The Arsenal of Miracles

by Gardner Fox

  Still, if the people realized that they might be fighting the most desperate battle of their lives at this site, they should respond with fervor. He went to Peganna, telling her how he felt.

  “Oh, they will dig,” she assured him. “I told the clan of the Axe to follow me and to send riders to the clans of the fox and the wolf. Within a week this will be a tent city, Bran Magannon.”

  Bran studied the great metal wall, then moved back a hundred paces. “Tell your men to begin their dig here,” he said slowly.

  “Bran, you don’t understand. I want only to expose the mausoleum. What good will it do us to begin so far away?”

  “You said yourself you would put up a tent-city about the tomb, to house the men who will explore it. How large a tent-city do you imagine the Crenn Lir must have made, to house the men who built it?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Death came for them, perhaps while they were still working on their vault, mavourneen. They will have left artifacts and other things from their culture behind them. Perhaps even more cubes like the one your young chief found.”

  “Even if we found those artifacts, it would do us no immediate good. Eventually we will, naturally, but right now the vault is the more important of the two.”

  Bran sighed, “What good is the vault without the egg?”

  She stared at him. “Gron Dhu has the egg, Bran.”

  “Exactly. I mean to have him bring it to us.”

  Peganna sat down on the grassy slope. “Bran Magannon, you talk in riddles. If Gron Dhu comes here he will kill us both. Especially since we’ve gone to the trouble of finding the vault for him.”

  “I know that.”

  She laughed, almost in irritation. “Yet you want him to come with an army to fight and defeat us.”

  “I didn’t say that. I want him to come here, it’s true. As to the army and its ability to defeat us—I have other thoughts on the matter.”

  “What thoughts, Bran my darling?”

  “None I can tell you as yet, acushla.”

  Her white hands balled into fists. “Bran Magannon, sometimes I could hate you! Do you realize how infuriating you are with all this mystery?”

  “I want no inkling of what I have in mind to come to the ears of your precious brother. Else he might send his army and stay home himself with the egg.”

  She shrugged her shoulders, smiling wryly.

  Bran came to her and kissed her.

  On the third day of the dig, they uncovered the imprint of a human body pressed by time and the acids of slow corrosion into a length of rock. The archeologists who had come to the summons of their queen spent long hours with delicate brushes and a plastic spray that formed a protective sheath about the fragile outline. When they were done, they announced the body to be that of an old man.

  “A man, you say?” Bran asked. “A humanoid?”

  “More than a humanoid. A man, as we know man to be.”

  They found three others, the next day, and five more the day after, and the bodies were all of old men. This made no sense, Bran protested, and the scientists agreed with him. Yet here was the proof of their words, these faint limnings of men grown old and weak, dying like flies about the tomb they had constructed.

  “It was no old man we saw in the cube,” Peganna murmured.

  The archeologists agreed to that, too.

  The spades of the diggers turned up more than body outlines. Here they found a cluster of the crystal cubes; beyond them were metal drinking cups, apparently fashioned of an alloy that was resistant even to the ravages of time. There were pictures carved and painted on the cups, though the paint was worn so much only a few flakings were left.

  A tent had been set aside for the philologists, those men who best understood the Crenn Lir language. These men and women labored over the broken shards and the cups, deciphering words, putting the crystal cubes to their foreheads to interpret the telepathic messages they carried.

  The mausoleum grew into the air as the dirt around it was dug out and carted away. Its walls were rectangular in shape and still brightly gleaming, as if made from the same alloy as the drinking cups. Nowhere did they show a doorway or even a single scratch.

  Three weeks after the dig had begun, the dirt was pushed away from a tiny hollow in the exact center of the mausoleum roof. Peganna was there with Bran when the hollow was revealed. She gave a little cry and fell to her knees, rubbing her fingertips into and around it.

  “The blue egg will fit here, Bran!”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “It is time now to send for Gron Dhu.”

  Peganna was fearful, but she was so accustomed to follow where he led that she did no more than remonstrate with him. At his request, she sent for the young sub-chief of the shepherds.

  “Orsakan, my lord would have you leave us for a little while, to pay a visit to my brother,” she told him.

  “That usurper,” the young man spat.

  “Exactly, Orsakan,” Bran said. “And it is to that usurper you will desert. Hold on! No need for temper. Only hear me out. I must bring Gron Dhu here—with the blue egg. Understand this clearly.

  “Understand also that if you hope to see your people on a rich planet, a world where you will not have to take pills to stay alive, your mission is of the utmost importance. Everything hinges on your ability to convince Gron Dhu that you have turned against Peganna and have deserted to his standard.”

  The sub-chief glanced at his queen, who nodded, Orsakan squared his broad shoulders. “If it is the wish of my queen, then it shall be my wish as well.”

  “You are to tell Gron Dhu that we have found what we believe to be the weapons vault. Tell him everything you have seen here, to convince him that you speak the truth. Hold nothing back—except your loyalty to Peganna.”

  The young man frowned. “Gron Dhu will bring an army. He will make you and Peganna his prisoners.”

  “No,” Bran said crisply. “He will not.”

  By nightfall, Orsakan was galloping a fleet darse, an animal peculiarly Lyanim, which was a combination of a horse and a deer that put Bran oddly in mind of the mythical unicorn, across the grasslands toward distant Andelkrann. He would be a week in traveling to the ancient city. Gron Dhu would make the return trip much more swiftly, for he would bring his army by flier to the dig.

  “Until then, we can go about our chores,” Bran told Peganna.

  Two nights later, the archeologists sent for the queen. Bran accompanied her into the huge tent set aside for the storage of the Crenn Lir artifacts. Rising to greet their queen were the foremost archeologists and philologists of the Lyanir.

  “We know what happened to the Crenn Lir, highness,” the oldest among them said. He was shaking slightly in his excitement.

  Peganna took her place in a chair at the table. Bran sank down beside her, leaning elbows on the table. A few of the clan chiefs had followed her into the tent, going to the places which were theirs by long custom.

  The old man, who remained standing, touched a handful of crystal cubes on the table before him. His gaze went to the shards of pottery, the drinking cups, a metal cylinder or two in which had been found metal sheets covered with the Crenn Lir writing.

  “They were a great people, the Crenn Lir,” the old man said softly. “In my eyes, they were the master race of all humankind. You, my queen, and you, Bran Magannon who was once my enemy, are both descended from these ancient people.”

  Before time began for the Earth or for the planet Lyanol, the Crenn Lir were. They had struggled up from earliest existence as a simple cellular organism in the sea, onto land and from four legs to two, with two arms. From beast they became man over unguessable ages. Once their evolving brains had become intelligent enough, they had progressed swiftly.

  They were fortunate in that their solar system held other planets that were as habitable as their own. When their population exploded they went out to these worlds and from them to the planets of the nearer stars. It took a thousand centuries,
but they found the way. There were individuals among them who left their names as milestones in the years. Imnalis of Vasthor, who found a way to travel faster even than the rays of light, by warping space itself. Karanthin, who bettered the discoveries of Imnalis by finding out the properties of space and time needed to perfect teleportation, and then proving his theory by building the first tele-door.

  With the tele-doors, the Crenn Lir ranged their universe.

  All they need do was take the materials to build a tele-door to a newly discovered planet, place it there and within seconds they had the resources of the Crenn Lir worlds at their fingertips. Their colonies ranged far through the stars.

  Until—

  A cruising hyperspacer first encountered the Yann.

  The spaceship vanished in a spiral of incandescent energy.

  Yet the commander of that ship had sent back a report of the black vessel that had come plummeting out of the deeps of space between their universe and the next one, millions of light years away. The Crenn Lir were alerted to the fact that there were aliens in the space they ruled, invaders from another galaxy, who first destroyed without asking questions, without lifting a hand in proffered friendship.

  The Crenn Lir gathered its space might and waited.

  The aliens were not sighted again in our galaxy until a fleet of ten thousand ships dropped down on the planet called Ufinisthan. Their tremendous weapons wiped out the planet with all life. Then the aliens went back across the millions of light years to their own galaxy.

  And the Crenn Lir began to die.

  The death came at them slowly, as though the forces that gave them life were being drawn off, funneled outward into Time itself. Men who had lived at least a thousand years now lived less than fifty.

  When ships were sent to desolate Ufinisthan—Deirdre? wondered Bran—they could not land because of the intense radiation that blanketed the entire world. It was this radiation that, seeping across all space, was killing off the Crenn Lir people.

  When the Crenn Lir tried to land men on Ufinisthan, within hours they were dead. No man could set foot on the blasted world without dying before he could gather any information.

  The Crenn Lir struck back.

  Oh, yes. They marshaled their finest warships and they sent them to the galaxy of the aliens, and in a titanic battle smashed the aliens, the Yann, until not one of them was left. On the return trip, every man in every Crenn Lir ship died of old age.

  “Not because of the time they took for the return voyage,” said a woman philologist who had picked up the threads of the story, “but because of the radiation that had seeped into their flesh and their bones.”

  One thing more those warriors in the intergalactic fleet had done. They had sent back word that the only hope for life for any of the Crenn Lir lay in going to the other end of the universe, where they had never been, and there to set up colonies and hope that in time, the deadly radiation would wear off.

  This had been done. Thousands of ships had fled to the more distant stars, each one carrying its cargo of men and women and children, in a vast farming of any habitable worlds they might find.

  “Your Earth, Bran Magannon,” smiled the woman, “and my Lyanol are colonies of the Crenn Lir.”

  “There is no proof of that,” Bran said slowly. “And yet—my people possess ancient legends of a garden called Eden where no man was required to work, where everything fell into his hand for the asking, where there was only happiness.”

  “A remembrance of the Crenn Lir worlds.”

  “It may be so. As our notion of the snake or Satan or Devil that tempted Eve may be only an imperfect remembrance of the events that lead up to the disaster that denuded the Crenn Lir planets of life.”

  The woman nodded, “Yes, it could have been passed down from mother to child in the Crenn Lir ships that crossed the voids to land eventually on Earth. What generation of children first set foot on your planet or our own, we may never know.”

  “And if there were many so-called men living there,” Bran murmured, “they must have wiped many of them out. In time, I suppose, they may have mated with the more attractive of the Cro-Magnon females. From them, in long thousands of years of time, the old Crenn Lir blood spread everywhere.”

  “As it did on Lyanol. We too have legends vaguely like your own. In that time, all memory of the event would have died out. Only a story would have remained.”

  “Of a garden called Eden,” Bran smiled. “And of a place named Aesann.”

  There was silence in the tent, after this. Peganna sat with her head in her hands, brooding at the crystal cubes spread out before her. Bran scowled at his clenched fists, thinking of how Empire had refused these people—their brothers and their sisters!—living room on their planets. The archeologists and the philologists with the clan chiefs glanced about at one another, waiting for they knew not what. Peganna laughed harshly, suddenly.

  “Our forefathers died here on Miranor. We, their distant nieces and nephews, will die as well.”

  “Only if you choose to die,” Bran told them.

  When they looked at him, he added, “Can’t you see it for yourselves? This is Earth history you hold here! The story of where man came from. Never has man really accepted the idea that Earth-planet was his true home. There are too many unanswered questions, too many gaps in the line of inheritance, to make it absolutely certain. I buy your explanation that the Crenn Lir are my ancestors. All Earth will buy it, too. We’ll go to them—Peganna, a few of your archeologists and philologists, and myself—with pictured proof of what these cubes and artifacts tell us. Empire will listen.” His big fist rammed the tabletop, causing the cubes to dance a little. “By God, I’ll make them listen!”

  They were infected by his enthusiasm. Smiles and cheerful voices broke out. Men stood to walk about the little tent, conversing here and there in small groups. Bran put a hand on Peganna’s forearm and squeezed it reassuringly, as if he might lend her a little of his own optimism.

  She lifted her head, smiled faintly.

  “You make it sound so easy. Always, you make the difficult so easy. It is a way you have.”

  “Actually, we are allies, Earth and the Empire and the Lyanir,” he told her, and the others paused at his words to turn and stare. “The war still goes on, the war between the Crenn Lir and the aliens. Don’t you understand that?”

  “There are no more Crenn Lir!” a philologist protested.

  “Nor are there any aliens left,” Bran nodded.

  His big hands made a sweeping gesture. “Out there on this planet where you live, however—those aliens are still attacking. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need the pills to stay alive. Their weapons made the radiation. What difference does it make if the Crenn Lir or their sons and daughters—the Lyanir—die before those weapons? It’s war, all the same.”

  “A one-sided war. We can’t strike back.”

  “Yes you can—at their ghosts, at their weapons.”

  Peganna drew a deep breath. “By that you mean it’s up to the Lyanir to tell Empire the truth, to get them to realize that we are all one family, really. The family of the Crenn Lir.”

  “Exactly. Until that is done, the war goes on.”

  An old man said softly, “You have convinced me, Bran Magannon. May Kronn help you convince your own people.”

  Next day, there was a new air about the workers. Bran sensed it when he came to the tent opening and stood breathing in the cool air of early morning. A young shepherd ran by, carrying two spades. A woman sang as she walked off into the hills with waterjars strung over her shoulders. Three older men, talking seriously, turned and waved a greeting at the Earthman.

  The clan chiefs had been busy last night. They had spread the word through the tents, told the Lyanir that they were in a war. It made no difference. It gave the young men a purpose. It even made taking the pills more bearable, since now they understood that the radiation had been caused by the alien enemies of their forefathers.


  Bran chuckled. The work would go apace, this day.

  And it did. By noon the last bits of ground were removed from the mausoleum so that it glittered, a massive metal rectangle one hundred yards long and forty yards wide, that seemed to be made of solid silver. This was their inheritance, Bran told them, when they were done. Inside it were the weapons and the artifacts, the blueprints and the designs, which were theirs as the sons and daughters of the Crenn Lir.

  Peganna knelt down beside Bran where he stood on top of the vault, and touched the little hollow where the blue egg was to fit. “If only I held it now,” she breathed. In frustration, she beat her hand against the metal lid.

  As if in answer, a voice cried out.

  A shepherd lifted an arm, pointed. They all could see them now, like a wedge of geese against the sky, flying swiftly. Air-sleds and larger fliers, moving south from Andelkrann.

  Gron Dhu had come.

  Peganna called out harshly, standing proud and regal. A wind fluttered her long silver hair and rippled the hem of her short black jacket. Bran pursed his lips thoughtfully when he saw the battle light in her eyes.

  “Acushla,” he began, intending to say more, but her gesture silenced him.

  “This is my fight, Bran Magannon. I am still rayanal of the Lyanir. Gron Dhu is the usurper.”

  Men ran to her call, fanning out, darting here and there into the hide tents and bringing out their weapons. Hill men and shepherds, mountain nomads and tenders of the darst herds, were ranging themselves at her back. The Lyanir were a fighting people. They recognized right when they saw it, and as Peganna had said, she was still their queen. They waited, watching the sky.

  A large flier lowered to the ground, half a mile from the metal rectangle. Gron Dhu was first off the ship, followed by his officers. Peganna waited on top of the rectangle, smiling faintly. Just so might a Crenn Lir woman have waited, bravely and with patience, for the coming of the alien death.