Jewels of the Dragon

by Allen Wold

"I don't know how long it will last."

  "What does it matter? Be what you want. Then you will be a Gesta, in the truest sense of the word, though mere are few who will understand that. I've had a lot of time for meditation, Rikky, and rightly or wrongly, I see things a bit differently these days."

  At last Rikard could stay awake no longer. Arin made up a bed for him in another room, and Rikard fell asleep at once. He dreamed he was in his backyard on Pelgrane.

  He awoke with his father's hand on his shoulder.

  "A Taarshome is here," Arin said. "Come talk with him."

  Rikard got up. He'd slept about five hours; it was enough. He followed his father into the main room and then up a side corridor to another, larger chamber. In the middle was a great golden glowing dragon.

  "This," Arin Braeth said, "is a Taarshome."

  2

  The dragon floated quietly in the middle of the chamber.

  "Don't touch it," Arin said, "or you'll fry."

  "I know that much. I've seen them up on the surface. One of them guided me to the stairs down to here. But how do you know it's a Taarshome? They were supposed to have disappeared from the galaxy millions of years ago or more."

  "They have come back. You can learn to talk with them if you have patience and time. I have had plenty of both. I could probably teach you a lot faster than it took me to learn."

  "And they provide you with food and power?"

  "Yes. I can't explain how. All I know is they found me down here about ten days after Blakely ran off. He'd taken all the food, and I was in pretty poor shape.

  "And I was lucky. Taarshome don't see the way we do, even with eyes, and have trouble knowing just exactly where we are. Apparently, our energy envelope is very weak and small. This one here has learned to perceive our physical shape, but it's as hard for him to see us as it is for us to see him."

  "Him?"

  "Well, I call him that. Actually, they're neuter. Parthenogenesis when it's necessary. Anyway, the dragon didn't touch me. Which was lucky. But it perceived that I was dying and figured out a way to get food to me. It's quite nourishing, but I'm sure glad you brought some human food with you."

  "Couldn't they help you get out?"

  "Not the way they come in. They follow the electrical wiring down from aboveground."

  "Eyes and all?"

  "The eyes have to be remade each time."

  "How about leading you across the Tathas chamber?"

  "They could only do that by touch, and that would kill me instantly. They don't handle physical matter much. They can, but it's an advanced technology for them. Something like pulling on a rope requires as much ingenuity and effort for them as constructing a plasma bottle would for us. And there are few of them here who have any interest in me personally, though they are very interested in humankind— and in the Belshpaer too, for that matter."

  "So you were stuck."

  "As you see. But life hasn't been a total bore. Not quite. Learning to talk with the Taarshome took much of my time after I recovered my strength. I lived in darkness for, I guess, two years before I got across to them that I wanted light. Food they understand. They have a direct analog. But light to see by is totally alien to them. They always see, in some sense or other, regardless of the surrounding medium or en­ergy field.

  "But I learned something else. I came here for the dial­ithite, and I found it. Lots of it. What Blakely didn't know was mat the bag full I threw out to him was only the first installment. He didn't wait around long enough for the other twenty-some bags."

  "My God!"

  "And I stopped at that only because I'd run out of bags. There's enough dialithite here to bring the value down to around a hundred thousand a gram, if it were all taken out. I wouldn't do that, of course.

  "And the thing is, I know how dialithite is made. If you can bring a mass into contact with one of those central glowing spots in the middle of a Taarshome's body, you produce a bit of dialithite, provided the material is a nonconductor, relatively dense, and has the energy to penetrate their body."

  "Does it hurt them?"

  "God, no, they love it. Why?"

  Rikard told them about shooting a dragon in the clearing in the woods, and the sparkling dust that had fallen from it.

  "Probably tickled it silly," Arin said. "Come on, I'll show you the dialithite mine." He crossed the room to a far door. The dragon followed.

  Beyond the door was a hallway, broken by some shifting of the earth. Where the hallway came to an abrupt end, a rough cavern opened out. It was not very large, only forty meters wide and thirty meters across and about three meters deep.

  Across the bottom of the cavern was a fissure, glowing with its own light. On the rough floor, on either side of the fissure, were piles of dialithite stones, heaps and mounds, glinting and shimmering.

  "All the treasure anyone could want," Arin said softly. There was no trace of avarice in his voice.

  The dragon came out of the hall behind them. It carefully avoided them, flew out into the cavern, and hovered a moment over the fissure in the floor. Then it plunged down into the volcanic recess. A moment later it came up again, brilliant, glowing, huge. Several sparkling dialithite crystals fell from it to the cavern floor. They dislodged others, which fell into the crevice and were gone.

  "They've been doing this ever since they came back two thousand years ago or so. The stones there represent only a fraction of what they've produced, inadvertently, over that period of time."

  Rikard gazed at the treasure and was overwhelmed. He had to take his mind off it. "You say I could learn to speak with them?"

  "The Taarshome? Yes. They've learned the trick now, so it shouldn't take too long to teach you the method."

  They went back to the chamber where they'd first met the Taarshome. It followed them. Arin stood in the middle of the room, facing the Taarshome. He seemed to flicker. Then he turned to Rikard and held out a hand.

  "Come here," he said, "and I'll teach you."

  Rikard stood beside his father, took his hand, and turned to face the Taarshome. Its tremendous static charge made all his hair stand on end.

  He felt a sense of competence and calmness.

  "It's this spot," Arin said, as if reading his mind. "You passed another such spot to get here. It was white and porous, like bleached bone. Such places are rare in the upper world. They are where the original power grid of the Taarshome still functions, although weakly, and it's that that lets you talk to them."

  Rikard stood, waiting for something to happen. He felt a lightness and a brightness, an effervescence, rainbowed and prismatic. The creature before him became more solid seeming, more real.

  Rikard knew that what he was seeing was only illusion. The Taarshome took on the form of a classical dragon, with a strong body, clawed legs, serpentine tail and neck, great head filled with teeth, and webbed wings.

  As he watched, the ancient power-web in which he was enmeshed grew stronger, fed by the energy in the Taarshome. The brilliance and color and effervescence of his surroundings became stronger. The calmness became peace and the competence became power.

  He floated in the heart of an ever-expanding crystal, the heart of a dialithite crystal, with planes and facets passing through each other, level upon level, in more than three dimensions, more than four.

  The dragon shape before him stood on its hind legs. Without any further change in form, it was no longer an animal but an angel. It was bright, white, iridescent, metallic, huge. It filled the crystal in which Rikard floated, a crystal which expanded beyond the intangible surface of the planet to spark on stars and suns. It provided the fabric and the substance of the universe itself.

  "We were the first," the Taarshome said. "We have been away, visiting distant relations. Now we have returned, and find this one park the only remnant of what once was ours."

  * * * *

  They had first come to Kohltri a very long time ago, when the planet had just formed and was still hot. Their
first home and birthplace was somewhere else, which even the intelligence and wisdom of the Taarshome could not make clear to Rikard's human mind.

  They had always been semicorporeal beings. Theirs was the first species in the galaxy to achieve sentience. In those early years they had not yet transcended the bounds of mor­tality. Their history before coming to Kohltri was longer than their history since. They were a space-faring, technological species, alone at mat time in the all-but-empty galaxy. There had been little life of any kind then, and only a handful of sentients.

  They came, and they found this world good, by their standards at that time. They grew and prospered and perfected certain technologies. They built an empire, which they shared with the six or seven other sentient species, only one of which, the Keltharin, were corporeal. They filled the galaxy.

  They changed Kohltri to fit their needs. As they reached the peak of their earlier mortal existence, life began on Kohl­tri. It was no doing of the Taarshome. It was the perfectly natural course of events.

  But the presence of the Taarshome had an influence on some of that life after it had formed. One species in particular developed intelligence, though biologically it was surpassed by other species. That was the Tathas.

  The Taarshome transcended their mortality, just as the Tathas, slower to evolve than purely animal life, finally developed a nuclear technology. The Taarshome left. The Tathas inherited the world.

  The Taarshome knew little of what had transpired on Kohl­tri after their departure. What they did know was only by inference from what they had found on their return a bare two thousand years ago.

  * * * *

  The story ended. Rikard blinked. He still held his father's hand. The Taarshome floated in front of him, glowing and golden. He felt as though hours had passed. He looked at his watch. The long conversation had taken less than a minute.

  "They gave you the full treatment," Arin said.

  Rikard turned and saw that there were two other Taarshome in the room with them.

  "Well," Arin asked, "am I crazy or not?"

  "Not unless I am too."

  "You understand us now," one of the Taarshome said in his mind. "And now we see you more clearly than before."

  "I am overwhelmed," Rikard told it.

  "Not many mortals would allow us to talk to them," the Taarshome went on. "You have the ability to hear, the will­ingness to listen. We would ask a favor of you."

  "What is it? I'll be glad to do whatever I can. If we can ever get out of here."

  "The Belshpaer, at our request, have already given you the key to escape the Tathas. We could not give it to your parent without the Belshpaer as intermediary. You need but try it to learn its working.

  "And they, too, the Belshpaer, would ask a favor of you. We know this because we have spoken with them, and their desire is similar to ours."

  "I'll do what I can," Rikard repeated.

  "What we desire, both the Belshpaer and ourselves, is to establish meaningful contact with the peoples of the galaxy. The Belshpaer need to be brought from their lairs, where they have hidden for the last vor-splatz-verng-relpank-lothik—your time sense is different from ours. We can't express ourselves. But their needs are simple. Select representatives to your governments will accomplish all they desire.

  "We, too, would become a part of your greater culture. Believe that we do not look down on you, though we tran­scended your life level long ago, even in our terms. This is because we once were like you in certain ways, and we can see you, in a certain sense, more clearly than you can see yourselves. All you lack is time. Given that, there is no downness to look at all.

  "But to introduce us into your society will be a much greater task. We ask. Will you help us?"

  "I'm willing, yes, but I have no knowledge of such things. I don't know if my help would do you any good."

  "You have the ability—this we know—even more than your father has. Are you willing?"

  "Yes, I am."

  3

  They started packing right away. Arm didn't have much that he wanted to take with him, and Rikard only what he'd brought, but there were the dialithite crystals.

  They spent an hour down in the crystal cavern in a constant state of near ecstasy, selecting only the largest and the best of the stones. They took over five thousand of them, which they planned to sell a few at a time over a period of many years.

  When they were ready, they went to the short passage leading to the machine room—the Tathas chamber. Standing at its edge, they both could feel its influence, the desire for darkness and solitude.

  "We go together," Arin said. "If anything happens to you, I won't want to live anyway."

  "We'll make it," Rikard told him. He took a good grip on the crystal sword. Together, they stepped forward.

  This time there was no overlay, no superimposition. The world of the Tathas completely replaced everything else.

  It was singularly amorphous and asymmetric, and yet there were shapes within it, and zones. Everything was darkly metallic, with an iridescent sheen that, under the Tathas influence, was sinisterly comforting. In the Tathas world one could not help but view that world as the Tathas would. That was its greatest danger, that one forgot one's original being and became lost in the psyche of the Tathas.

  "I think this is the way it used to be," Arin said. His voice was thin and metallic.

  "They can't accept change," Rikard said.

  "No. As a species, they are psychotic. I don't think they are even conscious any more, as we know that term."

  "They couldn't always have been like this."

  "They weren't, I don't think. I don't know, but I think something broke their spirit a long time ago."

  They took another step forward. They stood on an empty plain, with a dark and starless sky overhead. There were dim auroras to the north and south, but for the most part the sky was black. The colors of the shifting auroras, though dim, were painfully clear. Another step.

  They stood on a moorland. The ground was jumbled, with boulders scattered over it. Hollows held still, black water. There were scraggly bushes and strange fungus growths. But it was all surrealistic and plastic. None of it was natural. This was the way the Tathas had made their world. This was how, nearing the height of their culture, they had rebuilt the surface of their planet to provide them with the most comfortable life.

  Or rather, this was their psychotic memory of it.

  Rikard and Arin walked on. In a back corner of their minds they knew they were really in an abandoned Belshpaer machine room.

  The place that they seemed to be in had its fascinations. Everything had been made the way it was in order to satisfy the Tathas' totally alien sense of aesthetics and utility. Everything was artificial, and looked it. The Tathas had no true sense of sight. The visual appearance of things would make little difference to them. To human eyes, however, the artificiality was obvious.

  They passed a tree. It was no living thing but a construct of rods, wires, bolts, plates. It had a plastic, unrealistic, artistic style. A nearby bush had square leaves of foil; its branches were a network of rods. Its base was bolted to the ground.

  It had style, a highly evolved technique, and showed a thoroughly developed aesthetic sense. But the horizon was frighteningly, impossibly near. Strangely carved monoliths stood here and there, proof of the total alienness of the minds that had created them.

  Most unsettling of all were the strangely apertured heaps of small stones, reminiscent of tiny huts. They passed near one, taller than they, its structure defying gravity. Its openings were irregular and dark. Did something move within?

  They hurried on.

  Three Tathas stood in front of them, or seemed to stand, taller man broad, tangled basket weaves of shapes parodying human structure. They were people.

  Or they had been once. They retained intellect. They were aware of the world around them, both the true world and that of their memories. They remembered.

  But there was
no spark of self-consciousness. They had lost self-awareness. They were intelligent, unconscious, awake, insane, like biological computers misprogrammed. Their desires were only vegetable desires.

  Without regret or compunction, Rikard struck at the three in front of him. The crystal blade sheared through their fibrous bodies. They fell, writhing, crawled away, and left them alone.

  "How do we get out of here?" Arin cried. His voice was a chalk-squeak across the blackboard sky.

  "Not beside, but before," Rikard said. There were Tathas just over the terribly close horizon. "Between the gray stones, and with the stars." They stepped forward. The whole scene shifted, as if they had gone a hundred meters instead of one.

  "There are no stars," Arin said.

  There were no stars. There were no gray stones. There was only between.

  "We're trapped forever," Arin cried. The sound of some­thing wet slapping came from a nearby heap of small stones. At the horizon to their left they could see a not-distant-enough gathering of fiber bundles.

  Rikard looked at his father. The psychic overlay tried to make him see his father as a Tathas would "see" him: col­orless, textured, a form more felt than seen. But Rikard still had eyes, and though the face in front of him withered, it was his father's face.

  It was gray. He looked at his hands. They were gray. A sticky tendril groped out from the stone heap.

  "The dialithite," he said. He groped in his father's pack for one of the stones and brought it out. It was gray, dull, dead, lifeless. But there was a flicker of light elsewhere around the landscape. He took another stone out of the pack and held one in each hand, out to the sides.

  The Tathas world shimmered. He was between the gray stones. No, not beside; "anext" as the Belshpaer had said, but also before, in front. He didn't know what that meant yet.

  "Put your hand on my shoulder," he told his father, "and follow me as closely as you can." Where were the stars?

  The stones in his hands warmed. He could feel a subtle pulse of competency and calmness. The full effect of the stones could not be felt unless he looked at them. But then he wouldn't be between them. And besides, the stones here were gray and opaque. Where were the stars?