JAYDIUM
by Deborah J. Ross, writing as Deborah Wheeler
Chapter 7
As they continued across the massive
forest, shipbrain sketched details of a variety of animals--insects, amphibians
in the rivers and ponds, and reptiles, some of them the size of wolves. There
seemed to be no recognizable primates or felines. Shipbrain continued to report
nothing on the radio frequencies except natural background noise.
So much for my woodmen.
Without checking the scrubjet=s
chronometer, Eril couldn=t
be sure how long they=d
been flying, watching and scanning. It felt like forever, suspended between
forest below and equally endless sky above. Kithri said nothing about the
flower field and very little about anything else.
The novelty of the planet quickly wore
thin on Eril. He found himself itching for something--anything--to
happen. This couldn=t
be all there was--a few tantalizing mysteries and then nothing but hours on end
of unremitting pastoral peacefulness.
He signaled shipbrain to pipe the
radio scans to his headset. Maybe there was something out there after all and
the dumb machine was too limited to recognize it.
He listened, hearing nothing
but uncommunicative noise.
Eril=s thoughts turned to the unconscious
man in the hold. Maybe they should find some place to set down and try to rouse
him, find out who he was and where he=d
come from. The stranger might even be from this world, peacefully exploring the
tunnel when he and Kithri jolted out of nowhere. Eril instantly discarded the
notion. For one thing, they=d
been in their own Stayman--a normal jaydium tunnel of it anyway--when the
spacer appeared. For another, the suit was clearly designed for work in space.
Who in their right mind would go exploring a tunnel in extra-vehicular
gear? Boredom must be corroding his brain, to even think of it.
Squawk!--BURST--bzzz--BURST-- Squawk!
came shrieking over the headset. Eril nearly leapt out of his seat.
"I don=t
know," he said, quickly scanning the location functions. "It=s
gone now. Damn!"
"I=ll check shipbrain=s
analysis." After a brief pause, she said, "Inconclusive. Could have
been some natural source--lightning, something like that."
"No damned lightning made that sound."
"You know something shipbrain
doesn=t?"
"I gotta hunch. I gotta hunch of a
hunch. Where=s
the source?"
"Shipbrain pins it near Port
Ludlow--or where it used to be. We could fly there in an hour, if you want to
check it out."
"You bet I do!"
oOo
Brushwacker
cleared the last ridge. Eril and Kithri looked down into the depression where
Port Ludlow had lain baking in the sun. No low, flat‑walled buildings of ash‑brick
greeted them, no spaceport with its battered insystem traders and field of
garishly painted scrubjets. No distant fields of sallow, struggling green, no
tendril roads spewing forth plumes of powdery dust. After the forest, Eril hadn=t
expected any of that. But neither did he expect what he did see.
Once, when he was a boy of four, the
year before his father disappeared on that Exploration mission, Eril=s
mother had taken him and his sister to an antique crafts exhibition. There he
watched a glassblower fashion a fairy castle, looping and twisting the liquid
glass into filigree designs. It was his earliest childhood memory.
Six-year-old Avery chose a winged horse
for herself, but Eril had eyes only for the tower. It stood on his dresser, a
touchstone for his imagination, until...he could not remember what happened to
it. Now the memory of that childhood treasure rose up in front of his eyes,
magnified a thousandfold and tinted like a watercolor rainbow, a crystal city
set in a cup of living green.
"Lo-o-ok at that," Kithri
said.
Eril leaned forward across her
shoulders, straining for more, hardly daring to breathe least the city shimmer
and evaporate like a fever-born mirage. Even at this distance, he could
distinguish individual structures. A ruby spindle shone in the late afternoon
sun, dwarfing a flat rectangular block of pearlescent lace and a chain of
smaller towers linked at every level by bridges of the same translucent
material. A series of causeways, sapphire blue and turquoise, wound through the
forest of towers.
As they drew nearer, Eril realized that
the city was not nearly as large as it first seemed. He was accustomed to the
scale of artificial satellites or ancient mega-cities like New Paris or
Terillium City, where ten thousand might live and work within the same
self-contained scraper. These shining buildings before him could not be more
than three or four stories high. It was their slenderness and composition that
made them seem so elegantly tall. Judging by Fifth Fed standards, he put the
city=s
entire population at fifty thousand people, no more.
Or perhaps they aren=t
human. Perhaps we=ve
discovered a new race of intelligent aliens! That had only
happened twice before in humankind=s
exploration of space and in neither case were the aliens this sophisticated. He=d
met a few during the early years of the war, semi-telepathic anthropoids who
quickly withdrew to their own planets at the first sign of interstellar
warfare. The pseudofelines were even more reclusive and limited their own
colonies to less than a dozen individuals.
When he first went into space, Eril
thought he wanted adventure, the biggest there was. Before him lay the wildest
discovery he could ever hope to make, even in the far-flung Exploration Corps.
A long-remembered quiver shot through
him like an ember leaping into flame. At any moment, the city people would spot
the scrubjet and send out an envoy.
Wait until the Council gets my
report--first the spaceman and now a whole new civilization! If only Weiram
could see it...
"Whatever made the radio signal,
it wasn=t
that city," Kithri said in a puzzled voice. "There=s
nothing alive down there."
Eril=s mind still roiled with images of a
brilliant new interspecies alliance. "What are you talking about? It=s got
to come from there. It couldn=t
have been anything else. I=m
betting we=ve
just made First Contact with a new civilization!"
"I=m betting you=ve
got rocks in your skull," she retorted. "I=ve
been monitoring the infrared and motion scans, and there=s
not a trace. And no radio, either. The burst must have been a natural fluke, just
like shipbrain said. If anyone was there, their radar would have picked us up
by now and they=d
have sent someone to check us out."
Eril skin prickled. Logically she was
correct, but it wasn=t
logic that had kept him alive through one dog-fight after another at the end of
the war. Maybe he was fooling himself, maybe he wanted the city to have
inhabitants. Maybe he wanted an excuse not to go back--not yet, not
empty-handed. Whatever his rationalizations, he couldn=t
shake the bone-deep certainty that the noise burst had been from some advanced,
power-using intelligence.
But would such an intelligence
necessarily be friendly? The two alien races known to the Federation were timid
and anything but warlike, but he had no way of knowing if they were a fluke or
the rule.
Their radar would have picked us up,
Kithri had reminded him. Were they even now being tracked by hidden weapons?
Was the city=s
silence an absence--or a lure?
oOo
Kithri brought >Wacker
down into the shallow bowl of parkland that surrounded the city. With a sinking
heart, Eril recognized the signs of deterioration‑‑the splintered towers, the
shredded supports beneath the causeways, the bridges whose lacy structures had
crumbled in patches. The cores of the buildings still stood upright, lonely and
proud as they slowly lost their battle with the elements. His fairytale city
was nothing but a decaying ruin.
"Eril, wait!" Kithri said
suddenly. "On the infrared--I=m
picking up something moving on the far perimeter, something small, or maybe
there=s
only one of them. I--you could be right..."
An alien survivor,
Eril wondered, or only a large animal, something we missed in the forest?
Hope soared in him again.
They came around to the far side of the
city, following the location of the reading, to hover over a belt of velvety
tree-dotted lawns. Eril had seen similar gardens on long-civilized worlds,
intricate orchestrations of botanical species chosen for their nonproliferating
nature. They required little maintenance to preserve the original landscaping.
On the far side of the park lay a huge,
flat field. Where it was not pock-marked by faded blast‑sites, the surface was
smooth, the color of cream instead of the charcoal ceramic asphalt used by the
Federation in its spaceports. A chain of crumbling buildings, most likely
control towers, ran down the center like the shattered fragments of a spinal
column. Nothing else, not even the rusting framework of a abandoned ship, rose
above the level surface.
"You could berth twenty‑‑no,
thirty starcruisers out there without being crowded," Eril said.
Kithri=s voice sounded tinny in the cramped
cockpit. "Even during the war, we always had something, if only
some old insystem junker."
"Jaydium kept us coming back. Even
with the Fed falling apart, that was too valuable to forget."
"But they didn=t
come back here. Eril, could that mean‑‑no Federation at all, no space
travel, maybe the whole place left to rot like some sort of graveyard
planet?"
"If you=d
built a spaceport that size, and a city like that, would you just leave?"
"Not if I had any choice,"
she answered bleakly. "But if they weren=t human, why should they even think
like us?"
"There=s
got to be something left," he said stubbornly. "Something.
Where was that heat source?"
"It=s gone out of range. Or maybe the
damned detector malfunctioned and it never was there at all."
"No matter, we=ll
be waiting for it when it sticks its pitouchee out again."
"Uhn!" came from behind them,
a voice barely recognizable as human. The spaceman, as if following a carefully
orchestrated script, had woken up.
o0o
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