Jaydium by Deborah J. Ross Page B

something out there after all and the dumb machine was too limited to recognize it. He listened, hearing nothing but uncommunicative noise.
    Eril’s thoughts turned to the unconscious man in the hold. Maybe they should find some place to set down and try to rouse him, find out who he was and where he’d come from. The stranger might even be from this world, peacefully exploring the tunnel when he and Kithri jolted out of nowhere. Eril instantly discarded the notion. For one thing, they’d been in their own Stayman — a normal jaydium tunnel of it anyway — when the spacer appeared. For another, the suit was clearly designed for work in space. Who in their right mind would go exploring a tunnel in extra-vehicular gear? Boredom must be corroding his brain, to even think of it.
    Squawk! — BURST — bzzz — BURST — Squawk! came shrieking over the headset. Eril nearly leapt out of his seat.
    â€œWhat the hell was that?” Kithri demanded.
    â€œI don’t know,” he said, quickly scanning the location functions. “It’s gone now. Damn!”
    â€œI’ll check shipbrain’s analysis.” After a brief pause, she said, “Inconclusive. Could have been some natural source — lightning, something like that.”
    â€œNo damned lightning made that sound.”
    â€œYou know something shipbrain doesn’t?”
    â€œI gotta hunch. I gotta hunch of a hunch. Where’s the source?”
    â€œShipbrain pins it near Port Ludlow — or where it used to be. We could fly there in an hour, if you want to check it out.”
    â€œYou bet I do!”
    o0o
    Brushwacker cleared the last ridge. Eril and Kithri looked down into the depression where Port Ludlow had lain baking in the sun. No low, flat-walled buildings of ash-brick greeted them, no spaceport with its battered insystem traders and field of garishly painted scrubjets. No distant fields of sallow, struggling green, no tendril roads spewing forth plumes of powdery dust. After the forest, Eril hadn’t expected any of that. But neither did he expect what he did see.
    Once, when he was a boy of four, the year before his father disappeared on that Exploration mission, Eril’s mother had taken him and his sister to an antique crafts exhibition. There he watched a glassblower fashion a fairy castle, looping and twisting the liquid glass into filigree designs. It was his earliest childhood memory.
    Six-year-old Avery chose a winged horse for herself, but Eril had eyes only for the tower. It stood on his dresser, a touchstone for his imagination, until...he could not remember what happened to it. Now the memory of that childhood treasure rose up in front of his eyes, magnified a thousandfold and tinted like a watercolor rainbow, a crystal city set in a cup of living green.
    â€œLo-o-ok at that,” Kithri said.
    Eril leaned forward across her shoulders, straining for more, hardly daring to breathe least the city shimmer and evaporate like a fever-born mirage. Even at this distance, he could distinguish individual structures. A ruby spindle shone in the late afternoon sun, dwarfing a flat rectangular block of pearlescent lace and a chain of smaller towers linked at every level by bridges of the same translucent material. A series of causeways, sapphire blue and turquoise, wound through the forest of towers.
    As they drew nearer, Eril realized that the city was not nearly as large as it first seemed. He was accustomed to the scale of artificial satellites or ancient mega-cities like New Paris or Terillium City, where ten thousand might live and work within the same self-contained scraper. These shining buildings before him could not be more than three or four stories high. It was their slenderness and composition that made them seem so elegantly tall. Judging by Fifth Fed standards, he put the city’s entire population at fifty thousand people, no more.
    Or perhaps they aren’t human.