A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [150]
She took a taste of each item, including the sweets, and complimented herself on her culinary prowess. Then she began to eat her meal with gusto and satisfaction. “Take all the time you want, Davlin,” she called out to the empty landscape. “I’ll just wait here.”
She sipped more wine and sat back to watch the glorious desert sunset.
77
DAVLIN LOTZE
His first order of business was to determine where he’d been stranded. Between one breath and the next, Davlin Lotze had passed through the Klikiss transportal, traversing an unimaginable distance—and arrived here among ancient ruins under a pastel sky with a dim sun lurking like a blind eye on the horizon.
He looked around, taking the time to make a calm, reasoned assessment of the lumpy Klikiss structures around him. The air was dry and thin, but breathable, as seemed to be the case on nearly all of the Klikiss worlds he had read about. The trapezoidal stone window on this end of the portal wall also seemed intact and functional.
One step at a time. This was a problem to be solved. Davlin spent an hour wandering among the ruins. Perhaps Margaret Colicos had fled here—although in the frame around Rheindic Co’s transportal, there were hundreds of coordinate squares to choose from. If she had indeed used the alien system, Margaret could have traveled to any of the planets. She could be anywhere, and she could still be alive.
Just as he intended to survive.
Later, as the silence weighed down on him, Davlin called out, “Hello!” Receiving no response, he yelled three more times. He listened to the echoes of his words on a world that had probably never heard a human voice, and then decided to call no further attention to himself.
As he explored his surroundings, he found neither water nor anything that looked edible. The jagged landscape, the towering Klikiss mounds, even the color of the sky, nagged at his memories. He tried to recall the Colicos material he had scanned while preparing for the Rheindic Co investigation.
This world was remarkably similar to a planet called Llaro, the site of the first Klikiss ruins discovered by the “planet prospector” Madeleine Robinson and her sons nearly two centuries earlier. The Robinsons had found dormant Klikiss robots in the ruins there; if Davlin could locate another Klikiss robot, perhaps he could ask the black machine for assistance. Of course, this might not be wise if the ancient beetlelike machines had in fact murdered Louis and the green priest and destroyed all the equipment on Rheindic Co…
Under lavender skies, walking against brisk winds, he made his way back to the trapezoidal stone wall. He spent a day contemplating how best to try it again, testing the system before he made another mistake.
Whether this place was indeed Llaro or some similar uncharted Klikiss world, Davlin was lost. If each symbol around the trapezoidal stone window was the coordinate of another destination among the long-abandoned Klikiss planets, he had no way of knowing which was which.
Even if he could remember the symbol on the address tile that had sent him here in the first place, he had no idea which of the alien coordinate tiles would take him back to Rlinda Kett on Rheindic Co.
Did he dare go anyplace else at random? Though he had survived the journey here, what if he chose incorrectly the next time? What if he transported himself to a place where the air was not breathable, or where the ruins had collapsed? Unlikely, but possible. Was that what had happened to Margaret Colicos?
On the other hand, he was already getting hungry and thirsty.
He inspected the transportal machinery to reassure himself, though he did not have any grasp of how the mechanics functioned. Nevertheless, the generator hummed. Everything appeared to be intact. His passage had apparently