Jaydium

by Deborah J. Ross

  Even though Eril didn’t understand all the words, their meaning was clear. “Just lie back and we’ll get you out of it.”

  With Kithri’s help, Eril unfastened the complicated series of clasps and locks. Underneath, Lennart wore a jumpsuit with embroidered patches on the chest and upper arm — stylized rockets and lightning bolts ringed with unrecognizable script. He grinned at them as he sat up and gestured around him.

  “Won thin shoor, thiz play naw AlfaCentaw. Beezmee whuh hept, maybe Einstein rie bow tie trav. Yoofol see fren enuh. Shors a pritt plan yoo gaw.”

  “Look, I don’t know how much of this you can follow,” Eril said, “but when you popped out of — wherever you were — it seems we popped into this place. Do you understand?”

  While Lennart clambered to his feet, Eril repeated himself, pointing towards the city, the deserted spaceport, and the scrubjet. Lennart nodded before answering, “Alnoo, yoofol too, heyh? Hot damm. Maybe niz we could bett unnerstan chothre, sin we stuh kere for why. Weefol splore lessgo citee, heyh?”

  “Explore the city?” Eril guessed. “My thought exactly. No point in waiting for a formal invitation.”

  “Before we go anywhere,” said Kithri. “I’m stashing what’s left of this haul.”

  With visible reluctance, Kithri allowed the two men to help her unload the packaged jaydium and set it in a pile well away from the tree. She opened a safepocket in the scrubjet’s inner wall and drew out a small device. Eril recognized it as a guardsafe-field generator. She set it on top of the pile and stepped back. After a short delay, the field ignited over the pile, shimmering poisonous ocher for an instant before it flickered into invisibility. No sign remained of the jaydium stash or its safekeeping system. Lennart watched the whole proceeding intently.

  Eril slipped the force whip into its holster and slung his small pack over his other shoulder. “Who do you think’s going to steal your jaydium out here?”

  She paused, considering. “I don’t know — it’s just habit, I guess. It’s probably only a matter of time now until the stuff goes to junk.”

  “Kithri, do you have some kind of weapon?” As he’d unloaded the insulated jaydium, Eril had considered the problem of self defense. He’d even thought of the lazer cutter, but rejected it as too heavy and cumbersome to be of much use. He found the idea of Kithri wandering unarmed through an alien city unaccountably disturbing.

  She studied him for a moment before nodding, then brought out a battered stungun from beneath her pilot’s seat. Eril recognized the palm-sized gun, a combination short-range nonlethal weapon, heat beam — for cutting thin sections of metal and starting fires — and emergency beacon. He carried a survival unit very much like hers, only his had a hollow handle containing a back-sharpened knife blade, a length of permawire and three large-eyed needles.

  “I’ve got the whip and my emergency kit,” he said. “You take your little stun-popper there, and the water container. He turned to the spacer and said slowly, emphasizing his words with gestures, “Lennart, I don’t have a weapon for you, so I want you to stay close to us. In fact, I want us all to stay together. No exploring on your own, and if I say ‘Jump,’ I don’t want you to stop and ask ‘How high?’ I just want you to do it. Understood?”

  “You’re taking a lot for granted, throwing around orders like that,” Kithri said, lifting her chin. “We’re not a pair of recruits — or babies.”

  “And I’m no nursemaid,” he said. “But we don’t know what nasty surprises the city-builders left for us. You haven’t had training in how to deal with such things, and I have. I may not have any fancy infiltration equipment, but I’ll do my best to keep us alive.”

  A stormy expression flickered across Kithri’s gray eyes. “Okay,” she said after a moment, “you’ve made your point. You don’t have to rub it in. I’ll go along with you. For now, anyway. You too, Lennart?”

  “Dun luh to me lie arm fortreh, buh I’m ease. Tever yoosay, baw.”

  o0o

  The parkland ended abruptly in a narrow apron of quartz-like stone. The grass grew right up to it, and on the other side lay pale satiny pavement that marked the beginning of the city. Eril kept to the cover of overgrown bushes and umbrella trees as long as he could, searching for any traces of automatic weaponry. There was no response when he hailed the city or rolled a clod of earth over the threshold. He took a deep breath, drew his force whip and stepped cautiously into the open.

  He wasn’t sure what he expected to find or what he’d do when he found it. Neither his Academy training nor his wartime experience had prepared him for First Contact. If the city builders — assuming there still were any — were anything like the gentle, timid aliens known to the Federation, then the last thing he’d want to do was blast them away with the force whip. He slipped it back into its holster and adjusted the straps so he could draw it again quickly.

  Eril started down a broad avenue flanked on one side by a lacy, pearlescent rectangle. On the other side sat a delicate spindle, two stories high and faceted like rubies. His boots crunched shards of multicolored crystals that littered the street. There was no other sound except for the rasping of his breath in his throat and the muted pounding of his heart.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hallo! Anybody out there? Hallo!”

  “H-a-a-l-o-o-o...” His voice echoed down the spacious avenue. It sounded eerie, barely human.

  He stopped in front of the spindle and studied it for a moment. It was about fifteen feet on each side of its square base, and deep crimson in color. The nearby buildings, pearly shades of pastel, looked anemic by comparison.

  “Eril!” Kithri yelled from the bushes. “What’s going on out there?”

  “Nothing so far,” he called back. “Stay where you are! I want to check —”

  “The hell you are!” Kithri strode across the stone border, Lennart at her heels. She halted in front of Eril and set her fists on her hips. “We’re not going to wait back there while you go off by yourself!”

  Eril, realizing the futility of arguing with her, turned his attention back to the spindle. Kithri followed his gaze, throwing her head back to stare.

  “Wow,” she said in a hushed voice.

  Lennart grinned, poked Eril with one elbow, and repeated, “Wow.”

  Eril placed his flattened hand on the side of the spindle. The faceted wall felt hard and smooth, like gemstone. It was slightly cool, but warmed almost instantly. He jerked his hand away.

  “What is it?” Kithri asked.

  Eril shook his head. “Damned if I know. It’s not like any substance I’ve ever seen before.” His right hand went automatically to the hilt of the force whip as he began searching for a door. There was none he could identify.

  After a few minutes, they gave up looking and went on. Several blocks southward, they spotted a squat lavender pyramid with a curious fuzzy surface that contrasted sharply with the smooth exteriors of the other buildings.

  A few buildings later they came to a single-storied cylinder of light, clear blue, like blue topaz. A doorway gaped before them, wide enough for all three to pass abreast. They went in, cautiously picking their through the piles of splinters that had fallen from the causeway overhead. The doorway was slightly elevated from street level but there were no steps, only a smooth ramp.

  Inside they found a single central room, about twenty feet in diameter and ringed with delicate fluted columns of the same pale blue. With the exception of some multicolored dust piled up along the curved wall, it was completely empty.

  Eril took a few steps on the unexpectedly spongy floor. When he prodded it with one heel, it didn’t give perceptibly although it effectively muffled his footsteps. He glanced up and saw the blurred outlines of nearby buildings through the translucent roof. Kithri and Lennart spread out, examining the walls.

  “What would you do in a place like this?” Kithri murmured. She wiped her hands on her dun-colored overalls, which looked even dingier than before.

 
; “Space only knows,” he answered. “Hold a tea party?”

  “Nobodd home,” said Lennart. “Nafor lon tie. Whoover bill thiss playz grayon dezih buh litt shor onth upkee.” He held up his hand, his fingers coated with rainbow-colored sparkles.

  Eril nodded, getting the general idea that Lennart didn’t approve of the current standard of housekeeping. I hope we understand each other better before some crisis lands on us. Most of the time I’m only getting one word out of three, and it’s probably the same for him.

  Beyond the blue cylinder they found a series of spacious, interconnected courtyards, lined with opal-tinted benches and abstract sculptures. The street slanted down into a broad trough lined by knee-high curbs. At regular intervals, round openings appeared in the lower part of the walls. They looked to Eril like water pipes rather than drains. He knelt to inspect them, but could discover no trace of liquid or other contents. Nor were there any discernible seams in the paving material.

  Here, near the center of the city, the buildings stood closer together, their shapes and vibrant colors clashing. Eril thought them the visual equivalent of the Academy banquets he’d been forced to sit through, getting more glazed in the eye and queasy in the stomach with each passing course. The red of rubies, the purple of amethysts, the blues of sapphire and turquoise formed a riotous mixture of color, with only narrow corridors separating the towers.

  Kithri pointed to the tiny tracks skirting a pile of grit-fine dust. “Something lives here.”

  “Something the size of a lizard,” Eril commented.

  “You’d think there’d be something more,” she said. “Weeds poking through cracks, the local version of cockroaches.” She grimaced. “Believe me, you never get rid of them.”

  Eril ran his hands over the seamless paving material. He glimpsed something moving at the far end of the dust pile and bent to examine it further. He saw what it was and chuckled. Not one of Kithri’s cockroaches, but an ant. Every planet he’d ever been on had them. This one had eight legs and bright red antennae. It seemed to be a lone scout, quite uninterested in the dust granules.

  They went on for a while, deeper into the crowded heart of the city. Some of the courtyards were sunken, accessible only by ramps. After a while they no longer exclaimed at each new building, as if their capacity for awe had gone numb with overload.

  Eril knelt and picked up a fist-sized piece of flame-colored glass shaped like an elongated teardrop. Was it a sculpture, a thing of deliberate beauty, or only a fragment that happened to have a pleasing form?

  Straightening up, he saw the sun had begun to dip behind the horizon. A chilly, moisture-laden breeze sprang up, whistling eerily between the towers. The crystal buildings seemed even colder and less human as daylight left the sky.

  Chapter 9

  Eril unfolded Kithri’s micropore emergency blanket and spread out their meager supplies while she went in search of dead wood for a fire. He added the contents of his own pack to the pile and sat back to contemplate the situation. The food supply was meager, just the lunch leftovers and emergency rations, his and Kithri’s. They could find water in the forest but they had no purification unit or anything to hunt with, except the force whip and stungun. Prudently, they should return to their own Stayman tomorrow. Given that he didn’t know exactly how to get there, they ought to be trying right now instead of preparing for a camp-out.

  Just one night won’t hurt anything, Eril told himself, knowing full well that he was rationalizing. The truth was that he wanted the city to himself for a little longer, before it swarmed with Federation scientists.

  Lennart hunkered down beside him, looked over the assembled gear and said something incomprehensible. Eril pointed to the variable-insulation fabric. “Blanket.”

  “Bee-ann.” Lennart nodded and grinned.

  “No, no, you’re saying it all wrong. The word has an L and a K. Blan-ket. Say it, Blan-ket.”

  Kithri dropped a double armful of fallen wood next to them. It rattled like dry bones as it hit a patch of bare earth. She scowled. “Don’t patronize him.”

  “I was just —”

  “He’s not an idiot. He knows what you mean.” She brushed off her hands and set them on her hips.

  “We’ve got to understand each other better,” Eril said. “Since there’s two of us and one of him, it makes more sense for him to learn our dialect.”

  “Sokay, pal,” said Lennart. “Doanfi vermee. Telps f’yoo tak slow, buh nawso bad. I gih the gennel driff.”

  Kithri turned her back on both of them and began making the campfire.

  Eril pointed to the force whip. “Do you know what this is?”

  Lennart shook his head. He looked troubled when Eril explained that it was a weapon. “Yoofol kep, yoofol yooz,” he said, shaking his head. “No thin, no tall, no damm guh! Nessep — whar! Unnerstan?”

  After a moment’s uncomfortable silence, Eril went through the assembled items, naming each one and watching the spaceman’s response, either recognition or puzzlement. As he did so, he sorted them into items better stored away for safekeeping and those needed at hand. The water in particular would have to be rationed until they could find a safe source.

  Lennart pointed towards the place where Kithri had set the guardsafe-field. “Is wazz?”

  “A device,” Eril answered, “for hiding something valuable, keeping it from being stolen. You understand?”

  “Hies reel weh, yoono. I can see a thin. Whuzzo valla? Hoo’d stee sumthin tauheer?”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

  Lennart took a deep breath. “Whuh — arr — yoofol — hie?”

  “Nothing much, only a half-load of jaydium.”

  “Eril!” Kithri whirled around from the newly lit fire. She’d used her stungun to ignite the tinder and now she waved it in his direction. “That’s my jaydium!”

  “What is he going to do, walk off with it? Out here in the middle of nowhere? When he doesn’t even know what a ‘safe field is? A moment ago you were charring me for treating him like an idiot!”

  Kithri pressed her lips together. “It’s not your haul, not even half. So it’s not your decision to make. Where I come from, letting strangers know you’re carrying jaydium is damned dangerous.”

  Lennart took advantage of the pause in their argument to ask, “Waz this jhaydiuh?”

  “Jaydium. How can you not know about jaydium?” Kithri asked. “You’re a spacer, aren’t you?”

  He stared back at her with a bewildered expression and started speaking rapidly and incomprehensibly.

  “Jaydium — a mineral used in spaceflight,” Eril managed to interject. “Faster-than-light, do you understand?”

  “Fazzer thah lie? Snaw possuh. Yoo can seed Einstein’s limm forwhy mass sponenshul incree as the Niverss Nuhcertent Prinz varz wih thinver of —”

  “Hold it! Slow down, I can’t follow you. Kithri, did you get any of that?”

  She shook her head. “Just that he seems to have all sorts of reasons why faster-than-light travel isn’t possible.”

  “I’d already gathered that. I wonder how long ago... Lennart, what was the year? The date? When do you come from?”

  “Day? Yoofol doano day? I coobe owtaheer few mozz maybe, shibee arawn fie-fhay.”

  By scrawling numbers on a patch of dirt next to the fire, they were able to establish the length of the year and fix Lennart’s time somewhere around 3058 Common Era. Common Era, that unimaginably ancient time from the Lost Eras before the First Federation. Almost nothing was known of that time, beyond its mere existence.

  “You’re from our far, far past,” Eril said. “So long ago we don’t use that dating system, not even in history texts.”

  Lennart looked bleak and nodded. “I thaw nivver see the few. Spay the close I get, buzz kine lone, heyh? Can exa befrenn theyfol can unnerstan the say lang.” He combed back his hair with one hand. “So whenz weefol now?”

  “It’s 107-Five,” Eril answered, “counting from the foundin
g of the current Federation.”

  “That’s assuming,” Kithri added, “that he’s come forward into our time instead of us going back into his.”

  “We’ll have to check the stars tonight to be sure.”

  Eril gazed at the parkland, where the weirdly elongated shadows of the umbrella trees striped the lawn and shivered inwardly. Kithri could well be right, much as he hated to admit it. But what kind of disaster could turn such a dense, exuberant forest into the desolate Cerrano Plain? And the city... Surely some trace of that should remain...

  “Yoofol fly awtie fazzer than lie?” Lennart asked suddenly.

  “We’ve always had superlight speed, that’s what’s made the Federations possible. During the First Fed, roboships brought back the first samples of jaydium.” Eril had only the vaguest impression of the bulky sublight barges of pre-First Federation spaceflight. It was jaydium that reduced the prohibitive cost of the fusion-driven faster-than-light drive and made possible the exodus of humanity into space that marked that golden era.

  “Yoofly fazzer thah lie in thah shih?” Lennart asked, pointing at Brushwacker. There was only a faint lemony light remaining in the western sky, and twilight softened the tiny ship’s scars. “Doan luh lie muzz, buh can telmuh fruh th’ex. Yoofol gaw allsore noo gadges, whomy t’say whuh theyshuh loo lie? Eril, yoogaw one pritt spiff shiheer, heyh?”

  “It’s mine, not his,” Kithri said, biting off the words.

  Lennart looked from one to the other, his expression unreadable in the gloom. “Hot damm.”

  Exactly my sentiments, thought Eril.

  “Yoofol show me insie?”

  Kithri hesitated so long that Eril was sure she’d refuse, but in the end she didn’t. Lennart was so eager to see all the new aircraft developments over the years, his enthusiasm was irresistible. Finally, exasperated with the limitations of language, Kithri shoved him bodily into the co-pilot’s seat. Eril stood at the opened cockpit door and watched, trying to keep a straight face as she ran through the equipment and explained everything again in words of one syllable. From the look on Lennart’s face, composed of equal parts of delight, concentration and bewilderment, Eril couldn’t tell how much he really understood. But one thing was sure, the ancient spaceman was crazy over anything that flew.