John Maddox Roberts - Space Angel (16 page)

"Heavy jungle," said K'Stin, "many animals, large and small. Some predators, nothing to trouble a Viver, but you soft ones will have to be careful. Also found some big stone buildings about five kilometers from here, but there was a lot of jungle growth on them, so they are probably uninhabited."

"All right, then," the skipper said. "First task: check out those buildings. Look for signs of life—intelligent life. Keep in regular contact with the ship and take no unnecessary chances. Get going."

The party was equipped for a long hike through difficult terrain, without arm- and leg-armor, just body armor and puncture-proof coveralls. Everyone wore belted laser handguns and machetes; Ham and Torwald carried forcebea'm rifles in addition. The Vivers were, as usual, walking arsenals. They crossed the clearing and within moments the jungle had swallowed them up.

In spite of their serious mission, the Earthmen stared with fascination at their exotic surroundings: one tree with a spirally fluted trunk sprouting a crown of feathery blue leaves fifty meters from the ground, another bristling with long spikes, vines that crept along the ground, and others looping from one treetop to another; and everywhere there were flowers. Some were so tiny that clusters of hundreds of blooms made a mass no bigger than a fingertip, others so large that a single petal measured two paces across.

They walked into wave after wave of odor, from the most delicate of perfumes to the rankest stenches. Every plant in the jungle seemed to call attention to itself, with outlandish form, outrageous color, inescapable aroma, or a combination of all three. Animals were apparent in equal profusion and variety. Some were small, many-legged insect equivalents; scaly creatures, some legless, that appeared to be reptiles; furry beasts of all sizes that might have been mammals. There were no birds or anything with feathers, but many species of the other three types flew. The air was alive with flying insects, and big creatures with translucent wings chased the bugs. At one point a little thing, vaguely reptiloid, with wings landed on Kelly's shoulder and studied his face through jewellike, golden eyes.

To Kelly's relief, the little dragon flapped silently away after a few moments of careful contemplation.

The relatively open forest near the clearing soon gave way to dense undergrowth and the Vivers, in the lead as usual, began plying their sword-length machetes. Their arms rose and fell mechanically, shearing through tough, woody vines as easily as if they were daisy stalks. A kilometer of such growth would have taken standard humans all day to cut through. The Vivers covered that distance in a little less than an hour.

The stifling humidity soon had the standard humans' bodies streaming with sweat, despite the sophisticated air-circulation systems implanted in their coveralls. Sweat squished in their boots and ran from their sleeves into their gloves. Even the light body armor began to chafe and their packs to weigh heavily. The Vivers, of course, seemed perfectly comfortable, as did Homer, who burbled away, composing complex verses in some language or other. The standard humans were relieved when K'Stin called a halt.

The party had halted along the edge of a slowly moving stream about twenty meters across. The water was murky and looked ominous. Occasionally, the surface was marked with a chain of
V's
as something large and swift swam just below the surface. B'Shant plucked a large blossom and tossed it into the water. Immediately, the surface was disturbed as something shot toward the flower. The searchers received the impression of a scaly snout amid a spray of water—the blossom was gone. A few seconds later, it reemerged as ragged fragments, spat out in disappointment by the hungry reptiloid.

"I, for one, don't care to dispute right of passage with those things," Finn admitted.

"There is no problem," K'Stin said. "Get ready to cross." Without waiting for a reply, he barked an order to B'Shant. The other Viver picked three more of the big flowers and tossed them into the water about twenty meters downstream. Three heads appeared almost simultaneously to snatch the blooms. This time, though, the Vivers shot them as soon as their heads appeared above the surface. The beams, set for cutting action, sliced deep, filling the water with dark-blue blood. As the dead creatures thrashed in nervous reaction, dozens of wakes converged upon them. In seconds, the water was churned into spray as carnivores battled one another for possession of this bounty.

"Cross now!" K'Stin commanded. Nervously, the others obeyed, holding weapons high, while the Vivers remained on the bank, scanning the water, beam rifles ready. As soon as the others were across, B'Shant crossed, then K'Stin as B'Shant watched from the opposite bank. Halfway across, K'Stin was yanked abruptly from view. A few seconds later he reappeared, wrapped in the coils of some long serpent, one that seemed to be equipped with tentacles. K'Stin located the thing's head and seized it, yanking it upward over his own. As soon as the ugly head was clear of K'Stin's body, B'Shant put a needlebeam neatly through its eye. Immediately, the beast dropped loose and K'Stin waded ashore without further ado.

"Homer, you didn't mention these creatures before. Were they here on your last visit, along with the fragrances and flowers?"

"Possibly so, Ham, but the inhabitants may no longer be keeping them in check. Or, perhaps, this is an area kept deliberately wild. In any case, none of these creatures is dangerous to me, so they may have made no impression. It was long ago and my memory falters at such a span."

"If it was millennia ago, your memory may be excused for slipping a little," Torwald noted.

The Vivers resumed their mechanical trail-clearing and the rest followed, sweating and puffing. None of them had had so much planetside activity in months; everyone was out of shape. Another hour passed and they were within sight of the buildings, which the Vivers had spotted earlier. First, the party could make out the tops of the structures through gaps between the trees, then lower levels appeared. Suddenly, they were free of the trees and gawking with wonder. Before them stood a wall built of gigantic stone blocks, twenty meters high and stretching away on either hand as far as the eye could discern. From behind the wall they could see the mammoth buildings, tall towers and massive, stepped, pyramidal structures, all wildly and grotesquely decorated.

"Primitive-looking, eh, Kelly?"

"That's primitive? What do you think, Torwald? It looks pretty advanced to me."

"All it takes is wealth and manpower to build like that, kid. Building on this scale has been done by people not yet out of the Stone Age. Let's save our judgment for later, though. How're we going to get over that wall?"

"We will climb to the top," said K'Stin. "Then we will lower ropes for you." Suiting actions to words, the Vivers began climbing straight up the wall, their claws finding holds in crevices that were barely visible to those on the ground. Homer simply walked up the wall as easily as if it had been a horizontal surface. From the top, the Vivers dropped their ropes.

"Don't try to climb, we will pull you up," said K'Stin. Ham and Torwald were first to grasp the ropes at the knotted handholds. Seemingly without effort, the Vivers hauled the two heavy men to the top. The first thing the two realized when they had reached the top was that the "wall" was actually a platform, apparently of solid masonry. The buildings they had seen were constructed atop this cyclopean terrace.

The stone of the terrace was worn smooth from the passage of centuries, greenish-gray streaked with yellow. The buildings were a riot of noisy color, as garish as the jungle had been, faced with slabs of alabaster, speckled porphyries, colorful marbles in all hues. Every surface was carved with figures, interlaced designs, or abstract patterns. All the edifices were heavily garlanded by jungle growth. Over the centuries, seeds blown by winds or carried by flying creatures had found nooks and crevices where soil had collected, and there they took root. Their roots had widened the cracks, their rotting remains had contributed more humus, and larger plants had replaced them, until, now, full-sized trees were growing on many of the structures, their huge, gnarled roots separating giant blocks as if they had been children's toys.

"Sergei," Ham asked when the entire party stood atop the platform, "what do you make of this stone?"

"The platform's made of a fairly soft limestone," the geologist said. "It wouldn't be difficult to cut and polish. I'll have to get a closer look at the colored stuff facing the structures."

"Let's try that one, then." Ham pointed to the tallest of the pyramidal edifices, the upper part of which was fairly free of growth. "From that high up we might get some idea where Lafayette's been taken." They set out for the building at a weary but eager pace, their curiosity giving them new energy. At the base, they craned their necks upward. Looming above them were vast stone faces, snarling, four-eyecf devil-masks, all of the same type but no two exactly alike, thirty meters from the lowest wattle below their beaky snouts to the top of the finlike crest surmounting their double-domed skulls.

"Now, what might those be, Finn? Gods? Demons? Guardian Spirits? Dead Politicians?"

"Useless to speculate without further data. Anybody see a door?"

They searched around the base and found that the ugly masks continued at intervals of six meters. Below a truly horrifying face, its four eyes made of a translucent green stone, they found a low arched doorway.

"That's a true keystone arch," Nancy observed. "From the style of these structures I'd have expected corbels."

"Whoever these people were," Sergei said, "they had access to offworld materials. The eyes on that mask are made of transparent jadeoid, and that stuff forms only on planets with a high percentage of ammonia in the atmosphere. I can see a few other decorative stones that couldn't have originated on this planet. Of course, the people who built this might have been cannibalizing materials from earlier, spacefaring cultures."

They filed through the arch, the Vivers having to duck low to clear the keystone. Inside, the sudden switch from bright sunlight to interior dimness left the standard humans blinded for a few seconds. They switched on their torches and found that they were in a large square room, its walls covered with what appeared to be writing. They were also inlaid with gold.

"Maybe we should take back a few samples," suggested Torwald. "Not much, just a few dozen kilos apiece. What do you think, Finn? It seems a shame to just let the jungle take over."

"Shame on you, Tor, suggesting such vandalism. Besides, there could be proprietors hereabouts who might object."

"Let's go on," Ham urged. "Plenty of time later to gather souvenirs, after we figure out what we've found." They proceeded through the lower floor, finding more rooms, mostly small, all decorated with gold-inlaid inscriptions. Eventually, they came upon a ramp leading upward. Their explorations continued as they ascended the pyramid, and they encountered more script-carved rooms, the rooms getting larger as they climbed higher. The party found hallways leading to terraces that overlooked the jungle, but nothing to indicate what the building was. There was no sculpture, no sarcophagus, nothing that appeared to be a throne-room.

"Maybe it's the national archives," suggested Torwald. "All this writing could just be rules and regs."

"Or it could be a temple," Nancy offered. "Those walls could be covered with prayers."

"No figures of gods, though," objected Kelly, "unless that's what those masks outside are."

"You won't find god-sculptures in synagogues or mosques, Kelly," said Torwald. "Taboos against picturing a diety are fairly common." They were approaching the last ramp. This one led to a spacious, airy room with large doorways opening onto the top of the pyramid. For the first time since entering the structure, there was no writing on the walls. Instead, the room was perfectly featureless except for a cylindrical dais of stone about a meter high in its center. Capping the dais was a disk of what appeared to be solid gold at least fifteen centimeters thick. The disk was engraved with designs of bewildering complexity. They studied this prodigy for a long time before anyone spoke.

"It looks like a star chart to me," Finn said. "I think that the figures made with straight lines are numbers. It's somewhat stylized, and it's terribly complex, but then, you can see about a thousand times more stars here than you can see from Earth."

"You think they had an astronomical bias?" Ham asked.

"If they built this pyramid qnd inlaid it with gold for the purpose of setting this disk here, then they surely had some interest in the subject. Perhaps Sphere should inspect this thing."

"I'll relay that suggestion to the skipper," said Ham. "Meanwhile, let's step outside and take a look around while we still have light." The view from the top of the pyramid was breathtaking. The platform upon which the pyramid rested was much larger than they had believed, covering at least ten acres and studded with more of the primitive-sophisticated architecture. Here and there, more of the platforms poked up through the jungle.

"I see smoke coming from one of those complexes," said Kelley, pointing to a smaller platform about three kilometers away.

"There's another," said Michelle, indicating a more distant complex. From both, thin columns of gray smoke were rising into the breezeless air. The sun was beginning to lower, turning a lurid red in the process. The color change turned the jungle and the ruins, exotic to begin with, into as bizarre a sight as any they had ever seen. Ham took out his transmitter and made a brief report of their findings.