Upon a Sea of Stars (75 page)

“Quite a place,” commented Farrell. “But you’re willing to visit it a third time, sir?”

“Yes,” agreed Grimes after a long pause. “But I’m not prepared to make a third attempt at awakening ancient deities from their well-earned rest. In any case, we lack the . . . I suppose you could call her the medium. She’s on Lorn, and even if she were here I doubt if she’d play.”

“Good. I’ll adjust trajectory for Kinsolving, and then we’ll send Carlottigrams to our respective lords and masters requesting permission to land. I don’t think that they’ll turn it down.”

“Unfortunately,” said Grimes, but the faint smile that lightened his craggy features belied the word.

Slowly, cautiously Farrell eased
Star Pioneer
down to the sunlit hemisphere of Kinsolving, to a position a little to the west of the morning terminator. Grimes had advised a landing at the site used by the Confederacy’s
Rim Sword
and, later, by his own
Faraway Quest
. The destruction of the neo-Calvinists’
Piety
had made the spaceport unusable. This landing place was hard by the deserted city of Enderston, on the shore of the Darkling Tarn. It had been the Sports Stadium.

Conditions were ideal for the landing. The sounding rockets, fired when the ship was descending through the first tenuous fringes of the atmosphere, had revealed a remarkable absence of turbulence. The parachute flares discharged by them at varying altitudes were falling straight down, each trailing its long, unwavering streamer of white smoke.

Grimes and Sonya were in the control room. “There’s Enderston,” the Commodore said, “on the east bank of the Weary River. We can’t see much from this altitude; everything’s overgrown. That’s the Darkling Tarn . . .” With a ruler that he had picked up he pointed to the amoebalike glimmer of water among the dull green that now was showing up clearly on the big approach screen. “You can’t miss it. That fairly well-defined oval of paler green is the Stadium . . .”

The inertial drive throbbed more loudly as Farrell made minor adjustments and then, when the Stadium was in the exact center of the screen, settled down again to its almost inaudible muttering.

At Farrell’s curt order they all went to their acceleration chairs, strapped themselves in. Grimes, with the others, watched the expanding picture on the screen. It was all so familiar, too familiar, even to the minor brush fire started by the last of the parachute flares. And, as on the previous two occasions, there was the feeling that supernatural forces were mustering to resist the landing of the ship, to destroy her and all aboard her.

He looked at Farrell. The young Captain’s face was pale, strained—and this, after all, was a setting down in almost ideal conditions. There were not, it is true, any ground approach aids. But neither was there wind, or cloud, or clear air turbulence. And Survey Service officers were trained to bring their ships down on worlds with no spaceport facilities.

So Farrell was feeling it too. The knowledge made Grimes less unhappy.
Now you begin to know what it’s like, Jimmy boy,
he thought smugly.

But she was down at last.

There was almost no shock at all, and only an almost inaudible complaint from the ship’s structure, and a faint sighing of shock absorbers as the great mass of the vessel settled in the cradle of her tripodal landing gear. She was down. “Secure main engines,” ordered Farrell at last. Telegraph bells jangled sharply, and the inertial drive generators muttered to themselves and then were still. She was down, and the silence was intensified by the soft soughing of the ventilation fans.

Grimes swiveled in his chair, gazed out through the viewport toward the distant mountain peak, the black, truncated cone hard and sharp against the pale blue sky. “Sinai,” Presbyter Cannon had named it. “Olympus,” Grimes had labeled it on his new charts of the planetary surface. But that name was no longer apt. On its summit the neo-Calvinists had attempted to invoke Jehovah—and Zeus had answered their call. On its summit Grimes had tried to invoke the gods of the Greek pantheon—and had been snatched into an oddly peopled Limbo by Mephistopheles himself.

This time on Kinsolving the Commodore was going to be cautious. Wild horses—assuming that there were any on this planet, and assuming that they should be possessed by such a strange ambition—would not be able to drag him up to the top of the mountain.

Nonetheless, Grimes did revisit the mountaintop, taken there by the tamed horsepower of
Star Pioneer
’s pinnace rather than by wild horses. Nothing happened. Nothing could happen unless Clarisse, descendant of the long dead artist-magicians, was there to make it happen. There was nothing to see, except the view. All that remained of the two disastrous experiments was a weathered spattering of pigments where the witch girl’s easel had stood.

Everybody visited the famous caves, of course, and stared at and photographed the rock paintings, the startlingly lifelike depiction of beasts and their hunters. And the paint was dry, and the paintings were old, old, even though some faint hint of their original magic still lingered.

Even so, this was an uneasy world. Men and women never walked alone, were always conscious of something lurking in the greenery, in the ruins. Farrell, reluctant as he was to break the Survey Service’s uniform regulations, issued strict orders that everybody ashore on any business whatsoever was to wear a bright scarlet jacket over his other clothing. This was after two hunting parties had opened fire upon each other; luckily nobody was killed, but four men and three women would be in the sick bay for days with bullet wounds.

Grimes said to Farrell, “Don’t you think it’s time that we were lifting ship, Captain?”

“Not for a while, Commodore. We have to be sure that the new tissue cultures will be successful.”

“That’s just an excuse.”

“All right, it’s just an excuse.”

“You’re waiting for something to happen.”

“Yes. Damn it all, Commodore, this sensation of brooding menace is getting me down; it’s getting all of us down. But I want to have something definite to report to my Lords Commissioners . . .”

“Don’t pay too high a price for that fourth ring on your sleeve, James.”

“It’s more than promotion that’s at stake, sir, although I shall welcome it. It’s just that I hate being up against an enemy that I can’t see, can’t touch. It’s just that I want to accomplish something. It’s just that I don’t want to go slinking off like a dog with his tail between his legs.”

“The original colony did just that.”

“But they . . .” Farrell stopped abruptly.

“I’ll finish it for you, James. But they were only civilians. They weren’t wearing the Survey Service badge on their caps, Survey Service braid on their sleeves or shoulders. They weren’t disciplined. And how long do you think your ship’s discipline is going to stand up to the strain, gold braid and brass buttons notwithstanding?”

“For long enough.”

Sonya broke in. “This is Jimmy’s show, John. He makes the decisions. And I agree with him that we should stay on Kinsolving until we have something to show for our visit.”

“Thank you, Sonya,” said Farrell. Then, “You must excuse me. I have things to attend to.”

When the young man had left their cabin, Sonya turned to her husband. “You’re getting too old and cautious, John. Or are you sulking because
you’re
not running things?”

“I don’t like this world, my dear. I’ve reasons not to.”

“You’re letting it get you down. You look as though you haven’t slept for a week.”

“I haven’t. Not to speak of.”

“Why didn’t you let me know?”

“It’s so damned silly. It’s that bloody nightmare of mine—you know the one. Every time I shut my eyes it recurs.”

“You should have told me.”

“I should have done.” He got slowly to his feet. “Probably some good, healthy exercise will make me sleep better. A long walk . . .”

“I’ll come with you.”

She fetched from the wardrobe the scarlet jackets that they had been given. Grimes took from a drawer his deadly little Minetti, put it in one pocket, a spare clip of cartridges in the other. Heavier handguns and miniaturized transceivers they would collect from the duty officer at the airlock.

Within a few minutes they were walking down the ramp to the path that had been hacked and burned and trodden through the encroaching greenery, the trail that led to the ruined city.

It was early afternoon. The sun was still high in the pale sky, but the breeze, what there was of it, was chilly. And the shadows, surely, were darker here than on any other world that Grimes had ever visited, and seemed to possess a life of their own. But that was only imagination.

They walked steadily but carefully, watching where they put their feet, avoiding the vines and brambles that seemed deliberately to try to trip them. On either side of the rough track the vegetation was locked in silent, bitter warfare: indigenous trees and shrubs, importations from Earth and other worlds, and parasites upon parasites. In spite of the overly luxuriant growth the overweening impression was of death rather than of life, and the most readily identifiable scent on the chill air was that of decay.

They came to the outskirts of the city, picking their way over the tilted slabs of concrete, thrust up and aside by root and trunk, that had once been a road. Once the buildings between which it ran had been drably utilitarian; now the madly proliferating and destructive ivy clothed them in somber, Gothic splendor. An abandoned ground car, the glass of its headlights by some freak of circumstances unobscured, glared at them like a crouching, green-furred beast.

Grimes tried to imagine what this place had been like before its evacuation. Probably it had been very similar to any sizable town on Lorn or Faraway, Ultimo or Thule—architecturally. But there had been one difference, and a very important one. There had been the uncanny atmosphere, that omnipresent premonition of . . . Of . . . ? That fear of the cold and the dark, of the Ultimate Night. Other cities on other worlds had their haunted houses; here every house had been haunted.

He said, “The sooner young Farrell lifts ship off this deserted graveyard, the better.”

“At least it’s not raining,” Sonya told him, with an attempt at cheerfulness.

“Thank the odd gods of the galaxy for one small mercy,” grumbled Grimes.

“Talking of odd gods . . .” she said.

“What about them?”

“Sally Veerhausen, the Biochemist, told me that there’s a very odd church on a side street that runs off the main drag.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. It’s to the right, and it’s little more than an alley, and you turn into it just before you get to a tall tower with a latticework radio mast still standing on top of it. . .”

“That it there, to the right?”

“Must be. Shall we investigate?”

“What is there to investigate?” he asked.

“Nothing, probably. But I seem to recall a period when you exhibited a passion for what you referred to as freak religions. This could be one to add to your collection.”

“I doubt it,” he told her.

But after a few minutes’ careful walking they were turning off the main street, making their way along an alley between walls overgrown with the ubiquitous ivy that had been brought to the world by some long dead, homesick colonist.

The church was there.

It was only a small building, a masonry cube with its angles somehow and subtly wrong. And it was different from its neighbors. Perhaps the stone, natural or synthetic, from which it had been constructed possessed some quality, physical or chemical, lacking in the building materials in more general use. Its dull grey facade was unmarked by creeper, lichen or moss. Its door, grey like the walls, but of metal, was uncorroded. Over the plain rectangle of the entrance were the embossed letters in some matte black substance—TEMPLE OF THE PRINCIPLE.

Grimes snorted almost inaudibly. Then, “What Principle?” he demanded. “There have been so many.”

“Perhaps,” said Sonya seriously, “the greatest and most mysterious one of all.”

“The Golden Way? The greatest, I admit . . .”

“No. Sally got her paws onto such records as still exist—the vaults in the city hall kept their contents quite intact—and found out that there was a cult here that worshipped, or tried to worship, the Uncertainty Principle . . .”

“Mphm. Could have been quite a suitable religion for this world. Inexplicable forces playing hell with anything and everything, so, if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.”

“Or get the hell out.”

“Or get the hell out. But—who knows?—this freak religion might just have worked. Shall we go inside?”

“Why not?”

The door opened easily, too easily. It was almost as though they had been expected. But this, Grimes told himself, was absurd thinking. The officers from the ship who had found this place must have oiled the hinges. And had they done something about the lighting system too? It should have been dark inside the huge, windowless room, but it was not. The gray, subtly shifting twilight was worse than darkness would have been. It accentuated the wrongness of the angles where wall met wall, ceiling and floor. It seemed to concentrate, in a formless blob of pallid luminescence, over the coffin-shaped altar that stood almost in the middle of the oddly lopsided hall.
Almost
in the middle . . . Its positioning was in keeping with the rest of the warped geometries of this place.

“I don’t like it,” said Grimes. “I don’t like it at all.”

“Neither do I,” whispered Sonya.

Yet neither of them made any attempt to retreat to the comparative light and warmth and sanity of the alley outside.

“What rites did they practice?” whispered the Commodore. “What prayers did they chant? And to
what?
”

“I’d rather not find out.”

But still they did not withdraw, still, hand in hand, they advanced slowly toward the black altar, the coffin-shaped . . . coffin-shaped? No. Its planes and angles shifted. It was more of a cube. It was more than a cube. It was. . .

Grimes, knew, suddenly, what it was. It was a tesseract. And he knew, too, that he should never have come again to this world. Twice he had visited Kinsolving before, and on the second occasion had become more deeply involved than on the first. Whatever the forces were that ruled this planet, he was becoming more and more attuned to them.