“I hope.” She sighed. “I try to hope.”
“I have it!” That triumphant shout rang from the water. “A perfect lifestone!”
Far Diver plunged out of the water. Rider moved to help, but he needed no help. Climbing the ramp before she could reach him, he held up his crest fin. Brightly glowing, it was flexed around the bright black prism.
He sank flat on the raft, drawing long gasps of air and shivering from its bitter chill.
“You distressed us,” she told him when he had revived enough to lift his head. “You were down so long.”
“The wreck I found,” he said between the gasps, “was a long way out. Too far for me to get there again. Sunk very long ago. Nothing remains of the craft itself, but I found the cargo. Glass, porcelain, gold that never decayed.”
He dropped flat again, and she waited for him to catch his breath.
“Tell us,” she urged when his shields came open, “about the stone.”
“Those relics first.” With an affectionate flicker of his crest fin, he reached to touch her heart. “Wonderful porcelains. Paintings on them showed people without wings, living on land that had no ice. Land scattered with queer green towers splashed with colors. Trees and blooms, they were called. The sun was larger then, brighter. Sometimes low, sometimes high, sometimes gone. I think because the world still turned.”
“The lifestone?” she asked again.
“I dug there in the mud. Searched and dug again till my crest began to dim. No bones, no stone. Not even an anchor rock. I dug till I was dead for air. Swimming back, I came on something I never expected there above the mud. Bones scattered over a high coral knob. Bones of a blackwing, the skull and the claws and a dagger-fanged jaw. And a skyler’s skeleton.”
“The stone?”
He pulled it out of his pouch and offered it to Watcher.
“Father, for you.”
Watcher’s shields quivered and closed with emotion. He blinked till he could see again, but a proud admiration dazzled him again when he looked at his son. Handsome as always, Far Diver was drawn lean from hard toil and long hunger, but still muscular and fit, strong enough to dive again.
Still young and fit enough to change.
“A noble offering.” Crest fin bent deep, he waved the stone away. “A gift to earn you the light of the Eternals. It would prove devotion to your secret name, if it needed proof, but I have lived long beyond the stage for change. Give the stone to your mother.”
Far Diver offered it to her.
“For you, my loving mother, if my father wishes.”
With no move to take it, she wrapped them both in her swimming fins.
“My good … good son.” She was shaken with emotion, her voice a broken wheeze. “You offer more than I can take. The stone is your own life. Your chance for Shadowland and skylerhood. I love you for the offering, more than I ever have. But I can’t leave your father here to die alone. The stone is yours, to use while you have the strength to change.”
Far Diver refused at first to leave them.
“You go for us,” his mother said, “as much as for yourself. Your life in Shadowland will be your greatest gift to us. And your sacred duty to the Eternals.”
“I will return if I can, with all I can bring for you.”
He ate the fish they had saved for him. Restoring himself, he lay a long time asleep in the sun’s red glow. Once his swim fins flapped, and he gasped for breath as if he had dived again. Then, having relaxed again for a time, he cried out as if in sudden pain.
“He was dreaming,” Rider said. “Waking now.”
He lay quietly again, however, and dreamed again before he raised his head.
“Strange dreams,” he said, “of my own transformation. I thought the time was long ago, long before the ice closed the way to Skygate. When my change time had come, I had friends who made a feast for me. I left them at sunset and swam to Skygate. Free of my sea skin, I learned to use my wings and flew west toward Shadowland.
“The sun was larger then, hotter, but almost still in the sky. It climbed as I flew, and stood at noon before I reached the continent. The long night had buried it with snow, but except on the high mountains most of the snow was gone. Green forests covered most of the great central valley.
“I was tired by then, and famished. I found farmlands below me, surrounding high-walled towns. Skylers welcomed me when I came down in the middle of a town, begging for news of their seaside families and friends. I stayed there a long time, learning the ways of the greenside, working to pay for my keep.
“The skylers seemed prosperous and happy, but they had good reason for the walls. Their enemies were the flying monsters we call blackwings. The adult creatures are no great danger, because they seek their prey from the sea. But they are form-changers, as we are, with two stages of life. The young are voracious wingless wormlike things with savage jaws. They hatch at night. When day comes, they swarm over the land, devouring everything.
“The skylers were already saving their crops. They had need for haste, because the larval killer-crawlers came swarming in soon after I arrived. They ate the stubble in the fields to bare clay, ate the leaves off the trees, killed and ate every animal they could surround, finally attacked one another.
“They terrified me, but the towns are well defended. The cold nights kill any crawlers that fail to grow their wings and fly back to the sea before darkness falls. I volunteered to join the soldiers on the walls. They told me I was needed more at Skyhold.
“That’s their great fortress city. It stands on a high tableland at the center of the continent. High mountains and higher walls defend it. Many of its levels are carved deep into the granite below, and its towers are so tall that the ice can never cover them. The crawlers are no threat to it; they don’t climb so high or get so far from the sea. Skyhold was planned to stand against greater dangers, designed to keep the race alive forever, even after the sun is dead.
“A hundred generations of workers have been toiling to complete it. Joining them, I worked in a quarry—an enormous pit where granite mountains had stood. I ran a machine that controlled gravity. Using it, I could lift enormous masses of stone to the carrier.
“Later they sent me on to Skyhold itself. There I moved those masses off the carrier. They were not ready for the wall. Common granite was too fragile for that. It had to be powdered, mixed with other stuff, molded finally into gigantic blocks of something harder than diamond and tougher than steel.
“Working there all the rest of the day, I learned to enjoy the skyler’s life. I made good friends. Though skylers bear no children, our native emotions are never lost. The stone, in fact, widened the scope of my mind in ways I can’t describe. My wits and senses were sharpened, my memories and skills enlarged by all that earlier wearers of the stone had known.
“I met a beautiful woman who had come through Skygate before I was born—the skylers’ lives are long. Her name was Lifestar. We expected our love to endure forever; we hoped in fact that skyler science could give us actual immortality, perhaps elsewhere in the universe. Our dying sun has no other planets, but the skylers were hoping to reach some kinder world. They had built an interstellar ship, using their gravity technology.
“Lifestar volunteered with me for its first flight. Accepted, we finished our training, passed all the tests, went aboard together. The ship lifted. The planet fell away and vanished. We were safely out in space, with stars blazing all around us, when I woke. My heart still aches from the pain of that bitter instant when I knew that my beloved Lifestar had been only a dream, now lost forever.”
Far Diver stopped with a dismal sigh, his crest gone black.
“A prophetic dream, I think,” Watcher said. “There is an old tradition of very vivid dreams that came from lifestones and foretold the future.”
“It was vivid enough.” Diver nodded forlornly, turning to his mother. “Lifestar was as real and dear as you are.”
“We heard you cry out,”
she told him. “A cry of pain.”
“Pain sharp enough, when I knew she was gone.” His eye shields closed for a moment, and his swim fins shivered. “But there was a second dream that hit me just as hard.”
He lay silent, remembering.
“It began right here, when I dived off the raft this last time. I thought I’d found that ancient wreck again. Gold and glass and porcelain buried in the mud. Out of breath and rising, I found the skeletons on that coral knob. The skyler’s and the blackwing’s—but this time I found an anklet I knew around the skyler’s shinbone. A guardian at Skygate had given it to me. I thought the skeleton had been my own.”
“A dreadful dream.” Rider’s fin caressed him. “We should have waked you.”
“I slept on through another dream. Was it prophetic?” His eye shields blinked at Watcher. “I hope I never know. Again it was a long-past time. The planet still turned, but even more slowly. Those ragged black scabs had covered most of the sun. The seas were already freezing, but the skylers had not yet brought this floating lifegate. The few of us still here had to spend the endless nights breaking the ice from the holes where we came up to breathe.
“We were always hungry, with most of the fish already gone. I was diving with three friends, dreaming of the greenside of the old epics and seeking the lifestones that might let us escape into the sky. When we found a stone, I won the game we played for it. The losers lifted me to an ice floe for the transformation, and wished me the light of the Eternals.
“High overhead when I left, the black-scabbed sun sank lower as I went west, till I was flying into freezing twilight. The long day had thawed much of the sea ice, but the world seemed empty. No blackwings rose to attack me; perhaps they were gone, with no prey left.
“No longer the greenside, the great continent was buried under glaciers that spread from the mountain ranges. No skylers rose to welcome me. The valley cities had vanished, and the killer-crawlers that once had swarmed against them. The cold grew ever more savage as I pushed on into the frozen highlands. At last, flying under brilliant stars, I came to Skyhold.
“It was clearly the work of giants, if the skylers were ever giants. Its walls have no gates. They rise out of the glaciers, so tall the air was too thin for my wings. I had to perch and rest before I saw the towers inside. They are dead black stone, higher than the wall, with steep-pitched roofs to shed the snows. Sealed against time and change, they have no doors, no windows. I saw no lights, no motion, never a hint of anything alive.
“I flew on beyond Skyhold, around the night side, back into the sunlit side. I found no skylers anywhere, nothing alive, till I was back above this half-thawed sea and saw a blackwing diving after me. Drawn with famine, it flew so clumsily that I might have escaped if I hadn’t been so tired and cold. It caught me, but lacked the strength to carry me. We went down together.”
Far Diver had lain flat on the raft as he spoke, eye shields almost closed. Moving now, he raised his head to stare silently out across the empty ice field under the dim crimson sun.
“Such frightening dreams.” His mother’s crest flickered dimly. “I don’t understand them.”
“Memories?” Watcher asked. “Memories of skylers who had worn the stone before you found it?”
“Perhaps.” He bent his crest in agreement “Perhaps that’s why they seemed so real.”
“Do they trouble you?” Rider asked him. “Make you fear to change?”
He turned to gaze at the square black block of Skygate and the faint stars above it.
“They awe me, but no matter.” His lean shoulders lifted. “We’ve no future here. Nor anywhere, unless I find our people still alive in Skyhold. It hurts to leave you, but I must go.”
He embraced them both, and pushed the lifestone into the hollow tip of his crest. It burned suddenly bright. He fell flat on the float, moaning and writhing in the agony of change. They crept back to watch him burst free of his sea skin. Climbing to the perch, he looked down on them with the blood red fire of his new life blazing in the lifestone. His eyes held no recognition.
“A stranger,” Watcher whispered. “He has forgotten us.”
“He is our son,” Rider said. “He will remember.”
The gauze of his spreading wings dried swiftly in the bitter air, and she shuddered when the sun touched them with the color of blood. Wavering a little at first, he circled close above them, calling a promise to return, and flew off to vanish among the faint stars in the dusk-dark west.
“A good son,” she murmured. “He will be back.”
“I hope,” Watcher said. “With a lifestone, I hope, for you.”
With nothing else to hope for, they waited for him. Though Watcher denied that he was hungry, Rider dived again for silverfins. She came back with none, so weak with long starvation that he had to help her back to the ramp.
“My last dive,” she whispered when she could. “No matter. The silverfins are gone.”
She saw him moving toward the ramp.
“Don’t go down!” she told him. “You’ve no more strength than I do.”
“Just for mudworms,” he told her. “They’re full of grit, and they taste like mud, but they can give us strength.”
He dived to search the mud banks toward the coast and found none of the tiny pits that marked mudworm siphons. Like the air-gaspers and the silverfins, they were gone. He made it back to the raft, but his leap for the ramp fell short.
“Diver!” Rider called when she saw him, vibrant with joy. “He’s back! I see him over Skygate.”
She helped him to the ramp, and he saw their son returning, flying low above the far black block of Skygate, his wings a fleck of scarlet in the sunlight.
“Our magnificent son!” Rider’s crest was radiant. “Perhaps with good news for us.”
Or perhaps himself in trouble, Watcher thought. He flew too low and too slow, laboring hard to stay aloft. He said nothing to dim her delight, but her sudden sobbing cry was crueler than the cold.
“No! No! Pray the Eternals to save him.”
The blackwing dived from high behind him, a thin black arrow in the somber dusk Too late, too feebly, he swerved to evade it. It talons caught his right wing. They struggled, tumbling in the air.
“A clumsy strike,” he whispered. “The creature must be weak with hunger. I think he has a chance.”
The bodies separated, but Diver’s wing was mangled. Side by side, they fell to the ice.
“That dream.” He shivered. “His dream of the skeletons on the coral knob. It was prophetic. The stone was warning him.”
“My precious son.” She moved toward the ramp. “I must go to him.”
“You can’t!” He caught her fin. “It’s too far. You aren’t able—”
She broke away from him and dived off the ramp. Her first leap carried her only halfway up the slippery rim of the pool. She splashed back, dived, leaped higher. Struggling over the edge, she got her breath and swayed to her feet.
He was moving toward the ramp.
“Don’t!” She flashed her crest to halt him. “You’ve no strength for it.”
That was true. He sank back to the deck, eye shields clenched in shame for his weakness and his age. She was still there when he could see again, waving a silent farewell. She turned when she saw his answer, and set out across the ice.
Helpless, he could only watch. Far Diver had fallen far-off across the ice, and it took her a long time to reach him. Starved too long, and her sea shape was never made for walking, she fell and rose, fell and rested and rose again, till at last she dropped beside the crumpled body and did not move again.
Watcher lay alone and blind on the raft, his eye shields closed, till he ceased to feel cold or hunger, grief or pain, till he had no will to move again, till memory and emotion darkened and he knew his world was dead.
He sat up and rubbed his eyes, blinked and rubbed his eyes again. The raft and the ice and that dull red sun had vanished. Half of him was still Watcher, fil
led with a terrible sadness for Rider and Diver and the dying world, but he began to recognize the spider’s cabin, not quite real until he saw the bright black gleam of the amphibian bead still lying under the hem of the curtain.
A lifestone. He shrank from it, shivering. Perhaps it had lain a billion years, or ten billion, in that cave with the bones of the skylers, but something in it was still alive. He shuddered from the unknown power that had drawn Indra Singh and the engineers to die at Skygate, and captured the minds of Dr. Andersen and Dr. Cruzet, and possessed his little sister.
“Kipper? Having fun?”
Andersen came out of the pilot bay. Day hung limply in his arms, fast asleep. He stopped for a moment before he walked on across the cabin to open the curtain and lay her on the berth behind it. He seemed relaxed and cheerful, that glazed intentness gone from his eyes.
“Fun?” Kip pointed at the bead on the floor. “Not with that thing here.”
“If it bothers you …”
He picked it up, frowned at it for a moment, and stowed it in the locker under the berth with the others he had brought back from the cave. Glad to have it out of sight, glad to be almost himself again, Kip felt Watcher’s sadness lifting from him. The turbine’s hum had stopped. The only sound he heard came from Cruzet at the kitchen counter, humming tunelessly as he made breakfast.
“Okay, Kipper?” Andersen asked him. “You look a little woozy.”
“I’m okay,” he said, but his voice was slow and hoarse. Like Watcher’s. “I think.”
“I know bad things have happened.” Andersen grinned with a warm concern for him. “Things you never expected. But we’re on our way to the great ice continent! Mountains and glaciers to climb! And the mystery of the spectral signal!
“What do you think we’ll find?”
Skyhold? The fortress of the skylers that he had seen in the dream? Built to stand forever, was it still standing? Was something there still alive, using the power of the lifestones to defend the frozen planet?
The Black Sun Page 23