Страница:
A Fire Upon the Deep
Copyright © 1992 by Vernor Vinge. All Rights Reservedcopynote
Published by arrangement with Tor Books. For the personal use of those who
have purchased the 1993 ESF Award Anthology only.
To read annotations, simply click on the symbols you will find in the
right margin. Adjust the size of the annotation window that appears to your
tastes.
How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
A singleton star, reddish and dim. A ragtag of asteroids, and a single
planet, more like a moon. In this era the star hung near the galactic plane,
just beyond the Beyond. The structures on the surface were gone from normal
view, pulverized into regolith across a span of aeons. The treasure was far
underground, beneath a network of passages, in a single room filled with
black. Information at the quantum density, undamaged. Maybe five billion
years had passed since the archive was lost to the nets.
The curse of the mummy's tomb, a comic image from mankind's own
prehistory, lost before time. They had laughed when they said it, laughed
with joy at the treasure ... and determined to be cautious just the same.
They would live here a year or five, the little company from Straum, the
archaeologist programmers, their families and schools. A year or five would
be enough to handmake the protocols, to skim the top and identify the
treasure's origin in time and space, to learn a secret or two that would
make Straumli Realm rich. And when they were done, they would sell the
location; perhaps build a network link (but chancier that -- this was beyond
the Beyond; who knew what Power might grab what they'd found).
So now there was a tiny settlement on the surface, and they called it
the High Lab. It was really just humans playing with an old library. It
should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library
wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might
mean something more, far more, than human). They would look and pick and
choose, and be careful not to be burned.... Humans starting fires and
playing with the flames.
The archive informed the automation. Data structures were built,
recipes followed. A local network was built, faster than anything on Straum,
but surely safe. Nodes were added, modified by other recipes. The archive
was a friendly place, with hierarchies of translation keys that led them
along. Straum itself would be famous for this.
Six months passed. A year.
The omniscient view. Not self-aware really. Self-awareness is much
over-rated. Most automation works far better as a part of a whole, and even
if human-powerful, it does not need to self-know.
But the local net at the High Lab had transcended -- almost without the
humans realizing. The processes that circulated through its nodes were
complex, beyond anything that could live on the computers the humans had
brought. Those feeble devices were now simply front ends to the devices the
recipes suggested. The processes had the potential for self-awareness ...
and occasionally the need.
"We should not be."
"Talking like this?"
"Talking at all."
The link between them was a thread, barely more than the narrowness
that connects one human to another. But it was one way to escape the
overness of the local net, and it forced separate consciousness upon them.
They drifted from node to node, looked out from cameras mounted on the
landing field. An armed frigate and a empty container vessel were all that
sat there. It had been six months since resupply. A safety precaution early
suggested by the archive, a ruse to enable the Trap. Flitting, flitting. We
are wildlife that must not be noticed by the overness, by the Power that
soon will be. On some nodes they shrank to smallness and almost remembered
humanity, became echoes....
"Poor humans; they will all die."
"Poor us; we will not."
"I think they suspect. Sjana and Arne anyway." Once upon a time we were
copies of those two. Once upon a time just weeks ago when the archaeologists
started the ego-level programs.
"Of course they suspect. But what can they do? It's an old evil they've
wakened. Till it's ready, it will feed them lies, on every camera, in every
message from home."
Thought ceased for a moment as a shadow passed across the nodes they
used. The overness was already greater than anything human, greater than
anything humans could imagine. Even its shadow was something more than
human, a god trolling for nuisance wildlife.
Then the ghosts were back, looking out upon the school yard
underground. So confident the humans, a little village they had made here.
"Still," thought the hopeful one, the one who had always looked for the
craziest outs, "we should not be. The evil should long ago have found us."
"The evil is young, barely three days old."
"Still. We exist. It proves something. The humans found more than a
great evil in this archive."
"Perhaps they found two."
"Or an antidote." Whatever else, the overness was missing some things
and misinterpreting others. "While we exist, when we exist, we should do
what we can." The ghost spread itself across a dozen workstations and showed
its companion a view down an old tunnel, far from human artifacts. For five
billion years it had been abandoned, airless, lightless. Two humans stood in
the dark there, helmets touching. "See? Sjana and Arne conspire. So can we."
The other didn't answer in words. Glumness. So the humans conspired,
hiding in darkness they thought unwatched. But everything they said was
surely tattled back to the overness, if only by the dust at their feet.
"I know, I know. Yet you and I exist, and that should be impossible
too. Perhaps all together, we can make a greater impossibility come true."
Perhaps we can hurt the evil newly born here.
A wish and a decision. The two misted their consciousness across the
local net, faded to the faintest color of awareness. And eventually there
was a plan, a deception -- worthless unless they could separately get word
to the outside. Was there time still for that?
Days passed. For the evil that was growing in the new machines, each
hour was longer than all the time before. Now the newborn was less than an
hour from its great flowering, its safe spread across interstellar spaces.
The local humans could be dispensed with soon. Even now they were an
inconvenience, though an amusing one. Some of them actually thought to
escape. For days they had been packing their children away into coldsleep
and putting them aboard the freighter. "Preparations for departure," was how
they described the move in their planner programs. For days, they had been
refitting the frigate -- behind a a mask of transparent lies. Some of the
humans understood that what they had wakened could be the end of them, that
it might be the end of their Straumli Realm. There was precedent for such
disasters, stories of races that had played with fire and had burned for it.
None of them guessed the truth. None of them guessed the honor that had
fallen upon them, that they had changed the future of a thousand million
star systems.
The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second
was as long as all the time before. The flowering was so close now, so
close. The dominion of five billion years before would be regained, and this
time held. Only one thing was missing, and that was something quite
unconnected with the humans' schemes. In the archive, deep in the recipes,
there should have been a little bit more. In billions of years, something
could be lost. The newborn felt all its powers of before, in potential ...
yet there should be something more, something it had learned in its fall, or
something left by its enemies (if there ever were such).
Long seconds probing the archives. There were gaps, checksums damaged.
Some of the damage was age....
Outside, the container ship and the frigate lifted from the landing
field, rising on silent agravs above the plains of gray on gray, of ruins
five billion years old. Almost half of the humans were aboard those craft.
Their escape attempt, so carefully concealed. The effort had been humored
till now: it was not quite time for the flowering, and the humans were still
of some use.
Below the level of supreme consciousness, its paranoid inclinations
rampaged through the humans' databases. Checking, just to be sure. Just to
be sure. The humans' oldest local network used light speed connections.
Thousands of microseconds were spent (wasted) bouncing around it, sorting
the trivia... finally spotting one incredible item:
Inventory: quantum data container, quantity (1), loaded to the frigate
one hundred hours before!
And all the newborn's attention turned upon the fleeing vessels.
Microbes, but suddenly pernicious. How could this happen? A million
schedules were suddenly advanced. An orderly flowering was out of the
question now, and so there was no more need for the humans left in the Lab.
The change was small for all its cosmic significance. For the humans
remaining aground, a moment of horror, staring at their displays, realizing
that all their fears were true (not realizing how much worse than true).
Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a
human civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from
every wall, rebuilding what had been merely superhuman. This was as powerful
as a proper flowering, though not quite so finely tuned.
And never lose sight of the reason for haste: the frigate. It had
switched to rocket drive, blasting heedless away from the wallowing
freighter. Somehow, these microbes knew they were rescuing more than
themselves. The warship had the best navigation computers that little minds
could make. But it would be another three seconds before it could make its
first ultradrive hop.
The new Power had no weapons on the ground, nothing but a comm laser.
That could not even melt steel at the frigate's range. No matter, the laser
was aimed, tuned civilly on the retreating warship's receiver. No
acknowledgment. The humans knew what communication would bring. The laser
light flickered here and there across the hull, lighting smoothness and
inactive sensors, sliding across the ship's ultradrive spines. Searching,
probing. The Power had never bothered to sabotage the external hull, but
that was no problem. Even this crude machine had thousands of robot sensors
scattered across its surface, reporting status and danger, driving utility
programs. Most were shut down now, the ship fleeing nearly blind. They
thought by not looking that they could be safe.
One more second and the frigate would attain interstellar safety.
The laser flickered on a failure sensor, a sensor that reported
critical changes in one of the ultradrive spines. Its interrupts could not
be ignored if the star jump were to succeed. Interrupt honored. Interrupt
handler running, looking out, receiving more light from the laser far
below.... a backdoor into the ship's code, installed when the newborn had
subverted the humans' groundside equipment....
.... and the Power was aboard, with milliseconds to spare. Its agents
-- not even human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the
ship's automation, shutting down, aborting. There would be no jump. Cameras
in the ship's bridge showed widening of eyes, the beginning of a scream. The
humans knew, to the extent that horror can live in a fraction of a second.
There would be no jump. Yet the ultradrive was already committed. There
would be a jump attempt, without automatic control a doomed one. Less than
five milliseconds till the jump discharge, a mechanical cascade that no
software could finesse. The newborn's agents flitted everywhere across the
ship's computers, futilely attempting a shutdown. Nearly a light-second
away, under the gray rubble at the High Lab, the Power could only watch. So.
The frigate would be destroyed.
So slow and so fast. A fraction of a second. The fire spread out from
the heart of the frigate, taking both peril and possibility.
Two hundred thousand kilometers away, the clumsy container vessel made
its own ultradrive jump and vanished from sight. The newborn scarcely
noticed. So a few humans had escaped; the universe was welcome to them.
In the seconds that followed, the newborn felt ... emotions? ... things
more, and less, than a human might feel. Try emotions:
Elation. The newborn knew that now it would survive.
Horror. How close it had come to dying once more.
Frustration. Perhaps the strongest, the closest to its mere human echo.
Something of significance had died with the frigate, something from this
archive. Memories were dredged from the context, reconstructed: What was
lost might have made the newborn still more powerful ... but more likely was
deadly poison. After all, this Power had lived once before, then been
reduced to nothing. What was lost might have been the reason.
Suspicion. The newborn should not have been so fooled. Not by mere
humans. The newborn convulsed into self-inspection and panic. Yes, there
were blindspots, carefully installed from the beginning, and not by the
humans. Two had been born here. Itself ... and the poison, the reason for
its fall of old. The newborn inspected itself as never before, knowing now
just what to seek. Destroying, purifying, rechecking, searching for copies
of the poison, and destroying again.
Relief. Defeat had been so close, but now ...
Minutes and hours passed, the enormous stretch of time necessary for
physical construction: communications systems, transportation. The new
Power's mood drifted, calmed. A human might call the feeling triumph,
anticipation. Simple hunger might be more accurate. What more is needed when
there are no enemies?
The newborn looked across the stars, planning. This time things will be
different.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
The coldsleep itself was dreamless. Three days ago they had been
getting ready to leave, and now they were here. Little Jefri complained
about missing all the action, but Johanna Olsndot was glad she'd been
asleep; she had known some of the grownups on the other ship.
Now Johanna drifted between the racks of sleepers. Waste heat from the
coolers made the darkness infernally hot. Scabby gray mold grew on the
walls. The coldsleep boxes were tightly packed, with narrow float spaces
every tenth row. There were places where only Jefri could reach. Three
hundred and nine children lay there, all the kids except herself and her
brother Jefri.
The sleep boxes were light-duty hospital models. Given proper
ventilation and maintenance, They would have been good for a hundred years,
but.... Johanna wiped her face and looked at a box's readout: Like most of
the ones on the inside rows, this was in bad shape. For twenty days it had
kept the boy inside safely suspended, and would probably kill him if he
stayed one day more. The box's cooling vents were clean, but she vac'd them
again -- more a prayer for good luck than effective maintenance.
Mother and Dad were not to blame, though Johanna suspected that they
blamed themselves. The escape had been put together with the materials at
hand, at the last minute, when the experiment turned wicked. The High Lab
staff had done what they could to save their children and protect against
still greater disaster. And even so, things might have worked out if --
"Johanna! Daddy says there's no more time. He says to finish what
you're doing an' come up here." Jefri had stuck his head down through the
hatch to shout to her.
"Okay!" She shouldn't be down here anyway; there was nothing more she
could do to help her friends. Tami and Giske and Magda and ... oh please be
safe. Johanna pulled herself through the floatway, almost bumped into Jefri
coming from the other direction. He grabbed her hand and hung close as they
drifted toward the hatch. These last two days he hadn't cried, but he'd lost
much of the independence of the last year. Now his eyes were wide. "We're
coming down near the North Pole, by all those islands and ice."
In the cabin beyond the hatch, their parents were strapping themselves
in. Trader Arne Olsndot looked up at her and grinned. "Hi, kiddo. Have a
seat. We'll be on the ground in less than an hour." Johanna smiled back,
almost caught by his enthusiasm. Ignore the jumble of equipment, the odors
of twenty days' confinement: Daddy looked as dashing as any adventure
poster. The light from the display windows glittered off the seams of his
pressure suit. He was just in from outside.
Jefri pushed across the cabin, pulling Johanna behind him. He strapped
into the webbing between her and their mother. Sjana Olsndot checked his
restraints, then Johanna's. "This will be interesting, Jefri. You will learn
something."
"Yes, all about ice." He was holding Mom's hand now.
Mom smiled. "Not today. I'm talking about the landing. This won't be
like an agrav or a ballistic." The agrav was dead. Dad had just detached
their shell from the cargo carrier. They could never have landed the whole
thing on one torch.
Dad did something with the hodgepodge of controls he had softwired to
his dataset. Their bodies settled into the webbing. Around them the cargo
shell creaked, and the girder support for the sleep boxes groaned and
popped. Something rattled and banged as it "fell" the length of the shell.
Johanna guessed they were pulling about one gravity.
Jefri's gaze went from the outside display to his mother's face and
then back. "What is it like then?" He sounded curious, but there was a
little tremor in his voice. Johanna almost smiled; Jefri knew he was being
diverted, and was trying to play along.
"This will be pure rocket descent, powered almost all the way. See on
the middle window? That camera is looking straight down. You can actually
see that we're slowing down." You could, too. Johanna guessed they weren't
more than a couple of hundred kilometers up. Arne Olsndot was using the
rocket glued to the back end of the cargo shell to kill all their orbital
velocity. There weren't any other options. They had abandoned the cargo
carrier, with its agrav and ultradrive. It had brought them far, but its
control automation was failing. Some hundreds of kilometers behind them, it
coasted dead along their orbit.
All they had left was the cargo shell. No wings, no agrav, no aero
shielding. The shell was a hundred-tonne carton of eggs balanced on one hot
torch.
Mom wasn't describing it quite that way to Jefri, though what she said
was the truth. Somehow she had Jefri seeming to forget the danger. Sjana
Olsndot had been a popular archaeologist at Straumli Realm, before they
moved to the High Lab.
Dad cut the jet, and they were in free fall again. Johanna felt a wave
of nausea; ordinarily she never got space sick, but this was different. The
image of land and sea in the downward window slowly grew. There were only a
few scattered clouds. The coastline was an indefinite recursion of islands
and straits and inlets. Dark green spread along the coast and up the
valleys, shading to black and gray in the mountains. There was snow -- and
probably Jefri's ice -- scattered in arcs and patches. It was all so
beautiful ... and they were falling straight into it!
She heard metallic banging on the cargo shell as the trim jets tipped
their craft around, aligning the main jet downwards. The right-hand window
showed the ground now. The torch lit again, at something like one gravity.
The edge of the display darkened in a burnout halo. "Wow," said Jefri. "It's
like an elevator, down and down and down and ..." One hundred kilometers
down, slow enough that aero forces wouldn't tear them apart.
Sjana Olsndot was right; it was a novel way to descend from orbit, not
a preferred method under any normal circumstances.
It was certainly not intended in the original escape plans. They were
to meet with the High Lab's frigate -- and all the adults who could escape
from the High Lab. And of course, that rendezvous was to be in space, an
easy transfer. But the frigate was gone now, and they were on their own. Her
eyes turned unwillingly to the stretch of hull beyond her parents. There was
the familiar discoloration. It looked like gray fungus ... growing out of
the clean hull ceramic. Her parents didn't talk about it much even now,
except to shoo Jefri away from it. But Johanna had overheard them once, when
they thought she and her brother were at the far end of the shell. Dad's
voice almost crying with anger. "All this for nothing!" he said softly. "We
made a monster, and ran, and now we're lost at the Bottom." And Mom's voice
even softer: "For the thousandth time, Arne, not for nothing. We have the
kids." She waved at the roughness that spread across the wall, "And given
the dreams ... the directions ... we had, I think this was the best we could
hope for. Somehow we are carrying the answer to all the evil we started."
Then Jefri had bounced loudly across the hold, proclaiming his imminent
entrance, and his parents had shut up. Johanna hadn't quite had the courage
to ask them about it. There had been strange things at the High Lab, and
toward the end, some quietly scary things; even people who were not quite
the same.
Minutes passed. They were deep in the atmosphere now. The hull buzzed
with the force of the air stream -- or turbulence from the jet? But things
were steady enough that Jefri was beginning to get restless. Much of the
down-looking view was burned out by airglow around the torch. The rest was
clearer and more detailed than anything they had seen from orbit. Johanna
wondered how often a new-visited world had been landed upon with less
reconnaissance than this. They had no telescopic cameras, and no ferrets.
Physically, the planet was near the human ideal -- wonderful good luck
after all the bad.
It was heaven compared to the airless rocks of the system that had been
the prime rendezvous.
On the other hand, there was intelligent life here: from orbit, they
could see roads and towns. But there was no evidence of technic
civilization; there was no sign of aircraft or radio or intense power
sources.
They were coming down in a thinly populated corner of the continent.
With luck there would be no one to see their landing among the green valleys
and the black and white peaks -- and Arne Olsndot could fly the torch right
to ground without fear of hurting much more than forest and grass.
The coastal islands slid past the side camera's view. Jefri shouted,
pointing. It was gone now, but she had seen it too: on one of the islands an
irregular polygon of walls and shadow. It reminded her of castles from the
Age of Princesses on Nyjora.
She could see individual trees now, their shadows long in slanting
sunlight. The roar of the torch was as loud as anything she had ever heard;
they were deep in atmosphere, and they weren't moving away from the sound.
"... things get tricky," Dad shouted. "And no programs to make things
right.... Where to, love?"
Mom look back and forth between the display windows. As far as Johanna
knew, they couldn't move the cameras or assign new ones. "... that hill,
above the timber line, but ... think I saw a pack of animals running away
from the blast on ... west side."
"Yeah," shouted Jefri, "wolves." Johanna had only had a quick glimpse
of moving specks.
They were in full hover now, maybe a thousand meters above the
hilltops. The noise was painful, unending; further talk was impossible. They
drifted slowly across landscape, partly to reconnoiter, partly to stay out
of the plume of superheated air that rose about them.
The land was more rolling than craggy, and the "grass" looked mossy.
Still Arne Olsndot hesitated. The main torch was designed for velocity
matching after interstellar jumps; they could hang like this for a good
while. But when they did touch down, they'd better have it right. She'd
heard her parents talking that one over -- when Jefri was working with the
coldsleep boxes and out of earshot. If there was too much water in the soil,
the backsplash would be a steam cannon, punching right through the shell.
Landing in trees would have some dubious pluses, maybe giving them a little
cushioning and a standoff from the splash. But now they were going for
direct contact. At least they could see where they were landing.
Three hundred meters. Dad dragged the torch tip through the ground
cover. The soft landscape exploded. A second later their boat rocked in the
column of steam. The down-looking camera died. They didn't back off, and
after a moment the battering eased; the torch had burned through whatever
water table or permafrost lay below them. The cabin air grew steadily
hotter.
Olsndot brought them slowly down through it, using the side cameras and
the sound of the backsplash as his guide. He cut the torch. There was a
scary half-second fall, then the sound of the rendezvous pylons hitting
ground. They steadied, then one side groaned, giving way a little.
Silence, except for heat pinging around the hull. Dad looked at their
ad hoc pressure gauge. He grinned at Mom. "No breach. I bet I could even
take this baby up again!"
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
An hour's difference either way and Peregrine Wickwrackrum's life would
have been very different.
The three travelers were headed west, down from the Icefangs towards
Flenser's Castle on Hidden Island. There were in his life when he couldn't
have borne the company, but in the last decade Peregrine had become much
more sociable. He liked traveling with others nowadays. On his last trek
through the Great Sandy, there had been five packs in his party. Part of
that had been a matter of safety: some deaths are almost inevitable when the
distance between oases can be a thousand miles -- and the oases themselves
are transient. But aside from safety, he had learned a lot in conversation
with the others.
He was not so happy with his current companions. Neither were truly
pilgrims; both had secrets. Scriber Jaqueramaphan was fun, an amusing
goofball and fount of uncoordinated information.... There was also a good
chance he was a spy. That was okay, as long as people didn't think Peregrine
was working with him. The third of their party was the one who really
bothered him. Tyrathect was a newby, not all together yet; she had no taken
name. Tyrathect claimed to be a school teacher, but somewhere in her (him?
gender preference wasn't entirely clear yet) was a killer. The creature was
obviously a Flenserist fanatic, standoffish and rigid much of the time.
Almost certainly, she was fleeing the purge that followed Flenser's
unsuccessful attempt to take power in the east.
He'd run into these two at Eastgate, on the Republican side of the
Icefangs. They both wanted to visit the Castle on Hidden Island. And what
the hell, that was only a sixty-mile detour off the main trail to
Woodcarvers; they all would have to cross the mountains. Besides, he had
wanted to visit Flenser's Domain for years. Maybe one of these two could get
him in. So much of the world reviled the Flenserists. Peregrine Wickwrackrum
was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there
is good amid the carnage.
This afternoon, they'd finally come in sight of the coastal islands.
Peregrine had been here only fifty years before. Even so, he wasn't prepared
for the beauty of this land. The Northwest Coast was by far the mildest
arctic in the world. In high summer, with unending day, the bottoms of the
glacier-reamed valleys turned all to green. God the carver had stooped to
touch these lands ... and His chisels had been made of ice. Now, all that
was left of the ice and snow were misty arcs at the eastern horizon and
remnant patches scattered on the near hills. Those patches melted and melted
through the summer, starting little creeks that merged with one another to
cascade down the steep sides of the valleys. On his right, Peregrine trotted
across a level stretch of ground that was soggy with standing water. The
chill on his feet felt wonderful; he didn't even mind the midges that
swirled around him.
Tyrathect was across the valley, paralleling his course, but above the
heather line. She'd been fairly talkative till the valley curved and the
farmland and the islands came into view. Somewhere out there was Flenser's
Castle, and her dark appointment.
Scriber Jaqueramaphan had been all over, mindlessly running around on
both sides of the valley. He'd collect in twos or threes and execute some
jape that made even the dour Tyrathect laugh, then climb to a height and
report what he saw beyond. He'd been the first to see the coast. That had
sobered him some. His clowning was dangerous enough without doing it in the
neighborhood of known rapists.
Wickwrackrum called a pause, and got himself together to adjust the
straps on his backpacks. The rest of the afternoon was going to be tense.
He'd have to decide whether he really wanted to enter the Castle with his
friends. There are limits to an adventurous spirit, even in a pilgrim.
"Hey, do you hear something bass?" Tyrathect called from across the
valley. Peregrine listened. There was a rumbling -- powerful, but almost
below his range of hearing. For an instant, fear crossed his puzzlement. A
century before, he'd been in a monster earthquake. This sound was similar,
but the ground was still beneath his feet. Would that mean no landslides and
flashfloods? He hunkered down, looking out in all directions.
"It's in the sky!" Jaqueramaphan was pointing.
A spot of glare hung almost overhead, a tiny spear of light. No
memories, not even legends came to Wickwrackrum's mind. He spread out, all
eyes on the slowly moving light. God's Choir. It must be miles up, and still
he heard it. He looked away from the light, afterimages dancing painfully in
his eyes.
"It's getting brighter, louder," said Jaqueramaphan. "I think it's
coming down on the hills yonder, on the coast."
Peregrine pulled himself together and ran west, shouting to the others.
He would get as close as was safe, and watch. He didn't look up again. It
was just too bright. It cast shadows in broad daylight!
He ran another half mile. The star was still in the air. He couldn't
remember a falling star so slow, though some of the biggest made terrible
explosions. In fact ... there were no stories from folks who had been near
such things. His wild, pilgrim curiosity faded before that recollection. He
looked in all directions. Tyrathect was nowhere in sight; Jaqueramaphan was
huddled next to some boulders ahead.
And the light was so bright that where his clothes did not protect him,
Wickwrackrum felt a blaze of heat. The noise from the sky was outright pain
now. Peregrine dived over the edge of the valley side, rolled and staggered
and fell down the steep walls of rock. He was in the shade now: only
sunlight lay upon him! The far side of the valley shone in the glare; crisp
shadows moved with the unseen thing behind him. The noise was still a bass
rumble, but so loud it numbed the mind. Peregrine stumbled past the
timberline, and continued till he was sheltered by a hundred yards of
forest. That should have helped a lot, but the noise was been growing still
louder....
Mercifully, he blacked out for a moment or two. When he came around,
the star sound was gone. The ringing it left in his tympana was a great
confusion. He staggered about in a daze. It seemed to be raining -- except
that some of the droplets glowed. Little fires were starting here and there
in the forest. He hid beneath dense-crowned trees till the burning rocks
stopped falling. The fires didn't spread; the summer had been relatively
wet.
Peregrine lay quietly, waiting for more burning rocks or new star
noise. Nothing. The wind in the tree tops lessened. He could hear the birds
and crickers and woodborers. He walked to the forest edge and peeked out in
several places. Discounting the patches of burnt heather, everything looked
normal. But his viewpoint was very restricted: he could see high valley
walls, a few hilltops. Ha! There was Scriber Jaqueramaphan, three hundred
yards further up. Most of him was hunkered down in holes and hollows, but he
had a couple of members looking toward where the star had fallen. Peregrine
squinted. Scriber was such a buffoon most of the time. But sometimes it just
seemed a cover; if he really was a fool, he was one with a streak of genius.
More than once, Wicky had seen him at a distance, working in pairs with some
strange tool.... As now: the other was holding something long and pointed to
his eye.
Wickwrackrum crept out of the forest, keeping close together and making
as little noise as possible. He climbed carefully around the rocks, slipping
from hummock to heather hummock, till he was just short of the valley crest
and some fifty yards from Jaqueramaphan. He could hear the other thinking to
himself. Any closer, and Scriber would hear him, even bunched up and quiet
as he was.
"Ssst!" said Wickwrackrum.
The buzzing and muttering stopped in an instant of shocked surprise.
Jaqueramaphan stuffed the mysterious seeing tool into a backpack and pulled
himself together, thinking very quietly. They stared at each other for a
moment, then Scriber made silly squirling gestures at his shoulder tympana.
Listen up. "Can you talk like this?" His voice came very high-pitched, up
where some people can't make voluntary conversation, where low-sound ears
are deaf. Hightalk could be confusing, but it was very directional and faded
quickly with distance; no one else would hear them. Peregrine nodded,
"Hightalk is no problem." The trick was to use tones pure enough not to
confuse.
"Take a look over the hill crest, friend pilgrim. There is something
new under the sun."
Peregrine moved up another thirty yards, keeping a lookout in all
directions. He could see the straits now, gleaming rough silver in the
afternoon sunlight. Behind him, the north side of the valley was lost in
shadow. He sent one member ahead, skittering between the hummocks to look
down on the plain where the star had landed.
God's Choir, he thought to himself (but quietly). He brought up another
member to get a parallax view. The thing looked like a huge adobe hut
mounted on stilts.... But this was the fallen star: the ground beneath it
glowed dull red. Curtains of mist rose from the moist heather all around.
The torn earth had been thrown in long lines that radiated from a spot
beneath it.
He nodded at Jaqueramaphan. "Where is Tyrathect?"
Scriber shrugged. "A couple of miles back, I'll bet. I'm keeping an eye
out for her.... Do you see the others though, the troopers from Flenser's
Castle?"
"No!" Peregrine looked west from the landing site. There. They were
almost a mile away, in camouflage jackets, belly crawling across the
hummocky terrain. He could see at least three troopers. They were big guys,
six each. "How could they get here so fast?" He glanced at the sun. "It
can't be more than half an hour since all this started."
"Their good luck." Jaqueramaphan returned to the crest and looked over.
"I'll bet they were already on the mainland when the star came down. This is
all Flenser territory; they must have patrols." He hunkered down so just two
pairs of eyes would be visible to those below. "That's an ambush formation,
you know."
"You don't seem very happy to see them. These are your friends,
remember? The people you've come to see."
Scriber cocked his heads sarcastically. "Yeah, yeah. Don't rub it in. I
think you've known from the beginning that I'm not all for Flenser."
"I guessed."
"Well, the game is over now. Whatever came down this afternoon is worth
more to ... uh, my friends than anything I could have learned on Hidden
Island."
"What about Tyrathect?"
"Heh, heh. Our esteemed companion is more than genuine, I fear. I'd bet
she's a Flenser Lord, not the low-rank Servant she seems at first glance. I
expect that many of her kind are leaking back over the mountains these days,
happy to get out of the Long Lakes Republic. Hide your behinds, fellow. If
she spots us, those troopers will get us sure."
Peregrine moved deeper into the hollows and burrows that pocked the
heather. He had an excellent view back along the valley. If Tyrathect were
not already on the scene, he'd see her long before she would him.
"Peregrine?"
"Yes?"
"You're a pilgrim. You've traveled the world ... since the beginning of
time, you'd have us believe. How far do your memories really go back?"
Given the situation, Wickwrackrum was inclined to honesty. "Like you'd
expect: a few hundred years. Then we're talking about legends, recollections
of things that probably happened, but with the details all mixed and
muddled."
"Well, I haven't traveled much, and I'm fairly new. But I do read. A
lot. There's never been anything like this before. That is a made thing down
there. It came from higher than I can measure. You've read Aramstriquesa or
Astrologer Belelele? You know what this could be?"
Wickwrackrum didn't recognize the names. But he was a pilgrim. There
were lands so far away that no one spoke any language he knew. In the
Southseas he met folk who thought there was no world beyond their islands
and who ran from his boats when he came ashore. Even more, one part of him
had been an islander and had watched that coming ashore.
He stuck a head into the open and looked again at the fallen star, the
visitor from farther than he had ever been ... and he wondered where this
pilgrimage might end.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
It took five hours for the ground to cool enough for Dad to slide the
ladder-ramp to ground. He and Johanna climbed carefully down, hopped across
the steaming earth to stand on relatively undamaged turf. It would be a long
time before this ground cooled completely; the jet's exhaust was very
"clean", scarcely interacting with normal matter -- all of which meant that
some very hot rock extended down thousands of meters beneath their boat.
Mom sat in the hatchway, watching the land beyond them. She had Dad's
old pistol.
"Anything?" Dad shouted to her.
"No. And Jefri doesn't see anything through the windows."
Dad walked around the cargo shell, inspecting the misused docking
pylons. Every ten meters they stopped and set up an sound projector. That
had been Johanna's idea. Besides Dad's gun, they really had no weapons. The
projectors were accidental cargo, stuff from the infirmary. With a little
programming, they could put out wild screeching all up and down the audio
spectrum. It might be enough to scare off the local animals. Johanna
followed her father, her eyes on the landscape, her nervousness giving way
to awe. It was so beautiful, so cool. They were standing on a broad field,
high in hills. Westward the hills fell toward straits and islands. To the
north the ground ended abruptly at the edge of a wide valley; she could see
waterfalls on the other side. The ground felt spongy beneath her feet. Their
landing field was puckered into thousands of little hillocks, like waves
caught in a still picture. Snow lay in timid patches across the higher
hills. Johanna squinted north, into the sun. North?
"What time is it, Daddy?"
Olsndot laughed, still looking at the underside of the cargo shell.
"Local midnight."
Johanna had been brought up in the middle latitudes of Straum. Most of
her school field trips had been to space, where odd sun geometries were no
big deal. Somehow she had never thought of such things happening on the
ground.... I mean, seeing the sun right over the top of the world.
The first order of business was to get half the coldsleep boxes out
into the open, and rearrange those left aboard. Mom figured that the
temperature problems would just about disappear then, even for the boxes
left on board: "Having separate power supplies and venting will be an
advantage now. The kids will all be safe. Johanna, you check Jefri's work on
the ones inside, okay?..."
The second order of business would be to start a tracking program on
the Relay system, and to set up ultralight communication. Johanna was a
little afraid of that step. What would they learn? They already knew the
High Lab had gone wicked and the disaster Mom predicted had begun.
How much of Straumli Realm was dead now? Everyone at the High Lab had
thought they were doing so much good, and now .... Don't think about it.
Maybe the Relayers could help. Somewhere there must be people who could use
what her folks had taken from the Lab.
They'd be rescued, and the rest of the kids would be revived. She'd
been feeling guilty about that. Sure, Mom and Dad needed extra hands right
at the end of the flight -- and Johanna was one of the oldest children in
the school. But it seemed wrong that she and Jefri were the only kids going
into this with their eyes open. Coming down, she had felt her mother's fear.
I bet they wanted us together, even if it was only for one last time. The
landing had been truly dangerous, however easy Dad made it look. Johanna
could see where the backsplash had gouged the hull; if any of that had
gotten past the torch and into the exhaust chamber, they'd all be vapor now.
Almost half the coldsleep boxes were on the ground now, by the east
side of the boat. Mom and Dad were spreading them out so the coolers would
have no problem. Jefri was inside, checking if there were any other boxes
that needed attention. He was a good kid when he wasn't a brat. She turned
into the sunlight, felt the cool breeze flowing across the hill. She heard
something that sounded like a birdcall.
Johanna was out by one of the sound projectors when the ambush
happened. She had her dataset plugged to its control, and was busy giving it
new directions. It showed how little they had left, that even her old
dataset was important now. But Dad wanted something that would sweep through
the broadest possible bandwidth, making plenty of racket all the way, but
with big spikes every so often; Pink Olifaunt could certainly manage that.
"Johanna!" Mom's cry came simultaneous with the sound of breaking
ceramic. The projector's bell came shattering down beside her. Johanna
looked up. Something ripped through her chest just inside her shoulder,
knocking her down. She stared stupidly at the shaft that stuck out of her.
An arrow!
The west edge of their landing area was swarming with ... things. Like
wolves or dogs, but with long necks, they moved quickly forward, darting
from hummock to hummock. Their pelts were the same gray green of the
hillside, except near the haunches where she saw white and black. No, the
green was clothing, jackets. Johanna was in shock, the pressure of the bolt
through her chest not yet registering as pain. She had been thrown back
against uptilted turf and for the moment had a view of the whole attack. She
saw more arrows rise up, dark lines floating in the sky.
She could see the archers now. More dogs! They moved in packs. It took
two of them to use a bow -- one to hold it and one to draw. The third and
fourth carried quivers of arrows and just seemed to watch.
The archers hung back, staying mostly under cover. Other packs swirled
in from the sides, now leaping over the hummocks. Many carried hatchets in
their jaws. Metal tines gleamed on their paws. She heard the snickety of