The Golden People

by Fred Saberhagen

  The yellow glow ahead was coming from inside a one-story building. The structure was of a simple, flat-roofed design, with doorways and windows open to the tropic night. It appeared to be constructed of the same rough stone as the low wall. There was a gateway in the wall now, and they passed through it, Adam still following his guide, toward the building's largest doorway.

  "Go inside," said the tympanic voice of Adam's guide, who had now stopped at a little distance to one side. "Go inside and look. I want to see what effect on your parapsych theories is had by the sight of a possible result. Did I phrase that correctly? I am not one who knows your speech behavior well. But go and look. Be my fellow scientist, hey?"

  Adam walked toward the open doorway at the center of the low building. Inside he could see a large, plain, stone-walled room, illuminated by the bright yellow glow that was coming from no visible source. The room contained nothing but a large, open pit or tank sunk into the middle of the floor and defended by a circular low wall.

  The sight of a possible result. The Field-builders' torture chamber, or one of them. Adam paused in the doorway, intuition whispering to him that in this room he was going to find the half-alive remains of Alexander Golden.

  He didn't want to see that. He hoped more fiercely than ever that the next teleportation jump would quickly come, come now, and take him out of this. But he made himself cross the floor to the low wall around the tank, and look over the wall and down.

  "They came in past the robot picket ships ten hours ago," said General Lorsch. For the first time in many days there was no tiredness in her voice. Her electronic pointer flashed as it marked the location of the sighting on the holographic model of the space around Golden. Around her the small, dimly lighted briefing room on the command deck of the flagship was quiet, the small group of people who filled it listening intently.

  "The pickets have been following them," the General went on, "and no doubt they are aware of that. Now they're within fifteen hundred kilometers of planet surface, and holding position there. We're going to surround them as best we can with our three manned ships, and then we're going to ask them some questions. Yes, Colonel, what is it?"

  Brazil stood up in the small group of senior officers present. "Ma'am, is an arrest certain?"

  Lorsch paused for just a second before answering. "I'd say almost certain. This is the Jovian ship, and it's illegal; we can't have people jaunting anywhere they like in starships, involving all humanity in God knows what.

  "I don't know if the Jovians intend to resist arrest. We don't know what weapons they may have. Considering their abilities, maybe something very new and very good." She looked around her solemnly. "We'll be three ships to one, but, frankly, this operation may develop into a battle. We must be ready for that."

  Another officer stood up. "Boarding parties, ma'am, I presume?"

  "Correct. Colonel Brazil is going to be in command of that part of the operation. Colonel, I want you to me right after this meeting."

  Me and my hotshot record, Boris thought, sitting down again.

  Adam stood looking down into the tank, feeling a kind of strained, puzzled relief, an anticlimax. Five meters below, an amphibious beast of a kind that he had never seen before splashed and wallowed in shallow water. There was nothing in the appearance of the beast to connect it with Alexander Golden, or indeed with humanity in any way; rather it looked vaguely like a seal. Assuming that the creature was native to Golden, it was hardly surprising that Adam had never encountered a member of its species before. Golden was after all an Earth-sized world, and he was now standing in a hemisphere of that world that had never before been explored by Earth-descended humans.

  There was a tiny splash in the water, just beside the seal-like creature. And then another splash and then another. Something, a slow hail of small objects, was falling into the tank.

  Adam looked up at a blank stone ceiling, close above. He could see the tiny objects materializing in the air now, a thin rain of them, looking like pebbles, coming out of the air under the low ceiling to fall and patter around the thing living in the tank. Suddenly, like an animated rubber toy, the creature stretched its body completely out of its old shape and into a new one, altering its form completely into something like that of an octopus. Still it never at any stage of the change looked anything like Alexander Golden, or any other human being of Earth.

  "Observe classic symptom of falling stones," boomed the guide's voice, from somewhere in the darkness outside the building. "But do you not detect the sickness? I thought you were a sensitive, teleporting as you were."

  Adam turned to face the wide dark open doorway. All he could think of was to try to change the subject. In his growing state of shock, ingrained planteering methods won out again. "Will you tell me your name?" he asked.

  "I am studying you, not the other way around. Co-operation, please."

  "I only want to—"

  Afterward Adam could not remember just what he had meant to say he wanted. He found himself sitting on the stone floor, with his back against the low wall that guarded the tank, and with no idea of how long he had been sitting there. He felt no pain and had no memory of any, but the feeling that he had driven his will into some analog of a stone wall, so that his will had been bent back upon itself. The effect was disorganizing, like an electric shock to the central nervous system.

  The guide's concussive voice, patiently curious, now repeated its question from the outer darkness. "Do you sense the sickness of the one in the tank? Answer, please."

  It seemed wise to avoid further argument. Adam got to his feet and looked into the tank again. No further change in the occupant was observable. "No. This being looks—strange to me. But I can sense nothing wrong, in the sense of sickness." Merit, Ray, where are you?

  They were nowhere, as far as he could tell.

  Could he somehow have missed, been left out from, a teleportation jump?

  If Adam's guide was aware of his efforts at telepathy, it did not comment on them. "That being in the tank has deformed itself," the creature outside in the night explained. "Crippled its mind and body, by using what you call parapsych forces in an attack upon another being. Such is the usual result of attempting such use—" The guide interrupted itself with a sudden skreeking noise. "Did you think he was one of your kind? Not so, he is one of mine, and this planet is his native world.

  Such as he are brought to this island to reach for health, and I am here to help them. I think you came here because of that, and because I like to think about your kind."

  Adam knew that straining anxiously for the teleporting jump would not help him to attain it. He strained anyway. He got nowhere.

  Again he tried to contact Merit's mind, or Ray's, and again he had no success.

  The guide asked him again, with patient interest: "Why do you of Earth destroy each other with such enthusiasm?"

  Trying to think of a reasonable answer, Adam for the first time and without trying caught a flash of the guide's mind; a glimpse not of black threatening, foreshadowing wings, but of something incomprehensible but magnificent. Adam's mind supplied the image of a carven alien palace.

  Was this a Field-Builder? But no, it couldn't be. Ray had been very vague in his physical descriptions of them, but he had said…

  Now that Adam tried to think of it, he could not recall that Ray had given any physical description of his enemies at all. But their minds, their minds as Ray had pictured them, were vats of sickness.

  Now the guide, with keen curiosity, was telepathically directing a question—Adam could not tell what question—to another of its kind. Adam sensed that other mind, too, for one instant, then both were gone from his perception. Through the open doorway he heard metallic scratching noises again, as his guide went moving away through darkness.

  Adam was left alone with the thing, the creature, in the tank. But do you not detect the sickness? He could not. Remembering his hallucination on the

  Stem City slideway, he closed
his eyes briefly; the low stone wall beneath his hands felt utterly and completely real.

  Opening his eyes, he saw a light outside the building, and for an instant interpreted what he saw as the dawn. But this was a much closer fire, not far outside the doorway now and moving nearer still.

  After another glance at the wallowing, stretching thing in the tank, Adam went to. the doorway and looked out.

  The fire came walking quietly around the corner of the building and toward him, in the shape of a tall man. A man being consumed steadily by flame, pacing toward Adam, who backed away mechanically, with almost no capacity left for astonishment. With dim horror Adam saw that the flesh was already charred away from the bones of the man's arms and fingers. The figure turned a blackened horror that was no longer a face toward Adam. Sound came from it, a parody of speech.

  Only then was Adam able to react with some semblance of purpose. He dashed back into the building, with the vague thought of somehow getting water to throw on the burning man, or some flame-smothering thing to wrap him in. But there was no way to scoop up water from the tank, nothing within his reach but stone, no way to help. The seal-like creature in the tank still sloshed gently, in water far down out of Adam's reach.

  Adam turned away from the tank and ran outside again. He was just in time to see the flaming figure collapse. There was no writhing in pain or shock; the body was simply too structurally damaged now to stand.

  As Adam watched the body shrivel on the sand, the next teleporting jump swept him up unexpectedly.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Colonel Boris Brazil had just left a last briefing session with the General, and now he was conducting a similar meeting of his own, meanwhile wondering in odd moments how he had ever managed to get himself into this.

  "We're about twenty-four thousand kilometers from them right now," he was telling the hundred potential space marines—most of them really planeteers—who sat in rows looking up at him. "We're keeping station. And they're just sitting there, eight hundred klicks directly above the Ringwall. They won't answer us, but they certainly know we're here. In a few hours we're going to start closing in on them from three directions, and do whatever we have to do to get their attention one way or another. If it does come to a fight, and the General does decide on a boarding action— well, you and I are elected."

  The hundred faces arrayed before him were all sober, and the great majority of them were young.

  They asked him silently: Are you going to be able to lead an operation like that? What do you know about it? How many of us are going to get killed?

  Boris went on: "I don't need to tell you that a genuine battle would be something new for all of us. I've been in a little fight or two, here and there. And I did get a high score the last time I played at maneuvers with robot ships, if that kind of thing reassures anyone."

  His audience relieved him somewhat at this point by managing a faint perfunctory laugh, and he went on. "All right—let's see who among you had the highest ratings in boarding techniques, last time you practiced. Anybody with A-one, raise your hands. Good. How about A-two?"

  In a matter of minutes he had squad leaders chosen. Dismissing the rest temporarily, he called the handful of squad leaders, a much more manageable number, into a smaller meeting to sketch in a tentative battle plan.

  "We have half a dozen yesmen available for what look like the dirtiest jobs. So I'm going to volunteer six people, I want you to suggest names, for the comparative safety of puppet chambers aboard this ship."

  Wish I had Adam Mann here for this job, Brazil thought to himself. He was remembering that first geryon hunt here on Golden, with Mann in the puppet chamber then. That seemed now like so many years ago.

  Adam came out of the last teleportation jump into broad daylight, standing almost upright at the bottom of a ravine overgrown with low vegetation. He staggered, off balance for an instant, crashing through bushes of unfamiliar types. The sky visible above the steep sides of the ravine was a clear blue, with a few clouds in it red-tinged by a sun quite low in the sky. The time was either shortly after dawn, or late in the afternoon.

  There was a sound like steady thunder, coming from somewhere in the middle distance.

  No one else was in sight.

  Adam started up one side of the ravine. When he had climbed a few meters he could see drifting, mountainous clouds of spray in the lower sky ahead of him, and he knew that he was very near the Ringwall now. The thunder in the air must issue from the vast falls and rapids of its surrounding rivers.

  He climbed all the way up the side of the ravine, and stopped. He could see now that he was standing about halfway up the side of a larger slope. All along the wide valley below him, a wild nameless river tore itself over kilometers of rocks. Above the river's opposite shoreline, rainbow-haunted clouds of mist climbed steadily, as if impelled by a rising wind. The clouds were ascending a steep, barren slope, kilometers long, to fog the morning sky above the Ringwall itself.

  Built atop that long opposite slope, the outer cliff-face of the Ringwall went curving and angling away from Adam in both directions. It had a look of unreality, like a surrealist painting on a stage backdrop; yet it was real. Flying birds were distant specks between him and its bulk.

  And it was not really a cliff face, or at least it was not completely natural. Looking at it this closely, from this angle, Earthly eyes could at last be sure of that. The Ringwall was at least in part deliberate construction, made according to some intelligent design.

  There were outcroppings, along its top and upon its flanks, with lines as straight as those of any structure ever built on Earth, their shapes suggesting turrets and battlements. There were calculated niches, and true columns, and real buttresses, appearing here and there along the length and height of that awesome wall. In the blue-shadowed recesses between the larger projections there might be room for small villages—but Adam knew somehow that villages would not be there.

  The Ringwall. Adam Mann looked down at the foot of its island, then looked up, up a kilometer and more, at the face of the wall itself. He could see now how a million niches and a million windows of various depths and shapes had been cut into the white or brown or gray rock. There were streaks of pure crimson, straight or in perfect curves, that ran among the openings and marked the joinings of stone blocks whose sides were measurable in hectares. Trees grew on the wall in places, miniature forests less like window-gardens than like moss upon a castle wall.

  Adam thought of the thousands of pictures taken from Space Force scoutships, ships driving or floating six hundred kilometers or more above this scene. No telescopic camera had been able to see detail anything like this, not through the eternally rising mist and through whatever it was that fogged the films in infrared. Not simple heat, apparently. Adam, at his distance on the ground, could feel no radiant heat.

  There were certainly structures on Earth at least as high as this one. There might be one or two as big, measured by volumes and distances. Measured by sight and feel, there was nothing to compare with it.

  Adam tore his eyes away from the Ringwall at last. On his own side of the river he scanned the long bushy slope, cut with small winding ravines, that extended for a great distance to his right and left. He was looking for his companions, and once he began actively looking for them he quickly spotted Ray. The huge man, his body tiny against the backdrop of the river valley, was standing some distance below Adam, on a little rocky plateau directly above the river's edge. Ray had his back turned to Adam, and was gazing steadily across the river, up to where the giants' stonework waited.

  Adam cupped his hands to his mouth, but the yell he had been about to utter died in his throat. When he looked at Ray more closely, he saw that Ray was standing firmly in midair, his feet half a meter above the rock.

  It was no news to Adam that Ray Kedro had the power to do such things; but the sight of a para-psych trick now, here in the face of the enemy, gave Adam a sense of something indefinably wrong. W
as the trick meant to impress someone? The Field-builders? If not that, what?

  Adam looked around again in all directions, but could see nothing of either Merit or Vito. He turned and scrambled back down to the bottom of his small ravine, then followed its sinuously eroded curve down the larger slope toward Ray. Adam had lost his weapons, his food, and his canteen, but such losses might not matter much. Not if they could quickly complete whatever job Ray had in mind…

  Adam halted for a moment, closing his eyes. For the first time, doubt came over him with dizzying force. What job did Ray expect to do here, exactly? No one knew that but Ray.

  And Adam hurried on. Yes, complete the job—or quickly abandon the attempt, Adam thought to himself—and jump out of here again within a few hours.

  He wondered at himself, as he trotted down the ravine. Why had he ever agreed to come here? Three men, one woman, against…

  Against what, exactly? Adam thought of the creature who had spoken to him on the island, and of the burning man he had encountered there.

  If it had been anyone else but Ray who had suggested that four of them come here and attack the Field-builders, Adam would have called it madness. But because it was Ray…

  And then I even used what we call projection to present our case, Ray had said to him once. That method gives me very considerable powers of persuasion.

  Did Ray actually mean for only the four of them to—

  Adam stopped again. Somewhere down the ravine ahead of him, a woman was wailing. It was a low sound, expressing terrible grief. Slowly Adam moved forward. A terrible buried suspicion was rising in his mind, and he could not yet let himself see exactly what the suspicion was.