The Madness Season, page 43
It turned to her when it was done, the blood of the beast dripping from its muzzle. But it did not eat. It waited.
She closed the door.
The only light in the room was that which came from the projector panel, a single luminous switch. By it she could see no more than the glitter of jeweled eyes, fixed upon her.
"I think you understand me," she said to it. "I think you understand a lot more than we've given you credit for. Maybe not my words, but my tone; maybe not language, as such, but gestures and gifts . . .
and intentions. Dai, I think you understand a lot."
It licked its lips, cleaning one swath of the fur around its mouth. "Was it good?" she whispered. Noting with distant interest the seductive tone which had entered her voice. "The Tyr don't let you kill often, do they? Ploka, my friend. But we can change that. You and I, together"
She flipped the power switch up, and the screen came on. Then she keyed in the Saudar commands that would start the special sequence, and pictures came to life before them.
The hraas did not move. The jeweled eyes watched.
How to communicate, without language or common symbols? How to contact an intelligence so alien to that of humanity that hating the Tyr might well be their only common ground? An intelligence which just might be more than that of a simple animal; an intelligence that might be made an ally, if the right understanding was reached.
Pictures on the screen: Hraas, on their homeworld. Indigo grass. Carmine trees. Animals like the one she had offered it, squealing with terror in the high brush.
The hraas growled softly.
Pictures of the Tyr. Pictures from the Conquest of Tahuus, in which the hraas were netted and bound up and shipped off, into eternal slavery. Ntaya watched as Tyr died right and left, fighting to subdue the vicious beasts. But what did a hundred Honn deaths matter, or even a thousand, when the whole of the Tyr could never die?
Then the picture of Tahuus went dark, and in its place came the image of wormholes. Tyr-caves. The hraas' current home.
The hraas growled again, this time not so softly.
Again the pictures changed. No longer moving, because Ntaya had lacked the time to create sophisticated fictions. Now the Tekk appeared, with the hraas by their side. Neither dominant, neither afraid. Now the two appeared in battle, the Tekk burning Tyr flesh to a crisp even as the hraas gleefully shredded their potential antagonists to bloody bits.
Now an open landscape, with the hraas set free. While the Tekk stood by their skimship— their skimship— and smiled in triumph.
The sequence ended. She turned on the room's overhead lights, adjusting them to their dimmest setting.
The hraas' eyes had adjusted to partial darkness, and sapphire glinted dangerously, embedded in fields of blackest glass.
"You see," she whispered.
The hraas did not move. Its eyes did not blink.
"We can do it." She clasped her hands dramatically. "Together."
Slowly, the great beast rose to its feet. The bloodied muzzle swung down to its kill, and then opened; saberlike teeth hooked into the slaughtered offering, lifting it off the floor as the hraas walked slowly toward her.
It came to where she stood, and stopped. She could smell the blood on its breath, and the rancid odor of the smaller beast's fear.
It laid the body by her feet.
Slowly, heart pounding in excitement, she crouched down. Extended her hand until her fingers pressed into an open wound, coating them in blood. Then raised the fingers to her mouth and licked them, one by one.
The hraas snarled. It might have been laughter.
More likely—she thought—it was anticipation.
TYRQA-ANGDATWA: (REFUGE)
By the time I reached the place that I sought, the last of my strength was nearly gone. I had emptied the fourth tank of coolant long ago, and left its casing on the cracked plain behind me. Now, as I approached the pit that promised access to the Tyr's summer refuge, I had to force myself to take each breath, to push the burning air in and out of my lungs by sheer force of will, long after my body had ceased to desire such pain.
Only a short while longer, I promised myself. Wondering if it were true. Soon, soon now, there will be shelter.
The Tyrran caverns coursed beneath this very plain, obscured by miles of cracked, dry soil. Sometime in the distant past one section of ground had given way, collapsing into a burrow that ran too close beneath its surface. The resulting pit was long and narrow, with sloping walls formed by cascades of rubble and a dark, gaping mouth near one end.
For a moment I hesitated—and I sensed, with dread certainty, that something was watching me.
Waiting. It had been with me all along, since the moment I left the skimship, but not until this moment had its presence been so clear. It was large, and dark, and burning. Hungry. It wanted very much for me to descend through the rock, into the heart of its lair—and because it wanted this, with such a dark passion that I cringed from the mere touch of it, I hesitated.
Come, it whispered. Here is water. Here is food. Here is peace, at last.
Despite the heat, I shivered. But a shaft of sunlight lancing over the horizon reminded me that dawn was about to break, and started me moving again. Fear of the sun was one thing, suicide quite another; when that blue-white disk cleared the eastern horizon and bathed this land in the full heat of day, no living thing would survive.
Exhausted, hungry, and full of misgivings, I entered the Tyr's dark warren.
It was like no cavern I had ever seen. Neither water nor air nor mere geological activity could have caused tunnels quite like these. The walls were utterly smooth, like polished glass, and crisscrossed with looping channels that made the whole of it look like an artist's conception of the inside of a twisted and knotted rope. I put out a hand to steady myself, and it came back from the wall slightly sticky. The walls and ceiling of the tunnel—designated only by their position as there was no real division between the parts— were lit intermittently by clumps of green moss, the same that I had seen in the longships. These were limp and dry, half-dead from the heat, but for Raayat eyes their light was more than sufficient. The bottom of the tunnel was carpeted in rubble, first pebbles and clumps of dry soil and later, as I progressed, rocks and bones. There were bones everywhere: large ones, small ones, most of them split open in several places so that the precious marrow could be sucked out. Bone chips stabbed through the soles of my feet as I walked, cutting through them so many times that soon I was trailing thin ribbons of blood behind me.
That was when I stopped, and shape-changed my feet into something a little more durable. What was the point in having such skills, if one died from blood loss while not using them?
It was then I heard a noise. I barely had time to turn toward it when something very large and very dark rushed me. For an instant it was silhouetted against the moss-light, and I saw the outline of a body as large as my own, and equally well armed. Perhaps if I were a true Raayat, accustomed to knowing where my spikes were and what they could accomplish, I would have met the attack head-on. As it was I was considerably less certain, and ducked to one side in an attempt to dodge the worst impact of the creature's lunge.
Something sharp gouged into my side, hard and cold and not at all like a claw. It ripped through the skin beneath one of my chest plates before grinding to a stop against bone. The pain awakened an animal fury, and suddenly my new Raayat instincts were at the fore. I backhanded the creature across what appeared to be its face. Three jagged spikes faced outward from my forearm, and they buried themselves in flesh and bone as I struck. By the force of their impact I knew that I had instinctively adjusted my muscles for strength, as I did in my confrontation with Kost. A dangerous move, but it had its desired effect. My attacker's combat spike was dislodged from my side, and my blow sent him reeling with sickening force against the nearby wall, ripping his face against my spikes as he hit, crushing the back of his skull.
Reason returned, and with it memory. With my other hand I hefted the spear-shard—muscles adjusting as I moved, tensing with augmented strength—and then drove it into the creature's chest, with all the force I could muster. Guessing where its heart must be, from its size and posture, and then just praying for luck. The Saudar metal screeched against bone as it pierced through, and blood sprayed my face as it sank deeper and deeper into the creature's torso. I leaned my weight onto it, panting, and barely avoided a spike that was thrust at my head. But the creature's movements were spasmodic, and as I waited, pinning it down, they became more and more uncontrolled. Finally its arms fell down by its side and a tremor shook its flesh; I watched as its silhouette jerked and twitched, until at last all motion subsided.
Then, and only then, did I dare to step back and look at it.
It was Raayat.
I pulled its body into the light. A mere shell of bone
and dry, cracked skin, it had already been dying when it jumped me. Starvation had taken its toll, and thirst; the combat spikes, brittle, snapped when they struck the floor.
I felt a deep satisfaction, an almost sexual contentment, as I regarded my battered adversary. And a very real sickness, at the thought of taking such pleasure from killing. Was this what it meant to be Raayat? I felt sour bile rising in my throat, but managed to force it back down. If Tyrran nature had decreed that a primitive selection for strength and combat skill was the way to choose its generations, I was hardly in a position to argue. This fellow had failed to find himself food, but I had mine. And considering my physical condition, it had come not a moment too soon.
His blood was thin, but more than welcome. Like most starving creatures, he had begun to digest his own tissue for nourishment; his blood thus contained what I needed, albeit in short supply.
For the first time in a very long while, I wondered if I might not manage to survive after all.
* * *
Tunnels. Endless tunnels. I longed for a skein of thread to reel out as I went, but had to settle for scratching shallow marks into the stone walls with bone chips, in the hope I could find them and remember their meaning when the time came to return. If ever.
My vision was changing. Images came from all around me, wove into a coherent whole somewhere in my Raayat brain. Summer vision, from all four eyes combined. It seemed natural. It was necessary.
Danger was everywhere.
Sometimes, as I stumbled onward, I imagined I heard a voice. Inside myself, or perhaps below; calling to me in a tone that was repellently sensual, seductive and cajoling and threatening all at once.
Come, it whispered. Thought without sound. Come.
The ultimate promise, with only a faint shadow of darkness about the edges.
I'm trying, damn you.
* * *
How many creatures crossed my path, crawling or leaping or slithering out of the greenglowing darkness to attempt to take my life, scoring my hide or tearing into my flesh with their teeth or their claws or their spikes before I managed to crush the life out of them, I cannot say. Dozens, perhaps. It seemed like hundreds. Some, like the Raayat, were dangerous. Others were merely pitiful, like the oversized lizard that accosted me at a fork in the corridor, lashing its tail in a frenzy of need even as its heart, overwhelmed by heat and hunger, succumbed to death before my eyes.
I staggered down endless corridors of night, and defended myself as best I could, with all four arms.
My mind was elsewhere. I longed for the creature that waited below with all the passion that man reserves for woman. When an animal attacked me—it happened more and more often as I descended, and my adversaries were more and more desperate— my dominant emotion was that of irritation. That it had dared to stop me, that it might well wound me, that I must waste my precious time putting it to death, when I would rather be moving onward. That voice that came from below me, and its owner, had become my only concern.
Come, the voice beckoned. Electrical currents danced on my skin in response to the summons, sensations both painful and arousing. I saw Kiri before me, but she wore a Raayat tail. For balance, she told me. Do you like it?
I remembered the weight of her body on mine, and shivered with longing.
"No," I whispered. "Yes. Anything you are. Anything you want to be."
A creature attacked me, and she vanished. I fought.
I won. I descended. Foot by foot, a path strewn with bones and blood and Raayat sweat. I was blind to time, deaf to danger, unresponsive to all but the call of the creature that crouched somewhere beneath my feet, and an occasional vision of pleasures past.
Come, it whispered. The voice was in my head. My own voice.
I had no desire, other than to obey.
Tentacles. Overhead. I remembered them, vaguely. Remembered I didn't trust them, for some reason.
Why? All I could recall was that they supplied the caves with oxygen, a vital link in the underground summer ecology. Why did I give them such a wide berth, sliding against the far wall so that I need not even step beneath them, much less come in contact with their vegetative flesh? What memory had I lost that was vital to my survival—what memory had been taken from me, as part of the game that the Tyr was playing?
I couldn't remember for the life of me. Nor did I know when I had lost my weapon, whether I had left it in the flesh of a kill or simply dropped it as I stumbled onward. That, too, was part of the game. Its game.
The only game in town.
Leyq. I had found them. Swaths of dried slime that streaked the walls in shades of gray, pale imitations of their longship counterparts. I reached out to touch one, and my hand trembled slightly. I was close.
Very close. The landscape was more and more familiar to me, an ancestral memory reinforced by the longships' intentional mimicry. As the leyq grew wider, the tunnel would progress.
I ran.
The leyq grew wider. So did the tunnels. The two were interconnected, I understood now. And when I saw the first leyqmaker, I wasn't surprised. Jellyfish-like, it clung to the wall near a fork in the tunnel, digesting the rock beneath it with mindless patience and leaving, in its place, a trail of adhesive excrement.
It and its brothers must have carved these tunnels eons ago, while the Tyr still huddled in geological caverns and trembled at the thought of earthquakes. Surely no life on this planet could have developed the continuity that the Tyr had, much less its intelligence, without a summer shelter that would last through generations.
The voice from below had become far more, now. It was a rumbling that vibrated through the rock— wordless promises that made my flesh tremble with longing—an ecstasy of knowledge injected directly into my brain. Where that voice was, there was an end— to running, to fighting, to killing. And more than that. Somewhere in the part of me that still clung to a human identity, I recognized that at last I was headed toward where I needed to be. And the Tyr itself was urging me onward.
I turned a sharp corner, and suddenly found myself in a fair-sized chamber.
Facing a Raayat.
He came at me with a roar, and I barely had time to note that he was in excellent physical health before he struck. This was no weakened animal, driven half mad by starvation. He hit me full on, driving one of his shoulder spikes full length into my arm; I heard my own plates split as I tried to pull free, and blood ran down both our bodies. Mine. He knocked me down to the floor and pinned me there; the shock of impact cracked off most of my rear defense spikes. I barely had the wherewithal to see where we were, to take stock of my options— very few, and all of dismal outlook— before he struck at me again. I managed to turn him aside, trying to adjust for greater strength as I did so. But I had worked too many changes on too little life; the change did not happen quickly enough, and as he brought one arm down across my throat, cutting off my air, I knew that I was fighting against more than I could handle.
The thought of dying here, so close to my objective, was infuriating. Anger bought me a moment's new strength, and I somehow managed to angle my foot against his torso. Over his shoulder I could see a tangle of black tentacles, that hung down almost to chest level. I levered up and pushed, with all my might. And broke him loose. He fell backward, caught himself on a jagged edge of rock—and then lost hold of that, and went sprawling into the slimy black tangle at which I had aimed him.
It is only carnivorous in summer, Frederick had assured me.
I watched only long enough to see the tentacles close tightly about him, and to hear the screaming start. I had no strength left to witness his suffering. Turning away, I lay my head on the hard stone floor and shut my eyes, mimicking sleep. And perhaps I was wounded enough, or simply tired enough, for I drifted into something mat might be its equivalent. It was darkness, anyway. For now, that was enough.
A food chain without beginning. Noah's ark without a pantry. Thousands of animals trapped in near-darkness, with only each other for food, for a decade or more. Is it any wonder that Nature experimented with other modes of life, and found individualism wanting?
Darkness. Parting slowly. Fog drifting back. Thoughts coming clear, for the first time in God knew how long. Jesus Christ . . . how long had I been out?
I opened my eyes. They were sticky with blood, and offered little vision. I lifted a hand to wipe them clean—and pain shot through that arm, so sudden and so intense that I cried out and let it fall. And tears came, which was good enough. Those, too, could wash away the blood.
I was not where I had been.
I stared at the ceiling. Few tentacles growing here, and no naked stone; the whole vault above me was lined in moss, a rich glowing green that filled the cavern with surreal light. Could so much have grown since I fell unconscious? The mind demanded a simpler explanation. I had been moved. But to where?
I used a good arm to raise myself up, until I could lock that one elbow behind me.
And I saw.
Bathed in rich green light, it stood in the midst of a forest of columns. It might have been Raayat once, or Kuol; the form was similar, although few spikes remained. It was hard for me to see where its body began or ended; bits of it seemed to extend to the columns, where they merged into the pale, gleaming rock without visible boundary. Its chromatic pattern— a sunburst of gold and cerulean, with secondary spirals of half a dozen other bright hues— extended out onto these bands of connective tissue, making the creature look as though it sat at the heart of a rainbow. Or perhaps at the center of a web. The latter seemed more fitting as I realized who— and what— it was.
