“Rann,” Ling cut in, her voice grown hushed. “These slabs may not have belonged to Ro-kenn or Ro- pol.”
“Who then? You deny ever seeing them before. Neither have I. That leaves …”
He blinked, then pounded a heavy fist on the wooden slats. “We must crack this thing! Ling, let us commence unleashing the unit’s entire power on finding the key.”
Lark stepped forward. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“You seek disease cures for your fellow savages? Well, the Jophur ship squats on the ruins of our station, and our ship is held captive. This may be your only chance.”
Clearly, Rann had another reason for his sudden zeal. Still, everyone apparently wanted the same thing — for now.
Lester looked unhappy, but he gave permission with a nod, returning to his vigil over the sensor stones.
We’re doing it for you, Uthen, Lark thought.
Moments later, he had to retreat several more steps as space above the prehistoric computer grew crowded. In-numerable glyphs and signs collided like snowflakes in an arctic blizzard. The Buyur machine was applying prodigious force of digital intellect to solving a complex puzzle.
As Rann worked — hands darting in and out of the pirouetting flurry — he wore an expression of simmering rage. The kind of resentful anger that could only come from one source.
Betrayal.
A midura passed before the relic computer announced preliminary results. By then Lester Cambel was worn out. Perspiration stained his tunic and he wheezed each breath. But Lester would let no one else take over watching the sensor stones.
“It takes long training to sense the warning glows,” he explained. “Right now, if I relax my eyes in just the right way, I can barely make out a soft glow in a gap between two of the bottommost stones.”
Long training? Lark wondered as he peered into the fragile pyramid, quickly making out a faint iridescence, resembling the muted flame that licked the rim of a mulching pan when a dead traeki was boiled, rendering the fatting rings for return to Jijo’s cycle.
Cambel went on describing, as if Lark did not already see.
“Someday, if there’s time, we’ll teach you to perceive the passive resonance, Lark. In this case it is evoked by the Jophur battleship. Its great motors are now idling, forty leagues from here. Unfortunately, even that creates enough background noise to mask any new disturbance.”
“Such as?”
“Such as another set of gravitic repulsors … moving this way.”
Lark nodded grimly. Like a rich urrish trader with two husbands in her brood pouches, big starships carried smaller ships — scrappy and swift — to launch on deadly errands. That was the chief risk worrying Lester.
Lark considered going back to watch the two Daniks work, invoking software demons in quest of a mathematical key. But what good would he do staring at the unfathomable? Instead, he bent close to the stones, knowing each flicker to be an echo of titanic forces, like those that drove the sun.
For a time he sensed no more than that soft bluish flame. But then Lark began noticing another rhythm, matching the mute shimmer, beat by beat. The source throbbed near his rib cage, above his pounding heart.
He slid a hand into his tunic and grabbed his amulet — a fragment of the Holy Egg that hung from a leather thong. It was warm. The pulselike cadence seemed to build with each passing dura, causing his arm to vibrate painfully.
What could the Egg have in common with the engines of a Galactic cruiser? Except that both seem bent on troubling me till I die?
From far away, he heard Rann give an angry shout. The big Danik pounded the table, nearly toppling the fragile stones.
Cambel left to find out what Rann had learned. But Lark could not follow. He felt pinned by a rigor that spread from his fist on up his arm. It crossed his chest, then swarmed down his crouched legs.
“Uh-huhnnn…”
He tried to speak, but no words came. A kind of paralysis robbed him of the will to move.
Year after year he had striven to achieve what came easily to some pilgrims, when members of all Six Races sought communion with Jijo’s gift — the Egg, that enigmatic wonder. To some it gave a blessing — guidance patterns, profound and moving. Consolation for the predicament of exile.
But never to Lark. Never the sinner.
Until now.
But instead of transcendent peace, Lark tasted a bitter tang, like molten metal in his mouth. His eardrums scraped, as if some massive rock were being pushed through a tube much too narrow. Amid his confusion, gaps in the sensor array seemed like the vacuum abyss between planets. The gemstones were moons, brushing each other with ponderous grace.
Before his transfixed eyes, the silken flame grew a minuscule swelling, like a new shoot budding off a rosebush. The new bulge moved, detaching from its parent, creeping around the surface of one stone, crossing a gap, then moving gradually upward.
It was subtle. Without the heightened sensitivity of his seizure, Lark might not have noticed.
Something’s coming.
But he could only react with a cataleptic gurgle.
Behind Lark came more sounds of fury — Rann throwing a tantrum over some discovery. Figures moved around the outraged alien … Lester and the militia guards. No one paid Lark any mind.
Desperately, he sought the place where volition resides. The center of will. The part that commands a foot to step, an eye to shift, a voice to utter words. But his soul seemed captive to the discolored knob of fire, moving languidly this way.
Now that it had his attention, the flicker wasn’t about to let him go.
Is this your intent? he asked the Egg, half in prayer and half censure.
You alert me to danger … then won’t let me cry a warning?
Did another dura pass — or ten? — while the spark drifted around the next stone? With a soft crackle it crossed another gap. How many more must it traverse before reaching the top? What sky-filling shadow would pass above when that happened?
Suddenly, a huge silhouette did loom into Lark’s field of view. A giant, globelike shape, vast and blurry to his fixed, unfocused gaze.
The intruding object spoke to him.
“Uh … Sage Koolhan?… You all right, sir?”
Lark mutely urged the intruder closer. That’s it, Jimi. A bit more to the left…
With welcome abruptness, the flame vanished, eclipsed by the round face of Jimi the Blessed — Jimi the Simpleton — wearing a worried expression as he touched Lark’s sweat-soaked brow.
“Can I get ya somethin’, Sage? A drink o’ water mebbe?”
Freed of the hypnotic trap, Lark found volition at last … waiting in the same place he always kept it.
“Uhhhh …”
Stale air vented as he took gasping breath. Pain erupted up and down his crouched body, but he quashed it, forcing all his will into crafting two simple words.
“ … ever’body … out!”
EWasx
THEY ACT QUICKLY ON THEIR PROMISES, DO THEY not, my rings?
Do you see how soon the natives acquiesced to our demands?
You seem surprised that they moved so swiftly to appease us, but I expected it. What other decision was possible, now that their so-called sages understand the way things are?
Like you lesser rings, the purpose of other races is ultimately to obey.
• • •
HOW DID THIS COME ABOUT? you ask.
