Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Danforth turned his back to the empty tunnel openings out of lingering childhood superstition about watched pots.

  Should really be concentrating on an analysis of that reply signal.

  But at the keypad, though he already knew from his chronometer, he typed: CRI, time to detonation?

  68 MINUTES, 4 SECONDS.

  A vivid picture of row stacked upon row of perfect black holes pushed itself into his brain like an unwelcome caller.

  Will Clausen really try to bring them out?

  It would be good for the prospector’s lagging public image if he did, but Danforth too easily imagined him losing Ibiá conveniently in the rubble.

  Heroic rescue of xenobiologist and native companions accompanies tragic loss of… etc, etc.

  He worried for Susannah, wondering how much Ibiá really meant to her. He would not bet two cents on the young man’s continuing health as long as Clausen was around and armed.

  Armed! Shit. You fucked this up real good, TD…

  He glanced again at the tunnel entries, but they yawned as dark and silent in the latening sun as they had two moments before. He squinted up at the oblate vermilion sun hovering a hand span above the western rim. The hard black shadow would soon rise out of the depths of the rift to swallow ledge, Sled and all, like Jonah’s whale. He shifted his burdened legs restlessly. He wanted to be away from this place by darkfall.

  “Ron? How’s it?” he called, to fill the silence.

  Concentrating on her tiny soldering arc, McPherson shook her head mutely.

  “Will we be able to fly her?”

  She set the tool down, grinning bravado enough to travel the length of the cargo hold. “Is that you or me you’re talking, hotshot?”

  “Don’t get smart. Anyone.”

  The bravado dimmed. “No flying so far.”

  “Damn.”

  CRI was blinking at him again when he returned his attention to the monitor. Hurriedly, he answered her summons.

  CRI replied: NEW ENERGY SOURCE DOWNRATED DRASTICALLY 53 SECONDS AGO. NOW WITHIN SIGNAL RANGE. ANALYZING FOR PATTERN. DETECT SHORT REPEAT SEQUENCE ALTERNATING WITH STRINGS OF PRIME NUMBERS, ALSO REPEATING. TRANSMISSION OF “MUSIC” CONTINUING ALONG WITH…

  Primes! For Danforth, this was the final convincing link in the evidence chain. Primes surely meant sentience, either past or present.

  He typed: Transmit short repeat.

  CRI replied: 01010101010101010101… COMMENCING PRIME SEQUENCE: 2,3,5…

  Danforth froze the screen and stared. “Ron? Come take a look at this.”

  He typed: Comment, CRI?

  IT IS NOT MUSIC.

  “Great. Now we know one thing it isn’t.”

  DUE TO CONTINUOUS UNVARYING REPEAT, AN AUTOMATIC RECYCLING SEQUENCE SEEMS A PROBABLE EXPLANATION.

  “A blind loop? For what purpose?”

  McPherson clattered up behind him. “What is it this time?”

  He pointed at the monitor. “What do you make of it?”

  She studied it closely, sucking her lip. “A neutral signal and a bunch of primes. So?”

  “Neutral,” he repeated musingly. “Hadn’t thought of it that way.” He typed: neutral signal between identifying prime sequences.

  CRI replied: YES. A LOCATOR, PERHAPS.

  “Yeah, some kinda ‘I’m here’ signal without the detailed data,” McPherson suggested. “Like our homing beacons.”

  Danforth repressed an urge to scan the green-and-amber sky. He recalled Clausen’s snide remark about repair crews. He gave an inch to his imagination and a vision burst behind his eyes like a colored flare: the planet fertile, teeming with life, the airwaves choked with signal, clear green skies busy with big and little traffic. He saw the empty ledge around them bathed in the golden light of dreams, crowded with shining aircraft, lightweight ceramic and spun-glass creations as delicate as the bodies of their Sawl builders, winged with fantasy.

  The deep pulsing ache in his chest he knew to be longing.

  They held the wind and clouds in their hands…

  He marvelled that Ibiá was so entranced by the goddess mythos when it seemed to him so much more wondrous that mere men could make such miracles.

  “Tay?”

  He was staring at his own broad-fingered ebony hands. Never had they seemed to him so powerless. Danforth blinked, shook his head.

  McPherson eyed him with unvoiced concern, then nodded at the screen. “Now CRI’s suggesting Emil’s bombs might’ve tripped some kind of alarm reflex.”

  “An alarm…” Danforth reviewed the recent sequence of events. He pictured the magnetic field map, how the elaborate field contours had collapsed into a single weak focal point right after the detonations, how planetary circulation had ceased soon after.

  Is all this actually possible?

  His golden dream-image told him it was, and he was astonished at the depth of his sense of loss.

  “He’s done it, goddamn his eyes! There were machines and he’s wrecked them, just like he hoped!”

  “Hey, Tay, there’s gotta be something still working in there:” McPherson soothed logically. “To broadcast the alarm loop.”

  “And whatever it is,” Danforth raged, “that sonofabitch is gonna blow it to smithereens in sixty-five minutes, along with a few of our colleagues, and maybe ourselves!”

  He pounded his fist against the dash, and then repeatedly against the rigid plastic binding his thighs. “Damn, damn, damn these legs!”

  When the energies within passed in equilibrium, hot plasma in a straight-line run, the Dancer could allow himself some further awareness. Not of his physical body or where he was, his material surroundings: the Dance was the only ‘place’; the physical, only the two points of white heat and the howling space between that was himself, the link.

  Yet other Identity still lurked, with its companions Meaning and Memory, elusive as shadows but nagging, insistent.

  He listened to the dual music coursing through him, Something in the weaker signal nudged at his notice, a familiar syllable breaking repeatedly out of a sequence of nonsense. A memory. Whose? The young man’s memory. His.

  His.

  Could he be himself and be the Dancer still?

  Memory prodded. The familiar pricked, echoed in the music. Remember.

  Remember another dance. Excited particles leaping within endless microscopic circuitry. A different dance, and yet not so different.

  Remember. Memory sharpened. The familiar was a knife point in his flesh.

  Flesh

  and not flesh…

  Ahhhh…

  CRI.

  Memory flooded the opened sluice. The Dancer staggered, stumbled, nearly fell.

  CRI.

  The weaker stranger-signal was suddenly the known. More than tone and pulse and energy. Identity.

  CRI!

  Rescind the automatic sensor shutdown. Absorb the siren’s burning energies. As much ecstasy of matter as the human mind can bear…

  and still compute.

  CRI! Can you hear me?

  Repattern those energies, in the impulsive skittish language of electrons. Sing the tale-chant of your Dance. Identity and meaning in the interplay of charge, the dance of positive and negative.

  Ah, glorious!

  Raellil.

  Transformer.

  Transmitter.

  The monitor screen blanked abruptly.

  “Hey!” McPherson rapped uselessly on the plastic housing. “Shit.”

  Danforth unclenched his fists, distracted from his fury of self-recrimination. “Huh?”

  “She’s gone dead!” McPherson scrambled up, heading for the tail.

  But Danforth caught her arm. “No. Not yet. Look.”

  Together, they stared at the monitor, which now read, flashing for the expected reply: YES, MR. IBIÁ?

  Danforth frowned. He typed: Ibiá not here, CRI.

  WHERE, THEN? I AM RECEIVING…

  The screen blanked again.

  “Wha
t the…?”

  “Weird,” McPherson agreed.

  Danforth typed: What’s going on, CRI?

  There was no response. The screen stared back like a dead eye.

  Danforth drummed his fingers fitfully. “Sixty-two minutes,” he muttered. “Any luck with the power beam?” He flipped a random switch. The idiot light did not respond. “We’re dead men,” he muttered.

  And then without preliminaries, the screen filled with rapid machine chatter: APOLOGIES, DR. DANFORTH. DIFFICULTY FIXING MR. IBIÁ’S LOCATION RESOLVED. RECEIVING DATA TRANSFER NOW.

  “What the hell’s she talking about?”

  SOURCE OF LOOPED SIGNAL COULD BE INTERPRETED AS COMPUTERLIKE MECHANISM IN RESPONSE FAILURE-MODE. “MUSIC” AS YET UNEXPLAINED.

  Danforth typed: You’re getting all this from Ibiá?

  SECONDARY DATA RATE SIGNAL, SAME SOURCE, IDENTIFYING CALL CODE 175IBIÁ. INTERPRETATION OF DATA IS MINE.

  “I don’t get it.” He typed: What kind of data?

  The computer paused, as if pondering the proper descriptive: SENSORY DATA.

  Where or what is he sending from?

  THAT INFORMATION IS NOT INCLUDED, DR. DANFORTH. The computer made a rare excursion into the gray area of surmise. IT IS AS IF A COMPLEX SET OF NEW SENSORS HAVE BEEN TIED DIRECTLY INTO MY SYSTEM. THE CIRCUMSTANCES ARE SOMEWHAT UNPRECEDENTED.

  “I’ll say.”

  IF FAILURE MODE IS THE PROPER INTERPRETATION OF THIS DATA, THE MECHANISM INDICATED MAY YET BE REACTIVATED. I HAVE SUGGESTED THAT MR. IBIÁ SEARCH FOR A RESET INDICATOR.

  You mean he’s actually found machinery in there?

  “He’s obviously transmitting from something,” put in McPherson.

  NO MENTION OF MACHINERY AS SUCH. MY INSTRUMENTS REGISTER NO CONCENTRATION OF REFINED METALS TO INDICATE CENTRALIZED CIRCUITRY MASS. BUT GIVEN NATURE OF SIGNAL, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ONLY PLAUSIBLE EXPLANATION.

  “Even weirder,” McPherson commented.

  Danforth typed: You better tell Ibiá to get his ass out of there before he gets blown up, CRI. Ask him can he bring this AI with him?

  Again, CRI paused. Then: I BELIEVE THE RESPONSE IS NO.

  You’re not sure?

  THE REPLY WAS UNUSUAL. I AM INTERPRETING IT AS LAUGHTER.

  A third and fourth sample produced the same unlikely results. A prickle of instinct woke along Susannah’s spine. She flushed the instrument once again, doggedly, then sat with it in her lap, letting the prickle spread to a full-body tingle.

  Ghirra waited with her patiently, casting an occasional quick eye at his sister guarding the narrow glowing doorway.

  As if it were a casual adjustment, Susannah reprogrammed the little analyzer for greater accuracy within a very tight range: if the box claimed the presence of human DNA in the samples, she wanted more specific figures. If contamination was the problem, she would recognize her own genetic signature, even in the rough mapping allowed by an unsophisticated instrument.

  She ran the next sample.

  A human signature, with its familiar sequences of nucleotides, appeared on the screen, but a detailed reading showed no sign of contamination by her own genetic material. She looked again. It was human, yet subtly altered. Some of the differences she thought she recognized but couldn’t place.

  She stored the analysis, cleaned the cavity, then searched among her supplies for a disposable syringe. Pressing the thumb of her ungloved hand hard against the tip of her middle finger, she jabbed quickly and cleanly, drawing a few cc’s of blood for her next sample run. She fed it into the machine, stuck her bleeding finger into her mouth and waited.

  The DNA signature was clear and complete, indubitably hers.

  She found another syringe, then looked up at Ghirra, whose full attention she had finally gathered. She held out her plastic-gloved hand.

  He reached instead for the syringe. “I will do this.”

  Ghirra’s blood produced the same basic human signature, as Susannah knew it would. She had run this comparison of Sawl and Terran genetic structure in detail with CRI, but then had been concentrating on the similarities, for likeness had been what she most wanted to see.

  This time she focused on the differences, slight as they were.

  That’s what’s familiar!

  She called up the stored figures from the rib sample analysis and displayed them side by side with Ghirra’s. Except for the hypervariable regions where genetic structure varies between individuals, the signatures were nearly identical.

  Susannah nodded with the slow concentration of an old man at prayer. She turned to the wall beside her, touched it hesitantly.

  “Ghirra,” she said unsteadily, “I’ll know better when I can run more accurate tests and a full protein analysis, but it would appear that, genetically, you are more closely related to this wall than you are to me.”

  The Dancer felt urgency enter his Dance. The signal called CRI spoke to him.

  As he led her through his steps, chanting his tale for her, she returned him data that helped to focus and identify his purpose.

  And data that was problematical.

  Memory stirred again, like silt in clear water.

  The data showed that destruction was imminent. The signal called CRI advised escape.

  But the other, still-steady siren wail. He was bound by its repetitious blind insistence.

  The signal called CRI named it a loop, and offered the opinion that if the loop could be broken, proper functioning might be restored.

  The Dancer knew it was his purpose to join loops, not undo them. But connections sundered may be remade, a large circle engendered.

  Join all in the symmetry of the Dance.

  Ghirra cocked his head, smiled uncertainly. “This is amusement, Suzhannah?”

  “A joke? No. Look at the data. You may not be able to read the words but you can see the figures are very nearly the same.”

  He tapped the luminous wall with a delicate knuckle. “But I am not like this.”

  “Nor is your toenail like your eyes or your bones. They’re made of specialized cells, but DNA from each will match exactly.”

  She ran her eyes up the long slant of the glowing panels across the wide hallway. Her theory was as audacious as this strange ancient construction itself. “I think the material to build these tunnels was grown by your ancestors from their own genetic material.”

  Ghirra’s look was pure bewilderment.

  “Maybe it was simply what they had the most of and the technology was in place. Maybe this structure needed support and they hadn’t the strong metals for it. Perhaps this polar location was once frigid and needed a special insulation. Or perhaps they did it for the sheer beauty of it.”

  She leaned toward him eagerly. “They cloned the most resilient but workable substance their bodies had to offer. Ghirra, isn’t it a marvelous possibility? Bioengineering on the grandest scale imaginable! This is the really conclusive proof that you are descendants of the old race of technocrats!”

  Her voice rang down the hall, camouflaging the approaching quiet footsteps. But Aguidran sensed movement out of the corner of her eye. Her head jerked away from the bright doorway of the inner room. She bent swiftly for her knife.

  Susannah heard her guttural oath and glanced up in time to see the wall flare and sizzle beside the Ranger’s head.

  Ghirra yelled a quick warning command. Aguidran froze, her hands instinctively spread wide.

  “That’s right, honored doctor,” Clausen drawled, easing around the corner of the hall, laser in hand. “Keep your tiger leashed and we’ll all get out of here alive.” He advanced on them confidently, gesturing with the laser at the narrow doorway. “What’s she got in there?”

  Susannah’s concern was for Stavros, so vulnerable in the tiny room. She leaped to her feet. “There’s no lithium here to blow up, Emil.”

  “On the contrary, my dear Susannah. The place is lousy with it.”

  He stopped in front of her, shoved Ghirra against the wall and dire
cted Aguidran to follow. “Which is what brings me here. I’ve got a full-strength standard charge detonating in fifty-eight minutes, more or less, which just gives us time to retrace our steps and be airborne.”

  She snatched at his arm, not for the laser but to pull at him pleadingly. “Turn it off! Emil, please, look around you! You can’t destroy such an incredible artifact! Do you know what these tunnels are made of?”

  “I heard,” he said, shaking her off tiredly. “But it’s too late, Susannah. You cannot say I didn’t offer. The opportunities for deal-making have long since passed unexploited.”

  “But what if it’s still alive?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” He waved brusquely at the analyzer, abandoned on the floor. “You have your samples: proof enough to write your papers. Now I assume you would rather live to write them than not, so gather up your gear and your companions and be off.”

  He backed toward the doorway, the laser trained at Aguidran’s gut. Ghirra flattened his palm against his sister’s chest as she gathered herself to lunge forward. She growled in protest.

  “Raellil…!” Susannah heard her mutter.

  Ghirra moved closer, blocking her path, murmuring urgently, his hands pressing her back, desperate to convince.

  Clausen halted at the doorway. One eyebrow arched in mild surprise. The laser’s snub nose sank perceptibly. “Well, I was just going to ask where, but…” He glanced back at Susannah. “What the hell is he doing?”

  She answered with an honest shrug. “Only Stav knows what he does these days.”

  Clausen frowned. The spectacle of Stavros made him even more uncomfortable. “Get him out of there,” he snapped, and moved aside.

  The Dancer wove into his tale-chant a dream of unison. He sang the glories of the circle. He sought to draw the signal called CRI deeper into the Dance.

  But she would not rise and soar with him.

  She had her own imperative, her warning: GET OUT GET OUT.

  She sent him quantities to express her urgency. Straight-line measurements of time in response to the sinuous leapings of the Dance.

  58… 57… 56…

  The Dance was not linear.

  To the Dancer, Time was meaningless except as rhythm.

  His purpose was to join.

  To complete the circle.