Azure's air turned out to be close in composition to the mixture that Scientist had devised for the bio-life of Merkon, and surface conditions varied within limits that it could tolerate. Scientist had wanted to perform surveys, have the lander sent down empty to bring up samples of this and that, carry out endless tests that would have delayed things interminably.... But Taya's impatience of old had reasserted itself, and as usually happened, the machines had capitulated.
Now the moment was only minutes away. Below, the water-vapor clouds were unfolding into huge chasms opening out to engulf them as the lander sank lower. The piles of whiteness looked like jagged teeth on which the flimsy shell would dash itself to pieces, but the probe had shown them to have no more substance than the vapor from hot water in shower rooms. Even so, the three young-ones grouped around Taya watched apprehensively. Through the gaps now widening between, they caught their first glimpse of the fantastic, convoluted surface that lay below.
Cariette cocked her head to one side suddenly and looked up. She was one of the paler ones, with long brown hair that hung to her shoulders, gathered in a band of beads. “What's that noise?” Taya had been aware of the sound becoming audible above the lander's drive, but without really registering it—a steady rushing like water spraying from a nozzle, but with a steadier, more forceful quality.
“It's with the picture,” Jasem said. He was yellowish in color, his hair straight and black, cropped short. He seemed not to have gotten it in his head yet that what he was looking at was really out there. The window was not a screen.
“No, I think it's from outside,” Taya said.
“The air gets denser as we go lower,” Scientist confirmed from behind them. “The sound is the flow around the hull."
“Outside!” Bron repeated in an awed voice. He was another white-skin, his hair yellow like Taya's, but curly, and eyes that were blue instead of green. It was the first time that any of them had heard sound coming from “outside."
“Ooh, it looks like fingers of solid frost miles deep! I can't watch,” Marcala cried from the other side, covering her eyes.
“Everything's so bright. How does the light come from everywhere?” Eltry, one of the blackest boys, asked beside her.
“It's all right, Marcala. We're inside it already,” Nyelise said. “It's just like smoke."
Then the whiteness outside suddenly thinned to become wisps streaming past the window, and was gone. And the vista of Azure's surface lay spread out below them.
From Merkon, orbiting above like the smaller planet that accompanied Azure, the world had looked like a smooth ball. Even the pictures from the probe had given Taya no real feeling of scale, despite the machines’ attempts to illustrate it by analogies. The regions where the surface rose into broken masses, ending in pointed peaks and ridges between plunging clefts and furrows, were more immense than she had come even close to grasping. The lander was surely already lower than the tops of some of the more distant ones, yet the surface beneath seemed to be as far away as ever. The distant forms were streaked and mottled in shades of gray; those beneath the lander, more rounded, colored in blotches of browns and greens. A hump sitting atop a wall of ribs and fissures, seeming so close that Taya felt she could have reached out and touched it, drifted by suddenly, followed by a lesser one, and then they were gone.
The folds below became greener, seemingly made of innumerable rounded cells packed against one another like the pieces of a mosaic pattern. Ahead, the general surface fell away toward a shining arc of light that curved out of sight behind a mound of green and reappeared farther on. Taya realized that it was one of the winding corridors of water—no other word came to mind. In the distance it joined a silver floor that extended away to end in a line—now appearing straight—at the edge of the strange, starless, blue-and-white sky.
The lander rose on a current of air, then plunged, causing the same floating feeling inside her that Taya had experienced when they detached from Merkon, and drawing squeals from some of the younger ones. “Engineer was right,” she said, looking at Kort. “Air acts like water when you move through it fast enough. To be honest, I never really believed it."
“Mec-brains,” Kort told her, as if it explained everything. Merkon's two kinds of life teased each other continually over their proclaimed advantages. Adopting many of Scientist's methods, Engineer had experimented with models to determine a shape that he said would use the planet's air to neutralize weight—that had been long before anyone knew of Azure's flying bio-forms. Skeptic had taken a lot of convincing about that. Engineer had tested the full-scale lander empty a few times, then carrying just mec-forms, before Taya and the children went aboard. As with the earlier concerns over collisions with objects outside during the final stage of Merkon's approach to Vaxis, the risks were greater for bio-people. Kort's mind, for example, was still operating safely up in Merkon. The body he was controlling locally could always be replicated if anything happened to it.
“The probe is up and in position,” Engineer reported from Merkon via the lander's audio. “You're coming inside its visual range now."
“Can you put what it's seeing up on another screen?” Taya said.
The intended landing site was in an area that the probe had reconnoitered—secluded, but not excessively far from one of the spread-out Merkons where the Azurean two-legged bio-forms lived. The probe didn't have the ability to regain orbit under its own power and had put down on the surface to await the arrival of the lander for transport back up to Merkon. It was active again now, hovering high above the landing site. The view from its imagers appeared on one of the other screens, showing patches of green, brown, and yellow bordering a belt of gray that Taya knew to be water. A slim white arrowhead was moving inward from one edge toward the center.
Cariette pointed. “Is that us—the lander?"
“It's how the probe sees it, looking down,” Jasem confirmed.
“It looks so tiny,” Marcala said from the far side.
The sound of the drives rose, and the craft's horizontal movement slowed, finally ceasing altogether. It seemed to hang motionless for a moment, then began descending. Taya turned to peer back through the port. The surface was taking on form and depth, resolving itself into finer detail: valleys and folds, like sheets heaped carelessly on a bed; patterns of wiggling, branching lines, that she realized were channels of water joining the larger body; intricate changes of shading that she couldn't make out as denoting depressions or elevations.
The masses of green cells were not markings on the surface as she had supposed, but domed shapes swelling upward, like the tops of marbles packed together on a floor. As the lander came lower, she saw that they were the tops of the peculiar vertical-standing structures that the probe had sent back pictures of. Nobody had been able to guess how such formations could have come into being, or if they had been built by the bio-forms inhabiting Azure, what their purpose might be. If anything, they suggested extraordinarily intricate communications antennas. They were larger than any impression Taya had gleaned from the probe's pictures, their tops towering overhead outside the ports—and although the lander's rate of descent was by now barely perceptible, it was still moving. Bron gasped as his mind finally found its focus on the scale of what he was seeing. Marcala turned an awed face upward to stare at Kort.
And then the note of the drives fell abruptly to leave just the hum of the internal systems. All motion had ceased. They were at rest on the surface of the planet Azure.
* * * *
The column stood along the road, waiting for orders, officers sitting rigidly on their mounts, faces betraying no emotion, the ranks exchanging apprehensive looks and murmuring uneasily. Prodded by soldiers using their spear handles, the two peasant informers traveling with them, who had fled into the trees, were flushed back into the open. At the column's head, Descemal, cavalry captain of the Leorican Royal Guard, fought down the terror that had left his mouth dry, his chest pounding, and his stomach feeling as if the
insides had fallen out of him.
It had come out of the sky above the mountains to the west and passed over them with the scream of a tempest, a huge white bird, its wings raked back like the trailing points of an arrow's head. Every man had seen it, every ear had heard, until still sinking ever lower, it had disappeared eastward below the ridge line bounding the valley of the Ther River.
Only one remained uncowed despite his rags and chains, and the rope halter about his neck by which he was being led. Serephelio, the seer, stood in the center of the road, eyes shining, his face turned upward with an expression of ecstasy. Warned that Cyron had ordered his arrest, he had fled the city of Aranos. Descemal had been dispatched to find him and bring him back. “The prophecy of the Oraculars has come to pass!” Serephelio intoned. “A new light has moved in the sky at the time of conflict! Now shall the gods of silver come down to walk among men!"
Descemal's lieutenants, Crelth and Seskilian, waited. The captain considered his situation. To disobey direct orders from the King by not bringing the seer back to Aranos now that he had taken him was unthinkable. And yet there could be little doubt that his troop was closer than any other force to the spot where the apparition had descended. Not to investigate would be an abdication of duty besides displaying inexcusable lack of initiative. There was more than an adequate guard here to conduct one demented seer back to the city.
“Take twenty picked men and follow the Ther River,” he said to Crelth. “Find the place where this beast has come to earth. Observe its nature and endeavor to interpret its disposition and intentions. Watch especially for signs that might be construed as indicating silver gods. Send word full-haste to me in the city when your intelligence is complete."
Crelth clapped a leather-gloved hand to his chest, showing that he understood and would comply.
“Ride on ahead now and report to the King's counselor in Aranos,” Descemal instructed Seskilian. “Tell him that we are bringing back the seer in chains. Describe to him the sight that was beholden today, and inform his eminence also that in keeping with my office of defender of the realm, I have sent a detachment to observe and apprise us of events. Further, I respectfully suggest that a reinforcing body be dispatched in this direction."
* * * *
Other screens came on in addition to the two that were already live, showing views outside the lander in different directions. The scenes moved by intermittently, zooming in and out to focus on details as machines up in Merkon analyzed the images. One showed the dark, shadowy space extending away between the main antenna support columns—seemingly hundreds of them, constructed not in slim pylons like Merkon's external antenna arrays, but as huge trunks branching out above to support the green domes seen from above. Taya began to doubt they were antennas at all. Why were there so many of them? And where were the machines to handle the enormous information flow that such a profusion implied? The same thought had evidently crossed the minds of some of the others. “I think it's a big tent that the bio-forms made,” Nyelise said. “They don't have anything like Merkon to live in here. So they made a big green blanket and propped it up with poles to live under."
“Is that what it is?” Cariette asked, looking up.
“Taya doesn't know everything,” Eltry said. “She's as new here as we are.” The children no longer referred to her as “queen.” It had suited them for a time, when both she and they were younger. Now, for some reason, it didn't feel appropriate—like games they used to play that didn't hold the same interest anymore.
“We'll just have to wait and see,” Taya told them.
Another screen showed the green surface outside rising toward ridges topped by shapeless masses of gray, devoid of symmetry or line, unsuited to any purpose that Taya could imagine. The probe had shown the green carpet that covered most of the level space as made up of countless fibers, the function of which was a mystery; and even stranger, there were tiny life forms with lots of rod-like limbs scurrying among them. On a third screen, the immense sheet of water, coming close to where the lander was standing, extended away for an inestimable distance, ending at another maze of antennas, or green-blanket-tent, or whatever it was, rising in a series of ridges to the sky behind.
“Well?” Cariette looked from Taya to the two metal figures standing behind. “Aren't we going outside?"
“We agreed that Kort would go first,” Scientist said. “In any case, I want to repeat some checks of the outside conditions before you go too. From the probe's data, it looks as if you'll be all right as you are, without the suits, but we need to be sure."
“But I want to go outside now!"
“Patience. It will only take a few minutes."
Taya smiled to herself. Sometimes, listening to Cariette was like hearing replays of herself from years ago. Refusing to get involved, Kort stepped into the double-doored lock that Engineer had built to keep the lander's environment separated, and the inside door closed behind him. The view on one of the screens changed to show Kort standing in the lock.
It had occurred to Thinker that the surface conditions of Azure might not be suitable for bio-forms, and Engineer had designed sealed suits to provide a tolerable environment that they could carry around with them. But it seemed they wouldn't be needed. Temperatures in the place that the probe had surveyed were slightly cooler than the norm in Merkon, showing a swing with the alternation of light and dark that followed from Azure's turning about its own axis as it orbited Vaxis. Also, the planet's air was more moist. Pressures were around the levels maintained in Merkon, and the air blocked out the shorter wavelengths of Vaxis's radiation that could damage delicate biomolecules. Medic had decided that two-piece trousered suits a little heavier than the clothing they normally wore would be all that Taya and the others would need, along with thick-soled boots because of the irregular nature of the surface.
Besides dust particles derived from the mineral aggregates of which much of Azure was composed, the air samples analyzed by the probe also contained large numbers of complex biomolecular structures. While many of these resembled the carriers of what bio-people experienced as odor and taste, Scientist had been startled to learn that some were similar to the rudimentary “cells” that he had observed in his researches—the basic units that replicated repeatedly to form bio-bodies. Thinker theorized that this could be an early airborne phase of existence that bio-forms in their natural environment went through before coalescing into the more highly organized multicell forms that swam and walked and flew. So did these represent the terminal forms of different paths of development radiating from a primitive, single-cell airborne phase? Or were they steps along a single chain of metamorphoses in a sequence yet to be determined? If the latter, it seemed logical that the smaller forms ought to precede the larger, in which case the upright bipedal pattern that corresponded to Merkon's bio-forms was merely an intermediate. Skeptic wanted to know why, if that were so, Taya and the others should have assumed the bipedal form directly, without going through any smaller preliminary stages such as a many-limbed, shell-bodied phase, a streamlined, aqueous phase, or a winged phase at all? It was all very confusing.
“Well?” Cariette said again, looking up at Scientist.
The robot made a sound that convincingly imitated a sharp exhalation of air. “Not yet. We have to refill the lock with cabin air before you can enter."
“Why, if it's the same as Azure's anyway?"
“Thinker thinks there might be reasons he hasn't thought of."
“Suppose the air's acid, and Kort turns white and starts to fizz like metal in a test tube in one of the labs,” Marcala said, sounding worried.
“I think if anything like that were true, we'd know about it already,” Scientist said.
“But what if—"
“Shh, look,” Taya interrupted. “The outer door's opening."
“Oh, he's going to turn into fizzy froth! I know he is.” Marcala covered her eyes with her fingers—but opened a gap between them to peek through.
The screen showed a side view of Kort illuminated from in front, which meant that the outer lock door in the hull was open. His head moved through a slow arc to scan the direction that the light was coming from, paused, and traversed back again; then he moved forward and was lost from view for an instant before the screen changed to show what his eyes were registering. It was much like the scene that the lander's external imagers had already delivered: carpets of strange, green fibers intermixed with shapeless lumps of metal compounds; the enigmatic, towering branched structures lost in their coverings of green; the mass of water a short distance below, looking more blue than gray now, rippling and undulating as it flowed.... And then Taya became aware of sounds unlike anything she had ever heard filling the cabin.
There were screeches and squeaks, almost like metal being scraped over metal; cries like shrill shouts, the way the children's voices sounded sometimes when they played. Some came randomly as isolated chirps, while others sang out repeating patterns over and over. There were whistles and hoots, again some sharp and short, others coming in sequences that rose and fell like notes of the music that Taya and some of the other children liked to compose. The more she listened, the more she was able to pick out. The lavishness and depth increased moment by moment, like a picture of sound unfolding in her mind that she somehow felt rather than saw. And behind it all was a rushing sound, vaguely like the noise that the air had made outside the lander's hull, but more broken, with a curious chattering rhythm. They were hearing what Kort could hear through his ears, redirected via the cabin speakers. Azure was a world of sound also. A world of sound outside!
The screen showed Kort's feet moving carefully down the steps that had extended below the outer door. Simultaneously, another view from above the door showed his back. Finally, he stepped onto the mat of green fibers. He didn't turn white and fizz away into foam. Marcala took her hand down from her face. “So what's it like to be standing on a planet, Kort?” Taya asked aloud.
Silver Gods From the Sky Page 2
