Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

“I defer to you in this,” he replied. “I believe this sort of a swim would be easier than all the walking we’ve done.”

There were some quick lessons on how to use the poles—logs chosen because they were somewhat flattened on one side—and particularly how to manage them when in the channel and it was too deep to reach bottom.

“We’ll shove off in the raft first,” Harker told them.

“Give us some time to get clear and some sense of how it handles, then follow. If anybody falls in, your job is to keep them from going under. If the raft comes apart in midriver, then each of you take a target of opportunity and I’ll take the one that’s left!”

It didn’t come to that, although it was a pretty hairy operation. The raft was not really navigable; the logs slipped, opening and closing gaps that caused some considerable danger to those aboard. In the center channel, Harker used his pole alone as a makeshift rudder to allow the current to take them across without also sweeping them down to the ocean. Littlefeet looked scared to death, but he did his job, obeying Harker’s commands exactly, and they made it, having drifted a good two kilometers south while crossing.

Once on the other side, the raft was quickly abandoned. Just in case they had to return this way, Harker and the two natives pulled it completely up onto the bank and then just into the thick trees beyond.

They jogged back up to try and join the two swimmers as quickly as possible and made very good time. Harker was both pleased and amazed at how effortless this had become. He felt he was in better shape now than he’d been in training all those years ago.

They reached Kat first, who was breathing very hard but feeling proud of herself. N’Gana was a hundred meters farther on, trying to bring his breathing under control. He was still breathing as hard as he’d been when he’d pulled himself onto the shore.

Harker wondered a bit at that. Neither he nor Kat was exactly a champion athlete and he’d never have the kind of bodybuilder shape N’Gana had, but the man shouldn’t be breathing as hard as he was.

“I’m all right!” the colonel snapped. “It’s just age catching up with me, I fear. I’ve walked this far. I’ll make the journey.”

There was nothing to do but accept his assurances, but it bothered Harker. It suddenly occurred to him, though, that if something did happen to N’Gana, then, if he hadn’t forced himself into this party, Kat Socolov might well be the only one available to get Hamille into that bunker or whatever it was.

And just beyond those hills, no more than a half day’s walk away, and maybe a day through, they would be there. Then it would get really dangerous.

There was a reason why the energy grid was so clear in the night sky. They were close to one of its anchors, and a climb over the twelve-hundred-meter hills to the top of the pass between showed a sight that few humans had ever seen at ground level and remained whole.

Below, the remains of the Grand Highway still showed, joining other old routes that were still visible after all these years, even with large parts overgrown by jungle. Ephesus, the continental capital, had been four times the size of Sparta. There had been a spaceport out there, on the bluffs, which was still easy to recognize because of the sheer lack of anything growing there. That whole district was still possible to make out, and that was good, because that was where they had to go.

Straight ahead, though, the barren ruins of the ancient city stopped dead. They had not merely been dissolved or burned or swept away but replaced by a city of the new masters.

You could see pictures, you could see orbital shots, you could see it as a bizarre shimmering shape over a great distance, but now, this close, it was like nothing they had ever seen or even imagined.

“How would you describe that to a blind man?” N’Gana wondered.

It was a series of interlocking geometric structures, but virtually every possible shape was represented. It was a city of shimmering, twinkling light, predominantly yellow but with an odd pale green afterglow. It stretched for at least twenty kilometers, probably the entire old center city. Its beauty and symmetry, even to their eyes, was nothing short of breathtaking, but at the same time it was clearly built by and for minds so totally alien that Hamille seemed like a brother. At the very top were spires, actually trapezoids, not balanced or uniform but clearly serving the same function. Each of these protruded into the sky perhaps eight or nine hundred meters, and beams of energy ran into and out of them.

Kat Socolov shivered, though it was even hotter than usual. “It gives me the creeps,” she muttered, as much to herself as to the others. “I feel like I’m looking into the minds of beings that I can never understand.”

“Don’t keep looking at it!” Littlefeet hissed. “If the demons sense you looking, they steal a little of your mind. They got part of mine when I saw this place from the farthest high mountains. They aren’t looking now, but I think they will be!”

He was certainly serious, and none of the others quite knew how to take his comments. He did seem to have an abnormal sensitivity to, and fear of, the Titans, which he called the demons, but there wasn’t that pull that he’d reported, at least not now.

“Littlefeet how high up were you?” Harker asked, trying to reconcile the two visions.

“Way up. Up to the snow line.”

“Above the grid?”

“Not exactly. But it was like right there. I could almost touch it. It actually went to ground not much farther up, I remember that much.”

Harker nodded. “I think that’s it. We don’t know what those beams are, but they seem to have a lot of different uses. It’s almost as if those energy strings are living things. That city looks like it was grown from some crystalline structure, maybe artificial but certainly brought here with the invasion ships. But those pulses, that glow, that sense of strangeness you get when you look at it, the shimmering effect—that’s more of this energy. They live in it. They work it, mold it, like a sculptor with clay. It’s entirely possible that they are always connected using it as well. If you got close enough to that kind of beam, your brain would be overwhelmed by the alien information it was carrying. If it’s some kind of life, even artificial life, it might have sensed you in the stream and tried to incorporate your mind into it.”

“Huh?” Littlefeet responded.

“Never mind. Let’s just say that, if I’m right, we’ll be okay so long as we don’t get close to that stuff or intersect an energy stream. We’ll have to watch it, though. Swing wide around over to the east and in to the spaceport highway. Let’s give them no reason to take a close look at us.”

That they could all agree upon.

The offworlders were more than impressed by the two natives, who were clearly scared out of their wits by the sight of the alien city, which they understood even less than the other members of the group, but they stuck it out.

Littlefeet was surprised at how little he was affected by the sight even this close. He couldn’t understand it, but when he thought about it, he remembered that he’d had very few episodes in the daytime. It was at night, and particularly when he was tired and trying to sleep, that the visions came.

The great alien base city continued to dominate everything as they descended. It was no automated station, either. At least a dozen times they were forced to dive for cover in the bush as one or another of the fuzzy egg-shaped craft sped by overhead, either going toward the structure or leaving it. They made an odd sound, like the drone of a giant insect, as they went over; some headed out over the ocean beyond, vanishing over the horizon. The only place they didn’t seem to go was straight up, but Harker and N’Gana knew full well that they’d be in orbit in a shot if they suspected what was inside that oddly shaped tumbling little second moon.