Strangers Among Us

I Count the Lights-3

He turned over his wrist to expose the datascreen and spent the remaining time until sunset reading messages and sending several variations of, “The investigation is proceeding apace and a resolution is expected shortly,” which was a flat-out lie, but at least bought time.

I’m chasing wild geese, he thought as he sent the last message. He glanced at Lodolo, who had stopped rocking and now sat motionless, eyes closed. And sooner or later those wild geese are going to turn into pigeons and come home to roost. Despite everything, his mouth quirked. I must be worried. I’d never have come up a mixed metaphor that ugly if I were thinking clearly.

He sighed. He’d almost taken early retirement from Diplomatic Corps Security three years ago, and if he had, he and Annie would currently be fishing in the mountains of Montana and hoping against hope their daughter would find someone with whom to give them grandchildren. But the opportunity to be head of security at a major new embassy on a newly opened planet had seemed too good to pass up. The pay was very, very good. Though Annie hadn’t made the trip out here with him, she’d visited a couple of times, courtesy of the free-transportation program that had also landed him with the Boynton problem.

I guess we can still go fishing after I’m cashiered out the service, he thought wistfully. In a much smaller boat. Wearing a disguise. Which will also be useful for panhandling for loose change on weekends.

He sent a final note to Simon, updating his secretary on where he was and what he was doing. If he fell off the Tower like the Ambassador . . . well, it would end all hope of a trade agreement, for one thing, but what really concerned him was that he not simply vanish without Annie ever knowing what had happened.

Almost without his noticing, the sun had slipped behind the dome of the Temple. The lengthening shadows vanished completely a few moments later. In the deepening twilight Lodolo finally stirred, and looked up at the Tower. “I count the lights,” he said helpfully.

“So I’ve heard.” Kelvas got heavily to his feet. “Let’s get this over with.”

The High Deaconess had left them during the hour they waited, but she reappeared now, striding across the stones of the courtyard on bare three-toed feet. “I will wait here for your return,” she said. “To learn what you have found.”

Or to make sure they clean up the blood promptly, Kelvas thought.

The eerie green bioluminescent lights of the Tower had come on as the day faded. As the evening land-breeze sprang up, the Temple began to emit a low organ-like chord that made the hairs on the back of Kelvas’s arms stand up. He knew the Prevarians felt peace and awe when they heard it, but considering what had happened to the Ambassador, he thought the human fear-response might be more appropriate.

Lodolo began to climb. As they passed the first light he said, as Kelvas expected, “I count the lights”; but then, for the first time, he said something else. “One.”

Another nine steps. “I count the lights. Two.”

And again. “I count the lights. Three . . .”

They climbed onward. The steps, worn and slightly rounded, sometimes even sloped down, away from the tower. Kelvas kept as close to the wall as he could, trailing one hand along it. The last light slipped from the sky. Darkness surrounded the base of the Tower: all illumination in the Temple Complex was shielded to prevent it from spilling upward. Only outside the Complex wall did the ordinary bluish illumination favored by the Prevarians appear, and even that was sparse: the Prevarians had better night-vision and what they considered brilliant illumination was more like what Kelvas associated with the kind of restaurant where the ambiance was more important than seeing what you were eating.

Lodolo strode confidently up the middle of the stairs, seemingly unconcerned by the ever-deepening abyss to his left. “I count the lights. Fourteen . . .”

Kelvas was fit for a man in his late 50s—he had to be, in his position—but he still found the climb wearing on him. The ambassador had not been particularly fit—he hadn’t had to be, in his position—and Kelvas found himself impressed Hori had undertaken the climb at all. He really believed in this trade agreement, he thought. He really cared about this planet and its . . . people.

“I count the lights. Twenty-eight . . .”

Kelvas had never cared very much about any of the worlds on which he’d served. His heart was always back on Earth. He didn’t hate the various aliens he’d met, and he’d done his level best to understand their societies, but not out of real interest: only so he could do his job and identify potential threats to the diplomats he was charged with protecting. He didn’t think of aliens as people so much as things that he had to deal with efficiently in order to do his job.

“I count the lights. Thirty-two . . .”

Like this simpleminded monk. Kelvas gulped more air and kept climbing, trying to ignore the growing ache in his calves.

Around and around. And then . . .

Just like that, Lodolo stopped. He didn’t say, “I count the lights.” He didn’t say . . . what number were they up to? Forty-six? Instead, he made a low, unhappy moan in his throat. He tugged at Kelvas’s sleeve, and pointed. Kelvas, who had been climbing with his head down, concentrating on putting one foot after the other, looked up.

He couldn’t see any reason for the delay. They stood two steps below one of the green lights, casting what seemed to him a paltry pool of illumination, though no doubt beautifully bright to Lodolo. An Aspect of the God, smiling beatifically—although even that had a slightly demonic look to human eyes, given the strangeness of the Prevarian face—stared out from the wall below the light. The next light glowed some five metres away.

Kelvas looked at Lodolo. The monk, still moaning softly, had begun to rock back and forth again, for no reason Kelvas could see.

Kelvas resisted the urge to say “I don’t understand.” He resisted the urge to say, “I count the lights. Forty-seven.” But he couldn’t just stand there all night, either. He took a step forward, and then another. The monk’s moan deepened.

As then, as Kelvas passed the smiling Aspect of the Silent God, the next light, number forty-seven, went out.

To Kelvas’s eyes, it was as if the steps disappeared completely, swallowed by the darkness. Their black stone barely showed even in the green light of the bioluminescent lamps. The stars glimmering overhead had no hope of reflection.

Lodolo plucked at Kelvas’s sleeve, as though trying to stop him from advancing. But Kelvas pulled free, barely noticing, mind racing. Was this where the Ambassador died? Had Lodolo seen this interruption in the lights as he walked around the Tower, counting the lights?

But why had the light gone out? And what lurked in the darkness?

Kelvas turned and looked out over the city, trying to get his bearings. The Embassy glowed on the horizon, its Terran lights brighter and whiter than anything else in sight. The Ambassador had fallen from the side of the Tower facing the Embassy . . . a fact that the anti-traders insisted pointed to a Prevarian murder plot.

It could have been right here.

It had to have been right here.

But how did that help him?

He couldn’t send a forensics team up here to investigate: the High Deaconess had made it clear that would not be allowed. The Prevarians lacked the technological know-how to even attempt to gather samples, and in any event, the steps were ritually washed every day, the only time anyone mounted the Tower while the sun shone.

If he were going to discover anything, it would have to be now. He took the flashlight from his belt and unfolded the collapsible framework that allowed him to attach it to his uniform cap so he could keep his hands free. Once the lamp was firmly in place, he reached up and switched it on. Lodolo cried out in distress and flung his blue arm over his big eyes at the flare of bright white light.

“Sorry.” Kelvas started back up the steps, head down, studying each riser and runner in turn. A trip wire, perhaps? But no, not if the steps were washed daily: someone would have discovered it.

He looked up at the wall as he approached the spot where the next lamp should have gleamed.

There it was, its crystal sides reflecting his torch, but devoid of even the slightest green glow. Below it, the Aspect of the Silent God: in this instant, in sharp contrast to the Aspect he’d just left, screaming in apparent terror, mouth wide, eyes bulging, the perfect embodiment, for a human, of the Tower’s constant threatening moan.

He looked down at the steps again, and leaned forward to get a closer look at the step right in front of the burned-out lamp.

Just enough light came from the stars glittering above that Ambassador Hori could make out the shape of the dark lantern, and the indistinct Aspect of the God below it. He came abreast of it.

Something slammed into his side. He toppled left. The steps were only a metre wide, and sloped downward. His upper body fell into nothingness, and dragged his legs with it.

Prevarian gravity was very close to Earth’s. Ambassador Hori had just over four seconds to stare up at the whirling stars above him before, for him, they were blotted out forever.

“I count the lights!” Lodolo shouted—screamed. Then the monk slammed into Kelvas from behind as something else shot over his head, brushing against his shoulder. Kelvas thudded to the steps, gasping, then rolled over.

In the light from Kelvas’s torch, Lodolo struggled for balance on the very edge of the precipice, giant eyes enormously wide in terror, arms flailing. He tipped backward—

Kelvas lunged forward.

He grabbed the monk’s blue-skinned ankle, jerking Lodolo back onto the steps even as he toppled.

The monk slammed down on the black stone harder than Kelvas had, and lost his breath completely, gaping soundlessly as his face purpled in the light from Kelvas’s headlamp.

Kelvas whipped around again, searching frantically this way and that for their attacker.

The circle of light slid over black stone.

Nothing on the steps.

Nothing on the—

No—there!

A flicker of movement, in the gaping mouth of the Aspect of the God.

He raised his light. A round black ball, contracting as he watched, settled silently into place. An instant later the darkened lamp glowed back to dim green life.

Kelvas got carefully to his feet and drew the weapon he wasn’t supposed to be carrying on the Tower, a tiny personnel stunner. He jammed it into the opening and triggered its powerful electric jolt. The thing in the mouth of the carved face sizzled and popped, then dropped to the steps. It rolled toward the edge of the sloping stair.

Lodolo shot out a three-fingered hand and grabbed it. “I count the lights!” he gasped out, as he allowed Kelvas to slip the ball from his palm. It weighed far more than its size suggested: it would have to, since it had to have mass enough to force a grown man from the steps.

“Indeed you do,” Kelvas said. “And you do a very good job of it.” He slipped the ball into his pocket to examine later, then held out his hand to the monk, who gripped Kelvas’s five fingers in his three and let Kelvas help him to his feet. Kelvas took a deep breath. Adrenaline had left him feeling a little shaky. “Let’s go down,” he said.