by Chris Bunch
‘Easy for you to say,’ Wolfe said. ‘All right. We’re inside their first line of defense. Let me see what I can discover.’
He sat, awkwardly.
Breathe . . . welcome the void . . . there is no pain . . . there is no fear . . . earth and water combine, restore your body . . . now reach beyond, find hei, let hei surround you.
Without realizing it his gauntleted hands touched, tried to link fingers.
He was above the planet’s stony surface, looking down, looking at, looking through.
Here are weapons stations . . . here passageways . . . here there are . . .
Wolfe came back to his body’s awareness, felt the flush of strength, energy, peace wash over him.
‘Now we shall enter their fortress.’ For some reason, it was natural to speak in Al’ar.
He took another, longer tube from his pack and got to his feet. Taen began to say something, fell silent.
They went between boulders, Wolfe dimly aware of something shooting, no awareness of where the blasts were striking. He went flat and crawled for almost fifty yards behind the cover of one of the mounded passageways.
Joshua came to an open space, hesitated, held up one hand for Taen to wait, went across the open space very fast.
Nothing happened. Wolfe beckoned, and Taen stumbled after him. He’d barely gained the shelter of a low cluster of rocks when a laser-blast shattered splinters behind him.
Taen looked at Wolfe and saw eyes staring, fixed on some strange invisible eternity through the faceplate.
Joshua’s fingers moved automatically on the tube, and one end extruded until it was nearly four feet long. He opened a tiny compartment on the side of the tube, took what looked like a jeweler’s eyepiece connected to an electrical lead, and positioned it in the center of his suit’s faceplate.
He moved Taen out of the way, then stood, tube on one shoulder. It swept back and forth, then held steady on an open, completely unremarkable rocky patch.
Wolfe touched the firing stud and the rocket blasted out, flame spouting from the rear of the launch tube. The rocket exploded, smoke and flame gouting. Through the boil, they saw where the hidden hatch had been ripped open.
Wolfe tossed the launcher tube aside.
‘Come,’ he ordered, and Taen followed.
The hatch was only open about a foot, exposing a ramp, blackness. There wasn’t room to squeeze through.
Wolfe took the hatch, hunched, and lifted. Metal shrieked, but the ramp did not move.
Taen was beside him, grasping organs beside human fingers. Wolfe felt resistance give, and the hatch shrieked open another foot.
Wolfe half pushed Taen through, followed him down.
Joshua saw clearly, led the way down twenty feet to where the ramp ended at a T-intersection, pulled Taen into it just as an automatic hatch slid across the rampway.
The silence came like a curtain of rain across Wolfe’s mind.
He unsealed his faceplate, sucked clean, sterile air, knowing the fortress’ atmosphere was still present.
‘Welcome home, Taen,’ he said.
Taen opened his suit, as well.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I am not home. But I have reached a waystation on the journey.’
His voice echoed down the cold metal corridor.
They started down its curving length, moving carefully, weapons ready. They’d gone about seventy yards when, without warning, the deck fell away below them.
ELEVEN
Joshua rolled until he was falling facedown, then used his suit’s steering jets to stabilize out of the beginnings of a spin. Craning his neck to the side, he saw Taen floating about three feet above him.
The Al’ar drew level with him and Wolfe realized their rate of descent was slowing. They’d dropped about five hundred feet and were falling at no more than a few feet per second when Joshua saw a deck looming below. He kick-snapped erect and bent his legs for the landing.
No impact came as the fortress’ antigrav caught, held them. As they touched down, a metal roof crashed across, sealing off the tunnel they’d fallen down.
‘Alice, and friend. Canned for the feast,’ Joshua said. Taen did not respond, but scanned the walls and decks of the oval-shaped trap. Both still had weapons ready.
‘I see nothing that suggests weakness that might be cut away,’ Taen said.
‘Nor I,’ Joshua agreed. He tried to feel out, beyond. Through three-quarters of the arc, he could feel nothing but metal, rock. On the fourth, his vision went beyond, but only into emptiness. Then it met something and was hurled back.
Joshua shuddered, as if he’d been struck.
‘What was that?’ Taen asked.
‘Somebody out there doesn’t want to be watched,’ Wolfe said.
‘Lay down the weapons,’ came a voice. It filled his mind and the tiny room.
Wolfe hesitated, noticed Taen had knelt, set his weapon down, did the same.
He felt someone, several beings, watching him, and squirmed, not comfortable.
The section of the wall slid open, and five Al’ar were in the opening. Two held long, slender weapons identical to Taen’s. The other three wore dark ceremonial robes. The one in the center wore a Lumina stone on a metallic headband. He knew all of them to be Guardians.
‘Name yourselves.’
‘Taen.’
‘The One Who Fights From Shadows is the name I was given many years ago by another Guardian,’ Wolfe said. ‘In Terran, Joshua Wolfe.’
He felt his own Lumina warm as the Al’ar reached toward him.
Then the stone became cold as the Guardian turned to Taen. ‘My senses did not tell me that another of us had remained behind.’
Taen made no reply.
‘Why did you not make the Crossing with the others?’
‘I do not know. Perhaps I was unworthy.’
The Guardian began to speak, stopped, as if rethinking his words, then went on: ‘You have spent time among these others, these groundlings. You have let your mind become corrupt. There was no “worth” to those who have gone, no “shame” to those who have remained here.’
‘And how was I to sense this?’
Wolfe blinked, thinking for an instant he’d detected impossible pain in Taen’s words.
‘If you did not go, then we must assume there is intent to your remaining. Perhaps it has to do with this one who accompanies you.
‘Neither of you is the other’s prisoner. You are working as a pair, as a conjoined unit? I find this a concept beyond visualization.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Taen said, ‘it exists.’
The Guardian’s attention shifted to Wolfe ‘I am puzzled by the responses of this young one. Perhaps you might assist me in clarifying the murky pool.’
‘I doubt that,’ Wolfe said. ‘I myself have little clarity of thought.’
‘What do you seek?’
Joshua said nothing but slowly shook his head.
‘Perhaps I can answer for both of us,’ Taen said ‘I began this search, looking for the Guardians, even though there was little but rumors. I sought to find why I was abandoned, and to be allowed either death or to join the others.
‘This one, whom I had known when we were hatchlings, and whom I fought against in the time of war, joined me. What he hopes to gain, what he hoped to gain by studying our way in the time before war, I cannot tell you. But he was a strong pupil, both in the ways of fighting and in the ways of thinking. Since we have been together, he has become an adept, having talents even I was not aware could be gained. But I leap ahead.
‘Before we could truly begin our search, we felt a threat, something unseen, unknown. Its onset is a buzzing, as of insects, but there is not true sound. I have felt an aura of blue when this happens; he has not. He has had some pain, some physical evidence, his outer layer showing bruises for a time accompanied by sharp pain, then the signs vanish.
‘Both of us felt this had something to do with our quest, and feel this menace growing, and feel it
especially strongly here in these parts of space that were once Al’ar.’
As Taen spoke, Wolfe felt an emanation from the first Guardian, then the others - something dark, strange, cold. Taen flinched as if he’d been struck and Joshua realized he, too, had felt what the Guardians had emitted.
‘So,’ Taen said, ‘we were not becoming insane. This is real. What is it?’
The Guardian looked at his two fellows, then back at Taen and Wolfe. ‘This shall be explained. But not at this moment. You. Terran. I cannot bid you welcome as an honored one. Our races fought too long and there was too much blood spilt for me to feel or say that. But you are now our guest. You will eat, sleep, learn here, and no one shall bring you harm or offer you shame. I am Jadera.’
The Guardian bowed slightly, and the Lumina on his headband flared, subsided.
Wolfe’s vision blurred inexplicably, cleared when he blinked moisture from his eyes.
He realized there was a smile on his face.
Wolfe half remembered some of the foods they ate, but most were unfamiliar. They were the dishes of a state dinner, which no youth, even the son of an ambassador, would have been allowed. Some he liked, a few he had to force down, fingers crossed as his mind reminded him there was nothing in the Al’ar diet a Terran could not survive.
He wondered what the Al’ar foods tasted like to the aliens. To him, they were a flurry of flavors, mingling or sometimes overriding each other. Some were solid, but most were in heavy soups. A few came in covered, insulated containers, and were inhaled as a gas.
The room he ate in was huge, shadowed. Against the walls light-constructs flared, subsided. Beside each seat was a half dome on the table that delivered and removed each dish.
The Al’ar ate at small tables around him, conversing in low tones. Joshua wryly reminded himself the unemotional Al’ar were genetically incapable of performing a Prodigal Son routine and that he was the only one who was upset that Taen’s arrival wasn’t made more of.
At first he thought all of the aliens on the planet had been summoned, but then he realized many of them were present only in image.
He quietly asked Taen how this was done.
‘A simple matter,’ Taen said. ‘Each sits in a booth with a background prepared to simulate this room. There is a communications device in front of him, and he has large screens around him. This way, we do not shrivel in loneliness, even though we are great distances apart at our duties.’
Wolfe turned to Jadera. ‘If it is a permitted question, what are the duties of the Guardians on this planet?’
‘You may ask, and I shall answer. There are many, ranging from maintaining this fortress to keeping watch for intruders to . . . the matter that brought you here, and that which I shall speak of at another time. Still others have rituals to attend to.’
‘Rituals?’ Wolfe asked. ‘But we Terrans always believed - I do not know why - the Guardians were leaders of the flesh, not what we would term priests.’
Taen lifted a grasping organ, expressing surprise at what Joshua said.
‘But how could that be?’ Jadera responded before Taen could speak. ‘How can a being lead in the body if he has not a vision, an ability to lead in the spirit?’
‘Quite well,’ Joshua said. ‘Every time we Terrans have had someone like that, we end up killing each other over which god is the better.’
‘I have heard of this,’ Jadera said. ‘But it makes no sense. I have had it explained as what you Terrans call a god but understand it only as a concept in the mind, not reality. How could there be an argument, when there is but one truth?’
‘How could there not be an argument,’ Wolfe countered, ‘when every believer in truth I have known or read of seems to think that truth belongs exclusively to him and his friends?’
‘I guess we were foredoomed to war against each other,’ Jadera said.
Wolfe’s attention was drawn to a table not far from his, a strangely carved, octagonal piece of furniture. At it sat an Al’ar of great age. His corpselike pallor was mottled, marred.
When he saw Wolfe looking at him, his hood flared to its full size, his grasping organ touched a stud, and the Al’ar and where he sat vanished.
Jadera had noted what occurred. ‘That was Cerigo. He is one who holds firmly to the old ways, and believes that we should have fought you the instant our races came in contact rather than waiting. He also lost his entire brood-cluster in the war, so he has little ability to stand the sight of Terrans.’
‘And I lost those who bred me as well,’ Wolfe said softly. ‘Yet I still am sitting here. Perhaps his . . . truth is lacking in some areas.’
Jadera said nothing.
‘Then we are what you call shamed,’ Taen said in Terran, then returned to Al’ar. ‘Please do not dwell on Cerigo and his behavior unless you must.’
Wolfe shrugged and turned back to his plate.
After a time, Jadera spoke again. ‘When you were given your Al’ar name, did the Guardian who gave you that name tell you its history, or of the one he must have been thinking of when he bestowed it on you?’
‘No,’ Wolfe said, startled. ‘I did not know of any such.’
‘That is odd,’ Jadera said. ‘If he had not gone before, if he had not made the Crossing, I would inquire why not. When one of us is given his adult name, it is only after a long consultation, and the hatchling is given the opportunity to study the past and either accept or reject the name as being fitting.’
‘Perhaps,’ Taen said, ‘it was because he was unsure of whether it was right to bestow a name on this one even though he was an honest Seeker of the Way. That Guardian, whose name I must not use, since he is gone, hesitated, and I was forced to remind him that the codex had been consulted and such a thing was not forbidden, even though it had not been done within memory. Perhaps he intended to give the history to this One Who Fights From Shadows at a later time. Perhaps the war prevented that from occurring.’
‘But still,’ Jadera said. ‘The naming ceremony was not proper.’
He sat motionless for a moment. ‘This must be rectified before any other matters can be dealt with, since one presses closely on the other.’
When the meal was finished, the Al’ar sat silently for a time, as was their custom.
Wolfe had done the same as a boy, among the Al’ar who taught him, and the old feeling of warmth, of belonging, came as he sat, still in voice and mind, among the Guardians.
Then, one by one, the projected visions of those elsewhere on the planet blinked out.
Jadera rose. ‘I shall show you a burrow that we have modified as suitable for you.’
Another Al’ar led Taen away, and Joshua followed Jadera.
The chamber was octagonal, with a ceiling in various shades of purple that curved slightly downward at the corners. Where the resting rack would have been, soft, circular pillows in various colors had been piled inside a framework.
There was a table against one wall; a cup and a flask of some liquid sat on it.
‘Is this satisfactory?’ Jadera inquired. ‘Does this not shame us? We have done the best we know, but we never envisioned a Terran as anything other than . . . as being our guest.’
Joshua noted with amusement that a covered vessel and a neat pile of soft clothes was set discreetly in one corner. ‘More than sufficient.’
Jadera held out his grasping organs, turned, and left. Joshua yawned, undressed, and lay down on the pillows, wondering what they were normally used for.
His hand stretched out and found the empty holster his gun should have been in. A thought came that this was one of the few times in many years a weapon hadn’t been ready at hand, yet he felt no anxiety.
Then he closed his eyes and sleep dropped like a curtain about his mind.
Wolfe was asleep, but not asleep. He dreamed, but what came and went in his mind were not dreams.
The universe his sac opened in was not the one he had known. It was already old, decaying toward rebirth.
&n
bsp; He had a memory of those who’d chosen to breed him, and of those other adults who cared for his cluster as they swarmed, grew, fed, played.
Wolfe, dreaming, tried to feel happiness, contentment, anger, laughter, could not.
There was but satisfaction at being fed, at besting another or of helping another of the cluster against a third, then the lesser satisfaction of helping another better ‘him’self.
He was Al’ar.
There were places set aside for hatchlings where no adult went. Some were mountainous, some covered with many breeds of ferns, from tiny ones that crumpled in his grasping organs to ones that towered above him and hid the sky. Other places had lakes and islands.
The hatchlings went into these places and formed groups or lived singly, doing as they had seen adults do, attempting those tasks adults did and they would do in their turn.
They fought, one against one, one against several, several against one.
Hatchlings died, but this was as it should be so the race would grow, would increase, would progress.
The one who had not yet been given a name killed more than most, and this was noted, both by his elders and other clusters.
There were five of them. When the third moon set, they met outside the cave their cluster was living in. They knew the direction to take, had walked most of it during daylight, thinking of other things so as not to alarm the hatchling who carried death with him.
That one without a name had built a burrow that was not a burrow but a challenge, foolishly, on the banks of a flowing waterway, with little cover and few places to flee other than into the water. But even the current would carry him toward the dens of beasts that would feed on Al’ar.
He had built a low fire from minerals he’d dug from the bank, under what the Wolfe-dreamer thought was a leafless tree carved of stone but was something that lived and grew.
The five stopped at the last bit of groundcover and looked long at the guttering fire and the motionless shadow of the one who seemed to have no fear.
