Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

“If it is—” Dian was at the telescope, but I heard the awed words she murmured almost to herself. “A new world ready to welcome us!”

“Maybe.” Waiting uneasily for a turn at the telescope, Arne shook his head. “We haven’t met them yet.”

“Maybe?” Pepe mocked him. “We came to meet them, and I think they’ll have enough to show us. I see bright lines across the ancient delta. Some run all the way to the river. Canals, I imagine. And—”

His voice caught.

“A grid! There on the western edge. A pattern of closer lines. Could be the streets of a city.” He was silent as Earth rolled under us. “Buildings!” His voice lifted suddenly. “It is a city. With the sun shifting, I can make out a tower at the center. A new Alexandria!”

“Try for contact,” Tanya told him. “Ask for permission for us to set down.”

“Down to what?” Arne drowned. “They didn’t ask us here.”

“What’s the risk?” Dian asked him. “What have we got to lose?”

Pepe tried when we came around again.

“Squeals.” Frowning in the headphones, he made a face of wry frustration. “Whistles. Scraps of eerie music. Finally voices, but nothing I could understand.”

“There!” Tanya was at the telescope.

“Out in the edge of the desert, west of the city. A pattern like a wheel.”

He studied it.

“I wonder—” His voice paused and quickened. “An airport! The wheel spokes are runways. And there’s a wide white streak that could be a road into the city. If we knew how to ask—”

“No matter,” she told him. “We’ve no fuel to search much farther. Put us down, but out where we won’t make a problem.”

On the next pass, we glided down. The city roofs raced beneath us. Red tile, yellow tile and blue, aligned along stately avenues. The airport rushed beneath us. We were low above the tall control tower when I felt the heavy thrust of the retrorockets.

We tipped down for a vertical landing. The thundering cushion of fire and steam hid everything till I felt the jolt of landing. The rocket thrust gone, we could breathe again. Tanya opened the cabin door to let us look out.

The steam was gone, though I caught its hot scent. I rubbed the sun dazzle out of my eyes and found clumps of spiny yellow-green desert brush around us. The terminal building towered far off in the east. We stayed aboard, uneasily waiting. At the radio, Pepe got hums and squawks and shouting voices.

“Probably yelling at us.” He twirled his knobs, listened, tried to echo the voices he heard, shook his head again. “Could be English,” he mustered. “Angry English, from the sound of it, but I can’t make anything out.”

We sat there under the desert blaze till the plane got too hot for comfort.

“Will they know?” Arne shrunk back from the door. “Know we brought their forefathers here?”

“If they don’t,” Tanya said, “we’ll find a way to tell them.”

“How?” Sweating from more than the heat, he asked Pepe if we could take off again.

“Not for the Moon,” Pepe said. “Not till we must.”

Tanya and I climbed down to the ground. Spaceman came with us, running out to sniff and growl at something in the brush and slinking back to tremble against my knee. Arne followed a few minutes later, standing in the shade of the plane and staring across the brush at the distant tower. A bright red light began flashing there.

“Flashing to warn us off,” he muttered.

I had brought my videocam, Tanya had me shoot clumps of the thorny brush and then a rock matted over with something like red moss.

“Data on the crimson symbiote reported by the last expedition.” She spoke crisply into my mike. “Apparently surviving now in a mutant Bryophyte—” “Hear that?” Arne cupped his hand to his ear. “Something hooting.”

What I heard was a pulsing mechanical scream. Spaceman growled and cowered closer to my leg till we saw an ungainly vehicle lurching over a hill and rolling toward us on tall wheels, flashing colored lights.

“Now’s our chance,” Tanya said, “to give them the gifts we’ve brought. Show them we mean no harm.”

Clumsy under the heavy gravity we climbed back into the plane and came down with our offerings. Dian carried one of her precious books, the Poems of Emily Dickinson, wrapped in brittle ancient plastic. Arne brought a loudhailer, perhaps the same one DeFalco had used to warn the mob away from the escape craft. Pepe stayed in the cockpit.

“We come from the Moon.” Arne pushed ahead of us to meet the vehicle, bawling through his hailer. “We come in peace. We come with gifts.”

The vehicle had no windows, no operator we could see. Spaceman ran barking to meet it. Arne dropped the bullhorn and stood in front of it, waving his arms. Hooting louder, it almost ran over us before it swerved and rolled on around us to butt against the plane. Heavy metal arms reached out to grab and tip it. Pepe scrambled out as it was lifted off the ground. The hooting stopped, and the machine hauled it away, while Spaceman whimpered and huddled against my feet.

“Robotic, I guess.” Pepe stared after it, scratching his head. “Sent out to salvage the wreck.”

Baffled and anxious, we stood there sweating. Flying insects buzzed around us. Some of them stung. Tanya had me get a closeup of one on my arm. A hot wind blew out of the desert west, sharp with a scent like burned toast. We started walking toward the tower.

“We’re idiots,” Arne muttered at Tanya. “We should have stayed in orbit.”

She made no answer.

We plodded on, battling the gravity and swatting at insects, till we came over a rocky rise and saw the wide white runways spread out ahead, the tower at the hub was still miles away. Parked aircraft scattered the broad triangles between the flight strips. A few stood upright for vertical landing and ascent, like our own craft, but most had wings and landing gear like those I knew from pictures of the past.

We dropped flat when a huge machine with silver wings came roaring overhead, stopped again when a silent vehicle came racing to meet us. Arne lifted his bullhorn and lowered it when Tanya frowned. Brave again, Spaceman growled and bristled till it stopped. Three men in white got out, speaking together and staring at him. He stood barking at them till one of them pointed something like an ancient flashlight at him. He whined and crumpled down. They gathered him up and took him away in the van.

“Why the dog?” Arne scowled in bafflement. “With no attention to us?”

“Dogs are extinct,” Tanya said.

“Hey!” A startled cry from Pepe. “We’re moving!”

The parked aircraft beside the strip were gliding away from us. Flowing without ripples, without a sound, with no mechanism visible, the slick white pavement was carrying us toward the terminal building. Pepe bent to feel it with his fingers, dropped to put his ear against it.

“A thousand years of progress since we came to fight the bugs!” He stood up and shrugged at Tanya. “Old DeFalco would be happy.”

Scores of people were leaving the parked aircraft to ride the crawling pavement. Men in pants and skirt-like kilts. Women in shorts and trailing gowns. Children in rainbow colors as if on holiday. Although I saw nothing much like our orange-yellow jumpsuits, nobody seemed to notice. People streamed out of the terminal ahead. Most of them, I saw, wore bright little silver balls on bracelets or necklaces.

“Sir?” Arne called to a man near us.

“Can you tell us-”

With a hiss as if for silence, the man frowned and turned away. They all stood very quietly, alone or in couples or little family groups, gazing solemnly ahead.

Pepe jogged my arm as we came around the building and into a magnificent avenue that led toward the heart of the city. I caught my breath and stood gawking at a row of immense statues spaced down the middle of the parkway.