Star Bridge Read online

  A wire gleamed. It circled the rusty beam. A bright metal hook went through the waistband of Wu’s baggy breeches. Where the wire joined the hook was blue brilliance, burning in the torchlight with a cold, splendid luminescence. It was faceted, like diamonds, thousands of them sparkling.…

  Kicking, gasping, Wu swung jerkily back and forth. Horn shook himself. He walked out on the beam, stooped, took hold of the unexplainable wire. It moved liquidly in his hand, and he almost dropped it and the living burden it supported. His hand tightened. Inside it was a comfortable handle.

  He backed along the girder, his chest rigid with strain, shining with sweat. Wu swung heavily below, each swing threatening to send them both into the gulf. Finally one backward-reaching foot touched solid rock. Horn strained backward. Wu swung in, rising. His hands caught the edge of rock. He clawed his way desperately over the brink, crawled meters from the edge, and collapsed, panting and trembling.

  The thing in Horn’s hand flowed again. Horn looked down. The parrot was perched on his finger, her ragged wings drooping wearily.

  “Disaster,” she said breathlessly, “is the crucible of human hearts. We thank you, my master and I.”

  Wu sat up slowly. “Indeed, indeed. You are a noble young man, brave—”

  “It won’t go away if you shut your eyes,” Horn said.

  He stuck the torch into a crevice in the wall. It flared smokily over the scene as he sat down and pulled his gun forward between his knees so that it pointed toward the old man and the bird perched now on his shoulder.

  “I toppled you off the girder,” Horn said. “I’d just as soon toss you over the edge again.”

  “It was a stupid thing to do,” Wu said. “You can’t get answers from a dead man.”

  “Obviously. What is your life worth to you? It’s immaterial to me whether you live or die.”

  Wu sighed and shook his head. “Ah, violence! You give us no choice. An old man and an old bird, what chance do we have against youth and callousness and a gun?”

  “Answers,” Horn said.

  “How old do you think I am?” Wu asked.

  Horn stared at Wu’s ageless face. “Seventy? Eighty?” he said, and knew that he was wrong.

  “More than fifteen hundred. Fifteen hundred weary years. Searching for peace and never finding it. Longing for rest and afraid of dying. Lil and I going on and on.”

  Horn’s eyes narrowed, but the rest of his face was immobile.

  “Like Lil, I am the last of my race,” Wu went on. “When I was born on Stockton Street in San Francisco, my people were the most numerous on Earth. And the oldest. But they clung to Earth while others went out to the stars. With Earth, they died.

  “I was different. I immigrated to Mars. At Syrtis City, with youthful folly, I established the New Canton Sanitary Laundry. But water was scarce and cleaning fluids were dear. It was cheaper to weave new plastic clothes than to clean them.

  “I became a ship’s cook on a small, prospecting vessel. Its owners struck the richest treasure in history. On one of the asteroids, we found the Diamond Cavern.”

  Wu crawled warily to the suitcase close to the edge of the pit, dug into it, and crawled back with a bottle. He lifted it to his lips; his throat moved convulsively twice before he lowered it and handed it to Lil. Wu sighed; his small, black eyes blinked.

  “Living diamonds, sir. Carbon deposits in a mountain torn from an exploding world. The cavern was underlaid by uranium. For a long time, that energy fed Lil’s race; when it began to fail, they learned how to fission individual atoms. When the uranium was used up entirely, they learned to gather thermal energy even from very cold molecules, in defiance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Improbable? True. But all life exists in a kind of defiance of the Second Law.

  “Living diamonds. But the creatures were more wonderful than their crystalline skins. As you have noticed, Lil is no parrot. She is a pseudomorph of the Diamond Cavern.”

  A tear sparkled gemlike in Lil’s one eye and dropped to the dusty tunnel floor.

  “Lil’s race had many things to offer men. They had a culture almost as old as Earth itself. Energy was low there; time moved slowly. They were almost immortal. But the ship’s crew saw only one thing: the diamonds. One radiation bomb destroyed the cavern and all the creatures in it, discoloring and ruining most of the diamonds in the process. Only Lil was saved. I hid her in the galley. We have been together ever since.”

  Lil moaned thinly. “Poor old Lil,” she sobbed. “She’s all alone. Ah, ah, ah. Her people, all gone. Her world murdered and forgotten. No friend in all the universe but poor old Wu. Oh, the lost wonder, the beauty.…”

  She wilted. Horn’s gun lifted. Wu held up a warning finger. “Sh-h-h,” he said softly. “You are going to see something that no one alive but me has ever seen.”

  Lil’s gay, disheveled plumage flowed. The yellow legs collapsed into pliant pseudopods. A glittering surface of diamond was uncovered. Everything else ran shapelessly into an opening at the top, leaving a diamond the size of a man’s two hands clasped together.

  Torchlight struck it. The diamond threw it back, multiplied, in an incredible glory of prismatic colors. Horn caught his breath.

  “Wait,” Wu whispered. “Wait until she opens.”

  Seams appeared in the top of the burning, thousand-faceted spheroid. Six diamond petals bent slowly down. Above them rose six slender, living tendrils. Reaching pink fingers, they grew and divided into delicate and intricate membranes like a pure white web.

  “With those and her amorphous body,” Wu said, “she can assume any form she wishes. Those tracks you saw, the rabbit who looked at you across the stream, the bird that flew to me—all Lil.”

  The pistol slipped from Horn’s relaxed hand; it slithered up under his shoulder. At the sound, the diamond thing leaped explosively into the air. Its splendor was concealed, in an instant, by the parrot’s ragged feathers.

  Lil swayed and moaned again. “Gone, all gone.”

  “Don’t cry, Lil,” Wu said softly. He rummaged deep in one pocket. “Here’s a little trinket I’ve been saving for a bitter hour. It came out of the stickpin of a grafting Company inspector who tried to jail us for vagrancy.”

  Lil stopped moaning and flapped to Wu’s shoulder. Her strong beak took the gleaming, pea-sized diamond delicately from his thick fingers. A muffled crunch and the stone was gone.

  “One tomorrow,” she said cheerfully, “is worth a million yesterdays.” She rubbed her beak affectionately against Wu’s wrinkled cheek. “A most beautiful diamond.”

  “She can assimilate almost any form of carbon,” Wu said. “But she prefers diamond. When we’re prosperous, that’s what she eats. Recently we’ve been reduced to anthracite.”

  “The secret,” Horn said coldly. “How have you lived so long?”

  “Lil,” Wu said. “Her people learned many things in their long, almost eternal existence: life, probability, atomic structure.… That was only one of the things mankind lost through greed. She keeps me alive, and I help her find food.

  “We wander. If we stay still very long, Duchane’s Index will find us. That vast collection of memory would quickly fit our descriptions into a thousand-year-old record of jewel thefts. We would like to stay on the frontiers, beyond the reach of Eron, but there are few diamonds there.

  “Wanderers, eternal vagabonds, we have seen a hundred worlds and known them all and have only our memories that go back too far to show for it. We must keep moving. Men would wonder why I don’t die. My secret would rouse in them the same madness as Lil’s diamond carapace. They would kill me for it.

  “Yet there are consolations. There is always tomorrow—a new ship to catch, a virgin planet waiting. When memory grows too long, there’s a way to blot it out. The weed for me, and diamonds for Lil, and rum for both of us.”

  Horn studied them for a moment. “That’s all you’ve done with it?”

  Wu shrugged. “What would you do?”

 
“It would give a man a different perspective,” Horn said thoughtfully. “You could do something for all humanity: in science, politics, philosophy. You owe it—”

  “For what?” Wu asked dryly. “Humanity had nothing to do with it. It tossed away its chance when its representatives wiped out Lil’s race.”

  “Original sin?” A smile flickered across Horn’s face. “If a man could think things out thoroughly, plan carefully, act slowly,” he mused, “he could guide his people into better, wiser paths. If a tyrant arose, like Eron, he could—”

  “One man against an empire?” Wu broke in. “Empires rise and fall, and that cycle is dictated by forces ignorant of things as insignificant as a man. They are as vast and mysterious in their workings as fate itself. Eron will fall—in its own time. But you will probably be long dead, and I myself may be dead. Even Lil can’t push that finality away forever.”

  “Forces!” Horn shrugged. “They are only men in the mass. One man can lead them or push them. And one man, acting at the right time, at the right place, in the right way, can topple the greatest boulder.”

  “And get crushed himself when it falls,” Wu said. “No, thank you. As long as I have lived, as weary as life sometimes grows, I cling to it—more desperately even than you. What have you to lose but a few unhappy years? It is easy for you to be foolhardy and contemptuous of danger. I must be timid and cowardly. This miserable carcass, which has lasted me so long, may last me as long again, with care.”

  Horn was on his feet. He pulled the torch out of the wall and motioned with his head for Wu and Lil to go in front. Wu picked up his suitcase and turned his head back to look at Horn.

  “Don’t you believe me, sir?”

  “You aren’t in the pit, are you?” Horn answered. The question Wu asked was something Horn couldn’t answer directly. For the moment he was willing to accept it as a working hypothesis; it fitted the observed data. In addition, it was too fantastic not to have an element of truth. “Keep moving. We may be late as it is.”

  “We mustn’t make you late for your appointment with destiny,” Wu said. The words floated back mockingly.

  The tunnel began to widen. It spilled them into a great chain of vast black areas: warehouses, Horn guessed, for the first interplanetary commerce. Sloping ramps led them up and up again. With the first distant suggestion of sunlight, Horn ground out the torch against the wall and, a little farther on, leaned it against the side of the last broad tunnel.

  Storms had washed mud and debris into the crumbling entrance. The narrow exit that remained was well concealed by a gnarled juniper tree. Horn peered between the leaves. Beyond were ruins: mounds of weathered rubble pierced by an occasional rusted spear, a tottering wall. It was deserted. Horn climbed through the hole and slipped down under the lowest branch. Wu followed with a muffled sigh of relief.

  Horn crept to the shaky wall and glanced quickly over it. He stifled an exclamation. “The Victory Monument!”

  It towered against the noon sky, eight hundred meters away, where once the Mars Docks of Old Sunport had been. But even Sunport, at her proudest, couldn’t have built this.

  Its base was an immense black cube capped with a black hemisphere. It was at least nine hundred meters high. Towering endlessly above that rounded pedestal was a great, cylindrical column. It was faced with luxion and glowed with rising waves of living color. Blood-red just above the black hemisphere, it shimmered through orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The top faded to a shining white.

  Crowning the pillar, four kilometers overhead, was a huge, steel-gray sphere, smooth and featureless except at the poles. There, thousands of slender golden spikes bristled in every direction.

  “Eron!” Wu said at Horn’s elbow.

  “I’ve never seen it,” Horn said.

  “It’s a good reproduction,” Wu said. “That’s it. Eron. Your boulder. Let’s see you topple it.”

  Horn turned his eyes away from the monument and studied the area surrounding it. Only around the vast perimeter of the mesa were the ruins visible, and the other side was so distant it dwindled away grayly. Everywhere else the ruins had been sealed under a marble-smooth surface inlaid with murals.

  “Sunport,” Wu said softly. “They built it high and tall, on the ruins of a city called Denver, so that it would be nearer the stars. Like Eron, it ruled the known world. Legend says that a great barbarian leader sacked Sunport in its greatness. He led his nomad bands upon it, the legend says, and tore it down and gave it back to the sun, its might and its oppression.”

  “Eron, too, can be destroyed,” Horn said.

  “A straw man.” Wu chuckled. “Legend is not to be trusted. Sunport was dead long before then. Created by a historic need, it died when its job was done. That tribal hero cremated a corpse.”

  Horn shrugged. There were immediate problems; he was intent upon the crowded surface of the sealed ruins.

  Across giant doors in the black cube’s face was a broad platform. Obviously temporary, it had the solidity of permanence. Like the broad steps that led up to it, the platform was gleaming, golden plastic. Emerging from under it and stretching far across the field were deep, metal-lined tracks. Facing the platform were concentric semicircles of bleachers, their tiers capable of seating many thousands.

  Pavilions were a riot of color everywhere. Milling among them were the Golden Folk. Surely there were more of them here, Horn thought, than had ever been gathered together before. Below him was the aristocracy of Eron, the heirs of the universe, proud, powerful, arrogant—and effeminate. Not one of them could have done what he had done to get here.

  The voices rose to Horn, their laughter, their gaiety, high-pitched, nervous. It sounded like the music for a last palsied dance before dissolution.

  They were leeches, bloodsuckers. It would be pleasant to have the power to crush them all. The white, anemic worlds would bless him and grow strong again. But only one of them was to die. There would be time for only one.

  The Golden Folk were no threat. Danger lay only in the strength they bought. Guards, sprinkled thickly, outnumbered their masters. They lined the perimeter of the paved mesa, alert and watchful. Units were posted in strategic spots. They clustered around the base of the black cube. They seemed unusually tall there, even at this distance. They were the Elite Guard, Horn realized, the three-meter Denebolan lancers.

  It wasn’t a question of being afraid of them. They were only a complication to be considered.

  Monoliths ringed the edges of the mesa. They were the tall, black spires of battleships, their one-hundred-meter diameters and half-kilometer lengths dwarfed only by the monument. Two broad, golden bands, fore and aft, adapted them to passage through the Tube. Nothing projected beyond them; it was understood that they kept the ship from touching the Tube’s deadly walls.

  There were nine of the monoliths, each one a sleek, efficient, ruthless fighting machine. Each one carried twelve thirty-inch rifles. The thrust of their unitron helices could throw twelve-ton projectiles at velocities sufficient to vaporize them on impact. One shot would have split apart a mountain.

  Only the rifles, normally retracted into flat turrets in the N-iron hulls, were busy, roaming restlessly in search of targets in the pale sky or on the mountains beyond that seemed close but were actually kilometers away. They found nothing to stop their searching.

  Other ships were in the sky and on the ground: cruisers, scoutships.… Eron guarded its rulers thoroughly.

  One small pistol against the massive power that had crushed a star cluster. It was not too uneven. Horn wasn’t fighting with battleships, and brute power isn’t efficient at swatting gnats. It takes only one small bullet to kill a man.

  They thought eight hundred meters was an impossible range for a portable weapon. Horn smiled grimly. Eron didn’t know its own devices.

  Something whined above him. Instinctively, Horn threw himself down in the brush-covered hollow and turned his head to glance upward. The fantastic black mass of
a battleship was poised above them, its hull rippling with iridescent color, betraying the infinitesimal power loss of the unitronic field that lifted and drove it.

  Wu squalled and jumped to his feet. With one hand, Horn dumped him unceremoniously into the brush and held him there.

  “Shut up and stay down!” he shouted above the whine.

  Wu shivered helplessly, his face pressed into the dirt. “My ancestors, preserve me!”

  Gently the giant stern lowered, passed them not a hundred meters away, and slowed to a stop on the field below. Colossal, tripod landing skids unfolded and bit into the mountain. The ground quivered under them. From behind them came the rumble of falling rock. Horn thought of the tunnel and hoped, briefly, that it hadn’t been blocked.

  He raised his head above the wall, shaken now so that it was only half as high. He could still see the monument and the platform in front of it. The ship served him instead of Eron; it gave him a shield from casual observation.

  He glanced upward at the black tower, and Lil fluttered across his vision. For the first time he realized that she had been gone.

  “Guards are as thick as lice on a beggar’s bed,” she reported. “But that monster is nothing to worry about. A man in armor pays no attention to ants underneath his foot.”

  Wu groaned, unappeased. “Can’t a man pick up a wretched handful of diamonds? Must the Company send ships enough to blow the whole planet into atoms?”

  Horn unclipped the pistol from the cord around his shoulder. There was little to go wrong with it, but even that little was a chance that need not be taken.

  With the quick efficiency of the Guard, he stripped it down. Out of the butt he shook the small, flat dynode cell. Its molecule-thin films stored the energy of a ton of chemical explosives. The little magazine of fifty bullets was well oiled; the projectiles slid easily. The helix-wound barrel was clean and untarnished.

  It was in perfect working order. When he pulled the trigger, a bullet, armored against atmospheric friction, would leave the gun with the velocity of an ancient cannon shell.