The Sea is Full of Stars

The City of the Ancient Ones, Grabant 4

The great machine of the Ancient Ones knew that something was up. It was clear to both Core and the two women that there was a lot more activity below them and on the surface, much of it concentrating on the ancient city. They could feel the lines of force, feel the energy in intelligently directed patterns flowing on or near the surface. As before, it was not something they could understand or connect with, but the fact that what had been a rare occurrence was now almost common spoke volumes.

It knew!

Core knew it needed to pursue its own agenda, yet it could not violate its own central programming, which placed Jules Wallinchky’s interests paramount. It couldn’t quarrel with its master’s series of probable outcomes, but it did have a different set of hopes. If what had happened to Josich Hadun happened here, Core would much prefer that it conclude as a merger with the Ancient Ones’ great machine. Still, it had to prepare for any eventuality, and that meant, if need be, preparing the two women for the eventuality of severing contact with Core. Wallinchky wanted them programmed so they would protect him and obey his commands no matter what happened to any of them. Core wanted an imperative to contact it if at all possible.

The best that could be done would be to implant in them a drive to interface with whatever was out there. Core also wanted more of the human touch, or at least experience from that prior existence, so they would be self-sufficient if need be. It would be tricky, but it was possible.

Even a supreme computer couldn’t think of everything, but it would try.

The Kharkovs had been unwilling to come, and in fact stated that they would be delighted to become curators of the collection and at least ensure that it was not harmed by whoever got it, which was not what Wallinchky wanted, but was enough to satisfy his primary concerns. He knew that the Kharkovs would be only superficially analyzed by the Realm, and the cover story that they’d been engaged for restoration work, and only after being stuck here, with only one of them allowed to go offworld at a time after that, would be enough to absolve them of culpability.

“All right, so where is this gadget?” Ari asked over the suit intercom. The environment suit had come a long way from primitive spacesuits of the past; it was lightweight, fitted itself to the wearer, and had a small matter/energy/ matter converter that could supply basic sustenance and air and power to the suit almost indefinitely. There was no way around the need to be completely covered, of course, and while the helmet bubble was small and unobtrusive, it was certainly there, magnifying sounds and also making everything seem somewhat unnatural.

Ari hated the suits. If you got an itch, it was almost impossible to satisfactorily scratch it without risking breaking the seals.

“The girls are bringing the gadget, as you call it,” Wallinchky responded. “See? There!”

Ari turned and saw two figures emerge from the surface level airlock carrying what looked to be an enormous circular box. It might have been the largest trampoline in the Realm, but he knew it wasn’t. The two small, frail-looking women were handling the thing as if it weighed next to nothing; in fact, even outside the artificial standard gravity of the compound, they and everything else still weighed about seventy-five percent of normal, so if that thing was as heavy in normal gravity as it looked, well, they might well be hefting something close to half a ton.

“Is it that light, or are they really that strong?” he asked his uncle.

“A bit of both, actually. It is lighter than it looks, but I wouldn’t want to be one of those carrying it.”

Ari looked around. “I feel so damned exposed out here. What if Genghis Whatever and his buddy decide to just come on out and pop us cold?”

“They may come out—indeed, I suspect at least one of them will—but they won’t ‘pop us cold,’ as you so colorfully put it. They don’t want to damage this thing, and, besides, they’re within easy range of the main computer’s defensive ring. We’ll know when, and if, they emerge. Ah! Here we all are together! Come, nephew! It’s a good walk yet to the ruins!” Jules Wallinchky gazed at the barren, dark landscape, the twisted spires, the yellow, brown, crimson, and orange rock formations, and the almost black sky with its many stars. “Beautiful day for a walk, if I do say so myself!”

The landscape was indeed bleak, but they walked along what seemed almost a road. It wasn’t much of one, but it was wide and unnaturally smooth, and sunk into the bedrock about fifteen centimeters at the start and went deeper as they approached the city on the horizon.

“What did you build this thing for?” An asked his uncle.

“I didn’t build it, nephew. It’s part and parcel of that city up there. It’s one of many. There’s a lot that’s fascinating about this place. Now and then you’ll see the remnants of a crater, before we sink too deep to see a lot of the surface detail. The craters are all younger than the road, but the road has no crater marks. Almost like… well, like it’s maintained for use.”

“Creepy,” Ari commented.

“It’s like a lot of things they left. Ever been in one of these ruins before?”

“When I was a kid, for a short time, yeah. Not since. I barely remember it.”

“Well, it’s kind of like a template more than the ruins of a great civilization. We have a nice roadbed here, but no surface, no signs or adornments, no clue as to who or what moved along it. Why have roads if you can teleport, as almost everybody thinks they could? In fact, why even have basic city outlines if you can be creative and imagine yourself in a palace? Two things are sure: they didn’t think like us, and they weren’t much like us physically, either. Also, they were sure nutty over the number six. Six six six. The biblical number of the Beast, my boy. The demigods who fell from Heaven.”

“I thought those were angels.”

“Angels, demigods, what’s the difference? All that one god stuff is only semantics. Word games. In Greece mighty Zeus ruled as supreme god atop Olympus, and then there were the subordinate gods with monstrous power as well— gods of the sea, gods of the air, gods of earth and fire. Gods of love and gods of hate. Even a god of wine and spirits. The Romans renamed ’em, but kept ’em pretty much the same. Jupiter was boss, Venus the love goddess, and so on. So what did the Hebrews do? They renamed them. The god in charge was God, and He was the only God, father of us all. But he had this whole race of superbeings with enormous godlike powers just like Zeus and Jupiter and the others did. Only they weren’t gods, no. They were renamed angels. Presto! Monotheism with no need to really change things. The angels of the Bible are credited with as much or more power than the lesser gods of Olympus. Word games, that’s all. It’s why I could never take ’em serious.”

Ari Martinez was thinking that he’d rather be in church then, praying to God and hoping He existed and heard, and he wouldn’t care one whit about semantics.

Jules Wallinchky started to breathe heavily halfway before they got to the city, and he called for a rest. He could hear his pulse pounding, and he didn’t like it.

“What’s wrong?” Ari asked him.

“I’m older and in worse shape than I thought,” the older man wheezed. “Just a minute, I’ll be okay.”

Why not have a heart attack now and make everybody else happy? Ari thought optimistically. At least maybe he can’t make it all the way on this crazy escape.

But after some water and a few minutes’ rest, Wallinchky got up and started walking again. He was feeling muscle cramps and a lot of joint pain as well, but he’d made this walk a hundred times in the past and he damned well was going to make it this one last time.

“Uncle Jules—where do you think this big ancient computer will take us?”

“Heaven, boy! Or Hell. Or maybe they’re the same place, eh?”

He’s gone nuts! My God! The boss of all the bosses has slipped over the edge!

The intercom came on with the voice of the compound’s central computer: “One person in suit has left the police courier boat and is heading toward you down the road.”

Wallinchky stopped. “Just one?”

“Yes. It appears to be the unknown one. I am unable to get complete information on him since the same field I am generating to protect you from surveillance also masks him to a degree. Also, there appears to be a great deal of non-native tissue and structure in him, possibly as much as in the two we did who are now with you.”

“You mean it’s artificial?”

“No. But it has a lot of artificial parts, much of it new.”

“Is it closing fast?”

“No. He appears to be walking at a normal pace. He will, of course, catch up with you if you remain where you are, but it is clear that this is not his intent.” There was a pause. “Now the second one has left the ship, but he is not following. He appears to have a maglev bike with him. I suspect he is going to use it to circle around and come in from a different angle.”

“Keep me posted,” Wallinchky ordered, and started to move again.

The road was now well sunk into the bedrock, with smooth walls on either side. It was never deep, but close to two meters down by the time it reached the ruins.

Stepping into those ruins gave an eerie feeling even to the big man; for Ari it was nothing short of overpowering.

The city was huge—it only began where it could be seen from the compound; now, he could see it stretched out as far as the eye could see in all directions. It was impossible to say how many of those ancient beings lived and worked here, but the idea that there might have been hundreds of thousands on this world once, so very long ago, wasn’t out of the bounds of possibility, and a million could not be rejected.

“It—It kind of takes your breath away,” Ari commented, gaping. “I don’t remember the one I was in being this big.”

“It’s geometric, too,” his uncle told him. “The shape is a giant hexagon, that six stuff again. There are six main roads that run along the angles. We’re hitting at a corner—that’s why it doesn’t seem so big when you look at it from the house.”

“What do we do now?”

“We follow the road all the way to the big area in the center that must have been real important, since it’s a hexagon, too. We’re gonna set up right in the center of the old town and then we’re gonna turn this baby on and see what happens.”

It’s going to kill us, you old bastard! You’ve lived your life, but I haven’t even started! Ari looked frantically around. Maybe he could run. Maybe when they turned it on he could use this vast alien ruin and just hide until whatever was done, if anything, was done.

The city wasn’t properly a ruin, though, not as he thought of ruins. There were no crumbling structures, no bashed-in statuary or ornate columns holding up nothing. What was here was totally intact, and where something almost certainly stood that stood there no longer, it had left not even dust.

The houses were huge, formed out of some sort of rock or synthetic stuff that made it look like striped marble and alabaster tinted not yellow or pink, but pale green with sapphire-blue threads. There were no doors, but the doorways were a good three meters high and were oddly shaped, from a base of no more than a meter or so, extending out at thirty degree angles to a wide point, then coming back in and going to the top, which was slightly rounded and not much wider than the base. The doors were clearly never designed for Terrans, nor for anything at all anybody ever knew.

“Notice that even the doorways have six sides, although they ain’t hexagons,” Jules Wallinchky noted. “Kinda makes you think they looked like giant turnips. Wouldn’t that be something? Findin’ out that they were vegetables? Giant thinking veggies. I don’t think we’ve ever come across anything like that.”

“Yeah, well, maybe in their time the vegetables ate us,” Ari grumped worriedly.

Jules Wallinchky laughed. “Cheer up, nephew! I don’t think we’re gonna die, but if we do, then today is as good as any to do it! If you don’t lose that fear of death, then you can never appreciate life or take the chances life gives you.”

The old boy was breathing hard, but his spirits seemed high. Too high for his nephew’s tastes.

It took much longer, with more breaks, to reach the city center. The computer reported that the man on the maglev bike was far to their left and had halted short of that entrance to the city. The other continued to follow them, but at a distance.

“O’Leary on the bike is playing pickup,” Wallinchky noted. “He’s not gonna get himself wrapped in our doings. He’s gonna wait just outside and come in when whatever’s done is done, mostly to pick up the pieces. Since nobody’s likely to be pouring in from space blowing us and the city to bits, he should be able to just pick up our gadget and leave. Very convenient.”

The grand mansions, shaped with their own odd angles, went on and on, but as perplexing were the open areas, which were prevalent. The roads inside seemed to follow a definite logical grid, but there were empty lots all over the place, some of great size, smooth as glass and made out of the same stuff as the houses. Something was supposed to be there, or had been there, but there wasn’t a clue as to what. The empty lots weren’t intended to be built on later, though; they were spaced too regularly, and were too different in size and shape from the blocks of houses, to be fill-ins and afterthoughts.

No streetlights, no signs, no cartouches, nor so much as an ornate doorknob or something that might have been a house number. Nothing. Inside the structures it was the same; although large enough to be multistoried and have lots of specialized space, they were in fact hollow, as if cast and left only to be seen, not lived in.

“Ari, why don’t you help the girls set the thing up? It’s kind of obvious how it goes,” Wallinchky said. “I think I need to sit and rest for a few minutes.”

Ari complied, meanwhile wondering why he was here, doing this. It was the last place he wanted to be, with a cop raiding party almost certainly overhead, a giant supercop maybe a few kilometers away, and maybe an obsessed nut case coming along while his uncle was, well, clearly in poor health and becoming more and more unhinged. Still, as Ari helped the women unpack the thing, slide it out, then steady it while their augmented limbs positioned it as if it were foam, he couldn’t help but reflect that something inside him was just too weak to resist his uncle, even now. At least I’m not like those two, he thought, but that very idea brought him up short.

Maybe he was like them. Maybe he could no more disobey Jules than they could. Damn! The only way to know was to disobey, but how the hell was he supposed to do that here and now?

In the meantime, they began to assemble the thing, whatever it was.

It didn’t seem sufficient to threaten or kill anybody over, let alone risk a lot. It looked in fact like something molded out of cheap plastic, although its weight and balance said that something was buried inside, something heavy. It unfolded in a pattern that soon became clear: a hexagon, with internal bracing between each junction point, much like the layout of the great ancient city. In the center was a hexagonal hole, and into this a large and definitely not hexagonal device fitted. This was the heavy part; he could guide it, but the two women’s augmented strength was necessary to lift it into place. The big unit was a good four meters across unfolded, but covered maybe a third of its center and used both hub and ribs for support.

“The power supply,” Jules Wallinchky told him. “I have no idea what’s in it, but it’s not the kind of thing you want to start taking apart to see how it works without maybe a solar system between you and it. Is it seated?”

“Looks to be,” Ari told him, stepping away from it. “Alpha, go up to the central unit and press a panel on the side. Yes—just look for it. There! Now open it!”

She did so, and a small control panel was revealed as the door slid back. There were seven active lights on it, six green forming a hex, and one yellow and larger for the center.

“It turned itself on?” Ari asked, fascinated in spite of himself.

“Naw,” his uncle responded. “It never turned off. There’s no way to do that. But all those lights were red when it wasn’t here and set up. They were still red in the lab back at the house. Now look! Green!”

“Yeah, but the center’s yellow!”

“Caution, as always, nephew. The people who built this thing were Realm types, maybe Terrans like us. This isn’t any ancient stuff.”

“Are you all right, Uncle? You don’t sound so good.”

“My heart is telling me that something gave or didn’t take well, nephew. Doesn’t matter now, so long as this thing works, and if the replica did with that ersatz power supply we gave him, hell, this should do wonders.”

“But—surely they tested all this out. Why didn’t it swallow up the makers?”

Wallinchky laughed. “Maybe it did, and that’s what scared ’em so much. Then again, maybe this ancient machine needs more motivation. It didn’t take the ones who came after, and it didn’t take old Josich when it was turned on. It only took him when he wanted to be taken. Well, nephew, I sure as hell want to be taken. I got nowhere else to go, and I wouldn’t even survive the trip back to the house.”

Ari had a sudden hope that maybe Wallinchky would croak before this went any further. That would solve a lot.

“Beta, come stand by me and be ready to assist me as needed,” the old man commanded, breathing hard but still very much alive. “Alpha, touch the center yellow light, then touch each of the green lights in turn as the display indicates. When the whole thing blinks, come over here with us.”

“Yes, Master,” she responded, and pushed the yellow button. A white light emerged and went to the top left light. She pressed it, then followed as it drew the hex completely around the center and then went back so that she pressed the center again. The center light turned green and the whole display began to blink. The center power plant started vibrating, and Alpha made her way quickly out and over to Jules Wallinchky’s side.

A dark, man-sized shape appeared just opposite them, its e-suit dark and impenetrable.

“You’re too late!” Wallinchky shouted with satisfaction at the newcomer. “It’s already begun! Even we can’t stop it now!”

“You’re wrong,” the newcomer responded in a deep, eerie voice that seemed as much machine as human. “I am just in time.”

Ari was beginning to relax. Except for a slight whining in the comm system of his suit, the great device didn’t seem to be doing anything at all. He finally got up, walked over to the newcomer, and looked to see if anything of the face could be made out in the permanent night.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

The figure laughed. “You know who I am—or who I was, anyway. I know you’ve guessed that. Want to see my beautiful face?” He switched on the internal helmet light so his full face was visible.

Ari screamed and stepped back. There was flesh on only about a third of the head; the rest was a blue-gray metallic color and looked horribly robotic, but robotic in the shape of a human skull.

“What are you?” Ari cried.

The figure pointed at the two women. “Much like what was done to them, only mine was from quite an explosion and a fair amount of exposure to an atmosphere I wasn’t designed to use. It burned off most of my false skin, and I just decided I didn’t have time to grow new flesh.”

“Kincaid!” Wallinchky exclaimed. “I thought it was you! Some replacement parts, eh? That’s why the height didn’t jibe!”

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s serviceable,” responded Jeremiah Kincaid, or what was left of him, now more machine than man. “It’s better than yours, Wallinchky. Before I could have a heart attack, I’d have to have a heart, wouldn’t I?” He turned and stepped up to the device, which continued to power on to no obvious effect. “What the hell are you waiting for?” he screamed at it. “I will follow Josich the Emperor Hadun all the way to Hell itself!”

The center area exploded with light, and Ari Martinez backed up and fell over a curb. When he looked up, there was a fountain of energy rising up to the heavens, and more radiating from the points of the device.

Back at the house, Tann Nakitt watched in awe as the energy became visible, grew, and spread in geometric patterns, as did O’Leary on the maglev bike from just outside the city. It didn’t save either one of them as the energy ribbons flowed out from the city and down the ancient roads, striking the compound just below where Tann Nakitt stood. He suddenly felt its danger and turned with a curse to it and a prayer to all the Geldorian gods, then everything went black and it seemed he was falling down a bottomless pit of darkness.

Genghis O’Leary saw the ribbon coming toward him. It struck and enveloped him before he could do more than feel sudden alarm at its approach, and then the bike shook and fell to the ground with no sign of a rider.

Closer in, those near the center of the city felt only the falling sensation, nothing more.

Back at the house, the Kharkovs felt a queasy sensation, and there was a momentary sense of reality vanishing and then coming back, but they were still there, in their laboratory, when it was suddenly over.

Core lost contact with the two women at 2.3 seconds after Kincaid’s outburst, but managed to capture some of the surge and sensation and to photograph the phenomenon for its own records and later examination.

Now it had to decide what to do. Wallinchky’s orders, to be executed only in the event of his death or if this worked, were clear, and final. Core was not to oppose a landing, but was to destroy the device if possible.

It was possible but hardly necessary. The energy surge, which it might possibly not have caused at all, considering the timings, had melted the device into a shapeless mass on the plaza.

Core’s orbital eyes, however, had noted the convergence of a signal and the shoot into some kind of extradimensional space, the properties of which could not even be guessed at. An examination of the phenomenon, including what had happened to Nakitt in the house and, for the briefest of moments, to even Core itself, indicated that the subjects had been somehow digitized and the energy pattern sent along that beam.

Apparently without loss.

Core was impressed.