Warlord of Kor Part 14

Behind the altar, there was a s.p.a.ce just large enough for them to squeeze through. Rynason's heart leaped; he pointed quickly to it and turned to fire again as Mara pushed her way into the narrow aperture. A disintegrator beam hissed over his head; another tore into the wall two feet away from him. The Hirlaji were trying to keep their fire away from the altar itself.

Rynason turned and squeezed behind the altar as soon as Mara was clear.

It was tight, but he made it, and once through the narrow opening they found more room in the darkness. They could hear noise outside as the Hirlaji moved toward the altar, but it sounded far away and dim. Mara moved back into the darkness, and he followed.

They moved perhaps twenty feet into the wall behind the altar before they were brought to a halt. The pa.s.sage ended. Well, no matter; if it was not an escape route, at least it would afford cover from the weapons of the Hirlaji. Rynason dropped to the floor and rested.

Mara sat beside him. "Lee, you shouldn't have tried it," she said anxiously. "Now we're trapped." He felt her hand touch his face in the darkness.

"Maybe," he said. "But we may be able to catch them off their guard again, and if so we may be able to get out."

She was silent. He felt her lean against his shoulder wearily, her hair soft against his neck. Then he remembered that she had been hurt.

"What happened to your arm? And you were bleeding."

"I think it's broken. The bleeding was nothing, though: you should see yourself. You were so tattered and b.l.o.o.d.y when you came in that I hardly knew you. Knights should come in more properly shining armor."

He grinned wearily. "Wait till next time."

"Lee, where are we?" she said abruptly. Their eyes were becoming adjusted to the darkness, and they could see rising around them a complexity of machine relays, connectives, and pieces which did not seem to make sense.

Rynason looked more closely at the complex. It was definitely Outsiders work, but what was it? Part of the Altar of Kor, obviously, but the Outsiders telecommunicators had never used such extensive machinery. Yet it did look familiar. He tried to remember the different types of Outsiders machinery which had been found and partially reconstructed by the advancing Earthmen in the centuries past. There weren't many....

Then, suddenly, he had it, and it was so simple that he was surprised he hadn't thought of it before.

"This is Kor," he said. "It's not a communicator--it's a computer. An Outsiders computer."

NINE

Mara's frown deepened; she looked around them in the dimness, her eyes taking in the complexity and extent of the circuitry. It faded into the darkness behind them; lines ran into the walls and floor.

"They built their computers in the grand manner, didn't they?" she said softly.

"I've seen fragments of them before," Rynason said. "This is a big one--no telling how much area the total complex takes up. One thing's certain, though: it's no ordinary computer of theirs. Not for plain math-work, nor even for specialized computations, like the one on Rigel II--that was apparently used for astrogation, but it wasn't half the size of this. And navigation between stars, even with the kind of drive they must have had, is no simple problem."

"The Hirlaji think it's a G.o.d," she said.

"That raised another problem," Rynason mused. "The Outsiders built it, and must have left it here when they pulled back to wherever they were going ... if they ever left the planet. But the Hirlaji use it, and they communicate with it verbally. The Hirlaji are apparently responsible for keeping it protected since then. But why should the Hirlaji be able to use it?"

"Unless they're the Outsiders after all?" said Mara.

Rynason frowned. "No, I'm still not convinced of that. The clue seems to be that they communicate verbally with it--they must have been using it since before they developed telepathy."

"Couldn't there have been direct contact between the Hirlaji and the Outsiders back when the Hirlaji were just evolving out of the beast stage?"

"There must have been," said Rynason. "The Temple rituals are conducted in an even older form of their language than most remembered--a proto-language that was kept alive only by the priest caste, because the machine had been set to respond to that language."

"But aren't primitive languages usually composed of simple, basic words and concepts? How well could they communicate in such a language?"

"Not very well," Rynason said. "Which would explain why the machine seemed to make mistakes--clumsiness of language. So the Outsiders, maybe, left the machine when they pulled out, but they set it to respond to the Hirlaji language because our horsefaced friends were beginning to build a civilization of their own and the Outsiders thought they'd leave them some guidance...." He stopped for a moment, remembering that first linkage with Horng, and Tebron's memories. "The Hirlaji called them the Old Ones," he said.

"And that order to Tebron ... about the other race that they would meet someday. That was based on Outsiders observations."

"I wonder when the Outsiders were on Earth," Rynason said. "Sometime after we'd started our own rise, certainly. Maybe in ancient Mesopotamia, or India. Or later, during the Renaissance?"

"The time doesn't matter, does it?" Mara said. "They touched down on Earth, took note of us, and left. Somehow they thought we were going to develop more rapidly than we did."

"Probably before the Dark Ages," Rynason said. "Maybe they didn't see that thousand-year setback coming...." He stopped, and stood up in the low pa.s.sageway among the ancient circuitry. "So here we are, second-guessing the Outsiders. And outside, their proteges have disintegrators probably left by the Outsiders, and they're just waiting for us to try to get out."

"Our new-found knowledge isn't doing us much good, is it?" she said.

He shook his head slowly. "When I was still on the secondary senseteach units I met Rene Malhomme for the first time. My father worked the s.p.a.cers, so I don't even remember what planet this was on. But I remember the night I first saw Rene--he was speaking from the top of a blue-lumber pile, shouting about the corporations that were moving in.

He was getting all worked up about something, and several people in the crowd were shouting back at him; I stopped to watch. All of a sudden six or seven men moved in from somewhere and dragged him down from where he was standing. There was a fight--people were thrown all around. I hid till it was over.

"When the crowd finally cleared, there was Rene. His clothes were torn, but he wasn't hurt. Every one of the men who had attacked him had to be carried away; I think one of them was dead. Rene stood there laughing; then he saw me hidden in the darkness and he took me home. He told me that when he'd been younger he'd worked his way all the way in to Earth, and studied some of the cultures there. He'd learned karate, which was an ancient j.a.panese way of fighting."

Rynason took a deep breath. "He said everything a person learns will be useful someday. And I believed him."

"A nice parable," Mara said. "We could use him against the Hirlaji, though."

Rynason was silent, thinking. If they could only catch the aliens off guard ... but of course they couldn't, now. He let his eyes wander aimlessly along the circuitry surrounding them. Tell me, old Kor, what do we do now?

After a moment his eyes narrowed; he reached up and traced a connection with his fingers, back to the front, toward the altar. It led directly to ... the speaker!

The voice of Kor.

And if he could interrupt that connection, put his own voice through the speaker, out through the altar....

"Mara, we're going out. I've found my own brand of karate for our friends out there."

He helped her to her feet. She moved somewhat painfully, her broken left arm hanging stiffly at her side, but she made no protest.

"We've got to be fast," he said. "I don't know how well this will work--it depends on how much they trust their clay-footed G.o.d today."

Quickly, he outlined his plan. Mara listened silently and nodded.

Then he set to work. It was largely guesswork, following those intricate alien connections, but Rynason had seen this part of such machines before. He found the penultimate point at which the impulses from the brain were translated into sound and broadcast through the speaker. He disconnected this, his torn fingers working awkwardly on the delicate linkages.

"Ready?"

Mara was just inside the narrow pa.s.sage behind the altar. She nodded quickly.

Rynason twisted himself so that he could speak directly into the input of the speaker. He raised his voice to approximate the thin, high sounds of the Hirlaji language.

_Remain motionless. Remain motionless. Remain motionless._

The command burst out upon the altar room of the Temple, shattering the silence. The Hirlaji turned in surprise to the altar--and stood still.