Land and Overland - Omnibus

by Bob Shaw

  The sound of the gondola's exhaust cone and legs swishing through vegetation snapped him back into a universe of practicalities. Bartan had climbed over the gondola's side and was perched on the outer ledge, reaching towards his wife with one hand. She caught hold of it and within a second was standing beside him. Toller helped her roll herself over the rail, marvelling as he did so at the simple bodily contact. Bartan came inboard again with a single lithe movement and clutched Sondeweere to him. Toller, Berise and Zavotle were spontaneously drawn to them, and arms were lapped upon arms in a gratifying multiple embrace. It ended when the gondola's legs glanced against the ground, sending a shudder up through the deck.

  "Take us aloft," Toller said to Wraker, who at once began firing a long burst which was to revitalise the gigantic entity of the balloon waiting patiently above them.

  "Yes, yes!" Sondeweere divorced herself from the cluster of bodies and stepped towards Wraker, her right hand extended in a gesture of greeting. He responded by raising his free hand, but the expected clasp did not take place.

  Sondeweere reached past him and—before anybody watching could react—caught the red line connected to the balloon's rip panel and jerked it downwards with irresistible force.

  There was no immediate reaction in the cramped microcosm of the gondola, but Toller knew that the balloon had been killed. Far above him a large trapezium of linen had been torn out of the balloon's crown, and the envelope would already be starting to wrinkle and sag as the hot gas which sustained it was vented into the atmosphere. The ship was now committed to setting down on Farland—possibly for ever.

  "Sondy! What have you done?" Bartan's anguished cry was heard clearly through the general clamour of shocked protest. He lurched towards Sondeweere with both arms outstretched, as though belatedly trying to prevent her making an injudicious move. She fended him off and went quickly to an empty section of the gondola. Sondeweere has gone. Toller thought. The symbonite superwoman is now among us.

  "There was good reason for what I did," she said in a firm, clear voice. "If you will listen to me for…"

  Her words were lost as the gondola struck the ground and tilted to a steep angle, hurling bodies and loose equipment against one wall, before dropping back to the horizontal.

  "Get the struts off," Toller shouted, jolted out of his reverie. "The balloon is coming down around us."

  He tugged the quick-release knots which were securing a strut to the corner nearest him and pushed the slim support away from the rail, hoping to prevent it taking the weight of the subsiding envelope. The gondola was being inundated with choking hot miglign gas which was belching down out of the balloon's mouth. A sound of splintering told Toller that at least one of the other struts had already been overloaded.

  He climbed over the side, peripherally aware of others doing the same, and leaped down to the ground. He ran a short distance through what felt like ordinary grass and turned to view the collapse of the balloon. The vast shape was still tall enough to blot out part of the sky, but it had lost all symmetry. Distorted, writhing like a leviathan in its death throes, it sank downwards at increasing speed. The slight breeze deposited most of it downwind of the gondola where it lay flapping in the grass, raised into shifting humps here and there by gas that was trapped within.

  A brief period of silence followed, then the crew members turned and closed in on Sondeweere. There was no hint of threat in their demeanour, nor even of resentment, but the courses of their lives had been profoundly altered by a single unexpected action on her part and they sought some kind of reassurance. Toller could see them well enough in spite of the darkness to note that he was the only one wearing his sword. Obeying old instincts, he dropped his hand to the hilt of the weapon and looked all about him, trying to penetrate the folds of alien night.

  "There are no Farlanders within many miles," Sondeweere said, addressing herself directly to him. "I have not betrayed you."

  "May I be so bold as to enquire what you have done?" he replied, falling back on sarcasm. "You will appreciate that we have a certain interest in the matter."

  "We need to know," Bartan added in a quavering voice which indicated that he, perhaps more than anybody else, had been devastated by the turn of events.

  Sondeweere was wearing a belted white tunic and she drew it closer around her throat before she spoke. "I invite you to consider two facts which are of paramount importance. The first is that the symbonites of this world are aware of my exact whereabouts at all times. They know precisely where I am at this moment, but their suspicions are not aroused and they will take no action because—fortunately for all of us—I am of a restless disposition and it is my habit to travel far and wide at irregular hours.

  "The second fact," Sondeweere went on, speaking with a calm fluency, "is that the symbonites brought me here in a ship which can make the interplanetary crossing in only a few minutes."

  "Minutes!" Zavotle said. "Only a few minutes?"

  "The journey could have been completed in a few seconds, or even fractions of a second, but for short distances it is more convenient to proceed at a moderate speed. My point is that if I had gone aloft in the skyship the symbonites would very quickly have realised what was happening and would have intercepted us with their own ship. As I have already told you, they are not homicidal by instinct, but they will never permit me to return to my home world. They would have forced the skyship down, and in doing so would have killed everyone on board."

  "Is their weaponry so much superior to ours?" Toller said, trying to visualise the aerial encounter.

  "The symbonite ship carries no weapons as such, but in flight it is surrounded by a field—call it an aura—which is inimical to life. The underlying concept cannot be explained to you, but be assured that a meeting with the symbonite ship would have resulted in all our deaths. Whether the symbonites wanted it that way or not—we would have died."

  A silence descended on the group of fliers while each assimilated Sondeweere's message. The breeze suddenly freshened, spanging the mute figures with chilling drops of rain which easily penetrated their light shirts and breeches, and clouds slid across the stars like prison doors closing. Farland exults, Toller thought, trying to repress a shiver.

  Berise was the first to speak, and when she did so her voice carried an unmistakable note of anger. "It seems to me that you were somewhat high-handed in tampering with our ship," she said to Sondeweere. "Had you told us the full story when you came on board, we could have dropped you off again and returned to Overland unmolested."

  "But would you have done so?" Sondeweere gave them a wan smile. "Would any of you have chosen to be so … logical?"

  "I can't speak for the others, but I certainly would," Berise said, and all at once Toller intuited that the challenge to Sondeweere had less to do with the ship and the outcome of the expedition than with rivalry for Bartan's affections. He found time, in spite of the extremeness of their plight, to be once again awed by the female mind and to become slightly afraid of Berise. She was another Gesalla. Now that he thought of it, all women seemed to be Gesallas to one extent or another, and a man was no match for them in their chosen arena.

  "The skyship has not been harmed beyond repair," Sondeweere pointed out. "I purposely brought you to a remote area where you are unlikely to be discovered by Farlanders, so there is ample time for the work to be carried out."

  Then what was the point of collapsing the balloon? Toller thought. The woman has more to tell us…

  Bartan took a step towards Sondeweere. "The others may leave if they wish—I will stay here with you."

  "No, Bartan! Have you forgotten why I was brought here in the first place? The symbonites would slay me rather than permit me to associate with a functional male of my own race."

  Toller, with his soldier's interest in tactics, was locked into the problem he had set himself. The reason Sondeweere collapsed the balloon had to be that she intended the ship never to fly again. In which case…

 
"There is an alternative course open to all of you," Sondeweere said. "I will describe it for you, but you must make the decision for yourselves. If you decide against it, I will help repair your ship and will undertake to guide you back to Overland, while I remain here. If you decide in favour of it, you must be apprised of all the dangers and…"

  "We decide in favour," Toller cut in. "How far is the symbonite spaceship from here? And how well is it guarded?"

  Sondeweere turned to face him. "I am surprised by you, Toller Maraquine."

  "There is no need," Toller said. "I am not a clever man, but I have learned that there are some issues which—no matter how wise and learned the disputants—can be settled in only one way. It is a way I understand."

  "The killing way."

  "The way of justifiable force, of blocking an enemy sword with a sword of my own."

  "Say no more, Toller—I am in no position to make moral judgments. It was my idea to take the ship, because it offers my only hope of escape from this drear and unfulfilled existence, but there are many dangers."

  "We are prepared to face danger," Toller said. He glanced around his companions, associating them with the statement.

  "But why should any of you be prepared to risk death on my behalf?"

  "We all had our own good reasons for taking part in this expedition."

  Sondeweere moved closer to Toller, all the while gazing into his face, and for the first time since their meeting he sensed she was employing her extraordinary powers of mind.

  "Yours was not a good reason," she said sadly.

  "How long must we stand around in this freezing quagmire?" he demanded, stamping his feet on the squelching ground. "We are likely to die of the ague unless we stir our bones. How far from here is the ship?"

  "A good ninety miles." Sondeweere spoke with a new briskness, apparently having accepted that an irrevocable decision had been reached. "But I have a transporter which can take us there."

  "A wagon?"

  "A kind of wagon."

  "Good—this is no country for a forced march." Relieved at having been spared any further deliberation, Toller ran with the others to the gondola for the unloading of weapons and food supplies. He took one of the five muskets for his own use, but without much enthusiasm. The net of pressure spheres which accompanied it was likely to be an encumbrance in close combat, and the time it took to lock on a new sphere before each shot detracted seriously from the weapon's efficacy.

  "Look what I have found." Zavotle, who was shivering violently, extended an unsteady hand in which he was holding a brakka shaft around which was rolled the blue-and-grey flag of Kolcorron.

  Toller took it and hurled it into the ground like a spear. "That's our obligation to Chakkell taken care of—from now on we go about our own business."

  He descended from the gondola and was placing his supplies with the others when it occurred to him that Sondeweere was no longer with the company. He scanned the darkness and in that instant heard a strange sound, one which was made up of other sounds—the hissing of a giant snake, the snorting of a bluehorn, the creaking and rattling of a wagon. A moment later he discerned the squarish outline of a vehicle which was slowly approaching the ship. Curious as to what kind of draught animal was responsible for such a cacophony, he went forward to meet Sondeweere, and halted—confounded—as it became apparent that the lurching vehicle was moving under its own power.

  The rear of it resembled a traditional wagon covered with canvas supported on stretchers, but in front was a fat cylinder from which ascended a tube belching white vapours into the murky air. Sondeweere was visible as a pale blur behind the glass screen of a cabin-like structure which formed the forepart of the vehicle's main body. It drew to a halt on wide, black-rimmed wheels, the noise from it decreased to a ruminative snuffling and Sondeweere leapt down from the cabin.

  "The wagon propels itself by harnessing the power of steam," she said, forestalling a barrage of questions. "I sometimes use it as a caravan when I'm travelling long distances, and it is well suited for our purposes."

  The journey across that region of Farland was one of the most singular Toller had ever undertaken.

  Part of the strangeness sprang from the unique governing circumstances and the ambience. In spite of the protection offered by the transporter's canvas top, the five astronauts were oppressed by a clammy coldness unlike anything in their previous experience. Dawn came, not as a fountaining of golden light and heat as on Overland, but as a stealthy change in the colour of the environment, from black to a leaden grey. Even the air within the vehicle became tinged with grey, a mix of exhaled breath and dank mist seeping in from outside which seemed to curdle around the passengers and chill their blood. Only Sondeweere, clad in substantial tunic and trews, was unaffected by the penetrating cold.

  Toller and the others parted the canvas frequently, hungry for the sight of an alien world and its inhabitants, but found little to inspire wonder in the glimpses of blue-green grasslands swept by curtains of rain and fog. Toller noted that the road on which they were travelling was paved and well maintained, much superior to anything on Overland. As it gradually widened they got their first glimpse of Farlander dwellings.

  The buildings drew some comment, not because they were exotic in any way but because of their sheer ordinariness. Had it not been for the steeply pitched roofs the unadorned single-storey cottages could have blended in with the local architecture almost anywhere on the twin worlds. There was no sign of their inhabitants so early in the morning, and Toller thought it entirely reasonable that they should choose to remain abed for as long as possible, rather than venture out in such an inhospitable clime.

  "It isn't always as cold and gloomy as this," Sondeweere explained at one stage, speaking from her isolated position at the vehicle's tiller. "We are in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and you happen to have arrived in the middle of winter."

  Toller was familiar with the concept of seasons, thanks to his upbringing in one of the philosophy families of old Kolcorron, but it was new to the younger members of the group, mentally conditioned by living on a world whose equator was exactly in the plane of its orbit around the sun. At first the idea that Farland was tilted was quite difficult for them to grasp, and then as it began to take hold they questioned Sondeweere extensively, intrigued by the thought of days and nights which constantly varied in length, and the consequences thereof. For her part, Sondeweere seemed pleased to be able to put aside the symbon component of her identity for a while, and to react naturally as a human among humans.

  Listening to the intercourse, Toller was occasionally overcome by a sense of unreality. He had to keep reminding himself that Sondeweere had undergone an incredible metamorphosis, that the group was on its way to do battle with alien beings for the possession of a ship which had been wrought out of miracles and magic. And, above all, that every member of the group could easily die in the hours that lay ahead. The young warriors appeared to have dismissed that thought, supremely confident—as he had once been—that death could not touch them.

  Stay that way as long as you can, he advised them mentally, aware that the nerve-thrumming exhilaration which had always sustained him on the eve of battle was totally absent. Was it the reaction of a sun-dweller to this bleak and mist-shrouded world whose clammy coldness penetrated him to the marrow? Or were premonitions at work? Was the capacity for any kind of pleasure being withdrawn from him in preparation for the final disillusionment?

  During one of his periodic inspections of the dreary landscape his attention was caught by the sight of a distant building which, as at last befitted an alien world, was unlike any he had seen before. Nested in a narrow valley, it was little more than a silhouette of near-black among dark greys, but it was huge in comparison to the Farlander houses and had numerous chimneys which plumed smoke into the sullen sky.

  "An iron foundry which supplies factories throughout this region," Sondeweere explained in response to his query. "On Ove
rland the various operations would be carried out in the open air, but here—because of the climate—it is necessary to have an enclosure. The native Farlanders would doubtless have produced similar structures in due time, but the symbonites have artificially accelerated the process of industrialisation. It is one of their crimes against nature in general and against the people of this world in particular."

  But you too are a symbonite, Toller thought. How can you criticise the activities of your own kind?

  The question, far-reaching though he sensed it to be, was at once displaced by others, less philosophical in nature, which had begun to swarm in his mind. Previously, far out of his intellectual depth, he had conjured a simplistic vision of superbeings effortlessly taking control of a primitive world—but now it was dawning on him that the symbonites had been in a situation similar to that of a platoon of well-armed Kolcorronian soldiers facing a thousand Gethan tribesmen. In a straight and simple conflict, no matter how superior their weaponry, they were bound to be overwhelmed—therefore other strategies had been called for.

  "Tell me," he said to Sondeweere, "have the Farlanders never offered any resistance to the invaders?"

  "They are unaware of any intrusion," she replied, eyes fixed on the dull-gleaming road ahead, "and who could possibly make them aware? You were quite unable to accept anything that Bartan told you about me—so just imagine how you would have reacted had he told you that King Chakkell and Queen Daseene and their children, plus all the aristocrats in the land and their children, were alien conquerors in human guise! Would you have believed him and tried to lead a rebellion? Or would you have dismissed him as a raving lunatic?"