Jack Williamson, page 28
He wanted to bury the bodies. The soil was too hard, Pepe said, for us to dig the graves without any tools. The pod, he thought, should be tomb enough, but the dried-up mummies we’d found on the satellite still haunted Casey.
“We’ll burn them,” he said. “We’ll build a funeral pyre.”
We had no axe to cut timber for it, but storms had shattered old trees along the neglected streets. We spent most of the day lugging and dragging and piling fallen limbs, the annoyed prairie dogs scolding at us. When Casey declared we had enough, we brought the bodies out with as much respect as we could and laid them side by side on the pile.
We realized then that we had no way to ignite it. Pepe wanted to search for flint and steel, but Casey recalled a science exhibit he and Mona had seen in the Crown. He went back there and returned with a concave mirror. A dead leaf under it smoked and burst into flame. Pepe bent his head and murmured a Spanish prayer. We threw more wood into the blaze till sunset.
Next morning the ashes were dead. We gathered the flakes of bone into Mona’s basket. When I wondered what to do with them, Pepe offered to scatter them out of the pod. That astonished me, because Sandor had seemed to fly with magic, never touching any controls. No magic, Pepe said; his microbots had done it with their magnetic and electrostatic fields. Sandor had taught him how to use the control stick.
“The Serengeti.” Casey nodded gratefully. “I saw a herd of wildebeest there. Mona loved animals.”
Pepe flew us high over the ice-filled crater at the top of Kilimanjaro’s enormous new cone and back down to skim the eastern shore of a wider Lake Victoria. Gliding low over the lush green grasslands of the Serengeti, we opened the door. Wildebeest, gazelle and zebra fled ahead of us, and wide-winged birds scattered from a waterhole. Casey stood in the open door, scattering the ashes.
“Immortals.” Pepe shook his head sadly as he closed the door and stopped the roaring wind. “I wish they had been.”
He brought us back into the long shadow of the Crown and landed again among the scolding prairie dogs. Still in his seat, he looked around at Casey and me.
“Y ahora qué? What next?”
Casey shrugged. I felt crushed under black despair. We three were here alone with the animals now, without friends or food or the instincts that kept them alive. Groping for purpose or even sanity, I asked Pepe if he could take us back to the Moon.
“The computer will surely be cloning us again,” I told him, “when it knows the Earth is dead. Whenever that happens, our new brothers ought to have our account of what we have seen.”
“The station wouldn’t let us in.” He shook his head. “Sandor left it sealed.”
Still I felt desperate to escape all the riddles of ruin and death that hung over us. Could he fly us to Lo’s home planet? Or maybe on a flight that would take another thousand years? I thought we might hope to find ourselves cloned again when we got back, and Earth restored to life.
He brightened for a moment, but then shook his head again.
“I’m not an interplanetary pilot. Even if I were, we might not find any world alive. Anybody who thought we might carry contagion would shoot us out of the sky.”
He landed us again among the startled prairie dogs. By sunset we were out of the pod, sitting again at the jade table, making another meal out of the hard biscuits Pepe had found in the locker and wondering how to stay alive.
“We can live in the pod, but this—” He stopped to scowl at a bitten biscuit. “Even this pig feed won’t last us long.”
We talked of trying to farm or hunt, but we had no seed or tools to turn the soil, no weapons to kill the game around us, not even the prairie dogs, no skills for anything. Casey kept moodily silent, gazing up at the spire above the Crown, till Pepe asked if he knew any way for us to stay alive.
“We carry the Sagittarian microbots.” I heard his bitter irony. “They ought to make us immortal.”
“So did Sandor,” Pepe said. “They didn’t save him.”
“We don’t know what they are.” He nodded, looking up at the Crown, its golden dome, a huge half moon rising into the dusk. When he spoke again, it was more to himself than to us. “Mona thought she had picked up those microbots from me. She was searching to understand them, hoping they would shield us from whatever killed the planet. I think she was finally in sight of something that had begun to terrify her.”
Lips compressed, he shook his head.
“What she was finding, or thought she was, I never knew. She’d learned to read my mind, but hers was blank to me. We were in love, and she seemed happier and more hopeful toward the end. I was happy with her.”
With a long sigh, he shook his head and sat a long time remembering.
“We hoped to live forever,” he went on at last, his tone wistfully forlorn. “We used to laugh and talk about the good times of our lives. She wanted to know what her life might have been if Sandor had let her grow up with us on the Moon. She was fascinated with the story of the great impact and the history of the station. She talked about her travels with her mother, and all the odd creatures she had seen. She loved every new species, every sort of life. And the Crown—”
A momentary smile lit his face.
“While it lasted, we had a great life there. She enjoyed everything the robots gave us to eat and drink. We had wonderful nights in bed. She was always searching. Happy, toward the end, with whatever she thought she was finding.”
He looked up at the spire, a new determination of purpose in his eyes.
“I’m going back inside.”
Next morning he did. Pepe and I followed him out of the pod to a broad avenue that once had been magnificent. Great trees had stood along it, most of them dead or dying now. A tall tangle of vines and brush walled the crumbling pavement. We had to scramble around fallen logs and clamber through a rocky gully that floods had cut.
Towering at the end of the avenue, the building was farther away than it had looked, and even more colossal. We took most of an hour to reach the jungle-clotted gardens around it. Weeds and brambles filled a long crescent pool below the entrance. A gigantic golden figure towered out of it, one great arm lifted to hurl a wheel-shaped ship into space.
We stopped again and again to gaze in awe at the topless columns, the great animals marching around the dome, the fire in the diamond spire. Their immense dimensions and the sense of death and long decay hit me with a sudden ache of longing for our safe little digs in the Moon, but Casey plunged doggedly on.
We followed him around the end of the crescent pool and up a ramp of something like white marble to a monumental doorway. The door was an enormous golden slab, deeply engraved with another gigantic figure, this one lifting a planetary globe toward the sky.
The globe held me hypnotized.
An island of life on this ocean of death, it glowed with vivid color. Spinning, it glowed with cloudless blue seas and strange green continents patterned with what I thought must be roads and cities, sometimes a flash of polar ice. It changed as it turned. The hemispheres that vanished never came back. With every rotation, it revealed another world.
I stood gawking at it till a narrow panel opened at the bottom of the door. A bone-white robot stepped out to meet us, a human-shaped figure so graceful in form and motion that for an instant I took it to be alive. It stopped to block the entrance, stood still for a moment to inspect us, raised a silent arm to motion us away.
Pepe and I backed off uneasily, but Casey stood his ground, calling out something that echoed the intonations of Sandor’s speech. The robot stood frozen for half a minute, then glided aside and beckoned us to enter.
39
Emptiness met us. Emptiness, darkness, silence. Yet the great building had a life of its own. Light brightened around us. Another bone-white robot came noiselessly to meet us across a vast, vacant floor. It stopped when Casey uttered some command he must have learned from Mona, and we stood gazing around us.
We had come into a lofty hallway that curved around the building. The outside wall was suddenly lit with holo murals. Panel after panel, they were windows into worlds beyond the Earth. Alien landscapes and monumental buildings, spaceports and spacecraft, strange plants and stranger animals, figures and faces of human stocks that varied from planet to planet.
Casey gestured at them.
“The colonized planets. They all had people here. Delegations, traders, tourists, what have you. This was the nexus of interstellar civilization. You can see the problems, with relative time lost on space flights, but they made it. Centers like this bound the worlds together.”
“And they’re dead.”
Pepe paused to frown into another holo window at a rugged landscape as red and lifeless as Mars. A huge blue balloon rolled across it on a wide roadway that led into dusty distance. Three smaller blue globes rolled along behind it.
“Are they dead?” He hunched to a shudder and turned back to Casey. “All dead? Did the contagion get here from another planet? Or maybe spread from Earth?”
“That’s what Mona was trying to discover.” Casey shrugged. “She’d found no evidence of any ship arriving since Earth died. Two hundred forty years ago. She was afraid that meant that other worlds had died, and even the crews of ships in interstellar flight. Meant that the human enterprise was over.”
“How could that happen?” Pepe shook his head, staring again at the rolling balloons. “All at once, if it did? On planets and ships so many light-years apart?”
“I can’t imagine.” Casey peered blankly past us, down the empty hall. “But that’s our problem now. I think we’ve got to crack it if we want to stay alive.”
“If Mona couldn’t do it, or Lo and Sandor on the satellite—”
Pepe let his voice trail off into the haunting stillness.
“Another thing that puzzles me.” Casey turned back to frown at us. “I don’t think Mona ever found an actual hint, not that she told me, but she did seem happier toward the end. I don’t know why.”
The robot had stood waiting. Casey spoke to it now. It answered with accents we had first heard from Sandor when we were children on the Moon. He nodded, and it beckoned us along the endless curve of that hushed and empty hall. Wide archways were spaced along the inner wall, signs above them glowing with symbols hieroglyphic to me.
The empty stillness was getting to Pepe. He looked at Casey, hesitating.
“The robots know us,” Casey told him. “Mona introduced me.”
It turned to lead us through a tall arch, into black darkness. As lights came on ahead, I saw that we were in another great hall, running toward the center of the building. Far along it I saw another robot pushing some silent device that must have been sweeping the floor. I heard no sound, saw nothing alive.
“There were people here?” Pepe asked uneasily. “Not just machines?”
“Many thousands of people,” Casey said. “From two thousand planets.”
“And they died?”
“The robotic staff removed the bodies.”
He spoke to the robot again, and it led us through a door into an elevator that surged silently upward.
“I want to show you the sections Mona and I explored,” he said. “The Earth section. And the section from Lo’s planet, where she grew up. A tiny fraction of the Crown, but enough to give you an idea what it is. As likely as any, I suppose, to give some useful clue.”
We spent a long day trudging though the Earth section, trying to understand what we saw. These centers were built, Casey told us, to share knowledge and culture, and to unify humanity. And of course for business. Tourism and trading.
“Interstellar trading must have been real adventure,” he said. “The trader had to pack up his goods and take off for some distant star, knowing he would never get back to the world he had known—time would have turned it strange. With luck, he might make friends and find a market for his cargo. He was just as likely to find nobody who wanted his goods, or even that the new planet had no place for him.”
I felt lost. Casey had learned scraps of Mona’s language, enough to give the robots simple commands and understand simple replies. I caught a little of his driving purpose, but understood only a little of what he tried to show us. We walked through laboratories devoted to sciences I didn’t know, museums filled with artifacts that were mostly riddles to me, libraries filled with information in a hundred formats I couldn’t read.
We looked into splendid theaters without players, great lecture halls without speakers, enormous stadiums where thousands of empty seats looked down on bare arenas. There were endless galleries of art that left only blurs of cold confusion in my mind, great empty chambers that greeted us with a roar of music that was merely noise to me, shops filled with items I didn’t recognize. There were universities where we might have mastered all the arts and crafts and sciences of all the worlds, if we had carried microbots to let us learn them.
We didn’t.
The place was a haystack of baffling straws. I came to feel that we were searching for an invisible needle that might not exist, one that I thought we would never recognize even if we found it. I was footsore and relieved when at last Casey said he had showed us enough.
Fantasmas!” Pepe shivered.
We had seen no actual apparitions, but the silence and the emptiness had begun to people my own imagination with all the thousands from a thousand different races on a thousand far-scattered planets who had lived and worked here, died and disappeared.
The robots treated us like prehistoric royalty. They had taken us to the spacious quarters where Mona and Casey had been put up. A magnificent lobby was walled with live holos of the long Terran history. A forest of live plants perfumed the air in the great dining room. We each had private chambers, and always sleek white robots waiting silently to serve us.
There was a pool where they taught us to swim, a gym where they massaged us and watched us work out. Though no galactic encyclopedia had been programmed into them, they answered simple questions and obeyed simple commands. They were expert chefs. Under Pepe’s coaching, they were able to make a fair copy of the huevos rancheros his father used to cook on the Moon.
I don’t know how long we were there. Never outside, we never saw the sun. Pepe’s gift timepiece could show the days and dates on several hundred planets. Toying with its magic, he had lost the setting for Earth. Casey became our clock. He was nearly always out, wandering through the labyrinths around us in search of any thread of meaning he could follow.
Sometimes in the beginning Pepe and I went with him, but the stillness and the sense of universal death overcame our hope for anything we could understand. Our own days began when he came in to eat or nap. That was never long. He was soon gone again.
“I’m learning,” he insisted. “I think my microbots are beginning to kick in. I can decipher simple inscriptions and talk to the robots. Not that they’ve had anything useful to say.”
“What can you hope for?” Pepe asked him. “There’s no sign that anybody ever saw the cataclysm coming. What could their records possibly tell us?”
“Mona had a theory.” Thinking, he frowned at the wall. “In the early ages of interstellar flight, there was a revolt against the microbots. The rebels felt that they were stealing our freedom, turning us into machines.”
Pepe was nodding. I had felt the same way. Casey grinned and went on.
“The conflict became a sort of religious war. At the worst of it thousands of them died from battle wounds their microbots couldn’t repair. Defeated, the survivors seized spacecraft and went out to settle new worlds of their own. Mona was searching ancient history for records of those attempts.
“So far as she had found, they’d all gone bad. Without microbots, the rebels were unfit. They lacked our community of knowledge and skills. Their new worlds were often hostile. Terraforming failed. New diseases killed them. Yet toward the end she was wondering if some hadn’t survived to renew the war and try to wipe us out.
“The animals are still alive, while bearers of the microbots are dead. She suspected that something had made them a lethal weapon. Unlikely on the face of it, but what else could explain the sudden death of so many wearers at the same time on worlds so far apart?”
He frowned at us as if asking for an answer.
“She never found any actual proof of that, not that she told me, but toward the end, I think she was on to something. What it was, she never said, but still I hope to find what killed her. And everybody.”
“Whatever it was,” Pepe muttered. “I don’t think I want to know.”
“At the end, something had made her happy,” Casey said. “I’m not afraid to learn it, if I can.”
He went out again and came back grim with one more defeat. He ate a silent meal with us when the robots served it and went to his room without a word. Next morning he wanted no breakfast. He shook his head moodily when Pepe urged him to come with us to the pool and let the robots teach him how to swim.
“You’re killing yourself,” Pepe told him. “All for nothing, so far as I can tell. You’ll live longer if you relax and get some exercise.”
“Will I?”
He watched in bleak silence while we ate, but took coffee when the robots offered it, a better brew than we had ever tasted on the Moon. When they had slipped away, he spoke abruptly.
“I dreamed last night.” He pushed his empty cup away, and paused to shake his head in bafflement. “A dream I can’t explain or understand. It seemed too near and real to be any sort of dream. I thought—it’s hard to explain, but I thought I could see everything that ever happened.”
He squinted to see if we thought he had come unhinged.
“Mona.” He looked away, the words coming slowly. “Her clone mother, Mona Lisa Live.” His face lit with wonder. “I saw her with my clone father. That was back in Medellin, the hot spot where he was a hired gunman for the drug lord they called El Matador. She was there to sing. I saw El Matador drag her off the stage, trying to rape her. I saw El Chino shoot him down.”
