ANCIENT HOME

1563 4D

Andrew clenched his fist around the stem; the flower closed its bloom. “Is it true? They’re gone?”

Onnhasshakh answered, “Yes. Only we few move on past the closure.” Her eyes danced light. “Where now?”

Andrew‘s grip eased. “I want to see Ezzar and Grendel, and my children, and all that has happened.”

“So you return to the blade’s edge?”

He took a deep breath. So much gone. “Yes. The child said I have work to do.” He gently shifted the stem, and his belly lightened. “The relocs. I want to see what has happened.”

“A good beginning.”

He moved the stem, and the ship wheeled; mountains shot away beneath them as he headed north. They swooped in on a long line of dark dots in the snow, straggling up a long mountain pass. He brought the ship in beside a four-abreast line of marchers, large packs bowing them down as they trudged onward. None were moving.

“Gods and stars. They’re all dead.” He looked closer; every person in the line was frozen in place, faces rotting blue-black. Ragged coats and wraps trailed in the unrelenting wind. Heaps of snow marked others, fallen.

Fueled by Turiosten and Onnhasshakh, he and Jeddin descended to the ship’s loading bays, floundered out through the bitter wind and ice, catalogued, searched, examined, counted, took the ship on to another pass, and then another; his rage gathered into a grim chill of hatred for the ones who had done this. As he drew close to one child, he shivered. What had seemed a great smile on its small dark face was the exposed surfaces of its teeth — the lips had peeled away.

They would need days, months, years, to count and name all the men, women and children left here to be the indifferent statuary of death.

No guards had stayed to die with them.

At last, his belly overfull with the horror of it all: “How do I find that shaft at the City top?”

Onnhasshakh said, “The ship will find its own home, now. We need no masquerade of equipment and facilities. Let it guide you.”

Andrew lightened his hold on the stem to a bare touch; it pressed this way and that, and he gave way. “It’s going into the rock!”

“Yes. Let it seek.” The ship plunged, held, then settled; the walls around Andrew darkened into the familiar blackness of a deep, lightless tunnel. The radiance from Onnhasshakh and Turiosten and Arhnhashokha did not lighten it.

“But we’ll be embedded in rock. How do we get out?” The walls shifted; the darkness seemed to intensify.

“Wait.”

All movement stopped; the walls leaped to light once more, but now Andrew saw scenes of forest and plain, animals of indescribable variety roaming and flying in a wealth of life. in the panoramic light, Andrew saw in the chamber a huge table; at its far end stood a vast pair of deeply-detailed steel doors, of the same kind he had seen at Engrammatic but far more complex and beautiful. This was jadronarr work at its finest.

On one wall hung a shrouded box; on the other, facing it, an image with its display lamps darkened.

“Where are we?” Nazrelo picked himself up and massaged his temples. Marande and the other fighters groaned, clambered to their feet.

“I don’t know.” Andrew released the flower easily and stood. “We’re in the City — the ship found this place.”

Jeddin strode to the head of the table, opposite Andrew. His words were Onnhasshakh‘s. “This is a confluence of innerspace and your world, strengthened by qaqanhialh. It is the ancient home of this ship. Illuminate the image.”

Marande found the lamps and activated the image. It was a portrait of Arlen, smiling out at them. She said, “This is Arlen‘s great chamber, the one he took from the City many years ago. Did he know?”

“The ship has not been here since before the Colonization,” Jeddin said, again as Onnhasshakh. “He would only see the worldly images the walls would give. Now they belong to the ship’s mind again.”

Andrew remembered Frintar and the government. New battles lay ahead. “We will negotiate a peace here. I would like to show the government and the corps what we have seen.”

“We were unconscious,” said Marande. “What did you see?”

Andrew explained their voyage.

“Do they know we are here?” Nazrelo asked.

His feet still damp from the deadly snows, Andrew strode to the great doors and drew them open onto a darkened reception room. “They will.”