Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (11 page)

 
          
 
The river was widening now: ever and again it
opened into small lakes, upon which tiny islands lay at anchor. There were
insects here, brilliantly colored creatures swinging aimlessly to and fro over
the surface of the water. Once, despite Theon's shouts, Krif darted away to
join his distant cousins. He disappeared instantly in a cloud of glittering
wings, and the sound of angry buzzing floated toward them. A moment later the
cloud erupted and Krif came back across the water, almost too quickly for the
eye to follow. Thereafter he kept very close to Theon and did not stray again.

 
          
 
Toward evening they caught occasional glimpses
of the mountains ahead. The river that had been so faithful a guide was flowing
sluggishly now, as if it too were nearing the end of its journey. But it was
clear that they could not reach the mountains by nightfall: well before sunset
the forest had become so dark that further progress was impossible. The great
trees lay in pools of shadow, and a cold wind was sweeping through the leaves.
Alvin and Theon settled down for the night beside a giant redwood whose topmost
branches were still ablaze with sunlight.

 
          
 
When at last the hidden sun
went down, the light still lingered on the dancing waters.
The two boys
lay in the gathering gloom, watching the river and thinking of all that they
had seen. As
Alvin
fell asleep, he found himself wondering who last had come this
way,
and how long since.

 
          
 
The sun was high when they left the forest and
stood at last before the mountain walls of
Lys
. Ahead of them the ground rose steeply to
the sky in waves of barren rock. Here the river came to an end as spectacular
as its beginning, for the ground opened in its path and it sank roaring from
sight.

 
          
 
For a moment Theon stood looking at the
whirlpool and the broken land beyond. Then he pointed to a gap in the hills.

 
          
 
"Shalmirane lies in that direction,"
he said confidently.
Alvin
looked at him in surprise.

 
          
 
"You told me you'd never been here
before!"

 
          
 
"I haven't."

 
          
 
"Then how do you know the way?"

 
          
 
Theon looked puzzled.

 
          
 
"I don't know—I've never thought about it
before. It must be a kind of instinct, for wherever we go in
Lys
we always know our way about."

 
          
 
Alvin
found this very difficult to believe, and
followed Theon with considerable skepticism. They were soon through the gap in
the hills, and ahead of them now was a curious plateau with gently sloping
sides. After a moment's hesitation, Theon started to climb.
Alvin
followed, full of doubts, and as he climbed
he began to compose a little speech. If the journey proved in vain, Theon would
know exactly what he thought of his unerring instinct.

 
          
 
As they approached the summit, the nature of
the ground altered abruptly. The lower slopes had consisted of porous, volcanic
stone, piled here and there in great mounds of slag. Now the surface turned
suddenly to hard sheets of glass, smooth and treacherous, as if the rock had
once run in molten rivers down the mountain. The rim of the plateau was almost
at their feet. Theon reached it first, and a few seconds later
Alvin
overtook him and stood speechless at his
side. For they stood on the edge, not of the plateau they had expected, but of
a giant bowl half a mile deep and three miles in diameter. Ahead of them the
ground plunged steeply downward, slowly leveling out at the bottom of the
valley and rising again, more and more steeply, to the opposite rim. And
although it now lay in the full glare of the sun, the whole of that great
depression was ebon black. What material formed the crater the boys could not
even guess, but it was black as the rock of a world that had never known a sun.
Nor was that all, for lying beneath their feet and ringing the entire crater
was a seamless band of metal, some hundred feet wide, tarnished by immeasurable
age but still showing no slightest trace of corrosion.

 
          
 
As their eyes grew accustomed to the unearthly
scene, Alvin and Theon realized that the blackness of the bowl was not as
absolute as they had thought. Here and there, so fugitive that they could only
see them indirectly, tiny explosions of light were flickering in the ebon
walls. They came at random, vanishing as soon as they were born, like the
reflections of stars on a broken sea.

 
          
 
"It's wonderful!" gasped
Alvin
. "But what is it?"

 
          
 
"It looks hke a reflector of some
kind."

 
          
 
"I can't imagine that black stuff
reflecting anything."

 
          
 
"It's only black to our eyes, remember.
We don't know what radiations they used."

 
          
 
"But surely there's more than this! Where
is the fortress?"

 
          
 
Theon pointed to the level floor of the
crater, where lay what
Alvin
had taken to be a pile of jumbled stones. As he looked again, he could
make out an almost obliterated plan behind the grouping of the great blocks.
Yes, there lay the ruins of once mighty buildings, overthrown by time.

 
          
 
For the first few hundred yards the walls were
too smooth and steep for the boys to stand upright, but after a little while
they reached the gentler slopes and could walk without difficulty. Near the
bottom of the crater the smooth ebony of its surface ended in a thin layer of soil,
which the winds of
Lys
must have brought here through the ages.

 
          
 
A quarter of a mile away, titanic blocks of
stone were piled one upon the other, like the discarded toys of an infant
giant. Here, a section of a massive wall was still recognizable: there, two
carven obelisks marked what had once been a mighty entrance. Everywhere grew
mosses and creeping plants, and tiny stunted trees. Even the wind was hushed.

 
          
 
So Alvin and Theon came to the ruins of
Shalmirane. Against those walls, if legend spoke the truth, forces that could
shatter a world to dust had flamed and thundered and been utterly defeated.
Once these peaceful skies had blazed with fires torn from the hearts of suns,
and the mountains of
Lys
must have quailed like living things
beneath the fury of their masters.

 
          
 
No one had ever captured Shalmirane. But now
the fortress, the impregnable fortress, had fallen at last—captured and
destroyed by the patient tendrils of the ivy and the generations of blindly
burrowing worms.

 
          
 
Overawed by its majesty, the two boys walked
in silence toward the colossal wreck. They passed into the shadow of a broken
wall, and entered a canyon where the mountains of stone had split asunder.

 
          
 
Before them lay a great amphitheater, crossed
and crisscrossed with long mounds of rubble that must mark the graves of buried
machines. Once the whole of this tremendous space had been vaulted, but the
roof had long since collapsed. Yet life must still exist somewhere among the
desolation, and
Alvin
realized that even this ruin might be no more than superficial. The
greater part of the fortress would be far underground, beyond the reach of
Time.

 
          
 
"We'll have to turn back by
noon
," said Theon, "so we mustn't stay
too long. It would be quicker if we separated. I'll take the eastern half and
you can explore this side. Shout if you find anything interesting—but don't get
too far away."

 
          
 
So they separated, and
Alvin
began to climb over the rubble, skirting
the larger mounds of stone. Near the center of the arena he came suddenly upon
a small circular clearing, thirty or forty feet in diameter. It had been
covered with weeds, but they were now blackened and charred by tremendous heat,
so that they crumbled to ashes at his approach. At the center of the clearing
stood a tripod supporting a polished metal bowl, not unlike a model of
Shalmirane itself. It was capable of movement in altitude and azimuth, and a
spiral of some transparent substance was supported at its center. Beneath the
reflector was welded a black box from which a thin cable wandered away across
the ground.

 
          
 
It was clear to
Alvin
that this machine must be the source of the
light, and he began to trace the cable. It was not too easy to follow the
slender wire, which had a habit of diving into crevasses and reappearing at
unexpected places. Finally he lost it altogether and shouted to Theon to come
and help him.

 
          
 
He was crawling under an overhanging rock when
a shadow suddenly blotted out the light. Thinking it was his
friend,
Alvin
emerged from the cave and turned to speak.
But the words died abruptly on his lips.

 
          
 
Hanging in the air before him was a great dark
eye surrounded by a satellite system of smaller eyes. That, at least, was
Alvin
's first impression: then he realized that
he was looking at a complex machine—and it was looking at him.

 
          
 
Alvin
broke the painful silence. All his life he
had given orders to machines, and although he had never seen anything quite
like this creature, he decided that it was probably intelligent.

 
          
 
"Reverse," he ordered experimentally.

 
          
 
Nothing happened.

 
          
 
"Go. Come. Rise. Fall.
Advance."

 
          
 
None of the conventional control thought
produced any effect. The machine remained contemptuously inactive.

 
          
 
Alvin
took a step forward, and the eyes retreated
in some haste. Unfortunately their angle of vision seemed somewhat limited, for
the machine came to a sudden halt against Theon, who for the last minute had
been an interested spectator. With a perfectly human ejaculation, the whole
apparatus shot twenty feet into the air, revealing a set of tentacles and
jointed limbs clustering round a stubby cylindrical body.

 
          
 
"Come down—we won't hurt you!"
called Theon, rubbing a bruise on his chest.

 
          
 
Something spoke: not the passionless,
crystal-clear voice of a machine, but the quavering speech of a very old and
very tired man.

 
          
 
"Who are you? What are you doing in
Shalmirane?"

 
          
 
"My name is Theon, and this is my friend,
Alvin of Loronei. We're exploring
Southern Lys
."

 
          
 
There was a brief pause. When the machine
spoke again its voice held an unmistakable note of petulance and annoyance.