They were both moving methodically toward the moon, using the thrusters on their backpacks. They rotated themselves, bringing their legs down, striving to land on the surface. It appeared they hoped to arrange things so they both touched down at the same moment. If so, they didn’t quite manage it.
The rod-carrier came in a second or two behind his partner. They must have been wearing grip shoes of some sort, because they landed and stayed. There was another delay, perhaps as much as a minute, while they turned on lamps fitted to their sleeves and stood front to front. Then they fitted the end of the rod opposite the hawk to a base plate. They laid the plate flat down on the rocky surface, knelt beside it, and produced a handful of spikes.
“It’s a marker,” said Alyx.
They drove the spikes in and tugged at the rod. It was secure.
“What in hell,” asked Tor, “is the significance? It’s just a big rock.”
“Maybe a battle was fought there,” said Alyx.
George frowned. “That seems unlikely.”
One of the figures stood beside the rod, and the other lifted a device that had been suspended from his belt and aimed it at his colleague.
“Picture!” whispered Alyx. “He’s taking a picture.”
They took more. Pictures of each other. Of the rod. Of the rock. Sometimes they pointed the device out toward the stars.
Then they put it away and walked across the moonlet. One knelt, produced a chisel, and loosened a piece of rock. He brought out a bag, put the piece in the bag, sealed it, and attached it to his belt.
When light fell on their faceplates, Tor could see nothing except a reflection of the light source, sometimes the sun, sometimes the rings, sometimes a nearby moon or one of their own lamps.
Tor went in close to get a better look at the rod. The hawk was perched on a small globe. Its wings were half-folded, its tail feathers spread. Its short curved beak was open. When he’d seen enough, he started to go long range again.
“Hold it,” said Alyx.
He reversed himself and tried to close back in, pushing on the plate, left side, right, top, and bottom. Rings and moons and stars wheeled around them. The dark giant moved beneath and drifted to the rear. Damned system. But gradually he began to understand how it all worked. He found the moonlet and locked in on the top of the rod. On the globe.
“Good,” said Alyx. And then: “How about that?”
“How about what?” asked George.
“Look at the sphere,” she said.
Tor did, but saw nothing out of the way. It was gold, and it had a few irregularly raised sections.
“Can you bring up the big moon again?” asked Alyx. “The one with the atmosphere?”
He tried to remember where it was, rotated the sky, found it, and brought it in close.
“Look,” she said.
He looked. Much of the land surface was green. “It’s a living world,” said George.
And very much like Earth, as all living worlds had been, so far. Blue oceans and broad continents. Ice caps at the poles. Mountain ranges and broad forests. Great rivers and inland seas. But in the face of all that, he knew he still hadn’t understood Alyx’s point.
“The shape of the continents,” she said.
There were two of them on the side he could see, and it looked like a third partially swung around the other side. “What?” he asked.
“It’s the design on the sphere. The space guys are from this world.”
“Planting the flag,” he said.
“I think so.”
“First landing on another world?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
The blue planet was bright in the sunlight. “You know,” George said, “I’m beginning to understand what the chindi really is.”
PUSH THE BLACK button, the square one, and the scenario changed. They traveled to a broken desert fortress beneath racing moons. Their chairs floated above the sand, charged the walls (“Look out,” breathed Alyx, while Tor closed his eyes), and drifted above a cobbled parade ground filled with serpentine creatures wearing war helmets, carrying shields and waving banners. A hot wind blew across them, and a swollen sun burned in a cloudless sky. The creatures were engaging in synchronized drills, cut and parry, advance and retreat. It was vaguely reminiscent of old-style military drill, but these were far better coordinated and faster than anything humans could have managed. Tor had forgotten to use his imager to record the first sequence. But he unclipped it now and tried to get as much as he could. It wasn’t as good as a direct on-line capture, but it would work.
“It’s almost choreographed,” said Alyx. “Set to music.”
But there was no music. “Push the button again,” said George, anxious to be away from the serpents. Tor wondered if he was beginning to suspect that a quiet fireside conversation would only be possible with another human.
He complied, and the fortress faded to rich hill country. They looked down on a broad river, and Tor saw spires on the horizon. And bursts of light in the sky. Explosions.
Someone was under attack.
“Can you get us over there?” asked George, meaning the spires.
It was a matter of following the river. They passed over idyllic farm country, and saw near-humans (arms too long, hands too wide, bodies too narrow, too much height, as if someone had bred an entire generation of basketball players) in the fields. The spires grew, silver and purple in the late-afternoon sunlight. They were tall and spare, linked by bridges and trams. Fountains and pools glittered.
As they drew nearer they saw that the explosions were fireworks. And they could hear music, of a sort. Cacophonic. Discordant. Wind music. Flutes, he thought. And something that sounded vaguely like bagpipes.
And drums! There was no mistaking that sound. There was an army of them somewhere, tucked out of sight, or maybe broadcast over a sound system, but pounding away.
And the city was singing. Voices rose with the flutes and bagpipes, and more fireworks raced into the sky. Cheers rolled through the night. Squadrons of inhabitants paraded through elevated courtyards and malls and along rooftop walkways.
“They’re celebrating something,” said George, relaxing a bit.
Alyx squeezed Tor’s wrist. “What, I wonder,” she said.
After a while, Tor hit the button, and they moved on. Past a glass mosaic, a pattern of cubes and spheres atop a snowbound precipice, apparently abandoned.
To a torchlit city of marble columns and majestic public buildings, waiting by the sea as dawn crept in.
They saw battles. Hordes of creatures in every conceivable form, creatures with multiple limbs, creatures that glided across the landscape, creatures with shining eyes, engaging each other in bloody and merciless combat. They fought with spears and shields, with projectile weapons, with weapons that flashed light. They fought from vast seagoing armadas and from groundcars drawn by all manner of beasts. Twice, Tor saw mushroom clouds.
A fleet of airships, hurried along by sails for God’s sake, emerged from clouds and dropped fire (burning oil, probably) on a city spread across the tops of a range of hills. Smaller vessels rose from the city to contest the attackers. Ships on both sides exploded and sank, their crews leaping overboard without benefit of parachute.
“That’s enough,” said George. “Turn it off. Let’s look at something else.”
Tor hit the button.
They were in space again, adrift near the long blazing rim of a sun, watching fiery fountains rise into the skies, while solar tides ebbed and flowed. And then the surface began to expand, and Tor suspected that the images were accelerated. But he didn’t really know. How long did it take for a sun to go nova? Within moments, the solar surface became bloated as if it were about to give birth. And it exploded. The whole vast globe of the sun simply blew up.