Jaydium (7 page)

“No damned lightning made that sound.”

“You know something shipbrain doesn't?”

“I gotta hunch. I gotta hunch of a hunch. Where's the source?”

“Shipbrain pins it near Port Ludlow — or where it used to be. We could fly there in an hour, if you want to check it out.”

“You bet I do!”

o0o

Brushwacker
cleared the last ridge. Eril and Kithri looked down into the depression where Port Ludlow had lain baking in the sun. No low, flat-walled buildings of ash-brick greeted them, no spaceport with its battered insystem traders and field of garishly painted scrubjets. No distant fields of sallow, struggling green, no tendril roads spewing forth plumes of powdery dust. After the forest, Eril hadn't expected any of that. But neither did he expect what he did see.

Once, when he was a boy of four, the year before his father disappeared on that Exploration mission, Eril's mother had taken him and his sister to an antique crafts exhibition. There he watched a glassblower fashion a fairy castle, looping and twisting the liquid glass into filigree designs. It was his earliest childhood memory.

Six-year-old Avery chose a winged horse for herself, but Eril had eyes only for the tower. It stood on his dresser, a touchstone for his imagination, until...he could not remember what happened to it. Now the memory of that childhood treasure rose up in front of his eyes, magnified a thousandfold and tinted like a watercolor rainbow, a crystal city set in a cup of living green.

“Lo-o-ok at that,” Kithri said.

Eril leaned forward across her shoulders, straining for more, hardly daring to breathe least the city shimmer and evaporate like a fever-born mirage. Even at this distance, he could distinguish individual structures. A ruby spindle shone in the late afternoon sun, dwarfing a flat rectangular block of pearlescent lace and a chain of smaller towers linked at every level by bridges of the same translucent material. A series of causeways, sapphire blue and turquoise, wound through the forest of towers.

As they drew nearer, Eril realized that the city was not nearly as large as it first seemed. He was accustomed to the scale of artificial satellites or ancient mega-cities like New Paris or Terillium City, where ten thousand might live and work within the same self-contained scraper. These shining buildings before him could not be more than three or four stories high. It was their slenderness and composition that made them seem so elegantly tall. Judging by Fifth Fed standards, he put the city's entire population at fifty thousand people, no more.

Or perhaps they aren't human. Perhaps we've discovered a new race of intelligent aliens!
That had only happened twice before in humankind's exploration of space and in neither case were the aliens this sophisticated. He'd met a few during the early years of the war, semi-telepathic anthropoids who quickly withdrew to their own planets at the first sign of interstellar warfare. The pseudofelines were even more reclusive and limited their own colonies to less than a dozen individuals.

When he first went into space, Eril thought he wanted adventure, the biggest there was. Before him lay the wildest discovery he could ever hope to make, even in the far-flung Exploration Corps.

A long-remembered quiver shot through him like an ember leaping into flame. At any moment, the city people would spot the scrubjet and send out an envoy.

Wait until the Council gets my report — first the spaceman and now a whole new civilization! If only Weiram could see it...

“Whatever made the radio signal, it wasn't that city,” Kithri said in a puzzled voice. “There's nothing alive down there.”

Eril's mind still roiled with images of a brilliant new interspecies alliance. “What are you talking about? It's
got
to come from there. It couldn't have been anything else. I'm betting we've just made First Contact with a new civilization!”

“I'm betting you've got rocks in your skull,” she retorted. “I've been monitoring the infrared and motion scans, and there's not a trace. And no radio, either. The burst must have been a natural fluke, just like shipbrain said. If anyone was there, their radar would have picked us up by now and they'd have sent someone to check us out.”

Eril skin prickled. Logically she was correct, but it wasn't logic that had kept him alive through one dog-fight after another at the end of the war. Maybe he was fooling himself, maybe he
wanted
the city to have inhabitants. Maybe he wanted an excuse not to go back — not yet, not empty-handed. Whatever his rationalizations, he couldn't shake the bone-deep certainty that the noise burst had been from some advanced, power-using intelligence.

But would such an intelligence necessarily be friendly? The two alien races known to the Federation were timid and anything but warlike, but he had no way of knowing if they were a fluke or the rule.

Their radar would have picked us up,
Kithri had reminded him. Were they even now being tracked by hidden weapons? Was the city's silence an absence — or a lure?

o0o

Kithri brought
‘Wacker
down into the shallow bowl of parkland that surrounded the city. With a sinking heart, Eril recognized the signs of deterioration — the splintered towers, the shredded supports beneath the causeways, the bridges whose lacy structures had crumbled in patches. The cores of the buildings still stood upright, lonely and proud as they slowly lost their battle with the elements. His fairytale city was nothing but a decaying ruin.

“Eril, wait!” Kithri said suddenly. “On the infrared — I'm picking up something moving on the far perimeter, something small, or maybe there's only one of them. I — you could be right...”

An alien survivor,
Eril wondered,
or only a large animal, something we missed in the forest?
Hope soared in him again.

They came around to the far side of the city, following the location of the reading, to hover over a belt of velvety tree-dotted lawns. Eril had seen similar gardens on long-civilized worlds, intricate orchestrations of botanical species chosen for their nonproliferating nature. They required little maintenance to preserve the original landscaping.

On the far side of the park lay a huge, flat field. Where it was not pock-marked by faded blast-sites, the surface was smooth, the color of cream instead of the charcoal ceramic asphalt used by the Federation in its spaceports. A chain of crumbling buildings, most likely control towers, ran down the center like the shattered fragments of a spinal column. Nothing else, not even the rusting framework of a abandoned ship, rose above the level surface.

“You could berth twenty — no, thirty starcruisers out there without being crowded,” Eril said.

Kithri's voice sounded tinny in the cramped cockpit. “Even during the war, we always had
something
, if only some old insystem junker.”

“Jaydium kept us coming back. Even with the Fed falling apart, that was too valuable to forget.”

“But they didn't come back
here.
Eril, could that mean — no Federation at all, no space travel, maybe the whole place left to rot like some sort of graveyard planet?”

“If you'd built a spaceport that size, and a city like that, would you just leave?”

“Not if I had any choice,” she answered bleakly. “But if they weren't human, why should they even think like us?”

“There's got to be something left,” he said stubbornly.
“Something.
Where was that heat source?”

“It's gone out of range. Or maybe the damned detector malfunctioned and it never was there at all.”

“No matter, we'll be waiting for it when it sticks its
pitouchee
out again.”

“Uhn!” came from behind them, a voice barely recognizable as human. The spaceman, as if following a carefully orchestrated script, had woken up.

They dragged the spaceman from
Brushwacker's
hold and laid him under a massive tree whose branches spread out like an umbrella from its knotted trunk. Although the spaceman was still unconscious, his breath came in hoarse grunts as he jerked his head from side to side. Eril knelt beside him. The shade felt cool and damp after the sun's brassy heat and the crushed grass gave off a sweet, earthy smell.

Kithri touched the side of the man's neck. “His pulse is faster. Skin temperature feels okay. Shouldn't we do something for him, like get him out of his suit?”

“I don't think so,” Eril said. If this suit was anything like the extravehicular gear he knew, it had its own life support function. It might be safer not to tamper with it.

Kithri gave him an exasperated look. “We can't just sit here like a pair of brainless sand-hens! We've got to
do
something! Look, I've got some more water in stores. How about if we bathe his face? That can't hurt, can it?”

The spaceman quieted as she wiped a damp cloth across his cheeks and brow. Slowly his breathing deepened, and the color of his skin changed from waxen to pink. His eyes moved behind his closed lids and suddenly jerked open.

Before, the face had been one of an ordinary, fairly young man, neither handsome nor ugly. When his eyes opened, so red-brown they looked auburn, they transformed his face into one of startling intensity. His pupils dilated and constricted as he shifted his gaze from Eril to Kithri.

Eril put his hand on the spacer's shoulder. “You're all right now,” he said, with his friendliest smile. “We're friends.”

“Uh... Huh?”

“Friends,” Eril repeated slowly. “Can you understand me?”

The spaceman wet his lips. “Whuh hept? Whirrmy? Whirrs the shih?”

Eril exchanged puzzled glances with Kithri, then tried again. The spacer seemed confused, although not frightened, as he answered. “Wirron — explorshon miss — Nited Therrin Spay Cummin — AlfaCentaw to Peers sunstar — we mit liestor — I win offboar — then I wek up here. Hoor yoo?”

“I'm sorry, we can't understand you,” said Eril.

“No, wait,” Kithri said. “It's like an archaic form of Pan-Anglish.
Therrin,
that's like
Terran
, Old Terran! That almost-last bit was, ‘Then I woke up here.' Can't you hear it?”

Now that she'd pointed it out, he could. Eril dredged his memory for the history lectures he'd sat through only because the Academy required them. He never thought there might be anything useful in them. “There was something about a Terran Space Cum-something — Command? United Terran Space Command?”

After a fraction of a second, the spaceman nodded vigorously and gestured toward himself. The movement was hampered by the bulky suit. He repeated in a louder voice, even more heavily accented, “Nited Therrin Spay Cummin — Cummind Pascal, Lennart Pascal.”

Commander Lennart Pascal.

“Eril Trionan, Kithri Bloodyluck,” Eril said, pointing at himself and Kithri.

“Whirrmy?”

Where am I?
Not a bad question to begin with. Before Eril could explain that they didn't know where they were either, Lennart Pascal tugged at the catches across his chest with his heavily gloved hands. “I'm bow too suffcay. Yoofol could hell me owtta this thin?”

Even though Eril didn't understand all the words, their meaning was clear. “Just lie back and we'll get you out of it.”

With Kithri's help, Eril unfastened the complicated series of clasps and locks. Underneath, Lennart wore a jumpsuit with embroidered patches on the chest and upper arm — stylized rockets and lightning bolts ringed with unrecognizable script. He grinned at them as he sat up and gestured around him.

“Won thin shoor, thiz play naw AlfaCentaw. Beezmee whuh hept, maybe Einstein rie bow tie trav. Yoofol see fren enuh. Shors a pritt plan yoo gaw.”

“Look, I don't know how much of this you can follow,” Eril said, “but when you popped out of — wherever you were — it seems
we
popped into this place. Do you understand?”

While Lennart clambered to his feet, Eril repeated himself, pointing towards the city, the deserted spaceport, and the scrubjet. Lennart nodded before answering, “Alnoo, yoofol too, heyh? Hot damm. Maybe niz we could bett unnerstan chothre, sin we stuh kere for why. Weefol splore lessgo citee, heyh?”

“Explore the city?” Eril guessed. “My thought exactly. No point in waiting for a formal invitation.”

“Before we go anywhere,” said Kithri. “I'm stashing what's left of this haul.”

With visible reluctance, Kithri allowed the two men to help her unload the packaged jaydium and set it in a pile well away from the tree. She opened a safepocket in the scrubjet's inner wall and drew out a small device. Eril recognized it as a guardsafe-field generator. She set it on top of the pile and stepped back. After a short delay, the field ignited over the pile, shimmering poisonous ocher for an instant before it flickered into invisibility. No sign remained of the jaydium stash or its safekeeping system. Lennart watched the whole proceeding intently.

Eril slipped the force whip into its holster and slung his small pack over his other shoulder. “Who do you think's going to steal your jaydium out here?”

She paused, considering. “I don't know — it's just habit, I guess. It's probably only a matter of time now until the stuff goes to junk.”

“Kithri, do you have some kind of weapon?” As he'd unloaded the insulated jaydium, Eril had considered the problem of self defense. He'd even thought of the lazer cutter, but rejected it as too heavy and cumbersome to be of much use. He found the idea of Kithri wandering unarmed through an alien city unaccountably disturbing.

She studied him for a moment before nodding, then brought out a battered stungun from beneath her pilot's seat. Eril recognized the palm-sized gun, a combination short-range nonlethal weapon, heat beam — for cutting thin sections of metal and starting fires — and emergency beacon. He carried a survival unit very much like hers, only his had a hollow handle containing a back-sharpened knife blade, a length of permawire and three large-eyed needles.