Collected Short Fiction, page 850
“Crail came out to meet us. Looking older, limping on a cane, but almost too tough to die. Celya begged him to let her see her mother. He waved the cane and called her a filthy bug-loving slut. She’d shamed herself and fouled the family name. If she had blood rot, she’d got it from her black devil. He yelled for his guards.
“They came out of the house. A squad of mulattos and quadroons, all branded with their license numbers, looking fit as ever. Grail’s wife followed them, white as chalk and shriveled to a wisp, so sick she had to be carried in a chair. She waved a handkerchief and beckoned Celya toward her. Crail yelled at her to get back in the house.
“Celya fell to her knees, trying to climb out of the boat. Ram helped her to the dock. Crail struck at her with his cane. As weak as she was, he staggered and one of the guards caught him to keep him on his feet. Ram picked Celya up and carried her to meet her mother. Crail yelled again, and the guards snatched her out of his hands. She got to her mother. They hugged, but she called back to Ram.
“ ‘Wait for me, darling. Just a minute, till I can say good-bye.’
“But of course we couldn’t wait. He knew Celya was dying. Crail gave us three seconds to get the hell off his dock. The guards hustled her into the house, her mother with her. Crail ordered the guards to fire. Ram jumped back in the boat and grabbed an oar to push us off. The guards fired a volley. The bullets Whistled over our heads. All we could do was get away.”
White Water got off the bench, turning back to his leaky valve.
“I think Ram’s immune to the rot.” He paused to spit a brown jet at a fly on the floor. “But still it nearly killed him.”
That afternoon he went for a swim in the river. It was muddy and high, the current fast. White Water said there were crocodiles in the lagoons down in the delta. I wondered if Ram meant to come back. We watched for him till the sun went down. Kenleth shouted at last, and we saw him wading ashore, the crown of worlds glowing in the dusk. He looked tired but that bleak set was gone from his face.
He spent all the next morning in Celya’s room, poring over that electronic book, and finally shook his head in defeat.
“The text is chicken tracks. The video sections make it look like a history of the planet. There’s just enough to tease us in the maps and that trilithon symbol in those high mountains west. The only chance I see.”
“Chance?” That startled me. “A chance for us? At some other world?”
He nodded.
“There’s nothing for us here. Not any longer. I want to see that trilithon. If it’s really there, where the map seems to put it.” He shook his head and looked far away. “But don’t bet on it. The map was made maybe a hundred thousand years go. A younger planet. No delta yet. The mouth of the Blood is far down the coast.”
That afternoon Kenleth and I went with him back to the academy complex, the museum where I had first met Celya and the library and lecture halls around it. He wanted modern maps of the upper river and records of any expeditions into the mountain region where the trilithon had been.
Vandals had been there before us. We found doors battered in, display cases smashed. The storm had damaged the roof, and rain had flooded the clutter the looters had left on the floors. Ram took us through the ruin and finally stopped us at the entrance to a gloomy hall.
“The Grand Dominion.” He gestured at the sodden waste on the floor. “This was Celya’s treasure house. Her prize collection of artifact from what she thought had been imperial tombs. Personal ornaments, weapons, tools. Silver, gold, metals I didn’t know. Tantalizing objects Celya had no names for.”
He shrugged and turned to leave the building.
“Precious to her but no road map to take us to the trilithon. The blacks could have been there, but they never made maps, not of any kind we can read. The whites never got far beyond the head of steam navigation. We’ve got a long way to go.”
That night a stabbing headache woke me. I lay sweating and shivering till day came at last, and I wanted no breakfast. The blood rot had hit me.
31.
I tottered down to breakfast. The cook was serving ripe mangoes, boiled eggs, and fried slices of something like plantains. They looked good enough, but one taste of the egg wrenched me with nausea. I staggered when I tried to stand, and Ram helped me back up the stair.
I thought I was dying.
“Not quite yet.” He grinned at me bleakly. “You’re white enough, but Earth has its own evolutionary tree. You could still draw an ace.”
I don’t know how long I was sick. My watch still ran, but the days of Earth meant nothing here. Sometimes I was conscious. I remember Kenleth holding my hand, his warm touch a lifeline out of the darkness. I remember Ram lifting my head to give me water I couldn’t swallow.
Sometimes I was back on Earth. Once we were flying into Lubbock and they wouldn’t let us land because I had blood fever. We flew on into a thunderstorm, with no destination. Once we were back at home. Lupe had called the media to a press conference to announce our return. Derek tried to give a slide show, with shots of the Sahara gate and all the strange worlds we had seen. The reporters laughed and walked out, and the campus cops were called to arrest me for bringing the fever home to Portales.
Later I was lying in the bottom of the launch, listening to the steady puff of the little engine, staring up at the awning. It was woven of coarse strips of some straw-colored reedy stuff, with herringbone stripes of orange and rust. Sometimes they made patterns like the glyphs in the e-book, but never anything sane.
Kenleth brought me water as soon as I could swallow. A time came when I wanted to live. I could breathe without coughing. I could sit up and look around us at the wide brown river and the green forest walls. Periclaw was already far behind. White Water was taking us up Blood River.
“To look for that trilithon, if you remember,” Ram said. “If it’s anywhere near where that old map shows it.”
I grew stronger. I was able to swallow a few sips of the hot black corath tea when Kenleth offered it, and finally felt eager for another full mug. Kenleth fished from the boat and Ram broiled his catch on the boiler door. They discovered ripe papayas in the abandoned fields, and yams Ram could bake. Once Kenleth found bees in a hollow tree. Ram built a fire to stun them with smoke and brought back a basket filled with delicious honeycombs.
I grew ravenous for any food they offered. I was able to stand, able to climb out of the boat and walk on the sandbars when we stopped to gather driftwood for the boiler. My recollections of sweat and pain and dread began to fade away. I felt alive once more, alert to things around me. The river was lower now, as the monsoon wind had changed. It was empty of traffic. The banks looked empty of people.
“Sheko breathed death on the river,” Ram said. “They’ve gone back to the jungle.”
When we came in sight of the redbrick fort at Hake’s landing, Kenleth told me what he knew about his parents. His white mother had worked at the Periclaw civic center. His black father was an artist and singer an explorer found in the jungle. He was a registered guest with a license to stay. People bought his paintings and flocked to hear him sing.
His mother heard him at a concert and met him at a tea. He asked her to show him the city. They fell in love, which broke the law. His father was hanged. His mother lived in hiding till the explorer bribed Hake to stow her away on his trading boat. That was before he was born.
He showed me a ring his mother gave him the last time he saw her, after they had followed Toron into the jungle. Her last relic of his father, he thought it had come from some jungle tomb. A wide gold band, it was set with three polished black stones to make a tiny trilithon. It was too large for Kenleth’s finger, and he wore it on a cord around his neck.
The brick fort was abandoned, but he wanted to see his old home. We tied up at the empty dock. I was able to limp ashore with him. Kenleth ran ahead of me to the scraps of the stake palisade that still stood where the compound had burned, and found only a new jungle of ferns and vines inside. Nothing was left that he remembered. He came back with tears in his eyes.
Pushing on upriver, we passed tributaries, one so wide that White Water seemed uncertain which branch to follow. Ram frowned over the maps in his e-book, and found no useful clues.
“We’ll trust our luck,” he said. “Or White Water’s hunch.”
We stopped when we had to, for driftwood or fallen logs we could cut, and steamed on when we had steam. The channel narrowed, cut through rocky hills. The vegetation changed, rain forest replaced with evergreens. We found mountains ahead, blue in the distance.
Day by day, they rose higher. We came out of barren hills into a high-walled canyon cut through black granite. It narrowed till the sky was a thin bright strip we had to crane to see. The current grew too fast for the toiling engine. Thunder boomed against the cliffs. We came around a turn and found a waterfall ahead.
I’d seen Niagara. This was wider, higher, the thunder louder. Kenleth stood up in the boat, gaping at the crashing water and the canyon walls that boxed us in.
“Is this the end?”
I thought it was. I still felt weak. I saw no way out. The water fell over an enormous dam, roaring down into a cloud of white spray lit with a rainbow arc where a shaft of sunlight struck it. White Water steered the launch to a tiny strip of gravel beach and eased us to it. He and Ram jumped out and pulled the launch half out of the water.
We stood there on the beach, craning up at the dam. Built of something smooth and black, it curved from wall to canyon wall. I felt shut in, caught in closing granite jaws.
“They were giants!” White Water shook his head at it. “The magicians of the Grand Dominion.”
Ram was scanning the dam’s long curve.
“The map shows it,” he said. “There’s a long lake above it. It must have been built for power. There should have been tunnels to carry water to turbines and generators somewhere. Or maybe not?” He shrugged and turned to scan the walls around us. “So much has been forgotten.”
“Far enough?” White Water gave him an inquiring frown. “Is it back to Periclaw?”
“We can’t stop here. Not with the trilithon just beyond the lake.”
“I can’t leave the boat,” White Water said. “It’s all I have.”
Ram stood a moment frowning at me. Kenleth shrank against me, groping for my hand. Feeling helpless, I could only shrug.
“We’ve nothing here.” Ram winched as if from a stab of pain. “We’ve got to go on.”
“I don’t see how.” White Water gestured at the black cliffs and the narrow far scrap of sky. “You’ve got rough country ahead. We’ve been living off the land, but we’ve left the easy pickings behind us.”
“Will?” Ram turned to me. “Are you fit to climb?”
“I’m stronger,” I told him. “I’ll do my best.”
“If you’re that crazy,” White Water said, “I’ll wait for you here.”
“Thanks, my friend.” Ram gripped his hand. “But don’t wait long. If we find the gate, if it lets us through, we’ll never be back.”
“You will be.” White Water frowned at Ram’s face and the golden birthmark. “Your destiny is here.”
“I’ve had my destiny.” Ram again flinched as if from an actual stab. “It’s over.”
We shook White Water’s hand and left him with the launch. Ram loaded himself with fruit we had dried, fish we had smoked, yam-like roots we could bake. Kenleth carried blankets. I had a water jug and a strip of the awning, with ropes to stretch it like a tent.
The dam builders had left us a way around the fall, a sloping ramp that led us behind that roaring water to a narrow crevice in the canyon wall. In single file we followed it for hours, uphill and down, until at last we came out into twilight on a windy ledge, the lake a thousand feet below us, so vast that most of it was lost in the dusk.
The wind had an icy bite. We retreated into the crevice and spread the blankets. I slept and dreamed that Ram had left us there alone. He had gone back with White Water to rule a new Grand Dominion. I felt relieved to find him still with us, kindling a tiny fire to make hot tea.
By daylight, we saw a range of snow-clad peaks beyond the lake, blue with distance. We were already high above the timberline. I wondered if the trilithon might be beyond our reach, but we made a frugal breakfast and took the trail again, over barren ridges and through rocky gorges.
By noon, we were down to the lakeshore, the water so crystal clear that Kenleth wanted to swim till he dipped a foot and felt how cold it was. The trail went on, cut into the cliffs just a few yards above the water level.
We followed it all day, to a narrow in the lake and a bridge across it, five long arches of some dark stone, hardly scarred by time.
We camped in a shallow cave where an overhang jutted above the path, and crossed the bridge the next morning. The lake widened again beyond it, reaching far toward those snow-topped peaks. We left it there, climbing the path to a stony, treeless tableland.
The next day we saw the trilithon, toy-small in the distance, so far that another noon had come before we reached it. It stood alone, the only feature on a scrap of barren plain. It had grown enormous as we finally neared it, the twin black pillars towering out of a broad black pavement.
Ram opened his e-book and craned to study the symbols cut deep into the huge crossbar a hundred feet above us. He sighed at last and snapped the book shut. Kenleth stood gaping at the pillars and the bleak landscape beyond them. The path had ended and it looked like the road to nowhere. In a mix of awe and unbelief, he turned to Ram.
“It’s a door? Where does it go?”
“¡Quien saber He shrugged. “That’s what a friend of ours would say. With luck enough, we hope to find her somewhere on the other side. We’ve got no way to know except to try it.” He turned to Kenleth. “Are you ready?”
Eyes shining, Kenleth caught my hand.
“One more shuffle, one more deal.” Ram shrugged and grinned at me. “If you have the magic key.”
I’d worn the emerald pendant since he gave it to me. I slipped the silver chain over my head, and gave it back. He held it in his right hand and caught mine with his left. I got my balance and held my breath. Grinning at Kenleth, he chanted his Swahili numbers. His hand gripped harder. We stepped through together.
32.
The sunlight dimmed and reddened. My ears clicked to the air pressure change. The ground jolted as a different gravity caught me. My right ankle failed. I staggered and went down, my breath knocked out. I lay gasping for air that was suddenly oven-hot and bitter with dust.
“Will?” Ram and Kenleth had my arms, trying to help me up. “Are you hurt?”
I tried to say I was okay, and found no voice. I tried to stand and fell back against the black stone column. Sitting propped against the column, I gasped for breath and gripped the ankle to ease the pain.
“Where?” Kenleth sneezed and coughed from the dust. “Where are we?”
“My Little Mama always said she’d run from hell.” Ram stood gazing around us. “I think we’re there.”
The trilithon stood on a flat stone bench. The land around it was pocked with craters, but almost level to far dark mountains. Wind-blown dust lay piled around scattered boulders of rust-red stone. The sun was huge and high, the color of red-hot iron, so dim that it didn’t hurt my eyes.
“Mars?” Ram shook his head. “We couldn’t breathe on Mars.”
“What’s that?”
Kenleth was pointing back through the trilithon. The paved trail we had followed was gone. All around us, that lifeless waste of rocks and dust and crater pits reached away to dark and distant mountain peaks bare of snow. A gust of the burning wind stung my eyes with dust.
“That thing?” Ram turned to me. “What could it be is?”
I blinked and rubbed my eyes and found the object. Far away among the craters, it was a great thick angular mass of some dark stuff, something no natural force could have shaped.
“A building?”
“Odd, if it is.” Ram shook his head. “No doors or windows I can see.” He shaded his eyes to study it again. “Something the trilithon-builders left? Maybe the ship that brought them?”
He sat down in the shadow of the high lintel stone and opened his pack to find his e-book. The script pages flickered across the screen. He stopped on the image of a planet that might have been a second Mars, waterless, cratered, the color of dust.
“I wish we had Derek here.” He frowned a long time at the image and finally looked back at me. “But I think the book’s a history of the Grand Dominion and its founders. I can’t read the text, but the planets we’ve seen are all there, even the twin system. I think they had to reach the planets with rocket craft before they built the trilithons.
“This planet is the first one in the book. Could be it’s the first one they reached. Not fit for life.” He scowled at the red desolation around us. “They would have gone on from here. Found better worlds, but barren of life. Finally Earth and life they could transplant from there.”
He touched a key. Lines of golden hieroglyphs flashed across the image. He pointed at a tiny black trilithon symbol in a wide crater at the center of it.
“That could be where we are.” He shook his head. “Or I could be wrong. No way to know.”
“An ugly place.” Kenleth shivered in spite of the heat and shaded his eyes to stare back through the trilithon at the dead waste beyond it. He turned anxiously to Ram. “Can we go back?”
“I wish we could.” Ram touched the pendant. “We’ve tried. The key never lets us.”
“So what can we do?”
“Not much.” He shook his head, with a wry glance at me. “Not till Will can walk.”
He touched a button to close the book. It stayed open. A bell-tone pealed. The dead screen flashed red and green, red and green again. It froze, amber-hued. English letters scrawled themselves across it unsteadily, as if written in haste.
RAM AND WILL, IF YOU EVER READ THIS, YOU HAVE REACHED BETA CENTRAL TRILITHON. WE ARE GOING ON TO PLANET ALPHA. WE NEED YOU WITH US. IF YOU CAN FOLLOW, TAKE THE SOUTHWEST ROUTE TO THE MOUNTAIN GATE.
