Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  By the fifteenth panel, the lines were strong and deep, the pattern clear even without benefit of shadow. Susannah waved her empty hands in frustration. “I should know better than to go anywhere without my sketchbook! Ghirra, will we have time to come back here?”

  His shoulders hunched uneasily. He was clearly caught between not wanting to deny her and thinking her interest a waste of time.

  Megan offered a cheesy grin and pulled the tiny camera from her belt.

  “Technology to the rescue.”

  Ghirra handled the silvery little box with reverent care, twisting it repeatedly in his hands. He set it to his eye as he had seen Megan do.

  “This will give a picture out of the air?”

  “Out of the light,” corrected Susannah. She hitched the oil lamp closer to the sketchbook, blotting at her sweat as it dampened the page. The Infirmary wagon’s tail gate was too low for a proper drawing table. Her back ached and she longed for the miraculous coolness of the SkyHall.

  Ghirra lowered the camera to stare soberly into the lens.

  “It doesn’t give an image right away,” Susannah continued. “Meg s old-fashioned that way. Has to be computer processed, so we won’t know what we have till we get back to DulElesi, and that’s only if CRI’s back on line. Meanwhile…” She erased energetically, redrew a line or two, then straightened, stretching the cramp out of her spine. “Does this look accurate to you?”

  Ghirra watched two boatloads of priests pole by on the water below, then slouched away from the balustrade, the camera cradled in both hands. He set it down on the tailgate with infinite care.

  “You draw this well, Suzannah.” He tapped the pencilled lines and circles with an emphatic finger. “But this is not language.”

  His stubborn mood matched her own. “Why are you so sure?”

  “Old drawing,” he said again. “Priests’ drawing. This is nothing.”

  “Ghirra, the pattern shows a consistent change from beginning to end. That can’t be accidental!”

  He twisted away gracelessly, heading for the infirmary door. “This is nothing, Suzhannah.”

  “The artist had something in mind!” she called after him, but he tossed back a gesture of dismissal and ducked into the entry.

  “I suppose there is such a thing as l’art pour l’art,” Megan commented, plunking a loaded dinner tray down on the tail gate.

  “Here?” replied Susannah rudely.

  “Well, probably not. The Sawls are neither primitive nor sophisticated enough for that sort of decoration, but maybe in the past…”

  “Why is he being so obstinate about it?” Susannah fussed. “It’s like he doesn’t want it to mean anything!”

  “Why are you pushing him so hard about it? Maybe the idea is new to him. Maybe he’d have preferred to have thought of it himself.” Megan handed her a warm ball wrapped in russet leaves. “Here, eat this. It’s like cooked sushi.”

  Susannah closed her sketchbook and shoved it aside.

  “Or maybe.” Megan offered, chewing placidly. “he doesn’t like us constantly telling him what goes on in his own turf. He’s touchy enough as it is about the PriestGuild having any claim to the truth. Wasn’t it you who once admitted that doctors get so into their power over life and death that they end up sure they know it all?”

  “Yeah, but Ghirra…”

  “What, but Ghirra’? Because he’s bright and gentle and dedicated, and an alien, he shouldn’t have an ego? Those are the guys that usually have the biggest, because they’re smart enough to know they’re better than most.”

  “But he’s been so openly curious all along.”

  “Sure. He has a good scientist’s instincts. But Ghirra’s a pretty big fish in this particular pond. Hard to have a bunch of strangers show up to tell him all he knows is still not nearly enough.”

  “I’ve never said…”

  “Of course not. But you have all this equipment and methods and ideas…” Megan hoisted the little camera guiltily and stowed it back in her sash. “We’re talking self-image here, not racial—the way Ghirra pictures himself in relation to his own world. That has to have changed radically since our arrival. No matter how eager he is to learn and share knowledge, all this has probably left him a little sensitive to challenge.”

  “Challenge’? I didn’t…” Susannah’s denial faltered. She turned away to lean over the outer railing and stare down at the boatmen still hard at work on the water. “Ah, hell. I guess I haven’t been the most tactful about this. I keep forgetting he’s…”

  “I know.” Megan spoke in italics. “Not one of us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’d do him more honor,” she finished slowly, “if you remembered.”

  Susannah retired to a dark corner of the inner room to try on her new robe. The apprentices came in to hang up their smocks while she was stripped to the waist, washing.

  Privacy, she reflected, is of little value in this society.

  Xifa joined her at the sink with a weary smile and the information that a special invocation to Valla Ired was to be performed after the dinner meal by Ogo Dul’s PriestGuild, led by their young Ritual Master, who had only recently inherited her post. Susannah promised to attend.

  When she was alone again, she undressed fully and slipped the robe over her head. It was not too small, as she had feared, but draped gracefully along her body. Even in the stifling heat, the silken fabric felt cool to the touch. The pale yellow was luminous against her tanned skin.

  Susannah felt beautiful, but could not be sure. For the first time she wished the Sawls used mirrors.

  She turned to find Ghirra in the doorway.

  “You will come to see Kav Larma dance?” he inquired formally.

  “Of course.” She felt intruded upon, but ashamed of the moment of temper that had passed between them. She made an awkward, apologetic pirouette. “Do you like my new gown?”

  “This is very beautiful,” he acknowledged. “Ibi will like seeing you in this.”

  Some demon of heat and exhaustion made her press him further. “Do you like seeing me in it?”

  His head tilted, as if he was not sure he had heard her right, and his surprise made Susannah laugh.

  “Of course, it never even occurred to you, did it,” she said, rueful with relief. She went to him abjectly and leaned her forehead against his shoulder like a friendly animal. “Forgive me. Do you understand any of this?”

  “I think, yes.” He slid a paternal arm across her back, taking instinctive charge and reminding her that his own practice of healing extended to the mind as well as the body. “You feel without him.”

  “And the heat,” she murmured, already comforted. “Making me a little crazy.”

  “This is its other danger,” he agreed.

  “Ghirra, I hope you do know how much I respect your methods, that I’ve learned as much from you as you say you have from me.”

  He let his arm drape over her shoulder in a companionable fashion, a smile curving the corners of his mouth. “This is good hearing, Suzhannah,” he replied with gentle irony. “Maybe with this, we will find some true knowing together.”

  17

  Clausen straightened from his crouch and slid the cooling laser gun into the holster on his belt. He wiped sweating palms on his thighs, frowning irritably at the damage done to his trousers.

  “All right, that should do it. Let’s run the cable.”

  “Done that, while you were welding.” McPherson gestured with the battery lamp and the beam sliced randomly through the heated darkness. Clausen’s shadow lunged across the fragile golden span of the dish antenna suspended in its slanting ring of stones. “With the extra from the Sled, it’ll reach just inside, a little past the first landing strut. Least we’ll be undercover…

  “From what?” Clausen fastened the flap on his holster and kicked at the ground with a booted toe. Dust rose up like smoke in the lamp beam. “Not even a goddamn dew fall here to worry about…

&nb
sp; “The sun,” she replied earnestly. “When it comes back.”

  He shook his head. “McP, you’re losing your ear for irony… if in fact you ever had one.”

  He grabbed the lamp and strode across the dark clearing to the Lander, elbowing past Weng who watched from beside the landing strut, fanning herself with a plastic container lid. McPherson followed reluctantly, with a glance into the rustling blackness of the encircling fields, where the Saw Is were hard at work on some project of their own.

  Clausen moved in on Danforth’s bedside work station without ceremony. The planetologist howled as his keypad went dead beneath his fingers. He returned McPherson’s weary look of apology with a glare as she unplugged his monitor.

  “Get your own equipment down from the Caves, for Christ’s sake!”

  The pilot shook her head. “Gone. Like the cable.”

  “All of it? Jeez, the kid’s serious.”

  “No shit.”

  The monitor was not heavy, but McPherson sagged under it as if it weighed a ton. She looked pale and heat-worn in the glare of the emergency lamp that served as Danforth’s work light.

  “Pushing you hard, isn’t he, babe?” he muttered with a sidelong glower as Clausen carried off his terminal and keypad. Clausen was now flaunting his armaments by wearing the laser openly, and Danforth considered this a challenge and an insult to them all, especially to Weng. Still, beneath his resentment, he allowed a flicker of gratitude that someone was seeing to the repair of the comlink.

  McPherson nodded, brightening a little to his show of concern. “Listen, don’t worry about this, huh? I got an idea for a kind of chair we can rig up, let you move around a little so’s you can use the stuff too.”

  “I need that box today, McP.,” Clausen barked from the far side of the Underbelly.

  “Yessir, right away, sir!” She mugged a giant tiger snarl at Danforth and went off lugging the monitor so that it bounced against her hip with every step.

  Danforth switched off his lamp and sat in darkness, pretending it was cooler that way, laying out his own sequence of priorities for the reestablished link. He had developed theory and planning into a sublime art to pass the time, but cherished the hope that real answers would now be forthcoming, with CRI back on line.

  New data were his primary concern. He needed new data badly, global data for the freak monsoon that had wrecked his Sled, and then for the recent lack of rainfall as well. He needed to know where, they had come from, and if those activities were restricted to the same narrow band as the snowstorm seemed to have been.

  Then some proper modeling to get a lock on my X-factor.

  He was distracted by the mysterious clinkings and soft chatter from the Sawls working in the dark fields. He could see by faint Cluster light that the broad leaves hung limp with thirst and heat fatigue.

  And we’re no different, he mused. He couldn’t recall what had caused him to start hoarding water. Even before Weng had declared the practice official in the Underbelly, each had been doing it privately. He wondered when they might be forced to begin rationing as well.

  And he worried that the prolonged darkness and unrelenting heat might at last be nibbling at the fringes of his reason, just as the tides work patiently to erode even the rockiest shore.

  Nothing so extreme as panic or madness, Danforth consoled himself. We’ll leave all the melodrama to young Ibiá, who has obviously gone over that edge he’s been teetering on for so long.

  But Danforth had caught himself of late replaying the strange weather events at the time of the Leave-taking, events he preferred to forget as he stared up at the panoply of burning stars, listening hard into the night silences as if there were something out there in the dark that might offer a more satisfactory answer to his questions than the data chattering across his computer screen. He mentioned these lapses to no one. Clausen, he suspected, would mockingly blame some animistic African gene for his recent tendency to ascribe intent to the windless suffocating heat. McPherson would look at him with incomprehension, maybe even pity. And he himself felt that anthropomorphizing was a sign of desperation, of grasping for the easy, sloppy answer.

  So he fought off his seizures of what he lightly diagnosed as intellectual dehydration, and renewed his commitment to the search for Factor X, determined to make measurable sense out of weather that was thus far as adequately explained the way the Sawls explained it as by any other more rational and “scientific” means.

  “Need another foot or so!” Clausen called out from the newly arranged console. “Grab that other end!”

  Danforth twisted his disabled body sideways on the bed and eased over the edge the leg that was cast-bound only below the knee. The weight of the cast pulled at his unused muscles. The healing gash in his chest was no longer so painful, but sitting upright unsupported in the heat made him reel with weakness.

  “Damn!” he rasped, craning his neck to watch as Clausen bent to plug the cable run from the antenna. McPherson hovered and Weng stood back, still fanning herself with the slow, detached dignity of a fairy tale empress. “Damn, I’m tired of these legs!”

  The console looked like it was a million miles away.

  Damn you, Clausen! he raged more silently, while part of him noted with interest that it was not Ibiá the saboteur who was the focus of his impotent wrath. Still another part wondered how his colleagues would react if he broke down and wept out of sheer frustration.

  “I have completed that data search you requested, Mr. Ibiá.”

  Stavros shuddered awake from dreams of talking to a towering pillar of fire. CRI’s tinny summons reverberated in the darkened cavern. He felt for his oil lamp and shook it gently.

  Empty. Must have fallen asleep and left it burning.

  He let his head sag back to the table.

  “Mr. Ibiá?”

  “Just a moment, CRI.” His voice creaked. Fumbling, he located his little battery lamp and switched it on, then gazed about, groggy and stiff from his long, exhausted collapse at the makeshift console. Liphar lay naked on his pad against the wall, frowning through his sleep. Discarded clothing lurked in the corners like corpses. There was no sign of Edan.

  “What day is it?”

  “L plus 84,” responded CRI briskly.

  Stavros pinpointed the urgency nagging at him the most, beside the desperate need to relieve himself. “Did the drone get off?”

  “Exactly according to your orders, Mr. Ibiá.” The computer managed to sound insulted by his worried tone.

  Stavros closed his eyes, then roused himself with effort and shuffled to the sink. The water was no longer merely tepid, it was warm, and flowed slowly from the tap. He regarded the thinning trickle with foreboding and shut the tap down tightly as soon as he had splashed his face and chest and drunk his fill. He nosed around among his supplies and dug out a packet of freeze-dried apricots to dull an unreasoning hunger, then slouched past the console, dripping from face and hands, heading for the lavatory at the far end of the outer hall.

  Back in the cavern, he stripped off his loose linen pants, offended by their griminess and by the pungence of his own unwashed smell. He sat down at the console, feeling oddly vulnerable as he faced the sophisticated machinery in his sweating nakedness.

  “Okay, CRI, I’m in one piece now. What did you find?”

  “A preliminary scan of the remote sensing data, together with the hemispheric photos from the polar orbiters, has turned up a few items that might be of interest to you. First, in the northern hemisphere, Mr. Clausen’s deep sensors indicate a sizable gravitational anomaly near the center of the great ocean, suggesting the presence of a buried mass.”

  “A mass of what?”

  CRI hesitated, as if recalling that it was not Danforth she was reporting to. “A solid body, Mr. Ibiá, Its composition is impossible to determine at the moment, but the ocean is roughly circular and could be interpreted as a water-filled impact basin.”

  “Oh. One hell of a crater.”

  �
��Is this the sort of anomaly you were hoping to discover?”

  Stavros rubbed his eyes. “Not precisely, but it’s interesting. Go on.”

  “It is particularly interesting in light of the specifics of your request,” CRI encouraged. “In the southern hemisphere, at a point exactly opposite to this gravitational blip, is a large but clearly defined area of severe upthrust. Very broken terrain. This would also be expected in the case of a major impact. It is the only feature in the southern desert highlands that could be considered anomalous.”

  “Hmm.” Stavros ran through the words of the tale-chant describing the creation of Lagri’s mountain fortress. It did not seem impossible that the “bolt of the creator’s might” could have been inspired by some race memory of an ancient meteor strike.

  “Can you get me a picture of that area, CRI? Some kind of close-up?”

  “The polar orbiters are equipped for hemispheric resolution only, Mr. Ibiá. As for the radar imaging…”

  “Come on, Clausen must be flying something that’ll produce high-resolution pictures?”

  “I am not at liberty to divulge…”

  “Okay, okay. Tit for tat. How about this: don’t tell me anything ‘sensitive’, just get me the photo. Can you do that?”

  “At the present low-transmission rate, it will take some time, even supposing I can locate such data.”

  “Sounds like I damn well gotta go there myself!”

  Stavros fumed. Were he dealing with a human, this kind of foot-dragging would be preparatory to the suggestion that a certain sum might unlock sticky doors. However, he had not yet heard of anyone successfully bribing a computer.

  Go there myself, he thought ironically. If I only had wings.

  But the notion had its attractions, despite its current impossibility. It was so obvious and simple that he could not understand why he hadn’t thought of it before. He shoved his stool away from the console and, despite the heat, began to pace excitedly.

  What better way to prove the Goddesses exist than to go find one?