Transgalactic (4 page)

At last he reached the ground and looked back up the side of the ancient structure, marveling one last time at the effort and dedication and sacrifice that had gone into this monument to an ancient ruler, now being reabsorbed by the world from which it had sprung, and he wondered if this location, long-cycles ago, had been more accessible, a desert perhaps before a climate change or some tectonic shift had transformed it into its present state. He turned and made his way into the jungle.

The jungle was heavy with the ripe aroma of growing things and vegetable decay and an underlying alien taint that told Riley of a different evolutionary chemistry. Its floor was relatively free of undergrowth. The towering trees kept sunlight from reaching the surface, except in a few places where stray beams nourished a bush or flowering plant. The jungle floor, though, was deep with debris, and Riley walked carefully, watching his surroundings for predator threats. He stepped on something solid. When it didn't move under his foot, he reached down and withdrew a fallen limb that he could use as a club. It was not the best of weapons, but it was better than nothing. If he were on this world for very long he would have to fashion hmself a bow and arrows or a spear.

A few steps farther on, he needed the club when something lashed out at him from a tree trunk. He saw it in time to knock it away. It was a gigantic flower, like pictures he had seen of an overgrown orchid, only this one had stout petals that closed upon its victims. Now, half shattered but still lashing, it emitted a stifling odor of decay. A bit farther on, in a patch of sunlight, he came across a bush that had spherical yellow growths at the ends of its branches. Birdlike creatures were fluttering around it, and some were eating at the growths with unbirdlike teeth. Riley waved them away with his club and picked one of the spheres. They were fruit, he thought, and the native creatures ate it. He bit into it. It was sweet and tart and filled with juice that ran down the sides of his mouth. Maybe it was poisonous, as alien evolutionary products are likely to be, but sustenance was more of a concern. Poison or not, his re-created body would have to cope with it.

As he made his way farther into the jungle, he felt a few rumblings inside, but they subsided, and when he came upon a different kind of blue fruitlike globe and sampled it, his body accepted it without protest. Finally he reached a stream where a lizardlike creature, about the size of a large dog, was drinking. It raised its head to look at him as he approached, as if evaluating whether he was a danger or a meal, and then scuttled away as Riley raised his club, a sign that Riley interpreted as a hopeful indication that it had seen creatures his size wielding weapons before. He had two chances for getting off this planet; the first was to encounter the descendants of the creatures who had built the pyramid, the second was that they had progressed from that primitive beginning to the stage of powered technology and spaceflight. Surely the emissary of the Machine for whom the receiver in the pyramid had been built had accomplished something. Otherwise he would have to raise an alien civilization to interstellar capability in a generation, and he wasn't sure Asha, or the galaxy, would wait that long.

Of course the emissary could have been killed by alien creatures, savage or sentient, before it could achieve whatever otherworldly goal for which it had risked everything. But then there must have been an original landing party to install the receiver in the first place, and its members had survived long enough to accomplish their mission.

Riley stooped and drank from the stream. The water was tepid and tasted of the jungle floor through which it flowed, but it was liquid and his body didn't object.

He followed the stream, coming across other reptilian creatures, more birds with teeth, and insects that now seemed to avoid him, until he came to what seemed like a trail. He looked both ways before he turned in the direction away from the pyramid toward what he hoped was civilization.

He had gone only a few steps when he realized that something was following him. He turned. Behind him was a creature about his size, though its bulk made it seem larger. It was standing on thick, powerful legs. It had big hips, small upper limbs, and a big head with two red eyes and a protruding jaw fitted with large sharp teeth that it was showing now. Clearly it was reptilian and a carnivore and a threat.

*   *   *

The threat facing him was not the kind of instinctive violence this fecund jungle had produced so far. The creature, dangerous as it looked, wore a leatherlike belt around its middle—it was hardly a waist—and from the front of the belt dangled a pouch, perhaps containing a reserve supply of food, which suggested forethought, and at its side a metal knife, an encouraging indication of a metal-working level of civilization. All this in the brief moment of decision as the creature drew its knife with what resembled a hand with an opposable thumb. Riley knew that he had a chance to defend himself with his club and perhaps his superior agility against the creature's strength and natural weapons, but defense came at a price. He had no future on this primeval world without assistance, and, primitive as it looked, the creature surely represented whatever assistance was available.

Riley stood still, his club at his side, its tip resting, unthreateningly, on the reddish-brown soil of the trail while the creature lifted its knife … and then extended it toward Riley, hilt first. Riley accepted it, looked at it admiringly, and then held it back out to the creature, who took it without recognizable emotion and, throwing its head back, roared.

Riley leaned on his club. “So, friend,” he said, “we are met here on your world, far from wherever I need to be, and maybe you can help me get there. I know you can't understand what I'm saying. But maybe you will, or maybe I will understand you, and anyway, it helps me to talk.”

The creature roared again as if honoring Riley's effort to communicate.

“I'm going to call you ‘Rory,'” Riley said. “I think you saw me climb down the side of that pyramid and you believe that I am a god taken strange shape, or maybe the reincarnation of the god-emperor entombed there, and I'm going to let you think that until I can tell you otherwise and get your help on more equal terms.”

Rory roared again.

“You see? We're getting to understand each other already. You just said something like ‘we've been standing here talking when we should be getting on with our business,' and I agree.” Riley stood to one side of the trail, moving carefully and slowly and extending his club-free left hand to indicate that the way was clear for Rory to pass.

The creature moved past Riley, not looking at him nor altering its progress to avoid possible contact, and stalked down the trail, not looking back to see if Riley was following. Riley got a whiff of the creature as it went by him; Rory smelled ripe, like decay. Riley walked behind but not too closely, cautiously watching the sky above and the jungle's edge on both sides. He wasn't as wary as before. Somehow he trusted Rory's experience with local dangers and, perhaps, those dangers' awareness of the threat of Rory's kind.

They walked in silence, Riley examining what he knew about evolutionary processes. There was far more in his mind than he recalled ever learning, perhaps the residue of his pedia's incredible stock of mostly useless information deposited now among the neurons and their connections that the pedia had impressed into its own purposes. This world clearly was in its Jurassic-like period of tropical growth and reptilian dominance. But the ancient tomb, even older than the million-long-cycle-ago people of the Transcendental Machine, suggested that these dinosaur-like creatures had possessed the ability and the technology to build that pyramid for far longer than humanity had dominated Earth and its solar companion worlds. Perhaps this world had never experienced the catastrophic die-offs that allowed mammalian life to emerge from its hiding places on Earth to produce, eventually, humans. These reptilians had enjoyed more than a million long-cycles to achieve a space-going civilization, if that was in their capacity to imagine.

But if Rory's tools were typical of its civilization's level of technological development, its people had not progressed in a million cycles. They had regressed, he thought. Then he changed his mind.

They had reached a river. Riley could hear it and smell it long before they arrived upon its bank. The river was wide, perhaps one hundred meters across; its flow was thick with reddish-brown sediment and its surface was strewn with leaves and branches, as if, somewhere upstream, the sky had opened up and let fall avalanches of rain. Drawn up on the bank was a boat, or more accurately, Riley judged from his memory of things unseen, a canoe or dugout.

Rory pushed the boat into the water and waited, as if not presuming to direct Riley to get in. There were no seats, and once Riley had entered he crouched in one end, looking for oars or paddles but seeing only what seemed to be a staff lying on the bottom of the boat, not much longer than his club and clearly not long enough to reach the bed of the river.

Rory got into the other end of the vessel, agilely for its size and massive thighs. The boat sagged noticeably into the water, and Riley recognized again the muscular weight of the creature who had befriended him—or who had become his guide and perhaps his acolyte. The boat turned into the current, hesitated for a moment as the river tried to take it along with the flotsam that covered its surface, and then an invisible force took hold of the vessel and turned it upriver, fighting the current with apparent ease.

Rory's people possessed some kind of powered propulsion. Maybe they were not as primitive as Riley had feared. He tried to see the motor, if that was what it was, but all he saw was a train of bubbles.

An hour and eleven minutes later, after Rory had deterred two river monsters who raised their heads out of the muck as the boat passed and Riley understood the purpose of the staff in the bottom of the boat, they reached a place where the jungle had retreated from the river or had been cut back. In that leveled spot, many hundreds of meters across, was a city built of stone like the pyramid.

But it was a ruined city. Unlike the pyramid, its stones had fallen.

*   *   *

Rory sat still in the back of the boat as if waiting for Riley to disembark, and then, when Riley rose and stepped out, moved its heavy body onto what once might have been a dock but was now only shattered stone. The alien creature pulled the boat between two jutting rocks onto a surface that might once have been paved. Riley got no more than a glimpse of two dark holes in the back of the boat before Rory marched off toward the city and Riley followed.

As they got closer to the ruins, other dinosaur-like creatures came toward them, running faster than Riley would have expected. They were of several sizes, from what appeared to be children to heavily muscled adults like Rory and some who were large but not as muscular, females perhaps. There were forty-six of them. Riley wondered how he had come to that total without counting, especially since they seemed bent on attacking him, like a pack of carnivores.

But Rory roared at them and they slowed and then parted as he and Rory passed. The others fell in behind them, roaring softly among themselves. Riley was beginning to distinguish between roars, as if his newly acquired clarity of thought was able to make the kind of analyses that his pedia once had made for him and Asha had made without any such artificial aid. And he was aware of the smell of these creatures, like rotten meat and decaying vegetation, like Rory's odor but worse. This Jurassic world, with all its fecund waste, stank.

As they drew closer to the edge of this ancient city, Riley saw crude shelters, cottages or cabins, built of quarried stone and thatched with dried yellow vegetation. He knew now what had happened to the ruined structures of the old city. They had been scavenged for building materials for its fallen descendants. He felt a wave of despair. There would be little technological help from these decadent remains of a once great civilization.

And then, as Rory led their way into one of the stone huts, Riley remembered the powered propulsion of Rory's boat. Somehow that had survived.

The interior of the hut was dark until Rory withdrew a small object from the pouch hanging from his belt and applied it to a hollowed stone whose contents sprang into flame and a flickering light. Strawlike vegetation was heaped in the corners of the hut. In the center was a low stone table without chairs or stools. Rory opened a nearby wooden chest and withdrew several kinds of the fruit that Riley had already sampled and placed them on the table. From another chest it withdrew a large piece of raw meat. Rory removed two stone flagons from under the table and filled them with a dark fluid from a pottery pitcher also stored under the table, sat on his haunches, and buried his teeth in the raw meat.

Riley hesitated. The odor of the creatures was even stronger here—or his sensory apparatus had been improved along with everything else—and he felt his stomach rebel at the thought of eating, but he pushed the revulsion away as he reached for one of the flagons and sipped its contents. It was a kind of wine, and Riley was briefly encouraged by the thought that at least these creatures had mastered the art of wine-making and pottery creation as well as fire, although not, apparently, the art or desirability of cooking meat. Maybe he would be able to teach them skills that would begin their ascent back into the civilization that had created the city and the pyramid, though it would not, he realized, reach the stage he needed for a reunion with Asha during his life span, no matter how long extended by his passage through the Transcendental Machine.

He was starting to sample the fruit when a loud clap of thunder exploded immediately over their heads followed by flashes of lightning and a downpour, like a gigantic bucket being emptied above them, that rattled the vegetation that roofed the structure and began to drip through in places and then in streams. Riley looked at Rory, who seemed oblivious, and continued to eat. It had consumed half the raw meat already and the rest seemed destined to follow immediately.