by James Gunn
And so the pyramid builders set their skills to hiding it, containing it as they had the spirits of their ancestors. They built this structure around it, and it would have sufficed if the climate had not changed, if the planet’s ice age had not ended and returned vast stores of water to the oceans and the lakes, and if torrential rains, like the one Riley had just experienced, had not turned the region, perhaps the entire planet, into a hothouse of tropical growth. And ruined the structure that contained the ancient spaceship.
And left it for his salvation. If he could just figure out how to get into it and, if he was successful in that, how to master its alien technologies.
Behind him Rory roared. It was not a full-throated roar such as the one that had greeted him on the jungle trail, or the ones Rory had addressed to the dinosaur-like creatures who had descended upon them like a pack of starving carnivores as they entered the village that surrounded the ruins of the ancient city. It was a more cautious roar that Riley was beginning to understand.
“You’re trying to tell me that this is a bad place and we should get out of it before it destroys us,” Riley said in his own language. “Well, we can’t go just yet. I’ve got to figure out the entrance to this ship, and then I’m going to do something that you’re going to find pretty terrible. So you’d better go back to your people, and maybe I’ll see you later and maybe I won’t.”
Rory roared again, more plaintively this time, if that were possible. He moved back a few paces and squatted, looking toward Riley and turning his head back and forth as if trying to reassure himself.
Riley turned toward the red sphere. It towered several meters above his head. He could not see the top and estimated its height only from the curvature of the middle section. Debris from the ceiling had fallen around it, doing no apparent damage, and its shiny surface was free of dust and grime, as if the downpours to which it was regularly subjected washed it clean, or some undying electronic charge repelled foreign materials.
Riley circled the ancient ship, climbing over piles of stone and wading through pools of rainwater, but there was no break in the shiny, unmarred surface of the red sphere, no line that might suggest an entrance. He returned to his original spot, where the patient Rory, conquering his ancestral fears, watched him with red, perhaps anxious, eyes.
“Well, Rory,” Riley said, “nobody ever told me this was going to be easy.”
Rory gave a muted roar.
“That’s right,” Riley said. “Maybe the entrance is on the upper half of the ship, where I can’t reach, or see either. But that wouldn’t make any sense. These aren’t the kind of people who would use ladders, say, to reach the surface. They’d need ground egress for their machines or the vehicles that they’d need to ferry the machines to the pyramid. Unless they had something like antigravity. Well, I don’t believe in antigravity, Rory. At least not yet. There’s something here that I haven’t thought of. But I will.”
And then a terrible thought occurred to him: Maybe the ship had malfunctioned and another ship had been sent to take the engineers away!
* * *
Riley raised his club and struck the side of the red sphere in frustration. It sighed like the melancholy exhalation of some dying giant. Riley turned. Behind him Rory was cowering, but he had not fled. “We’re not getting anywhere here,” Riley said. “Let’s go back to your shanty and think this through.”
He went past Rory, no longer concerned that the powerful alien might suddenly attack but acutely aware of the dinosaur-like creature’s stench—as fetid as this teeming, rotting world itself. They walked back, Rory behind. Riley could sense Rory’s anxieties easing as they made their way through the ruined city toward the rock huts that had grown up around it. He entered Rory’s hut as if it were his own and squatted on his haunches at the low table that still contained the remains of the meal that Rory had laid out. None of the other dinosaur-like creatures had entered. They had gathered again, singly and in small groups, around the route after he and Rory had emerged from the sacred place, but Rory apparently occupied some position of authority that kept him and his walking-meat companion from being attacked or his home violated.
Riley picked up a piece of fruit from the table and put it in his mouth, not much caring what it was or how it tasted. He had a problem, and he needed to think about it with all the clarity of a mind liberated from clutter and inefficiencies by the Transcendental Machine. Rory settled on the other side of the table, squatting more naturally than Riley, and watched Riley as if some transformation might occur at any moment. He paid no attention to the rotting meat in front of him, crawling now with insects and sending its overpowering scent to Riley’s side of the table.
“What we need,” Riley said, “is the ability to communicate.” He turned that into a roar, which surprised him as much as Rory. His mind, Riley discovered, had been working on Rory’s language all the time he had been focusing on immediate issues, as if his pedia was still there, inside his head, conducting its separate, alien processes.
Rory roared back. “The god speaks.”
“I seek the machines”—what was it Rory had called the red sphere back in the building that housed it?—“the cursed thing of the gods who come from the sky.”
“The cursed thing brings death without life,” Rory said, with a tremor in his roar that suggested even saying the words was dangerous.
For a people that believed in sacred burial, “death without life” probably meant “destroying the soul and its rebirth.” “And yet,” Riley said, “you use a god-thing to move your boat.” He was guessing here, but the propulsion system on Rory’s boat, some inexhaustible engine that pushed air or water backward to move the boat forward, clearly was beyond the technical capability of Rory’s people, or even those of the people who had built the pyramid and the city.
“A gift from the old ones,” Rory said.
By which he meant, Riley thought, the old ones of his own kind, the city builders, who had destroyed the gods who came from the sky, who had taken over the devices that they could manage and made them their own. “Any other gifts from the old ones?” Riley asked. Maybe there was a device the ancient engineers had used to open their ship, a device that somehow had been passed down the generations, its original purpose lost in antiquity if it had ever been known.
“None,” Rory said.
So much for that faint hope. No matter how Riley tried to pry into Rory’s memories he could get nothing more from him, either because of Rory’s reluctance to recall forbidden lore or the inadequacies of Riley’s understanding of Rory’s language, or of the language’s inability, or Rory’s, to deal with the conditional or the speculative.
Riley finished his meager meal, although he did not feel particularly hungry, perhaps because his body was more efficient now, and Rory, relieved of the necessity to respond to the creature he considered a god, brushed away the insects and buried his fearsome rows of teeth in the hunk of meat in front of him. Afterward, as darkness slowly gathered outside the open doorway to Rory’s stone hut, Riley found a corner and stretched out in it, his back against one cool, sturdy wall, his head against the dusty stone floor.
He did not feel the need for sleep so much as he recognized the efficiency of rest. He understood now what Asha had meant when she said that she almost never slept. Instead a quiet period was a time to still the turmoil of a mind churning with thoughts competing for attention and allow unconscious processes to begin sorting them out and, he hoped, coming up with answers.
Even though he thought now with a clarity and a precision he had never before experienced, his new condition was no guarantee of a solution to questions whose answers were buried under ancient ruins and a million long-cycles of the past.
Four hours and thirty-seven minutes later, he jerked awake, surprised that he had fallen asleep, and aware of movement outside the hut. He put his hand on his club and rose to his knees, ready to spring to his feet, but Rory was ahead of him, already up, already at the doorway i
nto the night. The dinosaur-like creature roared, and from outside came the sound of heavy feet running away.
Apparently Rory’s status had been compromised by his association with a creature unlike anything seen before in this village and whose only value, if it had any, was as quick food. My meat would probably be poisonous to you, Riley thought, evolving as I did with alien biologies and bacteria your bodies have never encountered. But that would be small comfort if he were being consumed by ravenous carnivores.
And then he remembered the other thing that had awakened him. He had been dreaming about the chamber into which he had been transported and his efforts to find a way out. In his dream he had emerged from the chamber into the crude corridor outside, and the doorway had closed behind him.
In that recollection was a possible way into the ancient spaceship that he had not considered.
* * *
“We should leave now,” Riley told Rory. “Before”—he waved at the hut’s entrance, hoping that the gesture meant something in Rory’s culture—“your people return.” He had no words yet for “friends,” if such a concept existed on this eat-before-you-are-eaten world.
Riley brushed past Rory into the night. The sky was clear, but there was only a little light from a few scattered stars. Rory’s world, it seemed, was located far out on the spiral arm, which explained, perhaps, why it had never been visited by representatives of the Galactic Federation, or, if it had been visited, had been abandoned to its own savagery. Even the Federation could not hope to civilize these reptilian carnivores.
Perhaps the people of the Transcendental Machine had hopes for them, if, indeed, that was the purpose of the receivers that, Riley now believed, had been hidden all across his own spiral arm. But they could as easily have been the scouting party for a future invasion by an aggressive civilization that had run out of room in the spiral arm next door.
In any case, the failure of the red sphere to return with its engineers may have discouraged the Transcendental Machine people as well. Or the arachnoids had wiped out the people who had built the Machine before they could complete their transgalactic project. Riley believed that the arachnoids were the degenerate descendants of the Machine builders, not the builders themselves.
Or, the Machine builders had succeeded, and the galaxy Riley knew might be the realization of their plan. Perhaps the Machine builders were in their midst. Perhaps one of the species that made up the Federation was the Machine builders.
But all that seemed unlikely and certainly irrelevant. What was relevant was his need to get to the ruined city and the structure that housed the red sphere before he was attacked by the carnivores who lacked Rory’s restraint. There was movement in the darkness, and behind him Rory roared. It was a warning to those following and waiting to attack. “I am your leader,” the roar said, “the son of a leader and the son of the son of a leader, and you will die in my teeth.”
Riley had not cared if Rory followed. He did not relish abandoning Rory in the midst of the city he feared, using the savage to fulfill Riley’s need to escape this world and find Asha, and then leaving Rory to his angry tribe. But now he was glad that Rory had come along.
He walked faster. Even in the darkness he could remember every step of the path they had taken, every fallen stone along the way. If they could make it to the city, their pursuers might be too terrified to follow.
The outskirts of the ruins were only a few paces away when their pursuers attacked. They fought off the first group, Riley with his club and Rory with his fearsome head and teeth and his powerful legs. The pack retreated, leaving them bloodstained and wounded, and Riley said, “Quick. To the city before they attack again,” and he turned and ran toward the ruins, not knowing whether Rory was the source of the footfalls behind him or the carnivores who hungered after them.
As he reached the edge of the ruins, the sounds of pursuit faded, and there was only the solitary noises of his own breathing and Rory’s heavy feet. When they drew near the structure Riley had come to think of as the museum of the red sphere, Riley turned. The yellow sun was coming up beyond the distant jungle tops, and Riley could see Rory’s wounds and what seemed like a broken arm. “I’m going to do something bad,” Riley said in Rory’s language, “and you won’t want anything to do with it. I don’t know what you’re going to do now. Maybe your people will accept you back after I’m gone”—if, indeed, I’m right, he thought—“at least I hope so. But it won’t do either of us any good if I stay.”
He realized that he had come to think of Rory as a companion if not a friend. Rory looked at Riley with unblinking red eyes, and Riley wasn’t sure how much of his speech the other had understood in his mangled Rory-ese. In his own language, he said, “Good-bye, buddy. You’ve been far more of a help than I had any right to expect.” He resisted the urge to pat the monstrous creature on the head, turned, and entered the museum. The red sphere was already glowing with reflected sunlight. Riley moved around it, thinking about the exit from the place of the Machine receiver. He had not checked it; he had only assumed that the way back was permanently barred.
Riley ran his hand along the surface of the sphere until he found a place where the surface suddenly gave way, and his hand disappeared up to his wrist. He swallowed, took a deep breath, and moved forward, feeling a cool tingling over his entire body as the light changed to a rosy glow and then something like day.
CHAPTER SIX
Asha’s handmaidens were still asleep, curled up at the foot of the bed, when Asha sat up, swung her feet to the floor, and stood. She moved quietly to the corner of the wall from which her handmaidens extracted the towels and had deposited the fancy clothing her suitors had brought. She had watched the motions with which her attendants had opened the wall, and the wall opened at her touch, like a cabinet door. She searched through the folded clothing until she found the clothing she had worn to the world of the Transcendental Machine that had been returned by the third suitor, and slipped them on. Below, on the floor, were her old sandals. She put them on her feet.
She walked to the far wall, turned on the mirror/receiver, and switched to the Monster and Princess puzzle. Quickly she redid her solution, only this time she completed it: the Monster’s best search strategy always found the Princess, and the Princess’s best avoidance strategy always enabled her to escape. Like all such puzzles, if both parties used their best strategies the situation was a standoff.
As she completed the last entry, the door clicked. The solution to the puzzle, apparently, was the recognition of her equality, and as a citizen she was no longer to be confined. Asha moved to the door and took one last look at her sleeping attendants. “Sorry, guys,” she mouthed, and moved silently through the open door.
The big room was empty, as she expected, and the massive doors to the plaza opened as she approached. She stopped in the entrance. Unexpectedly, the night was almost as bright as day. As she moved farther into the plaza and looked up, she understood why: the sky was ablaze with stars—not the few thousands she had been accustomed to in Federation Central and certainly not the few hundreds of Terminal or the scattered few of the Great Gulf, but tens of thousands shedding their baleful light on the planet of Squeal.
No wonder the little people of Squeal were terrified of the sky. Rather than a position farther out on the spiral arm, Squeal was close to the center of the galaxy with all its clustered suns. One of them, looking much like the rest, might be the central black hole, no more than a pinprick in the tapestry of night but surrounded by an accretion disk of dying suns and their doomed planets, and spewing deadly radiation, absorbed now by Squeal’s atmosphere. But always looming over Squeal was the threat of some supernova explosion, some terrible brightness in the night sky, that would release a cascade of cosmic rays for which the atmosphere would be no protection. And going out into that hostile space beyond the atmosphere without the protection of radiation-proof ships would be suicide. Even travel through the air of Squeal would risk fatal exposure at uppe
r levels of the air that covered the planet.
The only sounds as she crossed the plaza toward the structures on the other side were her muffled footsteps and the splashing of the central fountain. The air was mild and tinged with the characteristic sandalwood odor of Squeal itself. She looked up at the indestructible Machine in its place of honor on the fountain’s peak and reflected on all it implied: ancient technology reconceived as sacred symbol, long-forgotten plans and dreams reborn as contemporary mythology. Nothing endured; everything is renewed. And yet we struggle on, she thought, hoping to make a difference, attempting to make our brief existences mean something.
The buildings on the plaza differed in size and decoration, but they were constructed up against their neighbors, with no space between, like pictures she had seen of big cities on Earth and the cities built by the people of the Transcendental Machine. The only one that stood isolated on the plaza was the palace in which she had been kept. Avenues at each corner of the plaza allowed the Squeal people to come and go, although she had never seen vehicles there. Perhaps delivery wagons came to the rear.
Asha arrived at the front entrance of a building that was a bit larger and more colorful than its neighbors, with a front expanse of green paint or tile, perhaps reminiscent of verdant Dorian plains. The stairs did not turn into a welcoming ramp. In fact, there was no welcome at all. Double doors were stubbornly closed. Asha looked for some indication of a bell or knocker. Seeing none she waved her hands in front of the doors and its frame in the way she had learned to control the mirror/receiver and the cabinet-wall, but there was no response. If she was mistaken in the building, its occupants were Squeal people conditioned from birth to avoid the night.
But she was not, and she pounded on the door with her fist. The sound echoed across the empty plaza, stirring echoes that might in normal circumstances have brought a crowd of curious or alarmed spectators or uniformed guardians of the peace. No answer. She pounded again. Finally she heard a muffled voice from the other side of the door. “Go away!” it said in the squeal language.
