The Black Sun

by Jack Williamson

  “Alarming sense.” Cruzet nodded. “Can you say what it wanted?”

  “Not really. I think it was doing a sort of autopsy, as if I were already dead—if it knows the difference between life and death. I felt it reaching into me. Studying me like you would a plastic model in an anatomy lab. Looking at the organs and the way they work together. It did my body. And then—then my mind.”

  He waited for Mondragon to refill the mug.

  “Thank you, Carlos.” He drank it eagerly. “I got cold. I need the heat.”

  “Your mind?” Cruzet urged him again. “What was it doing to your mind?”

  “I don’t know what.” He stared away, as if to search the empty air. “Or how. I was a rat in the lab. That’s how I felt, jerking at first to jolts of pain. That was physical, just for starters. It shook me with waves of emotion that had no cause I understood. Terror, too, that I did understand.”

  Jaw clenched, he made a bitter little grin.

  “Because I was so helpless. I couldn’t move a muscle.” He convulsed again. “Sorry!” he muttered. “A dozen kinds of hell. Nothing I want to remember. Thank God it’s already fading.”

  “Tell us,” Cruzet urged him. “While you can. Anything you do remember.”

  “Memories. Memories.” He grimaced at Mondragon, seeing nothing. “That’s what they wanted. Everything about me, everything I ever felt or was. A blur of things I forgot long ago. A little steam engine I built when I was a kid. My elation when I discovered Euclid. A rocket I made that exploded in the air and brought the cops. On and on. Down to quantum engineering and wavecraft and StarSeed and how we got here.”

  “It was measuring your mind.” Cruzet seemed relieved. “Deciding, I hope, that you weren’t another Jake Hinch.”

  “Maybe.” He nodded uncertainly. “But I don’t think it ever really understood what I am. It made me repeat some of the recollections again and again. It wanted more than it ever got. More than I ever knew. I don’t think it was ever satisfied. Finally it just stopped and left me.”

  He shivered, holding the mug toward Mondragon for yet another refill.

  “Pure nightmare!” He gulped the syncafe and grinned at Mondragon. “Un sueño malo.”

  More soberly, he turned to mutter at Cruzet.

  “No comfort for us. They just inspected me. The way we might have inspected a green-skinned corpse off a saucer ship. Found me as strange to them, I think, as they are to us. Yet I got no sense that they care or really want to know what we are or why we’re here, except to make sure we can do no harm to them. I think that’s why they left me alive. Anxious to be rid of us.”

  He shuddered again.

  “I hope they’ve had enough.”

  Mondragon whispered a prayer.

  “We’ll wait and see,” Cruzet murmured. “Nothing else to do.”

  Andersen shut his eyes and lay back on the berth, breathing as if he were asleep. Half an hour later he sat up and said he felt okay. Still chilled, but okay. Yet for a time they stayed together in the cabin, grateful for one another and the shelter of the steel-shelled titanium hull.

  Stirring reluctantly at last, Cruzet climbed into the bubble to try the ship again. He stayed so long that Mondragon went to look for him and found him silent at the radio, so intent that he made no answer when Mondragon spoke.

  “No ship,” he told them when he came down. “We’re too far out, even for that chance reflection.”

  “Podemos—,” Mondragon began. “Can we …”

  Looking into their tight faces, he swallowed the question and turned to heat water for syncafe. Cruzet joined him at the counter to make a soya stew and toast slugs of novakelp. They ate in silence, with little appetite. Mondragon cleaned their bowls and spoons. Andersen rose heavily, went to the toilet, came out to shrug at Cruzet.

  “Let’s try.” His voice was hoarse and slow, but at least he was himself again. “They stopped Hinch, but that was after he dynamited the tower. Let’s see what happens if we just start the engine.”

  “Why not?” Cruzet nodded. “No good just sitting here.”

  He went forward to the controls. Mondragon climbed with Andersen into the bubble and shivered when he looked out. Nothing was different. The frozen ocean still lay flat to the straight black horizon; the strange constellations blazed as they had blazed forever; the dead black sun hung among them as it had always hung, only slightly higher here; the black stone tower stood where the ice gods had built it before Earth was born. A world of night and ice and death, without life or time or motion …

  Except for that deep black crack in the ice, which the ice gods had made to swallow el Señor Hinch. Blacker than midnight, blacker than the tower or the sun, its bottomless depth chilled him to the bone. The ice gods ruled here, angry that they had been disturbed.

  He heard the turbine hum. Cruzet backed them away from the fissure and drove a kilometer north along it in search of a better crossing.

  “No difference,” Andersen called. “Let’s try here.”

  Cautiously, Cruzet pulled them close to the brink and stopped. Mondragon got into his airskin, climbed down to the ice, and stood near the crack, where they could see his signals. Front and rear wheels extended, the machine inched forward. He watched and signaled Cruzet to stop when the front wheels touched the other side. He climbed back aboard. Cruzet drove on across.

  Out of the airskin, he climbed back to the bubble.

  “The ice gods must love us,” Andersen greeted him. “Why else?”

  Cruzet came to join them, passing a flask of Hinch’s cognac. Sipping it, they stood there a few minutes looking back across the chasm at the black tower and the black sun and the sky’s starshot black infinity.

  “So now?” Cruzet was still shaken. “Are they playing with us?”

  “We’ll see.” Andersen shrugged. “They didn’t like Hinch and his dynamite, but they have let us go. At least this far. Drive on and we’ll see what happens.”

  “Quiero—” He spoke on impulse. “I wish—I almost wish we could go farther. I know the great ice cap is too far, but I would like to climb it to see that city of the ice gods.

  “If we could—”

  They turned with him to look past the tower across the featureless black horizon.

  “It’s halfway around the planet.” Cruzet shook his head, speaking half to himself. “Twenty-five thousand kilometers. Ten or twelve thousand across this frozen stuff, till we come to another ten or twelve thousand kilometers of the cap itself, old glaciers, ice cliffs and crevasses, and who knows what.”

  They found the marks their wide-set wheels had left on the frost and followed them west. The tower dwindled into the timeless night. Slowly, slowly, the black sun sank behind them. Mondragon took his turns at the wheel, made syncafe and starchow stew, dozed in his berth, called the ship when he was in the bubble. Two hundred kilometers out from the tower, he got an answer.

  “Mr. Mondragon?”

  La rubia! His heart beat faster. Her voice seemed relieved and pleased. Concerned for the Alpha, of course. For Andersen and Cruzet. For him? Would she see him now as something more than the mojado stowaway?

  “Si, señora.” Not thinking, he used the Spanish words. “We are returning.”

  “Your report?” He had been too slow to speak. “Good news, or bad?”

  “Yo no sé.”

  She would wish to know if they had found dangers that might stop the terraforming of the planet, but he found no words to tell of the tower’s sealed door or the light in the ice or how the gods of the planet had split it to make a trap for el Señor Hinch. Or el demonio that had seized Dr. Andersen.

  “Good or bad, I do not know.” He tried to speak in English, though he had never mastered the correct Anglo accent. “We encountered phenomena I did not understand. We lost el Señor Hinch, but we have been allowed to return.”

  “Phenomena?” He wondered for a moment if his language had confused her. “What do you mean?”

  “Strange
things, Señora. Muy extranjero.”

  Perhaps the Spanish would not matter now. He wanted to tell her all he’d seen and felt. The vastness of the tower, the weight of the ages it had stood, the miraculous opening of the ice, the alien power that had taken and released Dr. Andersen. Yet he knew he could never make her understand.

  “Siento. I have no words to say.”

  “Mr. Hinch?” She seemed sharply impatient. “You mean to say he’s dead? Let me speak to somebody else.”

  “Un momento.”

  Cruzet was in his berth. Mondragon called Andersen and went down to take the wheel. Driving on, following the wheel marks on the frost, marks that might be here forever, he thought of her and Kip and la ninita. Kip would be glad of his return and eager to listen when he spoke of the ice gods. Day cared only for her mother and the panda doll.

  La rubia herself? Her concern was los ninitos. If he could help her find or make a good home for them, she might be grateful. He wished to have her close, to hear her actual voice again, to share her Anglo world and share his own with her. Or was the gulf too great? The gulf between the quantum engineers and el pobrecito who had herded goats on the bare Chihuahua hills, a gulf as deep as the rift the ice gods had opened to defend their fortress tower.

  Cruzet woke and took the wheel. Mondragon made syncafe and heated one more chicken-flavored novakelp stew. They stopped to gather in the cabin for a last quick meal. Andersen drove on while Mondragon slept. When he woke to take the wheel again the ice white crest of the peninsula was rising against the stars ahead.

  Andersen was above him in the bubble, humming some quick-paced melody, when at last they crossed the old beach and jolted up the rocky slopes to the ship. The air lock of the work balloon stood open to welcome them. They rolled inside. Air roared in around them. The inner gates opened. The wide floor was nearly empty, but in a moment people came streaming in through the safety gate. Among them were the engineers who had helped assemble the spider, and the security officers in their stiff black caps.

  Mondragon saw Glengarth and Senn, and even Jesus Rivera in a greasy apron, a cabin steward, an assistant cook who was also a hydroponics engineer with knowledge of terraforming. All were smiling and expectant, anxious for news.

  He looked for la rubia and found her at last, coming through the safety gate, Day clinging to her hand and Kip running ahead. A man walked beside her, a tall stranger in blue seamed with the black security stripe. He caught a quick breath and looked again. The stranger was Jonas Roak, walking very close to her.

  Fifteen

  Kip was sitting with Rima and Day in a booth at the side of the dining room when he saw Mondragon coming down the line of serving machines.

  “Mom! There’s Carlos. I’ll ask him to sit with us.”

  She saw Andersen and Cruzet at another table, grinning at Mondragon and waving him toward them.

  “Kip!” she called. “Don’t you see …”

  He was already running to meet Mondragon, eager to carry his tray. Mondragon followed him back to the table, smiling hesitantly at Rima.

  “Señora, perdoname por favor—”

  “Won’t you join us?” Graciously, she waved him to sit. “But let’s speak English. Your own English is really excellent.”

  “Gracias—” He caught himself. “Thank you, Dr. Virili, but I left Chihuahua so recently. I do not have the good accent.”

  “No le hace.” She smiled. “I like your accent.”

  Happy with her kindness, he wanted to explain himself. “Everything has been so strange to me.”

  “To all of us, since we took off.” He liked her smile. “I hope we can relax a little now.”

  He wasn’t sure of that, but he didn’t want to spoil her smile. He thanked Kip, who was setting the dishes out of his tray and urging him to sit. He slid into the booth beside him, glad to be back from the encounter with the demons of the ice, glad to be sitting here with la rubia—with Rima, if he dared to think her name. He felt a little awkward, uncertain of what he could say that would not break the moment, but she was already speaking.

  “We all appreciate what you have done for us, Mr. Mondragon. You and your companions.” She paused to nod at Cruzet and Andersen, who were walking on to another table. “I’ve heard their reports. I think we can be pretty safe in the habitat now, but I want to hear your own story.”

  “If you have talked to Mr. Andersen,” he said, “you know more than I do. They—the beings of the tower—examined him. They could have killed us all, the way they killed Mr. Hinch. But they let us go. I don’t know why.”

  “I don’t expect to ask them.” She grew serious. “Now, perhaps, Captain Stecker will let us go on digging for the habitat.”

  “Mr. Carlos?” Day looked up from her bowl of cereal and soya milk. “Did you see Me Me?”

  “I didn’t.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “She’s my panda. She’s lost on the ice.”

  Blue eyes wide and bright with tears, she looked so tiny and pathetic that he wanted to pick her up and comfort her. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We saw many kilometers of ice, all of them empty. I don’t think Me Me is out there. If she had been, we’d have found her.”

  “I know she’s there, Mr. Carlos. She—” Day swallowed hard, trying not to cry. “She keeps begging for help.”

  “Dear, you mustn’t fret so much.” Rima put her arm around the child. “You know we left your panda back on Earth, with a friend to take care of her.”

  Day looked stubbornly unconvinced.

  “She’s got this silly idea,” Kip tried to explain. “I don’t know how.”

  “There’s a lot we don’t know.” Mondragon stirred soyasweet and tofucream into his syncafe. It tasted almost good. He turned hopefully to Rima. “You’re already digging for the habitat?”

  “The work’s going well,” she said. “We’re already finished cutting out a chamber for the entry air lock. Tomorrow we can begin spraying sealant on the walls to make them airtight.”

  “Exciting!” Kip added brightly. “We went with Mr. Glengarth to see the cliff where they’re digging. The place still looks cold and dark as anywhere, but the habitat will let us move off the ship. We’ll have our own apartment. Mr. Glengarth says there will be a school with big playrooms, and hydroponic farms where we can grow our own garden.”

  “One more question, Mr. Mondragon.” Rima spoke when he had run down. “This tower you found? How old is it?”

  Quién sabe? But he must speak English.

  “Very old,” he said. “Maybe older than the ice.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s made of black stone, or something like stone.” Wanting her to think him something more than the ignorant mojado, he spoke slowly, careful with the accent. “Great blocks like brick, larger than houses. So tough it’s hard to drill, even with a laser. Change must be slow here, yet stones have fallen from the top and shattered on the ground, so long ago that ice has covered half of them. We saw nothing that seemed alive. Nothing except things I do not understand. The rings of color on the tower wall and the ice quake that trapped Mr. Hinch.”

  “Who does understand?” She shrugged and pulled little Day closer before she looked back at him. “I asked because of a fossil skeleton we dug out of the cliff. Dr. Singh thinks the creature was able to fly. Probably intelligent. She found puzzling objects with it. Perhaps beads or money—”

  “Like that black pebble you found on the beach,” Kip said. “The one you gave me.”

  “Si. I remember.”

  “A riddle to us.” For a moment she looked hard at him. “Dr. Singh was wondering if the creatures were advanced enough to invent a high technology. If perhaps they built the tower while the planet was alive. And if some of them might still exist. I guess we have no way to know, but what do you think?”

  Quién sabe? Careful to avoid Spanish, he was glad she trusted his opinion. “Something did sense our ship still out in space. Something lit the signa
ls on the ice and on the tower—if the flashes of color were meant to be signals. Something did kill Mr. Hinch. But what the something is, I don’t know.”

  He saw the shadow of worry on her face.

  “We may be in no danger,” he assured her quickly. “The beings studied,”—he stopped to find the English word— “interrogated Mr. Andersen. Searched his memory, he says, trying to learn all about us. They could have killed us, but they let us go….”

  His voice trailed off when he saw four men in black security caps coming down the serving line. One of them was Jonas Roak.

  “Mr. Roak.” Kip dropped his voice and spoke to his mother, his blue eyes narrowed. “I don’t like him. He says Carlos brought the bomb to blow us up.”

  “Eat your breakfast,” Rima told him.

  “I brought no bomb.” Rima was searching his face, perhaps not so certain as Kip was. He repeated, with an injured emphasis, “I know nothing of the bomb, except that Mr. Roak accuses me.”

  Kip ignored his soyamax toast and alga-egg omelet.

  “It was Mr. Roak himself.” Almost whispering, he frowned at the men. “Dr. Cruzet says he was furious when they got the phone call and sealed everybody on the ship. He’s the bomber.”

  “You mustn’t say that.” Rima rapped the table by his plate. “I’m not all that fond of him, but he was the launch inspector. His duty was to keep the ship safe, not to kill us. There seems to be no real evidence against anybody. Earth and Fairshare are a long way behind us. The bomb didn’t explode. It’s no threat to us now—”

  She flushed, turning suddenly in her seat.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Mondragon. Mr. Glengarth says you are no longer suspected. You’ve proved yourself a brave and able man. I hope you can forgive me—”

  “De nada—” He caught himself. “A Fairshare activist did help me get aboard. There was a Fairshare document in the coveralls they gave me. But most certainly—” His voice caught, and he glanced into Kip’s anxious face. “I swear by the saints that I am innocent.”