* * *
“SurTac Duncan,” the page said for the second time. “You are wanted at the lock.”
The aircraft was waiting. It could wait. Duncan pressed a com button at a panel and leaned toward it. “Duncan here. Advise them I’m coming in a few minutes.”
He walked then, as he had been granted Luiz’ free permission to do, into the guarded section of the infirmary, no longer there by a bending of regulations, but bearing a red badge that passed him to all areas of the ship but those on voice-lock. It was satisfying to see the difference in security’s reaction to him, the quickness with which doors were opened to him.
And when he had come into Niun’s room, the guard outside turned his back a privacy which he had not often enjoyed.
He touched the mri, bent and called his name, wishing for the latest time he had had other options. He had obtained a position of some power again; had recovered favor where it mattered; had fought with every deviousness he knew; but when he looked at the mri’s thin, naked face, it felt not at all like triumph.
He wished that they would allow Niun covering for his face; the mri lived behind veils, a modest, proud people. After some days with him, Niun had finally felt easy enough in his presence to show him his face, and to speak to him directly, as a man to a man of like calling.
There is no other way for us, Niun had told him, refusing offered help, at a time when the mri had had the power to choose for himself. We either survive as we were, or we have failed to survive. We are mri; and that is more than the name of a species, Duncan. It is an old, old way. It is our way. And we will not change.
There were fewer and fewer options for them.
Only a friend, Duncan thought bitterly, could betray them with such thoroughness. He had determined they would survive: their freedom would cost something else again; and that, too, he prepared to buy, another betrayal . . . things that the mri regarded as holy. In such coin he bought the cooperation of the likes of Boaz and Luiz; and wondered finally for whose sake he acted, whether Niun could even comprehend his reasoning, or whether it was only selfishness that drove him.
“Niun,” he urged him, wishing for some touch of recognition, some reassurance for what he was doing. But Niun was far under this noon: there was no reaction to his name or to the touch of his arm.
He could not delay longer. He drew back, still hoping.
There was nothing.
* * *
He had not expected a pilot: he had looked to fly himself. But when he climbed aboard he found the controls occupied by a sandy-haired man who bore Saber’s designation on his sleeve. GALEY, the pocket patch said, LT.
“Sorry about the delay,” Duncan said, for the air was hot, noon-heated. “Didn’t know I wasn’t solo on this one.”
Galey fired up, shrugged as the engines throbbed into life. “No matter. It’s hot here, hot down there at the water plant on repair detail, too. I’d rather the ship, thanks.”
Duncan settled into the copilot’s place, adjusted his gear, the equipment that Boaz had provided, into the space between his feet, and fastened the belts.
The ship lifted at an angle, swung off into an immediate sharp turn toward the hills. Cold air flooded them now that they were airborne, delicious luxury after the oven-heat of the aircraft oil the ground.
“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked of Galey.
“I know the route. I flew you out of there.”
Duncan gave him a second look, trying to remember him, and could not. It had been dark, a time too full of other concerns. He blinked, realizing Galey had said something else to him, that he had been drifting.
“Sorry,” he said. “You asked something?”
Galey shrugged again. “No matter. No matter. How’d the kel’ein make out? Still alive, I hear.”
“Alive, yes.”
“This place we’re going have something to do with them?”
“Yes.”
“Dangerous?”
“I don’t know,” he said, considering that for the first time. “Maybe.”
Galey absorbed that thought in several kilometers of silence, the white desert slipping beneath them, jagged with rocks. Duncan looked out, saw black dots below.
“Dusei,” he said. Galey rocked over and looked.
“Filthy beasts,” Galey said.
Duncan did not answer him or argue. Most of humankind would say the same, would wish the remaining mri dead, with just cause. He watched the desert slip under the airship’s nose, and the land roughen into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain—dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.
They circled out over Sil’athen, the long T-shaped valley remote in the highlands, a slash into the high plateau, much eroded, a canyon full of strange shapes carved by caustic rains and the constant winds that swept its length. There was wreckage there of ships not yet lifted back for salvage, aircraft that Niun had made the price of his taking; the wreckage too of nature, many an aeons-old formation of sandstone blasted into fragments.
When they landed at the crossing of the high valley and stepped out into that place, into the full heat of Arain’s red light, the silence came suddenly on them both, a weight that took the breath away. Duncan felt the air at once, a violent change from the pressurized and filtered air in the ship, and began coughing so painfully that he had at once to have recourse to the canteen. Filter masks and tinted goggles were part of the gear; he put his on, and adjusted the hood of his uniform to shield his head from the sun, while Galey did the same. The mask did not overcome the need to cough; he took another small sip of water.
“You all right?” Galey’s voice was altered by the mask. Duncan looked into the broad, freckled face and felt better for the company of someone in such silence; but Galey did not belong, he in no wise belonged. Duncan slung his canteen over his shoulder, gathered up the gear, and tried not to listen to the silence.
“I’m all right,” Duncan said. “Listen, it’s a long way down the canyon and up into those rocks. You don’t have to come.”
“My orders say otherwise.”
“Am I not trusted with this?” Duncan at once regretted the outburst, seeing how Galey looked at him, shocked and taken aback. “Come on,” he said then. “Watch your step.”
Duncan walked, at the slow pace necessary in the thin air, Galey walking heavy-footed beside him. The mri were right in the dress they adopted: to have any skin exposed in this sun was not wise; but when Galey began to drift toward the inviting shade of the cliffs, Duncan did not, and Galey returned to him.
“Don’t walk the shade,” Duncan said. “There are things you can miss there, that may not miss you. It’s dark enough where we’ll have to be walking, without taking unnecessary chances.”
Galey looked at him uneasily, but asked no questions. The wind sang strangely through the sandstone spires.
It was a place of ghosts: Sil’athen, burial place of the mri. Duncan listened to the wind and looked about him as they walked, at the high cliffs and caves that held their secrets.
A dead people, a dead world. Graves of great age surrounded them here, those on the east with weathered pillars to mark them, those on the west with none. There were writings, many already beyond reading, outworn by the sands, and many a pillar over-thrown and destroyed in the fighting that had raged up and down Sil’athen.
And in the sand they found the picked bones of a great dus.
Sadness struck Duncan when he saw that, for the beasts were companions of the mri, and dangerous as they could be, they could also be gentle: sad-faced, slow-moving protectors of their masters.
This too, was added to the destruction of a way of life.
Galey kicked at the skull. “Fast-working scavengers,” he said.
“Leave it alone,” Duncan said sharply. Galey blinked, straightened, and took a more formal attitude with him.
It was a true observation nonetheless, that there were scavengers in great numbers in the seemingly lifeless wastelands: nothing dropped to the sand but that something made use of it; nothing faltered or erred but that some predator was waiting for that error. The mri themselves did not wait the desert at night without the dusei to guide them. Even by day it was necessary to watch where one stepped, and to keep an eye on rocks that might hide ambush. Duncan knew the small depression that identified a burrower’s lair, and how to keep the sun between himself and rocks to avoid the poisonous strands of windflowers. He knew too how to find water when he must, or how to conceal himself—the latter an easy task in Sil’athen, where the constant winds erased the tracks of any passage, smoothing the tablet of the sands almost as soon as the foot left the ground. Skirling eddies of dust ran like a mist above the ground, occasionally stirring up in great whistling gusts that drove the sand in clouds.
Such a trackless, isolated place the mri had chosen . . . such an end Niun had chosen, as if even in passing they wished to obliterate all trace that they had been.
They had been here, he had learned in his long studies, his cajoling of translators, for many centuries, serving regul. Here and hereabouts they had fought—against each other . . . for regul in the beginning had hired them against the mercenaries of other regul, mercenaries who also chanced to be mri. The conflicts were listed endlessly in regul records, only the names changing: The mri (singular) of doch Holn defeated the mri (dual) of doch Horag; Horag (indecipherable) fled from the territory (indecipherable).
So it had begun here—until Holn flung the mri not against mri, but against humanity. Solitary, strange fighters: humans had known a single mri to taunt a human outpost, to provoke a reaction that sometimes ended with more casualties in his killing than humans were willing to suffer. Wise commanders, knowing the suicidal fury of these mri berserkers, held their men from answering, no matter how flagrant the provocation, until the mri, in splendid arrogance, had passed back to his own territory.
A challenge, perhaps, to a reciprocal act?
Niun was capable of such a rash thing.
Niun, whose weapons, worn on two belts at chest and hip, ranged from a laser to a thin, curved sword, an anachronism in the war he fought.
An old, old way, Niun had called it.
All that was left of it was here.
The place had a feeling of menace in its deeper shadows, where the sandstone cliffs began to fold them closer, a sense of holinesses and history, of dead that had never known of humankind. And there were deeper places, utterly alien, where mri sentinels had watched and died, faithful to a duty known only to themselves, and where the rocks hid things more threatening than the dead.
He had looked on such.
It lay there, distant above the cliffs where the canyon ended, where heaps of rock had tumbled in massive ruin.
“How far are we going?” Galey asked, with a nervous eye to the cliffs that confronted them. “We going to climb that?”
“Yes,” Duncan said.
Galey looked at him, fell silent again, and trod carefully behind him as he began to seek that way he knew, up among the rocks, a dus-trail and little more.
It was there, as he remembered, the way up, concealed in dangerous shadow. He marked his way carefully with his eye, and began it, slowly.
Often in the climb he found himself obliged to pause, coughing, and to drink a little and wait, for the air was thinner still on the upper levels, and he suffered despite the mask. Galey too began to cough, and drank overmuch of their water. Duncan considered letting Galey, who had not come as he had, from a stay in sickbay, carry more of the equipment; but Galey from Saber’s sterile, automated environment, was laboring painfully.
They made the crest at last, and came into sunlight, among tall spires of rock, a maze that bore no track, no enduring sign to indicate that mri had walked here: in this place, as in Sil’athen, the wind scoured the sand.
Duncan stood, considering the sinking of red Arain beyond the Spires, breathed the air cautiously, felt the place with all his senses. He had land-sense, cultivated in a score of trackless environments, and it drew at him, subtle and under the threshold of reason. Galey started to say something; Duncan curtly ordered silence, stood for a time, and listened. The omnipresent wind pulled at them, frolicked, singing among the spires. He turned left.
“Follow me,” he said. “Don’t talk to me. I last walked this in the dark, and things look different.”
Galey murmured agreement, still breathing hard. He was silent thereafter, and Duncan was able to forget his presence as they walked. He would gladly have left Galey: he was not used to company on a mission, was not used to schedules or reports or being concerned for a night spent in the open—and SurTac that he was, he had little respect for the regulars when they were stripped of their protective ships and their contact with superiors.
It occurred to him that Flower staff had no authority to order a regular from Saber to accompany him.
Stavros did.
* * *
Dark overtook them on the plateau, as Duncan had known it would, in a place where the spires were few and a vast stretch of sand lay between them and the farther cliffs.
“We might keep going,” Galey volunteered, though his voice seemed stained already.
Duncan shook his head, selected a safe spot, and settled to stay until the dawn, wrapped in a thermal sheet and far more comfortable than in his previous night in this place. They removed the masks and ate, though Galey had small appetite; then they replaced them to sleep, turn and turn about.
A jo flew, briefly airborne, a shadow against the night sky. Once Duncan woke to Galey’s whispered insistence that he had heard something moving in the rocks. He sat watch then, while Galey slept or pretended to sleep, and far across the sands he saw the dark shadow of a hunting dus that moved into the deeper shadow of the spires and was gone.
He listened to the wind, and looked at the stars, and knew his way now beyond doubt.
* * *
At the first touch of color to the land, they folded up the blankets and set out again, shivering in the early dawn, Galey stiff and limping from his exertion of the day before.
The spires closed about them once more, stained by the ruddy sun, and still the sense of familiarity persisted. They were on the right track; there remained no vestige of doubt in Duncan’s mind, but he savored the silence, and did not break it with conversation.
And eventually there lay before him that gap in the rocks, inconspicuous, like a dozen others thereabouts, save for the identifying shelf of rock that slanted down at the left, and the depth of the shadow that lay within.
Duncan paused; it occurred to him that even yet there was time to repent what he was doing, that he could lead Galey in circles until they ran out of supplies, and convince them all that he could not remember, that the place was lost to him. It would need great and skilled effort by Boaz’ small staff to locate it without him. It might go unlocated for generations of humans on Kesrith.
But relics did not serve a dead people. That everything they had been should perish, that an intelligent species should vanish from the universe, leaving nothing—there was no rightness in that.
“Here,” he said, and led Galey by the way that he well remembered, that he had seen thereafter in his nightmares, that long, close passage between sandstone cliffs that leaned together and shut out the sky. The passage wound, and seemed to spiral, down into dark and cold. Duncan used his penlight, and its tiny beam showed serpentine writings on the walls, turn after turn into the depths.
Daylight broke, blinding and blurring as they arrived at the cul-de-sac that ended their descent. They stood in a deep well of living stone, open to the sky. The walls here too were written over with symbols, and blackened with the traces of fire, both the stone and the metal door that stood open at the far side of the pit.
Galey swore: the sound of the human irreverence grated on Duncan’s ears, and he l
ooked to his left, where Galey stared. A huddled mass of bones and burned tatters of black cloth rested in a niche within the stone. It was the guardian of the shrine. Niun had paid him respect; Duncan felt moved to do so and did not know how.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said, and immediately recalled Melein’s similar words to him, a chilling echo in the deep well.
He tried to put his mind to other things—knelt on the sand in the sunlight and opened up the gear that he had carried, photographic equipment, and most of all a signal device. He activated it, and knew from that moment that human presence in this place was inevitable. Searching aircraft would eventually find it.
Then with the camera he rose and recorded all that was about them, the writings, the guardian, the doorway with its broken seal, the marks of destroying fire.
And last of all he ventured into the dark, into the shrine that not even Niun had presumed to enter—only Melein, with Niun to guard the door. Galey started to follow him, stepped within.
“Stay back,” Duncan ordered; his voice echoed terribly in the metal chamber, and Galey halted, uncertain, in the doorway—retreated when Duncan stared at him. Duncan drew a careful breath then and activated the camera and its light, by that surveying the ruin about him.
Shrine: it was rather a place of fire-stained steel, ruined panels, banks of lifeless machinery, stark and unlovely. He had known what he would find here, had heard the sound of it, the working of machinery the night the place had died, destroyed by the mri.
And yet the mri, who well understood machines, revered it—revered the artifact they had borne away from it.
Mistrust recurred in him, human mistrust, the remembrance that the mri had never offered assurances to him: they had only held their hand from him.
Banks of machinery, no trace of holiness. The thing that Niun had so lovingly carried hence, that now rested in Flower’s belly, suddenly seemed sinister, and threatening . . . a weapon, perhaps, that could be triggered by probing. The mri penchant for taking enemies with them in their self-destruction made it entirely possible, made Niun’s treasuring of it still comprehensible. Yet Boaz and security evidently had some confidence that it was no weapon.