The Glass Scarab

Igxkyal the glass gatherer was the first to see it. He was out on the plains just before sunrise, his carapace already half filled with sheets and shards that he could sell in the morning market, when he felt the familiar tingle up his spine.

Familiar, but somehow not quite. The balls came to him with signature sensations: the buzzing of spinners, the shaking of sliders, the almost-painful pulsing of smashers. But this was a gentle tingle, a subtle back-and-forth like a banner flapping softly in a warm breeze (though neither banners nor breezes existed on the Martian plains). Curious, Igxkyal skittered into a smooth crater, tucked his limbs into his shell, but kept one eye extended to watch this new kind of ball.

The first thing he noticed was the slow, smooth descent of the ball. Normally they plummeted through the thin atmosphere at the speed of sound, exploding the air with waves of noise that would turn anyone not in his carapace to mush. The second thing he noticed was its incredibly un-ball-like shape: not a smooth globe of ice nor a rough sphere of iron, this was long and thin and cylindrical. And finally he noticed that its tail was pointing the wrong way, a down-turned column of flame that preceded the thing rather than following it.

Igxkyal ducked his eye back inside his shell before the thing struck the surface, accustomed as he was to the shattering quake of a ball’s impact, but no explosion came; instead, he heard a gentle thud and then stillness. He waited a long time before extending his eye again.

No one at the market believed him about the cylindrical ball, even when they saw the glass he brought back from its shallow crater. When he told them how the thing had floated to the surface on a pillar of flame, they rolled their eyes in disbelief. When he described the tall, narrow, metal stalks on which the thing stood, they clicked their mandibles derisively. And when he described the portal that opened in the thing’s middle and from which a long pole emerged, so that Igxkyal fled in great fear and astonishment before the pole descended to the ground, they turned away without even trying to conceal their laughter.

The glass from the thing’s crater was unlike the usual pieces from the plains: thin and flexible, with waves of color woven through them, not brittle and sharp and clear like Igxkyal’s usual wares. His regular customers–scientists who came up from laboratories many miles below the market, lens grinders who made prosthetic eyes, engineers who valued the unusual clarity of his glass–weren’t interested in these strange new pieces. He did draw the attention of a few artists and shamans, but since these groups had their own markets on a different level and seldom came to the technical exchanges, Igxkyal made few sales. At the end of the day, he swept most of the strange colored shards into his carapace and carried them back to his apartment.

Igxkyal spent the night sorting glass and pondering the strange ball. Clearly this was not a natural thing, a ball of iron or ice like the thousands he had seen in his career in the glass fields. This thing, whatever it might be, had behind it some intelligence, though of what sort he couldn’t imagine. Nothing in his experience matched its height, its shape, its daring; on the plains, such a shape was like taunting the gods. Every glass gatherer knew the old legends–the Tall One of Znegarth, or the Giant Who Touched the Large Moon–and none of those ended well. Even the below-grounders who had never seen a glass crater knew the stories, and were shaped as much in their thoughts as in their bodies by the wisdom of staying low and seeking cover.

So if it wasn’t from here–if it wasn’t native to the plains and dunes–where was it from? Igxkyal had heard the scientists who bought his glass whispering among themselves sometimes about the possibility of other worlds, other life, but they had never suggested such things might come here. He knew that his glass sometimes found a home in great machines the scientists built, optical structures that made distant things seem near, but how distant must be the kind of place that would make thing such as this?

As he drifted off to sleep, a disc of colored glass propped on his pillow, Igxkyal determined that he would need to bring one of this scientist customers out to see the thing. He dreamed that night of a telescope made of the wavy colored glass that would carry his sight across great gulfs of space to a world forested with tall metal cylanders that hummed beneath bright green skies.

Igxkyal would normally have started his gathering on the south fields–he kept a regular pattern of rotations to ensure a good variety of glass–but was drawn to the east fields and the strange cylinder’s landing site. He had started to doubt himself that the thing existed, and needed confirmation.

He was almost overcome by joy when he came to the top of a crater’s lip and saw the thing standing in the distance, its bold tip pointing at the Small Moon. So it was still true! Igxkyal had to sift for several minutes to catch his breath, waiting for hearts to slow their excited drumming. When he felt composed again, he rolled down the crater’s outside hill and scrambled across the plain.

The glass around the cylinder had hardened overnight, and bent less when Igxkyal picked it up. The colors were much brighter, though, and the undulating waves more pronounced. Before leaving that morning, he had made arrangements to split his market time between the technical and artistic exchanges; he was sure to find an enthusiastic audience for these new pieces.

He was so engrossed by the prismatic glass that Igxkyal didn’t notice the creature approaching him until it was almost on top of him. One moment he was slipping an especially colorful piece with red and green waves under his carapace, the next he was frozen in terror as first a bright yellow light and then a long black shadow swept over him. His feelers, so reliable at detecting incoming balls, had not even tingled.

The creature–it was mobile and therefore must be alive–was like nothing Igxkyal had ever seen. It was vertical, and tall, almost a quarter the height of the cylinder. Its carapace was white and shiny, and topped with a globe-shaped shell that seemed to be fashioned from iron and glass. Igxkyal couldn’t see the thing’s eyes, though by the way it waved its limbs about he suspected they were somehow attached to its digits.

He lay very still as those writhing digits passed above his carapace and grasped a hunk of stone beside him. The thing held the stone up to its top and turned it over and over in its digits. Igxkyal could see the rock’s bumpy brown-and-red surface reflected in the top’s glass front. The creature tucked the rock into a pouch on its carapace, and reached down for another.

It was all Igxkyal could do to keep from shuddering as the creature’s digits brushed his carapace. He dared not move, and kept one unblinking eye extended; he felt his eyeball drying in the dusty air, and applied all his will to keep the lid from snapping shut.

After was seemed like hours but must only have been seconds, the creature stepped over Igxkyal and began to move toward the cylinder. Only when it grasped the telescoping pole that hung down from the open portal and began to rise up into the air, did Igxkyal pull his eye inside and scurry away from the field, his carapace only half full of glass.

When the technical market opened, Igxkyal discovered that the story of the cylinder had made the rounds overnight, but was no longer a target of derision. His stall was by far the most popular, and he had to repeat his story over and over again for the engineers who idly fondled his bright, wavy shards of glass. He couldn’t imagine the cause of his customers’ change of heart, but Igxkyal wasn’t one to let an opportunity slip by; his prices grew steeper as his story became more exciting and the crowd at his stall grew larger. He sold most of the pieces to opticians and geologists before closing his stall amid a flurry of protests so he could test the interest at the artists’ exchange.

The light in the artists’ exchange was brighter and more diffuse than in the technical exchange; it was a hundred meters closer to the surface, with inverted funnels of stone in the ceiling that brought the sun’s light to the market floor. Most below-grounders never came so close to sunlight, and even Igxkyal, who spent many hours each day in the dim light of dawn, blinked uncomfortably upon entering the hall. But when he spread his wares out across the borrowed table, Igxkyal’s eyes were truly dazzled; what had been interesting waves and brilliant colors under the technical exchange’s hydrogen lamps became kaleidoscopic spirals of devastating beauty in the sunlight.

Igxkyal was not alone in letting out a gasp when the pieces were exposed; a vibration of astonishment shuddered through the hall, and soon Igxkyal was surrounded by clutching digits and shouted questions. He fended them off with a hiss and an uncharacteristic flash of the scarlet interior of his carapace–it had been many years, in the rough-and-tumble days of his glass-gathering apprenticeship, since he had made so primitive a display of aggression. It worked, though, and his audience formed a respectful half circle around him.

It was then that Igxkyal learned that he wasn’t the only one to see the cylinder. Another glass-gatherer, a young day-gatherer named Ethgabar, had seen the thing yesterday. But Ethgabar got no closer to the thing than the width of several large craters, and didn’t come back with the evidence Igxkyal had produced from inside his carapace. Ethgabar had brought back a description, though, of what he called a narrow mountain on the horizon that shimmered in the reflected light thrown by the field of glass. Ethgabar had not seen the thing’s descent, and so naturally assumed it had risen from the ground like a geyser. Igxkyal drew forth a thoustand eye stalks with his story of how the cylinder had actually come down from the sky on a pillar of flame.

The bidding for Igxkyal’s few remaining pieces grew more and more heated, and the prices rose higher and higher, until one of the old shamans–Igxkyal could tell by the brown and gold markings on his carapace that he came from an ancient and respected clan–signaled a stop to the market with a sharp snap of his digits. The crowd slowly, reluctantly dispersed, while the shaman approached Igxkyal. He set his limbs on either side of the table, extended his eyes until they were almost touching the last two pieces of glass, and demanded–gently, quietly, but firmly–that Igxkyal take him to see the cylinder that fell from the sky.

To say that Igxkyal was nervous to be leading an entourage of shamans and scientists and minor potentates across the glass fields would be a gross understatement. He was terrified, literally trembling his shell, as he picked his way between craters and mounds with a train of fumbling below-grounders in his wake. None of them, he was certain, had spent any appreciable time outside; many, he suspected, had never been outside at all. And they trusted him implicitly, though he had so far only been responsible for his own shell on these badlands.

They traveled in fits, starting and stopping frequently as they made their doubtful progress. Several times he had to hiss loudly to steer the group around the geysers that lay near the ground’s surface, and once he shrieked loudly at a cluster of scientists who had stopped abruptly to peer into a mirrored pool of magma. On the glass fields, as any gatherer learned in a short time (or didn’t survive for another lesson), there is no mercy for the slow, the clumsy, or the hesitant. Without him, Igxkyal was sure none of his party would make it back to the safety below ground.

At last the cylinder came into sight, rising above the craters like a long finger pointing at the small moon. A ripple of gasps and murmurs ran through the train, and the above-grounders clustered close to Igxkyal. He waited until they were all crowded behind him, then tucked his limbs into his carapace and skidded quickly down the loose hill of gravel toward the cylinder. Less surely, the rest tumbled after him.

They were very close now to the thing’s metal feet; Igxkyal noticed for the first time that its white body was covered with black markings that must be some sort of code or language, though he couldn’t imagine what meaning the lines and circles conveyed. He also noticed that the thing hummed and pulsed as though alive with subtle power.

A shriek of terror from behind him drew Igxkyal’s attention back to the gravel hill. He looked up, and saw, at the top of the hill, the creature he had met that morning. The shriek grew louder and more piercing as the others saw the creature, and Igxkyal realized that the creature must have seen them as well, for after a moment’s hesitation it charged down the slope with its strange bipedal gate, dropping pieces of rock and glass as it ran.

In seconds the creature was upon them, and it scooped up the elder shaman in its giant paws. The others surrounded the creature with a flurry of hissing and display of carapaces while the shaman waved its eyes dizzily at the creature’s head. The creature seemed unbothered by the aggressive signs, and suddenly slipped the shaman into a pouch on its carapace. The shrieks became a high droning wail of anger and anguish.

So many strange sensations had flooded Igxkyal over the last two days that he almost mistook the tingling in his spine for mere excitement at seeing the elder shaman captured. But some ancient part of his brain, shaped by eons of ancestors dodging and skittering across these scabby plains, broke through his complacency with a fearful alarm. Igxkyal knew immediately that it was a ball–a big slider, the worst kind that spins and dances across the ground before burrowing a great crater into the rock, the sort that sprays shrapnel across miles of plan before it comes to rest. And it intended to come to rest very close by.

His warning shout was not enough to cut through the keening of the above-grounders, who were now surrounding the tall creature’s limbs and batting against it with their bodies while it tried to scoop more of them into its carapace pouches. Igxkyal shouted again, but his cry was drowned not only by the scuffle on the hill but by the scream of the slider bursting the air above them.

Igxkyal permitted himself a final glimpse before he pulled his eyes inside and burrowed quickly into the sand and rock. He saw the cylinder, sharp and tall, against the spinning ball, and heard what may have been a gasp of recognition–far too late–from one of the above-grounders. And then the world was noise and thunder and shards of glass and stone flying through the sky all around.