Footfall

“Da. They dare.” Now that we ca

“I hate them,” Lorena said.

They were under the house, inspecting the support pillars. Carlotta was more frightened than Wes. He tried to reassure her-not hearing what he was saying, but knowing he was lying badly. The quake was coming. Soon. These pillars had to be reinforced before the San Andreas fault tore loose and sent everything rolling downhill in a spray of debris. A sound like a brass trumpet ripped through the world; and then the world tilted and everything started to roll.

Wes Dawson woke to the blare of the acceleration warning, and Russian curses, and the deep hum of Thuktun Flishithy’s drive. The floor was tilted, not toward a wall but toward one corner… the outer-aft-antispinward corner. The fithp must be accelerating and decreasing spin, simultaneously.

The fithp would have no time for prisoners during maneuvers. Wes did what the others were doing. He spread out on his belly like a starfish knd curled his fingers and toes in the padding-dry here, though damp throughout the rest of the ship-and dozed.

The tilt grew more pronounced as Thuktun Flishithy’s spin decreased. After several hours everyone shifted to the aft wall. They were awake and talking, but not to Wes Dawson. Once he heard “amusement park” in English, and Nikolai made rollercoaster motions with his hands while the rest laughed.

Another several hours and the aft wall had become a flat floor. Thuktun Flishithy’s drive was pushing at one Earth gravity or close to it.

The door opened.

It was a door now, and four fithp warriors rolled through without pause. They herded the humans into the corridor, where four more warriors waited with the teacher’s female assistant, Tashayamp. Dmitri bowed to her. “Greetings,” he said (the pattern of sound that they had learned for a greeting; it had the word time in it). “Question, destination selves?”

“Destination Podo Thuktun,” Tashayamp said. “Ready your minds.”

With no superior present, she seemed surer of herself. Now, what gave him that impression? Wes watched her. She walked like an unstoppable mass, a behemoth. She wasn’t adjusting her gait! He had seen her veer from contact with warriors and humans alike. Now the warriors were presumably her guardians, and her human charges had demonstrated both the agility and the motivation to dodge her ton-plus of mass.

Never mind; there was something he wanted from het “Question, destination Thuktun Flishithy?”

“In two mealtime-gaps this status will end. There will be almost no pull. You will live floating for a long time. You must learn to live so,” she said. She hadn’t answered his question; but then, they often didn’t.

The corridor branched. The new corridor dipped, then curved to the right. Now, why the curve? This ought to be a radial corridor. Wes remembered that the streets of Beverly Hills had been laid in curves just to make them prettier. Was that it? Under spin the corridor would rise at twenty or twenty-five degrees…

But under spin, a radial corridor would be vertical. Fithp couldn’t climb ladders. The routes inward had to be spirals. Look for fast elevators too?

As the Soviets had stopped talking to Wes, so Wes had stopped talking to them. He had fallen into a kind of game. Observe. Deduce. Who will learn faster, you or me?

Tashayamp says we’ll be living in nearly free-fall in a day or so. What makes nearly free-fall, and why not spin the ship to avoid it? The fithp liked low gravity, but not that low. What could prevent them from spi

Ah. An asteroid, of course. They’ve got an asteroid base, a small one, and we’re going to be moored to it. I wish to hell they’d let us near a window.

And now we’re to see the Podo Thuktun. They showed that in the picture show. Installing the Podo Thuktun was a big deal, so important that they recorded it and showed it to us. As important as the fuel. So what was it?

Thuktun means message or lesson or a body of knowledge; I’ve heard them use it all three ways. Thuktun is part of the mother ship’s name. Fistarteh-thuktun, the sleeper with the tapestry harness, is mated to thuktun and doesn’t seem to have a normal mate. What, then, are we about to see?

The curved corridor ended in a massive rectangular door. Unlike most, this door didn’t seem to have automatic controls, and it took two warriors to shoulder it aside.

The troop marched in.

A spiral ramp ran up the sides of the cylindrical chamber. The cylinder was nearly empty: conspicuous waste in a starship. In the center was a vertical pillar no thicker than Wes’s wrist. He looked up to where it expanded into a flower-shaped cradle for…

For the Podo Thuktun, of course. It was a relic of sorts: a granite block twenty-five or thirty feet long by the same distance wide by half that in height. Its corners and edges were unevenly rounded, as if it had weathered thousands of years of dust laden winds.

There was writing on it. In it: Wes could see overhead light glinting through the lines. Something like a thread-thin laser had written script and diagrams all the way through the block.

He was being left behind. Tashayamp and half the warriors were escorting the Soviets up the spiral ramp; the other warriors were coming for Wes. He hurried to join them. Platforms led off the ramp at varying heights, and on one of these three fithp were at work. They ignored the intruders.

Fistarteh-thuktun and his spaceborn acolytes looked down for a long moment of meditation before begi

At one time bloody wars had been fought over the diagram in the central face of the Podo Thuktun. Was that diagram in fact a picture of a Predecessor? Half the world had been conquered by the herd that thought it was. Many generations had passed, and heretics had been raped of their status with dismaying regularity, before the fithp realized the truth.

Message Bearer’s interstellar ramjet had been made from that diagram.

The priest and his acolytes turned to the library screen. Paykurtank tapped at a tab the size of a human’s fist. The screen responded by showing a succession of photographs. One after another, granite half-cubes appeared in close-up against varying half-seen backgrounds.

“Skip a few,” Koolpooleh suggested.

“I countermand that,” Fistarteh-thuktun said instantly. “We’ll at least glance at them all. We’re seeking any relevant information left by the Predecessors regarding aliens, or Winterhome, or its natives,”

The thuktunthp were arrayed in order of their discovery, and roughly in order of simplicity of the lesson delivered. The history of the fithp could be read in the order of discovery of the thuktunthp. Uses of fire, mining and refining of metals, uses of the wheel: the Predecessors had made these easily available to their successors. Later discoveries had been found in caves or mountaintops or lifeless deserts.

“Pause that. Koolpooleh, is this nothing but mathematics?”

“I have no trouble reading the Line Thuktun, Fistarteh-thuktun. Simple plane geometry, a list of axioms.”

“Go to the next one.”

“The Breaker has arrived with trainees.”

“Ignore them. Pause that!”

Koolpooleh and Paykurtank were watching the humans, furtively, with one eye each. Fistarteh-thuktun pretended not to notice. Perhaps they could learn from watching the aliens. Perhaps not. The fithp warriors were even now aground and dealing with the prey.

Fistarteh-thuktun remembered what it was like to run, to take prey from a rushing stream, to see nothing but mountains in the distance and clouds overhead…