LotS/The Story/Puny Human Birthdays II/VlargRelicHunter
Atreyu's eyes found the opening before his scanner did. Perhaps that meant his senses were sharp, or maybe that destiny's hand was grasping his and leading him onward. Either of those things would have been both gratifying and appropriate to the purpose which had brought him there. But when the scanner then reported that he was standing within three meters of a black hole, he decided the device might simply be faulty.
He tried to quell the eagerness that rose in his breast, lest it go unfulfilled yet again. The first two discoveries had filled him with similar anticipation, but it had transpired that they were only weather-worn channels in the rock face, yielding nothing but dust and stone before they terminated in frustrating barriers. However, the deep shadows within this latest gap buffeted his caution. And when drew nearer, it was shredded altogether.
There were groves in the stone, too regular to have been the work of nature's whims. Someone had once carved designs around the opening, their effort recognizable even if time had rendered its fruits illegible. He'd found it. That realization hammered in his chest and exploded in his brain. It left his mouth in a strong, euphoric exhalation.
He clambered over a fallen chunk of rock. And there too his hands found markings. He glanced upwards, at the place where it must once have rested -- part of an arched entrance.
Broken scanner or not, he felt destiny's hand ushering him onwards.
He'd have a story to tell.
Stories...
"They call it the eternal tale, because each generation adds to it."
Atreyu sat and blinked at the teacher. If her words had any effect on him, he gave no sign. The little boy's face was inscrutable, as it so often was. But she continued nevertheless. They'd all agreed this was important -- that the child should be raised to know about his parents' heritage alongside the ways of the empire which had adopted him after their deaths.
"On a boy or girl's eighteenth birthday..."
There was a slight, almost imperceptible narrowing of his eyes. She was a veteran enough educator to know the signs of a child carrying out the process of mental arithmetic. He was calculating how far in his future that birthday lay. Maybe this interested him after all...
"...they leave home and go on..." She paused, and remembered Atreyu's reading habits. "...a quest."
Sure enough, the word triggered a change in the boy's face. He was staring at her with renewed intensity, perhaps even eagerness.
"What kind of quest?" he asked.
"It has to be a story. Something they can come back and tell to the others. And it has to have meaning."
"Meaning?"
"A story that brings new knowledge to their community, or inspires them. One worthy of becoming part of the eternal tale."
Atreyu pulled a small oblong object from his belt, flicked a switch on its red metal case, and tossed it into the air. It hovered there, and shone a broad beam of light in front of him. When he moved, the bright flood led the way -- illuminating the path ahead.
More markings adorned the walls on either side, carved or burned into the rock. These had escaped the ravages of time better than the entrance, and the bizarre characters almost screamed the identity of the hands which had wrought them. The inscribed messages were unintelligible to him. But he raised his left bracer and captured an image of each one. Professor Sung might be able to interpret them. And even if he couldn't, the very fact of the pictures' existence -- that he alone in all of academia would possess those fragments of source material until he chose to share them with the galaxy -- would delight him beyond measure. Atreyu smiled as he imagined the broad grin amidst Sung's bushy beard.
The knowledge of his triumph swelled within him. He'd already succeeded in his quest. Even if he left that very moment, and returned to the colony, he'd have a story to tell -- the tale of how he'd evaded Huk-Kral patrol ships to enter Ciaxia's atmosphere, and come to number among perhaps only a handful of humans who'd ever walked upon its dusty surface. The story of finding one of the Quiskerians' ancient subterranean temples, and looking upon carvings likely never glimpsed by the eyes of man.
But he didn't intend to go back. Not until he'd uncovered everything the temple held within its depths.
"First contact, my boy! First contact!" Professor Sung spoke the words with such elation that he might have experienced the event firsthand. "Aliens! Imagine what that meant, to a species which had only dreamed, imagined, and speculated about extraterrestrial life."
"Yes, professor..." Atreyu said.
He led the professor along the path and rolled his eyes. The man was more jovial than ever when he'd been drinking, but also keener to spread his considerable store of knowledge to an uninterested populace. Atreyu had come upon him on the road, and he hadn't wanted Sung to stagger homeward on his own and perhaps tumble into a ditch on the way. So he'd accepted the task of leading him there, even though that meant withstanding the accompanying didactic barrage.
"Ah, when I was a young scholar, I dreamed of visiting the old Quiskerian planets and exploring their ruins. Just think -- all that priceless knowledge, just waiting to be studied! I even wrote to the Huk-Kral's ambassador to ask permission for a research mission. Do you know what he told me? He said that if I went anywhere near those worlds, his people would rip my arms off. Savagery! Barbarism!"
The professor sighed, hiccupped, and moved on to a discussion of Rylattu fishing practices -- not knowing what seeds he'd planted in the young man's mind.
Atreyu laughed, letting the sound of his joy echo down the tunnel and reverberate from the stone walls.
His story would be even more amazing than he'd hoped.
He took one more picture of the relief sculpture before him. There, carved from the rock, was a spheroid. A planet, the shapes of its continents familiar to Atreyu as they were to every other human -- though he'd only ever seen them in images. Earth.
Behind him stretched a long line of similar artworks. He'd scrutinized each of them in turn, though none had held any particular meaning for him. As best he could tell, they chronicled scenes from Quiskerian history. But this one...
He moved onto the next sculpture, almost giddy with anticipation. He wasn't disappointed. It showed a spacecraft, of a design he recognized from history books. It was the type the aliens had used in their mission against Earth. And as though the universe were expressing agreement with that thought, the following relief depicted human beings -- battling against Quiskerians. Billy Stopless, Professor Helios, Aloysius Zeroth... These and other faces he'd been shown on electronic screens or rendered in holographic light stared at him from stone.
A thought slammed its way into his brain, one of such unequivocal importance that he couldn't believe it had only just appeared there. The Quiskerians were supposed to have built the temples on Ciaxia long before their attack on Earth. And these carvings looked ancient. But that was impossible. The stone figures before him couldn't have been made before the events they chronicled. That meant he was looking at proof the Quiskerians had continued to build and adorn their temples in this archaic fashion until near the end of their civilization.
Atreyu took more pictures, and hoped their monumental academic significance wouldn't make Professor Sung burst across the walls of his study.
The next series of graven images meant nothing to him. They were filled with carved letters and symbols that he hadn't the means to translate. But he recorded each one in turn.
It wasn't until he'd passed over a dozen more that he came across another which captured his attention.
A huge reptilian face glared at him, a visage fearsome even through the medium of stone. It looked like...
"A dragon?"
Atreyu frowned. Some of the carvings much further back had depicted vast, grotesque creatures, which he'd taken to be the Quiskerians' archaic deities or else monsters from their mythology -- for they didn't match any true species he'd ever learned about. But all the ones since had illustrated conventional scenes that he'd taken to come from historical events such as the attack on Earth. Hence this one seemed absurdly out of place.
And yet it was unmistakable. The terrible face, the tail, the wings... If it wasn't supposed to be a dragon, the very same creature he'd read about in his childhood stories, the coincidence was remarkable.
He lifted his bracer and took a picture. Atreyu stared into the creature's eyes, and felt a strange shudder pass through his body. He shook his head, wondering if he'd caught an alien infection since landing on the planet. That would be an unpleasant souvenir to take back to the colony...
But he thrust the thought aside. He'd come to the end of the sculpted scenes. Only one more lay to his right, rendered unreadable by the curvature of the tunnel wall -- which presented him with only the edges of the sculpted figures. He moved around in front of it, so he could see what it showed.
His frown deepened. It was...
Something seared its way past his face. The stone exploded.
Atreyu hurled himself aside, just in time to avoid the next blast.
"You're fast, human," said a growling, almost feral voice. "But not fast enough to steal from me!"
Three red eyes, forming a triangle, glared at him from a purple-furred, almost pteropine face. A Vlarg dressed in bulky armor plates stood in the passage, clutching a blaster in his hand.
"The relics here are mine!" he said.
"I don't-"
"Mine!"
The Vlarg fired.
Atreyu slipped the next blast as though it were a clumsy boxer's punch. The first rule of dodging gunfire: watch the arm, not the weapon's maw. No one can move faster than a gunshot. But you don't have to, if you move faster than the person holding the weapon.
The Vlarg snarled. He aimed again. But Atreyu saw where the weapon was pointing. By the time it fired, he was out of the way. The alien wasn't much of a gunslinger. Otherwise Atreyu's head would have exploded instead of the sculpture. And if his adversary couldn't hit him when he was standing there with his back turned, he sure as hell couldn't hit him now.
Atreyu ducked the next blast, and wondered if his kung fu sifu would be proud of his speed and agility or annoyed that he'd allowed himself to be caught unaware in the first place. The mental calmness which allowed such a question under those circumstances was reassuring. So was the heft of his sword...
He lunged. The Vlarg flinched out of instinct. Then confusion crossed his furry purple face. He was well beyond the reach of the human's blade. Epiphany struck a split-second before the weapon, when the handle telescoped into a spear shaft and thrust the point into his hand.
The Vlarg howled. His gun clattered against the tunnel floor.
Atreyu withdrew the weapon and slipped into a combat stance.
"I didn't come here to loot relics," he said. "Why don't we just-"
The alien didn't reply with words. He simply growled, and leapt -- driving the blades on his right vambrace at the human's face. The spear's point was through his neck in the next moment.
Words came to Atreyu's tongue, one saying among many others which belonged to his birth-people.
"This is my story," he whispered. "And you aren't in it."
He slid his weapon out of the Vlarg, and cleaned its blade on the alien's fur. Then he remembered the sculpture.
It was ruined. The blast had ravaged the stone, and obliterated whatever it once depictured. He sighed. He'd only had a single glimpse of the image before its destruction. The dragon had been there, he knew that. The same terrible visage as on the neighboring relief. And though he couldn't be certain, he was almost sure the creature had been battling a human being. A man. That carved figure had had some kind of symbol on him.
Maybe it was mere fancy, a trick of the mind. But it had reminded Atreyu of the Sian emblem.