But he did reach up, almost without hope that it was a real rope, real people calling him to loop the rope around his waist. But he complied, and the rope pulled, lifting him, and it hurt, and he grabbed the rope, thinking he would never reach the top. Probably there was no top.
Then hard hands were on him, lifting him up, and a broad, ugly face was bending over him, and he saw the glint of light on filed steel teeth.
“Gee, Boss,” Sidis said. And Roan had the strange thought that it must be raining, because there was water running down the leathery face.
“You Gooks . . . took your time . . .” Roan said. And then Askor was there, grinning a meat-eating grin, and their faces were prettier than any faces Roan had ever seen. He smiled.
Smiling, he let it all go and whirled down into the bottomless soft night.
“Eat slowly,” a testy voice said from somewhere; Roan’s eyes were almost shut against the bright light. “And not too much.” Roan sipped a brothy soup, the bowl trembling in his hands. After the soup the doctor poked him, shone lights in his ears and mouth and whistled. “I’m giving you a walloping shot of vitastim,” he said. “You’ll feel human in about an hour. But don’t overdo it. Unless, of course, you want to,” he added.
Askor and Sidis hustled him into a hard shower, gave him a brush to scrub with. Then they let him sleep. By the time Roan had on a uniform which almost fit his bone-thin body, he’d come back to himself. The face that looked back at him from the mirror was a stranger’s. A gaunt, old-looking, deep-eyed stranger. And the hair above his ears had silver streaks in it. But Roan grinned at the reflection.
“We’re alive,” he said. And behind him, Askor and Sidis smiled, too.
“Let’s go, men,” Roan said. “There’s nothing more here for us.”
Aboard the stolen light cruiser Hell’s Whore with an hour’s run in space, Roan relaxed in the big padded First Officer’s chair, studying the pattern of lights on the screen.
“I’m glad you two showed up when you did,” he said. “But it was pretty stupid of the two of you to try it alone.”
“We wasn’t alone, Boss,” Sidis corrected. “We had their best bucket here. Tough we had to wait around out there on Four for three months to get a crack at her, but you know there wasn’t much left of the old Rage of Heaven”
“Nice work, taking a cruiser with that hulk,” Roan said. “Maybe you’re learning after all.”
“Nothing to it. They thought they was taking us.”
“I wish I’d been there—instead of where I was.”
“You didn’t miss nothing.” Sidis flashed his teeth and examined the tip of the steel toothpick with which he had been grooming them. “It was kind of pitiful, them bums pulling guns on us.”
“And that’s what they call the Imperial Terran Navy,” Askor snickered. “Them nancies—”
“Those weren’t real Terries,” Roan said. “That was just some sort of rag-tag gipsy outfit using the name. The real Terries are on Terra.”
“I heard of it,” Sidis said doubtfully. But I thought—Hey, Captain, we ain’t going there, are we?”
“Why shouldn’t we go there?”
“I dunno. I figured maybe you was still looking for the ITN like Cap’n Dread.”
“I’ve seen enough of the ITN for now,” Roan said shortly. He rose and picked up the folded garments of blue and silver polyon which he had replaced with the old familiar ship-clothes, tossed them to Sidis.
“What’ll I do with this stuff?” Sidis asked, holding the Terran uniform.
“Burn it,” Roan said.
XXXV
Sol was a brilliant jewel to starboard of Hells Whore and now the tiny, faint points of lights that were Sol’s planets could be seen. Roan tried to pick out the one that might be Terra. But he couldn’t be sure. It was a double planet, Starbird had said, but the faint companion. Luna, would be too dim to see at this distance.
There was the usual buzz of interstellar noise as he switched the receiver on, but nothing else. He took the microphone and began transmitting. “Imperial Terran Cruiser Hells Whore calling Niss headquarters . . .”
“What makes you think they speak Fanterran, Boss?” Sidis asked nervously. He had been nervous ever since they sighted the great, silent Niss ship.
“They did five thousand years ago,” Roan said.
“How long’s it been since anyone tried to run the blockade?” Askor inquired.
“Four hundred years,” Roan said. “They didn’t make it.”
“Swell,” Sidis muttered.
“We ought to be in detector range now,” Roan said calmly. He adjusted controls; a meteorite flashed around the repulsion field of the ship’s hull. The image grew on the screens.
“She’s a big baby,” Sidis said.
“No bigger than the last one,” Askor pointed out.
“Yeah—it was dead,” Sidis conceded. “But what if this one ain’t?”
“Then we’ll get blasted into the Nine Hells. Why?”
“Just asking,” Sidis said, and then they watched the screen in silence.
Up close, the Niss ship looked familiar, even to the characters sprawled across the dark curve of the hull. It was a twin to the dreadnaught they had boarded after Henry Dread’s death, so many years before. Immense, ancient, dead.
It took an hour with a cutting torch to force an opening. Dead air whistled, stilled. Inside, sealed in their atmosphere suits, Roan and his men walked along the narrow, empty, dim passageways, remembering the route, passing the little piles of dust and fish bones that had been Niss warriors.
In the control room there was an ancient, abandoned-looking uniform jacket hanging over the back of the pilot’s chair—the first garment they had seen. Roan came closer to the control board.
“Terran!” an echoing voice said. “Stand where you are!”
Roan slipped his power pistol from its holster.
“Drop your weapon!” The voice was hollow, alien as not even a Geek’s voice was alien, and, filled with an inexpressible weariness.
Roan stopped breathing for a moment. Askor and Sidis stood behind him, silent.
“Never mind,” the voice came again. “Keep your gun, Terran. I cannot keep this up. And I am dying, so there is no need to shoot me.” The chair moved, swung around. In it was draped a creature that looked like a long, crushed polyon bag with something rotten in it. The part that moved, Roan decided, must be the mouth.
“My form shocks you,” the voice said. “It is because my energy level is so low. But how did you come here? Where are my people?”
Roan made his voice sound. “You are the first Niss I’ve ever seen.”
“I am Over-great-one Thstt, Commander of Twelve Hordes. The alarm energized my forebrain and I came awake, here, in the stink of loneliness. I called, but none answer. Only you, Terran.”
“I’ve waited years for this,” Roan said. “I always thought it would be very satisfying to kill a Niss. But now T don’t seem to care.”
“Did the armies of Terra arise then and destroy us? I see our dreadnaughts all in station, orbiting the enemy home-world. But no one answers my signals. And when I tried to call my home planet, I got only . . . listen.”
The Niss floated out a portion of his polyoid body, threw a switch. “Listen!”
Roan could hear nothing. But out of the receiver came a swirl of purple smoke. No. Not purple. Some inconceivable color. It writhed into the room and disappeared without dispersing.
Thstt screamed, and his scream turned finally into a smoke of the same color as that coming out of the receiver. The Niss’ odd, formless body twisted and swelled, pulsating and then shrank, slacker than before.
Roan stepped over, switched off the microphone. “I don’t know what that means,” he said in a shaken voice.
“It’s the sound of desolation,” Thstt said. “Don’t you see? There is no one left but me. We had planned to seize your Galaxy because our own was infected with a parasite that consumed Niss v
ital energies. But we have lost. And so we died—all but me, waiting here in alert statis . . .”
“The Niss were never conquered,” Roan said. “They just disappeared, as far as anyone knows. And the machinery has run down, over the eons.”
“And so I, too, die,” said Thstt. “And with me the ancient and mighty dream that was the race of Niss. But do not shoot me, or I will implode and you, too, will die. There is no need to watch me. It is not pleasant. We Niss are strong, and strong is our hold on that mystery we know as life . . .”
But Roan did watch. The polyoid body first grew, expanding as high as the ceiling and half as wide as the room, exchanging an alien rush of terrifying colors within itself. Fascinated, Roan found himself hypnotized by the horror of the colors and by something else, as though the death agonies of this alien were being breathed into his own nostrils, stuffed into his own ears, touching nerve endings . . .
Thstt began to shrink now, the colors becoming denser and slower and coagulating into painful scabs. Roan felt himself grasping painfully for breath and his mind reeled at the horror he felt.
Then, suddenly, it was over. Roan let out his breath in a long sigh. He went to the crumpled polyon on the floor, and when he picked up the shrunken, pathetic thing, something clanked inside of it, like bones.
“Gee, Boss,” Sidis spoke for the first time.
Askor wiped his face with a horny hand. “Let’s get out of here, Chief.”
Roan nodded, silently and turned away, feeling a strange loneliness, as though a part of his life had died.
Even from a hundred miles up it was beautiful. At twenty miles the night side was misted with lights and the day side was a soft harmony of blue and green and russet. Roan could feel the leap of his heart, the shine in his eyes. Terra. Home. If only Henry Dread could have seen it like this.
Roan dropped deeper into atmosphere, and his men leaned close, scanning the scene on the high mag screen.
“Look, Boss,” Sidis pointed. “They’re coming up to meet us. Maybe we better arm a couple batteries.”
Roan watched the atmosphere planes, flashing their wings in the sun, far below.
“They’re coming to meet us, as you said,” Roan pointed out. “Not to shoot at us.”
A jet flyer barreled past, rolled like a playful fish, then shot away toward the west.
“Hey!” Askor was studying the charts and comparing them with the screens. “That there is Americanada. Only it’s upside down.”
Sidis keyed the communicator and called, for the twentieth time. There was no answer. The jet was back, circling, then streaking away again.
“He wants us to follow,” Roan said. He altered course, trailed the tiny ship. It led them over a dazzling blue and green coastline, across green hills, over a sprawling city, down to a wide paved field as white as beach sand. Roan lowered the ship carefully so as not to disturb the wide bands of colored plants massed beside the ramp. The ship grounded gently, and the rumble of the drive died.
Roan stood, feeling his mouth dry, his knees trembling slightly. It wasn’t like fear. It was more like the feeling he’d had the first time he saw Stellaraire: Wanting her, and afraid that somehow he’d do some small thing wrong, and lose her. Askor was buckling on his guns. “Leave ’em here,” Roan said. “This is home. You don’t need your gun at home.”
“Us Gooks got no home, Cap’n,” Sidis said. “But maybe we can pretend.”
Roan took a deep breath. “Maybe we’ll all have to pretend a little,” he said.
XXXVI
They descended from the ship into a world flashing with sunlight. Beyond the flower beds were trees that fluttered silver when the wind blew, and the air smelled of a thousand perfumes. It was so familiar to Roan’s dreams that tears came to his eyes.
“Where’s all the Terries?” Sidis wondered aloud.
Faint but pervasive, as though sounded by the motion of the air, came a gentle music.
“Come on.” Roan led the way across the glass-white concrete, past Terran planes, blind and closed, past a row of empty, bright-colored buggies, used no doubt to convey passengers from the long-range planes to the building ahead where helicopters waited on the roof.
There was a wide, color-tiled walk between whispering, silver-leafed trees. Roan followed it and bumped into the door before he saw it. It was absolutely translucent glass, as was the wall. Only a faint line showed where the glass door joined the glass wall, and beyond it was a garden of thin-petalled flowers. Within he could see solid panels, walling off rooms, and more flowers and streams and fountains.
But no people.
Roan thought for a panicked moment of Aldo Cerise, of the beautiful, sad, dead city and the woman who was only a statue. But no. There were obviously people here. People? Could it be that the Niss had taken it over, that there were now only Niss?
He pushed at the door, but it didn’t open and there wasn’t a handle.
He heard running steps and through the trees came a child, a human child, and after the child a large white animal that Roan recognized as a dog, from the picture-book he’d seen as a child.
“Paulikins! Paulikins!” called the dog, and then barked wildly, seeing them.
The child stopped before Roan, rocking a little after the run. He stared mercilessly, a beautiful pink and gold child with round blue eyes.
The dog ran up, panting, and cringed with his tail between his legs. “It’s only a child, sirs,” he said and trembled all over. “A youngling. T don’t know how he got loose.”
“It isn’t old Niss,” the child said. “It’s just a funny man. Look at his funny hands. See, Talbot?”
“Of course we’re not Niss,” Roan said, and patted the child on the head. “We’re human, like you.”
Talbot was sniffing the air, and edged closer, trying to sniff at Roan without seeming to. His eyes rolled to take in Sidis and Askor, standing silently by.
“Is it a Mama or a Daddy?” Robert asked. “It smells funny.”
“There’s been a mistake, sir,” Talbot said. He had lost his fear and sat on his hunches, looking serious. He was a big woolly white dog, spotlessly clean, and Roan could imagine that Paulikins rode-on his back and afterwards curled up on the grass and rested his head on his furry stomach.
“I see,” Roan said. “We landed in a spaceship and naturally everyone would think we were Niss.”
“If you could wait here a moment, sir, I’ll inform the Culture Authorities. You see, they’re fetching a Niss scholar. They didn’t want anyone else to greet you.”
“We’ll wait,” said Roan.
A helicopter hesitated and lighted easily as a fly on the roof. Askor and Sidis got up from where they had been sitting under a tree, smelling flowers they had picked. Roan was pacing under the trees, practicing Terran in his mind. The dog’s accent had been smoother, much more precise than his own. Many of the words Roan had had to strain or guess at. Also, there was a rising inflection that Roan’s language lacked.
The woolly dog was back and made a deferential noise in the back of its throat. “If you would come this way, Sir, so that you can be properly received.”
Roan turned to follow the dog and Askor and Sidis fell in beside him. He waved them back.
“You two wait here,” he said. “I’ll handle this.”
“How come, Chief?” Askor frowned. “Up to now we always stuck together.”
“I don’t need a bodyguard here,” Roan said. “And I don’t want the sight of you two to scare anybody. Just stand by.”
The glass door opened silently at a touch. Roan followed the dog into a paneled-off room which looked as translucent from the inside as the glass door had looked from the outside. The room was planted with a lush, green lawn that sprang softly under his feet. A breeze blew through the room, though there were no openings in the one-way glass.
A door slid open soundlessly across the spacious room, and a handsome young woman—no, a handsome young Man with bright brown hair that curled ar
ound his head like a cap stepped through and smiled. A dog followed, silent and watchful.
“I am Daryl Raim, the Niss expert,” the Man said. His voice was low and controlled, as though he tuned each phrase before he spoke it. Roan felt his face looking angry.
“I’m no Niss,” he said in a voice that sounded harsher than he intended. I’m a Man.”
“Of course. Usee you are not Old Niss.”
When Daryl smiled, a dimple broke in the smooth, white skin of his left cheek. Roan found himself for the first time a mixture of embarrassing emotions and to his horror, he blushed. There was something feminine and appealing about the dimple, and the smooth white skin glowed as though it wanted to be touched.
Daryl sat down gracefully, motioned Roan to a chair entwined with trumpet-vines.
“I . . .” Roan didn’t know how to begin. How to explain who he was. “I am a Terran,” he said finally.
Daryl nodded, smiling encouragingly. Roan felt foolish. Always before, “I am a Terran,” had been an impressive thing to say.
“Of course,” Daryl said. “I assume you have some important message from Old Niss?”
Roan’s mouth opened and closed. His face hardened. “No,” he snapped. “I’m a Terran, coming home. The Niss are dead.”
“Oh?” Daryl’s voice was uncertain. “Dead? I’m sure this news will interest many people. But if you’re not from Old Niss . . .?”
“I was born on Tambool, out in the Eastern Arm,” Roan said. “Out there, Terra is a legend. I came here to see if it was real.”
Daryl smiled apologetically. “Geography was never a hobby of mine.”
“Tambool is another world. It’s half a lifetime away. Its sun is so far away you can’t even see it in the sky from here.”
Daryl smiled uneasily. “You’ve come from Beyond? You’ve really . . . returned from the dead?”
“Who said anything about the dead?”
“I can’t believe it.” Daryl seemed to be talking to himself now. “But you do look—and your ship is like—and—and I’ve seen your face before—somewhere!” He finished up with his voice almost on a note of fright. Roan thought he shuddered—but the smile never left Daryl’s face. He held out his arm. “Look. Goosebumps!”
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