“That’s all?”
“The books.”
“You said something about them when we were looking in the window.”
“They were too far away to read the titles. But the binding on all of them was identical. He had about sixty volumes. Different colors, though some matched in sets of two and three.”
“Go ahead.”
“It looked very much like the Library of the Confederacy. We have most of the volumes at home.”
“Very good,” I said. “I never noticed. What was the lamp all about?”
“When I pointed it at him, he didn’t cast a shadow.” A big grin appeared. “The alien was either a vampire or a hologram.”
Damn. “So,” I said, “who hired the lunatic?”
“We should be able to answer that when we find out what Rachel was hiding.” He winced. “Try to be gentle, okay?”
“I’m being gentle. And you already know, don’t you?”
“Let’s wait for more evidence,” he said.
“Are we going home?”
“Not yet. Not until we find out what happened to the inhabitants of this place.”
We’d had enough for a while. Alex was hurting, we’d both been hauling extra weight around on the island, and the aliens we’d hoped would be hanging out here, that we’d be able to talk to, were nowhere in evidence. It broke my heart. And I could see that Alex was affected, too. He sat quietly in the cabin, a book on-screen. But the pages never got turned.
In the morning, his arm was better, and we returned to scouring deserts, forests, and oceans. There were more cities, but they were all like the one on the shore: empty and decaying.
The cities didn’t look
old
, the way ruins normally do. And they didn’t look as if they’d been destroyed, as if they’d been struck by a natural catastrophe, or by war. They all gave the same impression: that they’d simply been abandoned. That the inhabitants had just walked away.
Alex sat and stared out at the sky. We passed over a river that looked as wide as anything in the Confederacy. Then more plains, rolling away to the horizon, unchanging, tranquil, empty. Then, finally, a crumbling ruin of an ancient city. With what had been a power plant at its outskirts.
If herds of deer or equines, or individual predators, had ever prowled those lands, they were missing now. We saw the remains of some large animals. But we seldom saw anything walking. Or flying. I wondered what had cast the shadow on the island. Probably Zakary.
The cities were not
big
. They never approached the grandeur or size of the sprawling metropolises on Rimway. Nor could they match the eloquence of modern architecture. Or the engineering techniques. By our standard, they’d been large
towns
. The biggest of them had probably been home to no more than eighty thousand inhabitants. But, even in their desolation, they retained a kind of charm. Maybe it was simply a sense of loss, an illusion that these places had once, not very long ago, been home to someone.
One in particular, straddling the intersection of two rivers, had athletic fields and pools and open areas that must once have been parks. There’d been floating bridges, only one of which remained intact. And there were complexes that might once have been entertainment centers.
We saw carts, and the skeletons of creatures who’d apparently been attached to them. Some places had been wrecked, brought down perhaps by heavy storms. Others had burned. But for the most part, the streets and roads were, if not pristine, nevertheless in decent condition, showing evidence that at one time they’d been well kept. And now suffered only from neglect. But in all that vast desolation, we saw none of the builders.
Country of the dead.
We orbited the globe every hour and seventeen minutes. There was life in the oceans. Spouts and some large tails splatting down on the water. But there were no liners, no boats, nobody fishing.
We changed course. Looked at different towns and cities. Some were crowded with skeletons. Some showed us only a handful. A few were clear. The skeletons looked
human
.
We saw nothing to suggest anybody still lived down there. There was no moving vehicle, no one waving to us as we passed overhead. And all right, I know we were too high, and they couldn’t have seen us, but the metaphor is accurate. There were occasional animals. Some vulpine creatures. A scattering of felines. No birds, though. We saw absolutely nothing in the air. On the whole, the countryside seemed as empty as the towns.
Near the end of the fourth day, we passed over an idyllic country scene, a small waterfall lost in the woods. A large log cabin stood on a patch of ground near the base of the falls. We were in the northern latitudes, and it was winter, cold on the ground. The place had a chimney, but had anyone been there, we’d have seen smoke.
“In fact,”
Belle said,
“the entire world is, on average, somewhat colder than we would expect, given its composition and its distance from the sun.”
“How much colder?” Alex asked.
“Four or five degrees Celsius.”
It doesn’t sound like much, but it was substantial.
Alex looked down at the log cabin. “I guess it’s time we tried again,” he said. “Maybe we can get a sense of what happened.”
The cabin had an upper story. We circled the area, looking for a place to land. The open space was all on the opposite side of the river. There would have been room behind the cabin except that a cart was inconveniently parked. “We’ll have to go downstream a bit,” I said.
“Okay. Whatever—” He’d been very quiet.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Sure.” He heaved a long sigh. “One light,” he said. “I’d give a lot to see one light. A
real
one.”
Whoever had sent Zakary had committed as vicious an act by dangling that light in front of Alex as by planting the bomb.
We landed about a kilometer away. The sun had been down five hours and an overcast sky blocked off the starlight. I shut off the antigravs and the extra weight came back. I like low-gravity worlds.
“Are you going to wear the pressure suits?”
asked Belle.
Alex looked at me. Shook his head no. “You, Chase?”
“I don’t think we need them.”
“I agree. But please keep a channel open so I can hear what’s happening.”
Alex put his scrambler into his holster. I checked to make sure mine was set properly and tucked it into my belt.
I’d brought the lander down in the middle of a glade. We pulled jackets on, Alex collected his shoulder pouch, and we went through the airlock. The air was
cold
. The jacket immediately began to warm up, but it did nothing for my nose and cheeks.
We stepped down onto a light snow cover and turned on our lamps. The glade and the woods were quiet.
The navigation lights lit the place up pretty well, but once we got away from them, got into the trees, the darkness closed in. And I mean seriously. This place felt different from the island. Maybe it had been that, on the island, I could hear the tide coming in, or going out, whatever it was doing. And there were some animals. Now all that was gone. The woods felt
empty
. There was a sense of utter solitude. No critters, no noises in the trees except branches creaking in the wind. Nothing other than the unchanging drone of the insects.
There were a lot of thick bushes armed with spikes. We had to cut our way through. The ground was uneven and full of holes, and the holes were filled with snow. It was an ideal setup for breaking an ankle.
We moved cautiously but still managed to stumble around a lot. It’s amazing how clumsy you become when you abruptly pack on a large chunk of extra weight.
We found the cabin. No lights, of course, this time. And, when we peeked in the window, no alien. The door was locked. We circled the thing, looking for a way to get inside without breaking a window. I couldn’t tell you why, since everything on this world seemed to be returning to nature, but we didn’t want to disturb the place. We’d not had that problem with objects that had been thousands of years old. But the cabin was different: It felt as if someone still lived there.
The windows were also locked, as was a door in the rear. Curtains were drawn across the glass, except for a room in front, where they were on the floor. We could see a fabric sofa and two armchairs. They looked as if they’d have been comfortable for us. An open book lay on a side table.
We circled the cabin and stood again at the front door. “What do you think?” I asked.
“Always play it safe.” Alex knocked. Softly at first. Then louder. Nothing stirred within. He picked up a rock, measured it against a window, and paused. “Damn,” he said. Then he broke the glass. The loud, dull bang echoed through the silence.
I wondered what he’d have done had something come charging out of the bedroom.
“Blame it on you, kid,” he said. I didn’t recall having spoken, but maybe he’d gotten to know me too well. He stuck his lamp inside, then climbed through. A moment later, the door swung open.
The room had a fireplace and a stove. A pile of logs was stacked against one wall. I took a close look at them and saw only dust. A faded picture hung near the door. The dust on it was so thick that it clung to the glass and resisted all efforts to brush it off. I took it outside and washed it in the river. It was a sketch. Of the waterfall. Someone stood nearby, looking out across the falls. He wore a long blue coat, with a hood pulled up over his head. His back was to the viewer.
The way it stood, the mode of contemplation, the upper limbs pushed into pockets, seemed very human.
The chairs and the sofa were corroded. The fallen curtains were stiff and had become part of the floor. Alex examined the lamp that stood on one of the side tables. “Oil,” he said.
In the kitchen, we found a metal container. An icebox. Dishes and glasses were neatly stacked in cabinets, though most were cracked. Alex found one in good condition, wrapped it in one of the protective cloths he routinely carried during a mission, and put it in his pouch.
A staircase rose to the upper level. Two rooms opened onto the landing. Alex went up and disappeared into one of the rooms. Moments later, he came back out and looked into the second room. Then he stood at the top of the stairs, hesitating. “Chase,” he said. His voice sounded odd. Strained.
I went to the foot of the stairs. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re dead.”
I went up. “Who’s dead?”
“Everybody.” He seemed tired. Dismayed.
“I’ll be back.” I looked at the open doors, picked one, and went in. Someone was in bed.
Some
thing
.
My God. There were two small, desiccated corpses.
A couple of kids. “Yeah,” I said. They
were
human. Alex stood in the doorway, but he wouldn’t come any farther.
“What the hell happened here?” he said, more to himself than to me.
They’d been dead a long time. I couldn’t tell their gender. When I looked more closely, I wasn’t so sure about their humanity.
The bed was cold. The blankets were stiff. Frozen.
He took a deep breath. “There’s more.” He looked at the other doorway. I went in. There was another bed. And two more corpses. Gray and withered. Adults this time.
One was holding a gun. Alex took it. Cracked it open. “Primitive. Fires eight rounds,” he said. “Four left.”
“Murder-suicide.”
“Yes.”
“They killed their own kids.” I’d never seen anything remotely like it before.
Alex dropped the weapon on the floor. He tried to pull the blankets up to hide the corpses. But they were frozen in place. “Let’s go,” he said.
THIRTY-THREE
I arrived at last on the street where once I’d lived, and found it full of ghosts.
—Walford Candles, “The Long Road Home”
“I have news.”
Belle let it hang, as if enjoying drawing out the suspense.
“I’m listening,” said Alex.
“We have a city.”
“Another one—?”
“This one has lights.”
The lights were in rows. Streetlights. Others appeared to be inside houses! And we could see an area that might have been a mall or park.
It was a glowing diamond, accentuated by the vast darkness surrounding it.
Alex threw his head back in the chair. “How about that!” he said. “Chase, we’ve hit the jackpot.” He was out of his chair, bouncing around the cabin like a kid. “Belle, are there any radio transmissions?”
“Negative, Alex. There’s no activity.”
“All right, let’s try to provoke some. Open a broadcast channel for Chase.” He smiled benignly. “Once again, the honor is yours, beautiful.”