The Light at The End of The Universe -, page 9
“A lie!” said Kelso.
“No,” said the wheest. “If we had gone through the canyon you wanted, you would have seen. It leads to the Akellenir.” He shook his head sadly. “A wide field of ice, the coldest spot on the mountain. It draws the winds down; and down; no winds rise anywhere there.”
“You’ve seen it?” I asked him.
Sakkoneesh nodded, eyes still on Kelso. ‘It was there that I failed once before. It seems the easy way for the fly, until you enter the winds. They are too strong, they drown the mountain’s voice.”
“The mountain’s voice,” Kelso said bitterly. “I’ve heard that voice; it’s not beautiful.”
Sakkoneesh said, “Only the mountain can lead us upward. We must follow its voice, or fall.”
“Mike fell anyway,” said Kelso. “You should have warned him.”
But Sakkoneesh again shook his head. “I have told him to listen for Hirrkaleorashe’s song; it is the only way.” He looked at me. “Mike, you did hear it, yes?”
’ I remembered the high keening of the winds back in the canyon, eerie and harsh, like the wailing of lost souls. The “song” had drowned out everything in my head, had nearly blasted me into unconsciousness. But it had led me to stop flailing against the winds, to blend and ride with them, and I had found the rising air.
I shrugged. “Yes, I heard it I couldn’t hear anything else for a while.”
“And you followed it,” said Sakkoneesh.
“If you want to say that,” I agreed. “Anyway, I’m alive, and we can go on.”
Kelso stood up, looking from me to Sakkoneesh, his face hard and angry. “It was luck, no more. You should have warned him.”
Sakkoneesh too stood, and met Kelso’s eyes defiantly with his own. “How could I have described it? A man will fly or he will fall. A man will listen to the mountain, or he will not. You have heard it, Kelso. Yet you fell, and you retreated.”
“My wings were damaged,” Kelso said shortly. He walked away from us, toward the open end of our cul-de-sac; he leaned into the winds near the entrance to keep his balance and looked out at granite, ice and endless distance. Abruptly he took out his holo camera and began to shoot.
I followed him, and said, “You wouldn’t tell me before that happened when you tried this fly. You didn’t get through that canyon, did you?”
He shook his head, not looking at me, still shooting holos of the harsh black pinnacles, the glare of snow and ice in the midday sun. “I had a guide then too,” he said. “A different one. He led me into that canyon and we both fell. I saw him smiling afterward, and it crossed my mind that he’d deliberately sabotaged the fly, so this time I made sure we got a different guide. But the same thing happened.” Now he did turn to me, and with a small shock deep within me I saw the pain in his eyes. “Mike, we can’t trust Sakkoneesh, or any wheest. I think they don’t want any Earthmen to fly this mountain, and they see to it that we go into that canyon.”
“But we got through it,” I said. “Anyway, why should they try to kill us? Sakkoneesh is on this fly too; he wants to get to the top.”
“Not as much as he wants to protect his sacred mountain,” Kelso said. “We’re offworlders; maybe it would be a defilement if we succeeded in the fly when none of the wheests ever could. Who knows what’s in their heads? Winds, probably.”
“Did you hear the mountain?” I asked him.
He smiled bitterly. “The song of Starmont, you mean? Yes, but it was nothing supernatural. It was only wind; you know that, Mike.”
In my memory 1 heard that song, the high keening that had drowned my thoughts. My fears had gone with them, had left me with a kind of peace. What were songs, anyway? I wondered. Sounds to erase thoughts, perhaps.
“Let’s continue the fly,” I said. “Before my muscles freeze up.”
Kelso nodded. “But from now on, watch out for Sakko-neesh. I hired him to protect us, not to kill us.”
Another memory struck: “Did you, Kelso? Sakkoneesh told me you wanted him to help me kill myself.”
He looked at me with astonishment. “He said that? To help you kill yourself?” He shot a hard look at the wheest, and folded his holo camera into its case at his waist. Sakkoneesh stood with eyes closed, wings around him, in an attitude of waiting patience. Kelso said, “Sakkoneesh!”
The wheest opened his eyes and regarded us calmly. Kelso strode to him, his footsteps heavy and flat in the snow. “When did I say anything about Mike killing himself?” Kelso demanded.
Sakkoneesh shrugged, his wings half-rising and settling again. “You said your friend was a man chasing after his mind. You said to let him chase it.”
Kelso stared at him, waiting for more. But Sakkoneesh stopped, and after a moment Kelso said, “I may have told you that. It’s true; Mike thinks too much. But I didn’t say he’d try to kill himself.”
Sakkoneesh smiled softly. “But you know they are the same,” he said.
“No,” said Kelso, “they’re not the same at alL You have the mind of a barbarian, Sakkoneesh.”
“I am a barbarian,” said the wheest. “And you have come to Hirrkaleorashe to be barbarians with me.”
Kelso turned away from him, anger tightening his face. “This is pointless. We came to fly the mountain, Sakkoneesh, that’s all. It’s not some kind of sacrament to us.”
“Wait,” I said, putting a hand on Kelso’s shoulder. Our eyes met, and I tried to will the anger from his. “Sakko-neesh is right in one thing: Starmont is no place for thinking. If we hesitate when the winds hit us, they drive us down and we’re lost.”
But Kelso’s face remained hard, unyielding. Behind him, out in the wind-whipped heights of Starmont, I saw snow blown into the air, spraying and scattering in the swirling winds.
I said, “Do you know what Delbelen told me this morning? She said we have to surrender to the mountain, let it tell us what to do. And she’s right; the mountain is too strong to fight.”
Kelso smiled bitterly. “So you’re back to theories again? I told you. once before, you even have theories for not thinking. We’re not wheests, Mike; we can’t fly by instinct alone.”
“In the canyon just now,” I said, “all the time I was falling, I was trying to think how to save myself. But I kept falling till my mind blanked out; then I felt the free spaces in the winds, and I got out safely.”
“You were lucky,” he said. “Don’t count on it happening again.”
I dropped my hand from his shoulder: I felt the connection between us already broken. “I don’t think we can count on anything here,” I said.
He shrugged. “You’re right about that, anyway. It’s us against the mountain.” He looked out again, at bleak rocks and slick ice walls. And I remembered what he’d said years ago, when I’d first met him on Perdu. Hatred is the best motivation, he’d told me; it gets you farthest.
The mountain was an immense, exciting enemy for Kelso; but it was beautiful to me.
“We must go on,” said Sakkoneesh. He had come to stand near us by the entrance of the cleft. “I will lead, and you may follow or not, as you wish.”
I began to adjust my wing-straps, moved my face-mask into place. Kelso, silent and grim, did the same. Sakkoneesh watched us, and when we were ready he said, “I will tell you one thing more, since you want warnings. There is another akell above us, another test. 1 have never flown that high, but its name is Akell Dolenashe. Dolenashe is the aspect of the god that destroys. We will see.”
He glanced from Kelso to me, then turned and kicked out into the swirling winds. He rose quickly, riding an updraft, his ’outspread saillike wings glowing pink in the sunlight.
Kelso watched him for a moment, then stepped to the edge. “He means he’ll try again to kill us,” he said without looking back at me. “Keep your wits, Mike. Make sure your oxygen feed isn’t set too high.” Then he stepped out into the winds, and his opened wings reflected dull grey against the snowy heights as he followed Sakkoneesh upward.
After a moment I turned up my oxygen two notches, and ran into the air.
Once again the winds took me, filling my wings and driving me before them. I breathed deeply of the rich oxygen from my tanks and remembered the exaltation I had felt two days ago when Kelso and I had flown over Star-mont and seen its mysterious summit from high above. I’d been intoxicated then by the sight and because I’d been hyperventilating Starmont’s high-oxygen air. Now I was again taking in extra oxygen, but I told myself it was only for the sake of tiring muscles.
Still, it was affecting my head. I felt light and a little giddy, and the close call I’d had in the canyon seemed remote, as if it had happened weeks ago. The mountain continued and continued, and though the deep forests of its lower levels had given way to snowy crags, this seemed less a change in what I was seeing than in how I saw it
Kelso wasn’t far above me, but Sakkoneesh was only a dark shape against the bright sky. I concentrated on flying, feeling my wings once more become part of me, and soon I reached Kelso’s height. I grinned as we passed, each circling in a rising thermal, but he only nodded. He seemed tired, the movements of his wings slow.
Once the thought came to me that all that held me aloft were my dream-thin wings, that without them I’d plunge a dozen miles down, helpless. But the thought only drifted through my mind and was gone. I chased after Sakkoneesh, gaining on him as we flew up the air.
Then I realized that Sakkoneesh was leading us inward again toward the mountain. We were flying with the wind, stroking easily; but as we approached Starmont I saw grey clouds roiling and churning like a maelstrom of the skies. A storm, I thought, he’s taking us straight into a storm; and I knew this must be the final akell he’d told us about. I flew harder after him, wanting to stay as close as possible so I could follow his lead precisely.
Cold rain broke over me, soaking my body and partially obscuring my face-mask. But I followed Sakkoneesh’s darker shape in the dimness, banked where he did and found the updraft, beat my wings after him and felt a sharp blast of icy air almost as an answer. Starmont disappeared, everything faded but the buffeting greyness and Sakkoneesh ahead of me; the winds screamed around me, clutching at my wings.
It was impossible to fly here in the normal way of flying, but I scrambled and clawed my way through the darkening winds. It was like swimming into a torrent, the forces constantly shifting, pushing and pulling, spinning me aside. I could barely see Sakkoneesh through the storm, and the winds drove heavy rain at me.
I wasn’t frightened. I felt a tingling throughout my body as though every one of my nerve endings had become hypersensitive; I welcomed the wind and water as though they were caresses, and I realized once that I was laughing. The storm became an extension of myself, the winds a shifting network of sensors, the roiling grey clouds a nutrient cocoon in the air. The winds seemed to warm me even as they whipped around me.
Suddenly I realized that the winds were warm, even hot. They rose from below, they met the ice-winds that swirled around the mountain and they made a howling vortex in the air. I smelled acrid gases, and remembered that Starmont was a volcano; I realized we must be over one of its vents. But the smell was faint, the outside air only penetrating the edges of my face-mask because of the force of the winds.
And the mountain sang. This time I heard it clearly, a rising and lowering wail within the whipping blasts of the storm, a sound like the cry of some wild beast more vast and awesome than any creature I could have imagined. It was harsh and raw-edged, and totally compelling: I forgot where I was, forgot my battle with the storm, knew only that I was wrapped in something huge and unhuman, buffeted by the voice of a being who cried of destruction and creation.
The dark winds that swirled in my eyes seemed to clear, and I saw: wide green plains stretching into distance below, alive with tiny creatures. I touched the plains with feet a hundred miles wide, ran fingers of wind over the grass-carpeted floor. And I felt the planet in its depths, reaching slow-flowing channels of burning magma down into bedrock and beyond, into hidden pools whose heat warmed me even in the cold heights where I wrapped myself in icy winds. I was Starmont, I was Hirrkaleorashe, more than a mountain, more than a world.
I was part of a star; I remembered the pain of my birth thousands of milennia ago, flung outward into space in a stream of incandescent matter millions of miles long. I remembered coalescence, the gathering of myself into a world, and ages when the planetary crust hardened till the heat of life was prisoned inside a world and I tasted freedom only from one last upthrust of mountain.
And I saw the creatures that tried to fly my mountain, ridiculous small beings whose past was a moment, whose hopes were mist. I saw myself as Hirrkaleorashe perceived me, tiny and insignificant, and the sight jolted me out of contact with that vast alien presence, silenced its harsh song; again I was struggling through heavy winds, and—
Darkness flashed before my eyes, falling past me; only after it was gone did I realize it had been a winged figure flailing clumsily at the winds as it plummeted. A human figure, and I looked down and saw that it was Kelso, and saw him disappear into dark clouds.
My mind leaped urgently as fear came back to me; I wanted to fly down to save him, and I would have plunged into the downdraft that had swept him past me, but abruptly that current was no longer there. Instead a scorching blast of acrid air threw me upward. Then again the wail of the mountain filled my ears as the winds took me; I righted myself in the air and felt oneness with the storm return, and my path led upward.
Without Kelso? Could I abandon the man who had saved my life so many times? I struggled again in the winds, searching for a downdraft, but felt myself rising inexorably and heard the mountain-cry that drowned all my thoughts, that told of unhuman vastness, that saw time move in milennia; and knew there was no importance in my needs, or Kelso’s. We were dark motes in the air, nothing more.
The winds drove me up, my mind burning with the fire of Starmont’s singing; and just as earlier I had given myself up to the winds, now I gave Kelso and everything else to them also.
I rose, shifting and leaning into the storm; crosswinds lashed at me, burning even through my suit, but I rose. And gradually I became aware of Sakkoneesh, who had somehow gotten below me, but now he fought his way to my height and past, turning in the air to look at me for a moment He motioned for me to follow him carefully, and began to stroke slowly and deliberately with the winds.
I was surprised by the fatigue I saw on his face, and surprised too that he no longer flew with the grace he had had earlier. His wide wings seemed to lack strength; he made his way upward through the roiling, crashing greyness completely at the whim of the winds now, unable to overcome them with powerful wing-strokes. But the mountain still sang to me its cry of eternal pain and peace, and I was able to follow him upward until I felt the heat of the updrafts diminishing and even began to see flashes of light through the dark winds above.
Sakkoneesh led carefully, glancing back at me now and then, and I managed to keep him in sight I hardly felt the aching tiredness of my back and legs; everything was storm, rain, winds, and the crying, vast song of Starmont. We flew, we rose, and the darkness faded till we were climbing through sun-bright mist; and at last that too was gone and we were in open air with clouds churning below us like a dark ocean where tentacled monsters fought.
We circled in the quiet air above the storm for long minutes, both of us looking down for Kelso, both knowing he wouldn’t appear. The mountain had become silent, its giant voice diffused and gone. Sakkoneesh found a rocky cleft in the mountain, covered with soft green and blue mosses, and we landed.
Or fell, for both of us were exhausted; we collapsed on the damp ground, frost-crisp moss crunching beneath us. I lay back panting, and above I saw the golden sky deepening into red; the sun was lowering in the east and the few clouds that hung this high were tinged a deep pink.
Yesterday, when we had landed exhausted at the homestead on Starmont’s slopes, Kelso and I had rolled and laughed in the grass. Today I felt only relief to be released from the air, and though my breath came in gasps they didn’t call up laughter. Kelso wasn’t here; he had fallen.
“What are his chances?” I asked Sakkoneesh when I could, rolling on my side to face him as he sat in the glistening moss.
“He is dead,” said Sakkoneesh, his black eyes dull in the late afternoon light. “You saw. He tried to fly above the akell.”
A dark shape flashed before my eyes, but it was memory: Kelso, falling.
“He tried to go outside the winds,” Sakkoneesh said softly. “But they become greater away from the mountain. They drove him down onto the rocks.”
“The winds were strong enough where we flew,” I said, “but we made it.”
Sakkoneesh stared down over the edge of the precipice; below us the dark clouds still churned. “We stayed near the mountain,” he said. “There are winds that rise in the storm. Away from the mountain, all the winds blow down. By the time he reached the winds that rise into them, his fall was too great”
“Then that’s why the path leads through the storm,” I said, and Sakkoneesh nodded. Poor Kelso, I thought; he outsmarted himself. Didn’t trust Sakkoneesh, didn’t trust the mountain. Now he’s dead.
That was hard to comprehend: Kelso dead, after he’d dared the power of suns and captured them in his holos? Kelso, my life-friend? Could he die on the bare rocks of some primitive planet, his death unseen except as a brief dark shape falling?
But how else would Kelso die? He challenged his limits all his life, out here among the far stars; he dared everything, made his life a battle with the universe. Searching for what?
For his mortality, of course. Why else was I here, myself? We chased the sharp sense of living, felt it most clearly where living touched dying. But that couldn’t go on forever.
