by Gunn, James
“Perhaps a few more,” Asha said. “But we should avoid using explosives. These walls are sturdy and ancient, but they aren’t impervious, and we don’t want to announce ourselves to the arachnoids.”
There were, indeed, half a dozen more encounters, a couple by creatures like the one that Asha had dispatched, four more that were different, not only from the first but from each other. One of them was a scuttling machine with a large mouth equipped with feelers and several arms that ended in tools of some sort. One of those tools turned fiery; another spat what seemed to be plastic. Asha had to blow off all of its limbs before it stopped struggling.
“These machines must have kept the tunnels in repair,” Asha said. “After all these long-cycles, they are still functioning.”
One of the others was a small arachnoid, who was far more difficult to kill and got past Asha only to have Tordor slice off its forward part, perhaps its head, with his proboscis.
“An arachnoid that got lost or expelled or hungry enough to look for food in the drainage tunnel,” Asha said.
“And there are thousands above,” Riley said.
“Maybe millions.” Asha stopped and looked upward at a patch of light that illuminated something like a product of miscegenation between a ladder and a staircase. “Here we are,” she said.
* * *
Asha moved quickly upward to a grated covering that irised open at her touch. Tordor followed more clumsily on his stumpy legs. Riley emerged last, into the fading light of a single small blue sun. The red sun had dropped below the horizon during their time in the tunnel, and the remaining sun cast eerie shadows from the buildings that surrounded them.
Riley looked at the walls of the city, jagged crystalline structures glowing in the fading sunlight, and felt more uneasy than he had in any other alien setting. The experience was like finding himself in a canyon whose sides were shifting and strange beyond the power of his eyes to fix and the power of his mind to resolve into something familiar. He shook himself and looked at the avenue, which looked as shiny and new as the day it had been poured or extruded or laid by alien creatures. But debris and dust had blown in from the surrounding fields, and seeds had been blown in as well, or been deposited by alien creatures, and sprouted into small bushes and weeds along the edges. But the center of the straight, shining avenue was still open and stretched vacantly as far as they could see.
“What next?” Tordor asked.
“Now we have to find the Transcendental Machine,” Asha said.
“I thought you knew its location.”
“We didn’t enter the city here,” Asha said, “though we should have. And these buildings are disorienting. They’re all different, and yet they all look the same.”
“It’s a city,” Tordor said dismissively. “And where are the aliens you warned us about?”
“Don’t ask for trouble,” Asha said. “It will arrive soon enough. It will be dark soon, and unless we can find the cathedral quickly we’ll have to spend the night fighting them off.”
“Why do you call it a cathedral?” Tordor asked.
“That’s what it felt like,” she said, and set off down the avenue, looking one way and then the other like a hunting animal searching for a scent trail. Tordor followed impatiently, as if wanting to strike out on his own but hesitant to lose the advantage of Asha’s experience.
The avenue branched. Asha hesitated and then took the one that led to the right. As nearly as Riley could judge, that one led deeper into the city, perhaps more toward the center of this weird construction, ancient beyond imagination.
The procession continued without pausing for rest or food as the blue sun descended beyond the farthest spires. As the sky grew slowly darker, the buildings around them began to glow—or perhaps they had glowed before but their illumination had been obscured by the sunlight. The glow came in many colors and the colors shifted continually, some of them shading into hues that Riley had never seen before and even into suggestions of colors beyond his powers of perception. Riley looked away, feeling that he could become lost in their depths and never find his way out.
“Now. Now,” his pedia said. Riley thought that maybe it was becoming unhinged.
“Are we getting closer?” he asked.
“We can only hope so,” Asha said.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Tordor said.
Distantly came the sound of a curious warbling wail. Asha’s head came up.
“What’s that?” Riley asked.
“That’s the arachnoids,” Asha said. “They haven’t discovered us yet, but one of them, at least, has picked up our trail. The others will be joining the pursuit soon. It’s getting dark, and we have to find the cathedral soon or stop for the night.”
“We have lights,” Tordor said.
“Lights won’t hold off the arachnoids.”
“We have weapons,” Tordor said. “They aren’t used to weapons.”
“Weapons didn’t do the Geoffrey’s crew and passengers any good,” Asha said. “Weapons don’t work if the attackers far outnumber the defenders and the attackers don’t care about death,” Asha said. “They don’t seem to care.”
Tordor looked at Asha with deepset, inscrutable alien eyes. “You are misleading us,” he said. “You don’t want us to find the Transcendental Machine. At least you don’t want me to find it. I’m going to find it on my own.” He started off down a different avenue than the one they had been following.
“Stop!” Asha said. “You have no chance alone!”
Tordor continued.
“You’ll never find the machine,” she said. “I’ll take you there.”
Tordor didn’t stop. His massive shape began to dwindle in the distance and the gathering dark.
“Heavy-planet aliens are like that,” Riley said. “I’m surprised he stayed with us as long as he did.”
“I think he left because he wanted to lead the arachnoids away from us, maybe as penance for his earlier betrayal,” Asha said.
“Or for us to lead the arachnoids away from him,” Riley said.
Another warbling sound came from the direction Tordor was heading, and then another, closer perhaps. Tordor didn’t hesitate.
As soon as Tordor turned a corner into another avenue, Riley saw the first of the arachnoids pass by that avenue and come toward them with awkward movements that ate up distance with remarkable speed. It was huge, much bigger than the arachnoids they had seen on the runaway system’s planet or even the remains they had seen in the carnage leading from the landers. Behind it came half a dozen more, even bigger if that was possible. Two of them peeled off into the avenue that Tordor had taken.
“Get ready!” Asha said.
“Now you’ve done it!” Riley’s pedia said.
And then the arachnoids were upon them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
They had fought off the first wave of arachnoids, although a few had gotten close enough to inflict some damage. Both of them were bleeding from numerous cuts. Asha dived into her pack for bandages that she applied to Riley’s wounds. Her own she ignored, and they began to heal, almost as he watched. Not only was she the Prophet, she had been transformed by the Transcendental Machine, and this enhancement of her body’s natural ability to restore itself was one more piece of evidence.
“Strange,” Riley said. “Our pilgrimage began with a barbarian attack and ends with another.”
“These are not the same kind of barbarians,” Asha said.
“Do you think we lost them?”
“They don’t live here,” Asha said. “Maybe they have some superstitious fear of the city. Ren thought they were not creatures on their way toward civilization but the remote descendants of the creatures who built this city—and maybe the entire star-empire along this spiral arm.”
“Why would that make them reluctant to follow us?”
“This is the place of the gods, or where the gods once lived,” Asha said. “And they have forgotten that they were once the
gods they venerate.”
Riley looked around. The city—the end of the pilgrimage that had taken them across a multitude of stars and the even emptier space between two spiral arms—lay before them. Somewhere in its crystalline depths hid a magic shrine. The shrine that would turn them into gods, or into dust. “Dust thou art, to dust returnest,” said his pedia. Transcendence awaited.
The city was a million years old—maybe older. Riley’s pedia had called the city in the runaway system “half as old as time.” Surely this was as old as time itself.
Riley saw long curving avenues between soaring spires and graceful arches, without open space, without a break between structures. Debris cluttered the avenues now—decaying vegetation blown in from the surrounding countryside, animal droppings perhaps, an occasional fragment of translucent building material. The spaces between the buildings were narrow, more like paths than avenues, as if they were not built for traffic. That was what had saved them during the first attack, keeping the arachnoids bunched in front. But the streets, if that was what they were, remained remarkably clear, and the city looked as if it had been abandoned for only a few years. It could be a human city, if a human city could have been built of this kind of material; it resembled translucent mother-of-pearl that changed colors as he looked at it.
But something was subtly wrong—not just the colors and the material but the shape, a curve here, a twist there, as if the builders had a different way of looking at the world or even a different kind of vision, or as if they perceived shapes as extensions from other dimensions. Riley couldn’t look at them for long at a time without feeling that something alien passed along his optic nerve into his brain and began a wrenching process of transformation.
“Don’t look,” his pedia said.
“This must have been how they communicated their culture,” Riley said. “Maybe not in literature or music or art but in shapes.”
“It bothers you, too?” Asha said. “I learned not to look for more than a minute.”
“Maybe this is why the barbarians shun this place. Once you lose the ability to absorb your own culture, it terrifies.”
“There’s enough to be frightened of as it is,” Asha said. “Five of us reached the city. I was the only one to reach the shrine.”
“You think the arachnoids will return?”
“They don’t give up,” Asha said, and shivered. “They sense prey, and I think they have hunted everything else to extinction.”
Riley studied the cityscape with an eye for movement. He saw nothing but the blowing debris. “Which way?” he asked.
Asha looked at the surrounding buildings. “I’m not sure. I was always bad at directions or locations. The Transcendental Machine changed all that, but this place is different. We entered at another spot, and Ren was leading. Then we got ambushed, and Ren and I ran in the other direction. There was no time to look for landmarks, even if these alien-shaped structures offered anything recognizable. When the creatures got really close, we ran even harder and ended up at the shrine, by accident.”
“That’s why you took a chance with the Transcendental Machine.”
“There was no way back. The lander had been overrun by the arachnoids and probably looted. Here the night creatures lurked everywhere. But it wasn’t as much of a choice as an accident. I didn’t know it was the machine then. Dust had piled up in and around it. It could have been the remains of hundreds of cycles or the detritus of the ages. I was just trying to hide. But you’ve never believed in transcendence.”
Riley looked at her without subterfuge. “I didn’t believe in anything. I was hired to find the shrine. Somebody cared—a lot. I can understand why, but I still don’t know who. And if I couldn’t reach the shrine, I was instructed to kill the Prophet. Which turned out to be you.”
“If you could.” Her gaze offered a challenge.
“If I could.” His expression admitted the possibility that he might not have prevailed.
“But you didn’t try.”
“I can’t take credit for that,” Riley said. “We haven’t found the shrine.”
They turned and moved deeper into the city. The blue sun was descending beyond the farthest spires, and the red sun would not rise for another few hours. In the darkness the night creatures awaited.
* * *
As they walked warily along a narrow street surrounded by towering alien structures, Riley smelled the city. Every planet has characteristic odors. Many odors, of course, depending on the zone and the vegetation and the location near bodies of water, but one underlying odor by which the planet and even its natives, wherever they are, could be identified. Pilgrim’s End was like that. The worlds in this spiral arm were stranger, as if the supernovas that had cooked the original elements of that arm had a different recipe. And the city was stranger than the countryside. Some of the materials that went into the original construction were still outgassing molecules after all these long-cycles. Pilgrim’s End smelled as twisted and strange as its architecture.
The air temperature was moderate—a bit warm when both suns were in the sky, not so warm with a single sun, and cooling quickly when both were set. Riley shivered in his jacket. Asha seemed unaffected by heat or cold.
The air was breathable enough, a little higher in oxygen and lower in carbon dioxide than humans were accustomed to, and exhilarating at first. Tordor said it was because the planet had lost oxygen-consuming animal life after degeneration began and vegetation had a chance to restore the primeval balance. Sapients changed their worlds in their own images, but once they were gone the worlds recovered. Sapients destroyed; worlds restored.
The silence of the city was palpable. Only the occasional keening of the wind and the rustling of the litter broke the spell. The quiet in a place built for bustle and noise was unsettling.
Riley kept his head in constant motion. Although his pedia was an early warning device, he trusted his own senses more, and he had survived by paying attention—in this case to movements perceptible only at the edge of vision. “What are we looking for?” he asked.
“It was dark,” Asha said. “The long night, after the blue sun had set. I had the impression of long spidery legs. They moved fast and were hard to hit, as if their bodies were small and perched high above their legs.”
“We see aliens as variants of the creatures we already know.”
“They might not be anything like spiders,” Asha said. “They didn’t like fire. After the first three were grabbed—transcendence knows what happened to them—Ren and I built a fire, but in the long night we ran out of fuel, and the creatures almost got Ren when he tried to collect more, just outside the firelight.”
The blue sun was almost down behind the farthest buildings, its fierce light shining through their walls like a prism. “Maybe we’d better prepare for the short night,” Riley said, “and gather enough firewood so that we don’t have to brave the darkness.”
“That’s a metaphor for the human experience, isn’t it?” Asha asked. “Sit by the fire and be protected, or risk the darkness and maybe die.”
“Like all metaphors, this one doesn’t gather firewood,” Riley said, and stopped at a spot along the avenue where the buildings were lower and heaps of brush and deadwood had been blown by ancient winds. He made one small pile of brush a few meters from a solid building wall, topped it with deadwood, and built two larger piles of deadwood along the wall.
Asha pulled a stubby pipe from her pack and aimed it at the brush. The brush burst into flame. “One thing I learned,” she said, “was to bring a heat stick.”
“You are a fount of resourcefulness,” Riley said and settled himself with his back against the building wall. He patted the spot beside him. “Get some sleep,” he said. “We’ll rest until the red sun rises, and then move farther until we stop again for the long night. I’ll stand watch.”
Asha settled down and let him put his arm around her shoulders. “I never sleep,” she said. “You sleep. I’ll watch.”
Riley didn’t argue. “Wake me if anything moves or the fire needs wood.” And he dropped into a deep sleep almost immediately.
His pedia awakened him an instant before Asha’s hand touched his shoulder. “There’s movement,” she said.
Riley caught a glimpse of something vaguely spidery at the edge of his vision. It vanished when he looked at the spot directly, but he knew it had been there. The fire had diminished. Riley tossed another piece of firewood on top, and sparks flew upward into the night, dying as they ascended. Beyond the flames Riley got the impression of more thin, segmented, hairy arms retreating. He added another log and slid his gun out of its holster and laid it on the ground next to his right hand.
“I don’t think they’ll attack,” Asha said, “and the red sun will be rising in less than an hour. But I thought you’d want to be awake.”
“My pedia woke me anyway,” Riley said.
“I know you hate it. I could silence it again.”
“Get rid of her!” his pedia said. The pressure again began to mount in his head.
“I may need it before we find the shrine.”
“I know you can’t get rid of it, even though it’s like having a spy in your head, but there’s hope that the Transcendental Machine could free you. It removes imperfections and perfects potentials.”
“You’re trying to kill me,” his pedia said. The inner voice was bordering on hysteria.
“I’d like to believe that, but if that’s what it does, why did you return after already achieving transcendence?”
She was silent for the time it took him to draw several long breaths and check for movement. “I needed to find this place again,” she said finally. “What good is a Prophet who can’t show people the way to salvation? I was just a low-level assistant on the previous voyage. No one told me where we were going and I didn’t ask. Ren kept everything inside, like a treasure hunter with an ancient map. So I didn’t know where we were when we got here.
“And I needed to prove that it was real, not just an illusion.”