I was standing in the topmost chamber looking at the Queen’s Soul, the crystalline star of ice blue, when the telltale touched my thigh with a warning I did not want to feel.
Somewhere close someone had fired a laser.
I jumped for the light, which I had set opposite the Queen’s Soul, to shine through it in the night. I switched it off and stood perfectly still. I heard nothing, only, again, the faint rustle of wind. Cautiously, I moved to an opening at the side of the chamber that lead out to a multilayered balcony of sorts, and stood without moving, listening to the night.
Why would anyone fire, except at me? I had no desire to be egotistical in this matter. There were lots of people I wouldn’t mind their firing at, but why would they fire, except at me?
The sandcat. They had disabled the sandcat and now they would be searching for me. The laser was cool in my fist and I hadn’t even been aware that I had drawn it.
I looked around me at the spires of crystal, some dark, some faintly shining against the stars. I didn’t want a laser battle in this temple. I didn’t want a laser battle anywhere. A laser fight is like a knife fight, or maybe a duel with sticks of dynablast, in that nothing gets out of it whole. I started back down through the crystal corridors, from blue room to blue room, from darkened chamber to cool, smooth pearl-walled room to the vast Star King’s Chamber with the hundreds of crystal stalactites that fell behind the thronelike place like a huge curtain. The names were all right out of the minds of the earliest explorers, but they often seem to fit with uncanny accuracy.
My gun touched a crystal growth and a tone sounded through the rooms and I froze. It seemed as loud as a dropped plate, but I heard no reaction. Had my telltale somehow malfunctioned, triggered by a bit of bounced radio waves? Had the crystals amplified something very distant?
I crept down, down, gun in hand, passing unseeing through fantastic glories, and finally felt sand under my boots. The sandcat was around to the right. Would they be waiting in ambush? Had they simply fired a pulse to hurry me to my only way out?
The palace was a dark, flat outline against the stars on this side. Only the spire tips and up-angled surfaces reflected the distant starlight. Everything else was impenetrable blackness.
I realized my grip on the laser was too tight and I flexed my fingers, feeling my heart pound, and imagining the adrenaline flow. Fear is when you are unsure of your own ability, said Shigeta in my memory’s ear Fear can be a weapon you use. The imagination of your enemy can be your ally.
Right, Shigeta. Where are you when I need you?
I moved along the curving wall, from chambered opening to sharp-edged arch. Again, as an overlay to the no-noise sounds of the night, I heard Shigeta speak.
It has become unfashionable amid these teeming billions to be a survival type. Fortunately survival types are not overly affected by such fashions and manage to go on doing that which they do best: to survive, even to survive being unfashionable. But was I a survival type? There had been times, yes, when I had been tested and thought that I was at least adequate. But the doubts crept in the armor chinks and ran down my mind like rivulets of sweat. A country or a planet that kills completely the killer in man will be destroyed by any other country, planet, or race that still has that ability. A civilization is created by maintaining a balance between the pragmatic savage and his power and the impractical dreamer.
Yes, but what do you do in the starlit night when some zongo wants to slice you to a few shovelfuls of meat?
Your subconscious is your best aid. Hunter and hunted are symbiotic. Both sets of senses are alert to the same stimuli. Anything may be a sign, a warning, a sense trigger. Often, you do not consciously recognize the warning, for it is in the subsconscious perceptions. Trust your instinctual reactions, for these instincts were the first you had and will be the last to go.
Suddenly, in the tense night I grinned. I remembered a beautiful black girl who had once told me, “If someone was after me I’d make sure not to trip.”
The sandcat was two openings away. I waited a long time without moving, hardly breathing, still unsure whether the laser telltale had been true or not. I heard nothing, nothing that had not been there earlier. I started to come around the crystal column to move toward the sandcat’s “garage.”
There was a tiny scrape of something on something, sand gritted under a hard surface. I froze, now fully exposed. I half expected a bright red light to pin me to death.
I heard the faintest of rustles, my ears stretching out over the distance, and I drew back, my feet silent on the soft sands. I stood with my back against the crystals, feeling them press into my warmsuit with a hundred sharp points.
Now what? I could get away in the darkness but at daylight they would find my tracks. I scanned the skies. Even to my inexperienced eyes, there seemed no hope of a sandstorm to give me cover. Besides, how would I live? All the food and water was in the sandcat, and it was a long way back to anywhere.
Could I hide in the Star Palace? Quickly I scanned my memory for what I knew of it, of the explorers’ tapes and the University of Tokyo’s fine film on it. There were lower depths, I thought. I vaguely remembered a single entrance in the bedrock, cut in the style of the Grand Hall, and some mention of older ruins below, a fragment of sentence about the possibility of the building having “grown” on a much older site.
I turned and went along the crystalline base and up the wide stairs, or what might be stairs, and into the Palace the only way I knew how to get in. I ran into several walls in the dark, and cut my cheek, then my elbow. I finally started using the light, dialed to pinpoint and on a low intensity.
It took me over an hour to find the spiral down. It was clogged with sand, and I could barely squeeze through into a small chamber of dark and rather pedestrian crystals. I dialed up the light and found the cut in the rock a little further on. I went back and smoothed over the sand by throwing handfuls back over my tracks. Then I went down into the bedrock.
There were rooms, all empty, all fairly equal in size, with nothing so complex as the triclinic openings and the spiraling open spaces of the fanciful structure high above me. There was the dust of ages and the simplicity of primitive building. It looked as though they had shaped existing caves or widened fractures in the rock.
I finally came to what seemed to be the last room and I stopped. I was tired, physically and emotionally. I sat down on a drifting dune of sand that perhaps had taken thousands of years to get this far down the complex. I lay back and closed my eyes.
Slowly I ran through the disciplines of relaxation, but not going quite so far as to close off my hearing. If they were coming, I wanted to know. I did not like the idea of death at all. I certainly did not welcome it as some do; to me, death was extinction, not a transition to a higher plane.
In a sudden, delayed thought it came to me that I had killed a man. Somehow it didn’t seem to me that I had. I hadn’t seen him dead, only injured. A wistful hope that they had lied to me persisted, but I knew they hadn’t.