Then he closed his eyes, slid the rest of the way down the wall, and expired. Upon which Ruslan, beyond frustrated, beyond angry, clenched his fists and cursed the sky before howling at the newly dead body before him.
“You can’t die! You can’t!” His youthful self looked around wildly. At the lingering corpses. At the dead city. “Don’t leave me alone! Don’t, don’t!”
He pounded on the thin, motionless chest until his hands hurt. It didn’t do any good. The brain didn’t function, the heart didn’t start. It wasn’t fair! To meet someone else, to encounter another living person, only to have them greet you with a dying farewell.
Afterward came the guilt. Why should he be spared? Why out of the thousands, the millions, did he continue to live? His health stayed good, his mind sound. Several times, overcome by despair, he had contemplated killing himself. Why live on alone only to die among the greater loneliness that surrounded him? Why had he been singled out to become the last old man?
Then the Myssari exploration team had found him. Their astonishment at encountering a surviving human far outpaced his own at the sight of their trisymmetrical bodies. After centuries and ages of his kind searching the cosmos, he was the first human to encounter an intelligent alien species, and the last. He let them take him (not that, courteous though they were, they gave him any choice). He let them keep him alive. To remember, and to dream.
He woke up to the soothing sounds of a cloisteram stream: not quite strings, not quite woodwinds, all reminiscent of spring and running water—aural honey. He did not remember when reminiscence had replaced apprehension, but he was glad of the change. Better to lie abed in the grasp of old bad memories than incomprehensible nightmare realities. Humming softly, the lid of his deuomd retracted toward his feet and out of sight.
When he sat up, the first thing he did was silently salute someone he would never meet.
All praise to the snapweft.
He tried to push out the thought as forcefully as he could. Whether even a twinge of it was received, or perceived, or otherwise picked up by the half-Myssari, half-machine pilot he did not know. A slight shiver passed through him. Just cooler air outside the capsule, he told himself.
Less activity eddied around him than he had anticipated. Only a few other pods had opened to permit their denizens egress. As soon as he could stand he vented his curiosity on Kel’les.
“There is no reason for them to come out of stasis. Most will not do so until the ship arrives at their intended destination.”
“Then what’s the story behind these?” He indicated the clutch of awakened who were presently shuffling off in the direction of a nearby corridor. Bac’cul and Cor’rin were among them, chatting energetically. “Are they all assigned to work down on the planetary surface?”
Two of his minder’s hands gestured elaborately, though it was not quite an explanation. “Some are, certainly. But there are those for whom a stop at a previously unvisited world is worth being roused from stasis, if only to garner a glimpse of it from orbit.” S’he extended a third hand. “Come, Ruslan. We must go one way and our supplies another.”
The human trailed slightly behind. “Will we be in the first group to go down?”
Kel’les looked back at him, almost facing him. “There is no teleport system here. No string of linked platforms like we used to reach the ship from Myssar’s surface. The Myssari presence is modest and wholly scientific in nature. The demands required to construct and sustain even the most basic, conjoined teleport system would cost more than maintaining the entire scientific outpost. We will descend to the surface via the ship’s cargo transporter.”
That seemed fitting. He’d thought of himself as little other than cargo ever since the Myssari had recovered him.
Treth was beautiful from orbit. Ruslan had never traveled off-world until the Myssari had found him, but he’d had access to millions of stored images of other worlds. He did not specifically remember looking at or reading information about Treth, but with dozens of human-settled worlds to choose from and thousands of uninhabited others, it was hardly surprising that he should fail to recall a specific one.
Nor was there anything especially distinctive about the blue-green-brown orb turning slowly beneath the great interstellar craft and its much smaller orbit-to-surface transporter. The oceans Yah’thom had promised were smaller than those on Seraboth, the mountain ranges less imposing, the deserts widely scattered. It could have been Earth and he would not have known it. That it was called Treth was proof of nothing. With the passage of time, names change as readily as does history.
Though he was in excellent health, additional precautions were taken to ensure his safe arrival. Dropping from orbit via a cargo transporter could sometimes be rough. Wouldn’t do to damage their prize specimen. There were straps and pads and sensors, so much so that he felt far more confined than he had within the deuomd.
The descent to the surface was cheerily anachronistic: all bumps and bangs, sideways slews and howling, as flowmetal and composite squabbled with atmosphere. The discomfort went away as soon as the transporter touched down. Kel’les was at his side almost instantly, unpacking him. There was a dose of medicine, a shaky but increasingly steady trek down several corridors, further descent via a mechanical lift, and then he was standing on the surface of a new world. His third.
Visually it was anticlimactic. Low hills off to the right dusted with vegetation that was reassuring shades of green. Ordinary dirt underfoot. A sky that shaded to yellow but was blue enough to be comforting. Ahead and to the left, the ruins of a once extensive metropolis. Even at a distance he could clearly make out crumbling towers and collapsed domes among the rest of the decomposing, verdure-encrusted infrastructure. Wherever intelligence fled, Nature took over. In that, conditions on Treth were no different from those on Seraboth. He felt almost at home.
A driftec was waiting for them, hovering a handsbreadth above the ground. Glancing upward, he saw no sign of the orbiting starship. When the next might arrive here he did not know and it did not matter. He had no control over such things and had not for some time now. It had been many years since he had been the captain of his ship.
Not a good attitude with which to begin, he chided himself. A little optimism, if you please. They were here to find something that might lead them to old Earth. If nothing else, it should be an invigorating change from daily life on super-civilized Myssar.
The driftec was composed of completely transparent ripples. Looking toward the stern, one could see its drive and other components encased in something like clear jelly. As soon as everyone and the first load of supplies were aboard, the driver activated the craft’s systems. From a handsbreadth it rose to the height of Ruslan’s waist, turned, and accelerated silently toward the ruined city.
On the way, they passed several lines of enormous trees that rose higher than anything he knew from Seraboth. At intervals the massive growths extruded branches that themselves were greater in diameter than most of the plants with which he was familiar. Each bole was topped by a crown of dark pink tendrils that waved in the wind. The straight lines in which the trees grew were a strong indication they had been planted here, perhaps to impressively flank some long-disintegrated boulevard leading to the city. Wrestling for sun-space among the massive trunks and exposed roots was a riot of lesser, opportunistic vegetation.
Of native fauna he saw nothing, though Bac’cul assured him it was present. “Some of it is hostile. Keep that in mind if while we are here you are tempted to wander off on your own.”