Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  “I couldn’t, Meg. Three more died while we were moving everyone up to Physicians’. I just couldn’t…” She lowered her eyes dispiritedly and set the medikit on the ground with a tired sigh. “We’ve lost fifty-six in all.”

  Megan nodded sadly.

  Susannah shook her hair back in a gesture of resignation, then went to greet Danforth, planting a light kiss on his cheek. “How’s this patient doing? I’m glad some of them recover. You look a little thin, Tay. Aren’t they feeding you?” She peered at the ragged scar along his side and ran her hands along his legs, checking the casts. “The wound’s healed nicely, though I’m sorry I couldn’t make it a little neater for you. Looks like someone attacked you with a chainsaw. How’s it feel?”

  “Fine. But Susannah…” He grabbed her hand and held it. “Walking cast? Please god, before my brain atrophies along with my body?”

  Susannah smiled at him. “You got it, next thing on my list.” Her eyes raked Clausen as he waited at the console with his back prominently turned. Her lips tightened briefly. Then she moved casually to his side and spoke in a tone of gentle admonition.

  “Sorry to have caused such a scene, Emil… but was it absolutely necessary to be so hard on the boy?”

  She really does think he’s crazy, marvelled Megan.

  Clausen swiveled in his seat. “Ah, the noble Susannah. Now which boy is that?”

  Susannah did not miss a beat. “He was fortunately unhurt, but the harm done to our relationship with the Sawls is irreparable.”

  “Oh, that boy.” Clausen crossed his legs, enjoying himself. “I’m much more interested in the other.”

  Susannah’s frown mirrored innocent concern. “Was there another?”

  Clausen sighed, disappointed. He turned back to the terminal.

  “CRI, add the following charge: for aiding and abetting the escape of an injured felon, Dr. Susannah James.”

  “It’s great you got them to bring it back!” McPherson cracked her knuckles excitedly. “It’s in terrific shape! The flood hardly beat it up at all! Just needs a serious bath.”

  “Real serious,” remarked Megan from the console. The returned A-Sled sat in the clearing beside its damaged companion craft.

  “Nah. I’m charging up the portable sonic now. Bet I have that Sled in the air inside of ten, twelve hours.”

  “I’m surprised Aguidran didn’t hold it hostage, in return for Clausen’s head.”

  “What about B-Sled?” inquired Susannah, keeping informed on the progress of the Sled repairs as Stavros had requested. She’d fitted the last section of fiberplast around Danforth’s thigh and strapped it tight. “Sit up, Tay. See how it feels.”

  McPherson glanced reflexively toward the clearing. The Sleds’ sunbright image danced through the force field’s distortions. “It’ll come along faster now Emil’s decided to get his hands dirty.”

  “Could they get any dirtier?” Megan muttered.

  The pilot shrugged. “Say what you like, he knows his stuff. And he’s real eager to get out there and get done, so’s we can get out of here.”

  Danforth sat up and swung his legs off the edge of the bed. The fracture in his left shin was nearly mended. Susannah’s new bindings had given him back a working knee. He flexed it gingerly. The reset break in his right thigh was healing more slowly and required continued immobility.

  “No marathons,” Susannah smiled. “I’d like you to keep using the chair as much as possible for a while, but Ghirra has sent you a gift.”

  She gestured to McPherson, who ducked behind a crate and hauled out a pair of hand-carved crutches. Danforth took them eagerly, stroking the smooth, aged wood and the leather-covered padding, softened with long use. He touched the lap-joints near the tips where the shafts had been recently lengthened.

  “Tell that doctor-man thanks,” he said.

  “I think he’d like it better if you told him yourself.”

  “I think you should get right on them, come over here and take a look,” said Megan. In front of her, CRI’s screen was lighting up with pictures. “Commander?” she called. “You’ll want to see this, too.”

  Danforth set the crutches under his arms and swung himself forward, awkwardly but with increasing ease as the memory of upright movement came back to him.

  “Haven’t done this since I wracked up my first car,” he laughed. “Christ, it feels good to walk!”

  McPherson paced along beside him, grinning happily, then dodged ahead to wheel his chair next to Megan at the console.

  Weng emerged from her cubicle to join the others as they gathered around the terminal. She moved briskly and gave them all a gracious smile, but Susannah worried at the visible strain in her face, the skin taut at the corners of her mouth, marks of a hurt as deep as the gash in Stavros’ shoulder. Clausen might be killing Weng without lifting a finger.

  “Ogo Dul.” Megan announced. “The nearest coastal settlement and the one DulElesi trades with most often. It’s built inside cliffs, too. This is one of the market levels.”

  “Boats!” exclaimed McPherson delightedly.

  Danforth put aside his crutches and lowered himself into his chair. Megan continued her guided tour. The observers’ patience with her detailed commentary told Susannah how starved they were not only for a change of scenery, but for the chance to relax and have a little fun, acting like the dinner guests of tourists just home from vacation.

  Into the middle of their laughter walked the Master Healer, his shirt as limp as his stance, open to the waist. He stepped through the entry cylinder with slow care, touching its silvered inside curve with an interest restrained by caution. At the inner lip of the cylinder, he glanced warily back at the clearing where Clausen, up to his elbows in the guts of B-Sled, was whistling Mozart.

  Susannah went to meet him, instantly worried. “Is everything all right?”

  Ghirra nodded, then stopped short, at first puzzled, then amazed.

  He sniffed wonderingly. “How is this? How is it like a deep cave here?”

  “The force field…” Susannah faltered. Where to begin?

  “You can do this?” Ghirra lifted his dust-streaked arms to the cooling air. “With your machines?”

  “Sure, doc. Watch.” Danforth leaned over in his chair and felt for a loose pebble. He tossed it at the shifting curtain of energy that walled the Underbelly. The pebble sparked and bounced off what must have seemed to Ghirra to be wavering but insubstantial air.

  His mouth sagged open. “How?” he demanded.

  Danforth looked to Susannah. “Does he really want to know?”

  “Later, later,” said Megan. “Ghirra, come look at this. This is SkyHall. It was cool in there, too, remember? CRI, run the next, what was it, half-dozen or so frames in slow sequence, please.”

  Ghirra held Susannah back as she turned toward the console. He was eager as a boy in his astonishment. “The machines can do this anywhere?”

  “Anywhere you have the power.” She pointed upward. “And the loop.” Her finger traced the circumference of the Lander’s underside above their heads. She thought his look suggested that she’d been concealing some major bit of Terran magic. “It hasn’t been working since the flood. Stav didn’t tell you about air-conditioning?”

  “Ghirra!” Megan insisted. “Need your help explaining this!”

  Ghirra wrapped his damp shirt more tightly around his chest and swallowed his awe enough to resume his dignity. Weng extended her hand to him with the first real smile Susannah had seen her manage since the transmission of Clausen’s infamous List. “Good evening, GuildMaster.”

  Ghirra took her hand in the instinctively courtly manner he reserved for Weng alone, and held it, regarding her solicitously.

  “Trying times, are they not?” said Weng lightly, and removed her hand gently from his grasp.

  Ghirra smiled his sympathy and turned to Danforth, his eyes immediately drawn to the newly bound legs. “You are well, TaylorDanforth?”

  Danforth pa
tted the crutches beside him. “The better for these, doc. Sorry to hear about all your trouble out there.”

  “Trouble is shared always, TaylorDanforth,” Ghirra replied quietly.

  Danforth raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, doc. It is that, all right.”

  “Okay, now here we go,” continued Megan. “These were etched on the stone walls all around the hail. I was caught by the quality of abstraction, but Ghirra here was rather dismissive. He called them…”

  “Old drawing.” Ghirra peered at the lines and crosshatchings on the screen with renewed mistrust. “I do not dis-miss these. Meghan. I say they have not meaning. They are drawing only.”

  “Art, he means,” said Megan with a grin. “A mere trifle.”

  “How old are they, do you know?” Weng inquired.

  “Very many generations, Commander.”

  “It was Susannah who noticed the changes,” Meg pursued. “Watch this.”

  CRI ran through the sequence slowly. The hatchings and lines shifted relative to each other, drifting, intersecting, moving apart in a choppy rhythm suggestive of a consecutive progression.

  “Run it again, CRI. Faster, this time.”

  The second run brought a soft exclamation of admiration from Susannah. The changes from frame to frame smoothed into a virtually seamless moving image.

  Weng leaned into the screen with sudden interest. “Again, please, CRI.” She straightened when the sequence had finished. “I would swear… CRI, may I have the first and last frames, split screen, please.”

  “Certainly, Commander.”

  Weng stared. “Now run the sequence again, please.”

  CRI complied. The old spacer watched intently, then stood back. “How does it strike you, Dr. Danforth?”

  Danforth returned her look blankly, “How does it strike you. Commander?”

  “You don’t see it? Well, it seemed to me that… but perhaps… wait, let me try something.” She reached over Megan’s arm to tap in a long command. “Complete without verbalizing, please, CRI.”

  “YES, Commander.”

  A single image from the latter part of the sequence filled the screen, the etched pattern of tines in sharp relief against the pebbled rock. Slowly, as CRI processed the command, a second underlying image began to surface. A flat gray background softened the sharpness of the rock. Paler connected blotching hovered beneath the intricate crosshatchings. Bright spots that might have been taken for random pitting of the stone were shadowed by a spatter of black dots.

  “Excellent,” said Weng. “A very good match. Proceed, please.”

  The two images shivered together for a moment. Then the SkyHall photo began to fade. It left behind a screen of grainy gray stained with lighter smoke and pinpricks of black.

  “My god,” Danforth murmured. “Could they possibly…?”

  “That looks like a star field, Commander,” McPherson observed.

  Weng’s black eyes leaped past Danforth in triumph to settle on the mystified Master Healer. “You see, I believe you are mistaken, GuildMaster. This ‘old drawing’ of yours is very meaningful indeed.”

  “Star field? You mean…?” Megan fell silent. “SkyHall! Of course!”

  “What stars?” asked McPherson.

  Weng’s thin hand inscribed a graceful overhead arc. “These stars. On the screen is a photo-negative from the sky survey that Dr. Sundqvist is completing at present from the Orbiter’s observatory.” She outlined the lighter blotches with eager fingers. “There is the Coal Sack, invading the cluster. CRI, let’s bring in Dr. Levy’s photo again, please.”

  They watched again with wonder as the two images swam toward their astonishing correlation.

  “The degree of accuracy is remarkable.” Weng was almost voluble with enthusiasm, “And mind you, Dr. Danforth. This image, the closest match to our own current one, is from the middle of the sequence. The succeeding images are future prediction.”

  Ghirra had observed their building excitement in silence. Now, as they all fell silent to grapple with the flood of implication, he spoke up gravely. “What is this meaning, Commander?”

  “It means someone knew!” Danforth rasped. “Someone here a very long time ago knew Byrnham’s Cluster was heading for collision with the Coal Sack! Unless…”

  “No, Tay.” Megan put in. “The drawings arc not recent. I’d stake my rep on that.”

  “I believe the first image in the sequence will tell us how long ago they knew,” Weng added. “What do you say to my periodic table now?”

  Danforth shrugged incredulously. “No further questions, Counselor. Except maybe… who was it who knew?”

  Ghirra spread his hands, pleading. “Commander…?”

  Weng turned graciously. “I will explain to you as best I can, GuildMaster.”

  “To him?” Megan exclaimed. “What about me?”

  “And me,” Susannah agreed. “What collision with the Coal Sack?”

  “Dr. Danforth?”

  “Be my guest, Commander. The stars are all earthly suns to me. I leave the astronomy to Jorge Sundqvist… and you.”

  “You do know what a star is, GuildMaster?”

  Susannah laid a protective hand on Ghirra’s arm. “Stav’s got him well on his way toward a galactic point of view.”

  “Excellent.” Weng embarked, with CRI’s assistance, on an illustrated mini-lecture on the history of Byrnham’s Cluster, maintaining for Ghirra’s benefit a strictly nontechnical approach.

  As the explanation progressed, Clausen wandered in from the clearing. Looking a bit heat-dazed, he stood nearby, cooling off, listening without seeming to.

  Ghirra listened intently. Now and then, he asked for clarification. The greatest obstacle to his understanding was the question of scale: he had no frame of reference for the vast distances and quantities involved, with one exception. Conceptualizing the appropriately enormous stretches of time did not faze him in the least.

  “I have done some preliminary calculations on this, as Dr. Danforth knows,” said Weng. “The data suggest that about a hundred and sixty-five thousand standard years ago, the Coal Sack would actually become visible in its approach.”

  Megan absorbed this with difficulty. “One six five?”

  “It would have been, of course, detectable long before that,” Weng continued. “With sophisticated sensing equipment.”

  “Our Egyptians, those great technocrats,” offered Meg by way of comparison, “were just moving into the height of their powers a mere five thousand years ago.”

  Weng nodded appreciatively. “A hundred and fifty thousand years ago, the Cluster entered the outer limits of the nebula. The Fiixian system, however was on the far side of the Cluster at the time. The affects of the collision would have grown steadily for the next forty thousand years as the system’s orbit moved it around to the front of the Cluster, climaxing around fifteen thousand, then easing somewhat as the orbit returned it toward the back. The Cluster itself, however, continues to move into major intersection with an outstretched arm of the nebula, mitigating the effects of relative position.”

  Weng paused for breath.

  Ghirra stood in pensive silence, sucking his cheeks into hollows. Susannah worried that he would be overwhelmed by this onslaught of information. She recalled his metaphoric commentary on the beauties of the Cluster when night first fell over the Dop Arek.

  “Getting a little over your head, is it, honored doctor?” commented Clausen drily, from behind.

  Ghirra did not seem to hear. He stared at the monitor from the depths of his increasingly pronounced stoop, his eyes half-lidded, barely focused.

  Weng ceased her lecture, concerned. The others stilled around her, while Clausen chuckled softly to himself.

  Susannah reached, then held back her hand. “Ghirra?”

  His eyes flicked up at the sound of his name. He glanced around, read the contempt in Clausen’s face and waiting anxiety in the others’. He turned his back on the prospector, let his frown relax, and offer
ed his most glowing smile to allay concern, though Susannah was unconvinced.

  “I will tell you my mind on this,” he began softly. “Ibi asks me one time, do I believe the First Books? I say, only priests call them truth.”

  He leaned forward to touch exploring fingers to the monitor screen. Wonder deepened his voice. “But this what you tell me is very like… it tells the story very like our chant of the coming of the Darkness.”

  Susannah’s hand flew to her mouth. “The Tale of Origins! Yes, it does!”

  “…‘And then it happened,’ ” Megan recited from memory, “ ‘that the Darkness arrived and the king grew old’… according to myth, that was when all the trouble started and the Sisters started playing games with the weather.”

  “Wait. Playing games?” Danforth turned wide eyes on Megan. “Thought they were fighting a war.”

  “Depends on who you talk to.”

  He noted Weng’s triumphant smile, then buried his head in his hands with a theatrical moan, “I give up. I’m surrounded.”

  “Another reality crisis, Dr. Danforth?” asked Weng with great gentleness.

  He nodded into his hands, then drew them abruptly across his face and sat up. “Sorry, doc, go on with your story.”

  Ghirra was perplexed by this outbreak. He spread his hands. “The story of the Darkness is the Darkness: The Sisters are blinded. They do not see the many dying they make with their wagers. But the First Books say also that the Darkness will end.” He paused, sucking his cheek again, then looked to Weng. “You say how this… dust moves in the sky, Commander? Will it move…?”

  “Beyond, GuildMaster? Yes. Your ancestors knew that, and they even knew when.”

  Weng recalled to the screen the final frame of Megan’s photo sequence. The area of crosshatching had moved beyond the greatest concentration of surface pitting. She made a fast calculation at the keypad. “In approximately eighty-five thousand years, Byrnham’s Cluster will leave the environs of the Coal Sack. If there is, as I believe, some direct connection between this occurrence and your world’s deadly climate irregularities, GuildMaster, I certainly wish I could offer you more encouraging news,”