Time swooped past.
“Attention!” cried from the screen. “You are off course! You are in absolutely barred territory!”
“Say on,” Flandry jeered. He half hoped to provoke a real response. The voice only denounced his behavior.
A thump resounded and shivered. The tone of wind and engines ceased. They were down.
Flandry vaulted from his chair, snatched a combat helmet, buckled it on as he ran. Beneath it he already wore a mindscreen, as did everybody aboard. Otherwise he was’ attired in a gray coverall and stout leather boots. On his back and across his chest were the drive cones and controls of a grav unit. His pouchbelt held field rations, medical supplies, canteen of water, ammunition, blaster, slugthrower, and Merseian war knife.
At the head of his dozen Dennitzan marines, he bounded from the main personnel lock, along the extruded gangway, onto the soil of Chereion. There he crouched in what shelter the hull afforded and glared around, fingers on weapons.
After a minute or two he stepped forth. Awe welled in him.
A breeze whispered, blade-sharp with cold and dryness. It bore an iron tang off uncounted leagues of sand and dust. In cloudless violet, the sun stood at afternoon, bigger to see than Sol over Terra, duller and redder than the sun over Diomedes; squinting, he could look straight into it for seconds without being blinded, and through his lashes find monstrous dark spots and vortices. It would not set for many an hour, the old planet turned so wearily.
Shadows were long and purple across the dunes which rolled cinnabar and ocher to the near horizon. Here and there stood the gnawed stump of a pinnacle, livid with mineral hues, or a ravine clove a bluff which might once have been a mountain. The farther desert seemed utterly dead. Around the city, wide apart, grew low bushes whose leaves glittered in rainbows as if crystalline. The city itself rose from foundations that must go far down, must have been buried until the landscape eroded from around them and surely have needed renewal as the ages swept past.
The city—it was not a giant chaos such as besat Terra or Merseia; nothing on Chereion was. An ellipse defined it, some ten kilometers at the widest, proportioned in a right-ness Flandry had recognized from afar though not knowing how he did. The buildings of the perimeter were single-storied, slenderly colonnaded; behind them, others lifted ever higher, until they climaxed in a leap of slim towers. Few windows interrupted the harmonies of colors and iridescence, the interplay of geometries that called forth visions of many-vaulted infinity. The heart rode those lines and curves upward until the whole sight became a silent music.
Silent … only the breeze moved or murmured.
A time passed beyond time.
“Milostiv Bog,” Lieutenant Vymezal breathed, “is it Heaven we see?”
“Then is Heaven empty?” said another man as low.
Flandry shook himself, wrenched his attention away, sought for his purposefulness in the ponderous homely shapes of their armor, the guns and grenades they bore. “Let’s find out.” His words were harsh and loud in his ears. “This is as large a community as any, and typical insofar as I could judge.” Not that they are alike. Each is a separate song. “If it’s abandoned, we can assume they all are.”
“Why would the Merseians guard … relics?” Vymezal asked.
“Maybe they don’t.” Flandry addressed his minicom. “Chives, jump aloft at the first trace of anything untoward. Fight at discretion. I think we can maintain radio contact from inside the town. If not, I may ask you to hover. Are you still getting a transmission?”
“No, sir.” That voice came duly small. “It ceased when we landed.”
“Cut me in if you do … Gentlemen, follow me in combat formation. Should I come to grief, remember your duty is to return to the fleet if possible, or to cover our boat’s retreat if necessary. Forward.”
Flandry started off in flat sub-gee bounds. His body felt miraculously light, as light as the shapes which soared before him, and the air diamond clear. Yet behind him purred the gravity motors which helped his weighted troopers along. He reminded himself that they hugged the ground to present a minimal target, that the space they crossed was terrifyingly open, that ultimate purity lies in death. The minutes grew while he covered the pair of kilometers. Half of him stayed cat-alert, half wished Kossara could somehow, safely, have witnessed this wonder.
The foundations took more and more of the sky, until at last he stood beneath their sheer cliff. Azure, the material resisted a kick and an experimental energy bolt with a hardness which had defied epochs. He whirred upward, over an edge, and stood in the city.
A broad street of the same blue stretched before him, flanked by dancing rows of pillars and arabesque friezes on buildings which might have been temples. The farther he scanned, the higher fountained walls, columns, tiers, cupolas, spires; and each step he took gave him a different perspective, so that the whole came alive, intricate, simple, powerful, tranquil, transcendental. But footfalls echoed hollow.
They had gone a kilometer inward when nerves twanged and weapons snapped to aim. “Hold,” Flandry said. The man-sized ovoid that floated from a side lane sprouted tentacles which ended in tools and sensors. The lines and curves of it were beautiful. It passed from sight again on its unnamed errand. “A robot,” Flandry guessed. “Fully automated, a city could last, could function, for—millions of years?” His prosiness felt to him as if he had spat on consecrated earth.
No, damn it! I’m hunting my woman’s murderers.
He trod into a mosaic plaza and saw their forms.
Through an arcade on the far side the tall grave shapes walked, white-robed, heads bare to let crests shine over luminous eyes and lordly brows. They numbered perhaps a score. Some carried what appeared to be books, scrolls, delicate enigmatic objects; some appeared to be in discourse, mind to mind; some went alone in their meditations. When the humans arrived, most heads turned observingly. Then, as if having exhausted what newness was there, the thoughtfulness returned to them and they went on about their business of—wisdom?
“What’ll we do, sir?” Vymezal rasped at Flandry’s ear.
“Talk to them, if they’ll answer,” the Terran said. “Even take them prisoner, if circumstances warrant.”
“Can we? Should we? I came here for revenge, but—God help us, what filthy monkeys we are.”
A premonition trembled in Flandry. “Don’t you mean,” he muttered, “what animals we’re intended to feel like … we and whoever they guide this far?”
He strode quickly across the lovely pattern before him. Under an ogive arch, one stopped, turned, beckoned, and waited. The sight of gun loose in holster and brutal forms at his back did not stir the calm upon that golden face. “Greeting,” lulled in Eriau.
Flandry reached forth a hand. The other slipped easily aside from the uncouth gesture. “I want somebody who can speak for your world,” the man said.
“Any of us can that,” sang the reply. “Call me, if you wish, Liannathan. Have you a name for use?”
“Yes. Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, Imperial Navy of Terra. Your Aycharaych knows me. Is he around?”
Liannathan ignored the question. “Why do you trouble our peace?”
The chills walked faster along Flandry’s spine. “Can’t you read that in my mind?” he asked.
“Sta pakao,” said amazement behind him.
“Hush,” Vymezal warned the man, his own tone stiff with intensity; and there was no mention of screens against telepathy.
“We give you the charity of refraining,” Liannathan smiled.
To and fro went the philosophers behind him.
“I … assume you’re aware … a punitive expedition is on its way,” Flandry said. “My group came to … parley.”