Jack Williamson, page 12
He startled me awake, once in the night, with a cry of anguish.
“Mona! Mona, wait for me!”
Day had come when I woke. A yellow sunbeam from the window struck his seat. It was empty.
16
I called his name and got no answer. He had left the cabin door open. I climbed down to the ground and found no trace of him. The morning sun, hot and high in the east, showed no life on the great plain around us. The mossy turf held no footprints. No sound, not even a whisper of wind, came from the gold-and-crimson forest in the west. No golden balloon floated above it.
Wondering what to do, I climbed back aboard, rummaged through the food locker for a breakfast pack, then found that I had no appetite. Only desperate questions. Why was Casey gone? Was he in delirium from those poison thorns, or perhaps an alien virus on the vampire’s fangs? Or maybe drawn into the singing forest by his fevered dreams of Mona? Without a clue, I had to look for answers.
First of all, I called the station to report on our landing and Casey’s disappearance, trusting the robots to record it. I had no weapons. DeFort had brought no arsenal to the Moon, but my euphoria from the song of the trees was not entirely gone.
Carrying only the binoculars, I left the plane and walked toward the forest. It looked very open, parklike and clean, the floor matted with the same leafless blue-green turf. The trees stood wide apart, with no fallen leaves or branches under them. They towered higher and still higher as I came near. Even the saplings along the forest’s edge reduced the plane to a toy. Those trees farther on seemed to rise endlessly. The ground beneath was strangely clean. I found only one fallen leaf, a blanket-sized sheet of copper-red tissue stretched over a kitelike frame.
Listening for any sound from Casey, all I heard was silence, a stillness that somehow seemed alive and alert, watchful, waiting. Or so I felt. When I shouted once, my voice woke echoes from the towering trunks, sounds so faint and ghostly that I did not call again.
Walking farther, I heard a muffled thud and found a fruit that had fallen near me. I picked it up. A bright pink bubble, pear-shaped and heavy in my hand, it flexed as if filled with liquid. Was it fit to eat, or perhaps as poisonous as those jungle barbs? I weighed it again, considering that. We were here for the rest of our lives. The food in the locker would soon be gone. We had to take our chances, and its odd aroma woke my appetite.
The small end of the bubble tapered into a sort of nipple. I squeezed it. Fragrant wine-red drops oozed out. I caught them in my palm and sniffed again. Saliva wet my mouth. I touched them with my tongue. The taste was slightly salt, slightly sweet, and altogether good. I sucked at the nipple till the bubble was flat.
It satisfied my hunger, but left me with a question in botany. The fruits in our old world had been seeds covered with flesh, evolved to tempt more mobile organisms to eat and scatter them. The bubble had shrunk to a flat bladder with no seed in it. What was its biological function?
The forest looked darker and stranger when I looked ahead. The massive trunks, the color of time-darkened bronze, rose like the columns of an enormous temple. The branches spread so high I had to crane to make them out. The dense foliage shut out the sun to leave me in a heavy twilight. I had gone only a little way before I stopped, sensing that I was invading a sacred place where I had no right to be.
Turning back, I searched north along the fringe of the forest, cautiously keeping daylight in view. I must have gone two or three miles before I heard something sing again. Its voice seemed to come from treetops, far ahead at first and far away, then near, louder, till it had become a trilling lilt high above me, a melody so lively and eager that I quickened my pace to its beat.
Was it aware of me?
For a moment I thought so, but its song continued when I stood still. Was it addressed to Casey, not to me? Suddenly certain of that, with no rational reason, I stood wondering till it broke. After a moment of total silence, I heard a piercing note like a cry of pain that changed into a long-drawn wail that seemed to come from all around me. The glow of color in the treetops darkened as if from a sudden shadow, but I saw no cloud.
Overwhelmed by a wave of dread I knew no reason for, I retreated farther into the open and looked a little anxiously for the plane. It stood where I had left it, small and lonely in the distance, no more than a tiny silvery exclamation point to that dying wail. I was raising the binoculars to make sure it was safe when I saw another balloon.
A bright golden ball, small and far away, it came drifting over the forest toward the plane. A wave of darkness followed it, a shadow too large for it to cast. It was drifting too low. The gondola dragged the treetops, caught and broke free, caught and broke free again. That fading wail had sunk into a breathless hush, as if the forest itself felt anxious.
The glasses shaking in my hand, it took me a moment to get the balloon into a sharper focus. My breath stopped. It had snagged again on the splintered limb of a tree lightning must have blasted. Wind dragged it free again, but its fabric must have torn. Deflating, it sank fast. A door opened in the side of the gondola. Something jumped out.
I tried to steady the glasses, tried to get the focus sharper. The falling creature looked half human, half unearthly, yet clearly female. Her skin was hairless, smooth, almost the golden hue of the balloon. She had three-toed, dark-clawed chicken feet, made for perching, but her thighs curved nicely to a golden tuft of pubic hair. Her full golden breasts were nippled like the fruit I had sucked.
For an instant I caught her face. Smoothly oval, softly feminine, it was framed in flowing pale-gold hair. Her eyes were darker, golden green, wide with terror. Her mouth gaped as if with a scream too far off for me to hear.
Tumbling down, she spread wings, bright gold sails attached from her shoulders to her elbows. One seemed crooked, useless. She had opened them too late. Falling fast, she flapped them wildly, came down hard, staggered, stumbled, sank into a golden huddle, lay there not moving. On the impulse to help if she needed help, I started toward her and stopped when Casey came running out of the woods behind her.
He knelt beside her, felt her narrow wrist, bent his head against her breast to listen for her heart. I saw his lips moving as he spoke, saw stark fear fade into relief when her eyes blinked and stared at him and finally smiled. He leaned a long time over her, bending to listen when her lips moved, kneeling to examine that injured wing.
I saw her flinch and sink back when she tried to move it. He gathered her up to lift her. Her feathered arms went around his neck, the gold wings wrapping them both. I thought he was taking her aboard the plane. Instead, he carried her back into the forest. The treetops shone bright again. Something like a single voice pealed from them, grew and spread into a great chorus of rejoicing, I imagined, that she was safe.
More wonder than compassion urged me to follow, but I thought he wouldn’t want me. He must have thought I was aboard the plane if he thought about me at all. Why hadn’t he tried to reach me? Had the forest somehow possessed him, the way the black vampires possessed their hosts? Such riddles—all unanswered—haunted me.
The voice of the forest softened as he carried her into the shadows. A gentle melody that fitted no melodic pattern that Dr. Lazard had taught when she gave us music lessons at her holo piano, it became as quietly soothing as the wind sounds and brook sounds and surf sounds Tanya’s mother used to play when we were young and she wanted us to sleep.
It quieted my anxieties enough to let me stop and inspect the deflated balloon, a great ragged sheet of something that looked a little like plastic film but was still altogether baffling. It had no metal in it, no rivets or grommets or cylinders of gas. I found no cords or ropes or any valves that they might have controlled. It was all one single piece. I found no seams or stitches, no mark of manufacture. And the gondola—
I had to stand and scratch my head and stare again into the forest, which was purring softly now, like ten thousand of Dian’s cats. The gondola was a slick orange-red shell, hard as a pecan shell. It had split wide open to let that winged creature escape. I wondered how there had been space for her till I saw that it was lined with some soft pliant gray stuff shaped to fit the curves of her body. Leaning to look inside, I caught a hint of the winelike odor of the fruit I had found.
What was she?
Another fruit of the forest, grown on some singing tree? That was hard to imagine, but what else? Neither the trees nor the black vampires could have evolved here on Earth. My father had taught us words invented for such other-worlders. Panspermia. Extraterrestial. Xenobiology. The words were all I knew.
Hopeful for Casey’s return, I stayed in or near the plane. Hunger and thirst, I thought, should bring him back, but he never did appear. Again and again I ventured out to the forest fringe to look for any sign of him, but I never went far. What kept me out was something greater than my concern for Casey, awe more than actual fear, a dread of some felt presence that I didn’t know or understand. A presence aware of me, perhaps warily alert, perhaps merely curious, maybe unconcerned with me at all. The sense of that was not hostile or alarming, yet strong enough to stop me.
I found another great copper-colored leaf, fallen from that shattered tree at the forest’s edge. I dragged it out into the open, brought a holocam, measured and described it for another report to the station. The long central vein was a hollow tube with something like a reed at the end. It squeaked faintly when I squeezed it. Were the leaves the voice boxes of the forest?
On another day I went back to study the balloon again. I found the empty shell of the gondola melting into the ground. The golden fabric had faded almost white, and a flap of it was stuck fast when I tried to pull it free. Dragging it loose, I found tiny yellow roots grown into it from the turf. One mystery solved. The forest needed no rangers or loggers to give it the look of a well-tended park. The mossy turf was doing that work, absorbing whatever fell.
Next morning I sat aboard the plane, trying to sum up our data and conclusions for transmission. I now had no doubt that Arne’s terror of alien invasion was based on fact. Though we had seen no evidence of spacecraft in Africa, or any high technology at all, the black vampires were certainly not native to Earth. The singing trees? They remained an even greater riddle.
Waiting for the Moon to rise into radio range, I couldn’t help feeling that the microphone was a black hole where my words would be lost forever. Though I hoped the Robos would be listening, I had no way to know. I confess a certainperverse satisfaction in the thought of Arne shaking in terror that the vampires might find him.
The cabin door was open. I heard a sudden clamor, a sound like a thousand voices screaming, with no music in it. It rose and fell and became a rapid cannon fire that to my ears had no harmony at all. Watching from the door, I saw the whole forest flickering as if from multicolored lightning.
In a moment Casey and the winged thing burst into view. They ran frantically. She was limping. He held her hand to help her, her wings wrapped around him. Out of the trees, she spread them and tried to fly. One wing buckled. She sprawled to the turf. He picked her up, her arms around his neck, and plunged on toward the plane. The forest boomed in time with his footfalls, and scarlet lightning blazed behind them.
Something followed out of the forest.
17
An ungainly, brown-furred beast, loping clumsily on long hind legs and shorter forelegs in a way that made it grotesquely tall behind and short ahead, it was already halfway to the plane. I first thought Casey had time enough to win his race, but he staggered weakly. The golden being seemed too heavy for him.
A dozen yards out of the woods, the beast stood up on its huge rear legs, trumpeted like the elephants I had seen in holos, and lumbered faster. I grabbed the binoculars and got them in focus to see the creature more clearly. Even as a biped, it looked more like a great ape than anything human, but really not much like anything ever evolved on Earth.
Two huge yellow eyes glared out of a slick hairless head ridged with a red, saw-toothed crest. Its hands were wicked claws. The three-toed feet were armed with longer claws and bright red spurs. A sharp black penis thrust out below its yellow-furred belly. It came on at a lurching run, as if more used to ambling on all fours.
Casey was still well ahead till he stumbled on the being’s dragging wing. They sprawled together on the turf. She lay motionless under the twisted wings. He came up on hands and knees, stared up at the beast, struggled to his feet and stumbled to meet it. In his left hand he had a weapon, something that looked like one of the gray socks we wore in our boots, rocks packed in the toe.
The beast stopped once and turned back to bellow its rage into the forest. The forest echoed it with a great booming crescendo of discordant wrath. The beast swung back, howling like a hunting wolf. Casey raised his right hand, open palm out, in an appeal for peace.
The creature growled and came on to swipe its claws across his chest, ripping off most of his tattered shirt. He shifted the sock to his right hand, swung it high, brought it down toward the thing’s yellow-shelled head. It ducked and grappled him with both black-clawed hands. The sock swung again and struck beside the crimson crest.
The thing stopped as if dazed, the yellow eyes blinking at him. He stepped back to get his breath, bright blood running down his chest. It swayed and fell toward him. I thought he had knocked it out, but it grappled him again, snatched him off his feet, whirled his body, tossed him sprawling.
The sock went flying and bounced off a golden wing. He lay motionless till I saw his fingers groping at the turf. The creature stalked to him, kicked a scarlet spur into his side, stamped its three-clawed foot on his blood-stained chest, and turned with arms spread high to trumpet a raucous call of triumph into the forest. The forest answered with a thundering paean of victory.
It spurred his limp body again, leaned to gather the female with its crimson claws, and carried her back toward the forest, the injured wing dragging. The forest welcomed his return with a rumbling chant that kept time to his footfalls.
Casey tried to sit up before I reached him, and sank weakly back. A pitiful scarecrow, he was hollow-eyed and half naked, dried blood clotted black on the welted marks of the vampire’s fangs, fresh blood oozing where the claws had slashed him.
“Damn, damn, damn!” He gave me a forlorn little grin. His voice turned anxious. “Did you see Mona?”
“I saw—saw something.”
“Wasn’t she beautiful?”
“Something strange,” I said. “Out of a new biology.”
“She is—different.” He was panting for breath. “Wonderful! And strange enough till I found Mona in her.”
He shook his head at my look of disbelief and tried again to rise. I helped him stand. He staggered after the creature swaggering away with the female, stumbled and nearly fell, stopped with a helpless shrug. He stood looking after them, getting back his breath, while the creature’s razor crest shrank to a bright red point in the distance, bobbing along above her golden wings. They vanished at last in the shadows. He turned back to me, still swaying on his feet, something wild in his deep-sunk eyes.
“I guess you think I’m sick or crazy.” He shook his head, with a faint little grin. “I know she’s a different breed. Hard to understand. But she does have Mona in her. If you had seen her eyes—she has Mona’s eyes.” He was hoarsely whispering, an awed devotion on his haggard face. “Mona’s voice when she sings. I love her, Dunk.” His face set with stubborn purpose. “I’ve got to get her back.”
“How? How can you hope—”
He wasn’t listening.
“That—that hideous thing!” His voice went thick with baffled fury. “A devil from—from I don’t know where. I believe it came down in that first balloon we saw. Hunting her. We’ve been hiding. Running from it.” He stopped to calm his quivering voice. “I can’t let it take her.”
His scarred fists were knotted, but he was barely able to stand. He limped with me back to the plane and let me clean his wounds and spray them with healant. He must have been sick from some poison or virus, but half his weakness came from hunger.
“She found fruit for us,” he said. “Something like big red grapes, full of juice we could suck. I liked the taste. It gave me a sort of high, but it wasn’t meant for humans. There’s no strength in it.”
He devoured two meal packs and a banana the robots had grown in our hothouse, and poured himself a stiff shot of the moonshine El Chino had taught him to distill. He said it eased his pain. Groggy with exhaustion, he was still too jittery to sleep. He wanted to talk about Mona. Or Monas. The human refugee who boarded the escape plane with El Chino and the gold-winged alien had somehow run together in his mind.
“She sang to me, Dunk. Not with words, her language has no words. Not even with any tune I ever heard. But she made me sense what she felt for me. We were speaking with something better than words.” He paused to shrug at the questions on my face. “I don’t know how. It doesn’t matter. Listening, I saw what she saw. Heard what she heard. I understood the trees when they sang to her.”
I got up to brew a pot of tea.
“Dunk!” His voice rose impatiently. “If you think I’m out of my head, it’s because you never heard her sing. But damn those trees!” He made a bitter face. “They don’t like me. Maybe because I’m not a tree. They say I don’t belong. They’re afraid I’ll take her away. But she loves me, Dunk. She loves me.”
His voice had fallen into silence, and he sat staring away at nothing till I touched his arm to offer the mug of hot tea. He jumped as if that startled him.
“Sorry, Dunk. I forget where I am.” He gave me an apologetic grin and sloshed a shot of his moonshine into the tea. “She gave me dreams.” Sipping at the tea, he let his voice fade absently. “Memories, really, at night when I slept with her arms around me.”
