"Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Chapter 26 Kimera’s Breath

Soon after the Upright hunt, de Bonneville disappeared. Nemoto warned Malenfant not to ask too many questions.

On his own, Malenfant wandered around the court, the streets outside, even out into the country. But he learned little.

He found it hard to make any human contact. The Waganda were incurious — even of his sleek biocomposite coverall, a gift from the Bad Hair Day space twins, an artifact centuries of technological advancement ahead of anything here.

Most definitely, he did not fit in here. Madeleine Meacher had warned him it would be like this.

Anyhow, he tired quickly, and his hand still ached. Maybe those Bad Hair Day twins hadn’t done as good a job on him as they thought.

The days wore on, and his mind kept returning to de Bonneville. When he thought about it, Pierre de Bonneville — for all he was an asshole — was the only person in all this dead-end world who had tried to help him, to give him information. And besides, de Bonneville was a fellow star traveler who was maybe in trouble in this alien time.

So he started campaigning, with the Kabaka and Nemoto in her role as the katekiro, to be allowed to see de Bonneville.

After a few days of this, Nemoto summoned Malenfant from his villa. Impatient and reluctant, she said she had been ordered to escort Malenfant to de Bonneville. It turned out he was being held in Kimera’s Engine, the mysterious construct buried in the hillside at the heart of this grass-hut capital.

“I do not advise this, Malenfant.”

“Why? Because it’s dangerous? I’ve seen de Bonneville. I know how ill he is—”

“Not just that. What do you hope to achieve?” She looked at him out of eyes like splinters of lava; she seemed sunk in bitterness and despair. “I survive, as best I can. That’s what you must do. Find a place here, a niche you can defend. What else is there? Hasn’t your hop-and-skip tour of a thousand years taught you that much?”

“If that’s what you believe, why do you want my pressure suit?”

She coughed into a handkerchief; he saw the cloth was speckled by blood. “Malenfant—”

“Take me to de Bonneville.”

Accompanied by a couple of guards, Nemoto led Malenfant from the palace compound, and out into Rubaga. They followed streets, little more than tracks of dust, that wound between the grass huts.

After a while the huts became sparser, until they reached a place where there were no well-defined roads, no construction. The center of the plateau — maybe a kilometer in diameter and fringed by huts — was deserted: just bare rock and lifeless soil, free of grass, bushes, insects or bird song. Even the breeze from Lake Victoria seemed suppressed here.

It looked, he thought, as if a neutron bomb had gone off.

They marched on into this grim terrain. Nemoto was silent, her resentment apparent in every gesture and step.

Malenfant had been ill during the night and hadn’t gotten much sleep. He was feeling queasy, shivering. And the landscape didn’t help. The ground here was like a little island of death in the middle of this African ocean of life.

At last they reached the heart of the central plain. They came to a wide, deep well set in the ground. There were steps cut into the rock, spiraling into the ground around the cylindrical inner face of the well. In the low light of the morning Malenfant could see the steps for the first fifty meters or so, beyond that only darkness.

Nemoto began to clamber down the steps. She walked like the stiff old woman she had become, her gaudy court plumage incongruous in the shadows. Malenfant followed more slowly.

He wished he had a gun.

Within a few minutes they’d come down maybe thirty meters — the open mouth of the well was a disc of blue sky, laced with high clouds — and Nemoto rapped on a wooden door set in the wall.

The door opened. Beyond, Malenfant saw a lighted chamber, a rough cube dug out of the rock, lit up by rush torches. At the door stood one of the Kabaka’s guards. He was a pillar of bone and muscle, overlaid by fat and leathery skin. Nemoto spoke briefly, and the guard, after a hostile inspection of Malenfant, let them through.

The room was surprisingly large. The heat was intense, and the smoke from wall-mounted torches was thick, despite air passages cut into the walls. But the smoke couldn’t mask the sweet stenches of vomit, of corrupt and decaying flesh. Malenfant grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket and held it over his face.

Pallets of wood and straw, covered by grimy blankets, were arranged in rows across the floor, and Malenfant had to step between them to make his way. Maybe half of the pallets were occupied. The eyes that met Malenfant’s flickered with only the dullest curiosity.

The invalids all seemed wasted by the disease that had afflicted de Bonneville, to a greater or lesser degree. Patches of skin were burned to blackness, and there were some people with barely any skin left at all. Malenfant saw heads free of hair — even eyelashes and eyebrows were missing as if burned off — and there were limbs swollen to circus-freak proportions, as well as broken and bleeding mouths and nostrils. There were attendants here, but as far as Malenfant could see they were all Uprights: Homo Erectus, reconstructed genetic fossils, tall and naked and golden furred, moving between the sick and dying. There seemed to be no real medical care, but the Uprights were giving out water and food — some kind of thin soup — and they murmured comfort in their thin, consonant-free voices to the ill.

It was like a field hospital. But there had been no war: and besides there were women and children here.

At last Malenfant found de Bonneville. He lay sprawled on a pallet. He stared up, his face swollen and burned beyond expression. “Malenfant — is it you? Have you any beer?” He reached up with a hand like a claw.

Malenfant tried to keep from backing away from him. “I’ll bring some. De Bonneville, you got worse. Is this a hospital?”

He made a grisly sound that might have been a laugh. “Malenfant, this is… ah… a dormitory. For the workers, including myself, who service the yellow-cake.”

“Yellow-cake?”

“The substance that fuels the Engine of Kimera…” He coughed, grimacing from the pain of his broken mouth, and shifted his position on his pallet.

“What’s wrong with you? Is it contagious?”

“No. You need not fear for yourself, Malenfant.”

“I don’t,” Malenfant said.

De Bonneville laughed again. “Of course you don’t. Indeed, nor should you. The illness comes from contact with the yellow-cake itself. When new workers arrive here, they are as healthy as you. Like that child over there. But within weeks, or months — it varies by individual, it seems, and not even the strongest constitution is any protection — the symptoms appear.”

“De Bonneville, why did they send you back here?”

“I have a propensity for offending the Kabaka, Malenfant, most efficiently and with the minimum of delay. So here I am again.”

“You’re a prisoner?”

“In a way. The guards ensure that the workers are kept here until such time as the Kimera sickness takes hold of their limbs and complexion. Then one is free to wander about the town without hindrance.” He touched his blackened cheeks; a square centimeter of skin came loose in his fingers, and he looked at this latest horror without shock. “The stigmata of Kimera’s punishment are all too obvious,” he said. “None will approach a yellow-cake worker, and certainly none will feed or succor him. And so there is no alternative, you see, but to return to the Engine, where at least food and shelter is provided, there to serve out one’s remaining fragment of life…”

“Who is Kimera?”

“Ah, Kimera!” he said, and he threw back his ravaged head. Kimera, it turned out, was a mythical figure: a giant of Uganda’s past, so huge that his feet had left impressions in the rocks. “He was the great-grandson of Kintu, the founder of Uganda, who came here from the north; and it was Wanpamba, the great-great-grandson of Kimera, who first hollowed out the hill of Rubaga and entombed the soul of Kimera here…” And so forth: a lot of poetical, mythical stuff, but little in the way of hard fact. “You know, they had to reconstruct these old myths from the last encyclopedias, for the people had forgotten them — but don’t let the Kabaka hear you say it…” De Bonneville’s eyes closed, and he sank back, sighing.

Nemoto, nervous, plucked at Malenfant’s sleeve. Her mime was obvious. Time was up; they should go; this was an unhealthy place.

Malenfant didn’t see what choice he had. All the way out, Malenfant was aware of de Bonneville’s gaze, locked on his back.

Outside the grisly dormitory, Malenfant peered into the deeper blackness of the well. “Nemoto, what’s down there?”

“Danger. Death. Malenfant, we must leave.”

“It is the Engine of Kimera, whatever the hell that is. You know, don’t you? Or you think you know. Rubaga has the only significant radiation-anomaly signature on Earth…”

Her face was as expressionless as her Moon-rock Buddha’s. “If you want to fry your sorry skin, Malenfant, you can do it by yourself.” She turned and walked off, leaving him with the guard.

The guard looked at him quizzically. Malenfant shrugged, and pointed downward.

He walked to the ledge’s rim — a sheer drop into darkness, no protective rail of any kind — and leaned over. There seemed to be a breeze blowing down from above, rustling over the back of his neck, into the pit itself, as if there were a leak in the world down there. Now, he couldn’t figure that out at all. Where was the air going? Was there a tunnel, some kind of big extractor?

The only light came from the flames of rush torches, flickering in that downward breeze, and Malenfant’s impressions built up slowly.

He made out a large heap of ore, crushed to powder, contained within a rough open chamber hollowed out of the stone. Maybe that ore was the yellow-cake de Bonneville had talked about. Long spears of what appeared to be charcoal — like scorched tree trunks — stuck out of the heap from all sides and above. Water was carried in channels in the walls and pipes of clay, and poured into the heart of the heap. He guessed the heap contained a hundred tons of yellow-cake; there were at least forty charred trunks protruding from it.

The chamber was full of people.

There were a lot of tall Uprights, many squat habilines, and some Waganda: men, women, and children who limped doggedly through the darkness, intense heat, and live steam, serving the heap as if it were some ugly god. They hauled at the charcoal trunks, drawing them from the yellow-cake, or thrust them deeper inside. Or else they hauled simple wheelbarrows of the yellow-cake powder to and from the heap, continually replenishing it. Their illness was obvious, even from here. Peering down from far above, it was like looking over some grotesque anthill, alive with motion.

The heap was intensely hot — Malenfant could feel its heat burning his face — and the water emerged from the base of the heap as steam, which roared away through a further series of pipes. There was a lot of leakage, though, and live steam wreathed the heap’s ugly contours.

The principle was obvious. The heap was an energy source. The steam produced by the heap must, by means of simple pumps and other hydraulic devices, power the various gadgets he’d witnessed: Mtesa’s ascending throne, the fountains. Maybe the water that passed through the system was itself pumped up from some deeper water table by the motive power of the steam.

There had to be a lot of surplus energy, though.

And now he made out a different figure, emerging from some deeper chamber at the base of the pit. It was a woman. She looked like a cross between a habiline and an Upright: big frame, thick neck, head thrust forward. She was wearing a suit, of some translucent plastic, that enclosed her body, hands, and head. She was familiar to him, from a hundred TV shows and school-book reconstructions. She was Neandertal: another of humanity’s lost cousins.

Holy shit, he thought.

There was a flash of light from the hidden chamber, from some invisible source.

It was blue, a shade he recognized.

Neandertals, and pressure suits, and electric blue light. Unreasoning fear stabbed him.

He got out of there as fast as he could.

The next day Malenfant visited de Bonneville again. Malenfant brought him a small bottle of pombe; de Bonneville fell on this avidly, jealously hiding it from the other inmates of the ward. Malenfant wanted to ask about the Engine, but de Bonneville had his own tale to tell.

“Listen, Malenfant. Let me tell you how I came to this pass. It started long before you arrived…”

De Bonneville told him that a gift had arrived for Mtesa, the emperor, from Lukongeh, king of the neighboring Ukerewe. There had been five ivory tusks, fine iron wire, six white monkey skins, a canoe large enough for fifty crew — and Mazuri, an Upright girl, a comely virgin of fourteen, a wife suitable for the Kabaka.

“Mtesa’s harem numbers five hundred. Mtesa has the pick of many lands; and many of the harem are, as I can testify, of the most extraordinary beauty. But of them all, Mazuri was the comeliest.”

“I think I saw her in the palace. Mtesa likes her.”

“She has—” De Bonneville waved his damaged hands in a decayed attempt at sensuality. “ — she has that animal quality of the Uprights. That intensity. When she looks you in the eyes, you see direct into her primeval soul. Do you know what I’m talking about, Malenfant?”

“Yes. But I’m a hundred years old,” Malenfant said wistfully.

“Mazuri was young, impetuous, impatient at her betrothal to Mtesa — a much older man, and lacking the vigor of her own kind…”

De Bonneville fell silent, in a diseased reverie.

“Tell me about the Engine.”

“The Waganda say the yellow-cake is suffused with the Breath of Kimera,” de Bonneville said, dismissive. “It is the Breath that supplies the heat. But a given portion of yellow-cake is eventually exhausted of its Breath, and we must extract and replace the cake, continually.”

“What about the tree trunks?”

“We must insert and extract the trunks, according to the instructions of—” He quoted a term Malenfant didn’t know, evidently a sort of foreman. “The Breath is invisible and too rapid to have much effect — except on the human body, apparently, which it ravages! The tree trunks are inserted to slow down the Breath from the heart of the heap. Do you see? Then it gets to work on the rest of the yellow-cake. And that is, in turn, encouraged to produce its own Breath in response. It’s like a cascade, you see. But the Waganda can control this, by withdrawing their charred trunks; this has the effect of allowing the Breath to speed up, and escape the heap harmlessly…”

A cascade, yes, Malenfant thought. A chain reaction.

“And the water? What’s that for?”

“The emission of the Breath is associated with great heat — which is the point of the Engine. Water flows through the hillside, through the engine. The water is a cooling agent, which carries off this heat before any damage is done to the Engine. And the heat, of course, turns the water to steam, which in turn is harnessed to drive Mtesa’s various toy devices and fripperies…” Malenfant heard how de Bonneville’s voice slowed as he said that, as if some new idea was coming to him.

To Malenfant, it all made sense.

Twentieth-century nuclear-fission piles had been simple devices. They were just heaps of a radioactive material, such as uranium, into which reaction-controlling moderators, for example carbon rods, were thrust. Technical complexity only came if you cared about human safety: shields, robot devices to control the moderators, a waste-extraction process, and so forth. If you didn’t care about wasting human life, a reactor could be made much more simply.

With a little instruction, a tribe of Neandertals could operate a nuclear reactor. A bunch of children could. Especially if you didn’t care about safety.

“It’s the Breath that makes you ill,” he said.

“Indeed.”

“Why not others? Why not Mtesa himself?”

“The Breath is contained by the hundreds of meters of rock within which the Engine is housed. But, though it is not spoken of, there is much illness among the general population; and there are elaborate taboos about associating too closely with products of the Engine — you shouldn’t drink the water that has circulated through the yellow-cake, for instance.”

Malenfant remembered how Nemoto had warned him against inserting his hands in Mtesa’s fountains. He felt, now, a renewed itching in his own damaged skin.

Shit, he thought. I must have taken a dose myself.

De Bonneville waved his gnarled hands. “The Engine is clearly very ancient, Malenfant. The Waganda’s legend says it was constructed by an old king, seventeen generations before our own glorious Mtesa. It seems to me the Waganda have learned how to control their crude device, not by proceeding from a body of established knowledge as we might have done, but by trial and error over generations — and expensive trial and error at that. Expensive in human life, I mean!” But he was tiring, and losing interest. “Let me tell you of Mazuri…”

“You screwed the king’s favorite wife. You asshole, de Bonneville.”

“I tried to put her aside, when I left Rubaga to meet you. But when I returned, full of pombe and the excitement of the hunt, there she was… Ah, Malenfant, those eyes, that skin, that mouth…”

He was found out. Mtesa’s fury had been incandescent. De Bonneville was expelled from his position in court — dragged, by a rope around his neck, by Mtesa’s enthusiastic Lords of the Cord, and subjected to fifty blows with a stick, a punishment severe enough to lame him — and then banished to the lowliest position of Rubaga society: to work in the yellow-cake Engines, buried deep within the hillside.

De Bonneville grasped Malenfant’s arm with his ruined, clawlike hands. “It was all a trap, Malenfant. One accumulates enemies so easily in such a place as this! And I… I was always impetuous rather than careful… I was led into a trap, and I have been destroyed! Seeing you now, a traveler, makes me understand anew how much has been robbed from me by these savages of the future. But—”

“Yes?”

His blue eyes gleamed in his blackened ruin of a face. “But de Bonneville shall have his revenge, Malenfant. Oh, yes! His determination is sweet and pure…”

He confronted Nemoto.

“Nemoto, you know what the Engine is, don’t you? It’s a nuclear pile. A fucking nuclear pile.”

Nemoto shrugged. “It’s just a heap. Maybe a hundred tons of ‘yellow-cake’ — which is a uranium ore — with burned tree stumps used as graphite moderators. It was a geological accident: yellow-cake seams inside this hollow mountain, and some natural water stream running over the pile, cooling it…”

Natural nuclear reactors had formed in various places around the planet, where the geological conditions had been right. What was needed was a concentration of uranium ore, and then some kind of moderator. The function of the moderator was to slow down the neutrons, the heavy particles emitted by decaying uranium atoms. A slowed-down neutron would impact with another atomic nucleus and make that decay, and the neutron products of that event would initiate more decays — on and on, in the cascade of collapsing nuclei the physicists called a chain reaction.

Under Rubaga’s mountain, the action of water, over billions of years, had washed uranium ore from the rock and caused it to collect in seams at the bottom of a shallow sea. The uranium had then been overlaid by inert sand, and the rocks compressed and uplifted by tectonic forces, the uranium further concentrated by the slow rusting of surrounding rocks in the air. Thus had been created seams of uranium, great lenticular deposits, two or three meters thick and perhaps ten times as wide, under their feet, right here.

At first there had been no chain reaction. But then water and organic matter, seeping into cracks in the uranium seams, had served as primitive moderators, slowing the neutrons down sufficiently for the reaction process to start.

“The reaction probably started as a series of scattered fires in concentrations of the uranium ore,” Nemoto whispered. “Then it spread to less rich areas nearby. It was self-controlling; as the water was boiled by the reaction’s heat it would be forced out of the rock — and the reaction would be dampened, until more water seeped back from the surface layers above, and the reaction could begin again.” She smiled thinly. “And that is what the Neandertal community here discovered. It took them a couple of centuries, but they learned to tinker with the process, inserting burned wood — graphite — as secondary moderators…”

The workers in the pile maintained it with their bare hands. At times the workers had to haul heaps of yellow-cake from one part of the pile to another; or they mixed the yellow-cake, by hand, with other moderator compounds; or they cleared out the coolant-water pipes — the small fingers of children were well adapted for that particular chore. And as well as the regular operation of the pile, they had to cope with accidents, types of which Nemoto listed in the local language: leakages, spill-outs, crumbles, hot beds, slaps.

“Why did the Neandertals need to do this?”

“Because of us: Homo Sapiens, Malenfant. For a while, after the ice, the Earth was empty. The Gaijin implanted their little pockets of reconstructed prehumans. But then along we came, and it all unraveled as it had before, thirty or forty thousand years ago. You’ve seen how the locals treat the Uprights, the habilines.”

“Yes.”

“So it was with the Neandertals… except here. The Neandertals had their uranium, their radioactivity. They laced water supplies. They tipped their spears… It helped keep back the humans, until a smart human leader — a predecessor of Mtesa — came along and struck a deal.”

“So Mtesa supplies human slaves to the Neandertals. To maintain the pile.”

“Essentially. Makes you think, doesn’t it, Malenfant? If only the true Neandertals, of our own deep past, had discovered such a resource, perhaps they could have kept us at bay, survived into modern times — I mean, our times.”

Malenfant frowned. “It doesn’t sound too stable. A nuclear pile isn’t much of a weapon… You’d think that Mtesa’s soldiers could overwhelm the Neandertals, take what they wanted, drive them out. And the radioactivity — we’re all living on top of a raw nuke pile, here. Even those who don’t have to go work in that hole in the ground are going to suffer contamination.”

Nemoto grimaced. “You are not living in Clear Lake now, Malenfant. These people accept things we wouldn’t have. The Waganda have built a stable social arrangement around their Engine. They keep their bloodlines reasonably pure by stigmatizing any individual showing signs of mutation or radiation sickness. It’s a kind of symbiosis. The Waganda use the Engine’s energy. But the Engine maintains itself by poisoning a proportion of the Waganda population. Mostly they use Uprights and habilines anyhow; among the humans, only Mtesa’s victims finish up in the Engine.”

Malenfant said, “Those toys of Mtesa’s — the fountains and the Caesar’s Palace trick throne — can’t absorb more than a few percent of the pile’s energy… The rest of it runs that Saddle Point gateway. Doesn’t it, Nemoto? And that is the true purpose of this place. This is some huge Gaijin project. ”

“I am no tourist guide, Reid Malenfant. I don’t know anything.” She looked away from him. “Now leave me alone.”

Malenfant had trouble sleeping. He felt ill, and at times he felt overwhelmed by fear.

He’d glimpsed a Saddle Point gateway, buried deep in this African hillside. That was where all the power went. And that downward breeze had been air passing through the gateway, a leak in the fabric of the world.

He felt drawn to the gateway, as if by some gravitational field.

I don’t want this, he thought. I just wanted to run home. But I brought myself here. I chose to come to this place, kept digging until I found this, the center of it all. A way back into the game. Just like Nemoto.

A way to fulfill whatever purpose the Gaijin seemed to have for him.

I can’t do it. Not again. I just want to be left alone. I don’t have to follow this path, to do anything.

But the logic of his life seemed to say otherwise.

Spare me, he thought; and he wished he believed in a god to receive his prayers.

Malenfant was woken, rudely, by a shuddering of his pallet. His eyes snapped open to darkness, and he sucked in hot African air. For a second he thought he was in orbit: a blowout in the shuttle orbiter, a micrometeorite that had smashed through Number Two Window…

He was alone in his villa, and the grass roof was intact. He pushed off his cover and tried to stand.

The ground shook again, and there was a deep, subterranean groaning, a roar of stressed rock. A quake, then?

Through the glassless windows of the villa, a new light broke. He saw a glow, red-white and formless, that erupted in a gout of fire over the rooftops of Rubaga. Grass huts ignited as tongues of glowing earth came licking back to ignite the flimsy constructions. He heard screaming, the patter of bare feet running.

That fount of flame came from the heart of the town, Malenfant saw immediately — from the well of Kimera, from the pit of that monstrous Engine.

De Bonneville. It had to be. In some way, he’d carried out his vague threat.

The shuddering subsided, and Malenfant was able to stand. He pulled on his biocomposite coverall and stepped out of the villa.

All of Rubaga’s populace appeared to be out in the narrow streets: courtiers, peasants, courtesans, and chiefs, all running in terror. The big gates of the capital’s surrounding cane fence had been thrown open, and Malenfant could see how the great avenues were already thronged with people, running off into the countryside’s green darkness.

Malenfant set off through the capital toward the center of the plateau. He had to push his way through the panicking hordes of Waganda, who fled past him like wraiths of smoke.

By the time he’d reached the dead heart of the hilltop, even the great grass palace of Mtesa was alight.

Malenfant hurried into the central plain, away from the scorching huts. He reached the blighted zone with relief; for the first time in many minutes, he could draw a full breath.

The fire of Kimera loomed out of the earth before Malenfant, huge and angry and deadly; and all around the rim of the plain he saw the glow of Rubaga’s burning huts. Christ, he was in the middle of a miniature Chernobyl. And it scared the shit out of him to think that there was nobody here, nobody, who understood what was going on, nobody at the controls.

He walked on, his feet heavy, his chest and face scorching in the growing heat. His hands were burned and tingling, and the light of the fire was brilliant before him. He didn’t see how he could get any closer. He began to circle the blaze. He stumbled frequently, and his eyes were sore and dry.

I am, he thought, too fucking old for this.

Then he saw what looked like a fallen animal, inert on the ground. Malenfant braved the fire, sheltering his head with his arms, and approached.

It was de Bonneville. He lay facedown in the barren earth of Rubaga. Malenfant could see, from scrabbles in the dirt, that he had walked away from the pit until he could walk no more, then crawled, and at last had dragged himself by his broken fingertips across the ground.

Malenfant knelt down and slid his arms beneath the deformed torso. De Bonneville was disconcertingly light, like a child, and Malenfant was able to turn him over and lay that balloonlike head on his lap.

De Bonneville’s blue eyes flickered open. “Good God. Malenfant. Have you any beer?”

“No. I’m sorry, de Bonneville.”

“You must get away from here. Your life is forfeit, Malenfant, if you confront the Breath of Kimera…” His eyes slid closed. “I did it. I… ”

“The Engine?”

“It was the water,” he said dreamily. “Once I made up my mind to act, it was simple, Malenfant… I just blocked the pipes, where they admit the water to the well…”

“You blocked the coolant?”

“All that heat, with nowhere for it to go… You know, it took just minutes. I could hear them crying and screaming, as the burning, popping yellow-cake scorched their bodies and feet, even as they thrust their tree trunks into the heap. It took just minutes, Malenfant…”

De Bonneville, limping on his already damaged legs, had escaped the well minutes before the final ignition and explosion.

“And was it worth it?” Malenfant asked. “You came back from the stars, to do this?”

“Oh, yes,” de Bonneville said, his eyes fluttering closed. “For he had destroyed me. Mtesa. If I die, his empire dies with me… And more than that.” De Bonneville tried to lick his lips, but his mouth was a mass of popping sores. “It was you, Malenfant. You, a heroic figure returned from the deep past! From an age when humans, we Westerners, strove to do more than simply survive, in a world abandoned to the Gaijin. You and I come from an age where people did things, Malenfant. My God, we shaped whole worlds. You reminded me of that. And so I determined to shape mine…”

He subsided, and his body grew more limp.

Dawn light spread from the east, and Malenfant saw a cloud of smoke, a huge black thunderhead, lifting up into the sky.

It was you, de Bonneville had said. My fault, he thought. All my fault. I was probably meant to die, out there, among the stars. It should have been that way. Not this.

He cradled de Bonneville in the dawn light, until the shuddering breaths had ceased to rack him.

The morning after the explosion, Malenfant was arrested.

Malenfant was hauled by two silent guards to Mtesa’s temporary court, in a spacious hut a couple of kilometers from Wanpamba’s Tomb, and he was hurled to the dust before the Kabaka.

His trial was brief, efficient, punctuated with much shouting and stabbing of fingers. He wasn’t granted a translator. But from the fragments of local language he’d picked up he learned he had been accused of causing the explosion, this great epochal crime.

Nemoto stood silently beside the Kabaka while the comic-opera charade ran its course. She did this, he realized. She framed me.

To his credit, Mtesa seemed skeptical of all this, irritated by the proceedings. He seemed to have taken a liking to Malenfant, and was shrewd enough to perceive this as an obscure dispute between Malenfant and the katekiro. Why are you involving me? Can’t you sort it out yourself?

But the verdict was never really in doubt to anyone.

When it was done, the Lords of the Cord came to Malenfant. Rope was looped around his neck, and he was dragged to his feet.

Nemoto walked forward, hunched over, and stood before him. In English, she said, “You’re to be treated leniently, Malenfant. You won’t be working the Engine. You’re to be cast—”

“Into the pit.” And then he saw it. “The gateway. You’re forcing me to the Saddle Point gateway. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“You saw the light, Malenfant. If I thought that pressure suit of yours would fit me, I would take it from you. I would walk into the Engine of Kimera and confront the enigma at its heart, following those mysterious others who come and go… But I cannot. It is my fate to remain here, amusing the Kabaka, until the aging treatments fail, and I die.

“I had to do this, Malenfant. I could see your reluctance to go forward — even though you brought yourself here, to the center of things. I could see you could not bring yourself to take the last step.”

“So you pushed me. Why, for God’s sake? Why are you doing this?”

“Not for the sake of God. For history. Look around you, Malenfant. Look at the huge strangeness of this future Earth. Certainly the arrival of ETs deflected our history — and those exploding stars in the sky tell of more deflections yet to come. But no human has ever been in control of the great forces that shaped a world, of history and climate and geology; only a handful of us have even witnessed such changes.”

“If none of us can deflect history, you’re killing me for nothing.”

“Ah.” She smiled. “But individual humans have changed history, Malenfant — not the way I tried to, with plots and schemes and projects, but by walking into the fire, by giving themselves. Do you see? And that is your destiny.”

“You’re a monster, Nemoto. You play with lives. The right hand of this Stone Age despot is the right place for you.”

She raised a bony wrist and brushed blood-flecked spittle from her chin, seeming not to hear him.

He was overwhelmed with fear and anger. “Nemoto. Spare me.”

She leaned forward and kissed his cheek; her lips were dry as autumn leaves, and he could smell blood on her breath. “Good-bye, Malenfant.”

The cords around his neck tightened, and he was hauled away.

The rest of it unfolded with a pitiless logic. As a prisoner, condemned, Malenfant had no choice, no real volition; it was easy to submit to the process, to become detached, let his fear float away.

He was indeed treated with leniency. He was allowed to go back to his hut. He retrieved his EMU, his ancient pressure suit in its sack of rope.

He was taken to the rim of the central desolation.

There was a small party waiting: guards, with two other prisoners, both young women, naked save for loincloths, with their hands tied behind their backs. The prisoners returned his stare dully. Malenfant saw they’d both been beaten severely enough to lay open the skin over their spines.

I’ve come a long way, thought Malenfant, for this: a walk into hell, with two of the damned.

Once more he descended the crude spiral staircase.

Soon they were so deep that the circle of open sky at the top of the shaft was shrunk to a blue disc smaller than a dime, far above him. The only light came from irregularly placed reed torches. The stairs themselves were crudely cut and too far apart to make the descent easy; soon Malenfant was hot, and his legs ached.

The prisoners’ faces shone, taut with fear.

They passed two big exits gouged in the rock wall, one to either side of the cylindrical shaft. The air from these exits was marginally less stale than elsewhere. Perhaps they led to the great avenues from east and west that he’d noticed from outside, tunnels that led into the body of the hillside itself.

A hundred meters down, water spouted from clay founts, elaborately shaped, mounted on the walls. The water, almost every drop of it, was captured by spiral canals that wound around the shaft, in parallel to the stairway. The founts gushed harder as they descended — water pressure, Malenfant thought — and soon the spiral canals were filled with bubbling, frothing liquid, which took away some of the staleness of the still air of the well. But the founts and channels were severely damaged by fire, cracked and crudely repaired; water leaked continually.

Already he was hot and dizzy; a mark of the dose he’d already taken, maybe. He reached toward a canal to get a handful of water. But a dark bony hand shot out of the darkness, pushing him away. It was one of the prisoners, her eyes wide in the gloom.

Malenfant watched the narrow, bleeding shoulders of the prisoner as she descended before him. Here she was, going down into hell, no more than a kid, and yet she’d reached out to keep a foreigner from harm.

Deeper and deeper. There was no trace of natural daylight left now.

They reached a point where the two prisoners were released to a dormitory, hollowed out of the rock, presumably to be put to work later. Before they were pushed inside, they peered down into the pit, with loathing and dread. For here, after all, was the Engine that was to be their executioner.

And Malenfant was going on, deeper. The guards prodded at his back, pushing him forward.

At last the descent became more shallow. Malenfant surmised they were approaching the heart of the hollowed-out mountain. They stopped maybe fifteen meters above the base of the well. From here, Malenfant had to go on alone.

By the light of a smoking torch, with a mime, he asked a favor of the guards. They shrugged, incurious, not unwilling to take a break.

Malenfant pulled his battered old NASA pressure suit from its sack.

He lifted up his lower torso assembly, the bottom half of his EMU, trousers with boots built on, and he squirmed into it. Next he wriggled into the upper torso section. He fixed on his Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that he lifted his bubble helmet, starred and scratched with use. He twisted it into place against the seal at his neck.

The guards watched dully.

He looked down at himself. By the light of a different star, Madeleine Meacher had spent time repairing this suit for him. The EMU was a respectable white, with the Stars and Stripes still proudly emblazoned on his sleeve.

…But then the little ritual of donning the suit was over, and events enfolded him in their logic once more.

Was this it? After all his travels, his long life, was he now to die, alone, here?

Somehow he couldn’t believe it. He gathered his courage.

Leaving the staring guards behind, he walked farther down the crude stairwell, deeper toward the fire. The starring of his battered old bubble helmet made the flames dance and sparkle; it was kind of pretty. His own breath was loud in the confines of the helmet, and he felt hot, oxygen-starved already, although that was probably just imagination. His backpack was inert — no hiss of oxygen, no whirr of fans — and it was a heavy mass on his back. But maybe the suit would protect him a little longer.

He’d just keep walking, climbing down these steps in the dark, as long as he could. He didn’t see what else he could do.

It didn’t seem long, though, before the heat and airlessness got to him, and the world turned gray, and he pitched forward. He got his hands up to protect his helmet and rolled on his back, like a turtle.

He couldn’t get up. Maybe he ought to crawl, like de Bonneville, but he couldn’t even seem to manage that.

He was, after all, a hundred years old.

He closed his eyes.

It seemed to him he slept a while. He was kind of surprised to wake up again.

He saw a face above him: a dark, heavy face. Was it de Bonneville? No, de Bonneville was dead.

Thick eye ridges. Deep eyes. An ape’s brow, inside some kind of translucent helmet.

He was being carried. Down, down. Even deeper into the mountain of Kimera. There were strong arms under him.

Not human arms.

But then there was a new light. A blue glow.

He smiled. A glow he recognized.

Cradled in inhuman arms, lifted through the gateway, Reid Malenfant welcomed the pain of transition.

There was a flash of electric blue light.