A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Poul Anderson

“We’ll try. We, uh, we have a lot of speed to kill. In our condition, fast braking is unsafe. Can you give us about half an hour?”

  Aycharaych would not have spent several seconds reaching a decision. “Permitted. Be warned, deviations may cause you to be shot down. Proceed.” Nor would he have broken contact with not a single further inquiry.

  Outside was no longer black, but purple. The spacecraft strewed thunder across desert. “What the hell, sir?” Chives exploded.

  “Agreed,” said Flandry. His tongue shifted to an obscure language they both knew. “Use this lingo while that channel’s open.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “First, play back any pictures we got of the place we’re supposed to go.” Flandry’s fingers brushed a section of console. On an inset screen came a view taken from nearby space under magnification. His trained eyes studied it and a few additional. “A spacefield, aye, standard Merseian model, terminal and the usual outbuildings. Modest-sized, no vessels parked. And way off in wilderness.” He twisted his mustache. “You know, I’ll bet that’s where every visitor’s required to land. And then he’s brought in a closed car to a narrowly limited area which is all he ever sees.”

  “Shall we obey, sir?”

  “Um, ’twould be a pity, wouldn’t it, to pass by that lovely city we had in mind. Besides, they doubtless keep heavy weapons at the port; our pictures show signs of it. Once there, we’d be at their mercy. Whereas I suspect that threat to blast us elsewhere was a bluff. Imagine a stranger pushing into a prohibited zone on a normal planet—when the system’s being invaded! Why aren’t we at least swarmed by military aircraft?”

  “Very good, sir. We can land in five minutes.” Chives gave his master a pleading regard. “Sir, must I truly stay behind while you debark?”

  “Somebody has to cover us, ready to scramble if need be. We’re Intelligence collectors, not heroes. If I call you and say, ‘Escape,’ Chives, you will escape.”

  “Yes, sir,” the Shalmuan forced out. “However, please grant me the liberty of protesting your decision not to wear armor like your men.”

  “I want the full use of my senses.” Flandry cast him a crooked smile and patted the warm green shoulder. “I fear I’ve often strained your loyalty, old chap. But you haven’t failed me yet.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Chives stared hard at his own busy hands. “I … endeavor … to give satisfaction.”

  Time swooped past.

  “Attention!” cried from the screen. “You are off course! You are in absolutely barred territory!”

  “Say on,” Flandry jeered. He half hoped to provoke a real response. The voice only denounced his behavior.

  A thump resounded and shivered. The tone of wind and engines ceased. They were down.

  Flandry vaulted from his chair, snatched a combat helmet, buckled it on as he ran. Beneath it he already wore a mindscreen, as did everybody aboard. Otherwise he was’ attired in a gray coverall and stout leather boots. On his back and across his chest were the drive cones and controls of a grav unit. His pouchbelt held field rations, medical supplies, canteen of water, ammunition, blaster, slugthrower, and Merseian war knife.

  At the head of his dozen Dennitzan marines, he bounded from the main personnel lock, along the extruded gangway, onto the soil of Chereion. There he crouched in what shelter the hull afforded and glared around, fingers on weapons.

  After a minute or two he stepped forth. Awe welled in him.

  A breeze whispered, blade-sharp with cold and dryness. It bore an iron tang off uncounted leagues of sand and dust. In cloudless violet, the sun stood at afternoon, bigger to see than Sol over Terra, duller and redder than the sun over Diomedes; squinting, he could look straight into it for seconds without being blinded, and through his lashes find monstrous dark spots and vortices. It would not set for many an hour, the old planet turned so wearily.

  Shadows were long and purple across the dunes which rolled cinnabar and ocher to the near horizon. Here and there stood the gnawed stump of a pinnacle, livid with mineral hues, or a ravine clove a bluff which might once have been a mountain. The farther desert seemed utterly dead. Around the city, wide apart, grew low bushes whose leaves glittered in rainbows as if crystalline. The city itself rose from foundations that must go far down, must have been buried until the landscape eroded from around them and surely have needed renewal as the ages swept past.

  The city—it was not a giant chaos such as besat Terra or Merseia; nothing on Chereion was. An ellipse defined it, some ten kilometers at the widest, proportioned in a right-ness Flandry had recognized from afar though not knowing how he did. The buildings of the perimeter were single-storied, slenderly colonnaded; behind them, others lifted ever higher, until they climaxed in a leap of slim towers. Few windows interrupted the harmonies of colors and iridescence, the interplay of geometries that called forth visions of many-vaulted infinity. The heart rode those lines and curves upward until the whole sight became a silent music.

  Silent … only the breeze moved or murmured.

  A time passed beyond time.

  “Milostiv Bog,” Lieutenant Vymezal breathed, “is it Heaven we see?”

  “Then is Heaven empty?” said another man as low.

  Flandry shook himself, wrenched his attention away, sought for his purposefulness in the ponderous homely shapes of their armor, the guns and grenades they bore. “Let’s find out.” His words were harsh and loud in his ears. “This is as large a community as any, and typical insofar as I could judge.” Not that they are alike. Each is a separate song. “If it’s abandoned, we can assume they all are.”

  “Why would the Merseians guard … relics?” Vymezal asked.

  “Maybe they don’t.” Flandry addressed his minicom. “Chives, jump aloft at the first trace of anything untoward. Fight at discretion. I think we can maintain radio contact from inside the town. If not, I may ask you to hover. Are you still getting a transmission?”

  “No, sir.” That voice came duly small. “It ceased when we landed.”

  “Cut me in if you do … Gentlemen, follow me in combat formation. Should I come to grief, remember your duty is to return to the fleet if possible, or to cover our boat’s retreat if necessary. Forward.”

  Flandry started off in flat sub-gee bounds. His body felt miraculously light, as light as the shapes which soared before him, and the air diamond clear. Yet behind him purred the gravity motors which helped his weighted troopers along. He reminded himself that they hugged the ground to present a minimal target, that the space they crossed was terrifyingly open, that ultimate purity lies in death. The minutes grew while he covered the pair of kilometers. Half of him stayed cat-alert, half wished Kossara could somehow, safely, have witnessed this wonder.

  The foundations took more and more of the sky, until at last he stood beneath their sheer cliff. Azure, the material resisted a kick and an experimental energy bolt with a hardness which had defied epochs. He whirred upward, over an edge, and stood in the city.

  A broad street of the same blue stretched before him, flanked by dancing rows of pillars and arabesque friezes on buildings which might have been temples. The farther he scanned, the higher fountained walls, columns, tiers, cupolas, spires; and each step he took gave him a different perspective, so that the whole came alive, intricate, simple, powerful, tranquil, transcendental. But footfalls echoed hollow.

  They had gone a kilometer inward when nerves twanged and weapons snapped to aim. “Hold,” Flandry said. The man-sized ovoid that floated from a side lane sprouted tentacles which ended in tools and sensors. The lines and curves of it were beautiful. It passed from sight again on its unnamed errand. “A robot,” Flandry guessed. “Fully automated, a city could last, could function, for—millions of years?” His prosiness felt to him as if he had spat on consecrated earth.

  No, damn it! I’m hunting my woman’s murderers.

  He trod into a mosaic plaza and
saw their forms.

  Through an arcade on the far side the tall grave shapes walked, white-robed, heads bare to let crests shine over luminous eyes and lordly brows. They numbered perhaps a score. Some carried what appeared to be books, scrolls, delicate enigmatic objects; some appeared to be in discourse, mind to mind; some went alone in their meditations. When the humans arrived, most heads turned observingly. Then, as if having exhausted what newness was there, the thoughtfulness returned to them and they went on about their business of—wisdom?

  “What’ll we do, sir?” Vymezal rasped at Flandry’s ear.

  “Talk to them, if they’ll answer,” the Terran said. “Even take them prisoner, if circumstances warrant.”

  “Can we? Should we? I came here for revenge, but—God help us, what filthy monkeys we are.”

  A premonition trembled in Flandry. “Don’t you mean,” he muttered, “what animals we’re intended to feel like … we and whoever they guide this far?”

  He strode quickly across the lovely pattern before him. Under an ogive arch, one stopped, turned, beckoned, and waited. The sight of gun loose in holster and brutal forms at his back did not stir the calm upon that golden face. “Greeting,” lulled in Eriau.

  Flandry reached forth a hand. The other slipped easily aside from the uncouth gesture. “I want somebody who can speak for your world,” the man said.

  “Any of us can that,” sang the reply. “Call me, if you wish, Liannathan. Have you a name for use?”

  “Yes. Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, Imperial Navy of Terra. Your Aycharaych knows me. Is he around?”

  Liannathan ignored the question. “Why do you trouble our peace?”

  The chills walked faster along Flandry’s spine. “Can’t you read that in my mind?” he asked.

  “Sta pakao,” said amazement behind him.

  “Hush,” Vymezal warned the man, his own tone stiff with intensity; and there was no mention of screens against telepathy.

  “We give you the charity of refraining,” Liannathan smiled.

  To and fro went the philosophers behind him.

  “I … assume you’re aware … a punitive expedition is on its way,” Flandry said. “My group came to … parley.”

  Calm was unshaken. “Think why you are hostile.”

  “Aren’t you our enemies?”

  “We are enemies to none. We seek, we shape.”

  “Let me talk to Aycharaych. I’m certain he’s somewhere on Chereion. He’d have left the Zorian System after word got beamed to him, or he learned from broadcasts, his scheme had failed. Where else would he go?”

  Liannathan curved feathery brows upward. “Best you explain yourself, Captain, to yourself if not us.”

  Abruptly Flandry snapped off the switch of his mind-screen. “Read the answers,” he challenged.

  Liannathan spread graceful hands in gracious signal. “I told you, knowing what darkness you must dwell in, for mercy’s sake we will leave your thoughts alone unless you compel us. Speak.”

  Conviction congealed in Flandry, iceberg huge. “No, you speak. What are you on Chereion? What do you tell the Merseians? I already know, or think I know, but tell me.”

  The response rang grave: “We are not wholly the last of an ancient race; the others have gone before us. We are those who have not yet reached the Goal; the bitter need of the universe for help still binds us. Our numbers are few, we have no need of numbers. Very near we are to those desires that lie beyond desire, those powers that lie beyond power.” Compassion softened Liannathan’s words. “Terran, we mourn the torment of you and yours. We mourn that you can never feel the final reality, the spirit born out of pain. We have no wish to return you to nothingness. Go in love, before too late.”

  Almost, Flandry believed. His sense did not rescue him; his memories did. “Yah!” he shouted. “You phantom, stop haunting!”

  He lunged. Liannathan wasn’t there. He crashed a blaster bolt among the mystics. They were gone. He leaped in among the red-tinged shadows of the arcade and peered after light and sound projectors to smash. Everywhere else, enormous, brooded the stillness of the long afternoon. The image of a single Chereionite flashed into sight, in brief white tunic, bearing though not brandishing a sidearm, palm uplifted—care-worn, as if the bones would break out from the skin, yet with life in flesh and great garnet eyes such as had never burned in those apparitions which were passed away. Flandry halted. “Aycharaych!”

  He snatched for the switch to turn his mindscreen back on. Aycharaych smiled. “You need not bother, Dominic,” he said in Anglic. “This too is only a hologram.”

  “Lieutenant,” Flandry snapped over his shoulder, “dispose your squad against attack.”

  “Why?” said Aycharaych. The armored men gave him scant notice. His form glimmered miragelike in the gloom under that vaulted roof, where sullen sunlight barely reached. “You have discovered we have nothing to resist you.”

  You’re bound to have something, Flandry did not reply. A few missiles or whatever. You’re just unwilling to use them in these environs. Where are you yourself, and what were you doing while your specters held us quiet?

  As if out of a stranger’s throat, he heard: “Those weren’t straightforward audiovisuals like yours that we met, were they? No reason for them to put on a show of being present, of being real, except that none of them ever were. Right? They’re computer-generated simulacrums, will-o’-the-wisps for leading allies and enemies alike from the truth. Well, life’s made me an unbeliever.

  “Aycharaych, you are in fact the last Chereionite alive. The very last. Aren’t you?”

  Abruptly such anguish contorted the face before him that he looked away. “What did they die of?” he was asking. “How long ago?” He got no answer.

  Instead: “Dominic, we share a soul, you and I. We have both always been alone.”

  For a while I wasn’t; and now she is; she is down in the aloneness which is eternal. Rage ripped Flandry. He swung back to see a measure of self-command masking the gaunt countenance. “You must have played your game for centuries,” he grated. “Why? And … whatever your reason to hide that your people are extinct … why prey on the living? You, you could let them in and show them what’d make your Chereionites the … Greeks of the galaxy—but you sit in a tomb or travel like a vampire—Are you crazy, Aycharaych? Is that what drives you?”

  “No!”

  Flandry had once before heard the lyric voice in sorrow. He had not heard a scream: “I am not! Look around you. Who could go mad among these? And arts, music, books, dreams—yes, more, the loftiest spirits of a million years—they lent themselves to the scanners, the recorders—If you could have the likenesses to meet whenever you would … of Gautama Buddha, Kung Fu-Tse, Rabbi Hillel, Jesus the Christ, Rumi … Socrates, Newton, Hokusai, Jefferson, Gauss, Beethoven, Einstein, Ulfgeir, Manuel the Great, Manuel the Wise—would you let your war lords turn these instruments to their own vile ends? No!”

  And Flandry understood.

  Did Aycharaych, half blinded by his dead, see what he had given away? “Dominic,” he whispered hastily, shakily, “I’ve used you ill, as I’ve used many. It was from no will of mine. Oh, true, an art, a sport—yours too—but we had our services, you to a civilization you know is dying, I to a heritage I know can abide while this sun does. Who has the better right?” He held forth unsubstantial hands.

  “Dominic, stay. We’ll think how to keep your ships off and save Chereion—”

  Almost as if he were again the machine that condemned his son, Flandry said, “I’d have to lure my company into some kind of trap. Merseia would take the planet back, and the help it gives. Your shadow show would go on. Right?”

  “Yes. What are a few more lives to you? What is Terra? In ten thousand years, who will remember the empires? They can remember you, though, who saved Chereion for them.”

  Candle flames stood around a coffin. Flandry shook his
head. “There’ve been too many betrayals in too many causes.” He wheeled. “Men, we’re returning.”

  “Aye, sir.” The replies shuddered with relief.

  Aycharaych’s eidolon brought fingers together as if he prayed. Flandry touched his main grav switch. Thrust pushed harness against breast. He rose from the radiant city, into the waning murky day. Chill flowed around him. Behind floated his robot-encased men.

  “Brigate!” bawled Vymezal. “Beware!”

  Around the topmost tower flashed a score of javelin shapes. Firebeams leaped out of their nozzles. Remote-controlled flyer guns, Flandry knew. Does Aycharaych still hope, or does he only want revenge? “Chives,” he called into his sender, “come get us!”

  Sparks showered off Vymezal’s plate. He slipped aside in midair, more fast and nimble than it seemed he could be in armor. His energy weapon, nearly as heavy as the assailants, flared back. Thunders followed brilliances. Bitterness tinged air. A mobile blast cannon reeled in midflight, spun downward, crashed in a street, exploded. Fragments ravaged a fragile facade.

  “Shield the captain,” Vymezal boomed.

  Flandry’s men ringed him in. Shots tore at them. The noise stamped in his skull, the stray heat whipped over his skin. Held to his protection, the marines could not dodge about. The guns converged.

  A shadow fell, a lean hull blocked off the sun. Flames reaped. Echoes toned at last to silence around smoking ruin down below. Vymezal shouted triumph. He waved his warriors aside, that Flandry might lead them through the open lock, into the Hooligan.

  Wounded, dwindled, victorious, the Dennitzan fleet took orbits around Chereion. Within the command bridge, Bodin Miyatovich and his chieftains stood for a long while gazing into the viewscreens. The planet before them glowed among the stars, softly, secretly, like a sign of peace. But it was the pictures they had seen earlier, the tale they had heard, which made those hard men waver.

  Miyatovich even asked through his flagship’s rustling stillness: “Must we bombard?”

  “Yes,” Flandry said. “I hate the idea too.”