Priam's Lens

by Chalker, Jack L

  Although within seconds Krill was quite confused at having not two but three shoot orders in her sequence, something not in the plan, the important thing was that it all happened.

  They shot.

  The plate suspended above cracked like thin ice. The jagged rupture spread through the side of the underground complex, and up into the left side of the Titan base itself. The one shot was too much for the small plate, which was never intended to be used in any way, much less like this, and it fell and shattered on the factory floor below.

  The crack continued to spread. Where it struck the Titan base, the crystals shattered like so many thin glass bulbs under pressure.

  From high on the hillside, two women, mouths open in awe, forgot their unconscious charge and watched as an indescribable sliver of something shot out of the very earth and shattered a large segment of the base. It was followed by a sonic boom the likes of which not even most space pilots had felt before—a boom that deafened them, flattened some trees on the plain below, and knocked both women down.

  The base itself was in serious trouble. It flickered and shimmered as popping and crackling sounds were heard inside, and the whole center structure, all twenty-plus stories of it, began to collapse in on the already ruined left section, which could no longer provide structural support.

  Two more Titan craft flew out as it collapsed, but they were unsteady, wobbling, and both crashed to the ground in front of the disintegrating base.

  The towers anchoring the grid fell in as the structure imploded in dramatic slow motion. For a brief moment the grid shone brightly in the sky in spite of the glow, as if it had suddenly received more power than it ever had carried before, and then, just as suddenly, but completely, it winked out.

  “They did it!” Spotty cried, still not sure she could hear after that big explosion but too excited to remain scared. “They killed the demon city!”

  The plain was slowly dimming, going dark, as the base continued to collapse. A multitude of tiny figures were moving like excited insects all around in front of it, but from this distance it was impossible to tell who or what or how many they were.

  A good dozen ships, however, had already left before the shot was taken or had managed to break out before the impending collapse; these now hovered over the area, save only the two finishing off the transmitter and the two others now turning to molten rock an area between the old spaceport and the base.

  Spotty watched, and her joy was suddenly muted. “Littlefeet,” she muttered, an agonized expression replacing the jubilant one.

  Harker groaned in back of them, then opened his eyes and cried out, “No! I—”

  He suddenly realized he was on his back and in the trees and that the two women were there and paying no attention to him whatsoever.

  He tried to get up, failed the first time, then managed to sit up and feel his jaw and the back of his head. He tried to remember what had happened but it was all a confusing blur.

  “Kat! Spotty!” he called.

  Spotty continued to look at the spectacle, which was now becoming harder and harder to see as most of the illumination faded, leaving only that from the surviving ships and the areas they had transformed to magma. Kat, however, turned and bent down. “You okay?” she asked him.

  “What—what happened?”

  “Oh, they took the shot,” she told him. “The base is no longer.”

  He tried to get to his feet in a hurry and, with her help, he managed it. “You mean I missed the damned show? After all that?”

  “You got caught in one of their beams. The only way not to have you turned into one of their spies was obvious, so I knocked you out.”

  “You knocked me out?”

  “Well, you were kind of spaced-out, you know. Easy target.”

  He felt his jaw and then the back of his head once again. “I think you got lucky. Feels like my head hit a rock or something when I fell. Damn! Was it worth seeing? Help me to where I can at least look at the rubble!”

  “C’mon, helpless! Not much to see anymore, though. And stay out of the way of those ships. They’re reeling but they’re not finished yet!”

  But, they were finished, at least at Ephesus. The ships patrolled the area, back and forth, and occasionally one of them sent out a searchlight of some kind, checking on something below, but there was little more they could do. They seemed aimless, confused, unable to accept that they’d just suffered a tremendous blow and that something was definitely out there hunting them for a change.

  Harker watched it, and something in the back of his mind understood.

  “They don’t have any connection with the rest of the network,” he commented. “They can’t consult, they can’t get orders, they can’t make collective decisions at the speed of light. One thing’s sure—they didn’t trace the shots to space. They’re not going up in a hurry to take on Hector, Krill, and her gates.”

  She shook her head. “It didn’t look hke it came from there,” she told him. “For some reason, sheer luck, I was staring down at it when it happened. It was hke it came out of the ground. I expected a bolt from the blackness, and it came from out of the ground. Go figure.”

  He looked up at the night sky. “No grid. No giant continental neural net. Now it’s the flowers that’ll be going mad.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. I’m not even positive myself what it means, but I can tell you that they are hurt bad.”

  Spotty turned and looked at him. “Will they build it again? Will it come back?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know, Spotty. I honestly don’t. I hope not. If they don’t, at least we’ll know that Krill reclaimed this system. How they do this in places where they’re not orbited by a peanut moon hke that I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter to us anymore.”

  Kat looked back at the now darkened scene. “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now we’re out of the battle and out of the war,” he told her. “Now we get to go someplace where I can sleep off this pounding headache, where we can all eat and drink and relax. Maybe, when we get back to the Styx, we’ll take some time and teach Spotty how to swim. She’s already got an oversized flotation collar on her chest. Two of ’em. Shouldn’t be too hard for somebody who walked into a demon city and walked back out leaving it a pile of rubble.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  “Well, we find a really pretty place near the coast with a nice view of the ocean and no monsters under the sand and with lots of food and water and good wood, and we work up some tools. We live there and we do the best we can and see about building a boat. We defend the place and protect it. If they find us before I finish the boat, well and good, or if I finish the boat first, well, maybe we’ll go find out who won the war. There’s nothing but time now, and there’s no hurry at all.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Something of Value

  The shuttle craft circled the area and studied the settlement below. It was quite typical of small communities on Eden, although those on the other continent had not developed as smoothly, and those who lived there were still primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers.

  Not that Eden’s small villages were any wonders of technology, but the people did tend to stay put and trade a bit with their near neighbors.

  Like the others they had surveyed, this one had shelters but no totally enclosed structures; rather, the “houses” were basically earthworks with roofs of woven straw held up by bamboo-like poles. They had no sides, and were open to the elements.

  There was a small fire pit, but it was well away from the rest of the village and only a wisp of smoke could be seen from it. These people had an inordinate fear of fire, and while they used it, particularly on Eden, they used it minimally.

  At one time there appeared to have been taller earthworks as a kind of outer wall, but these had now been so dug through with access paths that they were more a boundary than a hindrance.

  As with the others, the people painted their faces and bodies, sometimes
with dyes but sometimes with permanent and elaborate tattoos. They wore no clothing. The women had long hair but the length did vary once it reached the shoulders; the men tended to wear shoulder-length hair and medium-full beards, but clearly hair and beards were cut and trimmed.

  The newcomers had already seen how some great sea beasts could sneak in under the sand and present a nasty danger to anyone on it, yet these people seemed to have no fear of them. There weren’t too many coastal communities, but the few that there were seemed to have found a way to divert the creatures or keep them well at bay. Indeed, the coastal types were mostly fishers, who used small, rough dugout canoes to spread nets woven of hairy vines native to the more junglelike interior. They used the sea creatures—“fish” was a relative term for creatures that filled the same general niche and were edible—as trade goods for dyes, fruits, vegetables, cooking oils, and the like from villages farther inland.

  The cliffs seemed to be almost solid salt.

  So far they had contacted a number of tribal groups on Eden—and particularly in the Great Basin region, the vast bowl-shaped area ringed by high mountains—looking for any traces of the expedition that had been sent in and had performed its duty.

  The two-person shuttle craft did one more lazy circle, then the uniformed woman in the left seat said to her similarly attired male companion, “Let’s put down. This is the most sophisticated-looking group we’ve seen on the coast yet, and the closest to the site of old Ephesus.”

  “You’re the boss,” the man responded, and hordes of young children scattered and people came from just about everywhere pointing to the sky as they descended.

  “Jeez, they really make a lot of babies around here,” the woman noted.

  Her companion shrugged. “After dark there doesn’t seem an awful lot else to do.”

  The shuttle gave a thump and was then on the ground. The hatch opened, and a set of steps came out, leading to the ground on the side away from the village wall.

  They expected to see everybody start running or hiding behind the battlements. Instead people, particularly the kids, rushed to them with laughing, smiling faces.

  Amid childish greetings that amounted mostly to “Hello, lady! Hello, man!” there were a few older faces, mostly women but at least one man who, even through the beard, had a somewhat familiar look to the uniformed woman.

  He made his way through the kids, who had to be dissuaded from climbing into the shuttle by automatically closing the hatch from the outside, and he finally got to the two of them.

  “Hello,” he greeted them. It was an oddly accented voice, but firm and deep and clear. “They said you would come one day, but most of us no longer believed it.”

  She stared hard at him. “Mister Harker? That can’t be you behind that beard, can it?” She knew it couldn’t be—he was too young for that—but he sure looked a lot like the warrant officer.

  The young man laughed. “I think you want my grandfather. I’m afraid he’s not here right now, but my grandmother is overseeing the salting of the morning catch. Would you like me to take you to her?”

  “Your grand—” She caught herself. “Yes, please. We would like to meet her.”

  “We don’t use long names around here,” the young man explained. “It’s not worth it. And, as I understand it, they never could decide on what family name to use, so they finally just said to heck with it and haven’t used much since. Instead, when they founded this village they named it Treasure. That’s all we’ve called ourselves since I was born. The Treasure People. I’m Curly, ’cause of my curly hair. ’Course, half the people here got curly hair, but I got the name first.”

  “Well, I’m Barbara, and this is Assad. We’ll keep it on a first-name basis, then,” the woman said.

  A lot of the villagers looked very, very related; the new arrivals had to wonder just how close some of them were. Still, there was some variety, and it was clear that they had sprung from more than two people.

  An older man, with deep, ancient scars carved in his skin and a body covered with faded tattoos, his hair and beard gray, but who looked of more Mediterranean ancestry than Curly did, got to his feet with the aid of a carved walking stick and came toward them. He limped from what was clearly a very old wound, but he seemed not to notice.

  “Hello!” he called to them. “I am so happy to see that you arrived before I was gone to God.”

  “We seem to have been expected,” Assad commented, smiling and relaxed. “Are you from the original expedition?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” he replied. “But I was born and raised here, before the Liberation. I was simply lucky enough to be there and be a part of it. I should have died, but God decided at the last minute that somebody had to tell the story of those who were there at the end. I’ve waited many years to tell it to somebody.”

  “We will certainly listen,” Barbara assured him, “and people who’ll follow us will interview everybody and record it for future generations. You know what I mean by that?”

  “I have been told that the voice and even the image can be somehow captured and shown elsewhere, yes, but I never saw it and I got to admit it’s a little wild to think on.”

  “Uncle, these people want to see Grandmother,” Curly put in.

  “Huh? Oh, all right, sure. Let’s all go over. She’s right over there.”

  They headed toward an older woman who was still in excellent physical shape but who clearly had lived long and been through a lot. Her hair was almost white, and her skin was weathered and wrinkled, but there was a tightness to the form and she still was a handsome woman. She was giving instructions, mostly critiques, to younger women packing fish in salt loaves, when she heard them and turned.

  “Hey, Kat! I thought you’d be running for the air boat!” the gray-haired man called.

  She turned and smiled. “Littlefeet, one of these days you’re going to grow up! I knew they’d come in their own time.”

  The two officers stared. Finally, Assad said, “You are not Katarina Socolov, are you?”

  The old woman smiled. She didn’t have all her teeth anymore, but she had more than many her age. “Yes, although it’s been a very long time since anybody called me anything more than ‘Kat,’ or more often Mom or Grandma.”

  “But—we’ve been searching all over for you and the others! There are stories about you around the region, but we thought we’d never find you!”

  “Well, we’ve been right here since six months or so after the big bang. Couldn’t do much more. By then I was pregnant with this hairy bastard’s father,” she gestured toward Curly, “and I was scared to death as it was. Never thought I’d ever have a kid at all. We set up right here, the four of us, after Littlefeet reached us at the Styx.”

  “Four? There are other survivors?” Assad pressed.

  “Well, not really. Depends on how you look at it, I guess. There’s Gene, of course—he’s Curly’s grandfather, as well as a lot of others you see around here—and Father Chicanis was around for some time, but he died a year or two ago. Spent half his life trying to reestablish the true faith on Eden, only to fail miserably not only at that but even at keeping it up himself. See, those Titans, they were using everybody as guinea pigs. Mostly it was keeping everybody out in the wild, well, wild. Raw material for their experiments, we figure. They used a broadcast net and some biochemical agents to do the job in a general sense. Worked on us as much as it had on the ones born and raised here. Still around, so maybe it’s inside the genes now or something. Weird stuff, too. Like extreme claustrophobia. No buildings, you see? We built a nice big straw and bamboo hut—we call ’em straw and bamboo, even though they aren’t really—using designs I remembered from my anthropology studies. Real pretty thing, and sturdy. But we couldn’t spend the night in it. In fact, we couldn’t spend ten minutes in it before we were all climbing the walls and rushing outside. That kind of stuff. It actually gets worse as you get older, too. I don’t think we could ever go down that tunnel now
, and even that big factory is the stuff of nightmares. I don’t know how Little-feet and Spotty did it. More force of will than me, anyway.”

  “Is that why you never went back to your shuttle?” Barbara asked her.

  “Oh, we did. Not right away, of course, but a couple of years later, when we managed to get real beach access and test the dugout canoes. Thing was, we couldn’t get in the damned thing. That claustrophobia again, you see. And then we got to thinking, that even if we forced ourselves in, even if we took some of the organic drugs and maybe knocked ourselves out for the trip, where would we wind up? In a little room on the little moon, and then to a little enclosed shuttle, and—well, you see? We couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. By then—two, three years—we had a couple of kids. Couldn’t leave ’em, and we couldn’t really take them into that environment when we weren’t sure we wouldn’t go crazy. That kind of settled it.”

  They nodded. It was consistent with the behavior several of the survey teams had monitored, and now, coming from someone familiar with the outside universe, it made sense.

  “So you stayed and you built all this,” Barbara said, looking around.

  “Yeah, eventually we solved the serious problems. It rains a lot in this place, so we dug out those big cisterns and lined them with a clay that proved pretty waterproof and we’ve never been without fresh water. About five years ago we found a kind of forest stalk that’s pretty big but hollow inside, and, sealed with clay, it actually works well as a pipe. Now we got running water and a basic system for getting rid of waste. A lot of the kids are pretty clever, too. They’ve been coming up with stuff. We’re actually building a new kind of society here. It’s different, it’s not evolving anything like what I grew up with, but it’s a good society. You know we’ve never had a murder here? There’s virtually no crime at all. The Hunters, poor devils, have been pretty well wiped out. When we run across a possible survivor or the result of some other sick Titan experiment, we put them out of their misery. Otherwise, there’s little in the way of violence. You feel safe and secure here. There’s plenty of food, the climate’s good, and these kids have never really known want or fear. If somebody, even a stranger, comes, they’re welcome, as you are, to anything we might have and free to help out or go along.”