MAZEWAY

Jack Williamson

Copyright © 1990 by Jack Williamson

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-37936

ISBN 0-345-36936-X

Cover Art by Don Dixon

e-book ver. 1.0

When the all-cutting blade

Meets the uncuttable stone . . .

Can you guess the consequence?

—an ancient red delver riddle

1

The Game of Blade and Stone

"Dad, when can we go home?"

"The halo is our home, Benn." His father frowned. "We must earn our right to stay here."

They were jogging together in the squirrel cage. That was an odd name for it, Benn thought, because there were no squirrels in the halo. Squirrels from old Earth couldn't live here, because they needed air. The exercise made Benn and his father puff and sweat, but they had to do it every day because they needed the gravity of Earth as well as air to breathe.

"Better forget your dreams." His father looked hard at him. "Learn to like the halo."

Benn shook his head and kept on jogging. The cage was in the gym tank. That was part of the big wheel they lived in, spinning very slowly here at the fringe of Cluster One. The cluster was a city, a little cloud of ice-moons and strange eldren places spinning around the home of the Eldermost, all so far out that the Sun was only one more star. He had never seen Earth at all, but his mother still called it home.

"Let's cool off." They slowed the cage and jumped out into the cold thin stink of old sweat and alien plastics. "You wouldn't like Earth." They sat on a bench. "Not the way it is."

But he loved Earth, the way it was in his mind. The huge home world, so much bigger and stranger than these bare gray snowballs. He wanted to walk on soft green grass under tall green trees and a bright blue sky. He'd always dreamed of towering mountains and stormy oceans and the great human cities hung like diamonds in the skyweb above them. He wanted to feel the strong pull of Earth and the push of the wind and heat of the sun on his bare face, with no eldren lifeskin sealing them away.

"Why?" he whispered. "Why?"

His father took a long time to answer, and his voice seemed tired. "Old Earth was wonderful once, at least for your mother. But we can't go back."

He waited for his father to explain.

"We never told you, Benn." A little muscle bunched on his father's jaw. "But you're six today. I think you're old enough to know what happened."

He waited again, but his father sat staring off at the thick green vines of the walls of the habitat till he had to ask, "What did happen?"

"A thing came out of space and tore the skyweb down."

He knew about the web. Runesong had told him what it had been: the great human city, really a thousand cities hanging in the sky, its houses and factories and space docks strung like shining beads on strong kwanlon wires that spread midway out to the Moon. He'd seen holo pictures of the web and read about it in flimsy old paper books.

"What kind of thing?"

He could hear his mother, softly singing the way she used to sing when she was putting him to sleep. She was out in the garden tank, picking newberries to bake him a birthday pie. His mouth had watered for it, but suddenly his stomach had twisted hard. He stared at his father, wondering. The web had surely been too wide and strong and splendid for anything to tear it down.

"I saw it." His father looked grim. "Nothing I could believe. Half machine, the eldren say, yet half alive. It had wings to fly in air and jets to fly in space. It sliced through the web. The ballast parts flew off into space. Most of it crashed down on Earth."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"We didn't want to hurt you." His father tried again to smile. "The eldren called the creature the heatseeker queen. It came out of space and made a nest in an iron asteroid. One of the young came down to wreck the web."

"Is it—" He stared at his father. "Is it still—"

"It's dead. It fell in the ocean. The queen must be dead by now."

"Bennie?"

His mother was coming in. Her face and arms were freckled purple with newberry juice, but he thought she was as beautiful as Runesong had been. Almost, anyhow. Her basket was full of the sweet-smelling berries, and he felt suddenly hungry again.

"Tell him, Quin!" She stood looking at his father with an odd little smile. "Tell him what happened to the queen and her brood."

Quin grinned, saying nothing.

"Your father killed them." Smiling proudly through the freckles, she came to stand with her arms around both of them. "He's a hero, Benn!"

"The halo wants no heroes." His father shrugged. "The eldren way has no room for them."

"He's still a hero." His mother's face grew very serious. "Benn, we're here in the halo because of what your father did. He saved the eldren from whatever that creature could have done. It's true that most of them don't like killing, but the El­dermost brought us out here to be speakers for mankind. That's our job, working for permission for human people to stay in the halo and join the Elderhood."

"I see." He nodded slowly, not quite sure he liked what he saw. The Earth would surely have been a better home. He asked, "What happens if they don't let us stay?"

"Nothing good." His mother's voice was slow and small. "They've got to let us stay."

"Your job, Benn, when you grow up." His father's strong arm slid around him.  "The eldren never hurry anything, but you must carry on, doing whatever you can to convince them. It won't be easy. Too many of them don't think we're fit for the Elderhood."

"If they don't let us stay—"

His father's head shook and his mother's face looked sad be­neath the purple freckles, but neither spoke.

"If that will be my job—" He sat straighter on the bench, feeling proud for a moment and then suddenly afraid. "How can I begin?"

"Get to know the eldren. Learn the eldren way."

He nodded. "Runesong used to tell me that, but I never quite knew what she meant."

She was eldren, and he had loved her. He had seen a good many other eldren beings flying past the big windows of the habitat. Some of them frightened him. They had come from all across the galaxy, even from beyond it. They were hundreds of different races, all with different shapes and different languages. Their leader was the Eldermost, the great wise being who lived down in the core of a big snowball in the middle of the cluster.

"They're too strange." He shook his head. "They can't even talk."

"They do talk," his father reminded him. "In ways of their own. Not with sound, but with radiations that carry where there is no air. With light. Ultraviolet. Infrared. Radio. We have to use translators."

"I know." But even in translation, most of what they said was hard to understand. Uneasily he looked at his mother. "Are they smarter than we are?"

Her lips drew tighter, but she didn't answer.

"Could be." His father shrugged. "Hard to say. Certainly they know more. They've been learning things and filling up their libraries and museums for half a billion years. They don't think quite the way we do. But most of them mean well enough when you understand them."

He asked for more about the eldren way.

"Remember Sunshine?" His father grinned. "Your trouble with her?"

Sunshine was the cat. The trouble had been long ago, but he rubbed his wrist when he thought about it now. It had happened out in the hydroponic garden, when she was drinking the soya cream his mother poured for her breakfast. He tried to pick her up. She scratched him. His wrist bled and stung. He kicked her.

"Don't do that," his mother had scolded him. "It isn't nice. The eldren wouldn't like it."

She didn't say why. Sunshine was a Terran cat, not eldren at all, but his mother only frowned when he told her that. He had to go to Quin, who picked him up and put a patch over the scratch.

He asked why the eldren would care what he did to the cat.

"You hurt her," his father said. "Hurting anything doesn't fit their lifestyle. They don't fight, though they certainly could. Their high-tech industries could build weapons more terrible than any we used to make on Earth. In half a billion years, they've never fought a war."

Lifestyle had been a new word, and the scratch stung again when he thought about it now. He waited for his father to explain more about Sunshine.

"When you kicked her, you broke a very simple eldren rule. It says you don't hurt people."

"She scratched me first."

"She's still planetic." Quin frowned, thinking how to say it. "We humans used to be planetic. We will be again, unless we're able to learn the eldren mind-set."

He waited again, but Quin had stopped to stare at the climb­ing vines of tomatoes and squash and melon that provided food and oxygen for the habitat.

"It looks easy when we talk about Sunshine," he finally went on. "But there's more . . ." His voice trailed off, and his gray eyes had sharp lines around them when they came back to Benn. "You'll do it, son. Because you must."

"How can I learn?"

They both looked at him, and he thought he saw the shine of tears in his mother's eyes.

"There's a game," his father said at last. "The Game of Blade and Stone."

"Runesong talked about it."

That was long ago, back while she still lived here. She had been a Newling, different from all the other eldren because she loved him and he could love her. Very different, too, from any­body human, because of her shape and because she liked empty space better than gravity or air. Yet she had never been strange to him, because he had known and loved her since she received him into her shining wings when he was born.

She had been still lovely when she had to go away. Lovely in spite of the long laser scar that made a stiff black ridge across her shining side. Her body had been sleek and soft to touch, tapering neatly to the tail-jet she used to move in space because her nanionic centers had been crippled. Her long thin nose ended in a quick little-fingered hand. Her eyes were a little like Sun­shine's, but they shimmered with rainbow colors when she spoke. Her voice was that shimmer, and the flicker of her wings. It had always come to him through speakers, but it was the warm human voice she had learned from his father's mother.

She used to amuse him with poems and stories out of human books she had read. He loved one poem she remembered when he asked her about the Game of Blade and Stone. He memorized it and copied it into a little green-backed notebook when he learned to write, and he could still recite the opening:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

Of course Xanadu was just a dream the old poet had dreamed, but Runesong had told him about Mazeway, which was a double world, its two planets named Blade and Stone. He used to wake with those pleasure-domes shining in his mind.

Stone, she told him, was the underground arena for the game. The old Red Delver warlords had invented the rules, she said, when they got tired of killing one another to choose their ruling primarchs, and the caves were still full of their tricks and traps.

He asked if he could ever play.

"Not very likely." The light dimmed in her wings. "The game was never meant for human people."

Remembering all that, he sat straighter and asked for more about the Game of Blade and Stone.

"It's a sport for the eldren," his father said. "And also a school in the eldren way. When new peoples want to settle in the halo, it is used to teach them the eldren style of life."

"But we—" His voice caught when he thought of Runesong. "We can't play?"

"I've inquired." His father nodded, looking at him very so­berly. "I'm always told that the game was never planned for planetics. I suppose some human might be allowed to enter, but he'd be facing terrible handicaps."

"I want to try," he told them. "When I'm grown."

"Perhaps you can." Pride shone in his mother's eyes. "But don't promise too much now." Her hand caught his, and he felt her tremble. "The game isn't really meant for us."

"We'll see," he said. "We'll see."

2

Cheetah

Roxane Kwan was born on the far-off Earth a year or so after the skyweb fell. During a monsoon season, so her father said, in a hunting camp somewhere on the Serengeti plain. He never pointed out the place, and she never knew the date. She couldn't remember her mother.

"The lions ate her."

That was all he ever told her. The hard truth, or only a bitter joke? She used to wonder. He was a grimly silent man, even with those he commanded, yet he had cared for her as tenderly as their hard lives allowed and she thought he loved her.

She grew up as a sort of mascot for the Kwan Corps. That was his brave name for the handful of hopeless human relics he had gathered from the wrecks and life-pods and ejection gear that had brought them down alive from the falling skyweb. Half naked, half clad in odd rags and scraps of half-tanned hide, half armed with rough-forged knives and swords and the few pre­cious service guns and lasers they had salvaged from the ruins, they followed him back and forth along the belt of desolation where the sky cities had come flaming out of space.

Perhaps because they had no other hope. Exiles from the sky, they lived like hungry predators, hunting with the lions and leopards and hyenas in the old game preserve, digging for useful loot in the shattered ruins of the old Sun Country lodges. With­out his cold nerve, few could have stayed alive.

All wore the golden Sunmark, the bright-glinting badge of what they once had been and what he promised to make them again. Though that laser-printed brand was all he required for enlistment, his discipline was strict. He allowed no women among them. Growing older, Roxane sometimes wondered if her mother had left him nursing some secret bitterness against all women.

The year she was six he taught her to shoot a little target rifle he had found in the abandoned ruin of a shooting blind. Lying downwind from a water hole, she got her first game with it, a young waterbuck that had come to drink.

It was too heavy for her to carry, but she gutted it with the long knife one of the men had forged for her and stayed proudly with it, standing off the vultures, until he came to help. He never said she had hunted well, but she saw his pleased grin at the blood that had smeared her when she tried to lift the carcass. The men dressed it out and took it back to roast on the campfire. They gave her the first good-smelling slice, and said she hunted like a cheetah.

Afterward, they called her Cheetah.

All except her father. To him, she was always a Kwan, elected at birth to be a Signer for the Sun Company and next after him to head the House, destined to succeed him to the proud title of Sun Tycoon. When they had made a way back to space. When they had rebuilt the skyweb, restored the Company, recon­quered the planets. That was his dream.

He stood proudly straight as she always recalled him, lean and ready as a leopard, hair and beard sun-bleached to the color of his brown-burned skin. His uniform was gone long ago, but he wore his old service pistol in a sturdy leather belt and clung to the tattered wreck of a blue service cap, pinned with a golden sun circled with silver stars.

His right eye was weak and squinted. He commonly covered it with a faded black patch, cut like the patch in pictures of Ivan Kwan, the legendary founder of the House. His nose had the same haughty jut, though a dark scar crossed it. Wearing the patch and the nose and that battered cap like insignia of power, he called himself a general.

General Maximilian Kwan. That may have been his actual name. Growing older, she was never really sure. Some few of his genes may have come down from old Ivan, who had claimed to be an actual Romanoff. Or perhaps the iron Kwan nerve was all he ever needed. No actual proof was possible. The official Sunblood registries had burned, with all the Company records, as they fell out of the sky.

She always longed to know about that wonderful fabric where the cities of the sky had been hung, but her father seldom spoke about it, or the stranger wonders of the Oort halo far on beyond. She had to listen to the men when they sat around the campfires. They all had lived in the web, and they spoke of the splendid times before the fall with a wistful sadness in their voices.

They were tutors. It was Marco Lara who taught her to read the yellowed old paper books they sometimes found in buildings not entirely burned or flattened. He was her father's first lieu­tenant, a wiry little one-armed man, the right arm off from the elbow down, lost she never knew how. When she could read, she used to carry the books in her backpack till they fell apart, because they carried her back to discover all the wealth and pride and power that had been. In dreams of her own, she ruled with the Sun Tycoons, spun the wonder of the sky web, voyaged far­ther on to the planets and the halo.

Bit by bit, she learned what the halo was: a vast swarm of small ice-worlds formed in the outer fringe of the condensing Solar nebula, reaching out nobody knew how far. Strange space beings had come from there, the starbird and the skyfish. The monster, too, the great space creature that had come to tear the skyweb down. In spite of the monster, she kept on begging for more about the halo than anybody knew. When her father's dream came true, she wanted to go on out, to explore the un­known ice-worlds where the starbird and the skyfish had lived.

Most of the men believed in her father and his dream. So did she—at least while she was young. Belief came harder as the years went by and he grew older and she saw no promise of any kind of magic ladder back to space. There were always a few who muttered their doubts, though they seldom dared to chal­lenge him.

One doubter spoke on a lean day in a cruel season when the monsoon nearly failed. They were crossing the Great Rift valley. There was no food except for her, and too little water. Half the hungry men wanted to turn back to look again for game closer to Mt. Kenya. She heard that skeptic whisper that her father was never born a Kwan.

"Listen, mister!" He halted the company there in the desert. One hand near the old projectile gun, he swung to face the challenger. "If you don't believe me, why are you here?"

The skeptic's name was Blixter. A big man, fat in better times, he had no pigments fit for Africa. His hair was yellow straw, his face loose and flabby now where the fat had been, burned red-raw and always peeling. He carried an old laser pistol, use­less until he found a new power cell, and an eight-foot spear that he used like a walking cane when he limped.

"Prove it, sir." He blinked at her father, leaning on his cane. "If you can." His pale eyes were rimmed with red. They fell before her father's one-eyed stare, but still he muttered stub­bornly, "Show us anything!"

Marco Lara moved to her father's side, hunting gun cradled in his one good arm.

"You can try to kill me." Her father stepped closer to Blixter. "If you've got guts for it."

Blixter shuffled his broken boots on the gravel and shook his head. Like a crippled wildebeest, she thought, dying with a bullet through his belly. She felt sorry for him.

"Or else—"

Her father stopped to glance at her, and she was proud of him. His single eye scanned the other men, who stood squinting against the sun at Blixter and Lara and him.

"Or else—" His thin lips drew into a snarling smile at Blix­ter, and he rasped the words, loud and slow and savage. "You'll confess yourself a lying coward and tell the corps that I am in fact a space-born Kwan, the true and rightful heir to the Family of the Kwans, sole owner now of every Sun Company share, destined by legal right to become the next Sun Tycoon."

Blixter stood still blinking for half a minute, till Lara leveled the hunting gun. He gulped then, and spat dry foam and said he did believe.

Her father turned that hard dark eye from him to the other men.

"Listen!" he rasped. "One more time, I'll tell you who I am." They looked at him and looked at each other and looked again at Blixter, who had dropped his spear and sat slumped down on a rock. Finally, sweating in the breathless heat, they squatted in a circle to hear what he said.

"I was born in the High House." He paused to glare again at Blixter, who wilted under his look. "I have my Company microcard to prove it." He slapped the worn leather pouch belted to his hip, but he didn't show the card. "My mother came from the true Kwan line. My father was a Kwan by election. I grew up in the web.

"I was a Sun Fleet commander, out in space the day the seeker struck. Bringing the Moon Queen home from the Pallas wire. The attack caught me alone in the control dome, nosing down to dock at Kilimanjaro High."

He stopped and looked away toward the faint white crown of the mountain itself, so far and low in the south that it rippled like a banner in the heat.

"Kilimanjaro!" He spat the word at Blixter, and paused as if he expected one more challenge. Blixter sat still, gasping in the heat, and he went on. "My signal officer had caught some warn­ing from Fleet Command, but nothing he could believe. Made no report to me. The thing caught us by surprise. It flew out of Earth's shadow cone not a dozen kilometers ahead. God knows what, or where, it came from.

"Something shaped more like some weird insect than any­thing I'd ever thought we'd meet anywhere off Earth. Climbing out of the shadow, shredding the web with a blue-blazing tail-jet. We tried to fight it. Turned the ship to meet it. Fired two nuke torpedoes."

He shrugged and turned to Marco Lara. They nodded to­gether as if in some bleak understanding.

"Spitballs! The nukes went home. Dead on. Blazing through the filters on ignition, hot enough to kill anything we ever put in space. But that damn thing—it never seemed to feel 'em. Just went on wasting the web. The ballast satellites kept sailing out of orbit, dragging docks and labs, minigrav factories, Sun Fleet bases, the High House itself!"

Lean lips shut tight, he turned again to wait for Lara's nod of bitter affirmation. A thin streak of bright red blood had begun to ooze down his gray-stubbled chin from where sun and wind had cracked his lower lip.

"Nightmare! A picture I'll never forget! The shape of the monster and the wreck of the cities. Ships and pressure spheres and the tangled ruin of everything, bright in the sunlight and shining against the dark like broken strings of beads! The whole sky world coming apart and falling up to nowhere.

"The wires themselves could have killed us. Kwanlon cables, too small to see, tough enough to slice our hull. We steered clear of them, but that blue jet caught us, close enough and hot enough to fuse all our external signal and observation gear. We lost air pressure in the crew compartments and the engine room.

"Killed all the crew."

Lara was nodding again, and Rox...