Ascending - James Alan Gardner [140]
Therefore, we made swifter progress, though we were now in a part of the ship where the ground was exceedingly well trodden. In spots, the dirt had worn away entirely, revealing solid flooring beneath. Festina said all these floors were made from steel-plast, a material found in human star-ships as well—which made sense, considering the Shaddill had taught humans how to make starships in the first place. One wondered what other features the stick-ship possessed in common with a vessel like Royal Hemlock…and we soon discovered such a feature, as a door we were approaching swished open automatically at our approach.
Doors had opened for us in this fashion several times on the Hemlock; however, this was the first such occurrence on the stick-ship, and Festina halted our march immediately. More precisely, since I was walking in front, she grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and yanked me back sharply.
I turned with a reproachful look and was about to tell her she should not handle me with such brusqueness…but she threw her hand over my mouth before I could speak a word. Apparently, she did not want any lurking Shaddill to hear us talking. When she was certain our companions would also keep quiet, she motioned us to stay where we were, then crept forward stealthily toward the open door.
She stood just outside the door for a tediously long time, holding her breath and listening for any sort of noise from the inner room. The rest of us listened too—Uclod and Lajoolie rolled back the coverings of their spherelike ears, exposing raw eardrums to the world. Perhaps this made their hearing even keener than mine; at any rate, Festina must have believed they had the best ears among us, for she turned to them and mouthed the word, “Anything?” Both Divians shook their heads. Festina shrugged, clenched her stun-pistol in both hands, and hurled herself forward into the room.
Nothing happened. No shots, no shouts, no scuffles. After some tense moments, Festina reappeared in the doorway and waved us forward.
The Milk Of A Million Mothers
By normal standards, the light in the room was dim: just-after-sundown twilight like the hangar where we first landed. After the darkness of the tunnels, however, the soft dusky glow seemed pleasantly welcoming.
It was bright enough to show that the room was empty…which is to say, there were no robots or Shaddill or bulky machines. Instead, three mini-chili trees grew in a widely spaced triangle, their trunks arrow-straight and their branches heavy with yellow fruit. Nothing else sprouted from the surrounding soil—no bushes or undergrowth, not a single blade of grass—but in the center of the triangle formed by the trees stood a fountain carved from gray stone.
We had all seen such a fountain before—in the pictures Festina showed of her world, Agua. This was unmistakably a creation of Las Fuentes.
The fountain was simple: a low bowl-shaped basin ten paces across with a knee-high wall surrounding it, and a single unadorned pillar rising from the center. The pillar stood a little higher than my head; it had three spouts just down from its top, each oriented toward one of the mini-chili trees. At the moment, however, the spouts were not spouting. Indeed, the entire fountain was bone-dry, as if it had not operated in ages. It sat in stony silence—a silence that was somehow more intense because it ought to have been broken by the cheerful gushing of water.
“Okay,” Uclod said softly, “this clinches it. The Shaddill are Las Fuentes.”
It seemed appropriate to talk in near-whispers. We had stopped just inside the door, none of us ready to venture farther. “Admiral,” Aarhus murmured, “those fountains on Las Fuentes planets—did any of them work?”
Festina shook her head. “By the time humans arrived, they’d been sitting idle for thousands of years—gummed up with dirt and mold. A lot were completely buried under normal soil accumulation; they were only found because they