“Sort of. Not like I could record you or Ashur—it looks like a distortion when you play it back, though you can hear some of the words. What I mean is that I made a transcript. I thought it might be important.”
Ahi grinned at her. “I think you’re going to help a lot on this trip.”
Dragonette swished her tail with pleasure. “I think you’re going to help a lot, too.”
Ahi giggled. Then she tucked her half-eaten bar back into her pack. “Let’s top off our water bottles and get back to it. I want to reach the First Staircase by the time the sun goes down. Then we can chow down for real.”
Top off our water bottles meant hike a good fifteen minutes to the river’s edge. The Maisy had diverged from our trail by then, or we diverged from hers, and the canyon had widened into a landscape of mudstone knobs and bobs, weathered into fantastical shapes. At this point, we couldn’t see Maisy anymore, but we still heard the rush of her flow, and I wondered if our bottles might be swept away if we tried to hold them in that current.
“Watch your footing,” Ahi warned as we picked our way through hoodoos. “This rock can be slick when it’s wet.”
The morning rain had left many puddles. A closer glance at them revealed ephemeral life taking advantage of the brief moisture. Tiny creatures with tails wiggled in the water. Other creatures with multiple limbs that were as fine as hairs skimmed the surface, seeming to float on the tips of their toes. Kitten and Dragonette rushed from pool to pool.
“Are you recording them?” I said.
“Yes,” they replied gleefully.
I expected the noise of the river to get louder, but it stayed about the same. Instead of the rushy part, we had picked our way toward a large pool that had formed in a basin between two tilted blocks of sandstone. The water was so clear, I couldn’t see how deep it was. On the bottom, we saw colorful pebbles. Ranks of taller hoodoos, marching off toward the South Rim and the Maisy River, shaded us from the ferocious sun.
“Here,” Ahi declared reverently. “This is where Maisy shows her true spirit. The water is clean and clear.” She uncapped her bottle and dipped it into the pool. Ashur knelt beside her and did the same, staggering a little when his pack almost tipped him over.
“If you fall in,” warned Ahi, “don’t waste your time struggling. Keep calm and unstrap yourself from your pack.”
When Ashur shot her an impatient look, she returned his glare. “It happened to me. Sometimes you find things out the hard way; sometimes a friend warns you and saves you the trouble.”
That startled him. “Good advice,” he said. “Thank you.”
She grinned.
I knelt beside them and filled my own bottle. Dragonette zoomed back and forth over the pool, skimming the water with her tail and making little splashes with it. Kitten crouched next to me and dipped in one paw. “I’ve done this in the Habitat Sector,” she confessed. “In the ornamental ponds. I try to touch the colorful fish, but they swim away. They’re very uncooperative.”
“You would think people tried to eat them or something,” I said.
“I know, right?”
Dragonette paused when her play disturbed an insect that had three pairs of blue, iridescent wings. “Oh my!”
Ahi screwed the cap back on her bottle. “Life is all around us if you stop and look. The water draws it.”
Kitten and I held still. Dragonette flew to Ahi’s shoulder and perched there. We watched and listened. Once we stopped moving and making noise, we saw them.
Dozens of insects with colorful wings. The skinny bugs floating on the surface. The wigglers darting among the pebbles. Slender reptiles clinging to vertical surfaces, moving only their eyes as they scouted the territory. Tiny rodents that watched us with great suspicion. Winged creatures hopping back and forth on the other side of the pool, talking among themselves with short chirps.
“The animals in the canyon are quiet,” Ahi said at last. “They react to the ships as if they were loud people. We would, too, if we lived here.” She tucked her water bottle into her pack and stood. “We’d better get back to the trail.”
Ashur and I put our water bottles back where they belonged. Dragonette hopped to the top of Ashur’s pack frame, and Kitten trotted behind him as he followed Ahi. I brought up the rear, thinking once again of my painted tiger. If he were standing at the edge of this pool, he might decide it had been worthwhile to risk the unknown.
“Thanks, Maisy,” I whispered as we headed back to the trail.
* * *
I needn’t have worried about lagging behind. As our day struggled past noon and headed downhill toward evening, Ahi and Ashur began to tire. Their youthful exuberance had sent them headlong into the hike—now they were paying the price for not pacing themselves.
I had developed stamina during the day. I had adjusted to the heat and found my body’s natural rhythm. When they began to slow down, I stayed a few steps behind them, enjoying the respite. I got my second wind as we walked down a red dirt trail that snaked between outcrops, descending through switchbacks that led to broad, flat ledges whose regular surfaces would have been a joy to walk across, had the hot sunlight not been beating down on us (first on top of our hats, and then right into our faces).
Yet somehow I had grown accustomed to that flood of light. What had intimidated me in the morning had lifted my spirits in the afternoon.
Ahi turned at one point and regarded both Ashur and me, beaming. “Your skin is getting some healthy color.”
That remark baffled me until I took a closer look at Ashur. His skin had taken on deeper tones of brown. I could see why Ahi liked that—we weren’t pale-skinned people, but Olympians spent so much of our time in low light, we must have seemed pale to her.
The North Rim loomed to our right, perhaps one thousand meters high at this point. It glowed with spring sunshine, and now it had three distinct layers with different shades, from rusty red on the top, to yellow gold, to tan. To our left, the South Rim had fallen back several kilometers; it rose in a grand staircase with massive steps that each had scarps several hundred meters high. The canyon had angled north, turning away from the Gorge and its three towers, and exposing a vista that included buttes the size of battleships. One massive chunk stood right in the center, almost as tall as the South Rim. I guessed we would have to go all the way around it on one side or the other if we hoped to find our way to the Gorge, and I wondered which route was more perilous.
The path started to climb again, slowing my young friends even further and taxing me again. Once we reached the apex, we saw something up ahead.
“Spaceships!” declared Dragonette. “At last!”
They stood among the buttes and spires. I recognized the scene—I had seen it on the big screen in the Ship Operations Command Center, on Olympia.
“We’ve got maybe another hour of hiking before we get to them,” said Ahi. “Pretty soon, we’re going to be far enough out of this inner canyon to see another amazing sight.”
I had an idea what she meant. Sure enough, once we had climbed far enough to see past the steep walls, the Three came back into view on our left.
They stood like mountains. Now that the clouds were long gone, I could see the snow and ice that blanketed their tops. I wondered if anyone had ever been crazy enough to try to climb one of them.
Somehow I doubted it.
Our path had become more level, though we still climbed for brief stretches. I used those level spaces to catch my breath. I felt a growing excitement as more and more spaceships came into view. I saw some that reminded me of Merlin, at least to the extent that they had structures similar to the ones that moved that ship through holes generated in space–time. Most of the others possessed nothing like that. We passed one that looked like a big sphere, then another that seemed to be a series of broken loops.
These were not the tame ships whose parts were spread throughout Joe’s Salvage Yard. These were revenants from past ages, made by races long since decayed into
dust. They did not tolerate salvage. If we got anything from them, it would be something they chose to give. If anyone stole from them, there would be a price to pay.
At last we climbed a natural staircase through a slot canyon that brought us onto a broad plateau. Spaceships spilled odds and ends from end to end. The path wound straight through them, veering northwest. From here, we could see part of the Gorge, where the feet of the Three disappeared into deep, blue shadows.
We followed Ahi through the wondrous wreckage.
Danger, I thought. Unsorted Apocrypha.
“I’m glad we got here when you could see everything,” said Ahi. “This is my favorite part of the graveyard.”
“This is what I expected a spaceship graveyard to look like,” said Ashur.
“Me, too,” said Ahi, “before I started to work at one. Joe’s Salvage Yard is way more organized, and most of that stuff is newer. This stuff is old, and mysterious, and weird.”
It looked so weird, it made the Bernard Herrmann music from The Day the Earth Stood Still start playing in my head, a segment called “Space Control,” from a scene where Klaatu (who isn’t what he seems to be) is moving through the mysterious, unfathomable interior of his spaceship, preparing to use the gizmos therein to stop all the electricity on Earth. The predominant instruments in that segment are an electric violin, an electric bass, and two high and low theremins, which are played when hands (or whatever appendage you may have) interact with electric fields. Crystalline harp and piano arpeggios lend a shivery sense of the eerie.
Kitten must have been thinking along the same lines. “Gort!” she said. “Klaatu barada nikto!” letting the giant robot from the movie know that his companion was dead, and needed to be brought back to life.
Our path wound its way between exotic machines that could have fallen right out of Klaatu’s spaceship. Ahi didn’t have to warn us not to touch anything. What if we stopped all the electricity on Graveyard?
Kitten stretched her neck. “I feel a little disappointed there are no flying saucers.”
“Those are in here, too,” said Ahi, “but most of them are broken and half buried, so they’re harder to spot.”
Other than our voices and the sound of our footsteps, that landscape was eerily silent—until, halfway across, a sharp crack! made me jump.
“Walking trees,” remarked Ahi.
Ashur looked around. “What…?”
She paused and pointed to a gnarled tree bent over a stretch of bare ground on the northern side of the plateau. “That scarp is more of a slope. The walking trees love it there, because gravity helps them make their journey.”
We all paused to stare at the tree.
“Wait for it…” advised Ahi.
One of the branches that leaned toward the ground suddenly bent at one of its joints with another crack!
“After they get big enough to bend over,” said Ahi, “they’re pretty much walking their whole lives. When that branch touches the ground, it’ll sprout roots at the joint. Once it does that, a signal is sent to the old roots, and they start to die. They end up moving a few feet per week. Their seeds grow in bulbs on the roots, so they leave those behind when the roots die, and they sprout during the spring rains and start the whole process over again.”
“Where do they go?” said Ashur.
“They walk to the edge of cliffs and climb over. Or they wander over to a canyon wall and then start walking back the way they came. Sometimes they go into areas where they can’t thrive, and just dry up, but there always seems to be about the same number of them running around at any given time.” Ahi laughed. “Back when people first settled here, they tried to make furniture out of them.”
“And the furniture walked away?” I guessed.
“Yep.”
Ahi started up again, and we followed. As the broken spaceships began to thin, the walking trees took their places. “Just a little farther,” said Ahi. “Up this staircase.”
It was another natural fall of rocks, this time forming broad steps that led to the top of a ridge.
“Aren’t the walking trees going to keep us awake all night?” said Ashur.
“Yeah,” said Ahi, “they’re noisy, but you don’t want to try to sleep among the ships.”
Kitten leaped up the steps and stretched her neck to look back the way we had come. “Why not?”
“Because sometimes they talk to you,” said Ahi.
Ashur and I exchanged looks. “Like the Sentinels?” he said.
“Nope. When these ships speak, they make a lot more sense—but you wish they didn’t.”
I paused on the stairs and gazed at the Klaatu ships that had seemed so wonderful and fascinating as we were passing through them. What do you have to say that spooks Ahi? I wondered.
I looked back and found her watching me, a slight frown on her face. She turned away before I could be sure I had seen it.
She’s got secrets, I realized. There are things she isn’t sure she should tell us.
Ahi was young to carry that sort of burden. Ashur was, too. I had been even younger when my parents trained me as a dissident. They had implanted secret technology in my brain and filled it with forbidden databases and communication links. That had turned out to be the right thing for them to do. I was alive because they had made that decision. Ashur had bonded with Octopippin and made the Minis, and Ahi …
She was the best guide Graveyard had to offer, but something told me she might be paying a high price for that.
Ashur followed Ahi. Kitten and Dragonette disappeared over the top. I started to follow. Then I heard a noise.
It wasn’t the sharp crack! of the walking trees. This had been more like a scuffle, a brief fall of rocks. I scanned the plateau, searching for the slightest signs of movement.
The graveyard was living up to its name. It remained silent and still.
Ahi appeared at my side. She studied the same scene I had just surveyed. “Stuff moves in here. Even when you think it can’t.”
We waited a little longer. When nothing moved, I made a tactical error.
This time, no barrier deflected my call. Instead, it seemed to fall into an endless deep, as if nothing had stopped or dissipated my signal, so it just kept going and going.…
I turned with Ahi and walked away, thinking that no one had heard me.
Someone had.
* * *
The sun had begun to sink when we climbed onto the ridge. I kept scanning behind us, looking for any sign of followers.
“You won’t see anyone,” Ahi said when she realized how worried I was. “They weren’t invited to this spot. These ships will keep people away from us.”
She seemed confident of that. I schooled my tone to be curious without seeming skeptical. “How will the ships do that?”
“With time fractures,” she said.
Even the Minis didn’t seem to know what question to ask to get Ahi to clarify that remark. So we kept silent while she scouted ahead. She seemed to be looking for something in particular, and finally saw it. A lip had eroded out of a big slab of pale stone that looked much finer-grained than the sandstone beneath our feet, making the formation look like a big frozen wave. “That’s limestone,” she said. “We’ll put our air mattresses under there. That overhang will keep us dry if it rains in the middle of the night.”
Ashur and I followed her to the shelter. Dragonette, in the meantime, had helicoptered up to a point where she could scan the terrain from all sides. Kitten climbed to the top of the stone wave and stretched her neck, turning her camera eyes on everything in range.
Dragonette returned and perched on my shoulder.
I said, though it would have been sensible for her to do so.
.
Worries aside, it felt wonderful to take off that pack. It felt even better to sit on the air mattresses. The face of the North Rim, now looming about 1,500 meters over the canyon floor, glowed with the light of sunset. At its feet lay chunks of rock that had peeled from its face, some the size of houses.
Ahi dug a packet of brown cake from her pack. “This is a pemmican bar. It’s packed with calories. Eat slowly, and you won’t be hungry by the time you finish.”
Kitten stretched herself down the length of my legs, enjoying a vicarious treat as I ate my bar. “It’s tasty,” she said. “Sort of like a brownie, but not as sweet.”
“The sweetness comes from dried fruit instead of sugar cane,” said Ahi. “I did ask for the chocolate chip ones, though. They’re more fun.”
Dragonette enjoyed her own connection with Ashur’s taste centers. She eyed me, waiting to see how I would approach the subject that loomed over us.
It was Ashur who broke the ice. His tone was respectful but firm—it reminded me of the way Nuruddin asks questions. “So—please tell us about the time fractures.”
Ahi’s eyebrows perked. “We’ve known about them for a while. There are a lot of theories about why they happen in here. My favorite hypothesis is that the ships generate them. After all, they can make shortcuts in space–time when they move.”
I could have argued that a ship activating that sort of field inside a gravity well would probably be quite destructive to its surroundings, but what did I know about it? Who could say what those ships could do when they interacted with each other? What esoteric combinations could they form?
“Here’s what I’ve seen,” Ahi continued. “If you’re inside a time fracture, you still feel like time is passing, but it lasts a really long—time. I guess you could say it feels like time is stretching.
“Outside the fracture, time is moving at its normal pace. You hear weird noises—thunder sounds like the muttering of a monster, or a god. Rain sounds like tinkling glass. Sometimes you hear other things.” She shivered. “That may be leaking through the fractures, things that don’t belong to our universe.”
Medusa in the Graveyard (The Medusa Cycle) Page 22