“Mom!” Feeling sick, frozen with shock, he had to gasp for his breath. “Mom—”
He heard no answer, but in a moment he saw her. In her own yellow airskin, she was already outside, running desperately after Day.
“Mom, wait!” he shouted into the radio. “I’ll get Carlos. We’ll come with you.”
“No!” She looked back. “Wait for Andy and Tony. Maybe they can help.”
She ran on.
Mondragon came rushing out of the rear compartment, searching frantically for Rima.
“They’re gone!” Kip was breathless with shock. “Mom and Day. Day’s out with no airskin.”
“Qué?” Mondragon stood blinking dazedly. “Qué dice?”
“My sister!” he gasped. “She’s shining all over. Like a lamp.”
“Outside?”
“She’s climbing the ridge, the way Andy and Tony went.”
Mondragon ran up the steps to the bubble and groped for the binoculars. Kip followed. Peering through the starlight, he saw a tiny fleck of white light dancing along the crest of the ridge. Day, still shining, still moving. In a moment she was gone. He found his mother’s light, already far toward the ridge.
“Rima, I’m coming!” Mondragon shouted into the microphone. “As fast as I can.”
“No, Carlos! No!” Rima stopped for an instant, gasping for breath. “Don’t leave Kip.”
She ran on.
“Los santos sagrados!” Mondragon looked hard at Kip. “Are you afraid to stay alone?”
“I’m coming with you,” Kip said. “But we must leave a note for Andy and Tony.”
“They won’t get back.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s been too long.”
But he scrawled a note and left it on the desk.
“Cabrón!” Mondragon pulled his suit off the hanger and stopped to squint at the air pack. “My breather unit. It must be replaced.”
“Hurry!” Kip urged him. “They’ll be gone.”
At last, the unit replaced and their helmets sealed, they ran down the ramp. Kip felt lost in the dark. As his eyes adjusted, he made out the towering wreck ahead. The high shadow of the wall beyond. When he found Rima’s helmet light, she was already at the top of the ridge. The light flickered and vanished.
“Vamanos!”
Mondragon was already tramping ahead. Kip scrambled to keep up. Mondragon paused to give him a hand when he needed it. Together on the crater rim, they stood breathing hard, looking down the slope beyond. Kip found the pavement, a pale straight streak across the frost. No helmet light moved on it. No signal light shone on the wall where it ended.
“They’re gone.” Mondragon stared from his helmet, hoarsely whispering. “Something took them.”
The never-ending night seemed suddenly darker.
“Perhaps—” Mondragon hesitated. “Perhaps we should go back. Your mother was concerned for you.”
“I’m concerned for her.”
“Yo también,” Mondragon breathed. “Let’s go on.”
Down beyond the rubble, Mondragon found footprints on the pavement.
“Your mother’s.” Mondragon pointed. “Dr. Cruzet’s. Dr. Andersen’s. Your sister’s.”
Most of them were faint, hard to see. Day’s tiny prints were darker than the others. He wondered if whatever made her body shine had also thawed the frost. The prints led straight to the wall, ending against a huge blue-black block.
“No sign—”
Mondragon’s voice broke off. A point of bright violet light had appeared at the center of the block, a few meters above them. It swelled into a violet disk, with a bright blue point at its center. The blue grew into an inner disk, a sharp green point at the center. Green disk, yellow disk, orange and red, the whole pattern spread down to the pavement level. Rainbow colors fringed their shadows on the frost.
Trembling, Kip reached out to touch the glowing stone.
“Don’t!” Mondragon gasped. “Remember Indra Singh—”
His hand met no stone. It went through the violet glow.
Thirty-three
Off balance when his reaching hand found nothing solid, Kip stumbled forward into darkness. He felt Mondragon clutch his arm. The stars were gone. They stood in darkness, groping blindly to turn up their helmet lights, until he saw the pavement shining softly beneath their feet. The glow spread ahead of them, faintly lighting the walls of a high-arched passageway, wider than the tunnel from the quarry.
He felt the pavement moving them.
“Madre de Dios!” Mondragon crossed himself. “Are you okay?”
“Copasetic!” Kip whispered. That was a word of Captain Cometeer’s. “This is a better adventure than I ever had in my Game Box!”
Slowly at first, then faster, faster, the pavement swept them on till they came out into a space so vast that it took his breath. A full kilometer wide, it looked three times that high. The floor swept them along it, toward no end that he could see.
“Too fast!” Mondragon muttered. “Let’s try the edge.”
The motion slowed as they walked toward the wall. Tiny points of light shone over it, rising row on row until Kip lost them in the twilight overhead. Each light burned above a small black spot. As they came closer, he saw that the spots were pits in the wall. The motion of the floor stopped before they reached it, but Mondragon walked ahead to look into pits.
“Huesos! Amphibian bones.”
Kip came closer. The pits were triangular, a meter wide at the bottom, tapering to a point at the top. His light found yellow-white sticks lying in the dust inside them. The light above one was a tiny six-sided prism that shone dimly red. The next was faintly green, another pale blue. Many were gray and dead.
Lifestones, he thought, like the skylers had worn.
Mondragon reached to pick up the yellow sticks. A thin-walled tube with something like a knuckle at the end. A curved shard of something like plastic, longer than his arm. Something round and ridged across the top, with great hollow sockets where eyes had been.
“Tumbas. Graves.” He stepped back to look up at the endless rows of them, climbing till they blurred into dusky gloom. “Millions of graves. The amphibians came here to die.”
Kip stood remembering his dream. The lifestones had been strange magic. They seemed stranger now.
“My mother saw fantasmas.” He felt Mondragon grip his arm. “She said my father came to visit her after Don Ignacio heard he was dead.”
Kip shivered, backing farther from the rows of dusty vaults. They rose too high, reached too far along the endless wall. Too many amphibians had left something that still flickered in the stones they had worn.
“Fantasmas—” Mondragon stared up at the wall, and something caught his voice. “They’ve haunted us. They’ve possessed your sister. They killed Indra Singh and her crew.” He turned abruptly. “Let’s get on.”
The floor shone again as they drew farther from the wall, and it swept them on. Forever, it seemed to Kip, until at last it brought them out into an even vaster space. A circular room, kilometers wide, kilometers high. Towering archways were spaced all around it, opening into cavernous dim-lit halls like the one they had followed.
“They were smaller than we are.” Kip shook his head, gazing up into that dim, enormous cavern. “Why did they build so big?”
“They could use the space,” Mondragon said. “They were fliers.”
The far-off roof was a swarm of brilliant stars.
“Strange constellations.” Mondragon craned to search them. “Not the ones we have seen.”
“Brighter. I wonder—”
Shivering, Kip found stars he knew. They were the constellations Watcher had known in the western twilight. The floor carried them on. Awed into silence, he stared into the dark archways around them, stared up into the starry dome, stared at Mondragon.
“Alli!” Mondragon pointed, and Kip saw a cluster of tiny figures far off in the dimness. “There!”
The glow beneath them slowly faded, and the
ir motion stopped.
“Vamanos.” Mondragon gestured. “Come on.”
Tramping on, they found the floor brighter again, shining dully red. A wide red strip faded into orange as they crossed it, into yellow, into green. The strips made circles, he saw, circles inside of circles.
“Andy!” Mondragon’s shout crashed in his helmet. “Dr. Andersen.”
Andersen had left the group ahead, walking to meet them, His head was bare. Stopping near them, he gestured for them to unseal their helmets.
“—safe enough.” Kip caught the words when Mondragon helped him lift his helmet. “They breathe oxygen.”
Who are they? Kip wanted to ask, but Andersen was leading them on toward Cruzet and his mother. They were perched a little awkwardly on tall T-shaped stools around a big round table at the center of a wide violet spot beneath the center of the dome. Their helmets lay beside them. Day sat on the edge of the table in front of her mother.
“Hi, Kipler Nipler.” Day knew he hated the name, but she waved and smiled as if only trying to tease him. “Welcome to Me Me’s place.”
She wore a bright ruby lifestone behind one ear, a bright green one behind the other. She looked happy, with no harm he could see from being outside without her airskin. He looked for the panda doll and couldn’t find it. His mother slid off the odd T-bar to hug him and help him climb to the perch beside her.
Perches made to fit amphibian feet, not human bottoms.
“Glad you made it,” Cruzet greeted them. “Saved us a trip outside to bring you in.”
“Hungry?” Andersen asked. “Tony says they’re going to feed us.”
“I don’t know.” Rima frowned uncertainly. “Their biochemistry must be different. Their foods may not be safe.”
“Ask Tony.”
Andersen nodded at Cruzet, perched across the table. Kip saw a pale blue bead stuck high on his forehead, almost where the skylers in his dream had worn the lifestones in their crests.
“They’ve studied several of us,” Cruzet said. “Jake Hinch first. Then the bodies of Singh and her crew. Now Roak’s. They’ve found our DNA compatible and identified foods of their own that won’t kill us.”
Why do they study us? Kip asked himself. What do they want to do with us?
He felt too uneasy to ask questions, but Mondragon was pointing at the pale blue jewel on Cruzet’s forehead.
“The beads? Can you tell us what they are?”
“Relics, apparently, of dead amphibians.” Andersen nodded at Cruzet. “Tony, can you tell us anything?
Cruzet narrowed his eyes, moving the bead as if to adjust it, and shook his head. Kip nodded to himself. The skylers in his dream had seemed to use the lifestones almost like telephones, but also for a lot more. They had turned swimming youngsters into flying skylers. They had held the memories of drowned skylers buried for ages in sea mud.
“Andy—”
Now at last, he thought, Andersen might believe him if he told about the dream. He had caught his breath to speak, but they had all looked away, at the table top. It shone for a moment with that familiar pattern of swelling circles. The rainbow colors vanished. A dark point spread from the center. It became a round opening, with a crystal dish lifting into sight.
“Yes, Kipper?”
Andersen had turned inquiringly back to him, but he had forgotten the dream.
“A magical banquet!” he shouted. “Like the feast of death in the Castle of Skulls, where the Lethal Lady served poisoned wine to the Purple Emperor.”
Nobody heard him. Their eyes were on the little nut-brown wafers stacked in a neat pyramid, and the shining bubbles arranged around them.
“Thank you, Me Me.” Hands together, Day gazed up at the star-dusted vault. “Thank you very much.” She turned to smile at her mother. “Me Me made these just for us.”
The dish was too far for her to reach. She scrambled to her feet and ran across the table to pick up the wafers and hand them around. Rima accepted one, frowning at it doubtfully.
“Taste it, Mom! Just taste it. A lot better than all that soya stuff.”
Rima took a tentative bite and smiled. Kip tried the cake she gave him. Crunching crisply in his mouth, it tasted a little like wheat toast and more like the beef jerky he used to buy after school at the corner grocery in Las Cruces.
“It’s good.” He grinned at Day. “Even if a doll did cook it.”
“These are water.” She was passing out the bubbles. “The skylers need water like we do. This is how they fix it.”
Kip sucked at it. Cold water came into his mouth.
“Mom! Mom!” Suddenly excited, Day was pointing up into the dome. “It’s Me Me!”
Straining to see, Kip found a tiny black shadow drifting across the dim-lit vault. It grew, descending in a slow spiral.
“It’s really Me Me!” Day watched with shining eyes. “The black things can’t get her now.”
It glided down on long transparent wings that glistened in the violet glow of the floor, and perched on a T-bar across the table. A bright golden bead shone from the crest of its strange head. Its eyes were huge and round. Fixed on Day, they shimmered with swelling rainbow circles.
“Me Me! Me Me!” Day turned to her mother, sobbing with joy. “Here she is!”
Rima shrank from the creature, voiceless with horror.
“Speak to her, Mom!” Day started across the table toward it. “She’s so terribly glad we found her.”
With a gasping scream, Rima grabbed to stop her. Twisting away, she ran on, arms lifted high. A thin pink snake ran out of its snout, coiled around her, lifted her.
“Stop it!” Rima slid off her perch and dashed around the table. “Help me, Carlos! Help my baby! Andy, Tony—”
“Mon, don’t fret,” Day was calling. “I’m okay.”
The creature had cuddled her against the sleek brown fur on its breast. Rima stopped, trembling, staring blankly.
“She understands if you don’t know her.” Day smiled fondly up into the rainbow shimmer of it eyes. “She’s grown up now, but she still loves me.”
It hugged her to its heart again, and set her back on the table. The snake slid back into its snout. The wide wings folded. Its body was shaped like Wave Rider’s, Kip thought, sleekly tapered, evolved for life in the sea. Shifting for its balance on the perch, it flashed its huge eyes at Rima and made a strange, hollow bellow.
“She says hello,” Day said. “She wants to make us happy.”
Shivering, Rima came weakly back on the awkward perch.
“What’s that—thing?” Cringing from it, she appealed desperately to Andersen. “What does it want with my baby?”
Andersen shrugged and nodded at Cruzet.
“They did need her.” Cruzet pushed at the shining bead on his forehead, as if adjusting it. “They’ve wanted to talk ever since they felt us coming. Your daughter seems to have been their most useful link, maybe because she’s so young.”
“What—” Day was still standing in front of the creature, stroking its velvet breast. Rima stared at them, shaking her head. “What is it?”
“A female amphibian.” Cruzet seemed unsurprised by anything, his voice precise and dry. “We may as well call her Me Me, since of course she has no English name. She is one of the fortunate few who survived the attack”
“Attack?” Andersen echoed.
“The wreck we saw was one of the attackers,” Cruzet said. “They failed, but it was a very close call. Only a few amphibians escaped. They’ve been frozen, with only their mental net awake. Me Me was revived when the net detected us.”
“Slow down,” Andersen told him. “What’s the net?”
Cruzet frowned, pausing for words.
“Let’s begin with the objects we’ve been calling beads. They are special organs of extended memory and long-range communication. In contact, they formed a network that held the mind of the race. They’ve always survived the death of the individuals who grew and wore them.”
Li
festones. Kip nodded to himself.
“Day! Baby Day!” Hoarse with emotion, Rima held out her arms. “Come back to me.”
“Please, Mom.” Day shook her head. “Just a minute.” She turned back to the creature. “Me Me? Are you hungry?”
The creature bellowed again, a muffled rumble like distant thunder. Day offered it an orange-colored cake off the table. The pink snake came out again to take it from her fingers and lift it to a full mouth of fine white teeth. The snake stabbed back to kiss her cheek. She smiled happily, and Rima shuddered.
“The attackers?” Andersen asked. “Who were they?”
“The history isn’t clear.” Cruzet frowned and shook his head. “Many of the mindstone records were damaged or destroyed, but here’s the picture as I get it.” He paused to shift the blue bead again. “They knew their sun was dying. This fortress was part of a grand plan to keep them alive forever, even on a frozen world. The attack’s a tragic irony—”
He paused, looking up into the creature’s shimmering rainbow eyes, and abruptly went on.
“Their grand plan defeated itself. Not content with the stronghold here, they tried to colonize the nearest stars. They never discovered quantum-wave propulsion, but they did develop gravity-propelled spacecraft. Those were slower. Interstellar flights took thousands of years, with the passengers in stasis sleep. The attackers were descendants—”
He stopped himself, pushing at the bead. The amphibian’s eyes were fixed on him. Smiling into them, he was silent so long that Andersen prompted him.
“Tony? Can you go on?”
“Sure.” He blinked in a startled way. “I’ve got it now. A dozen ships went out, carrying colonists. They were in mindstone contact for—I’d guess the term means something like a light-year—but they all went on beyond contact range. The attack came ages later, after they had been almost forgotten.”
He stopped again, with a puzzled frown.
The Black Sun Page 29
