Xenopath, page 19
Then his regret was replaced by curiosity, again, as his vehicle passed a truck that had pulled into the side of the road. A dozen men in uniforms stood at the side of the road, smoking and chatting. He was moving at speed, and was unable to tell if the men were militia, though he suspected so. He could tell, however, that to a single individual they were shielded. His transit, so close, should have brought their minds flaring into his like so many burning torches, but again all he detected was the slippery blitz of static, and then nothing as he raced on by.
Even if they had been militia, it was strange that every one of the troop had worn a shield. Vaughan could understand, perhaps, a commanding officer choosing to keep his thoughts a secret... but even that was decidedly odd in such a sequestered backwater.
Then he saw the second truck, and the laser-cordon barring the way. Half a dozen men and women in camouflage fatigues hung around the vehicle, their interest stirring as he approached. They pushed themselves from where they had been lounging, unslung weapons, and moved into the road.
He scanned, and read nothing.
The officer in charge strolled along the centre of the road as Vaughan approached, a palm raised nonchalantly to halt him.
Vaughan slowed, opening the side-screen as he drew alongside the officer.
The woman had the crew cut and overfed face of a career soldier, and the intimidating gaze of one backed by the authority of superior firepower.
She rested an arm on the roof of the Bison and pushed her face close, inspecting both Vaughan and the interior of the vehicle with one quick sliding glance.
“ID.”
Sweating despite himself, Vaughan produced his card. He waited, staring through the windscreen at the blue laser cordon, as the officer processed his ID through a com on her hip.
He wondered if the sweat standing out on his face would be seen by the soldier as a sign of his fear, and therefore his guilt. To get so far, only to be picked up by a random road-block...
But the card passed muster. She handed it back, and Vaughan gave silent praise to Lin Kapinsky.
“What’re you doing this far south, Mr Lacey?” The woman spoke with a colonial twang, high and nasal.
“I’m on holiday,” he said. “Someone suggested I take a look at the southern ranges. I thought I’d check them out.”
“Think again, Mr Lacey. The road’s closed.”
He thought fast. “Is there any other way I can get to Preston?” he asked, naming the town a hundred kilometres beyond his destination. If he managed to reach Lincolnville some other way, he didn’t want the military to know he was there.
“All the roads are closed hereabouts, Mr Lacey.”
He stared at her. “And when will they be reopened?”
“That,” she said, “I can’t say. Military operation, Mr Lacey. And who can say how long military operations might last?”
Vaughan gave a theatrical sigh. “And I was told the southern range was one of the best.”
“Well, why don’t you take my advice, turn yourself around, and check out MacArthur’s Range away back. That’s almost as pretty, take it from me.”
“You know,” Vaughan said, “I might just do that.”
The woman nodded. “Safe journey, Mr Lacey.”
He reversed, giving the officer a salute, turned the Bison and accelerated back along the road.
A military operation. He wondered if it might be linked to Denning’s imminent arrival? If so, Scheering was leaving nothing to chance.
He felt a cold dread in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps he’d been a fool to think he would be able to waltz in here, warn the radicals, and skip back out again with their secret in his possession.
It was going to be a tad trickier than that.
He travelled five kilometres north, then pulled into the side of the road. From his earlier examination of the area on his handset, he recalled secondary roads branching off the main highway at intervals and twisting further into the foothills.
He consulted the map and charted three narrower roads, which left this one and climbed south. One of them, a particularly tortuous track, looped around a low peak and approached Lincolnville from the south-east. It would put another hundred kilometres on his journey, maybe delay his arrival until after sunset, but the track looked insignificant enough not to warrant an army blockade.
And if the militia had barred this track, then he would test the Bison’s off-road capabilities and head for Lincolnville over the hills.
He set off again and ten kilometres further along the highway turned right up a pot-holed minor road, heading into the mountains.
He travelled for an hour. The track was rough and unfinished, and at one point a landslide had slurred the track ten metres down the hill, but the Bison was equal to the challenge. He passed a couple of farms, clearly occupied, but again detected not the slightest mind-noise from within. He wondered if it were mandatory for the citizens of Mallory to wear shields, and if so then why the government had passed such a Draconian law. What might the average citizens of the colony world know that their government did not want the rest of the universe to find out?
The fiery orange sun was a hand’s breadth above the mountain peaks high to his left when he came around a great loop in the road and was presented with a spectacular panorama: the hillside shelved away to form a long, broad valley, its blue grass scintillating in the twilight.
The track edged along the margin of the valley, and Vaughan made out, perhaps two kilometres distant, the telltale glow of a laser cordon. Beside it, reduced to the size of a child’s toy, was a militia truck.
Vaughan braked, heart thudding, and considered his options.
According to the map, he was still a hundred kilometres from Lincolnville. There were no roads branching from this one that would take him anywhere near his destination.
He supposed he could always conceal the truck, wait until nightfall, and see then if the military checkpoint remained—the laser cordon presented an obvious indication of their presence. But if the militia were aiding Denning’s mission, then they would remain in situ until the exec and his teams arrived.
He scanned the surrounding land. The valley was wide, and easily navigable by the Bison, but not so wide that his passage would go unnoticed by the military. To his left the hillside climbed acutely, graduating to rocky outcrops and minor peaks. Hardy though the Bison was, he doubted it could negotiate such precipitous terrain.
He was startled by a noise coming from behind him. He turned in his seat and made out, perhaps a couple of hundred metres further up the valley, the first of a herd of... animals, obviously, but animals the like of which Vaughan had never seen before.
Only when visually aware of the creatures did he sense their presence in his mind: an inchoate, tuneless music, totally alien and unsettling. He turned off his implant.
The leading beast was huge—that was the first thing that struck him—perhaps four metres high. It was brown-skinned, and wore its tegument in what looked like sections of armour.
There, its resemblance to anything Earth-like finished. Its four legs were thick and long, its head huge. It had a thick trunk perhaps a metre long, on either side of which sprouted a lethal array of tusks like tines. Above huge black eyes, arranged on each side of the head, was another set of tines. It looked ferocious, and the thunderous sound of its bellow echoed like a war cry.
It approached the Bison and slowed. The others, behind it, slowed too. Vaughan counted over twenty in the herd, many of them the size of their leader.
The others halted, as one, and seemed to be watching their leader as it slowed and took small, cautious steps towards the vehicle.
Two metres away, the great beast halted.
Vaughan stared, and the creature stared back at him. He felt suddenly, profoundly, moved. After his initial alarm, it came to him that he had nothing at all to fear from these animals, and only then realised that the side-screen was still wound down.
The beast blinked, regarding him, and though Vaughan knew that Mallory possessed no intelligent life forms, he felt as if he were communicating on some level with a creature wise beyond its classification.
Then the beast surprised him.
It moved forward, a single step bringing it right up to the flank of the Bison. Then, before Vaughan could react, it raised its short, thick trunk and reached out towards his head.
His first instinct was to draw away, his second to sit tight.
The trunk, its nostril panting a warm, fetid breath, came in through the window and caressed his head, pressing itself against his skin, inhaling like a vacuum cleaner, sniffing, then settled on his forehead. There it remained for perhaps ten seconds. Vaughan, his pulse racing, looked up, along the length of its trunk, into the dark discus of its left eye.
The eye blinked, gently.
Then the animal broke contact, swung around and harrumphed to the rest of the herd. They began moving around the Bison, trundling across the track and heading into the high foothills. Their leader was the last to move off. Watching it back off, then move around the vehicle after the others, Vaughan felt impelled to call out some kind of farewell, or lift a hand in a valedictory gesture. Instead, he just watched them go in silence, aware that he had participated in a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
In single file the herd passed through a cutting in the rocks above. When it came to the leader’s turn to ease itself between the slabs of rock, it paused, turned, and stared at Vaughan. It lifted its truck and issued a low, bassoon-like note, and Vaughan received the crazy impression that it was telling him to follow them.
Convinced that he was deluding himself, but curious nevertheless, he climbed from the Bison and crossed the track, climbing through blue grass and tumbled scree towards where the khaki rump of the creature was shuffling on up the cutting.
The gap was wider than he first thought, easily wide enough to admit the Bison. He followed the beast, though its strides had taken it far up the cutting, and found that the pass opened out into a greensward—or rather bluesward—which ran aslant between a tumble of boulders below and the flanks of rocks above.
By now the leader of the herd had crossed the clearing and was moving through another cutting, though this time it did not turn to encourage his pursuit... if indeed it had originally.
Vaughan paused and considered his options. He was no doubt anthropomorphising the creature’s actions, but what did he have to lose?
He returned to the Bison, started it up and left the track. It bucked over the uneven ground, rocking him in his seat, as he approached the cutting. He slowed, and the truck scraped through with centimetres to spare on either side. Minutes later he emerged on the bluesward and accelerated across the sloping ground towards the far rocks. The next five minutes would determine whether he had deluded himself.
This pass was wider than the last, and longer, and when it ended the Bison emerged into a dazzling wash of dying sunlight and Vaughan was amazed to find himself on what was obviously a man-made track, rougher than the one he had left but a track nevertheless... which meant that, at some point in the past, it must have led somewhere.
He followed it, the Bison pitching back and forth. The track climbed, then levelled out and paralleled the lie of the valley to his right, hidden though it was by a fold in the hills.
Of the creatures—his unwitting helpers?—there was no sign.
He travelled for two hours through the gradually dimming light, and at one point came to a high crest in the track that afforded a vantage point over the hills to the valley. He stopped the Bison and stared out. Far below, and behind him now, was the dazzling line of light that was the laser cordon.
He continued on his way, and the track fell away down the hillside. At last, in darkness now and the vehicle’s powerful headlamps lighting the way, the track joined the original road. Vaughan accelerated, hardly daring to believe that he had bypassed the military checkpoint, and an hour later he came to the highway leading to his destination. A couple of kilometres further on a sign declared that Lincolnville was just fifty kilometres distant.
The highway climbed, wound through the foothills, and less than an hour later Vaughan came to a collection of weatherboard dwellings, strung out along a single main road, and a sign welcoming him to Lincolnville, population five hundred. There was no sign, he was relieved to see, of any military presence.
Half a dozen four-wheel drives were pulled up outside the town’s only hotel-cum-bar. Vaughan parked the Bison beside them, shouldered his holdall, and made for the plinth of steps to the hotel’s veranda.
He was about to push through the double doors when he stopped. He dropped his bag and considered his handset. So far on his journey south, he had yet to come across an unshielded mind. He wondered if the citizens of Lincolnville likewise had something to hide.
He activated his implant, and instantly knew the answer.
Mind-silence, except for the confused emotions of a newborn baby on the second floor of the hotel.
Vaughan entered and found himself in timber-panelled lobby. The place had the appearance of something from a Wild West holo-movie set.
To the right was a door leading to a small bar, occupied by half a dozen men and women.
A Nordic blonde girl in her teens, obviously surprised to see him, appeared behind the reception counter.
He asked for a room for tonight, and if he could buy a meal. He was in luck as far as accommodation went, but the kitchen was closed. He took a small room on the second floor, fetched a meal from the Bison, and ate it while staring out of the window at the darkened main street and the looming shape of the mountains to the south. They were shadowed and dark against the starscape, and gave Vaughan the impression of dour hostility. Tomorrow, first thing, he would be heading further south, towards Campbell’s End. He pushed the thought to the back of his mind.
Melancholy, he went down to the bar and ordered a local beer—thin and insipid compared to his regular Blue Mountain. It was late, and he was the only customer.
He took his beer to a table near the window and stared out.
Minutes later, snow began to fall, reminding him of Canada.
The girl’s question startled him.
“I said,” she repeated, “are you with the military?”
“Excuse me?”
She was wiping the table next to his, camouflaging her shyness with a truculent stare.
“You a soldier?”
He smiled. “No. A tourist?”
She shook her head. “A tourist? Then how you get through the roadblocks?”
He considered his reply. “I’ve been in Preston for a few days. Last night I camped in the hills.”
She seemed reluctant to believe him. “So you’re nothing to do with what’s going on in the valley? You’re not with the S-L forces?”
He smiled again, trying to reassure her. “What is going on?” he asked.
She resumed her polishing with renewed vigour. “You’re a tourist, so you don’t need to know, do you?”
“Still, I’d like to know.”
She stopped and looked at him. “How do I know you’re not an S-L spy?”
He showed her his ID. “See. Earth citizen.”
She peered at it, then looked at him dubiously. “But then a S-L spy would have cover, wouldn’t he?”
He took a sip of beer, considering his next words. “Someone told me that everyone around here carries mind-shields? Is that right?”
She moved to the next table, and Vaughan thought she was refusing to reply. Then she said, “Carry them? We’re implanted, mister. Everyone on Mallory.”
Vaughan nodded. “Is that a government edict?”
“Huh?” Incomprehension showed in her Scandinavian eyes.
“Is it a law that everyone on Mallory should be implanted?”
“Everyone over the age of ten, yes,” she said. She thought about it, then went on, “S-L don’t want telepaths from Earth learning all about them, do they?”
“All about them?”
The girl decided she’d said enough, wished Vaughan good night and told him that the bar was closed now. If he wanted another beer he could help himself.
He did just that, and sat in the darkened barroom considering the events of the day. High above the mountains was a spread of stars in an alien arrangement, and he wondered where Sol might be.
He realised he was seventy light years away from Earth, and Sukara.
NINETEEN
THE TELEPATH
PHAM SPENT THE night under the banyan tree in Gandhi Park, and in the morning sat on her blanket and wondered what to do next.
Since being chased by the laser killer yesterday, she had been unable to rouse Khar. At first she thought that he might be sulking, or that he was so ashamed of nearly getting her killed that he couldn’t bring himself to speak to her.
Now she wondered if he had left her in the night, flown from her head and lodged in someone else’s.
If he had done that, then she was both upset that he had left without saying goodbye, and a little afraid now that she was alone. Khar had helped her since she had arrived on the upper decks. Okay, he’d got her into trouble yesterday, but he had won her money and kept her company and filled her head with interesting thoughts. And, to be truthful, there was something exciting about being chased by a killer. It was like something from her favourite holo-movies.
“Khar,” she said now. “Why aren’t you talking?”
The silence stretched, then the familiar voice sounded in her head. I am communing.
She smiled to herself, relieved that he was still there. “Communing? Who with?”
It would be better if you did not know that.
“Ah-cha,” she said. She was quiet for a while, then said, “I’ve decided I’m going to look for Abdul today.”
Do you know where to find him?
“He told me he begged on Chandi Road. I’ll look there.”
Very well, Pham.
“Okay, so I’ll leave you to your communing, Khar.”
