“Goddamn, you are a cheerful demidead person.”
“Not me,” she grinned. “I am going to live forever and get the money-back offer on my geriatric treatments. Come on.”
I followed her, looking carefully into the various darknesses we passed. We made the call to Maintenance, bought a few drinks and evaded hands; all the while I rather nervously scrutinized everyone. We rented a new room for the night, this one guarded by a two-meter hulk who smiled at Nova as though he were a child and it was his birthday, and glowered at me as if I had taken away all the presents. Nova coaxed him into lending me a spare Colt laser that someone had forgotten. Even as we made love, with that special kind of feverish intensity that people have when life seems short, I knew where that weapon was every second.
In the morning I coded two messages and put them on the net that would move it around to the side facing Earth, or the synchronous satellite that was in equilateral orbit. They would be sent in tightbeam high-speed blurts to Earthcom, then down to the surface. When Huo received it with my Drop Everything Else colophon I expected he would do just that, and a reply should be back in a few days at the latest. The message to him was simple and short: Who is trying to kill me and why?
The other coded enquiry was to Sandler, my accountant. Earthside Thorne red herring. Am assassin target here. Investigate, inform care of Diego Braddock, Bradbury. I signed it “Brian Thorne.”
Now all I had to do was stay alive.
One of my first reactions was to grab a sandcat and head for some isolated knob and hole up, but my next thought-train said that might be just what they wanted. No witnesses, maybe not even a body. Who would miss one of Publitex’s flacks?
I dug into the gear I had left in Wootten’s guild locker and got out my own Colt laser. I’m fully aware that I am a hopeless romantic, but I didn’t want to be a dead romantic. I did a few fast draws from the molded holster at my hip and felt a little better. It was a minor skill that I had not thought I would ever really need, but now I was glad for the hours of practice and the careful gun and holster fittings. A laser is one of the deadliest weapons ever conceived for close fighting. The millisecond pulse of coherent light is the zapgun of old-time fiction, the disintegrator of popular writing back when we were first thinking of leaving that old ball of mud. There’s a thumb setting for pulse-per-second on the side, turning it from a single pulse firing into a multipulse ray that can slice like an invisible sword. As ruggedly as these weapons are constructed, however, such prolonged firing requires the powerful batteries to deliver their energy at a rate that can melt the circuitry. There is a vernier adjustment for intensity, and both controls can be reached with your thumb as the gun rests in the holster. In addition, my holster has a telltale that will pick up the radio waves that are emitted during firing and send a tiny alerting shock into my thigh. If you are close enough you can hear laser discharge, but at any distance, or with enough ambient noise, they are pragmatically silent. Thus the telltale can make you aware of laser firings nearby. The firing range of hand lasers is limited by the batteries, but their accuracy is one hundred percent within any visible range. While the gun is one hundred percent precise the man behind it might not be. That was what I was counting on.
Nova protested violently, but I sent her off toward home in her sandcat, along with four of Sunstrum’s friends. They all looked more than capable, and very angry that anyone would endanger Nova. Me, they didn’t care about. I didn’t blame them. Anyone who seems like a perennial laser target will find he has few friends. At least close friends. Once Nova had left I suddenly felt very alone. Wootten and Puma were off in other directions, and I knew no one except the casual drinking buddies of the other night. None of them had enough of an investment in me to stay by me, and I didn’t blame them, either. They were all curious, but kept carefully neutral. Maybe the assassins were some of Nova’s admirers and they didn’t want a blood feud. Killing me wouldn’t affect anything, no Guild or Legion, unless someone else got sliced in the process. I was politely asked to leave two different bars and I went quietly.
This was not the first time I had been the assassin’s target. I was always hoping it would be the last, but somehow it never was. I couldn’t tell anyone who I was, or at least, I didn’t think I could and didn’t think it would do any good anyway. I was beginning to think it might be better to follow my first impulse and get the hell out of Bradbury. I couldn’t shoot down everyone who came near me, and they had the advantage of anonymity.
It took both my Unicard and my Publitex card to rent a sandcat. I could see the owners were not interested in having one of their valuable machines disabled or ruined. Not even valid assurances of unlimited credit and complete insurance coverage would do it, not until I guaranteed double the full cost of the sandcat, and was backed by the Publitex power. And then I only think they did it to get me out of town. I headed west, then veered north, messing up a trail turn with my treads so they couldn’t be sure which way I went. I cut east when a lucky sandstorm came along. I was driving blind, navigating by bleeper and satellite, taking my bruises as I hit rocks and fell over the edges of small craters and ancient rilles. But the sandcat is built rugged and I had a good seat. I was well east of Bradbury when the storm veered off and I cut south again, this time to combine pleasure with hide-out, and stopped in a gully near the Star Palace about sunset.
I ran the heat sensors over the ruins from a distance and used night-light and sonar and everything else I could find, including squinting. Then I rolled the sand-cat right into the Star Palace and backed it into an odd-shaped exterior room that was part of the base of the structure. I took a light and checked my laser and climbed out of the cat. I stood listening for a long time, not focusing, only receiving. There was only the sound of a slight wind. The Star Palace was still dead. The cooling metal of the sandcat’s engine went ping and then there was only the whisper of wind.
The opening I had backed into was large, one of a series that ran around the base of the ruin, opening outward, each a monoclinic or triclinic shape, a negative crystal formation, each facet composed of millions of smaller facets. Even in the dim afterglow of sunset there were firesparks here and there at the lower levels and as I looked up there were the fabled crystal spires, the luminous domes that caught the faintest traces of light, the sheer sloping walls of great polished facets, the traceries of gemstone lace, and the incredible structure that science said was a natural formation and logic said could not be. Organically grown and controlled crystalline architecture seemed to be the only answer. But what artists, what architects, had conceived and constructed such a mountain of beauty? It was filled with halls and caverns, small rooms and large, each flowing from one to another so that you were not certain where one stopped and another began.
I roamed for an endless time in this unique and beautiful structure. Tomorrow, in the sunlight, I knew it would be a different experience, as the solar light came down through the crystals, bathing this chamber in emerald green, that one in ruby red, this long high hall in dappled rainbow.
But now, as I wandered, my powerful handbeam sent back refractions from a million surfaces, reflecting and rereflecting until I seemed to stand in space with light above and below, shifting monumentally with each small movement of the torch. I came out on a smooth balcony and looked up at the stars and galaxies and unseen radio giants.
Man was small and the universe was vast beyond
comprehension. I thought the standard thoughts of someone faced by beauty and size he cannot handle, then I went into a corridor of black crystals like orthorhombic mirrors, and further into a series of upward spiraling blue chambers, each smaller, bluer, and more complex than the one before it.
I was standing in the topmost chamber looking at the Queen’s Soul, the crystalline star of ice blue, when the telltale touched my thigh with a warning I did not want to feel.
Somewhere close someone had fired a laser.
I jumped for the light, which I had set op
posite the Queen’s Soul, to shine through it in the night. I switched it off and stood perfectly still. I heard nothing, only, again, the faint rustle of wind. Cautiously, I moved to an opening at the side of the chamber that lead out to a multilayered balcony of sorts, and stood without moving, listening to the night.
Why would anyone fire, except at me? I had no desire to be egotistical in this matter. There were lots of people I wouldn’t mind their firing at, but why would they fire, except at me?
The sandcat. They had disabled the sandcat and now they would be searching for me. The laser was cool in my fist and I hadn’t even been aware that I had drawn it.
I looked around me at the spires of crystal, some dark, some faintly shining against the stars. I didn’t want a laser battle in this temple. I didn’t want a laser battle anywhere. A laser fight is like a knife fight, or maybe a duel with sticks of dynablast, in that nothing gets out of it whole. I started back down through the crystal corridors, from blue room to blue room, from darkened chamber to cool, smooth pearl-walled room to the vast Star King’s Chamber with the hundreds of crystal stalactites that fell behind the thronelike place like a huge curtain. The names were all right out of the minds of the earliest explorers, but they often seem to fit with uncanny accuracy.
My gun touched a crystal growth and a tone sounded through the rooms and I froze. It seemed as loud as a dropped plate, but I heard no reaction. Had my telltale somehow malfunctioned, triggered by a bit of bounced radio waves? Had the crystals amplified something very distant?
I crept down, down, gun in hand, passing unseeing through fantastic glories, and finally felt sand under my boots. The sandcat was around to the right. Would they be waiting in ambush? Had they simply fired a pulse to hurry me to my only way out?
The palace was a dark, flat outline against the stars on this side. Only the spire tips and up-angled surfaces reflected the distant starlight. Everything else was impenetrable blackness.
I realized my grip on the laser was too tight and I flexed my fingers, feeling my heart pound, and imagining the adrenaline flow. Fear is when you are unsure of your own ability, said Shigeta in my memory’s ear Fear can be a weapon you use. The imagination of your enemy can be your ally.
Right, Shigeta. Where are you when I need you?
I moved along the curving wall, from chambered opening to sharp-edged arch. Again, as an overlay to the no-noise sounds of the night, I heard Shigeta speak.
It has become unfashionable amid these teeming billions to be a survival type. Fortunately survival types are not overly affected by such fashions and manage to go on doing that which they do best: to survive, even to survive being unfashionable. But was I a survival type? There had been times, yes, when I had been tested and thought that I was at least adequate. But the doubts crept in the armor chinks and ran down my mind like rivulets of sweat. A country or a planet that kills completely the killer in man will be destroyed by any other country, planet, or race that still has that ability. A civilization is created by maintaining a balance between the pragmatic savage and his power and the impractical dreamer.
Yes, but what do you do in the starlit night when some zongo wants to slice you to a few shovelfuls of meat?
Your subconscious is your best aid. Hunter and hunted are symbiotic. Both sets of senses are alert to the same stimuli. Anything may be a sign, a warning, a sense trigger. Often, you do not consciously recognize the warning, for it is in the subsconscious perceptions. Trust your instinctual reactions, for these instincts were the first you had and will be the last to go.
Suddenly, in the tense night I grinned. I remembered a beautiful black girl who had once told me, “If someone was after me I’d make sure not to trip.”
The sandcat was two openings away. I waited a long time without moving, hardly breathing, still unsure whether the laser telltale had been true or not. I heard nothing, nothing that had not been there earlier. I started to come around the crystal column to move toward the sandcat’s “garage.”
There was a tiny scrape of something on something, sand gritted under a hard surface. I froze, now fully exposed. I half expected a bright red light to pin me to death.
I heard the faintest of rustles, my ears stretching out over the distance, and I drew back, my feet silent on the soft sands. I stood with my back against the crystals, feeling them press into my warmsuit with a hundred sharp points.
Now what? I could get away in the darkness but at daylight they would find my tracks. I scanned the skies. Even to my inexperienced eyes, there seemed no hope of a sandstorm to give me cover. Besides, how would I live? All the food and water was in the sandcat, and it was a long way back to anywhere.
Could I hide in the Star Palace? Quickly I scanned my memory for what I knew of it, of the explorers’ tapes and the University of Tokyo’s fine film on it. There were lower depths, I thought. I vaguely remembered a single entrance in the bedrock, cut in the style of the Grand Hall, and some mention of older ruins below, a fragment of sentence about the possibility of the building having “grown” on a much older site.
I turned and went along the crystalline base and up the wide stairs, or what might be stairs, and into the Palace the only way I knew how to get in. I ran into several walls in the dark, and cut my cheek, then my elbow. I finally started using the light, dialed to pinpoint and on a low intensity.
It took me over an hour to find the spiral down. It was clogged with sand, and I could barely squeeze through into a small chamber of dark and rather pedestrian crystals. I dialed up the light and found the cut in the rock a little further on. I went back and smoothed over the sand by throwing handfuls back over my tracks. Then I went down into the bedrock.
There were rooms, all empty, all fairly equal in size, with nothing so complex as the triclinic openings and the spiraling open spaces of the fanciful structure high above me. There was the dust of ages and the simplicity of primitive building. It looked as though they had shaped existing caves or widened fractures in the rock.
I finally came to what seemed to be the last room and I stopped. I was tired, physically and emotionally. I sat down on a drifting dune of sand that perhaps had taken thousands of years to get this far down the complex. I lay back and closed my eyes.
Slowly I ran through the disciplines of relaxation, but not going quite so far as to close off my hearing. If they were coming, I wanted to know. I did not like the idea of death at all. I certainly did not welcome it as some do; to me, death was extinction, not a transition to a higher plane.
In a sudden, delayed thought it came to me that I had killed a man. Somehow it didn’t seem to me that I had. I hadn’t seen him dead, only injured. A wistful hope that they had lied to me persisted, but I knew they hadn’t.
I had killed. I had killed not by accident, but with skills I had learned determinedly, killing skills, lethal arts. Like a fire department, I had hoped I would never have to use those abilities for anything but exercise. But I had known quite clearly what I was learning to do, just as I honed my abilities in other areas, such as target practice. Friends of mine, rich and comfortable behind bonded guards and alarm systems, had sometimes derided me gently for “dabbling” in these deadly arts. They had asked what gunfighting or knife-fighting abilities had to do with our modern world, where most crime was either a sophisticated computer dodge or a mindless riot. There were crimes of passion, but not many. Much of the crime was corporate, huge, impersonal, done at board level or by the manipulations of the Families. Direct, personal survival skills were seldom needed, or so they thought, disregarding driving hazards, urban riots, defecting guards, faulty alarm systems, and all the other failures of a complex technological civilization.
It seems to me that many, if not all, of those factors that keep an individual alive and functioning in dangerous situations might also be translated into national terms, into a country without tension, because it is confident and secure.
Survival is not just killing. Survival is something as broad as glob
al ecology and as personal as watching both ways, even on a one-way street. It seems to me you should kill to eat, if you wanted meat, or when there is no other way to stay alive, but never just to kill. That is not survival, for all the creatures of the system are part of you, and if I survive I want the variety and pleasures of Earth, and Mars, to survive also. But I would kill the last unicorn on Earth if that were absolutely the only way I could survive, and I would not feel guilty. The most dangerous enemy man has is man himself. If you do not survive, that in which you believe also does not survive, unless your death somehow sustains it. I can see a man or woman dying for something they believe in, but how much better to fight and live to enjoy it?
Now I asked myself what I believed in so strongly that I would find it worth dying for, and I found nothing. That saddened me, for I really thought every man should have something important enough in his life for him to consider its survival worth his death.
It was very depressing to discover that about myself. Both Madelon and Nova came to mind, of course, but Madelon had removed herself, and Nova . . . I said I loved her, I believed I loved her, and I wanted to love her, but in some deep part of me I was actually unsure right now of my ability to open myself up to love.
To divert my mind from bleak depression I opened my eyes and looked up at the ceiling.
At first I just looked up without focusing; then I saw that I was looking at something. Across the entire ceiling of this room, an ancient chamber far below a structure last occupied twenty thousand years before, was a mural. It was brighter and clearer than any of those in the other ruins. I sat up, suddenly excited, flashing my beam here and there, revealing more and more of the mural to my astonished eyes. There was a letdown as I realized the images were still as indistinct and as undecipherable as those found elsewhere, but here, in this oldest of habitations, the mural was the most complete and the brightest in color—and I was the first to discover it.
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