The Black Sun

by Jack Williamson

  They were still pushing on. Even if the ship and so many friends were gone. She would surely feel better when she rested. He was tired himself, with a bruise on his shoulder from his tumble when the avalanche hit the Alpha, but he remembered Andersen, so eager to see more of the great ice continent. Thinking of that, he climbed back to the bubble and watched the road again.

  Clinging to the cliffs, the road brought them into a deeper canyon that sloped east toward the frozen sea. The glaciers that cut it were gone, their moraine ridges left across the U-shaped floor. The road turned west, into the continent. Toward the high ice. Toward the towers of Skyhold.

  And toward what else?

  Wondering, trying not to ache for Jim Cheng and Roy Eisen and all the others, he rubbed his aching eyes and kept the binoculars on the pavement. The canyon walls grew higher, blocking out the starlight till he was blind without the binoculars. The drone of the turbine rose and fell as they climbed one slope and ran down the next. Stiff from sitting, he stood up till he got tired of standing and finally sat again. Yawning, he wished sadly for his lost Game Box. With Captain Cometeer, things had always happened faster.

  “Okay, Kipper?” Andersen’s hearty hail woke him. “Look where we are!”

  Stiff and cold from sleeping with his head on the desk, he pushed himself up and found Cruzet and Andersen coming up from the cabin. He looked out of the bubble. What he saw took his breath. The spider had come out of the canyon into a pit that might have been a grave dug for something really gigantic. The walls were cleanly cut, rectangular and straight, climbing sheer to the white ice of the cap.

  They had stopped down in the end of the pit, on a floor that seemed oddly level. He found their wheel tracks, and the road that had brought them through a narrow gap in the black cliffs behind.

  “Strange!” Andersen took the binoculars and stood a long time scanning the cliffs, craning his neck to look up at the ice that capped them. He shook his head, passing the glasses to Cruzet. “Nature never made this pit, no nature I know. Yet I can’t imagine anything able to dig it.”

  Kip remembered the skyler working at the quarry in his dream, lifting great chunks of granite to be made into building blocks for Skyhold. Would they laugh if he tried to tell about the dream, or understand and thank him? He had caught his breath to take the risk when Cruzet gestured with the binoculars.

  “Andy, what do you make of that?”

  Andersen took the glasses. Peering without them through the starlight, Kip found a long boulder ridge a kilometer or so ahead. Another moraine, perhaps? But that odd hill?

  “Ruins!” Andersen’s voice was hushed with awe. “The ruin of something monumental!”

  He looked again, and finally offered the glasses to Kip.

  “Here, Kipper. Want a look?”

  Eagerly, he seized them.

  “The beings that built the road,” Cruzet was saying. “They had a city here.”

  The tumbled boulders on the ridge were huge granite blocks, many of them smoothly squared or rounded. Here was the corner of a massive wall, there the stump of a great column rising out of the wreckage.

  “What was that?” Cruzet pointed at something a kilometer farther ahead. “It must have been as tall as a skyscraper.”

  It had been cone-shaped; the top of it was now shattered into piles of rubble around it. He saw oval openings high up. Doorways, he thought, for flying things. Andersen took the binoculars and turned to look behind. Even without the glasses, Kip could see rows of dark holes high in the cliffs.

  “Nesting places?” Cruzet stared up at them and turned to gesture at the ruins ahead. “For our amphibians? If they actually sprouted wings and migrated here. If they dug that mine. Made the road. Built this city—if it was a city.”

  He made a baffled shrug.

  They had been the workers in the quarry, Kip thought. Digging granite to build Skyhold. Had the beads made Day imagine that Me Me was a prisoner in Skyhold? That seemed so unlikely that he said nothing.

  Cruzet gestured toward the end of that enormous pit, lost in the starlight many kilometers away.

  “Day said we were going that way, but how do we climb a six-kilometer wall?”

  “Day got us here.” Andersen shrugged. “She’ll take us on.”

  Kip followed them down to the cabin. His mother and Mondragon sat together at the little table, eating soyamax pancakes with Stecker’s Vermont maple syrup. Day had drained a glass of alga-orange juice and scraped her cereal bowl. She lay in her mother’s lap, sleeping quietly. Mondragon picked up the small gray prism that lay on the table beside his plate and handed it to Andersen.

  “The last bead,” he said. “It fell off her head when it changed. I found it on the floor.”

  Andersen frowned at it through his pocket magnifier and scraped it with his knife.

  “Destroyed,” he muttered. “Like the others. How come?”

  Thirty-one

  Rima carried Day to the berth behind the curtain and went to sleep with her. Groggy for want of sleep, Mondragon asked Andersen’s permission and lay down on the berth in the cabin. Cruzet drove the spider on to the cone-shaped ruin ahead. When Kip saw him and Andersen getting into their airskins, he begged to go with them.

  “Why not, Kipper?” Andersen grinned. “The next best thing to landing on a new world with your Captain Cometeer.”

  They helped him seal his helmet, and he went out with them to walk around the great piles of shattered granite blocks that had been the top of the cone.

  “What wrecked it?” he asked Andersen, his voice a hollow boom in the helmet.

  “Seismic shocks, as the planet cooled?” On the radio speaker, Andersen’s answer seemed strange and far away. “Or who knows? A lot can happen in a billion years.”

  “Look at that.” Cruzet stood peering at a toppled stone twice his height, roughly fractured on one side, cut to a smooth curve on the other. “It must weigh a hundred tons. The amphibians were smaller than we are. How did they move it?”

  “Small men moved big rocks back at home.” Andersen shrugged. “Remember Stonehenge.”

  “These are bigger than anything at Stonehenge.”

  “Do you think—” Kip decided to risk the question. “Do you think maybe they could control gravity?”

  “Not likely.” Cruzet spoke shortly, as if it had been a stupid question. “That’s a nut we’ve failed to crack, even with quantum science.”

  “They didn’t fly the blocks,” Andersen added. “They built the road.” He gestured toward the pavement, which ran on beyond the ruins. “I want to know where it goes.”

  Kip climbed back to watch from the bubble when they drove on, Andersen at the wheel. The pit had the shape of a gigantic room, he thought, with dark rock walls and a black strip of sky for a ceiling. The ruins lay on a shelf here at the end. A sloping ramp led down to the floor, which was a dim expanse of starlit frost that lay perfectly flat as far as he could see.

  “A lake.” Cruzet came up to the bubble. “A frozen lake. That’s why it’s so level.”

  Meltwater had flooded the quarry after Skyhold was finished, Kip thought. The road makers must have come here after it froze. He remembered the skyler who had awakened from the dream of flying into space with his beloved Lifestar. Had the amphibians moved off the planet? Were the owners of it now some remote descendants of the black-winged predators? He felt half afraid to know.

  “Your sister—” Cruzet shrugged and focused the binoculars. “She said we would follow the road, but she’s no help now.”

  He tilted the binoculars to study the ice-capped walls that towered to the stars ahead. He looked a long time and finally laid them down with a shrug of frustration.

  “She didn’t say we’d have to sprout amphibian wings.”

  Andersen called him down to check the turbine. Trying the binoculars himself, Kip wished the spider had wings. The walls of the pit rose as straight as if a great knife had cut them, slicing cleanly through a layer cake of rock. Sm
ooth black granite climbed kilometers high, with light-colored limestone and sandstone above, and on top of that the white cap of ice.

  He saw no way out.

  The spider rolled on with never a lurch or jolt. The turbine droned like a faraway bee. He sat at the desk, wistfully trying to imagine how his friends in the Legion would have escaped a fix like this. Captain Cometeer had never let them give up, no matter how hopeless they were.

  “Wits can be sharper than swords,” he always said, but Kip saw no way for wits to help them here. Or swords either, for that matter. He was nodding sleepily when a new star blazed out, rising on the ice horizon high ahead.

  Or could it be a star? Stars here neither rose nor set, because the planet no longer spun. This was a hot point of violet light, right at the rim of the pit. Its color changed as he looked, to indigo, to blue. Hands shaking with excitement, he got the binoculars on it and saw that it shone in the ice that rimmed the pit.

  “Andy!” he shouted into the interphone. “There’s a light shining ahead!”

  The spider stopped. Andersen ran up the steps with Cruzet close behind. He seized the binoculars to study the light. It was yellow, just changing to green.

  “Spectral colors!” he whispered. “The colors of the flash we saw from space …”

  His breath caught.

  “It’s forming a target pattern now, like the one we saw in the ocean ice. And on the tower wall …”

  Cruzet was reaching, but Andersen clung to the binoculars.

  “Another minute, Tony. The bull’s-eye is turning red. And stabilizing.” He gave up the glasses. “The changes have stopped.”

  To Kip’s unaided eyes, it was only a dim fleck of light in the edge of the ice.

  “The same pattern,” Cruzet said. “Red at the center, ringed with concentric circles. The colors all in spectral order, out to violet at the edge. Certainly a signal.”

  “Of what?”

  “There’s the road!” Cruzet swept the glasses back and forth across the end of the pit. “It zigzags up the cliffs to a dark spot just beneath the light. Maybe the mouth of a tunnel.”

  Andersen reached for the glasses.

  “Do you think it—” Cruzet stared at him, eyes wide with a sudden unease. “Do you think they’re showing us the way?”

  “Could be.” Andersen shrugged and raised the glasses. “Could be.”

  “Why?” Cruzet had seldom shown emotion, but his voice had fallen to a husky half-whisper now. “What could they want with us?”

  “We’re on our way to know.”

  They went below. The turbine sang. The spider rolled on. With the binoculars, Kip found the road for himself, a thin black line across light-colored strata. It was lost in the darker layers, but he traced it up to the rim of the pit, where the rock gave way to ice.

  It ended at a dark gap just below the shining circles. A tunnel, really, that might take them somewhere under the ice? Wondering, he felt again that they were on a great adventure, exciting enough for Captain Cometeer. He kept the binoculars on the road and the circles till Andersen came up to study the tunnel mouth again.

  “It’s right at the bottom of the ice,” he said. “Could be it was once a surface road. Roofed when the snows began to accumulate. But that shining spot?” He shook his head. “I’d like to know …”

  He shrugged and grinned.

  “There’s a lot I’d like to know.”

  Kip stood wondering if he could tell about his dream.

  “Comments, Kipper?”

  Andersen must have seen the expression on his face, but Kip was still afraid to tell about the dream.

  “I just wonder.” He shook his head. “It really is exciting.”

  Andersen went down to take another turn at the wheel. The spider ran fast, but they took most of an hour to reach the bottom of the wall. There the road became a sloping ledge cut into the rock. It looked so narrow that Cruzet and Andersen went out to measure it.

  “We can do it,” Andersen decided. “With all the wheels pulled under us. If we’re careful enough. If we don’t run into rockfalls. I think.”

  They pulled the wheels together and climbed the wall, easing the spider very gingerly around sharp hairpin turns at the corners of the pit. They found no fallen rocks, and they came over the top at last, into the tunnel. Andersen let Kip come with them when they went out to inspect it.

  “Huge!” Cruzet peered up at the pointed archway overhead. “A good fifty meters wide and twice the height of our mast. Why would the amphibians need anything so big?”

  Andersen flashed his helmet lamp down the tunnel and found only blackness. Frowning, he turned to look back down at the frozen lake half a dozen kilometers below.

  “Do you want a crazy guess?”

  “A crazy place.” Cruzet nodded, with a wry little twist of his mouth. “A crazy world.”

  Andersen stood a moment longer, gazing back into the pit.

  “There’s a lot of granite gone,” he said at last. “Several hundred cubic kilometers. I’d guess it went down the tunnel. This could have been a quarry, but I wonder what they were building.”

  Skyhold, Kip thought.

  “The spider!” he heard Cruzet shout. “It’s running away from us!”

  They had left it in the tunnel mouth. It was gliding away. The pavement under it, dead black when they stopped, was softly glowing now. They ran to overtake it. Kip and Cruzet tumbled into the lock. Andersen waited outside, kneeling at the edge of the pavement, reaching down to feel it with his glove.

  “Andy!” Cruzet shouted from the open lock. “Come on. Now!”

  Looking up, Andersen discovered that he had fallen behind again. He sprinted to overtake them, and Cruzet pulled him into the lock.

  “Thanks! I wasn’t looking.”

  “A crazy road!” Cruzet muttered when they were back in the cabin and out of their helmets. “It was moving faster in the middle, like a faster current in the middle of a river.”

  “High-tech.” Andersen nodded. “Very high-tech. But there’s no motion in the pavement itself. It’s a surface vector effect that carries us along. Actuated, I imagine, by the burden on it. The spider was gaining on me because it’s heavier.” Puzzlement narrowed his eyes. “A man named Clarke once suggested something like it. I’d like to know the physics and the math.”

  Kip followed them into the pilot bay. Andersen at the wheel, Cruzet behind him, they stood looking through the windows. Dimly lit by their own lights, the tunnel walls were some smooth blue-gray stuff, broken with dark vertical seams. Spaced many meters apart, the seams marched very deliberately past them.

  They stood a long time looking in silence.

  “Tony.” Andersen turned at last to Cruzet. “What do you say?”

  “I was thinking.” Cruzet frowned. “Watching the stripes on the wall, I’d guess we’re making six or eight miles an hour. At that rate, we’d be a long time on the way to the source of that flash. If that’s our destination.”

  “I guess the old architects had time enough.” Andersen squinted at the slowly marching seams. “No rush to move stone from the quarry. We can drive ahead a lot faster. Let’s do it.”

  Cruzet went down to tend the engine and Andersen drove them on, keeping to the center of the tunnel. Kip stayed in the bubble. They were rushing into darkness, the seams in the wall racing past them now. The pavement shone dimly under them, a pale gray glow running a few dozen meters ahead and fading out behind. The quiet hum of the turbine neither rose nor fell. Nothing ever changed the dull gray blur of the wall. He watched till he got tired of watching, and went back down to the cabin. Mondragon was sitting up on the side of the berth, blinking at him sleepily.

  “Adonde? Where are we?”

  “Out of the pit,” Kip told him. “In a tunnel under the ice.”

  On their way to Skyhold, he thought, though he didn’t say so. He was at the kitchen shelf, mixing mock orange powder into a glass of water, when his mother and Day came out from behind
the curtain.

  “Me Me?” Day rubbed her eyes and looked anxiously around the cabin. “Where’s Me Me?”

  “I don’t know,” Rima said. “But please, dear, you mustn’t worry. I’m sure Me Me’s all right, wherever she is.”

  “I do worry.” Day was very positive. “She is not all right. She’s still running from the black things and crying because she can’t get away.”

  “We’ll help her when we can, but let’s get some breakfast now. Eggs and toast, with orange juice?”

  “I’ve got to listen.” Day shook her head. “Me Me needs me bad.”

  Rima made breakfast of powdered eggs and soyamax toast. Mondragon took the wheel while Cruzet and Andersen came to the table, but Day didn’t eat. Her face pinched with distress, she stood silently listening.

  They drove forever down the tunnel. The men took turns at the wheel. Rima spent her time with Day, who hardly ate, hardly slept, and seldom even spoke. Kip slept on a foam pad in the bubble, and sat for long hours staring down the tunnel, never seeing more than that pale glow that moved down the pavement with them.

  Grieving for his old brave companions in the Legion of the Lost, he tried to remember his best adventures with them. Sometimes he tried to invent new worlds to explore with Captain Cometeer, but he could never imagine another planet as strange as this one, or any enemies as terrible as the blackwings in his dream.

  When Mondragon was off duty, they sometimes sat together in the bubble, remembering Earth. Mondragon always asked to hear more about his mother and their home in Las Cruces. Kip liked to hear about Cuerno del Oro and the fiestas in the plaza and Don Ignacio’s tales of the great birds of space.

  “Carlos, aren’t you ever sorry?” he asked. “Sorry you left your home to stow away with us?”

  “Nunca!” His voice was loud and clear. “I’m happy to be here with your mother and you and la pobrecita Day. No matter about la mala suerte, I’ll never have regret.”