The Eternal Enemy (11 page)

“You all remember what to do, right?” Markos asked.

The ten children flashed a brilliant crimson.

“All right then, Old One. Start opening the door.”

The Old One touched the bulkhead and the door started to swing upward and outward. As soon as it had traveled a few centimeters, the smallest child, Markatens, dropped to the deck and described what he could see through the widening crack. No smoke, no signs of destruction Markos had warned him to look for.

Markos felt trapped in his own body as it reacted to the changing demands. At least when he'd been Terran, years of experience had helped him know what physical feelings he'd have to deal with—adrenaline, hormones, fatigue. But this new body had no in-betweens. Without the immediate threat of battle, it reacted with incredible speed, shutting down his heightened awareness and relaxing muscles that a moment ago were tightly knotted.

He bent down to see Aurianta.

At first glance he thought his body was still playing tricks on him, that the tension of possible battle had created a chemical in his system that changed his perceptions. He felt as though he'd been given a large dose of a hallucinogen. When he glanced up at the Old One and the children, Markos's fears doubled. No one seemed affected by the scene as he'd been.

His mind reeled as he stared, dumbfounded, nearing fright and shock. The ship had landed a few kilometers away from what looked like a city. The tallest building was only three stories high, though needlelike spires pierced the sky ten stories up. Somehow he felt the city was there only as an afterthought, something to add a little sanity to the landscape.

Balloonlike plants floated through the air, drifting on gentle breezes, some high in the prismatic sky while others drifted lazily a meter or two off the ground. Tendrillike roots dangled from the inflated transparent sacs, moved in slow motion, circling, twisting, constantly seeking a place to alight below.

The sky proved impossible to look at for more than a second or two at a time. The sun was either rising or setting, resting on the horizon like a large, diffuse blob of constantly changing colors. The rest of the sky mirrored this effect, though the colors were far less intense and their boundaries less clearly defined. It was like staring up into a huge, deep opal that covered the whole sky, shimmering and changing with each passing moment.

Wherever his eyes rested, they were treated to more of the same, and he flashed again on the idea that he might be hallucinating.

“This place …” he started to say, then stopped when he realized he couldn't put the feeling into words.

The ground of Aurianta was reddish-brown where no vegetation grew, almost a maroon, with little shards of dark brown, bright orange, and yellow. Grass grew in abundance, in some areas in tall patches that reached two to three meters, while elsewhere it grew to only a few centimeters. Each clump of grass seemed to have different colored blades, though the taller groups showed many distinctly different shades of green. There were pastel flowers in bloom, each petal a different color, each stem a different shade of green.

There were oddly shaped trees, shaped as if they had been tended by some insane bonsai sculptor. Their long, flat leaves made the memory of autumn in Vermont seem like a black-and-white movie.

He needed to turn away from the overwhelming landscape. “What I don't understand is why anyone would want to leave,” he said.

Habers were coming to meet them; they were less than a kilometer away. Markos got the impression that they were just out for a leisurely stroll.

The sun was setting; the diffuse patch of brighter, prismatic color was sinking down, swallowed by a row of distant, faint hills. All the Habers seemed to notice this instantly. The Old One immediately climbed down from the bay door and faced the sun, holding his arms outstretched to either side like a flow-bridge.

All the other Habers had stopped walking and had turned to face the sun. They linked hands and formed lines of at least fifty Habers; the lines stretched row after row back to the city.

Alpha and his brothers climbed down to see what was going on. Markos joined the others on the ground.

A strange noise started building, first like a steady haunting wind; it built quickly to a steady hum like a thousand hydroelectric generators. It came from the Habers.

The Old One's eyes radiated a deep emerald green that touched a sympathetic chord inside Markos. The green was more brilliant than their greeting color. The Old One was making the same sounds, eerily echoing his brothers' calls.

Markos rushed to the Old One's side and grabbed one of his hands. “Come on!” he shouted.

Alpha rushed over and grasped the Old One's free hand and the other children linked up from Alpha. The small group watched Alpha Indi sink below the horizon.

The feelings started immediately. The physical and emotional pleasure was stronger than being a flow-bridge. His whole body vibrated, built up and up, making him lose control. His only conscious thought was to feel grateful.

He started humming too. It helped soothe the raw energy, mellow out the physical feelings. The ecstatic pleasure pulsed within him in rapid bursts of tingling sensation.

Then the sun set, and the sky started to darken into soft twilight. The noise stopped, they all broke contact, and the feeling was gone. The Habers resumed walking.

Markos knew his pleasure had been a shared pleasure. He'd experienced a sense of oneness, of belonging.

“We,” the Old One said, “we are home.”

The Habers' eyes glistened and sparkled in the soft twilight. As the Old One explained about Markos and the children, the Habers' eyes lit, probing the Old One's color-intensified messages, making him stop for clarification and detail. As long as Markos looked at their eyes, they all looked like Habers.

They were short, tall, thin, and fat, with pear-shaped torsos, barrel torsos, convex and concave—every variation of the basic bipedal anatomy seemed to be represented. Some of their shoulders were lower than Markos figured they should be, and some of their legs seemed only marginally functional. They looked like a great quilt of patches, dolls sewn together by insane tailors with synesthesia.

By the time the explanation was over, the Habers from the city were lined up waiting for something. “What do they want?” Markos asked verbally, afraid he already knew the answer.

The Old One turned and with violet hues in his eyes, colors that passed for a smile, said, “They, they want you to act as a flow-bridge.”

“Now?”

“Yes.” Flashed with red.

Markos shook his head. “Not yet. We've got to get into the city first, get settled in there, get accustomed to this change. I have to set up some kind of command post. I've got to start training and teaching. We don't have time for this now.”

The Old One disappeared into the crowd with a few flashes, explaining to the Habers milling about that they would have to wait. Silently but with soft, light yellow flecked with a dark blue seeping from their eyes, the crowd ambled back toward the city. Markos's group followed.

The path felt cool and alive beneath his feet. The stars overhead seemed to sparkle in a pattern and harmony, a visual melody, faint and airy, impossible to pin down. The wind rustled the fields and made the grass change shades of gray in the dying light, a faint melody of its own. The flowers swayed, colorful metronomes keeping beat to the visual melody.

It's these eyes, Markos thought. They see things that shouldn't be there.

The city glowed with light, pulling him and the others toward it. The closer he got, the more beautiful it appeared to be. While the sun had been up, the city was bland, a washed-out eggshell white, a sobering, steadying part of the constantly shifting landscape. It had offered a base in reality, an unchanging vision in a world of change.

The closer he came, the less he believed that. The city wasn't actually moving, but he thought it was shifting in and out of phase. It was like watching a mirage dance on the horizon. It shimmered and slid, but the city was no mirage.

But still it danced.

When he was very close, he realized what was happening. The buildings weren't just off-white—their outer shells were plastered with a white covering, but the covering contained tiny pieces of maroon, yellow, and orange, tiny shards of micalike crystal, crumbled bits of blue and green. The colors were embedded in the walls, and from a distance the walls seemed to move. The buildings fluoresced, and each piece of rock and crystal fluoresced in a different, flickering color, like chromatic fire from a jeweled city. When the colored rocks flickered in phase, the color of the building changed to an off-white, tinted by a soft pastel.

He walked the path with awe and pride, overwhelmed by the constant beauty of Aurianta. The only thing he was anxious about was seeing the Habers eagerly lined up, waiting for him to act as a flow-bridge. He wasn't going to tackle the whole city. What did they expect from him?

But as he walked, watching their backs before him, he figured he was overreacting. They had politely accepted his answer. Too many things had to be accomplished before he could think of creating so many changed Habers. He no longer felt that acting as a flow-bridge was a proper thing for him to do. He could end up contaminating an entire race with his mutations, and until it was proven necessary, he would avoid it despite the sensual pleasures involved.

The streets of the city were unpaved, firmly compressed earth, with small patches of weeds and grass poking up in corners and untrodden areas. The buildings themselves were clean and new, as though the whole city had been built weeks ago. There were no signs of erosion, no cracking or crumbling facades or towers; the freshness of color and the age of the streets contradicted each other.

The city swallowed the returning Habers. Singly and in small groups they entered buildings. Other Habers stood in doorways and windows, beneath graceful, pointed arches, in alleys leading to arcades, watching the Old One lead Markos and his offspring through the streets.

There were many Habers who resembled the Old One, though none had the same dull gray-brown covering. He was reassured by their familiar shape and size; he doubted he could feel any real kinship for those Habers whose phenotypes were radically different from the Old One's.

“What's the name of this city?” Markos asked. His gargling, bubbly voice sounded obscene within the city and its beauty. He had grown so accustomed to it that he had almost forgotten how it sounded. Memories of Van Pelt's frozen, horrified face flashed in his mind.

“I, I believe its translation would be ‘War.'”

“What?” Markos asked.

“Not now,” the old Haber said, stopping before a building. “We, we are here. This is the place we, we will live in. I, I will explain about this city.”

Markos looked around. They were centrally located, near the heart of the city. This building had no outstanding characteristics to distinguish it from all the others. “How many entrances does this structure have?” he asked.

“There are no doors,” the Old One answered. “There are two entrances; this one and one in the back.”

Markos nodded. “Alpha, you stay out here. After we're inside, let no one in or out without my permission. Understand?”

Alpha flashed red and positioned himself outside.

“Markatens, walk around through the house. Take VeePee with you. Make sure no one is in there. When you're done, send VeePee back out here and position yourself by the back entrance, the same as Alpha. Understand?”

Markatens and VeePee flashed red, then entered the building.

“What is all of this for?” the Old One asked.

“It's a test.”

“There is nothing in this building that can harm us, us.”

“I know that, and you know that, and all the children know that. But let's stop taking chances and going on assumptions.”

VeePee appeared at the arch by the front entrance. “It is uninhabited,” he said.

That piece of information and VeePee's safe passage through the building were worth more to Markos than anything the Old One might have said. He hadn't thought the building was unsafe, but they needed to be treating their situations as real. They needed the practice. “Let's go in.”

They walked through the arch into a honeycomb of passageways. He immediately realized that VeePee couldn't have possibly checked out every passageway in the building in that short length of time. He was right, then, testing them. He would have to talk with them, show them how foolish doing a sloppy job like this was. But later.

The Haber led them through the building, explaining the basic layout of the house. He made it sound as if the building was centuries old. He assigned rooms to the children, then told them to explore the place, learn all they could about everything they saw and touched. He told them to meet him in the common area when they were done and stressed that they were not to leave the grounds. He assigned VeePee as relief for Markatens, and Triand as relief for Alpha.

“Okay, Old One. Tell me about this city.”

The Haber flashed red and led him into the common room. It was large enough to hold fifty or sixty Habers. They seated themselves on chairs of molded rock; Markos did the trick the Old One had taught him while on board the ship, hardening his body so that the chair could be comfortable. His breathing shifted into its rest cycle.

“This house is yours, Markos,” the old Haber said. “It was made for you long before you were born, before we, we left for Gandji. This city was made by those Habers who needed to understand the change. It is a refuge, a community for Habers devoted to finding an answer. We, we came here, or our, our ancestors did, from all over Aurianta to find an answer to this … this … war.

“When we, we realized the answer could not be found here, the Habers of this city built the ship. Most volunteered to sacrifice their lives and leave Aurianta for Gandji. Few were taken. Those Habers who remained behind stayed here to wait for the answer, to help when it arrived. We, we named the city, The Place Where the Answer to the Change Would be Found. In your language the city's name is War.”