The space around him did feel big, without having any dimensions that he could put a name to.
The others were looking around themselves as well. All except Binkis, who stood and stared at them as he had in the cave…
And perhaps he still is, him, Marc thought.
… except that his eyes were blank surfaces of the gray seething whatever-it-was.
"Bandwidth is insufficient," he said in the same flat voice.
It had no more affect to it than before, but now Marc could hear… or sense… a vast irritation in it. Something of the feeling a man might have when he was interrupted in important work.
"You have betrayed the Cloud Mountain People," Teesa said. "We who served and guarded you so long!"
The terrible eyes moved to her. "Memetic framework is insufficient," Binkis said. Then he paused for an instant. "There were others before you. After you there will be more. The study program continues."
"You're an observer?" Marc broke in. "You're a… a computer left to observe the experiment here on Venus?"
"This is congruent with those aspects your memetic framework can access," Binkis said. "You are an incompatible element. The time frame is incorrect and inconsistent with parametric projections."
Blair cut in. "We're unpredictable, eh? But what's the point of a study program if it only tells you what you expected to find out?"
A longer pause. "This is in congruence with the primary code," Binkis said. "Consulting decision tree."
Silence stretched. The subliminal flicker of movement from the not-ground and not-air increased.
"I think this is a projection," Cynthia said tightly. "An analogue we can interface with. We've been trying to talk it out of using the EastBloc weapon, the biobomb—"
"Biobomb?" Marc said sharply.
"Mutated smallpox. They were going to use it on Kartahown and then blame us for contamination—get us in Dutch back on Earth and wipe out our advantage, then go back to their original plan of building up Cosmograd until Venus was theirs."
"Sons of bitches!" Marc said, and shot a venomous look at Jadviga. "And now we know about the sabotage on the Vepeja!"
"No," Blair said suddenly, and seemed to draw a deep breath. "That was me."
"What!"
That came from several voices at once, Cynthia's loudest and most outraged.
"I'm an agent. Not theirs! I'm a French agent. Deuxieme Bureau. I am French… well, my mother was, and she raised me. But only the first fiddle with the valves, on my honor!"
"On your honor as a spy?" Cynthia said bitterly.
"On my honor as a human being. Yes, we—they—wanted to slow you down while the Union got its space program going. But not vileness, not a plague!"
"Sister," Teesa said. "He speaks the truth."
Suddenly Binkis turned his head to look at Blair. "Your code and mine are congruent. A temporary reduction of contamination within the sphere of observation."
"No," Blair said sharply.
"Analysis of memetic framework is insufficient," Binkis replied; there was a tinge of… regret? "Observations are beyond my paradigm. Consultation with the primary species becomes imperative." The universe returned.
Blair raised the rifle to his shoulder. The echoing crack boomed back and forth in the great chamber, but the bullet went wild as Jadviga Binkis launched herself into his shoulder. She dashed forward as he staggered.
"Franziskus!" she gasped. "Fight that thing! Fight it now!"
For a moment his face writhed, and then he turned and strode away, the dolly rattling behind him. The Lithuanian woman ran after him, her voice fading as they turned a corner in the narrowing cave.
Blair lowered the rifle, his bare chest heaving and covered in sweat despite the coolness of the air. Marc felt the same uncertainty… just what had happened? A light was shining from beyond the curve in the passageway. Or not a light, but something that shone through the very rock itself, until the fabric of the world rippled about him, and he saw once again the crawling lights beneath the surface of things that he had experienced in that other place.
Teesa's hands tore the Diadem from her head. "Run!" she shouted. "Run now!"
They did, a confused scramble out into the air. The waiting Cloud Mountain warriors took one look at their faces, and then over their shoulders, and turned and sprinted down the pathway towards the river. All over the cliff, every bird and pterosaur took flight at once, thousands lifting from the crimson stone in a screeching, shrieking tide.
"Take the 'saur; it'll be faster!" Marc shouted.
He had to grab Teesa by the arm and nearly throw her up into the howdah. The rest followed in a scrambling rush, Tahyo virtually climbing over his back in a blunt-clawed, wild-eyed scrabble. He twisted at the joystick just as Blair dropped the heavy rifle and made a flying leap for the harness that held the howdah on Steed Noble's back. The giant creature turned in his own length, starting a miniature avalanche from the ground around them. The real article was starting higher up, and a sheet of rock slid free of the cliff-face and earthquaked to the ground, sending four-foot boulders rolling nearly to the 'saur's feet like cosmic dice.
Then they were moving. Teesa screamed and screamed again, her hands beating at her temples; the light of the Diadem's jewel flared. The non-light leaked out of the cave-mouth behind them as they reached the water; this time the 'saur took the ford without hesitation, spray flying twenty feet into the air on either side, and they were through and up the slope on the other side, passing some of the fleeing warriors.
The world twisted.
For a moment Marc felt weightless, and then there was a roar that went on and on, filling the universe with its white noise. That died to merely a cataclysmically loud rumble, as Steed Noble paced on at his best freeway-ramp speed, slowing only a little as the slope steepened again. The whole Cloud Mountain war party was running, too, as the village that had been theirs and then the Wergu's and then so briefly theirs again shook itself into mounds of rock. Trees toppled in the forest all about, under a sky full of wings; a crocodile three times the length of a man thrashed its way out of the sacred lake below and ran staggering across the heaving land. Dust billowed past them, choking-thick, and Marc coughed until his eyes ran.
When Marc halted the 'saur and turned him, they all sat and stared, frozen. Where a thousand feet of cliff had reared on the other side of the water, a tumbled fall of scree stretched across from bank to bank. Dust still screened it, and boulders still shifted and bounced, but Marc could see where the water would pond back to fill the valley and make another, deeper lake. Dribs and drabs of Cloud Mountain folk still staggered and crept up towards the 'saur; surprisingly few of them were missing, but many were injured.
Smack!
Marc came to himself with a start. Blair was sitting and looking shocked, with a handprint across his face; Cynthia slipped down to the ground and strode away to stand with her back to the faux Englishman, her arms crossed.
Blair started to follow, then nodded at Marc's shake of the head.
Teesa was weeping, quietly and hopelessly. When Marc put his arm around her shoulders she accepted it without hope.
"The Cave of the Mysteries is gone forever, and it was never ours," she said, as the tears trickled down through the dust below her turquoise-colored eyes. "And the Diadem will never speak to me again, and my people's long home is gone, and now you will leave me and return to your Jamestown, and there is nothing left in all the world for me."
He took her in his arms, smiling down into her face. "Now, ma negresse, I've been thinking about that, eh?"
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Venus, Gagarin Continent—eastern border of the Jamestown
Extraterritorial Zone
1990
"You've taken a lot on yourself, Lieutenant Vitrac," General Clarke said grimly.
He made a gesture behind himself to keep the others quiet, especially Sam Feldman, who was quivering with a mixture of scientific eagerness and genuine emotion.
&nb
sp; "Yes, sir, I have," Marc said.
Apparently he wasn't in the least discommoded by the fact that he was appearing before a superior officer in breechclout and moccasins. He inclined his head slightly and gestured:
"But first may I present my wife, Teesa Vitrac, and my son, Marc Junior."
The General's hard-clenched aquiline face relaxed a little as he looked at the young woman. She smiled, and the exotic beauty of her amber-skinned, slant-eyed face blossomed into loveliness; the year-old child in her arms had something of that look, but his eyes were a darker blue and his hair was ash-blond rather than his mother's bright yellow. The barbaric finery of feathers and worked leather seemed to suit her, and so did the AK-47 slung over her back beside the quiver full of arrows.
"I'm pleased to meet you, General," she said easily, juggling the baby and extending a hand in the manner of Western civilization. "Marc has told me so much about you."
He blinked. Evidently there was some truth to that report, he thought. Nobody could learn quite that Cajun accent without alien hyper-tech. Or gotten complete fluency so fast.
The rest of the… traveling circus, he thought, has come just inside the boundary of the Extraterritorial Zone.
Though it wouldn't matter much, since east of here is nothing but wandering tribes for hundreds of miles, for all the claims of Kartahown's kings.
He ran a quick expert's eye over the neat rows of leather tents, noting the lack of dirt and disorder, and estimated that there were three or four hundred men, women, and children. All looking enough like Mrs. Vitrac to be her close kin.
Which they are, of course.
A girl of about ten Earth-years ran by, white-blond hair trailing, her arm around the neck of a greatwolf nearly as high as she was, its panting tongue dangling over the monstrous sawteeth. There were two or three other greatwolves in sight, all closer to the puppy stage; he thought he knew where the Cloud Mountain People had picked up that idea.
And not only that one. A fair-sized herd of tame churr was just crossing the stream that marked the border, under the guidance of whooping mounted warriors equipped with bows and lances and lariats. Dozens of sturdy two-wheeled carts were parked around the encampment, and gear was being unloaded. There was a pleasant scent of wood smoke and cooking already. Others piled wild shamboo before the beak of a 'saur of unfamiliar species. Cynthia Whitlock and Christopher Blair came from there, hand in hand and also in native dress; she wasn't carrying a child in her arms, but from the look of things was six months or so along.
"Wing Commander, and… Mrs. Blair," the General said, correcting himself in midsentence. "Good to see you alive."
"The two who disposed of the EastBloc biobomb," Marc said.
"Ah, yes, that," Clarke said. "I'd like to hear more details. We'll have to keep it quiet."
At Marc's raised eyebrow, he went on: "Give us some credit, Lieutenant. That trick would only work if we didn't know they were doing it. Now we know and they won't try it again. Other things, but not that."
Marc nodded, then began to wind up for his speech. Clarke made a chopping gesture.
"Save it, Lieutenant Vitrac. Yes, you're right. These people will be a valuable addition to the Extraterritorial Zone. And yes, we'll confirm the treaty you—with your damned impudence!—drew up with them. Full internal autonomy, commercial ties, educational access… they're the first people we've met who want that."
"Thank you very much, General Clarke," Teesa Vitrac said. "My people have been looking for a new home. And we've made a good start on… how do you say… our relationship with the Sky People."
The baby looked at him and solemnly sucked his thumb. Clarke laughed.
"You'll have to fight to keep that tyke out of Dr. Feldman's hands," he said.
"Sorry, Sam. Looks like there's definite proof that Venusians are H. sap. sap." Marc said, grinning at the older man.
Teesa joined in the chuckle; then she sobered and produced a silvery diadem. "This was our pride and glory, but it is nothing now," she said, and handed it to the scientist.
Feldman's pleasantly ugly face lit up, transformed. "And this is proof there were people here who weren't our kind," he said.
"Yes." Marc Vitrac's nod matched Clarke's.
The General shook his head. "And what happened to Binkis and his wife, if they weren't crushed under the rock? That seems a little… prosaic."
"I doubt we'll ever know," Marc said. He looked at his wife and shrugged expressively. "And who cares, eh?"
EPILOGUE
"I can fly!" Franziskus Binkis said, laughing. "I can fly! Jadviga; I can fly!"
She crouched weeping and pulling out strands of her hair. He leaped, bounding half his own height in the air, and came down laughing even as he fell. His chest heaved as it tried to drag in enough of the air; it was dry and thin, with an acrid papery scent of stone, dust, and ancient incense. For a moment there was the same feeling of twisting dislocation behind him, and then there was only the ruddy sandstone. His mind felt as light as his body, freed of the intolerable weight that had filled it. Strips of softly glowing yellow light on the high arched ceiling cast a complex pattern of brightness and shadows across the walls, illuminating faded frescoes and bas-reliefs blurred with unimaginable time.
If Franziskus Binkis had stopped to study their subject matter, he might have found them disturbing. Instead he pulled himself erect and danced across the great room like a gangling cricket, exulting in a gravity only one-third of Earth's. At last he came to a stop before a throne. It stood on a plinth of polished jade, drilled and worked into a fretwork of vines and tiny flowers made from chips of ruby and emerald, diamond and tourmaline. The spindly arms and back were of some silvery metal, wrought in the shape of elongated human forms.
The figure seated on it might have been their model, inhumanly tall and thin, clothed in robes of dull scarlet, the skin stretched over his slender scimitar features a deep russet brown, with a great crimson jewel above his yellow eyes, and black hair falling to his shoulders. Behind him stood a globe twice the throne's height, the lines of barren continent and shrunken sea, canal and polar ice caps, picked out in delicate glass and metal. Some fragment of Binkis' ruined mind noted the differences from the Mars whose photographs he'd studied, with more of life and less of desert.
The seated figure was utterly motionless; it took a moment for Binkis to notice that it neither breathed nor blinked, and that there was the faintest film of dust on the open eyes.
"You've been here awhile, eh, Velnio Ishpera, eh?" he said, staggering and laughing. "Quite awhile, you old devil's spawn!"
The whisper of soft shoes on the glass tile of the throne room brought Binkis around. The man approaching had something of the same look of mantis elegance as the figure on the throne, but he was very much alive… or was it a he? The muliebrous features could have been man or woman or creature from the stories his grandmother had told, supple as a snake in close-fitting black. The long blade it held in one hand shimmered black as well, but its edge caught the faint light with a lethal glitter. Yellow eyes regarded Binkis, and long silky-white hair tossed in a gesture.
"You are right, vas-Terranan," the stranger said, in good Russian with a lilting, purring accent. "He has kept vigil here for long and long. Very long, even as we of the First People keep count of time."
"Well, who is he, then?" Binkis said, brushing the back of one hand over his mouth with a rasp of bristles.
"Timrud Sa-Rogol. Last Emperor of the Crimson Dynasty. The Kings Beneath the Mountain, they who ruled a world for ten thousand years, and fell from power before your mayfly race did more than live as beasts among beasts."
The long head went to one side, and the half-human ears cocked forward. "But now let me question you, man of the Wet World. How do you come here, to disturb his rest?"
The blade rose. "And why do you think you can do so, and live?"
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