Terl took another look around. There were some cattle, a small herd of horses in the distance. Nothing worth shooting—since no Psychlo could eat meat of that metabolism—nothing dangerous enough to offer sport. It was luxurious to have time to think about hunting and even to be equipped for it—and even more luxurious not to do it! He had a bigger game going anyway.
He dropped down into the driver’s seat and punched the buttons to close the top. The unbreathable air exhausted from the cab and was replaced by proper gas. He took off his face mask, contrary to regulations, and dropped it on the gunner’s seat. The purple interior was a relief to his nerves.
This confounded planet! It even looked bad through the purple tint of the windscreens.
He glanced again at the map. Now was the time for some luck. He knew he couldn’t go up into the mountains themselves due to the uranium the recon drones always indicated in that area. But the recon drones also reported that these man-things sometimes came down to the mountain foothills, which were safe enough.
Terl thought over his plans again. They were beautiful plans. Personal wealth, personal power. The recon drones had told him more than others knew. The scans had pointed out a vein of almost solid gold, uncovered by a landslide after Intergalactic surveys were finalized. A delicious, fabulously rich vein of gold in plain sight, a vein about which the company was ignorant—since the landslide was recent and Terl had destroyed the records. A joke on Zzt to propose no more recon drones over the area!
The uranium count in that area of the mountains was formidable and so no Psychlo could mine it. Even a few bits of uranium dust could explode Psychlo breathe-gas.
Terl smiled at his own genius. All he needed was a man-thing and then a few more man-things. They could mine it and to blast with uranium. Somehow he would get the gold off the planet and home, and he had ideas about how he could do that too. Then wealth and power! And no more of this place!
All the security chief had to do was keep others from suspecting what he was really doing, to advertise quite other reasons. But Terl was an expert at that.
If he were truly lucky he could catch a man-thing this side of the meadow. He did not have too much time to lie in wait. He felt lucky.
The sun was very low, thanks to his late start. He’d lie up in that man-city for the night, sleeping in the car.
He sent the Mark II skimming along the ancient highway.
10
A skyline!
Jonnie Goodboy Tyler pulled up with a yank so sudden he startled Windsplitter into a rear.
There it was, straight east. It wasn’t hills or mountains. It wasn’t some trick of the eye. It was sharp and rectangular.
He had been so unconvinced.
When he had left the ancient ruin, he found a very easy way to travel. It was almost as if the ruin with the window had once had a broad path leading to it.
There were shrubs on the right and shrubs on the left, two rows about two hundred feet apart that dwindled eastward into the distance. Underfoot there was fairly even grass. You had to watch it a bit because there were shallow gullies in places. When you looked down between these little gullies, there was something gray white. Jonnie had inspected it with care. He had gotten down and dug at the edges of such a crack and it seemed that the gray white stuff was continuous.
Just like the inner walls of the ruin.
Maybe it was a wall of the ancients, fallen over sideways. But no, it would have cracked as it fell.
Outside the courthouse at home, level stones had been laid as pavement. But who wanted a pavement two hundred feet wide? And an hour’s journey long? For what?
This big path had not been used for a long time. If it was a path. It went between hillocks that had been sliced into and it went across water courses—although it was pretty irregular and broken in these.
He had been excited for a while, but then he got used to it and devoted his attention mainly to keeping Windsplitter from tripping in the little gullies.
When he was a little boy, one of the families had had a wheeled cart they hauled firewood in, and he had been told that once there had been a lot of carts, even one that was pulled by a mare. Well, you could sure roll a cart on this wide turf. And roll it fast and far.
But as to the “Great Village,” he was coming to believe as the afternoon wore on that somebody had probably seen that god house back there and multiplied it in his imagination.
And then suddenly there it was!
But was it?
He put Windsplitter up to a trot regardless of the little gullies. In the clear air the skyline wasn’t coming his way very fast. It even appeared to be receding.
He stopped. Maybe it was a trick of the eye after all. But no, the lines it made were up and down and flat on top and there was an awful lot of it.
It wasn’t hills or mountains. Only building sides could be that regular.
He started up again, more sedately, remembering now to be careful. And after a while he could see that he was getting closer.
The sun was coming down and he wasn’t there yet. The prospect of entering that place in the dark was definitely not cheering. Who knew what it might be full of? Ghosts? Gods? People?
Monsters? Ah, no. Not monsters. They were just the stuff mamas frightened their kids to sleep with.
He pulled off the path where it crossed a stream and made camp. He warmed up some of his roasted pork and then cut it with one of the sharp, shiny things he had taken out of the window.
My, he marveled, imagine anything cutting like that. It would make life a real pleasure. You had to watch it not to cut your own fingers, as he had already done twice, slightly. Maybe you could bed the cutting edge in wood or something for a handle. Then you would really have something.
After supper he built up his fire to keep the wolves off—a couple were sitting over there now, amber-eyed in the reflected firelight and looking hungry.
“Run away,” shouted Jonnie, “or I’ll be wearing your hides.” But the wolves just sat there.
Windsplitter and the lead horse didn’t want to go away from the fire. The wolves made them nervous. So Jonnie picked up a couple of rocks, fist-sized, from the nearby stream bed.
He wasn’t interested in hunting wolves, but his horses had to find grass.
He threw a pork bone about ten feet beyond the fire and in the direction of the wolves.
Big rangy things they were. One slunk forward, belly low, snarling to reach the pork bone. In a moment the wolf’s attention would be fixed on the bone.
Jonnie’s arm blurred. The far wolf caught the rock squarely between his eyes.
Jonnie’s arm blurred again. The near wolf didn’t jump in time and he too was a dead wolf.
Jonnie said to Windsplitter, “I got to do all the work, is that it?” And he walked over to the far wolf and hauled the carcass to the fire. Then he dragged the closer one in. Nope, neither one had a pelt worth taking at this time of the year. And they had ticks too.
“Go on and eat,” he told the horses.
He built up the fire again, just in case the wolves had friends, and rolled up in his robes. Tomorrow was going to be the day.
11
Jonnie approached the “Great Village” cautiously.
He was up before first light, and the yellow dawn found him in the outskirts of the place, peering, halting, looking closer at the strange sights, nervous.
Sand lay over everything, and grass and even scrub grew in the wide paths between the buildings.
He gave a start every time a rabbit or a rat came tearing out of the ancient structures, disturbed by his footfalls. Even though the hoofs were muffled by the grass and sand, the silence of the place was so intense that any disturbance of it seemed overloud.
He had never heard an echo before to notice it. The return of sound caused him a great deal of worry. For a little while he thought there must be another horse walking in the distance. But at last he worked it out.
He hit his wrist kill-
club against the one in his belt and promptly heard the same sound repeated softly like a mockery. He waited but no further mock occurred. Then he hit the clubs together again and the same sound returned. He decided it didn’t happen unless he did it first.
He looked about him. To both his left and his right were the tall remains of buildings, very tall indeed. Pitted by wind erosion, discolored by endless centuries of weather, they still stood, flat and even and imposing. Astonishing. Whoever could build such things? Gods, perhaps?
He eyed the massive size of the building blocks. No man could lift one by himself.
Jonnie sat his horse in the middle of what must have been the main path of the “Great Village.” He frowned, straining to comprehend the building of such a place. Many men? But how could they reach so high?
He concentrated laboriously. Gradually he could conceive that if one built up steps of logs, and if many, many men put ropes around a block, and if they carried it up the steps and then took the steps away, they might have done it. Marvelous, dizzy, and dangerous. But it was possible.
Satisfied that it didn’t need gods or monsters to have made this place, and therefore very relieved, he continued his exploration.
He wondered whether some odd kind of tree had grown along this path. He got down and looked at the stump of one. It was hard and jagged. It had been hollow and it was deep in the strange rock. It wasn’t wood. It was a reddish metal, and when you scraped away the red powder, underneath was black. He looked up and down both sides of the wide path. The placing of these things was very precise. Although he couldn’t figure out what they were for, it was obvious that, like buildings, they were placed objects.
The innumerable windows surrounded him, seeming to stare back at him. The morning sun had come now and it shone into those that faced it. Here and there were vast surfaces of the shiny stuff he had collected from the mound on the plain. It was not clear; it was whitish and bluish like the cataracts on an old man’s eyes. But there were whole sheets of it in some places. He began to realize it was some kind of covering, perhaps to keep out the cold and heat and yet let in light. People at home sometimes did that, using the tissue of animal stomachs. But those who had built the “Great Village” had access to some kind of rock or hard substance that came in sheets. They must have been very clever people.
He saw a great yawning doorway ahead of him. The doors had fallen away and lay there half-buried in the sand. The inside of the building gaped darkly.
Jonnie walked his horse through the door and looked about in the dimness. Debris was scattered all about, rotted and decayed beyond identification. But a waist-high series of platforms stood; they were of a remarkably white stone that had bluish veins in it.
He leaned down from his horse and stared at the walls behind them. There were heavy, heavy doors set into it, two of them ajar, one of them wide open. Big wheels of still bright metal were inset into them.
Jonnie stepped to the platforms of white stone and dropped to the other side. Cautiously he approached the open niche.
There were shelves, and on the shelves, tangled with rotted remains of some kind of sacking, were mounds and mounds and mounds of disks. Some were a dull gray, almost tarnished away, but one pile was bright yellow.
Jonnie picked up a disk. It was as wide across as two fingernails and remarkably heavy. He turned it over and his eyes bugged.
Here was that bird again! Talons gripping a bundle of arrows. Hastily he pawed into the other mounds, looking at disk after disk. Most of them had a bird on one side. The face of a man, the faces of different men, were on the other.
Face of a man!
And some of them had women on them.
This was not a god symbol. This was a man symbol.
The bird with the arrows belonged to man!
The shock of it sent him reeling. He supported himself against the wall of the niche for minutes. He felt his head buzzing with the readjustment of ideas.
These doors to the niches were man-made. The “Great Village” was man-made. The doors of the tomb in the mountains were of similar material even if larger.
The tomb was not a god tomb. The mound out on the plain was also man-made.
Man had once built things—he was certain of it.
And it would take many men to make this “Great Village.” Therefore there must have been many men at one time.
He rode his horse out of the place in a deep daze. His most basic ideas and values had suffered severe shifts and it took a lot of getting used to. What legends were true? Which ones were false?
There was the legend of the “Great Village” and here it was. Man had obviously made it and had lived here in forgotten times.
Maybe the legend of God getting angry with man and wiping him out was true. And maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it had just been a big storm.
He looked around the paths and buildings. There was no evidence of a storm: the buildings were still standing. Many even had that strange thin sheeting in the windows. There were no bodies about, but from a time so long ago, bones wouldn’t last.
And then he saw a structure that had its doors firmly closed and sheets of metal fastened where the windows should be, and looking closer, he saw that a huge metal clamp sealed the place. He got down and inspected the clamp.
It was of a different age than the village: there was no tarnish on it at all. It was old, but not that old.
Something or someone at some time had pushed aside the sand in front of the doors. It was grass-grown sand, but it had been disturbed.
Jonnie frowned. This building was not like the rest. It was in a fair state of preservation. Somebody had put metal sheets on the windows and the metal was quite different from any in the rest of the town: it showed no signs of corrosion.
Somebody had given this building special treatment.
He backed up to get a better overall view. It was indeed a different kind of building. Fewer windows. Block solid.
As an experienced tracker, Jonnie studied the time differences here. Long, long after the village had been abandoned, somebody had made access to this place, made a path, even dug a path in and out of the doors and then fastened the doors thoroughly. But even that had been a long time ago.
Curious, he scanned the front facade. One of the metal window covers was loose. It was higher than his head, so he stood on his horse and pried at it. It gave a little bit. Encouraged, he shoved the handle of his kill-club into the crack, and with a protesting whine the cover suddenly sprang loose, startling Windsplitter, who moved off.
Jonnie held on to the ledge, his feet dangling.
He pulled himself up. The transparent sheeting under the cover was still in place. He took his kill-club and managed to hit it.
The crash and tinkle of the stuff as it fell was shockingly loud in this quiet place.
Experienced now with the cutting quality of this stuff, Jonnie hung on to the ledge with one arm and cleaned up the jagged bits from one side of the frame and dusted off the ledge.
He pulled himself through.
The place was so dark that it took quite a while to see anything. Light was coming through in thin cracks where other windows remained covered. At length, his eyes adjusted and he dropped cautiously down into the huge room. Now that he was not blocking the window’s light he could see quite well.
Dust and sand were only a filmy cover over things. There were tables and tables and tables and chairs and chairs and chairs, all marshaled in orderly rows. But they were not the interesting things.
Almost every wall was covered with shelving. The stacks of shelves even protruded out into the room. Somebody had covered them with a sheeting you could see through. Something lay under the sheeting on every shelf.
Jonnie approached cautiously. He carefully removed the fastenings to the sheeting and looked behind it.
Queer, thick rectangles stood on these shelves. Rows of them. At first he thought it was all one piece and then he found that one could remove a single rectangl
e. He took one off the shelf.
It almost fell to pieces in his hands!
Awkwardly, he juggled to hold it together and then succeeded. What a strange object! It was a box that wasn’t a box. The covers slid sideways away from each other, enclosing a packet of thin—remarkably thin—slices that had black marks on them, lots of little, tiny black marks all in orderly rows. What a strange object! How complicated!
He put the first one back on the shelf and took a second, smaller one. It too fell open.
Jonnie found himself staring at a picture.
It didn’t have depth. At first it seemed to, but his finger told him it was just a flat plane. The object there was a big red circle, much bigger than a strawberry, much smoother. It had a stem. And alongside it there was a black tent with a crossbar in the middle of it.
He turned the sheet. There was a picture of a bee. No bee was ever that big, but this was certainly a bee. It too looked three-dimensional until his finger told him it wasn’t. And a black thing beside it had two bulges on it.
Jonnie turned another sheet. There was a cat—a small cat, to be sure, but it was definitely a cat. And it had a curved black thing beside it like a new moon.
A few pages later there was a picture of a fox. And beside it was a black pole with two flags coming off it.
Suddenly a quiver went through Jonnie. He held his breath. He grabbed the first object he had taken and pried it open again. There was the tent. There was the bee’s black mark. Yes—and there was the pole with two flags.
He held the two rectangles, his head in a whirl. He stared at them.
There was a meaning here. Foxes? Bees? Cats? Tents, bulges, new moons?
These things had meanings in them!
But about what? Animals? Weather?
He could sort all that out later. He crowded the two rectangles into his belt pouch. Anything that was connected to weather and animals had value. Rectangles with meaning in them. The idea made bright lights pop in your skull.
He replaced the protective sheet, went back out the window, replaced the metal covering as well as he could, and whistled Windsplitter over, dropping down to the horse’s back.
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 Page 6
