Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra

by Stephen Lawhead

  The wind roared with the sound of a rocket thruster throttled flat out. Overlaying this was a harsh, shushing rasp that was the wind-driven sand in flight. The company huddled together in the crowded tent and listened to the storm. Its howl absorbed all conversation, so they lay back in the dim orange halflight and watched the fabric of the tent stretch and flutter, hoping against hope that their fragile shelter would last the night.

  Some time later Treet awoke. The wind had died away to a murmuring whisper. He slipped quietly out of the tent, shoving sand away from the flap with a swimming motion of his hands. He stood and looked around. It was early evening. The sun was down, but the sky still held a leaden glow. Stars burned coolly overhead and the newly-rearranged dunes stood like bleached shadows, silent and immobile, their crests touched with silver.

  Treet surveyed their position. One of the skimmers was completely buried in the sand, the other only half-buried. The curved roof of the tent jutted between them. He climbed to the top of the nearest dune and scanned the horizon, letting his eyes sweep the undulating desert beneath the twilight sky. He had completed a ninety degree arc when he saw the obelisk.

  FIFTY

  “It’s no use,” sighed Pizzle. “I’ve done everything I can think of to do. I don’t think it’s going to start.”

  He sat in a ring of scattered skimmer pieces—cowling, chain, sprocket gears, screen mesh, wire, sealed bearings—his face and hands smeared with grease, peering doubtfully into the complicated innards of a dead sand skimmer.

  Crocker sat on his heels next to Pizzle, scratching his head and frowning. “I’m sure I don’t know what else to do.” He drew a soiled sleeve across his brow, jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the skimmer gliding up, and said, “You want to give ‘em the bad news or should I?”

  “What bad news?” asked Treet as he, Yarden, and Calin, who had become little more than a ghost since her psi deserted her, climbed down from the last working sand skimmer. They had driven to the obelisk Treet had spotted the night before to check it out.

  Crocker squinted up into the sunlight at Treet. “We’re down to one vehicle. We can’t get this other one to start.”

  “That’s bad,” said Treet. “But at least we still have one.”

  “Yeah,” said Pizzle darkly. “Keep your fingers crossed and hope it holds out.”

  “What did you find?” Crocker unfolded himself and stood, squinting in the direction of the obelisk—a narrow white slash in the pale blue sky.

  “It’s some kind of signal tower—that’s my best guess. It’s huge—I’d estimate close to two hundred meters tall. The base is one hundred meters in circumference—Yarden paced it off—five sides, twenty meters to a side. There are some funny markings on the base, like numbers or letters, only they’re not. The rest of it is completely smooth—some kind of plastic sheeting that covers it to about halfway up, then bare metal beams and struts like a radio antenna all the way to the top.”

  “Anything on top?” asked Crocker.

  Yarden answered, “Some kind of dish—like a satellite dish.”

  “Could be a microwave reflector,” mused Pizzle. “Those have to be pretty tall like that. Any way to climb it?”

  “There is a ladder of sorts that begins about five meters off the ground on the south side. But the thing is almost straight up and down. I wouldn’t want to go climbing around on it.”

  Crocker nodded thoughtfully. “Well, let’s get packed up here and take a look. The day is getting away from us as it is. We’d better make some good use out of it, or we’ve wasted a day’s ration of water.”

  The skimmer fairly groaned under the weight to its passengers. All five managed somehow to crowd aboard—along with the tents and the gear Pizzle insisted on bringing in case of a breakdown. They drove to the tower, a short ride of about six kilometers. Crocker parked the skimmer in the shadow of the soaring object and then walked around it.

  “Sure is a big old thing,” he said. “I think one of us should try to climb it. Maybe we’d see something from way up there that could help us out.”

  “You mean like an oasis or something? Forget it,” said Pizzle. “You’re dreaming.”

  “Or like a river, or green hills, or anything that shows us the way out of this desert,” said Crocker.

  “Or like a city,” put in Yarden. Everyone looked at her. “Is that so farfetched? We’re looking at a signal tower of some kind. Whoever built it must have built something else, too. Maybe we could spot it from up there.”

  “Sure, why not?” asked Treet.

  “Then you’re going up?” said Crocker.

  “Not me. You go up—you’re the pilot.”

  “Don’t look at me,” said Pizzle quickly. “I’m barely functioning without my glasses the way it is. I’d never see anything from up there.”

  “You were functioning well enough to wreck a skimmer,” Treet needled. “Now all of a sudden you’re blind.”

  “I’ll go up,” offered Yarden. “I’m not afraid of heights.”

  “Neither am I,” remarked Treet. “It’s the fall I can’t stand.”

  “You won’t fall,” said Pizzle. “You’ll be extra careful.”

  “It was your idea,” added Yarden.

  “It was Crocker’s idea!”

  “No, I mean this morning—when we first saw it. You said someone should go up and check out the view.” Yarden nodded, chewing her lip as she raised her eyes to where the shallow, round dish gleamed from the top. “It probably isn’t all that high. I don’t mind going.”

  “I’ll go,” muttered Treet.

  “You don’t have to.” Yarden smiled at him, then said, “You’ll be all right, just hang on tight.”

  So Treet found himself standing on Crocker’s shoulders, reaching for the vertical ladder. “I can’t reach it! It’s about a finger too far,” he called.

  “Lean against the base—we’ll boost you up.”

  He leaned full length against the base while the rest of them grabbed his feet and pushed him up higher. There was a single rail next to the indented rungs. Treet caught the bottom of the tubular railing where it joined the plastic sheeting and hauled himself up. The rest was relatively easy—as long as he kept his eyes on the rung just ahead.

  He climbed, one hand on the rail, one hand on the rung at eye level, stopping every other rung or so to sweep sand from the indentation. When he finally reached the place where the sheeting stopped and bare metal began, he crooked his arm around the rail and looked out.

  A sun-washed whiteness met his gaze on every side, shimmering in heat waves off the sand, melting into light blue in the distance. There was no green, no river, no city, no oasis—nothing but sand dunes and still more sand dunes, looking like the humped backs of white whales from high above.

  Treet called down his observation, and Crocker’s voice came drifting up to him. “Go higher! Higher!”

  Treet gritted his teeth and edged onto the metal superstructure. He could, he quickly found, climb the inside beams at the intersections of joints. This took him higher in a zigzag pattern and gave him good footing and something to hold on to with both hands. In a few minutes he was half again as high as he was when he’d given his first report, but still only halfway up the tower. Far below, the others were mere dark spots on the ground with round white centers which were their upturned faces.

  A slight breeze rippled his singleton and stirred his hair. The landscape was a wrinkled ocean whose waves were frozen white ice. Nothing could be seen south, west, north or east—except the same monotonous monochromatic dunescape. As Treet moved to begin climbing down again, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. He stopped and looked.

  Nothing. The heat shimmers were playing tricks on his eyes, he decided. He turned to lower his foot back onto the next joint and he saw it again—off to the southeast, the faintest vertical slashmark on the horizon. He looked again and saw nothing, but tried looking slightly to the left of it and saw it again—the lone s
pire of another tower barely nudging above the dune line. It disappeared into his blindspot whenever he tried to look directly at it, but became visible when he looked away.

  Treet marked its direction and began climbing down. It was a long, slow, muscle-knotting climb, but he finally reached the bottom of the ladder and slid down the base to drop onto the sand.

  “Well?” asked Crocker. “What did you see?”

  Treet raised a fist of white sand and let it sift through his fingers. “A lot more of this same white stuff, friends.”

  “I was afraid so,” grouched Pizzle.

  “And …” Treet paused, drawing them out.

  “Yes? Do we have to guess?” asked Crocker.

  “Another tower like this one, I think. Away to the southeast. The same general direction we’ve been heading all along.”

  “How far?” asked Yarden.

  Treet shrugged. “I can’t say. Pretty far. It’s hard to tell.”

  They all looked at each other. “Is everyone thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Crocker.

  “We are,” replied Yarden, “if you’re thinking of following these towers to wherever they go.”

  “Trouble is,” replied Pizzle, “that wherever they go is probably a million kilometers from here. They may not lead anywhere at all. We don’t even know if they’re still operational, or if whoever built them is still around.”

  “Do we have any better options?” asked Treet. “We’ve got four days of water left, and that’s at half rations. After that… well, we start dehydrating … seriously.”

  “Stop,” said Yarden. “All I can think about now is how thirsty I am.”

  “So let’s quit standing around here and get moving. The quicker we find the way out of this place, the better off we’ll be.”

  “You’re starting to repeat yourself, Crocker,” said Treet.

  They climbed back onto the overburdened skimmer and started off in the direction Treet had indicated. Thirty minutes later—traveling at a top speed of one hundred and ninety-five kilometers per hour—they reached the second tower, an exact duplicate of the first.

  “I suppose you want me to climb this one too,” said Treet, craning his neck to look upwards. Why did they have to be so blooming tall? he wondered.

  “If you wouldn’t mind—just to be sure,” said Crocker.

  The view from the second tower was precisely the view from the first in every respect—including the illusive suggestion of a third tower on the southeastern horizon.

  “It’s there,” said Treet as he dropped back exhausted to the ground. “If we keep going this direction, we’ll hit it.”

  A little over a half-hour later they reached the next tower.

  “I’m not going up again. I’m not selfish; let someone else have the thrill.”

  “Not necessary,” said Crocker. “We’re moving at a forty-five degree angle to the arc of the sun. I imagine we’ll find another tower if we keep on going.”

  Two towers later, they stopped for a drink of water. Fortunately the weather of Empyrion, even in mid-desert, remained uniformly friendly—twenty-five degrees centigrade during the day, dipping at night no more than eight degrees—with a light breeze, when there was a wind at all, so that the travelers did not sweat overmuch, or in fact have to worry about excessive heat at all.

  They decided to push on as far as they could go under sun power, and, by carefully increasing the skimmer’s speed, were able to pass a dozen more of the strange towers before the sunlight grew too weak to power the vehicle. The sun was low in the sky, throwing the shadow of one of the towers out ahead of them when they stopped.

  “As good a place as any,” replied Crocker. They erected the two remaining tents and then sat around glumly munching survival wafers and dried eel flesh. They allowed themselves one more sip of water before turning in for the night.

  Treet rested for a while, but could not sleep, so slipped out of the tent and, despite the need for conserving energy and body fluids, went for a walk. Walking helped him think, and thinking was what he needed most at the moment.

  He thought about their chances of survival—nothing much to think about there. Then he thought about the towers: incredibly tall and finger-thin, spaced at precise intervals across the desert. What were they for? Who used them? They looked quite old. Perhaps they had been built long ago, their makers dead a hundred generations, their purpose now forgotten. Perhaps, as Pizzle suggested, the towers led nowhere.

  The stars came out and splashed themselves over the sky. Treet found a place to sit at the bottom of a nearby dune and lay back to watch the sky. The sand, warmer than the air now that the sun had set, felt good against his back as he gazed up into the alien heavens.

  How many times have I seen this sky, he asked himself, and not really seen it? Empyrion’s sky was a magnificent creation, like Earth’s, but unlike it at the same time. The planet’s purer atmosphere made the stars appear much brighter, closer, more readily accessible. But they, like Sol, were just as faraway as ever. But which one was Sol? Which of all those shining flecks of light held his own azure bauble in its gravitational field?

  “I thought I’d find you out here.”

  Treet heard Yarden shuffle up. “You mind?” she asked, when he did not respond.

  “Uh, no, help yourself,” he murmured, raising his head and then lying back. Here she is, he thought, as much a puzzle as ever. Why can’t I get on the same wavelength with her? Maybe it’s her sympathetic ways.

  “I couldn’t sleep either,” she said, nestling into the sand beside him. “I thought I’d keep you company.” She did not look at him, but followed his gaze skyward. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing … everything. I don’t know. Stars. They’re all the same, but all different. You never get tired of looking at them. I wonder why?”

  “Maybe it’s because we know deep down that somehow they represent mankind’s future and past and everything in between.”

  “Huh?”

  Yarden smiled in the dark—Treet could tell she was smiling because her voice softened, became warmer. “I mean that when you look at a star you’re seeing light from thousands of years ago—that’s the past.”

  “Right.”

  “And the stars themselves represent the future—going there, visiting them, discovering things, spreading the human race through the galaxy—that sort of thing.”

  “And everything in between?”

  “Well, that’s what they represent right now—something to light the night, to give us something to steer by, to look at and wonder at, to plot a life’s course by.”

  “Yarden, I do believe you’re a romantic.”

  “Hopelessly,” she sighed. “You are too. I can tell.”

  “Me?” Treet scoffed. “Never. I’ve seen too much.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I mean I don’t harbor any illusions about life. It turns out like it turns out. There’s nothing anyone can do to change that. Certainly going all starry-eyed over things won’t help.”

  “You don’t believe that really.”

  “Believe what? That getting sappy about life will make it turn out better than it’s going to anyway? A man would be a fool to believe it.” He paused, and when Yarden did not say anything, he added. “How did we get on that subject anyway?”

  “You started it. But the stars are nice—like that big one over there. I don’t know when I’ve ever seen one brighter.”

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “There.” She lifted her hand and pointed to an intensely glowing star near the horizon to the northwest. “See? So big and bright. Blue-white.”

  “It’s a beauty,” allowed Treet. “And as a matter of fact, we haven’t seen it before.”

  “That’s strange.”

  “Not really—we’ve probably crossed some meridian or equator or something and it’s visible now. But it is bright.”

  “Maybe it’s Sol.”

  “Maybe
… but I don’t think so.” Treet’s voice sounded as if it were strained through a sieve. Yarden looked at him, but could only see the outline of his head dark against the light sand. “Yarden…”

  “Yes—” She stared at him in the darkness, trying to see his expression. “What is it?”

  He sat up bolt upright. “Yarden, it’s moving!”

  “What is?”

  “That star is moving! It’s coming this way!”

  FIFTY-ONE

  “I don’t see any movement.” Yarden fixed her eyes on the bright star. “Are you sure?”

  “Wait! Hold still, take a deep breath, and look …” Treet poised perfectly still for a few seconds. “See? It’s getting bigger. That is definitely no star. But whatever it is, it’s coming this way.”

  They watched for a few moments more, and then Treet went to rouse the others. Crocker cupped his hands around his eyes to shut out all extraneous light, watched motionless, and then announced, “You’re absolutely right. It’s a craft of some sort, and it’s headed for us. Judging by the angle of flight, I’d say it was low altitude and only moderate speed.”

  “Helicopter?” wondered Treet aloud.

  “Like a helicopter, yes.”

  “It’s following the line of the towers,” observed Pizzle. “Look where it’s coming from. Bing, bing, bing—right down the line.”

  “Pizzle, I do think you’re right,” said Treet. “Now why would they do that, whoever they are?”

  “They’re navigational towers,” explained Crocker, indicating the dark mass rising up into the night beside them. “The pilot homes in on the towers to stay on course.”

  “That’s a stupid way to fly,” said Treet.

  “Primitive,” agreed Crocker, “but effective.”

  Yarden broke in, “You don’t suppose they are looking for us?” Her stress on the word they made the others stop and look at her in the starlight. There was no doubt who they were.