The Sea is Full of Stars

“It’s like a lot of things they left. Ever been in one of these ruins before?”

“When I was a kid, for a short time, yeah. Not since. I barely remember it.”

“Well, it’s kind of like a template more than the ruins of a great civilization. We have a nice roadbed here, but no surface, no signs or adornments, no clue as to who or what moved along it. Why have roads if you can teleport, as almost everybody thinks they could? In fact, why even have basic city outlines if you can be creative and imagine yourself in a palace? Two things are sure: they didn’t think like us, and they weren’t much like us physically, either. Also, they were sure nutty over the number six. Six six six. The biblical number of the Beast, my boy. The demigods who fell from Heaven.”

“I thought those were angels.”

“Angels, demigods, what’s the difference? All that one god stuff is only semantics. Word games. In Greece mighty Zeus ruled as supreme god atop Olympus, and then there were the subordinate gods with monstrous power as well— gods of the sea, gods of the air, gods of earth and fire. Gods of love and gods of hate. Even a god of wine and spirits. The Romans renamed ’em, but kept ’em pretty much the same. Jupiter was boss, Venus the love goddess, and so on. So what did the Hebrews do? They renamed them. The god in charge was God, and He was the only God, father of us all. But he had this whole race of superbeings with enormous godlike powers just like Zeus and Jupiter and the others did. Only they weren’t gods, no. They were renamed angels. Presto! Monotheism with no need to really change things. The angels of the Bible are credited with as much or more power than the lesser gods of Olympus. Word games, that’s all. It’s why I could never take ’em serious.”

Ari Martinez was thinking that he’d rather be in church then, praying to God and hoping He existed and heard, and he wouldn’t care one whit about semantics.

Jules Wallinchky started to breathe heavily halfway before they got to the city, and he called for a rest. He could hear his pulse pounding, and he didn’t like it.

“What’s wrong?” Ari asked him.

“I’m older and in worse shape than I thought,” the older man wheezed. “Just a minute, I’ll be okay.”

Why not have a heart attack now and make everybody else happy? Ari thought optimistically. At least maybe he can’t make it all the way on this crazy escape.

But after some water and a few minutes’ rest, Wallinchky got up and started walking again. He was feeling muscle cramps and a lot of joint pain as well, but he’d made this walk a hundred times in the past and he damned well was going to make it this one last time.

“Uncle Jules—where do you think this big ancient computer will take us?”

“Heaven, boy! Or Hell. Or maybe they’re the same place, eh?”

He’s gone nuts! My God! The boss of all the bosses has slipped over the edge!

The intercom came on with the voice of the compound’s central computer: “One person in suit has left the police courier boat and is heading toward you down the road.”

Wallinchky stopped. “Just one?”

“Yes. It appears to be the unknown one. I am unable to get complete information on him since the same field I am generating to protect you from surveillance also masks him to a degree. Also, there appears to be a great deal of non-native tissue and structure in him, possibly as much as in the two we did who are now with you.”

“You mean it’s artificial?”

“No. But it has a lot of artificial parts, much of it new.”

“Is it closing fast?”

“No. He appears to be walking at a normal pace. He will, of course, catch up with you if you remain where you are, but it is clear that this is not his intent.” There was a pause. “Now the second one has left the ship, but he is not following. He appears to have a maglev bike with him. I suspect he is going to use it to circle around and come in from a different angle.”

“Keep me posted,” Wallinchky ordered, and started to move again.

The road was now well sunk into the bedrock, with smooth walls on either side. It was never deep, but close to two meters down by the time it reached the ruins.

Stepping into those ruins gave an eerie feeling even to the big man; for Ari it was nothing short of overpowering.

The city was huge—it only began where it could be seen from the compound; now, he could see it stretched out as far as the eye could see in all directions. It was impossible to say how many of those ancient beings lived and worked here, but the idea that there might have been hundreds of thousands on this world once, so very long ago, wasn’t out of the bounds of possibility, and a million could not be rejected.

“It—It kind of takes your breath away,” Ari commented, gaping. “I don’t remember the one I was in being this big.”

“It’s geometric, too,” his uncle told him. “The shape is a giant hexagon, that six stuff again. There are six main roads that run along the angles. We’re hitting at a corner—that’s why it doesn’t seem so big when you look at it from the house.”

“What do we do now?”

“We follow the road all the way to the big area in the center that must have been real important, since it’s a hexagon, too. We’re gonna set up right in the center of the old town and then we’re gonna turn this baby on and see what happens.”

It’s going to kill us, you old bastard! You’ve lived your life, but I haven’t even started! Ari looked frantically around. Maybe he could run. Maybe when they turned it on he could use this vast alien ruin and just hide until whatever was done, if anything, was done.

The city wasn’t properly a ruin, though, not as he thought of ruins. There were no crumbling structures, no bashed-in statuary or ornate columns holding up nothing. What was here was totally intact, and where something almost certainly stood that stood there no longer, it had left not even dust.

The houses were huge, formed out of some sort of rock or synthetic stuff that made it look like striped marble and alabaster tinted not yellow or pink, but pale green with sapphire-blue threads. There were no doors, but the doorways were a good three meters high and were oddly shaped, from a base of no more than a meter or so, extending out at thirty degree angles to a wide point, then coming back in and going to the top, which was slightly rounded and not much wider than the base. The doors were clearly never designed for Terrans, nor for anything at all anybody ever knew.

“Notice that even the doorways have six sides, although they ain’t hexagons,” Jules Wallinchky noted. “Kinda makes you think they looked like giant turnips. Wouldn’t that be something? Findin’ out that they were vegetables? Giant thinking veggies. I don’t think we’ve ever come across anything like that.”

“Yeah, well, maybe in their time the vegetables ate us,” Ari grumped worriedly.

Jules Wallinchky laughed. “Cheer up, nephew! I don’t think we’re gonna die, but if we do, then today is as good as any to do it! If you don’t lose that fear of death, then you can never appreciate life or take the chances life gives you.”

The old boy was breathing hard, but his spirits seemed high. Too high for his nephew’s tastes.

It took much longer, with more breaks, to reach the city center. The computer reported that the man on the maglev bike was far to their left and had halted short of that entrance to the city. The other continued to follow them, but at a distance.

“O’Leary on the bike is playing pickup,” Wallinchky noted. “He’s not gonna get himself wrapped in our doings. He’s gonna wait just outside and come in when whatever’s done is done, mostly to pick up the pieces. Since nobody’s likely to be pouring in from space blowing us and the city to bits, he should be able to just pick up our gadget and leave. Very convenient.”

The grand mansions, shaped with their own odd angles, went on and on, but as perplexing were the open areas, which were prevalent. The roads inside seemed to follow a definite logical grid, but there were empty lots all over the place, some of great size, smooth as glass and made out of the same stuff as the houses. Something was supposed to be there, or had been there, but there wasn’t a clue as to what. The empty lots weren’t intended to be built on later, though; they were spaced too regularly, and were too different in size and shape from the blocks of houses, to be fill-ins and afterthoughts.

No streetlights, no signs, no cartouches, nor so much as an ornate doorknob or something that might have