Murdoc Jern #2 - Uncharted Stars

by Andre Norton

  "And if this secret might well be one not to be shared?" Zilwrich asked.

  "That, too, I could accept," I said promptly. But I knew that I did not speak for Eet, or for Ryzk, who must now be included as one of our number.

  "We shall see," Eet answered, his reservations plain. Not for the first time I wondered whether Eet's dogged insistence that the quest of the stone's source be our main goal did not have some reason he had never shared with me. And then, could I, myself, completely surrender the stones, knowing what I could do with them, knowing that perhaps there was more, much more, we might learn from them? Supposing the Zacath-ans advised us to hide, destroy, blot out all we know of the gems. Could I agree to that with no regret?

  Later I lay in my cabin thinking. Eet, lying beside me, did not touch those thoughts. But at last, to escape a dilemma I could not resolve until we had passed many it's and buts in the future, I asked the mutant:

  "This reading of the past of the bowl, what did you learn of its past?"

  "As Zilwrich said, there were several pasts and they were overlaid, mixed with one another until what we gained was so disjointed it was difficult to read any part of it and be sure we were correct. It was not made by those who fashioned the tomb. They came, I believe, long after, finding it themselves as a treasure-trove, leaving it with some ruler to whom they wished to pay funeral honor.

  "The source of the stone—" he hesitated and the thought I picked up was one of puzzlement—"was not clear. Save that we do go now, if we have read the co-ordinates right, to that source. And the stone was set in the chart as a guide to those to whom it was very important. But that its native planet was their world of origin—that I do not think is the truth either. However, the reading was enough to set one's mind upside down, and the less I rethink on it the better!" With that he snapped mind-touch and curled into a ball to sleep. A state I followed.

  The warning that we were at the end to our journey in hyper came some time later. As the Zacathan had assured us when we rigged his protection that he could manage it by himself, I made speed to the control cabin, Eet with me. Soon I was well wrapped in my webbing, watching Ryzk in a like cocoon at the controls, trying to relax when the final test of our drastic emerge came.

  It was bad, as bad or perhaps a fraction worse than that which had hit when we had joined the ship in the LB before the other jump— Only this time we had all the protection Ryzk's experience had been able to devise, and we came out in better shape.

  As soon as I was fully conscious I looked to the radar. There were points registering on it, but they marked planets, not the ship locked to us through hyper.

  "We did it!" Ryzk almost shouted. At the same time Eet scrambled along my still nearly immobilized body. I saw then what he held in a forepaw against his upper belly—the zero stone.

  It was blazing with a brilliance I had not seen before except when we had put it to action. Yet now it was not adding to any power of ours. The glare grew, hurting the eyes. Eet gave an exclamation of pain and dropped it. He tried to pick it up again, but it was clear he could not use his paw-hand near that spot of fire. Now I could not even look directly at it.

  I wondered if it was about to eat its way through the deck by the heat it was engendering.

  "Blanket it!" Eet's cry was a warning. "Think dark-black!"

  The power of his own thought swept mine along with it. I bent what mental energy I could summon to thinking dark. That we were able to control the surge of energy in the stone by such means astounded me. That awful brilliance faded. However, the stone did not return to its original dull lifelessness; it continued to contain a core of light which set it above any gem I had ever known and it lay in a small hollow which its power had melted out of the substance of the deck.

  "Pliers—" I did not know whether they would help, for the heat of the stone might melt any metal touching it. But we could not pick it up in bare fingers and we dared not leave it lie, maybe to eat straight through the fabric of the ship level by level.

  Ryzk stared at it, unable to understand just what had happened. But I had pulled out of the cocoon of webbing and managed to reach the box of tools he had used earlier. With pliers in hand I knelt to pick up the gem, fearing I might find it welded to the floor.

  But it came away, though I could still feel heat and see that a hole in the deck beneath it was nearly melted through. Once on land, once in space, once on the edge of the wreckage we had used the zero stone as a guide. Could this small gem now bring us to the final goal of its home world?

  We did not need it, since the bowl chart had already located the planet for us, fourth out from the sun. And oddly enough, once placed within the bowl, the furious blaze of the loose stone subsided into a fraction of its glow, as if the bowl governed the energy.

  Though we kept a watch on the radar, there was no sign that the enemy had followed us into this system. And Ryzk set course for the fourth planet.

  I half expected that time would have wrought a change in the sun, that it might have gone nova, imploded into a red dwarf, even burned out. But this was not so. It tested in the same class as was indicated on the ancient chart.

  We went into scan orbit, our testers questing to inform us it was truly Arth type, though we were suspicious enough to keep all indicators on alert.

  What we picked up on our viewers was amazing. I knew that Terra, from which my species had come into an immeasurably ancient galaxy, had been monstrously overcrowded in the last days before general emigration to the stars began—that cities had soared skyward, tunneled into depths, eaten their way across most of the continental land masses, even swung out into the seas. I knew that, but I had never seen it. Terran by descent I am, but Terra is across the galaxy now and more than half legend. Oh, we see the old tri-dees and listen to archaic tapes which are copied over and over again. But much of what we see is meaningless and there are long arguments as to what really did or did not exist in the days before Terrans roamed the star lanes.

  Now I looked upon something like the jostling, crowded—terribly crowded—erections those tri-dees had shown. This was a planet where no empty earth, no sign of vegetation showed. It was covered, on the land masses by buildings, and even across the seas by strings of large platforms which were too regular in outline to be islands. The whole gave one a terrible sensation of claustrophobia, of choking pressure, of erection against erection, or against the earth of its foundations.

  We passed from day to night in our orbit. But on the dark side no light showed. If there was life below—

  But how could there be? They would be smothered, pushed, wedged out of existence! I could not conceive of life here.

  "There is a landing port," Ryzk said suddenly, but he had a keener eye than I, or else we had swung over and past what he had seen. To me there was no break in that infernal mass of structures.

  "Can you land?" I asked, knowing that treasure or no treasure, stone or no stone, I must force myself to set foot down there.

  "On deters," Ryzk said. "Orbit twice for a bearing. There are no guide beams. Probably deserted." But he looked far from happy, and I thought perhaps he might share some of my feeling about what lay below.

  He began to set a course. Then we lay back in our seats, our eyes on the visa-screen, watching the dead city-world reach up—for that was what it seemed to be doing—as if its towers were ready to drag us down to the world they had completely devoured.

  Seventeen

  It was a tribute to Ryzk's skill that our landing was three-point, exactly on fins. He rode the ship down her tail rockets as only a master pilot could do. Ad not for the first time I was led to wonder what had exiled him from his kind—drink alone? Then we lay in our webbing watching the visa-screen as our snooper made a complete circuit of what lay about us, reporting it within.

  With that report I came to respect Ryzk's skill even more. It was as if we had been threaded into a slit between walls of towers whose assault against the sky was such that one could not immedia
tely adjust one's thoughts to what one's eyes reported. Only now that we were in that forest of man-made giants could we see the hurts time had dealt them.

  For the most part they were either gray-brown or a blue-green in color, and there was no sign of seam or join as one might sight with stone blocks or the like. But there were cracks in their once smooth sides, rents in their fabric, which were not windows or doors. We could see no indication of those.

  Ryzk turned to check the atmosphere dials. "Arth type, livable," he said. But he made no move to leave his webbing, nor did I.

  There was something about those crowding lines of buildings which dwarfed, threatened us, not actively, but by their being. We were as insects, unable to raise ourselves from the dust in which we crawled, confronted by men who were giants with clouds gathering about their barely seen heads. And about it all there hung a feeling that this was a place of old death. Not a decent tomb in which honor had been paid to the one who slept there through the centuries, but rather a place in which decay had reduced to a common anonymity all that had meant aught—men, learning, belief-Nothing moved out there. No flying thing flitted among the towers. There was no sign of vegetation. It was truly a forest of bones long removed from life. We could see nothing to fear, save that feeling which grew in us, or in me (though Ryzk's actions led me to believe he must share my uneasiness), that life had no place here now.

  "Let us move!" That was Eet. There was a tenseness in his small body, a feral eagerness in the way his head darted from side to side, as if he tried to focus more intently on the visa-screen—though as that continued its slow sweep I saw no change in the monotony of the towered vista.

  I left the webbing, Ryzk also. The bowl with the zero stone was on the deck, with Eet crouched over it as if he were on guard above its contents. And the stone blazed, though perhaps with not the same intensity as earlier.

  We climbed down to join Zilwrich. The Zacathan was on his feet, leaning against the wall. He looked to Eet and I guessed some message passed between them. I lent my shoulders to the Zacathan's support and, together with Ryzk, aided him out of the hatch, down the ramp, to the apron of the space port.

  There arose a hollow moaning and the pilot slewed around in a half crouch, looking down one of the narrow passages between the towers. Save for the open pocket of the port, there was gloom unbroken in those ways, such dusk as I had seen in forests of other worlds. The moaning shrilled and then our startlement vanished as we realized it was caused by the wind. Perhaps that acted upon the rents in the building to produce such sounds.

  But outside the Wendwind the vast desolation was worse even than it had seemed on the screen. And I had not the slightest desire to go exploring. In fact, I was gripped by the feeling that to venture away from the port was to enter such a maze as one could never issue from again. As to where to search— Seen from the air, this planet-wide city covered all the ground, part of the sea. We might be half, three quarters, or the world away from what we sought, and it would take days, months of searching—

  "I think not!" Eet had brought the bowl with him. Now he held it out and we saw the double blaze of the point on its surface and of the jewel within. He turned his head sharply to the right. "That way!"

  But whatever lay "that way" might still be leagues from the port. And Zilwrich could certainly not tramp any distance on his unsteady feet, nor would I leave any of our party with the ship this time. We had the flitter—if we could crowd two of us into its cargo space, then we could quest some distance above the surface.

  We settled Zilwrich with Eet at the end of the ramp and returned to the ship. What supplies we had room for and the crossbows went into the flitter. Three of us, plus Eet, would make such a heavy load we could not gain much altitude, but it was the best we could do.

  The LB had been so modified it might take days to alter it again, and we had no time to waste.

  Judging by the sun, it was late afternoon when we were ready. I suggested waiting until the morning, but to my surprise the Zacathan and Eet overruled me. They had been in a huddle over the bowl and seemed very sure of what must be done.

  As a matter of course Eet took command after we packed ourselves into the small craft, using my hands to his service. We hovered perhaps twice my height from the ground, then headed off sharply to the right, crossing the edge of the port, turning down a dusky channel between the towers.

  The dark closed about us more and more as the buildings cut out the sun. Again I wondered how men could have lived here. Away from the port there appeared aerial runways connecting the buildings at different levels, crisscrossing into a net which finally grew so thick as to shut off most of the light from the level at which we traveled. Some of the ways were broken, and the debris of their disintegration weighted those below, or had landed in a heap of remains on the surface of the break below.

  We had the beamer on, and I cut the speed to hardly more than a hover lest we crash into one of those piles. Yet Eet seemed entirely sure of our direction, sending me out of one half-filled lower way into another.

  Dusk became full night. I had a growing fear we would be utterly lost, forever unable to find our way back to the comparative open of the port. There was a sameness to this level, just here and there the remains of a bridge fallen from the heights, the smooth bases of the buildings totally unbroken by any sign of an entrance.

  Then the beamer picked up a flash of movement. It had been so quick that I thought my imagination had betrayed me into thinking I had seen it—until our beam trapped the thing against one of the walls. So cornered, it turned to face us, slavering defiance, or perhaps fear.

  I have seen many strange beings on many worlds, so that weird defections from what is the norm to my species were not unknown to me. Yet there was something about this thing in the dark and forgotten ruins which brought an instant reaction of loathing in me. Had I been in the open, a laser in my hand, I think I would have slain it without thought or compassion.

  Only for a moment did we see it so, backed against the unyielding buttress, pinned by the light. Then it was gone, with such speed as left me astounded. It had gone on two legs, then dropped to four. And the worst thing was that it looked like a man. Or what might have been a man eons ago, before time had burned out all which makes my kind more than an unthinking creature set upon survival alone.

  "So it would seem that the city still has its inhabitants," Zilwrich commented.

  "That thing—what was it?" The disgust in Ryzk's voice matched my own emotion. "Where did it go?"

  "Turn to the left." Eet appeared unaffected by what we had seen. "In there—"

  "There" was the first opening I had seen on the ground level of any building. It was too regular to be another rent. The gap was large enough to accommodate the flitter. But I had a very unpleasant suspicion that it was also where the scuttling creature had disappeared. To search further would mean leaving the craft, and to be trapped by that "thing" or others of its kind—Yet I obeyed Eet's direction, bringing the flitter to a standing hover within the shell of chamber beyond that doorway. We were in a circular space. If there had been any furnishings, those were long since gone. But the floor was heaped with gritty, flaky stuff which perhaps had once been fittings. This was pathed, beaten solid in some places. And the paths—there were two of them—led directly to another dark opening in the floor, a well.

  I moved the flitter cautiously until we nosed the lip of that descent. We could indeed lower into it in the machine. But to do this, unaware of what might lie below, was a peril I was not ready to face. If I had such fears, Eet was not concerned with them. He hung over the bowl in which the gem blazed.

  "Down!" he urged. "Now down!"

  I would have refused, but the Zacathan spoke.

  "It is true. There is a very strong force below us. And if we go with caution—"

  I certainly would not descend outside the flitter, but to go in it would give us a small measure of protection. Yet I thought it foolhardy to try at all. I
fully expected a protest from Ryzk. Only when I glanced to him I saw he was as bemused by the gem in the bowl as Eet.

  Moving out over the well I eased the flitter onto settle-hover, thankful that we were using a craft meant for exploration. And I kept a wary eye on the walls as we began the descent at as slow a speed as I could hold us to.

  What had been the original use of this opening we could not know. But that it was also a passage for later users was apparent. Into the once smooth walls had been pounded or wedged a series of projections meant to serve as hand- and foot-holds, a very crude ladder. And the bits and pieces so used were rough, some of them surely ripped from more complex fittings. The work was very bad, its quality far beneath that of the city constructions, as if it had been done by a race who was at a primitive level.

  We were descending by floors, passing dark openings in the walls of the shaft, as if that were a hub of a series of wheels whose spokes were evenly spaced passages. I counted six such levels, yet the circumference of the well did not dwindle in size as I feared it might. And though the crude ladder led to several of the cross-corridor openings, it also continued on down and down, as if it served a vast warren of burrows.

  I watched the mouths of any opening the ladder served, but there was no sign of life, and our beamer could not penetrate them very far. Down and down, six levels, ten, a dozen, twenty—the wall grew no smaller. But it was a growing strain to hold the flitter on settle-hover at this slow speed. And always that ladder kept pace with us. Fifty—