Jask nodded despairingly, dropped his smaller sack, and entered the drain after it.
The bruin put the stone shield in place.
He said, “Come on, then. We have quite an arduous journey ahead of us, my friend.”
Jask followed in the mutant's tracks, the fungus-coated walls close, the water splashing under foot, the odor almost overwhelming him. He was behind the creature, and he had a knife: two interesting facts that jelled into one crisp, violent notion in his mind. He should be able to kill it. Yet he knew that if he had the skill and strength to jam the blade into the bruin's back, he would find himself half-strangled in those brawny hands before he had time to twist it.
“You're perfectly correct, friend,” the bruin muttered. “And unless you place that blade in one of two vulnerable spots, I'd hardly notice the pain.”
“I must have privacy in my own mind!” Jask snapped.
“So that you can plot against me?” the mutant inquired, chuckling loudly, clearly enjoying the exchange and not the least bit frightened by the Pure's momentary thought of murder.
Jask said nothing at all, plodded on, miserable.
Something danced across his foot, squeaking loudly, terrified. He jumped, shivered at the thought of having been touched by the tainted creature. He was thankful, now, that the tunnel was in complete darkness. The bruin, if he had heard the tiny creature, gave no indication of concern.
The mutant chuckled again and said, “By the way, I do have a name. I'm getting weary of seeing myself referred to so vaguely in your thoughts — mutant, tainted creature, quasi-man, bruin, bear-man. I'd prefer to be called Tedesco. It's the name I was born with.” A bit farther along the drain he said, “We've got a long, long journey ahead of us, Jask. It's best that we call each other by the right names and learn a bit of tolerance, if we can.”
Heresy, Jask thought.
An animal had no name, no personality.
“The name's Tedesco,'' the bruin said. “And I'm no animal. I'm a man.”
6
The reluctant Pure was led into the presence of his General, where the great man rested on his power sledge beneath a giant, sprawling oak tree in the main square of the tainted village. The sun had fully risen now and had seared away the last floury clouds of white fog, baking the town like a muffin in an oven. The white cliffs reflected the sun like a mirror and nearly blinded the eye if one looked in that direction. The buildings, on all sides of the square, made of stone, thatch, hand-hewn timbers and poorly formed glass, lay silent and heavy beneath the oppressively warm blanket of air. Beneath the oak tree, the shadows were cool and deep, the silence even more complete than in the waiting streets. The oak and the General seemed to complement each other, two examples of Lady Nature's power, though the oak was almost certainly not a pure species. The Pure soldier, aware of the sin he had committed, trembled visibly in the company of oak and General, devoutly wishing he were dead.
“You are the coward?” the General inquired, nothing in his tone but disdain.
The Pure soldier nodded, unable to look at the great man or at any of those who had accompanied him here.
“You were sent with Dyson Prider to investigate one arm of the storm drains. You knew that your mission was essential to the capture of these two espers.”
“Yes,” the accused said.
A slight breeze rustled the leaves of the oak, only for a moment, died away again, as if it were Lady Nature's own comment on his lack of courage.
“You panicked and turned back,” the General said, adjusting his cloak as he spoke, “forcing your companion, Dyson Prider, also to abandon the hunt in that arm of the drains.”
“Yes.”
“What is your name?”
“Ribbert Keene, Your Excellency.”
“Are you an animal, Keene?”
For the first time the Pure soldier looked up, a glint of defiance in his eye. “I am a man. I have a fine family history with no trace of genetic damage.”
“Would a man have turned back from a mission he knew to be of the utmost concern to his race and his enclave?” The General was not even looking at the accused, but upward into the thickly interlaced branches of the tree, as if he found it physically painful to direct his gaze on such a morally bankrupt man.
“The drains are pitch black, Your Excellency,” Ribbert Keene complained.
“You had torches.”
“Which dispelled the darkness only for a short way. Corruption lay on all sides — things crawling in mutated fungus, tainted mosses underfoot, mutated-rats, insects, scampering before and behind…”
“Nevertheless,” the General said, still staring upward into the cool, green leaves, his face a broad blandness that belied the fury boiling just below the surface, “you will submit to thorough genetic testing as soon as we have returned to the fortress. You will abide by whatever recommendations the genetic specialists make, based on whatever they discover about your gene patterns. Judging by your unmanly performance here this morning, I suspect the tests shall prove anything but negative. Dismissed.”
To his guards, who fenced him with ready weapons to ensure his safety, the General said, “Now we have only one team of men in the drains, and we can no longer count on trapping the fugitives below ground. Since these are desperate creatures, neither can we rely on their proceeding rationally. Logic, of course, never has been a normal tool of tainted beings. With this in mind I believe we should widen our search pattern and not expect them, necessarily, to show up somewhere in the town itself. They may try to reach the forests bordering the Chen Valley Blight.'' He shifted in his seat and looked away from the oak. “See that our men are better dispersed so that paths between the town and the forest are patrolled.”
One of the guards, who doubled as the General's chief messenger, moved away from the small park in the square to carry out his master's orders.
7
Merka Shanly (female: Pure) and her partner, Kane Grayson (male: Pure) — dressed identically in blue-white cloaks, blue boots and metal-studded black fabric belts; both carrying deadly prewar weapons; both with flashlights held before them — came out of the mouth of the drainage tunnel into a wide stone-walled chamber that was the hub of the storm drains, six spokes radiating from it. A low but vaulted ceiling was the home of web-building spiders and curious, green and yellow fungi that appeared to defy the laws of gravity by growing down and then, gradually, horizontal, until they laced together, forming living nets for no clear purpose other than — inexplicably — that of rivaling the delicate work of the spiders. The walls were patched with iridescent moss, with black moss and with a deep purple slime that writhed subtly whenever their lamps illuminated it. In the far corners, searching out holes in the decaying mortar, roaches and centipedes of unholy size skittered out of sight, so large and weighty that the tapping of their many feet was audible. A six-legged creature that might have been descended from a pure rat turned a baleful yellow-eyed stare at them, then hopped clumsily out of sight into the mouth of one of the other tunnels. A stone promenade, perhaps six feet wide, connected all the open tunnel mouths, though the center of the room was occupied by a pit, all cobbled in water-worn stone, that dropped straight down, out of sight, ready to carry storm water into the bowels of the earth.
“What now?” Kane Grayson asked, standing warily in the center of the promenade width, neither too close to the pit, out of which anything might crawl, nor too near the wall, behind which rodents and insects of tainted heritage were certain to be lurking.
His voice echoed softly from the damp walls.
“We cannot guess which of the other five ways to take,” Merka said, sweeping the dark, forbidding tunnels with the barrel of her rifle. “I see nothing for us to do now but sit and wait until the espers appear.”
“If they appear,” he said.
“Why shouldn't they?”
“Perhaps the other team got them — Keene and Prider.”
She said nothing, but set her thin, b
loodless lips in a tight line that expressed her reluctance to accept that.
He said, “Or perhaps there are other collection rooms like this one, dozens of other collection points for the water and, therefore, many other branching tunnels.”
She said, “Do you want to return to the General now, make a report that we were unsuccessful?”
He didn't even have to think about that. He looked away from her and said, “We'll wait a bit.”
“And I suggest that we wait in quiet,” the girl said. “Our echoing voices may carry quite far in these tunnels.”
They stood together in the center of the walkway with their backs to the tunnel out of which they had come moments earlier, uncertain that even that route was safe but prepared to trust it because it was, at least, known to them.
The rat with six legs came back from the opposite tunnel, looked at them, twitched its trunklike proboscis, disappeared again.
Merka Shanly was displeased at having drawn this duty, not chiefly because it was dangerous or frightening (though it was surely both), but because it must be performed in the company of Kane Grayson. She knew the man intimately, all there was to know about him, for she had been ordered by the Committee on Fruitfulness to share a conjugal bed with him some eighteen months ago. They had made love, regularly, nightly, for a year with no offspring to show for it and had, at the Committee's order, discontinued their relationship. Actually, she thought now, watching all the black tunnels, they had never really made love but simply screwed, mechanically, like a couple of prewar machines that worked mindlessly on programmed schedules. Kane had been rather uninteresting as a lover, as inept at that as he was at almost everything, a man frightened of his own shadow and too enamored of luxury to risk anything in hopes of advancement within the enclave's social structure. He was one of those who could not see that someday, in the not-too-distant future, the stores of prewar goods, once vast, would be so badly depleted that sweeping changes in Pure life-style must be instigated. When that time came, he would not be able to cope. His mind would go; and since insanity was classified as a mutation, he would be swiftly exterminated. Merka was a realist, prepared for the changes in Pure ways that were certain to come, and she intended, in the days of unrest, to climb the ladder of position within the Pure social structure and make it, if possible, to the very top.
The rat returned.
It's snakelike nose raised, sniffed them, lowered.
Ignoring them, it began rooting in the fungus and moss along the wall, foraging for food.
Aside from her adaptability to new conditions — which was not unlike that of the rat, which had quickly learned to accept their presence — Merka felt she had several useful qualities that would ensure success in the enclave structure. She was intelligent, fearless of the outside world in comparison to other enclave-raised Pures, and she was sexually attractive by the standards of her kind. Like almost all Pures, she was slim, with a softness to her flesh rather than a tautness of musculature. But where other women might have appeared slack and toneless, her softness was like that of a cloud, receiving, sheltering, warm. Her breasts were slightly larger than normal, well shaped and full; her flat stomach, flat hips and slim legs were equally alluring. She wished that the Committee on Fruitfulness would mate her to some man of position and power; then she could use her abilities and her beauty to cut herself a niche from which to make further social advancement. If she were always mated to Grayson's sort, she would remain a soldier in the ranks, her ability to please unappreciated by a man who would become excited over anything that was breasted and female.
Something moved in the mouth of the opposite tunnel, a lighter darkness against the black shadows there.
“Kane!” she said.
But even as she called and brought up her flashlight, a huge mutant, resembling a wild bear like the pure strain kept in the enclave, rushed onto the promenade, scooped up the squealing, six-legged rat and hurled it across the pit.
It struck Kane Grayson in the chest, dug claws into his cloak and held on, jabbering wildly.
Grayson dropped his flashlight and rifle and screamed so loudly that the echoes, compounding his own shrill voice, were deafening, rebounding from the cold walls like the cries of ghosts, demons.
When Merka looked back at the mutant, she saw that it had shuffled around the well in the center of the room and was almost upon her: heavy, fur-covered arms raised, claws unsheathed, teeth bared in a black and hideous face. She swung her rifle up to shoot, caught sight of a Pure man running along to the side and slightly behind the bruin, momentarily checked her shot for fear of hurting one of her own kind. Then, in the same instant, she realized the Pure was no Pure at all but was, instead, Jask Zinn, the esper, the tainted man. By then, the mutant had struck her, hard.
She slammed back against the stone wall, her head smacking it audibly. She staggered away, almost fell into the pit, then toppled sideways, still holding the prewar rifle in both hands, her flashlight lying on the floor and shining across the open pit.
Grayson was still screaming.
She heard the mutant snarl, heard him strike the other soldier.
The rat squealed, fell off onto her chest, scrabbled away into the shadows.
Grayson, mortally wounded, pitched over the brink of the drainage well, crying out, steadily, until he collided with a distant floor or a curve in the main shaft.
“Tedesco, no!”
She was not certain who had shouted, then realized it must be Jask Zinn.
“No!” he called again.
Miraculously the bearlike mutant checked the wicked, slashing blow it had aimed for her face, ripped the rifle out of her hands in one brutal movement, and was gone, taking Jask Zinn with him, leaving her badly shaken, stunned, but definitely alive. Hurt, yes. She was wracked with pain across her shoulders and breasts; lights of searing intensity shot through her head from the place where she had struck the wall. Chiefly, though, she was undamaged and alive.
When she had her breath back, she sat up, crawled to the edge of the central pit and shone her flashlight beam into it.
Darkness.
She could not see far enough to view Grayson's body. Suddenly she decided that was just as well. She got to her feet and looked for the other flashlight and for Grayson's rifle, found that the mutant had taken those with him. Turning, she stumbled into the tunnel out of which they had first come. She had to reach the General and tell him what had happened, what she had seen and what, from this encounter, she had surmised about the espers' purpose.
8
More than two kilometers beyond the tainted village, the storm drains broke open among the ruins of an unimaginably ancient city that had not harbored any form of intelligent life since centuries before the Last War, a place of canted walls, crumbling stone, rusted artifacts, a place of vines that fed on plastisteel but had not even now, after all these ages, consumed half of the available fodder. Three walls of what might have been a cathedral still stood, great arched windows free of glass, stone pews occupied by a few scattered bones, which may or may not have been the bones of men or quasi-men, its altar filled up with vines that consumed the plastisteel images that had once been symbols of some forgotten anthropomorphic god or goddess, demon or angel. Slabs of stone, some of them as much as eighty meters high, others as little as Jask himself, lay on edge, flat, or were still standing, carved with messages that could no longer be read, in words that were now without meaning. Odd machines, with skeletal frameworks that disappeared into the earth, with pincer hands, blank glass eyes, rusted speakers, stood on concrete pedestals, looking out over the vine-tangled vista that had once, presumably, been choked with life, with bustling, thinking creatures.
Jask and Tedesco passed what appeared to be a great, battered spacecraft, though Jask knew that was impossible. Spacecraft were only myths, fairy tales, heresies. Yet this monolithic hulk, pointing halfway to the sky, broken at its midsection, charred and dented, wound round with creepers and shaded by tree
s that had grown from saplings into mighty giants during its long sleep, had all the characteristics of a spaceship, according to the myths.
“What do you make of it, friend?” Tedesco asked over his shoulder as they tramped the crumbling streets, stepped around piles of curious debris and skirted gaping holes in the pavement that gave entrance to secret, vaulted cellars out of which swept cool, briskly moving currents of air. All the while they were flanked by the shiplike structure; it was immense.
“Nothing,” Jask said curtly.
“You've seen its like?”
“Never.”
“Then it would seem to me that such a sight would give rise to all manner of doubts — concerning your religion, that is.”
“It is not a spaceship,” Jask said.
“Oh?”
“It is something else altogether, something that was once quite common and ordinary.”
“Such as?”
“A monument, perhaps.”
Tedesco laughed aloud but said nothing more. He was aware that he had scored a point and that if he continued on this tact, he would only force Jask into a rambling and boring exposition of the tenets of his faith, of Pure beliefs. He had said that they would discuss the history of the Earth — both his version and the Pure, theological explanation — later, and he had meant that. Right at the moment, however, they must concentrate on clearing these ruins, which could easily be circled by Pure soldiers and sealed off. They must gain the forest and, shortly after that, the sanctity of the Chen Valley Blight.
At last they passed the tail section of the abandoned spacecraft — if, indeed, spacecraft it was — the soaring, rust-spotted, sixty-foot-diameter cylinders that might have been six mighty engines glinting like blue jewels in the slanting rays of the giant sun. Now Jask was more at ease, relieved of the threatening sight of the ship, no longer constantly confronted with the wonder of it — the deeply heretical wonder of it. Still, he found a great deal to catch his eye, engage his mind and make him feel, ultimately, as if he were displaced, lost, alone and unhappy.
Nightmare Journey Page 4