Susannah was too numb to protest. The tough skin of her therm-suit had protected her body but her uncovered hands and face were scraped raw. She touched a hand to her face and could not tell if the welling blood came from her palm or her cheek. Her doctor’s instincts told her these were only surface wounds, but the sight of her own blood flowing so freely frightened her unreasonably. She tore her eyes away from the dark cleft and the vision of herself lying shattered on the icy rock fifty meters below, and tried not to cling to Liphar like a dream-waked child. As soon as she could hear the wind and rain again, over the pounding of her heart, she cursed her foolishness. Weng had once observed that only a complete understanding of a world can render it harmless, no matter how benign its outward appearance.
Did I think of that, when the snow stopped? Susannah scolded. No. I go charging off into the hills like some giddy schoolgirl on a picnic. If I had listened to Liphar…
As she stared at the lithe little shadow bobbing ahead of her, it dawned on her that his reluctance to make the climb had been no mere habitual caution. Liphar had known. He had known enough to pack a rain poncho up a hot mountain trail on a cloudless day.
How did he know?
She hurried along behind him with chastened concentration. She observed him scrupulously; when he slowed, where he looked, where he put each foot. She took note of each protruding rock he used for balance. The wind mounted into swirling blasts that pressed her into a crouch. She could see no more than five meters ahead of them, but Liphar moved securely along the trail as if he could have walked it blind. He led her around two more steep switchbacks, then the trail cut through a towering pile of stone rubble that clogged the upper end of a canyon. Knife-sharp chunks of granite pressed in from either side, and the wind howled down the cut. Blood washed down the rock where Susannah grasped for support. The tom surface was like fire on her palms, and she realized she was tiring rapidly.
They struggled out of the boulder pile. The canyon widened. The path dropped sharply toward the canyon floor. Liphar hesitated. The bottom was invisible behind a curtain of rain. The roar of wind and falling water sang a demon’s chorus within the canyon walls. The young Sawl stood in anxious indecision, listening. His body was still but for his hands, working tirelessly at his azure bead.
Suddenly he swerved to one side and leaped up onto a ledge that snaked high along the wall, just below the canyon’s rim. Susannah clambered up after him, wondering why he chose not to retrace the easier route through the canyon. The ledge was narrow, too narrow for a Terran to negotiate comfortably. It was littered with rock debris and split here and there by the same thick root she had noticed on the upward climb. She struggled along fearfully, looking forward only, never down. Liphar raced ahead, waited for her to catch up, then pointed out a line of handholds chipped into the crumbling rock. When he was sure she understood his shouted explanation, he raced away again.
The canyon took a sharp curve. The ledge wall undulated sickeningly. Susannah had to scramble along half-bent to make use of the handholds, cut at a height optimal for a Sawl. She had eyes for nothing but her feet and the rock beneath them. Her fingers were stiff and cold. She blessed the imperviousness of her therm-suit. Ahead, the ledge ended abruptly where a side wash broke through in a jumble of collapsed strata. The roar of water echoed down the steep walls in a directionless bombardment that seemed born of the air itself.
Liphar halted again, blinking into the rain. He rocked on the balls of his feet and stared up the wash. It was wide and bottomed with oddly rounded stones whose symmetrical smoothness reminded Susannah of an oriental garden. But it was more like a river of rock cascading down the mountain. Liphar beckoned her close to him. His hands slashed swift straight motions across the wash to where the ledge picked up again.
“Go much quick, you,” he shouted into her ear. “Most quick! I go one time, next time you go.”
Susannah nodded, shielding her eyes from the rain. His continuing anxiety confused her. Surely they were past the worst, being off the top of the scarp? He clutched his bead, his thin cheeks sucked in with doubt. Then he slipped the thong off his wrist and pressed the bead into Susannah’s hand.
“Khem khe!” he declared and sprang away. She watched him jump down into the wash and fly from rock to rock, his feet barely touching down on one before he was on to the next. His poncho flapped around him tike a leather sail, his skinny arms outstretched like unfeathered wings. He did not look back until he had gained the other side, where he hauled himself up onto the ledge, panting, and quickly waved her on.
Susannah climbed down into the wash carefully. She tried to move as he had done, but her booted feet slipped on the smooth wet rock. She fell once, caught herself, fell again and cried out as the rock smashed into her shoulder. She pulled herself to her knees, tucked the talisman into a pocket and began to crawl, using hands, feet, elbows, whatever helped to move her along. In the middle of the wash, she glanced up to see Liphar gesturing with renewed fury from the ledge. His eyes were on her as he screamed unintelligible encouragements, but a telling bias in his stance made her look sidelong, up the broad rubbled wash.
Susannah froze, like a startled deer.
A man-high wall of water thundered toward her. Deep in its muddy boil, stones ground and clattered like dragon’s teeth.
Time slowed. The roar and clatter faded. The giant wave bowed gracefully into its downward rush, garlanded with a delicate wreath of bloody froth. Vast boulders danced and turned inside its curl, an endless freefall, slow as the movement of continents.
Susannah’s own scream broke the spell. She launched herself across the wash in a scramble for her life.
8
The Lander sat lifeless, shuddering in the storm.
Stavros set his battery lamp on the corridor floor. Leaning against the doorframe, he gave the looted cubicle a final survey. He dragged a damp palm across his brow, wiped both hands on his bared chest, then on his grimy white fatigue pants. He missed the comfortable cycling hum of the air system. Weng had kept the ship powered up on the emergency batteries until it was finally time for them to be disengaged and carried up to the safety of the Caves.
He ran through a mental catalogue of the salvaged equipment: those items which were intended to be portable, others he had spent ten sleepless hours cannibalizing, others he must leave behind. He tried to picture each emptied niche and cabin but his exhaustion confused their images in his mind.
He regretted that Danforth was not present to witness the rape of his coveted instruments. Or better still, to be forced to admit that the Sawls had predicted the abrupt weather change with uncanny accuracy. Perhaps, during those long last moments before B-Sled had gone down in the storm, as Stavros was certain it had, perhaps then Taylor had allowed this recognition a foothold in his rigid brain, an inkling at least, a brief suspicion that he should have laid aside his habitual contempt, and listened.
Stavros prayed that he had.
The glare of the battery lamp stung his tired eyes. He left it in the corridor and moved into the darkened emptiness of the cubicle. The sounds of the last stages of the evacuation, the general clatter and human voices, the rattle of cartwheels, floated up the central service shaft, softened by distance. The rain beat a hard staccato on the outer hull, percussive, regular.
Like a Sawl work chant. Stavros pondered a possible connection.
In the shaft of lamplight slicing through the doorway, the cubicle’s gray walls confronted the linguist balefully. He chose to read reproof in their smudges and stains, resentment of being deserted, left behind to brave the storm alone.
You’re not ready for this, he told himself. Not prepared to take people’s lives in your hands so soon. But in his heart, he knew it thrilled him. He drank deeply from the clay jug dangling at his waist. The water was sweet relief from the heat of the Lander’s upper levels. He felt it drop to his stomach and spread its chill down into his groin. It excited him, as the storm excited him, and the smoothly coordi
nated evacuation of the Lander. The taste of crisis was as pungent as the acrid smoke from the cookfires burning in the Underbelly. It was adventure myth come alive, all he had dreamed of in his narrow dormitory bunk on Earth. He stood in awe of their power as he discovered these atavistic joys, and he surrendered to them with a lover’s trembling helplessness.
He took another step into the room, resisting the impulse to search its shadowed corners. Danforth’s presence lurked invisibly.
For the loss of Emil Clausen, the young linguist felt not a moment’s regret. It was his one point of agreement with Megan Levy, that the prospector was a menace to all life-supporting planets. University gossip made CONPLEX responsible for the loss or adulteration of at least seven alien languages before linguists could document them properly. Stavros had thought long and hard before accepting a post on a CONPLEX-funded expedition, but even a wunderkind could not afford to turn down a good first assignment.
His quarrel with Danforth had been more a clash of personalities, but in addition, Stavros felt challenged by Danforth’s reputation. As he measured himself against the older scientist’s expertise and found himself wanting, he sniffed out Danforth’s weaknesses and worried them like a terrier in defense against his own insecurities.
Should be easier to write him off, Stavros mused, but shame resurfaced to challenge his excitement. Not even Danforth, for all his arrogance, deserved to die in the rain on some alien mountainside.
He rattled a stray bolt across the shelf of a stripped utility rack. He felt uneasy about leaving the racks behind. Taylor would… no. The racks were too tall to fit into the lift cage, and there was not enough time to disassemble them or drop them down the shaft one by one.
Taylor gone. The reality of it settled around him at last, like a chill fog. And Susannah missing. McPherson had brought that news.
Susannah…
Stavros snatched up the bolt and surprised himself by stuffing it into his pants pocket.
Out in the corridor, two sweating Sawls grunted over the last of CRT’s monitor screens. The lift cage was packed tight. Their comradely debate over where to add to the load was escalating into an argument. Stavros heard fear in their voices. They were not happy being away from the Caves in such weather.
The plastic sides of the cage creaked as they tried to shift its load.
At the bottom of the forty-meter shaft, a giant wooden winch substituted for the crippled lift system, a Sawl winch hauled down from the Caves to meet the emergency. Storm gusts howled about the bottom of the shaft, spiraling upward to rock the cage to an unfamiliar lullaby. The hum of the magnetic lift field had given way to the groaning music of rope on timber. In the cubicle, Stavros clenched his eyes in sudden dizziness. He touched his forehead to the cool plastic of the racks, seeking a better balance within the confusion of sound. He felt perilously near the edge, loving the anticipation of the terror, knowing he would hate it when it overtook him. He shook his head, distracted by a slap-slap rhythm like the flap of a window shade on a windy evening. Sounds billowed like sails. The rain drummed against the Lander’s shell but his ears were full of the ocean’s roar and the snap of storm-lashed canvas. The singsong shouts of the winch crew echoed up the lift shaft. Stavros saw himself salt-drenched, hauling at shredded rigging. Far below, the big machine moaned in its labors, brave wood straining at the upper limits of its strength. Stavros moved to the doorway as the music sang through him. The steamy odor of his own fear wrapped him in a heated embrace. His body rocked in communion with the taut hum of the ropes, with the creak of leather, with the sinuous motion of the naked backs of his Sawl companions as they struggled to heave their burden to the top of the pile. Ecstasy sang in him like a siren, luring his sanity. Reaching for a mast of pain to lash himself to, Stavros slammed his fist against the doorframe, yet still swayed off balance as the great ship beneath him rolled into a wave. His bare feet gripped for weathered planking. Another bash of his fist and his mind accepted that the deck he stood on was the smooth plastic of a twenty-first-century ship. But the stark terror in the faces of the two Sawls told him that the motion was not imagined. A monitor slid from the top of the lift and crashed to the floor.
Forty meters down, the winch crew fell abruptly silent. The only sound was the pounding of the wind and the rain on the outer hull.
Then a cracking like the cry of a rent glacier echoed up the shaft. The Lander shuddered.
Stavros sprang toward the lift. The two Sawls clung trembling to the safety grating. He wanted to be brave, to offer them calm in the face of this nonimagined danger, but his fear made him move too fast. He shoved them stumbling into the cage, tossed them the emergency lamp, then grabbed the top rail of the gate. He swung up to wedge himself in on top of the load and crammed his body against the ceiling grate. The lift bucked, dropped precipitately and stopped short with a jolt. The updrafts whistled like police sirens around the cage. The Sawls hung on with eyes shut tight.
The lift steadied. Stavros reclaimed his lamp and yelled down the shaft for the winch crew to lower away. A chorus of warnings drifted upward as the Lander swayed again, then settled at a tilt. The laden cage slammed against the shaftway. Stavros renewed his bellowed pleas, waving the lantern like a beacon. He heard McPherson’s voice below, raised in command. Painfully, the cage edged downward to the screech of metal against metal. Stavros managed a smile of encouragement for his companions on the lift. He raised the lamp at the entrance to each floor as they descended, flashing the beam into darkened corners and calling out to assure himself that no one had been left behind.
Megan waited at the easternmost cave mouth, closest to the trail that Susannah had taken to climb the cliff face. The tunnel mouth was an invitation to chaos. Raw gusts reached in to snatch at Megan’s legs. She chewed her lip and watched the mist bead up on her therm-suit. The world outside was darkening as the long slow night began.
“Where are they?” she moaned helplessly. After losing contact with Susannah and Liphar, Megan had busied herself for a while by helping with the evacuation of the Lander. A long ten hours later, she could only pace and worry. In another few hours, darkness would be complete, and there would not be light again for several weeks to guide the wanderers home. Megan saw malice in the creeping twilight.
“Stupid. Stupid!” she grumbled, then thought that Susannah’s foolishness paled in the face of what Danforth and Clausen had done. Muttering, she massaged her wrists. The cold damp had awakened her arthritis.
A Sawl woman sat a few paces up the tunnel at the foot of the inner stairs, cross-legged on the damp stone floor. She wore a knitted shawl over rough wool trousers and tunic. Even in the gloom, the soft drape shone blue as the water of a summer lake. A thick knotted fringe bordered it like a darker shoreline. The woman worked from a ball of brown yarn, turning her needles into the light of a small oil lamp that rested beside her knee. The lamp was of blown glass. Its glass chimney was faceted in an aesthetic rather than practical manner, for it reflected the light as a cut jewel would, flashing and irregular. The woman held her knitting close to the flame while tiny prisms danced and sparkled along the walls, and the tunnel remained for all useful purposes in darkness.
Megan paced in and out of the light, stiff with standing. The Sawl woman had said her name was Tyril, and Megan was grateful for her willingness to wait out the long hours at her side. Clausen would have said that Tyril’s unspoken duty was to keep Megan from straying too far into the Caves. Megan did not care. Tyril’s quiet presence was sympathetic, if uncurious, and Megan hoped she would be a friend. After six long weeks, Megan still knew none of the Sawls well, except Liphar, if one can ever be said to know a shadow well. Only Stavros could remark that a friend had said thus and so, and mean Sawl as often as Terran. More often, for as the weeks went by, he spent less and less time with his Terran colleagues.
She glanced about the plain stone walls of the tunnel. Why do they keep their distance so, these Sawls? A habit of privacy, within the overcrowding of
the Caves? Susannah had remarked, “They are waiting until they know us, know what we are.” But Megan wondered if the Sawls were trying to deny the existence of a universe beyond their own world by appearing unconcerned by the presence of visitors claiming to represent it.
Whatever their reluctance was, that caution that barred the Terrans full access to Sawl lives and living places, the Sawls seemed willing to put it aside in a crisis, to find space for the visitors in the already crowded Caves, to help with the salvage of the alien equipment. Megan was moved by their generosity. She would not like to be descended upon by a pack of strangers, poking, prodding, recording, demanding explanations for this and that. Our intrusion is just as presumptuous as Clausen’s, she admitted privately. It’s simply less harmful.
Covertly, she studied Tyril’s face. The same fine-boned angularity that seemed delicate in the Sawl men shaped the women’s faces with strength. The mouth was wide and firm, yet sensuous. The nose was a straight line that met heavy arched brows promising a seriousness of mind. She sat very still, cheek half turned into the soft light of the lamp, her jawline chiseled with shadow. But for the flick of her bone needles, Tyril might have been carved from fine brown marble. Megan thought her very beautiful. The men were as well, but more in the way that a child is beautiful: sexless and unripe. But watch that Terran bias, she reminded herself.
Megan let her eyes travel up the wall to focus on the niche above Tyril’s head. It was the entryway’s only hint of decoration, shallow and long, and crowded with tiny clay statuettes. In the dim light, Meg could barely distinguish their outlines, but she knew from the hours spent poring over her photographs that the entryway friezes contained mostly grotesques: stocky little gnomes with smoothly misshapen limbs, or wraithlike stick figures full of ribs and elbows. Each was a nightmare of anguish or deformity, bent, twisted, dwarfed or overgrown, as if an embodiment of a specific agony. The figures were painted in rich polychrome, the hues deepened with the gloss of age. The hundred tiny eyes glittered with shards of black glass.
The Wave and the Flame Page 7