Collected Short Fiction, page 680
She glanced at the pyramid in her hands and I felt her shiver.
“I think it’s the snakes,” she whispered sharply. “They must be nesting on the tower. After all, it rises almost into empty space, where they feel at home. I’m afraid we’re going to have trouble.”
That trouble came sooner than I had expected. The terminal tower dropped for a time below the moonlit hills as we drove on. The rose-and-purple of twilight had risen higher when we saw it again and the stranger darkness of the snakes had crept lower from the beacon dome, Filming the whole tower with a ghostly unreality. I was trying without success to imagine a tachyon ship landing on its fading stages when a snake buzzed us.
Acrid bitterness flashed across my tongue. A chilling numbness brushed me. The headlamps went out. I had the briefest glimpse of its serpentine shadow dipping and lifting against the moon-washed sky. It was gone before I heard its sonic crash.
IT LEFT us stalled on the road.
Tom awoke, grumbling Yiddish that I couldn’t understand. We lifted the hood and struck matches. Though nothing else was visibly damaged, all the batteries were drained. Even our flashlights were dead. We failed to start the motor.
Dead tired and still shivering with that bone-deep chill, I wanted to make camp. But we were near the summit, Kyrie said—so high the snakes might descend on us again. She shook Guy awake and we pushed the hearse a mile or more over the highest crest.
That far-off phantom tower had dissolved into the dark by then, but we pressed on down the winding canyon road toward the valley of the Rio Grande and the ruins of Albuquerque. Guy was asleep again, groaning and twitching as if pushing the hearse had been too much for him. Coasting now, we rolled down through the moonlight in a ghostly silence that set me to shivering with a sense that we had become inhuman company on an unearthly errand.
“We’ll be safer in the valley.” Even Kyrie’s soft whisper startled me. “We can surely start the motor when it’s light enough to see. Can’t we, Uncle Kim? I hope we reach Skygate tomorrow.”
The night was thicker in the canyon, but I knew the road from driving it on winter holidays in that long-ago world, now strangely unreal, when a few of us used to ski on the high Sandia slopes. Suzie had come once, though not exactly with me. I got to thinking of her, wondering what had happened to her since I left Skygate and whether Thorsen had survived his space infection. The need for sleep forgotten, I drove on in a kind of waking dream.
Two or three times, where the grade was too flat, we had to wake Tom to help us push again, but the thin cold moon was still high when we came out of the canyon into view of the mesa and the valley.
Steering by the gray edge of the pavement, searching the dark for washouts or rocks on the road, I wasn’t looking far ahead. I felt Kyrie stiffen and shiver, heard her gasp of dismay. Braking to an instinctive stop, I saw the fog.
A flood of luminescent white, nearly as bright as the bitten moon, it drowned the dead city. It filled the wide valley from the mounded ruins just below us to the line of lifeless volcanoes on the horizon. It reached north and south as far as I could see.
Though I could feel no wind, the mist was stirring strangely, rising and falling in soundless waves that broke against the rocks and the dark rubble islands, shattering into ghostly dissipating plumes.
“No!” Kyrie sobbed. “No!”
But it was there, too deep for the morning sun to break it up, too wide for anything to bridge, spread too far to leave us a way around it. For a long time we simply sat there in the dead hearse. There was nothing else to do.
I fastened my jacket and shivered in it, as the chill of the desert night followed the heat-drain of the snake, but Kyrie seemed to feel no cold. A remote white goddess in the dying light, she gazed sometimes at the useless glow of the tetrahedron in her hands, more often at that wild but silent sea ahead. My throat ached with a dull regret for the failure of our mission and a sharper pity for her.
A breath of wind must have risen, because the odor of the fog rolled over us in a sudden, suffocating wave, rank as the stink of a jungle swamp, fetid as a sewer, its muskmelon sweetness blended with an overpowering foulness. Though Kyrie seemed unconscious of it, I felt nauseated.
“Let’s get out,” I urged her. “I guess we can’t move the hearse, but we ought to make camp before the moon goes down. Somewhere higher—we passed a good spot in the canyon. The fog may rise in the dark.”
She nodded dully, as if nothing mattered now. I set the brakes and clambered out of the hearse. I was dancing a slow shuffle on the pavement, trying to bring my stiffened limbs to life, when she screamed.
Her outcry was wordless, agonized, desolate. When I called to know what the matter was her only answer was a thin moan of pain. I struck a match and found her kneeling over Guy in the back of the hearse.
“He’s dead,” she sobbed then. “Guy’s dead—”
XXIII
TOM groaned and awoke. We all crowded into the back of the hearse to examine Guy by the feeble flare of matches. He lay inert and swollen, with no breath or pulse. Kyrie splashed water on him, rubbed and flexed his furry limbs, tried to breathe into his mouth. Nothing revived him. Working over him, I began to catch an odor of dissolution ranker than his barnyard scent, stronger than the fetor of the fog.
Retreating from that smell of death, I climbed out of the hearse and saw the fog again. It glowed with its own cold light, though the moon had set. Rising silently, it had already drowned those black rubble islets. A wide tongue of it had licked into the canyon, was lapping at the pavement not a hundred yards below the hearse.
I shouted a warning. Tom scrambled out to join me, but Kyrie refused to leave Guy. He was too heavy for us to carry, but she stayed in the hearse, hauling vainly at him until Tom assumed our father’s thick accent to tell her a peasant tale about a goat boy who was eaten by a wolf because he wouldn’t leave his millet porridge.
“I suppose we ought to save our lives,” she whispered huskily then. “Though I see no good that we can do alone.” We were waiting to help her from the hearse, but she flung herself wildly back upon the corpse. “Oh, Guy! Guy!”
She lay sobbing on his body till a long foul tongue of fog licked into the ditch beside us, drowning us with its nauseating miasma. Silently then, Kyrie let us lead her up the canyon road.
As we started away from the hearse my foot struck something that made a jangling clatter. I picked up the object. In the pale glow of the tetrahedron, which Kyrie clutched in both stiff hands, I saw the glint of a hexagonal head and the gleam of wire-like limbs.
It was a dead mechanical ant, one of a swarm that lay in a glittering drift along the edge of the pavement, where it must have fallen when Nick was killed. I held it out to Kyrie, I suppose with some fantastic hope that she might revive it. She looked at me bleakly and I tossed it back into the dark.
Dull with despair, silent as the fog itself, we climbed back into the canyon. The pyramid gave enough light to help us follow the pavement. Tom and I had brought blankets and canteens and our small stock of food. Plodding stolidly, breath wheezing, he smoked his last narcorette.
I stopped to look back once. That wild white sea was tossing as if an unseen storm raged beneath it. The rocks around the canyon mouth broke it into soundless spray. I shuddered and heard Tom muttering a Yiddish prayer. We stumbled after Kyrie.
We made a cold and cheerless camp a mile from the fog, in a shallow cave above the road that refugees from Albuquerque must have dug. I found a few sticks of wood stacked beside a fire circle stone, but Kyrie was afraid a flame might draw the snakes. A dull hunger was gnawing at my belly, but we had to save our food. I washed my mouth with one sip of water and crawled into my blanket.
TOM was soon snoring, but Kyrie didn’t sleep. Immune to cold, she sat cross-legged at the mouth of the cave, the luminous pyramid cupped in her hands, her sad eyes watching the way we had come. Her stricken desolation shook me.
Bare to the glow of that great stone, her lean body was infinitely inviting, yet it stirred in me only a cold ghost of ardor. Desire itself was dying in the shattered world around us. What I felt was an infinite pity, an almost maternal urge to comfort her, to break her black despair. I remembered all the childhood years when she had been almost a daughter, with a child’s frank affection for her fond Uncle Kim. But in this doleful moment I could not even speak to her.
At last I slept, though I had meant to share her vigil. I awoke numb with cold. The cave was dark. The glow of the nexode was gone. Tom’s snores had ceased. I whispered and fumbled and found nobody.
Shaking with terror. I stumbled barefoot out of the cave. Seeing the high blaze of Orion, I knew that midnight was long past. The starlit road looked empty. When I called the only answer was a whispery echo from a distant cliff.
My toes struck a rock as I blundered toward the pavement. The flash of pain cooled my first panic. I limped back to the cave for my shoes and then crept down the road to search for Tom and Kyrie.
I failed to find them. The odor of the fog stopped me above the canyon mouth, a wall of unbreathable evil. I climbed a rock to look for the hearse. That insane white tide was breaking over it now, so that it appeared and vanished again beneath the writing tongues of luminiscent mist.
A funeral calm crept over me as I stood there. I gave up my useless shouting and wandered back at last to the cave. Trembling more from dread than cold, I slipped again into my blanket and waited aimlessly for day.
In my haunted thoughts Tom and Kyrie had died in some new effort to rescue Guy’s body. I could visualize the fog flooding all the world, squeezing out the last human zone as it rose to meet the high dominion of the snakes. Perhaps I was already the last man alive.
Oddly, my own fate did not matter now. Existence had become an emotionless abstraction. As I looked back into the past from that comfortless cave, my life revealed itself as a meaningless monotony of shabby failure and deadening frustration. I had been a lonely spectator, silently watching the rich feast of being that I could never fully join.
I recalled my old, unwilling envy of Tom, who had always seized the good things I somehow could never reach. My opposite, always the bold actor, never the timid or self-denying or self-righteous onlooker, had lived what seemed a more rewarding life than mine. Perhaps our father had_ been right. Perhaps I really was the schlemiel.
Exhausted by such profitless reflections, I fell into a troubled sleep. I recall a dream in which Tom and I were skiing down the highest Sandia slope. I was stiff and clumsy with the bitter cold. Tom swept far ahead and I envied his bold skill at the jump. Unsure of myself, I was afraid I couldn’t make the turn. I thought I was going over the rim, into the black, pine-fringed canyon below it.
But a girl’s warm voice called my name. At first I thought it was Suzie, but it was Kyrie I saw when I looked back, nude and splendid, somehow flying over the snow with no skis at all. She overtook me and reached to grasp my hand. I knew we could make the turn together.
Something woke me then and the shock of stark reality shattered the joy of that improbable dream. No voice had called my name. A gray ray of dawnlight stabbed into the cave, but it brought no warmth. I was numb with cold and utterly alone.
TOO numb at first to stand or think, I crept out into the heatless sun. I sat for a while on a rock outside the cave, kneading my stiff muscles. When I fell able I drank a careful third of the water left in my canteen and shuffled, down the road to look for Tom and Kyrie.
Where the canyon widened I could see the upper stages of the tachyon terminal rising out of pink mushroom fields of far-off cumulus into the cloudless stratosphere, still wavering and fading like a high mirage beneath the shadow of the nesting snakes.
The pavement lay empty ahead, with no trace of Tom or Kyrie until I came out of the canyon on the shore of the fog. Its heaving surface seemed calmer by day, dissolving into crawling blueish tatters as its tiny live balloons exploded in the sun, but its putrid fetor turned me ill.
It had receded enough to uncover our abandoned hearse, its tongues still licked around the wheels. Beneath those fading wisps of mist, I saw patches of wet, blood-colored slime on the pavement and on the rocks where the fog had lain.
Reeling and retching from that rotten sweetness, I improvised a mask from a handkerchief saturated with the last water in my canteen and plunged through those writhing tendrils to reach the hearse.
Guy’s body was gone. For a moment I thought Tom and Kyrie must have come back to carry it away. Then I saw blood puddled on the floor, seeping from a mound of putrefying fur. Glass-black claws gleamed on the fingers of a queer glove peeled from a gray-furred paw. I reached gingerly to move a dark-tipped ear and spilled loose fangs that clattered like gravel.
Shrinking back, numb with shock, I thought the body had been butchered by the unseen creatures of the fog. I searched the pavement, alert for any other evidence, for any sign of Tom or Kyrie, and found another puzzle.
Gouts of red had splashed the pavement behind the hearse. At first I thought the receding fog had left them there, but then I saw that the glistening patches of blood-colored slime had not come so high. The gouts were Guy’s blood, marking a trail where his flesh had been dragged.
The odd thing was the direction of that darkening trail. It led me off the pavement, across a rocky ditch scattered with the dead metal ants and up a steep slope away from the road and the slime and the fog.
Scrambling up that slope, I discovered Tom and Kyrie in a scene that stunned me. The mechanical ants lay dead in glittering windrows of silver-and-black around the edges of a great disk of white stone. Kyrie sat cross-legged on one side of the stone, her golden nudity splotched with blood. Tom stood at the other, bare to the waist and scarlet as a pirate. Between them lay the red body they themselves must have skinned out of Guy’s fur.
I caught my breath to call out, but something stopped me. My wonder and horror were compounded with a sudden sense of awe. The shining, snow-white stone was like an altar. Kyrie was the mad priestess, Tom the sacrificial priest. The bleeding offering between them must have been Guy’s corpse.
Shaken, I crouched behind a shelving stone to watch what went on. The skinned head lay in Kyrie’s lap. She held the blazing nexode against its forehead. Standing over the dark-clotted feet, Tom was chanting ritual words I didn’t understand. In response to the chant, Kyrie’s red fingers flashed about the nexode, touching its bright triangles as if they had been the controls of some mysterious machine.
I crouched there a long time. Ants crawled on me—the live desert insects. Afraid they might sting, I was more afraid to move. From Tom’s voice and Kyrie’s action I began to catch a sense of urgent tension, a grave purpose and a growing fear of failure.
Tom’s chant abruptly stopped. Kyrie froze, staring at him across the tetrahedron. In the silence I heard the lazy drone of a big blue fly and saw it settling on that stiff red face. A red hand brushed at it—and I gasped with astonishment.
THE body was alive. A stranger discovery—what I saw beneath the blood was not naked muscle and tendon but intact skin. I realized that this was not the hideous flayed thing that I had been imagining, but somehow a whole man. His hand reached for the nexode. Moving with an easy grace, he sat up on the spattered stone.
“Hi, Ky!”
“Nick!” Her breathless cry was a sob of mingled agony and joy. “Nicky!”
Something close to terror shook me, because the voice was Nick’s—perhaps a little deeper than I recalled it. The blood-bathed man was Nick—or at least an excellent copy, perhaps a bit heavier and taller. Frowning a little against the sun, he looked around and saw Tom.
“Hello, Hood.”
“Gevalt!” Tom stumbled backward. His fat hands flew up defensively. For once in his life he was ruled by pure emotion, by terror at his own handiwork. “What—what sort of thing are you?” His gazing eyes appealed to Kyrie. “What have we done?”
“We’ve beaten death,” Kyrie whispered.
“What is all this?” Nick came to his feet with the agile grace I remembered, peering down at the blood-smeared stone, off at the crawling fog, back at Kyrie. “Where’s Uncle Kim?”
I caught my breath, but found that I could not announce myself.
I was still too deeply shaken, paralyzed with bewilderment and dread.
“Asleep in the cave,” Kyrie was saying. “Poor little man. I’m afraid he hasn’t entirely got over his gamma-form infection. I couldn’t bear to disturb him.”
“Let him sleep.” Nick turned as if to step off the gleaming disk, paused to frown at the glistening piles of lifeless ants around it, came slowly back to Kyrie. “We’ve problems enough of our own.”
“But we’re all right now.” Her soft voice was almost too quick and eager, as if she could hardly believe her own words. “We can solve them, Nicky, now that you’re alive!”
He stood staring across the tattered sea of fog toward the far white billows of cumulus and the dim mirage of the terminal tower rippling in the sky.
“The most singular thing.” He glanced at the bright pyramid in his hands and back at Kyrie’s tense face. “Stranger than all of this.” Anxiously he stepped a little toward her. “I’ve been dreaming. Dreaming I was Guy. I even thought I’d killed Nick—”
His voice broke off sharply. He leaned to peer at Kyrie’s hands, swung to frown at the dark-stained knife stuck in Tom’s belt, suddenly looked down at himself, rubbing in a startled way at his own blood-stiffened skin.
“So I was Guy!” Nodding in a dazed way, he looked back at Kyrie. “But I’ve been—he’s been—changing?” Slow at first, his breathless voice came faster and faster as he spoke. “The nexode did it, I suppose. The nexode and the nonhuman side of our own nature. I must be a metamorph! Like that red bubble of beta-life in my mother’s laboratory bottle. All Guy’s illness that sleepiness and pain we couldn’t understand that must have been the beginning of the process. And now I’ve been born again. Out of his skin. With you and Hood for mid-wives.”
