|
35: The Seventh Plate
Balesso stared darkly at me. "Priest—come with us. We are going to explore the Anomaly to see how we can make it serve us."
On the transport, with all men on board, we took the Temporale spur to Mars. This spur, I should explain, exists in all time periods as a matter of routine Temporale and Time Train operations. It was the exact same spur we'd traveled in the luxurious liner of 2608 CC. It was the same spur on which we'd been ambushed in the disastrous 5004 Triber raid when Balesso had taken control. Now we took a ten hour ride, during which time I slept soundly. The medicines Taylor's people had given me uptime were still doing their work to cleanse and heal my body. I woke up feeling hungry and thirsty, but healed from the thigh shot.
"Isn't it beautiful," remarked none other than Balesso as he looked out the porthole over the shallow lakes and green vegetation covering the lowlands. The topography seemed very similar, and the water and trees reminded me of our partially terraformed world of 5004 CC. Under Tuttle's expert manipulation, the transport sailed through a Temporale pore, or gate. Tuttle sailed the transport directly to the Olympus caldera and settled down near the very same spot where I had spoken with Freddy Graniston the construction worker after whose clan my native city was named. It was the same spot where Sindi and Trini had picked me up in the Holy City. Now it was a totally empty head of red sandstone overlooking a bend in the river. The river was twice its size in my time.
Balesso's troops had their equipment out on the rocks. Tuttle paced about as if looking for something. The transport sat inertly on a flat spot with little wind devils racing around it in the thin but still breathable air under a tiny yellow sun. "It's down there," they said.
Balesso turned to Tuttle. "I want you to bring in whatever digging apparatus you have. I want to dig down there and empty that thing of Laars. They're in there, stacked a dozen high and a hundred deep, I'm sure they are. Why? Because in my wanderings years ago, I saw them go into their tomb. That's what the Anomaly is. I watched tow motors load their coffins by the dozen. They want to reawaken in the 5000s, after the Faraos are gone, and they want to take control again. I will save Mars from them."
Tuttle said: "It will take some days to bring in digging equipment."
Voreill said: "It seems to me we could use the transport and dig in through the river bed while we are waiting for the big equipment to arrive."
Tuttle shrugged. "Yes, I can help you there too. The transport is water-tight and crush-proof. I can nose her in and use the front scoops and other tools to see what I can do."
"Let me go with you to the sacred site," I said.
Balesso looked at me with a moment of rage crossing his dangerous eyes, while Voreill regarded me speculatively and said: "Now what would a priest of Mars the Divine want with a monument full of petrified aliens?"
I looked him straight in the eye, because I knew that a scoundrel like this was long on scheming but short on backbone. "I have religious training that may prove useful."
They both snorted at me, though caution got the better part of ridicule. Balesso said: "A bunch of chanting and empty curses? Priest, you fool..."
Voreill cocked his head thoughtfully to one side. "No, wait a minute. He may be right. Our religion consists of ceremonies for calling down warmth from the Sun, and Water from the Sky, which never comes...what if those things date back to a time when it did actually rain? What if there is some science buried in that mumbo-jumbo?"
I said: "We can stand here for hours debating. It won't kill you to let me sit in the transport while he digs down."
Balesso became suspicious once more. "You aren't thinking of tapping Tuttle on the skull and taking off on us, are you?"
Tuttle laughed. "He might tap me on the skull, but he can't go anywhere without me, especially trapped hundreds of feet underground."
"Let him go," Voreill said with a mix of mockery and opportunism in his eyes. "If nothing else, we won't have to keep an eye on him."
Several soldiers laughed.
Soon, Tuttle and I were alone in the craft and headed slowly into the water. It was my first time on the front side of the interior bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the crew or cargo space. Tuttle sat to my left in the pilot's seat, and I in a co-pilot seat. Instruments sprawled over the dash-panel before us, and over that was a thick viewport like in a spaceship. Sensors on the outside picked up light images and transmitted them through the transport's thick skin so they appeared on a display inside, imitating a broad windshield view like in a truck.
The transport hovered inches above the slime and ooze of the river as it turned slowly and started making a corkscrew motion. "We're not really going to dig through," Tuttle said. "We're going to slip sideways into the underverse a few feet, just far enough to get free of the rock strata, and then we'll drop down until we are just outside the Anomaly. I did a scan and found a pocket of soft clay we can poke through."
"I know you are still working for Taylor," I said.
"I know," Tuttle said. "He contacted me and said he had pulled you back to warn you."
"Whatever happens," I said, "this man cannot be allowed to rule Mars."
"We quite agree," Tuttle said. "The sad part is that history says he will become ruler, and be the second-worst tyrant in your history. The worst tyrant will be Voreill, who will murder him and take over the throne as absolute ruler. The question is just—how do we change that, if we can, without tipping the City of En over the edge?"
As we spoke, the craft descended slowly through a thick black sludge of greasy-looking macro-dots, or accretions of go-dots in the underverse that were held together by a kind of surface tension of stray energy from the universe visible to humans.
"At what point do you nudge him over the banana peel?" I asked.
"I don't know, to be honest. I'm playing it as it goes. Let's see what this alien tomb thing is all about. The only plan I have so far is that if it turns out we can't change the situation here, then he may not be able to carry through his plan. The Membrane has locked this huge metallic chamber into a netherworld status just this side of the underverse, and it seems to me whatever scheme he is hatching depends on getting it unlocked."
The craft nudged slightly to one side, and I saw black give way to damp grayish-brown clay as we re-entered the visible universe. Tuttle turned on a ping-scanner, whose return signature painted a picture resembling a pencil sketch of what lay before the transport. As Tuttle adjusted the export signal, the ping returns altered and slowly a clear image appeared. I recognized the huge structure trapped under the Holy City.
As engines whined and the transport skidded slightly in its place, I asked: "What are you doing?"
"Trying to see inside. They're blocking my signal but I'm going to kick it up."
The whine increased.
I gasped. Becoming visible was a figure lying on its back. It looked like a dead person, or someone in suspended animation, only it wasn't quite a person. The face was round, and its surface flat. It had only a pair of slits for nostrils, and no nose to speak of. The mouth, too, was a rudimentary slit. Where we have eyes, it had a pair of broad sensor surfaces, resembling the eyes of a fly with its many little cells to receive light. It had more than two arms—an array of them along its torso, extending down into longer limbs that might be legs.
"There are more of them," Tuttle said.
As dozens of such bodies in suspended animation became visible, he said: "Behold—the Laars."
I shook my head. "So what are we supposed to think? Somehow, the Membrane saw these people as a great danger to the future, and froze them in a state of near total entropy. Balesso thinks that if he can get in there and destroy them, this will unfreeze the Anomaly, which will then provide him with something he needs to control Mars in my time."
Tuttle shook his head. "It's not really apparent what Balesso plans."
I noticed a white object on the view screen. "What is that?"
"Good question." Tuttle changed the ping range in and out, and the image solidified on the screen. It was a metal plate appearing to lie loose in the clay outside the Anomaly. Tuttle used an exterior grappling arm to seize it and pull it inside. The radiation shield uttered a very low, safe buzzing sound as it probed for dangerous emanations.
"The coin map," I exclaimed as I looked at the vaguely oval plate with irregular edges, which might have been broken off from a larger metallic sheet. I quickly explained to Tuttle that I had seen this same pattern on the coin given me by Sam, and on subsequent coins of the type. "It is the map of the Holy Mother's liturgical circuit."
"Want me to extract it?"
"No, leave it. Just grab a closeup of the pattern."
|
