Poul Anderson - A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

Silent … only the breeze moved or murmured.

A time passed beyond time.

“Milostiv Bog,” Lieutenant Vymezal breathed, “is it Heaven we see?”

“Then is Heaven empty?” said another man as low.

Flandry shook himself, wrenched his attention away, sought for his purposefulness in the ponderous homely shapes of their armor, the guns and grenades they bore. “Let’s find out.” His words were harsh and loud in his ears. “This is as large a community as any, and typical insofar as I could judge.” Not that they are alike. Each is a separate song. “ If it’s abandoned, we can assume they all are.”

“Why would the Merseians guard … relics?” Vymezal asked.

“Maybe they don’t.” Flandry addressed his minicom. “Chives, jump aloft at the first trace of anything untoward. Fight at discretion. I think we can maintain radio contact from inside the town. If not, I may ask you to hover. Are you still getting a transmission?”

“No, sir.” That voice came duly small. “It ceased when we landed.”

“Cut me in if you do … Gentlemen, follow me in combat formation. Should I come to grief, remember your duty is to return to the fleet if possible, or to cover our boat’s retreat if necessary. Forward.”

Flandry started off in flat sub-gee bounds. His body felt miraculously light, as light as the shapes which soared before him, and the air diamond clear. Yet behind him purred the gravity motors which helped his weighted troopers along. He reminded himself that they hugged the ground to present a minimal target, that the space they crossed was terrifyingly open, that ultimate purity lies in death. The minutes grew while he covered the pair of kilometers. Half of him stayed cat-alert, half wished Kossara could somehow, safely, have witnessed this wonder.

The foundations took more and more of the sky, until at last he stood beneath their sheer cliff. Azure, the material resisted a kick and an experimental energy bolt with a hardness which had defied epochs. He whirred upward, over an edge, and stood in the city.

A broad street of the same blue stretched before him, flanked by dancing rows of pillars and arabesque friezes on buildings which might have been temples. The farther he scanned, the higher fountained walls, columns, tiers, cupolas, spires; and each step he took gave him a different perspective, so that the whole came alive, intricate, simple, powerful, tranquil, transcendental. But footfalls echoed hollow.

They had gone a kilometer inward when nerves twanged and weapons snapped to aim. “Hold,” Flandry said. The man-sized ovoid that floated from a side lane sprouted tentacles which ended in tools and sensors. The lines and curves of it were beautiful. It passed from sight again on its unnamed errand. “A robot,” Flandry guessed. “Fully automated, a city could last, could function, for—millions of years?” His prosiness felt to him as if he had spat on consecrated earth.

No, damn it! I’m hunting my woman’s murderers.

He trod into a mosaic plaza and saw their forms.

Through an arcade on the far side the tall grave shapes walked, white-robed, heads bare to let crests shine over luminous eyes and lordly brows. They numbered perhaps a score. Some carried what appeared to be books, scrolls, delicate enigmatic objects; some appeared to be in discourse, mind to mind; some went alone in their meditations. When the humans arrived, most heads turned observingly. Then, as if having exhausted what newness was there, the thoughtfulness returned to them and they went on about their business of—wisdom?

“What’ll we do, sir?” Vymezal rasped at Flandry’s ear.

“Talk to them, if they’ll answer,” the Terran said. “Even take them prisoner, if circumstances warrant.”

“Can we? Should we? I came here for revenge, but—God help us, what filthy monkeys we are.”

A premonition trembled in Flandry. “Don’t you mean,” he muttered, “what animals we’re intended to feel like … we and whoever they guide this far?”

He strode quickly across the lovely pattern before him. Under an ogive arch, one stopped, turned, beckoned, and waited. The sight of gun loose in holster and brutal forms at his back did not stir the calm upon that golden face. “Greeting,” lulled in Eriau.

Flandry reached forth a hand. The other slipped easily aside from the uncouth gesture. “I want somebody who can speak for your world,” the man said.

“Any of us can that,” sang the reply. “Call me, if you wish, Liannathan. Have you a name for use?”

“Yes. Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, Imperial Navy of Terra. Your Aycharaych knows me. Is he around?”

Liannathan ignored the question. “Why do you trouble our peace?”

The chills walked faster along Flandry’s spine. “Can’t you read that in my mind?” he asked.

“Sta pakao,” said amazement behind him.

“Hush,” Vymezal warned the man, his own tone stiff with intensity; and there was no mention of screens against telepathy.

“We give you the charity of refraining,” Liannathan smiled.

To and fro went the philosophers behind him.

“I … assume you’re aware … a punitive expedition is on its way,” Flandry said. “My group came to … parley.”

Calm was unshaken. “Think why you are hostile.”

“Aren’t you our enemies?”

“We are enemies to none. We seek, we shape.”

“Let me talk to Aycharaych. I’m certain he’s somewhere on Chereion. He’d have left the Zorian System after word got beamed to him, or he learned from broadcasts, his scheme had failed. Where else would he go?”

Liannathan curved feathery brows upward. “Best you explain yourself, Captain, to yourself if not us.”

Abruptly Flandry snapped off the switch of his mind-screen. “Read the answers,” he challenged.

Liannathan spread graceful hands in gracious signal. “I told you, knowing what darkness you must dwell in, for mercy’s sake we will leave your thoughts alone unless you compel us. Speak.”

Conviction congealed in Flandry, iceberg huge. “No, you speak. What are you on Chereion? What do you tell the Merseians? I already know, or think I know, but tell me.”

The response rang grave: “We are not wholly the last of an ancient race; the others have gone before us. We are those who have not yet reached the Goal; the bitter need of the universe for help still binds us. Our numbers are few, we have no need of numbers. Very near we are to those desires that lie beyond desire, those powers that lie beyond power.” Compassion softened Liannathan’s words. “Terran, we mourn the torment of you and yours. We mourn that you can never feel the final reality, the spirit born out of pain. We have no wish to return you to nothingness. Go in love, before too late.”

Almost, Flandry believed. His sense did not rescue him; his memories did. “Yah!” he shouted. “You phantom, stop haunting!”

He lunged. Liannathan wasn’t there. He crashed a blaster bolt among the mystics. They were gone. He leaped in among the red-tinged shadows of the arcade and peered after light and sound projectors to smash. Everywhere else, enormous, brooded the stillness of the long afternoon. The image of a single Chereionite flashed into sight, in brief white tunic, bearing though not brandishing a sidearm, palm uplifted—care-worn, as if the bones would break out from the skin, yet with life in flesh and great garnet eyes such as had never burned in those apparitions which were passed away. Flandry halted. “Aycharaych!”

He snatched for the switch to turn his mindscreen back on. Aycharaych smiled. “You need not bother, Dominic,” he said in Anglic. “This too is only a hologram.”

“Lieutenant,” Flandry snapped over his shoulder, “dispose your squad against attack.”