by Calista Skye
I was pretty intoxicated for most of yesterday. So I would have expected whatever I felt for him to be a pale shadow of emotion today. But then it turns out that I like him even more now that I’m sober.
I accept a new piece of fruit from him, christening it anti-kiwi because it’s just a like a kiwifruit but extremely red instead of green. “What do we do today?”
He points at the center pillar of the room, glittering like a crystal in the sunlight. “I want to know what that is. Perhaps it’s a way up.”
I get to my feet and unnecessarily brush non-existent dust off my crude dress. “Okay.”
We waste no time in walking there, just pausing to drink from the clean pool with a bottom of artificial, white rocks.
Then we follow the winding path, crunching through pretty coarse gravel. I’m struck by how nice this all is. If I were to construct a spaceship that would be in space for years, I’m sure I’d try to make a place like this, where the crew could soothe their souls in a vibrantly alive planetary landscape. All this has to come from the home planet of whomever built this ship.
The crystal column is surprisingly far away, and it’s much thicker than I thought. It’s the width of a house, and when we’re about a hundred feet away, the reflections of the sun are so bright and many that I have to shield my eyes.
It’s like a huge, clear icicle hanging hundreds of yards down from high up, going all the way down the seemingly endless layers of hanging gardens below us.
The path leads right up to it, and then just ends right at the edge of the crystal.
I lay my head back to look up the length of the thing. “This has to have some function,” I conclude. “Not just looking pretty.”
Brax’tan reaches his hand out to touch it. But his hand passes right through the material, as if it’s just air.
He frowns at his hand, which looks like it hasn’t taken any damage. “Feels like it’s just air.”
I go as close up to the crystal as I dare, then look down through it. If it’s a pillar of air, it’s essentially a bottomless pit that we should stay the hell away from. It must be an advanced hologram, looking real but having no actual substance. “Another one of Bune’s illusions.”
“Yes,” Brax’tan says, staring at the crystal illusion.
“Well, this won’t work. Let’s go.” I take Brax’tan’s hand and pull on it. He’s much too close to that hole for my liking.
He turns around, and again he has an empty look on his face, one that makes my skin creep. The golden light in his eyes is gone again. Then he takes one step backwards into the crystal, which engulfs him completely.
But he doesn’t fall to his death. For a moment, he’s suspended in the clear crystal, like a speck of dust in a sunbeam. Then, just staring at me blankly from inside it, he zooms upwards.
And in a moment of insanity I realize that this is it — if I’m going to get to the bottom of this, I have to follow him before I overthink it.
I turn around so I have my back to it. Then I take one long backwards step into the clear column.
14
- Delyah -
It feels like falling. There’s nothing under my feet, nothing to take my weight. There’s no smell, no air rushing past, no sensation at all. Except I can see that I’m being whisked up inside the column, being taken up to the ceiling high above.
I thankfully don’t have time to think much before I’m surrounded by darkness and feel that I’m gently set down on something hard.
The first thing I see is Brax’tan, and a little bit of relief washes through me. I seriously don’t want to be on my own in an alien spaceship like this. And of course, that’s why I stepped into the ‘crystal’. I guess I would rather risk dying than lose him.
“What’s that?”
He doesn’t even turn around. “You tell me.”
I just came from a huge room that was as bright as day, and this room is much darker. But I immediately see what those are.
“Robots.”
“Ro-what?”
“No, bot. Row-bot. Artificial humans. So a more correct term would be ‘android’. Except these weren’t modeled on humans.”
There has to be a hundred of them, hanging from the low ceiling here. They’re clearly artificial. They have two short legs each, a central torso and two long arms. The faces are dark and featureless, and they’re all made from gleaming materials. They’re about the same size as me, but the proportions are all wrong. They look more like chimps, except less elegant.
“Someone made them,” Brax’tan ponders. “But they are empty. Like a dead man. Only the body remains. The man is gone.”
“They are,” I say, impressed by his perception. “There is nothing in them.”
Brax’tan touches the shoulder of the nearest one. “Cold. But they’re not dead. They’re waiting to be filled with life.”
I look at the way the robots are hung up. Those are cables if ever I saw them. That’s how you would fill them with life. If you didn’t have something better to fill.
I lay one hand on Brax’tan’s forearm, because it feels good to touch that bundle of warm steel cable wrapped in the silky skin. “Are you sure you’re a caveman? You should be a professor at some seriously prestigious university. I think you’re absolutely right.”
He nods. “I don’t always understand what you mean. But it’s good to be deemed right.”
“Isn’t it, though? Please draw your sword, Brax’tan.”
There’s loud zhing, and his sword is in his hand. “Danger?”
“I think there might be. Soon. Brax’tan, you have a secret thing in your pack. Take it out, please.”
He stiffens. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I saw it before. You have a pad. A magical flat rock. Just like mine.”
I take the spypad out of the pack and hold it up. It immediately lights up in its ordinary kaleidoscope of glyphs and figures and images that I some time ago realized meant nothing and was meant to be unintelligible.
Brax’tan stares at it. “Ah.”
“Can I see it?”
He reluctantly takes his own pad out of his sack and holds it out. We exchange them.
“Just like mine,” I repeat. “Except yours works. Keep your sword ready.”
The image on this pad is different. Still alien, but less chaotic. I can’t stop looking at it. The solution to this is so close!
I’m aware that Brax’tan is looking at me impatiently. But understanding this alien writing is like trying to take a piece of packing tape off a package. You pick at it with your fingernail, trying to loosen a corner of it. And I’ve been picking at these symbols and this logic for months with no success. Now, just checking out this pad for ten seconds, I’ve suddenly lifted a little corner, and soon the whole thing will become clear to me, like pulling the entire tape off—
There’s a loud thump, and it makes me twitch so hard I almost drop the pad.
Brax’tan immediately pulls me behind him again so I can’t see what’s going on.
There’s another loud thump, and another. Then a thunder of them as the robots all drop to the floor and start moving, coming towards us with a dull, yellow light in their still featureless face plates.
I’ve rarely been so sorry to have been right.
Brax’tan draws back and drags me with him as the robots advance at us, their movements so smooth and natural that it freezes my blood. Because they’re clearly machines, but they walk like aliens. They move smoothly enough. But not like humans.
Brax’tan slashes his sword at the nearest one, cutting off its head. It has no effect — the robot is still coming at us.
Or rather, at me. They’re trying to walk around Brax’tan to get to me.
But this caveman won’t let that happen. He holds me securely behind him, while he cuts and slashes and stabs at the advancing robot army. If they’d been made of metal, I’m sure his thin steel sword would have shattered. But it has to be some kind of plastic or carbon
fiber, because the robot limbs seem to offer pretty good resistance to the sword, but the sounds aren’t the hollow clangs I would have expected if they were made from metal.
They don’t seem to have any weapons, except their hands. Three long fingers on each hand, and they actually do have a metallic sheen to them. They slim down from ordinary finger-thickness to tapered needles. Yep, those could do some damage to me.
Still, I don’t shoot them with the crossbow. I don’t think it would do much good against these artificial things.
They push us back to the edge of the crystal, which here is dark and only visible as a round boundary in the floor. It’s not nearly as thick as it was further down.
And it gives me an idea. These robots don’t seem that bright. They’re just marching at us, reaching out for me with their talon-like hands, like a bunch of alien robot zombies.
“Come,” I call to Brax’tan and drag him with me. It’s like dragging an aircraft carrier across a desert. But then he sees the point and comes along, still fighting off the robots.
We walk backwards along the edge of the circular ‘crystal’, and before long Brax’tan kicks at the nearest robot so it takes a step into the boundary. It promptly falls down through the hole in the floor, except I doubt it’s actually falling.
We work our way around the edge of the ‘hole’, and now the robots are falling into it without being kicked. They don’t have the intelligence to avoid the hole right in front of them.
Some of them try to walk around the edge, and Brax’tan easily fends them off, cuts them up and kicks them into the void.
One of them seems to be different from the others. It hangs back and watches, arms hanging by its side. First, I think that maybe it’s broken. But then it comes at me, around the edge of the hole, from the other side than where Brax’tan is. And it runs, much faster than the other ones.
It runs like a human. In fact, it runs like a…
“Brax’tan!” I scream, “that one!”
The robot reaches out for me with its clawed hands as it sprints around the circular hole. In sheer terror, I grab at Brax’tan’s hand, but at the exact wrong time.
Brax’tan yanks at my arm as he tries to get past me, but it’s too late. The robot has me.
There’s only one thing I can do. At the last possible moment before my face is punctured by those needle fingers, I drop the crossbow and step into the hole. Backwards.
I zoom up and find myself in another circular room. This one is smaller, and it has similar screens all around the walls as the immense hall we came from. But here, the view is not an alien coastline. It’s the jungle of Xren. Quite probably a live image, too. What would be the point of anything else?
I get the feeling this is as high up in this spaceship it’s possible to get. In fact, this looks like the control room of the ship. The bridge, in other words. There are chairs and alien consoles and things that vaguely look like instruments, glowing steadily. The same glyphs and figures I’ve seen on the spypad and the cave paintings are everywhere.
The center of the room is hidden by a gray, round wall that looks like frosted glass. As I look, a blue light comes on behind it.
“It just collapsed,” a deep voice says behind me.
I whirl around, then relax when I see it’s only Brax’tan, sheathing his sword.
“The robot?”
“Yes. Right after you went up, it stopped in its tracks and then fell to the ground.”
“Its controller gave up on it when I left. It didn’t want you. Brax’tan, that thing ran like a woman.”
He nods slowly. “It did remind me a little or your movements when you run. The round motion of the hips. Except less... enticing.”
I take a moment to calm down and let my heart-rate return to a more reasonable level.
I point to the screens. “There’s your jungle, seen from high up.”
He wanders over and looks down. “The view from Bune. So majestic.”
I walk around the room, touching the instruments and running my hands over the consoles. Always keeping an eye on the enclosed space in the middle. The consoles here look like they’re active and still work. Still, that blue light makes me wary.
I look over at Brax’tan. “Well, here you are. Bune called for you to come. You came. All the way in. Now what?”
He gives me an alien shrug. “I don’t know.”
“I think the entity that controls Bune lives right in there.” I point to the blue light in the center of the room. “They’ve been spying on us through the pads. They had no idea I was here until the pads showed me to them. That’s why the robots attacked us. They wanted to kill me, not you. They really don’t want me to be here.”
I go over to the frosted glass and kick my heel at it. “Hey, asshole. You’ve got visitors.”
Nothing happens, and that’s exactly what I expected.
Brax’tan comes over and runs his hand on the glass. “The heart of Bune. And yet, I see no sign of any Ancestors.” He gives it a mighty kick that would have toppled a decent-sized elephant. There’s hardly a sound. He pulls his sword.
“Don’t try your blade on it,” I warn him. “It will shatter on impact. That material is tough.”
“We need a hammer,” Brax’tan says darkly. “A big iron hammer.”
“Maybe. I have a feeling this wall only comes down when its owner wants it.”
I tap my lips with one finger. I have information overload. I need to think, but I can’t concentrate in here. My mind is full of half-baked thoughts that I need time to process before I can see the best solution here.
Then I glance at Brax’tan, and the breath catches in my throat. He’s staring at me, and the light in his eyes has gone out again.
I back off away from him. “You okay?”
Then he blinks once, and the light is back.
He turns to tap the back of his blade on the glass. The sound is like steel on concrete.
“Aliens inside Bune,” he seethes. “No Ancestors to be found. What is true in this world?”
It takes me a few seconds to reply. But he seems to be back to normal. “There are truths. And we will find them. Brax’tan, I think this is as far as we get this time. But we’ll be back. With friends and weapons and hammers and drills. We know where to go now.”
I kick the glass again. “You hear me in there? We’ll be back!”
- - -
We make our way back down to the garden level, entering the crystal shaft forwards to go down. In the back of my mind, I wonder how Brax’tan knew that’s how it works. Go in backwards to go up, forwards to go down. But my brain is so full of confusion now that I don’t know what’s important. The blank look in his eyes sometimes does worry me, though.
I lost the pad, and I don’t know where it is. Still, it gave me a moment of understanding.
Brax’tan spots my crossbow and picks it up, and I’m happy to let him carry it for a while.
The robots are lying inactive in a heap, and that makes sense to me. They were never intended to fight anyone. Making them attack me was a panicked, last-ditch thing. They were plainly running on some automatic program, a very simple one.
The alien up there only wanted Brax’tan here inside Bune. When it saw from the spypad that I was here too, whatever plans it had for him were shot to hell.
Now we know where to go. We know where the enemy lives. This was a complete success.
I follow Brax’tan’s broad back along the winding path.
That robot ran like a woman. Which woman could it be?
Well, I know how this works. All these things will circulate and percolate in my mind for a few days, and then one morning I’ll be cooking a meal or washing my hair and everything will become clear. The subconscious will do the heavy lifting for me. But it can’t be rushed.
And what will I do in the time before that?
The muscles of Brax’tan’s huge back flex with each step he takes. He walks like a lion, with perfect balance, holding
his head high in a display of perfect manly pride. Every so often, he’ll turn his head to check if I’m still there, giving me a little smile when he sees me.
The fight-or-flight panic when we were attacked by robots has settled down, and as usual it’s replaced by something else.
“Brax’tan,” I call softly.
He stops and raises his eyebrows. “Yes?”
15
- Delyah -
“Let’s take a break. Right there.” I point to the shore of yet another crystal-clear pool a stone’s throw from the path.
We walk over and sit down on a bed of soft, squat plants that are not quite a lawn and not quite a wheat field.
I pick some fruits from a nearby bush and hand some of them to Brax’tan. “I want to enjoy a little more time here, where there are no Bigs and Smalls. Sometimes it can be good to be away from danger.”
“And being inside a place like this, with alien plants and row-bots everywhere, feels like ‘away from danger’ to you?”
“Yeah, not really. But I guess it’s a different danger. Some of those Bigs scare me out of my mind.”
He bites into a fruit. “The irox have that quality.”
“And the raptors and the giant insects and the T. Rexes and sophiasauruses and bobont and just about everything else.” I shudder.
“I suppose this place carries a less immediate danger.”
I sit down on the remarkably soft plants and lean back on straight arms, facing the white, alien sun high up on the wall. “I don’t think there’s any danger here for us. The entity up there can’t sense us without the spypads. It has no control over most of this ship. Probably due to the crash. Most of it is automated. Like an emergency system that will open doors and so on.”
Brax’tan sits down beside me, right where I want him. “These things. These row-bots and spaceships and screens. These are common on your world?”
I scratch my head. “We have robots and screens, but not as good as these. We used to have spaceships, too. Very small and crude ones compared to this. I mean, this spaceship is an accomplishment on an incredible scale. On my planet, we’re nowhere near being able to build something like this. But we know that such things can exist.”