Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  Khyffer I breathed out, and heard the air of his lungs whistling away into the void.

  He tried again to breathe, and got nothing. A low-grade vacuum pulled against the inside of his helmet, drawing his face plate up toward his nose. Even his suit had joined the conspiracy against the Hereditary Lord of Phobos.

  He had to do something about this. Had to do something now. He turned to take a step toward the royal citadel, intent on battering the door down with his fists if necessary, when his foot slipped on the brink of the crater.

  In the minuscule gravity of the moonlet, he fell slowly. So slowly that he was halfway to strangulation before the plastic of his visor struck on a sharp rock and punctured.

  With a sudden gasp, the last air went out of his suit and lungs, and Khyffer I slipped down into the darkness to join the shadow-spirits of chaos and old night

  Chapter 26

  Invaders from the Beyond

  Green…

  Yellow…

  Red…

  Violet…

  Sauk Rapids, Minnesota, March 22, 9:32 p.m. GST

  Abigail Carruthers first noticed the apparition when she went into her kitchen for a glass of milk.

  The room was dark, and Abigail didn't turn on the overhead because she didn't want to waste electricity. The power company had turned most of the town off since early that morning, and she wanted to conserve whatever electricity was still getting through. Besides, the refrigerator had been off most of the day, too, and she supposed that if she didn't shine the room lights into it while slipping out her gallon of moo-juice, it would stay just that much colder that much longer.

  And the kitchen wasn't all that dark, Abigail Carruthers found when she was halfway across the floor. In fact, the light in here was pretty bright.

  The window over the sink faced east, and sometimes if the atmospheric conditions were right, she could see the glow of Minneapolis-St. Paul shining under the cloud cover at night. That's all it was, she supposed, but she went over to the sink anyway to see.

  The sky down that way was clear, though. With a dusting of stars such as you might get on a cold, crisp night with no fog rising out of the river valley.

  Still, there was that brightness… Abigail Carruthers leaned over the sink and pushed her face right up against the glass.

  It was coming from the north. Veils of yellow and green, like the fireplace when you put in one of those salted logs for a special occasion. The light was just as bright as flames too, but somehow less focused. It wasn't coming from any one point, like a barn caught afire or the woods burning out there. It wasn't swamp gas, which you sometimes saw hovering over the marshy ground that lay to the north in Aitkin County. And besides, that was too far away even for this light—unless the methane had sent the whole county up in flames.

  Nothing in Abigail Carruthers' experience accounted for the sheets of yellow and green fire, edged with red and streaked with purple, that danced in her window.

  Abigail was getting to be an old woman, going on eighty-five. Sometimes her eyes played tricks. Like the time she saw Harvey Gates swinging in the apple tree out back. She had waved to him through the window and even thought about going out and asking how his mother was—before she remembered that Cousin Harvey had been killed in Tunisia forty years ago and his mother, Aunt Sophia, had been dead twenty years longer. But, even with her knowing that, little Harvey pumped that tire-swing back and forth for another five minutes, laughing at the wind he was making, before he and the swing and even the green buds on the tree, for it was October then, faded out in front of her eyes.

  Sometimes Abigail saw things like that, and she knew afterwards that they were just visions, some stray neuron or a little piece of RNA taking a wrong turn in her brain cells—that's what Doc Wiggins called it. Or maybe her memory was just rolling itself up day by day for the long night that was ahead of her. But still, when Abigail saw these visions, they were so real.

  Like these sheets of green fire.

  Well, fire wasn't so much the issue anymore. She could tell nothing was burning. The light in the sky looked more like veils of organza or sheer nylon, rippling in a gentle breeze, and lit by some kind of footlights or maybe a huge Christmas tree somewhere behind them. Like the draperies of heaven, blowing at God's window.

  No, that wasn't quite it either.

  They looked like… angel wings. There were the arches of the wing joints, Abigail could see them clearly, towering high into the sky. And there were the feathers, brushed flat and tight and only slightly curled like the coverts and primaries on a hawk's wing. Those ripples at the bottom were the dragging secondaries, brushing the horizon.

  Abigail looked closer, trying to make out the angel's body. The most she could discover was the flow of its robes, yellow-white against the green wings. And above, where the face should be, surrounded by its halo, there was only a blackness, a blankness, a patch of the night sky without even stars to light it.

  The Faceless Angel, such as Abigail Carruthers had dreamed would come for her one day, was descending now from the north. It rode down across the land, dashing the still lake waters with the tips of its pinions and dragging the fertile land with the hem of its robe.

  The lights of its flaming body—green, yellow, red, violet—flared out behind her eyeballs. Abigail's hands now slipped on the cold porcelain at the edge of the sink, and she fell backward across the kitchen floor.

  Dead in the arms of her terrible Lord.

  Burr-burr

  Burr-burr

  Burr-burr

  Burr-burr

  Lisbon, North Dakota, March 22, 10:02 p.m., CST

  The emergency lines into the Ransom County Sheriff's Office had been ringing off the hook since about an hour after dusk. Deputy James L. Blackwood, serving the four-to-midnight shift, tried to answer them in order.

  "No, ma'am, that's not a plane crash. Those are just lights....No, they can't hurt you at all....And thank you for calling, ma'am."

  At first he thought this was just something having to do with the full moon that was laid on for this weekend. It was a legend in law-enforcement circles that a full moon always brought out the drunks and crazies. In the New York City precinct houses they used to line up in the hallways, down the stairs, and out into the street, waiting to tell some footsore old beat cop how the Martians were trying to come at them through the walls with ray guns, or how the saints were whispering evil thoughts in their pearly-pink ears.

  "No, sir," Blackwood told the next caller. "It's not a sneak attack by anyone....No, not by the Chinese, neither. It's just some kind of atmospheric disturbance, that's all."

  Lisbon, North Dakota, had its share of drunks and crazies, too. But in smaller proportion than big cities, of course. Most of the deranged people Jim Blackwood had to deal with were formers down on their luck, usually after their wives and children had left them for something better, or more exciting, or at least someone more sober and dependable. Then the farmhouse walls started to look a mite near, and the whiskey bottle seemed to have a sympathetic ear.

  "Well, ma'am, I don't know what they are, exactly. The space administration sent us a bulletin this morning, saying we might see some strange lights in the sky tonight. That's all anyone knows, I guess."

  And then there was the Devil's Den, down on the mud-banks along the Sheyenne River. When Lucas B. Smith, a.k.a. "Satan" Smith, started mixing his own brand of white lightning in with the Budsuds and the shots of Old Comfort, during what he liked to call "Happy Hour," then it usually took three cruisers and an ambulance to pull the cowboys and Indians down from the rafters and out of the river and sew up all their lacerations and contusions.

  "Yessir, Mr. Mayor. We did get a notice about that." Blackwood sat up straighter in his chair. "NASA says to expect, quote, photon emissions from excited electrons in molecules of atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen, unquote. They said the effect was something like a laser, but the rays weren't coming out in what they call coherent fashion. So it's no cha
nce of harming anyone....Yes, sir, I did happen to get a lot of calls about them. We're just trying to keep people calm, is all. That's just our job, I guess… Thank you, sir."

  It was going to be a long two hours until Harrison, his replacement, logged on at midnight. Longer even, if Bobby got himself stuck outside with his neck cricked back, enjoying God's own laserlight show in the sky. Jim Blackwood hoped it would still be going on by the time he went off shift, so he could see it for himself.

  Ditdahdah

  Dit

  Ditdahditdit

  Dahditdahdit

  Negaunee, Michigan, March 22, 11:13 p.m., EST

  Walter Haskell didn't know what kind of energy beam he would need to penetrate the greenish rays that were cloaking the mothership. He'd already tried signaling with his handheld flashlight, shining it up over the barn, and that had done nothing at all.

  Then he'd gone in the house and gotten the reading light off his desk. It was one of those little ones, with the metal-halide bulb that was smaller than his pinky fingernail. That gave out a good strong burst of illumination, though, and the silvered-metal shell behind the bulb even helped focus it a bit. But all he managed to do with it was light up the broadside of the barn and a slice of the roof.

  Then Haskell thought of his truck, with its six-hundred-watt spotlight. That would be perfect. He rolled the vehicle back out into the yard and kept the motor running. He thought of ripping the light off its mounting rack and running it off the house current, but to begin with the voltages were all wrong.

  Frantic now, because the mothership was getting closer all the time, Walter Haskell switched on his spotlight and aimed the beam up into the roiling clouds of yellow and orange light that were coming down from the north. He had to send his signal, so that he would be seen and recognized by the new Lords of the Earth as their friend and companion. He had to let them know that he would work for them as interpreter, ambassador, agent, or negotiator—whatever they wanted him to do.

  Haskell's Morse was pretty rusty. It had been sixty years since he was an Eagle Scout and could send messages back and forth across the lake with his troop. Of course, the aliens were going to know Morse; they had been studying our culture for generations, using first the television and then the data communications signals that humans had been sending into space ever since 1948.

  What should he tell them now, to gain their confidence? The other human beings were likely to be ornery, telling the mothership to go away. They were probably even shooting rockets at it, or trying to jam its photon energy pods with bursts of random energy. So, Haskell reasoned, he should send out his unmistakable greetings.

  W…E…L…C…O…M…E…S…T…R… A…N…G…E…R…S…

  Having got that far, Walter Haskell was pretty tired. His thumb was getting red and sore working the on-off slider switch on the searchlight. There had to be a faster way to communicate with the newcomers.

  Then he remembered that Bradley had owned a pair of walkie-talkies when he was a kid. Up in the attic was where Haskell had last seen them. Surely, the aliens were going to understand English, and coming in like they were, they would probably be monitoring on all hailing frequencies. They would certainly take kindly to a friendly voice coming up at them from the Earth.

  Walter Haskell left the truck running as he stormed into the house and up the stairs to the attic. Now, for God's sake, let's hope he had the right kind of batteries on hand.

  Chapter 27

  Eating Holes

  Pocket…

  Hook…

  Pocket…

  Hook…

  Outside Stonybrook Farm at L3, March 23, 4:17 UT

  The external surface of the farming colony's cylinder offered nothing as glamorous or as stable as a catwalk or sealed inspection tunnel for those who ventured outside. The most that the designers and builders offered the engineering and maintenance staff was a series of hemispheric depressions, ten centimeters wide and five deep, cast into the outer face of the dry-bond moonrock. These were set in diagonal lines on three-meter centers, spiraling clockwise from one end of the shell to the other. A two-centimeter-thick finger of rebar cut across the mouth of each depression.

  Anyone wanting to go outside had to wear both a vacuum suit and a peterpan rig—the latter being a simple body harness at the end of a three-point cabling system. The cables were wound on spring reels braked with pressure clamps; at the end of each cable was a hook billed with a snap clip.

  It was only after Peter Kamen had already signed on with the colony's engineering staff that they showed him this setup, and then he could hardly believe its crudeness. In order to tour the outside of the rotating cylinder he had to buckle on this rig, climb down an access well, and let himself out through a hand-cycled airlock. Before tripping the bottom hatch, he hooked one of his cables to a bar inside and then lowered himself against the spin gravity into the void below.

  From there it was a matter of walking the hooks—at the end of carbon-filament sticks that telescoped out to four meters and were used to both trigger and release the snap clips—from one pock-marked depression to the next. The reason for having three cables, as Kamen soon discovered for himself, was that anyone hanging by just one hook while trying to set the next soon ended up twisting around like a pinwheel. It had something to do with angular momentum and the colony's perpetual spin. So the trick was always to keep two points attached while setting the third.

  After considerable practice, his best speed over the ten-kilometer-long hull was just about forty meters a minute. At that rate, he could tour a ten-degree swath down one side of the facility in something like four hours—if he spent all his time setting and releasing his hooks and none of it examining the structure and its external systems. That meant he could "inspect" the entire outer surface in 1,500 hours of elapsed time—not counting pauses for doing any real engineering work, nor for meal breaks, sleep breaks, or returning to the interior for fresh air tanks. To make any of those interruptions, he would have to move, pocket-hook by pocket-hook, to one of only fifty-four access wells that were sited radially, three in line, at twenty-degree intervals around the cylinder. Kamen figured that, if he really wanted to, he could make a full-time professional career just out of inspecting the exterior works.

  So it was no wonder that he and General Manager Alois Davenport would rather sit inside and theorize about why the irrigation system was losing pressure—as they had done last week—rather than take a walk outside and inspect it. In fact, Peter Kamen wouldn't be out here at all now, except the system had gone up from fifteen percent to thirty in just the past ten hours. That was a simply unacceptable rate of change and called for drastic measures. Like this sortie to get a firsthand impression of what could be going wrong.

  So far, however, nothing presented itself.

  Kamen worked his way through the narrow space between one of the heat-exchange fins and the concrete curve overhead. He had to be careful, in placing his hooks and cables here, not to crush any of the hundreds of spaced sump pipes that came down from the hull and drained into the fin. These were the ducts that he had expected to find plugged up with ice wherever the cylinder's orientation to the sun cast them into the exchange unit's long shadow. But after feeling about twenty of them with his suit glove and backing up his impressions with a thermal probe, Kamen couldn't say that any were cold enough to support an ice blockage.

  Maybe Davenport's theory was actually a better one: that the fertilizers the colony was using might have scaled up inside the pipes or plugged the perforated drainage mats, which were the last layer under the soil before one came to the hull's inside surface....Except a scale buildup didn't tend to double itself overnight, and that was the problem Kamen was chasing now.

  Peter Kamen worked the spring-wound reel to lower himself across the face of the heat-exchange fin. As he went, his eyes traced out the delicate, black-enameled petals and microtubules that carpeted its surface. For a moment his attention was lost in the pattern of t
heir folding, so that his sight went slightly blurry.

  No, wait. The wateriness wasn't in his eyes but on his helmet bubble. He raised a glove and wiped across it. The blur smeared into thick, whitish streaks, What the hell was going on here?

  Half-blind now, Kamen stopped unwinding, hung in his harness, and thought this through. Something had gravitated to the outside of his helmet, that much was clear. It had struck his faceplate and adhered as a fine particulate, perhaps even a liquid mist, but then vacuum-dried into some kind of a gum resin or a static-charged powder. Now what did all that add up to?

  His urge was to spit on his fingers and rub at the smears, but of course he could not open his bubble to spit. Perhaps if he rubbed at just one spot diligently with a clean part of his glove—the seam that crossed the side of a knuckle, say—then he could probably brush away the gunk. Either that, or grind it irrevocably into the plastic. That was why he would concentrate on just a single two-centimeter-wide spot.

  Kamen wiped at it with a careful circular motion, paused and looked through at the far stars, wiped again harder, and studied the result. The plastic was coming clean at last. With some latent scratches, of course. Turning in his harness then, Peter faced the dark side of the heat fin.

  Son of a bitch! The blurring was back, right on the spot he had just cleaned.

  The heat-exchanger was spritzing him! It was hitting his face with something wet that dried immediately to a sticky white powder. Now, Kamen thought almost happily, didn't that solve a lot of problems! He had found the leak in the water system—exactly what he had come looking for—and on his first pass, too.

  Putting tension on his left reel to swing him out of the line of fire, Peter carefully polished another hole in the muck on his helmet and tried to sight across the surface of the fin, to see if he could catch the geyser of vapor in the angled sunlight. As he bent his head close to the tangle of tiny tubes and leaves, however, that second clean spot also clouded up.