It was deep dusk when they awoke and stretched. There was no sense in trying to travel by night, but they thought to look for water before settling down for further sleep. On their feet, peering through the twilight, they saw the last rays of Pia Sol dwindle behind the horizon. And then, suddenly and without warning, it happened.
One moment a faint tinge of sunset was at the edge of the sky. The next moment it had vanished. For scarcely a second the world was utterly dark. And then, as if someone had touched a master switch, the world sprang into light, into a blaze of brilliant and fantastically variegated colors. They both cried out, turned and turned to see around them. Everywhere, the same thing. Every one of the strange plants was pulsing and glowing with the light of its nodes; each one displaying one general class of color, but each color varying within its type. Here one saw orange shading into pink, pink into rose, rose into scarlet, scarlet into crimson; there one saw violet and lavender and aquamarine and turquoise and lapis lazuli. He had no words for all the colors and shades and tints, had not known that yellow and green possessed such infinite variety, that purple was not merely one purple but a hundred different purples, each one rich and luminous.
For hours and hours, thought of food and drink for gotten, Ran and Norna wandered on through the incredible luminescent forest of the Plain of Lights. This, then, was the “city” which Wild tradition had ascribed to the rorks — a guess no wilder or more erroneous than his own. She needed no explanation, a wonder was a wonder. But his own mind groped and sought, in the end coming up with nothing better than recollections of luminiferous bacteria found on the skin of certain sea creatures; and the cold, cold light of phosphorescent wood and water.
For endless ages this glory had been here, and no human eye ever saw it close before. It was worth hunger, thirst, discomfort; flight, cold, pain, and the fear of death. Hand in hand at first, arm in arm, later; at last, embracing, side by side, they walked on into Eden. It had been inevitable that, sooner or later, sometime on this flight together, flesh should join with flesh in the holy act of love. But they had been preoccupied with other things — simple survival — and their bodies had been taut with fright and cold. Presently, still dazed with visible joy, their faces turned to one another, and they kissed, and then kissed again. He spread the two pelts upon the ground. Some mild warmth seemed to emanate from the brilliant, light-giving plants as he uncovered her breasts and kissed them; and then, her arms around and her hands upon his back, he sank down upon and into her. And all the morning stars shouted together for joy.
• • •
For Norna the past had now ceased to exist and the future had yet to take shape. She was Ranny’s woman, now. It was all very natural and uncomplicated for her. But Lomar hardly felt that way. The natural exultan ce inevitable to the male who has been a woman’s first male existed side by side and somewhat apart from a growing but not particularly deep affection for her. Then, too, there was the question of what would happen to Norna when they got to the Guild Station. Could he keep her in his own quarters as his mistress? Surely she could not go and live among the shameless and squalid Tame Tocks! What would the Station’s attitude be; how would she be treated? For her to return alone to her own country now seemed impossible.
And, not urgently, not constantly, came the last question — and came again — and again: What about Lindel?
They had passed on with great reluctance through and from the Plain of Lights and up onto the more rolling hill country beyond it. The first night away, they could still see the wonders, like a table spread with jewels, from the distance; but after that, no more.
Rorks now began to appear more numerously, nesting in less cover and concealment than before, perhaps because no human feet were known by them to pass this way. The two of them continued to give wide berth to the creatures. Now and then a low, dull grumbling and clicking was heard from the somnolent things, but if they were ever noticed by them, they saw no signs of it. That is, no rork ever seemed to move more or “speak” more because of them. But once again, passing through the frostbitten and sered ranks of redweed, they began to have the feeling that they were being watched.
By Lomar’s calculations, inexact as they must be, he and Norna were just about at dead center in Rorkland. The next landmark, assuming that they passed near enough to see it, would be Hollow Rock; after that they could sooner or later expect to see Last Ridge up ahead of them. The storms and other bad weather that had beset them at the start were now seen no more, and a series of several days of calm, dry cold succeeded one another; the entire arc of the ascent and descent of Pia Sol clearly visible in a clear and cloudless sky.
In the shelter on Tiggy’s Hill, just before leaving it, Ran had noticed something half-buried in the dirt and rubbish of the floor. It was an old pikehead, dull for most of is edge, but sharp enough in one place to make him wonder if it had not been in process of being sharpened when some sudden alert (or slow drunk) had caused it to be dropped and forgotten. He groped and prodded and was rewarded with the find of the whetstone. Both had been popped by him, yawning, into his pockets, and had stayed there. He was not reminded of them until, during a pause for a rest on one crisp morning, he noticed a dead sapling on the ground which seemed just about the right size and weight for a pikestaff.
The work required to fit the wood into the socket was not considerable, and, while Norna, sitting with knees drawn up, looked on and laughed, he lunged and feinted with it as he had seen the Wild Tocks doing. And, in so doing, lost his footing, and tumbled, crying out in mock alarm, sliding down the slope of ground. He was scrambling to his feet with the aid of the staff when he heard her scream.
“Behind you — behind — kill it — kill it — !”
The rork was huge, and, somehow, he got the impression that it was very old. It squatted in its nest, leaning a bit to one side. He could see its flanks moving with the slow breath. Something shriveled and dirty clung about in folds, and the surface of its flesh where this tattered something met the body was sore and broken and oozing. The thing was shedding its skin.
With a movement so sudden that he felt his arms almost snap in their sockets, he raised the pike up above his head, holding it with both his hands. In another second he would have brought it down into that alien and fearful flesh before him — but that second never came. His motives were not clear to him — horrified fascination, perhaps, mingled with a measure of compassion for the now helpless creature — he refrained. Norna did not scream again, but he could hear her terrified whimper as the rork slowly, and surely painfully, lurching and scrabbling, turned itself around.
It smelled — pungently, and hideously unfamiliar. It resembled nothing he knew — and the nonresemblance was terrifying. It was not even to be identified with the supposedly harmless rork of the old 3Ds, for the yellow outlines of the mask were crumpled and distorted by the process of the shedding of the skin. The talons now digging into the ground with the weight of the body and the effort of turning were long and sharp and hideous. The noises coming from the thing had the quality of nightmare.
And yet he could not bring himself to plunge down the pike and then run for safety, knowing that safety was certain enough.
His flesh had been rigid while all this was going on. And then it shuddered and twisted and crawled, while the rork, finally “face” to face with him, made the old Tock tale come suddenly — frighteningly — shockingly true.
It spoke to him.
CHAPTER FIVE
The rork’s internal apparatus, vocal, thoracic, and otherwise, must of course have been vastly different from the human; or even the mammalian. The sounds rumbled, echoed, clicked, did things for which he had no names. He felt as though he were reliving the dream in which a rork had talked to him, would perhaps in another second awake. The fact that the sounds seemed to settle into words, words which he understood, increased this sensation, driving him into a kind of vertigo in which his very mind was imperiled, for the words were similar to tho
se of the dream.
Then, in a second, everything became real. There was a difference. The dream-rork had said, I kill. And the real rork … what was it saying?
Not kill.
Not.
Muscles twitching and jerking, but growing calmer, he lowered the pike. Behind and above him he heard Norna’s shuddering breath break off, heard her fall. He half-swerved, legs tensed to mount the slope. And realized that the rork’s words might not have been addressed to him.
Two men were standing there, clad in what he presently realized were cast-off rorkskins, clubs in their hands. They were men as certainly as he was a man, nothing at all alien in the lineaments of their bodies. It was their faces that were utterly different, and the difference was not physical. Their eyes did not look at him as he knew his eyes to be looking at them. Their mouths were not fixed in the same lines, nor their cheeks, nor their brows. It was nothing that he could have been able to describe, that difference, but it was instantly obvious, and infinitely significant.
He knew that these men had never grown up among other men than themselves.
And he knew now what had been following him.
One of the men, looking at him with an expression which might have been serene — or might have been some thing so infinitely alien that he, Ran Lomar, had no conception of it — looked at him and said, “Not kill.” It was a human voice, but it was a quite strange voice, and there seemed somehow to be something of the rork in it. It meant that Lomar would not kill the rork, that the rork would not kill Lomar and the two new men would not kill each other. It was not a warning, not a plea. It was a statement.
And Lomar believed it.
He put down his pike, head first into the ground, “No …” he said, his voice unsure, his mind certain. “We won’t kill … Let me … I must go up to her….” He gestured at Norna, still unconscious. One of them reached out a hand, he took it, was helped up the slope. His knees stopped trembling. He knelt beside her.
“Dirl sick?” the man asked. And he made a commiserating, comforting sound with his lips, such as one makes to a child. To a baby.
To a baby!
Lomar’s head snapped with the shock of it. He knew in that moment of realization who these men were and why they were different. He cradled her head in his lap and patted her face. The other man made the same reassuring, regretful sound. “Poor dirl,” he said. Behind them, the old rork groaned painfully, grunted, settled down again into its nest. And Norna opened her eyes.
It was at first hard for them all to understand one another. Lomar’s vocabulary was a totally human one, and in this respect vastly larger than the two men’s. But they could speak the language of the rork, and often did, until they realized that he could not, then ceased. Some of their talk was in human tongue, though infinitely corroded — with effort, he could make it out. But they seemed to have words of their own, not rork-talk, yet unknown to him. Yulloa, for example, had something to do with food … or eating … or hunger. He could not quite understand what, though. And ung-guoa-din — or something like that — had to do with the land itself, or traveling over it; but however often they repeated it, gesturing, it never made sense to Lomar.
The taller of the pair — he called himself Tun — dimly remembered his own origins. There was a woman and she had had another, smaller child, one at her breast. And there was a man. A fire. He had gotten lost. He cried into the night and the darkness, and the night and the darkness had cried back at him. Terror, fright, wandering, and the thousand wailing voices of the night. And hunger. Then came a something out of the blackness and picked him up and took him away. Fed him, warmed him, with its own body. And in the daylight, played with him.
The other man of the two had been born — and with simple, vivid gestures which admitted of no misconception, he described the process of human birth — here in Rorkland, and knew nothing else. His mother? He pointed to the earth itself, calmly, with the slightest of shrugs. His father? His hand gestured, distantly.
Lomar thought of the difference between the fact and the fiction. Here were the “stolen children” of the old Tock legends. The lost infants. In the darkness no human ear could tell the sound of a human child from that of the crybabies. But — the rorks could tell! Far from having been eaten, the lost infants had been adopted. Far from having met with cruelty, they had met with kindness. He contrasted their treatment with that accorded the young rork captured by men, and the contrast made him shudder.
From time to time the old rork nearby groaned its pain and its discomfort; and the two rork-men spoke to it soothingly, caressed it where the touch would not be painful. Repulsive, frightful as it was to Lomar, the rork was obviously regarded with the utmost affection by the two other men. Evidently the relationship between them passed beyond mere symbiosis, although just what that relationship might consist of was more than he could guess at. He recalled his mother, on Old Earth, playing with a kitten…. No, it afforded little parallel.
If he was bewildered, Norna was terrified. She clung to him, understanding nothing of what he was trying to tell her. There was a rork! A rork! Nearer than she had ever been to a rork before! — nearer than anyone she had ever heard of had been to a rork … and lived. She wouldn’t look at it, covered her ears rather than have to hear it, trembled, trembled, trembled.
It was no wonder to her that the rork could speak; everyone in Wild Tockland knew that they could talk; it did not make them a bit less frightening. On the contrary.
“Leaves us run away,” she whispered, over and over. “Oh, leaves us run and hide … hide … Ranny …”
The presence of the two newcomers did nothing to reassure her. They were as naked as not, they touched the rork, spoke the rork’s language, wore the rork’s cast-off skin. How could one know that they were, in fact, not men at all? not real men — perhaps they were really rork! assuming for the moment and for some evil purpose, the form and shape of men. Were-rork! She did not know the phrase and only guessed at the concept. Lomar could see another Tock legend growing before his eyes.
Nor were matters made any easier when the smaller of the two (his name, as clearly as Lomar could master it, was N’kof) most matter-of-factly propositioned her. Her shuddering refusal, he received as calmly as he had made the offer. One proffered a drink to a guest, the guest declined the offer, it would be impolite as the host to notice the impoliteness — inexplicable as one might find it — of the refusal.
In the end they did go away; that is, Lomar and Norna and Tun did. Lomar had some notion that the departure was intended to relieve the old rork of the discomfort of their presence; but he was not sure. Communication between them was improving, but it was still largely a sometime thing as far as clarity went. N’kof was to remain behind until the process of casting the skin was completed. He and Tun attempted to explain why this should be so, but whether it was to guard the almost-helpless creature from physical harm, or merely to keep it company, or because there was some especial tie between them, either they could not make him know or they did not care to try.
So the three of them headed north, where only two had been bound before. Tun made no comment on Norna’s fear of him, but he walked on the other side of Lomar and at some little distance away; nor did he thereafter ever come closer to Norna or speak to her. The pace was slower now; it seemed quite clear to Lomar that the main reason for hurry no longer existed. The weather was even benign, and Tun knew of so many places where food was to be found — here, a cache of edible nuts; there, a hollow tree or a cave with fungus; a pond whose frozen waters, pierced, yielded fish — that they were hungry no longer.
They walked more slowly, they paused to eat, they paused to admire (or at least examine) views. But most of all they talked. There was much to talk about, but all of it was difficult, yet gradually became less so. And every hour that passed as they paced up snowy hills and strolled along glades lined with frost-browned redwing plants, under huge and ancient trees, Ran Lomar gave thanks in his heart tha
t he had (for whatever reason) not killed the rork as it lay helpless before him. To this and to this alone he probably owed his life and Norna’s and the presence and guidance of Tun. For this man was no philosophical pacifist, no nobly savage vegetarian. His club cracked the skull of a rip which had once ventured too near — Norna clinging, shrieking, to the arm in which Ran held his pike — and more than once, skillfully thrown, brought down game.
Counting at first on their common humanity, Ran was a while in realizing that it was not this at all which made Tun not his enemy. In every way the latter regarded himself as closer to the rork than to other, strange men. It was because Lomar had not killed it when he could that Tun was now — if not his friend, then his companion. Ran reflected on the old principle that “a child raised among wolves will be a wolf” — not, of course, physically, but — in a way — mentally. How far did this hold trae of Tun and his like? He walked erect and not on all fours…. For one thing, Tun was not alone in being fostered by rorks. How many such “adoptions” there were or had ever been, neither he nor Ran Lomar had any idea. Nor did either know how old the oldest such foster child had ever been. But obviously some of them had been old enough to talk.
The small wanderlings, then, did not come altogether as so many tabulae rasae among the rork, and their human qualities and attributes and attitudes would have been in some measure maintained by the other humans they found in rorkland. In some measure … it would take years of close scientific testing and observation to determine even approximately how large that measure was. True, and inevitably, these people had been influenced by the rork among whom they grew up. But, just as a ray of light passing through a transulcent substance emerges tinged and colored by that substance, so the influences of the rork must have been transmuted by the vastly different nature of the human material.
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