by James Gunn
CHAPTER THREE
Riley looked down the long, sloping expanse of the pyramid’s side and toward the green and red and yellow foliage that marked the canopy of the burgeoning jungle below. It was a scene of fertility for which the barren deserts of his native Mars had not prepared him, but he recognized it from the picture books and recordings of humanity’s birthplace. “Teeming” was the word that came to mind, and even from his vantage point high on the pyramid’s side he could see creatures flying above the treetops and imagine the proliferation of predatory life below, but he had no choice other than to join it.
He began the long descent. The stones that formed the sides of the pyramid had been fitted together so precisely that they required no mortar, but the erosion of the ages and perhaps the onset of a wet tropical climate had worn handholds between the rocks. Farther below, when he had climbed down far enough to reach the jungle top, the supports for fingers and toes were reinforced by sturdy creeping vines. There he could see the flying creatures more clearly. They were large, reptilian creatures with big jaws and leathery wings made more for soaring than for flying. One swooped dangerously close, its jaws open as if to pick him off his precarious position. He shouted at it and waved his free hand. It swerved away and then returned for another try. But by this time Riley was ready with a piece of vine broken away. He hit the flying creature in the snout. It fell for a few seconds until it spread its wings and soared away as if in search of easier prey. Riley dropped the club and resumed his descent.
Below the canopy he saw and heard other kinds of life, monkeylike creatures and some that looked more reptilian, including a few snakes, but they weren’t close enough to be threatening. Mostly at this level there were insects, swarms of them, coming at him from all directions. He brushed them away with his free hand and then, surrendering, started down again, allowing them to settle on his body and his head while he hoped that this alien pest did not possess alien poisons, though it certainly contained alien viruses which he hoped his new body had new ways to resist. For a time he could insulate himself from his awareness of what they were doing, and before they could become intolerable, they abandoned him, as if finding his alien substance inedible or unattractive, or perhaps, he thought, his perfected body had adjusted its chemistry to thwart the sensory apparatus of the insect swarms. That certainly would be a new survival characteristic.
At last he reached the ground and looked back up the side of the ancient structure, marveling one last time at the effort and dedication and sacrifice that had gone into this monument to an ancient ruler, now being reabsorbed by the world from which it had sprung, and he wondered if this location, long-cycles ago, had been more accessible, a desert perhaps before a climate change or some tectonic shift had transformed it into its present state. He turned and made his way into the jungle.
The jungle was heavy with the ripe aroma of growing things and vegetable decay and an underlying alien taint that told Riley of a different evolutionary chemistry. Its floor was relatively free of undergrowth. The towering trees kept sunlight from reaching the surface, except in a few places where stray beams nourished a bush or flowering plant. The jungle floor, though, was deep with debris, and Riley walked carefully, watching his surroundings for predator threats. He stepped on something solid. When it didn’t move under his foot, he reached down and withdrew a fallen limb that he could use as a club. It was not the best of weapons, but it was better than nothing. If he were on this world for very long he would have to fashion hmself a bow and arrows or a spear.
A few steps farther on, he needed the club when something lashed out at him from a tree trunk. He saw it in time to knock it away. It was a gigantic flower, like pictures he had seen of an overgrown orchid, only this one had stout petals that closed upon its victims. Now, half shattered but still lashing, it emitted a stifling odor of decay. A bit farther on, in a patch of sunlight, he came across a bush that had spherical yellow growths at the ends of its branches. Birdlike creatures were fluttering around it, and some were eating at the growths with unbirdlike teeth. Riley waved them away with his club and picked one of the spheres. They were fruit, he thought, and the native creatures ate it. He bit into it. It was sweet and tart and filled with juice that ran down the sides of his mouth. Maybe it was poisonous, as alien evolutionary products are likely to be, but sustenance was more of a concern. Poison or not, his re-created body would have to cope with it.
As he made his way farther into the jungle, he felt a few rumblings inside, but they subsided, and when he came upon a different kind of blue fruitlike globe and sampled it, his body accepted it without protest. Finally he reached a stream where a lizardlike creature, about the size of a large dog, was drinking. It raised its head to look at him as he approached, as if evaluating whether he was a danger or a meal, and then scuttled away as Riley raised his club, a sign that Riley interpreted as a hopeful indication that it had seen creatures his size wielding weapons before. He had two chances for getting off this planet; the first was to encounter the descendants of the creatures who had built the pyramid, the second was that they had progressed from that primitive beginning to the stage of powered technology and spaceflight. Surely the emissary of the Machine for whom the receiver in the pyramid had been built had accomplished something. Otherwise he would have to raise an alien civilization to interstellar capability in a generation, and he wasn’t sure Asha, or the galaxy, would wait that long.
Of course the emissary could have been killed by alien creatures, savage or sentient, before it could achieve whatever otherworldly goal for which it had risked everything. But then there must have been an original landing party to install the receiver in the first place, and its members had survived long enough to accomplish their mission.
Riley stooped and drank from the stream. The water was tepid and tasted of the jungle floor through which it flowed, but it was liquid and his body didn’t object.
He followed the stream, coming across other reptilian creatures, more birds with teeth, and insects that now seemed to avoid him, until he came to what seemed like a trail. He looked both ways before he turned in the direction away from the pyramid toward what he hoped was civilization.
He had gone only a few steps when he realized that something was following him. He turned. Behind him was a creature about his size, though its bulk made it seem larger. It was standing on thick, powerful legs. It had big hips, small upper limbs, and a big head with two red eyes and a protruding jaw fitted with large sharp teeth that it was showing now. Clearly it was reptilian and a carnivore and a threat.
* * *
The threat facing him was not the kind of instinctive violence this fecund jungle had produced so far. The creature, dangerous as it looked, wore a leatherlike belt around its middle—it was hardly a waist—and from the front of the belt dangled a pouch, perhaps containing a reserve supply of food, which suggested forethought, and at its side a metal knife, an encouraging indication of a metal-working level of civilization. All this in the brief moment of decision as the creature drew its knife with what resembled a hand with an opposable thumb. Riley knew that he had a chance to defend himself with his club and perhaps his superior agility against the creature’s strength and natural weapons, but defense came at a price. He had no future on this primeval world without assistance, and, primitive as it looked, the creature surely represented whatever assistance was available.
Riley stood still, his club at his side, its tip resting, unthreateningly, on the reddish-brown soil of the trail while the creature lifted its knife … and then extended it toward Riley, hilt first. Riley accepted it, looked at it admiringly, and then held it back out to the creature, who took it without recognizable emotion and, throwing its head back, roared.
Riley leaned on his club. “So, friend,” he said, “we are met here on your world, far from wherever I need to be, and maybe you can help me get there. I know you can’t understand what I’m saying. But maybe you will, or maybe I will understand you, and anyw
ay, it helps me to talk.”
The creature roared again as if honoring Riley’s effort to communicate.
“I’m going to call you ‘Rory,’” Riley said. “I think you saw me climb down the side of that pyramid and you believe that I am a god taken strange shape, or maybe the reincarnation of the god-emperor entombed there, and I’m going to let you think that until I can tell you otherwise and get your help on more equal terms.”
Rory roared again.
“You see? We’re getting to understand each other already. You just said something like ‘we’ve been standing here talking when we should be getting on with our business,’ and I agree.” Riley stood to one side of the trail, moving carefully and slowly and extending his club-free left hand to indicate that the way was clear for Rory to pass.
The creature moved past Riley, not looking at him nor altering its progress to avoid possible contact, and stalked down the trail, not looking back to see if Riley was following. Riley got a whiff of the creature as it went by him; Rory smelled ripe, like decay. Riley walked behind but not too closely, cautiously watching the sky above and the jungle’s edge on both sides. He wasn’t as wary as before. Somehow he trusted Rory’s experience with local dangers and, perhaps, those dangers’ awareness of the threat of Rory’s kind.
They walked in silence, Riley examining what he knew about evolutionary processes. There was far more in his mind than he recalled ever learning, perhaps the residue of his pedia’s incredible stock of mostly useless information deposited now among the neurons and their connections that the pedia had impressed into its own purposes. This world clearly was in its Jurassic-like period of tropical growth and reptilian dominance. But the ancient tomb, even older than the million-long-cycle-ago people of the Transcendental Machine, suggested that these dinosaur-like creatures had possessed the ability and the technology to build that pyramid for far longer than humanity had dominated Earth and its solar companion worlds. Perhaps this world had never experienced the catastrophic die-offs that allowed mammalian life to emerge from its hiding places on Earth to produce, eventually, humans. These reptilians had enjoyed more than a million long-cycles to achieve a space-going civilization, if that was in their capacity to imagine.
But if Rory’s tools were typical of its civilization’s level of technological development, its people had not progressed in a million cycles. They had regressed, he thought. Then he changed his mind.
They had reached a river. Riley could hear it and smell it long before they arrived upon its bank. The river was wide, perhaps one hundred meters across; its flow was thick with reddish-brown sediment and its surface was strewn with leaves and branches, as if, somewhere upstream, the sky had opened up and let fall avalanches of rain. Drawn up on the bank was a boat, or more accurately, Riley judged from his memory of things unseen, a canoe or dugout.
Rory pushed the boat into the water and waited, as if not presuming to direct Riley to get in. There were no seats, and once Riley had entered he crouched in one end, looking for oars or paddles but seeing only what seemed to be a staff lying on the bottom of the boat, not much longer than his club and clearly not long enough to reach the bed of the river.
Rory got into the other end of the vessel, agilely for its size and massive thighs. The boat sagged noticeably into the water, and Riley recognized again the muscular weight of the creature who had befriended him—or who had become his guide and perhaps his acolyte. The boat turned into the current, hesitated for a moment as the river tried to take it along with the flotsam that covered its surface, and then an invisible force took hold of the vessel and turned it upriver, fighting the current with apparent ease.
Rory’s people possessed some kind of powered propulsion. Maybe they were not as primitive as Riley had feared. He tried to see the motor, if that was what it was, but all he saw was a train of bubbles.
An hour and eleven minutes later, after Rory had deterred two river monsters who raised their heads out of the muck as the boat passed and Riley understood the purpose of the staff in the bottom of the boat, they reached a place where the jungle had retreated from the river or had been cut back. In that leveled spot, many hundreds of meters across, was a city built of stone like the pyramid.
But it was a ruined city. Unlike the pyramid, its stones had fallen.
* * *
Rory sat still in the back of the boat as if waiting for Riley to disembark, and then, when Riley rose and stepped out, moved its heavy body onto what once might have been a dock but was now only shattered stone. The alien creature pulled the boat between two jutting rocks onto a surface that might once have been paved. Riley got no more than a glimpse of two dark holes in the back of the boat before Rory marched off toward the city and Riley followed.
As they got closer to the ruins, other dinosaur-like creatures came toward them, running faster than Riley would have expected. They were of several sizes, from what appeared to be children to heavily muscled adults like Rory and some who were large but not as muscular, females perhaps. There were forty-six of them. Riley wondered how he had come to that total without counting, especially since they seemed bent on attacking him, like a pack of carnivores.
But Rory roared at them and they slowed and then parted as he and Rory passed. The others fell in behind them, roaring softly among themselves. Riley was beginning to distinguish between roars, as if his newly acquired clarity of thought was able to make the kind of analyses that his pedia once had made for him and Asha had made without any such artificial aid. And he was aware of the smell of these creatures, like rotten meat and decaying vegetation, like Rory’s odor but worse. This Jurassic world, with all its fecund waste, stank.
As they drew closer to the edge of this ancient city, Riley saw crude shelters, cottages or cabins, built of quarried stone and thatched with dried yellow vegetation. He knew now what had happened to the ruined structures of the old city. They had been scavenged for building materials for its fallen descendants. He felt a wave of despair. There would be little technological help from these decadent remains of a once great civilization.
And then, as Rory led their way into one of the stone huts, Riley remembered the powered propulsion of Rory’s boat. Somehow that had survived.
The interior of the hut was dark until Rory withdrew a small object from the pouch hanging from his belt and applied it to a hollowed stone whose contents sprang into flame and a flickering light. Strawlike vegetation was heaped in the corners of the hut. In the center was a low stone table without chairs or stools. Rory opened a nearby wooden chest and withdrew several kinds of the fruit that Riley had already sampled and placed them on the table. From another chest it withdrew a large piece of raw meat. Rory removed two stone flagons from under the table and filled them with a dark fluid from a pottery pitcher also stored under the table, sat on his haunches, and buried his teeth in the raw meat.
Riley hesitated. The odor of the creatures was even stronger here—or his sensory apparatus had been improved along with everything else—and he felt his stomach rebel at the thought of eating, but he pushed the revulsion away as he reached for one of the flagons and sipped its contents. It was a kind of wine, and Riley was briefly encouraged by the thought that at least these creatures had mastered the art of wine-making and pottery creation as well as fire, although not, apparently, the art or desirability of cooking meat. Maybe he would be able to teach them skills that would begin their ascent back into the civilization that had created the city and the pyramid, though it would not, he realized, reach the stage he needed for a reunion with Asha during his life span, no matter how long extended by his passage through the Transcendental Machine.
He was starting to sample the fruit when a loud clap of thunder exploded immediately over their heads followed by flashes of lightning and a downpour, like a gigantic bucket being emptied above them, that rattled the vegetation that roofed the structure and began to drip through in places and then in streams. Riley looked at Rory, who seemed oblivious, and continued
to eat. It had consumed half the raw meat already and the rest seemed destined to follow immediately.
The vegetation rattled and cracked above them, as if struck by heavy hailstones. Riley looked through the open doorway to the space outside. It was covered with balls of ice bouncing off the shattered paving stones and their pools of accumulating rainwater. Then, in the midst of the titanic storm, Riley heard a distant sound like a sonorous bell. Riley had never heard anything like it. It was sad, like a tolling for the dead, and compelling, like a summons to whatever place after death the hearer nourished in his hopes for eternity.
Riley looked at Rory. The alien reptile had stopped eating. Ripples were moving across its body like shivers.
Riley looked around the hut and, seeing nothing else, tore the top from one of the food chests. Holding it over his head, he stepped out into the storm, feeling and then hearing the hailstones hitting the wood and bruising his knuckles. The water poured down over him, and he hoped the lightning strikes would not hit him before he reached his goal. He moved off toward the sound that seemed to be coming from the center of the city.
Finally he stood in front of a large, ruined building. Here the sound was louder and even more compelling. He picked his way past fallen blocks of stone and the vegetation that had grown up between them until he moved up a ramp into the shelter of what remained. Heavy streams of water rushed past him as he edged his way into the building, dodging gushes of rainwater from gaps and crevices, until he stood in a large hall, open to the elements where the remains of a roof gave testimony to what had once existed.
In the middle of the hall was an enormous red sphere being bombarded by rain and hail. From it came the unworldly sounds that had drawn him to this place.
CHAPTER FOUR
Asha’s attendants slept soundly at her feet, not moving when she turned but awakening instantly when she got out of bed. She could think through her situation while she remained in the expansive bed, but as soon as she got up the two were chattering away in their squeal-and-whistle language, and Asha’s mind got busy trying to make sense of what they were saying.
