Destroyer of Worlds (14 page)

Only there was no
they
. Boulders had crushed the midship passenger compartment. Everyone else aboard, clanmates all, were dead.

He feared he had been buried alive, but one small porthole remained uncovered. He should be able to get out. And then be torn apart?

How long had he been unconscious? A considerable time, to judge by the scene beyond the porthole.

By the thousands, natives in bucket brigades battled the conflagration. Flames now extended to the wooden piers that lined the riverbanks. Boats burned at the wharfs; other vessels, powered only by sails and oars and desperation, struggled for the safety of the river.

If the inferno spread, he would roast to death inside the wrecked shuttle—unless the fuel tanks ruptured first and an explosion killed him. If the natives contained the fire, they would then surely turn their attention to their hard-won trophy. Either way, to wait here was to die.

Atop a low stone pyramid, he spotted a cluster of the natives. A few, gesturing, stood apart at the very apex, ringed by others who held swords.
Thssthfok decided that the few in the center were rulers, directing the fight against the blaze.

Both air locks refused to open. No matter. Hatches—when they worked—offered the fastest ways out, best for combat situations. They were not the only way.

Thssthfok rummaged through equipment lockers until he found a structural modulator. Working methodically he traced closely spaced parallel strips with the modulator. More and more of the hull
twing
turned clear. Eventually he found a hull section not buried under rock, the exposed area just large enough to squeeze through. Reconfiguring the modulator, he turned that section of
twing
permeable. He forced an arm through the softened hull, got a solid handhold on a boulder, and oozed out of the ruined shuttle. The
twing
resealed behind him.

Only scorched ground and long, wedge-shaped indentations showed that additional shuttles had once landed here. And high in the sky—

Blinding blue-white streaks: fusion fire. The ships were leaving. Forsaking him.

He rigidified the exposed hull section before dashing from shadow to shadow, from wreckage to ruin, to the rear of the pyramid. The local gravity was oppressive, about half again what he was used to, and the air felt thick as syrup. Silently, he climbed the steep steps. Intent on the battle against the flames, no one noticed Thssthfok until he approached the summit.

The natives were as tall as he but only a fourth or fifth of his mass, with gossamer webbing between arms and legs. Their bones were hollow, judging from how they had snapped in battle. He guessed they had evolved from some sort of arboreal gliding creature.

To make a point, Thssthfok let the bodyguards whack futilely at his battle armor before scything down several with his laser pistol. Then he aimed his gun at the most garishly clad alien—and paused. “You're next,” he said.

The native gabbled, as unintelligible to Thssthfok as Thssthfok must be to it. The surviving bodyguards, quaking, lowered their swords.

The ruler was smarter than a breeder. He might be smart enough to serve.

A plan took shape in Thssthfok's mind. With his empty hand, he thumped his chest. “Thssthfok.”

“S'fok,” the ruler tried, tentatively.

Close enough. Thssthfok waggled the gun: Come this way. They went
down the pyramid and toward a nearby stone building. The ruler's domicile, perhaps. One of the guards there unsheathed its sword and Thssthfok lased it in two. “Thssthfok kills,” he instructed.

Gabble, gabble. The remaining guards backed away.

Thssthfok did not dare rest—nor did he let his royal prisoner rest—for much of a Pakhome day. By then, he had absorbed much of the local language. He knew that the “empire”—the fertile banks of one long, meandering river—was called Roshala. He knew that Roshala dominated this continent of Taba, and that the world was called Mala. He knew that a native was a Dra, collectively the Drar. He knew that his prisoner was Noblala, the empress.

She
knew that he was a potent wizard and a warrior of extremely limited patience. She would prosper or perish at his whim.

Whether because of Thssthfok's teaching, or some as-yet-unappreciated subtlety among the Drar, he woke unharmed the next morning. Noblala had grasped the concept of a power behind the throne.

 

IGNORING BASKETS OF FOODSTUFFS
—though cold sleep left one ravenous—Thssthfok disarmed the sensors and explosives that had guarded his hibernation. He put on his battle armor. He checked the charge on his laser pistol. After the firstaid/cold-sleep pod and the emergency stock of tree-of-life root, weapons were the most valuable items of salvage from the wrecked shuttle.

Only then, from habit more than interest, did he break his fast. Most of what waited for him was native food, smoked or salted or air-dried, uniformly desiccated into a leathery consistency. Tree-of-life scarcely grew here; the unsuitable sunlight, he surmised. He only occasionally needed to eat the roots—or, more precisely, the virus that reproduced nowhere but inside the roots—and he scarcely got that. The dearth of the tubers, more than the plodding pace of his slaves' progress, prompted many of his hibernations. His enemies among the Drar still had not realized that the root was a necessity rather than a luxury. If they ever did, they need only burn down the tree-of-life grove as he slept.

The attempts on his life, fortunately, had all been very direct. Even those were ebbing. This awakening marked twice in a row that a timer, not the triggering of a booby trap, had roused him. Were it otherwise, he would have, yet again, killed anyone near enough to have been involved. And
whoever ruled at the time of an attack. The ruler would have been responsible, by definition, whether for the attack itself or for failing to prevent it. And for good measure, several nobles (randomly chosen, but that was his secret) for
their
scheming. Who could say the dead had
not
also plotted against him? Anyone in the ruling class almost certainly had.

Very pedagogical, the death of others. And it was not as though these were Pak.

Thssthfok filled his pockets with grenades. Laser pistol in hand, he unlatched the massive door, almost too heavy for any Dra to open, then withdrew deep into the chamber. He smote the large brass gong and waited.

Soon enough, the door slowly swung inward in response to the gong. A Dra appeared, trembling, dressed in the lavishly feathered garb of the court scientist. The usual small honor guard waited behind her in the hallway.

During past cold sleeps, swords had changed from bronze to iron to steel. Now each soldier wore a holstered sidearm. These Drar stank of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. A crude chemical explosive, then, to propel projectiles.

The superiority of Thssthfok's weapons diminished each time he emerged.

“Excellency,” the Dra scientist said, her voice soft with fear. “The emperor bids you welcome.”

The emperor, whoever it was this time, could have offered his welcome in person. No matter. Emperors served only to channel resources to research and development. This latest emperor would make an appearance once his spies, usually found among the guards, assessed the state of Thssthfok's mood.

“And you are?” It galled Thssthfok to ask such obvious questions.

“Koshbara, Excellency.” Her vestigial wings fluttered nervously. “We have many advances to show you.”

“Proceed,” he told her.

Thssthfok recognized progress in their course through the palace, whose walls for the first time were brightly lit. Mass production of identical fixtures. Electric lamps, using some sort of incandescent filament. Power generation and distribution. “Alternating or direct?” he asked. “How do you generate it?”

Koshbara blinked. She would adapt soon enough to the pace of his thinking, or be replaced. “Alternating current, Excellency. Braf-fired steam engines drive the generators.”

Braf? He had not encountered the word but let it pass. Something that burned, probably peat or coal. The forest that once abutted the city was all
but gone, sacrificed, he presumed, to the wood-fired steam engines he had introduced at his last awakening.

Outside the palace, the sun beat down: huge, mottled, the sullen red of dying embers. In absolute terms it was a tiny star, an unexceptional red dwarf. Only because Mala orbited its sun so closely was this world habitable at all. As a consequence of that tight orbit it was tidally locked. One hemisphere baked unrelentingly, the other lay shrouded in permanent dark and cold. Fierce circulation patterns mixed day-and night-side atmosphere enough to moderate both.

The climate was unique to Thssthfok's experience; he ought to be fascinated. But to what purpose? The core explosion would sterilize Mala, too, soon enough.

They climbed the ceremonial pyramid for a panoramic view. The city had doubled in size while he slept. The skies were disappointingly empty of aircraft, but self-propelled vehicles had all but replaced beast-drawn carts. Along several corridors into the city, parallel steel tracks glinted in the sun and great engines, belching black smoke, pulled long chains of cars. Large, paddlewheel ships had replaced small sailboats. At the limits of his vision, ships anchored in the river delta awaited their turns to unload.

The air stank of complex hydrocarbons and their combustion byproducts. More of this braf, or something like it, he inferred.

Thssthfok let Koshbara lead him through the newest factories and research labs. He observed simple chemical plants, blast furnaces, and production lines. He saw crude experimentation with electricity and machinery for grinding lenses. They had produced lenses as wide as Thssthfok's forearm was long. For an observatory the empire planned to erect on Darkside, Koshbara explained eagerly, her pride finally overcoming her fear.

The chemistry was all empirical. The physics was quaint. The machinery wheezed and squeaked and groaned, every tortured sound a cry for optimization. The reek of chemicals and sewage—the very stench of the Drar themselves—oppressed Thssthfok. Still, what had begun in desperation had developed a veneer of plausibility: The Drar might be led to build an interstellar ramscoop within his lifetime. He could yet escape.

If he could manage to care.

 

THE LONGER IT TOOK
to build a starship, the less it mattered. What remained of his family, what remained of clan Rilchuk, were beyond all
hope or pretense of reuniting. Of what conceivable use, then, was his life?

What use was a protector with no one to protect?

The growling of his stomach, the more and more frequent pangs, seemed to belong to someone else. He had no appetite. It would be easy to stop eating, to waste away, to die. It would be easy, and faster, to let slip the precautions that kept assassins at bay.

The Drar meant nothing to him. Let them survive, or not, as they chose. Perhaps a laggard clan, taking note of their emergent technology, would make the decision for them.

“Excellency?” Koshbara had noticed his distraction. “Shall we go on to the repository?”

He would rather lie down and starve in his room, in familiar surroundings. To express the thought took more effort than it was worth. He followed her and their escort onto a noisy, self-propelled conveyance and then into another building. The repository turned out to be—a library.

A memory stirred, and with it a twinge of appetite.

It had been easy in his youth, in the vigor of his family, to be ambivalent about
the
Library, the great epochal archive on Pakhome. He remembered disparaging the childless protectors for claiming to have made the Library their cause, and the welfare of
all
Pak their purpose in life. He remembered how abstract—how unnatural—their service had seemed.

“Show me,” he ordered Koshbara.

They wound through aisles lined with tall shelves filled with books and scrolls. She pointed out sections on hydraulics, architecture, optics, and orbital mechanics. Idly, he unrolled scrolls and flipped through bound books. The storage medium was primitive; a few centuries would turn everything here to dust. It was nothing like the metal pages on which
the
Library scribed its knowledge.

They sampled the files in which an army of Drar labored to maintain an index to their arduously acquired new knowledge. He saw dread in the posture of these librarians, but also satisfaction in their accomplishments, and even gratitude for Thssthfok's guidance.

Curious, he thought.

Transfer these catalogue cards to metal, and the Drar system would little differ from the Library index on Pakhome. One group of librarians had scarcely discovered electricity; the other group planned for the interregnums when all knowledge of electricity had been lost.

Now the Library itself was lost. Its store of knowledge was too bulky to move even when—if the radioed messages of laggard fleets could be believed—the Librarians built or stole their own starships.

Knowledge abandoned left childless protectors without a reason to live. If the stories were true, the Librarians must pursue the surviving clans, with elements of the ancient archives somehow made portable. They must convince themselves that, in time, sometime, those clans would value what had been preserved.

Preserved how? In such circumstances, Thssthfok would transfer the old, scribed records to electronic or optical form—so that must be what the Librarians did. The logic was clear.

The chain of logic reminded Thssthfok of an idea he had had just as cold sleep last took him. The Drar outthought breeders, but never protectors. The technology
he
needed must soon outstrip their feeble minds, if it had not already done that.

“Koshbara,” he said, interrupting a lengthy and unnecessary description from one of the librarians. “Show me your mechanical calculators.”

Her ears bobbed in confusion. “Our what, Excellency?”