Silver Gods From the Sky

by James P. Hogan

  His reply came from the cabin speakers. “I can only describe it as an absence of stillness. There's a sense of constant movement everywhere that I haven't managed to fully integrate yet. It is felt rather than seen, resulting from the motions of the air and the sounds that it carries, and the movement of water. I have localized some of the sound sources as correlating with visible bio-forms, but for the most part it just seems to be ... everywhere."

  “What are the bio-forms doing?” Jasem asked. “Is all that noise their language? Are they talking to you?"

  “I'm not sure,” Kort replied. A series of views on the screen showed a flying form perched on a rod forming one of the green structures—there were smaller ones as well as the huge pillars holding up the “tents"; then, a hair-covered quadruped squatting on a slab of metallic compound; another was peering through a screen of standing fibers. They all stared fixedly as Kort picked them out in turn and zoomed in on them. “They seem to be watching me, but keeping their distance. The lander must be very strange to them. There hasn't been anything like it in any of the pictures that we've seen."

  “I thought that bio-forms were supposed to have made the first machines,” Nyelise mused. “Why aren't there any machines?"

  “I don't know,” Kort answered.

  “Why aren't they curious, so they'd come and see?” Cariette said. “If I'd never seen a lander before, I'd be curious."

  “Perhaps they're not sure if it would be safe,” Kort suggested. There was no word in the language of Merkon that meant “wary of a possible predisposition to deliberately harm another."

  “So can we go outside too now?” Cariette asked again.

  “I don't see why not,” Kort's voice replied.

  “But what about all those molecules in the air?” Marcala said. “We don't have mec-bodies like Kort's. Suppose they make us go all sticky and yucky, like some of the stuff Biologist makes.” Taya was aware that Thinker and Scientist had talked about that. Ultimately there was only one way to find out. The fact that the native bio-forms of Azure existed without ill effect weighed in favor of going ahead.

  “I'll go first on my own, if you want,” Eltry volunteered.

  “Logical but unacceptable,” Kort pronounced.

  “We'll have to go in two groups,” Taya said. “We can't turn Eltry's offer down, so he's one of the first group. I have to be one too, because I've never let anyone do anything I wasn't prepared to do first. Cariette, because it's the only way to keep you quiet, and Jasem. Then Bron, Nyelise, and Marcala can follow with Scientist. Okay?"

  Sounds came of the outer lock closing, followed by outside air exhausting. Taya moved forward to stand just inside the inner door, Eltry on one side, Cariette and Jasem on the other. Eltry, who never showed nervousness, was always one of the first among the children to try anything new. Jasem was sharp with his wits, missing nothing, and quick with answers. Taya's choices had been for good reasons.

  “Will we have to learn to make noises like that if we want to talk to them?” Cariette asked, frowning as she tried to make sense of the sounds pouring through from Kort's ears.

  “We're not sure yet if they're talking,” Taya said.

  “Of course they are. What else could it be?"

  “Many of the machines make noises that aren't talking. So do you sometimes."

  “Could the bio-forms here talk to each other with radio waves, like the machines do?"

  “If they did, Kort would have heard them. So would the probe."

  “Merkon would have heard them too,” Kort's voice said from the speakers.

  The lock door slid open. Taya and the three accompanying her stepped into the narrow space. The door closed behind, and the pumps started up again to equalize pressures. Cariette slipped her hand into Taya's and squeezed. “We're ready to open the outer door,” Scientist's voice said from somewhere.

  “Okay,” Taya acknowledged.

  “You might want to shade your eyes for the first few seconds,” Kort warned.

  The panel of ribbed metal in front of them slid noiselessly aside.

  “Oww!"

  “Eeeee!"

  Taya raised an arm to her brow. She had seen bright lights before, inside Merkon; and Vaxis in the final months of the approach had been too dazzling to look at directly. But those lights were localized in one place. This was a flood of light, immersing her. She felt as if she were bathing in light engulfing her from every direction.

  “Taya.” It was Cariette's voice, for once sounding alarmed. “I can't see anything."

  “It's all right. Give your eyes time to adjust."

  “The air. What is it? I feel as if I'm breathing syrup,” Jasem said.

  It was affecting Taya too. She was familiar with scents—many substances in Merkon, and foods that the machines produced, had distinct odors; and she and the children sometimes experimented with mixing perfumes to wear and bathe with that smelt pleasant. But they had all been isolated experiences, like light coming from one direction, such as a cutting machine in operation, or from a star. But this, what she was experiencing now.... It was like the light that seemed to pour from everywhere out of Azure's air, a deluge of fragrances and sensations overwhelming her senses, making it impossible for her to distinguish one from another, like dozens of voices all talking together in one room.

  Gradually, shape and detail emerged, and the scene consolidated into a semblance of what had appeared on the screens. But what the screens had shown was a pale rendering of what Taya was seeing now. Never in Merkon had she known such richness and subtlety of hue. Whichever way she looked, there were more variations and gradations of color than she had known her eyes were capable of seeing. With the wall of sound enclosing her, and the waves of aromas that seemed to diffuse right through her, she had the feeling of having lived her whole existence up to now as a shadow, and that she was only now experiencing reality for the first time.

  An instinct made her draw the air deep into her lungs, filling out her chest. Suddenly she found herself choking. It carried tastes as well as odors: a hint of sweetness more delicate than a hair's touch making her tongue tingle; a wisp of something sharp and pungent touching the back of her throat. Jasem hadn't gotten it quite right. It was like breathing syrup mixed with electricity.

  Kort turned and looked up from below the steps. “Is it distressing?” Mec-forms had no way of gauging the effects of odors and tastes. They expressed complex molecules as bond sequences and folding configurations, but were unable to equate them to sensations.

  Taya could feel her eyes smarting, and the back of one of her hands was itching, but she wasn't about to send the machines off into one of their fussing modes at a time like this. “There's so much that's new, all at once,” she said. “We just need to take it slowly."

  She moved out onto the top step, lowered a foot cautiously to the next, and swayed as a giddiness seized her. Kort extended an arm upward. Taya caught it to steady herself, then descended carefully and stepped onto the carpet of green fibers. The giddiness passed.

  And then, as she looked around, the sheer vastness of it all overcame her. She had always known that the space outside Merkon was huge, of course; but that vastness had always existed as a different realm, separated by virtue of being “outside” as opposed to “inside.” This, by contrast, was the same space as she herself occupied, filled with things that she could walk to and touch, yet extending away in every direction without end or limit ... uncontained.

  Eltry moved alongside her, having followed her down, and broke the reverie. He stood with his mouth closed tight, struggling to conceal his feelings as he took in the sounds and the scene. Jasem was halfway down the steps, moving falteringly. Cariette was still standing at the top, framed in the hull door, seemingly paralyzed. Behind her, the outer door of the lock slid shut.

  “Come on, Cariette. The others will be coming out. You'll have to make room,” Kort called up. She turned her eyes toward him but seemed only to half hear. The robot reached up with
both arms and hoisted her down. She stood with her mouth hanging open, unable to speak. “You remind me of Taya, the day she first saw the rest of you, before you woke up,” Kort said.

  The lander was standing on an open expanse of green floor lying between walls of antenna trunks and the smaller green wire structures that could now be seen standing among them. Behind the lander, the surface rose to distant heights that Taya was unable to estimate, covered to a large extent by piles of what looked to be strips of green plastic in various sizes and shapes strung on threads. On the side in front of the door, the carpet fell away to the edge of the flowing water, which was fringed by rounded slabs lying among mounds of powder. A smaller channel of water descended on one side toward the large body, here forming pools, and there breaking into surging patterns of white foam as it rushed and fell, making much of the background noise that they had heard in the cabin.

  Eltry stooped and tugged experimentally at one of the fibers forming the green carpet. It broke off easily between his fingers. He straightened up, examined it for a few seconds, then showed it to Taya. “Look, it isn't any kind of plastic at all. It's much too wet inside. When you rub it between your fingers, it smears out into a sort of green slime."

  Taya looked at it suspiciously, conscious of the itching on her hand. “What does it feel like?"

  “Just cold and wet."

  Taya stretched out a finger and touched warily. Cariette bent over and plucked one of many odd-looking devices standing scattered at intervals above the green. It was roughly disk shaped, about the size of a ring that Taya could form with a fingers and thumb, and consisted of a circular central part that was yellow, surrounded by delicate, overlapping laminar shapes. They were pale pink toward the center, changing to a yellowish white at the outer edges, where the tips curled into radially directed points. The only things vaguely comparable that Taya could think of were the cogs and gears inside some of the machines in Merkon, although this was far too soft and fragile to carry any load at all. It was attached to a piece of stiff wire that had more pointed laminas projecting from it, but at intervals, not clustered together, and green, of a rougher texture. What its purpose could be, Taya was unable to imagine. As she turned it between her fingers, she caught a hint of a different fragrance. She raised the disk to her face and inhaled slowly. An expression of bewilderment mixed with rapture spread across her face.

  “What is it, Taya,” Cariette asked, watching her.

  Taya handed her back the disk. “Try it,” she said. “Did you know that you can smell music?"

  Eltry had moved farther away. A flying form swooped from a strut of one of the antennas and landed on some piled slabs in front of him. It had a pointed head and mouth, and was covered in vanes that formed its wings and a strange, fan-shaped extension rearward above its two legs. It hopped from one apex to another, eying him with sharp, jerky motions of its head, and loosed a torrent of squawks and chattering at him. “I don't understand you,” Eltry said.

  Jasem had wandered down to the edge of the flowing water and was staring at it, mesmerized. Up in the lander, the outer lock door opened again to reveal Scientist, with Bron, Marcala, and Nyelise peering around his legs.

  Kort, watching all, had been strangely silent. Finally, he said to Taya, “What world are you creating now? Already, you feel things here and see things that we will never see."

  “I haven't heard you talk that way for a long time,” Taya replied. “We've always known that we have our differences. You are quicker at some things, and we're quicker at others. But we always see things more-or-less the same in the end."

  There was a short delay before Kort responded, which meant he had been debating with the other mec-minds up in Merkon. “This time things might not be the same,” he said.

  Taya looked at him quizzically. “Why? What makes you say that?” she asked.

  “I think you might be coming home,” Kort replied.

  3

  Xeldro's voice floated up ineffectually from the roadway below, already lost behind the trees. “Samir, where do you think you're going? Whatever it was, no good will come of it. It's no business of ours. Get back down here."

  “I have to find out,” Samir called back between breaths as he climbed the slope, pushing his way through the underbrush and leaves. “Don't worry. I'll catch up with the rest of you farther along the road, or else see you in Therferry."

  “You're crazy, Samir. You won't live to see twenty-one, the way you carry on."

  Samir grinned and ducked under a fallen trunk. “But I'll have lived two lifetimes already,” he shouted back. Xeldro's reply was muffled by the greenery.

  What was it about age that made men crave the secure and the familiar? He'd find out for himself in good time, he supposed. His father had been a good man, and Samir through his youth had diligently studied the metalworking arts as would any loyal and devoted son. But he had known in his heart that he could never spend the rest of his days cutting and filing over a bench, breathing furnace vapors, and barely ever seeing the outsides of the walls of the city. When his father died suddenly from sickness, he had taken to traveling with the caravan of Xeldro, who collected the knives, kitchenware, farming tools, and other implements, and traded them for jewelry, skins, cloth, or anything else imaginable upon which anyone was ready to place value. Samir's technical knowledge complemented Xeldro's bartering skills effectively, and they had done well together. However, Xeldro confined his circuit to towns and villages that lay within the borders of Leorica. One day, Samir told himself, when he too had developed an eye for a good bargain and an ear that could detect falsehood, he would travel beyond the deserts and even over the oceans and bring back treasures that Leoricans had never seen. The thought of immense distances and strange lands fascinated him. That was why he had to see for himself the giant bird that had swooped down from over the mountains and now lay just over the rise—that had soared above faraway parts of the world and looked down upon unimagined landscapes.

  He saw it as he came up among the rocks on the crest of the ridge. It was closer than he had guessed. A bend of the river curved toward the ridge, leaving just a narrow, wooded slope, and the bird was sitting close to the water in a grassy area between the trees. He was staggered by the size of it—far larger than any bird he had ever seen, or, indeed, any animal that he had heard of. Its feathers were the smoothest white, shining like the marble wall of a temple in the sun, while its wings were surprisingly small, stretched back along its body and flaring at its tail like the vanes of a spear point. Samir kept low behind the rocks and stared in wonder. He decided that it was some unearthly breed of giant swan. It sat motionless, seemingly watching the river.

  And then Samir's eyes widened, and he straightened up involuntarily. There was a human figure down there too—an armored warrior, from the look of him—moving barely several yards away from the Swan, but apparently taking not the slightest notice of it. There were other figures too, smaller ones: two at the river, another reaching up among some bushes by a stream. Snatches of their voices carried up on the breeze. Children's voices. Samir couldn't make any sense of it. What were warriors doing in a place like this, and with children? Why should the Swan have come down to them?

  Then, suddenly, another voice, a girl's, sounded from somewhere much closer. Before Samir could fix the exact spot or retreat behind cover, the bushes parted just a few yards away, and she appeared, talking over her shoulder to somebody following her. Her face was pale, like those of people who came from the north, her hair straight. She was wearing a peculiar reddish-brown, close-fitting garment with sleeves and legs, and holding a flower that she had picked. Behind her was an older girl, almost Samir's age, similarly clad in light green. She saw Samir first, and froze, staring, her mouth gaping in a silent cry, whether of surprise or terror, he couldn't tell. The younger girl saw her expression, turned, and instantly fell silent.

  Samir couldn't take his eyes off the older one. Her skin had a smooth, almost ethereal fine
ness, devoid of any line or blemish, as if it had never felt heat from the sun or been roughened by wind or weather. Her hands were delicate and smooth, her face flawless, and her eyes had such a quality of innocence that Samir could have believed that she had stepped into the world just a moment ago. But what astonished him most was her hair, falling in soft waves to her shoulders, the color of finest gold. She could only be of royalty—a princess, even if unusually dressed for one—though what royalty could be doing here, he was unable to imagine. He forced a smile, as much as anything from an instinctive reaction that some justification was called for to excuse his own presence. “I ... didn't expect to find anyone here,” he said. The Princess didn't respond.

  A heavier tread sounded, accompanied by the swishing of greenery being pushed aside. Moments later, the biggest warrior that Samir had ever set eyes on emerged behind her. The Warrior stopped just as abruptly as had the child and the Princess. Samir got the odd feeling that the Warrior was as confounded to see Samir as Samir was by the sight of him. He had to be seven feet tall, Samir judged, and was fully armored from head to toe, even his face. Over his upper body he wore a tight corselet, patterned in silver and blue speartips, hemmed at the waist by a belt carrying various accessories. The armor was more intricate and expertly fashioned than any that Samir had seen before, with amazingly complex arrangements of sliding joints around the shoulders and limbs, and individual eye visors that glittered like black gems. With relief, Samir noted that the Warrior didn't appear to be carrying a weapon, although he had no doubt this was the Princess's bodyguard. A fourth figure had appeared in the rear, also—another child, about the same age as the first, this time a boy, wearing a blue suit, his skin almost as dark as charcoal. The children's faces as they regarded Samir were frank and curious, without nervousness or fear—another sure sign of their royal origins. Samir began piecing things together. The Princess and these royal children, with handpicked champions to protect them, had come to this place to meet the Giant Swan from some godly realm. What had he intruded upon? He had no idea what it could mean.