Holt rolled over on his side to face Sunderland. “A year, Jeff, a year. You’re not going to finish your mapping. You could map for ten years and still have covered only part of the stone city. And what about the tunnels? The levels beneath?”
Sunderland licked his lips nervously. “Beneath. Well. If I had the equipment on board the Pegasus, then—”
“You don’t, and it doesn’t work anyway. Nothing works on the stone city. That was why the Captain landed. The rules don’t work down here.”
Sunderland shook his head and resumed his gathering up the maps. “The human mind can understand anything. Give me time, that’s all, and I’ll figure it all out. We could even figure out the Dan’lai and the ullies if Susie Benet was still here.” Susie Benet had been their contact specialist—a third-rate linguesp, but even a minor talent is better than none when dealing with alien minds.
“Susie Benet isn’t here,” Holt said. His voice had a hard edge to it. He began to tick off names on his fingers. “Susie vanished with the Captain. Ditto Carlos. Irai suicided. Ian tried to shoot his way inside the windwalls and wound up on them. Det and Lana and Maje went down beneath, trying to find the Captain, and they vanished too. Davie Tillman sold himself as a Kresh egg host, so he’s surely finished by now. Alaina and Takker-Rey are vegetables, useless, and we don’t know what went on with the four aboard the Pegasus. That leaves us, Sunderland, you and me.” He smiled grimly. “You make maps, I steal from the worms, and nobody understands anything. We’re finished. We’ll die here in the stone city. We’ll never see the stars again.”
He stopped as suddenly as he had started. It was a rare outburst for Holt; in general he was quiet, unexpressive, maybe a little repressed. Sunderland stood there, astonished, while Holt sagged back hopelessly into his sleep-web.
“Day after day after day,” Holt said. “And none of it means anything. You remember what Irai told us?”
“She was unstable,” Sunderland insisted. “She proved that beyond our wildest dreams.”
“She said we’d come too far,” Holt said, as if Sunderland had never spoken. “She said it was wrong to think that the whole universe operated by rules we could understand. You remember. She called it ‘sick, arrogant human folly.’ You remember, Jeff. That was how she talked. Like that. ‘Sick, arrogant human folly.’”
He laughed. “The crossworlds almost made sense, that was what fooled us. But if Irai was right, that would figure. After all, we’re still only a little bit from the manrealm, right? Further in, maybe the rules change even more.”
“I don’t like this kind of talk,” said Sunderland. “You’re getting defeatist. Irai was sick. At the end, you know, she was going to ul-mennaleith prayer meetings, submitting herself to the ul-nayileith, that sort of thing. A mystic, that was what she became. A mystic.”
“She was wrong?” Holt asked.
“She was wrong,” Sunderland said firmly.
Holt looked at him again. “Then explain things, Jeff. Tell me how to get out of here. Tell me how it all makes sense.”
“The stone city,” Sunderland said. “Well, when I finish my maps—” He stopped suddenly. Holt was leaning back in his web again and not listening at all.
IT TOOK HIM FIVE YEARS AND SIX SHIPS TO MOVE ACROSS THE GREAT star-flecked sphere the Damoosh claimed as their own and penetrate the border sector beyond. He consulted other, greater wisdompools as he went, and learned all he could, but always there were mysteries and surprises waiting on the world beyond this one. Not all the ships he served on were crewed by humans; man-ships seldom straggled in this far, so Holt signed on with Damoosh and stray gethsoids and other, lesser mongrels. But still there were usually a few men on every port he touched, and he even began to hear rumors of a second human empire some five hundred years in toward the core, settled by a wandering generation ship and ruled from a glittering world called Prester. On Prester the cities floated on clouds, one withered Vessman told him. Holt believed that for a time until another crewmate said that Prester was really a single world-spanning city, kept alive by fleets of food freighters greater than anything the Federal Empire had built in the wars before the Collapse. The same man said it had not been a generation ship that had settled her at all—he proved that by showing how far a slow-light ship could get from Old Earth since the dawn of the interstellar age—but rather a squadron of Earth Imperials fleeing a Hrangan Mind. Holt stayed skeptical this time. When a woman from a grounded Cathadayn freighter insisted that Prester had been founded by Tomo and Walberg, and that Walberg ruled it still, he gave up on the whole idea.
But there were other legends, other stories, and they drew him on.
As they drew others.
On an airless world circling a blue-white star, in its single domed city, Holt met Alaina. She told him about the Pegasus.
“The Captain built her from scratch, you know, right here. He was trading, going in further than usual, like we all do”—she flashed an understanding smile, figuring that Holt too was a trading gambler out for the big find—“and he met a Dan’la. They’re further in.”
“I know,” Holt said.
“Well, maybe you don’t know what’s going on in there. The Captain said the Dan’lai have all but taken over the ullish stars—you’ve heard of the ullish stars?…Good. Well, it’s because the ul-mennaleith haven’t resisted much, I gather, but also because of the Dan’lai jump-gun. It’s a new concept, I guess, and the Captain says it cuts travel time in half, or better. The standard drive warps the fabric of the space-time continuum, you know, to get ftl effects, and—”
“I’m a drive man,” Holt said curtly. But he was leaning forward as he said it, listening intently.
“Oh,” Alaina said, not rebuked in the least. “Well, the Dan’lai jump-gun does something else, shifts you into another continuum and then back again. Running it is entirely different. It’s partly psionic, and they put this ring around your head.”
“You have a jump-gun?” Holt interrupted.
She nodded. “The Captain melted down his old ship, just about, to build the Pegasus. With a jump-gun he bought from the Dan’lai. He’s collecting a crew now, and they’re training us.”
“Where are you going?” he said.
She laughed, lightly, and her bright green eyes seemed to flash. “Where else? In!”
HOLT WOKE AT DAWN, IN SILENCE, ROSE AND DRESSED HIMSELF quickly, and traced his path backward, past the quiet green pool and the endless alleys, out the Western Iris and through the city of the shipless. He walked under the wall of skeletons without an upward glance.
Inside the windwall, in the long corridor, he began to try the doors. The first four rattled and stayed shut. The fifth opened on an empty office. No Dan’la.
That was something new. Holt entered cautiously, peering around. No one, nothing, and no second door. He walked around the wide ullish desk and began to rifle it methodically, much as he looted the Cedran bubble-huts. Maybe he could find a field pass, a gun, something—anything to get him back to the Pegasus. If it was still sitting beyond the walls. Or maybe he could find a berth assignment.
The door slid open; a foxman stood there. He was indistinguishable from all the others. He barked, and Holt jumped away from the desk.
Swiftly the Dan’la circled around and seized the chair. “Thief!” he said. “Thief. I will shoot. You be shot. Yes.” His teeth snapped.
“No,” Holt said, edging toward the door. He could run if the Dan’la called others. “I came for a berth,” he said inanely.
“Ah!” the foxman interlocked his hands. “Different. Well, Holt, who are you?”
Holt stood mute.
“A berth, a berth, Holt wants a berth,” the Dan’la said in a squeaky singsong.
“Yesterday they said that a man-ship would be in next week,” Holt said.
“No no no. I’m sorry. No man-ship will come. There will be no man-ship. Next week, yesterday, no time. You understand? And we have no berth. Ship is full. You never go
on field with no berth.”
Holt moved forward again, to the other side of the desk. “No ship next week?”
The foxman shook his head. “No ship. No ship. No man-ship.”
“Something else, then. I’ll crew for ullies, for Dan’lai, for Cedrans. I’ve told you. I know drive, I know your jump-guns. Remember? I have credentials.”
The Dan’la tilted his head to one side. Did Holt remember the gesture? Was this a Dan’la he’d dealt with before? “Yes, but no berth.”
Holt started for the door.
“Wait,” the foxman commanded.
Holt turned.
“No man-ship next week,” the Dan’la said. “No ship, no ship, no ship,” he sang. Then he stopped singing. “Man-ship is now!”
Holt straightened. “Now?! You mean there’s a man-ship on the field right now?”
The Dan’la nodded furiously.
“A berth!” Holt was frantic. “Get me a berth, damn you.”
“Yes. Yes. A berth for you, for you a berth.” The foxman touched something on the desk, a drawer slid open, and he took out a film of silver metal and a slim wand of blue plastic. “Your name?”
“Michael Holt,” he answered.
“Oh.” The foxman put down the wand, took the metal sheet and put it back in the drawer, and barked, “No berth!”
“No berth?”
“No one can have two berths,” the Dan’la said.
“Two?”
The deskfox nodded. “Holt has a berth on Pegasus.”
Holt’s hands were trembling. “Damn,” he said. “Damn.”
The Dan’la laughed. “Will you take berth?”
“On Pegasus?”
A nod.
“You’ll let me through the walls, then? Out onto the field?”
The foxman nodded again. “Write Holt field pass.”
“Yes,” Holt said. “Yes.”
“Name?”
“Michael Holt.”
“Race?”
“Man.”
“Homeworld?”
“Ymir.”
There was a short silence. The Dan’la had been sitting there staring at Holt, his hands folded. Now he suddenly opened the drawer again, took out an ancient-looking piece of parchment that crumbled as he touched it, and picked up the wand again. “Name?” he asked.
They went through the whole thing again.
When the Dan’la had finished writing, he gave the paper to Holt. It flaked as he fingered it. He tried to be very careful. None of the scrawls made sense. “This will get me past the guards?” Holt said skeptically. “On the field? To the Pegasus?”
The Dan’la nodded. Holt turned and almost ran for the door.
“Wait,” the foxman cried.
Holt froze, then spun. “What?” he said between his teeth, and it was almost a snarl of rage.
“Technical thing.”
“Yes?”
“Field pass, to be good, must be signed.” The Dan’la flashed on its toothy smile. “Signed, yes yes, signed by your captain.”
There was no noise. Holt’s hand tightened spasmodically around the slip of yellow paper, and the pieces fluttered stiffly to the floor. Then, swift and wordless, he was on him.
The Dan’la had time for only one brief bark before Holt had him by the throat. The delicate six-fingered hands clawed air, helplessly. Holt twisted, and the neck snapped. He was holding a bundle of limp reddish fur.
He stood there for a long time, his hands locked, his teeth clenched. Then slowly he released his grip and the Dan’la corpse tumbled backward, toppling the chair.
In Holt’s eyes, a picture of the windwall flashed briefly.
He ran.
THE PEGASUS HAD STANDARD DRIVES TOO, IN CASE THE JUMP-GUN failed; the walls of the room were the familiar blend of naked metal and computer consoles. But the center was filled by the Dan’lai jump-gun: a long cylinder of metallic glass, thick around as a man, mounted on an instrument panel. The cylinder was half full of a sluggish liquid that changed color abruptly each time a pulse of energy was run through the tank. Around it were seats for four jumpmen, two on a side. Holt and Alaina sat on one flank, opposite tall blond Irai and Ian MacDonald; each of them wore a hollow glass crown full of the same liquid that sloshed in the gun cylinder.
Carlos Villareal was behind Holt, at the main console, draining data from the ship’s computer. The jumps were already planned. They were going to see the ullish stars, the Captain had decided. And Cedris and Huul the Golden, and points further in. And maybe even Prester and the core.
The first stop was a transit point named Greyrest (clearly, by the name, some other men had gone there once—the star was on the charts). The Captain had heard a story of a stone city older than time.
Beyond the atmosphere the nukes cut off, and Villareal gave the order. “Coordinates are in, navigation is ready,” he said, his voice a little less sure than usual; the whole procedure was so new. “Jump.”
They switched on the Dan’lai jump-gun.
darkness flickering with colors and a thousand whirling stars and Holt was in the middle all alone but no! there was Alaina and there someone else and all of them joined and the chaos whirled around them and great gray waves crashed over their heads and faces appeared ringed with fire laughing and dissolving and pain pain pain and they were lost and nothing was solid and eons passed and no Holt saw something burning calling pulling the core the core and there out from it Greyrest but then it was gone and somehow Holt brought it back and he yelled to Alaina and she grabbed for it too and MacDonald and Irai and they PULLED
They were sitting before the jump-gun again, and Holt was suddenly conscious of a pain in his wrist, and he looked down and saw that someone had taped an i.v. needle into him. Alaina was plugged in too, and the others, Ian and Irai. There was no sign of Villareal.
The door slid open and Sunderland stood there smiling at them and blinking. “Thank God!” the chubby navigator said. “You’ve been out for three months. I thought we were finished.”
Holt took the glass crown from his head and saw that there was only a thin film of liquid left. Then he noticed that the jump cylinder was almost empty as well. “Three months?”
Sunderland shuddered. “It was horrible. There was nothing outside, nothing, and we couldn’t rouse you. Villareal had to play nursemaid. If it hadn’t been for the Captain, I don’t know what would have happened. I know what the foxman said, but I wasn’t sure you could ever pull us out of—of wherever we were.”
“Are we there?” MacDonald demanded.
Sunderland went around the jump-gun to Villareal’s console and hooked it into the ship’s viewscreen. In a field of black, a small yellow sun was burning. And a cold gray orb filled the screen.
“Greyrest,” Sunderland said. “I’ve taken readings. We’re there. The Captain has already opened a beam to them. The Dan’lai seem to run things, and they’ve cleared us to land. The time checks too; three months subjective, three months objective, as near as we can figure.”
“And by standard drive?” Holt said. “The same trip by standard drive?”
“We did even better than the Dan’lai promised,” Sunderland said. “Greyrest is a good year and a half in from where we were.”
IT WAS TOO EARLY; THERE WAS TOO GREAT A CHANCE THAT THE Cedrans might not be comatose yet. But Holt had to take the risk. He smashed his way into the first bubble-hut he found and looted it completely, ripping things apart with frantic haste. The residents, luckily, were torpid sleep-balls.
Out on the main thoroughfare, he ignored the Dan’lai merchants, half afraid he would confront the same foxman he had just killed. Instead he found a stall tended by a heavy blind Linkellar, its huge eyes like rolling balls of pus. The creature still cheated him, somehow. But he traded all that he had taken for an eggshell-shaped helmet of transparent blue and a working laser. The laser startled him; it was a twin for the one MacDonald had carried, even down to the Finnegan crest. But it worked, and that was
all that mattered.
The crowds were assembling for the daily shuffle up and down the ways of the city of the shipless. Holt pushed through them savagely, toward the Western Iris, and broke into a measured jog when he reached the empty alleys of the stone city.
Sunderland was gone; out mapping. Holt took one of his markers and wrote across a map: KILLED A FOX. MUST HIDE. I’M GOING INTO THE STONE CITY. SAFE THERE.
Then he took all the food that was left, a good two weeks’ supply, more if he starved himself. He filled a pack with it, strapped it on, and left. The laser was snug in his pocket, the helmet tucked under his arm.
The nearest underway was only a few blocks away; a great corkscrew that descended into the earth from the center of a nexus. Holt and Sunderland had often gone to the first level, as far as the light reached. Even there it was dim, gloomy, stuffy; a network of tunnels as intricate as the alleys above had branched off in every direction. Many of them slanted downward. And of course the corkscrew went further down, with more branchings, growing darker and more still with every turn. No one went beyond the first level; those that did—like the Captain—never came back. They had heard stories about how deep the stone city went, but there was no way to check them out; the instruments they had taken from Pegasus had never worked on the crossworlds.
At the bottom of the first full turn, the first level, Holt stopped and put on the pale blue helmet. It was a tight fit; the front of it pressed against the edge of his nose and the sides squeezed his head uncomfortably. Clearly it had been built for an ul-mennalei. But it would do; there was a hole around his mouth, so he could talk and breathe.
He waited a moment while his body heat was absorbed by the helmet. Shortly it began to give off a somber blue light. Holt continued down the corkscrew, into the darkness.
Around and around the underway curved, with other tunnels branching off at every turning; Holt kept on and soon lost track of the levels he had come. Outside his small circle of light there was only pitch-black and silence and still hot air that was increasingly difficult to breathe. But fear was driving him now, and he did not slow. The surface of the stone city was deserted, but not entirely so; the Dan’lai entered when they had to. Only down here would he be safe. He would stay on the corkscrew itself, he vowed; if he did not wander he could not get lost. That was what happened to the Captain and the others, he was sure; they’d left the underway, gone off into the side tunnels, and had starved to death before they could find their way back. But not Holt. In two weeks or so he could come up and get food from Sunderland, perhaps.