Viking

by Daniel Hardman

  No vehicles.

  No barracks.

  No crew.

  Just rock-strewn beach and distant, faceless greenery. And the mute, indifferent beacon.

  The surge of hope that had powered his climb vanished as quickly as it came. Rafa laid his head against the rock and closed his eyes tightly to suppress the tears. And he prayed again, pleading for some escape from bleak despair.

  But he couldn’t concentrate on inner conflicts for long, because the mental image of the beacon kept intruding. There was a strangeness about it that brought turbulent questions to his mind. Why had the crew taken time to build such a structure—and when? Why had he never been aware of such a task?

  He opened his eyes again and stared. Definitely odd. Unlike the ugly practicality that characterized most mission equipment, the lines of the beacon were sleek and graceful. Biting back a groan, he hauled himself onto the gritty shelf of stone atop the bluff and crawled painfully forward, his forehead wrinkled in puzzlement. As he approached, the scimitar shadow of the beacon swallowed his tousled hair and sagging shoulders, and momentarily eased the sting of sun-reddened skin on his cheekbones and nose.

  He was within reach of the curving support legs, still blinking to adjust his eyes to the merciful softness of shadow against overbright sky, when he saw lines of delicate script standing out on the glassy metal.

  He stopped crawling.

  He stopped breathing.

  Behind and below, an especially heavy surge of surf crashed, raining prickles of salty mist on his raw neck and ears. But he took no notice.

  The hair along the nape of his neck bristled instinctively.

  Human hands had not embossed these words.

  42

  Julie and Satler sat silently when the clip ended. It had been the most dizzying and chaotic to date, but its portent seemed obvious. They’d watched with bated breath as Rafa dashed away from the sheltering trees, weaved frantically to keep ahead of the weird balloon-like colossus, and finally flipped upside down in the grip of restraining tentacles. They’d seen ground fall away and the pulsing jaws of the alien monster approach. Then the clip ended.

  Satler looked over uncertainly. I’m sorry seemed pitifully inadequate.

  Julie met his gaze squarely, though her eyes were filled with tears.

  What to say? He’d originally called her out of a sense of guilt, not certain how she’d react. A lot of vikings had next-of-kin that couldn’t care less what happened. Having some acquaintance with Rafa, he should have known to expect better from his wife. But he’d still been surprised and impressed with her level-headed loyalty.

  And—which came as a mild shock—he’d been a bit jealous. Romance hadn’t been all that high of a priority up till now, except for one ill-fated engagement a couple years earlier. He’d had the most innocent of intentions when he set up the face-to-face meeting. But in person, Julie was charming and intelligent and attractive, and he found himself longing for the kind of relationship that she and her husband obviously shared. It was tempting, in fact, to abandon his original purpose and simply enjoy the excuse for Julie’s company.

  But he had too much respect for Julie to allow such a thing, especially now that he knew her a little better. He’d suggested checking into hotel rooms in case they were being followed—but immediately clarified that he meant two different places. And he’d been careful to remain relatively detached.

  All of which made it extremely awkward to extend a gesture of comfort, much as he wanted to.

  Lacking words, he stood and began to pace. “I guess I’ll call my hacker friend and tell him to deactivate the feed from the satellite cache,” he finally said, more gruffly than he intended.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Julie responded. “I’m not through, yet.”

  Satler looked up, surprised at the strength of her reaction. “Julie, better be realistic. You won’t find anything after that.”

  Julie sniffed. “Realism has been a lousy strategy for me up till now.”

  “I know what you mean...” began Satler.

  “I don’t think so,” she said quickly. There was no anger in her voice, just an introspective intensity. “I don’t think you do. The jury said it was reality that I’d been betrayed by a vicious, cold-blooded murderer. I believed them. My mom said it was reality that I needed to get on with my life and get a divorce. I believed her. MEEGO said Rafa died in the stampede. I believed them. That makes me 0 for 3; I’m not going to be quite so credulous anymore. Let somebody else carry the burden of proof for a change.”

  “Are you saying you think Rafa’s still alive, then?”

  “I’m saying I’ll believe otherwise when I have to, but not before. Does that seem so crazy?”

  Satler sighed heavily. “No, Julie. It doesn’t.”

  “Good. Then let’s check the rest of the clips. I noticed one that was about forty-five seconds.”

  Resolutely she turned back to the screen.

  43

  Rafa gazed at the script with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief. He was only an arm’s length away from something conceived, crafted—no doubt handled—by non-human architects! For an instant his skin crawled with dread of the unknown builders, but the feeling rapidly gave way to curiosity.

  In the decades that terrans had roamed the stars, exobiology had moved from speculation to science, but human longing for companionship found no reprieve. No cosmic flag-waving ever signaled other explorers; no habitable planet held traces of civilization. Intelligence, it seemed, was a very rare commodity. With the advent of blinker ships, SETI enthusiasts had positioned hundreds of listening posts in likely places. And after years of listening, not a single electromagnetic fingerprint had been detected. Of course, it would be millennia before exploration of the Milky Way could legitimately be considered “complete”—but science and popular opinion had gravitated to theories of evolution that predicted only remote chances for sentience in the overall scheme of things.

  Hubris.

  Hesitantly he reached out to touch the gleaming symbols. They ran in vertical lines about as wide as his thumb, each glyph standing out in clean, glowing amber against the cooler hues of chrome behind. The shapes were more complex than Latin letters, more elegant. They reminded Rafa somewhat of Chinese, though circles and curves outnumbered angular strokes.

  As brine-wrinkled fingertips brushed the ridges, several lines of text lit up. A disembodied voice spoke in a soft sing-song full of clicks and sibilants.

  Rafa recoiled as if he’d been stung. Somehow his mind had already cast the arch as an artifact—a quiescent historical footprint, like Chichén Itzá or the pyramids at Giza—rather than a living, functioning device. Now he mentally shifted gears, ruefully thinking of the sweeping apex light. If his head hadn’t been pounding so much, maybe he’d have digested its significance better.

  Well, if it had been dormant before, the construction slept no longer. It was awake to his presence. Was that dangerous? Would he momentarily be visited or attacked?

  He took a deep breath. Perhaps he had triggered a signal of some sort; perhaps the script was his contemporary rather than a relic. But it did no good to dread, and besides, even if the arch makers were listening, they couldn’t be doing it from Erisa Beta II. A local civilization would have shown up on orbital scans. It would have lit up the radio spectrum. It would have advertised itself in a hundred different ways.

  Still, the beacon was overlooked, even though it must have been here when our satellites surveyed the area, he thought. What else did they miss?

  Unconsciously Rafa shook his head. No: the arch must be an anomaly in an otherwise empty world—a marker, a banner of sorts planted on foreign soil as one large step for alien kind. Anything more obvious would have attracted attention from the beginning.

  On the other hand...

  All at once MEEGO’s strange behavior on this mission made a twisted sort of sense. Suppose there was something else—an outpost maybe, or a jungle-shrouded city�
��possibly even a ship. And it had shown up after the company’s early surveys, after initial permits had been issued... It would turn an ordinary viking mission on its ear. Never mind the minor details, the training, or the death toll. Just get ink on the documents that validate a claim to the planet, any way at any cost.

  If that was it, no wonder their priorities were out of whack.

  They’d never retain the claim, of course; sooner or later the company would have to disclose their findings, and the government would step in and appropriate everything under eminent domain. No court on Earth would let this sort of discovery stay in private hands.

  But the publicity alone would be worth millions. And who could estimate the value of an exclusive, private analysis of alien technology, before regulation and bureaucracy reared their ugly heads? How about a travel franchise? Even if claims to part of the planet were annulled, MEEGO would probably end up running the only spaceport to the hottest destination anywhere... A cutthroat capitalist could doubtless come up with a hundred other lucrative angles.

  It furnished a compelling explanation for the sudden move to the coast, even if it raised a host of new questions. What had MEEGO found to send the vikings packing?

  A wave of dizziness swept over Rafa, the combined result of fatigue, thirst, too much sun, and the insistent, gut-wrenching pain from his head, ankle and ribs. He closed his eyes wearily, curiosity sinking under a resurgent tide of physical concern, wishing that the rain from yesterday afternoon would return. He’d depleted the water bag hours ago, and without precipitation it would remain limp and useless on his belt clip.

  To make matters worse, the itch from his beetle bite was back with a vengeance, as drying water on irritated skin produced a thin film of salt. His swollen forearm was pulsing from the constriction of a once ample cuff; he slit the sleeve with his knife and blinked in disgust at the pockets of pus that ran up beyond his shoulder and onto his chest.

  The urge to scratch was overwhelming. Without thinking he began scraping with the blade of his knife, grimacing as blisters popped and dripped onto the sand. Each stroke was torture, but the pain helped mask the itch, so he kept at it until the blade was covered with blood and he could take no more.

  Stupid, he thought, as he lay back to rest. That just spread germs everywhere. And it’s going to be that much worse when you’re back in the water. But at the moment his arm felt a little better.

  As if unwilling to take a back seat, the glowing script issued a soft, insistent tone. He sat up again. Now he saw that the block of text ended—if indeed the foreshortened edge at the upper right corner was an “end”—with a patiently blinking triangle.

  A cursor of sorts. It wanted input.

  Again his skin prickled. This monument or device or whatever it was supposed to be, was far too alive, far too functional for his comfort.

  He began to crawl away. Suddenly the prospect of wrenching with gritted teeth through salty waves seemed almost inviting. Anything to put distance between him and the disturbing arch. The sun would be down in another couple hours. If he pushed, he might make two kilometers by dark. Rafa’s knees scuffled across the sandy rock, the toe of his damaged foot lifted to avoid further injury.

  After three or four meters, he felt a growing pressure on his head and shoulders, thrusting back toward the center of the metallic parabola. The air at the points of greatest resistance shimmered like heat waves over sun-baked tarmac. Rafa strained ahead, panic rising.

  The counter-force stiffened.

  Five meters. He clawed and groaned and dug with his good foot in a sprinter’s stance. Now the forward barrier was nearly as unyielding as a brick wall. Visions of hapless, frantic animals caught in a trap crowded into his mind. He rotated onto his back, still fighting, and pushed with bunched shoulders to take the strain off his neck.

  It was no use. Every centimeter became exponentially tougher than the last, and the edge of the bluff still tantalized half a dozen meters away. He sagged. The inanimate, invisible ram slid him back a few centimeters, until friction and repulsion achieved equilibrium.

  He retreated a couple meters and could sense no impulse toward the arch. A graduated force field? Reaching outward, his hand encountered the beginnings of opposition at about the same place as before. At least his prison wasn’t constricting.

  The cursor still pulsed steadily.

  Too worn and pessimistic to crawl the perimeter of the field, Rafa picked up small stones and hurled them in various directions. No matter which angle he chose, the projectiles lost forward momentum as if slowed by an unseen hand, and dropped back to the sandy rock with an apologetic clatter. The boundary seemed to follow a constant radius from the center of the arch.

  For a moment he tasted defeat, face slumped bitterly. A lump rose in his throat. Please, Lord, don’t let me die like a caged rat, wrung out from thirst and exhaustion. His heart thumped steadily, slowly in his chest.

  Then he was shaking his head to chase away the tears, and pounding his clenched fist on the unyielding rock. “You can’t have me!” he shouted in hoarse anger at the arch.

  His words disappeared swept out across the rolling infinity of the ocean, vanished into the dark jungle in the distance without a trace. The arch winked amber, violet, amber, violet. Overhead, an oversized dragonfly look-alike swerved as it encountered the curved region of repulsion from the outside and flitted to compensate.

  ¡No me puedes tener!

  Back to the text. Maybe another touch would toggle off the prompt and deactivate his prison. He pressed experimentally. There was no visible change to the script, and a handful of tossed sand confirmed that the barrier remained intact.

  He tried two taps in quick succession.

  Three.

  A sustained, steady pressure.

  The cursor continued its patient, inscrutable oscillation.

  Maybe, Rafa thought, it will turn itself off if I don’t touch anything for a while. He spread-eagled wearily on the bare rock to wait, his eyes closed against the nearly horizontal rays of sunshine.

  What a strange picture this would make. He imagined an old-fashioned postcard of himself, sunburned and haggard, stretched prone on the rock under a metallic crescent. “Wish you were here,” the card would say across the top.

  What would Julie do with such a memento? Throw it away? Stick it in a musty old scrapbook somewhere? Would she come one distant day, when this planet was safely domesticated—impelled by morbid curiosity, perhaps—only to find his bones picked clean and open-armed to the pitiless heavens? What would she do at such a scene?

  Thinking about her activated latent reservoirs of pain. Intellectually, he’d long since reconciled her pragmatic stance on the conviction. What good would it do to blame her for taking the only available exit from a future of misery? He’d told Chen as much, when she asked. Even managed to sound convincing.

  His head said accept it, but his heart couldn’t. He’d managed a truce with the idea, not peace. Hadn’t he been faithful to Julie? Hadn’t he done his utmost to protect her, to take the honorable path at every crossroads? And as a reward she’d walked away.

  His wounded pride fought all attempts at dismissal. In fact, the hurt and anger had intensified with time. To protect the tenderness that his heart held for Julie, he had suppressed the censure that wanted to lash out. So far the emotional paradox had yielded a painful stalemate.

  Now the thought of a futile and lingering death, trapped—again, yet again!—like a helpless animal, disrupted the balance in his heart. The world hated him; it was time he did some hating back!

  Emotional barriers crumbled, and Rafa cringed. Corrosive recrimination would sear away his wellspring of tenderness—and he no longer had the strength or will to prevent it. In fact, he welcomed it even as he winced with revulsion. It was easier and infinitely more comfortable to point an accusing finger and turn his back on Julie, than to clasp a love that bared his heart for the stabbing. And if his prison never vomited him out again, it took
the sting out of dying lonely. A little.

  He unconsciously held his breath, fingers clenching whitely, as the hostility flared. You betrayed me, it screamed at his mental picture of Julie, abandoned me forever when I was innocent and most needed comfort.

  Precisely at the moment when the bitterness was most intense, a simple thought interposed itself. It came quietly, making no demands for his attention or allegiance, but with a soul-arresting certitude that took his breath away.

  Choose to love her anyway. You are free to choose.

  On its heels came the image of Chen lecturing him under the stars. “Love is giving somebody your naked self and letting them make their own decisions. Sometimes they hurt you and you keep on caring. Sometimes they hurt themselves.” And he suddenly understood why she’d stopped then, what she’d left unsaid.

  Chen hadn’t been urging Rafa to forgive—she’d been thinking about her own need to love someone honestly—and recognizing how Rafa’s own short-sightedness had robbed Julie of the same privilege. How could Julie forgive if her husband wouldn’t even let her into his world, wouldn’t even let her share his pain?

  Shame and regret crowded in as he saw how isolated he’d been, but almost immediately the first thought returned. Choose to love her anyway. You are free to choose.

  Yes, he wanted to shout. Yes! The “anyway” acquired new meaning. It wasn’t in spite of her disservice; it was in spite of his.

  Breath burst from his lips, and his shoulders rocked rhythmically. Tears streamed off his reddened cheeks as the anger vanished. It was an escape from the cramped tyranny of self, surrender to forgiveness and peace.

  Estrellita, he whispered, over and over again.

  Te quiero, Estrellita.

  * * *

  How long he wept, Rafa had no idea, but eventually the reflexive heaving of his chest and the quiver at his lips subsided, and his mind returned to the question of escape. Somehow the new stillness in his heart made the task seem possible. He wiped his eyes with the back of a hand, blinked a few times, and turned to squint blearily at the text.