The Black Sun

by Jack Williamson

  “You really built it?”

  “Yup. When we finally got the contract.”

  Once, Eisen had chewed tobacco. Now instead he munched little white pills he called joy jolts. His mass quota had limited what he could bring, and he sometimes wondered what he would do when they were gone. He paused now to pour one of them out of a little tin box and crunch it with his false teeth.

  “I had a little company. A partner and I, back in Idaho.” Kip thought he wished he were back there now. “We bought the Sternberg patent. The spiders cost a lot to build, and we never sold all that many. A few went to companies working in the Arctic. We shipped a couple to the Moon, but the Mission was our best customer. Bought them for the last dozen flights. Bought more than they ever paid for.”

  “Could we use it to rescue, Carlos?” He watched a workman with a toolbox climbing the long ramp into the spider’s steel belly. “Carlos and the others? If they’re having trouble?”

  “Don’t count on it.” Eisen frowned and shook his head. “The things are so big we could only bring two. We can’t risk them both, because we’d be so helpless here without them. Shut up on the ship. Our friends in the Alpha know they can’t afford trouble.”

  “Oh.” He looked down at the floor, trying not to show how he felt. “I guess we just have to hope they’re okay.”

  “They ought to be.” Eisen reached up to pat a huge black tire. “The spiders are good machines. They don’t break down.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Roy. I hope the Alpha gets back safe.”

  When the Beta was finished and tested, Eisen took surveyors up the beach to decide where to dig caves and tunnels for habitats. Kip’s mother never let him go along, even when Eisen said he wouldn’t be in the way, but she let him come with her when she went to look over the site they had selected.

  “The sonic probes found a lot of big granite boulders in the permafrost under us,” she told him. “Boulders the glaciers brought down before the planet froze. They’d be hard to excavate, and Dr. Cheng thinks we can do better, tunneling into the cliffs.”

  Eisen drove, and she let Kip climb with her into the transparent bubble over the cabin. They went fast, high above the frost, and the swaying motion felt a little like the elephant he had ridden at a zoo, when his mother had taken him to see all the Earth creatures they would never see again.

  Jim Cheng came up the steel steps to join them. He was a slim, quick, quiet man with a friendly smile. His father had been a Singapore banker. He had become a cosmologist and joined the Mission because banking bored him.

  Eisen stopped them a couple of kilometers north, at the mouth of a high-walled gorge a glacier had cut. The heat lamp, brighter than the starlight, cast a dim red glow over the frost around them, and the searchlight roved over gray-white cliffs that towered over the level beach. They were rust red a dozen meters up, climbing up toward a high white line of ice.

  “Limestone.” Eisen nodded at the cliffs. “Laid down on the bottom of a shallow sea when the climate was warm, so Dr. Singh tells me. Sandstone above, left by floods that came down off the continent when water still flowed. There’s iron in it that colors it red.”

  He turned to Rima. “A good sign,” he told her. “You’ll be looking for iron you can mine.”

  “Our habitat?” She frowned, staring at the cliffs. “Where?”

  “In the sandstone.” He gestured. “It’s stable. Drained dry and soft enough for laser drills. We’ll have to build a scaffold to get at it now, but we’ll soon have enough rubble out of the tunnels to make an access ramp.”

  She had Eisen drive them up the canyon as far as the floor was smooth, stopping now and then to record holo-images.

  “Look at it,” she urged Kip. “Our new home!”

  Kip looked down at the frost white floor of the canyon, and up at the naked cliffs and the midnight sky. All he saw was ice and rock and darkness. He shivered.

  “I know it looks pretty grim.” She made a hopeful smile. “But we’ll carve our new city into the rock, back where the cold can’t reach us. We’ll have fusion light and power. Hydroponic gardens for fresh vegetables. Wheat and corn and soy. They make tastier foods than soyamax.”

  He looked out again, at hard rock and old ice and everlasting night.

  “If you like your ham and eggs, your hamburgers and steaks,” Dr. Cheng was saying, “we have frozen embryos. We can breed our own livestock when we have space and grain enough.”

  “We’ll learn to live here.” Rima’s arm came around him. “The valley will soon look different. We can make it bright as daylight used to be. We’ll have roads and mines and shops. Interesting work to do. We can be happy here. Really, Kip, it’s a great adventure.”

  She was too anxious for him to believe it, and he felt a little sorry for her.

  “I hope.” He caught her hand. “Mom, I really hope.”

  He stayed in the cabin with Day, once when Rima had a watch to stand in the control room. He was eager for news when she came back to them.

  “Carlos—”

  He stopped when saw her face tighten. She still didn’t trust Carlos.

  “The expedition?” He changed his question. “Is there anything from Dr. Andersen and the expedition?”

  “Nothing, really.” She looked worried. “You know they’re so far out that the signal has to be reflected from the dust out in space. Sometimes it doesn’t reflect. They did try to call. Something about a wall of ice and a light shining in it, but the signal was garbled. It made no sense.”

  She let him come with her again when they went back up the canyon to where men had begun digging for the habitat. An arched tunnel mouth had been cut into the reddish cliff, twenty meters up. A man in a yellow airskin was driving a bulldozer, moving the great pile of broken rock under the tunnel to make a ramp that machines could climb. Dr. Singh was in the tunnel, waiting to ride with them back to the ship. She left her airskin down in the entry lock and came up into the bubble.

  “Fossils!” Her voice was quick and her dark eyes shone. “Fossil bones that may help explain what we saw on the ice cap. Something I hoped for, and never expected to find.”

  “Really?” Rima stared at her. “Tell us!”

  “Calcareous bones.” She was eager to tell. “In the alluvial sandstone stratum above the old seabed.” She saw Kip’s puzzled look. “That means the bones were buried in sand that floods washed down, when water ran here.” She turned back to Rima. “I’m using a thin-beamed laser drill to cut them out. Delicate work, but I learned the technique when I used to spend vacations on archaeological digs.”

  She had studied the biology of Earth before she joined the Mission.

  “I think we have a nearly complete skeleton. Interpretation is a riddle, of course, because we have no context, nothing whatever about the history of life here. But this is actual evidence that high life-forms did evolve, perhaps as complex as our own. Altogether a fascinating find. The creature must have been a bit smaller than a man. A vertebrate, around one and a half meters tall. I’ll report when I have more to say.”

  Kip saw the skeleton when Dr. Singh brought it to the ship, still half embedded in a heavy block of red sandstone. A gray-white skull, oddly narrow, with two staring holes where its eyes had been. Rust-colored stumps of broken bones sticking out of the rock. He shrank back from the dead grin, wondering what the live thing had been.

  “It looks almost human,” Rima said.

  “It was bipedal, but I think it flew.” Dr. Singh stooped to look down at it. “The bones were light and hollow. Many of them are crushed, perhaps from a fall that killed it. The arm bones are elongated, perhaps for flight, though any actual wing structure was too fragile to be preserved. I found small bones that may have come from a functional three-fingered hand. The legs were short, ending in something more fin than foot. I’d guess the thing evolved in the sea and later took to the air.”

  “Remarkable!” Rima bent with her over it and then looked up to smile. “We’re lucky to hav
e you with us.”

  “Thanks.” Dr. Singh nodded soberly. “There was a time when I longed to know everything about the life on Earth, but I joined the Mission to look for something new.” She paused to open a little plastic bag. “Here it is.”

  She poured the contents of the bag into her palm.

  Kip saw half a dozen short black stones that caught the light like polished gems. They were all alike, as thick as pencils. They were six-sided. When she stirred them with her finger, they stuck together to make a tiny honeycomb. He leaned down to study them and looked up at her.

  “Carlos had one.”

  “What’s that?” She stared at him. “Are you sure?”

  “Where did he get it?” Rima asked.

  “He picked it up on the beach. Up in the canyon where they’re digging the habitat, when he went out with Andy in the airskins. They were scraping off the frost to get soil samples.” He frowned at Dr. Singh. “What were they for?”

  “Ornaments, maybe?” She stirred them again, shaking her head. “Maybe money? They were scattered around the bones. The creature must have worn or carried them. I can’t guess what they are.”

  “That’s odd.” Rima’s voice had quickened, and she reached to pick up the little honeycomb. “The way they adhere. Are they magnets?”

  “Not the sort we know,” Dr. Singh said. “They do attract one another, but they’re not iron.”

  Rima woke that night, sensing trouble. Day had crawled into the berth with her earlier, whimpering again that Me Me was lost on the ice. She cuddled her, and they had slept again. Now, however, she was alone in the berth. She sat up, listening. Kip’s slow and even breathing. Nothing else. No sound from Day. Trembling, she rolled out of the berth.

  Day’s berth was empty. She wasn’t in the room, wasn’t in the bathroom.

  “Day!” She was suddenly hoarse. “Day, where are you?”

  Silence.

  She turned on the light.

  “Mom?” Kip woke. “Anything wrong?”

  “Day’s gone.”

  She grabbed a robe and ran out of the room. Kip straggled after her, rubbing his eyes. The circular passage around the elevator shaft was empty. Calling Day’s name, all she heard was silence. The ship was asleep. She pushed the button for the elevator.

  “Service suspended till oh four hundred,” a computer voice told her. “In emergency, use the stair or call security.”

  The stairway stood open. She ran up the spiral steps, Kip stumbling behind her. Another empty hall, all the doors closed. She ran panting around it, climbed again and still again until she came out into the hushed dimness of the control dome. Some instrument clucked softly. The strange constellations burned across the holoscreens above her. Second Officer Sternberg sat at a semicircle of green-glowing monitors, headphones on.

  “Sir, have you seen Day?” she gasped. “My little girl?”

  Sternberg started, blinked, and put a finger to his lips. She stood trembling, getting her breath, until he shrugged and pushed the phones aside.

  “Hinch and his crew are in trouble,” he said. “I can’t contact them. Have you a problem?”

  “My little girl. She’s disappeared.”

  “I haven’t seen her. Try security.” He pushed the phones back over his ears.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  Barefoot, robe flapping, she ran back down the endless spiral, calling Day’s name into every corridor ring. Emptiness, silence, fear. Her lungs ached.

  “Mom, wait up!” Kip lagged behind, calling after her. “No use to panic. She can’t get off the ship. She’s got to be somewhere. Nobody would hurt her.”

  Remembering Day’s dreams, she was close to panic. The planet was too old, too cold, too long dead. She had come to tame it, but suddenly it was monstrous, a world of black nightmare, full of ugly riddles. Its age-old evil had somehow entered the ship to capture her child.

  Her chest hurt. She stumbled, fell on the steps, staggered to her feet, and blundered on. Round and round the endless spiral, still gasping Day’s name into every empty corridor. Kip’s breathless protests fell far behind. The ship seemed empty, dead as the ice and night around them, until at last she came out onto the main deck.

  A black-capped security officer sat at a monitor in the watch desk near the elevator. He muttered and tapped the key, and she heard a sudden blare of recorded sound.

  “Sí, señor.” The stowaway’s voice, distorted till it seemed as strange as the rest of the planet. “En el hielo. Todos los colores del arco iris. Una señal? Yo no sé.”

  He tapped a key and it boomed again.

  “Una tapia muy alta— A very high wall—”

  It became a scratchy roar, and the officer turned it down.

  “Sir?” She raised her voice. “Have you seen my little girl?”

  “Dr. Virili?” The officer shut off the sound and blinked as if he hadn’t heard her. “That was the Alpha. They’ve come to some kind of barrier and another colored beacon.” He squinted at the monitor and hunched his shoulders as if from a chill. “Another damned display of God-knows-what. Makes me wish I was still a cop, back on my beat in Salt Lake City.”

  “My little girl? Have you seen my little girl?”

  “Sorry” An apologetic shrug. “Haven’t seen any little girl.” He reached for a notepad. “Give me her descrip—”

  “Mom!” Kip shouted. “I see her. Out at the lock.”

  Wearing only her nightie, Day stood on a toolbox she had dragged to the entry air lock. She was reaching up with a screwdriver to work at the control board. Rima rushed to her.

  “Wake up, darling! What are you trying to do?”

  Her tiny body jerked as if an electric shock had hit it. She raised the screwdriver like some kind of weapon and turned to peer at them with no sign of recognition, her dilated eyes so wild and strange that Rima shuddered.

  “Dear, don’t you know me?”

  Kip ran to grab her arm. She mouthed a thin mewing cry and jabbed the screwdriver at him. Rima snatched her up. She resisted stiffly for a moment and then shivered and cried out weakly in her own voice.

  “Mommy, let me go! Me Me’s calling me. She’s out on the ice, lost and freezing, with bad things after her.”

  “Wake up, dear! Please wake up. It was only a terrible dream.”

  “It is Me Me! Really Me Me, freezing and afraid.”

  Yet suddenly she was shivering and sobbing in Rima’s arms. The security officer said he was sorry he’d failed to see her pass the desk. He’d been taping the Alpha’s reports and trying to find some sense in them. The damned planet wasn’t fit for human life. Not for any sort of life a decent man would want to meet. He hoped the engineers could get them back into quantum drive and off the crazy place.

  “The kid’s lucky she couldn’t cycle through the lock. With no suit, she’d have been dead in a second. Frozen hard as iron in twenty minutes.”

  He found a key to start the elevator and went with them back to their cabin.

  Thirteen

  Mondragon had stopped them at the edge of the rainbow rippling over the frost around the tower. Jaws sagging, they gazed up at the dark titanic blocks and the disks of rainbow color that washed across it till Hinch’s nasal snarl sawed through their wonderment.

  “We’ve found their bleedin’ hive.” He goggled at Andersen, his eyes bloodshot and wild. “I’m going in.”

  “Not our mission, sir.” Andersen shook his head. “Our orders were just to look and report, avoiding needless risk. I think we’ve learned all we need to know. At least enough to frighten me. If you’ll excuse me, sir, our duty now is to rush a quick report back to the ship. By radio or any way we can.”

  “Report what?” Hinch rasped at him. “What the blazin’ hell would you tell ’em?”

  “Altogether, sir, I take it to be convincing evidence of intelligent life somehow still surviving here. A sophisticated technological culture probably older than the ice. Likely not very friendly to us—”

&nb
sp; “Ice gods!” Hinch mocked his measured tones. “Can you tell ’em what the bleedin’ ice gods are?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Andersen said. “But sir, if I may speak, I think we’ve found a potential danger to the ship and any colony we might try to plant. I think we ought to get back while we can, at least into radio range.”

  “If you’re such bleedin’ cowards …” Hinch glared at Andersen and then at Cruzet. “I ain’t! Get me into my airskin.”

  Andersen stared back for a moment.

  “You shouldn’t, sir.” He shrugged reluctantly. “Really you shouldn’t, but you are in charge.”

  “Señor—” Mondragon had to gulp and catch his breath. “Señor, you risk your life. You should not go alone.”

  “Want to come along?”

  “Bueno. Okay, Señor.”

  His own words surprised him. He saw Cruzet and Andersen raising their eyebrows at each other as if to say he was a fool, but he followed Hinch down to the lock.

  Ship supply had fitted the airskin and let him wear it on a few practice walks on the old beach. The tight-fitting fabric was filled with channels that breathed recycled air over all his body to dry the sweat and cool or warm it. The recycler module made a hump on his back. A crystal shell covered his head. Andersen sealed him inside and made him check the controls.

  “Watch your cycler,” he said. “The air cartridge should do you ten to twelve hours.”

  He scrambled after Hinch down to the frost and stood peering up at the tower. Blacker than the sky, it covered half the constellations. He shuddered as if the planet’s bitter cold had already bitten into the airskin. De verdad, if ice gods by any name existed here, their power must be enormous.

  Brighter than the starlight, the glow from that target shape of changing color on the topless tower fringed their shadows with shifting shades of red and blue and green. The vastness of the tower and the strangeness of the place seized him like the hand of death, turning this frozen world into the hell that Father Francisco used to warn him of, where los demonios were waiting to receive him when he died.