by James Gunn
The Pedia had been silent during the entire process of exploration, and finally Tordor said, “Are you still there?”
“Of course,” the Pedia said.
“You haven’t made any disparaging remarks.”
“You told me you would ask for my help if you needed it.”
“And a good thing, too,” Tordor said, though he found the silence disquieting. “Though that hasn’t stopped you before. I’m heading toward the center of the city where I may find a reason for what has happened to these unfortunate centaurs.”
“Why do you call them unfortunate?”
“No species would have brought this condition upon itself,” Tordor said, and took the next broad avenue that led into the heart of the city.
“The history of civilizations suggests otherwise,” the Pedia said.
The buildings Tordor came upon were older, larger, and in greater disrepair as he grew closer to the center of the city. The centaurs had started with a village and built outward from it as their numbers and their technological abilities increased. The newer structures closer to the walls had been built with better materials than the reinforced mud, or cement, that the earlier centaurs had put up, while the older buildings had been reconstructed and reinforced, though not enough to resist the ravages of time and a quaking world. Toward what seemed to be city-center was a large area that sloped gently down to a raised section at the far end. The entire space was defined by a low wall. In this gravity even a low wall was a deterrent.
“A corral,” the Pedia said. “An enclosure for quadrupeds in a natural amphitheater, like the theaters of the ancient Greeks.”
“I don’t understand any of that,” Tordor said. “It looks like a place four-legged creatures would gather, where they could stand and be instructed or entertained.”
“That’s what I said,” the Pedia said.
There were no bones, though, as there had been in the meeting hall Riley had entered on Nepenthe. If the centaurs had been gathered here to receive some message and instead had been attacked by some virulent disease from outer space or some equally deadly alien invaders, they had not died in their place as they had on Nepenthe. He would have to look elsewhere for answers.
Tordor turned his body slowly to survey the structures that surrounded the amphitheater, wondering which one looked like an administrative building where decisions might be made about the everyday rules and regulations that govern a city or a world. That’s where the alarm would have been sounded, if there had been time for an alarm.
“That building looks like city hall,” the Pedia said. “The one there behind the corral—beyond the gathering place.”
Tordor did not ask how the Pedia knew what he was thinking. He did not want to know, nor did he want the Pedia to know that it bothered him, that the thought of the Pedia peering into his mind, unlikely as it seemed but not impossible, made him uncomfortable. Even, perhaps, to the point of carrying out his threat to throw the medallion away.
“You were looking in that direction,” the Pedia said. “I apologize for breaching our agreement. You did not ask for my assistance.”
Tordor would have felt better about that reassurance if it had not addressed his unspoken concerns. But he refused to show the Pedia any sign of weakness. He moved around the perimeter of the amphitheater toward the large, low building on its other side.
The wide doorway had no closure, no door to keep centaurs out or in, and the outer wall meant that there would be no predators to be concerned about. The corridor beyond, wide and flat to accommodate the bodies of bulky centaurs, was dark, but Tordor could see by reflected sunlight that it was empty. Doorways opened on either side, like offices for minor bureaucrats or clerks, also without doors. Tordor glanced into them as he passed. Some contained what seemed like stalls with a table at one end and sometimes equipment upon it, perhaps to record or transmit information.
At the far end of the corridor was a door, the first one Tordor had seen in this building. It seemed to be made from the curious dark metal of the factory buildings, ornamented by carvings or engravings of geometric figures constructed with the straight lines that dominated centaur minds. It didn’t make any sense that it sealed an opening to the outside if there were none in what Tordor took to be the front. There was no handle or anything Tordor could wrap his trunk around.
“If you touch me to the obstacle,” the Pedia said, “I may be able to direct it to open.”
Tordor considered the offer and would have liked to have turned it down but saw no better choice. He extended the medallion and ran it around the perimeter of the door and then toward the center. Finally something inside the door clicked, and it swung inward. Beyond was a larger space with a larger stall and a larger flat platform or table attached to its front. But one side of the stall had been knocked to the floor and bones lay in a regular pattern in front of the door, as if whatever centaur official had occupied this office, if that is what it was, had forgotten how to open the door that had separated it from the others, a door that had provided a kind of authority to the person who worked behind it, and, in the end, doomed it, though only a few moments sooner than the others.
Tordor was about to turn away and have the Pedia open the door that had swung shut when they entered, but the Pedia said, “A device on the working surface might provide some clues to what happened here, in this room and on this world.”
There was, indeed, an apparatus on the table, not unlike what Tordor had seen on other such tables, but larger and more complicated. “We could perhaps take it back to the ship for analysis,” Tordor said. “It seems unlikely that we can do much with it here.”
“Let me try,” the Pedia said.
Tordor hesitated and then extended the medallion until it touched the device. A moment passed, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, a cacophony of sound burst forth from somewhere above his head. Tordor recoiled. “What’s that? What’s happening?”
The sound diminished to a more tolerable level. “It seems to be coming from this device to sound enhancers on the roof of this structure and throughout the building,” the Pedia said. “Radio waves are being transmitted to other devices for reproducing sounds and perhaps to receptors in other locations in the city and perhaps elsewhere, probably to inform and direct, though that does not seem to be the reason for its present emission.”
“Why would anyone make such noise?” Tordor asked.
“Humans call it music,” the Pedia said.
“Loud or not so loud,” Tordor said, “it’s still noise, and it is an affront to whatever evolution has provided for its creatures to hear its enemies and listen to its friends.”
“Humans have a curious affinity for sounds of a particular nature with different rhythms created by different instruments created for the purpose,” the Pedia said.
“Another reason for humans to have accepted a lower status in the Federation until they had become sufficiently civilized.”
“It is, to be sure, a very unusual music,” the Pedia said. “Full of strange rhythms and stranger tonalities, a sort of ambiguity, a shifting from moment to moment—”
“Turn it off,” Tordor said. “I find it repellent.” He did not say so, but the sounds were beginning to make him feel uneasy, perhaps even uncertain, which was the worst feeling a Dorian could have.
The sounds ceased. He removed the medallion from the device on the platform at the head of the centaur’s stall. “Let’s get out of this place,” he said. “There are no answers here, only more questions.”
He applied the medallion to the door. It swung open, more quickly this time. And he found himself facing a saber-toothed tiger.
Tordor stepped back and slammed the door before the tiger could spring. Perhaps it was the influence of the sounds the Pedia had inflicted upon him, but he did not like his chances with a predator when he had no weapon.
“From the bruise on his head,” the Pedia said, “I think this is the tiger you struck earlier in a rash moment of sen
timentality.”
“That is the difference between us,” Tordor said.
“Apparently it has trailed us from the forest edge,” the Pedia said, “perhaps in another act of sentimentality.”
“Predators, like Pedias, are never sentimental,” Tordor said. He looked around the room for a weapon. Perhaps the broken stall. He picked up a piece of rounded wood, smooth under the sensitive touch of his trunk. It was too big to swing, almost too big to lift, and he propped one end against a wall and stamped on it with his right hoof. The wood broke into two pieces, splintered at the ends that once had been in the middle. He picked up the smaller piece and swung it. It was an acceptable weapon—not ideal but passable.
“I do not like our chances,” the Pedia said.
“Small chances are better than no chances,” Tordor said. “Open the door.” He applied the medallion once more, with one hoof braced against the door to hold it shut until he could release the medallion and pick up the improvised club once more. Something thudded against the door, jarring it against him. When it stopped, Tordor put his shoulder against the door and let it edge open a crack, his club elevated to a striking position before he suddenly slammed the door shut again and heard the lock click.
Outside the door were two tigers and another was padding down the corridor behind them. He turned back into the room, searching for another way out. Behind him the door thudded again, and he had the impression that the lock, or whatever was holding it shut, might not be up to the task of holding out three tigers.
“I have informed the ship about our predicament,” the Pedia said.
“My predicament,” Tordor said.
“We are in this together.”
“You are only a communication device,” Tordor said, still searching the room.
“Nevertheless—”
“We are wasting time,” Tordor said “Our colleagues in the ship can’t help me in this gravity. I should have brought a weapon.”
“Heavy-planet creatures have a misplaced confidence in their abilities, no doubt based on their musculature and the density—”
“Enough of such racial analysis and more thought about our situation,” Tordor said.
“Apparently you have not noticed that this room is smaller than the width of the building it apparently occupies,” the Pedia said.
“That’s true,” Tordor said, looking around more thoughtfully.
“If there are instruments on top of this structure,” the Pedia said, “there must have been some access for quadrupeds to place them there and to provide whatever maintenance they might require.”
“Yes, I see that.”
“They would need a ramp.”
“Of course,” Tordor said. “But it could be outside.”
“Possibly,” the Pedia said, “but that would be no help to us. On the other hand—”
“It better be here,” Tordor said. “That wall looks promising.” He took the medallion in his trunk and applied it to the wall to his left, the one that seemed to be nearer to the center of the room than the one on the right. He moved the medallion across the breadth of the wall without results, and then, recalling the height of the centaur arms above the quadruped shoulders, he moved the medallion up. Still nothing happened.
Tordor turned back toward the door and the bones that lay in front of it. He searched among them and the tattered pieces of cloth that might have served as garments until he saw something that glittered in the gloom. He picked it up in his trunk. It was a piece of the strange dark metal from which the door and some of the newer buildings have been shaped. He held it up to the medallion.
The left wall clicked and a piece of the wall detached itself from the ceiling, letting the light of the setting sun illuminate a widening portion of the room. It swung down until it came to rest at floor level. Now it was clearly, as the Pedia had speculated, a ramp, and, as the door behind was battered again, Tordor moved toward it as swiftly as the heavy-gravity world permitted, toiled up the ramp, and stood outside in the clean-smelling Centaur air, looking at the red sphere ship that had come to rest only a few meters away.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
For a Dorian, Tordor seemed remarkably out of breath and wordless as he burst into the ship through the red surface that was permeable only to creatures the ship recognized through a process that none of them had been able to decipher. Asha and Riley waited for Tordor to resume his natural air of infallibility and imperturbability, but Adithya was not so patient. “What happened?” he asked in his native language, a dialect descended from the Asian subcontinent, before switching to the Anglo-American-derived second language common to all humans, and then to Galactic Standard that he had acquired during his time aboard the ship. “The Pedia kept us informed, but it speaks in Pedia-ese, all information and no emotion.”
Tordor had regained his dignity after his hasty departure from Centaur. “I must admit that my distrust of your immature Pedia was overdone. Its help was essential and proffered in a timely fashion.” He removed the medallion from his thick neck and handed it to Asha with an air of relief that seemed at odds with the generosity of his words.
“As for the centaurs,” Tordor continued, “they seem to have lost their higher mental functions, even their survival instincts. If this is the result of an alien invasion, there are no signs of aliens, unless they have turned into the predators I encountered and from which I had to escape.”
“That doesn’t seem likely,” Riley said.
“Nor was it presented as a likely scenario,” Tordor said. “The predators—the Pedia compared them to Earth’s tigers—were effective at what they did, which was to prey upon the centaurs, but they did not display the higher levels of intelligence necessary to build and operate spaceships or, indeed, technology of any kind.”
“So,” Asha said, “was this an instance of a worldwide epidemic that attacked the entire centaur population? And are you, perhaps, a carrier?”
“That, too, is unlikely,” Tordor said. “Unless it was narrowly tailored for specific portions of the centaur brain and no other centaur parts or the minds of other creatures. The tigers did not seem affected. And it seems to have occurred suddenly and universally, not the normal vectors of pathogens.”
“Unless it was released in the atmosphere at numerous places simultaneously,” Riley said.
“To make it more like what happened on Nepenthe?” Tordor said. “To be sure, there are resemblances: bones piled up in both places. But on Nepenthe, the Nepentheans seem to have died in place. The centaurs we found in their city died because they had forgotten how to open the gates, and herds roamed the grasslands and forests untouched except for their minds.”
“Then what is it we can draw from this experience?” Adithya said. “I hope you did not risk your life for nothing.”
“One possible explanation,” Tordor said, “is that Nepenthe and Centaur were both attacked by the same force, whatever it was, but that it affected them differently. They were, of course, aliens of quite different origins and development, and even intellectual perceptions of the universe, and it is possible that their response would not have been identical.”
“What kind of force could do that?” Adithya said.
“That is difficult to say,” Tordor said.
“Except,” Asha’s medallion said, “the music that was broadcast from the centaur office at the time of the catastrophe.”
“Music?” Asha said.
“Noise,” Tordor said. “It is difficult to imagine that this would be more than an annoyance. In any case, we did not retrieve the device that created it.”
“That seems like an oversight,” Riley said.
“We were in a bit of a hurry,” Tordor said. “The tigers were breaking through the door, and if they had succeeded they could have pursued us up the ramp to the roof.”
“That is no problem,” the Pedia said. “I can reproduce the sounds of the centaur device.”
“Go ahead,” Asha said.
�
��That might be unwise,” Tordor said. He did not want to tell the others about the unsettled way the sounds had made him feel. “If it damaged the centaurs—”
“Is it dangerous?” Asha asked the Pedia.
“Not to me,” the Pedia said. “I cannot speak to the more fragile neuronic systems of living creatures.”
“Do we have a choice?” Riley said. “Go ahead.”
The sounds began. They were strange sounds indeed. After a moment Adithya cried out, “Stop! It is making me feel very strange.”
“Yes,” Asha said. “Stop it until we can analyze this more fully.”
The sounds stopped.
“Well?” Tordor said.
“It does resemble music, though created by minds that share little with ours,” Asha said. “I can understand why you were concerned.”
“That is not—” Tordor began.
“Clearly it affected Adithya more quickly,” Asha said. “Maybe because he has not had our experiences.”
“I am not inferior,” Adithya said.
“Of course not,” Asha said. “You are our touchstone, our test subject. Without you we would be crippled.”
“I’m the canary in the coal mine?” Adithya said. It was a reference whose literal meaning had been lost. There were no more coal mines and no canaries. The Pedia had to explain.