Michael Kube-McDowell - Odyssey

She gestured helplessly. “I don’t.”

Derec stood and walked to where she stood, at the edge of the plaza. “And this place,” he said, spreading his hands wide to take in the city surrounding them. “Just look at it. It’s glorious. Doesn’t just seeing it make you feel exhilarated? Can’t you sense the unifying vision, the way it all fits together as one seamless whole? Look at the turrets with mansard roofs-beautiful! Look at the way the five Pythagorean perfect solids are used as structural shapes to focus-”

As he looked to the north, he stopped short. “That’s funny,” he said, puzzled. “I would have sworn that last night there was a grouping of three icosahedrons right there along that boulevard.”

“Icosahedrons?”

“The most complex perfect solid-twenty triangular faces.” He shook his head. “I must have been mistaken about the grouping. Maybe I was dreaming about this place last night. Anyway, I’m almost looking forward to going down there. If we’d managed to get back to Rockliffe Station last night or on to Aurora this morning, I’d have felt cheated by not having my chance to explore.”

“Have you bothered to notice that this city isn’t just a collection of buildings?” she asked petulantly.

“What do you mean?”

She pointed down over the edge at the small figures moving in the streets. “You go down there and you’re going to have to deal with the creatures that built this city. Is it as much fun thinking about having a hundred thousand monsters like Aranimas after you? We’re trespassers, you know. We weren’t invited.”

Derec folded his arms over his chest and scanned the city outward to the horizon. “I’d say more like a million or more inhabitants in a city this size. But they won’t be like Aranimas-or like Wolruf, for that matter.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“First, because Wolruf told me about his world and the Erani world, and this doesn’t fit the description-”

“She could have lied.”

“True. But you say you didn’t pick this destination, and I know I didn’t. That means it was the key that decided to bring us here.”

“So?”

“So, the key wasn’t made by Aranimas’s people, and it wasn’t made by Wolruf’s. If it was, they’d have known how to make the key work. They could probably even have made one with a lot less trouble than they seem to have gone through to find this one,” Derec said. “So why should it take us to either of their worlds?”

“Maybe they did learn how to set the destination,” she pointed out.

“Maybe. Or maybe the key was built to return to a certain place when it’s activated without guidance-as a way of reclaiming them when they fall into the wrong hands.”

“Then the creatures down there-”

“Might be not only the builders of this city, but the builders of the key,” Derec completed. “Which means that maybe we were invited.”

She squinted in his direction. “You’re going to go down there whether I do or not, aren’t you.”

“Yes. I’ll leave the key with you, if you want.”

“I thought we were a team.”

“Are we still?” he said, raising an eyebrow questioningly.

“Don’t you want to be?”

“I don’t know if we want the same things,” he said slowly. “You want to get back to Aurora. I want to do something to help Wolruf-and then look into this business of the Daniel O’Neill .”

“Both of which require getting off this planet,” she pointed out. “Our interests overlap at least that far.”

“They do, indeed,” Derec admitted. “All right, then. We’re still a team.”

“At least until we beg, borrow, or steal a spaceship.”

“Or learn how to control the Key to Perihelion, whichever comes first,” he amended.

“Or Aranimas shows up with fire in his eye and uses us for thrust mass,” Katherine said with a grin. She peeked over the side again. “Or we kill ourselves trying to get down from here. Maybe we can make them come to us?”

Katherine’s concern was justified. The only way down from the promontory seemed to be to climb down one of the sloping faces of the pyramid. Those faces were steep, much more nearly vertical than the faces of the Incan and Mayan temples of ancient Earth which the tower otherwise resembled. But unlike those temples, there were no wide ceremonial staircases cut into any of the four faces.

Instead, there was a regular pattern of holes down the center of each plasticrete face, a pattern that seemed to extend all the way to the ground. Each hole was wider than his handspan and twenty centimeters deep, and they were spaced in such a way that they would make convenient handholds and footholds.

It was possible they had been placed there purely for decorative reasons. “The fact is, I can’t see why anyone would want to climb up here-there’s nothing up here except a good view,” he told Katherine. “And if the view was important to them, they could have run a lift up through the center of the tower.”

Even so, the holes were in some ways better than a staircase. Hugging the face of the tower, with both hands and feet to provide good purchase and their backs to the view out and down that could inspire vertigo, they might just make it.

“You’re going to be hurting by the time we get to the bottom,” he told Katherine.

“I’ve got an eighty percent charge in my medipump and I feel fine. Besides, didn’t anyone ever tell you that women have more endurance than men?” she teased. “Let’s stop talking and get going.”

The worst part was going over the edge and feeling for that first foothold. Derec led the way, being careful not to dislodge the key from its spot tucked into his waistband. A moment later Katherine was beside him, clinging more tightly than she needed to the lip of the holes she was using as handholds.

“I almost hate to bring this up, but I wonder what sort of creatures might have decided these holes would make great nests,” Katherine said breathlessly.

“Flying snakes,” Derec said straight-faced. “A meter long with three rows of sharp teeth. Nothing to worry about.”

“You’re so considerate,” she said crossly, starting down.

“No charge,” he said with a smile, and followed after her.

If he had ever thought that Katherine would be the kind to pick her way timidly down the wall, letting him lead the way and guide her steps, the first few minutes would have banished that notion. Katherine-Kate-was agile and aggressive and, most of all, fast. In ten minutes they were a fourth of the way down the tower’s face. Since he had to be wary of moving too quickly and dislodging the key, Derec had trouble keeping pace.

“Hey, partner,” he called down to her. “Time-out for a conference.”

“I thought you were already taking a time-out, as slow as you move,” she shot back. But she stopped and waited for him all the same. “What’s up?” she asked as he joined her.

“A thought about the key. Do we really want to take it down there, not knowing what we’re walking into?”

She frowned. “That would be taking a risk, wouldn’t it?

If we knew how to control it, I’d say keep it with us. We could always use it to escape from a tight spot-”

“If we knew how to control it, we wouldn’t have to do this,” Derec said.

“You want to leave it here, in one of these holes?”

“That’s what I was thinking. The key is heavy enough and the holes deep enough that nothing’s going to dislodge it.”

“I don’t much like the idea of being separated from it,” Katherine said, her eyes clouded by concern. “It’s one of our two chances to get out of here, maybe the better one, for all we know.”

“I like the idea of being separated from it by force even less,” Derec said. “What do you say?”