And she leaped past him as if he were not there, as if he were a ghost. He whirled in dismay to catch her, to grab her.
And she was gone.
Panglor's knees trembled, his eyesight wavered, his lungs had trouble holding air. His mind reeled drunkenly; thoughts and emotions fired like a thousand sparks, sputtering and short-circuiting his nervous system. "Peep!" he wailed. He began to sway, began to lose his balance. He swayed backward, forward, backward . . . and then tumbling, toward the sea.
The water never touched him. Sunlight whirled around him like an enormous wheel, and then it went out, and he was submerged in blackness. That lasted for several heartbeats, and then into the blackness came a reddish glow that at first only brushed at his senses, then slowly grew stronger. There were sounds, as of rushing water, rushing air, rushing particles . . . He felt that he was still tumbling, twirling slowly, and he perceived that he was falling into a vast, crimson-glowing halo in the darkness. He was frightened and dazed, and for a terrifying moment he thought that he was finished and that this was the limbo he had always feared. And then he heard voices.
Voices?
Yes—at least three separate voices echoed faintly around him. Each one came from a different quarter; none sounded human. One was high and whiny; another was thick as gravel and faint as a whisper; the third was a thrumming of strings. And now there was a fourth . . . and it was . . . LePiep.
He tried to localize LePiep's whistle, but a sudden cacophony of winds and voices assaulted his ears, confusing him. He strained dizzily to recapture LePiep's voice, but it was lost in the darkness. He was still falling, falling endlessly toward the cozy gloom of a fire-lighted cavern, which he could never quite reach. He felt a rush of curiosity . . . and he squinted to peer around in this strange nonplace, and what he saw was LePiep looking up at a strange, gangling creature dressed in a robe. It was LePiep's curiosity that he felt.
Frustration exploded in his mind. He tried to reach out to her, to move toward her, to do something, but all that he could manage was to struggle futilely against an unyielding emptiness. He was invisible to LePiep and this other creature. He shouted for their attention, and when that failed, screamed. His vision of the two darkened, and he cried and pounded his fists in fury.
And suddenly he fell silent. Awestruck, he quit worrying for a moment about LePiep, or about himself. Clarity came to his thoughts. None of this made sense, at least not as he usually thought of it. But did that matter? No. What mattered was that certain things were happening; and whether he understood them or not, whether it was the planet playing tricks on him or someone else playing tricks, it would do no good to yell and become frantic—because look how much good that had done him so far.
So. He should keep watch and be ready to move when the tricks turned his way. Maybe he would awaken, and things would be different.
But in the meantime, he should accept.
Strangely, he found that not so hard to do—to remain calm, open, and understanding. But his head felt large and a little spacey, and he felt a heightened sense of geometry, of perspective, though visually there was little for him to see. LePiep and the other were gone; there was a reddish haze in the darkness, and a sensation of walls surrounding him, and then a pale outline in scarlet light. He walked, and after a time the outline resolved itself into a cave opening, and he passed through and found himself standing on high, solid ground, staring across a curiously jumbled-looking garden under a lemon-lime sky. See? he thought dazedly—you just be patient and everything works out. He set out along a narrow path leading down into the garden.
What he found was even more unusual than he expected. The "garden" was set in a basinlike formation, and it consisted of oddly shaped and textured shrubs that looked very much like carved stone. Approaching, he saw that the tallest were chin high, and the shortest, knee high. They looked rather like enormous mushrooms, carved out of stone by waters or winds of vanished ages. Each was distinctive, and most were so thoroughly and delicately chiseled that they seemed to have actual branches and leaves that bobbed and twisted as he passed. Frowning, he brushed one of the larger shrubs with his fingertips. A branch almost imperceptibly tilted to meet his touch. It was greenish-brown stone to his eye, but to his fingertips it felt cool, moist, and resilient. For an instant, he swore that it was whispering to him. "Rock-plants, huh?" he muttered. He shook his head and moved on. The rock-plants quivered as he passed, responding to his presence with gentle, rippling movements.
The garden was large, and the path wound through it with many twists and turns. The air was sweet and the sun bright, and despite his concern about his companions and his ship, Panglor gradually relaxed. If one could summon forth such peaceful surroundings, perhaps it was worth a certain amount of bewilderment. Farther ahead, the path hooked sharply to the right, around a queer twin-peaked muffin of a bush, and he followed it, sighing.
He stopped. The blood drained from his face. The next bush was a smooth-capped polyp a meter high. Stretched out across the top, limp and still, was LePiep. Her wings were partially unfolded, her eyes open but vacant. She did not stir at his presence. For a moment Panglor could not move, could not speak, could not breathe . . . could not tell if she was alive or dead. She was so still, so limp, he could not see even the tiny undulation of her breath.
The paralysis left him and he choked and moved forward, fighting anger and tears. She was dead—he had lost his only friend. On his third step, as though he had passed an invisible barrier, he met a wave of misery, of despair.
His heart trembled with uncertainty—then soared. "Peep!" he cried and rushed forward.
LePiep lifted her head listlessly, radiating a new wave of despair. Suddenly Panglor understood. She had given him up for lost and lain down in surrender, to die—just as once before, on Areax V, he had found her near death from loneliness, after her escape and flight from the pet dealer who had owned her.
Panglor halted beside the stone bush and reached for the ou-ralot. His hand passed through her, as through a mirage. LePiep looked about in confusion, glancing directly at him, but though she obviously sensed something, still she did not see him. His heart pounding, Panglor edged sideways around the rock-plant and LePiep. Suddenly she scrambled to her feet, radiating recognition and tormented excitement. Panglor circled farther around.
"Hiiieee! Hyolll!" she shrieked, spotting him. She sprang at him with such force that she knocked him backward into the next plant. "Hruuuuu!" she cried, squirming in his arms with anguished pleasure. Joy and love flooded Panglor's heart, shimmering back and forth between the two, like a small sun.
"Peep . . . babe . . . Peep . . . " he mumbled, hugging her desperately. The ou-ralot clung to him, quaking with exhaustion. He stroked her over and over, soothing her, calming his own ragged nerves. Eventually they settled down and regarded each other silently, gratefully. They were both exhausted, but they would make it—together. "Never let you go again, babe," Panglor muttered, and LePiep warbled in reply. Cradling her carefully in his arms, Panglor set off again along the path. The change in his heart was enormous—the warmth, the renewed care, the hope for the future. Concern for Alo.
Alo! And where was the ship?
"Kroool," said LePiep soberly, reflecting his feelings, even as he cut off the thoughts to keep them from muddying his mind. LePiep emoted hopeful worry. He scratched her head and walked silently on through the rock-garden.
On the far side of the basin the path angled upward into torturously ridged terrain. The path remained visible through the desolation, though, and Panglor shrugged and followed it. For perhaps an hour he trudged up one ridge and down another, muttering to LePiep, sometimes enjoying a wide view of the land of carved rock, and sometimes having no view at all except looming stone walls.
From the peak of a ridge he spotted—far to one side, half buried in a gully—something that glittered and that appeared to be the wreckage of an unfamiliar spacecraft. He continued along the trail, hoping to get a better
view from further on, but he did not see it again. LePiep clucked as he considered the puzzle, walking on. Could it have been a human ship? Deerfield? He thought not; it had appeared too odd. Further on, he encountered pieces of actual hardware scattered along the path. He noted a guidance vernier, an acceleration recorder (of different vintage from the vernier), and a sensor scope of entirely unfamiliar design. He inspected each object closely and slipped one of the pieces, a small valve, into his pocket. Then he moved on, wondering, Is this some elaborate hoax?
The next object he encountered startled him somewhat more; it was an upright canister, with odd plumbing attachments on its sides, perched atop a rock. It was the coffee brewer from The Fighting Cur's galley. Panglor stared at it without comprehension, but with carefully restrained emotion. It hardly seemed likely that anyone had dismantled the Cur in his absence, so . . . just accept, Balef . . . nothing was beyond belief now, though a great deal remained beyond understanding.
He thought of Alo. Where did she fit into all this? And what was she doing?
LePiep became agitated and fretful when he thought of Alo. He stroked the ou-ralot between the wings, calming her, and kept moving. Fifty meters further on, he rounded a bluff. The Fighting Cur stood just beyond a promontory of rock, bold against the sky. "I'll be damned," he whispered.
Then he saw Alo. The girl was pacing to and fro atop the promontory. "There she is. Peep!" he hissed, feeling a rush of confused emotions, some of them more than a little scary. But damn, it was good to see that girl—his passenger, his crew.
The ou-ralot peered up at him, reflecting his joy and adding puzzlement. Didn't she see Alo?
As they drew closer to the Cur, Panglor saw that the promontory was not just an oddity of the landscape; it was a long incline, a ramp that ended precisely flush with the top of the ship's cargo hull, near the hatch. Someone—the planet?—had built them a gangway.
Panglor hurried up the ramp with LePiep. Now where had Alo gotten to? He called . . . no answer. He entered the ship. She wasn't inside either; but everything else looked normal enough—including the brewer, which was in its usual place in the galley. "Okay, buddy," he said to LePiep, after searching the ship. "Let's go look outside—but you're staying with me, you hear?" His anxiety was rising again. If strange things were going to keep happening, he wanted above all not to lose LePiep again.
From the cargo hull, he gazed in all directions. The terrain appeared much as it had originally, except for the promontory and the fact that the sun, pale green now, was in the sky. He yelled, but got no answer. Time passed. LePiep remained quiet, attentive at first, and then dozing in his lap. A cluster of pastel-orange clouds moved across the sky.
Yawning, LePiep raised her head and peered about. Panglor stroked her unhappily, keeping a watchful eye around him. Suddenly the ou-ralot hooted, jumped up joyfully, and bounded out of his lap. "LePiep!" he bellowed. "No!" She was already halfway down the promontory. He started running, but was already left far behind.
LePiep streaked to the foot of the promontory and darted behind a massive boulder. Panglor stopped, gasping, hoping she would appear on the other side. She did not. "Peep!" he cried in anguish, smacking his fist into his open hand. Agonized moments went by.
"Hoop . . . hoop . . . " he heard distantly.
"LePiep!" he yelled.
Alo appeared from behind the boulder—carrying LePiep. Panting, Panglor ran to meet them. "There you are!" Alo cried. She was trudging wearily, and she looked angry. Her eyes were puffy, as though she had been crying. LePiep whistled tentatively, blinking back and forth between the two, radiating a hopeful warmth. "Where have you been?" Alo snapped.
Panglor stared at her in astonishment. "Looking for you!" he roared. "I've been looking all over this goddamn planet for you!" With an effort, he caught his breath and looked at Alo appraisingly. She was disheveled, and obviously tired, but appeared unharmed. "You okay?" he asked gruffly. He hated to admit it, but she really was a welcome sight.
"I'm all right," she said irritably. "Here—so's LePiep. You want to take her? I've been carrying her for a couple of hours." She hoisted the ou-ralot into Panglor's arms and continued plodding up the promontory toward the ship.
"Couple of hours?" Panglor said, keeping pace. "You couldn't have had her for a couple of hours. She was here with me, and she just ran off a minute ago to meet you—she spotted you before I did."
Alo snorted, not meeting his eyes. As they stepped onto the cargo hull, she said reproachfully, "You were gone all night. I've been back here twice, and I waited for you all night. When you didn't come back, I went looking. Found LePiep near a big vapor-pool, like the one we saw before—she was all upset—and I came back with her. But I had trouble finding my way."
Panglor stared at her, squinting. "This is a very strange place, Captain Puglor," she said. Panglor nodded and looked around. The sun was moving, edging along the horizon. How was anyone supposed to measure a day here—or anything else, for that matter?
Alo entered the ship and he followed. Only after sealing the hatch did he let LePiep down again. He was ravenous. "Want to eat?" he said. He opened a food compartment in the galley and blinked. "You took enough food."
"You were gone a long time!" Alo retorted hotly. She really was angry and he couldn't understand why.
"I told you—I was looking for you. I got lost myself, and so did LePiep. I saw the two of you together—long time ago, before I found LePiep—near some big ocean. But you didn't hear me when I called."
Alo frowned at him, her forehead wrinkling. She shook her head in disagreement, in bewilderment. Their eyes met.
"Gah!" Panglor said abruptly. He dug into his food, and when he had finished eating, he leaned back against the counter. Alo regarded him carefully and made herself a mug of brew. Panglor puckered his lips thoughtfully and made his own mug of brew.
LePiep, curled up on the counter, watched them both with sleepy eyes and reflected mingled feelings of wounded pride, bewilderment, and puzzled hope.
* * *
Once they had gone over both of their stories, it was clear that they were hopelessly inconsistent. Alo's time sense of their separation was far different from Panglor's, and although she reported spending a good deal of time near a gas-pond, watching the singing aerial crystals, she insisted that she had never seen any body of water. And the only time she had seen LePiep was just before her final return to the ship. She had been at the gas-pond then.
Panglor recalled his near-misses with LePiep—the times he had seen her at a distance, emoting joy or distress for no obvious reasons, and the way she had lain in utter despair atop the rock-plant, not seeing him until he was at just the correct angle. Strange images. But some of them tied together, if you didn't mind a few distortions of reality. He could almost discern a kind of logic to what was happening. "I think I see what we've got here." He hoisted LePiep up to gaze at her eyeball to eyeball. The ou-ralot hummed warmly. She made him feel confident; she even almost made him feel warmly toward Alo.
"Sure," Alo said sardonically. "Everything's clear."
"Sure, it's clear," he said. He lowered the ou-ralot and studied Alo thoughtfully. "What we've got here is a kind of system of mirages. You see from one direction, and I see from another—and we don't see the same things at all. I see you, standing by some lake or ocean, and you say you were somewhere else at the time, and anyway you never saw water, you only saw the gas-pond. LePiep is lost, looking for me, and she runs right by me, looking overjoyed. The ship—the ship, for chrissakes, vanishes when we turn our backs on it."
"Wait a minute—"
"Wait what—can't you see it?" he said impatiently. "That's it, it's got to be! Something is distorting time and space—like a continuous mirage, only instead of bending light it bends all of reality." He closed his eyes and envisioned an enormously complex system of refractions, twists in reality, convolutions in the structure of space itself, perhaps. What a thought—but why not? If manmade foreshortening gen
erators could stress space in a single dimension, couldn't natural forces create even stranger and more complex effects?
"Pangly, maybe we hallucinated—"
"Nah," he said, shaking his head. He knew he had seen what he had described. Besides . . .
He remembered something and groped in his pocket. His fingers found a small metal object, and he pulled it out for Alo to see. She squinted. "Valve component from a spaceship," he said. "I picked it up near the place where I saw the brewer."
Alo examined it skeptically, turning it over in her hand; but her eyes were wide. She jumped up, went into the control cabin, and returned a moment later with a sparkling violet crystal the size of an orange. "I picked that off a bush," she said. "No mirage."
Panglor studied it, thinking. "True, mirages can't account for all of it," he admitted. "But assuming that there are real objects here—like this, and like us—what's happening among us all is being affected by—by—"
He stopped to scratch his head. "Okay. Look. It's nothing to get upset about—it's just that the physical laws have been discontinued here, at least the laws as we know them."
"Revoked, huh?"
"Well, suspended, anyway. Remember the way we landed? And did you see that sun?"
"Ho! Red, with yellow stripes," Alo said. "It was kind of nice."
Panglor was startled for a moment, not remembering any striped sun, but he shrugged. "Right. But the question is, can we get out of this place?"
"Mmmm," said Alo thoughtfully. Suddenly, catching Panglor by surprise, she crossed over to him, hooked an arm around his neck, and kissed him on the mouth. Then she jumped back, grinning.
Panglor grunted, dazed. His mind fogged, cleared, and fogged again. Why had she done that; why was she grinning like that? And why was LePiep up and prancing on the countertop, whistling and emoting happy thrills? What the hell was going on? He felt his face glowing red.
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