Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

Susannah’s apprehension was a distraction at first. Expecting sudden surprises, she listened too hard to the echoes, watched the blackness too intently, until her eyes created their own dancing phantoms in response to the strain.

  She relaxed as they penetrated deeper, finding nothing and no one, but then she began to worry that Stavros’ quest was soon to end in failure, that there was nothing in the tunnels, nothing but the unyielding darkness and cool musty air. What if they did find nothing? Would a report be taken back to DulElesi that the Goddesses did not exist?

  She began to look more carefully. As the searchbeam slid up along the curving wall, she was struck by the amber beauty of the rock, glowing warmly even under the harsh light of the lamp.

  Agate? She wondered what other stone possessed this striated translucence so reminiscent of gem-quality tortoiseshell. The deeper into the tunnel they went, the thicker the translucent layer became. The lamplight was caught and diffracted, softening as it passed through the surface layers. A mild glow pervaded the floor around the focus of the beam and crept up the curve of the walls. As the lucid material thickened, it developed undulations, gentle distortions. The precise arc of the tunnel relaxed into an oval.

  The patter of their footsteps sharpened abruptly. Aguidran stopped, listening into the darkness. She flashed the lamp around, then traced the arc of the walls. The curving floor had flattened. The tunnel was widening. She aimed the lamp straight up. The top of the arc was suddenly no longer within range of the beam. She moved forward more cautiously. After a few hundred paces, the beam of light sliding along the wall met a sharp edge, and beyond, darkness. Aguidran halted again, and glanced back at her brother.

  “Shouldn’t we go straight ahead?” whispered Susannah. “Isn’t that what he’d do? He should be tiring by now. I haven’t heard Liphar calling for a while. You think he found him?”

  Ghirra frowned into the darkness as if it were consciously trying to confound him, then motioned his sister onward. Aguidran focused the beam a short pace in front of her, wary of the floor dropping away as suddenly as the walls had done. But it did not. The hard lamplight diffused through its amber clarity like honey flowing through denser molasses. Susannah thought of black and amber ice. She stooped and found the floor warm to the touch. It did not feel like rock.

  “Ghirra. Feel this.”

  The Master Healer crouched, put his palm to the floor. The lamp proceeded ahead with Aguidran, leaving them in increasing darkness. But the floor continued to glow faintly. Ghirra called to his sister to wait, but Susannah laid a hand on his arm, turning her back to the lamp beam.

  “Ask her to turn it off.”

  Puzzled, he complied.

  Aguidran growled about speed and their lack of progress, but snapped off the beam. Profound night closed in on them.

  “Let your eyes adjust, then look around you,” said Susannah. She heard Ghirra’s soft exclamation before she could fully make out his silhouette against the weak but steady luminescence. The details of a giant cavern ghosted into view.

  A golden glow surrounded them, as if they had been plunged inside the black and amber ice. The floor undulated away from a flat central axis which they had been following like a path.

  Several hundred meters in either direction, it rose into curving walls of lucent gold and apricot and saffron chased with madder and umber like wisps of cloud in sunset. Sturdy ribs of opaque material punctuated the glow with receding parentheses of darkness. Walls and ribs curled up and met seamlessly high above.

  “How lovely,” Susannah murmured.

  Aguidran’s silhouette retreated toward them, her leathers creaking as she knelt beside her brother. Ghirra ticked a fingernail against the smooth floor with a pensive grunt.

  “Let’s have the light again.” Susannah swung her pack down, unlacing a side pocket. She dug out a small stainless penknife, and pried open a blade to pick experimentally at the floor while Aguidran held the light. The sharp point left whitish scars far more easily than Susannah had expected. She flattened the edge against the floor and drew it carefully towards her. Several pale shreds of material spiraled up before the blade. She gathered them carefully into a plastic sample bag.

  “Ghirra, this is weird, but if you put a chunk of this stuff in my hand and asked me what it was, I’d guess at something organic, like elkhorn.”

  Patiently, Ghirra awaited clarification. Aguidran doused the beam again and hunkered down to scrutinize the cavern more thoroughly.

  “Keratins,” supplied Susannah, whispering again as if the cavern itself might be listening. “Fibrous proteins, like the material of our fingernails or our hair. On Earth, we have many herbivores with keratin-based growths called horns. Their feet are also protected by thick pads of keratin called hooves. But mostly, horn is more opaque than this. This is more like tortoise shell. The point is, it takes something living to produce it.”

  “But the light…?”

  “Bioluminescence,” she replied impulsively, “like your fish in the deep-caves. It’s a guess, Ghirra. Only a guess.” She held the sample bag up to the cavern’s glow, stemming the rush to conclusions, forcing herself to maintain some objective calm. “We’ll know when I power up the analyzer. There could be rocks this soft, I’m sure.”

  “Living? All this big cave?” Ghirra let out a breath and looked around, absorbing the idea. The glow was too dim for her to read his expression but the awe in his voice was clear. “Ibi must know this thing!” he whispered fiercely.

  He stood and shouted Stavros’ name once into the silence. The echoes multiplied his call into an urgent phrase of summons and carried it inward.

  Stavros hurried through the building glow, an unprotesting Liphar close on his heels. The siren fugue still rose and fell in his ears, though more gently now, as if calmed by his steady approach. But he had been pushing too hard. His shoulder protested every step, his chest ached when he breathed. He was stumbling so often that Liphar guarded his footing more carefully than he did his own.

  Ghirra’s shout chased after them, mixing with the clattering echoes of their own passage. Liphar slowed and glanced behind, but Stavros urged him onward. He was not avoiding the others. He merely did not wish to stop and wait. They would catch up on their own, not being weakened and in pain as he was.

  Ahead, the tunnel walls dropped away again. Stavros was well into the sudden space before its enormity penetrated his awareness. It brought him to a slow, astonished halt.

  A long rectangular cavern confronted him, five times the size of the shuttle bay on an FTL starship. The floor was once again cleanly flat, with the same oddly granular surface as the ledge outside. A distant ribbed vault arched overhead. Walls met and descended at right angles, supporting tier upon tier of narrow railed galleries. Gazing upward, Stavros stopped counting after twenty-five. The galleries were linked by spiraling columns of stair and empty cylindrical shaftways, cut from a translucent substance that reminded Stavros of the polished agate marbles he had coveted as a child, their swirling clouds of russet, black and sienna caught in a matrix of topaz and honey.

  “Lord!” he breathed, moving out into the vast space. Liphar clung to him like a shadow.

  The railings were carved from the same lovely substance, their simple but elegantly geometric lines creating an intriguing tension with the mutable quality of the material. There was no surface embellishment, no decorative frieze-work, no Tales being told in the architecture. The aesthetic of the space was the space itself: its proportions and the beauty of the material it was made from.

  “Tastes have sure changed since then,” Stavros murmured, wanting to linger, though the music called him inward.

  “It is like the duld, this,” ventured Liphar, eyes huge with awe.

  “A dwelling, yes, it was. Your ancestors lived here, Lifa, when the planet could still support life this far south.”

  Behind the many storeys of pierce-work railings were rows of doorways, modest man-sized openings, small and dark against the lumin
ous walls. Stavros looked back the way he had come, weighing the issue of proportion vs, function: the giant round tunnel so reminiscent of the underground rail tubes of Earth; the vast glowing courtyard, the ordinary doors.

  “I could fly this thing right in…” he recalled Danforth saying, and realized that he stood in the middle of an ancient parking lot.

  “Lifa,” he whispered, spreading his arms wide, “just imagine…!”

  Danforth jerked awake, wondering what, in the solitude of an empty landscape of sunlight and rock, could have summoned him from his doze so urgently. He tried to recall if he’d been dreaming.

  The unidentified signal still issued at low volume from the cockpit speaker, bizarre background music to suit the surreal landscape.

  On the monitor, a new diagram was forming, CRI’s density map of the surrounding hundred kilometers. Danforth stood up, shaking out his stiff legs, uncramping his spine. He surveyed the deserted ledge, the vacant green sky, the distant shadowed western rim. Doubt nagged at him subliminally.

  He shrugged and bent to the screen. The graphic was an awkward one, overly grainy like a photograph blown up too far. CRI was working at the upper limit of her instruments’ resolution, within an area smaller than the instruments had been designed to cover. Still, a picture of sorts was taking shape out of a chaos of individual values: a pattern of dark markings against a lighter ground; the wide black grin of the rift, a hint of hair-fine parallel lines joining many darkish areas of a soft but undeniably regular geometry.

  Danforth touched the dark spots wonderingly, traced the fine connecting lines. Empty spaces deep within the rock, tunnels large enough for CRI’s imperfect sensors to detect.

  “Christ, they’re big!”

  A slight shudder of the Sled’s body alerted him. He straightened away from the screen and turned.

  Clausen grinned at him from the rear of the hold, the laser pistol lolling in his open hand. “I’m not sure I approve of the way you leave my property lying around.”

  McPherson stood to one side ahead of him, significantly within an easy swing of the laser’s snub nose. She smiled wanly and shrugged. Danforth thought she looked a little frightened, mostly angry, trying to hide both.

  Clausen sauntered forward. “It was kind of you to send up the flares, Tay. Does this mean you’re coming to your senses?”

  He let the gun drift casually toward McPherson as he passed her, then leaned against the back of the copilot’s chair and jerked his head toward the sounds issuing from the console.

  “Does Ibiá think he’s fooling anyone with this purported signal?”

  Danforth regarded him neutrally. “If it’s him doing it, he’s got CRI well fooled.”

  “Nothing easier. Take some of Weng’s music and doctor it a little.” Clausen leaned into the monitor. “And what have we here?”

  Danforth searched for a lie the prospector might believe and failed to find it.

  “The tunnelling goes deep, then,” commented Clausen, bending closer to read the scale indicator. “A hundred meters to the centimeter? Well. Rather impressively extensive. What’s your thinking on those darker areas?”

  “You read these pictures better than I do, Emil. They’re your instruments.”

  “Tut, Taylor. This sounds like recalcitrance. Ibiá must be catching.” He stretched luxuriously, squinting along the wide ledge, then up at the towering wall and its neat rows of holes. “Lovely spot, this must have been once, when the planet was still alive… where are the others?”

  Danforth nodded at the map. “Inside.”

  “What do you think’s in there, ray?”

  “You’re good, Emil, I’ll grant you… even when you’re sure there’s nothing, you keep on looking.” The planetologist lifted his broad shoulders in an attempt at elegant disdain.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter, really.” Clausen turned away. “If you’re in communication with them, you’d better let them know they have an hour or so to clear out of there.”

  “I’m not in communication…”

  “Emil, let me go bring them out,” McPherson begged.

  “No, my dear, you must stay with our good friend Taylor and convince him to behave.” Clausen levelled the laser at the aft fuselage. A quick bright burst melted through the plastic com bubble forward of the tail fin. A thin line of smoke rose out of the charred hole.

  “SONOFABITCH!” Danforth snatched for his crutches.

  “Tay, no! He’ll…!”

  McPherson rushed to restrain him, but he whirled back to the controls, desperately punching switches. “CRI? CRI? Damn!”

  Clausen sucked his teeth, studying the damage regretfully. “All those hours in the broiling sun, gone for naught.”

  McPherson glowered helplessly. “You’re out of your fucking mind!”

  “Tut, McP. I prefer to think, efficient and unemotional.”

  “Gone,” she snarled. “Out there.”

  Clausen flashed a rueful grimace at Danforth’s back. “Don’t we all wish it was that easy? Profitable adherence to the status quo has never been considered a sign of insanity, my dear pilot. I thought we were in agreement on that issue.”

  “There are limits,” she spat.

  “Are there?” He went back into the cargo hold and picked up a longish steel cylinder from the floor near the open hatch. It was bound in a canvas sling with a wide strap which he tossed over one shoulder. He patted the cylinder’s blunt gleaming head as it nestled beside his thigh.

  “Now, Tay,” he continued pleasantly. “Perhaps you will inform me which of these myriad and mysterious entries our colleagues used, or I shall have to choose at random and plant my charge without being able to warn them that the place is about to blow sky-high.”

  “You have no goddamn right!” Danforth fumed.

  Clausen cocked his bullet head. “Have you seen the local ore count?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Then don’t waste my time with right or wrong, Tay. We are talking wet-dream-level returns here! You’ll be able to fund your own damn research and I can stay home for a change and see to my horses! Where are they?”

  Raging inwardly, Danforth told him.

  “Excellent. I’m glad you see it my way. With luck, we will all rejoin you soon.” Clausen saluted them jauntily, then vaulted to the ground and loped across the ledge toward the caves.

  McPherson watched him go uneasily. “Anyone in there but our guys?”

  Danforth turned away with an angry shrug.

  “Tay, I’m sorry. Please understand. Maybe I coulda put up a bigger fight at first, but I thought if I went with him, I could, you know…” She shook her head, defeated. “He don’t listen to reason.”

  Relenting, Danforth pulled her into the crook of his arm, dwarfing her. “Where’s the other Sled?”

  McPherson leaned into him happily. “The next ledge down. He’s got the ignition sequence and stabilizer chip in his pocket.”

  Danforth glanced at the dash behind him. “Are they interchangeable?”

  “No.”

  “Think you could follow him, maybe? Sneak that damn bomb out of there once he’s planted it?”

  “What would I do with it?”

  “Throw it over the edge?”

  “So it can take us and the Sleds out instead of them? I never saw either of us as martyr material, Tay.”

  “What, then? We can’t just goddamn sit here.”

  Restored by his presence, she patted his big hand on her shoulder, then slipped out from under. “Well, for one thing, I’m gonna try fixing this boat. Again. Maybe we can get the com back at least.”

  Cursing Clausen cheerfully under her breath, she trudged into the hold. As she bent to rummage for tools, she looked back at Danforth and smiled into his brooding frown. “Hey. Come keep me company.”

  While Stavros stood in the ancient courtyard, eagerly reading the ancient Sawl history written in its size and shape, his inner music increased in volume, making clear thinking impossible
. He gave in, and it drew him down the long axis of the hall to an archway centered in the end wall.

  The arch was tall and graceful, without decoration to hint at purpose, only a broad casing band of the same opaque materials as the ribs, tracing the arch darkly against the glowing walls. Translating from the language of proportion, Stavros guessed a ceremonial intent. Though it was tall enough to split the firs, three tiers of galleries, it was not much wider than the full span of his arms. It did not look casual. Yet he thought he detected a whiff of engineering whimsey in this exaggeration of height, a see-what-I-can-do playfulness.

  He urged Liphar through into a corridor of similar proportions that curved to the left in continuous and stately fashion for a full half-circle before reversing abruptly to curl off to the right. The unvarying dim glow of the walls was enough to light their way and nothing more. There was nothing to look at that required brighter illumination.

  Tay will be disappointed. No plant, no machinery. The only sign of tech is the miraculous achievement of the space itself.

  Stavros paced along the tall narrow tunnel, feeling smaller than he had in the far grander spaces behind them.

  When the corridor reversed direction a third time, curling back on itself briefly only to reverse again, Stavros sensed that like pacing out the subtle geometry of a formal garden or wandering between the high hedges of a maze, the purpose of this tunnel was the pattern of walking it: the pleasures of smoothly flowing curves contrasted with the frisson of abrupt change of direction. It was like a dance, with his partner the architecture itself, or its long dead builder, enabled by his creation to reach out through time with a bodiless hand to lead a stranger through the steps.

  Is this art, he wondered. A sculpture? A game?

  Three staccato curves were followed by a long lazy one. The amber glow deepened to burnt orange. Then suddenly the corridor straightened and angled sharply right. A ruddier brightness crept along the walls, not this time a light from within. Stavros picked up his pace.

  They emerged into a long, irregularly shaped hallway bathed in red-amber. It had no visible end, but disappeared around a distant snaking curve. The left-hand wall was tall and smooth and blank. The right wall slanted to meet it high above, slanting to the floor in broad panels of the same lucent agate-colored material, divided by stout vertical ribs.