Hiero Desteen (Omnibus)

by Sterling E. Lanier

  Despite the pleased certainty in his voice, Aldo would not have been human if he had not been nervous as they all climbed aboard the elevator. The layers of dust were over six inches thick on its floor, and they had already learned to move slowly to avoid stirring it up any more than was necessary. Fortunately, the dust must have contained much powdered rock, for it both rose slowly and settled quickly.

  The elevator ran on two metal tracks set deep in the cavern’s wall, and these had allowed only a little deposit of any kind to adhere. But of course the machine was old, old beyond the concept of even its designers. It creaked and groaned ominously as it started down, and the noises did not decrease as they sank lower. Some long-ruptured circuit made them stop at each level, and it took an almost physical effort on Hiero’s part to push the button and restart the contrivance afresh. There were five similar-appearing platform levels, and even the bear, who had been shielding his thoughts, let out an audible “whoof” of relief as they settled at last to the base of the shaft. They all felt the same. But their relief was to be short-lived.

  As they left, farsighted old Aldo, who was the last one out of the metal cage, reached back and touched the “up” button. He had decided to find out if they could return again in a pinch. Now his cry of dismay alerted them all. The elevator would not move. For ten minutes they poked, prodded, and fiddled with the mechanism and tried at least to locate the power source. The latter must have been buried deep under the floor, for they could find nothing. Thus they were five storeys lower now, with no known way back to the surface.

  “I would wager we must be at least half a mile down altogether,” Aldo said soberly, putting their common thought into words.

  We will have to find another way out, came Gorm’s cool thought. At least we are on our own feet, not in that thing which moves. The alien mechanism had rasped the ursine nerves more than he cared to admit.

  Around them now, in the much dimmer light of the cavern floor, loomed the dust-covered shapes of what had to be the great machines and devices of the past. From the platform far above, many of these things had looked to be of modest size. Now it was seen that all were large and many were absolutely monstrous.

  Hiero walked over to the nearest, intrigued by something puzzling in its shape. He used the shuffling walk, which they had learned stirred up the least floor dust, and he gently brushed the coating of inches-thick grime away from the surface of the shrouded object, while the others waited.

  “I thought it looked odd!” His laugh stirred remote echoes in the dusty aisles and corridors between the silent bulks and rebounded from cornices and projections far above.

  “This is a cover! All these things are protected. Look, you can lift it and see what is underneath.” He raised a corner of the heavy plastic wrapping, still moving slowly so as to avoid raising any more dust than was necessary. The soft gleam of a metal base, untouched for thousands of years, met their eyes, which by now were accustomed to the dim light.

  Excited, the soldier-priest ran to the next great object and then the next. All were covered with thick plastic sheeting, a substance which mocked the centuries, and the metal underneath appeared untouched by any corrosion or other of time’s ravages. Hiero drew his dagger and began to cut pieces of the plastic away, for the huge sheets were far too large to be pulled off by their puny efforts; many of the devices they covered were as high as a two-storey building and half an acre in. extent.

  “Hiero,” came the Elevener’s strong voice. “I think we had better be told what we are seeking, don’t you think? I have no wish to pry, but …”

  “Of course. I meant to tell you earlier, honestly. There’s been so much on my mind, I simply forgot.”

  While they stood about, or leaned on the buttresses of the incredible machines, he gave them a mental, closed-circuit recapitulation of the Abbey mission, describing the lost computers, or at least their purposes, as well as he could and explaining carefully why the Abbeys felt they were so important.

  “If what Demero told me is true, and I believe every word,” he concluded, “we need one of these things desperately. The attacks against us are mounting and coordinated. Our defense and any counterattack won’t have a prayer unless they are also completely coordinated.”

  Aldo had no more questions. Now that he knew what to look for, he began at once to examine the nearest mechanisms, seeking labels or identity marks of any kind. The others joined in, the bear helping him to lift the plastic covers, the girl aiding her lover in the same task.

  An hour later, they paused in their work, looked at one another, and laughed. Sweat and disturbed layers of dust had covered them all with a pale mantle, and even the bear looked a furry ghost of his former self.

  “Let’s see,” said Brother Aldo, who had been writing in a small book he had produced. “We have found nothing so far about computers, Hiero.” The priest wiped a grimy forehead with an even dirtier hand and tried to concentrate. Brother Aldo’s knowledge of the ancient languages was vital now, since Hiero himself had been able to memorize only a few simple words and phrases before setting forth.

  “We have found ‘engines,’ that is, machines,” Aldo continued, “and we have found other things, controls apparently. What these engines ran on, their power source, by the way, baffles me. Unless,” and he looked very grave, “it is the lost power of the atom itself, which caused most of The Death when misused. But I prefer not even to think about that.” Hiero did not see lit to mention that he felt the Unclean well might have rediscovered that particular power source. It was only a suspicion, but he had never ceased wondering what silent engines drove their dark, sailless ships.

  “We have found air-conditioning’ and ‘thermal control,’ ” Luchare put in.

  “Yes, but these are things, as I said, which occur in other sites I have visited. They mean fresh air and artificial heat, that’s all. We have no idea how they did these things, but we know they are neither weapons nor computers.”

  “We’re poking around out on one edge of this place,” Hiero said, after a moment’s thought. “How about heading for the middle? If there is an information storage center, it might be there, logically. I am trying to recall how the place looked from up top, and I think there was a circular space, with things set about on it in some regular pattern.”

  This plan was adopted, and they began a circuitous approach toward the center. Time and again they found a pathway or aisle blocked by some rearing hulk or other and had to go around or even retrace their steps. Hiero felt they were all minute creatures trapped in some vast and incomprehensible maze.

  Eventually, all coughing and sneezing by now, they emerged from a corridor between two long lines of machinery into the open space which Hiero had glimpsed from far above. For some time they had been moving up a very gentle slope, and it was now apparent that this radial point in the center was set higher than the rest of the cavern. “Probably a system of drains buried under all this dust so they could flush the place down when it needed cleaning,” Hiero said.

  They could see things of interest at once. Before them stood a vast, semicircular control board, its function very clear, since of all the things they had seen, it alone was not covered by plastic. Yet it had been, that was evident. For piles of plastic sheeting, minus any dust, lay here and there, as if each section had been ripped from the control board and cast aside at random. The thirty or so seats which were set in the floor in front of the board were not uncovered, however, and still retained their plastic shrouds.

  On the board’s center, several small, unwinking lights, three amber and one red, glowed in which was obviously the main panel, since it lay in the center of the great board’s gentle arc. The three humans stared for a moment, only realizing by degrees what was indicated by all this.

  “Someone’s been here,” the girl breathed. “Who could it have been? How long ago? Look, those lights must have been turned on.” She spun around suddenly, as if to catch someone or something stealing up behind them
. Yet nothing moved, save for themselves. The dusty relics of the most ancient past towered up in forgotten, majesty around them, only the three tiny lights of the board the sole indication that life was not extinct in the relics of a vanished age,

  The bear moved slowly forward and began, to sniff. Come here, his mind said. Something has been here and it has left a track. Something we know, was his grim afterthought.

  Stepping forward, Hiero looked down and saw what Gorm had found. A broad, grooved mark, its greasy path only slightly tinged by dust, came from off to their left out of yet another aisle in the bulking engines. This trace went along the front of the control board, occasionally broadening into a wide smear where the plastic sheets had been flung aside, and then vanished again, down into the gloom of still another canyon in the forest of silent machines. The message was clear. Something had come, uncovered and examined the board, and then gone away again. Had it turned on the lights somehow? Where was it now and when would it return? Hiero shivered. Whatever had made this strange mark was certainly not human, and even before the bear’s next message, he felt he knew what it was.

  That House-thing or one of its creatures has been here, came Gorm’s calm thought. Can’t you smell it yet? In his four-footed friend’s mind, Hiero caught the irritation at his duller senses, but he paid no attention.

  Swiftly, now he relayed a warning to the other two. At the same time, he bade Luchare relight the lamp she had extinguished when they had managed to get the cavern lighting system activated. Fire had been their only weapon against the House before, and it might still save them, should the monster reappear, or should it send its servants.

  “See here!” Aldo had been examining the portion of the board where the three small lights gleamed. “I can read these signs, or some of them. Some words such as ‘gantry’ and ‘silo’ are new to me, but here are ‘missile launch’ and a long series of numbers. We have found something terrible here, Hiero. This is a place which sent out into the air the flying Death itself, the great machines which traveled over and above the whole world, shedding foul poison and radioactive destruction.” He was shaken to the core as he looked down at the silent board. “Perhaps,” he added in a low voice, “perhaps some of those things are still waiting, waiting to spread more death, even after five thousand years.” No one spoke, even the bear’s mind, perhaps appalled at the thought that they might be able somehow, by mistake, again to loose such a horror on the world.

  It was Hiero who recovered first. His active brain simply could not mull over the past for too long. He had come here to find something, a weapon in fact, and instead he had found a deadly enemy, which if not actually present, was certainly not too far off. These matters transcended any brooding over vanished tragedies.

  “What are those lights?” he asked, his voice deliberately brusque. He wanted to shake Aldo out of his present mood and stir him to new activity. Tough as he was, the Elevener was a very old man, and he was facing in the flesh, so to speak, things he had thought of only as the abstract components of a nightmare. But now it was a living, revived nightmare, whose return to the world he dreaded more than any mere bodily peril to himself.

  With an effort, Brother Aldo returned to the present.

  “Those lights? All of them are marked with one word underneath. The two yellow ones say ‘standby,’ which I believe means ‘wait.’” He peered closely at the red bead on the smooth, black panel. “This one says ‘alert,’ which means ‘be on guard.’ A moment, though! A line of inlaid silver leads away to another area, over here to the right.” Muttering to himself, he stepped around two of the chairs, still tracing the line of bright metal with his eye. The others followed in his wake, waiting for a translation. The line wandered about for a distance along the board, at last coming to rest on a black, ovoid projection. Under this bulge were more letters.

  “Let’s see now,” the old man said. ” ‘Lift cover for total self destruct.” ” He turned and faced them. “Did you by any chance understand that?”

  I did, Gorm said unexpectedly. You are becoming very careless with your minds down here, all of you. You radiate even while using your human speech. You have found an old thing which will destroy all of this whole place, and us too, I gather. His mind was quiet and amused again. One would have thought he was describing his last meal.

  “I’m going to lift that cover,” Brother Aldo went on in steely tones, ignoring the bear. “The best thing I know about this awful place now is that we may be able to destroy it. I frankly regret having aided you to come here.” His passionate hatred of the pre-Death artifacts around him rang in every syllable of his voice.

  “Let me,” Hiero said quietly. “Don’t forget, I’m more used to machines than you are. You look over my shoulder and tell me what you read there. I won’t do anything without permission, I promise.” So strained and taut had both Aldo’s brain waves and his speech become, Hiero was beginning to fear the old man would do something irrational.

  The Elevener closed his eyes for an instant. When he opened them, he suddenly looked more at peace, and a faint smile touched his mouth.

  “I caught a fragment of your thought, boy,” he said. “You are quite right. I must not give way to emotion, and I was very close there. You go ahead, and I’ll try to supervise if I can.”

  The Metz examined the almost conical, black projection. He saw that it had a knurled edge, obviously designed for fingertips, and he began to turn it. A screw mechanism slowly revolved, and as it lifted, he saw both what lay underneath and the wisdom of such a cover. With sudden death for the whole area in one control, a screw opening allowed time to circumvent a madman or an enemy bent on self-destruction. A simple hinged affair would have been too easy.

  Under the cap, which he laid carefully aside, was a thing like an uncovered dial. A row of thirty numbers, engraved in the archaic system of the ancients, bordered a curved slot. At one end, set sideways in a smaller slot, was a pointer. Studying the mechanism, Hiero saw that the pointer could be pulled up, out of its own slot, and moved down the larger to any of the numbers desired.

  “Those are hours, or hour symbols, I feel sure.” Aldo peered over his shoulder. “It must be that one can set the thing for up to thirty hours and then—the whole place goes.”

  “Suppose they’re minutes, not hours, or some other unit of time we don’t even use any longer?” Hiero asked dryly, Luchare gasped behind them.

  “It says ‘hours’ here.” Aldo pointed to a pair of tiny letters, which Hiero had not even seen, at the base of the slot. “This is an abbreviation, but one I have seen many times.”

  “Sorry,” the priest said. “I’m getting jumpy. What do you say we have a meal? It must be well into the night up above, and I imagine we all could use some food.”

  Once their stomachs had been called to their attention, all were indeed hungry, and Gorm protested bitterly that he was being slighted when Luchare gave out each agreed-upon ration.

  You ‘re so fat you could live for a week on nothing at all, she said, poking his plump sides. Do you good to go without for a while.

  Hiero wondered to himself, as he ate the dried meat and biscuit, whether the water would last until they got out. He said nothing to disturb the others. They had brought only one large water skin with them, and when all had drunk, it was only a bit more than half full. The all-pervasive dust had made everyone very thirsty.

  Barely had they finished when the bear suddenly rose to his feet, apparently snifling, head erect.

  Nothing comes, was his thought. It is the mind of Gimp (here a pictorial composite of the little captain was made clear). He tried to reach us. There is trouble up above.

  Instantly both Hiero and Aldo shut their eyes in an effort to tap the sailor’s mind far over their heads, up on the surface of the dark plain. It was full night now, on the portion of the world’s surface nearest them.

  Gimp felt them at once, and they could gather the relief in his mind as he did. He was not, of course, used to
sending messages this way, but they persisted, probing and questioning, until out of jumbled images, emotions, and attempts to communicate, they got his story, or at least the gist of it. This was the tale:

  A lone guard, for the others were asleep, had heard something moving in the brush and had the sense to keep quiet and awaken Gimp. That worthy had found two more men accustomed to moving quietly and had awakened one-eyed Blutho and put him in command, with orders to arouse the camp and get under arms in silence. Gimp and his two trusties sneaked out and presently heard a man, they thought, moving, off to the south. They stole closer and were able to see, in the moonlight presumably, a number of mounted men on hoppers. (On what?—Hiero; Never mind, I’ll tell you later—Aldo.) Gimp cleverly ambushed one such person, killing the mount and capturing the rider without noise. This man, for it was a man, had been taken back to their camp and hastily interrogated. What they had learned was disquieting. A small, hand-picked army of the Unclean, both men and Leemutes, were coming from the south (the rider had been one of an outer screen of scouts) and were heading for a “buried world,” one to which they had a “door.” They were led by master adepts (Gimp called them “magicians”) and they were hunting a terrible man from the far North, a dangerous enemy who had to be slain at all costs. The captain wanted advice fast, for he now could hear the approach of the army itself. That was all.

  Hiero wasted no time. The prisoner was to be decently killed at once. The seamen were to take Klootz on a lead and move north as fast and as quietly as possible. The prisoner’s body was necessary, since he might otherwise be mind-traced by the enemy. His total absence would probably be ascribed to wild beasts or to an accident. As usual, Hiero wasted no sentiment on the Unclean and their vassals.

  His task done, he turned to the others and explained. Aldo had heard everything, but Luchare and Gorm had to be filled in. The girl pointed out the obvious clue, though the others had already guessed.