3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  Greenberg glanced back toward the Foitani. He nodded. "Right you are." He brought his thumb down on the blue firing button. He grunted—squeezing the contact closed took considerable effort. Not only were Foitani stronger than people to begin with, the firing button was rigged so it could not go off by accident.

  After the bombardment she'd been through, Jennifer found the detonation of the shaped charge an anticlimax. Unlike munitions makers, blasting experts do not make their devices as strong as possible, only just strong enough to do a particular job. Even in quiet circumstances, the blast would hardly have made her jump.

  She looked up over the top of the sledge. Just as in the practice run, Enfram Enfram Marf's charge had blown a neat, round hole in the white stone of the tower. Blackness lay beyond it.

  Greenberg looked up, too, then grabbed the communicator. "Calling the research base. I don't know whether you can see it—for that matter, I don't know if you can hear me—but we have succeeded in making a breach in the base of the column at the center of the Great Unknown."

  "This is Pawasar Pawasar Ras, human Bernard," the comm answered. Jennifer jumped—she hadn't expected a reply. Pawasar Pawasar Ras went on, "I regret that our project has been disrupted by the perfidious attack from the wretched pseudo-Foitani of Rof Golan. Nevertheless, we do continue to keep you and the Great Unknown under observation. We discern no evidence of damage to the column."

  Jennifer looked up over the sledge again. So did Greenberg. "I see a hole," he said. "Do you see a hole?" She nodded. "Good," he told her, then spoke into the communicator once more. "Honored kin-group leader, both of us think there's a hole in the side of that building. We're going to test it experimentally. How much do you want to bet that we get inside?"

  "As a matter of fact, we may not be the first ones to do the testing," Jennifer added. The two Foitani from Rof Golan, still paying no attention to the humans or their sledges, tramped past them toward the tower.

  "If you are somehow correct and there is an opening I cannot perceive, you must not permit the Rof Golani to exploit it. Use whatever means necessary to prevent their gaining entry," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. The translator didn't let him sound agitated, no matter how upset he really was.

  "How are we supposed to stop them?" Jennifer asked.

  "Use whatever means necessary," Pawasar Pawasar Ras repeated.

  Jennifer looked at the Foitani. Each of them was more than a meter and a half taller than she was. Each of them carried a weapon that could kill her at five times the range she could even make him itch. She looked at Greenberg. He'd been looking at the Foitani, too. Now his gaze swung back to her. She said, "Bullshit."

  He nodded. "You'd better believe it." He spoke into the communicator. "Honored kin-group leader, we didn't sign up with you to commit suicide. You ought to know, though, that the Foitani from Rof Golan seem to be suffering from the same thing your people do when they get too close to the Great Unknown. They don't seem to be in any shape to relay whatever they learn to anybody."

  A long silence followed. At last Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "There may be some truth to this comment. Nevertheless—"

  "No," Greenberg broke in, adding, "It's too late anyhow, honored kin-group leader. The first two Rof Golani have reached the tower."

  The big, blue-gray Foitani dropped their weapons to press themselves against the smooth white stone of the wall. They were only five or six meters from the hole in its side, but gave no sign of noticing it. For several minutes, they seemed content just to stand there. Then, not getting more than a meter or so away from the edge of the wall, they began walking parallel to it, one of them behind the other.

  They walked right past the hole. Their feet scuffed through the pieces of stone the shaped charge had blasted loose. They took no notice of them, either; as far as they were concerned, the area was as perfectly smooth as any other part of the processionway.

  Greenberg turned to Jennifer. "I will be damned. They can't see that it's there."

  Spanglish failed her. She fell back into Middle English. "Curiouser and curiouser." Then she said, "It makes me wonder whether the hole really is there after all."

  "I can tell you two things about that," he answered. "Thing number one is that we know the Great Unknown makes Foitani crazy and we don't think it does that to us. Thing number two is, we can go and find out, so let's go and find out."

  He stood up and walked toward the hole. Jennifer followed him. She saw the chunks of white stone that lay in front of it. Pretty soon, she kicked one of them. She felt it as her boot collided with it and heard it rattle away. All the same, she had the feeling she was approaching one of those holes quickly painted on the side of a mountain in an ancient animated fantasy video, the sort that would let whoever painted them go through and then turn solid again so a pursuer smashed himself against hard, hard rock. She stretched a hand out in front of her so she wouldn't hurt herself if the opening ahead proved not to be an opening.

  She kicked another fragment of stone out of the way. This one clicked off the side of the tower. The noise seemed no different to her from the one the first stone had made, but the Foitani from Rof Golan hadn't noticed that one. They noticed this time. They spun around. Their red eyes blazed. They'd let their weapons fall when they came up to the column, but they still had fangs and claws and bulk. Roaring like beasts of prey, they charged at the two humans.

  "Uh-oh," Greenberg said, which summed things up well enough. Running away from the Foitani didn't seem as if it would help. Greenberg and Jennifer ran for the hole instead. He shoved her in ahead of him. The rough stone at the edge of the hole ripped the knees out of her coveralls as she scrambled through. Greenberg dove after her scant seconds later, just ahead of the Foitani.

  By then she had a fist-sized rock in her hand, ready to fling in the face of one of the aliens. At such a close range, she thought, she might even hurt him. Greenberg scrabbled around in the darkness for a rock for himself.

  The Foitani came up to the hole and stared at it. They said something in their own language. Even without the moderating effect of the translator, Foitani from Odern sounded calm whether they were or not. As Jennifer had heard over the Harold Meeker's radio, Foitani from Rof Golan yelled even when there was nothing worth yelling about. These two screamed back and forth at each other. Jennifer didn't need a translator to guess they were saying something like, "Where did the funny-looking critters go?"

  Then she drew back her arm again to throw that rock, for a Foitan reached toward the hole. Those big, clawed hands came straight for her. If she waited any longer, she thought, the Foitan would pluck her straight out of her hiding place.

  But his hands stopped, right where the surface of the wall had been before Enfram Enfram Marf's charge bit through it. Jennifer watched his palms flatten out against what to him was plainly still a solid surface. He turned to his comrade, gesturing as if to say, Come on; you try it.

  The other Foitan tried it. His hands stopped where the wall should have been, too. He squawked something to his friend. Friend squawked back. They walked off, both of them shaking their heads.

  Greenberg indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt, "Whew!" Then he said, "You don't know how glad I am that they'd put down their guns. I didn't care to find out whether bullets believed in hallucinations."

  "Urk." Jennifer hadn't thought of that. After a moment, she added, "Who says I don't know how glad you are?"

  Greenberg spoke into the communicator. "Research base, we are inside the central tower to the Great Unknown. I say again, we are inside." He repeated himself several times, but got no answer. He stuck the comm in his pocket. "Maybe the Foitani from Rof Golan are jamming again."

  "Or maybe Pawasar Pawasar Ras and his friends can't hear you because you're calling from inside the tower and don't exist any more as far as they're concerned," Jennifer said.

  He gave her a dirty look. "I was right after all when I first got to know you—reading all that ancient science fiction has t
wisted your mind."

  "People used to say that about it then, too." Jennifer took out a hand torch and clicked it on. "As long as we're here, shall we see what here is like?"

  Greenberg also got out a light." We don't want to shine these out through the hole," he told her. "If the effect that keeps the Foitani from seeing it is like a one-way mirror, bright light from this side could ruin it."

  "All right," Jennifer said, "but if the effect is like a one-way mirror, how come the Foitani couldn't feel their way in, either?"

  "I don't know. I'm just glad they couldn't. Aren't you?"

  "Now that you mention it, yes." Jennifer turned around and played the torch on the far wall of the chamber. However disagreeable he was, Enfram Enfram Marf had been an artist with his shaped charge: that wall, only four or five meters from the blast, was hardly even scorched. The chamber itself was bare, but for the fragments of stone from the outer wall.

  "We're lucky," Greenberg said. "Looks like we didn't damage anything much in here."

  "We didn't, did we?" Jennifer looked around again. "This room is so bare, it's almost as if they emptied it out on purpose, knowing this was where we'd break in." The words hung in the air after she spoke them. She deliberately shook her head, "It couldn't be. The Suicide Wars happened twenty-eight thousand years ago."

  "But what's been keeping the Great Unknown alive all that time?" Greenberg said, a note of doubt in his voice. "The Great Ones had a higher technology than ours."

  "It couldn't be," Jennifer repeated.

  What happened next made her think of the closing line of a classic Clarke story: "One by one, without any fuss, the stars were going out." This surprise was not on such a cosmic scale, but it more than sufficed for the occasion. One by one, without any fuss, the ceiling lights in the chamber came on.

  "Oh, my," Jennifer whispered, and then, a moment later, "Oh, no." Nothing she'd seen about the empire of the Great Ones made her admire them or want them back. Much of what she'd seen had scared her spitless. And now an artifact—a big artifact—from the time of that empire was indubitably not just alive but awake. "Maybe if we leave, it'll go back to sleep," she said. "I think I'd rather face the Rof Golani than—this."

  "You've got a point," said Greenberg, who had to have been thinking along with her. But when they turned around to scramble out through the hole the shaped charge had blasted, they discovered it was no longer there. The inner wall looked as if it had stayed undisturbed for twenty-eight thousand Foitani years.

  Jennifer walked over to the wall, patted it much as the soldiers of Rof Golan had from the outside. It felt as solid as it looked. "Is it real?" she asked.

  "What's 'real'?" Greenberg countered. People had been wondering that since long before the days of Pontius Pilate, Jennifer thought, and generally, like Pilate, washed their hands of the question. Before she could say that out loud, Greenberg went on, "It's real enough to keep us in here, which is what counts at the moment."

  "I can't argue with you there," Jennifer said. None of the walls now, so far as she could tell, held any openings. But with the Foitani, that wasn't necessarily the way things were. If the Great Ones were as adept at memory-metal technology as their distant descendants from Odern, the chamber could have had a dozen doorways, or two dozen, or three.

  Bernard Greenberg evidently reached the same conclusion at the same time. He went over to the wall opposite the reconstituted one that led to the outside, began rapping on it here and there, as the Foitani did when they used their unnerving entranceways. For all the rapping, though, nothing happened.

  "Try higher up," Jennifer suggested. "They're bigger than we are, so the sensitive area should be farther off the ground than if we'd built this thing."

  "If humans had built this thing, it would have come with holovid instructions," Greenberg said. All the same, he raised his hand most of a meter. That produced results. In fact, it produced them twice: two doors opened up, less than a meter apart. They led into different rooms, one into a chamber much like the one in which Jennifer and he stood, the other into a long hallway.

  "The lady or the tiger," Jennifer murmured. One trouble with that was that Greenberg didn't know what she was talking about. Another was that the choice was more likely to be between two tigers. She turned to Greenberg. "Which way do you think we should go?"

  He plucked at his graying beard. "That room looks like more of the same. The hall is something different. Let's try it and see what happens."

  "Makes as much sense as anything," Jennifer said, "which isn't much. All right, let's do it."

  They stepped into the hall together. Jennifer's hand was on her useless stunner. Years of reading Middle English SF left her ready for anything, from Niven-style matter transporters to an extravaganza of lights out of the classic video 2001. Human technology was as advanced as any in this part of the galaxy . . . except, evidently, that of the Great Ones. Not knowing what to expect left Jennifer more than a little uneasy. She reached out to Greenberg and was not surprised to find him also reaching out to her.

  They didn't find themselves all at once in another part of the building. They weren't surrounded and overwhelmed by flashing lights. The hallway was just a hallway. But when Jennifer looked back over her shoulder, the door that had let them in was gone.

  Every so often, Greenberg reached up to rap on the hallway wall. For more than fifty meters, nothing happened when he did; he must not have been picking the right spots. Then, with the unnerving suddenness of Foitani doors, a blank space appeared where only wall had been.

  Greenberg and Jennifer both jumped. When she looked into the room that instant door revealed, Jennifer felt like jumping again. The chamber held an astonishingly realistic statue or holovid slide of a Foitan.

  "He's not quite the same as the ones from Odern or from Rof Golan," Greenberg said.

  "No," Jennifer agreed. The image of the Great One was a little taller than either of the descendant races she'd met. Its fur was green-blue, not the gray-blue of the Rof Golani or the plain, pure blue of the Foitani from Odern. The shape of the torso was also a little different. The legs were rather longer. The Great One might not have been of the same species as the modern Foitani; it definitely was of the same genus.

  "Everything we're doing in here seems stage-managed somehow," Greenberg said. "We've known all along that this is a center for the Great Ones. What else are we supposed to learn from seeing one almost in the flesh?"

  "I don't know," Jennifer answered. "Maybe that—" She stopped with a gurgle as the statue or holovid slide of the imperial Foitan turned its head and looked straight at her.

  VII

  Without conscious thought, Jennifer pointed her stunner at the—no, it wasn't a statue—at the imperial Foitan and thumbed the firing button. Only later did she pause to wonder why she'd done anything so aggressively futile. If the Great One was a holovid projection or a robot simulacrum, the beam would do nothing whatever to it. Even if he was somehow alive, the most she could do was make him itch. All she knew was that she wanted a weapon, and the stunner was the best she had.

  The Great One scratched vehemently, all over. "It's real," Greenberg said. He sounded as if he was accusing Jennifer.

  "I'm glad you thought it couldn't be, too," she said. She put the stunner away. Enraging something with carnivore teeth and four times her weight didn't seem like a good idea.

  The Foitan walked toward her. He didn't act outraged, just curious. He said something in his own language. The words didn't sound too different from the ones the Foitani from Odern used. The only trouble was that without a translator she couldn't understand any of them. She spread her hands, shook her head, and bared her teeth in a Foitani-style frown. "I wish I could wiggle my ears," she whispered to Greenberg.

  A look of intense concentration came over him. His ears did wiggle, close to a centimeter to and fro. Jennifer stared at him. His smile was sheepish and proud at the same time. He said, "I haven't done that since I was a kid. I wasn't sur
e I still could."

  Jennifer wasn't sure whether the ear wiggling did any good. The Great One stopped just in front of her and bent his knees so his eyes were on a level with hers. Those eyes were not quite the jet-black of the eyes of a Foitan from Odern; they were a deep, deep green-blue, an intensification of the shade of the Great One's skin and pelt. The color would have been stunning in human eyes. Here, it was simply alien.

  "We come in peace," Jennifer said, knowing the alien would not understand. She also realized it was barely true; they'd blasted their way into the tower, and a good-sized battle was going on just outside the Great Unknown's radius of insanity. For that matter, more than a few armed Foitani from Rof Golan were inside the radius of doom, even if at the moment they were in no state to use their weapons.

  Greenberg held his hands in front of him, palms out. Many races used that gesture to show they had peaceful intentions. Jennifer tried to remember if she'd seen it among the Foitani from Odern. She didn't think so. As far as she could tell, though, Foitani in general didn't have peaceful intentions all that often.

  The Great One kept studying Greenberg and her. A visual examination didn't seem to satisfy the alien. The Great One sniffed at them, too, with as little regard for their modesty as a dog would have given them. Jennifer wished she hadn't spent the last several hours sweating and terrified after the Foitani from Rof Golan attacked the research base of their cousins from Odern.

  Finally, to her relief, the Great One straightened up. He spoke a few words into the air. Holovid pictures of alien races appeared in front of him, one after another, as if in a video collage. Jennifer recognized a couple of species, but most were strange to her. Then the Foitan spoke again. The cavalcade of images stopped—with a pair of humans hanging in midair before the Great One.

  "That's impossible," Jennifer whispered to Greenberg.

  "Maybe not," he whispered back. "I've heard it claimed in traders' bars that the Foitani made it all the way to Earth. I never thought it was anything but a bar story, though."