The Faded Sun Trilogy (63 page)

And he turned and ascended the ramp.

*   *   *

There were supplies to find: Niun named what was needed, and together they bolted aluminum tubing into what passed very well for a sled. They loaded it into the cargo lift, and secured on it what stores Niun chose: water containers, food, and the light mats that were for sleeping; aluminum rods for shelter, and thermal sheets—tsi’mri luxury that they were, yet even Niun found the cold outside persuasive.

They chose spare clothing, and a change of boots; and wore a second
siga
over the first.

And last and most important of all they visited the shrine of the pan’en, and Niun gathered the ovoid reverently into his arms and bore it down to the sled, settling it into the place that was prepared for it.

“Take us down,” Melein said.

Duncan pressed the switch and the cargo lift settled slowly groundward, to let them step off onto the red sands.

It was already late afternoon.

Behind them, the cargo lift ascended, crashed into place again, with a sound alien in all this desert, and there was no sound after but the wind. The mri began to walk, never looking back; but once, twice, a third time, Duncan could not bear it, and glanced over his shoulder. The ship’s vast bulk dwindled behind them. It assumed a strange, frozen quality as it diminished, sheened in the apricot light, blending with the land: no light, no motion, no sound.

Then a rise of the land came between and it passed from view. Duncan felt a sudden pang of desolation, felt the touch of the mri garments, that had become natural to him, felt the keen cold of the wind, that he had desired, and was still conscious that he was alone. They walked toward the sun—toward the source of activity that the instruments had detected, and the thought occurred to him that did they find others, his companions would be hard put to account for his presence with them.

That there could come a time when his presence would prove more than inconvenient for Niun and Melein.

It was a bad way to end, alone, and different.

It struck him that in his madness he had changed places with those he pitied, and sorriest of all, he did not believe that Niun would willingly desert him.

*   *   *

Na’i’in set, providing them a ruddy twilight that flung the dying sea into hazy limbo, a great and terrifying chasm on their left, with spires upthrust through the haze as if they had no foundation. They rested in the beginning of that sunset, double-robed against the chill and still warm from walking, and shared a meal together. The dusei, that they had thought would have come at the scent of food on the wind, did not appear. Niun looked often during that rest, scanning their backtrail, and Duncan looked also, and fretted after the missing beasts.

“They are of a world no less hard,” Niun said finally, “and they are likely ranging out in search of their own meal.”

But he frowned and still watched the horizon.

And a strange thing began to happen as the sun declined. Through the gentle haze in the air, mountains leaped into being that had not been visible before, and the land grew and extended before them, developing new limits with the sun behind the hills.

On the shores of the dying sea rose towers and slender spires, only a shade darker than the apricot sky.

“Ah!” breathed Melein, rising; and they two rose up and stood gazing at that horizon, at the mirage-like city that hung before them. It remained distinct only for a few moments, and then faded into shadow as the rim of Na’i’in slipped beneath the horizon and brought them dusk.

“That was surely what the instruments sensed,” said Duncan.

“Something is alive there.”

“Perhaps,” said Niun. Surely he yearned to believe so, but he evinced no hope, no anxiousness. He accepted the worst first: he had constantly done so; it seemed to keep the mri sane, in a history that held little but destructions.

Melein settled again to her mat on the sand, and locked her arms about her knees and said nothing at all.

“It could be very far,” Duncan said.

“If it is the source of what you scanned?” Niun asked.

Duncan shrugged. “A day or so.”

Niun frowned, slipped the
mez
lower to expose most of his face. “Tell the truth: are you able to make such a walk?”

Duncan nodded, mri-fashion. “The air is thin, but not beyond my limits. Mostly the cold troubles me.”

“Wrap yourself. I think that we will rest in this place tonight.”

“Niun, I will not be a burden on you.”

Niun considered this, nodded finally. “Mri are not bearers of burdens,” he said, which Duncan took for kel humor, and the precise truth. He grinned, and Niun did likewise, a sudden and startling gesture, quickly gone.

The veils were replaced. Duncan settled to rest in a thermal sheet with rather more peace at heart than he knew was rational under the circumstances. In the chill air, the blanket and the robes together made a comfortably warm rest, deliciously so. Overhead, the stars, strangely few in a clear sky, observed no familiar patterns. He made up his own, a triangle, a serpent, and a man with a great dus at his heels. The effort exhausted his fading mind, and he slept, to wake with Niun shaking his shoulder and advising him he must keep his turn at watch: the dusei had not yet returned.

He sat wrapped in warmth the remaining part of the night, gazing at the horizon that was made strange by the growth of pipes atop the plainsward ridge, watching in solitude the rise of Na’i’in over their backtrail, a heart-filling beauty.

It was more than a fair trade, he thought.

As the light grew, the mri began to stir; they took a morning meal, leisurely in their preparations, content to say little and to gaze often about them.

And on the rising wind came a strange, distant note that made them stop in the attitudes of the instant, and listen; and then Niun and Melein laughed aloud, relieved.

The dusei were a-hunt, and nearby.

They packed up, and loaded the sled: Duncan drew it. Niun, kel’anth, senior of the Kel, could not take such work while there was another to do it; this had long been the order of things, and Duncan assumed it without question. But the mri watched him, and at the first rise they approached, Niun silently set his hand on the rope and disengaged him from it, looping it across his own shoulder.

*   *   *

It was not hard work for the mri, for the land was relatively flat and the powdery red sand glided easily under the metal runners. The chill that made their breaths hang in frosty puffs in the dawn grew less and less, until by mid-morning both Niun and Melein shed their extra robes and walked in apparent comfort.

During a rest stop, one of the dusei appeared on the horizon, stood for a time, and the other joined it. Ever and again the beasts put in an appearance and as quickly vanished; they had been gone some time in this last absence. Duncan willed his back, concerned for it and distressed at its irrational behavior, but it came only halfway and stopped. It looked different; he would not have recognized it, but that there were only two on all Kutath, and the larger one was still hanging back at the crest of the slope. Both looked different.

Leaner. The sleek look was gone, overnight.

The dus swung about suddenly and joined its partner on the ridge. Both went over that low rolling of the land; Duncan watched to see them reappear going away, and blinked, for it seemed impossible that something so large could vanish so thoroughly in so flat a land.

“What is the matter with them?” he asked of Niun; the mri shrugged and resumed his course behind Melein, meaning, Duncan supposed, that Niun did not know.

And soon after, as their course brought them near some of the blue-green pipe, Niun cut a bit of it with his
av-tlen
and watched it fill with water in the uncut portion.

“I would not sample that,” Duncan said uneasily.

But the mri took a little into his mouth, a very little, and spat it out again in a moment. “Not so bad,” he said. “Sweet. Possibly the pulp is edible. We shall see if I sicken from it. The dusei did not think so.”

This was a mystery still, that there could be communication of such precise nature between dus and man; but Duncan remembered the feeling they had had in the first discovery of the plants—an intense pleasure.

Niun did hot sicken. After midday he sampled a bit more, and by evening pronounced it acceptable. Duncan tasted, and it was sweet like sugared fruit, and pleasant and cold. Melein took some last of all, after camp was made and after it was clear that neither mri nor human had taken harm of it.

The sun slipped to the rim of the chasm and shredded into ribbons, lingering for a last moment. Their city returned amid the haze.

It was large; it was firmly grounded on the earth, and no floating mirage. The towers were distinctly touched by the light before it vanished.

“It is written in the pan’en,” Melein said softly, “that there was a city of towers—yellow-towered Ar-ehon. Other cities are named there: Zohain, Tho’e’i-shai and Le’a’haen. The sea was Sha’it, and the plains had their names, too.”

There was the wind, and the whisper of the sand grains moving. It was all that moved, save themselves, who came as strangers, and one of them strange indeed.

But Melein named them names, and Kutath acquired substance about them, terrible as it was in its desolation. Niun and Melein talked together, laughed somewhat in all that stillness, but the stillness settled into the bones, and stopped the breath, and Duncan found difficulty in moving for a moment until Niun touched his wrist and asked him a question that he must, in embarrassment, beg the mri to repeat.

“Duncan?” Niun asked then, sensing the disturbance in him.

“It is nothing,” Duncan said, and wished for the dus back, to no avail. He gazed beyond the mri into the darkening chasm of the dying sea, and wondered that they could laugh in such a place.

And that Melein in her mind saw the vast waters that had lapped and surged in that nakedness: that more than anything else thrust home to him the span of time that these two mri had crossed.

Niun pressed his arm and withdrew, wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down to sleep, as Melein likewise settled for the night.

Duncan took the watch, wrapped in his thermal sheet and warm in the air that frosted his breath. The moon was aloft, gibbous. A wisp of high clouds appeared in the north, not enough to obscure the stars.

He felt the presence of the dus once. It did not come close, but it was there, somewhere near them, reassurance.

Sharn, trembling with weakness, pressed the button that brought the food dispenser within reach. A slight inclination of her body brought her mouth against it, and for a time she was content to drink and to let the warmth flow into her belly. The tube already increased the flow of nutrient into her veins, but the long food deprivation had psychological effects that no tube-feeding could diminish.

About her, on the bridge of
Shirug,
a double hand of younglings slept, still deep in the hibernation in which they had spent major portions of the long voyage. Only Suth and a Geleg youngling named Melek had remained awake throughout, save for the brief sleeps into which jump cast them. Suth was fully awake already, and made haste to approach Sharn, dutiful in concern for the elder to whom it belonged, bai Hulagh’s lending.

“May I serve?” Suth asked hoarsely. Fever-brightness glittered in Suth’s eyes. The bony plating of his cheeks was white-edged and cloudy, an unhealthful sign. Sharn saw the suffering of the youngling, who had endured so long a voyage fully awake, and in a rare courtesy, offered Suth the same dispenser which she was using. Suth flushed dark in pleasure and took it hungrily, consumed food in great noisy gulps that surely brought strength to his tottering limbs—then returned it to her, worship in his eyes.

“Awaken the others,” she bade Suth then, and the youngling moved at once to obey.

Mission tape stood at zero.

They had arrived.

A quick look at scan showed the human ship riding close at hand, but the humans would hardly be organized yet. Often during the voyage Sharn had awakened for consultation with Suth, and each time she had known the humans slower than regul in coming to focus after jump: drugs; they had not the biological advantage of
hibernation. Some few were operating, but they were still hazed. This was known; the mri, who needed neither hibernation nor drugs, had always been able to take advantage of it.

And about them lay the mri home system.

That thought sent chills through Sharn’s blood and set her two hearts pumping almost out of time. From her remote console, she called up new plottings, activated her instruments, and sent the ship easing away from the human escort while they were still dazed. Automatic challenge sounded on the instruments, a human computer advising her that she was breaking pattern. She ignored it and increased speed in real space.

She was bound for the inner planets. Behind her, humans stirred to wakefulness, and sent her furious demands to return. She ignored them. She was ally, not subject, and felt no obligation to their commands. About her, the younglings stirred to life again under the ministrations of the skillful youngling provided her by the bai—a measure of his esteem, this lending of his personal attendant: Sharn reckoned dizzyingly of her own possible favor, as well as her own present danger.

“We will serve as probe,” she sent the angered humans at last, deigning to reply. “It is needful, human allies, that we quickly learn what manner of armed threat we face, and
Shirug
has sufficient mobility to evade.”

It was not the regul habit to go first.

But regul interests were at stake. Dead world after dead world: the incredible record of devastation enforced what decisions had been made on Kesrith. Doch-survival was personal survival, and more than that . . . incredible in itself . . . there was consciousness of threat against the regul species, that no regul had ever had to reckon.

Behind her, visible on the screens, the human ship seemed to fragment.
Saber
shed her riders, the little in-system fighter
Santiago
and the harmless probe
Flower.
Neither warships nor probe had the star-capable flexibility of
Shirug,
medium-sized and heavily aimed, capable of evading directly out of the system and back again, capable of near-world maneuvers which would prove disaster for vast and fragile
Saber,
that was all shielding and fire-power.