Transgalactic (6 page)

In between she sampled more of the Squeal food, moving past the baked foods to the fruit. She liked the sweetness of the purple balls and the tartness of the green, wrinkled grapes, but the bitterness of the red, sliced globes was a taste she would have to acquire if she were around long enough. She hoped that wouldn't happen. She allowed Eenie and Minie to continue to bathe her and had gotten used to their marveling at the outward evidences of gender.

Then the three suitors returned. This time they were without their headdresses, revealing the beginnings of a growth of hair, like a dark fuzz on the top of their normally hairless heads, and their gowns had turned into skirts, leaving their chests bare. They seemed more muscular than she would have imagined, more muscular, certainly, than Eenie and Minie, who had smooth, supple chests. And they had more gifts.

The one with the silver skirt moved his head in the gesture that Asha had identified as respect or recognition of her position and presented a silver gown like the one it had worn the first time they entered, but perhaps more resplendent with fancy blue panels and something like lace around the neck and hem. “For your grand moment,” the Squeal person said. Or maybe the squeal and whistle meant “ceremony,” “coronation,” or “ascension.”

“I hope it fits,” Asha said, and handed the gown to Eenie.

The second suitor held out a length of silver links. In each link had been set a blue gem, or glass shaped to look like a jewel. “To adorn your eminence,” the suitor said, “when your greatness receives its proper recognition.”

Asha took the necklace or belt—it seemed too big to go around her neck and too small for her waist—and handed it to Minie. The attendants seemed overwhelmed with joy. “It looks pretty swell,” she said.

The third suitor held out a pair of slippers, one silver, the other blue. “To carry you to your destined place,” it said.

“I hope they don't fit,” Asha said, and turned to put them on the bed. When she turned back they were standing in the same place, as if waiting for some response. “Look,” she said. “I'm sorry, boys—for I think that's what you are or are turning into in some kind of Squeal world hermaphroditic process—but I just can't make up my mind. You'll have to come back.” And she said to herself, “And I'm not looking forward to that, because I think then you'll come without your skirts, and I think you'll have developed genitalia that I don't want to see or even think about what they mean.”

After a moment they turned and left, watching more carefully this time that Asha didn't follow. The door clicked behind them, and Asha knew she was locked in again and that she would have to find an answer before their next arrival.

She turned once more to the mirror/receiver. Once more she studied the city into which the Machine had delivered her. She knew it was the city because she could always find the plaza with the fountain and the Machine elevated at its center. This time the city was dark, with just a few scattered lights. Asha had seen night scenes before, but the receiver had never let her look at the sky. She could have told a great deal about her situation if she could have seen the night sky, but either that control had been blocked or it didn't exist.

She was thinking about that when she noticed a bulky figure, so much unlike the elfen size of the little people, emerging from one of the buildings on the other side of the fountain plaza. “Tordor,” she said, and then she realized that it could not be the Dorian who had accompanied the pilgrimage on the
Geoffrey
. But it
was
a Dorian, and she knew how she was going to save herself.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

The powerful thunderstorm slowed and stopped. The disturbing sound from the red sphere faded away, and Riley heard a different sound behind him. Riley turned. It was Rory, shivering with cold or terror. Riley thought it was terror and felt a moment of sympathy for this massive creature enduring ancient dreads to follow him, or to pursue his own search for knowledge.

Rory and his people may have had good reasons for avoiding this place when it stormed. Aside from the powerful forces of the storm itself, the resonations of the red sphere were enough to stir superstitious awe. Clearly the structure was built around the sphere, perhaps to contain its power, perhaps to silence its otherworldly voice, perhaps to imprison it so that it could never ascend back into the sky from which it had come. Clearly the sphere was the ship that had brought the Machine's engineers to this world to build the receiver and its secret compartment in the heart of the sacred pyramid.

But now, and for many long-cycles into the past, the roof had fallen, and the sphere was getting its revenge. Because it should not be here. It should have returned the engineers to their home world, or sent them on to their next project. Why hadn't it? Had they succumbed to some alien disease, here on this planet and this spiral arm of the galaxy, far from their origins and the biology that brought them to sapience and their mastery of technology? Or, since they had been to many alien worlds and survived their alien biologies, had the pyramid builders of that time, a million long-cycles ago, discovered them as they emerged from the sacred pyramid and massacred them for their transgressions, overwhelming their weapons with sheer numbers and reptilian ferocity?

Whatever the reason, the engineers of the Machine had not returned, and their indestructible ship had been left behind, standing here in what was then a desert, as a reminder to these reptilian people of the gods who had descended from the sky, who had wielded great power and done great deeds, and who had died or been slain. Rory's ancestors must have been filled with terror and perhaps guilt, and perhaps it was from this mixture of guilt, sacrilege, and climate change that began their decline. This chariot of the gods, immune from the ravages of time and nature's violence that affected everything else, might yet spawn more gods. Or maybe it would attract vengeful gods in vehicles like this to destroy them. Hide the evidence. Shield it from some all-seeing eye.

And so the pyramid builders set their skills to hiding it, containing it as they had the spirits of their ancestors. They built this structure around it, and it would have sufficed if the climate had not changed, if the planet's ice age had not ended and returned vast stores of water to the oceans and the lakes, and if torrential rains, like the one Riley had just experienced, had not turned the region, perhaps the entire planet, into a hothouse of tropical growth. And ruined the structure that contained the ancient spaceship.

And left it for his salvation. If he could just figure out how to get into it and, if he was successful in that, how to master its alien technologies.

Behind him Rory roared. It was not a full-throated roar such as the one that had greeted him on the jungle trail, or the ones Rory had addressed to the dinosaur-like creatures who had descended upon them like a pack of starving carnivores as they entered the village that surrounded the ruins of the ancient city. It was a more cautious roar that Riley was beginning to understand.

“You're trying to tell me that this is a bad place and we should get out of it before it destroys us,” Riley said in his own language. “Well, we can't go just yet. I've got to figure out the entrance to this ship, and then I'm going to do something that you're going to find pretty terrible. So you'd better go back to your people, and maybe I'll see you later and maybe I won't.”

Rory roared again, more plaintively this time, if that were possible. He moved back a few paces and squatted, looking toward Riley and turning his head back and forth as if trying to reassure himself.

Riley turned toward the red sphere. It towered several meters above his head. He could not see the top and estimated its height only from the curvature of the middle section. Debris from the ceiling had fallen around it, doing no apparent damage, and its shiny surface was free of dust and grime, as if the downpours to which it was regularly subjected washed it clean, or some undying electronic charge repelled foreign materials.

Riley circled the ancient ship, climbing over piles of stone and wading through pools of rainwater, but there was no break in the shiny, unmarred surface of the red sphere, no line that might suggest an entrance. He returned to his original spot, where the patient Rory, conquering his ancestral fears, watched him with red, perhaps anxious, eyes.

“Well, Rory,” Riley said, “nobody ever told me this was going to be easy.”

Rory gave a muted roar.

“That's right,” Riley said. “Maybe the entrance is on the upper half of the ship, where I can't reach, or see either. But that wouldn't make any sense. These aren't the kind of people who would use ladders, say, to reach the surface. They'd need ground egress for their machines or the vehicles that they'd need to ferry the machines to the pyramid. Unless they had something like antigravity. Well, I don't believe in antigravity, Rory. At least not yet. There's something here that I haven't thought of. But I will.”

And then a terrible thought occurred to him: Maybe the ship had malfunctioned and another ship had been sent to take the engineers away!

*   *   *

Riley raised his club and struck the side of the red sphere in frustration. It sighed like the melancholy exhalation of some dying giant. Riley turned. Behind him Rory was cowering, but he had not fled. “We're not getting anywhere here,” Riley said. “Let's go back to your shanty and think this through.”

He went past Rory, no longer concerned that the powerful alien might suddenly attack but acutely aware of the dinosaur-like creature's stench—as fetid as this teeming, rotting world itself. They walked back, Rory behind. Riley could sense Rory's anxieties easing as they made their way through the ruined city toward the rock huts that had grown up around it. He entered Rory's hut as if it were his own and squatted on his haunches at the low table that still contained the remains of the meal that Rory had laid out. None of the other dinosaur-like creatures had entered. They had gathered again, singly and in small groups, around the route after he and Rory had emerged from the sacred place, but Rory apparently occupied some position of authority that kept him and his walking-meat companion from being attacked or his home violated.

Riley picked up a piece of fruit from the table and put it in his mouth, not much caring what it was or how it tasted. He had a problem, and he needed to think about it with all the clarity of a mind liberated from clutter and inefficiencies by the Transcendental Machine. Rory settled on the other side of the table, squatting more naturally than Riley, and watched Riley as if some transformation might occur at any moment. He paid no attention to the rotting meat in front of him, crawling now with insects and sending its overpowering scent to Riley's side of the table.

“What we need,” Riley said, “is the ability to communicate.” He turned that into a roar, which surprised him as much as Rory. His mind, Riley discovered, had been working on Rory's language all the time he had been focusing on immediate issues, as if his pedia was still there, inside his head, conducting its separate, alien processes.

Rory roared back. “The god speaks.”

“I seek the machines”—what was it Rory had called the red sphere back in the building that housed it?—“the cursed thing of the gods who come from the sky.”

“The cursed thing brings death without life,” Rory said, with a tremor in his roar that suggested even saying the words was dangerous.

For a people that believed in sacred burial, “death without life” probably meant “destroying the soul and its rebirth.” “And yet,” Riley said, “you use a god-thing to move your boat.” He was guessing here, but the propulsion system on Rory's boat, some inexhaustible engine that pushed air or water backward to move the boat forward, clearly was beyond the technical capability of Rory's people, or even those of the people who had built the pyramid and the city.

“A gift from the old ones,” Rory said.

By which he meant, Riley thought, the old ones of his own kind, the city builders, who had destroyed the gods who came from the sky, who had taken over the devices that they could manage and made them their own. “Any other gifts from the old ones?” Riley asked. Maybe there was a device the ancient engineers had used to open their ship, a device that somehow had been passed down the generations, its original purpose lost in antiquity if it had ever been known.

“None,” Rory said.

So much for that faint hope. No matter how Riley tried to pry into Rory's memories he could get nothing more from him, either because of Rory's reluctance to recall forbidden lore or the inadequacies of Riley's understanding of Rory's language, or of the language's inability, or Rory's, to deal with the conditional or the speculative.

Riley finished his meager meal, although he did not feel particularly hungry, perhaps because his body was more efficient now, and Rory, relieved of the necessity to respond to the creature he considered a god, brushed away the insects and buried his fearsome rows of teeth in the hunk of meat in front of him. Afterward, as darkness slowly gathered outside the open doorway to Rory's stone hut, Riley found a corner and stretched out in it, his back against one cool, sturdy wall, his head against the dusty stone floor.

He did not feel the need for sleep so much as he recognized the efficiency of rest. He understood now what Asha had meant when she said that she almost never slept. Instead a quiet period was a time to still the turmoil of a mind churning with thoughts competing for attention and allow unconscious processes to begin sorting them out and, he hoped, coming up with answers.

Even though he thought now with a clarity and a precision he had never before experienced, his new condition was no guarantee of a solution to questions whose answers were buried under ancient ruins and a million long-cycles of the past.