by Allen Wold
"Thanks." Rikard felt himself relax. He hadn't been aware of being so tense. "I'll see you tomorrow morning, then."
"Sure thing."
Rikard left and went back to the hospital to tell Darcy and Polski what had happened. Then he went home to bed, where he didn't get to sleep until almost dawn.
He woke after two hours, excited and ready to go. He collected the jeep, loaded the supplies and shelter, and drove to Dobryn's place. His guide was waiting for him, seeming a lot more cheerful.
"Sorry about being so short last night," Dobryn said, "but the mines take a lot out of a person, and I was pretty tired."
He got in the jeep, Rikard gave him the loan agreement, and they started off east through the city toward the edge of town. Dobryn gave directions as they went.
After a few blocks Rikard noticed they were being followed. When he had the chance, he slowed and tried to see who it was. It was Emeth Zakroyan.
"What's the trouble?" Dobryn asked.
"That woman behind us. She has a personal grudge against me."
"No kidding. She likely to cause trouble?"
"I hope not." But he loosened the gun in its holster nonetheless. Dobryn, he noticed, still carried the plastic pistol. It was a lightweight weapon, small caliber, short-range, with no real stopping power, but virtually undetectable by most scanning devices. It couldn't penetrate even light armor.
"You're pretty heavily heeled," Dobryn observed.
"Gift from my father."
"Can you use it?"
"Well enough."
"There are some predators farther out from the city."
"I'll show off if we meet any."
They drove through an industrial district. Zakroyan didn't try to close with them, but kept a block back. It made Rikard nervous.
Dobryn didn't seem to pay any attention. "You really looking for your old man?" he asked as they left the city proper.
"I really am," Rikard said and, as they drove through a brief stretch of outlying farms, with their glass roofs ablaze with morning sunlight, told the story of how he'd traced him this far.
"Then you don't really live here?" Dobryn asked when he'd finished.
"This is my twenty-fifth day."
"I would have sworn last night you were either a citizen or a Gesta."
"I'm a citizen now, as of eleven days ago. I've had some real good instruction."
They passed mining domes, dozens of them. Beyond were sparsely wooded hills, through which ran an unpaved track which they followed. Zakroyan was still behind them, about half a kilometer back. She seemed to have no desire to get any closer. Dobryn watched the other car for a while.
"Who is she?" he asked at last.
"Anton Solvay's private murderer."
"God Almighty, you pick good company. You got Solvay on your tail?"
"He's paranoid."
"Doesn't change the shape of the bullet hole."
"If she starts gaining on us, let me know."
"Sure will. Uh, you got other company."
Rikard glanced across Dobryn and saw, a hundred meters to their right, the glowing, ambiguous form of a dragon. It hovered a meter or so above the ground, drifting through the sparse trees, paralleling them and keeping pace. The nodules of light in its transparent body glowed and pulsed.
"Goddamn," Rikard muttered. The hairs all over his body stood up on end.
"That's putting it mildly." Dobryn's voice was unnaturally soft and hoarse. "As long as it stays out mere, we're all right, but in an open car, if it comes after us, we're fried. It can outfly us with no trouble at all."
They drove on, the dragon beside them, Zakroyan behind them. It amused Rikard, in a wry sort of way, to note that Solvay's tame killer had dropped back to a full kilometer when the dragon appeared. She was afraid of it too.
"Those things attack often?" he asked, meaning the dragon.
"It isn't an attack, really; it's more like they're curious and just want to kind of feel us out, literally speaking. But if you touch one, it's instant death. You fry."
"So I've heard."
3
They passed an occasional shack and a small mining town or two. The hills continued, as did the small and widely spaced trees. Once they came to a village, similar to Logarth south of the city. Rikard was prepared for another toll-collecting stick-up this time. He drove around the village, and when they got to the other side, the people were there waiting for them. But when the villagers saw the dragon, which was flying higher now, they scattered. Rikard and Dobryn drove on unmolested.
"Looks like those monsters are good for something after all," Dobryn said.
Zakroyan was still behind them, less than half a kilometer back now. She had followed them in their detour around the village. The toll collectors had not bothered her either. Which was a shame, Rikard thought.
A little farther on they entered thicker forest. The track just faded away. Dobryn guided them as they drove between huge trees, each with a trunk a meter or more in diameter. These trees, too, were widely spaced, twenty or thirty meters apart. Their branches high overhead covered the sky, casting the nearly clear forest floor into cool, green shade.
"If I go off course," Rikard asked, "can you get me back?"
"Sure. What are you going to do?"
"Try to throw our friend back there."
The ground was still hilly, and Rikard waited until Zak-royan's car dipped below a ridge behind them and out of sight. Then he turned the jeep downslope and gunned the engine.. Keeping to the low spots, he sped as fast as he dared through the trees, then started to turn back toward the city in a long arc. He couldn't see Zakroyan behind him any more, so he rushed on, then cut sharp and doubled back.
He intended to cross their route about a kilometer or so before the place where they had turned off. Dobryn guided him, and when they passed a familiar spot, he sped on beyond. Then he turned away from the city again to a place farther on their route, where several trees grew more closely together. He stopped the jeep and sat, gun drawn, to see if Zakroyan had managed to follow them. They waited half an hour. She didn't show. And the dragon was gone too.
"Looks like we've lost both of them," he said at last. He put his gun away and started the jeep again.
"Suits me just fine," Dobryn agreed.
They made a short stop for lunch, then drove until dusk, when darkness made driving dangerous. Rikard didn't want to use lights, just in case Zakroyan was still out there somewhere. Dobryn guided him a little farther on until they came to a set of ruins.
Broken hexagonal buildings littered the ground, overgrown by the trees. Nothing stood more than three or four meters above the ground. The ruins, rich terra-cottas and russets, were quite extensive, covering nearly a hundred hectares. Dobryn guided them through the rubble until they came to where a partially intact ceiling offered protection. They stopped the jeep and got out.
"You ever meet any Belshpaer?" Rikard asked as they set up the shelter against an inner wall.
"They're all dead," Dobryn answered.
"I know of at least six who aren't."
"You gotta be kidding. They died out five, ten thousand years ago."
"Well, these six don't know that." He told Dobryn about his meeting with them south of the city.
"That's really bizarre." Dobryn set up the cooker. The shelter let them see out but kept all light in. "I mean, are you sure they weren't just some people playing a trick on you?"
"Now, have you ever met any humans with three legs and six arms apiece?"
"No, I never have." He turned on the cooker. "That's really weird. Boy, if those archaeologists I worked with four years ago had known any Belshpaer were alive, they'd never have left."
"You know a lot about Belshpaer?" Rikard served them their supper.
"A little. I know they had starships. I know there are more ruins of theirs on several other worlds. But this is the most extensive collection ever found anywhere. Why, there are some buildings here th
at are still intact. The Tower of Fives is one. That's why those archaeologists went there."
"How'd you find the city in the first place?"
"The archaeologists had an aerial survey. Listen, that place is well-known on other worlds. It's been explored before. Of course, this isn't the most popular place for those academic types to visit."
"I can understand that," Rikard said.
They had no trouble during the night. After breakfast the next morning, they packed up and drove on through the ruins and into deeper forest on the other side.
Kohltri was a beautiful world. Forests like the one they were driving through covered most of the planet. There were a very few veldlike areas. Only the poles, and the peaks of a few of the tallest mountains, were bare.
Sixty-five percent of the planet surface was water, forming several large seas and a multitude of smaller ones, all teeming with life. The weather was generally calm, with light rain almost every night and seldom during the day.
It was a warm world, with an F6 primary, three moons, and a fine set of inner rings which glowed in near-white pastels at night. There were no other planets in the system.
There was no native sentient species. The Belshpaer, like the humans and the Atreef, were just settlers. Nobody knew where the Belshpaer home world had been.
Native life on the continents ran the full gamut, lacking only simianoids. The basic form was bilateral, which was also predominant through the rest of the galaxy. There were birds, insects, cold-blooded reptile types, and mammaloids. There were no monsters, just the usual range of predators feeding on a wide variety of herbivores.
Everywhere there were ruins. Dobryn confirmed the theory that if you dug anywhere, you'd find ruins eventually. Those on the surface had just not been buried as deeply, or had perhaps been uncovered by the rather mild weather.
"This whole world was just one city once, I think," Dobryn said. "Except the oceans, of course, and maybe the mountains. I guess they had lots of parkland too, but the place we're going to visit isn't really a separate thing. It just looks that way because everything around it has been buried. It's one of the oldest sets of ruins around, though, at least ten thousand standard years, as far as those archaeologists could figure out."
There was more wildlife this far from the city. On the worlds Rikard knew, there was little left of any native life, and that was mostly on preserves. He was fascinated by the variety. Most species were small, but a few were as big as a human.
They came to a river. Rikard drove out over it to follow it downstream. This was a major landmark, Dobryn explained. Even if they had gotten lost while throwing Zakroyan, they would have come to the river eventually. Now all they had to do was follow it.
"Looks like we've lost Zakroyan for good," Rikard said as they skimmed along over the broad, smooth, wet surface.
"And no more dragons either," Dobryn added.
"Those things can't be native to Kohltri."
"I wouldn't know about that."
"Well, look at it. Whatever the dragons are, they're a very advanced form of life, and there's nothing else at all like them here, is there?"
"Not as I've ever heard."
"Okay. A single species can't exist in isolation, unless it's the original prebiot. Something as advanced as those dragons is the end of a long line of evolution. If they were native here, there should be other life forms similar to them, predecessors and parallels. And they are a pretty bizarre life structure. Where are all the other trials, the ones that succeeded and from which the dragons evolved?"
"Beats me. Are you saying they came here from somewhere else?"
"Either that or were brought. Maybe the Belshpaer brought them when they colonized the world. Or maybe somebody else before or after. I don't know, but I'd bet you almost anything the dragons are from some other planet. And they're rather intelligent too."
"You gotta be kidding."
"No, not at all. Of course, they're so different we can't really tell. Not like dolphins or corvins, perhaps, but not just a superanimal either. They're pretty high up on the scale. I mean, they exhibit curiosity, or what passes for it close enough not to matter. I wonder nobody's come here to study them."
They came to a place where the river broadened into a marsh. It was thickly grown with reeds, shrubs, and water trees. The growth was too dense to drive through, and the jeep wouldn't float high enough to go over, so they had to swing around.
They reentered the forest to do so. There was more undergrowth here too. They had to go slowly, no more than thirty kilometers per hour.
Rikard found himself wanting to slow further. The light, though filtered through dense foliage, seemed just a bit too bright. He felt vaguely uneasy at Dobryn's presence. After a while he realized that it reminded him of what he'd experienced down in the tunnel where he'd fallen fleeing the dragon south of town.
"Is there tathas around here?" he asked. His voice sounded sharp and harsh in his ears.
"It's the balktapline." Dobryn, too, seemed to feel uncomfortable and sluggish.
"I was told this feeling was caused by a fungus."
"That may be, but it's the balktapline nevertheless, or at least something that's almost always found with it. See?" He pointed toward the ground.
Rikard slowed and looked over the side of the jeep. The ground was spotted here and there with bits of a dark material, metallically iridescent in a subtle way. It was the same material that had lined the tunnel he'd fallen into. It had not, he now realized, lined the passage to Dzhergriem's secret office.
"Is that balktapline?"
"It's a sure sign there's a lot of it nearby. Anthrace and reserpine too."
"Do you get this effect in the mines?" He wanted to just stop the jeep and crawl in a hole.
"No, we're shielded. If there's trouble, the guys who have to go down to the interface get triple pay."
"How come nobody's mining here?" He had to force himself to drive on.
"It's too far from the city. Look there. Somebody's been digging. You get an occasional prospector who's already crazy, and they'll come out to a place like this and work it for a while. They don't last long. Too much exposure, and they just lie down and die."
"I could use a little hidey-hole myself right about now. How long does this go on?"
"We're almost out of it. Bear left here."
A few hundred meters more and they were away from the influence of the strange stuff and were able to go back to the river again.
In the middle of the morning, they came to a place where the river broke and churned over huge boulders. They left the water here, since it turned and flowed north and they had to continue east. Dobryn was driving now. He turned the jeep toward the bank and entered the forest.
The forest was thick here, and they had to go slowly. The oldest trees, few of which were left, had reached their limit of survival, and most had fallen long ago. Younger trees had grown up in the open ground the fallen ones had left. These were still fairly substantial, though nowhere near the girth of their predecessors. They had not yet weeded themselves out in the struggle for sunlight and air, and grew closely together.
At one point they passed an ancient Belshpaer tower rising six stories through the trees. Its dark brown top was broken off, but it was otherwise intact in spite of the terrible weathering of its surface.
"Oldest datable Belshpaer ruin," Dobryn commented as they drove past. Rikard wanted to stop, but Dobryn told him he'd have plenty of ruins to look through when they got to the Tower of Fives.
At noon the forest thinned suddenly, and they emerged into a broad clearing. They were halfway across it before they saw the dragons. There were three of them on the far side.
The dragons saw them at the same time. Glittery, glowing, golden, glorious, and awful, they climbed into the air, serpentine and transparent, indefinitely outlined with a shimmer of what might be wings, and eyes that were all too real and terrible.
Dobryn jerked the floater into a
sharp turn, nearly dumping them. Rikard drew his gun, but even at the accelerated rate of perception the weapon gave him, things were moving awfully fast. He targeted on the head of one of the dragons and fired. The bullet had no effect.
They raced back toward the edge of the clearing from which they had come. Two more dragons came out of the trees in front of them. Dobryn swerved hard left.
Rikard fired again, aiming at a dragon's eye. It wasn't easy. The combined movements of the shifting dragons and the jeep's violent lurching over the ground made it difficult for him to keep his eyes on his target, let alone bring the red spot into the center of the circles long enough to squeeze the trigger. He saw a chance, fired, and saw a terrible eye wink out—and then reappear.
A static discharge made him swing around in his seat. Dobryn was still trying to get to the dubious shelter of the woods. Just a few meters behind them was a dragon, about to close. Rikard screamed and fired at one of the bright points of light in the body of the monster.
He must have hit it, maybe even hurt it, because the dragon shot straight up into the air, leaving a trail of glittering dust motes.
The jeep lurched, swerved, rose up into the air. Then they were careening through the trees. Rikard devoted all his attention to hanging on while Dobryn dodged and swerved.
The jeep never quite hit anything but came close enough to make Rikard want to scream again.
He risked another look behind them. There were no dragons in sight.
"We've lost them," he yelled at Dobryn. The jeep slowed somewhat.
"Keep an eye out," Dobryn said.
"They're gone," Rikard insisted.
"Are you sure?"
"Stop and see for yourself."
Dobryn braked the jeep to a halt. They sat in the silence and looked around. No dragons. They waited. No dragons.
"We've lost them," Rikard said again.
"We've also lost ourselves," Dobryn answered. "I don't know where we are."
"I think the clearing is back that way."
"No, the sun was just to our right, overhead. It's more in that direction."
"You're the guide."