Dryland's End

by Felice Picano

  Rinne remembered now. “In fact, Lady Todd, Wicca Eighth sent out an exploration party to a Seeded World in the outer arm named Pelagia. The party contained Ay’r Sanqq’, and one aim of the expedition was to bring back Ferrex Sanqq’.”

  “Damn that witch!” Llega Todd had a temper. “I’ll equip an armed Fast for you. You must go and find them first! Don’t dally, Rinne. This is of crucial importance!”

  Less than an hour Sol Rad. later, as Rinne was strapping into a Fast lounge, Llega Todd comm.ed her. She seemed a bit more relaxed.

  “As usual, Mart Kell is a step ahead. He already has provided us with a link to Wicca’s expedition. He goes by the name of P’al. He’s a longtime MC Official, and one of the Quinx’s most productive spies. He will be your contact. Here is the last set of transmission coordinates Lord Kell received from him. Seek him out and bring back that family we so want to meet.”

  “Yes, Lady Todd.”

  “And, Rinne, don’t take no for an answer. What happens now on Pelagia may well turn out to be of the utmost importance if we are to have any kind of future at all.”

  Chapter Nine

  “He’s coming to now,” Ay’r heard Alli Clark’s voice saying.

  When he opened his eyes he was looking directly up into the early afternoon Pelagian sky. Given the angle, he was in the backseat of the shuttle.

  “We’re approaching Fifty-Fifty soon,” P’al said, obviously piloting. “Is there something for him to drink?” Ay’r heard Oudma ask.

  “Apologies, Ser Kerry,” P’al said. “I was led to believe that you were hysterical. I found it necessary to use a rather primitive, but effective nervepinch technique for inducing instant relaxation. It was utilized in hypnosis in early Metro.-Terran times.” He spoke in a casual tone.

  “I’m not hysterical now,” Ay’r said. If anything, he felt vague, still drowsy.

  Oudma’s face was suddenly above him, helping him to sit up, offering him a sip of liquid protein from the shuttle’s emergency supplies. In her eyes, in the look on her face, in her entire attitude was something new. Ay’r didn’t know what it was: then he thought he did – a combination of awe, possibly even fear of him, and at the same time a realization. Or was it resignation? Of what? Whatever it was, he felt – no, knew – they would never again be as they’d been before.

  “They’re following my brother,” she said quietly, soothing Ay’r.

  “The optical scout picked up their pod’s trail,” Alli Clark said smugly. “We know exactly where they’re taking ’Dward. We’ll get him back.”

  Oudma looked less convinced. After Ay’r had drunk his full, she moved away, sitting next to her father.

  “But, first, we’re going to look at Fifty-Fifty, whatever it may be,” P’al said. “Despite your own recent experience with the local archaeology, it should be directly below us.”

  “The Fast sent out six more optical scouts,” Alli Clark said. “Four joined the first one and two are below. Did you figure out what was at the ruins in the swamp?”

  So that was that! ’Dward had been kidnapped, and now it was back to what the Metro.-Terrans had called “business as usual”! Ay’r had made his decision back there in the Great Cold Swamp – a decision of impulse, really – and now he would have to live with it. Ay’r heard himself groan in despair at the unfairness of it all.

  “I thought you said he wasn’t hurt!” Alli said sharply to P’al.

  “I’m not!” Ay’r was forced to say. At least he wasn’t, outwardly.

  But before he could explain that, Alli began coming at him with questions: What had he and ’Dward seen and why had they concluded the ruins predated the early Boglanders who had lived in the area? Under such a barrage, after a while, haltingly, Ay’r found himself answering her. The vast size of the stones themselves, the fact of the stones being there at all in that land of water and hummock and deadly root-trees was so unlikely that the Boglanders couldn’t have put them up. Now P’al took over, drawing him out, and Ay’r told them about the deuterium radiation and what it might mean, but that it might also be nothing more than chance, happenstance that some still-blazing chunk of sun-hot star from a local supernova had landed exactly there.

  And all the while, in his mind’s eye, Ay’r was reliving that moment of decision. He could see ’Dward’s face suddenly understanding what the noise of the Gods’ T-pod was and the strain as ’Dward began running toward Ay’r. He remembered that earlier moment when the white root had attacked the little fishlike creature and killed it so efficiently, so grotesquely, and ’Dward’s face revealing his sudden and complete realization that being beyond the familiar, the known, might not turn out to be all “good,” as he’d declared in the pod, but would expose him to sights, to experiences, he couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  Talking to Alli and P’al, answering their questions as best he could about that fishlike creature, about the root-trees, all of it, Ay’r could still feel ’Dward’s horror and surprise as he turned to run, could still feel his own guilt for exposing ’Dward to abduction, however unwittingly. Above all, he remembered that terrible moment when he realized he was facing a choice: he could save Oudma and the T-pod or ’Dward. Not both. He knew he had frozen then, like a Cyber given conflicting commands, unable to choose. He understood that he had never chosen at all, really, but had been stung into action; that proximity and impulse alone had made him leap toward the pod, forever abandoning ’Dward. Poor ’Dward! What had he felt seeing Ay’r turn away and lock himself in the pod. He must have taken it for the choice Ay’r knew it wasn’t. Abandoned, helpless, he had fallen back from the deadly roots, only to be paralyzed by the Gods’ nerve gas. Alone. Helpless. Inert. Ay’r found himself wishing he could go back and undo what he had done. At the same time, he guessed that he’d freeze up once again – once again probably do exactly the same thing.

  “Look over the side,” P’al was saying. “You can just make out what’s there. See! Directly below us. All around, really!”

  To distract himself from the awful memories, Ay’r looked outside the shuttle. Ocean water below: pale blue with undefined shapes beneath. To their left – north – three kilometers distant, the sweep of a spit of land.

  “I’m not sure I see anything beneath us,” Ay’r said truthfully.

  “It’s pretty deep.”

  “Let’s have the Fast provide us with a holo from one of the scouts,” Alli Clark suggested. “Project it upon the back wall of the shuttle,” she ordered.

  Ay’r moved from the long, curved backseat, and all but Alli Clark, who had now taken over as pilot, spun their chairs to face backward.

  A dark, murky, watery scene appeared.

  “I’ll try to opaque the back of the shuttle for a clearer picture,” Alli said.

  “That’s better,” P’al said.

  Yet the holo was still murky and rather dark. Only now Ay’r could make out the shirred surface of the sandy sea bottom and, embedded within it, blocks of stone similar to those he and ’Dward had seen in the swamp.

  Ay’r looked at Oudma and ’Harles, grieving silently. They blamed him, he knew. How could he ever be able to explain to them what had happened? Or worse, to ’Dward himself? If, that is, he ever saw ’Dward again.

  He had to stop thinking of this, concentrate on what was going on now. At this moment.

  “Can you make out any carvings on those stones?” he asked the Fast.

  “Not from what I have. But you’ll notice, Ser Sanqq’, that these stones are much more exposed than those you had seen, which appeared to be merely tips and tops. These are more complete.”

  The holo switched to the view from the second optical scout, apparently in another undersea area. The stones it displayed were far less spread out, much more jumbled together. Taller, too. They must be enormous.

  “Are those arches within the tallest stones?” P’al asked. “Especially in that series to the left? They seem to have fallen in a row!”

  The scout came close
r to the row of stones, revealing not arches, but what might have been oddly shaped wide passageways through the stone blocks.

  “Could other material which eroded long ago have gone through what we’re seeing as passages, connecting them and holding them up?” Ay’r suggested.

  “Perhaps,” P’al admitted. “But look there! And there, too! How the stones’ surface seems smoother, almost as though it had been rubbed over a period of time.”

  Slowly, by hints and suggestions, theories and ideas, Ay’r began to form a concept of the ruin. First: it was enormous, covering several score kilometers. Second: it had sunk or been flooded all at once; the regularity of algae and barnacle life proved that. Third: those great blocks of stones had fitted together without other materials and had formed specific structures, chambers, and galleries, each edifice several stories tall and tapering as it rose. Fourth: whatever life had built and/or once inhabited the ruins either had been very grand and pretentious, or simply physically large.

  The Fast was listening to P’al’s and Ay’r’s speculations and on its own began to chart out what its scouts were seeing: putting together a jumble of fallen stones into patterns it alone perceived, all the while experimenting, and realigning it all. The shuttle had flown several kilometers farther out to sea, so that even the spit of land which had served as a guidepost was now merely a line on the horizon when the Fast asked if it might present “a working draft in rough” of its concept of what the ruins might have looked like before disaster had befallen.

  The scouts’ “live” pictures vanished from the holo and were replaced by a ghostlike reconstruction in pale yellow and gray lines and solids. There, recognizable, were the hollowed-out vertical stones, no longer fallen like a row of dominoes, but standing up, side by side, connected by some sort of semitransparent membrane. In addition were chunkier, more-solid-looking blocks, arranged irregularly around the length of the taller stones, looking like chambers of some sort, and finally were the wide, flat stones, most of them completely flat on the ground, with other ones angled up as ramps and broken-off ramps.

  The Fast explained that it had analyzed the three types of stone by shape, cut, relative position to each other and to other stones. It called the wide, flat stones – even those which formed ramps – “pavement.” It called the tall stones with their strange passageways “galleries,” or corridors connecting to the far-larger, curved-wall “chambers.”

  As it was presenting its chart, the Fast reported that a minute before, one stone of the ruined gallery had fallen, possibly affected by a change in the water’s current brought on by the motion of one of the optical scouts. In the fall, the ruin had cracked off a section of stone. This would enable the scout to be able to thermoluminescence-date the interior of the stone and compare its outside with its inside.

  ’Harles Ib’r had been staring wordlessly at the holo-images of the Fast’s hypothesized reconstruction of the ruins. Suddenly he sighed and said so quietly that they had to ask him to repeat himself, “We’ve found the Sunken City of Dy’r.”

  “Tell us about Dy’r,” P’al urged.

  “The Boglanders sing of it in their legends. But it wasn’t their city, and no Boglander ever saw it sink into ruins. It was spoken of only by the elders, and this was when I was a youth. Nowadays, I doubt there are any who know of it, except perhaps Legend-Collectors.”

  “Tell us more,” Alli prodded ’Harles.

  “The elders spoke of Dy’r with hesitation, with reverence and fear. It was supposed to lie near where we are now – in the Far Eastern Archipelago. It had been discovered many generations before by exploring Boglanders, long before the Great Falling Inward, long before the great trek. Even then, the legends said, few ever came so far from the Boglanders’ original land to visit Dy’r’s ruins beneath the waters.”

  “But ... who lived in Dy’r?” P’al asked.

  “No Hume. Dy’r was in ruins long before Humes existed on Dryland. Before” – ’Harles corrected himself self-consciously – “before your Seeding of us took place. One bold Boglander of old was said to have asked the Voice and Eyes. It told him that the Sunken City had existed since the beginning of all things. It was older even than Dryland.”

  “Thirty million Pelagian years old, to be precise,” the Fast interrupted. “At least, that’s what both the thermoluminescence dating and the probe’s radiocarbon dating of the life-form remnants within the newly broken ruins say.”

  “And on the exterior of the stone?” P’al asked.

  “The earliest life-form remnants the scout could date on the exterior are from about the same era as the ruins which Ser Sanqq’ inspected.”

  “Only a few thousand years old,” Ay’r said. “Speculate, Fast.”

  “The age of the interior life-forms is truer to its age since the exterior would be more exposed to weathering and other erosion.”

  “Speculate!” Ay’r tried again.

  “Do you really want to know what I’m thinking about these ruins?” the Fast asked.

  “I asked, didn’t I?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Override discretion circuits,” Ay’r said.

  “Well, if you insist. Those stones were quarried and cut some thirty million years ago, right here on Pelagia. Their makeup is identical to that in many mountainsides. Furthermore, this once was a city – or at least what its inhabitants might call a city. The complexity and regularity of the working draft I displayed on the holo is repeated with only subtle modifications in every spot the scouts have visited through the extent of the ruined area.”

  “Then it is the Sunken City of Dy’r!” ‘Hales looked outside the shuttle down at the ocean.

  The Fast replied, “Very possibly, it did sink. Or rather, the land upon which it was built, now many fathoms beneath the ocean, either sank or was flooded. And Ser Sanqq’, I postulate that the ruins which you located in the swamp were an outpost of some sort. There might have been many such outposts, surrounding the city, but I suspect most of them are underwater or under swampland now. Not being as large as these ruins, they would be more difficult to locate. I did as you instructed, Ser Sanqq’, and scanned all the holos relayed by the scouts, looking for writings or carvings. There are no signs of writing, but the scouts did pick up a series of markings upon many stones, especially those which I’ve theorized were pavement, and – at a single and specific height – in the ruins of what I hypothesized were the galleries. The particular scheme of the markings is far too regular to be accidental. Repetitions of certain marks and spacings between the marks are very suggestive that the markings were made deliberately. Look!”

  On the holo a close-up of one stone, upon which the barely visible and much ocean-eroded markings could be seen, enhanced by holo-outlining. The most obvious thing about the markings were that they weren’t linear, so much as curved into arcs.

  “Irregular ellipses, actually, which also was suggestive,” the Fast corrected.

  “They weren’t read, but felt?” Ay’r asked.

  “Very good, Ser Sanqq’! That’s what I’ve come to believe. Felt by one particular limb or part of the body. The head or some organ on the face. I’ve gone through all the notated languages in the known galaxy stored in my circuits, and the closest one to this I can come up with is ancient New Venice’s Sonara tongue. In other words, the marks represent not words as we – and the Delphinid and Arthropod species – understand them, but sounds. Grunts, moans, clicks, clucks, sounds.”

  “Delph.s would make sense on a world with so much water,” Alli Clark offered.

  “Except, Mer Clark, that thirty million years ago only about twenty percent of Pelagia was water. And none of it in large enough sections to breed a Delphinid population of any real size. Nor, as your own findings showed, was this area included in that earlier ocean.”

  “The shape of the passageways through the galleries isn’t Delph. design,” Ay’r said. “Also, we’ve established that this ruined city, Dy’r,
was above-ground.”

  “True,” the Fast said. “Even after several millennia of being sunken, the ruins’ interior shows incomplete permeability. And the life-forms inside the stone, although microscopic, were once aerobic; they didn’t breathe water, but air.”

  P’al asked, “If the inhabitants weren’t Humes or Delph.s, what were they?”

  “Given the size of the galleries and chambers, the smallness of the plazas, the largeness and predominance of what I call ramps, they were larger than Humes, but not by much. Given the enormous amount of ventilation within the chambers, they were neither mammalian nor insect. Neither species sleeps or even hibernates, needing large supplies of air. Given the height of the buildings and the fact that they rise several floors and exit on top, as well as the fact that from above, looking down, the rooftops are oddly placed in relation to neighboring buildings, if sometimes only by a quirk; given several other factors I’ve considered, I posit that the inhabitants of Dy’r were – birds!”

  “Intelligent birds!” Alli Clark scoffed. “That would be a first.”

  “I told you you wouldn’t like it.”

  “I can accept the fact,” Ay’r said. “For one reason, it would explain why there are no birds at all on Dryland, not even in the Bog or the Delta or the Swamp, where they should be prevalent.”

  “Explain,” Alli Clark said.

  “If reptiles or saurians were the earliest dominant creatures on Pelagia, then selective evolution would have been most intense among them. As one line evolved far more rapidly than the others, finally achieving intelligence, manual skills, and eventually language, that line would have eliminated all others of its genera – in the way that ancient Humes were said to have eliminated all competing primate lines.”

  “Go on,” P’al said, seeming interested now.

  “We know that the so-called Terran dinosaurs were so successful a group that wherever they succeeded in evolving, they lasted a long time, then managed to wipe themselves out. They developed rich social lives, began to travel in vast herds, learned how to nurture and protect their young, even how to fight off predators. Meanwhile, the combination of their exhalation and enormous waste matter as well as the limited plant life meant that pollution and eventual starvation were inevitable.”