“What do you say?” Mondragon looked at her. “What do we owe him?”
“He’s a contemptible beast!” she whispered bitterly. “We ought to throw him out. But we’re human. Even here, we’ve got to stay human.”
Mondragon slowly nodded. Roak moaned again and let his head drop back to the floor. Together, they lifted him into the curtained berth.
“I’m no doctor.” She frowned at Mondragon. “But we’ve got to do what we can.”
Roak seemed unconscious. Mondragon helped her strip the blood-sodden jumpsuit off his torso and she examined the wound.
“The bullet hit his left side,” she said. “Just below the heart. There’s no exit wound; it’s still in him. There would be damage to the lung. Probably a lot of internal bleeding.”
He found a first-aid kit.
“Sedative and antibiotic Syrettes.” Opening it, she shook her head. “Antiseptic foam and a handful of healer patches. Enough to help ease his pain, but not much else.”
Leaving Roak unconscious, his breath now a slow and bubbling rasp, Rima drew the curtain. Mondragon had made hot coffee, and she sat with him at the little table.
“Not much I could do.” Her hands still shaking, she lifted her cup. “We’re not equipped for surgery.”
“Must we watch him?”
“He’s dying,” she said. “No threat now.”
They sipped the coffee, recovering.
“A nasty jolt when he came out.” With a wry shrug, she looked across at the door to the engine bay, where Roak had hidden himself. “He’s still a burden to us.”
“Perhaps we can’t toss him out,” Mondragon muttered. “But we can’t forget the children.”
“We’ll drive on,” she said. “When we can.”
Without much appetite, they finished breakfast. Mondragon drove them on. Rima opened the curtain to feel for Roak’s failing pulse, and went forward for a driving lesson.
“Easy enough,” Mondragon said, trying to cheer her, “if you learn to see the wheel prints when the red light picks them out. On level ice, they run straight toward those yellow stars that make a crooked arrow, just over the horizon.”
He let her take the wheel. She could see the tracks when he pointed them out in the bottom window, faint parallel lines in the frost below the spider, blurred by their movement and lost in the starlight ahead.
“No problem,” he told her cheerfully. “Not after you’ve trained your eye. Just keep those yellow stars straight ahead.”
At last she thought she could follow that shadowy trace of darker darkness that narrowed and vanished ahead. Leaving her alone at the wheel, he turned to listen for Roak’s labored wheeze.
“Not a sound,” he said. “I’ll take a look.”
He was gone a long time. She called to him and turned her head to listen. When she looked back, the trail was gone.
They were lost. All around, the pale gray frost lay flat and featureless forever. She found the black sun still low on her left, the broken arrow still low ahead, the shadow track of their own wheels still stretching back behind, but no mark she could see ahead. Chilled with panic, she stopped the engine and sat shivering, listening till she heard his call.
“Rima? Anything wrong?”
“I’ve lost the trail.”
She left the wheel and met him in the passage.
“Take a look at Roak,” he said. “No sign of life I can see.”
“I’ve lost us.”
“No le hace.” He shrugged. “I can find it.”
“I don’t know how.” She shook her hand. “Here in the dark on a million miles of ice, with never a sign—”
“No hay problema.” His grin cheered her. “My father’s goats never had a star to follow, or left a track so straight. They’re driving straight down the peninsula, toward the old temple.”
“The amphibian temple?” She trembled, staring at him. “Where Singh and her crew were killed! What will happen to my children?”
“We can hope for the grace of the saints. Shouldn’t you look at Roak?”
Leaning to look, she had to turn her face away from his odor.
“No breath I can hear.” She felt the lax wrist. “But there’s still a pulse. Very faint, but he’s alive. I must change the dressing.”
“If you must.” He bent to look and recoiled. “I’ll drive us on.”
The turbine hummed again, and the spider glided on. She found a basin in the bottom of the locker, brought warm water to scrub Roak’s hairy body, replaced the dressing.
“Las huellas!” Mondragon called from the controls. “I’m back on the trail. You must sleep.”
She did. The need was suddenly overwhelming. She closed the curtain on Roak and fell across the berth in the cabin. She was suddenly dreaming, an evil dream that she was frantically chasing Day, who was lost on the ice, hugging the panda doll and running nowhere faster than she could follow. A jolt of the spider roused her. She felt it slow and tilt and move again. The turbine hum decreased, and she heard Mondragon’s call.
“Dr. Virili, climb to the bubble. We’re on the isthmus. You’ll see the old temple.”
Suddenly wide awake, she ran up the steel steps. The spider had stopped on the wide platform where Singh and her crew had died. Mondragon was sweeping his searchlight across the mosaic wall ahead, tracing the gem-bright inlays that pictured the amphibians waddling out of the water, falling prostrate as if in worship, bursting from their outgrown shapes, finally spreading rose-hued wings to climb into a sky still blue.
“The Alpha?” Disappointment stabbed her. “Have you found it?”
“Not yet.”
The turbine purred. He drove them on around the corner and stopped again. His light brushed a dark and doorless wall, a high balcony, the oval openings above. He pulled them around another corner and stopped again. His light swept a billion years of frost on the empty platform, another wide ramp, empty ice beyond.
“Nada,” Mondragon murmured. “They drove on.”
“Where?”
She knew the answer, yet she waited desperately for his voice on the intercom.
“The ice cap,” he called. “Andersen always wanted to know what made the flash we saw from space. Stecker never let him go. I think he’s finally on his way.”
“With Kip? With little Day?” A cry of agony and terror. “Why?”
Only silence, until he asked, “Shall we go on?”
“What else? We couldn’t go back, even if we wanted.”
“But think about it, Rima.” His tone had a warning ring. “If they’re really headed for the cap, I doubt they’ll ever get there. I’m afraid we never could. Across several thousand kilometers of this frozen sea, till we reach the continent. Then another five thousand kilometers of ice and mountain ranges. With no map to show the way.”
“I know,” she said. “We’ll go on.”
“Está bien.” He paused and added, “Por los ninos.”
“Gracias.” She liked the music of his Spanish.
He drove them on, turning back toward the temple. The search beam swept another towering wall, pausing on the yellow gleam of monstrous crystal eyes inlaid in ink black stone, shifting to trace the deep-cut outlines of gigantic flying things that dived with wicked crimson talons spread to snatch the amphibians out of the sea.
“I wonder—” She couldn’t help the sudden dread that closed her throat. “If there are survivors, could they be descendants of those predators?”
“Quién sabe.” She felt grateful for his unbroken calm. “We’ve found riddles enough, and few signs of friendship. I hope we live to learn the answer.”
His light swept on to the end of the wall and came back again.
“The bodies.” His whisper was hushed and hoarse. “The bodies of Dr. Singh and the fusion engineers.” He narrowed the focus of the light to pick up three blue Mission blankets on the frost. “That’s where we left them. They’re gone.”
“Andersen? Did Andersen and Cruzet pick them
up?”
His light searched the frost.
“Creo que no. Their spider came no closer than we are. I see no new footprints.”
“So what moved them?”
Mondragon didn’t answer. The spider sat there a long time. At last the turbine purred again, and he drove them slowly down the ramp, into another endless desert of eternal ice.
The Alpha’s track took them straight west, the black sun now low behind and another star cluster ahead, a tiny group of bright blue giants that made an inverted teacup or perhaps a high-crowned hat. Rima asked for another lesson, and learned at last to follow the tracks.
“Suddenly, somehow, they seemed to come into focus,” she told him. “The marks of all eight wheels. I don’t know how I learned to see them.”
“The grace of the saints, my mother would have told you.”
“You must sleep.” She gestured him away from the wheel. “I’ll drive us on.”
“If you’re ready—”
“I am.”
He went down to sleep, and she drove them on. The tracks ran straight toward the hat-shaped cluster ahead, the black sun sinking very slowly behind. He stopped her when he woke, and made coffee while she opened the curtain to look at Roak.
“I’ve done all I could,” she said. “He’s bleeding internally.”
“You’ve done enough. Perhaps he’s human, but not very human.”
He set the little table and poured the coffee while she microwaved a small block of tofutuna roast.
“There’s still a long road ahead. We’d better ration the captain’s steaks and hams.”
Roak lived three more days. When the feeble pulse had ceased, Mondragon put on his airskin to cycle through the lock with the body. He spread the soiled bedsheet and blanket over it, murmured the words he recalled from his mother’s funeral, and left an empty helium cylinder standing at the head as a marker.
“A kind of immortality,” he muttered wryly, back in the spider. “That cylinder might last a million times longer than the sphinx or the pyramids.”
A little happier, they followed the track. At the wheel the next day, she heard a sudden crash of static and then Kip’s anxious voice.
“Alpha to ship. Alpha calling ship.”
“Kip?” She stopped the turbine. “Kip, where are you?”
“Mom? Mom, is it you?”
“Are you all right?”
“Okay, so far.”
“Day? My baby girl?”
Static rattled for an endless moment.
“I—I don’t know. She looks okay, but the black beads have got her.”
“Where are you?”
“Stopped under a tall black cliff. Under a cave high up, where I guess the flying things went. Dr. Andersen climbed up to it, and brought back a big mass of the beads. I don’t like them, Mom. I don’t like what they do.
“And I’m afraid—”
A crash of static cut him off, and the radio was dead.
Twenty-six
Kip woke with a jolt.
Something had happened to him.
Somehow, the cabin was gone. He lay out in the open, with no airskin, yet he was still breathing. His whole body felt strange, so stiff he could hardly lift his head. Stars shone in the west but the sky was dark purple overhead and brighter toward the east, blood-red around the sun.
And the sun—
No longer black, it glowed like red-hot iron. Swollen to three times its size, it was mottled with ragged dark splotches like black continents. The largest splotch was pocked and scratched with fiery red that made an ugly face. He lay shivering under its heatless glow.
Too cold and clumsy to stand, he got his arms beneath him and raised his head to see where he was. He lay sprawled facedown on something flat and hard. Metal, maybe, though the color was an odd yellow-green. It floated in a pool of dark water rimmed with a jagged wall of ice that glittered dimly under the crimson in the east.
Pushing higher to look beyond the wall, he saw a flat field of ice that reached as far as he could see. Turning stiffly toward the west, he found a square black shape far off across the frost—
Skygate!
The place of the changers.
He had been confused for a moment, feeling lost and not himself, but the sight of Skygate cleared his head. Certainly he was growing old and stiff and clumsy, but at least he knew where he was. He had always known Skygate. The holiest place. It stood empty and abandoned now, since ice had closed the ramp, but ten thousand generations had come here to change in the times before the ice. He had never been closer, but his father had stopped to see it after he changed, and come back amazed with its wonders.
The vast ramp where so many millions had come out of the water to shed their sea skins. The tall mosaic walls set with gemstone pictures of the metamorphosis. The balconies where the skylers could perch and the high windows where they could enter the temple. The black stone blocks of the rear wall, deeply carved with images of skylers trying their new wings, and the monstrous blackwings diving to kill them.
The skylers had brought the raft when the ocean froze. The raft’s heat was dying, but it was still warm enough to thaw the ice around it. A sloping ramp on one end helped the changers climb out of the water, and a high perch at the other end let them spread and preen their wings before they tried to fly.
His name had been Sky Seeker once, but he was only Watcher now. Good for nothing else. He had lain here too long, watching for blackwings—monstrous predators, starved and desperate since the long freeze closed their fishing grounds. He had dived again and again to warn his mate when they were diving at the raft. She was Wave Rider, her name had come down from long ago, when waves still ran on a liquid sea.
He watched too, more hopefully, for a skyler returning. Born in the sea, his people lived there till the change gave them wings to reach Shadowland. The new skylers always promised to return with lifestones for those they left behind, but nobody had ever come with one for him. Now that his own time for change had passed, his desperate hopes were for Wave Rider and their son, Far Diver.
He was desperate, because they had grown desperate. She was diving for fish, but the long freeze had killed most of the fish. The air-gaspers had disappeared with the open water. The deep-swimming silverfins had grown rare and wary. Far Diver had always gone deep to dig in the sea mud, searching for the bones of some unlucky skyler who had drowned with a lifestone on him.
“Watcher! A gift from the Eternals!”
He found Wave Rider’s head breaking out of the water. Scrambling to help her up the ramp, he ached with pity for her. Exhaustion had dimmed the glow of her crest, but beauty still shone in the fine bones of her face and her unshielded eyes. Her velvet fur was still dark and sleek, but he felt her bare ribs when she nestled against him. The best fisher of the three, she had shared too much of her catches with their son.
“Silverfins!” Elation lifted her voice. “I thought the last of them were gone, but I caught these inside the reef. One sonic shot got them all.” Anxiously, she peered around the raft. “Far Diver? Isn’t he back?”
“Not yet. He goes too deep and stays too long.”
He drew her closer, listening to the slow rush-and-sigh, rush-and-sigh of the air the dive had starved her for. Proudly, when she had recovered enough, she spilled three small fish from her pouch.
“Honor the Eternals!” Her head fin bent in reverence. “They saw our need, and found a fish for each of us.”
She laid the largest fish under the perch to keep it cold for Far Diver.
“Our splendid son.” She gave Watcher the middle fish, and kept the smallest for herself. “The most precious gift of the Eternals, yet he has always hurt my heart. Too proud of his endurance when he was young, too daring out under the ice, always probing for some forgotten wreck sunk too deep for salvage. So unhappy now, because he has never found a mate.”
“Yet always hopeful,” he tried to cheer her.
“He never will,” she muttere
d bitterly. “Because none is left for him to find.”
“Nobody, perhaps, here in the sea. What he wants is a lifestone, and his chance to reach Shadowland.”
“I remember …” Her eye shields closed, she relaxed against him, speaking slowly as she found her breath. “I remember when he saw your father’s lifestone. He was still a tadpole then, no longer than my flipper, but the stone fascinated him. He had to touch it, and he asked what it was.
“It was a second brain, your father told him, that would wake his body for life in the air. Your father told how he had found it in the wreck of a skyler ship that went down when skylers still sailed the seas. He wanted to know how the skylers made the stones. They grew them, your father thought. Grew them out of their crests in the third stage of their lives.
“He listened to all that with his eye shields wide. Wider when he watched your father struggle out of his sea skin. He made me hold him high to let him watch your father fly away across the ice toward Skygate and Shadowland.
“ ‘I’ll learn to dive the way he did,’ he told me. ‘I’ll swim out under the ice till I can find my own lifestone and follow him to Shadowland.’ ”
Watcher held her close, reliving those lost moments with her.
“So long ago.” A wistful sadness edged her voice. “Just a tadpole then, but he never forgot. He was always diving deeper than anybody else. Digging up the sea mud as soon as he could reach it. Searching the rotten hulks of buried ships for lifestones he has never found—and never will.”
Lying huddled against him, shivering a little from the frigid air she had been gasping, she raised her shields again to sweep the sky from the blood-stained east to the stars over Skygate in the western dusk.
“Never will,” she murmured again. “Because our world is dying. I think we three are the last still in the sea. As for the skylers—” Her head fin quivered with doubt. “I’ve watched friends change since I was a child, and listened to their promises. Nobody ever came back. Not even your father.”
“Now is a hard time.” He tipped his crest toward the heatless sun. “A cold time. A hungry time. But Far Diver has the heart we’ve lost. The long freeze may never end, but he’ll keep on pushing farther, staying longer, searching deeper, till he finds his lifestone.”
The Black Sun Page 22