The Space Guardian (9 page)

The ridge of hills ran south, and Stoat clung to them all that day. In the late afternoon they found a tiny uninhabited cup and set the flyer down. The cups were like another world. This one could have been any peaceful valley on any planet. Plants grew; insects buzzed. In the brush a rustling and a flicker of white told of a small creature alarmed and fleeing.

“If you will set up our tent, I will bring supper,” Stoat said, and disappeared with Shom at his heels.

In a short time he was back, two rabbit-like creatures, already gutted, hanging limp at his belt, and a variety of roots and other vegetables in his hand. Shom followed carrying a collapsible pail slopping full of clear, fresh water. Lahks looked from one to the other.

“I do not understand,” she remarked as Stoat set up a heating unit and began to cook his prey. “Here there is game, edible plants, good water, and you do not need precautions against dragons. Why are there no people?”

“Too small.” Stoat swallowed hungrily as the savory smell of his stew made his mouth water. Pack rations would last for months, were complete and sustaining, but they had neither taste nor odor and men still hungered for meat. “For a day, perhaps even for a week, this cup could support us. Then it would be bare. For a man alone, if he were very careful, it might be possible to live, but most men are not that careful, nor are they creatures who can live alone. Landlord Vogel’s cup was once like this. Although it was much, much larger and the men were much fewer when they came, it was soon empty, as you saw it. The vegetables you ate in Fanny’s hotel are ponics; the protein is vat-cultured.”

“But this type of rodent,” Lahks protested, gesturing toward the skins, “is a prolific breeder wherever it appears.”

“I do not know why the animals are so slow to breed and the plants so slow to grow.” He smiled slightly, as if at a private joke. “But I think, perhaps, that the planet is tired, old and tired.”

“But why do the dragons avoid these places? There is no barrier to them. Even if old ones have established territories, the young must need living space.”

Stoat shrugged. “Would you believe in magic?” he suggested in a faintly humorous voice, but with a basically serious intention. “It is the most logical explanation I can offer. No predator ever enters a cup, yet the droms pass in and out, and any domestic animal can also do so without discomfort.”

“So?” Lahks allowed her eyes to wander over their small haven and then nodded. “Did he who made the drom make thee?’ She opened her mouth to say something else, then leaped to her feet. “Where is Shom?”

Gratitude and deep warmth showed in Stoat’s eyes because few would care what happened to the defective, but he replied prosaically, “Washing. There is a spring in a depression beyond the bracken.”

“Well, thank the Powers—or whoever made this place for that. I’ll go and . . .”

“Not while Shom is there.”

Because her father had shed it completely together with the fanatical religion of the Shomir, Lahks had forgotten their excessive prudery. She realized her mistake before Stoat spoke, however, and raised an eyebrow icily. “. . . remove my windsuit,” she continued, as if he had not spoken, “so that I can finish quickly. My mother and brother are Shomir.”

She was beginning to be sorry for the lie because she trusted Stoat, but her urge to lay hands upon a heartstone was growing stronger. She did not want to take the chance of upsetting the smooth functioning of their team until that end was accomplished. Then at least part of the truth might be told. Now, however, as she rose to suit her action to words, she was reminded of what she had been about to say before concern for Shom had interrupted her.

“If this is an artifact also, should there be stones here?”

“Not now,” Stoat replied positively. His voice was quiet but rage flickered in his eyes for a moment.

Lahks understood and pursued that subject no further. Instead, she said eagerly, “There are ruins here?”

There was a long silence. Stoat seemed to find the bubbling of his stew inordinately fascinating. Lahks waited, wondering. If there was something Stoat wished to conceal, he need only have answered “no” to her question. Therefore, there was something he wanted, but was afraid, to share. As if in confirmation, he rose without looking at her and walked away. Equally silent, Lahks followed across the cup.

On the far side, near where the sheltering hills rose, were what seemed to be shoulder-high bushes. When she came to them, however, Lahks saw they were trees, entirely perfect in form and shape and of species common on many oxygen planets; only here they were shoulder-high, whereas naturally they grew to some ten or fifteen meters in height. Lahks put out a finger and touched. They were real, growing, dying—she could see that some had fallen and saplings were rising in the open spaces.

Stoat was threading his way carefully through the miniature forest. At a trickle of water, which Lahks realized would be a moderate-sized stream on the scale of the trees, he stopped and turned his head. Looking in the same direction, Lahks gasped. Far from a ruin, perfect, of incredible, fragile beauty, a house waited. The evening sun glinted from little windows, glanced from the polished tiles of peaked roof and delicate towers, warmed the yellow stone to gold. The house exuded welcome, begged them to be small, to come in and live in joy. Tears pricked Lahks’ eyes.

“They should not have left it alone,” she whispered brokenly. “It is still waiting for them.”

“Yes, but it is not lonely. Time has no meaning here. A thousand S-years, ten thousand, a hundred thousand pass this place as an hour. We feel pain because we cannot accept what it offers.” Stoat took a single step, touched the roof, then the facade, with gentle fingers. “The house is warm and content.”

By mutual consent they turned away. At the campsite Lahks broke the reflective silence. “But the droms were engineered, if our guess is right, for men of our own size—at least our size. Who. . .”

Stoat smiled quietly, as if at a distant, distant memory. “I think it is a child’s toy—a doll’s house. What little I have seen of other ruins. . .” He shook his head. “There is no use in trying to speak of them. Like this or the droms, you must see for yourself.”

When they started the next morning, clean and well fed, it was with the fixed determination to find the legendary ruins. Stoat lifted the flyer to its maximum altitude and left the ridge of hills. All three wore distance lenses and studied the terrain, but the bare scoured rock showed no sign of ever having supported any life, however far in the past. They set down only when the light began to fail in the lee of a pile of boulders. All had burning eyes and aching heads, and the howl of the wind, the sandpaper scrape of grit on the flyer’s sides, the cold and tasteless travel rations offered little comfort. Tomorrow, early, would bring the point of no return with respect to fuel. Neither Lahks nor Stoat mentioned this. In fact, they spoke as little as possible.

No one felt any better in the morning. They were exhausted from cramping and lack of sleep, and yet their bodies, accustomed to exercise, twitched from lack of activity. Sustabs were mouthed; water, body-warm and faintly tainted with the ammoniacal chemicals that could not be wholly removed, was sipped from stillsuit reservoirs. They took off again. Lahks noticed that Stoat did not glance at the fuel register. If she said the word, she knew he would turn back, but not until then. They flew on.

After a time Lahks found herself swallowing down a faint queasiness. The ground below them seemed to be moving. She shut her eyes, opened them. Still the ground moved in slow waves. Then she noticed that the direction in which the grit struck the ship had changed.

“The wind!” Stoat yelled to make himself heard. “This damned lunatic planet. I should have guessed. The wind is circular. It runs around inside the great mountain chains.”

“Am I dizzy, or is the ground shifting?” Lahks shrieked in reply.

“I think it’s the ground. Maybe loose rocks and pebbles down there.” Now Stoat did glance at the fuel gauge. To land in that river of rolling stones would be certain death.

“Go on!” Lahks shouted. “If the wind is circular, it will be quiet in the center.”

For reply, Stoat only laughed, but he turned the flyer even farther broadside to the gale. It slid sideways sickeningly, and he fought the controls, increasing the power to compensate. Lahks closed her eyes again. It was useless to stare into that tide of rock. Nothing could stand against it. Any structure would have been ground to powder and rolled along with the mass within weeks. Suddenly Lahks remembered the sensation of caution Ghrey had transmitted. She had associated it with the heartstone, but the heartstone came only from Wumeera. Did Ghrey know this planet? Did she dare call and ask for help? Dare open herself to the desires of the universe again? She shuddered, and as her mind shied away from the thought, a picture rose in it. A drom, grinning and nodding, stood across the stream from the little house and it was quiet, very quiet.

Awareness that the quiet was not all in her mind made Lahks open her eyes. Certainly the wind had fallen, although it still blew grit against the ship. Far ahead, here and there, irregular, sharp shapes shadowed what appeared to be a mist. Below sand dunes rolled almost as restlessly as the sea. I must have slept, Lahks thought, glancing at Stoat’s gray, sweat-shined face. She did not speak because it was plain that he, too, had seen the shapes. The flyer was headed directly toward them.

The wind continued to lessen, but as they reached the mist they were buffeted upward and peppered anew with flying sand. Once it hit, they could see nothing. His lower lip pinched by sharp teeth, Stoat fought to keep their course. Here the wind did not blow steadily but breathed in irregular gusts with irrational ferocity. Now the ship was tossed upward, now fell sickeningly as the air current failed completely. Lahks could not see the ground at all.

The leaps up and down and the sideways buffeting decreased. For a few minutes at a time it was even possible to hear the whine of the straining motor. Finally the intermittent spattering of wind-borne particles was more like petulant spitting than like sandblasting. And then, at last, they were free. The sand dunes below lay still, except for a faint rippling of their surfaces, and ahead, in a wide depression, was. . . . Could a city be merrily insane? Could ruins be happily irresponsible?

Above the engine noise came a sound so unexpected that both Lahks and Stoat jumped. Shom was laughing aloud.

In spite of the need to conserve fuel, Stoat circled the ruins once. By the time they set down, they were all laughing. Ruins can be many things. Some are tragic, some are awe-inspiring, some are merely melancholy. Never before had any of them seen comical ones. Two things were perfectly clear to Lahks and Stoat. The first was that the funny effect was not caused by the wind, the wear of time, or any disaster. The second was that, in its prime, the ruined city must have been more than funny; it must have been hilarious.

It was not a large city—town was a better word perhaps a hundred constructions in all. There were no streets. Sometimes it was necessary to climb up and over part of a construction to get to another. Open spaces appeared hither and yon, but with no apparent connection with the buildings—although to call the weird and wonderful shapes by that word was stretching a point. There were delicate lacy towers sprouting from odd angles of a squat monstrosity. There were graceful spans leading to nothing at all. There were long, low structures, curling and coiling around other constructions of sometimes indefinable shapes. The conjunction of exquisite beauty and blatant, unashamed ugliness went beyond being shocking. It was ludicrous.

In a sense, of course, it was insane, but Lahks realized after they landed the flyer in one open space on the periphery and looked at the whole from ground level that her initial judgment was not correct. Insanity, even when the “sufferer” is happy in his delusions, has an aura of sickness about it. There was nothing at all unhealthy in this wacky jumble. It was as if the dwellers therein did not care. Nothing at all mattered, neither the form or color of neighboring structures, nor the cost of building, nor even the physical shape or size of the inhabitants.

Stoat stood gaping at a slender structure, perhaps four meters wide, that bent over, as if to be a semicircle, but never touched the ground on one side. In this the door—it had to be a door, even though its shape was a wriggling irregularity—was at the top of the curve, ten meters at least from any point of entry.

“Did they have wings?’ he asked.

“Or no legs at all?” Lahks chuckled, staring off to the right at an oblong structure in which she would have to bend over double to live.

“And that, I suppose, was for a short, fat snake?”

The irony in Stoat’s voice was met by a glance of cool consideration. “There are such varying forms,” Lahks murmured, “and this planet is old, old.”

“You mean a galactic headquarters?” Stoat shook his head in negation. “No, for several reasons. I do not think this planet could have supported such, even as long ago as this was built. This came here after the desert, I think. More important, the planet is placed wrong. Wumeera is not on the rim, but stars are thin here. Most significant, however—all these people saw the same way. One of the most variable attributes of all species—even evolutionary divergence on the same planet—is sight. We see what we must. Look at the colors. The shapes are mad, but the colors are all in the same spectrum. They were all the same species, but”—his lips curved in a surprisingly soft, affectionate smile—“they must have laughed all the time—at themselves, at each other, at the world, even at the universe around them.”

“Say they laughed ‘with’ and I will agree.”

Still smiling, Stoat nodded. “Laughed with, then.” He glanced around. “Shall we start to search or set up camp?” he asked lazily.

Lips parted to say there was no hurry, Lahks suddenly felt a ripple of anxiety. She really did not wish to do anything. Her only impulse . . . no, impulse was too strong a word, it was too violent . . . her mild inclination was to sit down, or even lie down, and watch the endless mad patterns rise and fall, twist and turn, carrying eye and mind away into their laughable intricacy.