Earthblood (17 page)

"Watch out, boy," Henry Dread said, and stopped again. He took out his Mark XXX blaster and handed it over to Roan.

"You'll come back," he said. "And you'll know more than you do now." Roan balanced the gun in his hand, sitting on a lower limb of the old tree. He felt the solid metal of it, the waiting, repressed power, the cold steel with the flaming soul. He looked briefly at Henry Dread, who laughed, knowing what Roan felt with the gun.

Then Henry Dread was striding away across the plaza and Roan clambered up the tree, thinking as he climbed of the gracyls and how he'd climbed to follow their flights, and of the circus and the tree he'd climbed to see it, the Never-never tree, little thinking it was his last day on Tambool. And at the height of the wall he thought of Stellaraire and the tightrope and his eyes stung, but then he looked over the wall toward the park. And there was no room for thought of the past. Here lay the Terran civilization that Henry Dread talked of rebuilding.

Within the park green grass spread and flowers bloomed and Roan could see small automatic weeders moving along the paths where fountains rose and splashed untouched by time.

And across the manicured precision of the lawn, a fallen statue lay—a vast statue with a tunic draped around its hips. It lay face up, one arm raised, an arm that had once pointed at the skies.

It was a Terran. Pure Terran.

And made just like Roan.

Roan leaped down from the wall onto a bank of springy grass, and ran to the statue. Feature for feature—eyes, ears, nose, the connections of muscles—this was Roan. Terran.

Did my father look like this? Roan wondered. Who was this Man? Where did he come from? He walked around to the base of the statue. TER. IMP., it said, with the dove and the branch. And then:

ECCE HOMO, July 28, 12780

"Ecce," Roan said to the statue, touching it, wondering how the name was really supposed to be pronounced.

Then he became aware of sound scenting the air; the sound and scent seemed the same, both swirling faintly through the still air and he followed the melody. The scent was not the heavy perfume Stellaraire used, nor were the sounds the coarse sounds of the circus noisemakers. It was all something else. Something that stirred memories—hints, odors of memories—far in the deeps of Roan's mind.

Sunlight he'd never drowsed in, winds he'd never felt, peace he'd never known.

Peace, he thought, knowing Henry Dread had said it wrong.

The razored, spring-green turf came down to the edges of the pebbled path and ran between gardens of jewel-bright flowers. A wide-petaled blue blossom, with black markings like a scream in its throat, opened and closed rhythmically.

The music stopped briefly and then changed, as though drawing out things in Roan's mind. In the small pause, Roan heard the play of a fountain, the silver sound of music.

Then, more silver still, came the faint call of horns rising and loudening and loosening old locks in Roan's mind. A smokelike drift of stringed music floated into the horn motif, countering it softly, and then running away and coming back a little differently, so that the horn challenged it and took up the string song itself and then a further, tinkling sound joined the horn and strings and built an infinite, convolute structure in Roan's mind that spread through his whole being and finally broke into a thousand crystals, leaving Roan almost in tears for the old, old things that are lost and the beautiful, infinitely beautiful things that never existed.

A fat bee droned past, bumbled inefficiently into a flower, and hunted nearsightedly for a drop of honey. The flower folded a maternal petal over the bee and he emerged covered with yellow pollen and bumbled away looking triumphant and ridiculous.

Roan laughed, his nostalgia broken.

The music laughed, too. A little flute giggling and teasing and running away.

Roan went after the sound.

The park went on and on and the flower scents changed and interwove like their colors. Roan came to a still, blue lake, floated with flowers and enormous, long-necked birds that swam like boats and drifted up to him inquiringly when he came to the edge of the lake.

Roan turned from the lake into a wood where the vines made

bowers—thorned vines heavy with sweet berries—slim, curled vines bright with wide-faced flowers. He walked through sunny slopes where tall grasses rolled like water in the wind, and deep groves where the moss grew close and green in the still shade of warm-barked trees. Then the grove narrowed to a dark, arching tunnel of branches that ended suddenly in sunlight. Ahead of Roan was a wide, white flagstone walk that curved between fountains of flying water and led finally to a colonnaded terrace. From the terrace rose a fretted cliff of airy masonry. A house the wind blew through. Roan, thirsty now, scooped up a handful of smooth, cool water. It had a taste of bubbles, a smell of sunshine.

But the water had not been put there for any purpose, even to drink. It showered into the air merely to fall back into the pool. It pleased Roan somehow to think that the mighty Terrans made the water go up just so they could watch it coming down.

He went up the wide, shallow steps, into the airy building that up close seemed as solid and lasting as time itself. The marble floor within was an intricate design of reds and blues that moved into purple and led the eye straight to a ramp slanting up to a gallery on the left.

Roan listened for a moment to the ringing stillness, then started up the sloping way.

The house was a maze of rooms within rooms, all neatly kept. The air filters whispered noiselessly, doors opened silently to his presence, lamps glowed on to greet him, off to bid him good-by. On polished tables were set objects of curious design, of wood and metal and glass. Roan picked each up and tried to imagine its use. One, of green jade, grew warm as he held it, but it did nothing else and there were no buttons to press. So he carefully replaced it and went on.

Then Roan noticed the pictures. He stood in the middle of a room and his eye was caught by a picture in sinuosities of blue, as interwoven and complex as the music he'd heard. Every time he looked at the picture the lines caught his eye a different way, led them along a different trail, and he looked at the picture so long the blue disappeared and then the picture itself until finally he was left following tortuous convolutions in his own mind, and it was a shaft of late afternoon sun, burning through a high window, that brought him to himself and made him blink hard to get the sun glimmers from his eyes.

Some of the pictures were like the Blue; others seemed to project out from the walls, or were sheer patterns of light hanging in empty air. And some—as Roan looked and noticed—some were pictures of Terran places and houses and . . . people? The figures were so tiny and distant. Hunt though he did, he couldn't find any close-ups of Terran people. It didn't really matter. But it was what he most wanted to see.

Roan went on, walking right through a misty Light Picture in the middle of one of the rooms. All this. What was it for? Just to look at? Just to enjoy?

It seemed a human way to be. A Terran way to do things. Roan felt a kinship with all this. He knew how to look at the paintings, how to enjoy the music.

Then Roan walked into a room wide with windows, so that the sunshine shimmered clearly in it. Marble benches stood beneath the low windows and green plants hung over a scoop-shaped sunken pool. As Roan went over to stand on the edge of the empty pool there was a soft click! and water began foaming into the pool.

Roan laughed with pleasure. It was a bath! An enormously magnified version of the one Stellaraire had had in her quarters with the 'zoo. He stripped off his shabby, ill-fitting tunic, realizing suddenly how dirty he was.

He stood by a jet of soapy foam and scrubbed himself thoroughly. The pool carried off his dirt and dead skin cells in eddies of black and whirled in renewed, clean water. Roan luxuriated in the bath for an hour, watching the chasing clouds and blue sky through the windows, and wondering at the delicate veining of the Terran plants that nodded over the water. And thought wistfully of Stellaraire and how if she were here they'd splash water at each other and be foolish and afterward walk in the garden and make love with timeless joy in the deep grasses. And live here forever in this enchanted place where there was no violence, no raspy, alien voices, no ugly, misshapen faces, no one hating or despising or envying Roan his Terran ancestry, his Terran inheritance.

But there was no Stellaraire. Only a memory that overfilled him now and then, like a bud with no room to open into a flower.

Behind a colored glass panel Roan found simply designed but beautiful clothes, of some close-woven material that sprang to fit him as he put it on. There were silver tights that fitted from his ankles to his waist and were cool to the touch. Then a short, silk-lined scarlet jacket, soft to the skin but stiff outside with gold and jewel embroidery. He found boots that fitted softly like gloves, and protected his feet without heavy soles or heels. All this he put on, though there were other things. Thin white shorts and singlets and short cloth boots that were too thin to be used for walking.

The only other thing Roan took was a magnificent, massive jewel, engraved TER. IMP. It hung around his neck from a gold chain and where it rested against his bare chest, between the edges of his scarlet jacket, it warmed him, almost seeming to throb like a beating heart.

I look the way a Terran ought to look, Roan thought, looking at himself in the enormous mirror that backed the door to the bathing room. The jewel glowed on his browned chest and his freshly washed hair clustered in dark red curls over his forehead.

Roan wondered if a Terran would think him handsome. A Terran woman. Oh Gods, how long since he'd had a woman!

Roan buckled back on his old link metal belt. He wondered why he thought it brought him luck, because it didn't really. Then he reluctantly picked up the Mark XXX blaster. Here, it didn't seem right. But he shoved it into the belt, which stretched to hold it.

Roan retraced his steps through still corridors, down to the echoing concourse, out onto the broad terrace.

Far in the sky the lowering sun flashed orange from the towers of the city—where Henry Dread was searching for loot now with his vicious crew of cutthroats. It was soiled, grubby—all of the universe—but here it didn't exist. He didn't want to call it into being again.

Roan took a new path, beyond the house, walking quickly because he didn't have much time left. Night was coming. He'd seen, perhaps, most of what there was to see, and one more quick turn—

Roan drew up short.

Because reflected in a round mirror pool, among fragile violet flowers, was a human woman.

She was flushed pink in the sunset, pouring water from a long-necked jar. The water, sparkling pink, too, in the light, rippled over her slim neck, between her lifted breasts and around her softly bent body over her flanks, and finally ran murmuring into the mirror pool making no splash or ripple.

"Oh. Please," Roan said, not meaning to speak, and went up to the woman. But it was a statue, smiling its dreamy, carved smile, thinking the secret thoughts of stone.

Roan reached out and touched the soft curve of the hard, marble cheek. And far away came the violent stutter of guns. Then a single shot—a power rifle.

Perhaps it was the anger against life that filled him or perhaps it was a premonition of what was really happening, but Roan was running. Along the curved paths and then straight across the middle of the park where there was a wide concourse and through a small grove where night had already come, and up the fence, holding to the nearest heavy vine, and slowing to be quiet now, along the fence to the tree.

A gun rattled, paused, fired again. A voice shouted.

Roan looked from the top of the wall. The streets were violet shadows now, the towers bright-edged silhouettes against the orange and purple sky. There was a faint movement in the gloom below the tree and a face, a white blob in the darkness, looked up toward Roan, the glint of a knife in the teeth.

There was a sharp hiss. Something chipped at the tiles and then another hiss and whoever it was starting up the tree fell back and slumped to the ground.

Roan hefted the gun out of his belt. His Mark XXX that he'd all but forgotten in the park. Well, that dream of peace was over now. Roan waited, heard a few shots, distant now, saw nothing moving. He dropped softly from the tree, squatted, turned the body on its back. The coarse, slack features of a bald Minid stared past him with dead, surprised eyes. The stump of a broken-off wooden shaft poked from the Minid's chest just below the edge of the sheepskin vest.

One of the crew. A mean, dirty creature, but somehow one of his . . . Roan stood, trying to see through the dark streets; the firing was becoming steadier now, coming from locations to the north and east. A cold evening wind blew up, and one brilliant orange star came out. Probably the next planet of the sun Aldo.

Roan crossed the street, started up one of the dark avenues toward the north. Lights came on suddenly to illuminate the city; mists of light that seemed to hang in the air like clouds.

There was a sharp hiss. Something struck the doorway of the house near Roan and clattered on the steps. Roan dropped, rolled, brought his gun around and fired at a figure bounding from the shadowed doorway across the street. The figure fell, under the misting streetlight. Roan retreated to crouch in the angle between the steps and the Terran house. Three long-legged, round-shouldered creatures emerged from the side street. He saw the thick, recurving bows in their hands, the lank hair that dangled beside their oddly flat faces, the heavy quivers slung at their backs. They paused, fanning out. One saw the dead bowman, made a hoarse noise. At once, the three whirled, angled off quickly in different directions. One was leaping toward Roan. He brought his gun up, fired, swung and fired on a second savage as the first slammed to the curb of the mosaic sidewalk, almost at his feet. The second bowman reeled, stumbled, went down. Roan swung to the third and it dived for the black shadow of the building at the corner as his shot sent blue sparks from the door of the Terran house.