Posleen War: Sidestories The Tuloriad (29 page)

“Too risky,” Tulo answered. “We'll send down a lander to do a survey of some of the least contaminated sites. Binastarion, that's your job.”

“No problem, Tulo,” the kessenalt answered.

“By the way, Golo, how is progress coming on producing more of the Himmit-metal?”

The Tinkerer shook his head. “Essentially none. The forge refuses even to recognize that the metal exists.”

“Anything too good to be true probably isn't, I suppose,” Tulo said.

“Except that the metal is real, or we'd still be stuck back in the Diess system. I haven't given up on the stuff yet, Tulo. Neither should you.”

The clan lord smiled then. Count on the Tinkerer to persist until he breaks the rules of the universe, then reforms them and bends them to his will.

“Keep at the stuff, Golo. If any among us can find a way to create more, that someone can only be you.”

Goloswin nodded agreement, but added, “I am hoping that my assistant, if he ever learns the scroll the Rememberer has him slaving over, may uncover something in the other scrolls that will help.”

The fool hath said in his heart, “There is no God.”

—Psalms 14:1, King James Version

Anno Domini 2021

Hemaleen V

Aelool's first instinct was panic, a panic born of the sudden cut off of light mated to the simultaneous wedging of his body in a bend in the chute. Distantly, filtered through the soft flesh of his body and the hard rock, he heard Dwyer calling, “Arrre you alll rrright?”

The sound of another sentient being's voice was enough to stave off the panic that he felt building. He shouted back, and the echo in the chute was loud enough to strain his own ears, “All right . . . yes . . . just that. So dark though.”

“Turrrn . . . onnn . . . the . . . lllighttt.”

“How?” Aelool asked.

“Telll ittt tttooo turrrn onnn.”

“Oh. Light on.”

Immediately, the tiny lamp in front of the Indowy's helmet came on. It was quite intense, for such a small thing. Aelool saw for the first time the interior of the chute. Along the slightly bowed bottom there was a thick layer of what appeared to be dust but was almost certainly in goodly part ancient dried feces. Above that, the walls formed a rough triangle, meeting at the peak. Between the “dust” and the smoothness of the chute, there was no traction to be had. The walls were a different story, rougher in material and with apparently less care given to their construction in whatever distant day the pyramid had been erected.

Aelool couldn't press his palms to the walls, left to left and right to right; the design precluded that. He tried first using the backs of each hand but discovered that, even though protected by fur, the walls were a little too rough. He'd made a little progress that way before deciding that the damage to his hands was excessive. He then tried a different approach, crossing his forearms one over the other and placing his rougher palms against the walls. This worked better.

Along his upward path, numerous smaller chutes—feeders, he supposed—branched off. None were large enough to fit his body and so he ignored them.

What he could not ignore were the images in his mind, images mostly born of once having made the mistake of watching one of the humans' entertainments, a series of “movies.”

Thus, all the way up, Aelool kept thinking of huge stone balls rolling across his prostrate form, crushing it. That, or pits full of vipers and other pits with sharpened stakes at the bottom. He imagined a stream of sand filling the chute to suffocate him. He thought he heard . . .

“Knock it off, Aelool,” the Indowy said to himself, aloud. “The Posleen just don't think that way. For perverse and ghastly ways of doing away with grave robbers, it takes a human mind.”

After what seemed to Aelool to have been the passage of ages, but was in fact not much more than an hour, he saw his helmet's light reflected off of something approximately vertical.

“Ah, so that's what the humans' 'light at the end of the tunnel' looks like, is it?”

Another fifteen minutes of effort saw the Indowy's palms wrapped around the low corners of the triangular chute. He tugged, and tugged, and tugged a bit more until his torso was inside what appeared to be an inclined hallway. A little wriggling, and a few more pushes, and Aelool slithered down to the floor. He rolled over onto his back and lay there, panting with exertion, for some minutes. The greenish tendrils that looked like fur waved furiously the whole while.

After catching his breath, Aelool stood and placed his face as near the entrance to the chute as possible. “I'm in,” he shouted.

Dwyer answered back. “Good. Find the entrance. Open it.”

As predicted, the ramp wound in a right-angled, squared off spiral up the side of the pyramid, just inside the outer wall. To his right, that wall was angled in sharply, in accordance with the outer shape of the pyramid. On the inside, however, as he had glimpsed from the chute, the wall was vertical.

That vertical surface was covered with bas-reliefs. Aelool's first impression was that these were crude. Closer examination, however, told him that they were merely stylized. He didn't think anyone would ever call them “high art,” but they were not precisely low, either.

The carvings seemed to be of a mass of Posleen kessentai, all moving in one direction. Since that seemed to be the same direction he was going in, upward, Aelool followed right along, only pausing occasionally to glance to his left.

After a time, and a distance, the Indowy realized that the carving was not all of a piece. Rather, it was separated into segments. The separation was subtle however, a tree of some kind here, the edge of a pyramid there, or a mountain or the bulk of a spaceship elsewhere. In each section, the mass of kessentai were typical of their breed, if somewhat stylized, with crests and boma blades present.

Except for one figure, standing a bit above the rest, which had a crest but no blade. That figure, Aelool realized, was distinctly present in each frame.

Aelool turned a corner and discovered that the procession, if that's what it was, ended. Along the next wall the unarmed figure stood still in the middle of a great mass of God-kings, both of the figures claws upraised even as the rest of the kessentai held aloft recognizable boma blades. There was Posleen writing atop and across each of the panels now, but Aelool had never learned to read Posleen, High or Low.

Soft as they were, the Indowy's footsteps still echoed in the right-angular chamber. They raised low clouds of the thick dust that had lain undisturbed for untold millennia. Creepy, he thought, as he turned the next corner. For several minutes Aelool had to stop as the dust caused an uncontrollable fit of sneezing.

Here there were a series of battle scenes. Again, the central Posleen figure remained disarmed. As those scenes progressed, it appeared that the battle had gone against him. By the last, he was surrounded by other kessentai, all of whom seemed to be threatening him with their weapons.

After the next corner, there was more writing than carved figures. That one distinctive kessentai was there, though, and he was surrounded by others. These last, however, did not have their boma blades drawn. The central kessentai's head hung down, as if in shame or fear. At the next to last panel, Aelool saw, the kessentai's upper limbs were bound together, with another rope around its neck. At the last, he was led away by others, now with their blades drawn.

Aelool stopped to admire that last panel. Whoever the long-ago Posleen artist had been, and however crude or stylized his technique, he captured in the droop of the bound kessentai's crest, in the downcast eyes and the limp claws, in the stumbling gait and in the impression a pulling rope made on his neck, the absolute essence of hopeless despair.

He stood there a few moments, admiring, then, as he turned away, said, “No human or Indowy ever did better.”

The last set of panels told a different story, a horror story. First, it seemed, that despairing kessentai's walking limbs were broken with great bars. In the next, its agony, writ on the stone, became palpable as its head seemed almost to writhe above as the torso, laying in the dust. After that, two other kessentai displayed dangling orbs from their claws. Aelool had to do a double take before he saw that the suffering kessentai's eyes were missing from the carving. Then he was eviscerated, his intestines carved plainly from his stomach. They draped along the ground in the following panel, as the others carried him to a platform of some kind.

Aelool discovered what kind of platform had been memorialized in the next panel, as stone flames rose around the tortured and dying God-king.

There the bas reliefs ended, though there were another two with more of the untranslatable writing. It was just as well. Aelool wasn't sure he could take any more of the carved, stone-immortalized agony.

How bizarre, the Indowy thought, as he finished his progress toward the tenar portal. The Posleen are a hard and a harsh people, yes . . . but there is nothing in the records to indicate the kind of wanton cruelty displayed in those panels. What kind of crimes must that kessentai have committed to justify that? Aelool snorted. Hah! There are no possible crimes that might justify such an atrocity. And yet they seemed to have done it. Why else make the effort to memorialize it?

Having no answer, Aelool continued on to the portal. It was right where Guano had said it would be, right where his own internal sense of direction told him it would be.

Moving the light by shifting his head, the Indowy searched for the panel that Guano said would conceal the hand crank. He found it and, when he forced it open against the inertia of the ages, was surprised to discover that there was no dust therein. Carefully, even so, Aelool withdrew the crank and examined it.

“Nothing unusual,” he said to himself. “Just like a primitive hand drill.”

A few experimental twists of the crank took up the slack. But even after that, Aelool hardly needed to use his entire strength to turn the thing. On the other hand, it took ninety-three turns—he counted—before the tenar portal had opened so much as a human inch. By the time he'd opened the thing enough to admit the largest member of the party, Guano . . .

“You know,” Guano said through his AS, “I've never actually been inside the pyramid of a high lord before.”

Dwyer looked at the kessentai quizzically.

“I was not particularly high born,” the Posleen explained. “In time, my own followers would have built me a pyramid, but it would have been a much smaller affair. Much less ornate.”

“Speaking of ornate,” Aelool said, from where he lay panting in the dust, “if you follow the ramp down you'll see some things I never thought to see as the fruit of any of your people.”

“What things?” Guano asked.

“Carvings . . . that seem to tell a story.”

“This I must see,” announced Imam al Rashid, taking the lead ahead of Guano and proceeding down the dusty path.

It was nearly an hour before Guano and al Rashid returned. When they did, both were gesturing forcefully and arguing vociferously.

“It is the tale of a Rasul, a prophet of Allah,” the imam insisted.

“We don't know that,” Guano said, through his AS. “All we know is that someone was killed in a horrible way, untold millennia past. Might have been a prophet, might have been a Messiah, might have been a common . . . well, no, not a common criminal, based on how he was killed.”

“I'd thought you would have been able to read the inscriptions,” Aelool said.

“No,” Guano shook his head. “It is the same writing as High Posleen, but it isn't the same language.”

“Your AS?” the Indowy asked.

“Oh, it knows, all right. But it says it can't translate it, nor even give me a key.”

“A Prophet,” al Rashid insisted again.

“A mystery,” Guano countered.

USS Salem

“It's in Aldenata,” Sally said, later, when all were safely back aboard ship, “but written in Posleen. And, no, while I can recognize it, I can't translate it.”

She made her judgment based on recordings of the interior of the pyramid. Back on the planet, there'd been some discussion as to whether the landing party should detach and bring the panels back. Ultimately al Rashid had nixed that.

“Leave them,” the imam had said. “Seal the place up again. Eventually, parties of real archeologists will come, equipped to do a proper excavation and to analyze everything in its proper relationship to everything else. The most we can do, and the most we should, is record the thing.”

To this, Dwyer had agreed. In fact, the only one to disagree had been Aelool, and his reasons had little to do with preserving the heritage of the ages.

“You mean you'll want me to close the place again and then slide through inch-thick dried shit again and . . .”

“You can always be spaced, Indowy,” Dwyer had answered. Which observation pretty had much ended Aelool's objections.

“Before we depart the system,” Guano said, “I'd like one more chance to explore the pyramid. If we're not in a hurry, I mean.”

“We're not,” Dwyer answered. “Sally's still analyzing the traces of the Posleen ship that preceded us. It will be a while before she's ready to follow.”

Sally, the woman, looked suspiciously at the Posleen. Why should you need to do that? Looking for a weapon to use against us?

“You can have all day tomorrow,” the Jesuit said. “Von Altishofen; provide escort.”

“Yes, Father,” the Wachtmeister said. “Bourdon and Lorgus will be your men, Reverend.”

“And Aelool,” the priest added. “You'll go with them and seal the pyramid up.”

“Why don't you agree with al Rashid, Guano?” Aelool asked as the pinnace descended through the atmosphere.

“About that kessentai being a prophet?”

“Yes, that.”

“It's not so much that I disagree as that . . .”

“Yes?” the Indowy prodded.

“Well . . . for one thing, a carved stone picture is not proof of anything. But for the other . . . I'm just not qualified to say. It's theology . . . above my echelon.”

“Who could say then?”

“I don't know for sure . . . Father Dwyer . . . maybe his Pope. Maybe the Dalai Lama. Maybe my AS if it would say. Not me.”