by Ivan Cat
Where was he?
The moaning thrum of Coffin Island was still in Karr's ears, but the crash of wind and rain were gone. He was in a sleeping bag, naked (how had he gotten that way?), and the air around him was stuffy. He must also be in a bubble tent. Karr opened his eyes— and jumped. Arrou loomed over him. Four hundred pounds of alien stared down from a squatting position. For a second or two Karr lay flat on his back, smelling hot, swampy breath.
"How long have you been there?" Karr managed.
"Whole time," Arrou said patiently. "Jenette say watch Pilot" The bullet head twisted under the orange tent material. Bulbous eyes lined up with Karr's. "How feel? Still sleepy?"
"No," said Karr. "I feel much better."
Arrou took a short step in the small tent. "Not smart. Fly three days." He nosed into Karr's duffel and then stepped back with a clean, white uniform in his teeth.
"Arrou," Karr said, taking the garment from his preaching student. "I didn't exactly have a choice."
"Always choice. Just not always good choice."
"Hmmm," said Karr pulling the uniform on inside the sleeping bag.
"Brace self," Arrou said when Karr finished. Opposing pairs of thumbs on one of the alien's paws unsealed the tent. "Weird place."
The island's moaning grew louder as Karr stepped out into a melancholy, fleshless world. Arrou padded quietly behind.
Pipe organ bones towered against an overcast day. Not real bones, Karr saw in the glum light. The moaning shapes were actually the silvery-white inner boles of New Ascension's queer trees. And the ground was not heaps and stacks of skeletal debris as he had first assumed, but interlocking masses of knobby, bone-like lattice; the normally flexible ring-island root material was dead and petrified. Karr's bubble tent sat upon a relatively flat section with tarps folded into padding underneath, as did the other domes, all of which crowded like yellow mushrooms around a rainwater pool at the bottom of a gully. The heavy lifter tilted steeply up one side.
Expectant heads turned Karr's way, but no one spoke.
An uneasy mood hung over the encampment. Toliver's Guards stood alert around the banks above the gully, atop bleached piles of ring-island skeleton, pulse-rifles charged and ready, plates of skirmish armor strapped into position. The domestics, scattered throughout the area, did not flash, but sat dimly like cowled, mourning humans. Bullet heads tilted this way or that at any strange noise. They didn't like the big, dead island. It went against their instinct to keep ring-islands alive. Crash made an abortive bite into a patch of brittle stalks, trying to inject immune venom and stimulate growth, but there was nothing to stimulate; chalky fragments shattered between dagger teeth. The island was stone cold dead, except for the lamenting of fossils in wind, which only exaggerated the somber mood.
Karr joined those at a fire pit. Bigelow handed him a tray of rations.
"Breakfast or lunch?" Karr asked, holding up a gutbomb spheroid.
"Sort of an early dinner," Jenette answered.
"How long was I out?"
"Over twenty hours. It's late afternoon."
That explained why Karr was so stiff. He sat on a plastic crate and swallowed a spheroid. "What did you find out about this place?"
Jenette sat next to him, as usual a little too close for comfort. Karr felt her warm flesh through their clothes. "Not much."
"It's hard to search very far on foot," Bigelow explained, with a look at the cockeyed heavy lifter.
"Do we at least know where the C-55s are?" Karr asked, covering his mouth as the gutbomb ignited in his stomach.
The rotund scientist pursed his lips. "We know where they were." Bigelow borrowed Toliver's map-reader and called up an overview of Coffin Island. "They were stored in a munitions bunker right about here." Holding the device for Karr to see, Bigelow touched the island's center (the Enclave's initial island base apparently had no doughnut hole at its center). The spot glowed red. Around it, the map showed homes and industrial buildings and streets and plantations, from one shore to the other. Putting down his ration tin and taking the map-reader, Karr climbed up one side of the gully for a better view.
A maze of silvered skeletal boles encircled the gully. Here and there the horizon was studded with thicker groves.
For the first time since crashing on New Ascension, Karr had relatively firm ground under his feet. Coffin Island did not undulate like a living ring-island. The heaps and furrows of jagged bone only creaked and groaned as the ocean shifted. Pools of runoff water, which had carved ruts in loose heaps of material, rippled faintly at the bottoms of ditches and ravines. But there was no constant rolling and pitching like the surface of a bowl of gelatin, only a gentle, almost imperceptible, swaying. Karr would have appreciated it more if not for the morbid atmosphere which seemed to cling to his skin, like the smell of scorched grass. Coffin Island seemed to beckon to the unwary, eager to leech the life out of anyone foolish enough to challenge it. Karr shook off the feeling and glanced around. No homes, industries, streets, or plantations were visible.
Just bones.
He slid back down the slope, no wiser than before.
"Obviously the problem is that we don't know where we are," Bigelow observed.
"Easily solved," Karr said, turning to his awkwardly tilted orbiter. "Give me a minute to get the thrusters fired up."
Nobody moved.
"What?" Karr asked.
Desires for an alternate mode of transportation were mumbled.
"I'm feeling much better," Karr explained. "There's no need to be concerned. Let's get going, before we lose the daylight."
The others remained skeptical, but at Jenette's urging, the Guards made short work of striking camp. Fifteen minutes later, the expedition was back in the air.
For the benefit of those with a recently acquired fear of flying, Karr kept the heavy lifter low and slow, weaving between upthrust fossils. The island was a maze, even from above. Karr flew a gentle spiral in from shore, attempting to locate any sign of the abandoned colony. Below, tangles of bone material formed ravines and pathways that snaked back upon themselves with no rhyme or reason—and bore no resemblance to Bigelow's map. Dead ends and snags of impassable ivory logs abounded.
Jenette shivered behind the cockpit. Coffin Island was a nightmare that no colonist forgot, no matter how young they had been before the Enclave moved. "Be a good little girl," she whispered, "or we'll send you to Coffin Island." Scourge killed many colonists during the first few years of habitation on Elysium. Every inch farther inland Jenette expected to see human remains mixed in with the jumbled white shapes, a skull or an arm bone protruding out from under crumbled buildings. But there was none. No buildings, no human remains, not so much as a discarded quickfood carton.
They searched. The sun poked a gash in the overcast; lukewarm sweat trickled through Karr's hair despite a clammy breeze. They saw nothing but desolation jumbling away in all directions, heaping slightly higher here or lower there. They did, however, discover that Coffin Island was not as solid as it had felt from the ground. Deep, trench-like fissures scarred the surface every kilo-yard or so, like shatter lines on a ceramite plate. Some were deep enough to be filled with water at the bottom. "It's going to break up soon," Jenette commented. "The next big storm, or the next one after that...."
Nothing else stood out as an hour slipped by.
"There was a human colony here?" Karr asked at last. Despite what he'd been told, it didn't seem possible, given the place's current desolation.
Bigelow nodded. "Yes, and most of it was left behind during the evacuation: buildings, large machines, even the colony beacon itself. Not to mention infrastructure like roads and such. All abandoned."
Karr rubbed his jaw quizzically. "So where is it?"
Shoulders shrugged behind him.
"Maybe this is the wrong island, sir," Corporal Toliver offered. "Any island in the Dead Zone could look like this. Maybe this isn't Elysium."
Karr didn't like that possibility at all, cons
idering how long it might take to find another island in the Dead Zone. "Arrou, do you see anything?"
"No."
"Do you smell anything? Oil? Machinery?"
"From up high?"
Bigelow dug into one of the many pockets on his daysuit. "Perhaps this will help." He removed a compact, cylindrical device which sat on the end of a short handgrip. He flicked it on and it spun, lights blinking along the cylinder. "C-55s degrade over time. Over the last two decades there should have been a loss of three to five percent of initial warhead strength. Now that's not much, but when you factor in the size and number of the core-boring warheads, that may be enough radiant energy to detect...." Bigelow turned a full three hundred and sixty degrees, his face fading. "Or not."
At that point Karr abandoned the spiral search pattern and banked inland, closing on a landmark that looked like distant skyscrapers. It proved to be nothing more than densely packed sailtree skeletons, leaning together, snagged and cracked, and threatening to crumble down. There was no sign of human habitation near or in the overlapping bands of shadow underneath. Beyond them the towering skeletons fell away. The lifter flew over a wide clearing. The smooth expanse mounded up in the middle, like the exposed cranium of some huge, buried creature. Karr swooped low. The surface seemed to be made of bony fragments, compacted like sandstone.
Bigelow cross-referenced his instrument and the map-reader. "We're just about dead center over the island."
"Anything on the scanner?" Karr asked.
"Bupkiss, I'm afraid. Unequivocal bupkiss." The lights on the instrument were dim. "But at least we are in the general vicinity of the armory as indicated by the map." Bigelow leaned over the side of the lifter, trying to get a better reading.
"Time to cut our losses," Karr decided. "We'll continue the search elsewhere."
"Are you sure?" Jenette asked. "This place looks like Coffin Island. It feels like Coffin Island and all my instincts tell me this is Coffin Island."
"Mine too," Kan" agreed. "But facts aren't proving our instincts correct and a good Pilot doesn't make the facts fit the theory." He applied power and the lifter began to rise. "One more quick sweep on the way out, then we search for another island."
At which point Bigelow said, "Oops."
Karr looked over his shoulder. The scientist was frozen at the sidewall.
"Oops?"
Bigelow was a portrait of embarrassment. "I wholeheartedly beg your pardon."
"Define oops," Karr pressed.
"I dropped the scanner," Bigelow admitted. "I was concerned that the hull was blocking the signal—ceramite is such an excellent insulator—so I leaned over the side and it fell from my grasp. Again, my apologies—"
Karr held up a hand. "Never mind. Where is it?"
"I can see it." Bigelow looked back over the edge and pointed at the center of the clearing. "Right down there."
Karr began to descend, circling, until he spotted the tiny instrument. He maneuvered the heavy lifter beside it. Thruster fields kicked up small vortices of chalky dust as they hovered.
"That's it," Bigelow said enthusiastically and, before anyone could say a word, hopped over the side and down the two yards to retrieve his instrument. "It still works," he declared happily, as the lights spun and bleeped.
Not wanting Bigelow to burst a blood vessel climbing back in, Karr brought the lifter to a perfect four-point landing, the hull level with the smooth ground and nobody's stomach in his or her mouth.
Abruptly there was a crunch.
The lifter lurched. Cracks spread out from under the hull as the ground buckled. With an inelegant squawk, Bigelow's head disappeared below the level of the lifter's sidewall. His fingers barely managed to grab hold as a collapsing roar sounded from below. The lifter hung an awful moment and then began to drop. Karr punched the throttle. Ceramite deck slammed up into humans and domestics as a boiling white cloud billowed up from underneath.
One of Bigelow's hands slipped, unable to hold his weight. Bronte lunged, claws skittering across ceramite decking, her teeth biting into Bigelow's daysuit to keep him from falling. Humans staggered to assist her, heaving the scientist inboard as Karr regained control and the deck steadied.
"My goodness," Bigelow panted, plopping down hard onto the deck. "What an adrenaline rush! Thank you one, thank you all." He nodded to his human rescuers while scratching Bronte under the chin.
"What happened?" Jenette asked, scrambling back up beside Karr.
The answer became clear as the dust thinned, revealing a gaping hole where the lifter had touched down. Beyond and below its ragged edge lurked a subterranean cavity, several stories deep and an untold dimension wide. Karr spun the lifter for a better view. He and Jenette caught their breath at the same instant.
There at the bottom, spotlighted in a dusty shaft of light and almost obliterated by recently fallen debris, was the unmistakable gleam of golden, New Ascension roadwort pavement.
XXIX
Radiance is the language of truth, openly spoken and unmistakable, impossible to hide. Untruth cannot survive where many eyes are keen. Sound is the language of secrets, whispered from tongue to ear, where only a few may judge its meaning. Pact use both, as the Balance demands: Radiance for outer truth, sound for inner secret. How then can Pact trust blank-ones, whose only language is the language of secret, which they use for both truth and deception?
—Kthulah, Keeper of Gnosis
Tlalok was a prisoner. Four magnificent Pact hunters led him blindfolded to his reckoning. Strong footfalls drummed the turf around him, their unchanging pace bespeaking measured power, control. Where Tlalok's horde fought with passion and fury, these hunters channeled ferocity into regimentation, focused force. Tlalok was more than a match for any one or two of them, perhaps three, but their sacred number of four (the number of thumbs on a paw) guaranteed his defeat. Yet, it was not threat of physical force that shackled Tlalok that night. Nor did he wear bonds. Nor was it the coarse-fibered hood, filling with his own breath, that held him.
It was the Clash of Radiance which had beaten Tlalok.
Tlalok's horde had been closing inexorably on the blank-one colony, forming a noose and drawing tighter day by day, heartbeat by heartbeat. Each night when sunset brought night, and the red glow from the False Radiance brought another Clash, the number of the horde swelled. This night, Tlalok had expected no different.
Until he lost.
The Clash of Radiance had turned on Tlalok. At the moment when he was ready to unleash his fury on the blank-one colony, an even greater Radiance ambushed Tlalok. Tlalok battled to the limits of his fury. One to one, he might have been victorious, but the numbers of Pact allied with the opposing Radiance were irresistible—so great was their force that the underbellies of low hanging clouds lit up, nearly as bright as day. Tlalok's thousands-of-fours succumbed to thousands-upon-thousands-of-fours. Soul-flaying beauty beat Tlalok. Whispers of its sharp Radiance echoed on Tlalok's captors when they arrived on warboards to take him away. The ecstasy of it teased its way through Tlalok's head even now as he walked—the wondrous, wretched ecstasy of defeat.
Klak, klak, klak. Tlalok's captors champed their teeth rhythmically, guiding his blind steps up from the water's edge, deeper into the mysterious island they had brought him to. Klak, klak. Turn here. Klak. Now the other way. Onward they marched, always ascending, two hunters ahead of Tlalok and two behind. Klik, tik. Go straight. Up they wound, along broad avenues. No wild island was this, Tlalok decided, feeling finely manicured roadwort cobblestones under his paw pads.
The procession narrowed to a single file, passing over a long tree-root arch. Tlalok's claws knocked bark loose. The ragged bits fell a great distance; he did not hear them hit bottom. So, they were high now. But Tlalok felt no motion. This far above ocean level all islands rolled with the waves. But this one did not. Tlalok shivered at the thought of an island so large.
The hunters resumed their formation around Tlalok. The sound of many paws came to his ear
s from beyond. Many plates of armor rasped ahead of them, moving aside. Tlalok sensed throngs of Pact assembling to watch the conquered Radiance being brought to be absorbed, just as Tlalok had brought Pact newly joined to his Radiance to be absorbed. But there the similarity ended. Tlalok welcomed those less radiant than he with open arms, and they gladly joined their ferocity to his.
Tlalok never brought them in bondage.
Higher and higher the hunters marched Tlalok. Fog condensed on his flanks, and then as they climbed higher still, fresh breezes evaporated the fog. Tlalok longed for the cool caress of those breezes inside his suffocating hood. His captors had affixed a single dead star-buzzer inside, but its light was weak. Under the hood there was almost complete darkness. To stay calm, Tlalok played every childhood counting game he could think of. He counted blank-ones slain by his own claws, subdividing those into categories by dimension, gender, smell, and ferocity. And that had a tranquilizing effect for a while, but even so, his agitation rose.
After what seemed like eternity, a musical tinkling came to Tlalok's ears, muffled by the chafing hood fabric and the bellows of his own lungs. The texture underpaw changed to groomed hook-turf between splayed tree roots. Klak, tak. Klik, tik. Tlalok obeyed, winding through the unseen tree trunks, marching headlong toward whatever fate the Balance had in store for him; he would not give his captors the satisfaction of seeing him flinch.
The ground peaked. The tree maze ended and Tlalok's captors padded down a gentle slope, drawing to a halt at the bottom of a grassy bowl. The chiming sounded all about him there, and Tlalok heard murmuring, followed by a hush. The space felt serene, calm. Tlalok's arrival had been trying, but he began to hope that the indignities were over.
That's when strong paws grabbed the back of his neck.