by Dan Donoghue
Wolf's hunger gave him not the leisure to stand marvelling at the beauty of nature, however. So, waiting only to search the plain for signs of the bird people, and finding none, to his further puzzlement, he hurried down the side of the ridge, and entered the area. Though he tested often, he found no trace of the power. This paradise seemed not to have even that serpent.
It took him only a few minutes to kill a couple of animals, and not much more time to singe them into a state of edibility with the blaster. Even with two of their number freshly killed, the animals seemed unafraid, and took no great trouble to move from his path. It seemed that the bird people did not hunt here, and there were no signs of kerries. He covered most of the plain with a mind sweep. There still appeared to be no kerries. With food so plentiful, their absence was hard to understand.
On the edge of the lake, where the clear water showed no lurking sting-fish, he bathed his feet, and washed his body and clothes. Then he fashioned a pair of moccasins from the skins of the animals, and the strong sinews of the back legs. When that was done, he rested in the cool shade of a giant tree that overhung the water, and waited until the strength had flowed back into his body.
In the afternoon he killed again, and this time cooked the meat more slowly over a bed of coals. Many of the fruits that hung ripe looked and smelt enticing, but none resembled any he had known on Earth or at Cort's holding, and the risk was too great. The area seemed too benign. It showed not the tooth and claw of nature.
As the sun approached the western hills, Wolf set about making a secure sleeping place with more than his usual caution. Yet, test the area as he might, he could detect no sinister sensation, not even as the sun sank, and the twilight heralded the chief time of hunting of the nocturnal animals. Small things preyed on smaller things, Death reaped his nightly harvest, but no bird man sought his evening meal, and no kerries stalked the darkening shadows.
Wolf lay long into the night, gazing at the stars, and savouring the peace, and the goodness of life. He thought a little of his people on Earth, and recalled the companions of his youth, but so much had happened that their faces had become blurred in his memory, and it seemed many years since he had been torn away from them. Only the face of Leeli Pa'Lar remained clear to him as he had seen her first, across the firelight, and the rhythmic bobbing of dancing heads. Little had it in common with the ravaged features of the creature he had blasted into oblivion, because he could no longer bear to read her agony. Why had she come? He asked the question of the stars in their long, slow drift across the heavens, of the placid waters of the lake that threw their pale light back at them, and of the hills darkly hidden in the night. There was no answer. He felt very small in the vast scheme of life. He slept.
He awoke to the growing light, and the first stirring of animals about him. Cautiously he swept the area. Nothing threatened. The air was cool and sweet with dew, and he might have been back home, except there were no birds. The trees were sadly silent. If he could find, and come to terms with, these people who had the bones of birds, and lived like wombats, and if he could get them to turn off the deadly power, then would he choose this as his land, and, with the money, he would import birds, and bring joy to the morning trees.
He rose, glad to feel the strength returned to his body, and the peace to his mind. Truly, the absence of pain is a pleasure. He breakfasted on the meat remaining from his evening meal, and went down to the lake to drink. There was life in the waters, but he could not locate any sting-fish, though the water was very deep, and he could not sweep it all. He wondered if this water could be free of even that menace.
Still, there was work to be done. With a last look at the beauty of the lake, and the hills, glowing in the sunrise, he turned once more to the problem of the power.
At the foot of the hills, he opened his mind and swept about. There seemed to be no door, or tunnel. He tried to force his awareness into the hills themselves, and penetrated only a couple of centimetres, and came up against something that was slick, and hard, and impenetrable. It was like a surface that followed the contours of the hills, but was without crack or break of any kind. Baffled, he moved along the side of the hill. Always it was there. He had never experienced anything like it. For almost two hours he worked along the base of the hills where the verdant growth of the plain met the arid rock, while the sun climbed swiftly into a cloudless sky, and the heat began to flow up from the ground. He came to a place where a great rock jutted out of the side of the hill forming a wall about ten metres high. He was almost past it when a strangeness in the ground caught his attention. It seemed to be flatter, and depressed slightly, and the grass was stunted. He turned his back to the rock, and followed the carpet of stunted grass with his eye. It ran straight to a great square of equally stunted grass and bare rock.
He followed it. Where the rock was bare, he studied it carefully. It was fitted pavement. The rocks were of slightly differing types, and, where they joined, faint fusion lines could be seen. The builders had not used any sort of mortar. They had been in control of energy so powerful as to be able to fuse the rocks together. As far as he knew only nuclear power could create such heats.
Over the years, soil had built up on the pavement, and grass had taken root. When he stood again, the function of the square became obvious. Space craft had lifted from there, and the path led back to what? An underground city? And the hills? They were not hills, but the cleverly disguised roofs of a hidden place. With that knowledge, he could see the hills as unnatural. This plain was merely part of the much greater plain he had crossed, and the construction had been built across its narrowest part so that the artificial hills linked in with the true ones.
So the birdpeople hid from eyes aloft. That was clear, but there were no eyes up there now, so why was the grass untrodden, the fruit unpicked, the lake and the plain deserted? No space ship had lifted from that square in untold years. If the birdmen still lived in their secret lair, why did they no longer venture forth? Why had men not found any in two hundred years of exploration? Why did they drag sensitives to their deaths, yet lifted no hand against the ordinary man here, while they killed him on Death Island. Nothing seemed logical, and nothing in his own experience, and in those of all the minds he had read on the Star-bird, could give pattern or sense to it.
Back at the rock wall, he worried at the surface with his mind. The edges of great doors became visible to him, but no means of opening them, until he happened to lift his awareness higher, and on top of the rock, he found an absence in the impenetrable layer.
He clambered up, and there, beyond the broad flat surface of the top of the rock, and hidden from above by a smaller outcrop, was the shadowed mouth of a cave. No power blasted down this one to besiege his mind. Inside was a door, hardly disguised, which surrendered the secret of its catch easily to his mind. It opened smoothly, and, with his mind sweeping forward, he walked through onto a broad balcony, and looked over a low rail down upon the broad streets of a city.
It was well lit. The rocks above were not true rocks, but a cunning substitute that were transparent to light in one direction. Sunlight streamed in through them as through glass, and only patches of soil that supported the few trees and clumps of grass, cast shade. But it was not the light that caught, and held Wolf's attention. It was the robots, and the skeletons through which they moved. He had found the birdmen, and the reason they lay hidden. They were all skeletons.
Skeletons, thousands of them. They littered the streets, the steps, the doorways of buildings, and even projected from the very walls themselves. Skeletons of the people of the cellar of the plains, but not for these the death in lasting love. These had died in hate, some still locked in combat as they had fallen in some terrible battle of long ago. Skeletons of kerries, lined in rows before the bones of their masters. Half grown skeletons of children, some missing heads, and skulls missing bodies. Bones, a great, riven graveyard of bones, and in, and around them, the timeless robots chuckled, sweeping dust from all
except the bones, polishing, testing, and repairing weapons, then returning them to the spectral fingers of their owners, cleaning blades, and inserting them carefully back between the broken ribs of the dead.
As though caught in the meshes of a macabre dream, Wolf stared, and could not move. A robot worked up the stairs, and shuffled towards him, sucking dust from the floor. It reached him, and worked around him coming to within a hair's breadth of his feet, but it did not touch him, and continued on its way, apparently unperturbed that a stranger had entered where only the dead had lain for countless years.
At last he descended the stairs, and began to pick his way through the bones. Here was none of the staleness of long night. Here the air was fresh and clean, and everything shone with a cleanness that belied the dusty dead.
Gradually the differences in the two sides of the conflict became clear. The skulls of one lot wore strange metallic caps that had wires leading down to a little pack that had been attached to a belt about their waists, though the belts had not stood the erosion of time. They had used a short rifle-like weapon with a bulbous end, and a long-bladed knife. The others wore no caps, and had fought with small square ended hand weapons whose purpose was not readily apparent, the kerries, and a flame-thrower-like weapon that was probably some sort of laser.
Apparently, the buildings had been damaged, but had been carefully repaired by the ever industrious robots, though they had not disturbed the dead. Where the bodies had lain across broken walls, they had carefully built about them, so that the lower parts of the walls were pocked with holes through which the skeletons dangled, or under which they lay in crumbled heaps.
Some buildings reached to the valleys of the roof some hundred or so metres above, forming great pillars. Most, however, rose only ten or twelve stories so that there were great areas of open space above them, bright with sunlight, so that there was no sense of being shut in, or even underground.
Wolf had descended to one side of a great arched tunnel that led to the main gates. Across a broad open square, and facing the gates was an imposing building, with wide steps, and tall columns carved in the form of giant animals the like of which Wolf had never seen.
Here the battle had been bitterly fought, and the area in front of the steps was so thick with bones that Wolf was forced to tread carefully between them. Slowly, still awed by the multitude of the dead, and oppressed by a sense of trespass, and overwhelmed by the silent grandeur of the building, he climbed the stairs, and entered the wide doors.
The ground floor, or what appeared to be most of it, was something like a reception area, a vast, almost empty room, where robots waited patiently in little enclosures. The one nearest the door came alive with a number of little clicks, and swung towards him as he entered. An appendage was presented to him which was a little square surface with a claw above it, and the thing obviously expected him to place something on it. He could not oblige, so he had a brief look round.
The room was high ceilinged, bright, and clean, but only sparsely furnished with a number of narrow, uncomfortable looking benches which were probably the equivalent of chairs, and it was coloured a uniform blue-grey. Like the square outside, it was functional, and solid, but grim. To add to the gloom, one of the benches supported half a skeleton whose other half had disappeared. It had either been cut in half during the battle, or the top half had tumbled to the floor, and the robots had cleaned it up, possibly not recognising a new pile of bones as those of their masters.
Wolf stepped round the robot. It made no attempt to stop him, but moved over to a small box in its enclosure, plugged into it, and remained so for a few seconds. Then it unplugged itself, and ignored him. Wolf had a sudden unhappy vision of a report going in of an alien without proper identification papers trying to make an illegal entry, and of the armed robots who might act in the capacity of police.
He hurriedly left the building. As he walked out, the robot clicked itself into neutrality, perhaps to wait for another couple of thousand years for someone to come, and put something on its little square plate.
There were no armed robots bearing down upon the building so Wolf paused on the steps. Streets radiated out from the square, seeming to run far into the distance. Wolf chose one at random. The next building was obviously the equivalent of a shop. There was another series of clicks as he entered, and another robot came alive in a similar little enclosure, and once more he was politely presented with plate and claw. The building was huge, as large as anything in the memories of the people of the Star-bird, and packed full. Ranged in shelves were a multitude of articles, all shining new, and neatly displayed, and Wolf's curiosity burned within him, but he hesitated to touch anything. He had nothing to offer in payment, if payment was required, and he had already been reported. He did not want to end up in the equivalent of jail, and have to wait for some long dead judge to come and try him. Reluctantly he turned to leave.
Back in the street, he decided to make directly for the source of power, and to try to shut it off. With the multitude of robots, he could see no way to destroy the machine. It would need a blast-bomb to take out the whole complex, and that would be utter stupidity. Here was a whole culture of learning. Somewhere there must be a storehouse of knowledge that would put High America in advance of Earth for centuries, and the city must hold enormous wealth. Given time, he could trace the circuits of the robots and learn how to control them. That in itself would bring wealth untold.
Wolf found it a little difficult to orient himself in the geometric pattern of streets, but he picked what he thought to be the approximate direction, and set off. After a little, he left the business area of the city, and entered a residential one. About him were tall buildings with great glass-like windows, and interconnecting walkways at many levels above him. Here the carnage of battle was far greater. In places the skeletons were rolled in great tangled heaps, and they were not those of armed males, but of slighter females and young. Only a few of the capped enemy had died in the streets, but many thousands of the citizens. The guardians must have been overcome, and there must have followed a slaughter on a scale that surpassed even the great killings of Earth.
Drawn by a curiosity that got the better of him, Wolf entered one of the larger houses, and found himself in what must have been a communal living area. The polished floor was patterned with small clear tiles below which some substance changed colours so that scenes of hills and mountains, plains and seas, rippled across it. But what caught Wolf's attention was the opposite wall where a great clear square slowly took colour and form, and he found himself staring at one of the birdpeople. The face was small and narrow with great round eyes, a tiny mouth, no visible nose, but a large bulging forehead, and enormous cranium encircled with small pulsing depressions.
For a tense moment he thought the great stern eyes were alive, and seeing him, but then the colours faded, the face lost form, and melted away. Moments later colours came again, and another face formed, stared out at the room for its allotted time, then smoothed away. Four more faces, Wolf watched. He was vaguely disappointed. From his encounter with the skeletons in the cellar, he had built an image in his imagination of faces somehow more noble. He could detect no great nobility in the features that stared from the wall, rather a sort of fleshy cruelty.
Eventually Wolf turned away from the pictures, and surveyed the rest of the room. Everywhere there was colour and movement, softness, and the sense of leisure and luxury, so much in contrast to the building he had entered first. But here, too, lay the dead, and the dead oppressed him. An echo of their suffering seemed to hang over the bones, their spirits seemed to follow him with a thousand tormented eyes, and the robots, like some great mockery, chuckled blindlessly around, unaware of the tragedy that had gone on about them, had done so for centuries. Wolf left the house. He began to walk quicker and quicker, and then to trot, and lastly to run.
Suddenly he was out of the residential area, and into one of buildings that rose with featureless fronts to the
high roof. Massive buildings these, with no windows above the wide doors, and the streets were gloomy canyons whose smooth sides loomed threateningly. Few robots moved here. Few bodies lay. There was a silence here, the silence of a held breath. Even in the moccasins, Wolf's footfalls sounded mutedly, so he no longer ran, but crept.
At intervals he passed side streets. Down every one, the buildings stretched away into points of darkness. All had the large doors, and all were fronted with low platforms. They were some kind of storage buildings—warehouses. Wolf stepped up onto one of the platforms and approached the door. There appeared to be no catch. He caught hold of a handle and the door slid smoothly and silently open. None of the doors inside the city had locks. Apparently the bird people feared no thieves. Inside, as far along as the eye could see, and as high as the roof, were great racks of sheet metal of some kind. He went closer. It was aluminium, or some alloy of it. The next contained copper. Tons on tons of it. The next two contained metals he could not name, but the third held silver, a massive fortune of it. With his mind awed by riches, Wolf slid open the next door, and pulled up sharply. It contained hides, thousands and thousands of hides, all treated somehow, all arranged in size and type, all the hides of the animal population of a country. He walked slowly down along the rows, smelling the sharp acid tang.
At first they were all of large animals that he could not name. Then there were some kerries, great miles of the bird people, and, down the end, a stack of cattle hides, some horses, dogs, a few goats, and a pathetic little pile of human skins. He counted twenty and estimated that there were about two hundred, men, women, and children, beautifully soft and supple, with shining hair, and gleaming nails. The skins of adults were bad enough to view, but those of children. Wolf shuddered. He felt horror, then anger, and at last a great sadness. He could hardly blame the bird people for the killing of humans. They had been long dead themselves before their terrible machine had sent its ghastly caress into the minds of these, but what sort of people would make such a machine, and turn it on their own kind. There were skins of children of the bird people also.