by Vernor Vinge
And the light was so bright that where his clothes did not protect him, Wickwrackrum felt a blaze of heat. The noise from the sky was outright pain now. Peregrine dived over the edge of the valley side, rolled and staggered and fell down the steep walls of rock. He was in the shade now: only sunlight lay upon him! The far side of the valley shone in the glare; crisp shadows moved with the unseen thing behind him. The noise was still a bass rumble, but so loud it numbed the mind. Peregrine stumbled past the timberline, and continued till he was sheltered by a hundred yards of forest. That should have helped a lot, but the noise was been growing still louder…
Mercifully, he blacked out for a moment or two. When he came around, the star sound was gone. The ringing it left in his tympana was a great confusion. He staggered about in a daze. It seemed to be raining—except that some of the droplets glowed. Little fires were starting here and there in the forest. He hid beneath dense-crowned trees till the burning rocks stopped falling. The fires didn’t spread; the summer had been relatively wet.
Peregrine lay quietly, waiting for more burning rocks or new star noise. Nothing. The wind in the tree tops lessened. He could hear the birds and crickers and woodborers. He walked to the forest edge and peeked out in several places. Discounting the patches of burnt heather, everything looked normal. But his viewpoint was very restricted: he could see high valley walls, a few hilltops. Ha! There was Scriber Jaqueramaphan, three hundred yards further up. Most of him was hunkered down in holes and hollows, but he had a couple of members looking toward where the star had fallen. Peregrine squinted. Scriber was such a buffoon most of the time. But sometimes it just seemed a cover; if he really was a fool, he was one with a streak of genius. More than once, Wicky had seen him at a distance, working in pairs with some strange tool… As now: the other was holding something long and pointed to his eye.
Wickwrackrum crept out of the forest, keeping close together and making as little noise as possible. He climbed carefully around the rocks, slipping from hummock to heather hummock, till he was just short of the valley crest and some fifty yards from Jaqueramaphan. He could hear the other thinking to himself. Any closer, and Scriber would hear him, even bunched up and quiet as he was.
“Ssst!” said Wickwrackrum.
The buzzing and muttering stopped in an instant of shocked surprise. Jaqueramaphan stuffed the mysterious seeing tool into a backpack and pulled himself together, thinking very quietly. They stared at each other for a moment, then Scriber made silly squirling gestures at his shoulder tympana. Listen up. “Can you talk like this?” His voice came very high-pitched, up where some people can’t make voluntary conversation, where low-sound ears are deaf. Hightalk could be confusing, but it was very directional and faded quickly with distance; no one else would hear them. Peregrine nodded, “Hightalk is no problem.” The trick was to use tones pure enough not to confuse.
“Take a look over the hill crest, friend pilgrim. There is something new under the sun.”
Peregrine moved up another thirty yards, keeping a lookout in all directions. He could see the straits now, gleaming rough silver in the afternoon sunlight. Behind him, the north side of the valley was lost in shadow. He sent one member ahead, skittering between the hummocks to look down on the plain where the star had landed.
God’s Choir, he thought to himself (but quietly). He brought up another member to get a parallax view. The thing looked like a huge adobe hut mounted on stilts… But this was the fallen star: the ground beneath it glowed dull red. Curtains of mist rose from the moist heather all around. The torn earth had been thrown in long lines that radiated from a spot beneath it.
He nodded at Jaqueramaphan. “Where is Tyrathect?”
Scriber shrugged. “A couple of miles back, I’ll bet. I’m keeping an eye out for her… Do you see the others though, the troopers from Flenser’s Castle?”
“No!” Peregrine looked west from the landing site. There. They were almost a mile away, in camouflage jackets, belly crawling across the hummocky terrain. He could see at least three troopers. They were big guys, six each. “How could they get here so fast?” He glanced at the sun. “It can’t be more than half an hour since all this started.”
“Their good luck.” Jaqueramaphan returned to the crest and looked over. “I’ll bet they were already on the mainland when the star came down. This is all Flenser territory; they must have patrols.” He hunkered down so just two pairs of eyes would be visible to those below. “That’s an ambush formation, you know.”
“You don’t seem very happy to see them. These are your friends, remember? The people you’ve come to see.”
Scriber cocked his heads sarcastically. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t rub it in. I think you’ve known from the beginning that I’m not all for Flenser.”
“I guessed.”
“Well, the game is over now. Whatever came down this afternoon is worth more to … uh, my friends than anything I could have learned on Hidden Island.”
“What about Tyrathect?”
“Heh, heh. Our esteemed companion is more than genuine, I fear. I’d bet she’s a Flenser Lord, not the low-rank Servant she seems at first glance. I expect that many of her kind are leaking back over the mountains these days, happy to get out of the Long Lakes Republic. Hide your behinds, fellow. If she spots us, those troopers will get us sure.”
Peregrine moved deeper into the hollows and burrows that pocked the heather. He had an excellent view back along the valley. If Tyrathect were not already on the scene, he’d see her long before she would him.
“Peregrine?”
“Yes?”
“You’re a pilgrim. You’ve traveled the world … since the beginning of time, you’d have us believe. How far do your memories really go back?”
Given the situation, Wickwrackrum was inclined to honesty. “Like you’d expect: a few hundred years. Then we’re talking about legends, recollections of things that probably happened, but with the details all mixed and muddled.”
“Well, I haven’t traveled much, and I’m fairly new. But I do read. A lot. There’s never been anything like this before. That is a made thing down there. It came from higher than I can measure. You’ve read Aramstriquesa or Astrologer Belelele? You know what this could be?”
Wickwrackrum didn’t recognize the names. But he was a pilgrim. There were lands so far away that no one spoke any language he knew. In the Southseas he met folk who thought there was no world beyond their islands and who ran from his boats when he came ashore. Even more, one part of him had been an islander and had watched that coming ashore.
He stuck a head into the open and looked again at the fallen star, the visitor from farther than he had ever been … and he wondered where this pilgrimage might end.
THREE
It took five hours for the ground to cool enough for Dad to slide the ladder-ramp to ground. He and Johanna climbed carefully down, hopped across the steaming earth to stand on relatively undamaged turf. It would be a long time before this ground cooled completely; the jet’s exhaust was very “clean”, scarcely interacting with normal matter—all of which meant that some very hot rock extended down thousands of meters beneath their boat.
Mom sat in the hatchway, watching the land beyond them. She had Dad’s old pistol.
“Anything?” Dad shouted to her.
“No. And Jefri doesn’t see anything through the windows.”
Dad walked around the cargo shell, inspecting the misused docking pylons. Every ten meters they stopped and set up an sound projector. That had been Johanna’s idea. Besides Dad’s gun, they really had no weapons. The projectors were accidental cargo, stuff from the infirmary. With a little programming, they could put out wild screeching all up and down the audio spectrum. It might be enough to scare off the local animals. Johanna followed her father, her eyes on the landscape, her nervousness giving way to awe. It was so beautiful, so cool. They were standing on a broad field, high in hills. Westward the hills fell toward straits and islands. To the north
the ground ended abruptly at the edge of a wide valley; she could see waterfalls on the other side. The ground felt spongy beneath her feet. Their landing field was puckered into thousands of little hillocks, like waves caught in a still picture. Snow lay in timid patches across the higher hills. Johanna squinted north, into the sun. North?
“What time is it, Daddy?”
Olsndot laughed, still looking at the underside of the cargo shell. “Local midnight.”
Johanna had been brought up in the middle latitudes of Straum. Most of her school field trips had been to space, where odd sun geometries were no big deal. Somehow she had never thought of such things happening on the ground… I mean, seeing the sun right over the top of the world.
The first order of business was to get half the coldsleep boxes out into the open, and rearrange those left aboard. Mom figured that the temperature problems would just about disappear then, even for the boxes left on board: “Having separate power supplies and venting will be an advantage now. The kids will all be safe. Johanna, you check Jefri’s work on the ones inside, okay?…”
The second order of business would be to start a tracking program on the Relay system, and to set up ultralight communication. Johanna was a little afraid of that step. What would they learn? They already knew the High Lab had gone wicked and the disaster Mom predicted had begun.
How much of Straumli Realm was dead now? Everyone at the High Lab had thought they were doing so much good, and now… Don’t think about it. Maybe the Relayers could help. Somewhere there must be people who could use what her folks had taken from the Lab.
They’d be rescued, and the rest of the kids would be revived. She’d been feeling guilty about that. Sure, Mom and Dad needed extra hands right at the end of the flight—and Johanna was one of the oldest children in the school. But it seemed wrong that she and Jefri were the only kids going into this with their eyes open. Coming down, she had felt her mother’s fear. I bet they wanted us together, even if it was only for one last time. The landing had been truly dangerous, however easy Dad made it look. Johanna could see where the backsplash had gouged the hull; if any of that had gotten past the torch and into the exhaust chamber, they’d all be vapor now.
Almost half the coldsleep boxes were on the ground now, by the east side of the boat. Mom and Dad were spreading them out so the coolers would have no problem. Jefri was inside, checking if there were any other boxes that needed attention. He was a good kid when he wasn’t a brat. She turned into the sunlight, felt the cool breeze flowing across the hill. She heard something that sounded like a birdcall.
Johanna was out by one of the sound projectors when the ambush happened. She had her dataset plugged to its control, and was busy giving it new directions. It showed how little they had left, that even her old dataset was important now. But Dad wanted something that would sweep through the broadest possible bandwidth, making plenty of racket all the way, but with big spikes every so often; Pink Olifaunt could certainly manage that.
“Johanna!” Mom’s cry came simultaneous with the sound of breaking ceramic. The projector’s bell came shattering down beside her. Johanna looked up. Something ripped through her chest just inside her shoulder, knocking her down. She stared stupidly at the shaft that stuck out of her. An arrow!
The west edge of their landing area was swarming with … things. Like wolves or dogs, but with long necks, they moved quickly forward, darting from hummock to hummock. Their pelts were the same gray green of the hillside, except near the haunches where she saw white and black. No, the green was clothing, jackets. Johanna was in shock, the pressure of the bolt through her chest not yet registering as pain. She had been thrown back against uptilted turf and for the moment had a view of the whole attack. She saw more arrows rise up, dark lines floating in the sky.
She could see the archers now. More dogs! They moved in packs. It took two of them to use a bow—one to hold it and one to draw. The third and fourth carried quivers of arrows and just seemed to watch.
The archers hung back, staying mostly under cover. Other packs swirled in from the sides, now leaping over the hummocks. Many carried hatchets in their jaws. Metal tines gleamed on their paws. She heard the snickety of Dad’s pistol. The wave of attackers staggered as individuals collapsed. The others continued forward, snarling now. These were sounds of madness, not the barking of dogs. She felt the sounds in her teeth, like blasti music punching from a large speaker. Jaws and claws and knives and noise.
She twisted on her side, trying to see back to the boat. Now the pain was real. She screamed, but the sound was lost in the madness. The mob raced around her, heading for Mom and Dad. Her parents were crouched behind a rendezvous pylon. There was a constant flicker from the pistol in Arne Olsndot’s hand. His pressure suit had protected him from the arrows.
The alien bodies were piling high. The pistol, with its smart flechettes, was deadly effective. She saw him hand the pistol to Mom and run out from under the boat, toward her. Johanna stretched her free arm towards him and cried, screamed for him to go back.
Thirty meters. Twenty-five. Mom’s covering fire swept around them, driving the wolves back. A flurry of arrows descended on Olsndot as he ran, arms upheld to shield his head. Twenty meters.
A wolf jumped high over Johanna. She had a quick glimpse of its short fur and scarred rear end. It raced straight for Dad. Olsndot weaved, trying to give his wife a clear shot, but the wolf was too quick. It jinked with him, sprinting across the gap. It leaped, metal glittering on its paws. Johanna saw red splash from Daddy’s neck, and then the two of them were down.
For a moment, Sjana Olsndot stopped shooting. That was enough. The mob parted and a large group ran purposefully toward the boat. They had tanks of some kind on their backs. The lead animal held a hose in its mouth. A dark liquid jetted out … and vanished in an explosion of fire. The wolf pack played their crude flamethrower across the ground, across the pylon where Sjana Olsndot stood, across the ranks of school children in coldsleep. Johanna saw something moving, twisting in the flames and tarry smoke, saw the light plastic of the coldsleep boxes slump and flow.
Johanna turned her face to the earth, then pushed herself up on her good arm and tried to crawl toward the boat, the flames. And then the dark was merciful, and she remembered no more.
FOUR
Peregrine and Scriber watched the ambush preparations throughout the afternoon: infantry arrayed on the slope west of the landing site, archers behind them, flame troopers in pounce formation. Did the Lords of Flenser’s Castle understand what they were up against? The two debated the question off and on. Jaqueramaphan thought the Flenserists did, that their arrogance was so great that they simply expected to grab the prize. “They go for the throat before the other side even knows there’s a fight. It’s worked before.”
Peregrine didn’t answer immediately. Scriber could be right. It had been fifty years since he had been in this part of the world. Back then, Flenser’s cult had been obscure (and not that interesting compared to what existed elsewhere).
Treachery did sometimes befall travelers, but it was rarer than the stay-at-homes would believe. Most people were friendly and enjoyed hearing about the world beyond—especially if the visitor was not threatening. When treachery did occur, it was most often after an initial “sizing-up” to determine just how powerful the visitors were and what could be gained from their death. Immediate attack, without conversation, was very rare. Usually it meant you had run into villains who were both sophisticated … and crazy. “I don’t know. That is an ambush formation, but maybe the Flenserists will hold it in reserve, and talk first.”
Hours passed; the sun slid sideways into the north. There was noise from the far side of the fallen star. Crap. They couldn’t see anything from here.
The hidden troops made no move. The minutes passed … and they got their first view of the visitor from heaven, or part of him anyway. There were four legs per member, but it walked on its rear legs only. What a clown! Yet … it
used its front paws for holding things. Not once did he see it use a mouth; he doubted if the flat jaws could get a good hold, anyway. Those forepaws were wonderfully agile. A single member could easily use tools.
There were plenty of conversation sounds, even though only three members were visible. After a while, they heard the much higher pitched tones of organized thought; God, the creature was noisy. At this distance, the sounds were muffled and distorted. Even so, they were like no mind he had ever heard, nor like the confusion noises that some grazers made.
“Well?” hissed Jaqueramaphan.
“I have been all around the world—and this creature is not part of it.”
“Yeah. Well, it reminds me of mantis bugs. You know, about this high—” he opened a mouth about two inches wide. “Great for keeping your garden free of pests … great little killers.”
Ugh. Peregrine hadn’t thought of the resemblance. Mantises were cute and harmless—as far as people were concerned. But he knew the females would eat their own mates. Imagine such creatures grown to giant size, and possessed of pack mentality. Maybe it was just was well they couldn’t go prancing down to say hello.
A half hour passed. As the alien brought its cargo to ground, the Flenser archers moved closer; the infantry packs arranged themselves in assault wings.
A flight of arrows arched across the gap between the Flenserists and the alien. One of the alien members went down immediately, and its thoughts quieted. The rest moved out of sight beneath the flying house. The troopers dashed forward, spaced in identity preserving formations; perhaps they meant to take the alien alive.
… But the assault line crumpled, many yards short of the alien: no arrows, no flames—the troopers just fell. For a moment Peregrine thought the Flenserists might have bit off more than they could chew. Then the second wave ran over the first. Members continued to fall, but they were in killing frenzy now, with only animal discipline left. The assault rolled slowly forward, the rear climbing over the fallen. Another alien member down… Strange, he could still hear wisps of the other’s thought. In tone and tempo, it sounded the same as before the attack. How could anyone be so composed with total death looming?