Tristal knelt by her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We will do everything we can to help you. We will take you home. Are you hungry? Let me give you some chuck soup. It has onions and five boiled May apple bulbs in it. You might like it.” He brought a pitched cup of steaming soup close to her and set it down so she could reach it from the furroll. Then he wandered off with his back to her.
Tor called him from the far side of the firelight, putting his arm around him. “Good. Leave her alone. Let her get used to us. We will take her to her people, whoever they may be. Even this food is probably very odd to her.” Tristal wanted to watch her, but didn’t dare.
But he did turn and say, “Night Girl, you will like the soup. Just try the broth first. Tor made it for me. I have been sick. It is easy to eat.” Tor nudged him in the ribs, and they sat down across the fire from Celeste. Tristal began to sharpen his knife, but Tor made him put it away.
Celeste first smelled the soup. It was strange and sharp, as animal as the fur her whole body nested in. It would be her first food outside the dome. She cautiously sipped, and a deliciousness she had never experienced suffused her mouth. Yet it was hot, almost burning; dome food came out of the autoserve at 28 degrees, measured and unvaried. The heat hurt her lips, but the meat and onion flavor surrounded her tongue like a narcotic, spinning her senses loose.
She drank the whole cup, then banged her stick and held the empty cup out. Tristal took it and refilled it for her. Again she drank, catching small bits of meat in her teeth and feeling them as she chewed each thoroughly. She suddenly felt drowsy, settling into the furroll and sleeping almost as if drugged.
Tor and Tristal played a quiet game, the Shumai rhythm game called “Na, na,” glancing at the girl occasionally. Finally Tor rose and took down her clothes, folding them and putting them by the girl’s head. She woke as he stirred the fire. Some of the rain had turned to wet snow in large flakes, and the sparks rose and swarmed into the quietly falling white. Celeste was momentarily confused and disoriented by the contrary swirls, fire and dim flakes. What was this?
Tor gazed down at her. “It is snow. It is only the rain now cold enough to freeze. Do you understand?” She nodded. “Get dressed,” he continued. “Tris and I will turn our backs again. Then you can come out and touch the snow if you want, or you can go back to sleep.”
Celeste did dress, shivering in her smoky clothes, then walked from the outcrop and held out her hand to the snow, which lumped and melted as it touched her warm skin. What of the flowers? She went to them, knelt, watched the snow slowly piling on them, weighing them down. Were they to die, then?
Tor came behind her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They are bloodroot and are used to it. Snow falls on their blooms nearly every year. It will melt and they will spring up again.”
She turned to him, frowning. Could this be so? He held out his hand, and she took it to pull herself up. She held his hand, feeling its hardness, its calluses, and its size, which was larger than Royal’s, than Dexter’s even. Was he a mutant? No. He was too much like her, and his parental gentleness was a dimension new to her.
“Better go to bed,” he said. “Tomorrow we will take you to your people, whoever they may be.”
She did go, crawling back into Tor’s furroll, while Tristal slid into his and Tor piled leaves between the two and wormed his body down into them, calling Raran to nest with him. The big dog did, but kept a front paw across Tristal. Soon they all lay quietly, breathing slowly and evenly. The dog sighed like a human. The fire died down, and Celeste stared up in amazement at having stepped with scarcely a thought out of one world and into another, wholly different one. She breathed in the damp of the spring coldness, watched the falling snow, and finally sank into a deep slumber, resolving that she would not go back. No. Who knows what they would do to her for her disobedience and initiative. Surely they would not believe what she saw unless she took it with her, and then they would be in a fury about her introduction of radiation and organic life into the pure dome and levels, preserved, but for her, for more than a millennium now. Almost her last thought before sleep was another remembered image—Butto, sweaty and naked, and his comp friends, emptying the dead fetus down the recycle tube with a wet, slopping sound. She shuddered involuntarily. Tor, feeling her movement, put his hand over and smoothed her hair in the dark. No. She would not go back.
She woke when Tor stirred and rose in the morning. She saw they lay in a hollow, among trees. In the rising light, she saw each branch and twig covered with thick, white snow, even now beginning to melt and rain down in the brightness of a blue day. She cried out with the strangeness and beauty of it. Tor turned and looked at her, smiling at her wide eyes, then went to the fire to rebuild it. All his motions were smooth and sure, seeming slow but deft, as if he had studied and perfected them in advance.
Celeste stood, shivering in her robe, and slipped on her fabric shoes. She went to the fire, held out her hands to it, drew them back from the sudden, fierce heat, then held them out again. The strange wildness of everything around her amazed her like a dream. Tor dropped his coat over her shoulders and cinched its belt around her waist. It seemed to swallow her.
He laughed. “Well, waif, now you are added to Tris, maybe I should start a nursery.” She frowned. “Well, you understand, anyhow,” he added. “Now, go sit on the furroll again. We have to make you some kind of shoes if you have to walk in all this wet.”
She did as he asked, and, taking a piece of hide with hair on it from his backsack, he knelt at her feet and made some quick measurements as she felt an odd shiver of unwonted intimacy. Then he sat against the rock and cut out a rough pair of soft boots with a sharp knife from his underbelt.
“Wake Tris, Night Girl. He will have to sew these for you while I get some food ready.”
She had to reach across the dog, which lay awake but at ease. Raran let out a slight, throaty growl, and Celeste jerked back. Tor rose and stood in front of the dog. Raran rolled and wagged, groveling at his feet. Tor held her collar. “Now wake him.”
Celeste reached across again and shook Tristal by the shoulder. He came awake only slowly, eyes puffed, looking around as if he had forgotten all about last night, amazed at the presence of the girl.
“Raran has been growling at our Night Girl, Tris. Better teach her she has another master.”
Tristal rolled over by the girl, then patted his lap. Raran instantly came over and put her head on it, tail down. “Now, pat her,” he said to Celeste. She reached out a hand, and the dog again began a deep murmur. Tris jerked her collar hard, and the dog only pushed her head up against his leg harder. “Now,” he said again, and Celeste, full of fear, put her hand across and touched the dog’s head, then stroked it, feeling its smooth warmth, softer than sleep covers. The dog’s eye rolled up at her. She saw the long mouth, with jutting, blunted canine teeth, and behind them rows of pointed molars, exposed by a drooping, black-scalloped lip, which hung open as Raran panted slightly. She seemed swept up in momentary vertigo. It was a beast. She sat touching a beast whose head alone lay longer than Dexter’s rodents.
The sudden newness rolled away from her, but she drew back, covering her face with her hands. Smelling dog on them, she wiped them on Tor’s coat, only to have Raran put her nose back into her palm, wetting it with mucus, then licking the fingers with her long tongue. Celeste stood, holding up her hands. Would she ever get clean? Raran stood in front of her, now wagging her long-haired tail. Celeste ran to Tor and clung to him.
“Raran is only a dog. You don’t know much about dogs, either? What are we to do with you? Don’t worry. We will take you home today.” She only clung harder to him, opening her mouth, trying to talk again, feeling his bulk, his warmth, his encircling arm.
“I . . .” she said. “I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay with you.”
Tristal looked up from his sewing. “She does talk. She sounds like a Pelbar, I think. Doesn’t she?”
“Strange. Yes, she d
oes,” said Tor. “We will talk in Pelbar dialect, then. Is that better? Are we clearer?”
“Yes. A Pelbar?”
“You are not Pelbar, then?”
“No. I—I—”
“It doesn’t matter. But I know you won’t want us calling you Night Girl, for lack of a better name. What is your name?”
“Celeste.”
“Celeste, then. Not a Pelbar name. Are you sure you don’t want to go home?”
“Never. No. I want to stay with you. Out here.”
“Out here? We aren’t going to stay out here, Celeste. We are going to Pelbarigan. Want to come with us?”
“Pelbarigan? Yes, take me. Pelbarigan?”
“It is a city on the Heart River. A Pelbar city. You don’t look in shape to run, but you can walk. It will take us several days. Will you come with us then?”
Celeste nodded, wondering what she was committing herself to. Instinctively, her hand reached for her belt entry array, to see what Pelbarigan was in central memory, but of course the unit wasn’t there, and she felt only Tor’s heavy belt. Turning, she saw Tristal working on her behalf, shoving a broad steel needle through the leather of her new boots. He smiled at her shyly, saying nothing. His hair glistened. It was much blonder than Tor’s, but like Tor’s was bound in a single braid behind his head.
She had never looked at Tristal closely, and now saw his eyes in their washed blueness, frank and silent. Again she felt the shock and wonder of newness. No one in the dome and levels looked like that. All darkness had been flushed out of him. But he was truly a savage, without her careful education, surely without real technology, as he worked his heavy needle quickly, a bead of bright blood on one forefinger.
Tor handed her a pitched bowl of stew, thick and creamy, of the same things as that of the previous night. She ate it eagerly, looking up at a squirrel leaping through the high limbs, scattering clots of snow. She paused, her spoon near her mouth. Tristal watched her guardedly. A woodpecker knocked on a tree down the valley, and she whipped her head toward the sound. A vague thought formed in Tristal’s mind, but he kept it to himself.
He finished the boots by midmorning and knelt down and slipped them on Celeste, leaving her inner slippers inside them, showing her how to tie them.
Tristal muttered something to Tor about going up the hill before they left and set out with Raran through the rapidly melting snow. With a slight detour, he went to the place where they had encountered Celeste. A small box gleamed in the melted snow. Tristal took it up carefully, turning it over and examining it. He put it in his bag and continued on up the hill, soon finding himself staring down and out across the empty place to the silent, snow-topped dome. He looked a long time. He was sure Celeste came from the dome. He would not tell Tor, lest his uncle would try to return the girl and poison himself on the empty place. What of Celeste? Would the poison affect her? Did she wash soon enough? Was it a short enough distance to traverse it safely? How could he warn her without revealing that he knew her origin, which she plainly tried to hide? Well, he would let it go for now.
Before noon they left for the river. The going was slow, Celeste finding it hard to press on. She had exercised regularly, on level one, far end, using all the prescribed forms, but it surely had not prepared her for life outside in the wild. She strove to keep up, but the two Shumai had to move very slowly, never saying anything to her, remaining gentle and silent. She found she didn’t feel very well, either. Perhaps it was the food, the excitement, the flood of differences. In part it may have been her fear of this universe of newness. She gritted her teeth and continued.
By nightfall, though, she was so exhausted that she fell asleep immediately by the fire Tristal built while Tor wandered off into the brush, returning a short while later with two rabbits on his belt. He had skinned the animals out of Celeste’s sight, so as not to alarm or disgust her, and, with his back to the girl, he cut them into a seething pot, adding the wild bulbs they had dug as they walked. But Celeste lay fast asleep, only her dark hair visible at the mouth of Tor’s furroll.
The next morning found Celeste feeling even worse. She struggled up and walked until nearly noon, but then Tor cut some saplings with his axe, made a litter, and put her in it. He and Tristal carried her until late afternoon, when Tor, looking at his nephew, decided that the boy too had had enough. They went on, Tor dragging the litter, Celeste looking back at Tristal’s face, watching his quick motions, noticing his fatigue, realizing he bore it with scarcely a thought and no protest. She thought that passive and didn’t admire him for it.
The following day Celeste seemed weaker and feverish. Again they carried her, striking the river in midmorning. They took Tor’s canoe out of the tree where the Shumai had hung it, soon spinning out onto the broad stream.
Now she looked back at Tor, who watched her with a worried look as he stroked upriver. She showed scarcely any interest in the great stretch of water, after an initial alarm, and he knew from this that she was very ill. Their hope would be to get her to Pelbarigan as soon as possible. Celeste slept fitfully. She was unable to hold down the food Tristal fed her, holding her head in his lap.
Once when she awoke, she saw only darkness, then small points of light above her. She cried out in fear, sitting up, then felt Tor’s hand on her ankle, as he said, “Lie down, little one. We are going to Pelbarigan. Lie down and look at the stars. Look. Do you see the curves of the great snake reaching across the south? If you watch long enough, you will see a shooting star stretch its light across the whole sky. But you can sleep if you want.”
Later she awoke again. The stars had all moved. Raran lay by her, and she realized that Tristal too lay asleep in the bow of the canoe, curled ahead of her. Tor stroked steadily behind her, and when she stirred, said, “Look again, little one. See? Above you is the crown of stars. There are eight of them, and their names are Ivi, Odu, Ictu, Nod, Efen, Assu, Mok, and Orau. You will learn them when you learn our star game.”
“Where are we?” she whispered.
“Somewhat south of Pelbarigan. Soon the sun will rise, and you will then only have to turn your head to see the towers of the great stone city where they will care for you far better than we can.”
“Tor.”
“Yes?”
“You have been working all night as well as all day?”
“No. It is play, Celeste. For any Shumai, to be out in the air, or under this heaven of stars, with friends, and traveling, is the true flame of life.”
“I don’t understand. It is all so strange.”
As if to add to the strangeness, in the dim and growing light, the long horn of Pelbarigan’s Rive Tower sounded, stretching mournfully toward them, then throwing itself out across the river again and again from each jutting promontory of the limestone bluffs. Tor took up the long bull’s horn he had left in the canoe and sounded a return, round and long, then resumed his paddling, as did Tristal, now roused and sighing once, in the bow.
Celeste tried to raise herself but lost interest. Tor turned the canoe around, slowly, so she could have a look at the city in the dawn, then continued north to where four guardsmen waited on the bank for them, eventually taking the craft and drawing it up onto the sandy landing slope. Ahroe was one of them.
“Ahroe,” said Tor. “This is Tristal. Where is Stel? He was right. This is Celeste. She is from the dome.”
“What? You knew?” Tristal said.
Tor laughed. “I’m afraid being outside has been too much for her. She is very sick. Can you care for her?”
Ahroe’s smile faded, and she sounded the notes on her side horn for more guardsmen. “Tor,” she said. “Why aren’t you a father? You must have paddled all night. From the dome? Amazing. You must tell us. Come to our place. We have a bed for you, and one for Tristal. Stel will feed you, and you can sleep. The guardsmen and I will take care of the girl. Celeste? Celeste will rest. We’ll give her a nest.” Stooping, she said, “Hello, Celeste. I am Ahroe. Welcome to Pelbarigan. You wil
l be fit again soon enough.”
Celeste cried out and held out her hands to Tor, and he knelt by her and lifted her up against him. “You mustn’t worry, chipmunk. They will take fine care of you. Better than we did. You will be inside again. I fear our treatment of you has not done you any good. Ahroe will watch over you. See? She will be like your mother. Tristal will be your brother. They have everything you need, not just a fire by a rock and a dirty furroll, with chuck stew to eat. Now, kiss me, and I will go take a rest. I don’t mind running all day and night, but this boat work makes my bottom sore. Come, kiss me.”
Celeste put her mouth up to his beard, but she didn’t know how to kiss. Tor chuckled and kissed her forehead, then let her back down. Then he stood and stretched, dusted his hands on his pants, and strode with Tristal toward the small house of Stel and Ahroe, which lay outside the walls, up toward the bluffs. Raran walked undulantly alongside the boy. Celeste turned her head, watching him, as the guardsmen lifted her onto a litter, picked her up, and walked toward the main gate, with Ahroe alongside, holding the girl’s hand.
IV
ZELLER sat at the control table. Eolyn stood nearby. He opened the switches to the electronic callers. “Comp 2, Comp 4,” he said, evenly.
“Yes, Principal Zeller.”
“Have you checked level-six storage for hydrocarbons?”
“Yes, Principal. There are few. We have piled them near the riser.”
The Dome in the Forest Page 5