De Bonneville’s blue eyes flickered open. “Good God. Malenfant. Have you any beer?”
“No. I’m sorry, de Bonneville.”
“You must get away from here. Your life is forfeit, Malenfant, if you confront the Breath of Kimera…” His eyes slid closed. “I did it. I… ”
“The Engine?”
“It was the water,” he said dreamily. “Once I made up my mind to act, it was simple, Malenfant… I just blocked the pipes, where they admit the water to the well…”
“You blocked the coolant?”
“All that heat, with nowhere for it to go… You know, it took just minutes. I could hear them crying and screaming, as the burning, popping yellow-cake scorched their bodies and feet, even as they thrust their tree trunks into the heap. It took just minutes, Malenfant…”
De Bonneville, limping on his already damaged legs, had escaped the well minutes before the final ignition and explosion.
“And was it worth it?” Malenfant asked. “You came back from the stars, to do this?”
“Oh, yes,” de Bonneville said, his eyes fluttering closed. “For he had destroyed me. Mtesa. If I die, his empire dies with me… And more than that.” De Bonneville tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was a mass of popping sores. “It was you, Malenfant. You, a heroic figure returned from the deep past! From an age when humans, we Westerners, strove to do more than simply survive, in a world abandoned to the Gaijin. You and I come from an age where people did things, Malenfant. My God, we shaped whole worlds. You reminded me of that. And so I determined to shape mine…”
He subsided, and his body grew more limp.
Dawn light spread from the east, and Malenfant saw a cloud of smoke, a huge black thunderhead, lifting up into the sky.
It was you, de Bonneville had said. My fault, he thought. All my fault. I was probably meant to die, out there, among the stars. It should have been that way. Not this.
He cradled de Bonneville in the dawn light, until the shuddering breaths had ceased to rack him.
The morning after the explosion, Malenfant was arrested.
Malenfant was hauled by two silent guards to Mtesa’s temporary court, in a spacious hut a couple of kilometers from Wanpamba’s Tomb, and he was hurled to the dust before the Kabaka.
His trial was brief, efficient, punctuated with much shouting and stabbing of fingers. He wasn’t granted a translator. But from the fragments of local language he’d picked up he learned he had been accused of causing the explosion, this great epochal crime.
Nemoto stood silently beside the Kabaka while the comic-opera charade ran its course. She did this, he realized. She framed me.
To his credit, Mtesa seemed skeptical of all this, irritated by the proceedings. He seemed to have taken a liking to Malenfant, and was shrewd enough to perceive this as an obscure dispute between Malenfant and the katekiro. Why are you involving me? Can’t you sort it out yourself?
But the verdict was never really in doubt to anyone.
When it was done, the Lords of the Cord came to Malenfant. Rope was looped around his neck, and he was dragged to his feet.
Nemoto walked forward, hunched over, and stood before him. In English, she said, “You’re to be treated leniently, Malenfant. You won’t be working the Engine. You’re to be cast—”
“Into the pit.” And then he saw it. “The gateway. You’re forcing me to the Saddle Point gateway. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
“You saw the light, Malenfant. If I thought that pressure suit of yours would fit me, I would take it from you. I would walk into the Engine of Kimera and confront the enigma at its heart, following those mysterious others who come and go… But I cannot. It is my fate to remain here, amusing the Kabaka, until the aging treatments fail, and I die.
“I had to do this, Malenfant. I could see your reluctance to go forward — even though you brought yourself here, to the center of things. I could see you could not bring yourself to take the last step.”
“So you pushed me. Why, for God’s sake? Why are you doing this?”
“Not for the sake of God. For history. Look around you, Malenfant. Look at the huge strangeness of this future Earth. Certainly the arrival of ETs deflected our history — and those exploding stars in the sky tell of more deflections yet to come. But no human has ever been in control of the great forces that shaped a world, of history and climate and geology; only a handful of us have even witnessed such changes.”
“If none of us can deflect history, you’re killing me for nothing.”
“Ah.” She smiled. “But individual humans have changed history, Malenfant — not the way I tried to, with plots and schemes and projects, but by walking into the fire, by giving themselves. Do you see? And that is your destiny.”
“You’re a monster, Nemoto. You play with lives. The right hand of this Stone Age despot is the right place for you.”
She raised a bony wrist and brushed blood-flecked spittle from her chin, seeming not to hear him.
He was overwhelmed with fear and anger. “Nemoto. Spare me.”
She leaned forward and kissed his cheek; her lips were dry as autumn leaves, and he could smell blood on her breath. “Good-bye, Malenfant.”
The cords around his neck tightened, and he was hauled away.
The rest of it unfolded with a pitiless logic. As a prisoner, condemned, Malenfant had no choice, no real volition; it was easy to submit to the process, to become detached, let his fear float away.
He was indeed treated with leniency. He was allowed to go back to his hut. He retrieved his EMU, his ancient pressure suit in its sack of rope.
He was taken to the rim of the central desolation.
There was a small party waiting: guards, with two other prisoners, both young women, naked save for loincloths, with their hands tied behind their backs. The prisoners returned his stare dully. Malenfant saw they’d both been beaten severely enough to lay open the skin over their spines.
I’ve come a long way, thought Malenfant, for this: a walk into hell, with two of the damned.
Once more he descended the crude spiral staircase.
Soon they were so deep that the circle of open sky at the top of the shaft was shrunk to a blue disc smaller than a dime, far above him. The only light came from irregularly placed reed torches. The stairs themselves were crudely cut and too far apart to make the descent easy; soon Malenfant was hot, and his legs ached.
The prisoners’ faces shone, taut with fear.
They passed two big exits gouged in the rock wall, one to either side of the cylindrical shaft. The air from these exits was marginally less stale than elsewhere. Perhaps they led to the great avenues from east and west that he’d noticed from outside, tunnels that led into the body of the hillside itself.
A hundred meters down, water spouted from clay founts, elaborately shaped, mounted on the walls. The water, almost every drop of it, was captured by spiral canals that wound around the shaft, in parallel to the stairway. The founts gushed harder as they descended — water pressure, Malenfant thought — and soon the spiral canals were filled with bubbling, frothing liquid, which took away some of the staleness of the still air of the well. But the founts and channels were severely damaged by fire, cracked and crudely repaired; water leaked continually.
Already he was hot and dizzy; a mark of the dose he’d already taken, maybe. He reached toward a canal to get a handful of water. But a dark bony hand shot out of the darkness, pushing him away. It was one of the prisoners, her eyes wide in the gloom.
Malenfant watched the narrow, bleeding shoulders of the prisoner as she descended before him. Here she was, going down into hell, no more than a kid, and yet she’d reached out to keep a foreigner from harm.
Deeper and deeper. There was no trace of natural daylight left now.
They reached a point where the two prisoners were released to a dormitory, hollowed out of the rock, presumably to be put to work later. Before they were pushed inside, they peered d
own into the pit, with loathing and dread. For here, after all, was the Engine that was to be their executioner.
And Malenfant was going on, deeper. The guards prodded at his back, pushing him forward.
At last the descent became more shallow. Malenfant surmised they were approaching the heart of the hollowed-out mountain. They stopped maybe fifteen meters above the base of the well. From here, Malenfant had to go on alone.
By the light of a smoking torch, with a mime, he asked a favor of the guards. They shrugged, incurious, not unwilling to take a break.
Malenfant pulled his battered old NASA pressure suit from its sack.
He lifted up his lower torso assembly, the bottom half of his EMU, trousers with boots built on, and he squirmed into it. Next he wriggled into the upper torso section. He fixed on his Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that he lifted his bubble helmet, starred and scratched with use. He twisted it into place against the seal at his neck.
The guards watched dully.
He looked down at himself. By the light of a different star, Madeleine Meacher had spent time repairing this suit for him. The EMU was a respectable white, with the Stars and Stripes still proudly emblazoned on his sleeve.
…But then the little ritual of donning the suit was over, and events enfolded him in their logic once more.
Was this it? After all his travels, his long life, was he now to die, alone, here?
Somehow he couldn’t believe it. He gathered his courage.
Leaving the staring guards behind, he walked farther down the crude stairwell, deeper toward the fire. The starring of his battered old bubble helmet made the flames dance and sparkle; it was kind of pretty. His own breath was loud in the confines of the helmet, and he felt hot, oxygen-starved already, although that was probably just imagination. His backpack was inert — no hiss of oxygen, no whirr of fans — and it was a heavy mass on his back. But maybe the suit would protect him a little longer.
He’d just keep walking, climbing down these steps in the dark, as long as he could. He didn’t see what else he could do.
It didn’t seem long, though, before the heat and airlessness got to him, and the world turned gray, and he pitched forward. He got his hands up to protect his helmet and rolled on his back, like a turtle.
He couldn’t get up. Maybe he ought to crawl, like de Bonneville, but he couldn’t even seem to manage that.
He was, after all, a hundred years old.
He closed his eyes.
It seemed to him he slept a while. He was kind of surprised to wake up again.
He saw a face above him: a dark, heavy face. Was it de Bonneville? No, de Bonneville was dead.
Thick eye ridges. Deep eyes. An ape’s brow, inside some kind of translucent helmet.
He was being carried. Down, down. Even deeper into the mountain of Kimera. There were strong arms under him.
Not human arms.
But then there was a new light. A blue glow.
He smiled. A glow he recognized.
Cradled in inhuman arms, lifted through the gateway, Reid Malenfant welcomed the pain of transition.
There was a flash of electric blue light.
Chapter 27
The Face of Kintu
Long ago, long long ago.
Kintu giant comes down from north.
Nothing.
No earths, no stars, no people. Kintu sad. Kintu lonely. Very lonely. Nothing nothing nothing.
Kintu breathes in. Breathes in what? Breathes in nothing.
Chest swells, big big big. Round. Mouth of Kintu here. Navel of Kintu there. Breathe in, big big big, blow in, all that nothing.
Skin pops, pop pop pop. Worlds. Stars. People. Popping out of skin, pop pop pop. Still breathes in, in in in, big big big.
Here. Now. The Face of Kintu. Here. See how skin pops, pop pop pop, new baby worlds, new life, things to eat. We live where, on Face of Kintu.
The Staff of Kintu. People die, people don’t die. Inside the Staff of Kintu. Happy happy happy. Live how long, long time, long long time, forever.
In future, long long time. Kintu throw Staff, long long way. Throw Staff where, to Navel of Kintu. People live on belly of Kintu, long long time, long long way, how happy, happy happy happy.
Everyone else what? Dead.
The transition pain dissipated, like frost evaporating. He felt the hard bulge of the arms that carried him, the iron strength of biceps.
His head was tipped back. He saw the white fleshy underside of a tiny beardless chin. Beyond that, all he could see was black sky. Some kind of wispy high cloud, greenish. A rippling aurora.
His weight had changed. He was light as an infant, as a dried-up twig.
Not Earth, then.
He could be anywhere. Encoded as a stream of bits, he could have been sent a thousand light-years from home. And because Saddle Point signals traveled at mere light speed, he could be a thousand years away from a return. Even the enigmatic Earth he’d returned to, the Earth of 3265, might be as remote as the Dark Ages from the year of his birth.
Or not.
Now a face loomed over him, as broad and smooth as the Moon, encased in a crude pressure-suit helmet that was not much more than a translucent sack. The face was obviously hominid, but it had big heavy eye ridges, and a huge flat nose that thrust forward, and a low hairline. Thick black eyebrows, like a Slav, wide dark eyes. Those eye ridges gave her a perpetually surprised look.
Her. It was a female. Young? The skin looked smooth, but he had no reference.
She smiled down at him. She was a Neandertal girl.
There was black around the edge of his vision.
He was running out of air. His suit was a nonfunctioning antique. It was all he had. But now it was going to kill him.
The girl’s face creased with obvious concern. She lifted up her hand — now she was holding him with one arm, for God’s sake — and she started waving her right hand up and down in front of her body. Those thick Russian eyebrows came down, so she looked quizzical.
She was miming, he thought. Pain?
“Yes, it hurts.” His radio wasn’t working, and she didn’t look to have any kind of receiver. She probably couldn’t speak English, of course, which would be a problem for him. He was an American, and in his day, Americans hadn’t needed to learn other languages. Maybe he, too, could mime. “Help me. I can’t breathe.” He kept this up for a few seconds, until her expression dissolved into bafflement.
With big moonwalk strides she began to carry him forward. Inside his bubble helmet his head rattled around, thumping against the glass.
Now, in swaying glimpses, he could see the landscape.
A plain, broken by fresh-looking craters. The ground was red, but overlaid by streaks of yellow, brown, orange, green, deep black. It looked muddy and crusted, like an old pizza. Much of it was frosted. From beyond the close horizon, he could see a plume of gas that turned blue as it rose, sparkling in the flat light of some distant Sun. The plume fell straight back to the ground, like a garden sprinkler.
And there was something in the sky, big and bright. It was a dish of muddy light, down there close to the horizon, a big plateful of cloudy bands, pink and purple and brown. Where the bands met, he could see fine lines of turbulence, swoops and swirls, a crazy watercolor. Maybe it was a moon. But if so it was a hell of a size, thirty or forty times the size of the Moon in Earth’s sky.
His lungs were straining at the fouling air. There was a hot stink, of fear and carbon dioxide and condensation. He tried to control himself, but he couldn’t help but struggle, feebly.
…Jupiter. Think, Malenfant. That big “moon” had to be Jupiter.
And if that was a volcanic plume he’d seen, he was on Io.
He felt a huge, illogical relief, despite the claustrophobic pain. He was still in the Solar System, then. Maybe he was going to die here. But at least he wasn’t so impossibly far from home. It was an obscure comfort.
But… Io, for God’s sake. In the
year A.D. 3265, it seemed, there were Neandertals, reconstructed from genetic residue in modern humans, living on Io. Why the hell, he still had to figure.
The blackness closed around his vision, like theater curtains.
He drifted back to consciousness.
He was in a tent of some kind. It stretched above him, cone shaped, like a teepee. He couldn’t see through the walls. The light came from glow lamps — relics of the high-tech past, perhaps.
He was lying there naked. He didn’t even have the simple coverall the Bad Hair Day twins had given him in Earth orbit. Feebly he put his hands over his crotch. He’d come a thousand years and traveled tens of light-years, but he couldn’t shake off that Presbyterian upbringing.
People moved around him. Neandertals. In the tent they shucked off their pressure suits, which they just piled up in a corner, and went naked.
He drifted to sleep.
Later, the girl who’d pulled him through the Saddle Point gateway, pulled him through to Io itself, nursed him. Or anyhow she gave him water and some kind of sludgy food, like hot yogurt, and a thin broth, like very weak chicken soup.
He knew how ill he was.
He’d gotten radiation poisoning at the heart of that radioactive pile. He’d taken punishment in the mucous membranes of his mouth, esophagus, and stomach, where the membrane surfaces were coming off in layers; it was all he could do to eat the yogurt stuff. He got the squits all the time, twenty-five or thirty times a day; his Neandertal nurse patiently cleaned him up, but he could see there was blood in the liquid mess. His right shin swelled up until it was rigid and painful; the skin was bluish-purple, swollen, shiny and smooth to the touch. He got soft blisters on his backside. He could feel that his body hair was falling out, at his eyebrows, his groin, his chest.
He was sensitive to sounds, and if the Neandertals made much noise it set off his diarrhea. Not that they often did; they made occasional high-pitched grunts, but they seemed to talk mostly with mime, pulling their faces and fluttering their fingers at each other.
He drifted through periods of uneasy sleep. Maybe he was delirious. He supposed he was going to die.
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