn away. Derek took a photo and Ram hurried us on.
We left the village on a highway paved with gray concrete never meant to move, busy with trucks and odd-looking passenger vehicles that never veered to avoid us. It took us into a fair-sized city, the streets of it crowded with people who never saw us. Shop windows showed fashions strange to me. Our canteens were dry, but the loaves and cakes in a bakeshop wet my mouth with saliva.
“Look at that!”
Ram stopped us to point at an open square. A circle of tall megaliths surrounded a taller trilithon at the center. Banks of seats rose on either side, ready for the spectators to some event on a raised stage between the columns.
“Could it be?” he whispered. “A way out?”
We followed him to the stage, walked through the trilithon together, found ourselves still in the same soundless shadow city. His hand went into the solid-looking stone when he pressed the emerald pendant against it.
“If all this is just a simulation—” He shook his head at Derek. “Why would they do it? What was it for?”
“Maybe entertainment.” Derek frowned at the stage. “Maybe social engineering meant to stop the tides of war. Some kind of ideal utopia broadcast to show people what they ought to be instead of what they were.”
“Which fell flat,” Ram muttered. “The way the bridge did. And all long before the Egyptians built the pyramids.” He shrank back from the trilithon. “We re caught in a ghost world, with no way out.”
“Or perhaps there is a way.” Thinking, Derek scratched at the new stubble on his jaw. “That pavement has run straight, across all sorts of country. Maybe it went on. If we had a compass—”
“We don’t need a compass.” Ram nodded down the street. “I was born with a sense of direction. I never got lost, not back on Earth.” He pointed. “If the road ran on, it went that way.”
We followed the street until it became a highway that took us out of the city and thorough scattered country places, on beyond them across grassy prairie where sheep and cattle grazed. I saw nigged mountain slopes ahead and wondered if the road had really climbed them.
The sun grew hot. My tongue felt swollen, and my mouth had a taste of bitter dust. Hunger gnawed. I felt weak and sometimes stumbled over something I never saw. Sometimes the simulation itself shimmered into unreality. Plodding after Ram, I fixed my eyes on the flint point of his bamboo spear and tried to think of nothing else. I felt glad when noon came, and the cooler shadow of the eclipse. Carefully, Derek noted the time in his book. I wondered at his sanity, here in the midst of madness.
The sun returned, soon hidden by a dark cloud that rose in the west and rolled overhead. Lightning flashed around us, but we heard no thunder. Sudden raindrops struck us, but I felt no chill. Silent hailstones bounced around my feet. The rain ceased, but it had failed to cool the air.
The sun came back, suddenly hot. Thirst was bitter dust in my throat, hunger an ache in my belly. Reeling with fatigue, I tripped over something on the road that I hadn’t seen. I got my balance back, but Ram staggered forward and yelled an alarm in his native Swahili.
“Angalia. Look out!”
Falling face down on what looked like solid pavement, he disappeared through it. Derek and I were left standing alone.
9.
Stunned and giddy, I staggered again. My stomach heaved. That untouchable world whirled around me. My faith in my own senses was gone.
“Ram?” My voice was a rusty croak, but I called again. “Ram?”
There was no answer. His spear lay near where he had vanished. The pavement around us was empty. Lightning still flickered in the storm cloud that had passed us, but I heard no thunder.
“What happened?” Still giddily swaying for my balance, I blinked at Derek. “Where is he?”
Calmer than I, he peered around us, shook his head, and picked up the spear.
“A virtual world.” He began stabbing at the pavement. “Cleverly done. I’d been wondering about the solid ground under us. Nothing else is real, but we haven’t fallen through.”
He frowned at the hills ahead. I thought something had hazed them.
“You know what?” He nodded at me. “I think we’re coming to the end of the simulation. I think Ram walked onto ground that wasn’t there.”
He prodded at the pavement where Ram had fallen. The spear went through it. He stepped cautiously forward and his feet disappeared. Probing with the spear, he led our way down a rocky slope we couldn’t see. I followed him gingerly.
The sunlit pavement rose around me as if I were wading into water. He was ahead. I saw the pavement reach his waist, his shoulders, his ears. He was gone. A stab of panic stopped me. Trembling, a cold knot in my stomach, I looked back through the sunlight to another lighting flash in the thundercloud.
“Will?” Derek’s voice came from nowhere. “Let’s get on.”
I caught a deep breath and took another step. That sunlit world was gone, the sky darkly overcast. I saw a stretch of shattered pavement behind us, littered with broken rock. All around us lay lifeless ruin: crumbled walls, stumps of dead trees, wrecked tanks and cannon, broken stone, deep crater pits. We had walked off the end of the pavement, into the edge of a chasm many yards across.
Ram sat on the slope below us, rubbing at a bruise on his shoulder.
“Hello.” He grinned at us. “I was afraid you’d never show up.” The grin gone, he frowned at Derek. “If this isn’t Little Mama’s hell, I think it’s close enough to do.”
Down at the bottom of the pit, I saw a tank-like war machine, black with rust and rolled on its side, one caterpillar track ripped off. A long gun jutted out of it. A jagged hole yawned where the turret had been. Bones and skulls of men lay scattered about it, rusted helmets, wrinkled boots, fallen weapons half hidden in the mud. Derek climbed down to inspect it, picked up a wicked blade of some bright metal, and clambered back to us.
“Well?” Ram grimaced at him. “What do you think?”
He turned to shoot another photo and stood a moment rubbing thoughtfully at his jaw. “This was an interstellar civilization, on half a dozen planets scattered so far apart that their death is hard to understand. Warfare seems to have killed them.
“The trilithons must have been bottle necks for armies and military hardware, but here’s a theory. The people here knew about their danger in time to build the fortress we saw. They lost the war but some of them survived long enough to attempt a recovery.”
He gestured at the tank and the bones around it.
“This could be some kind of memorial, built to hide a battlefield. A virtual display of the peaceful culture they remembered and hoped to rebuild. What you might call anti-war agitprop. All of it virtual.”
“Could be.” Ram shrugged and winced as if it hurt. “What I want is something real. Something like a rare sirloin with eggs over easy at the Roosevelt on Second Street. Remember?”
Virtual or real, the war-tom landscape looked the same to be in all directions. Hopelessly lost, I wondered if we would ever eat again, but Ram got back to his feet. With the bamboo spear for a cane, he limped ahead again, leading us around shell pits and on toward a wooded ridge with higher hills beyond. We came to a scrap of the ancient pavement. A sign on a post at the middle of it had hieroglyphs that must have read something like DEAD END.
However, it was not quite the end. We climbed over a rock pile beyond the sign and into another tunnel, paved with colored stripes like the road we had ridden from the trilithons. I saw no movement, but the walls were tiled with something that still shone with a soft gray glow.
Ram insisted that he wasn’t really hurt, but we lay down on the pavement and tried to sleep. Taking my turn on watch, a few hours later, I saw that the wall was slowly sliding back around us. Derek woke, walked to keep with the wall, and estimated our speed at two miles an hour. He made a note in his little book and smiled into the light ahead.
“I wonder what comes next.”
“I don’t much care,” Ram grumbled. “It won’t be Earth.”
The road accelerated. I was on watch near midnight when it brought us out of the tunnel into the cold gray glare of that enormous moon. Full, it lit a dead landscape of high sand dimes and wind-carved rocks. Moving faster now, the pavement ran straight on across it into what Ram said was the east.
Miserable with thirst and hunger, I was still awake, lying flat on my back when the sun came up. I heard Ram’s excited shout and sat up to see him jump off the road. I shook Derek to rouse him. We grabbed our packs and followed. He stood staring at a strange monument that towered out of the dunes.
“The rulers?” He stopped to take a photo. “Or maybe the gods?”
Two colossal human figures, male and female, sat facing the road on a throne the color of gold. They were nude, the male jet-black. Ram might have been the model for it. The likeness seemed uncanny, even to the white birthmark on the black’s forehead. The full-breasted female was marble-white except for her own birthmark, a black crown of worlds.
“Your own great something grandparents.” Derek grinned at Ram. “If that mark’s really hereditary. You may be a prince, destined for a throne of your own.
“A prince of hell?” Ram scowled at him. “I wish you’d never seen those rocks under the Sahara.”
“Don’t say that. We could be the luckiest men that ever lived.”
Ram shrugged, with a dismal face. “Look where we are.” Derek nodded at the pavement. “On our own Silk Road. Old Marco Polo had a golden tablet stamped with a passport from Kublai Khan, but he had only East Asia to explore. We have your magic mark and your emerald key, with unknown planets ahead.”
“And all of them dead?”
“No matter.” Derek shrugged. “Marco got back to write a book. With luck enough, we’ll get back to do our own.”
“Not likely.” Ram scowled at the black colossus. “We’ve come too far from Earth, with no way back.”
“Your Little Mama found a way.” Derek grinned and clapped his shoulder. “She came from somewhere people were alive. And didn’t she say that the road to heaven runs through hell?”
“So she did.” Ram shrugged and squinted at the dance of heat on the desert horizon. “And you can call this hell.”
I felt almost too giddy and faint to care, but Ram shouldered his spear and led us on. The sun was larger and hotter I thought than the sun of Earth, but the daily eclipse brought a welcome shower. The sun came back to glisten on rain pools. We lay face down to suck mud-colored water out of the puddles. It was sweeter than wine, and we managed to fill our canteens.
Before sunset we were passing a water hole with a little herd of impalas grazing toward it. They raised their heads to look at us and ran in sudden panic from a cheetah darting from a clump of brush. Most of them were fast enough, but it overtook a laggard calf.
“There’s our dinner!”
Ram jumped off the road. We followed. The cheetah was lugging its kill toward the brush. Ram yelled and waved his spear. It dropped the calf and bared its fangs. He advanced on it. Derek and I yelled and looked for stones. It stood snarling till Derek threw a rock that hit it in the head. It finally left the calf and slunk back into the brush.
We carried our prize back toward the road. Derek had hunted deer with his dad when he was a kid, and he knew how to dress the carcass. I looked for dry wood. Ram kindled a fire. We held chunks of meat on sticks to broil them, and devoured them rare. They were wonderful.
We slept there that night, with one man up to keep the fire going and guard our kill. Next morning we had a splendid breakfast before we went, carrying a hindquarter of the calf wrapped in its hide. Flowing on as if it had never been broken, the road carried us on through into scrub vegetation and finally into more fertile grassland.
After the eclipse on the third day we saw low brown hills ahead, and a row of tall megaliths standing in a gap between them. Derek studied them with his pocket telescope.
“Trilithons,” he said. “They look like the terminal group that put us on the road, but I see another canyon in the way.”
Another vast pit opened ahead, but it was not a canyon. The pavement took us around the rim. It was enormous, five miles across, Derek guessed, and perhaps a mile deep. A spiral road wound down the walls of it, to a blue lake at the bottom that shone like a mirror.
“An open-pit mine.” He searched it with the telescope. “Abandoned.”
He passed the little instrument to Ram and then to me. I saw huge machines along the spiral, metal-jawed excavators, tall cranes, heavy vehicles piled with ore. Nothing moved.
Ram frowned at Derek. “What were they mining?”
“I’d like to know.” Derek shrugged. “Metals, I guess. It took a lot of something to build all they did.”
Ram grunted, and we let the road take us on. The megaliths ahead towered high and higher ahead, great stone pillars capped with massive lintels.
“One more terminal.” Derek took back the telescope to study them again. “Busy in its day. I count thirteen trilithons.”
The road slowed and stopped. It left us standing between two immense square columns of some dead-black stone. The lintel, forty feet above, framed it like a gate. The vast flat floor inside the circle shone white as new snow. Derek pointed across it.
“We saw the skywire,” he whispered. “Here’s the terminal!”
In the center of the circle I saw a thick disk-shape of some silver-bright metal. As large as a railway car, it had windows spaced around it and an oval doorway facing us. A bright cable that looked as thick as my arm rose from the top of it as far as I could see. Derek found his pocket telescope to follow it toward the zenith.
“Shall we take a skyride?” Derek grinned at Ram. “Up to your Little Mama heaven?”
“Heaven?” Ram reached for the telescope and took a long time following the cable toward the long thin blade of the sister planet. He shook his head and I thought I saw him shudder. “Will it be heaven? Or a deeper circle of hell?”
Yet he shouldered his spear and we walked together toward the foot of the cable.
10.
The thirteen tall black trilithons towered like prison walls around us. Or more like the pillars of some strange temple, I thought, with a skycar an altar at the center and the skywire ladder to the other world above. Awe of it chilled me. Ahead of me, Ram stopped and looked back at Derek.
“What if it’s another traffic control? Another killer planet? Our smoke hoods are a long way behind.”
“A chance we have to take.” Derek shrugged. “A run of luck we have to trust.”
“And no other choice.”
Ram shrugged and led us on.
The skycar had seemed toy-like, seen against those immense black pillars, but it grew as we neared it. A low wall of some white stone surrounded it, with a miniature trilithon framing a gateway. Derek fumbled for his camera and suddenly froze, staring ahead.
Something lay in the gate. A pile of tiny cubes and disks and cylinders that shone like new silver, mixed with bits of glittering crystal and little black lumps. They stirred as we came near, clumping into a snake-like shape. The head of it rose and changed into a grotesque travesty of a human head, with two gleaming crystal disks for eyes.
“What the hell?” Ram raised his spear. “If this is hell?” He blinked and shook his head at Derek. “If it’s the sort of demon my Little Mama—”
He stopped when it spoke to him in a brittle, short-clipped voice. A greeting? A question? A command? Its tone told me nothing. It moved again, the knobby head rising higher, arms sprouting from the body, the base of it dividing into legs and feet.
Walking like a man, it stalked to block our way. Ram flinched from it.
“Your Little Mama’s magic key,” Derek called to him. “It could be the ticket.”
Ram fumbled under his shirt for the little emerald pendant and thrust it toward the monster. The crystal eyes flickered red. It barked at us. The strange head bent in a sort of bow. One gleaming arm waved us toward an oval door sliding open in the side of the skycar. A twin thing appeared there, turned those gleaming disks upon us, and beckoned us to enter.
Ram flinched from.
“It’s a robot,” Derek told him. “I guess the flight attendant.”
“A robot?” Ram clutched his spear. “It looks like a devil’s dream.”
“I think it’s a cellular robot,” Derek said. “I saw an experiment at MIT. The units are relatively simple but designed to work together. Complementing one another, they make a whole greater than its parts. Let’s go aboard.”
Ram shrugged and held the spear like a cane. We walked past the robot into a ring-shaped room with rows of seats facing the windows. The doorway shrank and closed. A gone pealed. I heard no sound of any mechanism, but the dark circle of trilithons fell away. We dropped into the sky.
A wave of nausea hit me.
