“Pickeyes?”
“They’re birds, very small, and very fast. The name is earned. Anyhow, we started into the tunnel. The air wasn’t very good, and we were using oxygen. Our radio contact on the surface advised us to return. Bendimeyer, who was the security chief, didn’t like unscheduled activities.
“But we were all intoxicated by then. My God, I can still remember the exhilaration of that walk out into the buried city Until then, all we’d had of anything below Level II was the satellite scans.
“The tunnels were low, and we couldn’t stand up straight. Even I couldn’t, so you can imagine how Ux felt.
“Some of the interior spaces were intact. We saw murals, metalwork, tools, even petrified gardens. I remember Chellic saying how there was enough down there to keep researchers busy for a lifetime. We even found a library, though the books were dust.
“It was raining on the surface. We were looking at a scullery when Bendimeyer got on the radio. We knew immediately we had a problem because he sounded wide awake. ‘Moss,’ he said, ‘we got a critter in the tower. It’s started down, so you may hear from it.’ I asked what it was. ‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘Nobody got a very good look. It’s bipedal, we think. Rodley says it’s about Ux’s size. Big.’
“We’d been on Belarius long enough to know that nothing that travels alone is harmless. But we were armed, and we hadn’t found anything yet that a bolt wouldn’t stop. The thing that concerned me was that we had little visibility Those tunnels were made for ambushes.
“I asked Bendimeyer to keep me informed. He said they were sending a team after it, and I asked him not to. ‘That’ll only drive it down on top of us. Anyway, I don’t want nervous guys with weapons in here. We’re going to start back.’
“Chellic suggested we might be better off to wait it out. ‘The damned thing could never find us in this labyrinth,’ she said. But Ux said it could probably smell us. ‘Well be safer in the tower room,’ he said. I asked him why. ‘Because there are too many places here where several corridors converge. We can’t watch everything. If we can get back to the tower before it gets all the way down, we only have to worry about what’s in front of us.’
“Chellic concurred, and we got moving. Nobody was much interested now in the galleries and public rooms. We’d been marking the way we came, but we took a couple of wrong turns anyway going back, and lost a lot of time. In fact, we lost so much time that we were still wandering through tunnels when Ux commented that the critter might at that moment be passing through the tower room. After that, we were no longer sure what direction it might come from.
“Imagination raises hell under those circumstances. If you listen hard enough, you always hear something. I could make out claws scraping on stone, breathing in the walls, you name it. We were all walking now with drawn weapons.
“Ux fell in a hole at one point and twisted his knee. His weapon discharged, and drilled a neat round hole through the rock wall. He was limping badly after that, and we had to help him along. But nobody wanted to stop, so we kept moving. There wasn’t much talk.
“I checked back periodically with Bendimeyer. He had a team sitting at the top of the excavation with a small arsenal, but they’d seen nothing come out.” Moss took a deep breath. Sweat had begun to drip down his neck into his shirt. The narrative was taking on a life of its own: he needed no further encouragement from me.
“The places we were most worried about were the compartments, the little side tunnels, the holes in the wall. We hurried past them as quickly as we could, expecting every moment the wild attack that we knew was inevitable.
“Ux held up pretty well, and Chellic had turned into some kind of goddamn jungle animal herself. I wasn’t very happy about the situation, but I felt good about the people I was with.
“We stopped occasionally to check our bearings and rest our backs. It was during one of these halts, as we drew close to the tower room, that I had a sudden sensation, a flash, of terrible hunger. The lights dimmed, as if all three of our lamps had faded simultaneously. Chellic sat beside me, her head bent between her knees, her neck exposed under the hairline.” Moss sat stiffly erect. He put his empty glass carefully on the table, and caressed its rim with his fingertips. His eyes swiveled round, and locked with mine. “I thought how good it would be to bury my teeth in her.”
I sat in shocked silence. “The sensation, the urge, lasted only an instant. But it left me weak and terrified.
“When we started out again, Chellic had to stop to help me. And I was afraid to let her touch me. Ux asked whether I was all right. I told him I was, and increased my oxygen. But Chellic knew something had happened, and she made no effort to move on until I signaled I was ready to go.
“We came finally into the tower room. I was relieved to see the altar and the wide curving wall: it meant no more multiple entrances to be watched. Ux threw his lamplight around the chamber to be sure it was empty and examined the series of adjoining compartments. Chellic climbed the ramp on the far side of the altar and looked into the rising passageway ahead, while I kept a nervous eye behind us. ‘All clear,’ she said. The lights and shadows played across her face: even in the sweaty worksuit, with a pickax in her belt, she was a lovely woman.”
Moss’s hands gripped the arms of his chair. “There was no other way to proceed.” His voice was hardly a whisper. “No finding of guilt ever came out of it. Even now, knowing what I know, I cannot see what we might have done differently. But my God there must have been a way—.” His eyes squeezed shut.
“Ux suggested we rest before continuing. He eased himself down against a rock slab and placed his lamp on top of it, aimed into the passage through which we would leave. The guns are big-barreled things, not like the modest all-purpose weapons that Survey teams are routinely equipped with. These were military issue at one time. At short range and high register, nothing that lives could survive even a peripheral hit. Under all that rock, of course, we had to be careful, but you will understand we had no doubts about our weapons.
“I kept mine at hand the whole time. Ux was still limping badly, and it was obvious he was glad to get off the knee. But he seemed more worried about me, and asked several times if I was all right.” Moss’s face reddened a bit, and he managed a weak smile. “He said nothing along those lines to Chellic.
“Then it happened again: Chellic had walked over near the altar and begun to move through a series of stretching exercises. While I watched her, the chamber began to darken. I could sense her long limbs beneath the worksuit, see the suggestion of breast and shoulder: the blood was warm in her shoulders, and I could taste—” Moss’s eyes filled with tears. He shook his head savagely, leaped from his seat, and hurried out into the night. I ignored the stares of people around us, dropped money on the table, and followed.
He was staring up at the vertical sea. Reflections from the city lights played against its surface. “If I had my way,” he said bitterly, “we’d kill everything on that world and be done with it. Introduce a bug, attack the food chain, tickle a couple of volcanoes. Whatever it takes. But I’d clear that goddamn world once and for all.” He jammed his fists into his pockets and looked at me with tears in his eyes. “Did Ux ever tell you any of this?”
“No,” I said, trying not to feel guilty.
Moss laughed. It was an ugly sound. “Tiel, I’ve told this story a hundred times. I’ve told it to Survey, and I’ve told it to their analysts. I’ll live with it forever. Just like Uxbridge did.
“What you have to understand is, when the thing walked into the chamber, its slick humanoid skin glistening, its pink eyes surveying us, I was with it. Inside it. I felt the water-cold rock beneath padded feet, and the dusty air sucked past curving rows of incisors. I looked from Ux to Chellic to myself, delaying the moment of selection even though I knew, knew from the beginning. The lean one, Chellic, had been on its feet and turned to face me. The light from the lamps had acquired an amber tint. I, we, knew our danger. The three—thin
gs—were terribly slow, but all had burners.
We—it, I—hesitated. We wanted Chellic, and we advanced cautiously toward the altar, and dreamed how it would be. She seemed frozen, her breast rising and falling. And her face: my God, her face had twisted into a dark leer, lips drawn back in a feral snarl to reveal her own pitiful white teeth, an expression all the more horrible in that it contained no hint of fear, but rather implied that she too was about to share a live meal.
“And then I understood what was happening. We were all of us drawn into the mind and will of the beast: we all looked out through its eyes, and we would all rend Chellic muscle from bone.
“I tried to get out. To find my own eyes. The laser was a dead weight in my right hand, desperately far away. Chellic’s animal face was close now: she opened her arms wide, and advanced. Ux, with a scream that echoed round the chamber, got to his feet, but could only lean drunkenly against the slab from which his lamp illuminated the ghastly scene.
“In that moment, I got the laser up. We watched the weapon swing in our direction, and looked into the huge muzzle.
“I’ll tell you what it was like, Tiel: it was as if I were pointing the weapon at myself. I looked at its business end as certainly as I am looking at you now I was terrified of it, but I tried to pull the trigger all the same. I can make no claim to a heroic act, because I was even more terrified and repulsed by what would happen if I did not succeed.
“I’m not sure how to tell you the rest. Maybe you already know. Ux was also looking down the throat of the laser. And I guess it was more than he could take. He screamed and leaped at me. I jumped, and the weapon went off, slicing a chunk out of the ceiling. The creature took Chellic.
“Ux hit me hard, the laser slipped away, and the mindlink dissolved. To his credit, he recovered himself almost immediately, and scrambled after the weapon. Chellic and the beast melded together in a grim parody of a sexual embrace. They moved against each other’s bodies and Chellic cried out, more in ecstasy than in pain. Blood spurted, but the dance continued. It went after her throat, and Chellic sagged. Ux brought the laser up and fired. The creature shrieked, released her, threw a glance of pure malevolence and hatred at its attacker, and fled into the lower levels.
“A second shot went wild.”
He took my arm, and we walked slowly along the seafront. His palm was wet. “Ux never forgave himself.”
“What happened? To the woman? To Chellic?”
His jaw worked. “She was dead before we could get her to the surface.”
And I thought about the inscription on the west portico, which took on a dark new meaning.
In the hour of need, I am with you.
8.
So in the end it came down to the house at the bottom of the bay.
I’d intended to be out on the Point shortly past dawn, but I woke late, after another restless night, and then delayed over a long breakfast. I had a fair notion what was waiting for me beneath that calm surface, and I was in no hurry to confront it.
I landed in thick grass near the ruined projector station. Strangely, the dome was more difficult to see up close, where its dark bronze coloring blended with the thick vegetation that overwhelmed it.
A black ragged hole had been burned through the outer shell, big enough to allow entry. I’d brought a small sculptor’s laser with me, and used it to cut through the brambles. The place was half full of clay and mud. (The previous night’s rain hadn’t helped.) The console had been cannibalized, and the projector was gone.
There were a few scorch marks, and the frame that would have supported the projector was cut in half.
What had Hollander said? Now, the projectors are pretty well shielded. Undoubtedly by something other than a physical barrier.
Directly across the mouth of the bay, I could see the connector station which had once formed a link with this one. It still functioned, but only northward, and was now on the outermost edge of the seawall.
After a while, I got back into the skimmer and lifted off. The bay was unsettled: there was a steady eastern chop, and the water looked rough. It was a gray, formless day, oppressive and quiet save for the steady beat of the incoming tide. I located my buoy, and circled it slowly. Uxbridge’s house was not visible from the air.
A sharp gust rocked the skimmer. I took it down, eased it into the water, more carefully this time, and anchored it. I did not stop to think about what lay below: I kicked off my clothes, stowed them in the aft locker, and extracted my breather from its carrying case. I checked out the lamp, put on a belt, and attached a utility pouch. I strapped a depth gauge and timer to one wrist, the lamp to the other, pulled on the fins and mask, and slipped overboard.
The water was warm. But the sunless day reduced visibility severely; I could see only a few meters in natural light. I took my bearings from the buoy and the skimmer and started down.
I passed through alternating cool and warm currents. A few fish darted away, and one of the broad-ferned swimming plants common in Fishbowl’s temperate latitudes startled me by wrapping a tendril around one ankle and giving it a tug. When I reacted, it lost interest.
The grim, mottled, sea-shrouded house gradually took shape: turrets and parapets rose out of the gray depths, stone walls formed, ocular windows peered sightlessly down into a courtyard. I hovered above for several minutes, maybe choosing my best approach, maybe hesitating. Then I descended to one of the turrets, followed its sloping roof past exposed plates, and started down the face of the building.
At the upper level, I thumbed on my lamp and looked through a window that was, remarkably, still intact. Inside, silt was thick. A bed was jammed into a doorway, light furniture had been scattered about, and the contents of a bureau were spilled and buried. A closet door, partially open, had exposed two rows of hanging garments. These fluttered gently in whatever currents passed through the room.
Below me, lower on the wall, a long, serpentine fish glided out of a venting pipe and slipped into the gloom. I seized a cornice and hung on until it was gone. The stone was slippery with the algae that inhabit most water oceans.
The front door was missing, and the frame which had supported it was bent.
I passed inside, and the beam of my lamp faded into the depths of a large central hall. A staircase rose on the right, and double doors opened on the left. Chairs and tables were tumbled about, bookcases overturned, and the whole covered with sediment. Two portraits had once hung beneath the staircase: the frames were still in place, but the canvas had shriveled in each, and no hint of the subjects remained.
Though I knew more or less where I was going, I took a moment to look through the double doors. They had opened into a sitting room; even in its present condition, I could see that it had been a stiff, formal place: the sort of room in which one conducts formal matters, designed to impress a business acquaintance, and at the same time to hurry things along.
But I was surprised to see a photo of Ux (still dry behind its glass) with several people in academic robes. Other pictures and mementos lay buried in the silt. I knelt and dug, extracting them one by one. Most were ruined. But a few had been preserved: a highly favorable review of a book he’d written on ancient languages; an award from an institution whose name was no longer legible, acknowledging his work on Mycenaean linear documents; a photo of Ux and an attractive dark-haired young woman, both in coveralls, and both wielding spades. (My God, could that be Chellic?)
I placed them carefully in my pouch.
And I found the snow photo: an enlarged duplicate of the one from the chess club. My hand shook as I brushed the last of the sand away from it. Reuben Uxbridge, wrapped in a blue parka, smiled out at me.
But the photos were in the wrong room. Jon Hollander had said there was a retreat at the rear of the house, where he’d gone to play chess, and probably where Ux had really lived his life. That would be the normal place to keep such things. My heart pounded: I knew exactly what I was going to find. And I knew why Durell had tried
to destroy the house.
I examined the snow photo in the uncertain light: four men and three women braving a storm. Behind them, the looping colonnade of the Admin Building was visible. Just off to the left, behind Jon Hollander’s head, lay the frozen rim of the pool that fronted on the Field Museum. And I knew one of the three women. The one in the middle, who was laughing, and who appeared to be looking almost mischievously at Uxbridge, was the woman with the spade.
I swam the length of the hall, past closed doors, past ruined cabinets, past the sand-clogged rubble of a lifetime. I’d acquired a few fish, fat spiny-finned creatures that moved with me, but darted back out of the light. I was grateful for their company.
And finally I approached a door heavier and shorter than the others I had seen. It was ajar, and I poked my lamp inside.
The interior was spacious, a hall rather than a chamber. It was a circular room, with a high ceiling, completely shrouded by curtains. I could see a desk, an overturned computer console, padded chairs (presumably the ones about which Hollander had spoken), and a square table.
The inner sanctum. I caught my breath.
Things seemed somehow less displaced in that room, as though some strange gravity gripped them. The chairs and the table were still upright, a pot which had once contained a plant retained its place on the desk, a wine cabinet still stood.
I looked at the circular wall, thinking vaguely of the one in the tower room. How many hours had Reuben Uxbridge sat here, trying to exorcise the demon that had, indeed, followed him back from that ridden world? How often had he struck down poor bureaucratic Moss, when Moss was about to save her, save them all, at whatever cost to himself?
In a sense, Chellic had been fortunate. Uxbridge had been the real victim.
And Durell.
Only Durell, desperate for money, could supply what Uxbridge needed.
I approached the curtains, rotted now, still concealing their terrible secret. And I lifted them.
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 17