Fool’s Run

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I know,” he said, his voice so faint the Magician almost didn’t catch it. His eyes caught light oddly, filmed with tears or memories. His hands were loose; his whole body was loose, as though he were accepting the empty air. Jase’s throat stung suddenly. Seven years, he thought. It took him seven years to let go. God help us, how do we manage to survive, with our sorrows and brief loves?

  “Magician,” he said, shrugging the problem at hand back on his shoulders like an old familiar boulder. “You’ve got our attention. Now can you be more explicit—”

  “Pursuit-cruiser Hero to Hub-craft,” the com interrupted abrasively. “Fleet approaching last transmitted coordinates of Flying Wail. Please transmit new coordinates—”

  “They’re practically under your nose,” Jase said irritably. “Now—”

  “Orders upon approach? Do you want us to fire on them?”

  “I want you to get off—negative. Match speed and escort.”

  “Sir,” Hero said incredulously. “Code 5?”

  “Negative Code 5. They’re unarmed.”

  “Sir, are you certain?”

  “Just—I’m negotiating a return. Maintain silence; clear channels. Escort and wait—”

  “Code 8?”

  “Negative,” Jase shouted. “Negative Code 8. No force. Re—” He broke off as the Magician said something incoherent in the background. “Mr. Restak,” he said, suddenly, deeply uneasy. “Magician.” He heard Terra’s breathing behind him, hard, unsteady. “Mr. Restak! Will you respond? Damn it, Hero, will you get off—”

  “The need,” Terra said tightly, freezing Jase’s vocal cords, “is for light.”

  SEVEN

  Dark. Not the dark behind closed eyes, with its random shadows of color, not the dark of night with its distant fires, but the soundless, motionless midnight of emptiness…She stood in it. Was enclosed in it. Buried in it. She held darkness between her teeth, breathed it into her lungs. Her bones were carved of night. Her eyes held no light. She might have been beyond the edge of the universe, in a place where light had not yet been conceived.

  “This dark,” she whispered, to the Magician lost in his own blindness, to the vague, shadowy men, hardly more substantial than memory, whose gazes were riveted on her. “This dark…” A line of old poetry drifted through her head. “‘And dark on dark is dark…’ It is cold, this dark. And too small. The dark is…a skin that needs to be shed…”

  An eye opened in the dark. A pinprick of light.

  “The yellow star…Too far. Too cold. It means nothing. It is no message. It is…not real. There is no fire, but the memory of fire. The need…and the memory of need.” She felt the Magician’s mind, struggling, like a small insect in the corner of a gigantic web, to break free of her voice, her vision. The struggling ceased gradually; the fear she sensed all around her, within her—fear and the memory of fear—was no longer in him. He was truly swallowed in the dark, in no-time, under the cold gaze of the yellow star. She—a time-bound part of her—still remembered fear. Someone’s heart beat raggedly in terror at a memory; someone’s hands, clinging to a rifle, were slick with sweat.

  The need grew, the star grew, a sweet and dangerous flower in the dark.

  “The need is for light…”

  The cold star ate away at the dark. Existing nowhere, in no-time, it caused no shadow and gave no warmth. “It is a star of memory,” she said despairingly. “It gives nothing.” Her hands shifted on the metal she held. Someone said something: a word existed in another world, another time. A memory of light was filling her own mind, light from the past. “No warmth,” she whispered. “Not in memory.” But she carried light.

  A movement in front of her, stilled. She tasted fear like a pellet of metal. “Again,” she whispered. “Again.” But there was no desert sun above her head, nor did she stand on pale, heat-drenched sand. This was a tiny bubble of air enclosed against a vast dark. Two men breathed noiselessly in front of her, their faces turned away from the panel lights, shadowed as they watched her. They were so still they might have been trying to hide the sound of their heartbeats from her, or the meaningless murmurings within their minds.

  “Terra,” the dark said gently, pleadingly, and for a second she was outside of the vision, and the only light she saw was the tiny com-light on the panel between the two men. Her lips moved soundlessly: Michele.

  “Terra.”

  “The need is for light…”

  “No light you make can reach into a dream…No light you make can reach across such a darkness…You will only die. This time, you will die. And so will I because you will destroy my face, my heart.”

  “Michele,” she whispered. And then she felt it: the quickening, the terrible hunger for warmth, for light, for life.

  Her hands tightened on the rifle. She flung a light across the dark…

  There was not enough warmth in the desert sand. The light soaking into it, burning the skin, was not enough. The sun-filled sky, so lucent it hurt the eyes, was not enough. He hungered for it, ached for it, wanted to wrap himself in fire, net the sun like a fish and haul it toward Earth until the sand melted underfoot and yellow fire stretched overhead from horizon to horizon.

  He lifted the laser-rifle.

  He heard the screaming, like the cries of seabirds in the distance. It meant nothing. The need was for light. Stones exploded around him, walls and equipment lost their shapes. Fire billowed up between the Earth and the sun, gave the desert a reddish cast. The red sun was not enough, the need was greater. He made a world of fire, he painted all he could see with light. Until there was nothing left of it but fire…

  He stood in a red night. It was soundless but for the fire still licking at the bones of the barracks. His hands were welded to the rifle. He freed them finally, dropped the rifle. It made a small sound in the emptiness around him. He wondered a moment what dream he was in, whose dream. Then he began to see the shapes scattered across the ground, washed in the red light. The light of the red sun. Charred, fused, broken nightmare figures. An attack, he thought. I’m the only one left alive.

  And then his sweating, shaking body, his aching hands said what he had done.

  He made a sound. He was kneeling, blinking away sweat. Grey. Grey floor angling up to form the control panel. A swarm of lights. Under the lights, a keyboard.

  He expelled a breath that was not dark, was not fire. The Flying Wail was as soundless as his vision had been. He saw boots, black, scuffed brown, a glittering orange reptile skin that hurt the eyes. The sweat chilled suddenly on his face.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered. Then he heard her voice over the com.

  “Magician.”

  “Terra,” he whispered, afraid to move. Grey boots entered his vision; a dark hand reached down to him. He looked up, saw a living face.

  “Magic-Man?” the Scholar said tentatively. “You in there?”

  He nodded, let the Scholar pull him to his feet. He stumbled to the com.

  “Aaron?”

  “I’m here.” His voice was barely more than a whisper.

  “Chief Klyos? You’re not—she didn’t—”

  “She didn’t shoot,” Jase said. He seemed, to the Magician’s ear, to be handling words cautiously, as if he were astonished he still had a voice. “She didn’t shoot.”

  “You know—”

  “She talked. You told her to talk so she talked. You didn’t.”

  “I was—I was—The need was for light.”

  “I know.”

  “She made light.”

  “Not in the Hub-craft. Thank God.”

  “No,” the Magician said. He felt himself still trembling and sat down. “In my head. The only safe place for her to do it without harming Michele. She saved us,” he said, still incredulous, to both the Hub-craft and the Flying Wail. “She kept us all alive.”

  Jase’s voice came again. “Is that where you were?”

  “In Desert Sector. Making light.”

  “Mr. Restak—” He sound
ed shaken.

  “There wasn’t enough light. I felt it. Not enough light in the entire Desert Sector, not in the entire world…not for something under a dying sun, needing light to be born.”

  “Now?”

  Images formed at the edge of the Magician’s awareness, seducing his attention…A cliff face black as deep space. A dim, reddish sky beyond it. An oval bent back on itself, all colors or no color, lying on amethyst sand. A concave vision of a red star. The cliff. The oval. The red sun. Terra’s voice.

  “The vision.”

  She spoke to the tiny star of light that was the Hub-craft’s com. She still held the rifle, but she was no longer aware of it. The men had turned their faces away from her, toward the fire and dark beyond the starscreen as if her words and her thoughts were coloring their minds, creating visions among the stars.

  “The purple sand ripples. Something moves beneath its surface…The black cliff. The need is to reach the black cliff. The need is…”

  The Magician’s voice across the dark, struggling with the language of the dream: “Heat. The need is…to change. To transform. But the need is not in the sun. The black cliff…”

  “The cliff is a door, a gateway…”

  “A passage to fire.”

  “The vision is fire.”

  The rippling continued, a methodical undulation of amethyst particles, a vibration against the cliff. The cliff itself began to vibrate.

  “It’s not easy to estimate,” the Magician said tranquilly, “the perspective within the vision. Is the cliff a mile high? Or as high as my hand? Is the vibration enough to move a fist-sized stone? Or enough to disturb a thousand miles of surface?”

  “The gateway must be broken open.”

  Shock waves undulated across the sand. The gentle sea began to stir, water heaving onto the shore as from a boiling pot.

  “The gateway is immense,” the Magician said. His voice was hushed. “Any seed on Earth might have such an intense, explosive reaction when it finally splits itself open, driven toward light, but would it be able to perceive the source of light? The sun in this vision is as we might see it, on our horizon, though it is huge and dim…On the horizon beneath the dying sun, the cliff itself is huge. So is the thing beneath the sand, driving toward heat, disturbing the sea…”

  “Fire and water.”

  “It’s a hazardous beginning to life…a balance of fire and water, heat and cold. The black cliff contains the forge. The crucible.”

  “The need…” Terra whispered. “The need…”

  The center yawned open: a cave of colored teeth or a mouthful of jewels. It swallowed its own debris; it swallowed the last, frantic surge beneath the sand. The reflections of fire within the cave beat the jeweled walls like wings.

  “Fire…”

  A million messages, all at the touch of the planet’s inner fire. Joints sealed, surfaces smoothed, energy crisscrossing along elegant patterns of framework. White heat exploded out of the cliff in a rain of stars. Then the tidal wave struck.

  “Water.”

  “The healing,” Terra said. The word came from her in a soft sigh.

  Jase looked at her. She sat on the floor, one hand resting on the rifle beside her, though she seemed oblivious of it, of the Hub-craft, of everything and everyone within it. Her eyes were distant, defenseless, luminous with visions.

  He turned back to the starscreen, feeling light-headed, dislocated, his head full of the subjective and approximate imagery of dreams. The two voices supported and overlapped each other, the language never quite precise, always dancing on the surface of the vision itself, light on water, illumining but never encompassing. A transformation by fire and water…of what?

  “What are we seeing, I wonder?” the Magician mused. “Or how? Out of alien eyes, an alien mind watching? Or is this thing watching itself as it forms? Are we seeing its own biological blueprint, watching its heritage of genetic messages, its inner vision of commands that it must respond to? The cliff, the sun, the sea, inherited memories, a code of transformation, so that the sun we see is in its cells, its being? The true sun may have changed even more since this message was inherited…”

  Steam poured out of the cliff. It obscured the sea, the sun, hung like a dense tropical mist over everything. Long waves curled like scrolls above the sand, unrolled to the lip of the cave, withdrew slowly, heavily, dragging the sand with it. Layer after layer of amethyst, coloring the water a twilight purple…

  “A wave,” the Magician said. “Another wave…Another…”

  Jase glanced at the chronometer, but the time didn’t register in his mind. It meant nothing. That’s it, he thought. That’s what I’ve been feeling. Time is different. All my time-habits are suspended. He was aware of Aaron’s silence beside him. Concentrating, he could hear Aaron’s breathing, slow and almost noiseless, timed to the Magician’s counting of the waves. He wondered if he should become alarmed, fight his way out of the general hypnosis. Then he thought: To hell with it, I asked for an explanation.

  At last, after many waves, the Magician said, “There are contours beneath the sand.”

  “Sir,” Hero interrupted. “This is Hero. Fleet has matched speed and is escorting Flying Wail. Request orders.”

  “Just stay with them,” Jase said calmly. “Maintain silence.”

  “Patterns in the sand,” Terra said.

  “Spiderweb filigree…A lacework all down the shore…It’s huge, whatever it is.”

  Metamorphosis, Jase thought, remembering one of Terra’s inexplicable references. Only this was a thinking larva and its cocoon was made of amethyst and it plunged itself into fire and water as it changed. It is aware of its own construction, and it sent out a blueprint of its transformation across God knows how many light-years.

  “Sir. Hero again,” the fleet commander said edgily. “We’re picking up some weird chatter from the Flying Wail.”

  Jase sighed noiselessly. “Log it,” he suggested. “Might be some kind of code. Keep listening.”

  “Sir,” Aaron breathed, roused out of his trance. “What the hell’s going on? I can’t stop seeing—imagining things. I don’t even have an imagination. The Magician—he makes me see the things he’s saying. So does she. What—how are they doing it?”

  “I don’t know. Wait.”

  “Bones,” Terra whispered. “Bones of crystal.”

  The fragile, glittering skeleton lay limply across the sand, catching fire now and then from the weak sun as the steam thinned. The sun glowed like a hot coal in shadowy red smoke. Another wave fell, withdrew. Another.

  “The heat,” the Magician said, “must have glazed its framework. It was still so hot when it crawled back out of the furnace, it melted the sand, minerals, whatever else was down there. It formed a membrane between each—each bone. I don’t know what it’s made of. It looks like wings of lead crystal and stained glass. But that can’t be, if it’s meant to fly.”

  “Dark,” Terra said, but this time there was no anguish in her voice. “The need is to see. To see the sun.”

  “The main body is still buried. The brain.”

  Jase caught himself trying to imagine an alien brain and stopped. Beside him, Aaron stirred slightly, as if troubled by the same image. He turned briefly to look at Terra, amazement struggling with the hostility in his eyes.

  “Is it true?”

  “God, I don’t know,” Jase said. “Aaron, what is more imperative at this moment? Law? Retribution? Our fuel supply? I don’t know what’s true. But I do know what’s got my attention.”

  “The need is to see…”

  “The timing is astonishing,” the Magician said. “The needs are precise, crucial…a moment of fire, a moment of water, the sun…the well of magma, the sea to cool it, and enough wave action to unbury it, and all in daylight, never at night…Seven Earth-years to ready it for a few perilous moments.”

  But what is it? Jase thought, fascinated. What?

  “The body contours are beginning to show
. It looks—” His voice broke off in a murmur of surprise. He tried to speak again, failed. “I can’t—” He was panting suddenly, raggedly. “Too much…too fast…I can’t—I can’t—”

  “Magician.” Terra raised her voice slightly. “It’s not for you. The knowledge. Don’t listen to it. Let it go. The knowledge is not for you. Only the vision.”

  There was a long silence; Jase gazed absently at the com-light, as if he might hear, beneath the static and faint chatter, the masses of information rushing through the Magician’s head.

  “My God,” the Magician said shakily. “That thing’s programmed like a—like a—”

  Like a what? Jase shouted silently.

  Waves were washing the cylinder free. The cloudy surface was divided with a spectrum of color. Waves flowed over it, withdrew down the long, glassy lines of it, wearing away slowly, carefully, every particle of sand.

  The sun, seen under a blur of water…

  “The sun,” Terra said softly. “The red sun.”

  “The sun is a direction finder,” the Magician said surprisedly. “A point of reference. That would explain all the star-charts it swallowed. The need—”

  “The need is forever,” Terra said simply.

  “It’s the home-sun. The parent sun. The need goes deeper than intelligence. Even dim and dying, it’s—” Language seemed to fail him for once. “It’s a symbol. Long ago it must have bean more than a symbol. The young star must have been the heat source, the process itself. But the star aged; the transformation imperative evolved a different pattern. Even so, the evolutionary memory is long. The instinct is for that sun.”

  Jase drew breath, loosed it soundlessly. The yellow sun, he sensed, next time he saw it, would be, for a fraction of a moment, unfamiliar.

  “It’s moving,” Terra said. “The wings are moving.”

  They lifted to the steam, things of air and light, almost invisible. Very slowly they furled, tucked close to the body, then unfurled, the long, glittering length descending over most of the shore. They furled again, opened gently, almost sensuously in the warm, damp air.

  “It’s beautiful,” the Magician breathed. “Enormous, beautiful, intelligent and—”