by perpetrator
The asteroid, now a three sided pyramid coated with silver ablative, descended on negative-gravity beams from the cloudless purple sky above trees that looked remarkably like feather dusters. It landed next to a native city near the foot of the north polar mountain, crushing a square mile or so of this lacy forest beneath its base.
The towers of this city were thin stalks in the low gravity, wider at the peak than at the base, like trumpets standing on their mouths. At ground level were domes and spirals. All the cobblestone streets were curves. The doors and windows were tall and thin, as if meant for a race of wraith-thin giants.
Other than some architectural oddities, it might have been a city of Earth. An airport held craft of many fanciful designs, triplanes, ornithopters, and helicopters woven of silk and gossamer. There was a spaceport with a monorail launch-catapult. There was a power plant, with the characteristic cooling dome betokening atomic power.
Lady Luna cautiously sealed her breathing hood before exiting the airlock.
Lord Pluto was more cautious. He surrounded his armor with several defensive fields and energy shells, and vanished from their sight.
Aeneas was confident he could not be harmed by any combination of gasses, or biological or chemical agents. He wore a purple-hemmed white tunic and white sandals.
An energy ramp reached from the airlock to an oval fern-garden, intersected by canals, in the center of the city. Down the two walked.
Above the doorway of every building were hanging one or two or a dozen yard-wide globes of material whose surfaces were opaque to Aeneas’ instruments. These did not seem to be lights or weapons or energy supplies. Perhaps decoration?
The walls were likewise impenetrable, but clearly the native eyes could pierce their substance, because their windows were made of it also.
It was for this reason they had landed and drawn close. Lord Pluto’s power could not be broadcast over large distances. Aeneas said, “Lord Pluto, I assume you are still within earshot?”
He was. Suddenly the walls became clear as glass. All the buildings and towers were empty of any living thing. The gear and artifacts of the native peoples were all folded or stowed neatly, with no signs of panic or haste.
“That is eerie,” said Aeneas. “I’ve just noticed how quiet it is.”
Luna said, “No insects. No songbirds. My instruments detect no bacteria.”
The yard-wide globes hanging, either singly or in clusters, before the doors, now turned transparent as well. They revealed their contents. Lady Luna screamed in shock.
They were filled with corpses. Some held one. Some held many. They were long limbed and long-necked men, all crushed or compacted together. All seemed to be of the same race, but the mangled conditions of the bodies made it hard to tell. All were in postures of frenzy, as if dying in mid-struggle, in torment.
Aeneas, meanwhile, bent over and touched one of the ferns of the thick garden in which they stood. The lacy leaves seemed oddly pale and motionless. The plant stirred and chimed like glass at his touch, and his hand went numb.
“These plants are undead,” he said in a voice of quiet horror to Lady Luna.
The whole garden rippled as the lifeless leaves unfolded, spread, and turned toward them hungrily.
16. The Great Eye of Zeta Herculis
Lord Pluto’s voice issued from a point in midair. “I have rendered us invisible to the life-absorbing plants. They are still a danger should you touch them: step on no grassblade, let no leaf brush you.”
In the distance was the north polar mountain whose base was hidden behind the too-near horizon. It rose into the purple sky like a column, made ghostly by distance. Its peak had the crisp clarity and sharp shadows of an object in hard vacuum, and the crown had the typical antennae and dishes of an astronomical observatory.
Aeneas said, “Let’s go there. We can use the equipment to search for any living worlds in this system, or to discover our precise location, which I need before I can calculate a warp-path.”
A kinetic ray placed a contortion pearl on the peak. Through the pearl a mass of molecular engineering microbes was contorted up, as well as larger selfaware tools and servile minds. The servominds built and pressurized a receiver atrium fit for human life. The molecular engineering mass flooded through the observatory, seeped and pried into alien mechanisms, and began the classification and analysis process.
Aeneas, Lady Luna, and the unseen Lord Pluto contorted to the mountain top, watching the servominds, and making any decisions that needed ingenuity.
While they waited, Aeneas stood on the balcony and beheld the alien world underfoot. With his amplified vision, he saw flying creatures that looked like autogiro-winged butterflies, but they were pale as ice and radiating death-energy. He also saw myriad wormlike things floating on the surface of the canals, also pallid unlife. And, elsewhere, a swarm of locust-winged things hung on the wind like a silent dust storm over a vast but pale grassland.
All were Necroforms. All were vampires.
Aeneas could not restore feeling and motion to his hand. All the molecules of the dead cells were present, and in their proper places, but nothing was moving. Aeneas severed his wrist with an energy beam and grew a new hand from raw totipotent cell masses.
The servominds reported: The alien thinking machines were not actually machines, but a set of undead microbes, connected by thought-energy threads in a decentralized network, and held in a blood-red liquid substance that radiated death-energy. This liquid ran through every instrument in the observatory and controlled them.
Sir, milord, and milady, sent the servominds: Spaceman’s fog contains microscopic, positive life. This can be fed into the fluid containing negative life. This will power it, and allow the instruments to activate. To proceed, please give the order.
Aeneas studied the fluid using his many senses, warping space to bring him remote information or to Doppler-shift unseen frequencies into view. A spike of neutronium reached from the peak along the axis of this super-stratospheric mountain to the long dead core of the planet. Rivers of this vampire microbe fluid flowed up and down this spike, and through the spherical sea at the world’s core, and up fountains like vertical rivers. These waters circulated through vents and chimneys in the crust to the floor of the southern polar ocean.
Aeneas said, “This planet is all vampires. Their cells are dispersed throughout the hydrosphere, and are carried by the canal system to every part of the globe. I am not sure what the canals are for...”
Lady Luna said, “The canals form their computing network. The natives here have rigorously organized their subconscious minds, their dreams, to carry out both simple and complex mathematical computations. The unconscious minds of everything on the planet are connected to this worldwide liquid mind. It acts something like our signet rings, to carry out routine thought operations.”
Lord Pluto’s voice spoke out of nowhere, “Let me inspect the astronomical machinery. If I can hide us from any observer, even one inside the liquid mind used to control this facility, I will activate the instruments. Agreed?”
Aeneas said, “If you can mask us, yes.”
Lady Luna said, “I will ask my ring to help yours. Since the unconscious minds here are also organized into one system that commands the waking thoughts of the vampires, it should be quite easy for you. But I must also scan the machines from closer range.”
Inside they went. Any instruments based on the same principles of engineering as their earthly counterparts could be understood. Other objects were incomprehensible.
The ceilings and doors were tall and thin, as if built for men on stilts, but Lady Luna could squeeze through them by turning sideways. Aeneas tossed a pearl through any door he could not negotiate, and contorted through.
There were neither ladders nor ramps, merely trapdoors in the ceilings. In the low gravity, it was no more effort to leap thirty feet straight up than to step up a stair.
A trio of alien corpses were arranged on benches in a cham
ber filled with mirrors. This race differed markedly in shape from the corpses stuffed into glass spheres outside. Perhaps it was a caste or class difference. They were shaped like five-legged centaurs, if centaurs were proportioned like giraffes. The extra leg was designed for prodigious leaps in the low gravity. Their arms and fingers were long and elegant, with more joints than human arms. Their faces were narrow and strong, with philosopher’s brows, features expressive even in repose, sensitive lips and nostrils.
A set of carefully arranged glass wands held the dead bodies upright, limbs poised gracefully.
The floor was covered with markings of a writing system. Aeneas addressed the servominds. “Can you translate it?”
Not at the moment, sir. We have as yet encountered insufficient correlatives. We can translate their engineering manuals, and scientific textbooks, because we can correlate any patterns of possible symbols to various possible models of the universe. The writings here have an emotional or religious value for which there is no common ground.
But Lady Luna said, “I can read it. My ring can correlate these shapes with archetypes and symbols encountered in the local dream-spectrum, which is active. I’ve been recording continuously.”
Aeneas said, “Someone is sleeping on this world?”
“The whole solar system is one nightmare.”
“So what does it say?”
“This is a suicide pact: these three are servants who, at the last, refused to obey the order to turn themselves into vampires, but who did not wish to die by being fed to vampires. It is a set of poems or musical stanzas praising the goodness of their life they are leaving behind, sunlight and wind and scented ferns, and those stanzas praise the greatness of the master-race who created them, who no longer has need of them.”
Aeneas said, “For what reason? Does it say?”
She shook her head. “There is a statement that the master-race was created by an even higher master-race, overlords. The overlords ordered the masters to commit racial suicide. The servant race here was supposed to follow their masters out of love. Except suicide is the wrong word. What is it called when one surrenders life, not into death, but into anti-life?”
Lord Pluto’s voice came out of midair. “The word you seek is damnation. These three killed themselves to find escape.”
Lady Luna said sadly, “I do not think they escaped damnation. These sections written here are praises of the wisdom and justice of their masters, and expressions of their own grief and misery for not having the virtue to follow them into the endless pain and horror of a zombie existence. Any being who loves and praises his own tormentor is damned!”
Aeneas said, “Any being whose creator made him see evil as good and good as evil would utter such praises. Any creator making slaves to serve him, not children to inherit all the good he can bestow, will create blind creatures.”
Lady Luna muttered, “Horrible!”
That annoyed Aeneas. “Oh? Is our family so much better? The Moon Maidens you have made — is it their fate to serve you forever?”
She raised her hand and slapped him sharply on the cheek. He raised one eyebrow and smiled a crooked smile with half his mouth. “Hit the bull’s-eye, did I?”
Lady Luna said in a husky voice, “We are nothing like them! Nothing like this!”
At that moment, the alien machinery stirred into life. Aeneas could see ultraviolet and microwave-colored torches ignite, and hear sonar holograms being projected. Fluid containing undead microbes rushed through tubes and capillaries webbing the alien instruments.
Lord Pluto’s voice spoke. “We remain unseen. For safety’s sake, let us return to Talos, and have the servominds report there.”
A mental command sent to their contortion pearls returned them to the pyramid.
The suns were examined.
Aeneas said, “As it turns out, there is a cloud of material between here and Sol, absorbing certain spectrographic lines, messing up human almanacs of this star’s fingerprint. We are at Ruticulus, also called Zeta Herculis.”
Lady Luna said, “Am I supposed to recognize that name?”
Aeneas said, “No, but you are supposed to be glad I do. Sol can be reached in four warpjumps taking a day and a half each. The only question is fuel: I cannot refuel in deep space. I need to be in a gravity well.”
The other planets of the Ruticulus star system were examined. No living things were present anywhere. Beneath their layers of frozen atmosphere, all the unlife was quiet, motionless, torpid. The industrial complexes were still, materials packed, the space vessels grounded and partly dismantled.
Some of the worlds circling the warmer second sun had plantlife, insects, animals. From pole to pole, all were undead.
Through her ring, Lady Luna sent, “I assume the vampires consumed animals, bugs, grass, and viruses. But why did they preserve no food supply? Why not leave a seedcorn-stock of living beings alive to reproduce?”
She had ornamented her quarters with the pools and airborne orchids of her Moon. She luxuriated in a pond of breathable fluid. Around her, the deck was grass. Fawns grazed and puppies sported.
Lord Pluto sat on an iron chair in his unadorned chamber. “The whole star system is in mothballs. The glass spheres hung on every house were feeding troughs. The living were fed to the undead while the undead packed. Then the undead buried the undead.”
Lady Luna said, “The buried populations are in endless pain, hungering and famished. Who would do such a thing?”
Lord Pluto said, “I have necroforms on Pluto. They can be stored in compact spaces, and need no life support. I do not kill them, lest their memories and skills be lost.”
Lady Luna shivered, despite her warm pool.
Aeneas was pacing. Medical apparatus hung from the ceiling of his quarters, and vats and cells containing growths from the walls. His rib cage hung open, and he was idly fiddling and tinkering with his internal organs as he walked, dripping.
“The problem is that I do not know how to power the warpcore in a way Lord Pluto can hide. But what if all the space vampires stay asleep? Are there any overlords in this system at all? Is anyone looking for us?”
Just then, one of the moons of this world eclipsed the distant orange sun. The near one, the yellow subgiant, was below the horizon.
The third sun, a dark body, was visible in the rays of the other two suns. It was an orb of black, larger than a gas giant, a dwarf-sized neutron star that never ignited. It was hanging a degree beyond the yellow subgiant, as the season when this planet was in opposition was ending.
The neutron star object rotated, and brought into view its other hemisphere. Here was a huge eye, immense beyond measure, with iris and pupil. The eyelashes were longer than space elevators. A layer of atmosphere many miles thick was floating above its sclera. The storm systems, larger than the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, were as tiny to this eye as the microscopic flotsam found in the moist surface of a human eye.
Moons and asteroids would have been dust specks in those eyelashes. The lids narrowed as the eye-shaped artifact squinted, peering.
Luna spoke in a hushed, trembling voice. “I can see into its dreams. It is a weapon designed to consume whole star systems across interstellar distances. Its work is done. All worlds in the galaxy are dead. It is looking for life ... it hungers ... it knows we are here!”
17. Graveyard World
The neutron star eyeball stared down at the world where the pyramid of Talos had landed. The astronomical observatory went dark, and all communication with the servominds there ceased.
Lord Pluto was sitting on his iron chair in his barren quarters. “It cannot see us.”
Lady Luna was half submerged in a floral pool in her quarters. Over her ring, she answered, “Not us, personally. I can see in its thought that it is aware of life energy present in the liquid mind of this inner planet. You said you could keep us hidden from any observers!”
Lord Pluto said calmly, “Evidently an overestimation. It was more difficu
lt than expected to make thoughts inside a mental network invisible to each other. I am not familiar with the nuances of dream-frequency thought-transfer, as this is your specialty, Lady Luna. Again, we see the disadvantage of the compartmentalization of specialties Lord Tellus imposed on the Imperial Family.”
Aeneas was pacing in his quarters, scowling. “Can you mask the detectable side effects if I erect a gravity differential turbine to power the warpcore?”
Lord Pluto mused, “Assume them familiar with Forerunner technology, Aeneas. From what distance could you detect such a thing?”
“About half a lightyear. Three trillion miles.”
Lord Pluto said, “I can influence a volume of about half a mile diameter.”
Aeneas grunted glumly. “My warpcore is the mass of Halley’s Comet. My ability to warp space is limited by that mass. The longest safe warp I can make is ten to fifteen lightyears, which is nothing on a galactic scale. It is three lightyears from Zeta Herculis to HIP 82003, from there eleven lightyears to GJ 3959, from there sixteen lightyears to Bernard’s Star and then five lightyears to Sol. That includes two tesseract segment warps I cannot promise will be stable or safe. So we are not returning home without native help.”
Lady Luna said, “But you got us here!”
Aeneas said, “It was a blind, uncontrolled jump, and we were lucky. Longer and unsafer jumps I can make. Let’s not.”
Lady Luna said, “Can you add mass to your singularity?” She smiled, and let her ring show the smile to him. “Something as large as a neutron star?”
Aeneas said, “Easily. If a warpcore were built at the center of the neutron star, I need not even erect any armature rings around it to control the warp vectors. I could slave the Great Eye warpcore to mine by a resonance effect. The interior of a rotating Kerr singularity does not know or care where it is in time or space. The hard part is getting the Great Eye to cooperate — it is only a death-energy powered interstellar range weapon able to destroy all the planets of a star system in one shot, after all. Are you saying you can — without killing us! — mesmerize it? You are a tougher little girl than you look.”