Authors: Alan Dean Foster
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Skettle ventured conversationally. “That in this time of instantaneous local and rapid interstellar communication we still find the best way to assure a private conversation is to meet in person?”
Beskodnebwyl gestured agreement mixed with contempt, confident his human counterpart was incompetent to detect the latter. It amused him to so denigrate the unwitting biped. “Electronics are too easily intercepted, and voices imitated. Better to meet face-to-face.”
“Even if you don’t have one.” Skettle smiled thinly. He was wonderfully content, secure in the knowledge that by this same time tomorrow chaos would have paid its long-planned visit to the fair, leaving death, destruction, and ravening hatred for the thranx in its wake. No doubt this odoriferous pest with whom he had agreed to temporarily cooperate felt similarly.
“At least I know my face.” Antennae and truhands waved in Skettle’s direction. “It was thus when I was young, it will be the same tomorrow, and except for a darkening of color will be unchanged when I am old. Whereas yours will shrink and crumple like a fruit left too long in the sun, until it threatens to disintegrate from its own rotting loathsomeness.”
Skettle’s smile slipped away. “I’m certain this happy little tryst is as disagreeable to you as it is to me. Therefore let us do our business so we can both be spared any unnecessary additional contact.” Glancing back the way he had come, he proceeded only when Martine acknowledged his wordless inquiry with a slight wave of one hand.
Clicking a button on his handheld, he projected into the air between himself and a nearby tree a perfect miniature replication of the fairgrounds. There was no one else around to see, the nearest tourists being some distance away from the two alert scouts. As Skettle manipulated the elementary controls on the handheld, portions of the projection lit up accordingly.
“My people will set to work where you see the red highlights.” As his fingers moved, so did the responsive lights. “We’ll be starting fires in the most vulnerable places. Each of my people has undergone extensive training and is dedicated to the cause. In the event of unforeseen interruption or capture, they are prepared to operate independently of one another. Their assignments are overlapping, so that if one or more are intercepted or otherwise detained, any other can strike their missed targets for them.” Using the controls, he rotated the projection and expanded individual sections, finally settling on one bordering the lake.
“I myself will be seeing to the interfair communications facilities, and then sabotaging the relevant backup installation so that my original work will not be detected.” His voice had taken on a biblical tone that was lost on the thranx.
“Deprived of a central command, the fair security personnel will be unable to properly coordinate any reaction with one another. Separated and assailed on all sides by both my people and yours, they will either flee in confusion or be cut down should they attempt to interfere with us. Long before reinforcements can be brought from Aurora, we will have completed our cycle of destruction.” He offered the handheld to Beskodnebwyl, who took it in a truhand. Having paid careful attention to the human’s hand movements, the thranx had no difficulty operating the straightforward device.
“My followers will spread out from this central point.” Another bright light appeared in the air before the conversants. “Each will be carrying a small arsenal of compact high explosives as well as hand weapons with which to ward off the curious security personnel to whom you have already referred. As you have pointed out, by the time adequately armed forces can arrive from the city, my people will also have finished their work. Weapons and any other incriminating evidence will have been abandoned at preselected points, and my clan mates will have rejoined the pitiful surviving remnants of the panicked crowd. Any visiting thranx who happen to observe us at work will be killed. I am not worried about surviving humans identifying us, since it is well known the casual mammalian observer cannot tell individual thranx apart. In any event, the turmoil and disorder should be enough to blind even the most heedful of your kind.”
Skettle was nodding appreciatively. “Once their work is done, my people will embark on a similar course of action, whereupon among the resulting turmoil and confusion we can all go our separate ways, having accomplished far more together than we ever could have hoped to working separately.” Except, he added to himself, I’m going to try and kill you myself while Martine and Botha and Pierrot and the others dismember the rest of your revolting entourage. And if you and your disgusting fellows are entertaining similar thoughts in regard to us, you’ll see why we humans didn’t really need your help at Pitar.
“Then all is in readiness.” Glistening compound eyes stared up at the tall human. “This time tomorrow will see us putting a glorious end to any thoughts of closer human-thranx contact while consigning them forever to the wholly conventional level where they belong.”
Skettle voiced his agreement. He did not offer to shake hands with his many-limbed fellow terrorist, and Beskodnebwyl was careful to keep his delicate antennae as far from the foul-smelling human as possible. As soon as they had rejoined their respective lookouts, the four parted company, striding purposefully out of the pavilion.
Behind, they left only silent, imported trees to bear witness to the appalling plan of mass murder they had agreed upon. Trees, and as unlikely a pair of bystanders as were to be found promenading the fairgrounds.
As Briann helped his companion climb down out of the baobab, the padres considered what they had just seen. Not even Twikanrozex, with his sensitive antennae, could overhear conversation at such a distance. But he had been able to follow the complementing hand gestures of his fellow thranx, while Briann was an accomplished lip reader. Intervening vegetation and the need to avoid the attentions of the two lookouts had conspired to interfere with their observations, but they had seen and read enough to realize that something monstrous had been planned for the following day.
“It is so sad.” Twikanrozex’s antennae were weaving alternately back and forth. “To see humans and thranx working in concert together, only to discover that they are doing so for all the wrong reasons.”
Briann let out a despondent sigh of resignation. “And to think I was worried that the humans we followed for a while might go so far as to insult someone else, or that the two thranx might be involved in creating an incident.”
“And so they are.” Truhands wove patterns in the air as the two padres exited the pavilion. “An incident that beggars the imagination.”
“I wish we had been able to learn all the details of their plan.”
A truhand reached up to touch his shoulder. “We did well enough, Brother, and a good thing we did, too, else thousands might have died.”
“Some might yet.” Briann raised his gaze. Around him music and gaiety, laughter and contented clicking filled the bright blue of afternoon like birdwing butterflies dancing above a tropical pool. “We don’t know where they’re staying, or what the rest of them look like.”
“Steps can be taken. There may be some small disruption.”
Briann lengthened his stride, trying not to look at the children or the young unmolted thranx among whom he and his friend were walking. “There will have to be. The authorities can’t shut down the fair. If they do that, it will only help to frighten these people offworld, human and thranx alike. Based on our descriptions they might stop the four we saw at the shuttleport. Regardless, their associates will be alerted and take care to slip quietly offworld. The next time they strike, society might not be so fortunate. We have to catch them all, every one of them, here and now.”
Twikanrozex whistled affirmation. “You’re right, Brother. To accomplish everything, some risk will have to be taken. Some innocents may be hurt.”
His friend nodded. “Fortunately, the Church understands the necessity of proportional sacrifice to achieve a greater goal. I hope the local authorities will see it that way.”
“If not,” Twikanrozex observed as they turned a corner, heading for the tasteful, sweeping structure that housed Fair Administration, “then we will have to convince them.”
“It must be done the right way,” Briann concurred, “though it will not be easy. The Church does not yet command immediate respect from secular authorities. It will fall upon you and me as individuals rather than as Church representatives to make the case for an immediate and discriminating response to this threat. We will have to be direct and convincing. In this the Maxims are not likely to be of much help to us. When it comes to matters of philosophical discourse, police are notoriously indifferent.”
15
Due to the thickness and strength of the ceramic strata, it took several days to enlarge the opening through which the unfortunate digger had almost fallen to where it was wide enough to admit a small aircar. In that time, a laser rangefinder had been lowered into the fissure to measure the distance from the opening to the first surfaces below. The distances were not as great as first supposed. Still, had anyone fallen through the gap, they would have suffered a fatal plunge of several hundred feet into the lightless depths.
The laser and other scanning devices revealed the presence of nothing but empty space. The brown ceramic appeared to form a roof above an artificial void. No one in the camp accepted this conclusion. It would be a truly eccentric species indeed that would go to so much trouble and expense to seal such a vast volume of apparent nothingness away from the world. There had to be something more. Given the extent of the disclosed subterranean space, an aircar equipped with powerful lights and calibrating lasers would be the simplest, safest, and quickest means of exploring the mysterious alien emptiness. Hand weapons were also issued all around. On closer inspection, seemingly secure large underground spaces often were not as hermetically sealed as initially supposed. Local fauna might well have made use of so much protected, enclosed living space and needed to be guarded against accordingly.
Cullen and Pilwondepat were accompanied by Holoness and an aircar operator named Dik. To Pilwondepat’s barely concealed delight and in spite of energetic protestations, Cullen insisted that Riimadu remain behind on the surface. The thranx made an effort not to gloat over this decision.
Their vehicle was the smallest available to the exploration team, one intended to be used for quick jaunts to outlying sites of interest. As Dik maneuvered it over the edge of the much enlarged and thoroughly shored excavation, a crowd of students and workers gathered to see the voyagers off. Pilwondepat forced himself not to search among the gathering for the scaled face of the frustrated AAnn representative.
Eager but restrained, Cullen was musing aloud as the craft began to descend slowly into the pit. “Usually, archeologists crawl into ancient monuments and mausoleums, or if they are lucky, walk. In all my experience I don’t know of any expedition that uncovered an artifact large enough to fly into.”
“Personally,” Pilwondepat replied reflectively, “I happen to like crawling.”
“If I had six legs, so might I.” Cullen went quiet as the softly thrumming aircar approached the augmented cavity.
Their driver maneuvered the compact craft into the opening, fixed for vertical hover, and then dropped them through the cleft ceramic layer and down into the alien void itself. “Lights,” an unintimidated Cullen snapped briskly. Instantly, their immediate surroundings were illuminated by the spray of high-intensity search beams that had been hastily attached to the vehicle. Recorders mounted within the body of the craft switched on. Around them, all was blackness save where the powerful beams penetrated.
Holoness activated the scanning laser. Utilizing its far greater throw range, she played it across the western wall, a task for which it was not designed. Beyond that bulwark of dark ceramic lay an unbroken rampart of metamorphic rock and eventually, the outer wall of the escarpment.
“Turn.” Cullen was standing next to the driver. Everyone was too excited and nervous to make use of the aircar’s available seats. Even had he wished to lie down, the design of the seats rendered them useless to Pilwondepat. “Let’s have a look at the opposite wall.” Dik complied, and the craft pivoted neatly on its axis. As they came about, Holoness kept the ranging laser aimed parallel to the vehicle’s keel. The bright beam revealed—nothing. The opposite wall was so distant that even the laser’s tuned coherent beam could not illuminate it.
There was, however, a floor. Dropping down, the driver tentatively tested its solidity. It appeared to be composed of the same cryptic ceramic material as the ceiling. Against all reason, the vast chamber, of still unknown dimensions, appeared to have been built to hold nothing but ancient air.
“This doesn’t make any sense.” So far apart were the walls that Cullen’s voice produced no echo. The emptiness swallowed his emphasis. “There has to be something more to it than this. No species goes to this much trouble just to build an enormous empty box.”
“Who can quantify alien intentions?” In the dim glow of the aircar’s subdued internal lights, the multiple lenses of Pilwondepat’s compound eyes sparkled like mirrors tinted gold. “There are still many things humans do that strike my people as having no basis in reason.”
“Many humans would agree with you on that.” Opening one of the two personnel hatches in the transparent cab, Holoness started down the integrated steps molded into the hull and put a tentative foot on the floor. It supported her weight easily. “It’s solid enough.”
“As solid as the ceiling?” Tilting back his head, Cullen was able to make out the narrow shaft of sunlight that marked the hole the digging team had drilled in the rugged material. “All right: We’re in a big box with no visible internal landmarks. Where do we go from here?”
“Over there, perhaps?” Pilwondepat was pointing with all four hands. “
Creellt
—I think I see something.”
Dik swung a search beam in the indicated direction. Sure enough, the glossy bulge of a small dome marred the otherwise perfect flatness of the floor. It was about four meters in diameter and completely isolated. “Looks a lot like all those decorative bulges we found on the outside of this roof.” He grunted.
“So it does.” Holoness was staring, shining her own hand beam in the direction of the unassuming protrusion. “But why only one?”
“Get back aboard and we’ll go have a look,” Cullen told her.
Smacking the ceramic underfoot with her heel, she shook him off. “It’s solid as a rock here. I’m going to walk.”
With the aircar paralleling her, she strolled over to the swelling protuberance. It was a dark brown, the exact color as the rest of the ceramic material. Its central apex rose no higher than her waist. Reaching down, she tapped it with her light beam. The muted plasticene-on-ceramic clacking that resulted was not nearly loud enough to produce an echo in the enormous chamber.
“Likewise solid.” She straightened. “Maybe these isolated domes have some ceremonial significance. Let’s see if we can find some more.” She started to walk around the wide, low protrusion.
When she was halfway around, something hissed imperceptibly, and the entire dome began to slide in her direction.
Stumbling backward, she nearly fell as the massive convexity slid silently toward her. The blast of incredibly frigid air that erupted from the opening the dome had been covering might reasonably have been expected. The pale light that accompanied it could not.
“Therese, get back in here!” Cullen was shouting at her through the open hatch.
His anxious urging was superfluous. She all but flew back aboard. As soon as she was safely back inside, the exoarcheologist shut the hatch behind her. The icy atmospheric swirl that accompanied her retreat did little more than briefly chill the humans, but it threatened to freeze the moisture in Pilwondepat’s less tolerant and unprotected lungs. Fortunately, the craft’s heater quickly brought the internal temperature back up to human normal and thranx tolerable.
“What the hell happened there?” Cullen found himself gazing out through the transparent cowl at a perfectly circular opening in the ceramic floor. The dome that had blocked it lay to one side, apparently disinclined to move any farther.
“Maybe her walking on the floor has annoyed the gods.” Dik kept his hands on the aircar’s controls, ready to boost ceilingward and take them out of the murky chamber at an instant’s notice.
“Very funny.” As her breathing steadied, Holoness moved next to the cowl to stare out at the aperture. It was perfectly round, with walls as sleek as the floor beneath them. “Cold air I can understand—though maybe not
that
cold. But not light. Where can it be coming from, down here?”
“I expect,” Cullen responded, “we’d better go and see. Dik? Take it slow.”
The pilot nodded as he edged them toward the opening. The glow emerging from the passage Holoness had inadvertently brought to light was not intense. It dissipated long before reaching the ceiling of the vast, empty chamber. Gingerly, Dik eased the aircar forward, positioned it carefully over the opening, and then commenced a controlled descent.
The gap in the floor was wide enough to admit the craft, but with little margin for error on any side. They descended five meters, ten, thirty, with no sign of the walls surrounding them either opening up or contracting. As near as Cullen could tell, the perfectly vertical shaft had been formed to tolerances of less than a millimeter. Then, as abruptly as they had entered, they found themselves floating free in another open chamber. According to the console instrumentation, the temperature outside the aircar’s canopy was well below freezing. No one paid much attention to the external temperature readout, or for that matter, any of the others. They were too entranced by the light.
Tinted a pale green, it seemed to emanate from the floor overhead that had now become another ceiling. Below, revealed by the ethereal yet extensive illumination, was . . .
Pilwondepat uttered something in High Thranx that was incomprehensible to his human companions. Dik cursed under his breath. Holoness just stared. Cullen, their leader, mouthed the inaudible human equivalent of Pilwondepat’s whistling and clicking.
They were in another room. Except that
room
was so inadequate a designation to describe their surroundings that it did not bear audiblizing. Below them, rank on rank, tier on tier, row on row, were thousands upon thousands of teardrop-shaped cylinders. These stretched as far as the eye could see to north, to south, and to the east. Only to the west could the possibility of a boundary be faintly discerned. In that direction, Pilwondepat realized, lay the outside wall of the escarpment.
Below the hovering aircar, the endless tiers of cylinders dropped away to infinity. Searching for an end, for the bottom, brought only tears to the eyes of straining observers, and no closure. Lying between each level of cylinders were strips of gleaming metal and of plastic, and conduits of the ever-present ceramic. Only here, the latter was present in a veritable rainbow array of hues. The tiers were wrapped, crisscrossed, enveloped, in a web of lines and connectors and ducts that looked to have been spun by the mad mother of all spiders.
Gently swathing each cylinder, seemingly supported only by their flimsy, deceptively fragile selves, were halos of filaments and fibers that pulsed with a soft golden glow like the breath of babies become glass. So delicate were they that they might have been spun instead of wired. A narrow strip of some transparent substance ran the length of each cylinder, which themselves appeared to be fashioned from some dark purple metallic substructure.
“What can they be?” Holoness was standing as close to the canopy as possible, her nose pressed against the transparent plexalloy. “There must be
millions
of them.” She waved a benumbed hand in the pilot’s direction. “Dik, you’ve got to let them know about this up top!”
Emerging from the same daydream into which all of them had been plunged, the pilot nodded. After a couple of tries, he looked up and shook his head. “No can do. Something in this ceramic sucks up even long-wave transmissions like a sponge. I’ve lost the outpost’s carrier wave, too.”
Cullen swallowed hard, aware he was in the presence of something as exalted as it was alien. “Can you get us any closer? We can’t go outside here without environment suits.”
“No kidding.” The pilot manipulated controls. “At these temperatures I’m surprised there’s no frost on anything.”
“No moisture.” Everyone turned to look in Pilwondepat’s direction. “Hot desert above, cold desert below. No moisture. This place must be absolutely dry.” He gesticulated irony seasoned with aversion even though he knew that his companions would not be able to properly interpret the entire gesture. “Temperature excepted, Riimadu would probably like it down here.”
Under Dik’s circumspect guidance, the aircar drifted over to the nearest rank of cylinders. In the process, it passed above a narrow strip of metal, one of uncounted thousands that crisscrossed the chamber like steel silk. They might be walkways, Cullen reflected. If so, they had been designed for beings with far more slender builds than humans or thranx. Beings who were also utterly unafraid of heights. Despite omnipresent drops that could only be measured in the hundreds of meters, there were no railings.
With practiced hands, Dik drew the skimmer closer to the uppermost row of cylinders than Pilwondepat would have thought possible. While the pilot remained in his seat and at the controls, everyone else moved to stand next to the portside. From there they could look out and down at the first cylinder in the row. It lay directly below the edge of their vehicle’s hull. The vitreous band that ran down the center of the artifact was perfectly clear. Gazing through it, they could see the cylinder’s contents clearly. These immediately and unexpectedly supplied the answer to the main question that had plagued exoarcheologists ever since they had first begun to explore the wilds of Comagrave.
What had happened to the Sauun?
They had not expired of loneliness due to a failure to achieve space travel. They had not perished of racial melancholia. They had not obliterated one another in some undetected, undeclared war for which no evidence had yet been found.
They were still here.
Cullen remembered to breathe. “Next cylinder,” he ordered Dik. “We have to confirm similitude.”
“Okay, but this isn’t easy going. We’re in pretty tight quarters here.” As he adjusted the controls and the aircar began to move again, he indicated the pulsating nimbus that seemed to float just above each cylinder. “There’s a hell of a lot of energy fluxing here, and I’d just as soon we don’t make contact with any of these filaments, or whatever they are. Nonconductive hull notwithstanding.”