Outside the walls the Angel children hung, a row of small white-smocked bodies still and motionless at the end of long ropes. They had gone peacefully, all of them, but death is seldom peaceful; the older ones, at least, died quickly, necks broken with a sudden snap. But the small pale infants had the nooses round their waists, and it had seemed clear to Ryther that most of them had simply hung there till they starved.
As she stood, remembering, the crewman came from inside neKrol’s broken bubble. “Nothing,” he reported. “All statues.” Ryther nodded.
“Go?” the bitter speaker said. “Jamson’ World?”
“Yes,” she replied, her eyes staring past the waiting Lights of Jolostar, out toward the black primal forest. The Heart of Bakkalon was sunk forever. In a thousand thousand woods and a single city, the clans had begun to pray.
THE STONE CITY
The crossworlds had a thousand names. Human starcharts listed it as Greyrest, when they listed it at all—which was seldom, for it lay a decade’s journey inward from the realms of men. The Dan’lai named it Empty in their high, barking tongue. To the ul-mennaleith, who had known it longest, it was simply the world of the stone city. The Kresh had a word for it, as did the Linkellar, and the Cedrans, and other races had landed there and left again, so other names lingered on. But mostly it was the crossworlds to the beings who paused there briefly while they jumped from star to star.
It was a barren place, a world of gray oceans and endless plains where the windstorms raged. But for the spacefield and the stone city, it was empty and lifeless. The field was at least five thousand years old, as men count time. The ul-nayileith had built it in the glory days when they claimed the ullish stars, and for a hundred generations it had made the crossworlds theirs. But then the ul-nayileith had faded and the ul-mennaleith had come to fill up their worlds and now the elder race was remembered only in legends and prayers.
Yet their spacefield endured, a great pockmark on the plains, circled by the towering windwalls that the vanished engineers had built against the storms. Inside the high walls lay the port city—hangars and barracks and shops where tired beings from a hundred worlds could rest and be refreshed. Outside, to the west, nothing; the winds came from the west, battering against the walls with a fury soon drained and used for power. But the eastern walls had a second city in their shadows, an open-air city of plastic bubbles and metal shacks. There huddled the beaten and the outcast and the sick; there clustered the shipless.
Beyond that, further east: the stone city.
It had been there when the ul-nayileith had come, five thousand years before. They had never learned how long it stood against the winds, or why. The ullish elders were arrogant and curious in those days, it was said, and they had searched. They walked the twisting alleys, climbed the narrow stairs, scaled the close-set towers and the square-topped pyramids. They found the endless dark passageways that wove mazelike beneath the earth. They discovered the vastness of the city, found all the dust and awesome silence. But nowhere did they find the Builders.
Finally, strangely, a weariness had come upon the ul-nayileith, and with it a fear. They had withdrawn from the stone city, never to walk its halls again. For thousands of years the stone was shunned, and the worship of the Builders was begun. And so too had begun the long decline of the elder race.
But the ul-mennaleith worship only the ul-nayileith. And the Dan’lai worship nothing. And who knows what humans worship? So now, again, there were sounds in the stone city; footfalls rode the alley winds.
The skeletons were imbedded in the wall. They were mounted above the windwall gates in no particular pattern, one short of a dozen, half sunk in the seamless ullish metal and half exposed to the crossworlds wind. Some were in deeper than others. High up, the new skeleton of some nameless winged being rattled in the breeze, a loose bag of hollow fairy bones welded to the wall only at wrists and ankles. Yet lower, up and to the right a little from the doorway, the yellow barrel-stave ribs of a Linkellar were all that could be seen of the creature.
MacDonald’s skeleton was half in, half out. Most of the limbs were sunk deep in the metal, but the fingertips dangled out (one hand still holding a laser), and the feet, and the torso was open to the air. And the skull, of course—bleached white, half crushed, but still a rebuke. It looked down at Holt every dawn as he passed through the portal below. Sometimes, in the curious half-light of an early crossworlds morning, it seemed as though the missing eyes followed him on his long walk toward the gate.
But that had not bothered Holt for months. It had been different right after they had taken MacDonald, and his rotting body had suddenly appeared on the windwall, half joined to the metal. Holt could smell the stench then, and the corpse had been too recognizably Mac. Now it was just a skeleton, and that made it easier for Holt to forget.
On that anniversary morning, the day that marked the end of the first full standard year since the Pegasus had set down, Holt passed below the skeletons with hardly an upward glance.
Inside, as always, the corridor stood deserted. It curved away in both directions, white, dusty, very vacant; thin blue doors stood at regular intervals, but all of them were closed.
Holt turned to the right and tried the first door, pressing his palm to the entry plate. Nothing; the office was locked. He tried the next, with the same result. And then the next. Holt was methodical. He had to be. Each day only one office was open, and each day it was a different one.
The seventh door slid open at his touch.
Behind a curving metal desk a single Dan’la sat, looking out of place. The room, the furniture, the field—everything had been built to the proportions of the long-departed ul-nayileith, and the Dan’la was entirely too small for its setting. But Holt had gotten used to it. He had come every day for a year now, and every day a single Dan’la sat behind a desk. He had no idea whether it was the same one changing offices daily, or a different one each day. All of them had long snouts and darting eyes and bristling reddish fur. The humans called them foxmen. With rare exceptions, Holt could not tell one from the other. The Dan’lai would not help him. They refused to give names, and the creature behind the desk sometimes recognized him, often did not. Holt had long since given up the game, and resigned himself to treating every Dan’la as a stranger.
This morning, though, the foxman knew him at once. “Ah,” he said as Holt entered. “A berth for you?”
“Yes,” Holt said. He removed the battered ship’s cap that matched his frayed gray uniform, and he waited—a thin, pale man with receding brown hair and a stubborn chin.
The foxman interlocked slim, six-fingered hands and smiled a swift thin smile. “No berth, Holt,” he said, “Sorry. No ship today.”
“I heard a ship last night,” Holt said. “I could hear it all the way over in the stone city. Get me a berth on it. I’m qualified. I know standard drive, and I can run a Dan’lai jump-gun. I have credentials.”
“Yes, yes.” Again the snapping smile. “But there is no ship. Next week, perhaps. Next week perhaps a man-ship will come. Then you’ll have a berth, Holt, I swear it, I promise you. You a good jump man, right? You tell me. I get you a berth. But next week, next week. No ship now.”
Holt bit his lip and leaned forward, spreading his hands on the desktop, the cap crushed beneath one fist. “Next week you won’t be here,” he said. “Or if you are, you won’t recognize me, won’t remember anything you promised. Get me a berth on the ship that came last night.”
“Ah,” said the Dan’la. “No berth. Not a man-ship, Holt. No berth for a man.”
“I don’t care. I’ll take any ship. I’ll work with Dan’lai, ullies, Cedrans, anything. Jumps are all the same. Get me on the ship that came in last night.”
“But there was no ship, Holt,” the foxman said. His teeth flashed, then were gone again. “I tell you, Holt. No ship, no ship. Next week, come back. Come back, next week.” There was dismissal in his tone. Holt had learned to recognize it. Once, months ago,
he’d stayed and tried to argue. But the desk-fox had summoned others to drag him away. For a week afterward, all the doors had been locked in the mornings. Now Holt knew when to leave.
Outside in the wan light, he leaned briefly against the windwall and tried to still his shaking hands. He must keep busy, he reminded himself. He needed money, food tokens, so that was one task he could set to. He could visit the Shed, maybe look up Sunderland. As for a berth, there was always tomorrow. He had to be patient.
With a brief glance up at MacDonald, who had not been patient, Holt went off down the vacant streets of the city of the shipless.
Even as a child, Holt had loved the stars. He used to walk at night, during the years of high cold when the iceforests bloomed on Ymir. Straight out he would go, for kilometers, crunching the snow beneath until the lights of town were lost behind him and he stood alone in the glistening blue-white wonderland of frost-flowers and ice-webs and bitterblooms. Then he would look up.
WinterYear nights on Ymir are clear and still and very black. There is no moon. The stars and the silence are everything.
Diligent, Holt had learned the names—not the starnames (no one named the stars anymore—numbers were all that was needed), but rather the names of the worlds that swung around each. He was a bright child. He learned quickly and well, and even his gruff, practical father found a certain pride in that. Holt remembered endless parties at the Old House when his father, drunk on summerbrew, would march all his guests out onto the balcony so his son could name the worlds. “There,” the old man would say, holding a mug in one hand and pointing with the other, “there, that bright one!”
“Arachne,” the boy would reply, blank-faced. The guests would smile and mutter politely.
“And there?”
“Baldur.”
“There. There. Those three over there.”
“Finnegan. Johnhenry. Celia’s World, New Rome, Cathaday.” The names skipped lightly off his youthful tongue. And his father’s leathery face would crinkle in a smile, and he would go on and on until the others grew bored and restive and Holt had named all the worlds a boy could name standing on a balcony of the Old House on Ymir. He had always hated the ritual.
It was a good thing that his father had never come with him off into the iceforests, for away from the lights a thousand new stars could be seen, and that meant a thousand names to know. Holt never learned them all, the names that went with the dimmer, far-off stars that were not man’s. But he learned enough. The pale stars of the Damoosh inward toward the core, the reddish sun of the Silent Centaurs, the scattered lights where the Fyndii hordes raised their emblem-sticks; these he knew, and more.
He continued to come as he grew older, not always alone now. All his youthful sweethearts he dragged out with him, and he made his first love in the starlight during a SummerYear when the trees dripped flowers instead of ice. Sometimes he talked about it with lovers, and friends. But the words came hard. Holt was never eloquent, and he could not make them understand. He scarcely understood himself.
After his father died, he took over the Old House and the estates and ran them for a long WinterYear, though he was only twenty standard. When the thaw came, he left it all and went to Ymir City. A ship was down, a trader bound for Finnegan and worlds further in. Holt found a berth.
The streets grew busier as the day aged. Already the Dan’lai were out, setting up food stalls between the huts. In an hour or so the streets would be lined with them. A few gaunt ul-mennaleith were also about, traveling in groups of four or five. They all wore powder-blue gowns that fell almost to the ground, and they seemed to flow rather than walk—eerie, dignified, wraithlike. Their soft gray skin was finely powdered, their eyes were liquid and distant. Always they seemed serene, even these, these sorry shipless ones.
Holt fell in behind a group of them, increasing his pace to keep up. The fox merchants ignored the solemn ul-mennaleith, but they all spied Holt and called out to him as he passed. And laughed their high, barking laughs when he ignored them.
Near the Cedran neighborhoods Holt took his leave of the ullies, darting into a tiny side street that seemed deserted. He had work to do, and this was the place to do it.
He walked deeper into the rash of yellowed bubble-huts and picked one almost at random. It was old, its plastic exterior heavily polished; the door was wood, carved with nest symbols. Locked, of course—Holt put his shoulder to it and pushed. When it held firm, he retreated a bit, then ran and crashed against it. On his fourth try it gave noisily. The noise didn’t bother him. In a Cedran slum, no one would hear.
Pitch-dark inside. He felt near the door and found a coldtorch, touched it until it returned his body heat as light. Then, leisurely, he looked around.
There were five Cedrans present: three adults and two younglings, all curled up into featureless balls on the floor. Holt hardly gave them a glance. By night, the Cedrans were terrifying. He’d seen them many times on the darkened streets of the stone city, moaning in their soft speech and swaying sinister. Their segmented torsos unfolded into three meters of milk-white maggotflesh, and they had six specialized limbs; two wide-splayed feet, a pair of delicate branching tentacles for manipulation, and the wicked fighting-claws. The eyes, saucer-sized pools of glowing violet, saw everything. By night, Cedrans were beings to be avoided.
By day, they were immobile balls of meat.
Holt walked around them and looted their hut. He took a handheld coldtorch, set low to give the murky purple half-light the Cedrans liked best, plus a sack of food tokens and a clawbone. The polished, jeweled fighting-claws of some illustrious ancestor sat in an honored place on the wall, but Holt was careful not to touch them. If their family god was stolen, the entire nest would be obliged to find the thief or commit suicide.
Finally he found a set of wizard-cards, smoke-dark wooden plaques inlaid with iron and gold. He shoved them in a pocket and left. The street was still empty. Few beings visited the Cedran districts save Cedrans.
Quickly Holt found his way back to the main thoroughfare, the wide gravel path that ran from the windwalls of the spacefield to the silent gates of the stone city five kilometers away. The street was crowded and noisy now, and Holt had to push his way through the throng. Foxmen were everywhere, laughing and barking, snapping their quick grins on and off, rubbing reddish brown fur up against the blue gowns of the ul-mennaleith, the chitinous Kresh, and the loose baggy skin of the pop-eyed green Linkellars. Some of the food stalls had hot meals to offer, and the ways were heavy with smokes and smells. Holt had been months on the crossworlds before he had finally learned to distinguish the food scents from the body odors.
As he fought his way down the street, dodging in and out among the aliens with his loot clutched tightly in his hand, Holt watched carefully. It was habit now, drilled into him; he looked constantly for an unfamiliar human face, the face that might mean a man-ship was in, that salvation had come.
He did not find one. As always, there was only the milling press of the crossworlds all around him—Dan’lai barks and Kresh clickings and the ululating speech of the Linkellars, but never a human voice. By now, it had ceased to affect him.
He found the stall he was looking for. From beneath a flap of gray leather, a frazzled Dan’la looked up at him. “Yes, yes,” the foxman snapped impatiently. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Holt shoved aside the multicolored blinking-jewels that were strewn over the counter and put down the coldtorch and clawbone he had taken. “Trade,” he said. “These for tokens.”
The foxman looked down at the goods, up at Holt, and began to rub his snout vigorously. “Trade. Trade. A trade for you,” he chanted. He picked up the clawbone, tossed it from one hand to the other, set it down again, touched the coldtorch to wake it to barely perceptible life. Then he nodded and turned on his grin. “Good stuff. Cedran. The big worms will want it. Yes. Yes. Trade, then. Tokens?”
Holt nodded.
The Dan’la fumbled in the pocket of the
smock he was wearing, and tossed a handful of food tokens on the counter. They were bright disks of plastic in a dozen different colors, the nearest things to currency the crossworlds had. The Dan’lai merchants honored them for food. And the Dan’lai brought in all the food there was on their fleets of jump-gun spacers.
Holt counted the tokens, then scooped them up and threw them in the sack that he’d taken from the Cedran bubble-hut. “I have more,” he said, reaching into his pocket for the wizard-cards.
His pocket was empty. The Dan’la grinned and snapped his teeth together. “Gone? Not the only thief on Empty, then. No. Not the only thief.”
He remembered his first ship; he remembered the stars of his youth on Ymir, he remembered the worlds he’d touched since, he remembered all the ships he’d served on and the men (and not-men) he had served with. But better than any of them he remembered his first ship: the Laughing Shadow (an old name heavy with history, but no one told him the story until much later), out of Celia’s World and bound for Finnegan. It was a converted ore freighter, great blue-gray teardrop of pitted duralloy that was at least a century older than Holt was. Sparse and raw—big cargo holds and not much crew space, sleep-webs for the twelve who manned it, no gravity grid (he’d gotten used to free fall quickly), nukes for landing and lifting, and a standard ftl drive for the star-shifts. Holt was set to working in the drive room, an austere place of muted lights and bare metal and computer consoles. Cain narKarmian showed him what to do.
Holt remembered narKarmian too. An old, old man, too old for shipwork, he would have thought; skin like soft yellow leather that has been folded and wrinkled so many times that there is nowhere a piece of it without a million tiny creases, eyes brown and almond-shaped, a mottled bald head and a wispy blond goatee. Sometimes Cain seemed senile, but most often he was sharp and alert; he knew the drives, and he knew the stars, and he would talk incessantly as he worked.
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