Only for a moment did we see it so, backed against the unyielding buttress, pinned by the light. Then it was gone, with such speed as left me astounded. It had gone on two legs, then dropped to four. And the worst thing was that it looked like a man. Or what might have been a man eons ago, before time had burned out all which makes my kind more than an unthinking creature set upon survival alone.
“So it would seem that the city still has its inhabitants,” Zilwrich commented.
“That thing—what was it?” The disgust in Ryzk’s voice matched my own emotion. “Where did it go?”
“Turn to the left.” Eet appeared unaffected by what we had seen. “In there—”
“There” was the first opening I had seen on the ground level of any building. It was too regular to be another rent. The gap was large enough to accommodate the flitter. But I had a very unpleasant suspicion that it was also where the scuttling creature had disappeared. To search further would mean leaving the craft, and to be trapped by that “thing” or others of its kind—
Yet I obeyed Eet’s direction, bringing the flitter to a standing hover within the shell of chamber beyond that doorway. We were in a circular space. If there had been any furnishings, those were long since gone. But the floor was heaped with gritty, flaky stuff which perhaps had once been fittings. This was pathed, beaten solid in some places. And the paths—there were two of them—led directly to another dark opening in the floor, a well.
I moved the flitter cautiously until we nosed the lip of that descent. We could indeed lower into it in the machine. But to do this, unaware of what might lie below, was a peril I was not ready to face. If I had such fears, Eet was not concerned with them. He hung over the bowl in which the gem blazed.
“Down!” he urged, “Now down!”
I would have refused, but the Zacathan spoke.
“It is true. There is a very strong force below us. And if we go with caution—”
I certainly would not descend outside the flitter, but to go in it would give us a small measure of protection. Yet I thought it foolhardy to try at all. I fully expected a protest from Ryzk. Only when I glanced to him I saw he was as bemused by the gem in the bowl as Eet.
Moving out over the well I eased the flitter onto settle-hover, thankful that we were using a craft meant for exploration. And I kept a wary eye on the walls as we began the descent at as slow a speed as I could hold us to.
What had been the original use of this opening we could not know. But that it was also a passage for later users was apparent. Into the once smooth walls had been pounded or wedged a series of projections meant to serve as hand- and footholds, a very crude ladder. And the bits and pieces so used were rough, some of them surely ripped from more complex fittings. The work was very bad, its quality far beneath that of the city constructions, as if it had been done by a race who was at a primitive level.
We were descending by floors, passing dark openings in the walls of the shaft, as if that were a hub of a series of wheels whose spokes were evenly spaced passages. I counted six such levels, yet the circumference of the well did not dwindle in size as I feared it might. And though the crude ladder led to several of the cross-corridor openings, it also continued on down and down, as if it served a vast warren of burrows.
I watched the mouths of any opening the ladder served, but there was no sign of life, and our beamer could not penetrate them very far. Down and down, six levels, ten, a dozen, twenty—the wall grew no smaller. But it was a growing strain to hold the flitter on settle-hover at this slow speed. And always that ladder kept pace with us. Fifty—
“Soon, very soon now!” Eet’s thought was excited, more filled with emotion than any I had ever received before. I looked to the dials. We were some miles below the surface. I cut our speed to the lowest and waited. There was a bump, and we had landed. Only a single tunnel mouth faced us now, a little to the right. And it was too small for the flitter. Any further exploration must be on foot, and I had no desire to leave the confines of the small safety offered by that craft.
My prudence was justified. There was movement at the mouth of that tunnel, though I remembered that crude ladder had ended four levels above our present position. Only what came into our beam was a machine, unlike any I had seen before. But there was enough resemblance to things I knew to suggest that the tube rising to aim at us was about to discharge something meaning no good to invaders.
When I put a finger to the rise button, both Eet and the Zacathan spoke, Eet by thought, the alien in Basic.
“Do not!”
Do not? They were crazed. We had to get out of the range of that thing, if we could, before it fired!
“Look—” That was Zilwrich. Eet was still staring at the stone in the bowl.
Look I did, expecting death to come at me from that sinister tube. What I did see was—nothing at all!
“Where—?”
“Esper impressions,” Zilwrich answered. “It is known that certain things, trees, water, stones—and perhaps other objects—can hold visual impressions for many years, release them to one in the proper frame of mind for reception. The builders here may have known and used that principle. Or what we have seen may be only a report of its use at some time in the past, action which impelled such heightened emotions in those viewing it that the impression remained to be activated by us.”
“We go—there—” Eet brushed aside the need for any explanation. Instead he was pushing the bowl ahead, using it as an indicator that our way led down that dark passage.
In the end he had his way. Otherwise he and the Zacathan would have set off alone. And my pride, such as it was, would not let me hold back. Because we were now a party united against the unseen perils of the unknown, I gave Ryzk once of the crossbows. So armed, we started out, Eet riding on my shoulder, where his weight was something of a problem, Zilwrich and Ryzk on my heels.
I had taken a smaller beamer from our supplies, but we did not need its ray long. Soon the gem in the bowl gave us light. And what it showed ahead for a goodly space was smooth, unbroken walling, as if we were advancing along a great tube.
Distance in the dark underground was relative. I thought we might find lack of air a danger. But apparently whatever system supplied this depths with a breathable atmosphere was still operative.
At last we came to the end of the passage and out. Not into a mine burrowing, as I had come more and more to expect, but into a room crammed with apparatus, equipment, some firmly based on the floor, the rest on tables or long counters. In the middle of this expanse was a blaze of light toward which Eet wanted to go.
A cone-shaped object perhaps as tall as I sat on a table by itself. And in it a transparent porthole allowed one to view an inner rack on which rested a dozen of the zero stones, vibrant with glowing life as we brought the two we carried closer to their container.
Resting beside the cone, on the table, was a second rack to which were clamped a further dozen rough, uncut stones. They were as black as lumps of carbon, yet they did not have the burned-out look of the exhausted zero stones we had found in the derelict space ship on our first trial of the power of the gems.
Eet sprang from my shoulder to the top of the table, put down the bowl, and set about prying at the porthole in the cone, trying to get at the jewels within. But something about that whole array triggered my memory.
There are many ways of cheating known to the experienced gem buyer. Stones may be so treated as to change their color, even hide flaws. Heat will transform amethyst to golden topaz. A combination of heat and chemical skillfully used can make a near undetectable royal rovan of the best crimson hue from a pale-pink one. Heat can do—
I loosened one of the black lumps from the rack and brought out my jeweler’s lens. I had no way of testing the thing I held, yet there grew in me the belief that this was the matrix, the true zero stone. They might not be natural gems at all, but manufactured—which could logically give them the power to step up energy.
The
thing I held was certainly odd. Its surface was velvety to the eye, but not the touch. If it had been shaped like a seed pod—I drew a deep breath. Memory was playing a strange trick on me. Surely it had to be a trick.
Once before I had found stones, or what appeared to be stones, tumbled in a stream. To the eye, though not to the touch, they had had a velvety, almost furred surface. One of those stones had been appropriated by the ship’s cat, who had licked it, swallowed it, to give birth to—Eet! These were hunks of mineral, not rounded, podlike. But their surfaces—
I looked to Eet as I weighed that lump in my hand. He had discovered the secret of the latch on the porthole, jerked it open, and was taking out the rack with the finished gems. Then, to my amazement, as the weight of the tray was lifted from the latches which held it, I saw the cone come to life, a light flash on in its interior. Without thinking (further than wanting) past my desire to prove the truth of my suspicion, I inserted the second rack, saving out only the lump I had taken from it. My fingers were almost trapped as the porthole snapped shut of its own accord. And blazing light, blinding to any direct gaze, gathered behind the view-plate.
I had my answer. “Made stones.”
Zilwrich picked up one from the other rack, took from me the black lump to compare.
“Yes, I believe you are correct. And I do not think that this”—he indicated the black lump—“is true ore or matrix either.” He turned his bandaged head from right to left to view the room. The light was breaking in fierce waves from the cone, giving us a far radiance. “This was, I am certain, a laboratory.”
“Which means,” Ryzk commented, “that these are the last stones we may ever see. Unless they left records of how—”
There was sudden horrible shrilling, hurting one’s ears, reaching into the brain. I gave one glance at the cone and grabbed for Eet, shouldered Zilwrich back, and cried out a warning. Then fire broke through the top of the oven, fountained up. Somehow I hit the floor, Eet fighting in my hold, the Zacathan’s body half under mine.
Then—the light went out!
The following dark was so thick it smothered one. I groped for the beamer at my belt, for the second time unable to be sure whether my eyes or the light itself had failed. But a ray answered my press of button.
I aimed at the table, or where the table had stood. Now there was nothing at all! Nothing but a fan of clear space, as if the power had eaten a path for itself—but away, not toward us. Only one thing still lay there, seemingly unharmed, as if it was armored for all time against destruction—the map bowl. Eet uttered a sound, one of the few he had ever made. He broke from my hold and ran for it. But before he reached it he stopped short and I cried out even louder, moved by emotion in which fear and awe were mingled.
For in the beam of the torch Eet’s furred body shimmered. He reared on his hind legs as might an animal caught by a throat collar and tight leash as it reached the end of the slack allowed it.
His hand-paws flailed at the air, and from his jaws came a wail of agony. But no mind-touch. It was as if then he was only animal.
With his back stiff, high-reared on his hind legs, he began to move jerkily, in a kind of weird, manifestly painful dance, round in a circle, the center of which was the bowl. Froth gathered on his muzzle, his eyes rolled wildly, and his body continued to shimmer until he was only a misty column.
That column grew taller, larger. It might be that the atoms which had formed the sustance of Eet’s half-feline body were being dispersed, that he was literally being shaken into nothingness. Yet, instead of spreading out then into wisps, the mist began to coalesce again. Still the solidifying column was not as small as Eet, nor was it gathering into the same shape.
I could not move, nor did Zilwrich, nor Ryzk. The beamer had fallen from my hand, but lay so that its ray, if only by chance, held full on Eet, or what had been Eet, and the bowl.
Darker, thicker, and more solid grew the column of that shuddering thing. Eet had been as large as his foster mother, the ship’s cat. This was almost as tall as I. At last it stopped growing, and its frenzied circling about the bowl became slower and slower, then finally halted.
I was still held in frozen astonishment.
I had seen Eet take three shapes by hallucinatory disguise: the pookha, the reptilian thing at Lylestane, and the hairy subhuman who had entered Waystar with me. But that he had willed this last change I was certain was not true.
He was humanoid and—
A slender body, yet curved, with long shapely legs, a small waist, and above that—
He—no—SHE—stood very still, staring at her outstretched hands, their skin soft with a pearly sheen to their golden hue. She bent her head as if to view that body, ran her hands up and down it, perhaps to reassure herself that this was what she now saw.
While from Zilwrich broke a single word: “Luar!”
Eet’s head turned, she looked at us with large eyes, a deeper and richer golden than her skin, drew her long dark-red hair about her as a cloak. Then she stooped and picked up the bowl. Balancing it on the palm of one hand, she walked to us along the beam of the torch, as if to impress upon us her altered appearance.
“Luar?” Her lips shaped the word. “No—Thalan!”
She hesitated, her eyes not on us for a moment but looking beyond us, as if they saw what we never could. “Luar we knew, yes, and dwelt there for a space, Honorable One, so that we left traces of our passage there. But it was not our home. We are the Searchers, the Born-again ones. Thalan, yes. And before that, others, many others.”
She held out the bowl, reversed it so we could see the map. But the wink of the zero stone on it was dead, and that other stone it had held had vanished. “The treasure we sought here—it is now gone. Unless your wise ones, Honorable Elder, can read very forgotten riddles.”
“Thanks to you, Jern!”
I staggered as a sudden blow against my arm threw me hard against one of the pieces of equipment based on the floor. I clung to it so as not to go down.
Eet, in one of those lightning movements which had been his—hers—as a feline mutant, snatched up the beamer from the floor. She swung the full light on Ryzk as the pilot was setting another bolt to his crossbow. And from her lips came a clear whistle.
Ryzk twisted as if his body had been caught in the shriveling discharge of a laser. His mouth opened on a scream which remained soundless. And from his now powerless hands dropped his weapon.
“Enough!” Zilwrich, moving with the dignity of his race, picked up the bow. The whistle stopped in mid-note and Ryzk stood, turning his head from side to side, as if he fought against some mind daze and tried thus to shake it away.
Gingerly I investigated my hurt by touch, since what light there was Eet had focused on Ryzk, now weaving back and forth as if his will alone kept him on his feet. I could find no cut, but the flesh was very tender, and I guessed it had been so close a miss that the shaft of the bolt had bruised me sorely.
“Enough!” the Zacathan repeated. He dropped his hand on the pilot’s shoulder, steadied him as if they had been comrades-in-arms. “The treasure—the best treasure—still lies about us. Or”—he looked to Eet measuringly—“is now a part of us. You have what you have long wished, One Out of Time. Do not begrudge lesser prizes to others.”
She spun the bowl on her hand and her lips curved in a smile. “Of a surety, Honorable Elder, at this hour I wish no hurt to any, having, as you have pointed out, achieved a certain purpose of my own. And knowledge is treasure—”
“No more stones,” I said aloud, not really knowing why. “No more trouble. We are luckier without them—”
Ryzk raised his head, blinking in the light. He looked to where I leaned against my support but I think he did not really see me.
“Well enough!” Eet said almost briskly then. “The Honorable Elder is right. We have found a treasure world, which he and his kind are best fitted to exploit. Is this not so?”
“Yes.” I had no doubts of that.
r /> Ryzk shook his head once more, but not in denial. It was rather to try and clear his mind.
“The stones—” he said hoarsely.
“Were bait for too many traps,” I answered. “Do you want the Guild, those of Waystar, the Patrol, always at your heels?”
He raised his hand, wiped it back and forth across his face. Then he looked to Zilwrich, keeping his eyes carefully from Eet, as if from the Zacathan alone he might expect an answer he could accept as the truth.
“Still treasure?” There was something curiously childlike in that question, as if Eet’s strange attack had wiped from the pilot years of suspicion and wariness.
“More than can be reckoned.” Zilwrich spoke soothingly.
But treasure no longer interested me. I watched rather Eet. As mutant and trader we had been companions. But what would follow now?
Mind-touch instead of words, amusement in part but delicately so, came swiftly in answer to my chaotic thoughts. “I told you once, Murdoc Jern, we each have in us that which must depend upon the other. I needed your body in the beginning, you needed certain attributes which I possessed in the woefully limited one I acquired. We are not now independent of each other—unless you wish it, just because I have found a body better for my purposes. In fact, one which, as I remember, served my race very well thousands of years ago. But I do not declare our partnership at an end because of that. Do you?”
She came forward then, tossing from her the bowl, the torch, as if both were no longer of service to her. Then her touch was on my body, light, soothing above my bruised hurt.
I had chaffed against Eet’s superiority many times, sought to break his—her (I still could not quite accept the change) hold on me, that tie which fate, or Eet, had somehow spun between us since he—she—had been born on my bunk in the Free Trader.
It seemed that her touch now drew away the pain in my arm and side. And I knew that for better or worse, for ill times and good, there was no casting away of what that fate had given me. When I accepted that, all else fell into place.