Music was hammering her with little stone bells. “Detail is everywhere,” Cliff said wonderingly. “They got this from our culture transfer transmissions?”
A team member said, “Must have used what we sent to hack us and get more. This could be a sign of—what, respect? Or cooperation?”
“Go inside it,” somebody said.
“Right.” Beth said this firmly. “Maybe somebody waiting for us in there.”
“Or something,” came a call from the team. “Get us free back here! Can’t walk.”
“Steady,” Beth said. “Cliff, your decision.”
Yeah …
Cliff stepped through the doorway. He guessed in the original Chartres Cathedral there were wooden doors. Stone ones would be impossible to move, so this was open. Once he was inside, a somber gloom settled and clasped him in its fist, yielding gradually to the faint amber light through tall side windows. Groans and pops and shakes through his boots told him the rock was still shaping itself, in a fitful slow agony. Then some lumenstone flared and cast a spotlight. As though someone was adjusting this construct for him, suddenly a glow streamed in through what looked like stained glass, spattering everything with rose and blues and subtle purples, all in watery flickers.
Chiming in the air came some ancient music. Strings, mostly. “Bach,” Ash said on comm. “One of the Brandenbergs.” Viviane even named it—the third.
Pleasant, Cliff thought, and eerie also.
He explored, giving the team a running commentary. Nave, aisles, magnificent columns. He could almost believe he was in the real thing, many light-years away. He mounted the stairs to the very roof of all this stack of majestic stone. He felt eager, not even puffing as he surmounted into a suffused sprinkling of somber light.
Down one aisle he stopped. Alien heads adorned the walls. Long-necked lean women, with piquantly tipped heads. Masklike faces in succulent colors, not pink or brown like humans’ but rosy red, a lean oceanic blue, perky yellows. Squat heads like sullen snakes. Fishy big eyes, angry slit mouths, parachute ears—like cartoons of anything human.
Except one. The scowling, heavy-browed head was large, with big ears and a broad nose with flaring nostrils. Human, but ancient. Neanderthal? How had one gotten here? Next to that, a smaller head, more apelike, yet long-snouted. Like a dusty harp, something ancient twanged in some lost attic of his head. The lumenstone somehow knew about human evolution in detail.
Abruptly, great booming bells sounded. He felt the notes peal through him, in wavelengths comparable to his body size—a sensation of immanent meaning, if only he could fathom it. The bell rang solemnly, bringing added sounds like crows cawing into the air. Through the open windows, he could see big flap-wing birds, wheeling black against a brilliant white cloud. A smooth gray gargoyle leered nearby, tongue lolling. The birds again marked out across the sky. Somebody wanted answers. To what question?
He came out of the immense structure with his head crammed and confused. “Why’s this here?” Beth asked as she and Twisty came toward him.
“Where’s the team?” he countered.
“While you were inside, we got anchored again,” Beth said.
“I, as well,” Twisty said. Its arms gave a shrugging movement, all palms up, and its shoulders took part. “I believe the lumenstone wished to speak separately with some others.”
Cliff shot back, “What the hell is this?”
Twisty’s face gave nothing away. “You humans delight in analogies. Let me say then that some shared soup in my mind comes from two things ladling. The need to understand each other. The need to inspect, which the Increate does well.”
Beth said, “I don’t get it.”
“The slow slide of thought, from the Increate, works out its own fathoming of who you are. Plus where you would fit in our, as you term it, Cobweb.”
Cliff looked around. “Wait. Where’s all the team?”
Beth gestured. Her face was vexed, confused. He realized she was suffering from whatever interrogations this place had carried out on her, on the others. Cliff counted the team. “Two missing.”
“They are farther away.”
Beth said sharply, “It’s Pupwilla and Jereaminy. Both translators and field biologists.”
“They have been … subducted.”
“What?”
Nothing impeded them now as the team shuffled along, weary somehow. The world returned to its normal look. Cliff did not feel the tendrils prickling in his mind. He looked back, and the cathedral was slowly melting down, back into the stone. The Increate, Twisty had called it. Concrete intelligence?
“Their condensed form can accommodate many more minds than in the wild world, here,” Twisty said, using several arms to sweep over the view of the valley, now sharp and clear seen from the mountaintop.
Yet there were fumes festering the air as they rounded a knob of the smartstone. The fog hung low and yellow on the fluorescing rock. Blue-black seams worked in the swirls. The team stopped and stared, cautious now.
Ripples of amber light in the slowly working stone led them into the roiling fog. It was moist and clammy and smelled fetid, like a swamp. Cliff saw ahead a body on its back, arms and legs stretched out all the way. Jereaminy was in rigor mortis.
“Dead!” Beth cried.
“How long have we been pinned down here?” Cliff demanded.
“Half of one of your days,” Twisty said flatly.
“But…” Cliff thought about the cathedral, the bells … “It doesn’t seem that long.”
“The Increate held you each in a different state. In studying you, it ran your underlying rhythms at differing speeds. Slower in-body melodies it savors. Yours in particular, I would judge, ran slow to enable your reactions to the majestic building. I do hope you appreciate the ornate contortions the Increate provided, to relish and justly appreciate your self.”
Beth whirled on Twisty. “It killed Jereaminy! She was the best—”
“She is no doubt preserved, in the fashion of the Increate,” Twisty said with a furrowing brow that Cliff knew it thought was a frown. It looked more like a set of smiles above its eyes.
“Preserved?! She’s dead.”
“In a fashion. This will become clearer as we meet other manifestations of our globes, our planes of life abundant, our many provinces.”
Cliff put his hand on Beth’s shoulder and whispered, “Let’s tend to her.”
Beth nodded, biting her lip, beyond words.
Jereaminy’s skin was a somber black. Her body had puffed up until it filled her field uniform like a balloon. Or a stuffed sausage, he thought. Her tongue was a sausage, too, swollen and forced out of the mouth between yellowed teeth. Her eyes were abnormally wide open, as if shocked. Antlike insects swarmed in the sockets, buzzing.
Beth stood frozen, trembling, staring. Cliff stepped forward and slid his hand under the corpse. “Got to bury her,” he could barely manage to get out.
When his hand slid under the corpse, he could feel the tight skin through the cloth. Cold, spongy, slimy. As if she’d been dead a long time. He looked around. “Need some help here to carry her.”
Viviane stepped forward, holding out her canteen. “Wash your mouth out.”
“I, I…”
“Takes the smell away for a while.”
Only then did it hit him. The crawling, sour stench. He spat out the water. Viviane took the corpse’s legs and they started downhill. She had odd scorch marks on her arms—some kind of channeled damage.
“What happened?” Cliff asked.
“Felt some electricity flowing up from my boots, so I jumped,” Viviane said. “That cut it off. Close call. Sure burns my arms, though.”
A few steps along, the yellow fog brought its own putrid scent of rank swamp. Cliff was carrying more of the weight by leading them down.
He saw Pupwilla first. She was knotted up in a fetal position on her side, more like a humanoid charcoal lump than a person. Something had burned her to a crisp.
He av
oided looking into the faces of the dead as they dug two graves. Those two women he had gotten to know somewhat, but in the crowded days before and during their expedition, there had not been a lot of casual talk. Now he never would inquire into their interesting accents, their backstories, the tangled paths that had led them into space and now to another sun. He thought of this rather than let his anger get the better of him. Beth was doing the same, he saw.
She stood over the graves, each with a makeshift marker. Her speech was agonized, her voice reedy. Then they went back down the rock sheets toward the skyfish. Twisty had the sense to keep its distance and entered the open mouth quickly, not looking back at them.
The team was shambling on now, sweaty and confused, truly tired in the way he had learned to recognize. Heads sagged, feet dragged, words slurred.
He had never been one for the semi-military early stages of space training, the hustle hustle hustle, by-the-numbers, hup twop threep faur! stuff. But now he was grateful for the silent discipline Beth had imposed, by example, on them all during their descent.
As they entered the moist warmth, Beth gave him one of her mortar sentences, the kind that made the minimal noise incoming and did the maximum damage on arrival, delivered in a whisper.
“We’ve got to ditch Twisty.”
He nodded. Then he walked into the warm comforts of the skyfish. He took his time. All the wrenching around on the rock had twisted his back. He would be paying for it tomorrow. If there was one.
TWENTY-FOUR
THE INCREATE
The one good thing about stupidity is that it leads to adventure.
—SIDNEY COLEMAN
Beth took Cliff aside as soon as they got into the skyfish. They found a small alcove and she spoke quickly.
“You’ve got to be straight with me—not as my husband, but as a team member. Is my leadership really poor?”
“No.” He kept his voice low, flat. “We’re supposed to be diplomats, scientists, not fighters.”
Beth shook her head angrily, which he knew meant she was angry with herself, not him. “Everybody on board SunSeeker damn well knew the Glory signals were contradictory, by no means always welcoming.”
“They were warning off the Bowl, not SunSeeker.”
“So shouldn’t we have carried heavier arms, with all weapons out and ready to fire the moment we hit the ground?”
“The backfire dragons’ attack was too fast.”
“Okay, Redwing thought the same. But then, knowing how dangerous this place could be, we should’ve kept weapons out.”
“We met Twisty, who gave us no further warnings.”
“Suspicious, isn’t it, that Twisty didn’t show up earlier—a pretty ominous sign.”
“Maybe. He’s alien, so?”
“Then I allowed myself to be drawn into lengthy conversations with Twisty.”
“Yeah, but our charge here is pretty much to figure them out, so—”
“But this semi-philosophical stuff, about Earth customs and all, is distracting at a time when the team should’ve focused on our surroundings, weapons at the ready.”
Cliff saw that the tensions building in her for days were now going to spill out. She had a habit of keeping still too long. He said slowly, “Look, Twisty clearly knows this is a deadly place. So he says nothing to warn us. This is some kind of bizarre test, is all I can think.”
“If I were a sharper leader—”
“Twisty’s pretty damn offhand about death. That’s its clue.”
Beth bit her lip, then clenched her teeth. “I hate this.”
“I’ll call in some others.”
Minutes later, Cliff watched Beth open the meeting with, “Look, I’ve been thinking more and, well—we’ve got to ditch this damn bossy alien.”
“How?” Viviane asked. She had applied salve and some auto-meds to her arms and swaddled them. The burns she got were aching, but she was mobile, at least.
They were hunched together in a pocket cabin off the main corridor. The walls pulsed with a slow rhythm as the skyfish labored away from the mountain. They felt through the walls and floor a slow thrum of whistles, pops, and clicks, an eerie, melancholy song of labor from the great warm beast. Plus a warm breeze of quickening energy.
Viviane’s question made them pause. Ashley Trust finally said, “Yeah, how’s the question. Twisty’s our contact point, seems—but it’s led us into one damn ambush after another. Those damn backfire dragons, the carniroos, and then that weird smartstone, what it called the Increate. Twisty let us walk right into them.”
Best to let them vent first, then let ideas emerge, Cliff noted, a technique he had learned long ago from Beth herself. “No way we could have seen this smartstone thing coming,” he added.
“Agree,” Ashley Trust said, his eyes studying them each in turn. “That was just too weird. We’re not being educated, we’re not in communication. We’re being tested like rats in a maze.”
The man had been quite silent through the whole expedition, Cliff recalled. Probably trying to judge the situation, as a newly brought forth sleeper. Cliff and Beth had the most field experience here, from their time on the Bowl. But they sure as hell weren’t performing well. Four dead out of sixteen, worse in every way than the Bowl days.
“How to ditch Twisty is the problem, keep to that,” Beth said flatly, looking at the floor. Cliff could tell the others saw the doubts in her, close to the surface now.
Viviane said, “And when we ask, Twisty calls these ‘inspections.’ Whatthehell?!”
Cliff said evenly, “You dance with the one what brung ya, as the old-time saying goes—but not if it’s killing you.”
“Plenty questions,” Viviane said, waving her hands as if clearing a space. “Why send only one sort-of ambassador to deal with us? And one who gives us questions back, like we’re slow students.”
Beth sighed. “Um, maybe we are, here.”
Trust said, “No. Test animals. We’re not supposed to survive the maze.”
Bemor Prime, wedged in the soft oval doorway, said, “Yes, I assume it’s safe for me to speak? Or are we beyond all such considerations of safety?”
Cliff shrugged that off. “You’re same as us, Bemor Prime. I think, from stuff Twisty’s said, that we should think of Twisty as a moving camera, a portal, not just a single being.”
“So it and those zingoes that follow us everywhere are a way for someone—something—to watch us?” Viviane asked.
“Makes sense, some higher authority is trying to understand us by testing us,” Beth said.
“By testing to destruction?” Viviane said.
Cliff nodded. “Whatever it is, plainly this ‘portal’ doesn’t give a damn about keeping us alive.”
Viviane paused, thinking, then said, “Twisty keeps saying things about preserving life, but in what form?”
“If that smartstone is an example, it means uploading,” Cliff said.
“Twisty’s a funnel into that?” Ashley asked.
“Yeah,” Cliff said, “rock that works like computer chips, high memory density, some such.”
Viviane said, “How’s that connect to the attacks on us?”
Ashley said sardonically, “Maybe they’re ‘inspections,’ too?”
Viviane said, “Is there some chance that Twisty represents some local princes, rajas, or warlords?”
“This is an entire integrated system,” Ashley said. “It’s got to be run with big-time, huge-scale management. No pipsqueak rajas get to greet an incoming starship.”
“Okay, given. Back to present reality,” Viviane said. “How do we get rid of Twisty and strike out on our own?”
Ashley said, “Ah, on our own? Why not go back to the ship?”
They all looked at one another. Cliff realized from their expressions that they had all thought the same thing, but were reluctant to say so. “Not a bad idea,” he allowed.
Bemor Prime had watched them carefully, head swiveling, and now said, “I may not return
to ship. I am to explore. I find ship uncomfortable, as well. I am big, you small. You may make your own choices. Some of you should be debriefed.”
Beth pulled out her larger comm set. She booted it up and looked for a signal. “No signal. We’re, what, fifty thousand kilometers or so from SunSeeker?”
“You reached Redwing just yesterday,” Ashley said.
“True.” Beth paused. “No pickup at all, not even when I call in phase averaging over noise. And there’s plenty of transmission noise here. Damn!”
Cliff shrugged. “If we want to reach Redwing, we’ve got to get closer, at least.”
“Unless…” Ashley looked around at them. “Twisty’s blocking us out.”
Pause. “Why would he…?” Viviane started, then stopped.
“Because he anticipated this conversation,” Cliff finished for her.
Another pause.
Viviane said, “It won’t be easy chucking Twisty. Then what? We’re on our own.…”
“Not if we stay in this skyfish,” Cliff said.
“Even harder.” Ashley shook his head.
“Let’s talk to the Captain, Anarok.” Cliff stood up.
* * *
They didn’t make it. As Beth led them into a long corridor that led toward the skyfish’s head, which Captain Anarok apparently used as her pilothouse and helm, Twisty intercepted them from a side passage. As if it knew where we were, and where we’re headed, Beth thought as the alien warbled a complex “Hello!”
In response to the look on Beth’s face, Twisty quickly said, “Our studies of your cultural library show that in your kind, the best hellos rise at the beginning, drop in the middle, and rise again at the end. They are higher in pitch, and the pitch moves around. I have embraced this.”
Cute, but it’s tracking us, probably eavesdropping, too, Beth thought.
“Um,” Cliff said awkwardly. Beth just nodded.
Viviane said flatly, “We’re miffed that we’ve lost four of us.”
“I fathom that. Yet we have a wise folk saying: You can pile stones onto a flier, and in time, one more of them will bring it down.”
Cliff shot back, “Well, as we folk say, we’re mad as a sack of hungry weasels about it.”
Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel Page 21
