Kirlian Quest (28 page)

Abruptly the ship moved, jumping across the sky to hover above the trio.

"
That's mattermission!
" Sixteen cried. "It didn't accelerate, it jumped!"

"Unlikely," Hweeh said. "No transmitter, no receiver, no implosion and explosion of air."

"Just get out from under!" Herald said, jetting away. But he too was astonished. Until this episode, it had been inconceivable that anything could mattermit from place to place without entering a transmitter and arriving in a receiver. Now it remained doubtful—but conceivable. The devastating technology of this enemy...!

Hweeh and Sixteen followed his example with alacrity—and a laser beam speared down where they had been. The air exploded, the thunder pushing them on.

"It really
is
gunning for us!" Sixteen cried. "But
why?
"

Herald didn't care to try to answer that. He did not have the Ancient cube with him now, so could not be broadcasting any Kirlian signal. He has baffled not only by the
why
—though his hypothesis was clarifying that—but the
how
. Impossible things were happening! "We'd better separate, so that it can't blast all three of us at once," he suggested, feeling a touch of
déjà vu
. When he and Psyche and Whirl of Dollar had fled Caesar, the monster of Keep— But how much more formidable was
this
monster!

Somehow he felt no fear. Had he been in his own Slash body he would have shot a beam back, though with no expectation of bringing down a spaceship. Death by suffocation in a collapsing tunnel frightened him, or death by poison or freezing or disease, or by falling from a high place such as the ridge above Kastle Kade; but a laser was a comprehensible thing, basically natural, quick and clean.

Sixteen was now jetting far to the side, and Hweeh's suit moved in the opposite direction. How fortunate that the Weew had not returned to shock! Now they would see whom the alien went after.

Suddenly the ship was above Herald. He banked sharply, turning to go at right angles to his former route. This body had no lasers, but it was highly maneuverable and much faster than a Slash. In this situation, he actually felt more confidence as a Jet.

Again the laser struck where he had been. Close misses—but still he was not afraid. What could they take from him, that the death of Psyche had not taken already?

The Amoeba ship evidently could fire only straight down, so had first to position itself directly above him. It was not adapted for planetary search-and-destroy—not completely, anyway. In space it would have to orient on distant targets with extreme precision, so the fixed beam made sense. Any time the ship was in position it could score. But that extra step gave him the edge here. He was so close that a small change in his location was like an impossible maneuver in distant space, one the ship was not geared to follow. He could keep dodging it until it ran out of energy, which it had to do, pretty soon; those beams were powerful! They would miss him close each time—but they
would
miss.

Meanwhile, he was learning much about the enemy. Obviously it was him alone they wanted—and his only distinguishing mark was his aura. Therefore they were orienting on aura alone. They could detect it at this range without the aid of the cube. Maybe in its strength his aura resembled the aura of the Ancients, so they feared it regardless of its keying capacity. But they didn't dare land a party to capture him, so had to use a cannon capable of melting a hole through a mile-thick ship (well, through its hull, anyway) to nab him. A ludicrous waste of power.

The ship jumped again. This time Herald braked and spun about, jetting back the way he had come. The beam missed him, striking to the side where he would have been, had he repeated the maneuver. They were learning! He had four chances in five of keeping clear, since be could go in four directions or stand still. They had missed him twice; if they had chances for three more, the odds were about even they would catch him, unless he got completely out of their range. Provided they could afford the power expense.

Meanwhile he kept moving, waiting for the ship to commit itself again. The Amoeba had him pegged as an Ancient, or the equivalent, and was trying desperately to destroy him. If they feared the science of the Ancients that much, the Amoeba must be less developed than the Ancients had been. However, that was not any new revelation at this point. Why were they suddenly so intent upon him now?

Could it be because he represented no real threat to them unless he was in the vicinity of Ancient equipment? They had not paid him much attention while he was elsewhere in the Cluster; it was Psyche they had blasted, though she was dead already, because she had been keying the Ancient site of Keep. Obviously he could not key an Ancient site unless he were at it, and a nontechnological residential site hardly counted.

There had to be a functioning site
somewhere on Mars!
If he could only find it in time. After he escaped from this ship, of course.

The ship jumped again. This time Herald jetted straight forward at top velocity, not dodging. If he guessed wrong....

The beam struck well behind him. They had played him for another reversal!

Suddenly the pit of one of the prior strikes loomed before him. The dust was fused, the underlying lava melted. Oh, yes, these were ship-destroyer lasers, not little antipersonnel beams. If they had had a splay of pin-beams they could have caught him. Obviously then they had not anticipated this particular type of localized chase. The Amoeba was not omniscient; it could and did make mistakes. Very encouraging information he was getting, and he wasn't even serving on any committee. Still, the odds seemed to be with the Amoeba.

He shot over the lip and down into the pit, his brushes feeling the radiating heat. Fortunately the Jet form had the efficient cooling mechanism of wind; heat in his body was jetted out almost immediately. He could tolerate this surface, so long as he kept moving, barely touching it.

This was why the ship had misjudged. They had assumed he would avoid the hot spot, and thought they had him boxed in. They might well have been correct, had he thought where he was going. This was not just a little hot, it was a
lot
hot.

The sides of the pit were vertical, dropping down like the inner rim of a volcano before curving into slag. The mass of lava here had been vaporized! When laser science had first been developed, it had been supposed that it could never achieve much physical power. But they had been thinking of the animate lasers of the Slash, limited by the living processes; lasers had come a long way since then. Contemporary lasers might not pack the direct-motion punch of a physical missile, but the sheer heat caused explosive expansion. This one was evidently an outer-shell beam, causing the inner section to vaporize and wash straight back, while the outer rim remained clean-cut, uncluttered by the debris of its own action. It was a very nice bit of laser sculpture that he had to admire. The warships of Slash might match the sheer power of the Amoeba strikes, but not their finesse of application. A ship struck with such a beam would be holed cleanly, instead of merely melting sloppily and dissipating much of the force of the strike.

All this in an instant as he dropped into the hole. He noticed an Ancient tunnel, opened to the surface by that lovely strike. There must be radiating passages all over this area, hidden by the sand. This was a far more extensive site than the archaeologists had yet realized.

On impulse, he gambled by jetting straight into the tunnel. The depths disturbed him, but his chances on the surface were diminishing too swiftly. If this passage went deep enough, and had another exit, he might escape the Amoeba ship. Then he would be extremely careful about trying to evoke any more Ancient cubes. But if this tunnel did not...

He was in luck, so far. The passage angled down deep into the lava shield. He verified its openness ahead by sonic echoes, moving as fast as his perceptions permitted. When it came right down to it he preferred the risk of a dented intake to that of a laser-scorched posterior.

Had he eluded the Amoeba? His aura was intense, but crippled by his lost love, and the Martian dust should muffle most of the rest. The ship had not seemed to be able to locate him when he was deep below before, once be got away from the cube. If the Amoeba did not know precisely where to look for him, it would lose him; it could not vaporize the entire crust of the planet.

He coasted to a stop. For the fast time, he was alone in an unexplored section of the site. The dust of millions of years filmed the passage, though this section had obviously been sealed. It had been Herald's luck that he had entered an access tunnel and not a burial tunnel, or he would have struck a dead-end too near the surface.

Still he did not dare to emerge until he was sure the enemy was gone. He did not like the confinement and the strong possibility of death by crushing if a laser struck accurately, but he knew his best chance was to remain right here.

He thought of Psyche again, seeing her in the fire, feeling her incinerated flesh on his human hand, though now he had no hand. It was too much, and he had to blank it out. He would never recover his powers as long as that vision remained with him, yet he could only relinquish it by relinquishing
her
, and he could never do that. He wished he were not a tough Slash, a creature to whom suicide was unnatural. Why
not
go above and let the Amoeba blast him? The Curse of Llume, abated at one stroke, for him.

Desperately he cast about for some intellectual or physical diversion. He could not let his imagination seek its own horrors. He moved along the passage until he came to a sealed-off intersection. At one time it had been an entrance to a burial chamber. He pried at it with his forefeelers, and it broke open. He widened the hole and entered, front-first, so as not to disturb the interior by the breeze of his jet.

There was nothing inside except a little more dust and a single body-ring. He examined it as well as he could in the dark. It had the same kind of relief design as the ones on display in the main dig.

Why weren't there any bodies? If these were burial chambers with personal ornaments, why no coffins, sarcophagi, or dehydrated remains? The climate of Mars should be ideal for the mummification and preservation of corpses. The question brought the answer: Who would want to live under the decaying corpse of his personal parent-entity? The vapors might tend to diffuse upward, but a decaying body gave off a lot of gas in a short time, and some fumes would inevitably seek the path of lesser resistance: the passage below. Every sniff would remind the offspring most poignantly of the dear departed. Obviously they cremated the remains, and left only the sterile dust in the sealed chamber. After all, it was the
aura
that counted, not the body.

Yet in that case, why bother to seal off the chambers at all? Why not place the circular memorials in some hallowed place, and continue to use the residence? It would save a lot of work and promote efficiency. The Ancients had to have been the most efficient creatures ever to dwell in the Cluster. It was not like them to expend energy and materials wastefully.

The revelation burst upon him like the strike of a laser:
These were not the Ancients!

There were
two
cultures here: the Wormlike pre-Ancient colony, advanced enough to colonize alien planets but still hindered by foolishly material concepts of property and death, and the more sophisticated alien Ancients who had come as conquerors. Now it fell into place. The relics differed from ring to cube, the tunnels differed in size and type, the burial attitudes differed. And most significant, the heraldic devices differed. The devices on this ring bore no relation to those on the cubes; they represented two entirely different cultures.

Why had he not noticed this before? In retrospect it was glaringly obvious. Those not trained in heraldry might not appreciate the elaborate conventions that formed such art, or the permanency of their symbolism, but
he
did. It did not matter what that art was called or what the symbols meant. It
was
an art with its unique conventions, and it had to be true to its nature. That was the very root of heraldry. If it were not so, it would be meaningless, and useless for identification of living or dead. The continuity of evolution had to be embodied in the art, exactly as with the bodies of living creatures. The alternative was chaos.

Now he could re-create the essential sequence: The Worms had spread into neighboring space, colonizing those worlds most suitable to them. In this system, Mars had been good, while warm, wet Earth had been unsuitable. The stronger gravity, the constant water-storms and tides and fluctuations of weather would have ruined the finely crafted passages. Venus and Mercury would have been far too hot, and Jupiter too cold. So Mars had been ideal. For Worms.

For a thousand Sol years—perhaps much longer, since he could not know the date of these "undiscovered" passages here—the colony had prospered. Then the Ancients had come—as conquerors. They had obliterated the Worms, and made their own base, comfortable beneath the insulation of the defunct Worm metropolis. Then, as abruptly as they had arrived, the Ancients had departed, never to return—leaving Mars dead. As they must have left other worlds dead, all over the Cluster.

The Worms had shown Spherical regression, not the Ancients. One mystery abated!

But why had neighboring Planet Earth been spared? The Solarians had been barely sapient, then, far behind the level of the Worm colony. If the Solarians had been aware of the Worms at all, it was only as "mythical" dragons or horrendous serpents, tempting innocent females into evil knowledge. They had no fraction of the Worms' economic or combat resources. The Ancients could have wiped out all Earth-life easily. Their base seemed to have been maintained for a century or so, according to the archaeologists' dating, as if for exactly such a project. Plenty of time to complete it, considering their capabilities. Instead they had shut down, ignoring Earth.