by Allen Wold
The wounded Tathas did not die. In time they would re-grow like amoebas, becoming two or more individuals as each fragment regenerated the missing parts. But for now they were out of the fight. Their pain, which Rikard could telepathically feel, prevented their continued participation. And their minds, as degenerate and degraded as they were, were a product of the whole body, not just a localized brain. As they were cut apart, their intellectual capacity was accordingly reduced.
He felt every blow he struck. His involuntary telepathic reception of their thoughts and feelings brought him their every sensation. Only his hatred, disgust, and fear kept him slashing.
That and me realization that this was what Sed Blakely had left his father to face. He wished now that he'd killed the old hermit, or better yet, could bring the lunatic here to throw to these monsters.
The effort was exhausting, and he was still surrounded by the violently wriggling fungoid beings, but at last he regained the chamber where he'd first been attacked. He could go back now to the collapsed cellar.
Instead, he went on in the way he had been going before the Tathas had come upon him, fighting the fungi every step of the way. He could not have much farther to go. The Belshpaer had not built these cellars as a maze, but to serve some useful purpose. However much they differed from humans, they were virtual brothers compared to the Tathas.
In that light, their behavior made perfect sense. However strange they might seem at first, they could be understood, given time. Between humans and Tathas, however, there could never be common ground.
There had to be a way up and out, and soon. Because, in a larger sense, the Belshpaer were like humans. They would not have built these cellars without handy and easy means of access. That Rikard had not found a way out so far was merely accident, and the result of ruination.
He caught his breath, then continued forward. He fought with renewed vigor and determination. The Tathas gave way, fell back, retreated, broke, fled, and were gone. Ahead of him was an empty corridor. At its end the light of his torch revealed a stairway going up.
4
The sunlight, when he came to it, looked so good that for a moment he had to blink his eyes to keep the tears from blinding him. He was in another ruined cellar, but only a meter or so below street level. There were piles of rubble handy for climbing. He wiped his eyes and clambered up onto the road.
He decided to keep the crystal sword. He was sure to meet more Tathas later, and it would come in handy. The juices of the Tathas had stained the transparent blade blue-black. It shimmered darkly iridescent in the sunlight, a fantastic and poisoned sword. Feeling like some ancient warrior, Rikard strapped it carefully to his waist with his belt.
Now he had to find out where he was relative to the Tower of Fives. He didn't know how far he had wandered from his course while underground. It had seemed a long way, but anxiety, fear, and excitement had magnified things. He would have to scout until he saw the Tower again, and not make any assumptions as to his position or the distance from his starting point.
As it turned out, the assumptions he did have were all wrong. He had gone a very long way underground. The Tower was no longer ahead of him, but 120 degrees to his right.
He was able to keep it in sight the rest of the day. Toward dusk, climbing over one last pile of rubble, he came to a plaza across from which stood the Tower itself.
It was a tall building, as tall as anything elsewhere in the Federation. Its base occupied several hectares. Its walls were smooth and straight and unbroken for at least fifty meters. He could see no doors.
There had to be access. It would be around one of the other sides. Rikard chose left, and started to circle.
The sun was sinking. The side of the Tower he had first approached was the only one clear of rubble. His progress was further slowed by the deepening shadows on the piles of debris. He could wait until morning, but he was determined to find a way in tonight. In spite of his fatigue, he could not rest until he had entered the Tower.
Had he gone right instead of left, he would have come to the door sooner, but he did find it. Rubble had fallen in front of it, but the expedition of four years ago had moved much of it away. He stepped down into the cleared pavement and approached the door. It was latched but not locked. He swung the portal open and stepped in.
The foyer was dark but not empty. He switched on his torch. Piles of broken furnishings lay on the floor. Three statues of Belshpaer in various forms of dress stood on low pedestals. Thinking of the live Belshpaer he'd seen, Rikard thought these statues were commemorative rather than representative.
There was plenty of evidence of the expedition's presence. Footprints in the dust went everywhere. If his father had left tracks eleven years ago, they had been obliterated.
He went from chamber to chamber, examining the floor for tracks that might have been laid down earlier than four years ago. Most of the prints were thinly overlaid with new dust. Older ones should be distinguishable.
Near the center of the building, as far as he could judge, was a bank of five great elevators, which no longer functioned. Maybe it was this which had given the Tower its name.
There were also at least three sets of stairways, leading upward only. One of these was a utilitarian service stair near the central elevator bank. The treads were strange, to accommodate the Belshpaer's rotating mode of locomotion. Another was formal and ornamental, rising from what might have been a ballroom, looking like other such stairways Rikard had seen. The third was a narrow back stair off in a comer of the building.
The marks in the dust indicated that the archaeological expedition had concentrated its efforts on the upper floors. But Sed Blakely had implied that he had abandoned Rikard's father to the Tathas, and they dwelt belowground. The Belshpaer, too, had said that the "parent place" was "far deeply." Rikard looked for a way down. He entered a large chamber, illuminated by the golden light of a dragon.
He froze for a moment, then drew his gun. A thrill of fear ran through him. But it wasn't the same fear he'd felt in the presence of the Tathas. In fact, the sensation wasn't really fear at all. It was simply his perception of a huge, static field. It was the dragon itself he was feeling. The physiological sensations were so similar to fear mat that was the way he— and everybody else—interpreted it.
The dragon was dangerous nonetheless. If he touched it, or if it touched him, Rikard would be killed. A static field mat large couldn't help but be fatal if grounded through a human body. It would be like being struck by lightning.
He stood motionless, gazing at the dragon, feeling that he'd achieved some kind of new understanding of what dragons were. It was a living thunderbolt. It still gave him the impression of being serpentine, but it wasn't really that. It was a spherical field of energy, yellow-orange, with no hard edges. It was immaterial, and therefore transparent. It was highly energetic, and therefore it glowed.
The points of light tumbling over each other in its middle were its version of bones, its real body. The rest was merely an envelope which it could extend as pseudopods in any direction. The shimmering above and behind it, which were seen as wings, was a diffraction and reflection of the light emitted by the creature itself.
Only the eyes were material. This creature would not normally perceive the world in any fashion analogous to the senses of humans. Even the Tathas had physical senses.
The dragons, however, would be aware of a different order of energies. Its eyes had been created solely to enable it to deal with the sense of sight, which perhaps was not natural to it. In their own world, of energies rather than objects, the dragons would have no need for sight. But this was not their own world. However long they had been here, the dragons were only visitors.
The eyes looking at Rikard hinted at the possibility of intelligence and sentience. Then the dragon moved.
It came toward Rikard slowly. Maybe the presence of a dragon didn't automatically strike fear, though that might be the usual interpretation of the sens
ation of its static field, but that did not mean Rikard could afford to be casual in the dragon's presence. One touch would kill him regardless of the dragon's intelligence or intentions.
He backed away out of the hall. He tried to retrace his steps toward the front of the building, but the dragon moved quickly between him and the door. It forced him to take another way. It was herding him, guiding him. Rikard wondered if it knew its touch meant death to him, or cared.
He went, perforce, where the dragon seemed to want him to go. He went down a corridor, through several large rooms, across a large hall, and up another corridor. At last he came to the head of a stair going down.
He started to descend, then noticed the footprints in the dust. He forgot about the dragon and bent to shine his light on the marks.
They were older prints than those elsewhere in the building. They had twice as much dust in them as those made by the archaeological expedition of four years ago. There were three sets, two leading down, one coming back up.
He remembered the dragon then, and looked up to see how near it was. The dragon was gone.
5
He had been asking the wrong people all along. The dragon had guided him here and then left him. It had known where Rikard wanted to go. A new kind of fear touched him. How had the dragon known?
The tracks in the dust on the stairs were very plain. The story they told was every bit as clear. He followed the prints down to a cellar, through a vaulted room, to another stair, then down again, and yet again, deep into the earth under the Tower of Fives.
Seven levels down were all Belshpaer cellars, but the footprints went on into an irregularly circular tunnel that sloped still deeper. The walls were dark and metallically iridescent.
He stepped into the tunnel. He felt, very strongly, the pain of the light, the need to be alone, the desire to wait forever. He hurried. He got a mental image of strange monoliths off on the sides, but there were only the walls of the tunnel, which frequently branched. He felt a dark sky overhead, but it was only the roof of the tunnel. The footprints went on.
Suddenly the walls of the passage became white. The oppressive sensations ceased. He was in a lower Belshpaer chamber, maybe part of the Tower, maybe part of an adjacent building. He no longer felt an aching loneliness. Instead he felt a subtle sense of competency and calmness. It was oddly reminiscent of what he had felt in the presence of the dragon— once he had realized that the "fear" was really only static electricity.
These cellars, though of Belshpaer construction, were much older than anything Rikard had seen before. The walls were bleached bone, coarse and porous and stark white. These were ruins below ruins, a lost place buried by the lost civilization mat had risen above it.
All three sets of footprints went on. The feeling of competence and calm slowly faded as he followed them. He went down a level, wondering how his father had found this place. Rikard had no doubt that it was his father's tracks he was following.
He knelt to examine the tracks more closely. The two men had worn different kinds of boots, and their marks were easily distinguishable. One kind of track went both down and back. The other kind went down only. The man who'd come back had been in the lead going down. His prints were overlaid by the prints that did not return.
And then Rikard saw that there were other sets of tracks under these, obscured by them and the dust of at least a century. He couldn't tell how many sets there were, but some were going in each direction.
Blakely had returned, and Blakely had led Rikard's father here. He must have heard a story from some old prospector. With Arin Braeth's information and encouragement, he had remembered that story and led him here. Someone else, long since dead, had stumbled on this place by accident and had lived to tell about it, though he might not have understood the true significance of his find, nor have been believed when he told his tale.
Rikard stood up, and a wave of exhaustion swept over him. It was long past nightfall. His watch read one. But he could not stop now. He followed the tracks on down to yet a lower level, across a room, and up a short hall. He came to a huge chamber with a high ceiling. It was filled with dead machines which cast shadows so thick he couldn't see the far wall.
The Tathas effect was strong again. The dark metallic marks of their presence lay on everything. Even the footprints had been wiped away. But Rikard could see that Blakely's footprints did not cross that chamber. He had waited here before turning back.
Rikard took off his belt and wrapped it around the handle of his crystal sword. Then he stepped into the machine room. He saw, superimposed over the machines and hulks, a gray and plastic plane, plastic monoliths standing at odd angles, strangely apertured heaps of gray stone, wire trees made of plates and bars, artifacts of indecipherable form and function.
There were no Tathas here now, which suited Rikard just fine. He wanted to be alone. He gripped his crystal sword and shone the light ahead of him. It hurt his eyes and skin and smelled acrid. He worked his way across the chamber, past the illusory landscape of gray emptiness.
He dreaded contact with anything—Tathas, human, dragon. The light struck a far wall. He wanted to slow down and wait, not hurry so. He forced his feet to move.
A Tathas stood at his left, as tall as he, its gray-white fibers a loosely tangled basket weave in imitation of a man. Rikard pointed his sword at it and hurried to the wall. The Tathas did not follow; the sensations eased a trifle.
There was a door in the wall just to his left. He went to it and stepped through. The superimposed Tathas world faded away.
He flashed his light back across the machine room. From here he could see the door at the other side. A person could toss something across the room from here to the door at the other side if they tried.
He turned away from the Tathas place. He was in-a short corridor. The floor was free of dust, except at the edges. Someone walked here almost every day.
His excitement nearly choked him. He went up the short hall to the door at its end and opened it into light.
Someone was living here. There was furniture, knocked together out of scrap and ruin. Lights burned in the ceiling, from what power source Rikard could not guess. A door on the other side of the room opened, and a man stepped out.
Part Nine
1
The old man froze when he saw-Rikard. He was old more with hardship than with time. His hair was white, his beard full and gray. But Rikard knew his father's face, even after thirteen and a half years.
Rikard tried to speak, but his voice wouldn't work. There were too many conflicting emotions—anger, relief, exhaustion, hatred, joy. His vision blurred. His father was staring at him, afraid, surprised, wondering.
"Rikky?" the old man asked. His voice was choked. "Is that really you?"
"It's me Father," Rikard said.
Then suddenly they were in each other's arms, hugging, crying, slapping, shouting, laughing, kissing, all tangled up in each other.
"Oh, my God, Rikard," his father said, holding him at arm's length. "It is you. It really is."
"Father, are you all right?"
"Well, under the circumstances, yes."
They laughed and cried and hugged some more. When the first shock wore off at last, they sat and told each other how they had each gotten here.
Arin Braeth was deeply saddened, but not surprised at the news of his wife's death.
"I hadn't intended to be gone so long," he said. "It took me longer man I had planned to track this place down, but I could have come home in a month if it hadn't been for Blakely. He was going to pull me out with a rope, but he left instead."
"He's still alive," Rikard said, "and I know where he is. I'll take you to him when we get back."
"Yes, I'd like that. Who's your partner?"
"A guy named Stefan Dobryn. He got hurt on our way here. I left him camped in the ruins."
"There's nobody else with you?"
"Not here, no."
"Then you're trapped too."
"Maybe not. Some friendly Belshpaer tried to give me advice on how to get out of here. I'll have to try it once or twice before I figure out what they meant."
"But the Belshpaer, aren't they extinct?"
"Apparently not. I've met several. They know who I am, and who you are too, for that matter. They seem to think I'm some kind of savior. I don't know what they've been doing with themselves for all these years, but I think they finally want to come out of hiding.
"But that will have to wait until we get out of here, and I'm not going to try for our escape right now. I'm exhausted. And we have too many things to talk about."
That talking, covering only the high points, took until six in the morning. His father told of how he had deduced the existence and presence of the dialithite and had traced it here, but the last eleven years had been spent in simple survival.
"And the dialithite made that possible," Arm explained. "You've seen it? You've touched it? Then you know that feeling of peace and power it gives. That, and only that, kept me from losing my mind, kept me from giving up."
"But how did you live? I mean, power and food?"
"The Taarshome. No, I'm not crazy. There are none here now, but later there will be. Their time sense is different from ours. I'll show you one. And if you tell me then that I'm crazy, I'll believe you. But withhold your judgment until I have a chance to prove myself."
Rikard's story took most of the time. Arin wanted to know everything, how his son had gotten on after his departure, how Sigra had died, Rikard's education, his trip as an exploiter, how he'd traced Arin's movements here, and all that had happened since his arrival on Kohltri.
"You know I always wanted you to be a Gesta," Arin said, "and by God, you sure have the makings of one."
