“From them?” Andersen asked. “Why?”
He touched the bead and tipped his head as if listening to the amphibian. Its eyes flickered, and he turned abruptly back to Andersen.
“We never knew.” His voice was suddenly sharper and quicker. Kip thought the amphibian was speaking through him. “Perhaps the colonists had lost their own mindstones. Perhaps distorted recollections had made them paranoid, afraid we might threaten them. Whatever the reason, they certainly came to exterminate us. They attacked without warning, and they were well prepared. You saw the harm they did outside the walls, with heat weapons and nuclear missiles.
“Our best defense was a weapon of theirs—” Cruzet looked inquiringly at the amphibian. “A weapon given to us by an agent they had sent to spy on us. Knowing us, he had come to see their tragic folly.
“I inquired about the weapon.” Touching the bead, he spoke more naturally to Andersen. “The word for it seems to suggest something like mental illness or contagion. It damaged the mindstones. Often killed them. More or less, I suppose, in the same way that a virus disables computers.”
His voice changed again, no longer quite his own.
“It stopped the attackers, but our defenses were destroyed. Many thousand sleepers died in their cells. Millions of our most precious mindstones were killed. Expecting another attack, we believed we were beaten. We went to sleep, the few of us still alive, with no hope of ever waking.”
“Mom, don’t you see?” Day called across the table. “We woke them.”
She was standing with the pink snake wrapped around her. Rima gasped when it held her up to the enormous eyes. Day gazed into their dance of color, squealing with delight. After a moment, it set her back on the table and cuddled her against its breast. It rumbled gently, and she turned her head to beam at Rima.
“Me Me thanks us, Mom. She she’s so very happy that we woke her. She might have slept forever.”
Cooing softly at Day, reaching out the thin pink snake to stroke her hair, the amphibian seemed so friendly that Kip caught his breath and dared to speak.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a question.”
She boomed gently at him, the wheels of color spinning in her eyes, speaking a language he hadn’t learned to understand. He turned to Andersen.
“Captain Cometeer had to fight the Quake Master on the Trembling World. Did the amphibians cause the quake that made the avalanche?”
“Did they, Tony?” He spoke to Cruzet. “I was wondering.”
“Matter of fact, I think they did.” Cruzet waited for the play of light in the amphibian’s eyes. Nodding at her, he swung deliberately back to Andersen. “When the sun died, they went underground to tap the planet’s heat. They learned to stop quakes, or make small quakes to prevent greater ones.”
The amphibian was sharing one of the wafers with Day, its nimble tongue putting a bit to her lips and the next to its own. Rima sat staring, frozen in shock. Cruzet moved the blue gem on his forehead and spoke again, his voice almost natural.
“We tripped the old perimeter defense system deployed around the tunnel mouth. That’s what erased the mindstones we found in the blackwing nest and set off the quake. A larger quake would have closed the tunnel if Day hadn’t got back in contact.”
Day and the amphibian had finished the wafer. Smiling raptly up into the luminous eyes, she sang something that was eerily musical and strange. It answered with the same eerie syllables in a voice that was almost Day’s. The pink tongue kissed her lips and slid back into its snout.
“Tell me!” Rima was suddenly on her feet, shouting hysterically at Cruzet and Andersen. “What do they plan for us?”
“Nothing.” Cruzet shrugged. “Wakened so recently, Me Me’s nearly as bewildered as we are. She has been asleep in an underground refuge. The world around us now must be as strange to her as it is to us. She’s still searching for her own memories, and trying to recover what she can from the net.”
“My children?” Shivering, Rima looked imploringly at Andersen. “What will happen to them?”
“Hard to say.”
“My God! Don’t you care?”
“We just don’t know.” Soberly, he shook his head. “We’re in a critical spot. Alone here, with everything we ever knew lost in time and space behind us. Maybe alone in this galaxy. Alone in the universe, for all we know.”
“So what can we do?”
“Wait,” he said. “Hope. Try to cope.”
“How?” She shuddered, huddled miserably on the T-bar. “How?”
“We’ll look for ways,” he said. “Even back at home, we never really know the future. Bad things happen, but good things, too. We take what we must and do what we can. That’s life.”
Mondragon had come around the table to stand beside her.
“We’re alive,” he whispered. “We’re together.”
She gave him a wan smile and caught his hand. Kip had come up beside them.
“Mom,” he told her, “I think we’ll be okay.”
She didn’t seem to hear, but Andersen grinned at him.
“All copasetic, Kipper?”
“I think.” He looked up into the amphibian’s rainbow eyes and off at the towering archways that led off the enormous floor. There was still a lot to see. A lot of exciting things to learn. “I think it will be.”
The amphibian was booming again, her eyes shining at Cruzet. He nodded, touching the bright blue stone, and cleared his throat.
“The amphibians are pleased to greet us.” He spoke in a precise and careful way, as if reading a formal document. “They are grateful that we wakened them. They are anxious to plan for our future together.”
He turned to Andersen, waiting expectantly.
“Thank them,” Andersen said. “We can learn from them. They can learn from us. Our future is beyond my imagination, but together we can live forever.”
“I hope,” Cruzet said. “We can hope.”
“Me Me wants to live,” Day called across the table. “She wants to learn. She wants to help us. Now she wants to show me where we are.”
The pink snake lifted her again. The amphibian lurched off the perch and carried her away. Mondragon heard Rima’s anxious gasp and felt her arm tighten around him. He drew her closer. Silently, they watched the creature take Day on a circuit of the enormous archways.
Andersen stood craning to study the architecture of the great dome overhead. Cruzet gathered the discarded helmets off the floor and laid them in a neat row on the edge of the table. Kip climbed on a T-bar and leaned to take another cake off the dish. Gliding back at last, the amphibian perched beside them and put Day in Rima’s arms.
“Thank you, Me Me!” Day called as she soared away. “Don’t leave us long.”
They watched silently as she climbed and vanished among the ancient constellations.
Thirty-four
They lived there a week, eating the odd foods that came up through the middle of the great table and sleeping on the floor when they slept at all. They all wore the bright black beads they were calling mindstones now, even Kip and his mother. The little stones turned them into strangers and kept them busy with things Carlos seldom understood.
Day commonly sat cross-legged near the middle of the great table, with the others perched on the T-bars around her. The top of the table was sometimes like a blackboard; they could write or draw on it with pens or even their fingers. Sometimes it was like a TV monitor that could turn their drawings into pictures, or show them new pictures.
Sometimes they used words that sounded hardly human, sometimes English that was just as confusing. Nobody paid much attention to Kip. He used a little toilet, like the one in the spider, that had come up through the floor, and wandered around that enormous room and always came back to the pictures and the maps on top of the table. Out toward the glacier wall, there was a vast separate building. Pictures showed the roof of it lifting open and a cluster of huge silver balls rising out, climbing into the sky.
“A gravity ship,” Day said in that odd quick voice that wasn’t her own. “Meant to carry another colony out to the stars.”
“They’ve all been born in the sea,” Andersen added. “A dying race, since that froze. They hoped to find and colonize a living world, but their luck had run out when the colonists came back to kill them.”
“The ship had no damage in the war,” Day said. “It’s still ready.”
Ready for what? Kip felt sad for the amphibians. They had tried so long and hard to stay alive, tried until only their ghosts were left. The gravity ship looked wonderful, though maybe not so wonderful as their own quantum ship had been.
Thoughts of that made him even sadder. He grieved again for all his friends lost with it. For Jim Cheng, who had fitted his airskin and always smiled and tried to turn their troubles into jokes. For Reba Washburn, who had seemed cold and hard until he got to know her. Really, when she joined Mr. Sternberg in the fight against Captain Stecker and Jonas Roak, she had saved their lives. He grieved for Mrs. Sternberg and her kids, and all the others who had been Day’s friends till the stones began to make her so strange they were afraid of her.
That sadness made him think of Chichen Itza. That was the Mayan city he had seen when his mother took him and Day on a vacation trip to the Yucatan, the summer before they left Earth. She wanted them to remember the world they were leaving, but the ruins had made him glad to be getting away. A dead city of queer temples and pyramids built of great stone blocks, carved and painted with mysterious hieroglyphs, its ruins had lain buried under the jungle for five hundred years.
He’d felt a pang of sadness for the civilization that had died there. Maybe not so strange as this one, because the old Mayans had been human. Their descendants still live around the ruins, peddling postcards and trinkets to the tourists. It struck him now that even those peddlers were gone long ago. Dead with the Earth and all its life in the millions or billions of years while the quantum ship was in flight.
A shadow of sorrow fell over him, for his mother and Day, Carlos and Andy and Tony—they and he were surely the last humans alive anywhere in all the universe. They would die here, he thought, leaving their bones to last forever here on the ice with the dust of the dead amphibians. He shivered at the thought, and tried to get it out of his mind.
His spirits lifted a little after that first week, when Me Me let them move into new apartments somehow fixed up for them, in a space larger than any room he remembered from Earth. Its vast walls glowed softly blue when they were moving about and faded to a gray dusk when they were not. Dark oval openings pierced them, rising in row upon endless row until they blurred in the dim blue dusk.
“Nests, I guess you would call them,” Andersen said. “Empty homes that were ready for changing sea folk that never got here.”
Doors along the bottom of one endless wall opened into their apartments, small rooms with berths and bathrooms like those in their rooms on the ship, and tiny kitchens that looked like copies from the spider. The men went back to the spider to bring human-type food. He was glad for that, and for the comforts of a bed and a shower, but Day was soon rushing them back to that great central chamber.
“My Me Me!” Her voice was soft and glad, the way it had been when she used to hug her panda doll. “I always knew she was in bad trouble here on the ice. I’m happy the black things never got her. She says they’re all dead now.”
“What were they, dear?” Rima whispered. “I was terribly worried when they frightened you so.”
“Things that hunted us.” She shivered. “Things with terrible claws and great black wings. They hunted us everywhere, but they’re all gone now.”
“I think they were a racial memory that Day picked up,” Cruzet said. “A memory of the black-winged predators. A sort of racial nightmare, I think, that had come to haunt all the mindstones.”
“Me Me says they’ll never come back.” Day was nodding happily. “And she’s so glad we came to wake her up. So glad to have us here, because she needs us as much as we needed her.”
“How?” Kip asked. “How could she ever need us?”
“She’s coming down to see us again,” Day said. “Maybe she will say.”
They waited around the table, staring up at the strange constellations that shone in the gloom of that enormous dome, until the amphibian came gliding down again on her softly shining wings. Perching beside them, she picked Day up with that quick pink tongue and cuddled her against her velvet fur, caressing her with sounds like the cooing of the doves Kip remembered hearing back at White Sands before they climbed aboard the quantum ship.
At last she set Day back on the table. Kip tried to listen, waiting to learn why she needed human beings here, but he never heard her say. His mother and the men asked questions that she seemed to be translating. They seemed to understand Me Me’s answers, and asked more questions about things he never understood.
He was tired and bored before he saw Me Me’s tongue reaching into the kangaroo pouch on her glossy belly. She gave Day a little cluster of the black stones and picked her up to hug her again before she spread her bright wings and soared away. Day stood waving until she was lost among the strange stars overhead.
“Mindstones for us.” Happily, she handed the stones around to the men and her mother. “These come from different people, with different skills. An engineer, a teacher, a mathematician, a poet. Me Me says we can learn from them.”
She offered one to Kip.
“From Me Me, a gift for your birthday,” she said.
“I don’t want it.” He shrank away. “And I can’t have birthdays here, because there aren’t any days.”
“I’m Day.” She grinned at him. “And Me Me says no le hace.” She had learned a little Spanish from her baby-sitter back on Earth. “Me Me thought you’d like it because it comes from somebody you know. The Watcher, don’t you remember? He was the last of the sea folk.”
“Keep it away.” He shook his head. “It gave me nightmares.”
“Kipper?” They were all staring at him, and Andersen was asking, “What’s this about?”
“The stones.” He pointed at them. “Cosas del diablo, Carlos used to call them. You left one on the floor when you brought them back from the cave. Somehow it got to me, while I was trying to sleep. I never touched it, but it gave me a terrible dream. I was this Watcher, old and dying on a raft at the edge of the freezing sea.”
“Kip!” His mother was almost scolding. “You never told us.”
“I was afraid. I didn’t know how to explain.”
“You saw the planet dying!” Cruzet was excited. “That’s history! The history we’re trying to learn! But how did the stone get to that cave?”
“Me Me says the Watcher died on the float,” Day said. “A predator found him and carried the body there.”
“The mindstones are nothing devilish,” Andersen said. “They formed in the brains of the amphibians after their metamorphosis. Organs of memory a little like computer chips, though we still have the science of them to learn. They’re all in contact; I don’t know how.”
“We’ll find out!” Cruzet was silent for a moment, peering at the one Day had given him. “One more riddle left to crack. It’s a long-range effect; they detected us far out in space. In contact, they formed a kind of racial mind. Most of it was lost of course, with so many mindstones dead or damaged.”
“Try the mindstone.” Day offered it again. “It won’t bite.”
Uneasily, he put it against the scalp behind his ear. Something stuck it firmly. They all watched him, waiting.
“Nothing.” He shook his head, feeling relieved. “I don’t feel a thing. Or maybe—” He stared at Day. “It does bring back the dream when I was the Watcher. I remember how he loved his mate and their son. How sad he was he had no strength left to dive for fish or help when they were starving.”
He reached to push it closer to his ear.
“It really doesn’t bite.” He grinne
d at Day. “It lets me remember a lot, but I’m still me.”
“Bueno!” Andersen clapped his shoulder. “ ’Sta bien. We’ll be asking you for more about this Watcher and all about what you remember of the way the planet died.”
Still perched around the table, they did keep asking questions, but most of them were for Day, about what Me Me had told her. Most of them he didn’t understand. He really didn’t want to remember the Watcher or the bones in the cave, or think about how all their bones would finally be left here, frozen forever and ever. He wanted his lost Game Box.
He waited unhappily until they finally broke for a rest. His mother and Carlos sat smiling at each other, holding hands. Cruzet and Andersen slid off the T-bars, reaching across the table for bubbles of water and juice and the funny-tasting cakes that were really better than tofusoya cookies.
“Mopy-Dopy!” Day came across the table, shaking her finger at him. “Aren’t you happy here with Me Me?”
“Not very,” he said. “Not really.”
“She wants us to be. She’s doing everything to help us.”
“It’s all too strange.”
“At first it was.” His mother nodded. “But don’t you see how lucky we are? I thought we were going to die on the ice. Me Me is doing her best to help us.”
“A chance for us,” Andersen added. “And a new chance for the amphibians.” He turned to the others. “We’ve begun to get their story. The mindstones are almost eternal. With their planet freezing, they looked for ways to keep their common mind and their culture alive. Built this fortress on the ice. Looked for a younger planet.
“The war—the attack from the colonists—nearly wiped them out. The survivors went into stasis sleep, to be awakened if they were ever discovered. Our approach woke them. Me Me sees a chance that we can save each other, surviving in a sort of symbiosis.”
He frowned doubtfully at Rima.
“If we can—”
“We can try.” Rima nodded thoughtfully, smiling at Day. “They’d lost their will to live, with the sea frozen and no more sea folk born. We can bring them new hope, new life.”
The Black Sun Page 30