The Black Sun

by Jack Williamson

  They got nothing on the fourth day. Rima let Kip watch the monitor on the fifth day, when she had to care for Day and the Sternberg kids. All he heard was the mutter and rattle of interstellar static. Tired of that, he set up an adventure on the Game Box.

  He joined Captain Cometeer on an expedition to rescue the Silver Queen from the Steel Eaters. Guiding his paramatter craft through a magnetic storm, he had landed on the battle planet of the Iron Emperor when suddenly he was listening to the static again, wondering what had become of the Alpha. He had given up the game before the interphone rang.

  “Good news, Mr. Kip!” Glengarth was calling. “You can tell your mother that Roak and the captain have agreed to a search-and-rescue expedition. They didn’t like to stop work on the pit, but Andy gave them no choice.”

  He called his mother. She was with him in the dome a few minutes later, along with Cruzet and Andersen. Mondragon was close behind them.

  “How did you do it?” Rima was asking Andersen.

  “Gentle persuasion.” He gave her a bleak little grin. “I reminded them that establishing a launch complex was a major undertaking even back on Earth, with materials we could order from anywhere. Building it here on the permafrost is going to need a strong team.

  “The missing engineers are key players on our team. Dr. Fujiwara is our expert in quantum math. Dr. Krasov is the systems engineer that Roak claimed to be, with know-how to pull the whole job together. I told the captain we’d never get off the ground without Krasov and Fujiwara here to do their share. I slipped in a hint that Tony and I couldn’t do much at all without them.”

  “Roak called just now,” Glengarth added. “Captain Stecker has agreed to let you go. You and Tony. Carlos has volunteered to drive you.”

  Kip saw his mother looking hard at Mondragon. He looked back with an anxious half-smile. They both stood frozen so long Kip wondered what they were thinking. Neither one spoke, till she caught her breath and turned suddenly back to Andersen.

  “The risk?” she asked. “What about the risk?”

  “Quién sabe? as Carlos puts it.” He nodded amiably at Mondragon. “Who knows? We’ve promised to take no needless risk. So did Indra and the engineers. So far as we know, she’d had no hint of any danger.”

  He shrugged and turned soberly to Glengarth. “Are we cleared to go?”

  “Cleared,” Glengarth told him. “To leave as soon as you can service the machine and load supplies.”

  Kip stood beside his mother, watching wistfully as they turned to leave the dome.

  “Carlos …” His voice quivered, but he caught his breath and stubbornly went on. “I wish I could go with you.”

  They all stared in surprise.

  “Better stick to your Game Box,” Glengarth told him. “This is a game for men.”

  “Ahora no.” Mondragon gave him a very grave smile. “But sometime, perhaps, if your good mother is willing.”

  Eighteen

  They left early the next morning—morning by the ship’s clocks, which still ran on Earth time. Mondragon drove while Andersen looked after the fusion engine and the air recycler and Cruzet stood in the lookout bubble, sweeping the searchlight along the ice-bound coast.

  The Alpha vehicle had left its tracks on the frost, but Singh and the engineers had kept to smoother ice farther out, pushing steadily south till they reached the canal. There, they drove deep into the narrow cut and Andersen radioed Glengarth to report.

  “The builders were certainly competent engineers. The site itself is proof of that. The peninsula ridge, as we mapped it from space, is low and narrow here, the rock so stable that we saw no caving till we came to the rock slide that closed the canal. It’s deep and clean; they must have dumped the rubble into the sea.”

  “And all so long ago!” Glengarth’s voice was hushed with awe. “Could their descendants have survived?”

  “Not as navigators.” Andersen made a quizzical shrug. “Their sun took a long time dying. These oceans were probably frozen before our Earth was born. Any link between the canal and that black tower seems pretty remote.”

  “Too many such riddles!” Glengarth was silent for a dozen heartbeats. “We need answers now.”

  “We’re looking.”

  “Keep looking. The ship’s become a volcano.”

  “Sit on it,” Andersen said. “Sit on it.”

  After a hurried meal of the decent Earth food Jake Hinch had left aboard, Andersen climbed into the lookout bubble to log his survey of the canal. Cruzet drove them on, sending Mondragon down to rest.

  “Sleep,” he said, “if you can.”

  He couldn’t Restless in the berth, he thought of Rima and her hope for a safe future for Kip and Day. He thought uneasily of Jonas Roak, who wished to claim “the pretty bitch.” He thought of the missing spider and wished for something better than he expected.

  After an hour he rolled out of the berth to make a fresh pot of Hinch’s fragrant Kona coffee, and took it in insulated mugs to the others. Relieving Cruzet at the wheel, he watched the red glow of the ship’s own heat lamp dim and finally disappear below the horizon behind. Driving under strange stars through a silence older than time, he kept them to the Alpha’s wheel tracks and kept on wondering.

  The canal diggers? He groped for any sane image of whatever had sailed this ocean before it froze. Had amphibians really ruled the planet? And really built the lighthouse Singh expected? Perhaps before the canal was dug? Might something still be haunting it, waiting through endless ages on guard against unwelcome strangers?

  Afraid to think of what they might learn about the Alpha’s fate, he wished he were back in Cuerno del Oro, even with all its cruel poverty—if Rima and los niñitos could have been there with him. The planet was too cold, too dark, too long dead. Her dream of conquering its ice and everlasting night began to seem like madness.

  Fantasmas crept into his mind, the ghosts of the creatures that had left their bones in the sandstone and flashed their warnings from the ice. He almost thought he felt them now, watching through the starlight, angered by these rude strangers with their strange machines and dynamite.

  They had lost radio contact with the ship. And no answer came when they called the Alpha. Or when they called again. Joining Cruzet in the bubble, Mondragon found him motionless at the console, staring blankly off into the midnight sky above the ridge.

  “Those stars.” He started when Mondragon spoke, and turned to explain. “You see them rising very slowly now, as the planet’s orbit takes us around the dwarf.” He pointed. “They’re denser in that direction, toward what must be the galactic core.” He made a wry face. “And easier to understand than anything we find down here around us.”

  Moodily silent when they stopped to eat, Andersen seemed deaf when Cruzet asked for butter.

  “I was thinking.” He grinned a little wistfully. “Thinking of a woman I once knew and liked. Liked a lot. We had a senseless quarrel. But for that, I might have been a professor of engineering back on the Colorado campus, doing a bit of research and skiing the Rockies with her.”

  They ate a little of Hinch’s smoked salmon and radiated asparagus, finding no appetite even for his walnut torte or Grand Marnier. Mondragon dozed a few hours in his berth and drove again. The ragged shadow of the ridge had sunk till it was hard to follow, and he steered by the stars to keep on level ice a few kilometers out. He was nodding at the wheel in spite of himself when Cruzet shouted from the bubble.

  “Indra’s lamp, still shining! Maybe twenty kilometers ahead. I’m hailing it by radio.”

  He got no answer.

  “Veer toward them,” he called. “Just a little.”

  Veer was a new word to Mondragon, but he turned a little and watched the black horizon. The dull red point rose and grew a little brighter, but they had come within a kilometer before the spider’s dim red-lit shape emerged from the twilight. When he called again, Cruzet heard only the murmur of the cosmos. Andersen stopped them two hundred meters off, whi
le they put the searchlight on it and studied it with binoculars.

  “No cruising light,” he muttered. “Nothing except the heater. I see no damage. It just looks—” His voice fell. “Looks dead.”

  Andersen got into his airskin and climbed down through the air lock, Mondragon behind him. Leaving Cruzet at the searchlight, they tramped out across the frost. The Alpha’s air lock hung open, the access ramp down. Mondragon stopped beside it, pointing.

  “Huelas! Huelas digitales!” It took him a moment to find the English word. “Footprints.” He stooped to study them with his own flashlight. “Indra’s and the men’s.” Almost whispering, he stood up to stare at Andersen. “They wore no boots. Their feet were bare.”

  They climbed into the empty lock and cycled through. The three airskins hung in the entry chamber. Boots and jumpsuits lay tossed on the floor. Andersen picked up one of Singh’s boots and stood staring at it, shaking his head in disbelief. Pushing past him, Mondragon found the berths in the cabin neatly made up, the fusion engine humming smoothly on standby, the green-lettered log still glowing on the monitor. The last entry read:

  Location 944 kilometers south of the ship, 3 kilometers off the coast. We’re near the peninsula tip, though we saw a chain of reefs and rocks running several hundred kilometers on beyond us. The searchlight has picked up something on land. Possibly the ruin of the lighthouse we half expected. We have stopped to study it further.

  Andersen leaned in to scan the log.

  “Nothing useful.” Dazed, he shook his head. “No clue to what drove them crazy. Or how they were able to walk away alive.” He scowled at the monitor again, and turned to Mondragon. “Try the radio. If it’s working, call Tony back in the Beta.”

  It was working.

  “So?” Cruzet seemed beyond surprise. “Where’d they go?”

  “God knows.” Andersen’s voice was hushed and brittle. “I guess we’ll have to follow.”

  “Not on foot!” Cruzet protested. “Let me drive you.”

  “We have to go on foot,” he said. “To follow the prints. And out of caution. The Alpha’s hull failed to shield them from whatever hit them. I don’t want you that close.”

  “Andy, wait!” Cruzet raised his voice. “Stop a minute, and think about it. Indra and the men are five days gone, we don’t know how. Let’s cut our losses. Take both machines and get away while we can.”

  “Or hope we can,” Andersen mocked him. “What if we run? What could we gain? No matter what became of them, we’re stuck here. Not a ghost of a chance to get off the planet. Not without Nik and Kobo. I want to know what happened.”

  “I doubt we ever will—”

  “Stand by with the searchlight.” Andersen beckoned for Mondragon to follow. “Light our way as far as you can.”

  Back down on the ice, Mondragon walked ahead, tracking Singh and the engineers the way he used to track his father’s wandering goats. The searchlight swept the dark east horizon and stopped on a shadow darker than the frost.

  “See it?” Cruzet’s voice crackled in their helmets. “The binoculars make it bigger. But what it is …” His voice fell. “I hope to know.”

  “The lighthouse?”

  “Never finished, or what is left of the ruin, if it ever was a lighthouse. But there’s no tower standing. Nor the rubble of anything fallen. What I do see—” His voice stopped in a startled way. “Something odd! The land’s low and narrow here. I see what looks like a road or ramp that climbs out of the sea, leading up to the building. And another like it, running down on the other side.”

  “Interesting,” Andersen said. “We’re pushing on.”

  Cruzet dropped the searchlight back to them, and the prints were easier to find: Singh’s, small and narrow; Fujiwara’s longer; Krasov’s wider. They had walked side by side, straight toward the ramp that led out of the ice.

  “How the hell could they keep moving?” Andersen’s rapid breath was a ghostly rustle in Mondragon’s helmet, his voice stifled with an unbelieving dread. “Naked, outside in this vacuum, the temperature close to zero Kelvin.”

  Remembering stories his grandmother used to tell, of brujas and the dead called out of their graves, Mondragon shivered and followed the prints. He expected to find bloated bodies lying stiff and frozen on the frost, but the trail led him on. Never faltering, the footsteps had been vigorous and long, leading straight toward the ramp.

  Cruzet swung the light to it. They stopped in wonder, went closer, stopped again. Nearly a hundred meters wide, it was a smooth pavement of some dark stone. A low parapet edged it, built of the same dark stone. Or was it something more permanent than stone?

  “No sign of erosion.” Andersen rubbed the parapet with his glove. “But built for the use of creatures climbing out of the ocean, back before it froze. But the stone—it still feels as smooth as it must have on the day it was laid.”

  They followed the footprints up the ramp to a square platform that was walled with the same low parapet, and stopped when Cruzet lit it for them. Three hundred meters across, surrounding a vast blot of shadow at its center. A building when the searchlight rose to show it: an immense block-shaped structure of the same dark stuff, fifty meters wide and half that high.

  Mondragon wondered if the three had gone inside, but he saw no entrance. He was following the tracks around the building till he saw that Andersen had stopped, staring up at the towering wall. The roving searchlight had filled it with unexpected color. An inlay of gem-bright stone. Andersen brushed his glove across a wide blue-gray oval.

  “A mosaic!” He backed abruptly away to look higher up the wall. “The creatures themselves!”

  Cruzet broadened the searchlight beam to light the whole wall. What it revealed was a colorful panorama of the beach and the ramp and the building itself. The sea had not yet frozen. The creatures were wading out of the waves, climbing the ramp, crowding in front of the building.

  “Bipeds!” Andersen murmured. “They were amphibious bipeds.”

  They stood very erect on stubby legs. A little like penguins, Mondragon thought, awkward out of the water. Their arms were short finlike flippers, spread as if for balance. Waddling up the ramp, many had stopped when they reached the platform, staring up at the towering wall with strange green eyes set in oddly crested heads as round and sleek as a seal’s.

  “They were born in the sea.” Cruzet was moving the searchlight, and Andersen gestured. “I think this is a place where they came to change for life in the air.”

  Cruzet swung the light to follow the foot of the wall. It showed dozens of the creatures sprawled on the ramp, their bodies bloated. Farther along, they were bursting out of their swollen skins, opening delicate rose-colored wings. Those near the end of the wall were spreading the wings, climbing into the air.

  “The climax of their lives.” Cruzet was raising the beam to reveal them soaring over the building in a sky that had still been azure blue. “This must have been a holy place.”

  “For all?” Mondragon wondered. “Or los jefes only? The chosen leaders?”

  “No telling.” Andersen shrugged. “Could be we’re trying to read too much out of just one picture.”

  He gestured at the footprints and they tramped on around the corner. The wall above them here was blank black stone, with no inlays. High up, it was set back to make a railed balcony. Oval windows behind it were blacker than the stone, but still he saw no doors. Perhaps flying things needed none.

  The prints on the frost led them on around the next corner toward the farther beach and the other frozen ocean. Here, beyond the searchlight’s reach, the wall was only blacker blackness, shutting out the stars. Mondragon found nothing on it till his flashlight caught a yellow flash.

  Stepping closer he saw that it was an eye, a long shape of some yellow crystal, inlaid in a monstrous head cut into the ink black stone. Moving on, searching with the feeble beams, they found more unearthly eyes shining out of heads that chilled him.

  “Demonios!” he whisp
ered. “There were demons here.”

  “If their heaven was what we saw on the other side,” Andersen said, “this was their notion of hell.”

  They tramped on, probing with their flashlights, till he stopped again.

  “Their story,” he muttered. “The devils of the amphibian hell.”

  Undulating lines cut deep into the base of the wall were waves on their native sea. Higher, carved in sleek outline, the swimmers were leaping out of the water in flight from sulphur-eyed, half-reptilian monsters that dived after them with sharp-hooked talons and saber-fanged jaws.

  “Qué malo!” Mondragon turned to stare at Andersen. “Demonios!”

  “Predators,” Andersen said. “Preying on the amphibians.”

  “Demonios!” Mondragon murmured again.

  The yellow-eyed killers had been real. Had they evolved to become the demons of the ice? The fantasmas that watched from the dark and welcomed no strangers? He shivered, even in the insulated airskin, and reached for Andersen’s arm.

  “We should not be here.”

  He felt Andersen stiffen and heard his breathless gasp.

  “There! There they are….”

  The flashlights had picked them up. Finding no doorway, Singh and the men had tried to climb the wall. Krasov stood on the frosty pavement, broad feet planted wide apart. Fujiwara had climbed on his shoulders. Indra Singh stood on his, fingers clinging to the head of a yellow-eyed horror leaping out of the waves.

  Frozen into ivory, their jaws gaped wide, their teeth grimly gleaming in the starlight. Their eyes were blindly bulging, glazed by the airless cold. Agony and terror were printed on their faces. Mondragon shrank back and swept them again with his trembling light.

  “Las cuentas negras!”

  Quivering across them, his light stopped on a dark glint between Singh’s glassy eyes.

  “Beads!” He found the English. “The black beads Indra found with the bones in the cliff. I think the beads have killed them.”