Collected Short Fiction, page 840
I studied her again. Though my old admiration was gone, she still looked lean and competent. I felt a flash of respect for her hardihood. She saw my glance, lifted her eyebrows at Narayana, and went on.
“When the next craft appeared, I climbed to meet it. The robots came down for my luggage as if I had been expected. I followed them up the ladder. The ship is a sort of balloon, propelled by nuclear-powered thrusters, with living quarters at the bottom. Very high-tech. It would be luxurious, even back at home.
“And all still up and running, maintained by the robots. The air had a faint edge of old decay, but I got used to it. Water still good, sanitation still waking. I found a dried-up mummy in a bedroom. The last occupant; she must have left no instructions for her removal.
“That visit has filled out the story of their decline and fall. Their skycraft and the little gray robots were just too perfect. That perfection gave them their own rich golden age, but it finally killed them. They were safe from disease, rebellion, everything except their own high technology, but they were still dependent on the half men and supplies from the ground.
“They’d let the two cultures evolve apart. The half men adapted as well as they could to the surface world. They grew immune to the diseases. They tried to cope with change. But they couldn’t renew the wasted planet or stop the spread of the deserts. And they couldn’t save the master men.
“For their last century or so, the sky folk seem to have enjoyed an intellectual flowering. I’m still digging for more about that, but they had artists and musicians they thought were great. Poets. Mathematicians. Philosophers. Even historians who saw what was happening and got no attention. But they neglected their surface support system.
“Early on, they’d been competent governors. They and their robots were the judges, the police, the teachers. They let the half men support them, doing nothing for themselves. That finally killed them. They neglected their support system, let it decay, squabbled over what was left, finally destroyed it in an effort to crush a revolt of the half men. for control of their surf over wealth and power and nothing at all. I think the last of then starved to death.”
She shook her head at the mined tower.
“I still have a lot to learn. but that sums up the story.”
I asked if she was going home.
“Sometime, of course.” She shrugged. “But I’m far from finished. They left letters, journals, works of art, whole libraries that I haven’t even begun to explore.”
She stopped to study me, her eyes narrowed shrewdly.
“I can use you, Gil. I have bales of field notes that have to be copied and collated. I’ve tried to train people to do it, but none of them is really literate” Decision hardened her jaw. “I’ll take you back to the office I set up where I landed.” She tilted her nose at Narayana. “Get rid of ha.”
“I can’t.”
“You will.” Her jaw set harder. “We’re alive because they take us for gods. The masters had to keep their distance to keep respect. A very strict rule that I intend to follow.”
She gave orders and a horse was brought for me. Narayana cried and clung to me until Holaine scolded ha into whimpering silence. That wrenched my heart, but she stopped my protests. They put her own life in danga. Holaine was the masta pason now.
I’d never ridden. The horse bucked me off and set the nomads to laughing till she cut them off with a sharp command. They led the horse till I found my seat. We were five hard days on the way to the empty city For an office, she’d had the nomads clear the space around standing walls close beside ha skipper and put a straw roof over them. Improvised tables were stacked with ha notes and a small museum of salvaged artifacts. She had brought computers, and she set me to work keyboarding ha notes.
She stayed a week or so and left to go back into the air when another balloon touched down to station on nearby hill. I lived in rooms back of her office with two of her nomad helpers. They fixed meals and kept the place clean, but could give me no help.
I was trapped there, uncertain of my future and anxious for Narayana until the day she arrived, sunburnt and exhausted, her feet bleeding in worn-out boots. Her people had cast her out. Trying to follow me, she’d nearly died of thirst and hunger. A nomad band picked her up and brought her on to the sacred hill. There she heard of me, and walked again.
Her arrival crystallized my half-baked plans. Holaine had locked the ship, but left the combination in her computer files. I went aboard, found it fit to fly, found her flight plans. Narayana with me, I came home. I’ve told the survey that Holaine is alive and well, busy with research for a full study of the decline and fall of civilization on Q845K. They are organizing another expedition to support her work and bring her back when she is ready.
I have accepted a very minor position at the survey office, writing up the little I know of the planet. Narayana is with me, granting occasional interviews on her life there and learning to cope with technologies new to her. She seems happy as a child on holiday, amazed and delighted with the wonders around her. I’m just as happy that she seems totally devoted to me, even since she knows that I’m not a god.
The Stonehenge Gate
part II
“Choose your battles” is good advice—if you’re free to follow it.
Synopsis of part I
Back at home before it all began, we called ourselves the Four Horsemen, though none of us owned a horse and Lupe was a woman. We were teachers at our small New Mexico college. Lupe was an anthropologist, searching out the origins and history of early man. Derek Ironcraft taught physics. I’m Will White, telling the story.
Ram Chenji was the oddball. Born in Kenya, of mixed ancestry, he spoke of a strange great grandmother, a little black woman who said she had been a slave on another world. He carried a birthmark she called “the crown of worlds.” Before she died, she gave him an odd emerald pendant she said had let her escape, “though the gates of hell.”
Derek came back one fall from a summer internship with NASA. With penetration radar, he had found what looked like a larger Stonehenge buried under the Sahara. When the Christmas vacation came, we pooled our resources, flew to Tunis, and chartered a chopper to take out over the Grand Erg Oriental.
We found the columns of a massive trilithon jutting from a vast sand dune. The radar image showed the fallen lintel stone. Ram walked between the columns and fell into a circle of great black megaliths on a dead world he couldn’t breathe the air. Gasping, he climbed back to join us.
After that narrow escape, we returned to Tunis for oxygen gear. All of us together, we tried the key again. I felt the shock of a different gravity when we walked between the columns. My ears clicked to the pressure of a different atmosphere. Massive trilithons towered around a circle littered with bones of men and monsters that had died there.
A monstrous thing hopped out of nowhere and dived at Lupe while she was collecting specimens to study.
Something with long metal legs and a bright silver skull, it seemed half machine, half alive. Gliding down on stubby wings, it snatched her off the floor and hopped high again to dive at us.
In panic, we ran through another trilithon. Another gateway, it took us to yet another planet. We found ourselves on a moving pavement that carried us out into a strangely Earth-like landscape, where animals and planets looked familiar. Another enormous hopper followed, and stopped on the pavement as if to watch us.
Always hoping to find Lupe or some clue to her fate, we let the pavement carry us on. It took us through the monumental ruins of a vanished civilization, past the monumental figures of a black man and a white woman, seated side by side on a throne. Strangely, both their foreheads bore birthmarks identical to Ram’s. Farther on, we saw the abandoned ruin of an enormous fortress and a vast battlefield hidden below a virtual world, relics of a conflict that seemed to have left no survivors.
The constellations were strange when we saw the night sky. The gates had taken us far across the galaxy, Derek didn’t know how. The planet was double, the close twin world a huge moon that eclipsed ours every day. The road carried us to a skywire between them. Multicellular robots operated an elevator that lifted us to a city on the sister planet. It was empty, but well tended by waiting robots waiting for people to return.
Sadly, we lacked any language to command them. We were hungry. Though food was abundant, they gave us none. When we tried to take it, they pursued. We ran for a trilithon. Another gigantic hopper joined them. Derek turned and waited to let it snatch him up. His only chance to reach Lupe.
Beyond the trilithon, Ram and I found ourselves at the foot of another on a flat mountain summit, a lush
jungle landscape far below. We met people still alive. A runaway slave limped by us, seeking escape from a gang of black pursuers. Ram knew a little of their language, leaned from his great-grandmother. They knelt around him when they saw the crown of worlds, taking him for the son of the god Anak, expected to return and liberate their race.
“I don’t know what to think,” he told me. “I never quite believed all my little Mama told me about hell and how she got away. I never understood why she and I both wore the birthmark. In spite of all she said, I never expected any magic destiny.”
We learned a little about the planet’s two great continents, Norlan and Hotlan. Norlan lay around the pole, capped with ice, with only narrow strips along the coast inhabited. Hotlan sprawled across the equator, most of it drained by the great Blood River It was half unknown, the vast eastern rain forests roamed by nomad tribes and scattered with the monumental ruins of the dead civilization. The Norlan whites ruled the river from Periclaw, their seaport city on the delta.
Toron took us and his captive slave down the mountain and through endless miles of jungle, back to Hake’s trading post and a little red brick fort on Blood River. Toron delivered the captive to the Norlan agent at the fort and got Trader Hake to put us up in his walled compound. The fugitive slave, still alive, was hanged in front of the fort with a hook through his ribs.
“We’re in an iffy fix. “With a finger on the birthmark, Ram gave me a quizzical look. “It’s the crown of thorns that worries them. They’re afraid me, afraid I’ll set off another slave rebellion. Hake doesn’t want any trouble that might wreck his business. The agent wants no problems with his bosses in Periclaw.” He grimaced at the slave, still gasping for life in the tree. “They’d like to string the two of us up along with him.”
Part II
15.
Trader Hake put us up while the agent waited for orders from the high commission.
“Not because we’re welcome guests,” Ram said. “Toron tried to convince him that we really came here through the trilithon, sent from heaven to change the world. He seems certain we’re con men destined to be hanged. Either way, he sees us as a danger to his way of life. Just in case we really are divine envoys, he wants to play it safe.” The trader’s wife, Lela Lu, seemed more cordial. She was a thin blonde with honey-colored hair that hung free below her shoulders. She had pale blue eyes and a wistful smile that seemed shyly appealing, but her fair face showed lines cut by a life that must have been unkind.
She guided us down a long hall to a corner room at the back of the building and called a black maid to bring hot water for the bathtub. We bathed and let a black barber shave us. She brought her son to meet us. A bright-eyed child of seven or eight, he was nearly as dark as Ram.
“My name is Kenleth Roynoc.” He extended his open hand to Ram, palm up, and blinked in a startled way when Ram shook it. “What is yours?”
With no fear of us, he was fascinated. He wanted to examine my watch and touch Ram’s magical birthmark, and he asked questions we couldn’t answer about the haunted trilithon and how it worked. That night his mother sent him to call us to the family dining room. Two black waiters served the meal. There was excellent, hard-crusted bread, but most of the dishes were strange, with no names Ram could translate. I was hungry enough to enjoy them hugely.
Kenleth kept asking questions till his mother hushed him. She had little to say.
The trader watched us sharply, with shrewd queries of his own, hoping I think for incriminating slips. When we sometimes failed to understand him, he offered to let his wife teach us the language. Hoping, I suppose, that we would give ourselves away. She gave us lessons as long as we were there. Never seeming to doubt us, she told a pathetic story of her own exile from civilized society.
“I was born in Periclaw,” she said. “My father was a history professor. He was interested in the native culture and the relics of the lost civilization. He took me to hear Gauran Roynoc, a black singer. We met at a dinner after the concert.” Old pain pinched her face. “He became Kenleth’s father.”
She showed us a tiny bust of him, carved in polished jet that she wore on a gold necklace.
“He was a registered freeman, a native of the Roy-Roynoth tribe, nomads that range the northwest rain forest. An explorer heard him at a tribal ceremony and brought him back to civilization.” Emotion softened her voice and misted her eyes. “He had a fine voice and he sang the sacred songs of his people. Oral epics based on myths of the lost empire, maybe composed before the art of writing was lost.”
She wiped her eyes.
“I knew him several years. His songs made him a celebrity, but he also took my father’s classes, did research in archeology and finally became curator of the antiquarian gallery at the museum. I was his secretary. We traveled together up the river, collecting historic artifacts the natives sometimes brought out of the jungle. And—”
Her voice broke.
“I became pregnant. That would have been a sentence of death for the child and me. My father wanted to arrange an abortion, but I couldn’t kill Gauran’s child. I’d met Ty Hake on one of our trading trips, and I came down here to have Kenleth.”
Her shrug seemed more resigned than joyous.
“He’s been good to me, but I do miss the city.” She wiped her eyes again. “Gauran was hanged before Kenleth was born.”
The agent made a ceremony of giving Toron his bounty money. Ram and I, along with the trader’s family, were seated in folding chairs set up on the agency lawn, facing the old oak on the drill field and its evil-odored fruit. The agent’s black mistress escorted Toron to join us. The guard detachment, six men in stiff white uniforms, marched out of the fort to the beat of a drum and waited at attention.
The agent came out in a white jacket to stand beside the prize waiting on a little table. He signaled for another roll of the drum. With gestures at the flag flying over the fort and the half-stripped bones in the tree, he read a speech about the dignity of justice and the blessings of life in the World Union.
The drums beat again. He called Toron forward. His black mistress presented the prize. Five burlap bags, each stenciled with symbols Hake’s wife read us:
CORATH
ONE THOUSAND
TOP GRADE BEANS
After we left, she showed us a corath tree growing in a high-fenced yard in the compound, a savage-looking dog chained to it. It had long, leather-like leaves and little pink flowers with an evil odor. The flowers and the fruit pads grew directly out of the thick trunk, not from branches. The ripening pods were violet-colored, shaped like footballs and about the same size.
“The agent planted it here, to find if it can be cultivated.” She looked vaguely distressed. “That outraged the natives. The corath is sacred. The wild trees grow only in spots called the gardens of Anak, where he is believed to have planted them. Members of a holy brotherhood drink the tea to see their way to paradise. Gauran said corath had been the inspiration for his songs.
“For an unbeliever to touch the tree is a desecration, yet many risk their lives to harvest the beans. They’re money here on the river. My husband accepts them for trade goods and grinds them into paste for sale in Periclaw.”
She made a bleak grimace.
“A dangerous trade. Forbidden by the blacks except in the holy rites and illegal to the high commission unless a high excise tax is paid. But my husband says other would make the profit if he stopped.”
She showed us the building where the raw beans were fermented, dried, roasted, and bagged for shipment.
“It’s our cacao,” Ram told me when we were alone. “The source of our own chocolate. I’ve seen the trees back in Africa. I suppose it has mutated or been engineered to carry some stronger narcotic.”
We were together there at the landing nearly two weeks. The Periclaw authorities must have been as uncertain what to do about us as the agent himself. The first packet to come up the river brought him no orders for us. Waiting, with nothing better in sight, I grew more and more uneasy.
“Let’s learn all we can.” Ram was philosophic. “Something we owe to Lupe and Derek.”
He asked Hake’s wife about the history of the planet.
“Most of it’s lost.” Wistfully, she shook her head. “Norlan history goes back a thousand years, but the early people were too busy fighting the ice and one another to care about much else. They had no contact with the south continent until white explorers began cruising along the coast and up Blood River.
“My father was a student of what he called prehistory, but nothing to base it on except artifacts from the ancient ruins on the old civilization and the folk tales of the blacks. If you care about those myths and legends, the history of the world began when Anak and Sheko came through that gate on the sacred mountain the way you did.”
She waited for Ram to nod.
“They planted trees and put fish in the seas and freed the birds to fly before they brought the first men. Anak ruled the world in peace and shared his powers to let men build the gates to heaven, as well as the cities and temples that the jungles buried after Sheko killed him.”
