by David Geary
"No." There would have been other effects, advance indications, orbital irregularities. There was none of that. "No," she said. "I have no explanation. But that doesn't mean we need to bring in malevolent agencies."
"Who said malevolent?" asked Hutch.
They exchanged looks, and Angela let the question hang. "It's reacting to something. Has to be. Magnetic fields, maybe. Maybe there's been a solar burp of some kind. Hard to tell, sitting down here." She shrugged. "We'll just have to wait and see."
"Angela," said Hutch, "Is this thing like a cloud? Chemically?"
"Yes," she said. "It's constructed of the same kind of stuff as the big clouds that stars condense from: particles of iron, carbon, silicates. Hydrogen. Formaldehyde. And there's probably a large chunk of iron or rock inside."
Hutch tasted her coffee. It was spiced with cinnamon. "There were concentrations of formaldehyde," she said, "in the soil around Oz."
"I didn't know that," said Angela. "Is that true?"
"Yes, it is."
She looked out at the sun, which was still high in the southwest. It was only marginally closer to the horizon than it had been when they arrived.
"So how does it brake?" asked Hutch again.
Angela thought about it. "One way would be what we've seen: to hurl material outward. Like a rocket. Another way would be to manipulate gravity fields."
"Is that possible?" asked Carson.
"Not for us. But if anti-gravity is possible, and the evidence suggests it is, then yes, it could be done." Angela fell silent for a few moments. "Listen: let's cut to reality here. Just the existence of this thing implies wholesale manipulation
of gravity, of tidal forces, and of damned near every other kind of force I can think of. It's almost as if the thing exists in a dimensional vacuum, where nothing from the outside touches it."
"Almost?"
"Yes. Almost. Look: there are ftvo clouds. Let's assume both were traveling at the same velocity when they entered the planetary system. They should have broken up, but they didn't. The one on the far side of the sun is moving more slowly than this one. That's as it should be, because it's contending with solar drag, while our baby here is getting pulled along as it moves toward the sun. So there is some effect. But don't ask me to explain it."
Angela drifted out of the conversation while she watched the object, and the readouts. The cometary tail, which (in obedience to physical law) was leading the object, had become harder to see as the head turned toward them. Now its last vestiges virtually disappeared into the red cloudscape. After a while she turned back to them. "It's coming here," she said.
They watched the image. Watched for the tail to appear on the other side. It did not.
Their eyes touched. "Target angle stable," she added.
Hutch paled. "When?"
Carson said, "This can't be happening. We're being chased by a cloud?"
"If it continues to decelerate at its present rate, I would say Monday. About 0100."
"We'd better let Terry know," said Carson. "Get them back here and pick us up."
Hutch shook her head. "I don't think so. They're moving away from us at a pretty good clip. My guess is that it will be noon Sunday before they can even get turned around."
Bedtime. Angela noticed Hutch in front of a display, her expression wistful, perhaps melancholy. She sat down with her. "We'll do fine," she said. "It can't really be after us."
"I know," said Hutch. "It's an illusion."
The screen was filled with poetry.
"What is it?" Angela asked.
"Maggie's notebooks." Her eyes met Angela's, but looked quickly away. "I think there was a lot about the woman that I missed."
Angela's gaze intensified, but she didn't speak.
Hutch brought up a file. "This is from Urik at Sunset."
It was a group of prayers and songs celebrating the deeds of the Quraquat hero. Epic in tone, they retained a highly personal flavor. "Urik was to be experienced up close," Maggie commented in the accompanying notes, "and not from a distance in the manner of terrestrial heroes."
She went on: "Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters."
And, finally, a prayer that seemed particularly pertinent:
My spirit glides above the waters of the world, Because you are with me.
They looked east across the sky. It will come from that direction. Over there. It would come in over the coffee-colored sea. If the sun would set, which of course it won't for several more days, they'd be able to see it now. "It'll probably become visible during the next twelve hours," Angela said.
What was the old line from the Rubaiyatl
But who was now the potter?
And who the pot?
The snowfields were broad and serene.
Delta. Friday, May 20; 0900 hours.
Hutch was not happy. "What are our options?" she asked.
"How about clearing out now?" suggested Carson. "Get in the shuttle and go. Get away from Delta altogether."
Angela considered it. "I don't think the odds would be good. The shuttle was designed for ship-to-ship operations. It was never intended for use in gravity wells. It doesn't have much power. We can't really get clear, and I don't think we want to play tag with that monster. No. Listen, it's moving pretty slowly now. I suggest we stay where we are. Go around the other side of the world and hide."
"I agree," said Hutch. She depolarized the viewing panels, letting the red daylight in. "We know there were survivors on Quraqua and Nok: these things don't kill everybody. Let's just dig in."
"Listen," said Carson, "is it really going to score a direct hit on usT'
"Yes," Angela said. "I don't think there's any doubt about
it. It'll come in about thirty degrees off the horizon, and it'll land right in our coffee. Incidentally, its timing is perfect. If it were a little earlier, or a little later, it wouldn't have a clear shot at us. At the mesas, I mean."
Carson's stomach tightened. Its timing is perfect. "Okay," he said. "Let's make for the other side. Let the moon absorb the impact. After that happens, we clear out. If we can." His face was grim. "So now we know about Oz. It was intended to draw the goddam thing. I can't believe it. The sons of bitches deliberately arranged to bomb the civilizations on Nok and Quraqua. They must have been psychos."
"Let's talk about it later," said Angela. "We've got things to do."
"Right," said Carson. "Let's start by rearranging the cameras to get the best record we can."
"There is something else we could try," said Hutch. "Maybe our blocks worked better than we expected. We could blow them up. Pull the bait out of the water."
Angela shook her head. "I don't think it would matter now. It's late. That thing is coming for dinner no matter what we do."
The outermost moon in the system orbited the gas giant at a range of eighteen million kilometers. It was little more than a barrel-shaped rock, with barely the surface area of Washington, D.C. It was a fairly typical boulder, battered and ill-used. An observer in that moon's northern hemisphere would, during these hours, have been looking at a fearsome sky, a blood-red sky, filled by a vast fiery river. The river knew no banks and no limits: it drove the stars before it, and even the sun was lost in the brilliance of its passage.
30.
Delta. Saturday, May 21; 1010 hours.
They watched the dragon rise, a massive cloudbank, swollen and infected. Streamers and tendrils rolled toward them, over the eastern horizon.
The cameras had optical, infrared, X-ray, and short-range sensor capabilities. They were state-of-the-art stuff, but Hutch didn't think they were going to last long when things began to happen.
They picked three sites, each a half-kilometer outside the general target area. Two were on high ground. They slipped the cameras into makeshift housings, and bolted the units into the ice. One was set to track the approach of the dragon, and the others to scan the target area.
> When they'd finished they ran tests, adjusted the power cells, and executed a successful drill from the cockpit. Afterward, they retired to the dome for a turkey luncheon. Hearty meal, thought Hutch. Good for morale.
They cracked a couple of bottles of Chablis, and made jokes about the weather.
No one had much appetite. In a world that had lost its anchor to reality, it was hard to get seriously involved with a turkey sandwich. Anything now seemed possible.
Long ago, when she was nine years old, Hutch had gone with her father to see Michael Fairish, the magician. It had been an evening filled with floating cabinets, people getting sawed in half, and a black box that yielded an unending supply of doves, rabbits, and red and white kerchiefs. Priscilla Hutchins had tried to fathom the methods used by the magician, but she had been astonished time and again. And although she knew that trickery was involved, that magic wasn't real, she had nevertheless lost touch with the physical
world, and reached a point at which the impossible failed to surprise her.
She was at that point now.
After dinner, she went outside and sat down in the snow. She let the alienness of the scene suck at her, as if it might extract some hidden part, and infuse a portion of itself, a particle of enchantment that would re-establish a cable to comprehension. It was almost as if this world had been placed here exclusively for her and her companions, that it had waited through billions of unchanging years for precisely this moment.
The others joined her after a while, en route to other tasks, but they too paused in the growing radiance of the thing in the east.
Ashley continued to relay updates on the dragon, which was still running hot and true. Drafts was sliding from professional acceptance to near-panic, and had begun urging them to use the shuttle to get off-world. Janet, who had perhaps been through too much with Hutch and Carson, merely told them she knew they'd be okay.
After a while, they got up and straggled over to the shuttle. They disconnected the 1600 and carried it inside the dome. Not that it would matter when the fire fell out of the sky.
They began packing.
"I don't think we should wait until tomorrow," said Angela. "I'd feel better if we cleared out tonight."
"We live better here," said Carson. "There's no point in scrunching up in the shuttle for an extra day." He went inside and came back with more Chablis. To prove the point.
So they waited under the hammer and debated whether they would be safer on the ground or in the air at the moment of impact. Whether it wasn't paranoid to think they were actually being chased by this thing. ("It's not us" each of them said, in one form or another. "It's seen the mesas. It's the mesas it's coming after.") Whether, if they made a run for it, the object would adjust course again and come after them. Them, and damn the mesas. After a while, despite the tension, Hutch couldn't keep her eyes open. No one went to bed that night; they all slept in the common room, stretched out in chairs.
Hutch woke, it seemed, every few minutes. And she decided, if she ever went through anything like this again (which she would, but that's another story), she'd by God, clear out at the first hint of funny business.
Somewhere around five, she smelled coffee. Angela held out a cup.
"Hi," said Hutch.
The dragon was an angry smear in the sky.
"I'll be glad," said Angela, "when we're out of here."
There was a ring around the sun, and a thick haze over the plain. A half-moon had broken through in the southwest.
Fresh snow lay on the ground when Angela and Hutch came out of the dome, carrying their bags. There were a few flakes in the air. "It's frustrating when you think about it," said Angela. "Cosmic event like this, and we have to go hide on the other side of the world."
Hutch climbed into the shuttle. "I suppose we could stay, if you insist," she said.
"No. I didn't mean that." Angela handed her bags through, took her place at the controls, and studied her checklist. "But I wish we had a ship, so we could lay off somewhere and watch the fireworks." Hutch activated the commlink, and picked up the feed from Ashley. The dragon blinked on. The view wasn't good now because the ship was very distant. And still retreating.
Angela thought the main body might be more than a million kilometers behind the forward spouts. Yet the mind still saw it as a thundercloud. An ominous thundercloud. Belching and roiling and flickering. But still only a thundercloud. She tried to imagine a similar visitation over the Temple of the Winds. What would a nontechnological race have made of this harpy? And she wondered about the Monument-Makers. Why had they sicked it on that unfortunate race? And left their final ironic taunt? Farewell and good fortune. Seek us by the light of the horgon's eye.
And, in that moment, she understood.
The comm panel blinked. "Incoming," said Angela.
David Emory's face blinked on. "Hello, ground station," he said. "What's happening? Do you need help?"
Relief and pleasure swept through Hutch. "David, hello. Where are you?" But he did not react. She watched and counted off the seconds while her signal traveled outward to him, and her newborn hope died. He was too far away.
Carson climbed through the hatch. "I see the cavalry has
arrived," he said. "Where are they?"
David broke into a wide smile. "Hutch. It's good to see you. I'm on the Gary Knapp. What is that thing! What's going on?"
Hutch gave him a capsulized version.
"We'll get there as quickly as we can."
"Stay clear," she said. "Stay clear until the dust settles."
By mid-morning they were in the air.
They all watched the dragon: Emory on the Knapp, Janet and Drafts on Ashley, and Carson's group in the shuttle.
The pictures now were coming from the Knapp. They were clearer than anything they'd had before. Delta resembled a child's ball floating before a cosmic wall of black cloud.
They were about to be swallowed.
Enormous fountains of gas and vapor billowed away; vast explosions erupted in slow time, as if occurring in a different temporal mode. Fiery blossoms disconnected and drifted away. "It's disintegrating," Angela said. "It's moving quite slowly now, and I'd guess it's thrown off seventy percent of its mass. It's coming here, but afterward it won't be going anywhere else."
They'd left the plain and its mesas behind, and were gliding above a nitrogen swamp, bathed in the shifting light. Carson was in the right-hand seat. He kept making remarks like "My God, I don't believe this," and "No wonder they all got religion."
Gales battered the craft. Hutch, in back, wondered whether they'd be able to stay in the air. She watched the pictures coming in from Knapp. "The gas giant's tearing it up," she said, straining to make herself heard over the wind. "If we're lucky, maybe there won't be any of it left when it gets here."
"Forget that idea," said Angela. She took a deep breath. "It's a Chinese puzzle. Have you noticed anything odd?"
Carson studied the display. "Have I noticed anything odd!" He stifled laughter.
She ignored the reaction. "No quakes," she said.
"I don't follow."
But Hutch did. "It's fifteen hours away. Does this place have plates?"
"Yes."
She looked at Carson. "A celestial body that close should be raising hell with local tectonics. Right?"
"That's right." Angela poked her keyboard, asked for new data. "If nothing else, we should be getting major tidal surges." The swamp had given way to a mud-colored sea. Thick, slow waves rolled ashore. A few meters higher up, the rock was discolored. "That would be high tide," she said. "This doesn't look like anything unusual."
"What's the point?" asked Carson.
"The point is that these oceans, even these kinds of oceans, ought to be jumping out of their beds. Hold on." She opened the Knapp channel, and asked David to get readings on the positions of the satellites. While she waited, she brought up the entire file on the gas giant and its family of moons. She establis
hed orbits, computed velocities, and calculated lunar positions.
When the ship began relaying its information, she checked her predictions.
Tau, the misshapen rock at the edge of the system, had strayed out of its orbit. But by only about four hundred kilometers. Negligible. Rho was two hundred kilometers in advance of her predicted position. Everything else, within tolerances, was correct.
The sun was rising again as the shuttle gained on it. They were moving out over a gasoline swamp. Behind them, the sky burned.
"It's not solid," said Hutch.
"That's right," Angela announced with finality. "It's a dust cloud, after all. Has to be. There might be a solid core in there somewhere, but it must be small."
"But a rock," said Hutch, "even a big rock, isn't going to hold that thing together."
"That's right, Hutch. Find the glue and win yourself a Nobel."
Sunday; 1146 hours.
The thing on the monitors seemed like a visitant out of the old tales. A messenger from the Almighty. Carson wondered what the skies had looked like over Egypt on the first Passover? What the weather report had been for Sodom? What they'd seen from the walls at Jericho?
Something deep in his instincts signaled the approach of the supernatural. Out here, pursued by an apparently angry cosmic anomaly, watching it close in, Carson was getting religion.
He made no effort to shrug the idea off; rather he aggressively entertained it, wondering where it might lead. Might beings with cosmic power actually exist? If they were confronting one here, it was manifesting a disquieting interest in the more primitive races. A stupid god, driven to destroy right angles. A thing dispensing serious trouble to those who defied the divine edict to build only in the round.
He scanned through the religious and romantic art of Nok and Quraqua, as recorded in Maggie's records, looking for correlations. He found some. Here was a cloud demon of terrifying similarity to the thing in the sky. And there, a dark god with red eyes and lunging talons emerging from a storm.
1411 hours.
Lightning flickered through the gasoline-drenched skies. Ethyl rain swept in torrents across the windscreen, and clung to the shuttle's wings. Angela would have gone higher, above the atmosphere, but the turbulence was strong, and intensifying. She was not certain she could make it safely back down when the time came.
