We went down and looked.
It appeared remarkably human, and might almost have been a modern terrestrial metropolis. But its inhabitants had put their cars in their garages, locked their homes, and gone for a walk.
Mark Conover, riding overhead in the Chicago, speculated that the builders were not native to this world.
They were jointed bipeds, somewhat larger than we are. We can sit in their chairs and those of us who are tall enough to be able to see through their windshields can drive their cars. Our sense of the place was that they’d left the day before we came.
It’s a city of domes and minarets. The homes are spacious, with courtyards and gardens, now run to weed. And they were fond of games and sports. We found gymnasiums and parks and pools everywhere. There was a magnificent oceanfront stadium, and every private home seemed filled with playing cards and dice and geometrical puzzles and 81-square checkerboards.
They had apparently not discovered photography; nor, as far as we could deter-mine, were they given to the plastic arts. There were no statues. Even the fountain lacked the usual boys on dolphins or winged women. It was instead a study in wet geometry, a complex of leaning slabs, balanced spheres, and odd-angled pyramids.
Consequently, we’d been there quite a while before we found out what the inhabitants looked like. That happened when we walked into a small home on the north side, and found some charcoal etchings.
Cats, someone said.
Maybe. The following day we came across an art museum and found several hundred watercolors, oils, tapestries, crystals, and so on.
They are felines, without doubt, but the eyes are chilling. The creatures in the paintings have nevertheless a human dimension. They are bundled against storms; they gaze across plowed fields at sunset; they smile benevolently (or pompously) out of portraits. In one particularly striking watercolor, four females cower beneath an angry sky. Between heaving clouds, a pair of full moons illuminate the scene.
This world has no satellite.
Virtually everyone crowded into the museum. It was a day of sighs and grunts and exclamations, but it brought us no closer to an answer to the central question: where had they gone?
“Just as well they’re not here,” Turner said, standing in front of the watercolor. “This is the only living world anyone has seen. It’s one hell of a valuable piece of real estate. Nice of them to give it to us.”
I was at the time standing across the gallery in front of a wall-sized oil. It was done in impressionistic style, reminiscent of Degas: a group of the creatures was gathered about a game of chess. Two were seated at the table, hunched over the pieces in the classic pose of the dedicated player. Several more, half in shadow, watched.
Their expressions were remarkably human. If one allowed for the ears and the fangs, the scene might easily have been a New York coffeehouse. The table was set under a hanging lamp; its hazy illumination fell squarely on the board.
The game was not actually chess, of course. For one thing, the board had 81 squares. There was no queen. Instead, the king was flanked by a pair of pieces that vaguely resembled shields. Stylized hemispheres at the extremes of the position must have been rooks. (Where else but on the flank would one reasonably place a rook?)
The other pieces, too, were familiar. The left-hand Black bishop had been fianchettoed: a one-square angular move onto the long diagonal, from where it would exercise withering power. All four knights had been moved, and their twisted tracks betrayed their identity.
The game was still in its opening stages. White was two pawns up, temporarily. It appeared to be Black’s move, and he would, I suspected, seize a White pawn which had strayed deep into what we would consider his queenside.
I stood before that painting, feeling the stirrings of kinship and affection for these people and wondering what immutable laws of psychology, mathematics, and aesthetics ordained the creation of chess in cultures so distant from each other. I wondered whether the game might not prove a rite of passage of some sort.
I was about to leave when I detected a wrongness somewhere in the painting, as if a piece were misplaced, or the kibitzers were surreptitiously watching me. Whatever it was, I grew conscious of my breathing.
There was nothing.
I backed away, turned, and hurried out of the building.
I’m a symbologist, with a specialty in linguistics. If we ever do actually find someone out here to talk to, I’m the one who will be expected to say hello. That’s an honor, I suppose; but I can’t get Captain Cook entirely out of my mind.
By the end of the first week, we had not turned up any written material (and, in fact, still haven’t) other than a few undecipherable inscriptions on the sides of build-ings. They were even more computerized than we are, and we assumed everything went into the data banks, which we also haven’t found. The computers themselves are wrecked. Slagged. So, by the way, is the central power core for the City. Another mystery.
Anyhow, I had little to do, so yesterday I went for a walk in the twilight with Jennifer East, a navigator and the pilot of the other lander. She’s lovely, with bright hazel eyes, and a quick smile. Her long tawny hair was radiant in the setting sun. The atmosphere here has a moderately high oxygen content, which affects her the way some women are affected by martinis. She clung to my arm, and I was breathlessly aware of her long-legged stride.
We might have been walking through the streets of an idealized, mystical Baghdad: the towers were gold and purple in the failing light. Flights of brightly-colored birds scattered before us. I half-expected to hear the somber cry of a ram’s horn, calling the faithful to prayer.
The avenue is lined with delicate, graybarked trees. Their broad, filamented leaves sighed in the wind, which was constant off the western mountains. Out at sea, thunder rumbled.
Behind the trees are the empty homes, no two alike, and other structures that we have not yet begun to analyze. Only the towers exceed three stories. The buildings are all beveled and curved; right angles do not exist. I wonder what the psychologists will make of that.
“I wonder how long they’ve been gone?” she said. Her eyes were luminous with excitement, directed (I’m sorry to say) at the architecture.
That had been a point of considerable debate. Many of the interiors revealed a degree of dust that suggested it could not have been more than a few weeks since someone had occupied them. But much of the pavement was in a state of disrepair, and on the City’s inland side, forest was beginning to push through.
I told her I thought they’d been around quite recently.
“Mark,” she said, staying close. “I wonder whether they’ve really left.”
There was nothing you could put in a report, but I agreed that we were transients, that those streets had long run to laughter and song, that they soon would again, and that it would never really be ours.
She squeezed my arm. “It’s magnificent.”
I envied her; this was her first flight. For most of us, there had been too many broken landscapes, too much desert.
“Olszewski thinks,” I said, “that the northern section of the City is almost two thousand years old . . . . They’d been here a while.”
“And they just packed up and left.” She steered us out of the center, angling toward the trees, where I think we both felt less conspicuous.
“It’s ironic,” I said. “No one would have believed first contact would come like this. They’ve been here since the time of Constantine, and we miss them by a few weeks. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
She frowned. “It’s not believable.” She touched one of the trees. “Did you know it’s the second time?” she asked. I must have looked blank. “Twenty-two years ago the Berlin tracked something across the face of Algol and then lost it. Whatever it was, it threw a couple of sharp turns.” We walked silently for several minutes, crossed another avenue, and approached the museum. “Algol,” she said, “isn’t all that far from here.”
“UFO stories,” I s
aid. “They used to be common.”
She shrugged. “It might be that the thing the Berlin saw frightened these people off. Or worse.”
The museum is wheel-shaped. Heavy, curving panels of tinted glass are ribbed by polished black stone that is probably marble. The grounds are a wild tangle of weed and shrub anchored by overgrown hedge. A few flowering bushes survive out near the perimeter.
I laughed. “You don’t suppose the sun is about to nova, do you?”
She smiled and brushed my cheek with a kiss. Jenny is 23 and a graduate of MIT. “It’s going to rain,” she said.
We walked past a turret. The air was cool.
“They seem to have taken their time about leaving,” I said. “There’s no evidence of panic or violence. And most of their personal belongings apparently went with them. Whatever happened, they had time to go home and pack.”
She looked uneasily at the sky. Gray clouds were gathering in the west. “Why did they destroy the computers? And the power plant? Doesn’t that sound like a retreat before an advancing enemy?”
We stood on the rounded stone steps at the entrance, watching the coming storm. Near the horizon, lightning touched the ground. It was delicate, like the trees. And I knew what had disturbed me about the painting.
Jenny doesn’t play chess. So when we stood again before the portrait and I explained, she listened dutifully, and then tried to reassure me. I couldn’t blame her.
I have an appointment to meet the Captain in the gallery after dinner. He doesn’t play chess either. Like all good captains down through the ages, he is a man of courage and hardheaded common sense, so he will also try to reassure me.
Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.
But the position in that game: Black is playing the Benko Gambit. It’s different in detail, of course; the game is different. But Black is about to clear a lane for the queenside rook. One bishop, at the opposite end of the board, is astride the long di-agonal, where its terrible power will combine with that of the rook. And White, after the next move or two, when that advanced pawn comes off, will be desperately ex-posed.
It’s the most advanced of the gambits for Black, still feared after three hundred years—.
And I keep thinking: the inhabitants of the City were surely aware of this world’s value. More, they are competitors. They would assume that we would want to take it from them.
“But we wouldn’t,” Jenny had argued.
“Are you sure? Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that does matter is what they believe. And they would expect us to act as they would. “Now, if they knew in advance that we were coming—” “The Berlin sighting—”
“—Might have done it. Warned them we were in the neighborhood. So they withdraw, and give us the world. And, with it, an enigma.” Rain had begun sliding down the tinted glass. “They’re playing the Benko.”
“You mean they might come back here in force and attack?” She was aghast, not at the possibility, which she dismissed; but at the direction my mind had taken. “No,” I said. “Not us. The Benko isn’t designed to recover a lost pawn.” I could not look away from the painting. Did I detect a gleam of arrogance in Black’s eyes? “No. It doesn’t fool around with pawns. The idea is to launch a strike into the heart of the enemy position.”
“Earth?” She smiled weakly. “They wouldn’t even know where Earth is.”
I didn’t ask whether she thought we might not go home alone.
One more thing about that painting: there’s a shading of light, a chia-roscuro, in the eyes of the onlookers. It’s the joy of battle.
I’m scared.
________________
First published in Asimov’s, Sept, 1982. Copyright 1996 Cryptic, Inc.
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KILLER EYE
James Chambers
THESE DAYS ALL OF CAPTAIN ELL CAMDEN’S DREAMS WERE SILENT. IN THEM, PEOPLE MOVED THEIR mouths without speech, questions materialized stillborn on Camden’s lips, and everything transpired in eerie tranquility. In one dream Camden witnessed a jump plane crash. The graceful, silver craft plummeted into an open field where it erupted in a ball of fire and black smoke; but without the expected roar and shriek, the explosion seemed to billow outward in slow motion. Often Camden dreamt of walking through a bright meadow where a whisperless wind swayed the chest-high grass all around him. Flowers speckled the landscape like a fluorescent snowfall. Roses grew everywhere, rising on long, thorny stems laden with heavy, blood-red blossoms that bobbed and nodded at Camden as he passed. He felt them watching, straining toward him; he tried to call out, but the stillness devoured his cry. He awoke from just such a dream on the morning the kill orders came.
Snapping to consciousness, his body electrified with tension, Camden pawed the clutter on his nightstand until he unearthed a pack of stimarettes, then popped one between his lips and cracked its seal. Stimulating vapors cooled his throat and calmed his jittery nerves. He glanced at Lieutenant Ginny Nakata sleeping next to him, tangled in the bed sheets. Her black hair protruded in blunt spikes, and her torso rose and fell with her steady breathing. This was the ninth morning in three weeks he’d woken up beside Lieutenant Nakata, and he knew the others—Major Davis Wyle and Captain Marnie Ambrov, and even Nakata herself—wondered if he were becoming attached. Mission protocol allowed sex for physical and psychological release, not to foster romantic distractions that could jeopardize their mission. Cam-den knew he was due for a warning from Major Wyle, probably with orders to sleep alone for awhile or go to bed with Captain Ambrov to restore the balance. He didn’t care. All that mattered was that his dreams didn’t unsettle him so much with Ginny beside him.
Camden was one of four soldiers assigned to Chang Station. Selected for their skills and their psychological classification as “emotionally self-contained,” they were natural loners who required only passing social contact to satisfy their human need for companionship. They were killers, as well, weapons primed and waiting to be trig-gered. They’d been on duty for two years already or for more than a decade if you counted the nine-year journey from Earth to the Weed system. Two more years and they’d ship back home, assuming there was still an Earth to return to then.
Chang Station was one of thirty-five human outposts in the Weed system, each part of Operation Killer Eye, each home to four soldiers on the same twenty-two-year sniper stint. Most teams consisted of two men and two women, some of four soldiers of the same gender. All of them were trained to monitor Arbor, the Weed homeworld, and operate their outpost’s weapon: armaments ranging from cluster bombs to nu-clear missiles, grav phasers to particle beams. Chang Station stood embedded in the rocky surface of Freeloader, a moon in orbit around the gas giant Vegas Strip, one of five planets in the system. The other planets, their moons, and the asteroid belt that spiraled through the system harbored the other thirty-four KE stations.
With an hour to kill before reporting for duty, Camden slid from bed and ambled into the adjoining observation chamber. The viewport offered a perfect vista of silver dust and craggy rocks. Pale amber and green light crested the horizon, heralding planet rise for Vegas Strip, named after the stormy, Technicolor cloud bands that lit it like infinite rows of neon lights. Camden finished his stimarette and tossed it into a waste bin. He reclined and waited until the emerald edge of Vegas Strip crept above the horizon like a cooling sun. Afterward he headed for the shower unit, and a short time later, clean and alert, he dressed in his uniform and gently roused Lieutenant Nakata. She smiled as she slipped from the sheets, pulled on the sweatpants and T-shirt she’d left crumpled on the floor, and padded away.
The room felt emptier without her, a sensation Camden had only begun to no-tice these past few weeks. He’d never minded being alone before. In fact, he’d often preferred it. The change heralded a potential problem for someone with two years left in his solitary tour of duty. From the top drawer of his nightstand, he took the photo plate he’d brought in his small allowance of personal items and activa
ted the slideshow. It contained a handful of pictures of his parents and his brother, Varrow. He and Varrow had tried to stick together after they were orphaned by a plane crash, but bureaucratic artifice had forced them apart. Over the years they’d kept in touch, helped each other when possible, until they’d both enlisted, and the military separated them for good. Ell hadn’t heard from his brother for more than a decade when the news came six weeks ago—already 13 months old—that he’d been captured with a hundred others during a skirmish with the Weeds and was presumed dead.
Ell imagined his brother fighting and falling, being dragged off and trapped like a lab rat in an utterly silent starcraft piloted by alien beings. The Weeds had earned their name for their appearance: lanky stalk-like bodies and multiple, asymmetrical limbs that resembled branches and leaves, topped by a bulbous head like a cross between a rose blossom and a human brain. Their ships were said to be deathly still and quiet because the Weeds communicated telepathically.
That was one reason for the war. Because their telepathy didn’t extend to humans, the Weeds failed to recognize people as sentient beings, classifying them instead as something akin to ants or beetles, pests to be exterminated and driven out of civilized places. That was one theory, anyway, cooked up by experts after decades of study, although no one could say for sure.
It was Weed telepathy, though, that also gave humanity its only edge in the con-flict. It worked across vast, even interstellar distances, and so the Weeds had never developed any form of audible or electronic communication. They traveled in silent ships, lived in silent cities, and sent no signals through space. Thus they were unable to intercept or interpret human communication via radio, laser, or subspace comm, a weakness that allowed humans to infiltrate the Weed system and keep contact without exposing themselves. And so Camden had come to live in a cramped and Spartan base on an airless moon, where his sole task was to maintain a directed en-ergy weapon, dubbed “the torch,” and wait to fire it when ordered.
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