“What’s that?”
“Betraying a friend.”
The Wildman thought about that for a while. “But sometimes yuh wind up on the other side. Like Arjuna or Cu Chulainn—the Original Hound from way back when. Then yuh got it to do. I’m gonna hate like hell to kill Paulie. He’s been okay, and that was a good trick, cutting the arrow in midair.”
“I don’t understand. Is it that old blood feud between plainsmen and mountaineers?”
Teodorq shrugged. ‘Yuh best get yer sleep, boss. Big party tomorrow.”
Méarana, too, was wakeful, and Donovan went to stand beside her in the doorway of the longhouse, where the blue star was already perceptibly brighter. “End in sight,” he said.
The harper nodded, but said nothing.
“Afraid what you’ll find?”
She crossed her arms and shivered; and Donovan laid his arm around her shoulders. “Maybe you and I, we’ll complete what she started,” he said.
“I don’t care about old Commonwealth tech. Oh, I suppose it’s important, but…”
“I wasn’t talking about that.”
“Oh.” Méarana leaned against him. “Did you ever want something when you were a child, something you wanted so badly but never had, and you wanted it all the more for not having it?”
Donovan could not remember his childhood; but he said Yes because it sounded right.
“There was nothing special about her leaving, Father. Just a note. ‘Back soon.’ It should have been more. She should have said something more.”
“You never know when it’s the last time. No one ever knows. First times, though. That’s different. You called me ‘Father.’”
She leaned closer. “I was never sure before that I wanted to.”
“You almost did, a couple of times. At first, I was afraid that you would. Later, I was afraid that you wouldn’t.”
“I guess this is the time when I go all warm and gooey.”
Donovan laughed and, unlike the laugh of the scarred man, it was a pleasant one to hear. He kissed her on the forehead, and said, “I told you once that I’d always hoped something good had come out of the Dancer affair. I’m glad something did.”
The Sleuth was shaking him awake. Donovan! Fudir! Brute! We have trouble!
Groggy, he opened his eyes a slit. Red dawn was stealing through the open windows. “What is it?”
The old headman said, “We take our most precious treasures and place them in the Vagina of the World to be consumed by his love.”
That means to be incinerated by the power beam.
“Yeah, yeah. And…?”
Chain assured us that the Oorah consider a guest as their “most precious treasure.”
That means…
“Oh, shit.”
“And exceptionally deep, too,” said the Fudir.
“Will they use force?”
For a god of this sort? Of course.
“Armament?”
Billy and us got dazers, both fully charged. Teddy’s nine. Méarana has a pellet gun, and Sofwari has the needier, if he ain’t lost that, too. Knives, each of us. Méarana has three, two in the baggage. Paulie and Teddy have longswords. Watershanks has a knife, but nothing else.
“And all that against several thousand?”
A hefty fee for the ferryman; but otherwise, not a chance.
Donovan closed his eyes….and sees a young girl in a chiton. “There is a way out of this,” she tells him, and her voice is like a melody.
The headman came shortly after the second morning hour. He was accompanied by flower girls strewing their path with spring petals, by a musician playing a morning rag, and by several very large acolytes.
Méarana told him, through Donovan, that she wished to dedicate her most precious treasure to the god: her harp. Teddy agreed and named his best sword. No one else admitted possessing a most precious treasure—Donovan had one, but he was not about to sacrifice her—but they agreed to accompany their friends down to the pile of offerings. And so, flanked by the flower girls—and the large acolytes—and followed by the musician, all of them singing in harmony, they set off in a procession to the path that led down from the longhouse.
Teddy and Paulie were also singing, in their own languages, a jarring dissonance. What words Donovan caught sounded bawdy, but given how the Oorah had conceptualized the power beam, somehow appropriate.
The musician had an instrument that Donovan knew as a steel guitar, but was known here as an ishtar. He played the rag in alap—slow and improvisational—adding each new note of the scale at the right time. The Pedant reminded him that an alap could meander for hours and the Sleuth wondered if that meant they had lots of time. “We don’t know when he started playing,” the Fudir reminded them.
When they reached the base of the path, the ishtarist upped his tempo to jor and a tabla man walking beside him added rhythm. Donovan told his companion in Gaelactic, “When he ups his tempo again to jhala, things will start to happen, fast.”
Donovan could see the statues of all sixty-three saints. The Sleuth told him that these must be the statues of earlier sacrifices. With each new pass of the god, the oldest-but-one of the statues was retired, melted down, and recast in the image of the latest sacrifice.
Their own children. Sometimes, an elder. No wonder they welcome guests.
“Thank the gods,” said the Fudir, “that she came in the wrong season.”
Bavyo must have known; and so had Chain, but Donovan wasted no breath cursing them. The Emrikii had likely interpreted their eagerness to find Oor as a willingness to be sacrificed. It may have saved an outlying farmstead from a bloody mesa-top raid.
The offering pile was large, but given the size of the ring-village, not terribly so. Donovan was reminded of the sacrifices to Newton he had witnessed, in which a bull was dropped from a leaning tower to smash on the flagstones below or—in more humane settings—was felled by a weight smashing his skull. (It was important only that gravity killed the beast.) The offal and tripe were burned to the god; but the tasty meat—the rump, the flank, the loins—were butchered and distributed to the poor in the temple’s district. So a child of Oor might offer a beloved toy—but one that was worn out after much play.
A mongrel dog had been pegged into the ground by its leash. Seeing the harper’s distress, Teddy turned and cried out for Donovan to translate, “I dedicate this sword, Goodhandlingblade, to the god!” Under his breath, he added, “to the Chooser of the Slain.” Then he tried to stab it into the earth. In doing so, he accidently severed the dog’s leash, and the animal, sensing its freedom, tore immediately from the bowl.
The crowd murmured, trying to understand whether this was a good omen or not. Teodroq tried to look sheepish.
Then the priest looked up at the sun and barked an order and the well-wishing crowd turned to file out of the bowl. Watershanks cried out and ran after the dog. To catch him and bring him back? The priest knew better; and likely he had seen such last-minute changes of heart by previous volunteers. He signaled to one of his acolytes, who sped after Water-shanks, caught him easily, and struck him on the side of his head with an obsidian-edged club. The riverman fell without uttering a sound. The acolyte checked him, then made an angry gesture, and left him lying there.
Donovan reached into his scrip and pressed a button on his comm. unit: 999 999 999. Méarana glanced at him, and he nodded. There was no mistake now. The Oorah intended them for kindling.
The lander from Blankets and Beads soared up and over the western rim of the mesa. It had come down quietly in the night and had been waiting in the wastelands for Donovan’s signal. It circled the bowl once, to get bearings, and to scatter the flower girls and the musicians. They cried out at this apparition and one of them called to Holy Fahbády, who had come and gone in just this sort of chariot.
“Remember wh
at we agreed,” Donovan cautioned them. “One at a time up the ladder. Méarana first. Billy last.”
The musician had recovered his ishtar and he and the tabla man resumed the rag they had been playing, although they missed notes and beats now from nervous glances at the chariot. They backed away at jor tempo.
The priest stood a moment longer. Perhaps the chariot was intended as the most precious offering of all?
The craft settled to the ground and the hatch popped open almost immediately. Kid O’Daevs stuck his head out. “Move yO’ asses! Ten mintes to closest approach! Wild Bill takes off in five!”
They moved as one to the base of the ladder, and Sofwari helped Méarana onto the rungs even before it was fully extended.
The priest cried out and the burly acolytes rushed them. Teddy pulled his nine and shot the first. Paulie winged the second. Billy sprayed them with his dazer but, waving it back and forth as he did and not concentrating his fire, only numbed them.
It spread confusion, and that was enough. But the edge of the bowl was now lined with spearmen, who began to hurl their weapons. Paulie cleaved one spear as he had the arrow in the Roaring Gorge, and Teddy matched the feat. Billy actually seized one out of the air and threw it back, though being on the low ground, he did not quite reach the astonished spearman on the rim. Donovan called to Paulie, who faded toward the ladder.
Then an Oorah on the rim put a pipe to his mouth and huffed.
A dart embedded itself in Teddy’s midriff. He looked down at it and said, “That can’t be good.”
It was not much of a dart, and by itself would have meant little damage. “Poison,” he called to the others. Then, “Paralytic. Hurry!”
Sacrifices who tried to run were better handled by paralyzing them than braining them with obsidian clubs. The poison would leave them alive for the holocaust.
Teddy looked around, saw Donovan and Paulie on the ladder and Billy scrambling onto the lowest rung. He said nothing about waiting one’s turn, but only gauged what time would be needed. The harper was helping Sofwari into the airlock. She looked up and their gazes met.
Teddy waved at her, then he bent and plucked Goodhandlingblade from the ground and sped after the retreating priest and his bodyguards. “Teodorq sunna Nagarajan of World!” he cried, waving the sword over his head and shooting left-handed at the spearmen on the rim. A second paralytic dart tagged him, but the adrenaline was flowing. “Teodorq Nagarajan of World! Remember me!”
The acolytes guarding the priests turned with their short-swords and bucklers, but Teddy dispatched them easily, for the battle-fury was on him. An upswipe to knock a buckler aside, then thrust, and one down; he converted his extraction into a backhand cut that severed the carotid artery of a second man. Two. Spin on the ball of the foot and hack the arm of the man trying to sneak around his left. Three. The others broke, and Teddy found his legs too heavy to chase them. The priest stood unmoving, facing him with no more than a hemlock sprig. Magic, he recognized, even powerful magic, though hemlock had no meaning on the plains of World. He sang his deathsong at the top of his lungs. Were three enough for an honor guard? He had not paused to count the men he had shot with his nine. Where was it now? Dropped when the clip ran out. His most precious treasure, left now as an offering for a god who was only some ancient broken machine, and not the true god at all.
A blowgun man toppled from the terrace. Teddy saw Billy in the mouth of the airlock, aiming with a two-handed grip on his dazer. Another shot, but the dazer did not have the range. “Run!” Billy called. “Run, you ignorant savage!”
But he could not make it back; nor could they reach him in the time remaining. Too many blowguns. Teddy saluted with his sword, converted smoothly into a swinging arc, and the priest’s head leapt from his shoulders in a fountain of blood.
Then his body was a block of wood, devoid of all feeling. He fell face-first onto the obsidian ground.
But he gripped his sword the proper way around, a last defiance. Being utterly numb by then, he never felt it slide in.
Kid O’Daevs reversed the gravity grid and the mesa fell away behind them. The pilot threw in a sharp lateral vector to get off the bull’s-eye, and none too soon, for the pile of offerings on the viewscreen burst into a great ball of flame. Superheated air wavered and grew purple, rose like a geyser, and the wind rushed in from the sides, buffeting the lander and calling up long-disused curses from her pilot.
Méarana did not watch. She sat buckled in her seat and wept.
Watershanks, she had hardly known; but Teddy had been with her for a long time and she had come to regard him as a shrewd and faithful retainer, with more bottom to him than she had at first perceived. And it was just possible that, had he not drawn all attention to himself with his wild charge, the paralytic darts would have dropped them off the ladder like so many senseless mannequins.
Her first impulse was to order the lander to go back and destroy the village. Teddy believed that a dying warrior required an escort of his slain to enter the mead hall, and why should the Oorah’s religion be honored and not Teddy’s?
But the lander was not a warship, and could do nothing but circle the village and scare everyone. Beside, how could she plead mercy for the hard and vengeance-minded children of the Roaring Gorge and not for the uncomprehending children of the Oorah Mesa?
And so she blamed Donovan. The lander had come down in the night. Could they not have made their way to it? So what if the night was unlit and the way out uncertain? So what if there were no place for the lander on the steep and forested slopes of the mesa? Or that Debly might have gotten separated from them while climbing down those slopes and, lacking a beacon, never-ever be found?
So in the end, she blamed herself. She had brought Teddy to this place, where he could die fighting savages. And it did not matter that he had taken a terrible pleasure in the dying.
XVI IN THE BACK OF BEYOND
As Blankets and Beads closed on the mysterious object, its size and scope unfolded. It was the largest vessel they had ever seen. Indeed, it was difficult to think of it as a vessel at all. It seemed more a work of nature. A dozen Gladiola arks could have nestled comfortably on its landing decks.
Yet it had been molded and shaped by human hands, carved and pithed and tunneled; shaven and smoothed and polished. Tubes flared; sensor rings glittered; pods that must have been alfven engines squatted symmetrically along a hull on which, scoured to ghostliness by long centuries of radiation, was blazoned the sunburst of the Commonwealth.
“That ain’t a ship,” Maggie B. commented. “That there is a world.”
“What would it have carried?” her First Officer wondered.
“Anything,” said Donovan, “and everything. Colonists in cold sleep, embryos or seeds of every species; fusion power; nanomachines to remake the chemistry of whole worlds; artificial intelligences and automatons to orchestrate and oversee the whole process. Libraries of libraries. That—is an old Commonwealth terraforming ark.”
“Nanomachines,” said Captain Barnes skeptically. “Artificial intelligences. Fairly tales.”
“Giant ships,” Donovan replied, indicating the ark.
“It’s big and impressive,” she agreed. “But I’ll believe in a nanomachine when I see one.”
“An ark explains the Oorah legend,” Donovan said. “The god fertilizing a world made receptive. Méarana, remember Thistlewaite’s Cautionary Books? The ‘yin on ground’ is…”
“The ‘Vagina of the World.’”
“And ‘yang from sky’ is…”
“I get the picture. So the Oorahs are descended from the crew sent down to prepare the receptors.”
“One of the crews. There must have been others. But something went wrong.”
Ad-Din pointed to the viewscreen. “Maybe that.” He tapped the screen twice and that section magnified.
The sensor ring was melted. Scopes and arrays had sagged, and bent. The hull itself was scorched and broken. Launch tubes and hatches we
re melted shut. A battle? A brush with the berm of a Krasnikov tube? Stringers of glassine metal ran aft as if in the wind. Whatever had happened had happened under acceleration.
“Looks like a wreck, all right,” said Maggie B.
“Looks like salvage,” her Number One said. “A Commonwealth ship? Even the wreckage is valuable beyond measure.”
Maggie chuckled. “Do you want to put that under tow? We’ll have to mine it in place.”
“And don’t forget,” said Méarana, “parts of it are still working.”
Burly Grimes, the chief engineer, modified a communications satellite; and Ripper Collins, the second pilot, flew it by remote so they could take a closer look. The ark had not reacted to their presence, but Barnes was taking no chances.
The telemetry was displayed on the holostage in the conference room for Méarana and the others to study. Ad-Din took copious notes and marked locations that might provide entry for salvage crews. “Most of it seems to be in vacuum,” he commented, “but there are other sections still holding pressure and maintaining temperature. Here, for example…” His light-pen described a segement of the holo image above the table.
“After so long!” exclaimed Billy.
“Wait!” said “Pop” Haines, the Second Astrogator. “Back up the view there, D.Z. A little more. There!”
A ship, irregular in shape and bristling with sensor arrays, nestled against the ark’s hull.
“It’s an old Abyalon survey ship,” said D.Z. in wonder. “I have a model in my collection.”
“What’s it doing all the way out here?”
“Dang if I know, Pop,” said Maggie, “but I guess we ain’t the first to come across this thing. All right, Mr. Collins, bring her back down the dark side.”
Ripper maneuvered the probe up the ark’s sunlit face and turned on its searchlights. “Be a few minutes,” he said, “before we clear the north face. Newton! It’s like surveying a planetoid.”
As the probe cleared the “top” of the vessel, they could see that the other side of the ship was undamaged. There was a moment in which they glimpsed a second ship jammed into the vessel’s side. Then something on the ark rippled; and everything went black.
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