Uncharted Stars (26 page)

“Our supposition that the bowl might be much older than the tomb in which it was found, belonging to a people different from those with whom it was buried, is right. For we have deduced, though it is very hard to define any one well, at least four overlays left by former possessors.”

“And the zero stone?”

“That perhaps is the source of some of the difficulty we encountered. The force which animates it might well govern the unfortunate mixture of impressions. But this we can tell you—the map was of prime importance to those who first wrought it, though the bowl itself meant more to later possessors.”

“Suppose we do find the source of the stones,” I said. “What then? We cannot hope to control the traffic in them. Any man who has a monopoly on a treasure sets himself up as a target for the rest.”

“A logical deduction,” Zilwrich agreed. “We are four. And a secret such as this cannot remain a secret long, because of the nature of what we must exploit. Like it or not, you—we—shall have to deal with the authorities, or else live hunted men.”

“We can choose the authorities with whom we deal,” I replied, an idea forming in my mind.

“Logical and perhaps the best.” Eet cut across my thought, picking it up in its half-formed state, following it straight to a decisive conclusion.

“And if those authorities are Zacathan—” I said it aloud.

Zilwrich eyed me. “You pay us much honor.”

“By right.” It gave me a small quirk of shame to have to answer so, to admit that it was the alien whom I might trust above those of my own species. Yet that was so. And I would hand to any one of their Council the secret of what we found here (if we found anything worth the title of secret) more willingly than I would to any of my own leaders. The Zacathans have never been empire builders, never sought colonies among the stars. They are observers, historians, teachers at times. But they were never swayed by the passions, desires, fanaticism which has from the first made both great heroes and villains among my own kind.

“And if this secret might well be one not to be shared?” Zilwrich asked.

“That, too, I could accept,” I said promptly. But I knew that I did not speak for Eet, or for Ryzk, who must now be included as one of our number.

“We shall see,” Eet answered, his reservations plain. Not for the first time I wondered whether Eet's dogged insistence that the quest of the stone's source be our main goal did not have some reason he had never shared with me. And then, could I, myself, completely surrender the stones, knowing what I could do with them, knowing that perhaps there was more, much more, we might learn from them? Supposing the Zacathans advised us to hide, destroy, blot out all we know of the gems. Could I agree to that with no regret?

Later I lay in my cabin thinking. Eet, lying beside me, did not touch those thoughts. But at last, to escape a dilemma I could not resolve until we had passed many ifs and buts in the future, I asked the mutant:

“This reading of the past of the bowl, what
did
you learn of its past?”

“As Zilwrich said, there were several pasts and they were overlaid, mixed with one another until what we gained was so disjointed it was difficult to read any part of it and be sure we were correct. It was not made by those who fashioned the tomb. They came, I believe, long after, finding it themselves as a treasure-trove, leaving it with some ruler to whom they wished to pay funeral honor.

“The source of the stone—” he hesitated and the thought I picked up was one of puzzlement—“was not clear. Save that we do go now, if we have read the co-ordinates right, to that source. And the stone was set in the chart as a guide to those to whom it was very important. But that its native planet was their world of origin—that I do not think is the truth either. However, the reading was enough to set one's mind upside down, and the less I rethink on it the better!” With that he snapped mind-touch and curled into a ball to sleep. A state I followed.

The warning that we were at the end to our journey in hyper came some time later. As the Zacathan had assured us when we rigged his protection that he could manage it by himself, I made speed to the control cabin, Eet with me. Soon I was well wrapped in my webbing, watching Ryzk, in a like cocoon at the controls, trying to relax when the final test of our drastic emerge came.

It was bad, as bad or perhaps a fraction worse than that which had hit when we had joined the ship in the LB before the other jump—Only this time we had all the protection Ryzk's experience had been able to devise, and we came out in better shape.

As soon as I was fully conscious I looked to the radar. There were points registering on it, but they marked planets, not the ship locked to us through hyper.

“We did it!” Ryzk almost shouted. At the same time Eet scrambled along my still nearly immobilized body. I saw then what he held in a forepaw against his upper belly—the zero stone.

It was blazing with a brilliance I had not seen before except when we had put it to action. Yet now it was not adding to any power of ours. The glare grew, hurting the eyes. Eet gave an exclamation of pain and dropped it. He tried to pick it up again, but it was clear he could not use his paw-hand near that spot of fire. Now I could not even look directly at it.

I wondered if it was about to eat its way through the deck by the heat it was engendering.

“Blanket it!” Eet's cry was a warning. “Think dark—black!”

The power of his own thought swept mine along with it. I bent what mental energy I could summon to thinking dark. That we were able to control the surge of energy in the stone by such means astounded me. That awful brilliance faded. However, the stone did not return to its original dull lifelessness; it continued to contain a core of light which set it above any gem I had ever known and it lay in a small hollow which its power had melted out of the substance of the deck.

“Pliers—” I did not know whether they would help, for the heat of the stone might melt any metal touching it. But we could not pick it up in bare fingers and we dared not leave it lie, maybe to eat straight through the fabric of the ship level by level.

Ryzk stared at it, unable to understand just what had happened. But I had pulled out of the cocoon of webbing and managed to reach the box of tools he had used earlier. With pliers in hand I knelt to pick up the gem, fearing I might find it welded to the floor.

But it came away, though I could still feel heat and see that a hole in the deck beneath it was nearly melted through. Once on land, once in space, once on the edge of the wreckage we had used the zero stone as a guide. Could this small gem now bring us to the final goal of its home world?

We did not need it, since the bowl chart had already located the planet for us, fourth out from the sun. And oddly enough, once placed within the bowl, the furious blaze of the loose stone subsided into a fraction of its glow, as if the bowl governed the energy.

Though we kept a watch on the radar, there was no sign that the enemy had followed us into this system. And Ryzk set course for the fourth planet.

I half expected that time would have wrought a change in the sun, that it might have gone nova, imploded into a red dwarf, even burned out. But this was not so. It tested in the same class as was indicated on the ancient chart.

We went into scan orbit, our testers questing to inform us it was truly Arth type, though we were suspicious enough to keep all indicators on alert.

What we picked up on our viewers was amazing. I knew that Terra, from which my species had come into an immeasurably ancient galaxy, had been monstrously overcrowded in the last days before general emigration to the stars began—that cities had soared skyward, tunneled into depths, eaten their way across most of the continental land masses, even swung out into the seas. I knew that, but I had never seen it. Terran by descent I am, but Terra is across the galaxy now and more than half legend. Oh, we see the old tri-dees and listen to archaic tapes which are copied over and over again. But much of what we see is meaningless and there are long arguments as to what really did or did not exist in the days before Terrans roamed the star lanes.

Now I looked upon something like the jostling, crowded—terribly crowded—erections those tri-dees had shown. This was a planet where no empty earth, no sign of vegetation showed. It was covered, on the land masses by buildings, and even across the seas by strings of large platforms which were too regular in outline to be islands. The whole gave one a terrible sensation of claustrophobia, of choking pressure, of erection against erection, or against the earth of its foundations.

We passed from day to night in our orbit. But on the dark side no light showed. If there was life below—

But how could there be? They would be smothered, pushed, wedged out of existence! I could not conceive of life here.

“There is a landing port,” Ryzk said suddenly, but he had a keener eye than I, or else we had swung over and past what he had seen. To me there was no break in that infernal mass of structures.

“Can you land?” I asked, knowing that treasure or no treasure, stone or no stone, I must force myself to set foot down there.

“On deters,” Ryzk said. “Orbit twice for a bearing. There are no guide beams. Probably deserted.” But he looked far from happy, and I thought perhaps he might share some of my feeling about what lay below.

He began to set a course. Then we lay back in our seats, our eyes on the visa-screen, watching the dead city-world reach up—for that was what it seemed to be doing—as if its towers were ready to drag us down to the world they had completely devoured.

XVII

It was a tribute to Ryzk's skill that our landing was three-point, exactly on fins. He rode the ship down her tail rockets as only a master pilot could do. Ad not for the first time I was led to wonder what had exiled him from his kind—drink alone? Then we lay in our webbing watching the visa-screen as our snooper made a complete circuit of what lay about us, reporting it within.

With that report I came to respect Ryzk's skill even more. It was as if we had been threaded into a slit between walls of towers whose assault against the sky was such that one could not immediately adjust one's thoughts to what one's eyes reported. Only now that we were in that forest of man-made giants could we see the hurts time had dealt them.

For the most part they were either gray-brown or a blue-green in color, and there was no sign of seam or join as one might sight with stone blocks or the like. But there were cracks in their once smooth sides, rents in their fabric, which were not windows or doors. We could see no indication of those.

Ryzk turned to check the atmosphere dials. “Arth type, livable,” he said. But he made no move to leave his webbing, nor did I.

There was something about those crowding lines of buildings which dwarfed, threatened us, not actively, but by their being. We were as insects, unable to raise ourselves from the dust in which we crawled, confronted by men who were giants with clouds gathering about their barely seen heads. And about it all there hung a feeling that this was a place of old death. Not a decent tomb in which honor had been paid to the one who slept there through the centuries, but rather a place in which decay had reduced to a common anonymity all that had meant aught—men, learning, belief—

Nothing moved out there. No flying thing flitted among the towers. There was no sign of vegetation. It was truly a forest of bones long removed from life. We could see nothing to fear, save that feeling which grew in us, or in me (though Ryzk's actions led me to believe he must share my uneasiness), that life had no place here now.

“Let us move!” That was Eet. There was a tenseness in his small body, a feral eagerness in the way his head darted from side to side, as if he tried to focus more intently on the visa-screen—though as that continued its slow sweep I saw no change in the monotony of the towered vista.

I left the webbing, Ryzk also. The bowl with the zero stone was on the deck, with Eet crouched over it as if he were on guard above its contents. And the stone blazed, though perhaps with not the same intensity as earlier.

We climbed down to join Zilwrich. The Zacathan was on his feet, leaning against the wall. He looked to Eet and I guessed some message passed between them. I lent my shoulders to the Zacathan's support and, together with Ryzk, aided him out of the hatch, down the ramp, to the apron of the space port.

There arose a hollow moaning and the pilot slewed around in a half crouch, looking down one of the narrow passages between the towers. Save for the open pocket of the port, there was gloom unbroken in those ways, such dusk as I had seen in forests of other worlds. The moaning shrilled and then our startlement vanished as we realized it was caused by the wind. Perhaps that acted upon the rents in the building to produce such sounds.

But outside the
Wendwind
the vast desolation was worse even than it had seemed on the screen. And I had not the slightest desire to go exploring. In fact, I was gripped by the feeling that to venture away from the port was to enter such a maze as one could never issue from again. As to where to search—Seen from the air, this planet-wide city covered all the ground, part of the sea. We might be half, three quarters, or the world away from what we sought, and it would take days, months of searching—

“I think not!” Eet had brought the bowl with him. Now he held it out and we saw the double blaze of the point on its surface and of the jewel within. He turned his head sharply to the right. “That way!”

But whatever lay “that way” might still be leagues from the port. And Zilwrich could certainly not tramp any distance on his unsteady feet, nor would I leave any of our party with the ship this time. We had the flitter—if we could crowd two of us into its cargo space, then we could quest some distance above the surface.

We settled Zilwrich with Eet at the end of the ramp and returned to the ship. What supplies we had room for and the crossbows went into the flitter. Three of us, plus Eet, would make such a heavy load we could not gain much altitude, but it was the best we could do. The LB had been so modified it might take days to alter it again, and we had no time to waste.