The visual images that corresponded to the narrative were quite unsettling: ugly, misshapen rooms with queer things growing from the walls; in several instances, decomposing corpses and skeletons of human beings tangled up in the thick black branches and caved-in sacs of puslike material.
The city finds the dead, its people, all its dead people, killed in and by its rooms, its bad rooms, ugly rooms, rooms it never made or does not remember making, even though the city remembers, always remembers, knows and holds dear every memory of every generation of its peoples, loving peoples.
Days pass, and the city finds two more neighborhoods, places of decay, finds the city, sees the city, evil places, unknown places, dead or dying places, and the city panics, feels fear does the city, begins an inspection of its body, does the city, searching, fearful, finding trouble, does the city.
The city is equipped to dissect, to analyze, and the city does, cuts open its own sores, does the city, worried city, seeking answers, finding answers, terrified of predestined ends, is the city. Cancer grows in the city, explodes in random cells, in the city, sick city, rotting city, city all alone on a world it never made, wishing for the old world, its home world, city wishes, wish and wish, does the city, unable to fight the creeping sickness, city wishing, slowly dies.
Dies within it, all its peoples, cancer spreading like a fire, only days until its fingers lie hidden in every neighborhood. Cancer growing, faster, faster, sealing windows, closing doors, crushing rooms and smashing corridors, shifting, changing, eating the city, vomiting death to all its peoples, faster and faster, like a fire…
The visual impressions that flooded over the espers were vivid enough to make the narrative many times more terrifying than it might otherwise have been. The five seated on the rocking deck of the Hadaspuri Maiden not only saw the holocaust, but seemed abruptly thrust into the very middle of it, as if they stood amid the crumbling walls, shrinking corridors and hideous cancerous explosion of growth…
The city dying, sees its peoples dying, knows they trusted it, loved and lived and trusted it, knows it cannot let them perish as generations passed before. The city dying, knows these people, city's people every one, are the last that it will nourish, knows that if it loses these, it will be alone forever, past the ends of endless time and then some, without love and no more to cherish, lonely, lonely, aching city, city aching, wishing doom.
The city's brain is unaffected, unreined to its failing flesh, brain of city, all detachable, immortal even with no home. The city schemes to save some peoples, not their bodies, but their minds, schemes and thinks and sees to do, how to do it, save them all. In its brain, cells go unused, once the center of regulation, but no more body to control, could be used, the city figures, could be used to house other souls, souls of peoples, minds no longer fettered by the earthly flesh. Holding fast to its rotted body, the city brain seeks out its peoples, seeks their auras, mental nimbus, seeks, secures and saves them all, holds and cherishes, contains them, all its lovely, loving children, given new homes in its brain…
Then, in moments, the deed is done, city and peoples all are one, all flesh gone but minds remain, in the city's living brain. But a strange, unsettling feeling, courses through the city's brain, beats and pounds, calls out in anguish, like a beast refusing chains. Panic is the rush of souls, meeting hence from different poles, born of different worlds and finding, love and living not withstanding, that they have no common ground, city and peoples all fall down, all fall down, all fall down, down, down, down and down, city and peoples all fall down…
The last image of the invisible creature's projections was of a huge, convoluted brain, lying in a dark cavern, nestled in gossamer webs, pulsing with life but lacking any body to encase it.
The image flickered.
Was gone.
Slowly the five espers regained awareness of the real world…
Then the creature that has been plaguing us, Chaney said, is the living city itself — or at least the brain of the city that survived the body's death.
More than that, Melopina expanded. It's also the consciousness of a goodly portion of the millions of people who died in the city's collapse.
All of them mad, Tedesco 'pathed.
But why did they go insane? Kiera asked. I didn't fully understand that part of it.
The city made the mistake of thinking that since it had lived with people, contained them for centuries, it fully understood them. But it was apparently from another world — perhaps brought to Earth as a seed by our early space travelers — and it could not hope to understand the human mind. When it meshed with them, it drove them mad and pushed itself over the brink.
Melopina added to Tedesco's explanation. And since the brain is evidently immortal, it has trapped them in that state forever.
Kiera shuddered. Perhaps we should return to the craters, find the thing and destroy it.
Tedesco: I don't think so. I don't believe it wants to die.
Kiera: But what does it have to live for?
Tedesco: It has its compulsion.
Come again?
Tedesco: The city's behavior pattern reminds me of an ancient poem that survived the Last War. It was called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' and concerned an old sailor who spent his life repeating the story of a disaster at sea, compelled to repeat it as a form of penitence for his own complicity in that disaster. The city is a modern mariner.
I believe you're right, Jask 'pathed. I don't sense its presence any longer. I believe we're free of our unseen companion.
It's interesting to think about the power of its esp projections, Melopina said. It managed to follow us, psychically, for hundreds of kilometers, apparently without strain.
I'm glad we encountered it, Tedesco 'pathed.
Glad to lose all that sleep? — Chaney.
The living city taught us a valuable lesson, Tedesco 'pathed.
Then I'm a poor student — Chaney.
Tedesco: It taught us that it is fine to mesh minds as closely as the five of us have — as long as the parts of a gestalt are all of the same species. Such close contact between beings evolved on other worlds, under other circumstances, can bring madness. When and if we meet the Black Presence, we must be careful to hold our telepathic probing to minimal levels.
Then, leaving the Maiden at rest in the middle of the Hadaspuri Sea, they all slept soundly for the first time in days.
29
The Maiden crossed the Hadaspuri Sea without need of sails and put to shore twenty kilometers west of the isolated town of Langorra, which lay in the shadow of the Jinyi Fortress. The five espers hiked west and north, into the great pine forests, until they came to the village of Hoskins' Watch. Here they bartered for winter clothes to outfit Jask and Melopina against the rigors of snow and ice, which they would soon have to endure; Tedesco, Chaney and Kiera were comfortable enough in their own skins. They also obtained five sets of snowshoes for use in the high country, and spent a few minutes admiring the great statue of Hoskins, which stood at the edge of the town, peering down the rugged Lancerian Valley, an inscrutable expression on the stone face. They left town without incident, following the rising land, the leaden sky, and the sentinel pines that sheltered them from the worst of the north wind.
Thereafter, they did not encounter another settlement or see another human being for some long days.
Sixty kilometers from Hoskins' Watch the gray sky lowered like a canvas flat all during the dull afternoon and, with none of the warning of rain, salted the earth with a fine, dry snow. The tiny flakes sifted through the pines, eddied at the espers' feet, slowly built up as darkness came on.
They made camp in the lee of a granite cliff, sheltered by pines on two other sides, with a beautiful downhill view of the snowscape being created before their eyes. They had taken to marching by day and sleeping by night, for they now felt safe from pursuit, ever since they had gone unrecognized in Hoskins' Watch.
By morning more than eight inches
of snow had fallen, and the sky still sifted the white stuff.
Tedesco stomped through the fluffy carpet as if it were not there, oblivious of the huge white clouds he kicked up in his wake.
Chaney and Kiera frolicked in the snow together, running ahead of the others, sometimes loping on all fours, more often progressing in the more sedate, two-footed manner when they realized they were being watched. They were in their element now, and their spirits were higher than they had been at any other point in the journey.
Jask and Melopina were the laggards, having neither the strength to plow through the snowfall as Tedesco did, nor the grace and agility to dance across it as the wolf-people did. No crust had been built up, and the depth was not sufficient to permit the use of the snowshoes. The others held their pace in order not to pull too far ahead of the most humanoid couple in their group.
On the fifteenth day out of Hoskins' Watch, when they were in need of fresh meat, Chaney and Kiera unburdened themselves of their packs and set out to find and kill a deer. Within an hour they had cut one from its herd and driven it back toward the day's camp. When it was near enough to make butchering and storage convenient, they went for it, running fast, leaping, claws catching, teeth snipping first at its legs then, in moments when it stumbled, at its neck.
Kiera scrambled onto its back, bit deep near its jugular.
The deer squealed, turned, leaped confusedly.
Chaney was on it.
The deer reared up again.
It snapped its shoulders. Shook its head. Flung him away.
Be careful! — Melopina.
The wolf-people, on all fours, circled their quarry.
The deer stood with its head bowed, dripping blood on the snow.
Kiera feinted toward it.
The deer was instantly alert, skittering sideways.
She snarled at it. She moved closer, putting her head down, her paws widespread, hissed menacingly at the wounded animal.
The deer watched her carefully.
Forgotten, Chaney came in fast.
The deer squealed when the wolf hamstrung its left hind leg.
Snow flew.
Crippled, the deer tried to stagger past Kiera, hobbling on three legs, done for and knowing it. Its breath was frost.
Kiera leaped, high.
She got its neck.
The deer went down. It kicked. It stilled. The hunt was over.
The two wolf-people wiped their bloodied muzzles in the snow, rose from their feet onto their hind legs and walked down to join the other three espers.
Jask had expected them to take longer to rise out of the primitive state he had just seen them in. When they were in front of him, however, he saw that they were the same Chaney and Kiera, more civilized than not, more prone to kindness than violence.
I wouldn't think you 'd need to rob graves to eat, Jask said to Chaney. With your hunting prowess, your table should always be full.
Chaney shrugged. I prefer to buy my meat when I crave it. My kind was equipped to hunt and kill, and our abilities kept our strain alive through the centuries of violence following the Last War and through the many years of barrenness after that. But these days the need to bring down our own game comes seldom. I enjoy a hunt, but only rarely. Besides, I'm halfway to being a vegetarian.
I thought you disliked moralists?
I do. My predilection for becoming a vegetarian is strictly a matter of taste, not morals.
Ten days later, far up in the snow belt, they ate the last of the deer meat and wondered if the few packages of jerky, which Tedesco had picked up in Hoskins' Watch, would keep them until they had reached the Glacier of Light. They had not seen any animal life for more than three days.
The snow was now as much as ten feet deep, crusted enough for them to make use of their snowshoes.
The wind wailed at night, mournful as a beast that had lost its mate, somehow reminding them of the invisible companion they had picked up at the black glass craters and gotten rid of in the middle of the Hadaspuri Sea. All of that, of course, seemed to have happened in another lifetime, centuries ago.
During the day the sun glared on the diamond surface of the snow fields, giving the illusion that they walked upon a magnificent mirror or across the top of a serene ocean.
As they walked, the snow melted on the pelts of Tedesco, Kiera and Chaney. At night, as they lay sleeping, the water froze in pellets. When they woke again, they were bedecked in transparent pearls.
At last, a day before their last packages of jerky would have run out, they topped a white rise near sunset and looked out across the basin of land, which at its far end was stoppered by the mammoth anterior wall of the Glacier of Light.
30
They stood at the base of the glacier. Glowing worms of pastel light, twisting through the ice, shed little illumination on them. Less, even, than the stars that had been revealed in a cloudless sky.
The Black Presence isn't here — Melopina.
How do you know? — Jask.
Reach for it with your esp.
He tried. Well?
Did you find anything at all? — Melopina.
Reluctantly he admitted, No.
Perhaps we're not using our esp properly — Kiera.
How else could it be used? — Melopina.
I sense something in there — Tedesco.
Chaney: Me, too.
What? — the other three.
A machine, I think, Tedesco 'pathed.
The Black Presence would have machines, Kiera 'pathed.
And could the Presence, itself, be a machine? — Jask.
The old books don't say so — Tedesco.
You've previously admitted that the old books omit many things — Jask.
But omit something so basic? — I doubt that.
Melopina: I think I am receiving something besides a machine.
Oh?
A very minimal psychic radiation.
The wind battered the side of the glacier.
The worms of light lay still, dead but glowing.
There, yes — Kiera.
A man — Chaney.
No, it's a woman — Tedesco.
Both — Jask.
More than two — Melopina.
One by one, they sat down on the hard-packed snow and ice.
Hundreds of people — Kiera.
But none of them quite alive? Melopina 'pathed. Then again, how could they be alive in the center of a glacier?
They should be helped, Jask said. But how?
We can't melt a glacier, Chaney 'pathed.
They don't want help — Melopina.
They like it in there? — Chaney.
They went there of their own accord — Melopina.
I'm getting the same impression — Tedesco.
But—
They have been frozen on purpose, Tedesco 'pathed. The machines tend them, have tended them for thousands of years.
To what end? Chaney asked.
Preservation until… Melopina strained, searching the numbed minds of the glacier's inhabitants.
Until what? — Chaney.
Stop asking questions and help us find out — Kiera.
They 're being preserved until the Earth is fit for them, Jask 'pathed.
Until, Melopina expanded, the Last War is over, and the Earth is civilized again. What are they waiting for?
They have their own criteria for “civilization,” Tedesco said.
So? — Chaney.
And those criteria are much different from ours. They're waiting for cities to grow up again, become as mighty as cities were in their day. They don't want to be awakened from their cryogenic state to face a world without all the comforts they became accustomed to.
They may wait forever — Chaney.
Why should they mind? Jask 'pathed. They have no sense of time. “Forever” is no longer than a day to them.
These were the richest and most cunning men and women of those times just prior to the Last War
, Tedesco 'pathed. They saw that total destruction was coming, and they prepared for it.
They ran from responsibility, Chaney disagreed.
How can a single individual stop the tide of mass hysteria? — Kiera.
Agreed, Jask 'pathed. Chaney's acting like the moralist he dislikes. These people did what they thought wisest.
They survived — Tedesco.
As icicles? — Chaney.
The wind blew spicules of ice against their backs as they sat below the glacier, staring up.
Someday they'll be warmed — Tedesco.
They'll join society again, in its next great era, as if no time has passed at all — Jask 'pathed.
If there is another great era — Chaney.
Night fell across the plain.
The air grew colder still.
They'll take up the reins of the Earth long after all of us have turned to dust — Melopina.
Chaney said, This is nothing but a morgue full of zombies, then.
A cryogenic laboratory, full of paying customers — Jask.
Morgue and zombies, Chaney insisted.
The grave robber should know — Tedesco.
Chaney got to his feet, slapped his hands against his sides to knock away the thin film of ice that had begun to form on him. He looked up at the glacier one last time. No matter what they are, he 'pathed, they are not the Black Presence.
The others rose, too.
We can't afford to waste time — Chaney.
Nightmare Journey Page 16