by Allen Wold
"I don't feel a thing," Droagn said.
As they came to the inner edge of this second ring of ruins Rikard felt ever more as though he were being crowded by his companions, and ever more comfortable with the closeness of the walls, and ever more disturbed by the immense height of the columns and the light at their top, and could almost see the dark shadows of the imaginary landscape on the walls around him.
"Now wait a minute," Droagn said at one point. "I'm beginning to feel weird. It's not much, and it's not like what you said, it's more like having a fuzzy brain, or itchy nerves. It's not much, but I don't like it."
Rikard, by now, had to concentrate on his objective in order to proceed and bear the company of his companions. He kept on wanting to look for a way down underground, and he felt shadows behind him that weren't there.
"Does it get worse? Droagn asked him.
"This is nothing yet."
They suddenly came to a door, beyond which was the outside, and it was all Rikard could do to force himself to go out under the gray sky. They were at ground level, in what had once been another parkway but was now a jungle. The vegetation was much more lush here than it had been elsewhere, probably due to the efforts of the vanished people who had built the triangular towers. The trees and other foliage were high enough and close enough that they could not see the cones from where they stood, or what was left of them, or even the other side of this ring of ruins.
They entered the jungle, the floor of which eventually became strewn with small pebbles, then larger rocks, then eventually rubble covered the ground and they left the jungle. Here and there, in the low spots, were more trees, and here and there in the high spots something artificial but now unrecognizable still stood upright. And now they could see the stub of one of the cyclopean cones, and beyond it another rising higher, and maybe a third off to the left behind the first, and maybe another off to the right behind the second.
It was hard for Rikard to keep a clear head. He wanted to go back under the trees, or better still down into the hollows and find a hole and lie down, and not move, and get away from Grayshard and Droagn, and wait for the dark night and the stars and whatever they might eventually bring. It was all part of the Tathas effect, but knowing it was of little help. The dark landscape, another facet of the effect, was not yet truly visible, though he could feel it around him, black and metallic and plastic and artificial. Even Grayshard was acting nervous and twitchy. Droagn was dour and grim.
As they proceeded the way got rougher. Most of the rock—really ceramics and plastics—was grayish-whitish-brownish stuff, but here and there they saw darker lumps, metallically iridescent in a subtle sort of way, here a piece of glossy black, there one of iridescent blue, and occasionally a piece that was pearly white. This was the telltale sign that the "ore" containing the balktapline and related substances was near the surface.
Now Rikard had to deal with new forms of the superimposed though subtle Tathas hallucinations. It was not quite the same as he'd felt before, but there were still the oddly apertured piles of irregularly shaped rocks, the strangely familiar monoliths, the things like small trees of bent wires and bolted-on plates, and a much-too-near horizon—none of it real, all of it only in his mind. The sky, when he looked at it, was still gray overcast and so bright it made him hurt, but when he looked away it felt black, with greasy metallic multicolored stars much too near and all connected somehow one to the other. The ground, if he looked at it, was gray soil with rocks and coarse brush, but when he looked away it felt black and waxy and always somehow concave and the rocks were black and the piles of stones like hives were black with doorways that he dared not look into.
He forced himself to pay attention to his real surroundings and now could see that there was an end to the ring of rubble, but they were not halfway there yet. And then Droagn called out.
At first Rikard thought that Droagn was just suffering hallucinations, but after a moment he heard that there really was something moving among the rubble. And then the noisemakers came into view, like giant lizards with eight legs. They were moving not that quickly but with considerable determination toward them. Rikard found it hard to be frightened by them, though their intent was all too obvious. He was numbed by the Tathas effect, and kept slipping back into the darkness and aching need for enclosure and solitude.
"Kitah bley!" Droagn shouted at him, but Rikard couldn't bring himself to care even that his friend had actually vocalized. Then he felt the dim edges of the psychic blast that Droagn projected against the creatures. They had marvelously carnivorous teeth, but they weren't intelligent enough to be affected by this mental attack.
Rikard finally became aware that he was in personal danger. He drew his gun and gripped it firmly so that he closed the connection between it and the circuitry implanted in his hand, arm, and brain. But the effect of the time dilation thus produced, combined with the Tathas effect, was bizarre, dreamlike, nightmarish. The world around him seemed to slow down by a factor of ten, which satisfied the Tathas need to slow, but in fact his perceptions were speeded up by that amount, which was contrary, and was incredibly uncomfortable, a crinkly rushing feeling along the inside of the back of his head and neck going both up and down at the same time.
He was able to see the real world more clearly now, however. There was nothing superimposed in the darkness, and yet because he was moving faster the world had actually become darker, a phenomenon that must have occurred every time he used his gun though he had never noticed it before, and it made his skin feel remote and fuzzy.
The monsters were closing dangerously, and he shot two of them even though he was severely distracted. As he took aim at a third, Gray shard tried his Vaashka attack, a combination of psychic and chemical projection. Rikard felt an odd kind of tickling not at all like what he would feel without the Tathas interference, but it was enough to make him miss his shot. He was dumbfounded. He had never missed before when he was wired into his built-in range finder. He fired again, and missed again.
He did notice that the creatures, though habituated to the Tathas effect, were not completely impervious to Grayshard's form of attack and that they were all as distracted as he. He realized that under the circumstances, he was really not all that accelerated, and managed to focus his attention at last and dropped two more of the creatures with his last two shots. He fumbled to reload, and then the predators turned and ran away. Rikard pulled himself together, and felt Droagn's projection that there was a retreat of animal consciousness in a broad area around them.
Still dazed, they crossed the rubble field toward the stumps of the cones. To Rikard it seemed as if he were going through a place that was singularly amorphous and asymmetric, superimposed on the reality of the stone-littered ground with the white cones just ahead. There were shapes within this overlying darkness, and zones. Everything was darkly metallic, with an iridescent sheen that was sinisterly comforting. Rikard tried to warn his companions about it, but it took too much effort to speak, and it made him aware that he had companions when what he wanted was to be alone. He tried to stay away from the fragments of surface material, but that didn't help. The deposits of balktapline, reserpine, and anthrace, all the metamorphosed remains of Tathas architectural materials, must have been larger and stronger than the government assay had estimated, if it could have this much affect from underground.
Gray shard was shielded by his own clothes, but he too was subject to the material. "I can't believe it," he said, and in Rikard's ears his voice sounded like dull metal squeaking over smooth stone. "What must they have been like, to have left this madness behind them?"
"They were totally insane," Rikard grated. His voice felt like sand under a hard-soled shoe. He described what he felt as they stumbled onward.
"I don't feel that at all," Grayshard said. "It's more like I'm large and diffuse. It's a subtle thing, or I would say so, except that it's almost overwhelming. How can it be both at the same time?"
Rikard could
n't bring himself to respond. He hated the sound of Grayshard's voice, and his nearness, though he was thirty meters away.
"There's one thing," Grayshard said. "I seem to be comforted by the tightness of my disguise. It makes me think that the Tathas, before they disappeared from here, did not spend much time on the surface, but interpenetrated the ground, flowed through the soil, and did not move around in open spaces unless they had to."
"What the hell are you talking about," Droagn projected. His communication felt to Rikard like something unpleasantly slick brushing across the top of his mind.
"What do you feel?" Rikard grated, crunched, rasped.
"Darkness. Everything is artificial. I want to lie still all alone."
"That's like me," Rikard said. "What else?"
"Why?"
"It will help you get across this place. Don't fight it, go with it as much as you can. I've been under this influence before. What do you see?"
'I don't actually see them, but there are monoliths out there, and domes of stones, and wire trees. But the material all seems slightly translucent, and there are, ah, sparks inside, and the colors are all dark and unfamiliar."
"Where do you get that?" Grayshard demanded. "It's nothing like that at all."
"We get it," Rikard said, "from being exothermic animal-protein beings, unlike yourself."
He went on at length, and Grayshard responded, and Droagn did too, and so they talked themselves across the rubble to the base of the nearest cone stub. And there the Tathas effect was somewhat diminished, as if the white detritus that had fallen from the slopes above were some kind of shield.
"That feels better," Droagn said. He paused a moment, his face twisted with effort. "I don't feel any life at all in this area."
The cone was not very tall, and its top, and the top of the other cone they could see from there, had been eroded away, which was what had produced the marblelike detritus covering the ground.
"What I want to know," Rikard said, "is why anybody would build here in the first place. The Tathas stuff has been underground since before this world produced its own life. It has to affect anybody who comes near."
"Maybe," Grayshard said, "our cyclopeans were naturally protected by their own building material."
"Could be, but what about the people who built whatever was in that ring of rubble out there?"
"Who knows what they were like?" Droagn said. "And I don't really care."
They left the floater carts, four of which they'd miraculously managed to keep hold of during the crossing, and started up the white marble slope. The hallucinations continued, though with somewhat diminished impact, and became more precise and lucid though less intrusive as they went. The sense of oppression diminished, but now Rikard could actually see the dark empty plain on which the cones stood, see the dark and greasy sky overhead, with dim auroras to the north and south.
They got to the flat top of the stub without finding a way in. The Tathas effects were further diminished as they moved away from the outer edge of the cone top, so that the overcast sky became visible, the light was no longer painful, just unpleasant, and they could now bear each other's company. But the rubble fallen from the destroyed upper levels had blocked off any entrances that might have been exposed.
Beyond this stub they could see now that there were four other cone stubs, of varying heights. But as they looked around, and regained some control of their thoughts, they finally came to the conclusion that they were standing either on the base of a small cone, or were near the top of a large cone that had been deeply buried. The top of the stub was not that big around, but the other stubs were quite a way off, and if the remains on Dannon's Keep were any example, the cone bases should have been quite close together, so the latter explanation seemed more likely. If that were true, they might yet be in luck.
Where they stood, at the center of the stub top, the cone looked like slightly porous rock with striations of sedimentary layering. True marble decomposes into powder and blows or washes away, but this stuff, whatever it was originally, turned into marble, or what looked like it, though even it had broken down a lot over the millennia.
Though the surface was covered with rubble, they knew what to look for and could see where chambers and passages had been exposed and filled in. It looked like the effects of volcanic gases in lava, or water erosion through limestone, which was more accurate. Droagn, with his Prime, could not feel through the depth of rubble to empty chambers below. If they hadn't known better, they wouldn't look any further here. There was no hint that this place was in the least artificial. And there was no way to go in.
Having been shielded from the Tathas effect for a while, it was doubly unpleasant when they had to go back down to where they had left the two small floater carts. But that was what they had to do, if they were going to try to find a way in through the side wall. At least this close to the cone the detritus on the ground kept the hallucinations from being overwhelming.
They looked for signs that the outer shell had broken off, and found irregularities, now grossly weathered, that indicated that that had indeed happened. One hollow looked like it might have been a chamber long exposed to the elements, though there were no signs of the colored markings they had seen in the cone on Dannon's Keep. Still, from what they remembered of that place, they guessed as to where a door might be, took excavation tools from their floater carts, and started to work.
The material was brittle, and it wasn't long before they broke through. It was not a doorway, but they now had access to an inner corridor. They gathered up their equipment and went in.
The Tathas effect was much diminished as they went around the outer shell of the cone, so that they were comforted by the closeness of the walls, were not discomfited if they used only minimum lights, and could bear to be within a meter or so of each other. There was none of the dark landscape sensation.
The corridor they were in looked much like the outer shell of the cone on Dannon's Keep, with only the faintest trace of colored markings; As far as they could tell they were indeed high rather than low. They looked for a way down but didn't immediately find one. When they came to the third door leading inward they opened it and as they passed through the Tathas effects disappeared completely.
From then on their descent was much the same as it had been on Dannon's Keep, except that, this cone being better preserved, the walls were more luminous, the color codings more easily seen—and there were more artifacts. The objects were incomprehensible, such as the metal remains of a strange vehicle, a low platform with two large wheels, one on either side, and smaller wheels on gimbals, one each at front and back, with a rusted pile that might have once been an engine, and trails of rust where a drive chain might have been. Or a flat box with several arching rows of push buttons, mostly white but some red or black or green and what looked like grills at the back. Or an arching metal rod rising from a hexagonal base of black to an inverted cone of white in the apex of which was some kind of electrical connection. Mostly they left the things alone.
They kept on, going deeper and ever more inward, until at last they found a section of passage that seemed more like the museum quality surface, semitranslucent and almost damp, and found another door inward. But this one was marked with a diagonal yellow smear behind the two shades of blue and one of thin black.
"Now this is intriguing," Rikard said. "Let's go in here."
"Sounds good to me," Grayshard said, and Droagn pulled out a long pry bar from one of the carts.
He put the working end against the seam, pushed, chipped out tiny pieces of the shell-like material, levered back, and the door popped open. And beyond it were flashing lights and sirens.
3
Droagn jerked back and dropped the prybar, barely missing Grayshard. And if Rikard's camera hadn't been helmeted to his head, it would surely have fallen.
They all drew their guns, though Rikard managed to keep them out of the camera's view, but after a moment, as nothing e
lse happened and the slanting corridor beyond the doorway remained empty, they put away their weapons and went through.
Grayshard found a colored patch adjacent to the doorjamb and stroked it with his gloved hand. The siren suddenly cut off, and the lights in the ceiling stopped flashing and now burned steadily, slightly violet.
"They must have had a fantastic power system," Droagn said. He lifted himself up on his coils till he could just touch the light in the ceiling. "No batteries I know of could last as long as this place has been abandoned."
"And even if they could," Grayshard said, "think about the switch I just triggered. No moving parts. And still it functions, after two million years."
"I can't understand," Rikard said, "how people who could produce something like this place could have just been forgotten."
"Whoever they were, they were proteges of the Lambeza. And yet I've never heard anything about them, not even hints."
"Nor has anybody else," Rikard said. "I've run index checks and subject searches wherever I could, looking for just this kind of thing."
"It's the power supplies that intrigue me," Grayshard said. "How many instances of truly superior lost technology do you run across?"
"Not that many," Rikard agreed. "And what we do find is usually inapplicable to us. Like Droagn's Prime. But if we can learn how these people made such long-lasting switches and power supplies, the whole Federation will benefit."
"Exactly my point," Grayshard said. "And if I were to take such knowledge back to my people, I'd be not only rich but forgiven."
They descended the corridor until it teed into a circumferential one, and then they proceeded downward and inward, through chambers now better preserved, and still lit, though here and there the lamps had failed. Rikard recorded everything as they passed from room to hallway, past alcove and side chamber, but they didn't pause to examine the numerous items still remaining, even though here and there were some objects made of more perishable materials. They only paused when they came to those doors marked with the yellow smear, and then only to see if they could learn how to disable the alarms before opening them. They did not.