Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  It didn’t. They would both be faced with the same truth, whatever it was, once they got there. Danforth’s belief or lack thereof would be irrelevant to the final outcome. Stavros was sure that rested in his hands alone.

  Mine and Lagri’s.

  He wanted Danforth to believe him for more personal reasons, reasons he was surprised still mattered to him. It still mattered that the expedition’s Chief Scientist accept him as an equal. It was a vestige of the life that had gone before, perhaps the last, of the ambitions that had brought him to Fiix to discover a very different destiny.

  Stavros doubted CRI’s broadcast messages would meet with any response. He had ordered it because he wanted no stone left unturned. His own confidence rested in the pull he felt southward, as strong and direct as a rope around his neck, or more accurately, issuing from the centers of his palms. He was sure he could have plotted the course to Nolagri without benefit of a compass. This he did not tell Danforth. There was no way he could think to express it that would sound vaguely rational.

  When Stavros had finished his tale of voids and apprentices and a release from dying, Danforth was silent for a long stretch of difficult climbing terrain. He wound the Sled through a forest of wind-devoured spindles broken by long sheeting grades of sheer rock. The grades sharpened eventually into a wall of snowless crags and dry hard-faced peaks, the summits of the first range of the Grigar. The white cloud veil pressed in from above, suffocatingly close. Danforth checked windspeeds and altitude, then banked west to find a pass that cut south sooner than Clausen’s reported route.

  “Might pick up some time,” he commented neutrally into the com.

  Stavros grunted.

  “You’d think there’d be more wind at this height,” said Danforth.

  Stavros made another, less distinct sound of assent.

  “Or snow at least.”

  “Not when Lagri has the upper hand,” insisted Stavros at last, and then understood that he needed Danforth’s vote of confidence as he needed Susannah’s love, to counteract the guar-fire’s pull toward the total isolation of a mystic. He might joke about madness, but it no longer held any romance for him.

  “Stav.” Danforth used his Christian name for the first time in Stavros’ memory. “Just like you need to suspect me of ulterior motives, I need to reserve judgment on all this. You dig?”

  “Yeah, I dig.” Stavros savored the ancient colloquialism as Danforth gained altitude to slip the Sled over the top of a long, smooth ridge between two shattered peaks. He knew an offer of friendship when he heard one.

  On the far side of the range, Danforth managed a jolted landing in a gravelled wash on the floor of a wide yellow valley. He dropped the force field’s protective dome and heat engulfed them, pressing them into their seats. Nobody moved.

  “Should have found some shade,” Danforth apologized.

  “Where?” Susannah waved a languid, heat-heavy arm at the unbroken waste sloping away for endless miles to either side of them.

  Their voices seemed overloud and brittle, discouraging to chatter. The small clink of unbuckled seat harness rang through the hot silence like an off-tune carillon. Aguidran rose first, stretching elaborately, surveying the distance with eyes narrowed against the glare. Danforth hauled his legs out from beneath the control panel and tried to pull himself up against the back of his chair. His right leg gave as he shifted weight onto it, but Aguidran was there to steady him while Ghirra jumped up to hand him his crutches.

  Danforth nodded his thanks, making light of his exhaustion, but when the hatch has been opened in the floor of the hold, and they were resting in the shade of the Sled’s blunt delta wings, he quietly asked Susannah what she could give him to keep him alert and functioning.

  “Not as strong as I thought yet,” he grumbled.

  “I can keep you going for a while,” she said, “but what you really need is a relief pilot.”

  “You offering?” Stavros retorted, annoyed by his own uselessness.

  “It doesn’t look so hard,” ventured Susannah lightly.

  “Depends on the weather and the terrain,” said Danforth. “Right now, windless as it is, thermals are the only issue. You ever flown before?”

  “Small conventional craft, a few hours here and there in the air. No take off or landing, though.”

  Danforth looked to Stavros. “It could he the edge we need.”

  Stavros frowned. “I think you ought to try me out,” Susannah urged gamely.

  “Makes sense to me.” Danforth lay back in the pebbled sand, folding one arm over his eyes and the other over the laser stuck into his belt. “Now just give me a few quick winks here, a couple of pills, and I’ll be raring to go.”

  While Danforth slept, Susannah put together a cold meal from ship’s rations.

  “Not very appetizing, I’m afraid,” she told Ghirra. But the three Sawls ate without complaint, long used to the idea that food must often be no more than necessary nourishment. Stavros chewed at a bar of dried fruit, shoveled the rest of his share onto Liphar’s plate, and wandered off to sit alone behind the tail fin.

  Ghirra brushed soy crumbs from his borrowed therm-suit and asked Susannah about its workings. He marvelled at the protection it provided, that from the neck down, he could feel cool and dry in such deadly heat. He made jocular but pointed reference to his sister’s refusal to wear the suit they had brought for her. Aguidran grunted and resumed her reflex study of the countryside. Ghirra fingered the smooth resilient fabric of his sleeve, then flicked a covert glance at Stavros behind the tail. He kept his voice low, almost a whisper.

  “I think, sometime, Suzhannah, maybe it is better say yes, Clauzen, bring all this here to us. How do you say to this?”

  Susannah had been expecting something like this from the Master Healer. His self-image was to be unafraid of new ideas. Technology excited him and he understood enough to see its advantages. But he was hardly in possession of the whole picture.

  “If therm-suits and Sleds and medicine were all Emil would bring,” she replied after some consideration, “then I’d welcome him with open arms. If we could offer the lifesaving benefits of our tech without all the accompanying dangers… but technology has a history of running away with itself, particularly in the hands of megacorporations like CONPLEX. Imagine a guild that disregarded all the other guilds’ interests for the sake of its own enrichment and power.”

  Ghirra spread his hands as if the outcome were obvious. “This guild will not survive. The FoodGuild will not feed it. The Weavers will give it no cloth.”

  “This guild I speak of provides for all its own needs, through physical and economic intimidation.”

  Ghirra floundered. “In-tim…?”

  “What Clausen does with his laser,” said Danforth from the ground. “You don’t give me what I want, I’ll shoot you.” He raised himself on one elbow, patting the gun nestled against his belly. “Oh, he tries to buy you first, but that’s just because it’s less trouble. He’ll try to buy you, doc, if he gets half a chance.”

  “Buy me?”

  “Sure. Your talk of weather machines suggests you might be interested in a trade: your planet in exchange for whatever techy trinkets he has to offer. And, doc, your brain working overtime like it is, you’re vulnerable. Take it from one who knows.”

  “Clauzen tried this to you?”

  Danforth laughed bitterly. “He fucking owned me, man. Lock, stock and barrel. He just let me think it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Which is how he’ll put it to you, doc. It’s called colonialism.”

  Aguidran lunged forward suddenly with a sharp cry of warning. Plates and food and water mugs went flying. She shoved Susannah aside with a sweep of her arm, whipped the long blade from her boot and flung it into the sand a scant meter past where Susannah had been sitting. Fine grit and gravel erupted as the knife struck home, its carved handle humming wildly. A six legged lizard, two feet long from head to tail, thrashed to the surface, coiling back on itself,
its needle fangs slashing furiously at the invading blade. Aguidran scrambled to her feet and pinned the creature’s long neck under her heel, then jerked the knife free and cut off the head with a single clean slice.

  “Jesus!” Danforth exhaled. “Is everything trying to kill us on this planet?” It had not occurred to him to draw the laser.

  “It looked for our water,” said Ghirra with something akin to sympathy.

  “Guess we take our breaks inside the Sled from now on.”

  Susannah began immediate negotiations with Aguidran for the dead reptile’s remains. Stavros was drawn out of his solitary contemplation to stare down at the bloodied sand.

  Danforth gathered scattered cups and plate. “What’re you up to back there, Ibiá?”

  “Listening,” Stavros replied abstractedly.

  “What do you hear?”

  “So far, nothing.”

  Danforth marvelled at his new-found patience. “What do you expect to hear?”

  “I don’t know,” Stavros regarded him earnestly. “One of the many things I needed the old man to tell me before he died…”

  They continued south, winding from pass to pass, scaling the second range of the Grigar, Under Danforth’s initially nervous eye, Susannah took the stick for an easy hour of low-altitude flying as they crossed a high barren plateau. He allowed her to negotiate a gentle slope or two, and when she proved equal to both the milder terrain and his impatient teaching, he talked her across a stretch of rugged canyon land before resuming the chair to push the Sled over the more perilous heights of the range.

  On the far side, the mountains fell away into high, flat desert dotted with strange wind-smoothed rock formations reminiscent of a giant topiary garden. Danforth flew onward until Susannah’s drug no longer vibrated in his veins. When his eyelids drooped long enough that she leaned over from the copilot’s seat to shake him awake, he set the Sled down on a ledge in the shade of a rising peak.

  The passengers unbuckled slowly but made no move to venture outside the craft. Susannah promised a cooked meal and hustled Liphar to the rear to set up the portable stove. Stavros woke from his doze on the rear bench and came forward to talk to CRI.

  “Anything on those test updates?”

  “I am currently mapping anomalous magnetic field variations in an area centered approximately forty-five degrees off the southern pole. Remote sensing shows no indication so far of refined metal masses…”

  “Just call them machines, CRI,” drawled Danforth.

  “… but high-res imaging of the area is proceeding.” CRI supplied coordinates for the magnetic field, still over two days travel to the south.

  Stavros asked Clausen’s position.

  “We’ve gained another seventy-five kilometers on him,” offered Danforth. “He’s still not exactly proceeding as the crow flies. I suspect he’s doing a little prospecting along the way.”

  “Fine. Let him.”

  “Do you wish an update on the Contact procedures, Mr, Ibiá?”

  “Oh. Yeah, sure.”

  Danforth chuckled.“You’re drifting, Stav. Still listening for your voices?”

  Stavros nodded, more seriously than Danforth had meant the question.

  “There has been no indication of response to sixteen hours of continuous broadcast on the standard twenty-five frequencies,” CRI reported dutifully.

  “Both a binary and a decimal code?”

  “That is the procedure,” returned the computer stiffly.

  Stavros grimaced. “She’s humoring me.” He paced away, around the back of the empty benches, his hands fisting. “Up there in that goddamn orbiter where all this is nothing but a string of data to them! Christ! I don’t need this. I need help!”

  Danforth turned in his seat. “Easy, man…”

  “It’s about language, not just some damn procedure! Don’t they see? It’s always about language! How you find the right words, the right kind of words to bridge the gap between one consciousness and another!”

  Danforth remembered this passionate anger, how it used to rile him. He realized that he had wanted no rival to his own intensity. “Consciousness seems to be the thing in question, though,” he said mildly.

  At the sudden floating glaze in Ibiá’s eyes, he amended himself hastily. “For them in the Orbiter, I mean, and CRI, who has enough trouble of her own being considered a consciousness. Hey, what do you care what they think up there? CRI’s doing what you asked—it’s just part of her own little campaign for recognition that she questions your judgment.”

  Stavros slowed his pacing and returned forward to slump into his seat. He dragged both palms down across his face with a collecting sigh. “Okay, CRI. Then maybe we should try something that isn’t the procedure.”

  CRI waited, a mere hiss of disapproving static.

  Stavros turned to Danforth. “Any ideas?”

  Danforth tried to look committed to the inquiry. “Not my field, really. The machines I talk to already know I’m here. What tactics do you guys usually use beside numerical code?”

  “Math, geometry, pictures, patterns in the color and duration of light pulses, um…” Stavros let his head fall back, eyes lidded. “Patterns of sound…”

  To Danforth’s surprise, an idea surfaced “Ever try music?”

  “Sometimes. Usually a long shot.”

  “Why not send them some of Weng’s?”

  He could sense Ibiá replaying his words to ferret out the mockery the linguist was sure must be there. He found himself liking his long shot even more. It had a kind of wild mathematical elegance about it.

  “Stav, I’m serious. Despite all her protests to the contrary, her game theory analysis seems to me the best, in a way the most concrete evidence you have for consciousness. The whole concept of a game implies intention to me, I don’t care what the mathematicians say, and intention implies consciousness. Weng’s music is constructed around the same set of algorithms.”

  Stavros buried his chin in his chest with a faint, pensive glower. Danforth hazarded blunt honesty. “Look, you always used to be throwing the superiority of insight and instinct in my face like so much wet shit, right? ’Cause you didn’t think I had the intellectual balls for it. A straight numbers man all the way, right?”

  “Tay, I never…”

  “Sure you did. Forget it. But grant me this one, okay? My personal gesture to the irrational. Don’t reject it just ’cause it ain’t yours.”

  Stavros chewed his lip for a moment, then leaned forward. “You get all that, CRI?”

  “Yes, Mr. Ibiá.”

  “Then I suggest you give it a try.” He rose tiredly, grasping Danforth’s shoulder for support against the pain in his own, but letting his hand linger briefly as he gained his feet. “Get some sleep, Tay. We’ll keep the food warm for you.”

  Danforth was dreaming of machines made of cloud and ice when Susannah shook him awake. Her eyes were wide.

  Not fear, he thought, but something close to it.

  “I think you might want a look at this, Tay.”

  He glanced around the cockpit, slit-eyed against the brightness, but Susannah was pointing straight up. Danforth studied the sky without comment until she demanded impatiently, “What is it?”

  He shook his head slowly. The flat, unyielding white was quivering like a curtain in a wind. Waves of cooler white or dirty gray chased each other from horizon to horizon. He was reminded of the ripples of shadow that race across the ground prior to a solar eclipse, but he’d never seen anything like it in the sky.

  “What do you think, Tay?” Stavros came up from the rear of the hold, trailing Ghirra and Liphar. The young apprentice priest wore a doom-struck knowing look and would not stray a half step from Stavros’ side.

  “I, ah… I’d guess some sort of instability along the interface between the dry heat down here and the cooler, moister air above that’s creating the cloud.” He noted the direction of movement: north-northeast.

  The ripples broadened, like
an ocean flowing slowly northward. The hot white landscape throbbed beneath the undulating sky.

  “Valla’s death throes, Lifa says.” Stavros was struggling for some measure of calm. “Apparently it’s due to get fairly spectacular when Lagri calls in the heavy artillery… fire falling from the sky, the like… Devastation.”

  “I remember,” said Danforth. “He sang us the song—about the little children. But I don’t think it’s…”

  “Lifa says it’s all going according to schedule.”

  A wave of color surged past, a shell-pink gust across the pale surface of the sky. The long ends of Susannah’s hair lifted freely away from her body and crackled with tiny blue fire when she swept them back to bundle into a tight coil.

  Danforth saw terror bloom behind Stavros’ steady gaze, but because it was not fear of anything he could accept or understand, he could not imagine how to ease it. He looked at the pulsing sky and shrugged. “Best we be moving along, then…”

  39

  Megan stopped along the path to rest, pulling her broad-brimmed ranger hat low over her eyes. She thought this would have to be her last trip to the Caves until nightfall brought some relief from the crushing heat. She sat on a raised earthwork edging a terrace, where the mud and stone had dried as hard as fired ceramic. Dust clung to the legs of Megan’s therm-suit and to her hands as she tried to brush it away.

  In the fields, nothing stirred. Not a hint of breeze to rattle the dessicated stalks. The Sawls had salvaged what they could of their meager harvest. The rest had been left to shrivel as the irrigation pipes ran dry. After the departure of the Sleds, the population withdrew completely into the Caves. Only Ampiar ventured out into the white heat, dutifully, until Weng assured her that it was unnecessary for her to come unless needed.

  When the heat of sitting still became less bearable than the heat of moving, Megan roused herself onward, feeling helpless and profoundly depressed. The Lander glimmered like a white mirage, a mocking image of technological impotence.

  Clausen will not have to lift a finger, Megan mourned. Nature herself is delivering the planet right into his hands.