Диана Дуэйн - Nightfall_at_Algemron

In Gabriel's pocket, the stone flared with brief, definite warmth and went quiet again. Enda flinched. It seems, Gabriel thought, that what we're looking for is here.
Chapter Nine
"I still can't believe it," Helm said over visual comms a few minutes later. " We could have come straight here weeks ago!"
"If we'd known that this was where we were coming," Gabriel said.
Lalique was online as well, and Angela's face replaced Grawl's broad, striped visage after a few minutes.
"We were here months ago!" Helm said. "Why didn't that thing act up then ? Why didn't it lead you here then?"
"Maybe because I wasn't trying to make it lead me anywhere?" Gabriel said. "We came in after the craziness at Eldala with not much on our minds but dumping our data, picking up some more, and going straight back to Aegis. Frankly, I was so wrecked at that point," he added, "that this thing could have been jumping up and down holding a sign, and I wouldn't have noticed."
Angela snickered.
Helm gave Gabriel a wry look and said, "Okay, I take your point. You had a bad time of it. We shouldn't give you a bad time too." He sighed and looked at the weary red-orange star. "Well, you don't have any data to dump this run, but now what?"
"Opinion: do tourist things," Delde Sota said.
Gabriel grinned and said, "I think the doctor's idea is excellent. We'll go see the Glassmaker sites." "Aren't you carrying something a little unusual in the way of admission tickets?" Angela asked. Gabriel nodded to her. "This planet isn't that carefully policed," he said. "It's nothing like Algemron." "Thank God," Angela muttered.
"Anyway," Gabriel said, "we shouldn't have any trouble making our way just about anywhere on the planet we care to go, and then we'll see what we find."
"Query," Delde Sota said: "stone indicating more strongly?"
Gabriel glanced over at Enda, who was looking rather uncomfortable. For her, the question would have been unnecessary. He gave Delde Sota a wry look. "It's practically shouting in my ear. The source of whatever energy it's been tracking—if it even is energy—is definitely Ohmel. Even now, I think I can tell that the source is on the side turned away from us. The 'signal' has oscillated a couple of times now from loud, to louder, to just loud again."
"Rotation," Grawl said.
"I think so, yes."
They made contact with Ohmel control at Charlotte, found out where they could land at the port, and made their way down into atmosphere. They had spent little time here on the last passage through the system, Gabriel having been too weary after the events at Danwell to care about staying, but now they would have a little while to get more familiar with the place. Last time there had been scant opportunity to notice much except that the port facilities were in astonishingly good shape for a world so far out at the end of things.
Ohmel itself was an old world, cold and dry, with only the occasional lake here and there to break the red-brown surface. Coulomb was a very elderly star, perhaps not as far along as Mantebron, but (as Grawl put it) "well stricken in years," with maybe another couple of hundred thousand years to run before it finally died. Meanwhile, its inhabitants did not seem to be much concerning themselves with far-future occurrences. They were getting on with their lives. Lights were twinkling down there as Ohmel's broad terminator drew itself across Charlotte Port and night slipped in behind. The town attached to the port was small and prosperous and a good place to start a business as long as one of your names was Ngongwe.
The three ships made for the same landing spots they had used the last time over on the transient side of the port. There were a good number of cargo ships on the non-transient side. That came as no surprise, for the Ngongwe family, one of the ruling houses of the old vanished Leodal stellar nation, had parlayed their foothold here over a number of generations into a small but flourishing trading organization, the proceeds of which had enabled them to essentially buy the planet. Most of their trade was done around Aegis, Algemron, and Lucullus, but sooner or later most of the ships came back here for service, retrofit, or (if they had gone that far down the road) breaking. The Ngongwes had not become as rich as they were now by letting anyone else profit from their salvage.
Sunshine's skids touched down on the cracked concrete of the landing pad, and Gabriel glanced around in the dusk at the surrounding low buildings.
"What's the temperature out there now?" he asked.
"Three degrees below zero C," Enda said and reached into the central holodisplay to wake up the infotrading system. "A lovely spring evening on Ohmel."
The infotrading system automatically came online and started hunting in the local ether for the frequency that the planet's Grid used. After a few moments, it found the ingress/access nodes, and the Ohmel system and Sunshine's infotrading system went into synch with one another and began exchanging ID and security codes.
From the voice comms, a cheerful rich voice belonging to a man named Tabin Ngongwe, the port infotrading officer, said, "Sunshine, you back again so soon? We don't normally see a trader twice in the same six months."
Gabriel was slightly surprised at being remembered. "We came back for the tourist season." Tabin laughed. "What you got for us? You hauling inbound or just passing through?"
"We're empty at the moment; the systems are just gossiping to confirm status," Gabriel said. "Anything outbound?"
"Depends, Sunshine. Where you headed?"
Gabriel suddenly found himself feeling cautious, but he couldn't say why. "Not clear about that just yet," he replied. "We thought we'd just stay a few days and see the sights."
There was a roar of laughter at the other end. "Here? There's nothing here!"
It was a comment that Gabriel had heard before from natives of other planets, sometimes with even less reason than someone on Ohmel.
"We'll take a look at the outbound list early next week," Gabriel said. "I'll have it ready for you."
He closed down comms as the infotrading system finished its business and displayed the NO DATA TRANSFER. BEGINNING PURGE CYCLE heralds.
"It is kind of funny," Gabriel said, "to come straight back here."
"Maybe," Enda said. After a moment she added, "You are thinking that you know perfectly well why the stone did not bring you here the last time?"
"Mmm, partly, I was too tired, and I think I was still in shock. Can you go into shock after being telepathically wrung out?"
"You saw me do it on Danwell," Enda said. "For a human new to mindwalking, it strikes me as entirely likely." She looked out the front ports at the dark. "For my own part it was such a strange experience, that contact, and then the interfacing with the great machine down there in the old facility. I am not sure that I came away from it entirely unchanged, either."
"It wasn't so much that I was thinking of," Gabriel said. "After the little edanweir looked into me."
"If 'after' is the word we are seeking," Enda said. "Causality took some bending that morning, as did my perception of the flow of time—yours, too, I think. We were both sifted, both examined, by whatever that presence was that looked at you through the child." She got up, stretched, and looked at Gabriel speculatively. "Otherwise I am not sure that I could have done what I did with the device that spoke so forcefully to me regarding its use. What it was bending—time or space or both—I am not sure, but I was permitted its use because we two were linked. Or rather"—she headed down the hall—"because I was linked to you and therefore permitted access."
Gabriel turned that over in his mind. "Are you all right?" he said. "The stone—"
"Believe me," Enda said, "I know. Its pressure against me is increasing all the time. I am maintaining, for the moment, mostly by trying to be very quiet of mind, but we are moving among uncertainties here. I do not know what will happen if the stone becomes much more active." Enda went down to her quarters to change into wanner clothes. "I would say this. You should be careful with yourself, for any attempt by the rest of us to investigate these places without you and the stone is likely to be disastrous. Just a feeling I have. The excitement of exploration is heady stuff, and I would not attempt to deprive you of it, but do not get yourself killed in the exploration we are about to undertake. If you do, we are all likely to experience something similar."
Gabriel swallowed hard and went for his coat and breather gear.
They met up with the other four, all of them wearing heavy coats and the breathers, which were sufficient for Ohmel's springtime. Together, they all went out to dinner at a place not nearly as good or as fancy as the one on Algemron—rough stone walls, a textured composite stone floor, rustic chairs and tables and a limited menu—but the atmosphere was much better.
"Actually," said Helm, "if you came here in the winter, you could say that it didn't have any atmosphere." There were groans. "Terrible," Enda said. "Helm, you should be ashamed."
"Factual correction," Delde Sota said: "does have atmosphere in winter, but mostly lying on the ground."
More groans. "Better poor meal in comfort than stalled ox in military dictatorship," Delde Sota said.
"Sssh," said Enda, for "dictatorship" was not a word one used too loudly on Ohmel. There were many who would take offense at its use since it was an accurate description of the present regime. Lady Kfira Ngongwe was a true daughter of her house, meaning that as far as she was concerned she owned Ohmel and had no intention of simply letting the Concord waltz in here and liberate the place.
"Why is the ox stalled?" Grawl said. "I thought it was an animal. Is it a some kind of biomachine?"
This devolved into a long discussion of Standard idiom and many more bad puns, which Helm and Enda both considered a high form of humor. When the meal was done and they were nursing the last of their drinks, they began making quiet plans for the next day.
"It is good to have a guide with a 'detector' of sorts," Enda said. "At least we will not be going into this blindly, not knowing what trouble to expect."
"No," Gabriel muttered. "We're going to get into trouble right away, which will be worse." Helm looked at him sharply. "You didn't mention trouble."
Gabriel laughed. "I didn't think I'd have to. You've got the bestiary. You know what kinds of things live here."
They had all spent some time after that dinner at Helm's running copies of the bestiary through its paces. There were numerous lifeforms known to be associated with Glassmaker sites, some of them believed to be directly associated with the Glassmakers themselves—creatures they either created or altered from others extant elsewhere.
The arachnons were the ones Helm had been most concerned about. Anything that could either rip you apart with synthodiamond claws or spit nitric acid at you if it couldn't reach you was worth taking more than passing note of.
"Yeah, well, I'll be wearing my armor," Helm said, "and I suggest everyone else does the same. Those of us who don't have any, we're going to have to fake something up. Meantime, that's just generalized trouble. Anybody could have that. Anybody sent you any postcards about what to expect?" He glanced at the stone.
Gabriel let out a long breath and replied, "Nothing specific, but Helm, this place is alive. It's like the place on Danwell but bigger. I can tell that from even here, and it's more dangerous. The Danwell site was an untended facility."
"Opinion: could have fooled me," Delde Sota said.
"The machines were somewhat alive, as we reckon things," Gabriel said, "but there was no one there to tend them, no caretakers. This place has those—the stone can tell—and we're going to have to deal with them."
"Will not the stone make that road open to you?" Grawl asked. "What use giving it to you, otherwise?"
"I don't know," Gabriel said. "It worked that way at Danwell." He glanced at Angela. "No telling if it's going to do any such thing here."
She gave him a look.
"Does the stone give any indication of exactly what those caretakers are?" Enda asked.
"If it does," Gabriel said, "it doesn't know how to tell me." Or, he thought, it's refusing to. He shook his head. "I may have to improvise when we get there. Meantime, the best we can do is arm ourselves sensibly, go in carefully, and have the ships handy so we can make a quick getaway if we have to." He looked over at Delde Sota. "One thing, though: the werewisps. I don't think the weather here gets quite as bad as it does on High Mojave, but the nights are still going to get very cold. Are they going to get cold enough to bring the werewisps out in strength? Those things could suck all the power out of a ship in a hurry."
"Assessment: even one or two are strength enough for me," Delde Sota said. "Initial response: borderline situation, as planet is on inward swing, approaching perihelion four months twenty-nine days approximately. Orbital 'spring' indicates nighttime temperatures plus-minus negative thirty degrees C, but no colder."
Helm shivered. "Remind me to get out the woolies." Grawl looked at him. "What is a 'woolie'?" "They're in the Awful Cabin, I bet," Angela said. Helm threw her a look. "As a matter of fact—"
"Ahem," said Delde Sota. "Assessment continues. Temperature may be rather milder in central areas, but worst-case suggests no lower than negative thirty. More realistic suggestion negative fifteen degrees C."
"You won't even notice," Angela said to Grawl.
"I would prefer not to spend nights on the planet surface anyway," Enda said, "if that can be avoided."
"Well, let's see how it goes," Helm said. "No use tying ourselves into arrangements that may seem unnecessary. If the temperature starts dropping suddenly, though. we're out of there."
"No problem with that," Gabriel said. "Tomorrow morning?"
"Sounds good. After we find unbearable amounts of the unknown riches of the ages, we can come back and do the town again."
It seemed like a good plan. They finished their dinner and paid the bill, then walked back along the cold, quiet, narrow streets to the port parking area. Charlotte was more a town than a planetary capital, home to no more than fifteen thousand souls, and "downtown" was no more than a square mile of shops, retailers and restaurants—almost all of which had "Ngongwe" somewhere in their names. It was not very long before they came to a place low in a small dip in the local landscape of gentle hills. Here nestled an area of lights, service buildings, and landing lights now down to half-illumination for the evening.
Gabriel was strolling along looking at the lights and noticed Angela walking along beside him, giving him a thoughtful look. "Mmm?" he said.
"Was that an apology back there?" she said very quietly.
Gabriel thought about that and then said, "maybe."
She smiled slightly. "Well, then this might have been one too."
They nodded at one another in agreement.
"I was worried is all," Angela said.
"Oh?" Gabriel said. "I thought it was mostly Grawl who was worried."
"Absolutely," said Angela. "In fact, in the future I'll let her do all my worrying for me." She glanced up ahead of them where Grawl and Helm were walking side by side and discussing the virtues and vices of flechettes.
"Seems wise," Gabriel said. "She's built for it." "Seriously—"
"Don't mention it," Gabriel interrupted. "You had your reasons. Can't blame you for that." "Even the part about your tiny brain?" Her voice sounded smaller.
"I haven't had it weighed recently," Gabriel said. "There might be some truth in it, who knows?" He grinned at her.
Angela nodded and wandered along to gradually catch up with Grawl. Gabriel went after, his hands deep in his coat pockets, fingering the stone.
Halfway down that dark road, a little ahead of Gabriel, Delde Sota suddenly stopped and looked up into the night, which was cold, but not yet seriously so, now no more than negative ten C or so.
"What?" Gabriel asked, looking up, and then saw what she saw.
Stretched right across the starry sky was a huge black splotch. Only a very few stars were sprinkled across it, compared with the more normal starfield scattered across the rest of the heavens.
"Identification: the Great Dark," Delde Sota replied.
"The galactic rift, isn't it?" Gabriel said.
Delde Sota nodded, and together they stood for a moment while the others walked on. "It calls," Delde Sota said.
Gabriel looked at her in slight surprise. It was not often that she broke into sheerly human speech or forgot her initial modifier, and she never did so by accident.
"Yes," Gabriel said. "It does."
The more he looked up into that darkness, the more true he found the statement. He was briefly transfixed, and the stone in his pocket, which he had been turning over habitually in his fingers, reacted—not in the usual way, but by going cool, then cooler, and finally actually cold.
Gone, something inside him said, looking up at that great darkness. In his head, his point of view swung bizarrely so that he was not looking up into the sky but sideways or down over the edge of a great chasm, a huge gap in things. It was more than a merely physical emptiness. It seemed more the symbol of a greater one, a lack, a loss, a defeat. Long ago, said that silent presence in his head, somehow sad, and that sorrow awakened and stung briefly. Long gone .
Then the world resumed its rightful position, and Gabriel was standing on the ground again, not clinging like a fly on a wall to a precarious foothold with millennia of darkness lying beneath him, waiting for him to fall in silently and be lost. A long way down, said the human side of him, trying to make light of the image or impression he had just received. Irremediable loss, ages old. Something had happened, something that had not worked. Defeat, retreat, an ending. and the answer or solution or end of it all, far away into that seemingly bottomless darkness, far away on the other side of the night that never ends.
"What're you two looking at?" Helm's shout came back.
Gabriel glanced over at Delde Sota, who gazed back, uncommunicative for the moment, and that, too, was strange for her. For a moment the soft amber light from the landing area reflected in her eyes, making her seem strange and otherworldly.
Helm came along and looked up at the sky. "What was it? A ship?"
Gabriel wondered how he could explain, and finally shrugged and said, "Look at it up there. No stars."
Helm glanced up and said, "Yeah, just the good clean darkness, something that our kind can't mess up." He elbowed Gabriel genially and went after the others.
Gabriel followed, wondering how true that was likely to remain.
Chapter Ten
He went to sleep more quickly than he had in a long time. It seemed to have something to do with being on a planet and the perceived stability of such a place. However, he got little rest, for immediately he began to dream—something else that had been happening all too frequently of late.
The dreams were innocuous at first, and even in the midst of them he began to relax. Stars made up the background at first, great panoramas of them, slowly changing—not the kind of thing you would normally see from a driveship, where the stars stayed the same, alternating with the dead black of drivespace.
Then his viewpoint drew back somewhat, and another shape got between Gabriel and the stars: a great darkness. It took him a while to realize that this was not some natural phenomenon like the darkness of the rift beyond Coulomb but something made, a ship—if ship was even the right word for it. There was what seemed a large base, under which huge structures had been built—the stardrives, Gabriel guessed. Above it all was a mighty complex of supports and some clear building material. Inside, all the lights twinkled, and Gabriel realized that he was looking at one of the great traveling city ships of the fraal. Inside that clear structure—a huge elongated dome—he could see what looked like buildings, tall spires
with arched pathways between them. Tiny lights, small and faint as stars, glittered in them everywhere. A city of hundreds of thousands, all caught in glass like some rare plant, protected from the cold and dark outside.
In space there should have been no sound, and there was none, but he heard it nonetheless, the soft buzzing susurrus of many minds—thousands of them, tens of thousands—passing by in this empty place in the night. Fraal, he thought, coming from where? Going where?
Away, he realized, away from humanity and the human worlds, leaving it all behind and heading out into the darkness to try to find their homeworld. Strange that any species should be able to travel so far and for so long that it could no longer remember for sure where it came from. Many of those minds looked into the darkness and inwardly cried, How long must we travel? How may we ever we come home when we have lost the way? Where is home? Are we the ones who left, or have we become so different that there is no home for us any more?
We have wandered too long. We are not what we were. Take us back!
But one voice among the many cried out, No! I will not be what we were. I cannot be what is gone and well gone, and I would not have the rest of us be so, either. We must be what these present times allow us to be, what our own selves make us.
An image of some great meeting, under that domed sky. The fraal made no attempt to light that sky to look like day under some atmosphere, under some sun. The oldest night shone down through the dome, and outside it the slow stars went by. Here that single voice had been lifted and was heard without much concern by the others gathered in their thousands and tens of thousands. They had heard her voice before, and nothing had come of it.
You may go your way, if you feel so, the answer came in chorus, the many agreeing, all speaking together in the favorite way of fraal, almost in song. Many others have done so, gone the way you wish. You will be happy among those others, the humans and their like, but when you have been there a while, young as you are, having lived among them and learned their ways, will you be fraal any more?
Fear stirred inside her, but she said to them regardless, I would sooner not be fraal than I would go through this life always saying, This is not what I am looking for, or That is not what we once had! None of us have ever lived in this ancient past we seek so fruitlessly, and it keeps us from living here and now the only lives we have!
They laughed at her. It was not unkindly laughter, but it was infuriating, and Gabriel had heard its like before: from his father occasionally, or from others who knew that eventually you would get over this craziness of yours, that eventually you would see reason and come around to their way of thinking. It was the kind of laughter that made you, perhaps irrationally, turn your back on what you had and strike out into the darkness, though you shook with fear as you did it.
She faced them down, that great assembly that she had called, as any one fraal may. The single voice, though valued among fraal, was also feared as something that might be used as a weapon. Safe speech, among the fraal, lay in numbers, and "the lone voice in the dark" was how they characterized madness.
You, she cried, you all have heard the voice whose words I speak now, the one that does not look back with Joy on the old world but fears it and what it will make of us if we return. Does an adult climb back into its cradle or the sling in which its mother carried it? Is that the best thing to do with the rest of our lives? The uneasy dreams that make us all stir and cry out once or twice in a life are there for a purpose. They warn us of what happens if we succeed in returning to our childhood. It was in search of adulthood as a species that we went out into the night. Will we reJect it now, when it is Just beginning to come within our grasp?
The violences and strifes ofthe humans and the weren, the sesheyans and the t'sa and all the others, said the chief of the voices that strove against her, these are nothing to do with us. Their passions are not ours. Their fears, their hatreds are not ours. By drawing too close to them, by remaining among them and sharing in their wars and migrations and seeking after power, we endanger ourselves.
Is life merely about being safe, then? she cried. It was not for safety that we undertook this long Journey, but for difficulty, heroism, pain, and passing through pain into triumph, for courage, danger and deliverance from danger! All of them seek these same things, though the details may vary. They hunt truth and Justice as we do. They seek meaning, and where they do not find it, they seek to make it and so become godlike, for meaning, like matter, is made out of nothing! If you will leave them now to their fates, having Judged them too dangerous, too untidy, then when the equal and opposite reaction occurs, and the universe Judges you in your turn, you will be right to be afraid! No other voice will speak for you then. No one will say, Evil beset me, and you did not stand by idle but were our help. We were trapped, and you helped us find a way out. We were alone and hungry, and you fed us and bore us company!
It is easy, said several of the chief voices together then, to speak ancient sentiments in meeting and seem bold and compassionate, but it is harder to enact them without consensus. You have had none before, and you have none now. Perhaps it is time that there should be an end to your incitements.
She was silent then for several breaths. All that great assembly grew silent as well to see whether she would join her voice to theirs again.
Finally she spoke. We shall see how easy it is, she said, to act instead of merely speaking, and to act by commission instead of omission. You shall see me no more. You may hear of me and may speak of me in chorus if you like, but at the last, each of you will have to think of me alone and hear me, alone, in your minds. Will you dare?
She left them.
Astonished, they watched her go. She took with her, as was her right, one seed from the city's gardens. No one understood why she took that particular one, the slowest growing plant of all, the least likely to come to flower away from the conditions for which it was designed. Some saw it as a challenge, as her words had been, and they were glad to see her go. All around her, afterward, the silence fell, the silence that she had been trying to break ever since, with what success they would never know.
In the dream, Gabriel could hear the chorus of fraal voices raised to drown her and her memory out. He could see the little island of light and minds and voices drift away into the darkness, hunting an old dream.
. and that was when it began to shift. The voices all changed, grew ragged around the edges, and the light and the colors died, and that black blotch where there were no stars started slowly to creep across the sky, eating the stars that were there, blotting them out. The dream started to become nightmare as Gabriel started to feel, much too clearly, the many forms that nightmare was now learning to take. The writhing, stroking, strangling curl of the creatures living inside those like Major Norrik, and the acid pain and fury trapped inside the bioengineered skin of the kroath. Other anguishes, some that cut and some that burned, but all together, all working for the one cause now, not to conjoin voices, but to blot out and
strangle all voices that were not theirs. A terrible low roar of hating mind out of the night, and the darkness ate all the stars, and as the last star went out, it screamed—
Gabriel jerked upright in bed, sweating. The stone, across from him in its customary place on the shelf, was glowing softly, pulsing in time with his heart.
Gabriel wiped his head and grabbed the stone as if it was some kind of anchor or lifeline. It was somehow cause to all these effects. He was terrified of it, but avoiding the fear would get him nowhere now. He waited until his breathing calmed and the stone's pulsing slowed, and then he lay down again, but it was a long while before he could get to sleep. He did finally manage it; and he dreamed again, but this time he was less frightened to see the darkness come creeping against the stars. In the dream, he stood watching and said, irrationally, Now we begin to be warned against you. Now we are prepared. Come do your worst.
Silent, the dark tide washed over him, but this time Gabriel laughed. Chapter Eleven
The next morning Gabriel was the first one up. He got dressed in a slightly heavier than usual singlesuit and boots and made chai, drinking it black. Helm called from Longshot to discuss a schedule for the day's flying, and then Angela called to see if Gabriel wanted anything from the provisioners in town. They were assembling a shopping list when he heard the door open down the hallway and saw Enda in one of her long silky morning robes with all her long silver hair down her back come out to see about some chai herself.
The shopping list took a few more minutes, and Gabriel did not rush Angela. When Grawl's roars of "Hurry up!" from behind her finally encouraged her to finish, Gabriel got up from his seat at the dining table and went across to the galley for more chai. Enda slipped away as he came out, but by her door, she paused and looked at him.
Gabriel was still very uncertain about the protocol for these things. Finally, he simply said, "I had a dream last night."
"So did I," Enda said. She looked abashed and distressed. "It is one I have not had for a long time. I am sorry to have troubled you with it."
Gabriel shook his head. "I'm sorrier to have seen it."
She sighed. "Well, I was angry at first. We all have our privacies, and that was mine, but then I realized that it was not your fault. It comes, perhaps, from sleeping on a planet again. The mind relaxes, lets barriers slip. I would have told you eventually anyway, and—" She broke off. "Well."
Gabriel shook his head. " 'They asked me to leave,' you said. You didn't tell me that it was a City Administrator that they asked to leave!"
She sipped at her chai and made a face. "Gabriel, how in the name of physics can this still be so hot after you made it such a while ago? You missed your career. You should have been an engineer of some kind. The heavens only know how far a starfall would take us now, the way you bend the rules."
He sat down with his cup. "I'm not going to bother you about this," Gabriel said. "I'm sorry I trespassed. I wouldn't have known how to stop, though. I get into one of these and it just sort of carries me along."
"Never try to direct vision," Enda said. "If you do so, it stops being a vision and starts being about control. There is enough of that about."
She sat down and pulled her hair back, starting to braid it. "A long life," she said softly, "but still that moment comes back to haunt me, every now and then."
"How old were you?" Gabriel said.
Enda sighed, pulling the braid around to watch what she was doing. "Just past a hundred, a youngster telling my elders what to do. I had worked my way up to the posts just below that position, and the council of elders and speakers elected me to the administration. They merely got what they had asked for."
"So did you, though," Gabriel said, and the suddenness with which this thought occurred to him surprised him.
She looked at him a little sharply, then leaned back with that small curl of rueful smile that he had seen often enough before. "To have the gauntlet thrown down before me, to be forced to take up the challenge, yes, perhaps I did. So I went out into the night and started to become someone else, a Builder rather than a Wanderer. The city went on without me, as it knew well how to do, being thousands of years older than I, but it caused talk. No fraal quite so high in Wanderer society had defected before or has done since. As for me, I only spoke what others were thinking but mostly had not yet dared to do. It is so often thus with the universe. A hundred people think something, and as the pressure of the thought grows, one of them, standing at a convenient moment in space and time, suddenly utters it. Months later, years maybe, it is as if everyone had the same idea at once, and no one can remember that first voice—except the one who stood up and said it and then afterward thinks, 'What made me do that?' for the next two hundred years."
"Well," Gabriel said, "anyway, I'll try not to do that again."
"Seriously, Gabriel," Enda said, "do not push your vision around. It has reasons for where it wants to go."
He got up. Whatever her chai might be like, his was now cold, and he needed a refill. "All right," he said, "but now I see that you do, too."
She glanced at him as she finished her braiding, uncertain what he meant.
" 'We were trapped, and you helped us find a way out,' " Gabriel said quietly, his back to her: " 'We were alone and hungry, and you fed us and bore us company.'" He reached up for the sugar bowl.
Enda chuckled and said, "Yes, well, an old sentiment, much quoted, though sometimes the universe will quote you back at yourself with particular force. So what if it did, one day when I was on Phorcys and heard a story of a young Concord Marine who, it seemed, had a great deal more hidden in his depths? What if it did occur to me that such 'quotations' are never without purpose and that sometimes timing is crucial? It became obvious to me that I had been purposely put in your path to be of help to you. Do not ask me how. I am as hazy on the details as anyone else might be, but if one who claims to listen to the universe as a lifeguide starts to do so only on certain occasions or when it is convenient, things will not turn out well." She drank her chai. "If I have enjoyed myself since, well, you cannot blame me for that. Only the powers of evil claim that doing good is boring."
"Gabriel," Helm's voice suddenly came over comms, "are you guys ready yet? We're hot to trot over here. The doctor wants to go sightseeing."
Gabriel grinned and said, "Ten minutes." He started finishing his chai. Enda finished her braiding and slipped into the corridor, making for her room.
"Enda." Gabriel said. She looked at him. "Even if you did have fun, thanks anyway."
She bowed to him, a deeper bow than he had ever seen her use to anyone, and then she went off to get dressed.
About half an hour later they were in the air, heading in the general direction of Ohmel's north pole. They had left a sketchy flight plan with the port authorities, because no matter how secret you're trying to be, it's never wise to head off into mostly unknown territory without leaving at least the news that you've gone. Helm would have preferred to keep it all secret, but Gabriel refused. All of VoidCorp could have been hot on his trail, and he still would have insisted on what Helm jovially started referring to as "the suicide note." He did, however, let the port authorities think that the party was only going up to see the known, secured site.
"As for that," Helm had said, "why do we have to wander all over the landscape in atmosphere? I could be up in orbit until you find what you need, and then come down again."
"Helm, I can't get a decent fix from up high. I need to be down low for any kind of precision."
"You should get a better stone. Somebody stuck you with the monkey model."
Gabriel could think of no immediate response to this, and Helm had gone off chuckling.
Now that they were actually in the air, Gabriel was paying less attention to Helm's commentary on the landscape and more to the stone. Since they took to the air it had been warming steadily in his hands, and Gabriel was leaving the actual piloting to Enda at the moment. The warmth was not unbearable, but the stone was beginning to generate a peculiar buzz, a vibration that Gabriel was not entirely sure wasn't in his own mind or muscles. He would have liked to check this with Enda, but on no account would she touch the stone, and she seemed at the moment not even to like to look at it.
As they headed north over the red-brown terrain, Gabriel's mind kept harking back to last night's experience—he wasn't entirely sure it was wise to call these things "dreams"—and thinking there was more to Enda's departure from her people than merely the old disagreement between Wanderers and Builders. Maybe, as she had said, she had merely articulated something that many fraal had been feeling, yet in her case, as Gabriel remembered it from her "tone of mind" in the dream, something else had been going on inside her as well. She had a sense of something wrong with the way her people had been conducting their lives, a fatal flaw slowly expressing itself. Enda still had no idea what that flaw might be, though plainly the search for it had driven her for the first part of her life. Now Gabriel thought Enda suspected that the force or presence that had looked into her soul through the edanwe child had seen something of what she felt was wrong and could not understand. If it understood, it was not revealing what it knew.
She might be right about the connection between us, Gabriel thought, and it having something to do with our judgment on Danwell, but I really don't want to push her on this.
He glanced over at her. Enda was looking through the side viewport as she flew, gazing down at the ground. "The very beginnings of summer," she said to Gabriel. "Can you see it? Just the faintest haze of
violet and blue over things—lichens and the simplest of the plants waking up. In a month this place will be ablaze with color as everything awakens and makes use of the water and the air while they are available." She glanced at him. "How is our direction?"
"We're all right," said Gabriel. "North still."
They went on northward in formation with Longshot and Lalique. Only twice did they pass any settlements. This came as no surprise, for Ohmel was still very sparsely settled—maybe forty thousand people on the whole planet, and fifteen thousand of those were in Charlotte. The rest were divided among thirty or forty hamlets, villages, or towns, little domed communities all of them, for there was no use building a place to live that was unliveable for half the year. In fall and winter when the atmosphere froze and became snow, and water was just another kind of stone, all human and other life retreated into the domes and tended the underground hydroponics farms and greenhouses that kept everyone alive.
The secured site was at a place called Boxcar, which was about thirty degrees south of Ohmel's arctic circle. It was cold enough that they would all probably add a layer or two under their coats, and one of those layers would be armor. While Boxcar had long since been scoured by the archaeologists and declared empty of the dangers associated with the Glassmakers or any of the other Precursor races, Gabriel preferred to be cautious.
If things went well, shortly after that they would come to the unsecured site, and that would be another matter entirely. The Ohmel government, insofar as it paid attention to such matters, did not encourage citizens or visitors to explore unsecured sites. It made sure that such access was expensive and difficult for anyone who didn't own a long range ship or other transport that would make access possible. Otherwise, it was assumed that you might do as you pleased, and that the reputation of the sites would help them to police themselves.
There were numerous cases every year, both on Ohmel and on High Mojave, the other best-known home of Glassmaker sites, of explorers going out and not coming back again. Some of these, admittedly, were half-witted tourists who insisted on making their way out to the sites, and their failure to return was variously considered by the locals as merely the universe "culling the herd." There were plenty of ways to come to grief on Ohmel that did not involve anything unusual: the terrain, the fierce weather—during the cold season, the most volatile gases had a tendency to freeze and condense out of the air, a particularly emphatic kind of snow—and what was left of Ohmel's biosphere could also be deadly enough for the unprepared or incautious. At the same time, there were explorers who went out well-equipped, well-prepared, people expert in their fields, steady, sensible old hands, who also did not come back. About those deaths, the rumors were rampant.
Some of the rumors were plainly ghost stories, products of an information vacuum. Others were possible enough, if unsubstantiated. The Glassmakers had dabbled in the creation of sentient and semisentient life with varying levels of success. Some of their creations, like the werewisp, had been possibly too successful. They had no natural enemies and roamed the empty places in the long nights, looking for energy to drain. Explorers, typically (and necessarily) well supplied with powered equipment to hold off the terrible cold and do their other work, might as well have stood out in the frigid darkness and banged dinner gongs. Then there were other lifeforms, like the arachnons, less scattershot in their tactics but far more deadly and much more specifically associated with the old Glassmaker sites. They were guardians, some said. Others said they were simply engineered creatures that had lost their programming. In either case, they could be deadly. Numerous people had gone out to study them and had sent no data back nor come back themselves.
Gabriel had no desire to become one of these. Even though Boxcar was supposed to be safe, he would be wearing his armor, and everyone else would too.
"How close are we?" he asked Helm over comms.
"About fifty kilometers," Helm said. "Ten minutes at this speed."
Gabriel sat with the stone in his hands and felt the "buzzing" in it increase. It was in a tiny way like the experience of hearing all those fraal minds had been in the dream, but somehow this was more like hearing a recording of the minds. A sense of immediacy was missing, though the other content and "meaning" was still there. Now if only I could figure out exactly what the content meant.
"Coming up on it now," Helm said after a few minutes.
Enda, piloting, swooped down lower and dropped much of her speed. The others came in on either side, matching Enda's reduced acceleration. They all looked down.
There was very little there. Gabriel had read some time back, while investigating Glassmaker matters, that the ruins on Ohmel had suffered badly and were not nearly as spectacular as those on High Mojave. "Ruins" was a poor word for the buildings left on High Mojave. Delicate spires and domes of a glasslike material, they were so tough that nothing could break them. Even a subsidence of land under one of the more spectacular sites had done nothing but spill the glittering minarets on the ground below the cliff where they had stood, and now they lay there undamaged but drastically relocated.
Here, though, little or none of the original glasswork remained above ground. There was apparently some of it under the surface still, but the archaeologists, having found nothing remarkable enough to get their patron organizations to fund them any further, had left it all mostly buried. As their ships circled the site in the advancing morning, Gabriel could just make out the occasional buried glint of "glass," low shapes of opaque white or pale translucent green in the sun.
Enda shook her head, looking down on the site as she brought the ship around. "Think of how old that is," she said. "How many millions of years."
"Lots," Gabriel said and concentrated on the stone. He was rather shocked to find that the buzzing was dying off slightly.
"Where do you want us to land, Gabe?" Helm said. Gabriel thought about that for a moment. "I don't." "What?"
"This isn't it," Gabriel said, clenching the stone in one fist and trying to maximize the contact. "The stone's calming down. Swing north again and see what we get."
They turned north and headed slowly away from the Boxcar ruins. Gabriel closed his eyes.
Stronger, yes. The buzz was increasing. A little more to the left.
"A little farther to the west," Gabriel said.
Enda angled Sunshine a little that way. The "signal" got stronger.
"Whatever it is that the stone's been homing on," Gabriel said, "it's not that. That site's dead." "So we're going unsecured right away?" Helm said. "Joy."
"Oh, come on, Helm," Gabriel said. "You know you love it. Think of all the weapons we can bring along
with us."
"Think how little use they're going to be," Helm muttered, "against arachnons, for example."
"I thought you said you were ready for anything, Helm," said Enda, chuckling softly. "What a bastion of caution and conservatism you become at times like this."
"Mmf," Helm said.
They made their way northward. Gabriel stopped looking at the scenery, which at this point was pretty much red-brown rocks, outcroppings, and canyons. Instead he concentrated on the output he was getting from the stone.
"We're pretty close," he said, with some surprise. "In fact, we're very close." "Query: how very 'very'?" Delde Sota asked. "I almost understood that," said Angela from Lalique.
"Me, too," Gabriel answered. "Delde Sota, I'd say no more than two or three kilometers. Helm, don't overshoot it. Slow down!"
Enda slowed Sunshine still more. "Straight on?" she asked.
Gabriel tried to feel what the stone was trying to show him. "A little more to the west," he said.
"A canyon here, Gabe," Helm said, watching him from the center display.
"Right," Gabriel said. "Drop down a bit."
"Into it?"
"Yeah."
"How far?"
"I'll tell you."
Gabriel cupped the stone in his hands and tried to shut everything else out. Inside his mind he could just faintly see a kind of glow, like the glow from the stone, growing slowly stronger.
"Down more," Gabriel said as he watched that faint pearly light. It was hard to keep track of exactly what it was doing. The effect was like the light inside your own eyelids when you've been looking at the sun—very vague and diffuse.
"This is quite a deep canyon, Gabriel," Enda said. "I am not sure where we will find a place to land, except at the bottom."
"That might have to be it," Gabriel muttered. "Farther down."
Down the three ships dropped on their system drives, very gently, nearly hovering. Gabriel felt the glow growing stronger and then suddenly paling off again. "No," he said. "Stop and back up a little."
Enda coaxed the ship up again. Gabriel was more aware of this by the slight inroads he now had into her mind than by any feeling of the ship's movement. "Right here," he said.
"Gabe," said Helm's voice, "that's pretty nearly a sheer cliff face. A few little skinny ledges on it are about wide enough to take one of you. I might have trouble, and nowhere to land close by but a ledge about ten meters up. I wouldn't be sanguine about the ships' ability to stay there for long without the whole thing falling out from under them."
Gabriel opened his eyes and looked at the cliff face. It was striated beautifully in cream, brown, and red. It was very weathered, and with very few exceptions—mostly the little ledges Helm had mentioned—it was as vertical as anyone could hope. There was no sign of anything in the neighborhood even remotely glassy. There were, however, some deep cracks, wide enough for even Grawl to get through.
"The whole thing must be buried," Gabriel said. "Helm, tell me you have a grav belt or two in the Awful Room."
"I had one once, but I never used the damned thing. Sold it off. Now I wish I hadn't!" "Too late. I guess we'll have to climb. What about ledges underneath us?" "There's a couple," Helm said. He paused a moment then said, "Follow me."
About another twenty meters down were two separate parts of a big outcropping with room enough for the three ships. "I wouldn't go out late at night to take a leak," Helm said as he landed, and the others came down on either side of him.
Gabriel could see his point. Longshot was sitting right by the edge of the outcropping, and there was a thirty-meter drop directly beside her.
"Surely if you did that," Grawl said, "it would freeze in midair." "For a poet," Helm said, "you can sure be pragmatic sometimes." "What's the temperature now?" Gabriel asked.
"About three degrees C," replied Helm. "Heat getting trapped down here a little, seems like. It might stay warmer at nights, too."
"Or it might get colder," Angela said. "You'll want to keep an eye on that."
Gabriel looked out the front viewports at the canyon wall. The stone twinged and sizzled in his hand. "This is it," he said. "Let's get out there and look around."
It took perhaps half an hour for everyone else to get kitted out—cold weather gear, breathers, armor, weapons. They met at the edge of the outcropping and looked over the terrain.
It was a very confined, restricted kind of place. The canyon walls seemed almost to lean in over the viewer, a claustrophobic and unsettling effect. Beyond that, there was nothing overtly threatening about the place. Chilly wind whined down the canyon, making it seem more like negative ten C or so. Here and there a pebble tinkled downslope when someone put his foot down incautiously. There was no other sound.
Helm was looking down from the outcropping. "Actually," he said, "this isn't too bad. We climb down there then climb up the far side."
"One of us could always hover and drop the others on one of those little ledges," said Angela.
Helm snorted genially. "Not to run down your piloting, Ange, but you want to try that with that big barge of yours here? In this wind? You're braver than me. Then the one doing the flying gets to stay behind."
"No chance," Angela said hastily.
Gabriel looked up at the cliff on the far side. "It's a little less vertical than it looks," Gabriel said, "and it looks like there's plenty of handholds."
Helm grunted. "Good thing," he said. "Well, I have climbing gear and a couple of harnesses. We can go up two at a time."
"Where exactly are we going?" asked Grawl.
Gabriel was still gazing at the cliff face. "See that big crack there," he said, "where it looks like the strata shifted? That's big enough for us to squeeze through."
"Better hope there's something on the far side," Helm said.
"Oh, there's something there all right," Gabriel said. "If we can only get at it."
Helm went to fetch the climbing gear. These, too, Gabriel realized, had been packed away in the Awful Cabin, and once more he became determined to find time to go through that place from top to bottom and see what else Helm might have stuffed in there.
It took another twenty minutes or so to get the first two, Angela and Enda, into the harnesses. Enda was quickest. "I have used these before," she said as she was buckled into the harness.
Helm looked at her curiously. "Didn't know you went in for climbing."
"I do not," Enda replied, "but in the Wanderers' cities, there is so much to be serviced, and not all of it can be handled by machines."
Gabriel laughed inwardly at the image of Enda as a window washer, but he remembered that she had worked her way up through a lot of jobs to city manager. Maybe it's like hotel work. They say the best way to become a manager is to learn all the jobs from the bottom up.
"All right," Helm said. "You're on belay now. Down you go."
Down the two of them went, alternately clinging to handholds and footholds or spinning like spiders briefly when no holds were available. At the bottom, Enda slipped out of the harness and called up to Helm, "It will not be hard coming up. The cliff does not shelve significantly, and there is plenty of support for an upward climb."
"Right," Helm said. He and Grawl started pulling the harnesses up, and Grawl finished making fast to Lalique's skids the rope that would remain in place for access when they climbed back up again. Helm came over to check the knots, while Gabriel and Grawl harnessed themselves.
"Looking thoughtful," Gabriel said to Grawl as she gazed across the way at the cavern wall.
"I am making notes," Grawl said. "This will make a fine song some day."
"Assuming we find something."
"We have already found something," Grawl said, "or so you say." Gabriel nodded. "That's not it, though."
Grawl glanced at him, an odd expression. "Your meaning is dark to me."
He tried not to smile, mostly because he could feel the tension in her gut and recognized it. He had it, too. "You don't like heights either."
Grawl bared her fangs. then let the look relax into a smile. Gabriel would not have thought it was possible for a weren to look sheepish.
"I did not care to mention," she said. "It makes poor reading in the tales later."
"I wouldn't have mentioned it either," Gabriel said, "but if I throw up on the way down, I just wanted you to know that it's nothing personal."
"Spew," Grawl said, "is normally about as personal as it is possible to get. Nonetheless, warrior, I take your meaning."
Together they went on belay and made their way down. Gabriel was much relieved by knowing Helm and Delde Sota were up there keeping an eye on the ropes, but the tension remained, and he concentrated on controlling his stomach as he descended. It was no more than a minute or so before he was on the rocks and sand and gravel at the bottom of the canyon, shrugging out of the harness and feeling profound relief. Climbing would not be as bad as descending, but he still wished he could do without it entirely. The thought of standing on that narrow ledge across the way was making his stomach flipflop again.
While he was waiting for Helm and Delde Sota to come down, Gabriel took out the stone and walked a little way up the canyon, trying to see if he could find any other indication of a way in. In his hand, even through gloves, he could feel the stone buzzing and stinging in a generalized kind of way.
The going was difficult, strewn with boulders and jagged rocks of every kind, some rounded as if water had passed there, and some sharp, the cracked remnants of rockfall. Gabriel picked his footing carefully, tried to keep his attention on the stone—
It stung him. At the same moment he tripped and whacked his shin against the sharp edge of a fallen shelf of stone in front of him.
"Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow," Gabriel said, in too much pain for the moment to even swear properly. When he had recovered a little, he looked at the stone in his hand. It was pulsing softly, the light hard to see in the bright day here. He looked around, trying to make out what it might have been reacting to.
Off to his right on the far side of the canyon, a glint of light reflected off something polished. Not stone.
Glass?
"Gabriel," Helm shouted at him, the sound thin in the frigid air, "come on!" "No," he yelled back, "over here!"
Gabriel made his way over to the bright spot through the boulder-tumble and the cracked rocks, and finally came up to it. It was about three meters above the lowest level of the canyon and barely visible, just a ragged, partially obscured patch of glassy stuff about a meter across, more or less the shape of an
oval laid on its side and pale green in color. It was perfectly smooth and unscratched, like a mirror.
The others came along. Helm, fully armored and looking like an aggressive mobile gun rack, brought up the rear. The big gun in his hands was a Ric ZI stutter cannon, and Gabriel felt much better and also started wondering where he had been keeping that one.
"Look at this," Gabriel said.
They gathered around the patch of glass. Those tall enough to reach it touched it. "That's something," Helm muttered, "but how did that get inside all this?"
Delde Sota looked around her. "Analysis: all sedimentary," she said. "Original stone. Not later accretion."
"You mean," Angela said, "that someone built this facility here, and then the seas rose and deposited all this silt here, and the silt settled out into these layers and turned to stone, and then the sea dried up, and all this got carved away over time.?"
"Open-ended assessment: fifty or sixty million years total, give or take a million," Delde Sota replied.
They all were quiet for a moment or so, thinking about that. "Well," Angela said at last, "can we get in through this?"
"No telling," Gabriel said. "This might be just a wall. I remember them having to shock the glass at High Mojave, trying to make it flow or create an opening. Sometimes it took them months to find the way in."
He stood up on a nearby boulder, took the stone in his hand, and laid it against the glass.
Nothing.
"Well, come on," he said irritably. Nothing happened.
Gabriel closed his eyes, concentrated on the stone, thinking opening thoughts as hard as he could. He opened his eyes again. Nothing whatsoever had happened.
"Perhaps electricity would work better," Enda said, "since that was what they were using at High Mojave.?"
"Or maybe." Helm said. He started to sling the stutter rifle over his shoulder and go for the other piece of heavy armament he was carrying.
"'No!" Gabriel shouted. The forcefulness of the objection surprised even him. Is the stone starting to get into the act now? he wondered.
"No," Gabriel said, as the others all looked at him. "I don't think that's it. Come on," he said, "let's look up and down the canyon at this level. We may find another piece that is an access."
"One we do not have to climb to," Grawl said enthusiastically.
They spent the rest of the morning and all that afternoon walking up and down the canyon, trying to find more glass or an access to the northern cliff, but there was none. Gabriel spent the second half of the
afternoon simply sitting with the stone, trying to coax some more useful response out of it, but he had no luck. The canyon had fallen entirely into shadow when he finally looked up at Helm and Enda, who were coming back up the canyon toward him.
"Getting kind of late, Gabe," Helm said, looking around him. Above the canyon, twilight was beginning to fall, and the darkness would follow fast. Helm always wore a distrustful look at times like this, but with the evening drawing on, that look was now more distrustful than usual.
"Yeah," Gabriel said and looked down at the stone. "This thing isn't helping me much at the moment. Maybe we should call it a night."
Helm looked around. "I'll check the instrumentation when I go back in," he said, "but I don't think anything alive or mechanical has come near us all day, and I don't think anything's going to. Enda?"
She paused a moment then shrugged. "We may as well stay here," she said, "as leave and have to go through this whole operation again tomorrow. Additionally, I would dislike to attract too much attention to our goings and comings."
"Right," Helm said. "We can leave the cliff for tomorrow. Come on, folks, let's get ourselves back up to the ships and have some dinner."
Half an hour later, it was dark, and they were all inside Lalique, having dinner there—nothing fancy, just hot-packs shoved into the little galley oven. Everyone's appetites were sharp. Whether it was the cold, the exercise or the excitement that was responsible, they all ate twice what they normally would have, so that dinner took a good while. Some of them got sleepy afterward, out of all proportion to the exertion.
"Gonna go back and have my nap now," Helm said. "I'll take the late watch. Doctor?"
"Status: not weary at the moment," Delde Sota said. "Will stand this watch until 0200?"
"0300 would do better," Helm said. "Gabe, leave your comms on when you go back." He headed off, taking his various guns, and Delde Sota went after him.
"I will stand watch over on our side of things," Enda said. "There is no sleep in me tonight, I am afraid."
Gabriel nodded, for he knew why. He was all too able to hear how Enda heard the stone's buzzing as a tiny endless nagging noise, annoying like some little singing night insect singing a note specifically designed to drive you and no one else crazy.
He went back to Lalique s galley and got himself another cup of chai, not wanting anything stronger tonight. Gabriel wanted all his senses undulled, though he wasn't sure what he hoped would happen.
Angela was cleaning up the dining area when he got back. "This is so frustrating," Gabriel said, sitting down on one of the sofas. "The whole thing was supposed to just pop open and spill its guts when I arrived."
She laughed at that, taking the last of the plates and bowls away. "Might be you have to go up that cliff, whether you want to or not," she said from the galley.
"Grawl won't thank you for that assessment."
"Probably she won't," Angela said. She came back in and sat down on the lounger that was cattycorner to Gabriel's. She looked at the wall display, which was showing a view of the canyon, centered on the "glass spot," and augmented for IR and movement. Nothing was happening out there. Starlight shone.
The wind blew. Nothing more.
Angela looked at the uneventful darkness and blew out an annoyed breath.
"You ought to get some sleep," Gabriel said.
"Hah," Angela said, "but so should you, if it comes to that."
"No chance," Gabriel said. "Not in this situation."
"Me either," said Angela. "It's like getting shot at."
"Now when have you ever been shot at?" he said.
"Oh, it's happened once or twice," Angela said. "Mostly I try to avoid it. It has unfortunate side effects, like causing you to develop big holes in your body."
Gabriel's mind, however, was on another unfortunate side effect that males sometimes experienced upon being shot at, and from which he was also suffering at the moment. Not that anyone had shot at him, but the excitement of being here on the planet in potentially dangerous circumstances was now producing the same result. A good meal and a slight rest, especially in the presence of Angela, were all making it worse rather than better. He was presently thinking hard about how he was going to stand up without one particular embarrassing symptom of the side effect showing. The singlesuit tended to rather unfortunately emphasize the presence of the symptom. Now if I can just turn a little this way, Gabriel thought, and started to get up.
Then he stopped himself. Why am I doing this? I don't want to get up. I know perfectly well what I want, except I must be nuts, and she'll kill me if I ask her.
"Something on your mind?" Angela asked.
"Uh—" Gabriel swallowed. "Now that you mention—"
"Yes," Angela said.
"Huh?"
"Me, too," Angela said with a knowing smile. He looked at her.
"It affects me like that, too," she said, enunciating clearly, as if for someone who was hard of thinking. "For cripes sake," she added, "just this once. could it hurt?"
Put that way, Gabriel thought, she may have a point.
"Well?" she said softly.
He widened his eyes a little. She nodded once, waiting.
Gabriel very slowly pulled her close and kissed her very slowly. It was surprisingly easy. After a moment, he said so.
Angela looked at him in heavy-lidded amusement. "Did you think it was going to be hard?" "I hope it is," Gabriel said.
Angela smacked him in the head, not very emphatically.
"I'm sorry," Gabriel said. "Earlier it would never have occurred to me. In fact, exactly the opposite."
He had an idea that he was possibly making an error. He remembered Hal, a long time ago now, saying, "Never admit to any woman that you would never have considered sleeping with her. This is a sure way to have someone wind up on charges for assault—her, not you. No jury in the military would convict either."
But Angela was decidedly un-military.
"Which just goes to show you," Angela said, reaching out, "that brains, too, can grow suddenly and without > warning."
She turned out the light.
Some hours later, Gabriel slipped quietly back into Sunshine. His feelings were more than complex at the moment, especially since he knew that Enda would be sitting up keeping watch.
She simply looked at him from the pilot's couch and said, "Did you want some chai? I made an extra supply. In the pot."
He went back to get some. Normally he wouldn't have bothered this late at night, but he much doubted at the moment that mere chai would be able to do anything to keep him awake once he lay down again.
With his mug, he leaned over the free pilot's couch and looked out the front ports at the cliff on the other side of the canyon, into which a little starlight filtered. "If they wanted to hide that," Gabriel said, "I'd guess it worked."
Enda nodded. "Is everyone all right over there?" she said.
"More than all right," Gabriel said idly.
Enda gave him a sidelong look. "Grawl?"
"She was on watch when I left."
She nodded again and said, "A pleasant night."
"Yes, it was," Gabriel said and drank his chai.
"Gabriel."
He looked at her.
Enda was wearing one of those small demure smiles in which fraal specialize. "Perhaps you would do me a favor."
"Mmm?"
"I realize that you probably took this particular action out of consideration for me, but the next time by your favor. leave the stone here."
Gabriel stared at her. and then turned, very quickly, very quietly, and went to bed.
Grinning.
Chapter Twelve
It was more of a doze than a sleep, and much later he had trouble remembering the details, but the dream itself was straightforward enough.
Eyes were looking at him.
At first this unnerved him, then Gabriel decided he had nothing to lose and looked back. I have a right to be here, he cried into the echoing darkness. I'm the one who was sent. Give me what I came for!
What would that be?
What exactly am I here for? He considered for a moment, then said, My people are in trouble. There are forces coming from outside that mean to wipe us out. It's wrong to let that happen!
A long silence, while the presence over there in the darkness considered that. It was not the one with which Gabriel had been communicating before, but it was possibly related to it somehow, but then probably all these Precursor races knew each other, he thought. I mean, a hundred million years ago, who else would they have had to talk to but each other?
He had a clear sense that this conversation was passing through some kind of a translator, that whatever was on the other side was stranger than he could possibly imagine, yet at the same time, he was related to it somehow, for the stone had been changing him. It, too, had been learning to perform this translation by being in his company for so long. Changing.
It suddenly occurred to Gabriel to be sorry for the stone. He had been complaining about the changes in him that it had been causing. Now the idea presented itself, not as a possibility but as a certainty, that it was changing too. A nature as unchanging as, well, as stone, was being forced to shift into a new one. For a purpose.
The change of viewpoint so staggered Gabriel that he hardly knew what to do or say for a moment. Finally he just kept quiet.
This has happened before, said whatever was on the other side of the translation. This'? Gabriel asked.
The ones from outside, said the one who had been listening. The Externals. Their presence in this galaxy is nothing new.
Well, that's a relief. Gabriel said. Or I guess it is. So what did you do about them ? We died, said the other. Gabriel swallowed.
I'd like to avoid that if possible, he said after a moment. I mean, in the short term.
It may not be avoidable, said that voice sorrowfully, in any term. Much depends on whether the new enemy is more powerful or wiser than the old one… and whether the new antagonists are capable
of doing better than we did.
Gabriel could see the point of that, but it didn't make him any less tense. He could see—or feel—all those eyes looking at him, a long unblinking regard, made worse by the sense that some of them had no eyelids to blink with anyway. No one had ever had anything but theories about what the Glassmakers or Precursors looked like. It was the merest guesswork that they were human-sized or human-shaped, all based upon the size of some doors that had been found in sites on High Mojave. There was something about those eyes that made Gabriel very uncertain about the theories, no matter how many university qualifications their propounders might possess.
This enemy is powerful enough, Gabriel said into the darkness, remembering the tremendous ships that had come slipping up out of drivespace just off Danwell. Nor did power mean just ships. He thought of the kroath, the terrible strength and savagery of them and of what their existence said about the creatures who willingly created them.
As for the rest of it, Gabriel said, you will have to let us have the technology and see for yourself whether we will do better than you did. We cannot do worse.
You can, said that old voice—or voices. You can fail to die. You can survive to be their slaves, their creatures, without hope of ever being freed. Death would be preferable. At least they cannot reach you there. Should you succeed as we succeeded, there would at least be a chance for those who come after you—as we made one for you .
Then give us what we need to fight! Gabriel said. Our present technology is behind theirs at the moment, and that's where the difference must be made.
Assessment must be completed, said the voice.
All right, Gabriel said. Go ahead. I'll wait.
It has been in progress for some time, said whatever was listening. There was a choral quality to this presence Gabriel started to realize. Not just one voice but many, and an odd sense that some of it was here now and some in some other time. The past? The future? No telling.
Then let's get finished, Gabriel said.
All the eyes looked at him. There was a shifting, a rustling in the darkness.
Shifting, a rumbling through the fabric of things. the low, slow rumble, the sound of shifting stone.
Gabriel's eyes snapped open. All around him, Sunshine was shaking. Over comms from Lalique he heard Angela yell, "My God!"
Gabriel hurled himself out of bed, ran to the front viewports, looked out.
Outside, above the canyon, dawn was beginning. In front of them, he saw the cliff sliding away. As Gabriel watched, he could see the stripes and layers of stone moving, shattering, sloughing away from something underneath them. Surely it was an illusion that the "something underneath" was actually shrugging them off, as a buried creature shrugs away the mud or silt that has settled over it since it came to rest. oh, fifty or sixty million years total, give or take a million.
The whole front of the cliff slipped away, gently and with little fuss, though a great deal of dust went up,
and here and there some flake of stone under pressure snapped off and went flying through the air with great force, pinging into one or another of the ships. Over comms, Helm swore loudly at a deep impact mark left on Longshot's hull, as if the ship had not already had more than enough micrometeorite strikes in its time to take the sheen off the factory finish. When the dust cleared, they were all standing in their ships and staring out at a canyon nearly filled with rubble almost up to the level of the little outcropping on which they were parked. When the light got better, they would be able to walk straight across to what was now a single unbroken wall of gleaming green glass.
"Gabriel, did you trigger something? A time lock?" Angela asked, looking a little unnerved.
"I don't know," Gabriel said. "Somehow I doubt it. Other things may have been involved." The conversation he had just finished, for example.
If it was in fact finished, Gabriel wondered. Somehow, I don't think so.
They waited until the sun was properly risen before suiting up and going outside. It was still shadowed in the canyon and would be until Coulomb got some more height. Slowly and with care, they made their way across the tumble of fallen and shattered rock until they came to the foot of the wall.
The top level of the canyon wall opposite still lay atop the "glass" wall, hinting at a structure that supported it and ran in. The wall itself towered up at least ten meters high in front of them, all perfect, seamless, and while not opaque, still far too thick to see though. Delde Sota ran her hands and her braid over the surface, shaking her head in wonder.
"Mensuration: perfectly flat within tolerance of point zero-zero-zero-zero-zero one millimeters," she said.
Helm, too, was running his hands over the material. "You think they ever built ships out of this?" he said. "They would have been somethin'."
"It's an interesting image," Gabriel said. He stood there with his hands on his hips, looking up at the wall.
"So what now?" Helm said. "You said they shocked their way in on High Mojave."
Gabriel stood there. "I wouldn't like to do that," he said. "There's always the possibility that someone here might get annoyed. Anyway, I've got this. I'm supposed to use it."
He had the stone in his hand. He moved up to the wall and stroked the stone along it.
Nothing.
"This may take a while," Gabriel said. "Maybe you should all sit down and make yourselves comfortable."
They did, and Gabriel for a while simply walked up and down that wall, touching the stone to one spot, then another, seeing what he felt. The stone showed nothing at all visually, no glow or pulse. After a while he stopped looking at it and simply walked along with the stone against the wall, his other hand laid against the glass a little ahead of it, eyes closed, trying to see what he could feel. That slight buzz or sting from the stone was still there, a constant low-level sensation like a tremor in the muscles. Slowly, though, Gabriel began to feel a variation. A slight increase in the "buzz" down toward the eastern end of the wall, a slight paling or brightening of a faint glow in his mind.
He followed it down, moving slowly, watching that glow behind his eyelids for any increase. It was a very
subtle, faint effect, liable to be lost right away if he opened his eyes for any reason. It was maddening in its way. The stone had been shouting at him all this while, and now he was required to hear it whisper.
Gabriel grinned suddenly at that, realizing what was going on. Testing. he had been being tested for a long while now, and this was just another test.
He leaned against the glass and did his best to let his mind go empty and dark. This was not normally the kind of thing a young man Gabriel's age was good at, but hours in drivespace, sitting for days in the silence of a ship where the sound of the drives tended to fade into nothing, taught him more than he needed to know about the art of letting his mind unfocus, of letting time pass unhindered. The outside noises ceased to matter. The wind faded away, and the others' conversation faded with it. Darkness, silence, as if the inside of the mind was featureless as drivespace.
. nothing.
. nothing.
. and a little spear or curious pinprick of light, of energy looking curiously at him from the wall, from very close by.
Without opening his eyes, Gabriel reached out and put the stone directly on it. Everything flowed.
"Holy Thor on a pogo stick," Helm whispered.
Gabriel opened his eyes. All around him the glass was moving, drawing away from him, not as if it was afraid, but almost with a flourish, as if it had been waiting for the chance to do this and had only been waiting for the right kind of invitation. Helm, Angela, Grawl, and Delde Sota came slowly closer. Enda hesitated.
"It's all right," Gabriel said, peering into the darkness behind the glass. There was a large space leading into the body of the cliff, all faced and floored with the same kind of glass, all glowing faintly.
He stepped in, pausing only to look at the edge of the doorway that had opened for them. Surprised, he reached out to touch it. "This can't be more than a centimeter thick," he said, yet leaning back to look at it the stuff from outside again, he could not see through. The optical effect was as if the glass was several meters thick.
"Come on," Gabriel said.
They all went in, Enda last, looking around with curiosity. The space in which they found themselves was perhaps a hundred meters by a hundred, all smooth glass except toward the far side of it, the side leading into the cliff. There a meter-high tangle of delicate rods and threads of glass or metal lay scattered all across the floor and piled against the wall.
Gabriel glanced at it, then at Helm. "Razor filament?"
"Yup," Helm said as he unslung the stutter cannon again, clicking off the safety.
Angela and Grawl glanced at each other then unshipped their weapons as well. Gabriel pulled out his mass pistol—a Nova 6 that Helm had given him—and transferred the stone to his left hand. If there was razor filament here, then there were arachnons here as well. or had been. Gabriel was not willing to take the chance that they were gone.
Slowly they made their way forward, Gabriel taking point and disliking it intensely but not having much choice. Helm and Delde Sota were behind him, Grawl and Enda and Angela behind them. A soft sound as they walked made Gabriel pause and turn to see the outer wall quietly sealing itself behind them. The others glanced at this too.
"I do not much like that," Enda said. "The glass is more like steel when it comes to trying to shoot your way out of it. Should we become trapped here."
Gabriel shook his head. "It wouldn't be accidental, I think," he said. "We're either going to get out of here with what we came for, or I don't think we're going to get out at all."
Delde Sota gave him a look. Her braid peeked around from behind her back and began knotting itself into intricate designs. "Opinion: game disturbingly zero-sum," she said.
"That may be," Gabriel said, "but I have a feeling it's the only game in town."
They made their way on toward the razor filament. "Why pile it up against the wall?" Helm said.
"Unless there's a passage behind it," Angela said.
"Or unless there's not," Gabriel said. He paused and looked at it. The stuff would slice to ribbons anyone who tried to force their way through. They could shoot it up, but the flying fragments would probably do them as much damage as a flechette pistol. He put the stone in his pocket for a moment, pulled off his glove with his teeth, pushed it into his breast pocket, and came out with the stone again. He went over to the wall on the left side, and cupping the stone, laid his hand against it.
"Nothing here," he said after a moment. He then crossed over to the wall on the right, reached up, and laid the stone against it.
A tiny sense of movement in the wall, molecules shivering together a little farther down. "Here," Gabriel said and put the stone against that spot.
The glass flowed away from him, revealing a long corridor, glowing slightly, which led around the large hall they were in and onward into the cliff.
"What was that?" Helm said, glancing back at the razor filaments. "A DO NOT DISTURB sign?" "BEWARE THE CROG more likely," Angela said. "Could be either," Gabriel said. "Well, shall we?"
He led them inward, not hurrying. Soon that corridor dead-ended. Gabriel stood before it, briefly confused. then, on a hunch, he reached forward. The dead end drew aside as the outer wall had done, leaving a space exactly ten centimeters taller than he was and twenty centimeters wider.
"Thank you," he said and stepped through. Helm came through behind him—but not before the door had contracted itself to a lower height and a broader width.
"Uh-huh," Gabriel said softly, continuing forward and starting to think with mild derision about all the theories about the shapes of the Precursors, theories based on the shapes of their doors. When a door could flow like water, who knew what shape its builder would normally be? Who knew whether the shape the door held as you approached was not one it had assumed from looking at you and working out what you needed?
He put the thought aside for the moment as he walked. The corridor they were in was shortly joined by others, some winding into it from the sides, some seeming to come from inside the cliff, and all sloping gently downward. Gabriel paused at the first large junction and looked down the three other corridors joining it. They were all of the same smooth green glass, all of hemispherical cross-section, some of them quite low, some taller. Gabriel gestured at one of the lower ones with his hand and saw it draw away and grow taller. All down the length of the corridor its roof stretched upward, and its cross-section narrowed slightly.
"I still want to know where those arachnons are," Helm said softly.
"Maybe down one of those," Gabriel said, "if they were the last to use it half an hour ago—" "Or half a million years," Angela said. "No telling."
"Attention," Delde Sota said, gesturing down one of the right-hand corridors with her braid. "More filament."
It was finer than the last batch, so much so that it was hard to see, strung across the whole breadth of the corridor. Delde Sota advanced slowly, the corridor reshaping itself to her height, and the sticky filament stretched effortlessly with the movement of the clear green-tinged glass.
"Could be unfortunate to run into this at speed," Delde Sota said. "Nearly as much so as the razor filament."
Gabriel nodded and said, "I wish there was a way to tell how old this stuff is." But there was none, at least not that he knew.
He turned back to the main junction and closed his eyes briefly, consulting the stone for some kind of advice on which way to turn. Where the most power is, he thought, the main part of the facility. the most important part.
Assuming the two had anything to do with one another. The stone gave him an indication to his left and down.
"All right," he said softly. "Delde Sota, my eyes aren't as good as yours in this light. Maybe you'd come walk behind me and look over my shoulder so I don't run into any of those things all of a sudden."
He went forward with Delde Sota behind him and followed the stone's hints inward and downward. Once or twice he stopped and consulted the stone at places where corridors joined, and it nudged him left or right. Gabriel went the way it indicated, listening hard as he went, but he heard nothing but the others' footsteps behind him, the occasional chirp or ping of a weapon announcing its load status or charge level, a mutter from Angela, a growl from Grawl. Sometimes he could hear Enda's mind much more plainly than usual, as if the walls reflected her thoughts and concentrated them like sound. She was fascinated but cautious, and always nibbling at the edge of her consciousness was the constant awareness of the faintly malign regard of the stone, watching her.
Malign? I need to have a talk with this thing, Gabriel thought as he consulted it one more time and was told to turn a corner into another corridor. Gabriel did and then stopped immediately.
"Uh-oh," he said. "More razor filament." The corridor was completely blocked with it and did not stretch up and out when Gabriel entered. He eyed the stuff from a meter away.
Delde Sota's braid snaked past him and poked delicately at the blockage, its thinnest strands weaving themselves gingerly among the outermost filaments for a moment. "Assessment: strong filament," she said. "Hard to judge thickness. Helm?"
"My pleasure," he said, stepping forward as Delde Sota backed out of the tunnel, followed by Gabriel.
A second later the roar of the stutter cannon filled everything. It went on for what seemed like ages, and Gabriel was half-deaf when Helm finally lowered the gun and peered into the tunnel.
"Tough, that," he said, and let loose with another twenty-second burst of mobile thunder.
After that he straightened up and said, "Clear."
Gabriel shook his head at the thought of anything that could withstand a stutter cannon at that range for that length of time, and he went carefully back into the tunnel again—for it stayed tunnel-like, declining to stretch itself as the earlier corridors had done.
Bent half over, down Gabriel went with the others following him in varying degrees of discomfort. Helm probably had the least trouble, followed by Enda, who was more or less of a height with him. Down at the far end of the tunnel, Gabriel could see a difference in the light. It was brighter there. He came down to the end and put his head out.
"Great gods," he whispered.
Slowly he stepped into the great echoing open space that lay at this end of the tunnel. It was as if the builders of this place had set out to make a tribute to some great natural cave, but with less accidental formation and more grace. Formations of every kind hung from the ceiling and grew up from the glassy floor.
"What a wonder the world is," Enda breathed as she came out to stand near Gabriel.
He had to agree with her. This was nothing like the straightforward geometrical precision of the facility on Danwell—so little like it that Gabriel started wondering if the same species had created both these places. At this end of time, judging from just the evidence, there was no way to tell, but these people, whoever they had been, were most definitely artists. This might be a weapons depot or energy-manufacturing center, but it was also a work of art.
Endless spires and spines of crystal reared up here, acre-broad sheets of reflecting glass as polished as water lay scattered beneath the glittering sky. Glass cascaded down from ceiling and walls in a hundred shapes—curtains, spears, ropes, liquid flows caught as if frozen in the act of splashing, some with drops actually still hanging in midair as if caught by a fast imager. In reality, the drops were held in place by hair-thin threads of glass as strong and hard as steel. There were stalactites and stalagmites of the glass, but not simply dripping straight down. No, nothing so commonplace. They were mock chandeliers, swags, and twisted and braided cables of glass woven through one another, wound around pillars and posts of glass in cream and green and glowing rose. There were streams of cabling on the floor, like frozen serpents, which he looked at and had trouble swearing hadn't just moved. Up high near the shining ceiling, in shadows that dwelled there despite the softly glowing surroundings, there were tiny glints of light, and Gabriel looked up and couldn't swear that they weren't eyes, watching. He found he was having trouble just standing still and being there, for he didn't think he had ever seen a place more beautiful or more terrible. The beauty spoke for itself; the terror was because the makers were all gone.
The same thing will happen to us, Gabriel thought. No matter how successful we may be as a species, sooner or later time comes for us all. Your sun goes nova or dies of old age. Your planet goes cold and
loses its atmosphere. Things run out of steam, give up, kill each other off.
All around him he thought he could hear a faint sound in the air, like chimes, sad notes colluding in a minor key, melancholy and melodious, endlessly resigned. Deep they made the resting place. Subtle they wrought it, strong to bear the years, wise to do their work, but they are gone, all gone. Gone a long time now.
In the middle of the sad song, Gabriel's head turned as he heard the delicate tickle-tickle-tickle sound of little feet running on glass.
Those were eyes, he thought.
The source of the sound came out from behind a pillar of glass and looked at them. Then another one came out, and another. And another, and another.
They stood about a meter high. The bodies had thirteen segments, each one legged in triplicate, the legs staggered at one-hundred-twenty degree intervals so that when they moved they gave the impression that glittering crowns were coming toward you. The central segment had a ring of six glowing eyes and huge mandibles that worked together softly all the time. Slowly they surrounded the group.
Arachnons.
"Gather together and don't do anything sudden," Gabriel said softly. "We haven't damaged anything. Even if they're controlled, they may let us pass."
"If they're not controlled?" Helm asked through clenched teeth.
There was no answer to that. Gabriel shook his head and for the moment just watched the arachnons circling them.
Slowly they began to press in. Helm cocked the stutter cannon. "Don't, if you can help it," Gabriel said. "Don't! Really, Grawl, I mean it!" The weren glared at him, growling. "This is a not a time for misplaced sentiment!" "Whatever it is, it's not misplaced. Just trust me on this!"
They were pushed together as the arachnons pressed in closer. Some of the creatures were already lifting those razory claws, raking at the group as they were pushed closer together still.
"Don't let them hit you," Gabriel said, "especially with the acid, but stay out of their way! It matters."
Then one of them leaped at Gabriel, all its claws outstretched.
Shit! There was nothing to do. Gabriel lifted the pistol, let the creature have it right between the eyes, then threw himself to one side. From behind him, a roar of other shots broke out. There was nothing left when Gabriel scrambled to his feet but a scattering of dry shards and glittering broken bits.
He stared at the remnants then looked down the long corridor reaching into the darkness of the cliff.
"Well, so much for not breaking anything," he said softly. "Now what?"
The other arachnons stood still and watched them. Gabriel clutched the stone, trying to feel about for some hint as to what to do next.
Nothing.
Come on, he said. I don. 't want to hurt you or any of these. I was told to come here. I came. Now what?
A little shuffling movement came from the arachnons. All those eyes were dwelling on Gabriel now. Is it just me, he thought, or is the expression changing?
Two of the arachnons standing between Gabriel and the far end of the cavern drew aside, slowly, leaving a g a p.
"That looks like a hint," Gabriel said.
He stepped forward slowly, watching the arachnons. They watched him, but they made no move to hinder him. "All right," Gabriel said. "Let's go this way."
"I'll just play rear guard," Helm said, looking at the arachnons less than kindly as the others went on behind Gabriel.
They continued through the cavern, the arachnons coming close behind but never nearer than a meter or so. The ambient lighting of the place began to trail off in this part of the cavern, and increasingly Gabriel had to slow down, choosing his path between the glass constructs standing up from the floor. Twilight fell around him until only the upstanding slabs and twisted pillars of glass glowed. and he suddenly caught sight of a dark shadow reflected in one slab of crystalline glass as he passed it. Human once, the figure was now green-hided, armored in glowing-veined armor, clawed, and hunchbacked. Kroath! Kroath here in the darkness—!
Gabriel lifted his pistol, horrified, then caught a motion from another side in another slab of glass. A smaller kroath this time, thin-armed, frail, small, but twisted and terrible. Something about the way the head armor was constructed raised the hair on his neck.
Then Gabriel suddenly knew what he was seeing: that strange image that had occurred to him long ago, of Enda as a kroath. He had rejected it violently then. He did the same now, realizing that this moment was the origin of the image, and that a shattered fragment of it had somehow reflected back into the past, into his mind.
"Cut it out," Gabriel said under his breath, trying to calm his breathing down. "I'm not interested."
But someone was. Suddenly the place was full of reflected images, moments of old fear, old pain. The dripping, glassy cold of the glacier on Epsedra, battle after battle with the little ball-bearing kroath fighters, the VoidCorp cruisers bearing down on them at Danwell, the horror of the tangle inside Major Norrik. Again and again, the terrible flower of fire as the shuttle blew up, taking the ambassador and Gabriel's friends with it.
Stop it! Gabriel cried inside him, clutching the stone as all around him in the crystalline interfaces old dreads and new ones played themselves out. I'm not interested. They're all gone, all over with. These are illusions!
The reflections surged toward him, faces twisting with pain and rage, fire and smoke and energy bolts rising around them, and Gabriel lost his temper. " Stop it!" he yelled.
The stone flared in his hand, not with heat but light. The light pierced right through his hand, too bright to see. The images flamed in the fire of it, impossible radiance filtered through flesh and blood and shattered. A great cry like half the windchimes of a world being murdered went up, and all the light and the terror
went out of the air before him and fell ringing and glittering to the ground in bright shards.
Gabriel stood there in the darkness, shaking with fury and astonishment, and looked around him, completely confused. Pillars and slabs of glass lay everywhere, broken, ruined.
Slowly the others scuffed through the splinters and fragments, gazing around. "Boy," Helm said as he looked around with some satisfaction, "when you chuck your toys out of the pram, you do it proper."
"I'll do it again, too," Gabriel growled. He turned toward the deeper darkness and yelled, "It's me! It's me, for gods' sakes! Will you cut it out?"
The others looked around them, waiting for some response. None came. "Maybe they're just checking," Angela said quietly.
"Maybe they are. Well, they can stop checking!" Gabriel yelled.
The echoes said checking! checking! checking!. and died away. All around them glass and crystal chimed in peculiar harmonies to the words. Enda began to shiver.
Gabriel looked at her with some concern then turned away, for the harmonics he was hearing were beginning to bother him, too. All around him, the crystalline structures of the cavern shivered with sound, partly of his own making, partly rogue harmonies generated by his shout. Slowly the sound died away.
Behind them, the arachnons moved forward, pushing Gabriel and the others forward again.
Around them, to Gabriel's eyes anyway, the light was brighter now. How much of that did they see? he wondered. Must ask later. For the moment he concentrated on walking, while inside his hand the stone pulsed, pulsed stronger. They were going the right way. Up ahead was what he had come to see.
The cavern narrowed into a glassy thoroughfare about ten meters wide then suddenly widened out again. The light ahead was stronger. As they stepped through, Gabriel saw what it was coming from. He simply stopped and stared in amazement.
The whole place was full of great long glittering filaments of glass, interlaced, spun thin as silk or thick as cable, and all intricately interwoven in what Gabriel knew were patterns, though their symmetries were too subtle for him to grasp. Some of the strands shone with their own light, some with light reflected from the others. The immensity of this cavern dwarfed the last one, and everywhere it was hung with curtains and cables of glass running with light. Here and there, pathways through the great pattern were obvious, but Gabriel was chary of entering any of them. He wanted to be surer of his welcome.
At the same time, he was having to deal with the strange sensation of something inside his head. Well, something different inside my head, Gabriel thought, for there had been enough alien presences and voices and whatnot in him that he was beginning to feel like some kind of tourist attraction. This presence, though, was footing it very delicately among the strands of his thought, picking them up, matching them against each other, trying to make something of the color and the gauge. It seemed friendly. At least, nothing it was doing at the moment was precisely painful. That might be a misdirection, but Gabriel doubted that at the moment. Anything that could have killed him twenty minutes ago but had not would likely not be thinking seriously about it now.
"Uh, hello?" Gabriel said, a little more loudly than he might usually have spoken, like a guest announcing himself in the airlock. "I'm here now! Can we get on to specifics, please, before it gets dark? Really dark? That dark?"
He showed whatever was stepping carefully around in his mind that particular image, the strange one he
had experienced in Charlotte. Falling into the abyss, not just a physical fall but an emotional and ethical and historical one as well. All those things that made life worth living for humans, fraal, weren, t'sa and all the rest of them, lost, gone into the darkness, lost for millennia.
"I understand what we're playing for here," Gabriel said. "Won't you come meet me, so we can talk about it?"
Out from among the shining, woven webwork, something came stepping on five, ten, fifteen legs. It looked at Gabriel with about thirty hot blue eyes.
Its body was an oblate spheroid around which the many legs were spaced, some of them in contact with the ground, some of them held higher for manipulatory uses. The upper limbs worked together busily, doing something delicate that Gabriel could not easily see. The creature wore all those eyes in a cluster atop its head and a belt of them around the waist of the spheroid. All those eyes were blue. The creature looked at Gabriel, inclining its body to help the top eyes get a better view, and spoke to him in his mind in a voice that glittered.
Identification, it said in his mind.
I am a man, Gabriel said replied, concentrating on answering the same way. He was finding this communication hard to bear. He thought from his brief looks inside Enda's mind that he knew what a dispassionate mind was like, a cool assessment of the outer world. Now he saw that he was much mistaken and that he and Enda were, from this creature's standpoint, enough alike to be easily mistakeЧитать дальше