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Authors: Michael Berlyn

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BOOK: The Eternal Enemy
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“I'm going to take these children there and hide. I'll start teaching them immediately. You can stay here if you want, all of you,” he said, turning to face the group encircling him, “but I'm leaving. I'm not going to wait for Straka to grind me under her heels.”

“We, we were hoping this would happen,” the Old One said. “We, we waited for this change, the change we, we could never understand. Now you can explain it to us, us, and show us, us what it means.”

“What?” Markos demanded, totally confused.

“I, I think it is time, then,” the Old One said, rising slowly to his feet. The other Habers in the village flashed an emphatic crimson red. “We, we can now go home.”

“Home?”

“Yes,” the Old One said.

“I don't understand.”

“Understanding is not necessary. You understand what we, we could not. Gather your children and I, I will lead you.”

Markos stood quickly, his nerves taut. “Children,” he shouted, showing pink and yellow, “stop what you're doing and come here.”

All ten stopped, turned, then ran to him. While he explained what was required of them—silence, obedience, and self-discipline—the Old One started eating. He started eating everything he could find. Markos was astonished by what the Old One was doing.

“I, I am too close to death to lead you home. I, I do not have the necessary energy for the journey. My, my life must be sacrificed in this manner so that you and your children can see home. This is all important for those, those waiting for us, us. They, they wait for our, our return to understand the change.”

Huh? What was that all about? Markos wondered. But there wasn't time to go into it now. The Old One had just nonchalantly turned and walked out of the village. He was heading toward the mountains. Markos quickly ordered the children to follow the Old One, and they all set out through the grassy plain.

The evening was cool, the wind spiked with an icy chill. Mendils shrieked their mating calls in the darkness. The stars were coming out, filling the night sky of Gandji like thin, high clouds. The farther he walked, the worse Markos felt.

Maybe they should have stayed in the village. He was abandoning those left behind to certain death. They would just sit there, waiting for the Terrans to come and kill them. Markos was sure that would happen, and that bothered him deep down. He shouted for the Old One to stop, then walked past the children to talk with him.

“We can't go. I was wrong. We can't leave the others behind in the village. I can't let these outsiders take your planet away from you without giving them a fight.”

“They are not outsiders. They belong here just as much as we, we do. You are still of them. You understand them. Do not let your concern over the ones left behind cancel what you have accomplished.”

“I still feel the need to stay and get the ones in the village at least well hidden,” Markos said.

“And the others? In all the other villages?”

Markos looked at the ground by his feet.

“We, we must leave now and go home. These children are important. They are the answer for the change we, we cannot understand.”

Markos knew there was something more here he wasn't grasping, something the Old One wasn't explaining.

“Come,” the Old One said. “Or everything here will be wasted.”

He turned and walked off through the grass. The children waited by Markos, waiting to be told what to do. He motioned for them to follow the Old One, then followed as well.

They left behind a narrow trail of flattened grass. The children were silent, and Markos checked on them every few kilometers to ensure they were all right. He needn't have worried; they made him proud by their composure and self-control.

They stopped frequently to rest, to let their bodies catch up with them. Markos left the Old One alone. He felt awkward after that exchange they'd had minutes after having set out. He hoped the Haber knew what he was doing.

Just before dawn the Haber stopped. The mountains towered before them, still a half day's walk. They had left the plain and were in rocky ground, with small hills and cliff faces directly before them.

“How much farther?” Markos asked, exhausted.

“We, we are close now.”

The old Haber left the small group and walked up to a wall of rock. He touched it with both palms, then he became rigid, immobile; a few seconds later a cave mouth appeared in the rock around the place he was touching. Markos couldn't believe what he'd just seen. It had been a solid wall of rock and then, an instant later, there had been a cave mouth there. He was going to ask what the Old One had done, how he had done it, but he saw how much that had taken out of him. He seemed to have gotten smaller, lost some body mass. The Old One waved them all inside.

Once into the darkness, the Old One bent down and lifted a small rock. He clenched it in his fist and then opened his hand. The rock was glowing, shedding a weak light. He handed the rock to one of the children and repeated it until all held glowing rocks. They each could have generated light from their eyes, but Markos knew that there was a blinding-threshhold: Their eyes' photoreceptors would be blinded by their eyes' cold-light generators if they generated too much. When Markos had flashed light from his eyes, he'd been momentarily blinded, and regulating the intensity of the light was a skill he was still developing.

The light from the rocks was strong enough for them to walk safely into the cave. Markos didn't recognize the cave—this wasn't the place where he'd awakened after his death. He was apprehensive, but only for an instant. They were all in the Old One's hands, and they would have to take their chances.

They were safe. Or as safe as they could be on the planet with Straka in control of the
Paladin
.

The Old One uncovered food stores and they all ate. The cave was large, with walls that gave off a soft, sickly-green light. The floor was dank and cold, but the air was fresh enough. Water dripped down cracks in the walls, slowly but incessantly dropping into little puddles on the floor every few seconds.

They ate tubers and other roots, as well as some vegetation that the Old One needed to modify before they could eat it. Markos watched what the Old One did with his hands this time and was even more confused and amazed. That's what they must have meant by “touch and change,” he thought. God, I'm glad they
didn't
do that to the crew.

“How do you do that, Old One?”

“Here. You will understand more once you see this.” He handed Markos a large, irregularly shaped crystal.

Markos had never seen anything quite like it before. It had a symmetry that was not immediately apparent. He turned it over in his hands, felt the coolness and solidity of it, and was impressed with its beauty. “It's very nice,” Markos said, “but what has this got to do with what I asked?”

The old Haber flashed yellow, and Markos shook his head. What did the Old One want him to do? The crystal was nice, refracting the dim green light in the cave into some beautiful colors, but it was only a crystal.

He handed Markos another one.

Markos turned the crystal over as if searching for a seam or an opening, feeling with his strange hands for something hidden on its surface. It was smooth all over, as though it had been polished or grown artificially. Other than that, he discovered nothing else about it.

“It's very nice,” Markos said. “Prettier than the first.”

“You do not understand. I, I will have to teach you how to use them.”

“Never mind about these,” Markos said. “Tell me how you did that to the cave entrance.”

The Old One flashed the same lemon-yellow color again, then grabbed Markos's hands, cupping them around the crystal. “Touch and change it, Markos. Penetrate the crystal's surface and find what's been changed inside.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The crystal has been changed. There are unnatural dislocations in its structure. They create colors that are very complex. You can detect these changes, understand them, and then understand the colors.”

A book?

The more he learned about these creatures, the less sense they made. After having seen that artifact so close to Tau Ceti and finding Gandji circling the star, peopled by these creatures, everyone on board the
Paladin
had been bothered by the inconsistency of their culture.

If this crystal really was a book, then they could have a technology. Still, there was no explanation for where it had gone, or where it was now. And if they did have technology, why did they just sit and wait for Gandji to be destroyed? If they couldn't or wouldn't fight, why didn't they just leave the planet? Or perhaps they had lost the technology enabling them to travel through space? But they had brought him back to life, a task that required an extremely high level of technology.

He turned the crystal over in his hands, and the Haber let go of him. Touch and change it? He wasn't even certain this body had that ability.

Markos couldn't close his eyes to block out the surrounding distractions, so concentrating proved difficult. He looked down, though, staring at his hands and the crystal within them, staring at his mendil skin, at the smooth coolness of the crystal in his hands.

The crystal slowly warmed to his touch. He stared into its depths, clearing his mind of racing thoughts. The more he concentrated on the crystal, the warmer it felt. Suddenly it was warm and alive.

He could feel wild and frenetic movement on its outer surface, as if it were fluid. He shifted into a nonbreathing catabolism. His hands seemed to join the physical structure of the crystal, piercing its top layer.

He panicked for an instant, fearing he would never get his fingers out, fearing a permanent link as they sank deeper and deeper beneath its surface, but he fought it back. One quick glance showed his hands still outside the crystal's surface no matter what it felt like.

He detected the movement of shared electrons on the outer surface and realized that everything there was as it should have been; molecules were correctly aligned and nothing had been altered. He pressed downward with his mind, letting himself sink deeper, trying to become one with the crystal's depths.

Everything was suddenly different as he reached a second level. Atoms were displaced, while others pulsated, giving off light as they expanded and contracted. Groups pulsed together, and Markos recognized the colors, the actions, the complex Haber way of describing concepts and images with color.

He listened to the crystal speak.

And then he stopped listening and became one with the voice. His consciousness was gone, replaced by the mind in the crystal that told the story. He was in the body of a Haber, sharing his thoughts, his deeds.

He stared out over an alien landscape.

6

Vegetation writhed in animal agony, whipped into motion by circular gusts of wind. The Haber, Yulakna, perceived a strong sense of lightness to the fluid movement, the entwining thin vines wrapping themselves into knotted confusion about each other and huge roots. The vines seemed to have a life of their own, each with a course in life, a series of patterns they had to follow.

Markos felt the crystal held in Yulakna's hand, recording everything that he experienced. He knew Yulakna thought of the planet as “Red tinged with yellow swirled with maroon.” Markos thought of it as Red. The homeworld Habers would see this world and decide how many should go to Red, what kind of positive mutations the planet might create in their race, what changes these mutations might create in their physical and mental states.

To Markos, sharing in what Yulakna saw and experienced, the area being scouted was unappealing. The ground was claylike, a grayish ocher. Creatures as small as insects crawled in and out of tunnels and mounds of discolored earth in the few places the vines didn't grow.

Markos noticed the device attached to the crystal. He made a mental note to ask the Old One what it was afterward.

There were trees nearby—huge, massive trees that defined the forceful, erratic gusts of wind that changed direction almost constantly. The upper parts of the trees were devoid of leaves. At the end of each flexible branch hung a small seed pod that dripped a sticky liquid. Their root systems were gnarled and twisted, poking up from beneath the ground only to disappear a few meters along. Vines, whipped in changing directions by the wind, seemed to wrap and unwrap themselves around the roots, causing the overlapping and twisting root system to seem even more complex and beautiful to Yulakna. Markos tried to appreciate Yulakna's point of view, but the oddness of the place kept him detached.

Yulakna walked farther from the ship he and the three other Habers had arrived in, trying to gather as much information about this area of Red as he could. He was already thinking of himself and his fellow Habers as fitting in with the native life-forms.

Off to the right, animals grazed, feeding on the yellow vines. They were the size of small ponies, their six gangly legs supporting barrel-shaped bodies. Their hides were opalescent, reflecting the sunlight in patches of scaly reddish green and silvery white, which shifted as they moved. The natives grazed and did what all Habers understood, what all Habers felt was important. They lived, they bred, and then they died.

Markos realized these creatures were incapable of anything more complex, though he understood now that no Haber looked at it that way.

Yulakna heard something that didn't belong and looked upward toward the source of the noise. High overhead a glint of polished metal appeared, and both Yulakna and Markos knew what it was. The noise increased; after a few moments its form became visible. Markos knew from Yulakna that the ship was neither Haber nor Terran.

He had seen enough. He had to think.

He let go of the crystal and saw the cave.

“How long have you been on Gandji?” he asked the Old One.

BOOK: The Eternal Enemy
10.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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