Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy (7 page)

Before them, the land changed radically. What had been smooth snow became jagged gullies and sharp hillocks; but the far mountains seemed noticeably closer.

“Foothills of the Plutoman Apennines,” Shatz Abel explained. “From now on it’s rough and rougher, till we get to the mountains themselves. Luckily we get to pass between two of ‘em across a valley. The others would surely kill us.”

Dalin studied them with their single pair of ancient binoculars; they looked much as they had when he had dropped into the atmosphere courtesy of Wrath-Pei: like jagged teeth waiting to bite him.

“I suppose we’ll see,” Dalin said.

“That we will. If …”

He stopped himself and said, “Time to secure whatever gear we can’t bring, and get ready for our trek tomorrow.”

Overhead a moving dot of light caught Dalin’s eye; it seemed to detach itself from SunOne and move off toward the distant mountains.

Shatz Abel said, “You’ve seen your first transport heading for Tombaugh City, my king. We’re now close enough to pick them up as they drop. A good sign, no?”

Dalin nodded. “A good sign.”

They worked, securing and camouflaging their gear, pitched camp again, and waiting for the next morning.

“N
ow we walk!” Shatz Abel said.

Dalin’s pack felt as if he were carrying himself on his own back; but he said nothing, noting that the pirate’s pack was twice the size of his own. The snow boots he wore seemed oversized, but he soon came to see their advantages, when they hit the first deep pool of drifted snow and the boots kept him from sinking as their webbed soles automatically widened.

“Look back!” Shatz Abel ordered, when they stopped to rest briefly an hour later.

Dalin looked behind them and was surprised to see that nothing looked familiar. It was as if they had dropped onto another planet; for the moment, at least, gone were the snow plains and familiar hills; the landscape in all directions looked more like ancient Mars after an infrequent snowfall, pocked with glazed boulders and rusty rocks.

“It gets even stranger ahead,” Shatz Abel promised. “Ready?”

Dalin adjusted his pack and breathed deep. “Ready,” he said.

They trudged on, snow dust gradually giving way to stretches of black, interspersed with lengthy patches of ice. Dalin’s boots adjusted as well as they were able; on the ice, tiny spikes were activated, keeping him from falling; but once or twice, in the middle of black-red sand, his boots mistook this substance for snow and widened, nearly pitching Dalin over. He learned to trudge carefully.

But soon there was more ice than anything: a bluish plain swept with snow devils that twirled like dervishes around them. Cracks in the surface appeared, sometimes forming strange pictures; some looked like spider webs, or a Screen’s interference patterns, or the tendrilous heart of a nebula’s star-forming region. One looked like an Earth cow; another like a distorted human face.

“Dalin! Look out!”

The king was so absorbed in finding pictures that he nearly stepped into a crack wider than a man. His gripping boots stopped him and he looked down into dark blue nothingness as Shatz Abel reached his side.

The pirate shone a hand lantern down into the crevasse, but still they could see no bottom; to the contrary, the chasm seemed to widen out as it deepened.

“That would have been the end of you,” the pirate said.

Dalin backed away, resolving to look at no more pictures in the ice.

They walked on.

The plain became as an ocean, as wide and far as the eye could see—save for something in the near distance, a disturbance or frozen roiling in the ice that became more pronounced as they approached it. Beyond, the ice flattened again to the northern horizon, until the jagged peaks of the Plutonian Apennines thrust up like ravenous fangs at the sky.

Pointing to the disturbance in the ice, Shatz Abel said, “Christy Chasm!”

And soon enough they reached it.

Dalin now understood the pirate’s description: it did, indeed, resemble Screen pictures Dalin had seen of Mars’s great canyon, Valles Marinares, which cut that planet nearly in half across a third of its circumference. Take the red tones from Valles Marinares, replace them with gray-blue ice, shrink it in scale for Pluto, and the two would be indistinguishable.

“How deep is it?” Dalin asked.

“I reckon nearly a kilometer,” Shatz Abel said. “I wasn’t about to descend by myself, last time I was here.”

Dalin studied the length of the abyss, as well as its breadth, and said, “I understand what you meant now about no possibility of a bridge.”

“It’s just too wide, lad. We could spend a month trying to go around it or hoping for it to narrow out. Best just to go down and then go up.”

Dalin nodded. “I agree. When?”

“Tomorrow morning, after a good long rest.”

Again Dalin nodded.

Shatz Abel grinned. “Unless, of course, you’d like to go back.”

“Still thinking of goblins?” Dalin asked.

But seeing the look on the pirate’s face, as well as feeling the knot that formed in his own stomach, Dalin was sorry he’d opened his mouth.

“Best to get that rest, Sire,” Shatz Abel said, subdued as he pulled their tent from his pack and began to erect it at the chasm’s lip.

That night Dalin dreamed of something like white shadows in the wind, something that flapped before him before melting in the morning’s daylight.

T
hey began their descent at dawn.

There was an ice shelf fifty meters below their picked spot, and first they lowered their supplies down. Then Dalin prepared to go over the side, secured to a thick rope gripped in Shatz Abel’s beefy hands.

“Now remember, boy, I’ll let you down easy. Anything out of the ordinary, give a tug. Test the ice shelf before stepping onto it.”

Dalin nodded, and in a moment Shatz Abel had lowered him into the yawning chasm.

Dalin looked down; through the glare of ice he saw the ice shelf, and the supplies piled on it, rising toward him. And then a trick of light, a glint or shimmer that floated like a wave between him and the pile of provisions
–

Dalin yanked hard on the rope; immediately his progress stalled and he hung suspended in midair, staring hard at the spot where he had just seen the optical manifestation.

There was nothing there: the slight wind whistled coldly, pushing him askew; the day was bright with blue ice that hurt his eyes.

It was nothing.

“Boy! What’s wrong?” came Shatz Abel’s shout; and now the huge pirate’s form appeared above him, holding the rope in one hand, as if Dalin were a marionette.

“Nothing!” Dalin shouted up. “Nothing’s wrong—keep going!”

“Are you sure, Sire?”

“Yes!”

“Very well …”

Shatz Abel stepped back, and in a moment Dalin was lowered once more.

And almost immediately he saw the shimmer again: like a flapping mist that passed between himself and the ice shelf.

He almost tugged at the rope again, but refrained.

His body approached a section of the ice shelf just to the side of the gear; as he reached it, Dalin tugged on the rope to stop his progress, and tentatively tapped on the ice with his boot.

It seemed solid enough.

“Dalin!” Shatz Abel shouted.

“It’s all right! Let me down all the way!”

The rope lowered, then went slack; Dalin removed it from his waist and now stood firmly on the ice ledge—

It crumbled beneath him.

Calling out, Dalin sought with his hands to grab at the still-solid ledge where the provisions were stacked; but the ice was slick, and he felt himself sliding down. He had a brief look below and saw nothing but chasm, slivers of broken ice tumbling into an endless hole.

He looked up and saw Shatz Abel’s shocked face looking over the ledge above, his hand still gripping the slack, now-useless rope.

Dalin fell into nothingness.

And then was surrounded by a shimmering sheet of light, which seemed to float out of the walls of the chasm.

The goblin.

Chapter 8

O
f all the useless and unpleasant tasks Carter Frolich had to perform, his weekly audience with Prime Cornelian was the most irksome.

Though he always tried to control his anger and impatience, it always broke to the surface, to the detriment of everything he was trying to accomplish. Like it or not, he continued to need the High Leader; like it or not, his fate and the fate of his beautiful Venus were tied to the Martian warlord.

“Cornelian, how are you?” Frolich said to the High Leader’s loathsome Screen image. Already having blundered, he sought to correct himself: “I mean of course,
High Leader,
how are you?”

“Well enough,” the Martian said. He seemed preoccupied, as he often did—which was fine with Frolich.

“Are things well?” Frolich said, seeking to be diplomatic; the last thing he expected was a truthful answer.

“Not precisely, Frolich,” the High Leader said. “There’s been a coup of sorts on your home planet, Earth, and though it really was needed, it seems to have made things worse. And Wrath-Pei
vexes
me.”

“Oh?” Frolich said politely, though he had absolutely no interest any longer in what went on on Earth. Venus was his home now—no, was his
life;
and only Venus’s welfare concerned him.

“I was wondering, High Leader, if you’ve been able to consider my requests for that feeder tube upgrade project—”

With a wave of one metallic hand, Cornelian dismissed Frolich’s concerns. “Not now. Perhaps next week. You don’t have any trouble to report to me, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. Since the deactivation of half the Plasma Corps last month, I was concerned there might be … trouble.”

Frolich had never seen the High Leader so preoccupied. To his diplomatically acute mind, it seemed the perfect time to ask for what he wanted.

“High Leader, do you think the power from the deactivation could be diverted to the Maat Mons plan—”

“Don’t bother me with your toys!” the High Leader erupted.

“I’m sorr—”

The High Leader’s quartz orbs stared straight into Frolich through the Screen. Through his anger, the High Leader spoke slowly and distinctly: “Just tell me plainly: are things quiet on Venus?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

The Screen went mercifully blank, leaving Carter Frolich staring at it for a moment, before all but forgetting that the High Leader had even spoken to him. All that mattered was Venus.

Carter turned from the blank Screen to the rest of the cavernous chamber. It was the perfect place to work and dream: the Sacajawea Center’s Piton Room, set four hundred feet high into the flank of the extinct volcano Sacajawea Patera like a jewel. It was an eagle’s nest, jutting out nearly a hundred feet, its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a panorama out of Eden: Lake Clotho Tessera to the east, on its shores Lakshmi Planum, which would one day grow into a city; in the middle distance other communities, which, though disrupted in their growth, would one day prosper; and below, almost in the shadow of the volcano, was Frolich City, destined to be the planet’s largest. It had been named over Carter’s violent objections; briefly, he wondered if its former citizens, mostly dead now, would have argued so assiduously today in favor of that appellation.

Bypassing the ranks of worktables holding architect’s plans, stacks of engineering documents, miniature models of facilities—oxygenating stations, feeder tube plants, water purification terminals, transportation depots, and a hundred other projects and dreams—Carter walked to the edge of the Piton’s jutting windows and surveyed this paradise he had done so much for.

Murdered so many for.

The thought drove briefly through his mind, but he pushed it aside. Yes, he had done what had been necessary to save his Venus; many had died in the process.

Targon Ramir’s face rose briefly in his thoughts—
Murdered.

He drove Targon’s face from his mind, just as he drove away all the other ugly acts that had been necessary
.

What price is too much?

Staring out at the streets of Frolich City below him, where dust blew through empty streets and through backyards where children used to play—

The children gone, their parents murdered, cut down in their homes on Eden—

“That’s not the way it was supposed to be!” Carter shouted suddenly, his voice echoing in the empty room. Here it came again: the attacks, the voices in his head, the screams, it seemed like the core of Venus itself screaming at him, calling him murderer.…

“No!”

Frolich fell to the floor, holding his head with his hands; if only the devils would leave him alone, the demons in his memory.

“I had no other choice! You were going to kill my planet!”

Targon Ramir’s face, placid before death, his body battered by Prime Cornelian’s torturers, his face stripped of flesh, bleeding like any martyr’s, again came to haunt him. He had loved Targon Ramir like his own son, had shared his vision of Venus, of paradise, with this boy—and then Targon had betrayed him. Ramir had sought to destroy all they had worked for together; would have blown up every feeder tube on Venus, punching great brown plasma explosion holes in its beautiful oxygenating atmosphere and sent the planet reeling back to its hellish past for hundreds of years.

“
I couldn’t let you do that, Targon!
”

Unspeaking, Targon Ramir’s ruined face regarded him placidly, then faded away.

Through the floor’s windows, Carter Frolich stared wide-eyed at the dust-blown streets of Frolich City; a line of plasma soldiers marched mindlessly by near the city’s feeder tube facility; the soldiers looked like fire ants.

All the other cities, all empty, all full of dust.
Venus is no longer people.

If that was the way it must be, then so be it.

Slowly, Carter Frolich rose from the floor and straightened his tunic. He turned his back on the Piton’s windows, walked unsteadily to the nearest worktable. On it was a tiny, beautifully scaled model of Aphrodite Port; fragile representations of freighters and transports were lined in a row on what would be the largest port on the Five Worlds.