Webdancers (24 page)

Stupid thoughts
. On a superficial level, Meghina felt silly. But deeper, where it really mattered much more, she felt quite different. This was their shared destiny.

Our destiny to spin in circles?
One side of her asked a question of the other. And the other side did not answer. It just kept compelling her to go around and around in the garden.

* * * * *

Looking on, Tesh and Noah heard the scuffing and stepping of feet as Meghina and her companions continued their strange amusement. To Tesh, it looked like some sort of weird religious ritual, and she wondered if they would strip off their clothes next and paint themselves blue, as the ancients of Lost Earth used to do. With her military glasses, she saw the garden in full color, and the dark clothing of the circling people.

“Do you think they’re drunk?” she whispered. Then, from the direction of the zoo, she heard an animal roar.

“They’re drunk on something,” he whispered back. “Can’t say what, though.”

“Shall we join them?”

“I … “ When Noah hesitated, she noticed a peculiar expression on his face as he watched Meghina and the others. One of longing, she thought, and fascination. Then he said, “I’ll go, but you stay here.”

“Why? They aren’t dangerous.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t go, either.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I … I feel like they’re tugging at me, wanting me to be with them. But I feel something else, too, telling me not to. I … Uh, on second thought, I think we should both stay here.”

“That was a confusing answer.”

He smiled stiffly.

Tesh felt her own conflicting sensations. Noah always had good instincts. It was one of the things that made her comfortable being around him. He seemed like a protective force to her. But now she wondered why he was behaving this way.

Princess Meghina glanced in their direction, as if she had heard something. Tesh froze, seeing the eerie glint of moonlight in the searching, questing eyes. A chill ran down her back, as she felt a rush of fear. But the Princess soon looked away, and never stopped circling with the others. Faster and faster they whirled in a bizarre dance. And, as if in concert with them, animals in the zoo roared, chattered, and called out in high, agitated pitches.

At that moment, a faint green mist encompassed the five people, a mist that thickened and grew more green as moments passed, until Tesh could no longer see the dancers. The sounds diminished, and finally faded away entirely.

Presently the mist cleared, and the people were gone. Tesh saw only a moonlit garden, as if the whole scene had been an apparition.

Moving with caution, Noah led the way around the shrubbery, to the place where they had seen the strange activity.

On the ground, they found five heaps of clothing arranged in a circle. It looked like a magic trick. But as Tesh lifted the heap that had been Princess Meghina’s black gown, she gasped.

Tesh saw a moonlit hole in the ground, with something jammed down into it, out of reach. Thinking Meghina was trapped in the hole, Noah used a comlink to call for help.

While waiting, he and Tesh dug desperately with their hands, widening the opening. Finally Noah touched whatever was in there, but it only crumbled. Within minutes, uniformed soldiers burst onto the scene, and they began digging with autoshovels.

Beneath each pile of clothing, they found a hole. And inside every hole, only the husks of four Humans and one Mutati—like exoskeletons—with nothing inside.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Each sentient creature has a mental list of things to worry about. The lists are of varying lengths and of varying significance. It has been observed, though, that the thing that gets you will not even be on your list.

—Anne Jules, child philosopher of Lost Earth

Several times during the night, Dux had awakened and worried about the brave Mutati outside. Now, as he stirred yet again and opened his eyes, he wondered if he should go out and check on her. That might disturb everyone, though. He recalled that his grandmother was a light sleeper, and cantankerous if she didn’t get her rest.

Dux and his cousin slept on thin pads that Grandma Zelk had laid out for them on the floor of the small cabin. In the shadows only a couple of meters away, he saw the robot sitting by the dying embers of the fireplace. Kekur was a peculiar sentient machine, but he did seem dedicated to his duties. One of the yellow lights around his face plate pulsed slowly. Undoubtedly, he was monitoring his surroundings, standing sentry over the boys.

Once more, Dux drifted off to an uneasy sleep.…

In the morning, when he heard the old lady clunking around in the kitchen, Dux dressed hurriedly and went outside. A chill wind stabbed into his bones, and he closed his jacket.

Just ahead, he saw Parais perched on a low cedar bough that drooped under her weight, almost all the way to the ground. He hurried to her side. Behind him, he heard his grandmother calling his name, but he ignored her for the moment.

The Mutati opened one large eye, and Dux was shocked to see that it was a sickly shade of yellow, with purple veins through it. Her posture was bad and she leaned, as if about to tumble off the branch.

“Parais,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Took on too much mass,” she said. “Must expel it, but I’m so tired. My avicular chemistry has been warring with the increased organic material that I absorbed.” Her voice grew increasingly faint as she continued. “Just before dawn, I tried … tried to shed my body of the excess, but only stirred up my insides more, making me feel worse. I’ll try again later.”

“Are you sure you should do that?”

“Maybe. There are methods I’ve learned from other aeromutatis.” She looked up into the gray, foggy sky. “Perhaps the sun will come out, and give me new energy.”

Turning toward the cabin, he saw the old woman on the porch, with her hands on her hips. She did not look pleased, but at the moment he didn’t care about that.

He ran to her and said, “Grandmamá, we must help the Mutati. She saved our lives and risked her own. Can you give her a folk medicine?”

The wrinkled woman scowled. “You say she’s a good Mutati, eh? Maybe she’s fooled you, and the minute she’s stronger she’ll kill us all.”

Acey was in the cabin doorway now, with the robot behind him. “Parais wouldn’t do that,” Acey said. “She could have killed us many times before. We all trust her.”

“The Mutati needs help,” Kekur said.

The prior evening, Dux had told the robot not to speak without permission, so this gave him a moment’s pause. He decided not to scold him, however. Maybe Kekur’s internal programming had determined that it was a military priority to revive the Mutati.

“My healing powder might work on her,” Grandma Zelk said, touching the pouch at her waist, “but I hate to waste it. With all of the sickness in the ground around here, I’ve been sprinkling it on problem areas, trying to heal Zehbu.”

“Living planet organism to the Barani tribe of Siriki,” Kekur said. “Zehbu is linked to larger galactic-god entity Buko. A variation on the Tulyan deity Ubuqqo, one of many versions of the ultimate divinity. All unsubstantiated folk tales.”

“Don’t make me come after you with a stick,” the old woman said to the robot.

The yellow lights blinked around Kekur’s faceplate, but he had the good sense not to respond.

“Sadly, my supply of healing powder is diminishing,” Grandma Zelk said. “My powder came from my ancestors before me, who got it from Zehbu, along with the obligation to use it properly. Just a grain or two a decade was all Siriki needed in the past to remain healthy, but the required amount has increased dramatically.”

“Don’t waste your … healing powder on me,” Parais said, barely getting the words out. “Use it for a larger purpose.”

“The shapeshifter makes sense,” the old woman said, patting her small bag. “Look, boys, have you ever seen my pouch so flat? This is all I have left. Zehbu has been too sick to produce any more of it, and I’m afraid the downward cycle is irreversible.”

As if punctuating her comments, Dux felt the ground tremble underfoot.

“No place is safe anymore,” she said. Her face darkened, and gripping the pouch tightly, she turned and strode up a rocky slope. The boys and the robot followed, as did the robot. She kept up her legendary brisk pace, and as they climbed Dux was surprised that he didn’t hear a flow of water coming from up there, where the mountain stream ran down into the valley.

They reached a rock promontory where they could look down on the stream. Though it was late spring in the Sirikan back country and the water had always flowed swiftly in the past, it was nothing like that now, only a weak, trickling rivulet.

Bowing her head, the old woman said, “This water is one of the arteries of the living planet-god. You see how it is.”

“Yes,” Dux said. Somehow, the old superstitions and legends about Zehbu and the larger galactic entity Buko had always seemed true to him. The concepts seemed linked to the galactic ecology theories espoused by Noah Watanabe.

Hearing a noise behind them, Dux saw the large black eagle Parais fly in, struggling to flap her wings. She managed to land on an evergreen tree branch, which sagged under her weight. He thought she might look a little smaller than before, so perhaps she had managed to shed some of her mass. Or, it was only his wishful thinking. She still didn’t look well.

Noticing the shapeshifter, Grandma Zelk scowled at it. Her fingers rested on the handle of her powerful handgun, then moved away.

“Zehbu is displeased with the sins of mankind,” the old woman said, “so he seeks vengeance on the inhabitants of the planet.” Her voice became eerie and shuddering as she added, “None of us are safe anymore.”

She brought a smaller, yellowing pouch from the larger one at her waist. Dux had seen it before. It was her special “healing powder,” a green dust that reminded him of a similar-looking substance that he’d seen Eshaz sprinkle on the ground of Canopa once, during a momentary lapse when the Tulyan had not seen him watching. Dux wondered now if the substances might be related, and perhaps even identical.

Grandma Zelk opened the little pouch carefully, and for several moments she stared into it. But for some reason she did not reach in and sprinkle any of the contents around. Instead she tilted her head slightly, as if listening for something.

At that moment the ground shook violently for several seconds, and everyone struggled to maintain their footing. Acey hurried to his grandmother to help her, but she stood on her own and shook him off. Dux heard a distant roar, and was shocked to see the stream hiss below them, and turn to glowing red. Moment by moment, it became a heavier flow.

“Magma,” Kekur said, in a mechanical, matter of fact tone that seemed out of place for the emergency. But after that he said, “I am reporting this rupture of the planetary crust to headquarters.”

The glowing river flowed surprisingly fast, a powerful torrent heading for the valley floor below. Then, filling the old stream channel, the molten material began rising toward Dux and his companions, climbing the banks several meters a minute and causing trees and loose rocks to tumble into it.

Abruptly, the flow changed. A crack appeared in the hillside close to their feet and some of the lava began to flow into it.

“We’d better get out of here,” Acey said, again reaching for his grandmother.

But the rail-thin old lady would hear none of it, and held her ground. “I’m staying,” she said.

Dux saw a pool of hot magma perhaps fifty meters down slope from them, and he felt the heat. A queer sensation filled his brain, as if part of it had cracked off with the debris and fallen into the chasm.

Grandma Zelk opened her little pouch of healing powder and scattered a pinch of it toward the lava. As if by magic, a little breeze caught the powder and lifted it into the molten material, where it sparked and disappeared. “That is all I can do,” she said, closing the pouch. “It is no use to throw more in.” Her voice trailed off and she began murmuring incantations, as if to further ward off the evil spirits.

As long moments passed, Dux detected no noticeable effect on the flow.

Finally, behind him he heard a squeal of pain, and saw that Parais had tried to fly to them, but had fallen to the rocky surface, where she lay in a pile of feathers, struggling to breathe.

Chapter Forty-Nine

I can think of no more admirable trait than loyalty. It is the bond of honor that holds together relationships at all levels. The great leader can only fulfill his vision if he obtains the undying allegiance of his followers.

—In the Words of the Master, by Subi Danvar

Having already dispatched an attack squadron to confront the HibAdu force that Kekur had reported in the back country, Noah prepared to depart for the same region himself—a region where Kekur was also reporting tremors and the eruption of underground magma.

A military gridjet awaited Noah at the palace landing field, along with another squadron. In his office moments ago, he had dispatched a courier message to Doge Anton, reporting the situation to him. It had been a long night, and Noah had only been able to grab two hours of restless sleep, which he had forced on himself with a dermex, something that he didn’t like to do. But it had provided him with a deep slumber, and he did not feel overly tired at the moment.

Before leaving for the back country, Noah stopped by the garden area where Meghina and her companions had disappeared the night before. As he stepped out of the hovercar, a moist morning fog hung in the air, brightened by filtered sunlight.

He walked around the high shrubbery and saw soldiers using ground penetrating scanners and other equipment, trying to determine what had happened. The area had been excavated, creating a large single hole where there had previously been five smaller ones. In a patch of sunlight on one side, two of Noah’s officers and a Tulyan woman investigated the exoskeletons that had been removed from the holes. They lay in pieces on a ground tarp, but enough remained of their structures to show that they had once been four Humans and a Mutati, and that their original bone structures had been altered in death to thin, dry crusts.

Of all the strange things Noah had seen and experienced in his lifetime, what he had witnessed last night had been the most peculiar. And not just because of what he saw. While watching the whirling dancers, he had felt a powerful urge to join them, and an even stronger urge
not
to, because it would be dangerous to do so. He had hesitated, and then had followed the more compelling instinct, which proved to be right.

Where had Meghina and her companions gone? Would Noah have gone with them? All of them, and Noah as well, were immortals. Now he sensed that the compulsion to join them had something to do with the never-ending quality of life he shared with them. They had been drawn into something, but he—perhaps because he had a slightly different and perhaps stronger form of the condition—had been able to resist.

But what did I resist? And did I do the right thing?
He wasn’t certain.

Glancing at his wristchron, he knew he had to board the gridjet. Even so, he took a few moments and walked over to the exoskeletons. He’d seen them during the night when they were dug out, and now they seemed to confirm that it had not all been a nightmare, and that it had really happened.

The Tulyan woman looked at him, and said, “They vanished into five tiny timeholes that opened up and then closed afterward. Like little cosmic jaws.”

“Maybe we’d be safer getting off this planet,” one of the two officers said. He was Keftenant Ett Jahoki, a young man from a long tradition of military officers who had served with distinction in the Merchant Prince Alliance.

“No place is safe,” the Tulyan said, her voice ominous. “Timeholes tear through spacecraft, too.”

“But aren’t podships safer?”

“True enough. They do sense cosmic disturbances and often are able to go around them, but I think Master Watanabe here would prefer to hold this planet and attempt to remedy the problems here.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Noah said to the Tulyan. “What is your name?”

“Iffika,” she said. “My good friend Eshaz has told me many good things about you.”

“Thank you. But five tiny timeholes here? All in such close proximity?”

“Infrastructure defects take varying, surprising forms. We have seen similar things occur around the galaxy. I have tested this site carefully for telltale signs. There is no question about what happened.”

“But where did Meghina and the others go? Where did the timeholes take them?”

“They were all immortal, so wherever they are I suspect they’re still alive. Unless the physical impact on them was so severe that it demolished their cells to such a degree that they could not regenerate.”

Noah emitted a long whistle. “I’ve gotta get going,” he said.

Minutes later, as he boarded the red-and-gold gridjet, he thought about the special purpose of this trip. Kekur’s additional report of tectonic activity in the back country could refer to timehole activity, and Noah wanted to see it firsthand, accompanied by another Tulyan expert who could analyze what was going on. Even in the midst of galaxy-spanning chaos, some geologic upheavals were still considered normal. But Noah wanted to be sure. He also wanted to check on the welfare of Dux, Acey, and Kekur, along with the independent old woman.

Making the situation even more complicated, there were HibAdus to be dealt with.

* * * * *

In the rugged Sirikan back country, it was midday. Overhead, the sky had darkened, as if forewarning a downturn in the weather.

Hours ago, Grandma Zelk had scattered a pinch of her healing powder onto the magma river, and in that time there had been no apparent effect. Now she sat on a high rock staring down at the flow and murmuring trancelike incantations to Zehbu, while holding the small pouch in her hands. The level of the lava had risen closer, and now was perhaps ten meters below her. Remaining with her, Dux, Acey, and Kekur had all expressed concern that they should leave, that it was not safe to stay.

But the old woman would hear none of it, and the boys didn’t want to risk her health by forcing her to leave. She knew this country better than anyone, and had a right to remain if that was what she wanted. Her fate had become theirs.

Behind them, the Mutati bird lay on a flat stone. Since landing there, she had been taking measures to reduce her bodily mass, which she said she needed to do in order to remain alive. Every once in a while, Parais would glow orange and pieces of her body would peel off. Then she would adjust her form slightly, and the flesh and feathers would regenerate, as they were doing now.

So far she had shed only a small portion of her mass, and had told Dux it was a slow and painful process—and that she needed to get rid of more. “I won’t go all the way back to my previous size,” she said. “I want to remain large enough to carry two of you at a time.”

“We can get out of here on our own,” Acey had said.

“Perhaps, and perhaps not,” she had said in a gentle voice. “I suspect the latter.” Then, she had grimaced from the internal pain and had concentrated inward.

Looking back at her, Dux noticed that her feathers had lightened slightly in hue, so that they were no longer a rich black, but were instead more of a charcoal hue, with patches of dark gray.

Beside him he heard his grandmother’s incantations louder beside him, and then she stood up. Holding the small pouch over her head, she shouted, “Zehbu, son of Buko, I implore you. Save this world!”

At that moment, the magma bubbled and smoked, and fingerlings of molten red material rose toward her, as if the planet god was reaching out to take her.

“Grandma, we’ve got to leave,” Dux said. But, as she had done earlier with Acey, she pulled away. She had a beatific expression on her wrinkled face.

Despite the old woman’s stubbornness, Dux was just about to grab her and force her to safety. At the last possible moment the lava fingers changed course, and—flowing quickly—they encircled the rocky promontory where he and his companions were. In a matter of moments, before anyone could do anything, they were found themselves on an island, with lava flowing all around them. Dux felt the heat even more than before, and smelled sulfur, as if demons below were causing the upheaval.

The lava rose again, this time all around. Higher and higher. Feeling a wave of panic, Dux saw the Mutati standing up on her bird legs. Her eyes were still a sickly yellow, veined in purple, and she looked unsteady, in no condition to fly any of them to safety. Even if Parais could lift off, she might not be strong enough for passengers.…

* * * * *

Aboard the gridjet, Noah’s pilot flew toward the coordinates that had been provided by Kekur. Just ahead, he saw the gridplanes and ‘copters of his other squadron engaged in aerial dogfights against the orange-and-gray aircraft of HibAdu forces. On the ground, soldiers on each side faced off. He saw the HibAdu encampment in flames, but its soldiers were still fighting fiercely.

“Let’s help them out,” Noah said.

His pilot nodded, and the small plane streaked into battle, firing blasts of white-hot energy at the enemy. The other ships with him followed.

* * * * *

Dux felt a jolt that knocked him down. To his horror, the rock under Grandma Zelk cracked with a loud report, and she tumbled into the lava. Her body hit the red-hot flow with a sickening
thud
and a hiss of steam, then vanished. Only her pouch of healing powder remained behind.

“Come on!” Parais shouted. “Get on my back!”

Grief-stricken, Dux grabbed the pouch and ran with Acey to the bird. As they were climbing on, Parais said, “I think I’ve found the right balance of mass and strength, and I feel a little better. I think I can fly, but no guarantees.”

“Just like life,” Acey said grimly.

She flapped her wings slowly, and began to lift off ever so slightly from the rocky deathtrap, like a heavily loaded cargo plane. Up they went, slowly and steadily. They passed through a pocket of very hot air that nearly took Dux’s breath away. Moments later, higher, the air grew cooler and more breathable.

Looking back at the rock promontory below, he saw the loyal robot Kekur standing motionless, awaiting his fate.

“Drop us off and go back for him,” Acey said, saying what Dux was already thinking.

But the living lava had another idea. Burning bright red, it swept over the rock and took Kekur with it.