The Black Sun

by Jack Williamson

  “Exciting, don’t you think,” Andersen urged him again. “Better than your games with Captain Cometeer?”

  “Maybe,” Kip said. “Maybe.”

  This was no game. He had no exit key to hit if he wanted it to end. He was still a prisoner in the spider. The bright black gleam still shone behind Andersen’s ear. His little sister would soon be awake to take command again, to take them on toward the ice cap.

  He decided to say nothing of the dream.

  But he was alive and warm again, no longer Watcher. Andersen and Cruzet seemed almost human. His mouth was watering to the scent of the frying ham. They were on their way to Skyhold. This really was a great adventure.

  Twenty-seven

  The rock rose out of the frost ahead, a jagged shadow against the stars. Sharp peaks of naked stone climbed out of starlit ice. Sheer black cliffs below them walled an ancient beach. Mondragon stopped half a kilometer out and they climbed into the bubble.

  “The cave.” Rima scanned the cliffs and gave him the binoculars. “See it? That darker spot high up the cliff. Kip said Andersen was trying to get there.”

  “A hard climb.” He searched the beach. “I see a lot of footprints made when he looked for a place to climb. Maybe he found none.”

  “Or maybe he did. We need to know why they stopped. Let’s look.”

  “Can we take the time, when they’re still so far ahead—” He saw her frown. “I’ll try it if you think we must.”

  She took the binoculars to look again.

  “Difficult.” She nodded. “But my father used to climb on his vacations. I went with him to the Alps and the Andes. I think I can do it”

  “Pero yo—”

  “Drive us closer.” Her urgent voice stopped his protest. “I’m going out.”

  He stopped them close beneath the cave and watched from the bubble. Slim and quick in the yellow airskin, graceful as a deer, she came out of the lock, stood for a moment inspecting the cliff, chose a narrow chimney, and began to climb. A dozen times her bravery took his breath, but at last she vanished into the cave.

  Waiting forever, all he could see was starlit stone, weathered and cracked and eroded in the ages when the planet still had weather and erosion. Back in sight at last, she dropped a thin yellow rope to aid her descent, cycled through the lock, and climbed into the cabin.

  “Nothing!” She made a face and spread her empty hands. “The cave’s a boneyard. A den of those wide-winged vultures. It’s filled with bones of everything they caught. A lot of unlucky amphibians. Andersen dug through their skeletons. Looking I guess for their beads. He took any he found.”

  “Por qué?” He stared at her. “Why?”

  “We can ask him for answers, if we ever overtake the Alpha.”

  The rock had been the peak of a drowned seamount. They pushed on beyond it, toward that crooked cowboy hat. In the bubble again, she called the Alpha and listened forever to the meaningless murmur of the stars. She made a frugal meal and called him to share it.

  The hat climbed slowly as they crept around the planet. A bright red star appeared beneath it. The eye of a bucking mustang, he said, with the unfortunate vaquero sprawled across the sky above it. And perhaps a cactus beneath it, spreading thorns to catch the vaquero if he fell.

  “You’re dreaming,” she told him. “Worn out from pushing too hard. Let me drive.”

  She was at the wheel when the Alpha’s track turned sharply north. She stopped and woke him.

  “Why? Why would they turn?”

  “Quién sabe?” He rubbed his hollowed eyes and climbed into the bubble to search the way ahead. “The ice looks flat as far as I can see. The trail runs straight.” He shrugged. “Yo no sé.”

  Turn by turn, they pushed the spider on till the track bent sharply south. He searched again, and still found no reason for the turn.

  “Unless they know Kip was calling.” He frowned uneasily. “Unless they want to shake us off.”

  In a dream of her own she was naked, running barefoot across the ice with Roak wheezing close behind her, his hot breath foul with death. She screamed when his cold hand clutched her shoulder.

  “Qué es?”

  The hand was Mondragon’s. She sat up, sobbing with relief. The turbine had stopped.

  “I was dreaming.” She shivered and asked him, “Trouble?”

  “A problem.”

  He beckoned, and she followed him up the narrow stairwell to the bubble. Silently, he pointed to a dark boulder, half buried in a crater of broken ice.

  “Ejecta, Dr. Andersen calls it,” he said. “Thrown from an impact crater. They must have been steering around it. The boulder’s stone instead of ice. Thrown from land. We must be near the continent.”

  “And overtaking them?”

  He shook his head.

  “But look. Farther out.”

  She peered at the shattered ice around the boulder and turned blankly back to him. He pointed. Beyond the rubble, beyond the land’s pale glow, the ice lay black and slick and bare.

  “No frost,” he said. “Hot gases from the impact burnt off the frost. There is no trail.” He spread empty hands. “We’ve lost them.”

  “So what can we do?”

  A helpless shrug. “Yo no sé.”

  “Let’s drive on,” she said. “Toward the continent. Maybe we can pick it up.”

  She drove them on. He stayed in the bubble, calling directions to guide her through blocks of broken rock and fields of shattered ice. Again and again they had to retreat and search for another way.

  “Stop the turbine,” he called at last. “Something new ahead.” She climbed into the bubble. “We’ve come past the impact area.” He gestured. “There’s the continent.”

  All across the west a wide white stripe had risen between the ice and the stars. It hid the crooked hat and most of the bucking mustang. When her eyes adjusted to the starlight, she saw that the white stripe was ice, a vertical and endless wall that looked a full kilometer high.

  “A glacier,” she said. “With icebergs all along the foot, where the lip of it was crumbling into the sea. I saw something like it once, when I flew with my father along the edge of Antarctica.”

  “Magnificent.” An ironic shrug. “But it looks like the end of our road. Also, I think, for our friends in the Alpha. It looks impossible to climb.”

  She peered into his dismal face. “Where could they have gone?”

  “Not up that wall.” Lean shoulders sagging, he shook his head at it. “They’d never even have got to it, through all the ice falls.”

  “Can you find the trail again?”

  He only shrugged.

  “So it’s checkmate?” Her voice had risen sharply. She stood a long time shuddering, staring at the glacier. “The amphibian beads have won their game.”

  She bent suddenly over the navigation desk and huddled there, laughing wildly, till he caught her arm. She stopped herself then and sat up weakly.

  “I’m sorry, Carlos.” She gasped for breath and wiped at her tear-smeared face with the sleeve of her jumpsuit. “The joke just hit me. The jokers are the little black beads. And the joke’s on us.”

  “Qué lástima,” he told her. “A terrible joke.”

  “Not funny.” She made a bitter face. “Not funny at all.”

  Trying to rise, she swayed for her balance. He helped her down to the cabin. She sat on the edge of the berth, staring at him so stonily that he wondered if the beads had seized her. He found Captain Stecker’s bourbon, mixed two highballs, and sat down with her.

  “We’ve lost the trail.” She shivered so violently that the drink splashed out of her glass. She sat frozen for a moment, and gasped for her breath. “It’s too much! Too much to take. The ship blown up. My kids gone. We’re all alone on this damned snowball.”

  “But the game’s not over. Not so long as we’re alive.” He reached to touch her arm, but hesitation stopped him. He was still the Mexican mojado, she the gringo queen and a haunted stranger
now.

  “Not so long as we’re alive.”

  Repeating the phrase, she sipped what was left of her drink and tried to smile.

  “Gracias,” she whispered. “I lost my nerve. You helped me get it back. I thank you, Carlos, for all you’ve done.” Her face quivered. “For me and my children.”

  “I love them. May the saints defend them.”

  “And we must find them if we can.”

  He unfolded the little table and went down to check the engine and the cycler while she rummaged in the locker. The table was set when he came back, the room redolent with the fragrance of a stew she had made from Stecker’s irradiated beef, served with soyamax crackers.

  “Enough?” she asked, when their bowls were empty.

  “Bastante.” He nodded. “I might have eaten more, but the captain’s private hoard can’t last forever.”

  They cleaned the dishes and tried to sleep, she behind the curtain, he on the berth outside. When no sleep came, he climbed into the bubble and picked up the binoculars to search the frozen sea behind and the glacier wall ahead. Finding no hint of the Alpha, he laid the binoculars back on the desk. He stood lost in what he saw: the blazing constellations of a galaxy no human beings had seen before; the ice wall ahead, defending the secrets of a world where time had stopped, where life and hope could not exist. A fresh terror of it froze him.

  “Carlos?”

  Rima’s voice startled him. She had started up the stairs with two fragrant mugs of Stecker’s Kona coffee, but stopped to gaze around her at the starlit frost and the glacier wall.

  “A strange place—” He saw her shudder. “A strange place to die.”

  “But we aren’t dead.” He tried to grin. “Not yet.”

  She stared blankly past him for a moment before she seemed to see him.

  “I couldn’t sleep.” The forgotten coffee mugs were shaking in her hand. He took them and set them on the navigation desk. “Not here. Not now.”

  Wrenched with emotion for her, he took her in his arms. Stiff for a moment, she made a kind of sob and pulled him hard against her.

  “Rima! Rima!”

  He gasped her name and felt her body quiver. She was firm and warm in the thin jumpsuit, her quick breath sweet in his face. Trembling, he found her warm lips, the taste of her mouth. His eager hands caressed her till her body stiffened and he felt a shock of fear.

  In Chihuahua he had gone with a classmate to visit una casa de putas, but he had been afraid of women and all he didn’t know. He made excuses and sat with a beer till his friend returned. He stood frozen now, afraid of offending Rima.

  “No! Not here!” She suddenly pushed him away. “Not now!”

  He cringed from her, shaken with waves of bitterness and longing and shame.

  “Carlos, please!” Her voice was half a sob. “I don’t want to hurt you. It’s not because of who you used to be. It’s where we are. It’s my children.”

  “I love you,” he whispered. “That’s all I know.”

  “That’s enough.” She caught her breath and made a broken laugh. “Let’s drink the coffee while it’s hot.”

  He took the mug from her unsteady hand. They sipped the coffee, standing a little apart, until their breathing had quieted.

  “Carlos, you remind me—” She paused, looking into his face. “It’s twenty years since I last saw my father, but I adored him. I barely remember my mother, a blond beauty in a picture he had. She left us before I was five. He brought me up. He was the only family I had—till finally he left me to go out on a StarSeed ship.”

  Her face quivered, and she wiped at a tear.

  “He was as tall and lean as you are, with dark eyes and hair. He was an engineer. He used to take me with him to jobs all over the world. Latin America, mostly. That’s where I learned my Spanish. He loved the people and their culture. That’s half the reason he went out. That ship’s company were mostly Latinos. He hoped to help them find a better future.

  “I still miss him.”

  She paused again, unspoken emotions flowing over her face.

  “I begged to go out with him. It nearly killed me when he left without me, but he said I had a life of my own to live. He waited till I was sixteen and enrolled in college, with a trust fund set up to see me through.

  “But that world’s gone.” Her voice rose raggedly. “No use remembering.”

  “I—I remember.” His voice broke, and he had to brush the wetness from his own eyes. “I was standing with the Fairshare pickets outside the launch site when your taxi passed.” He shook his head at her, a little painfully. “It’s worth remembering, if that’s all we have.”

  Shivering, he turned to look out at the barrier of ice, the empty frost, the far-off stars.

  “It is a dreadful place.” His own calm surprised him. “We may die here. Yet still it has a splendor. Look at the sky.” He gestured. “Stars brighter than they ever were at home. Look at the glacier. A great waterfall frozen as it poured off the continent. And look—

  “There!” He pointed at the top of the glacier. “Did you see it?”

  She blinked at him dazedly.

  “It’s gone.” His voice fell. “But there it was! Far to the south, high on the rim of the ice. A dim red spark that flickered and vanished.”

  “The Alpha?”

  “Their heat lamp! They’ve found a way to climb the ice. They must have left a trail we can find.”

  Twenty-eight

  Kip could feel almost happy when Day was asleep. Andersen and Cruzet were nearly themselves, making little jokes, excited with the planet and all the riddles they hoped to solve, checking the engine and the cycler. They fixed food, took showers, took little naps when she gave them time. They were tired and grubby, their eyes hollow for want of real sleep, yet they seemed to be having great fun.

  Yet, even when she slept, they never removed the black amphibian beads stuck behind their ears. Sometimes Andersen would brush at his with his hand, as if it were a bothersome fly. Sometimes it would slip out of place, back into his curly red hair or down to his neck, as if he didn’t know he wore it. He always turned very serious when she woke, sliding it back to his ear and waiting for her commands.

  Those were bad times for Kip. Nobody talked to him, or even seemed to hear anything he said. Nobody cooked anything, not till Day slept again. Without the Game Box, he had nothing to do. Most of the time he stood or sat in the bubble, watching the black horizon ahead for anything new. Sometimes he tried to sleep.

  Sometimes he stood at the door to the pilot bay, watching Day where she sat on the holomonitor, telling the driver which way to go. The beads had done something terrible to her, something he didn’t understand. It made him want to cry, till he thought of Captain Cometeer and the Legion of the Lost; they always had terrible problems, but they never gave up.

  He always felt better when Day slept again. Andersen and Cruzet were getting pale and thin, but they seemed as eager to explore the planet as Captain Cometeer had ever been when he landed on some strange world. Andersen had known the geology of Earth. He was anxious to see the ice cap, and he knew a lot about it.

  “It’s not far ahead,” he said once, when Day was asleep and Kip could ask about it. “Half the planet’s water must be piled up there. The sun evaporated water, so long as it shone at all. Warm winds carried it to the cold night side, where it fell as snow. The snow froze into glaciers that flowed back to the sea till they got too cold to flow.”

  “The ice cap?” Kip felt nervous. Perhaps this expedition would have made a great game for Captain Cometeer and the Legion of the Lost, but it was too real and strange for fun. “We’re really headed there?”

  “To that high plateau in the middle of the continent.” Andersen nodded, grinning with his eagerness to see it. “To whatever it is that flashed that signal when we came down.”

  “It’s so far,” Kip said. “Can we get there?”

  “With your sister for a guide, we can.” He stopped to listen f
or her. She was still asleep behind the curtain. He looked back at Kip, his blue eyes shining. “There’s so much to discover! The ice cap’s half a world. Just ahead, all unknown, ours to explore!”

  “So much to learn!” Cruzet had always been calm and quiet, ready to take things as they came, but now he seemed as anxious as Andersen to rush ahead. “I want to see those gigantic structures—whatever they are—where we saw the flash. And meet whatever built them.”

  “The amphibians?”

  Kip couldn’t help shrinking from the bright black beads behind their ears. Now he knew they were the lifestones of his dream, but he was still afraid to speak of them. He didn’t want them to take him the way they had taken Day.

  Andersen shrugged and pushed absently at his bead.

  “What about them?” he asked cautiously. “Do you think they came out of the sea to build some kind of fort on the ice? Do you think they’re still there?”

  “They had big brains.” Andersen rubbed his red-stubbled jaw, considering that. “We know they were engineers. They dug the canal across the peninsula. Built the temple on the isthmus, and that tower on the island. But still—”

  He frowned and shook his head, squinting off at nothing.

  “Whatever they are, those mountain-sized objects we saw on the cap, they looked pretty big to be artificial. Yet they certainly don’t look natural. I can’t imagine …”

  He shrugged again.

  “If the amphibians knew their world was freezing …” Kip hesitated, careful not to speak of the dream. “Wouldn’t they want a secure place where they might live forever?”

  “Could be.” Andersen seemed serious. “But I doubt they did, considering what feeble little things they must have been. Maybe in danger of extermination by those flying predators. That’s the sort of question we hope to answer.”

  “Do you think—”

  Day woke, calling out to Me Me that they were on their way to save her, and Kip never heard what else Andersen thought.

  She emerged from the berth behind the curtain, face flushed and puffy, the black beads stuck tight in the pale tangled hair behind her ears. Andersen begged her to wash her face and eat her tofusoya cereal and soya milk, but her eyes had glazed again and her voice grew sharp and cold.