Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

But none of it was real. She felt a rumble in the stone beneath her feet. A further settling of the stone—or the beast within the stone, struggling to be free? The monster, and its eye sliced from its own belly by its own hand. The eye in the stone.

That was real. Nothing else could be.

The shakes began again. She knelt down and grabbed at an outcropping of rock, held on to it with all her might, as if clinging to it would keep the last of sanity from slipping away.

McGillicutty did not trust dragonflies. The Martian-style helicopters seemed too fragile, too delicate to entrust his life to. He clung to the handhold and swallowed hard, wishing mightily that he could be magically transported back to Port Viking, that he could peel off his pressure suit and forget this entire nightmare.

He looked out the open side-hatch, down onto the sprawling desert plains below. There was a new feature in the once wide-open spaces, and the dragonfly was coming up on it fast.

The ‘fly pilot swooped in low, down onto the craggy and unstable rocks atop the summit of the asteroid. The landing skids touched down, bounced once, and the ’fly was resting lightly on the rock. Time to go. McGillicutty found himself hesitating.

The geologist, Jansen Alter, urged him on with an un-subtle toe in his rear, and McGillicutty stepped out onto the ugly surface. Alter and Marcia MacDougal followed.

But the ‘fly didn’t leave immediately. The members of the stretcher party climbed aboard, bearing their ungainly load as well as they could. A near-catatonic woman in a miner’s armored pressure suit had to be hell to carry, especially under these conditions.

Its return passengers in place, the dragonfly leapt away.

McGillicutty, Jansen, and MacDougal watched it go, before turning toward the little habitat shelter, toward whatever had driven Coyote Westlake mad.

McGillicutty shivered a bit as he made his way over the craggy surface. It would not do to think of their destination in those terms, though he was hard-pressed to think of an alternative.

Already, some people had trouble referring to it as an asteroid. After all, there it was , a huge part of the landscape, so big that it was hard to imagine that it hadn’t always been there. Now they were calling it the Lander. Images of the huge asteroid slumped over on the Martian landscape were glowing down from video screens the length and breadth of the Solar System. Nothing like it had ever been seen.

But the second Lander was already coming, and the third was not far behind. Mercer stood, transfixed, watching the predawn sky as another of the massive things glided down to a magical, impossible landing. What were these incredible things? What did they intend?

Mercer was frightened, badly frightened by the invaders, and yet there was something far beyond fear in her heart. These were miracles she was seeing. Dangerous and threatening as they might be, the Landers were also wondrous. They were far beyond any imaginable human technology, as far beyond present human ability as flight would have been to King Tut. A strange and fitting comparison, Mercer told herself, for mountains of hewn stone symbolized the ancient Egyptian civilization—and here was a new monument of stone, a flying monument to rival any power of Tut’s engineers.

And, like Tut’s tomb, this Lander held mysteries inside. What or who was inside that made these mountains fly?

Her reverie was broken as another pressure-suited figure shoved past her, carrying some unknown piece of equipment toward the security perimeter around the first Lander. She and Jansen had lost their exclusive dominion over the landing site in the first minutes after the touchdown, but still she felt an irrational resentment against all these strangers barging in on “their” discovery.

Before the night was far advanced, the first Lander was surrounded—at a respectful distance—with a ring of powerful floodlights. Cameras, sniffers, sensors of every kind were pointed at the new mountain. Now and again a worker or a machine would scuttle in front of the lights, throwing huge and fearsome shadows. The skim jets were gone now, but a half-dozen dragonflies had taken their place. The ‘flies moved overhead on their oversize rotors and blades, shifting position with the abrupt grace of their namesakes, framed in the glare of the lights from below.

Spotlights from the spindly dragonflies stabbed down onto the upper slopes of the Lander, striving to find something, anything, that might reveal a clue. One of the dragonflies was casting its beam on the abandoned hab shelter. Casting its beam where Jansen was.

Damn it, yes, obviously someone had to go aboard and check the place out, and yes, a geologist should have been part of the team—but why Jansen? Mercer stood, staring at the grounded asteroid, at the tiny white dot perched atop it. She was afraid for her friend.

Let it ride , she told herself. Jansen’s there because she volunteered . She forced the worry from her mind. For there was something about this scene. Something so familiar, something so basic she could not see it. Never mind. It would come to her, sooner or later. Sunrise was on the way.

Coyote Westlake knew herself to be in a dream, for none of this made sense. She lay in a warm bed in an improvised field hospital where she was the only patient.

She was in an inflatable, general-purpose emergency-response building. A four-bed, two-room “hospital” was set up in one wing of the standard-issue cruciform building. Someone had left the door open, and Coyote could see the occasional busy-looking person bustling across the central room, back and forth to whatever took up the other wings of the little building.

The wall behind her back throbbed and hummed as the compressor chugged along, keeping the building pumped up. Maybe this wasn’t a dream. Maybe she had made it, maybe the copter had truly plucked her from the flank of the asteroid. Maybe she had seen that impossible eye swooping up to stare at her.

She felt herself shivering with reaction, and realized she was curled up in a ball again, eyes shut, blocking out the world. She forced herself to uncurl her body, lie flat on her back and stare at the bland beige plastic of the ceiling. Someone was speaking.

“Ms. Westlake?” the kindly voice repeated. “Ms. Westlake, if we could continue?”

Coyote turned her gaze downward from the ceiling and saw a heavyset, slightly doughy-skinned woman smiling at her. “I know this must be hard on you, but any bit of information might be vital.”

“Who… who are you?” Coyote asked, her voice sounding raspy and weak even to herself.

The woman frowned in obvious concern. “I’m Sondra Berghoff, one of the people investigating this landing. We’ve been talking now for a half hour, you and I. Don’t you remember?”

Coyote blinked and tried to hold her thoughts together. Which were the dreams, which were real? How long had she sat inside that hab tank, how long had she gone without sleep, without food and drink, too paralyzed by fear to move at all? Well, perhaps there was something wrong with her. “Yes,” she lied, hoping the memories would return soon. Wait a second. Sondra. Sondra Berghoff and a friendly smile, a hand that held her own, offering comfort. Yes, that was real, was a true memory. Her mind had been struggling to deny reality for so long, it was no longer capable of accepting anything as true.

“My colleagues have found a tunnel near your hab shed,” Sondra said. “They need to know where it leads, whether it is safe to go down it.”

The tunnel . What was down it? Was it safe? Safety? No! Danger ! An eye and a creature that must have been old before humanity crept down from the trees, a monster whose million-year sleep was now ended, and she had been there when it first opened its eye. Coyote froze again, fell back into whatever lost place in her mind she had just returned from.