“What is it?” Camilla whispered, shaking.
“God knows. Some kind of bird or animal, I suppose.”
They listened in silence to the ear-shattering scream again. She moved a little closer to him, and murmured, “It sounds as if it were in agony.”
“Don’t be imaginative. That may be its normal voice, for all we know.”
“Nothing has a normal voice like that,” she said firmly.
“How can we possibly know that?”
“How can you be so matter of fact? Oooh—” she flinched as the long shrilling sound came again. “It seems to freeze the marrow of my bones!”
“Maybe it uses that sound to paralyze its prey,” MacAran said. “It scares me too, damn it! If I were on Earth—well, my people were Irish, and I’d imagine the old Arran banshee had come to carry me off!”
“We’ll have to name it banshee, when we find out what it is,” Camilla said, and she wasn’t laughing. The hideous sound came again, and she clapped her hands over her ears, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!”
MacAran slapped her, not very hard. “Stop it yourself, damn you! For all we know it might be prowling around outside and big enough to eat up both of us and the tent too! Let’s keep quiet and just lie low until it goes away!”
“That’s easier said than done,” Camilla murmured, and flinched as the eerie banshee cry came again. She crept closer to him in the crowded quarters of the tent and said, in a very small voice, “Would you—hold my hand?”
He searched for her fingers in the dark. They felt cold and stiff, and he began to chafe them softly between his own. She leaned against him, and he bent down and kissed her softly on the temple. “Don’t be afraid. The tent’s plastic and I doubt if we smell edible. Let’s just hope whatever-it-is, the banshee if you like, catches itself a nice dinner soon and shuts up.”
The howling scream sounded again, further away this time and without the ghastly bone-chilling quality. He felt the girl sag against his shoulder and eased her down again, letting her head rest against him. “You’d better get some sleep,” he said gently.
Her whisper was almost inaudible. “Thanks, Rafe.”
After he knew, by the sound of her steady breathing, that she slept again, he leaned over and kissed her softly. This was one hell of a time to start something like that, he told himself, angry at his own reactions, they had a job to do and there was nothing personal about it. Or shouldn’t be. But still it was a long time until he slept.
They came out of the tent in the morning to a world transformed. The sky was clear and unstained by cloud or fog, and underfoot the hardy colorless grass had been suddenly carpeted by quick-opening, quick-spreading colored flowers. No biologist, MacAran had seen something like this in deserts and other barren areas and he knew that places with violent climates often developed forms of life which could take advantage of tiny favorable changes in temperature or humidity, however brief. Camilla was enchanted with the multicolored low-growing flowers and with the beelike creatures who buzzed among them, although she was careful not to disturb them.
MacAran stood surveying the land ahead. Across one more narrow valley, crossed by a small running stream, lay the last slopes of the high peak which was their destination.
“With any luck we should be near the peak tonight, and tomorrow, just at noon, we can take our survey readings. You know the theory—triangulate the distance between here and the ship, calculate the angle of the shadow, we can estimate the size of the planet. Archimedes or somebody like that did it for Earth, thousands of years before anyone ever invented higher mathematics. And if it doesn’t rain tonight you may be able to get some clearer sightings from the heights.”
She was smiling. “Isn’t it wonderful what just a little change in the weather can do? Will it be much of a climb?”
“I don’t think so. It looks from here as if we could walk straight up the slope—evidently the timberline on this planet is higher than most worlds. There’s bare rock and no trees near the peak, but only a couple of thousand feet below there’s vegetation. We haven’t reached the snowline yet.”
On the higher slopes, in spite of everything. MacAran recovered his old enthusiasm. A strange world perhaps, but still, a mountain beneath him, the challenge of a climb. An easy climb it was true, without rocks or icefalls, but that simply freed him to enjoy the mountain panorama, the high clear air. It was only Camilla’s presence, the knowledge that she feared the open heights, that kept him in touch with reality at all. He had expected to resent this, the need to help an amateur over easy stretches which he could have climbed with one leg in a cast, the waiting for her to find footing on the stretches of steep rocky scree, but instead he found himself curiously in rapport with her fear, her slow conquest of each new height. A few feet below the high peak he stopped.
“Here. We can run a perfectly good line of sight from here, and there’s a flat spot to set up your equipment. We’ll wait here for noon.”
He had expected her to show relief; instead she looked at him, with a certain shyness, and said, “I thought you’d like to climb the peak, Rafe. Go ahead, if you want to, I don’t mind.”
He started to snap at her that it would be no fun at all with a frightened amateur, then realized this was no longer true. He pulled his pack off his shoulder and smiled at her, laying a hand on her arm. “That can wait,” he said gently, “this isn’t a pleasure trip, Camilla. This is the best spot for what we want to do. Did you adjust your chronometer so that we can catch noon?”
They rested side by side on the slope, looking down across the panorama of forests and hills spread out below them. Beautiful, he thought, a world to love, a world to live in.
He asked idly, “Do you suppose the Coronis colony is this beautiful?”
“How would I know? I’ve never been there. Anyway, I don’t know all that much about planets. But this one is beautiful. I’ve never seen a sun quite this color, and the shadows—” she fell silent, staring down at the pattern of greens and dark-violet shade in the valleys.
“It would be easy to get used to a sky this color,” MacAran said, and was silent again.
It was not long until the shortening shadows marked the approach of the meridian. After all the preparation, it seemed a curious anticlimax; to unfold the hundred-foot-high aluminum rod, to measure the shadows exactly, to the millimeter. When it was finished and he was refolding the rod, he said as much, wryly:
“Forty miles and an eighteen-thousand-foot climb for a hundred and twenty seconds of measurements.”
Camilla shrugged. “And God-knows-how-many light-years to come here. Science is all like that, Rafe.”
“Nothing to do now but wait for the night, so you can take your observations.” Rafe folded the rod and sat down on the rocks, enjoying the rare warmth of the sunlight. Camilla went on moving around their campsite for a little, then came back and joined him. He asked, “Do you really think you can chart this planet’s position, Camilla?”
“I hope so. I’m going to try and observe known Cepheid variables, take observations over a period of time, and if I can find as many as three that I can absolutely identify, I can compute where we are in relation to the central drift of the Galaxy.”
“Let’s pray for a few more clear nights, then,” Rafe said, and was silent.
After some time, watching him study the rocks less than a hundred feet above them, she said, “Go on, Rafe. You know you want to climb it. Go ahead, I don’t mind.”
“You don’t? You won’t mind waiting here?”
“Who said I’d wait here? I think I can make it. And—” she smiled a little, “I suppose I’m as curious as you are—to get one glimpse of what’s beyond it!”
He rose with alacrity. “We can leave everything but the canteens here,” he said. “It is an easy enough climb—not a climb at all, really; just a steep sort of scramble.” He felt lighthearted, joyous at her sudden sharing of his mood. He went ahead, searching out the easiest route, showing her whe
re to set her feet. Common sense told him that this climb, based only on curiosity to see what lay beyond and not on their mission’s needs, was a little foolhardy—who could risk a broken ankle?—but he could not contain himself. Finally they struggled up the last few feet and stood looking out over the peak. Camilla cried out in surprise and a little dismay. The shoulder of the mountain on which they stood had obscured the real range which lay beyond; an enormous mountain range which lay, seemingly endless and to the very edge of their sight, wrapped in eternal snow, enormous and jagged and covered with glaciated ridges and peaks below which pale clouds drifted, lazily and slow.
Rafe whistled. “Good God, it makes the Himalayas look like foothills,” he muttered.
“It seems to go on forever! I suppose we didn’t see it before because the air wasn’t so clear, with clouds and fog and rain, but—” Camilla shook her head in wonder. “It’s like a wall around the world!”
“This explains something else,” Rafe said slowly. “The freak weather. Flowing over a series of glaciers like that, no wonder there’s almost perpetual rain, fog, snow—you name it! And if they are really as high as they look—I can’t tell how far away they are, but they could easily be a hundred miles on a clear day like this—it would also explain the tilt of this world on its axis. They call the Himalayas, on Earth, a third pole. This is a real third pole! A third icecap, anyway.”
“I’d rather look the other way,” Camilla said, and faced back toward the folds and folds of green-violet valleys and forests. “I prefer my planets with trees and flowers—and sunlight, even if the sunlight is the color of blood.”
“Let’s hope it shows us some stars tonight—and some moons.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“I simply can’t believe this weather,” Heather Stuart said, and Ewen, stepping to the door of the tent, jeered gently, “What price your blizzard warnings now?”
“I’m glad to be wrong,” Heather said firmly, “Rafe and Camilla need it, on the mountain.” An expression of disquiet passed over her face. “I’m not so sure I was wrong, though, there’s something about this weather that scares me a little. It seems all wrong for this planet somehow.”
Ewen chuckled. “Still defending the honor of your old Highland granny and her second sight?”
Heather did not smile. “I never believed in second sight. Not even in the Highlands. But now I’m not so sure. How is Marco?”
“Not much change, although Judy did manage to get him to swallow a little broth. He seems a little better, although his pulse is still awfully uneven. Where is Judy, by the way?”
“She went into the woods with MacLeod. I made her promise not to go out of sight of the clearing, though.” A sound inside of the tent drew them both back; for the first time in three days, something other than inarticulate moans from Zabal. Inside he was moving, struggling to sit up. He muttered, in a hoarse astonished voice, “Que pasó? O Dio, mi duele—duele tanto—”
Ewen bent over him, saying gently, “It’s all right, Marco, you’re here, we’re with you. Are you in pain?”
He muttered something in Spanish. Ewen looked blankly up at Heather, who shook her head. “I don’t speak it; Camilla does, but I only know a few words.” But before she could muster any of them, Zabal muttered, “Pain? You’d better believe! What were those things? How long—where’s Rafe?”
Ewen checked the man’s heart-rate before he spoke. He said, “Don’t try to sit up; I’ll put a pillow behind your head. You’ve been very ill; we thought you weren’t going to make it.” And I’m still not so sure, he thought grimly, even while he wadded his spare coat to put behind the injured man’s head and Heather encouraged him to swallow some soup. No, please, there have been too many deaths. But he knew this would make no difference. On Earth only the old died, as a rule. Here—well, it was different. Damn different.
“Don’t waste your breath talking. Save your strength and we’ll tell you everything,” he said.
The night fell, still miraculously clear and free of fog or rain. Even on the heights, no fog closed in, and Rafe, setting up Camilla’s telescope and other instruments on the flat place of their camp, saw for the first time the stars rise over the peaks, clear and brilliant but very far away. He did not know a Cepheid variable from a constellation, so much of what she was trying to do was incomprehensible to him; but with a carefully shielded light—not to spoil the dark-adaptation of her eyes—he wrote down careful strings of figures and co-ordinates as she gave them. After what seemed hours of this, she sighed and stretched cramped muscles.
“That’s all I can do for now; I can take more readings just before dawn. Still no sign of rain?”
“None, thank goodness.”
Around them the scent from the flowers on the lower slopes was sweet and intoxicating, as quick-blooming shrubs, vivified by two days of heat and dryness, burst and opened all around. The unfamiliar scents were a little dizzying. Over the mountain floated a great gleaming moon, with a pale iridescent glow; then, following it by only a few moments, another, this one with pale violet lustre.
“Look at the moon,” she whispered.
“Which moon?” Rafe smiled in the darkness. “Earthmen get used to saying, the moon; I suppose some day someone will give them names. . . .”
They sat on the soft dry grass, watching the moons swing free of the mountains and rise. Rafe quoted softly, “If the stars shone only one night in a thousand years, how men would look and wonder and adore.”
She nodded. “Even after ten days, I find I miss them.”
Rationally Rafe knew that it was madness to sit here in the dark. If nothing else, birds or beasts of prey—perhaps the banshee-screamer from the heights they had heard last night—might be abroad in the dark. He said so, finally, and Camilla, like the breaking of a spell, started and said, “You’re right. I must wake well before dawn.”
Rafe was somehow reluctant to go into the stuffy darkness of the shelter-tent. He said, “In the old days it used to be believed it was dangerous to sleep in the moonlight—that’s where the word lunatic came from. Would it be four times as dangerous to sleep under four moons, I wonder?”
“No, but it would be—lunatic,” Camilla said, laughing gently. He stopped, took her shoulders in a gentle grip and for a moment the girl, biting back a tart remark, thought in a mixture of fear and anticipation that he would bend down and kiss her; but then he turned away and said, “Who wants to be sane? Good night, Camilla. See you an hour before sunrise,” and strode away, leaving her to go before him into the shelter.
A clear night, over the planet of the four moons. Banshees prowled on the heights, freezing their warm-blooded prey with their screams, blundering toward them by the heat of their blood, but never coming below the snowline; on a snowless night, anything on rock or grass was safe. Above the valleys, great birds of prey swung, beasts still unknown to the Earthmen prowled in the depths of the deep forest, living and dying, and trees unheard crashed to the ground. Under the moonlight, in the unaccustomed heat and dryness of a warm wind blowing away from the glaciated ridges, flowers bloomed and opened, and shed their perfume and pollen. Night-blooming and strange, with a deep and intoxicating scent....
The red sun rose clear and cloudless, a brilliant sunrise with the sun like a giant ruby in a clear garnet sky. Rafe and Camilla, who had been at the telescope for two hours, sat and watched it with the pleasant fatigue of a light task safely over for some time.
“Shall we start down? This weather is too good to last,” Camilla said, “and although I’ve gotten used to the mountain in the sun, I don’t think I’d care to navigate it on ice.”
“Right. Pack up the instruments—you know how they go—and I’ll fix a bite of rations and strike the tent. We’ll start down while the weather holds—not that it doesn’t look like a gorgeous day. If it’s still fine tonight we can stop on one of the hilltops and camp out, and you can take some more sightings,” he said.
Within forty minutes they were going do
wn. Rafe cast a wistful look back at the huge unknown range before turning his back on it. His own undiscovered range, and probably he would never see it again.
Don’t be too sure, a voice remarked precisely in his mind, but he shrugged it off. He didn’t believe in precognition.
He sniffed the light flower-scents, half enjoying them, half disturbed by their faintly acrid sweetness. The most noticeable were the tiny orange flowers Camilla had plucked the day before, but there was also a lovely white flower, star-shaped with a golden corolla, and a deep blue bell-like blossom with inner stalks covered with a shimmering gold-colored dust. Camilla bent over, inhaling the spicy fragrance. Rafe thought to warn her, after a moment;
“Remember Heather and Judy turning green? Serve you right if you do!”
She looked up, laughing. Her face looked faintly gold from the flower-dust. “If it was going to hurt me it would have already—the air’s full of the scent, or haven’t you noticed? Oh, it’s so beautiful, so beautiful, I feel like a flower myself, I feel as if I could get drunk on flowers—”
She stood rapt, gazing at the beautiful bell-shaped blossom and seeming to shimmer with the golden dust. Drunk, Rafe thought, drunk on flowers. He let his pack slip from his shoulder and roll away.
“You are a flower,” he said hoarsely. He seized her and kissed her; she raised her lips to his, shyly at first, then with growing passion. They clung together in the field of waving flowers; she broke free first, and ran toward the stream which flowed down the slope, laughing, bending to toss her hands in the water.
Darkover: First Contact Page 6