Collected Short Fiction, page 742
“We’re on the way!” She clapped her hands. “We’ll see our people soon.”
“Not today,” he warned her.
The strip and the snow-banked huts shrank and dimmed under yellow haze as they rose. When the Polarians had flown it, with the hull pressurized and the thrusters at full power, it might have climbed above the dust to cross the continent in half a short Andoranda day.
But now it was a limping wreck. The damaged hatch could not be fully sealed. The navigation gear had been designed for Earth, and the monks had installed nothing he could find to show distance and direction here. With only the map for a guide, they would have to keep beneath the dust. The old cell banks held power for lift, but with little left for the thrusters. When he tried them, the skimmer felt sluggish and slow.
“We can’t take long.” Buglet shivered. “We can’t take long.”
Sharing her dread, he pushed the thrusters to the limit of their faltering power. With the tattered map spread between them on the navigation table, they left Station One to follow the long curve of that enormous muddy river until it poured through a chain of dead volcanoes in red-foaming rapids and a mile-wide fall that thundered down into blood-colored mist. When the abrupt night caught them, they dived to land on a black lava plain.
That night it was his turn to sleep, while Buglet watched. She looked small and forlorn when she woke him at dawn, her lean face bleak beneath the grime, her eyes too large, her pale lips quivering.
“It’s here,” she whispered. “Already in this universe.”
With no delay for breakfast, because the last of the ration bricks was gone, they took off at once. In a vast basin beyond the fall, the river widened into an endless brown inland sea, scattered with islands of dirty ice. All day they traced its shore and came down on the mud-plain beside it when night fell again.
Next day the river led them through spectacular red-walled canyons into an immense desert of wind-carved orange dunes. There it disappeared. Ahead of them, all the way to the coastal range—perhaps a thousand miles, he guessed—the map was blank. Guessing direction by the shape of the dunes, they went on until darkness forced them down. He slept while Buglet watched. The night seemed too short, and he woke groggy and depressed.
“It hasn’t caught up yet.” She seemed alert and oddly cheerful. “We ought to get across the range today. Maybe all the way to Station Two.”
Grinning weakly at her, amazed at her radiant vitality, he wanted to ask if she had learned to exist without food, drawing energy out of the multiverse the way the gods did. But the mere effort of speech had become a burden. He said nothing.
When the hazy sky grew bright enough to show the curves and slopes of the dunes, he lifted the skimmer. Beyond the sand desert, now with only the slope of the land for a compass, they kept heading for higher ground. Bare dark foothills beckoned them across a great plateau scattered with monumental buttes. Black lava fields lifted and vanished at last under a wilderness of snow where the glacier-bitten peaks towered into stormy clouds.
The cockpit chilled as they climbed. In the thinning air, they were breathing heavily. Red lightning began to flicker in the wall of the cloud ahead, and he turned uneasily to Buglet.
“I’m going to land. If night catches us in that storm, we could crash the skimmer all over again. By morning, the weather may be better—”
She wasn’t listening. Hunched against the cold, she had twisted to stare blankly back the way they had come. With a shudder, she turned suddenly to face him.
“It’s here,” she whispered. “Trailing us from Station One. We can’t stop.”
Keeping to valleys and canyons, searching for a pass, they climbed into the storm. Lightning blazed around them. Savage winds tugged and hauled, tossed them into foggy voids, flung them toward ice-armored peaks.
“No!” He heard Buglet’s stifled sob. “Please, no—”
A sharper chill numbed him, and he felt power drained from the thrusters. The skimmer dropped through swirling snow. Jagged granite loomed ahead. With inches to spare, he brought them through a narrow gap into wind and mist and fury.
“It has caught us.” Hushed with dread, her voice was almost lost in a volley of hail. “It’s riding on the hull. Sucking power out of the cells—I don’t know how—trying to drag us down.”
He fought it. With the thrusters dead, he dived for speed enough to gain control. They skimmed past sudden cliffs, dodged a volcanic cone, slid down a black-walled gorge.
“I think that gap was the pass.” Feeling her bleak desperation, he tried to seem hopeful. “I think we’ve got the main range behind us. If we can live to find the station—”
The cockpit lights went out. The controls froze. Dead metal, the skimmer swirled down through dense fog. He heard her anguished gasp, felt her cold lips brush his cheek.
“We can’t just die!” Her voice in the dark had a calm force that startled him. “We won’t—”
The wind of their fall screamed around the skimmer. Dark rocks sprang at them out of the fog, grazed the hull. Torn metal shrieked. The skimmer spun. Flung against the seat restraints, he glimpsed a long snow-slope.
Something struck his head—
5.
It was dark and quiet and deadly cold. For a moment he didn’t know anything else. Then all the tension and the terror of their flight came back, a jolting impact. The demon on the skimmer. Their crash across the cliffs into the snow. He reached for Buglet in the seat beside him, but his numb fingers found nothing at all.
“Bug—”
He tried to call her name, but no sound came. His breath was gone, and a great weight crushed his chest. He had to lie back, gasping. It took a long time to fill his lungs, and the air he inhaled seared them with cold.
“Bug—” Hoarsely, he tried again. “Bug?”
No answer came.
He tried to unlock the padded arms that held him in the seat, but his clumsy fingers couldn’t find anything. What pinned him down was something heavy across his knees, which he couldn’t see and couldn’t move.
Listening, he heard a faint groan of bending metal and a dull crunch of yielding snow. Something shuddered under him, and the vise closed harder on his knees. Then there was only soundless, paralyzing cold.
He lay wondering about the nature of the demon. To have trailed them here across all the unimaginable discontinuities of the multiverse, it must be more powerful than Belthar himself. Even if they had been able to reach Zhondra Zhey at the second station, she couldn’t have helped. Only a child goddess, she would have been no match for such an ultimate fiend.
Slow with cold, his mind came back to Buglet. Perhaps she was somewhere with him in the wreckage, unconscious or dead. Perhaps she had been thrown outside, to die on rocks or snow. Perhaps the demon had turned unknown forces against her. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, if Bug was dead.
Why was he still alive? To his dull brain, that was an oddly abstract riddle. Perhaps the demon was lurking still, outside the wreckage, watching him die. Perhaps it had already gone to stalk the premen at the station, leaving him for dead. He didn’t know. Strangely, he didn’t really care.
But it struck him as a great pity that the Fourth Creation had failed, a long thousand years after Eva Smithwick tried to repair the error that had left the gods without compassion enough to match their might. The waste of time and life and hope was shattering tragedy—but what hurt most was his grief for Bug.
When a muffled clatter aroused him, he knew that he had been deep in the anesthesia of cold. His knees were dead beneath that weight he couldn’t see. He couldn’t feel his feet, and his useless fingers ached. He tried to lift his head, straining to listen.
It came again: a scrape of metal, a creak of packing snow. Gray light struck from behind him, and a draft of colder air. He tried to turn, but his lifeless legs would not respond and his body was too heavy to move. He heard a far gale howling, saw swirling flakes of snow.
“Bug?”
He breathed her name and sank back again, with no actual hope.
“Davey, darling!” Her lilting voice seemed strangely clear and strong, melodiously caressing. “Let me help you.”
She came into view out of the gloom, moving with such perfect ease and grace that for a moment he thought she must be a dream. The grimy coveralls gone, she was nude and white and smooth. Her fluid beauty dazed him.
Swift as a dream, she bent over him.
Long and free, her black hair poured across his face. Its overwhelming odor took his breath—her too-sweet bridal scent, mixed with the clinging incense-reek of Belthar’s altar, tainted with a sour hint of godsgrace.
Her bare arms slid under him, smooth as glass and cold as snow. She lifted him against her white breasts. Her avid lips writhed through the suffocating hair, crushed against his mouth, sucking out his breath. They were cold as ice.
“Bug—”
He couldn’t speak. Convulsively, he tried to turn his head, to get his breath, to push her off. Horror paralyzed him. She—it—wasn’t Bug!
“Call me Gleesh.” The voice was hers, but cool and amused, laughing at him. “Your darling Bug is under the avalanche, buried under a million tons of ice.”
Still chuckling, it changed. The heavy-scented hair was suddenly a snake, sleek-scaled and powerful, whipping around his neck, cruelly constricting. The breasts burned red, turned to the killing eyes of a muman fighter. The trim legs became monstrous, hard-armored limbs, raking at him with savage talons.
He was dying. Those merciless coils were crushing his throat. Breath gone, his lungs were agonized. The blazing eyes stung his body with their stabbing pathseeker beams. The talons ripped through his clothing, tore at his numb flesh.
But, before he died, he felt a flow of power. As if she were still with him in the cockpit, he heard the real Buglet whispering: We need danger, Davey! To wake our latent talents.
His stiffened fingers alive again, he caught the thick coils at his throat. They knotted against his grasp, quivering, pulling savagely tighter. Teeth set, he strained to tear them away.
“Thank you, darling!” It was laughing again as if with delight, speaking still with Buglet’s breathless voice. “I hate an easy kill. The chase for you and your Bug has been grueling enough, but these lovely fights are worth it all.”
The snake contracted again, crushing his own hands into his throat. The killer eyes struck with blazing bolts, deafening in the narrow cockpit. Their blue fire was blinding. A reek of burned fabric and seared flesh stung his nostrils, and his whole body jerked from the shocks, a puppet ruled by strings of pain.
Yet he didn’t die.
If we need danger—Without speech, he tried to think at the actual Buglet, suddenly daring to hope that she was somehow still alive.—here it is!
New power nerved his hands, as if she were in fact still beside him, helping him open some unsuspected source of multiversal energy they both could share. He tore the crushing coil away from his throat, sucked air into his tortured lungs.
“Darling!” it breathed. “Do that again!”
Forcing those cruel loops farther away, he saw his own hands—and marveled at them. For they were glowing slightly in the gloom with a pale white light of their own, like the auras of the gods.
He closed them on the snake. The hard scales crackled and snapped under his luminous fingers. The muscular mass of it yielded. Hard tissue tore. Sudden red fire blazed and faded against the glow of his hands, and the coils were gone.
“Oh, Davey—”
With that gasp of joy, it changed again. He felt hard metal, smelled hot oil, heard a keen mechanical squeal. Bright steel blades spun against his chest, slashing through the coveralls.
But somehow they couldn’t touch his glowing skin. He flung both arms around that shifting shape, squeezed. The metal buckled and fractured and changed again. It became a blob of clinging jelly that flowed and tried to freeze around him, became a cloud of nauseating gas that burned his eyes and choked his throat.
“Davey, I do love you!”
Still he squeezed.
Its happy laughter ceased. Suddenly invisible, impalpable, it tried to get away. He held it grimly, probing for its life with the faint glow of his expanding nimbus.
“Dav—”
It had slashed back at him with its own red fire, but that dimmed and winked out. His shining hands held only emptiness. Nothing was left in the cockpit with him except a thin strange stink, a little like the scent of a den of diamondbacks, more like the odor of a poison weed El Yaqui had showed him on the Redrock mesa long ago.
The demon was dead.
In the struggle, he had somehow freed his knees from the object that had fallen on them—he saw now that it had been a massive steel-cased gravitic inverter that had been thrown through the bulkhead when the skimmer crashed.
He climbed out of the cockpit through the passage the demon must have opened through piled snow and battered metal. It felt good to stand straight and fill his lungs with clean air. Though his coveralls had been ripped to shreds, he somehow no longer felt the cold.
Pausing on a snow mound, he turned his hands, squinting at them with puzzled awe. Here, even in the yellow-gray light that filtered through the Andorandan storm, that dim nimbus was no longer visible. But it had been real. His hidden powers had been awakened long enough to let him kill a creature more deadly than a god.
But even as he strove again to understand that genetic gift, his elation was already fading. He felt chastened, almost guilty. Terrified at first, he had come before the end to enjoy the risk and pain and desperate effort of that combat almost as much as the demon did. Somehow, he felt, they had been kin.
When he turned to look for Buglet, his concern for her swept that discontent away. The flattened ruin of the skimmer was almost covered with the snow that sloped steeply up and steeply down as far as he could see through the wind-whipped fog and snow.
She wasn’t in the wreck—he felt somehow sure of that. Afraid the vast snow-slide had really buried her, he picked his way down the slope to look for her, slipping and stumbling, pausing again and again when cascading snow seemed about to start another avalanche.
The clouds thinned until at last he could see the barren valley at the foot of the slope, a vast trough of ice and snow and shattered stone, the tumbled stuff of the last slide forming a frozen wave far up the farther wall. If Buglet had been buried there—
He saw her then, a tiny yellow dot in her survival suit, creeping toward him down that snow-veiled wall. She waved, when she reached the bottom of it, and stopped to wait for him. She was sitting on a boulder when he came to her, damp from the snow and flushed with exertion, her lemon eyes luminous. The grime and terror of their long trek were gone, and her beauty stabbed him like a blade. He took her in his arms—and trembled from her cool kiss when he remembered the demon.
“It’s dead, Davey.” The whisper was her own, grave and true. “It was the only thing able to trail us, and I saw you kill it. I was watching—somehow watching—from where I was trapped under the snow.”
“I felt you—” The shudder passed. She was warm and light and alive in his arms. The flakes of snow that starred her hair and chilled her face were only snow. That demoniac hunter was dead, and her lips felt warm again. “I felt you helping—I don’t know how—”
“There’s a lot you have to learn.” Mischief flashed and vanished in her eyes. “I tried to help, and I felt you helping me. Don’t you remember?”
Happy and relaxed, he didn’t try to answer.
“The demon hit me first.” She could see that he didn’t remember. “The skimmer had been ripped open on the rocks we struck. The demon pulled me out and tried to kill me in the avalanche. It left me smothered under tons and tons of rock and ice. At first I thought I was going to die, but then you came to help me. Together, we made an aura for me, strong enough to shield me and lift me out.”
Feeling no need to say much more, they went on together down the glacial valley until they reached the brink of another ice-fall. Freezing winds whipped over its lip, and they drew back in awe from the chasms beyond. Endless snow-slopes. Ice-carved gorges. Sheer black cliffs, dropping at last to the dark-red ocean.
“It’s alive.” Staring out across its boundless blood-colored immensity, he saw something black and far away that jumped and flashed and fell back into a dot of bright foam. “I remember reading about it in truman books. The Andoranda analog of chlorophyll is red.” Shrinking from the wind, he shivered. “Live—but not our kind.”
“But this is the south cape.” She leaned to look far down at the ragged line of pink surf that traced the feet of those forbidding walls of naked stone. “Our only problem now is how to find our people.”
“Problem enough,” he muttered. “I can’t see any way down to the beach. Even if we got there, we wouldn’t know which way to go—”
“That way, maybe.”
She had turned with a gasp of surprise to point at a spur of rock behind them, and now he saw a trail winding around it toward a high gleam of metal. They climbed the trail to a flat rock shelf—a basalt bench that had been leveled for a landing pad. At the end of it, a spidery tower rose above a small metal dome. They pushed into the dome, through an unlocked door.
“An observatory.” He nodded at the narrow slit toward the sky. “El Yaqui showed the monks at Redrock the ruin of one on Creation Mesa—to prove to them that the premen knew astronomy long ago.” From the doorway, he scanned that far line of surf. “If the Polarians built this one, the station should be close.”
The flimsy-seeing tower held a beacon light, its power cells still alive. Before the sudden dusk fell, they had found how to turn it on. They slept that night on the floor of the empty dome, with no evil dreams. A skimmer woke them, screaming down to land—a time-worn twin of the one they had repaired. Running to meet it, they froze when they saw the grotesque being on the ramp. A tiny bundle of black-and-yellow fur, bounding on two enormous arms.
