Howling Stones

by Alan Dean Foster

  “I agree.” Essasu raised his pistol. “We must finish what we came for, and I regret that your interference requires a response. All space is our space, and within it the AAnn go where they please.”

  “This is not your road.” So saying, the senior male turned his back on the commander. As a threatening gesture, it didn’t carry much weight. Essasu aimed carefully and assumed that his companions were doing likewise. A single silent shot to the back of the head would end this unfortunate dialogue cleanly.

  All three Parramati tossed their stones into the air. They aimed them not at the scaly intruders but at one another. There were many times thereafter when Essasu carefully reviewed what had happened. It was very clear. It just wasn’t very believable.

  Spinning through the night toward one another, the three stones appeared to slow. Silently they struck. Instead of tumbling to the ground, they stuck and hovered, the resultant unified mass visibly altering its shape like the parts of a completed puzzle. A pale yellow-green efflorescence emanated from the amorphous lump, intensely bright in the darkness of the storm-swept night.

  A disk appeared beneath the suspended mass. Several body-lengths in diameter, it formed a translucent barrier between AAnn and Parramati. The reflective surface was bright with stars. Beyond, the natives could be seen huddled together and chanting softly.

  A projector of some kind, Essasu thought in disbelief. How had these primitives come by such a device? One of the techs was jogging his shoulder.

  “Commander? The storm is ending.”

  “I know.” He gestured. “Step through this. Shoot all three natives but do not damage their interesting device. We will take it back with us and let the appropriate specialists examine it.”

  Did the humans know anything about this? he found himself wondering. If so, all the more reason to eliminate them. An upward glance showed the station still quiescent, its inhabitants still oblivious to the little drama being played out below them. It wasn’t surprising. The violence of the storm would have smothered the sounds of a small war.

  “Choose!” The senior male was speaking again, from behind the disk. “The road that leads back to Mallatyah—or this one.”

  “Some kind of mirror device,” Essasu murmured aloud. “I wonder how they came into possession of it? Well, we will find out later.” He gestured sharply.

  Two of the tech-soldiers stepped forward, simultaneously crossing the lip of the disk. A couple of brief, startled screams resounded over the communicators just before they fell out of sight. It was exactly as if they had stepped into a hole. The disk swallowed them as neatly as if they’d gone over a cliff.

  Darting forward, Essasu and his remaining companion peered cautiously into the swirling translucency. They could see the pair who had gone in and over, flailing and kicking madly as they tumbled out of sight. Not down, he thought. They weren’t falling down so much as up. He started to put out a hand.

  The remaining tech restrained him. “Commander, don’t.” She struggled to pull Essasu back from the brink.

  Shaking her off, he reached out. His hand and forearm entered the translucency. His suit sensed nothing unusual, but something pulled forcefully on his arm. With an effort, he drew it back. At the same time he recognized the pattern of stars revealed by the disk, remembering it clearly now from the standard manual on Senisran. The faint memory had been nagging at him ever since the disk had first materialized.

  The constellations depicted in the disk were exactly what would be seen if one were standing somewhere in the planet’s southern hemisphere and looking up at the night sky. He could not pinpoint the exact location. The Seurapan Reef system, perhaps, or the Challooriat Atolls. Those locales and others were known to him from official familiarization scrolls that suddenly seemed no longer immaterial. Both island groupings were situated almost exactly as far below Senisran’s equator as Parramat was above it.

  The disk was a hole, or if one chose to use the Parramati definition, a road. Right through this side of the planet.

  9

  The two unfortunate tech-soldiers? They had fallen, all right. Right through Senisran into the night sky in the southern hemisphere. Shaken, Essasu lifted his gaze to the three Parramati. They were watching him silently.

  The storm in his mind mirrored the greater, darker one raging about him. Three stones come together: earth, road, seeing. A way of seeing a road through the earth to the sky?

  But how? Though more administrator than scientist, Essasu still was aware that several important laws of physics had just been violated directly in front of him. Not magic. He was no believer in superstition. It was technology, but of another order. Three stones. Surely the Parramati weren’t responsible for them.

  Then who were? How had they come to be here, on this backward watery world? Clearly the locals had learned how to make use of them. Had they been instructed, or was learning the properties of each individual stone a matter of trial and error? He’d seen no switches thrown, no surreptitious controls nudged. The Parramati had simply thrown the three objects together.

  To become useful they had to be combined. A single stone was nothing more than a lump of inscribed slag. But when pushed against another, or several others, it helped to open a gate. In this case, a gate to another part of Senisran.

  His thoughts reeled. Mallatyah and Torrelau were each home to dozens of the sacred stones. Many more were held and cared for on the other islands of the archipelago. Were some inert, no more than what they appeared to be, or were all potentially capable of equally inexplicable higher functions?

  What else could the sacred stones do? What would happen if a sea stone was combined with a pair of road stones, or growing stones with sky stones? Did only certain specific combinations have a higher function, or would any work?

  Puzzle pieces, he told himself. Hundreds of them, scattered the length and breadth of the Parramati archipelago. Each one looked after by a designated individual, or family, or clan. What else, if anything, besides the sky disk transporter could the stones become?

  He had a thousand questions, the answer to any one of which was more important than the elimination of a couple of bothersome humans.

  The female was speaking. “We are sorry for your friends, but they chose their road.”

  “Yes. Yes, they did.” Mumbling, Essasu and his remaining companion backed away from the glistening sky disk. Rain was sucked into it as readily as bodies, he noticed. How much control did these primitives have over a device clearly not of their own making? Could its locus be shifted? Toward him, for example? What if they pushed it forward and it slid under his feet? Would he, too, fall through to the sky in the southern hemisphere?

  Madness it was, utter and complete. Except that he’d seen it happen. As she retreated, the surviving tech stumbled slightly, reminding him that he was not alone, that another had witnessed the impossibility.

  Tilting his head slightly within the protective hood, he tried to raise the pair who had vanished into the disk on their communicators. When there was no response, he addressed the other members of the expedition who had taken up positions just inside the station’s breached defensive perimeter.

  “Interdiction is aborted. Return to the floater. Any who delay will be left behind. I repeat, return to the floater.”

  The tech glanced at him. “Commander, the mastorm … should we not wait awhile?”

  Essasu continued to back away from the three Parramati. “We are leaving now.” Suddenly nothing, not even the roaring storm, posed nearly the threat implied by the inexplicable translucent disk.

  “Did you see it? Did you see what happened?”

  The tech responded with a gesture of first-degree concurrence, massively emphasized. “I saw, Commander, but I do not understand. What happened to Suugil and Rieibaa? Where did they go?”

  “On a journey from which I fear they will not be returning.” Again he addressed himself to his suit pickup. “Assemble at the prearranged point. Do not, I repeat, do not
attempt to question or interfere in any way with any natives you may encounter.”

  Moments later the remainder of the assault team had reunited outside the station’s defensive perimeter. The senior among them eyed the commander searchingly.

  “What happened? Why have we aborted?”

  Essasu stared back evenly. “It seems we have chosen a wrong road.” At this, the other members of the group looked uncertainly at one another. Essasu did not elaborate. Let them query their surviving companion. Other thoughts occupied his thinking.

  The first thing he intended to do upon returning to Mallatyah was institute a thorough survey of all the sacred stones on the island. Then he would initiate careful, nonthreatening discussions with their caretakers. It should be possible to secure additional, nonhostile demonstrations of the stones’ abilities, under conditions that would permit proper scientific study and analysis.

  This was big, he knew. Major. Ra’selah miscaf nye. Much more important than some trifle of a treaty. And he, Essasu, would be responsible for its discovery and subsequent exploitation. The noble title to which he aspired was no longer a distant dream but an imminent reality. Such a destiny was worth the sacrifice of a couple of technicians. In gratitude, he would incorporate their names into his title.

  Their number reduced by two, the group pushed their way back through the storm, up over the ridges, doggedly retracing their path. Essasu found himself glancing back over his shoulder on more occasions than he cared to admit. He suffered from a quiet horror of looking around only to see a glistening disk full of stars bearing down on him, swallowing rocks, trees, and everything else in its circular path as it sustained a remorseless pursuit.

  Some kind of transport mechanism, he knew. One that the Parramati could call into existence but not manipulate. That would be for imperial scientists to master. Surely the system was designed to allow travel from one part of the planet to another and not to dump would-be travelers into an empty slice of sky! No doubt it was all a matter of proper alignment, the details of which time and study would resolve.

  He wondered if the two unfortunate technicians who had been swallowed up by the disk were still falling, and he shuddered.

  The origin of the disk-generating stones intrigued him almost as much as their operation. Who had manufactured them, and when? Those parts of Senisran that had been explored had revealed nothing in the way of a civilization predating that of the primitive natives. There was nothing; not a wall, not a statue, not a crumbling ziggurat. Nothing to indicate the earlier presence of a technologically advanced society.

  That the stones were not recent arrivals but had been on Senisran for some time was clear from the extensive mythology that had been developed around them by the Parramati. The fact that the devices were still functional was yet another testament to the achievements of their designers. Galactic archeology was not a subject that had much interested him, and he knew next to nothing about it, but there was clearly work here for specialists in many disciplines. He had to move with care and caution lest he overload his brain.

  Focus on the immediate, he decided. Concentrate on surmounting this wet, slippery slope without breaking a leg. Understanding, great acclaim, and noble titles could come later.

  One of the first steps must be to get hold of a stone and subject it to rigorous examination and analysis in the lab. Facilities denied to the station were available at Chraara. Other stones could be sent offworld for study, preferably accompanied by their respective stone masters. It would not matter if their relations with the Parramati suffered. From now on, it was the stones that mattered.

  Would he be believed, even with a witness to corroborate his statements? If only they’d had recorders going! It being, of course, inappropriate to make a record of a double assassination, there were only his personal observations and those of the surviving technician to attest to what had happened. It would have to suffice.

  Did the Parramati know more about the stones than they were saying, or were they akin to children who knew how to operate a complex machine but could not have begun to explain how it actually worked? Those questions too would yield to future scrutiny.

  “Be careful there!” he warned those ahead of him. “Watch your step.” Irony would not be a strong enough concept to describe their situation if, having just made the discovery of the age, they succumbed to the vicissitudes of bad weather.

  Whirling abruptly, he saw only wind-whipped trees and sodden ground. The image of the disk swallowing his two technicians was one that was going to be difficult to dislodge from memory. The sight of them stumbling, falling, screaming as they shrank into the starfield …

  Angrily, he returned his attention to the trail ahead.

  The four big persons squatted comfortably on their haunches. Torrelauapa lay below the slope on which they sat and off to their right, the waterfall and its narrow lagoon to their left. Three outriggers were heading out to sea, their nets draped neatly over their sides, while females came and went from the intricate mountainside gardens.

  Ascela, Jorana, Osiwivi, and Massapapu had gathered to discuss the incident of the previous night. Overhead, the tropical sun shone down through a perfectly blue sky storm-swept clean of particulates.

  “Are the stones safe?” Jorana inquired of Osiwivi.

  “All have been returned to their keeping places,” his friend replied. “To use them together was a difficult decision.”

  “But one that had to be made.” Massapapu was employing a middle finger to clean one ear. “We could not let the two humans be killed. Not while they were living in our space.”

  “Bad kusum.” When Ascela grunted, her whole body lifted slightly on powerful hind legs.

  “A violation of hospitality,” added Osiwivi.

  “But now the shiny-skinned ones, these AAnn, know the power of stones.” As was each of them, Jorana was openly concerned. “They will trouble our Mallatyahan relations and return to harass us as well.”

  “Perhaps not.” The others looked to Ascela, who while carrying no more weight in discussion than anyone else, was senior in years among them. “It may be that none of their big persons will grasp the true meaning of what was seen.” She barked gentle amusement. “After all, unless one knows the ways of using, the stones are only stones. Except for what the Mallatyahans choose to tell them, the shiny-skinned AAnn are ignorant of kusum.”

  “That is so,” Osiwivi agreed, “but I still think as does Jorana. They will trouble us unless we make them all go away.”

  Massapapu considered the problem. “We could send them all down a road from which they would not return.”

  Ascela gestured agreement. “That is easily enough done. But from talking with the humans, I believe that others would come to take their place. These who would come after would be more cautious as well as more ready to use weapons.”

  “Just as a human male has come to join the female.” Jorana’s nostrils flared slightly. “Do you think they will mate?”

  “I do not know. They don’t speak of such things to me. If I think of it, I will ask them sometime. They seem mismatched as to size.”

  Massapapu considered. “Maybe among their kind the female is always larger than the male.”

  Jorana made a low chittering sound deep in his throat. “It seems that we are going to have to learn how to live with these visitors among us, humans and AAnn alike. But that does not mean we must agree to let them come and dig out what they want from the land.” Double eyelids blinked. “Better for kusum to keep playing them off one against the other.”

  “Yes,” agreed Osiwivi. “Contact and trade is supportable—so long as we control it.”

  “But they will want to manage things.” Ascela shifted on her haunches. “Both believe that they speak from a position of strength, but neither has any stones.” She snorted derisively. “They are not stronger than us, but it is better to let them think that they are.”

  “They will continue to harangue us to choose between them,�
�� Massapapu argued.

  “Let them.” Ascela let her gaze wander to the relaxing symmetry of the terraced gardens. “We will continue to play no favorites. Access to all islands of the Parramati will be controlled, and we will not allow them to dig on our lands. We will pass judgment on every soft- or shiny-skin who wishes to reside among us.”

  “For how long?” Osiwivi was not afraid to let uncertainty show. “They have powerful weapons and machines.”

  “But they do not know the right roads.” Jorana half closed his eyes, squinting into the sun as he watched the last of the fishing outriggers vanish around the northern point. “Perhaps if we were to show some of them a true road, they would come to understand what preserving our kusum means to us.”

  “Yes!” Massapapu was immediately enthusiastic. “Show the two humans the great road. See then if they do not become more like us, more attuned to true kusum. Show them the great road and they will understand why we do not need their treaty and their trade goods.”

  As Ascela mulled over this proposal, she sifted soil through her fingers, studying the small lives it had to offer. Occasionally she nibbled.

  “An idea worthy of further consideration, but are these two humans the proper candidates? They do not strike me as big persons among their own kind. Wise, yes. Understanding and sometimes even sympathetic. Intelligent and knowledgeable, or they would not have been sent among us. But after much talking with them, I do not believe that they are persons of influence or power.”

  “We can add to their power as well as to their knowledge by showing them the road,” Jorana pointed out. “Once they have seen, then big persons of their own kind will have to listen to them.”

  Ascela rocked backward, using her short tail to form the third leg of a tripod on which she could balance. “Well, on one thing we are all agreed: something must be done about these persistent soft- and shiny-skinned visitors. If we cannot drive them away or kill them all, we must make them understand what it is to be Parramati. If that means they must be shown the great road, then so be it.”