“I’ll go in,” Holt said. “I’ll ship on, and see.”
“Then come back one day and tell us,” the fogs cried, and for the very first time Holt heard the mournful keen of a wisdompool that is not wise enough. “Come back, come back. There is much to learn.” The smell of incense was very strong.
Holt looted three more Cedran bubble-huts that afternoon, and broke into two others. The first of those was simply cold and vacant and dusty; the second was occupied, but not by a Cedran. After jiggling loose the door, he’d stood stock-still while an ethereal winged thing with feral eyes flapped against the roof of the hut and hissed down at him. He got nothing from that bubble, nor from the empty one, but the rest of his break-ins paid off.
Toward sunset, he returned to the stone city, climbing a narrow ramp to the Western Iris with a bag of food slung over his shoulders.
In the pale and failing light, the city looked colorless, washed out, dead. The circling walls were four meters high and twice as thick, fashioned of a smooth and seamless gray stone as if they were a single piece; the Western Iris that opened on the city of the shipless was more a tunnel than a gateway. Holt went through it quickly, out into a narrow zigzag alley that threaded its way between two huge buildings—or perhaps they were not buildings. Twenty meters tall, irregularly shaped, windowless and doorless; there could be no possible entrance save through the stone city’s lower levels. Yet this type of structure, these odd-shaped dented blocks of gray stone, dominated the easternmost part of the stone city in an area of some twelve kilometers square. Sunderland had mapped it.
The alleys here were a hopeless maze, none of them running straight for more than ten meters; from above, Holt had often imagined them to look like a child’s drawing of a lightning bolt. But he had come this route often, and he had Sunderland’s maps committed to memory (for this small portion of the stone city, at any rate). He moved with speed and confidence, encountering no one.
From time to time, when he stood in the nexus points where several alleys joined, Holt caught glimpses of other structures in the distance. Sunderland had mapped most of them too; they used the sights as landmarks. The stone city had a hundred separate parts, and in each the architecture and the very building stone itself was different. Along the northwest wall was a jungle of obsidian towers set close together with dry canals between; due south lay a region of blood-red stone pyramids; east was an utterly empty granite plain with a single mushroom-shaped tower ascending from its center. And there were other regions, all strange, all uninhabited. Sunderland mapped a few additional blocks each day. Yet even this was only the tip of the iceberg. The stone city had levels beneath levels, and neither Holt nor Sunderland nor any of the others had penetrated those black and airless warrens.
Dusk was all around him when Holt paused at a major nexus point, a wide octagon with a smaller octagonal pool in its center. The water was still and green; not even a ripple of wind moved across its surface until Holt stopped to wash. Their rooms, just past here, were as bone-dry as this whole area of the city. Sunderland said the pyramids had indoor water supplies, but near the Western Iris there was nothing but this single public pool.
Holt resumed walking when he had cleaned the day’s dust from his face and hands. The food bag bounced on his back, and his footsteps, echoing, broke the alley stillness. There was no other sound; the night was falling fast. It would be as bleak and moonless as any other crossworlds night. Holt knew that. The overcast was always heavy, and he could seldom spot more than a half-dozen dim stars.
Beyond the plaza of the pool, one of the great buildings had fallen. There was nothing left but a jumble of broken rock and sand. Holt cut across it carefully, to a single structure that stood out of place among the rest—a huge gold stone dome like a blown-up Cedran bubble-hut. It had a dozen entrance holes, a dozen narrow little staircases winding up to them, and a honeycomb of chambers within.
For nearly ten standard months, this had been home.
Sunderland was squatting on the floor of their common room when Holt entered, his maps spread out all around him. He had arranged each section to fit with the others in a patchwork tapestry; old yellowed scraps he’d purchased from the Dan’lai and corrected were sandwiched between sheets of Pegasus gridfilm and lightweight squares of silvery ullish metal. The totality carpeted the room, each piece covered with lines and Sunderland’s neat notation. He sat in the middle of it all with a map on his lap and a marker in his hand, looking owlish and rumpled and very overweight.
“I’ve got food,” Holt said. He flipped the bag across the room and it landed among the maps, disarraying several of the loose sections.
Sunderland squawked, “Ahh, the maps! Be careful!” He blinked and pushed the food aside and rearranged everything neatly again.
Holt crossed the room to his sleep-web, strung between two sturdy coldtorch pillars. He walked on the maps as he went and Sunderland squawked again, but Holt ignored him and climbed into the web.
“Damn you,” Sunderland said, smoothing the trodden sections. “Be more careful, will you?” He looked up and saw that Holt was frowning at him. “Mike?”
“Sorry,” Holt said. “You find something today?” His tone made the question an empty formality.
Sunderland never noticed. “I got into a whole new section, off to the south,” he said excitedly. “Very interesting too. Obviously designed as a unit. There’s this central pillar, you see, built out of some soft green stone, and surrounded by ten slightly smaller pillars, and there are these bridges—well, sort of ribbons of stone, they loop from the top of the big ones to the tops of the little ones. The pattern is repeated over and over. And below you’ve got sort of a labyrinth of waist-high stone walls. It will take me weeks to map them.”
Holt was looking at the wall next to his head, where the count of the days was scored in the golden stone. “A year,” he said. “A standard year, Jeff.”
Sunderland looked at him curiously, then stood and began gathering up his maps. “How was your day?” he asked.
“We’re not going to leave this place,” Holt said, speaking more to himself than to Sunderland. “Never. It’s over.”
Now Sunderland stopped. “Stop it,” the small fat man said. “I won’t have it, Holt. Give up, and next thing you know you’ll be drowning in amberlethe with Alaina and Takker. The stone city is the key. I’ve known that all along. Once we discover all its secrets, we can sell them to the foxmen and get out of this place. When I finish my mapping—”
Holt rolled over on his side to face Sunderland. “A year, Jeff, a year. You’re not going to finish your mapping. You could map for ten years and still have covered only part of the stone city. And what about the tunnels? The levels beneath?”
Sunderland licked his lips nervously. “Beneath. Well. If I had the equipment on board the Pegasus, then—”
“You don’t, and it doesn’t work anyway. Nothing works on the stone city. That was why the Captain landed. The rules don’t work down here.”
Sunderland shook his head and resumed his gathering up the maps. “The human mind can understand anything. Give me time, that’s all, and I’ll figure it all out. We could even figure out the Dan’lai and the ullies if Susie Benet was still here.” Susie Benet had been their contact specialist—a third-rate linguesp, but even a minor talent is better than none when dealing with alien minds.
“Susie Benet isn’t here,” Holt said. His voice had a hard edge to it. He began to tick off names on his fingers. “Susie vanished with the Captain. Ditto Carlos. Irai suicided. Ian tried to shoot his way inside the windwalls and wound up on them. Det and Lana and Maje went down beneath, trying to find the Captain, and they vanished too. Davie Tillman sold himself as a Kresh egg host, so he’s surely finished by now. Alaina and Takker-Rey are vegetables, useless, and we don’t know what went on with the four aboard the Pegasus. That leaves us, Sunderland, you and me.” He smiled grimly. “You make maps, I steal from the worms, and nobody understands anyth
ing. We’re finished. We’ll die here in the stone city. We’ll never see the stars again.”
He stopped as suddenly as he had started. It was a rare outburst for Holt; in general he was quiet, unexpressive, maybe a little repressed. Sunderland stood there, astonished, while Holt sagged back hopelessly into his sleep-web.
“Day after day after day,” Holt said. “And none of it means anything. You remember what Irai told us?”
“She was unstable,” Sunderland insisted. “She proved that beyond our wildest dreams.”
“She said we’d come too far,” Holt said, as if Sunderland had never spoken. “She said it was wrong to think that the whole universe operated by rules we could understand. You remember. She called it ‘sick, arrogant human folly.’ You remember, Jeff. That was how she talked. Like that. ‘Sick, arrogant human folly.’ ”
He laughed. “The crossworlds almost made sense, that was what fooled us. But if Irai was right, that would figure. After all, we’re still only a little bit from the manrealm, right? Further in, maybe the rules change even more.”
“I don’t like this kind of talk,” said Sunderland. “You’re getting defeatist. Irai was sick. At the end, you know, she was going to ul-mennaleith prayer meetings, submitting herself to the ul-nayileith, that sort of thing. A mystic, that was what she became. A mystic.”
“She was wrong?” Holt asked.
“She was wrong,” Sunderland said firmly.
Holt looked at him again. “Then explain things, Jeff. Tell me how to get out of here. Tell me how it all makes sense.”
“The stone city,” Sunderland said. “Well, when I finish my maps—” He stopped suddenly. Holt was leaning back in his web again and not listening at all.
It took him five years and six ships to move across the great star-flecked sphere the Damoosh claimed as their own and penetrate the border sector beyond. He consulted other, greater wisdompools as he went, and learned all he could, but always there were mysteries and surprises waiting on the world beyond this one. Not all the ships he served on were crewed by humans; man-ships seldom straggled in this far, so Holt signed on with Damoosh and stray gethsoids and other, lesser mongrels. But still there were usually a few men on every port he touched, and he even began to hear rumors of a second human empire some five hundred years in toward the core, settled by a wandering generation ship and ruled from a glittering world called Prester. On Prester the cities floated on clouds, one withered Vessman told him. Holt believed that for a time until another crewmate said that Prester was really a single world-spanning city, kept alive by fleets of food freighters greater than anything the Federal Empire had built in the wars before the Collapse. The same man said it had not been a generation ship that had settled her at all—he proved that by showing how far a slow-light ship could get from Old Earth since the dawn of the interstellar age—but rather a squadron of Earth Imperials fleeing a Hrangan Mind. Holt stayed skeptical this time. When a woman from a grounded Cathadayn freighter insisted that Prester had been founded by Tomo and Walberg, and that Walberg ruled it still, he gave up on the whole idea.
But there were other legends, other stories, and they drew him on.
As they drew others.
On an airless world circling a blue-white star, in its single domed city, Holt met Alaina. She told him about the Pegasus.
“The Captain built her from scratch, you know, right here. He was trading, going in further than usual, like we all do”—she flashed an understanding smile, figuring that Holt too was a trading gambler out for the big find—“and he met a Dan’la. They’re further in.”
“I know,” Holt said.
“Well, maybe you don’t know what’s going on in there. The Captain said the Dan’lai have all but taken over the ullish stars—you’ve heard of the ullish stars?… Good. Well, it’s because the ul-mennaleith haven’t resisted much, I gather, but also because of the Dan’lai jump-gun. It’s a new concept, I guess, and the Captain says it cuts travel time in half, or better. The standard drive warps the fabric of the space-time continuum, you know, to get ftl effects, and—”
“I’m a drive man,” Holt said curtly. But he was leaning forward as he said it, listening intently.
“Oh,” Alaina said, not rebuked in the least. “Well, the Dan’lai jump-gun does something else, shifts you into another continuum and then back again. Running it is entirely different. It’s partly psionic, and they put this ring around your head.”
“You have a jump-gun?” Holt interrupted.
She nodded. “The Captain melted down his old ship, just about, to build the Pegasus. With a jump-gun he bought from the Dan’lai. He’s collecting a crew now, and they’re training us.”
“Where are you going?” he said.
She laughed, lightly, and her bright green eyes seemed to flash. “Where else? In!”
Holt woke at dawn, in silence, rose and dressed himself quickly, and traced his path backward, past the quiet green pool and the endless alleys, out the Western Iris and through the city of the shipless. He walked under the wall of skeletons without an upward glance.
Inside the windwall, in the long corridor, he began to try the doors. The first four rattled and stayed shut. The fifth opened on an empty office. No Dan’la.
That was something new. Holt entered cautiously, peering around. No one, nothing, and no second door. He walked around the wide ullish desk and began to rifle it methodically, much as he looted the Cedran bubble-huts. Maybe he could find a field pass, a gun, something—anything to get him back to the Pegasus. If it was still sitting beyond the walls. Or maybe he could find a berth assignment.
The door slid open; a foxman stood there. He was indistinguishable from all the others. He barked, and Holt jumped away from the desk.
Swiftly the Dan’la circled around and seized the chair. “Thief!” he said. “Thief. I will shoot. You be shot. Yes.” His teeth snapped.
“No,” Holt said, edging toward the door. He could run if the Dan’la called others. “I came for a berth,” he said inanely.
“Ah!” the foxman interlocked his hands. “Different. Well, Holt, who are you?”
Holt stood mute.
“A berth, a berth, Holt wants a berth,” the Dan’la said in a squeaky singsong.
“Yesterday they said that a man-ship would be in next week,” Holt said.
“No no no. I’m sorry. No man-ship will come. There will be no man-ship. Next week, yesterday, no time. You understand? And we have no berth. Ship is full. You never go on field with no berth.”
Holt moved forward again, to the other side of the desk. “No ship next week?”
The foxman shook his head. “No ship. No ship. No man-ship.”
“Something else, then. I’ll crew for ullies, for Dan’lai, for Cedrans. I’ve told you. I know drive, I know your jump-guns. Remember? I have credentials.”
The Dan’la tilted his head to one side. Did Holt remember the gesture? Was this a Dan’la he’d dealt with before? “Yes, but no berth.”
Holt started for the door.
“Wait,” the foxman commanded.
Holt turned.
“No man-ship next week,” the Dan’la said. “No ship, no ship, no ship,” he sang. Then he stopped singing. “Man-ship is now!”
Holt straightened. “Now?! You mean there’s a man-ship on the field right now?”
The Dan’la nodded furiously.
“A berth!” Holt was frantic. “Get me a berth, damn you.”
“Yes. Yes. A berth for you, for you a berth.” The foxman touched something on the desk, a drawer slid open, and he took out a film of silver metal and a slim wand of blue plastic. “Your name?”
“Michael Holt,” he answered.
“Oh.” The foxman put down the wand, took the metal sheet and put it back in the drawer, and barked, “No berth!”
“No berth?”
“No one can have two berths,” the Dan’la said.
“Two?”
The deskfox nodded. “Hol
t has a berth on Pegasus.”
Holt’s hands were trembling. “Damn,” he said. “Damn.”
The Dan’la laughed. “Will you take berth?”
“On Pegasus?”
A nod.
“You’ll let me through the walls, then? Out onto the field?”
The foxman nodded again. “Write Holt field pass.”
“Yes,” Holt said. “Yes.”
“Name?”
“Michael Holt.”
“Race?”
“Man.”
“Homeworld?”
“Ymir.”
There was a short silence. The Dan’la had been sitting there staring at Holt, his hands folded. Now he suddenly opened the drawer again, took out an ancient-looking piece of parchment that crumbled as he touched it, and picked up the wand again. “Name?” he asked.
They went through the whole thing again.
When the Dan’la had finished writing, he gave the paper to Holt. It flaked as he fingered it. He tried to be very careful. None of the scrawls made sense. “This will get me past the guards?” Holt said skeptically. “On the field? To the Pegasus?”
The Dan’la nodded. Holt turned and almost ran for the door.
“Wait,” the foxman cried.
Holt froze, then spun. “What?” he said between his teeth, and it was almost a snarl of rage.
“Technical thing.”
“Yes?”
“Field pass, to be good, must be signed.” The Dan’la flashed on its toothy smile. “Signed, yes yes, signed by your captain.”
There was no noise. Holt’s hand tightened spasmodically around the slip of yellow paper, and the pieces fluttered stiffly to the floor. Then, swift and wordless, he was on him.
The Dan’la had time for only one brief bark before Holt had him by the throat. The delicate six-fingered hands clawed air, helplessly. Holt twisted, and the neck snapped. He was holding a bundle of limp reddish fur.
He stood there for a long time, his hands locked, his teeth clenched. Then slowly he released his grip and the Dan’la corpse tumbled backward, toppling the chair.
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