by Bob Shaw
He shouldered his bag, jumped down from the wagon at the intersection and set off towards New Minnett at a good pace, pausing only to wave goodbye. Bartan returned the farewell and directed the bluehorn east towards his own section.
His feeling of guilt increased as he admitted to himself that he was laying a trap for Sondeweere. She would not be expecting him until close to nightfall, and the trip to town had been arranged days in advance, giving her ample time in which to make all her arrangements with Glave. Self-reproach mingled with self-disgust and a curious kind of excitement as he bent his mind to a new kind of problem. If he did espy Glave's bluehorn from afar, tethered by the farmhouse, could he be underhanded enough to halt the noisy wagon and move in silently on foot? And if he were to find the couple in bed—what then? A year's unrelenting toil had clothed Bartan's frame in hard muscle, but he was still a lightweight compared to Glave and had little experience of fighting.
This is terrible, he thought in a crossplay of emotion. All I want out of life is to find my wife alone, working contentedly in our home. Why take the risk of losing what happiness I have? Why not turn back, catch up on Shome, and go on to the markets as planned? I could sit down with the old crowd and get merry on brown ale and forget all this…
The landscape ahead of Bartan was becoming obscured by refractive peach-and-silver mists as the fallen rain was lured back into the aerial element by the sun, and in the centre of his field of view there had appeared a wavering dark mote which seemed to change shape every few seconds. As he watched, the mote assumed a definite form, resolving itself into a rider approaching at considerable speed.
Bartan knew, long before proper identification was possible, that the rider was Glave Trinchil, and again there was a clash of emotions—simultaneous relief and disappointment over the fact that a confrontation was ruled out. This far from the farm Glave could claim that he was coming from any one of a number of places, and in all fairness there could be no justification for openly disbelieving him. With that analysis of the situation in mind, Bartan expected Glave to pass him with a casual greeting, and he was taken aback when the younger man began waving to him while still some way off, obviously preparing to stop and talk. Bartan's heart quickened with alarm as he saw that Glave was in a state of agitation. Could there have been an accident at the farm?
"Bartan! Bartan!" Glave reined his bluehorn to a halt beside the wagon. "I'm glad to see you—Sondy said you had gone to town."
"She said that, did she?" Bartan replied coldly, unable to shape a more appropriate response. "So you've been paying her another of your conveniently timed visits."
The imputation seemed to pass Glave by. His broad, artless face looked troubled, but Bartan could detect no hint of shiftiness or defiance which might have sprung from guilt.
"Go to her without delay," Glave said. "She has need of you."
Bartan swore at himself for having continued nursing his petty suspicions when it was becoming obvious that something serious had happened to Sondeweere. "What's wrong with her?"
"I truly do not know, Bartan. I called at the farm just to be neighbourly, just to see if there was any heavy work to be done…" Even though overwrought, Glave had to direct a satisfied glance at his well-muscled arms. "Sondy told me there was a tree to be uprooted. You know the one—where you want to plant the wirebeans and—"
"Yes, yes! What happened to my wife?"
"Well, I fetched a spade and an axe and set about the roots. It was hot work, in spite of the rain, and I was pleased when I saw Sondy coming down from the house with a pitcher of smallbeer. At least, I think it was smallbeer—I never got to drink any. She wasn't more than a dozen paces away from me when she gave a sort of a gasp and let the pitcher fall and sat down in the grass. She was holding her ankle. I was fearful she had done herself a mischief, so I went to her. She looked up at me, Bartan, and she gave a terrible scream, but the worst thing about it was … was…" Glave's voice faded and he stared at Bartan in perplexity, as though wondering who he might be.
"Glave!"
"It was a terrible scream. Bartan, but the worst thing about it was that her mouth was shut. I was looking straight into Sondy's face, and I could hear her screaming, but her mouth was tight shut. It fair made my blood run cold."
Bartan shifted his grip on the reins preparatory to moving off. "What you're saying doesn't make sense. All right, Sondeweere was moaning! Is that all there was to it? Had she turned her ankle? What did she say?"
Glave shook his head, slowly and pensively. "She does not say anything."
"She doesn't say anything! What way is that to…?" Bartan began to feel a new kind of alarm. "She can still speak, can't she?"
"I don't know, Bartan," Glave said simply. "You should go to her. I stayed as long as I could, but there was nothing I could do. Nothing I could think of…"
His remaining words were lost in the clatter of hooves and equipage as Bartan sent the wagon forward. He goaded the bluehorn up to the best speed that could be achieved on the uneven track, enduring the discomfort of sliding and bouncing on the unpadded seat. The bright mist had now blanked out the horizon and reduced his range of vision so much that he seemed to be travelling at the centre of a bell-shaped dome in whose sides faint pastel colours swirled all the way up to the sun. A short time later the vapours began to boil off, the sky became a milky blue and Bartan saw his own farm in the distance, gleaming, created anew out of rain and mist. By the time he reached it the sky was returning to its normal intense shade of blue and the daytime stars were reappearing.
He brought the wagon to a standstill, jumped down and ran into the house. There was no reply when he called Sondeweere's name, and a rapid search in which he threw himself from room to room established that she had to be out of doors. The first place he could think of looking was by the tree which Glave had mentioned, though it would be odd if she had lingered there so long—unless she had been overtaken by serious illness. Why had the oafish Glave not escorted her back to the house instead of fleeing as if he had seen an apparition?
Bartan left the building, sprinted past the sty which housed his modest stock of pigs, and went to the top of the grassy knoll which blocked the view to the east. He saw Sondeweere at once. She was sitting in the grass near the tree where Glave claimed to have been working, and she was still wearing her pale green oilskin cape. He shouted out to her, but she made no response of any kind. She remained completely motionless as he walked down the gentle slope, and his fears for her increased with every step he took. What manner of illness or disability would induce a person to sit for so long, head bowed, apparently oblivious to everything? Could she be fevered, or semi-conscious, or … dead?
When he was about six paces away from his wife he halted, overcome by a strange timidity, and whispered, "Sondeweere, dear one, are you well?"
She raised her head and a pang of relief went through him as he saw that she was smiling. She gazed at him for a few seconds—smile unchanging, no welcome in her eyes—then lowered her head again, obviously studying something on the ground in front of her.
"Don't play games with me, Sondy." Bartan stooped and went closer, and was reaching out to touch Sondeweere's hair when his eyes abruptly focused on what she was watching. Only a hands-breadth away from her crossed ankles were two small multi-legged creatures, seemingly locked in combat. Their articulated, crescent-shaped bodies were longer than a finger and dark brown on top, pale grey on the underside. They were unlike any other crawling thing he had ever seen in that each sprouted a single thick feeler from just below the head. He was already recoiling in disgust when his eyes began to sort out and comprehend the profuse tangle of legs, eye-stalks and antennae. The creatures had bound themselves together by their central feelers and were engaged in copulation, not combat … and… There was only one head to be seen. The female had eaten off her partner's head, and was gorging herself on the pale ichors oozing from his thorax, and all the while—quite undaunted, rhythm unaltered—his body we
nt on with its ecstatic thrusting and jabbing into her greedy abdomen.
Bartan's reaction was immediate and totally instinctive. He straightened up and smashed his boot down on the writhing obscenity he had witnessed. Sondeweere was on her feet in the same instant, screaming in a way that hurt his brain. Bartan gazed at her, afraid… How can she make a sound like that without opening her mouth? … then caught her as she toppled towards him in a faint.
"Sondeweere! Sondy!" He inexpertly massaged her throat and cheek, trying to restore consciousness, but her head lolled in the crook of his arm and her eyes glimmered white beneath the lids. He gathered up her limp body and began walking back to the house, his mind overloaded with worries and fears.
A short distance along the faint path he saw a movement on the ground, a brown glistening, and knew at once that it was another of the ugly crawlers. The sight added to his forebodings—he had never seen any of the creatures before, nor had he heard them described, but now they were beginning to abound. He altered his stride slightly so that his boot came down squarely on the crawler, crunching it into the soil.
Sondeweere stirred in his arms and, as though emanating from the far end of a mile-long corridor, there came a whispering version of her unnatural scream.
Twice more on the way to the house he encountered one of the nameless creatures, labouring towards him in a seething of many-jointed legs, and each time he pulped it underfoot and each time Sondeweere was affected as before. To Bartan it was unthinkable that there could be any kind of affinity or link between his wife and the crawlers, and yet—in spite of being unconscious—she had definitely flinched as each one of them was dying. And there was the question of the screams. How did she make the sounds without opening her mouth, and why were they so disturbing?
A pressing sense of gloom and a coldness on his spine told Bartan that the sunlit normalcy all around him was a sham, that he was straying into realms beyond his understanding. On reaching the house he carried Sondeweere inside and carefully put her down on her bed. Her brow was cool and her coloration normal, giving the impression that she was merely asleep, but she failed to respond to being shaken or to his urgent repetitions of her name. He eased her out of the oilskin and was removing her sandals when he noticed a speck of dried blood on her right ankle. It came away quite readily on a damp cloth and the skin underneath was unblemished, dispelling the idea that she might have been bitten or stung by one of the creeping horrors. But something had happened to Sondeweere, and try as he might he could not rid himself of the notion that the creatures were in some way involved. Could they exude a venom so powerful that merely coming into contact with it was enough to render a person unconscious?
Standing by the bed, staring down at his wife's inert form, Bartan felt his fortitude begin to crumble. Artoonl was right in what he said to me, he thought. I kept quiet about the warnings, and I led everybody to this place—and what has been the upshot? Two suicides, one disappearance which is probably a murder, still births, madness and near-madness, strange sightings and bad dreams, friends turning against friends, malice where once there was goodwill—and now this! Sondeweere has been struck down, and the earth spews out horrors!
With a considerable effort he wrenched his thinking out of the downward spiral and fought to regain his normal optimism. He, Bartan Drumme, knew that ghosts and demons did not exist—and, if there was no such thing as an evil spirit, how could there be an evil place? It was true that there had been a spate of misfortunes since the farmers' arrival in the Basket of Eggs, but runs of bad luck were always cancelled out sooner or later by runs of good. Artoonl was wrong in quitting after investing so much time and effort. What the farmers had to do was stand their ground and wait for things to improve. And Bartan's duty was clear—he had to stay by his wife and do everything in his power to restore her to her old self.
As he settled into his bedside vigil his thoughts were again drawn to the crawling creatures whose appearance had heralded Sondeweere's mysterious affliction. Many curious life forms, some of them highly unprepossessing, had been found on Overland, and it was likely that something so repellent would have been noticed elsewhere. On reflection he had been too quick at destroying the horrors. If he found another crawler he would overcome his revulsion so that he could trap and preserve it for inspection by someone with greater knowledge of such matters.
Bartan raised Sondeweere's limp hand to his lips and was holding it there, willing his own vitality to flow into her body, when he was alerted by a faint scratching sound from another part of the house. He tilted his head and listened intently. The sound was barely audible, but he placed its source at the entrance to the house. He stood up, puzzled, and took the few paces needed to take him out of the bedroom and through the kitchen to the front door. The line of brilliance seeping under the door was uninterrupted, and yet the delicate scratching continued. He opened the door and something which had been clinging to the lintel, something which twisted and squirmed, brushed his face as it fell to the floor.
Bartan gave an involuntary gasp, mouth contorted with shock and loathing, as he leapt back.
The crawler landed upside down with a thud, pale grey underside flashing, then righted itself and began moving into the house with every semblance of purpose. It single thick feeler was extended ahead of it, undulating, questing. Bartan's hoped-for objectivity failed to materialise. He stamped his foot down on the creature, and heard and felt its body burst and flatten—and between his temples there was the sound of Sondeweere's anguish.
He slammed the door shut and pressed his back to it, appalled, remembering times when he had seen human beings—a farmer's wife, little children at play—extend an arm and wave it in a strange, boneless motion which mimed that of a crawler's central feeler.
Chapter 8
After more than a year of near-continuous service in the fortresses Toller had accepted that he would never be able to sleep properly in weightless conditions. The inexplicable sensation of falling which plagued the station crews could be ignored in waking hours, but the dreaming mind had no defences against it. It was common among crew members to spend the entire rest period mumbling and twisting in their sleep-nets, seeing the planetary surface rise up to meet them with ever-increasing speed, and to awaken at the imagined point of impact with shrieks which entered and distorted the dreams of their comrades.
Toller had devised a personal routine which enabled him to deal with the problem. For the sixteen days of each duty period he made no real attempt to sleep, contenting himself with resting and drowsing when not required for active service. When it was time to return to Overland he would curl up inside the fleecy womb of the fallbag and sleep soundly throughout most of the long drop, rocked by its gentle buffeting and comforted by the low gurgling of the slipstream at the neck of the bag. At first he had been puzzled by his ability to sleep well in such unlikely circumstances, then had decided that the knowledge that he really was falling brought about a necessary accord between his intellect and the sensations of the body.
There was only one day left of his current duty spell and the tiredness had built up in him to the extent that within seconds of getting into his net he had lapsed into a bemused state, halfway between sleep and consciousness, in which there was little distinction between the remembered past and the vaguely apprehended present. It was peaceful inside Command Station One, which he had chosen as his living quarters in order to be close to the centre of operations at all times. The only sounds were the bored and scrappy conversation of the two men on watch, and the occasional swishing of the bellows which maintained a tolerable air pressure. Toller had turned his face to the wall of the station and was resting comfortably, something which would not have been possible at the beginning of the war. The walls were now insulated with flock and covered with skins which reduced heat loss and also helped prevent accidental puncturing of the shell.
One night, during one of his earliest duty spells, Toller had become aware of a faint but insistent w
histling sound and had tracked it down to a large knot in a section of midship planking. The core of the knot had shrunk and was permitting air to escape. When Toller had tapped it with his knuckle the core had promptly disappeared into the outer void, and as he had occasioned the damage he took it on himself to repair the vent with cork and mastic. He had carried out the chore willingly, knowing that reports of it would be widely circulated, thus reinforcing the message that Lord Toller Maraquine did not set himself above the lowliest conscripts in the Sky Service.
He did such things with an undeniable degree of calculation, but excused himself on the grounds that only one kind of leadership was feasible—and correct—in the unnerving circumstances of the interplanetary war. King Chakkell could force soldiers to venture into the weightless zone on pain of death, but once they were there a commander could only get them to give of their best by showing that he was prepared to share every privation and face every danger.
And the dangers had been plentiful.
It had been fortunate indeed for the defenders that King Rassamarden, going about his unimaginable affairs in the unimaginable environment of the Old World, had not launched his invasion fleet in the shortest possible time. Tens of days had gone by after the positioning of the first two fortresses with no sign of enemy activity, and the grace period had been used—under liven Zavotle's direction-—to measure the radius of the neck of comparatively dense air at the juncture of the atmospheres. A skyship had been rotated into the plane of the weightless zone and had been driven laterally on jet power for an estimated sixty miles before the pilot had begun to lose consciousness through asphyxiation. He had been in the process of rotating the ship for the return when the balloon had ruptured because of excessive torque from the struts. The pilot had managed to retain his senses long enough to get himself into Overland's gravitational field by means of his personal pneumatic jet, and on the following day had parachuted to the ground within walking distance of Prad. His survival had been a great source of reassurance for rank-and-file members of the Sky Service, but the acquired data had troubled the top echelons of their leadership.