The “importants” in the small dome’s entryway were recorded and removed, some for shipment to the Xenoarch conference. Kat was mildly surprised when Dan didn’t question the team’s haste in doing that. He shrugged and said,“You’re what’s called a full-range dig, right? Broad-overview researchers. How did that ed-vid description go? ‘Generally selective rather than specifically selective,’ like the Saunders. To you, this stuff is more valuable as part of a wide collection instead of individual treasures. So you want to take as much as you can, across the boards, to show off. That it?”
The brunette studied him with a crooked smile. “Sometimes I wish you weren’t such a fast learner. One of the reasons I enjoy xenosocio work with the N’lacs so much is that I’m a teacher at heart. I thought I’d be your tutor. But you’re boning up so thoroughly I can’t tell you anything.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Dan said, winking.
Praedar broke up that encounter before it could develop into a more interesting conversation. “The inner door,” the Whimed ordered. “Open. Scan is complete. No obstacles within. Air is not unique. We will see what is inside before we depart.”
Dan sighed, watching Kat hurry off on another task, and got busy on the assignment.
It was a brain-busting challenge, the type he liked. No other tech-mech, in any sector, had taken a crack at this particular problem. Trying to figure out the alien fibers and circuits—and were they circuits?—got his juices pumping. Dae had been intrigued by work-blind tinkering ever since he was a boy. This was as close as he was likely to come to his one-time dream of being a breakthrough engineering genius.
He called on all his skills. The door unit was a much tougher chore than dismantling and reassembling Adam’s pocket vidder from scratch—which he’d done when he was nine.
Ruieb-An’s translations of N’lac texts weren’t any help. Dan needed manuals, not inventories of food stocks or paeans to the ancient leaders of this world. And Ruieb’s data was mostly in that vein.
The N’lacs were no help, either. The majority of them were afraid to enter the small dome or even look at the door. Chuss and Meej did, but their knowledge of their ancestors didn’t extend to their technology. The two brothers did hang around, though, getting under Dan’s feet, poking into crannies, babbling, and making nuisances of themselves.
The original materials in the wall linkage were useless. Dan requested replacement fluidics elements from Getz’s “effigies.” Getz, predictably, turned him down. And Sheila refused to aid what she called a rape of Bill’s artifacts. Praedar and Kat, however, weren’t so fussy. Unlocking the door took precedence over Getz’s outraged feelings.
Kat brought Dan the elements and leaned over his shoulder awhile, watching him work. Her presence was distracting, but she didn’t play hormone games, as Sheila might have done in the same close quarters. It was just as well, though, that she didn’t stay long. Dan needed to focus his attention solely on the job.
He cleaned elements, installed them, learned that position didn’t work, pulled elements, realigned, and reinstalled them. He tried again.
And again.
And again.
Time was a weight, prodding the back of his skull. He fought its influence, fearing it would make him clumsy. One bad mistake could ruin chances of getting into the dome’s interior with minimal disruption. Without the door access, the expedition might have to bash down a wall to get inside and damage irreplaceable evidence of N’lac history.
After days of disappointment, Dan found the right combination. Everything finally fitted. Valves tripped. Air flowed into fluidics units. Circuits dead for centuries glowed to life, and dormant mechanisms readied for action.
Praedar had insisted that he be informed before Dan opened the door. He wasn’t the only one interested in the event. Kat, Sheila, Baines, Rosie, and a dozen other scientists crowded into the tiny alcove. With a flourish, Dan triggered alien systems. The door opened slowly, like an aged being waking after a long sleep.
“No significant air shift,” Dan said. “Indications are it was pressure tight once, but it’s lost that.”
“The N’lacs no longer knew how to maintain the seals,” Praedar said absently, then swept forward.
Dan accompanied the xenoarchaeologists inside. They fanned out, moving in centimeters, scanning the floor. The dredge’s hoses cleared interior air for the humans’ comfort. Porta lamps were set up. Recording gear hummed.
In contrast to the outer room, this was surprisingly bare. It looked as if the N’lacs’ ancestors had removed the furniture before they’d left the room permanently. Light beams raked across a fine layer of grit—sand drift from mesa and desert. No, this long-abandoned sanctuary hadn’t been airtight.
Sheila exclaimed with soft excitement and knelt by a bellshaped structure. The odd-looking thing dominated the far side of the room opposite the entry. It appeared to be built into the wall and filled nearly an eighth of the floor space. A funnel or stack angled toward the dome’s roof. But the exhaust duct had collapsed. A small, very heavy door sagged forlornly from the structure’s front. Sheila shone a headlamp into the guts. “Kiln? I can’t think of what else it would be. Weird design.”
“Possibly modeled upon the Evil Old Ones’ manufactories,” Praedar suggested. “The escaped slaves brought that learned technology with them. Hence the nonexistence of glass artifacts —effigies or fluidics elements—until this stratum.” The scientists nodded, conceding the logic of his assessment.
Kat was gesturing to another wall, urging Rosie, “Set to record at peak resolution! This is wonderful!”
A mural ran from the door almost to the glass kiln. Unlike the parade on the ramp wall, this wasn’t a catalog of ancient N’lac triumphs. This was more recent history, of what happened when N’lac civilization fell, of enslavement and escape. And of what the N’lacs had escaped from.
Repressing a sickened shudder, Dan stared at the vivid, life-size images of N’lacs, demon robots, and their masters.
Despite Praedar’s warnings about jumping to conclusions regarding alien motives, Dan couldn’t resist the temptation. The masters in these pictures were evil. And they were even more repulsive than what he’d imagined while listening to Sleeg’s tales. The N’lac artists who’d painted the mural were talented, and their abilities hadn’t yet been dulled by a hostile, oxygen-thin atmosphere.
Monsters! The Evil Old Ones! And their demons—hideous robot copies of their awful masters. Enslaved N’lacs cowered beneath wispy insectile tendrils—nonanthropomorphic appendages. No wonder the Evil Old Ones needed humanoids to be their hands!
At one side of the continuous picture, elegant N’lacs were shown amid grandeur, at the height of their culture. Then they were depicted being sucked into a central frame dominated by Evil Old Ones. They became smaller. Their hands enlarged. Their eyes became myopic, protruding. At the side nearest the outer door, escaping slaves swam through the Big Dark. Their bodies seemed to melt and fragment. Nearer the door still, the many-fathers-ago emerged into a realistically-drawn T-W 593 desert scene.
Two figures in that segment caught and held Dan. An adult N’lac male, genetically altered but not yet suffering the extreme effects of altitude disease, rested his webbed hand atop a youngster’s head and pointed to the central box. Dan didn’t need a translation. “Remember, my son, these terrible things. The Evil Old Ones bred us like beasts for their cruel purposes and punished us with their robots. Be ever on guard, lest they return.”
An unpleasant tingling sensation was working its way from Dan’s soles to his scalp. It was a lot stronger than the psychological effect, as Kat pegged it, that happened when he touched the ramp paintings. He wasn’t touching the mural.
Chuss and Meej had crept into the room. They squatted before the pictures. Fear was a scent, radiating from the young N’lacs. But they seemed unable to break away from its spell.
The scientists argued about the mural, the so-called kiln, and why Chuss’ people had ut
terly abandoned the domes. Not only that, they apparently had fled from this part of the river valley and had located their village far upstream, where Praedar had found them when he first arrived on this planet.
Chuss and Meej echoed all the N’lacs’ attitude toward the recently uncovered domes—part reverent awe, part angry fear.
Dan didn’t blame them. He felt the same. The mural scenes left him full of shivering dread. All of that central panel, with its awful portraits of the Evil Old Ones, was too damned alien! He’d prided himself on being a child of the stars, a true spacer, capable of handling anything the sectors could throw at him. But he wasn’t sure he could handle those nonanthropomorphic things, even as static, lifeless depictions on an ancient wall.
That annoying tingle he’d sensed earlier was increasing. He dug his fingernails along his forearms, raking irritably. Invisible insects were squirming under his skin. By now, other Terrans were affected by the same scratching urge; the Whimeds, Vahnajes, and Armilly reacted, too. Chuss and Meej scratched listlessly, as if not aware of their actions. Was the sensation caused by a dormant fungus they’d all stirred up when they’d trooped into this long-unused area?
Abruptly Praedar exclaimed, “I must tell Chen!” He wheeled and hurried out of the mural room.
A safety tether seemed to bind him to the other offworlders. As one, they followed him. Chuss and Meej remained by the wall, entranced.
Driven by an impulse he couldn’t name, Dan rushed out into blazing midmoming sunlight. Momentarily stunned by the glare, he blinked, getting his bearings. Praedar was already halfway along the cross-valley path leading to Chen’s museum dig.
“Come on!” Sheila cried. “Let’s hear Chen’s reaction!”
Scratching, tagging in a line like mindless geese, they all dogged Praedar’s steps.
A rational fraction of Dan’s brain told him to stop. This was stupid. What the hell was the matter with him? With all of them?
Ahead, cool beneath his canvas work awning, Chen sat at the edge of the deep-strata excavation and examined the latest treasures he’d fetched from below. As the mob approached him, the Oriental squinted at them curiously. Praedar took long strides, shouting, eager to share his discovery with his old friend.
The insects-under-the-skin sensation rose to an unbearable level.
And as it did, the planet scratched itself. It heaved, undulating.
Dan and the scientists were hurled off their feet. Praedar attempted to crawl, still trying to reach Chen’s dig. The quake knocked him back down—hard.
Chen, being seated, was riding out the ground waves with less trouble than his colleagues. His expression was one of bemused astonishment.
The earth shuddered again and again.
Dan, not knowing why, raised his eyes to the top of the cliff, to Hanging Rock. The boulder that had perched there since time immemorial was teetering, a building, breathtaking rhythm to its motion.
Then it was leaning farther and farther inward, toward the valley.
“Shree! Shree! Shree!” Panic-stricken cries echoed from the N’lacs’ village. Their high-pitched shrieks warred with the deep thunder of the quake and the groans of that rocking monolith above.
Dan felt the same helpless horror as the primitives. Unable to move, he clung to the bucking ground and watched the inevitable happening.
Time crept, defying his certain knowledge of how Hanging Rock must be falling.
With enormous, deadly beauty, it dropped, accompanied by an entourage of smaller stones and a hail of crumbling dirt.
The landmark smashed onto the museum pit, completely covering the excavation. Amid a gentle rain of sand and pebbles, it settled into its new site. The boulder now sat at the junction of the eastern valley’s paths—a sentinel guarding the entrance to the N’lacs’ village.
The canvas awning, the specimen tables, the collection case, j and Dr. Chen were gone, buried beneath kilotons of stone and earth.
CHAPTER NINE
Colleagues or Antagonists?
Reality and unreality were frighteningly mixed. The past, present, and future blurred and shifted. Dan was simultaneously an observer and a participant. He saw Praedar burrowing furiously at the edge of the museum excavation. The Whimed roared in futile rage at the thing that had killed his friend. He struggled to free Chen’s corpse. Dan, along with many others, was beside Praedar, digging with his bare hands, banging his knuckles painfully against Hanging Rock. And he was fighting tears, an agonizing lump filling his throat.
Instantly, it seemed, it was later. He was operating the dredge, sucking away dirt, knowing it wouldn’t matter.
Hanging Rock settled deeper with each load of soil the dredge removed. All they were doing was embedding the landmark farther.
Sheila and Joe shut off their remote med monitors. “No signs of life. No purpose in digging him out. Let him be...”
Years reversed, and Dan was on Alpha Cee Settlement, with his siblings and Reid. Fiona McKelvey’s wasted body was at rest at last. The lingering xenovirus that had attacked her before Dan was bom had claimed another victim. A physician consoled her family, saying “It was very sudden. She didn’t suffer...”
As Chen hadn’t suffered?
Then Dan was atop the cliff, picking over the spot where Hanging Rock had been, seeking answers and finding none. Baines was blaming himself. “There’s just no reason! That thing was stable. On bedrock. And there was no identifiable epicenter on that quake. It came from everywhere at once! None of this should have happened!”
Kat was weeping, clinging to Sheila and Rosie, wailing “It’s not fair! He can’t have died like this!”
Praedar sat by Hanging Rock. He had been there for hours, motionless, inconsolable, untouchable, as Reid had been, when his wife had died.
Dan was watching them both, the big Whimed and his father, two beings he wanted to help and couldn’t. Aching for them, and for himself.
And then he was elsewhere in the space of a heartbeat.
There was darkness—the Big Dark—numbing cold, and the mind-boggling expanse of stellar distances. He was melting, fragmenting, as the N’lacs had, transferring from one dot in infinity to another in a nanosecond. He wanted to know method, locations, vectors, and coordinates. But the form he inhabited understood none of those things. He was with a band of fleeing slaves, seeing through alien eyes, reliving their experience.
Then towering, ropy excrescences surrounded him, looming over him. He tried to scream. No sound came from his mouth. He couldn’t move. He was trapped by the Evil Old Ones, who preyed upon humanoids, taking them to unknown regions to serve as hands.
Their demons confronted him, too, shiny caricatures of their loathsome masters with lifeless, glittering compound eyes, scanning, on the lookout for disobedient slaves to punish.
Wispy insectile limbs reached for him, threatening to enfold him. His gorge rose as instinctual revulsion racked him.
Then the Evil Old Ones and their robots changed, becoming a giant boulder, falling toward him. Dr. Chen sat beside him, oblivious to the danger. The old man was poring over his finds from the N’lacs’ museum.
Dan struggled to warn him, to escape.
Hanging Rock was falling, falling, closer, closer!
“Dan! McKelvey! It’s okay!”
Panting, his pulse roaring, Dan sat bolt upright. One of the student xenoarchitects was leaning over him, gripping his shoulders reassuringly and repeating “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
With a groan, Dan buried his face in his hands, then swung his legs over the side of the bunk. He sat there sucking in air, quieting the triphammer pace of his heart. Finally he managed to say, “B-bad one. Thanks.”
“You must have been wrestling Procyon Five octopi,” the student said lightly, plainly relieved the pilot was getting back to normal.
“Worse! Much worse.” Dan stared dully at the shimmering spray bandage covering his raw knuckles. That much hadn’t been a dream; he had hurt his hands while digging at H
anging Rock.
Deciding he was fully awake, the student retreated to his lab and resumed work. Dan watched his rescuer through the nearby door, uncaring what he saw, marshalling energy. It was several minutes before he stumbled to an adjacent soni-shower and cleaned up. Grit and grime—leftovers from the efforts to extricate Chen’s body—were ground into his pores and beneath his nails. He let the vibrations work him and his clothing over thoroughly.
Feeling slightly fresher, Dan wandered through the complex, still not too certain where he should be going. His head wasn’t functioning in full gear yet. Around him, scientists continued their feverish preparations for the Assembly. The tragedy hadn’t altered the schedule. On the contrary, it gave new impetus to the expedition. They agreed Chen deserved that, as a memorial.
Dan noticed Kat and Sheila in one of the insta-cell’s offices and stepped in. He looked on as the women sorted through Chen’s personal belongings, separating personal articles from professional mementoes. Kat showed a set of solid opics to the blonde and said, “Praedar will probably want to keep this, don’t you think? It’s souvenirs of their first dig together.”
Sheila nodded. “Put it with that stuff from their Institute days. I think I’d better pitch these clothes, or feed them to the recycler. They’re too threadbare to save.”
“Sad,” Dan said, shaking his head. “All that’s left of his life.” They eyed him sharply. Both were visibly weary, but they reacted with remarkable patience. “No, he left much more,” Kat said gently. “An enormous body of work and the friendship of everyone he ever worked with, ever helped. That’s thousands of beings.”
“Including me,” Dan admitted. He fingered the boxes of opics and trinkets—curios, an unusual potsherd strung on a thong so it could be worn as jewelry, a yellowing program from the first Xenoarch Assembly Chen had attended, a comical clay model of him and Praedar side by side, their individual features exaggerated. “I feel cheated. You had a real chance to get to know him. I only got here weeks ago, was just finding the groove, and now he’s gone...”
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