Keflyn saw what he was steering toward. There was a herd of perhaps a couple of hundred large animals grazing their slow way through the deep grass. Her enhanced vision had already shown her that there were two similar species of animals gathered there. The largest group she recognized immediately as thark bison, also native of a very distant world and now domesticated throughout both Union and Republic space. The other, more massive beasts she did not recognize at all.
“Thark bison and Terran bison,” he explained. “The two types apparently get along quite well and often travel together. In the farther north, you will also find them living alongside beasts the Feldenneh tell me are the modern descendants of Terran musk ox. It took them a while to identify those two, since they now exist only here. At night you will hear the howls of the Terran wolves and the barks of the Callian herrimeyens that hunt them.”
“This world is a regular zoo,” Keflyn commented, watching the herd out of the skyvan’s side window as they moved past. In her own mind, this was proof enough that this had once been a major world. Domestic breeds were one thing, but no one imported something like a Kandian spark dragon or a herrimeyen except for exhibition. The sonic dragons were dangerous enough to have under any circumstances.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Addesin told her. “This is definitely the strangest world I’ve ever seen, but I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”
Five hundred centuries, especially under a cruel climate, could be disastrous to any civilization. It certainly had not done this planet any favors. Keflyn had spent a long day poking through the ruins that Jon Addesin had brought her to see, even employing her tremendous strength to do a fair amount of excavation, and all that she could say for certain was that the ruins of a large city lay beneath those rolling, sparsely wooded hills. Only the downtown section had once had buildings large enough that their crumbled remains were recognizable as anything that had never been a part of nature.
One thing that Keflyn had not discovered was evidence of battle. She had found stone, metal, and even glass that was shattered, crumbling, and corroded almost beyond recognition, but none of it burned or melted. Buildings had slowly collapsed in upon themselves, and some of the taller ones had even fallen, but she did not see any indication that they had been reduced by some tremendous explosion, or that a large blast such as a nuclear or conversion explosion had ever occurred anywhere in the area.
The frustrating part was that there was no real hint of the world this had once been, no hint of the personal lives of the people who had built this city or even any clear indication of their race. There was nothing she had seen to even prove that they had been indisputably human. There had been no doorways or windows left intact to suggest their shape or height, no furnishing buried beneath collapsed walls or roofs. Metal, except for the splintered remains of heavy beams, had been reduced to dust, and wood had been gone for ages.
Keflyn still felt the weight of incredible years that she had disturbed in the dust of these ruins. Her own race might not have even existed at the time when these buildings were new, before a recent river had cut this city nearly in two, and the Kelvessan were now a fairly old race in their own right. This place was so ancient, her investigation almost transcended archaeology into paleontology. She fancied that she would find dinosaur bones if she was to dig deeply enough.
“Once we knew what to look for from space, the
“I recall from the maps that most of the continent regions are actually removed from the equatorial areas,” Keflyn said, struggling with the primitive skills required in cooking over an open fire. Having lived her entire life in a spacecraft, she had never even seen a campfire before this.
“The map is a bit out of date, to say the least,” he told her. “The sea level is still many meters lower than it used to be, with a lot of water still locked into the remaining glaciers. There’s more land in the tropical regions than there used to be.”
“Then this used to be a much warmer world, even than it is now,” she concluded.
Jon Addesin had tried his best to be eager and cooperative. He apparently had not expected that she would spend an entire day digging in old ruins. He had tried to help her, but he had only been embarrassed to see her easily lift blocks of stone several times heavier than he could even begin to shift. The only high point of his day had been sneaking a peek at her while she had been washing the dust of the ruins off herself in a nearby pool. She wondered which had amazed him more, her four-armed body or the fact that she had been swimming in glacial meltwater.
Keflyn was beginning to feel very frustrated with the whole affair. She had been sent to find the clues that would lead the Starwolves to Terra itseff, only to find an impoverished, ancient world where every clue had been utterly destroyed under the weight of time and ice. All she had found was decayed blocks of stone, a Feldenneh with a fascination for a sexual affair with a Starwolf, and a human who was afraid he might get it in spite of himself.
At least she knew that this was almost certainly Alameda. “So now what?” Addesin asked, as if he had been following her thoughts.
She shook her head. “I do not see that I can ever make sense of this. It is a very big world, and we have very little time. I suppose that I can only call in the Starwolves and get the help I need to search this world thoroughly. Perhaps there is some structure or installation in this world that is buried but otherwise intact. The Methryn’s scanners would turn that up in minutes.”
“What are you looking for?” Addesin asked, then frowned. “Forbidden question. I forgot.”
He sat for a long moment, so obviously debating some question with himself so fiercely that Keflyn watched him. He did know something, that was obvious enough. She wondered if he would volunteer his little prize of information, or if she would have to force it out of him. One advantage to being a Starwolf was the ability to break just about anyone’s arm.
Maybe that was her father’s secret for dealing with people.
“As I say, you can spend the rest of your life just digging through ruins on this world,” he ventured at last. “Artifacts and ancient civilizations are one thing, but there is something here that has scared the Feldenneh half to death ever since they first found it. I promised them that I would take you to it, but I thought that you wanted to establish just which world this used to be first.”
“I know that this is Alameda,” she told him. “That was not the primary purpose of my mission, but I cannot accomplish anything more without the help of a Starwolf carrier. And I have my doubts even then that we will ever find what we are looking for, this world has been so thoroughly wrecked. I might just as well go to see this thing that scares Feldenneh. What is it?”
“That’s the surprise that we’ve been saving for you. And it’s so strange, I’m frankly hesitant to tell you about it because you might think that I’m either lying or simply insane. You’ll have to see this one for yourself.”
Another long day of flight had brought them to the far north of the eastern edge of the mid-continental mountains, on their way to very base of the towering face of the retreating glacier. They had long since returned to lands that, until relatively recent times, had been buried beneath the massive burdens of the continental glaciers. With such a complete lack of information on Alameda, Keflyn had no idea just how far the glaciers had extended at the time of the original colonization. She was only guessing that Alameda was still a colder world than it had been, since she hardly expected that humans would have established a major colony on a world that was so consistently cold. Jon Addesin disagreed with that assumption, pointing out that humans would live anywhere it profited them to live. She thought that might be true for a minor colony like Kanis, but hardly a major one.
Keflyn hoped that she was not just wasting her time. She had no limits set upon her, but she knew that she could not remain here for more than two or three weeks more at the most. And once the
And if this present little trip did not produce results, she was going to begin to get annoyed. Something was out here that the Feldenneh were very eager for her to see, but they were a very secretive folk, slow to give their trust and nearly as cautious with their own kind as with others. According to their own logic, it was infinitely
