Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  The passage was straight and low, still narrow enough to force them to proceed single file. No concessions had been made to aesthetics in these secret diggings. The rock remained as ragged as the excavators had left it, many ages ago, though the tunnel widened at intervals into larger chambers as if to relieve the claustrophobia of long travel through a constricting tube of stone.

  The coil of cable lightened rapidly. It had nearly played out when the tunnel widened once again. Here, instead of a single chamber, there were several, opening off a central hall. Stavros paused at a left-hand archway to let Edan go ahead of him with the lamp.

  His equipment awaited him, set up on a wooden Sawl table, ready to go as soon as he made up the cables. He sent Liphar around the low, domed room lighting oil lamps. A bedroll was revealed, a rough firepit in one corner, stoneware jugs filled with water, boxes of purloined ship’s rations, tools, utensils, clothing.

  He was stopped briefly by the sight of all the detailed preparations he had made in his first blind rush into commitment. With Aguidran’s help, he had planned the theft of the antenna very well. But he had let the long-range consequences of his actions slide by largely unexplored. The rage from his humiliation at Clausen’s hands and his heady new sense of mission had carried him this far, when in reality, it was mad recklessness to launch himself nearly single-handed against a corporate juggernaut like CONPLEX. For now he would be safe enough in his secret cave, while he did his research and framed his court case. Later, he would worry about consequences, when the message was sent and the die truly cast.

  He thought of Susannah, and wished her there with him, if only to help him forget for a while. And he thought of Kav Daven, here in the Caves, near to him now, yet still inaccessible.

  Stavros could only guess how long this dark space and its associated caverns would be his home and his prison. He could not safely venture into the open until Clausen’s hands were legally tied.

  And maybe not even then.

  Stavros suspected the prospector of a taste for revenge.

  He slouched toward the table with a resigned sigh. Edan watched intently as he plugged the antenna cable into the scavenged system. He wondered what end results she expected from their long trek through hail and thorns and heat. What a puzzle all these cables and switches must present to one who’d never heard of domesticated electricity, never mind the entire rest of the electromagnetic universe.

  He pulled up the waiting wooden bench, and sat down to activate the terminal. When the ready light glowed, he poised his fingers over the keypad, then froze, tongue-tied at the final moment.

  So what do I say for openers? Hi, CRI, how ya doin’, it’s been a quiet month and we’re all fine and dandy down here…?

  He grinned nervously, playing out the conversation in his head.

  What? Oh, no, sorry… No one else is available to talk right now Yup, all real busy… real busy.

  Liphar eyed him with concern. Stavros shook himself free of his paralysis and touched in CRI’s call code, followed by his own. He put the call on repeater and waited.

  CRI had kept a search circuit functioning round the clock. Edan jumped as the computer’s tinny voice filled the room. Stavros lunged for the volume controls and hurriedly flipped on the vocal transmission toggle.

  “Don’t shout, CRI, I’m here.”

  They were not the immortal words he had imagined himself uttering, but they would have to do.

  10

  As travel became harder due to the heat, Susannah spent less time on her sampling and more time trudging along in the sun, deep in a muddle of thought. She started keeping a list. It contained nothing conclusive, but the illusion of cohesion it provided was somehow comforting, to see all her most burning quandaries neatly inscribed on the same back page of her notebook, as if grouping them physically might also relate them causally.

  As the list grew, she began to see that new entries were often variations of questions she had already noted several items earlier. The basic issues were settling out like salts in solution.

  Megan discovered the list at the end of a long cycle’s march through the tall amber grasses of the northern Dop Arek. She snatched up the notebook as if hungry for something other than her own notes to read. She flipped through it, then stopped and held the last page up to the orange light of the lowering sun. She read the heading aloud as Susannah sat working with her portable analyzer.

  “ ‘Oddnesses’?”

  Susannah tossed her head diffidently. “Well, not each one so much, but maybe together…”

  “ ‘Three beasts,’ ” read Megan.

  “The hakra and the hjalk and the hekkers. I told you they seem remarkably similar, like specially tuned forms of the same animal.”

  “Generations of clever breeding.”

  Susannah nodded. “But if so, still an astonishing achievement, to breed three out of one and so perfectly adapt each to its intended specialization.”

  “The Sawls have had a lot of time, judging from guild records.”

  “But I can’t think of a Terran animal that breeders were able to work all the kinks out of before the genetic engineers were around to lend a hand. I’m going to do a DNA match as soon as I get done with my plant chemistry and can reprogram the box here. I mean, for instance, where are these animals’ other relatives? We haven’t seen a single wild herbivore, not a single wild mammal for that matter,”

  “Or birds. No birds, just those hideous flying lizards.” Megan shuddered only half jokingly. “Have you asked Ghirra about this?”

  Hammering resounded from the Weaver wagon next to them as a wheelwright from the Woodworkers’ Guild stopped by on his repair rounds. A group of Weavers patching the shredded canopies stopped work to help jack up the wagon and hold muttered debate over the significance of the heat and the long stretch without rain.

  “Ghirra says such animals were not meant to run wild, Now what the hell does that mean?” Susannah understood his surface meaning, that wild animals were those who could survive in the hostile wilderness without man’s care, being hard-skinned, spiny, sharp-toothed, poisonous, aggressive and omnivorous. “I mean, did he intend the subtextual implications of that remark? When he said ‘meant,’ was he suggesting intention and creation, and if so, by whom?”

  Megan offered the anthropological interpretation. “Those mysterious creators, remember, who bore both the Goddesses and the Sawls? However much the rationalist he claims to be, Ghirra’s still the product of a society steeped in religion.”

  Susannah made a face. “Try as I might, I do not find ‘the gods made it that way’ to be a very satisfying answer, Megan, and I’m surprised Ghirra does.”

  Megan shrugged. “I’m not sure he does. Next item… ‘abnormal growth rate’… The domestic crops really grow faster?”

  “Stav pointed that out to me before… before he left.”

  Megan continued reading. “ ‘Trehalose analogues’… ‘poisonous’?”

  “Yes. Doesn’t it seem odd to you that all wild animals and most wild plants on Fiix should be poisonous?”

  “Do you know that they are?”

  “No, but Ghirra says… well, besides, it’s the only excuse I can come up with for the split food chain.”

  “Ah ha. The very next item.”

  “I’m positing two separate ecosystems in operation here: the Sawls and their domestic plants and animals versus everything else. Normally, this would be an inelegant system, not making efficient use of the planet’s resources. It would seem to work against survival, unless survival was what necessitated the split in the first place. Thus, I’d prefer it if all the wild animals do prove to be poisonous.”

  “Does evolution work that way? I mean, support the development of coexisting separate systems?”

  “On a planetary scale? If it’s a natural mechanism, it’s unprecedented,” Susannah admitted.

  “If a natural…? Now who’s getting heavy with the subtext?”

  “Well, I kee
p thinking about Weng’s periodic table.”

  “Weng’s so-called periodic table.”

  “She’s only suggesting there were some people here once who knew some things the Sawls don’t know now. Not unreasonable.”

  “Ummm. So you are suggesting the three H’s might have been engineered?”

  “No. I… I don’t know… well, maybe. But that could be my Terran frame of reference asserting itself, plus a poverty of the imagination. The real explanation’s probably a natural one, but just as unlikely. I’ll bet.”

  Undisturbed by further violent weather, the caravan settled into a routine walking, eating and sleeping deeply after long hours in the heat. The hail damage was repaired little by little, injuries healed, and the wagons inched across the open plain at a measured crawl, like the sun sinking slowly at their backs.

  On the sixth throw, they picked up a little stream, shallow and sluggish, but the first fresh water since leaving the canyon of the hail. An unscheduled stop was made to refill the water kegs tied to the sides of the wagons. The brush-grown track ran parallel to the distant northern mountains, the Vallegar, Valla’s Wall. In the east, the turquoise sky faded into pale ambered green as it dropped to the grassy horizon.

  By the seventh throw, as the sun rested its salmon disk on the western limb, the stream had widened into a small sand-bottomed river. The caravan plodded through a hot, red dusk. The sharp grasses in Susannah’s path were darkened by her long, purple shadow.

  She thought it a trick of the odd light that the plain no longer seemed to stretch ahead to infinity. But again, there was a restlessness building along the caravan and she found herself searching the ruddy sky for sudden clouds. She was rewarded instead with the shrill music of the pipers striking an upbeat rhythm. The hjalk jostled and picked up their pace self-importantly, as if embarrassed to have been woken from a walking doze.

  From the head of the train came scattered singing, weary but cheerful. Susannah saw the lead wagons turn abruptly aside and appear to fall off the edge of the horizon. Over the rattle of harness and cartwheels, she heard a steady roaring.

  Ghirra smiled as she stopped to stare in confusion. He took her arm and drew her forward to the edge, where she stood gaping like a tourist at Olympus Mons.

  The plain simply ended. And then, a kilometer below, it began again, as a lowland savannah that sloped gently toward a green arm of ocean curling around the eastern extreme of the Vallegar. The northern bay shore was sharply mountainous, broken by rugged fjords. The southern shore was too distant to be clearly seen in the red dusk. At the nearer, western end, a region of tall sea cliffs and steep-sided inlets sheltered a smaller, narrow cove.

  Ghirra pointed. “Ogo Dul.”

  Susannah squinted into the dusky distance. She saw no bustling trade city on those wave-splashed cliffs, no sign of human habitation at all. The battered yellow canopy of the Infirmary wagon passed beneath, drawing her attention downward. A road nestled into the side of the stupendous drop, descending in eight long switchbacks. It was two wagon-widths across and paved with worn octagonal stones. A knee-high stone curb ran along the drop-side edge of the road, broken in places, where dry slides of dirt and gravel had shoved across the pavement. The lead wagons, beginning the third switchback, seemed cast in miniature, already far below.

  Susannah looked for the source of the roaring. To the north of the road, the little river that had accompanied them for the last few throws fell in a single red-gold ribbon off the edge of the precipice. Several hundred meters down, it smashed into a ledge and rebounded in a cloud of ruddy mist to drop again, a fan of sparkling threads cascading into a wide pool at the shadowed base of the chasm. There were clumps of trees, a level meadow flanking the river where it flowed out of the pool to resume its seaward journey, and blossoms large enough to be visible at a distance as points of vermilion glowing in the yellow grass.

  “Hell of a drop,” murmured Susannah inadequately.

  “Um. Kinda looks like Paradise down there,” Megan remarked at her side.

  They missed the first sunset in two and a half weeks, by their ship’s clock. The air cooled only slightly as they descended the long curl of road into premature evening and the fat red sun disappeared behind the chasm’s rim.

  “My ears just popped.” Megan noted.

  “And the humidity’s back,” Susannah added regretfully. She watched the lead wagons reach bottom and pull aside onto the grassy terrace beside the pool.

  “Will Aguidran let us stop here?” Susannah asked.

  Ghirra nodded at the russet mist. “This water we call Imvalla, but it is a favored place.”

  “Imvalla?”

  “Valla’s Tears. She left them here at this place, the tales say, and this is why Valla does not cry for the hurt she brings.”

  The air was warm and still in the poolside meadow, but a long collective swim in deep water and the absence of the punishing sun brought a festive air to the campsite.

  Megan relaxed and stared contentedly at the distant hot gleam of sunset ocean. Ghirra rediscovered laughter, telling light stories of past trade trips. Even the laconic Master Ranger was persuaded to sip at a ration of sour beer, adding the occasional droll detail to her brother’s recitations. At the twenty giant red-and-blue wagons, the FoodGuilders sang as they cleaned up after the dinner meal. The terrors of the hail seemed for the moment forgotten.

  As Susannah rolled out her blanket in the red twilight, she said to Megan, “It’s great without the sun, but how will we find our way in the night?”

  Overhearing, Ghirra smiled like a parent on Christmas eve. “You will know this, Suzhannah, when you wake.”

  Singing woke her, throaty and solemn. Shadows moved through warm dim light, and Susannah was confused, mistaking it for lingering dusk.

  But the light was in the east. The ocean horizon glowed in secret anticipation. The waking caravan faced the east and sang its welcome.

  Dawn already? I thought… Susannah’s entire understanding of the lengthy Fiixian light-dark cycle was abruptly thrown into question.

  And then the false dawn faded as the night sky’s glowing magnificence, the densely packed star globule of Byrnham’s Cluster, nosed above the horizon.

  Its center, perched on the sparkling rim of the ocean, was a rosy fuzz as luminous as an aurora. As darkness fell, its halo became visible, a semicircle of pointillist light that dominated half the sky, thinning gradually toward the perimeter and ending quite suddenly against velvet black. There was no familiar background star field. A profusion of nearby stars, bright as planets, were scattered across the otherwise empty night, red, gold, white and blue, like glimmering shells thrown up on the dark sands of a volcanic beach. Sooty tendrils of the surrounding black invaded the cluster’s luminous arc. Susannah thought of dark, long-fingered hands grasping a glowing melon.

  Ghirra crouched beside her, his expectant smile of the evening before made proud by her wondering delight. “Do you like our night lanterns?”

  She nodded, unable to frame an appropriate reply.

  He pointed out a huge red giant of a star halfway out from the cluster center, then a hotter blue spark caught in a dark cloud wisp. “The Rangers,” he explained. “They watch the Darkness, the red light for Lagri, the blue light for Valla.”

  “The darkness?” she asked, thinking he meant the night. But Ghirra traced a finger in the air, outlining the tendrils of nebular dust.

  “There… you see this? The Darkness.” He sat back on his heels pensively, then murmured. “Ibi says each night lantern is another world. Do you say this also?”

  “Well, yes, of course. At least, maybe not a world that supports life, but lots of stars have planets, worlds, that is. Mine has ten, but people only live on three of them, plus some of the moons.”

  “Mooon.” He wrapped his tongue around the syllable, making it two.

  “That’s right, you have no moons here, do you? A moon is a smaller world that moves around a larger world.”
/>   Ghirra lowered himself to the damp grass beside her and sat like a small boy with his knees pulled up to his chin. “Ah, so many. So many worlds.”

  11

  “The salvage party has finally left, and the two hjalk teams with them.” Weng set a Sawl oil lamp down on Danforth’s work table. “I thought you might appreciate some additional light.”

  Danforth nodded abstractedly, staring over steepled fingers at the Cluster glowing above the dark silhouette of the Talche. “I don’t know. Pretty good night for stargazing.”

  “The Cluster must have great spiritual significance for the Sawls,” noted Weng. “They sang in the fields when it rose.”

  “They sing all the time, Weng.”

  “But this time, they stopped work and sang.”

  Danforth squinted into the shadowy stalks walling the clearing. “They’re out there working in the dark? Don’t they ever quit?”

  “The Fiixian night is too long for work to stop every darkfall, Dr. Danforth. And we must be grateful that the ranger salvage party had no reluctance to set out in darkness. I wish Mr. Clausen had seen fit to wait for them.”

  Danforth made a small noise of disgust. “You think Ibiá is really after the antenna?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  Danforth faced out into the darkness, but his gaze turned inward. “Well, if he is, I hope for his sake he gets the hell out of there before Emil finds him at it.”

  Stavros shoved his bench away from the makeshift console. CRI was relating a long horror story and would not be sidetracked.

  The cavern was suffocating, the unrelenting heat of the night outside beginning to translate downward through the rock. Stavros’s fingers were slippery on the keypad.

  He stood, stretching the cramps out of his back, and went to the stone sink to splash water on his face. The water flowed by gravity from a cistern buried in the hill above his hiding place. It was tepid and tasted faintly of earth, but he gulped it gratefully from cupped hands and let it stream down his bared shoulders and chest. He decided to risk a trip to the Baths later, even if he had to overcome Edan’s caution by force.