Odyssey

Chapter 20. Morning On The Mount

They woke thoroughly chilled from their night on the exposed promontory, and the early rays of the rising sun did little to warm them. Despite the cold, Katherine quickly separated herself from him as though embarrassed by the contact.

“Let’s try the key,” she said nervously as she stood up.

Derec pulled himself up to a sitting position. “No hello? No good morning?” he said with a half-grin. But he reached for the key, lying an arm’s length away on the tile.

“Come on,” she said impatiently. “I had a bad dream that I’d like to rule out as quickly as possible.”

“What happened?”

“I was stuck here with you.”

Smiling, he stood and held it out toward her. “Do the honors?”

She quickly went through the activation sequence, then glanced up and met Derec’s eyes. “Ready?” she asked.

“What do we think of? Perihelion or the Station?”

“Perihelion first. I think we have to.”

He inclined his head in agreement. “Ready if you are.”

Her thumb went hard against the button, as though the vehemence with which she pushed it would speed their return. Light exploded against their retinas, the sunlight vanished, and they found themselves in the gray world of Perihelion once more.

“Now the Station?” Derec asked.

“How about Aurora?” she asked, her eyes glowing with excitement. “Wolruf said we could go anywhere with it. Why should we take ourselves back to trouble?”

“No,” Derec said. “First we go back to get Wolruf. I owe her.”

“I don’t want to go back there,” Katherine said anxiously. “We won’t be able to use the key again to get away, not for hours. They’ll have us locked up and it locked up by then, and we won’t have done anything for Wolruf. You could get help on Aurora-get a ship and go back for her.”

“How?”

“I have friends on Aurora-”

“The same ones that closed your account?”

She winced at the reminder, but was adamant. “More friends than we have on Rockliffe Station.”

“You’ll have to do the steering. I don’t have a clear enough image of Aurora in my head.”

“Happy to do it. Hold tight,” she said, and triggered the key once more.

Perihelion vanished on cue, but it was not the pastoral landscape of Aurora which replaced it. It took only an instant for Derec to realize that they had returned to the top of the tower that looked out on the great mystery city.

A heartbeat later, the same understanding impressed itself on Katherine. “Frost!” she declared, throwing her hands in the air and rushing to the edge with a vigor that alarmed Derec. “What went wrong?”

Derec looked past her to the nearer structures of the city. “Hard to say, since we don’t really know what happens when it goes right,” he said. “Obviously there’s more to controlling the key than just thinking about where you want to go.”

“But why here, then, a place that neither one of us knows?”

“I don’t know,” Derec said. “But it could be worse.”

“I’d like to know how,” she said, turning to face him and planting her fists on her hips.

“Well, just consider,” he said, stepping closer. “Whatever we are, we’re a long way from Rockliffe Station, and the way we left we’re not easily going to be followed. That means in one fell swoop we got away from Jacobson, Anazon’s robots, and the raiders. And as a little bonus we got away with the key.”

“Which we don’t know how to make work right. We’ve lost Alpha, we don’t know where we are, we have no ship, no money, no food, nothing but the clothes we’re wearing and that useless key.” It could not have been more of a tantrum of self-pity if she had ended it by stamping her foot.

“I didn’t say it was all good. I just said it could be worse.” Squatting on his heels, he stared at the key as he passed it from right hand to left and back again restlessly. “I can hardly believe what this thing does. For a machine this size to be able to transport matter ten feet, much less ten light-years, is the most fantastic feat of engineering-damn near magic. I can’t tell you how much I’d love to take it apart and see how it works. And finally I understand why everybody wants it. What I don’t understand is why someone tried to hide it.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked up. “Something Wolruf told me. The asteroid that I woke up on-it was artificial. Somebody meant it to be the final hiding place for this.”

Katherine was quick to pick up the implication. “As though it were dangerous, not just powerful.”

“Exactly.”

“Well-just think what a terrorist or assassin could do with it. Or an army where every soldier had one. Especially an alien army.”

“It’d be impossible to protect yourself against them,” Derec said, staring at the key again. “A lot of responsibility goes along with ownership of this thing. Maybe more responsibility than I want.”

“The monkey getting heavy already?”

Derec nodded. “On top of everything else, I still don’t know what I’m doing mixed up in the middle of this.” He looked up at her. “I suppose you think the pod was from theDaniel O’Neill, that I ejected in some emergency.”

“It’s the straightest line between two points.”

“I guess it is. But you know, there’s something that doesn’t fit in. Why did Monitor 5 think it was so important to give the key to me? Me, who’d been nothing but a nuisance to the robots up till then? It said something like ‘I found the key, Derec. You have to take it.’ How do you explain that?”

She gestured helplessly. “I don’t.”

Derec stood and walked to where she stood, at the edge of the plaza. “And this place,” he said, spreading his hands wide to take in the city surrounding them. “Just look at it. It’s glorious. Doesn’t just seeing it make you feel exhilarated? Can’t you sense the unifying vision, the way it all fits together as one seamless whole? Look at the turrets with mansard roofs-beautiful! Look at the way the five Pythagorean perfect solids are used as structural shapes to focus-”

As he looked to the north, he stopped short. “That’s funny,” he said, puzzled. “I would have sworn that last night there was a grouping of three icosahedrons right there along that boulevard.”

“Icosahedrons?”

“The most complex perfect solid-twenty triangular faces.” He shook his head. “I must have been mistaken about the grouping. Maybe I was dreaming about this place last night. Anyway, I’m almost looking forward to going down there. If we’d managed to get back to Rockliffe Station last night or on to Aurora this morning, I’d have felt cheated by not having my chance to explore.”

“Have you bothered to notice that this city isn’t just a collection of buildings?” she asked petulantly.

“What do you mean?”

She pointed down over the edge at the small figures moving in the streets. “You go down there and you’re going to have to deal with the creatures that built this city. Is it as much fun thinking about having a hundred thousand monsters like Aranimas after you? We’re trespassers, you know. We weren’t invited.”

Derec folded his arms over his chest and scanned the city outward to the horizon. “I’d say more like a million or more inhabitants in a city this size. But they won’t be like Aranimas-or like Wolruf, for that matter.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“First, because Wolruf told me about his world and the Erani world, and this doesn’t fit the description-”

“She could have lied.”

“True. But you say you didn’t pick this destination, and I know I didn’t. That means it was the key that decided to bring us here.”

“So?”

“So, the key wasn’t made by Aranimas’s people, and it wasn’t made by Wolruf’s. If it was, they’d have known how to make the key work. They could probably even have made one with a lot less trouble than they seem to have gone through to find this one,” Derec said. “So why should it take us to either of their worlds?”

“Maybe they did learn how to set the destination,” she pointed out.

“Maybe. Or maybe the key was built to return to a certain place when it’s activated without guidance-as a way of reclaiming them when they fall into the wrong hands.”

“Then the creatures down there-”

“Might be not only the builders of this city, but the builders of the key,” Derec completed. “Which means that maybe we were invited.”

She squinted in his direction. “You’re going to go down there whether I do or not, aren’t you.”

“Yes. I’ll leave the key with you, if you want.”

“I thought we were a team.”

“Are we still?” he said, raising an eyebrow questioningly.

“Don’t you want to be?”

“I don’t know if we want the same things,” he said slowly. “You want to get back to Aurora. I want to do something to help Wolruf-and then look into this business of theDaniel O’Neill.”

“Both of which require getting off this planet,” she pointed out. “Our interests overlap at least that far.”

“They do, indeed,” Derec admitted. “All right, then. We’re still a team.”

“At least until we beg, borrow, or steal a spaceship.”

“Or learn how to control the Key to Perihelion, whichever comes first,” he amended.

“Or Aranimas shows up with fire in his eye and uses us for thrust mass,” Katherine said with a grin. She peeked over the side again. “Or we kill ourselves trying to get down from here. Maybe we can make them come to us?”

Katherine’s concern was justified. The only way down from the promontory seemed to be to climb down one of the sloping faces of the pyramid. Those faces were steep, much more nearly vertical than the faces of the Incan and Mayan temples of ancient Earth which the tower otherwise resembled. But unlike those temples, there were no wide ceremonial staircases cut into any of the four faces.

Instead, there was a regular pattern of holes down the center of each plasticrete face, a pattern that seemed to extend all the way to the ground. Each hole was wider than his handspan and twenty centimeters deep, and they were spaced in such a way that they would make convenient handholds and footholds.

It was possible they had been placed there purely for decorative reasons. “The fact is, I can’t see why anyone would want to climb up here-there’s nothing up here except a good view,” he told Katherine. “And if the view was important to them, they could have run a lift up through the center of the tower.”

Even so, the holes were in some ways better than a staircase. Hugging the face of the tower, with both hands and feet to provide good purchase and their backs to the view out and down that could inspire vertigo, they might just make it.

“You’re going to be hurting by the time we get to the bottom,” he told Katherine.

“I’ve got an eighty percent charge in my medipump and I feel fine. Besides, didn’t anyone ever tell you that women have more endurance than men?” she teased. “Let’s stop talking and get going.”

The worst part was going over the edge and feeling for that first foothold. Derec led the way, being careful not to dislodge the key from its spot tucked into his waistband. A moment later Katherine was beside him, clinging more tightly than she needed to the lip of the holes she was using as handholds.

“I almost hate to bring this up, but I wonder what sort of creatures might have decided these holes would make great nests,” Katherine said breathlessly.

“Flying snakes,” Derec said straight-faced. “A meter long with three rows of sharp teeth. Nothing to worry about.”

“You’re so considerate,” she said crossly, starting down.

“No charge,” he said with a smile, and followed after her.

If he had ever thought that Katherine would be the kind to pick her way timidly down the wall, letting him lead the way and guide her steps, the first few minutes would have banished that notion. Katherine-Kate-was agile and aggressive and, most of all, fast. In ten minutes they were a fourth of the way down the tower’s face. Since he had to be wary of moving too quickly and dislodging the key, Derec had trouble keeping pace.

“Hey, partner,” he called down to her. “Time-out for a conference.”

“I thought you were already taking a time-out, as slow as you move,” she shot back. But she stopped and waited for him all the same. “What’s up?” she asked as he joined her.

“A thought about the key. Do we really want to take it down there, not knowing what we’re walking into?”

She frowned. “That would be taking a risk, wouldn’t it?

If we knew how to control it, I’d say keep it with us. We could always use it to escape from a tight spot-”

“If we knew how to control it, we wouldn’t have to do this,” Derec said.

“You want to leave it here, in one of these holes?”

“That’s what I was thinking. The key is heavy enough and the holes deep enough that nothing’s going to dislodge it.”

“I don’t much like the idea of being separated from it,” Katherine said, her eyes clouded by concern. “It’s one of our two chances to get out of here, maybe the better one, for all we know.”

“I like the idea of being separated from it by force even less,” Derec said. “What do you say?”

She nodded reluctantly. “You’re right. Let’s hide it.”

At Katherine’s insistence, they left the key right there where they were, in the leftmost hole of the pattern.

“It’s going to be a harder climb up than it is down,” Derec warned as they started down again.

“For them, too,” she said.

Freed from his burden, Derec could more readily keep pace, and the rest of the descent turned into an undeclared race. But the race ended prematurely when, sneaking a peek over her shoulder to see how much farther they had to go, Katherine saw something that made her want to start climbing upward again.

“Reception committee,” she hissed, reaching out and seizing Derec by the sleeve.

Letting go with his right hand, Derec twisted at the waist and looked down. At ground level, a hundred meters below their feet, a dozen figures stood in a half-circle. All twelve faces were tipped upward, looking back at him.

A happy grin spread slowly across Derec’s face. “But look who’s on the committee,” he exulted. “They’re robots!”

Katherine stole another glance down. “Considering recent history, I don’t know why that’s such good news,” she said.

“It means that this has to be a Spacer world-”

“Rockliffe was a Spacer station,” she said.

“-which means that our biggest problem from here on out is going to be bureaucratic red tape.”

“Optimist.”

“You’ll see,” he said, starting down.

The only response came from one of the robots waiting below. “Please move slowly and exercise all possible care,” it called up to them. “Climbing the Compass Tower is a dangerous activity.”