Sensitive

by Dan Donoghue

  The restless night, and the unforgiving jungle had told on his strength, and, though it was only midafternoon, he searched his back trail for kerries, and all round, and, finding none, went looking for a place to sleep. A quick sweep of the hill top discovered a small cave in a rocky place, where he could lie, and close the entrance with sticks that would protect him to some extent, and give him sufficient warning of attack in any case. Some broken branches made an entanglement so that he felt safe enough to crawl into the sleeper-tent. After a last sweep round, he relaxed, and slept.

  The lowering sun slanting in through the barricade, woke him. He lay for a few moments remembering, and orienting himself. He was hungry, but the comfort of the sleeper-tent held him a few moments more. His gaze travelled around the walls of the cave. With the light on them, they looked remarkably even of surface, almost as though the rocks were fitted. He turned to look at the back wall. Light splashed on it, but it was not the wall that caught his attention, but an edge of material curving up out of the soil of the floor. He squirmed out of the sleeper-tent, gripped it, and pulled. It came away easily. He held a small shallow bowl made of some clay-like material, and glazed in a fine shade of blue-black. There was absolutely no doubt that it was an artefact. He looked at the cave again, and saw the clogged hole in the roof, and suddenly realised that he was in an ancient fireplace.

  Outside, he brushed as much of the dirt as he could from the bowl, and then washed it carefully with water from his water-bottle. On the base was a tiny crest showing a kerry rearing up to strike at an eagle-like bird that was neither of Earth or, as far as he knew, of High America.

  It was still possible that the bowl had come from some human expedition but the fireplace certainly had not. He looked across at the other hilltops, and realised that they formed a squared pattern. The plain might once have been the site of a settlement. If so, something must have happened to destroy the vegetation, and allow erosion to carry off the soil between protected areas. Could it be, that a town had once stood here, and some catastrophe had destroyed it, leaving only the foundations of the largest buildings to protect the soil in places, and all the rest bared of vegetation with the soil killed. Blast bombs could do such. For a while, his purpose forgotten, Wolf hurried from hilltop to hilltop. Most were mere flat areas of broken rock, but one, a little higher than the rest, had projections that promised interest. The projections could have been the base of walls, and there were definitely three stone steps, set wider apart than would have been human ones.

  There was not much else, however. To speed things he swept with his mind. Nothing. Then, on sudden impulse, he directed his mind down. Under him, the ground was hollow. There was something there. He searched. He could see only vaguely through the stone, but in places it was so thin that he got an impression of a squared room. A thickness rising to the rock beneath his feet gave him the clue he needed to find the entrance. He had to shift a number of fallen slabs, and scrape dirt away, but the outline of a hatch came clear. Then he had to locate the catch. There was nothing above ground, but his searching mind found a strangeness in one side. He stamped on it to no effect, but when he lifted one of the rocks to his full height, and brought it crashing down on the spot, there was a sharp crack, and the hatch swung a little way down, then broke off completely, and fell with a series of bumps into the darkness. A puff of stale, sickly sweet smelling air lifted dust about his feet.

  He hurriedly set his blaster to bright light, and shone it into the hole. A flight of steps led down. He descended. At the bottom was the heavy stone hatch on the crushed, and scattered bones of some creature lying there. He bent, and tried to pick one up. It crumbled under the slight pressure of his grip, and poured like powder through his fingers. A couple of thin lines of corroded material that might once have been metal mingled with the bone dust.

  With the blaster held high, Wolf surveyed the room. There was the smell of darkness about him, the smell of stale air, and the silence of long, long night. Dust lay thickly, disguising the detail of the objects that cluttered the floor, but two skeletons on a raised platform in the middle of the room were horribly conspicuous.

  He went to them, leaving dark footprints in the dust of ages. They were strangely similar to human skeletons, and equally strangely dissimilar. The main difference was in the bone structure of the chest, and pelvis. A great breast bone protruded from the neck, and curved in semicircular blade to the bottom of the rib cage. About ten centimetres below that was a point where two other blades, supporting the legs swept up to converge and link, forming a sort of triangular base for the creature that must have held it rather stiffly upright. Arms and leg bones were similar to human, even down to a five fingered hand, and a five toed foot. However, the whole shape of the being must have been bird-like with the far greater dimension running from front to back, and the arms and legs on the sides. The neck was long in comparison with a human, and the supporting back bone structure much larger. The face was narrow to suit the body structure, but it was backed by a great swelling cranium that must have enclosed a massive brain—greater in proportion to body size than was a human's.

  The skeletons were lying side by side on the platform with inside arms linked, and outside ones resting across the great breast bones with boney fingers intertwined.

  The great hollow eye sockets stared up through the rims of grime, up to the roof of stone, and on to what star or heaven. Where were these beings now? Wolf had been brought up in no set religious beliefs. The Out-people believed that man lived on the top of a chain of being. When he died, his body returned to the bottom of the chain and provided sustenance for the lowest form of life. Similarly, his spirit went back into the great cycle of spirit, and mingled, and spread, just as his body mingled and spread through a million new life forms. Such a belief denied identity after death, but Wolf could not help but feel that this death pact in body must somewhere be paralleled in spirit. He stood for many minutes gazing down, strangely moved. Here was a despair and a heroism that reached across an age and more, and touched the core of his being.

  Slowly, he turned away, and, as he did so, his light fell upon a smaller platform on which rested the pathetic skeleton of what had once been a child. A thin bladed knife of some corrosion proof metal lay along the breast bone. The child had been killed, probably in its sleep, then the parents had settled down, side, by side, to die, in some ancient tragedy that had destroyed this city, changed the face of the country all about, and apparently wiped these people from the face of the planet.

  A shiver ran down Wolf's spine. He felt like an intruder in a sacred place, an unwelcome witness to a private sorrow. There were many things about that he would have liked to examine, but he stood in awe of the dead, and he could not rob them of the possessions they had kept so long. Let others disturb their peace if they liked, he would not.

  In turning to leave, he saw still another pattern of bones. This was of a different creature completely, but not unknown. It was obviously the skeleton of a kerry. What was a kerry doing in this place of death? He looked closer. One of the bones was broken, a rib bone, just behind the front leg. The kerry too had been killed. Had it come ravaging into the cellar when the hatch was open, and been killed, or, had it, too, been slain as a last kindness? Had it been a pet? Had kerries been brought to this land by colonising people, and had they gone wild when the colony failed? Were their presence the reason why there were no large animals left on the planet? It seemed probable.

  With such speculation in his mind, Wolf climbed the stairs into the evening light. With head and shoulders out, he felt hot breath that made his neck muscles bunch and crawl, and spun to look into the great yellow eyes of a kerry only centimetres away. Already he was falling, dropping back into the darkness, his right hand holding the blaster to dazzle the attacker, his left desperately swinging the lever to maximum kill.

  The light went out, leaving him blinded. He hit floor and sprang, rolling to the right, sweeping with his mind while his eyes
were useless. Nothing! Rapidly his vision cleared. He climbed shakily to his feet, and brushed the powder of the long dead from his clothes, while his heart eased its painful thudding, and the fear drained like cold water from his body, taking the strength of his legs with it.

  Then he took a couple of deep breaths, and mind-swept the surface. The kerry was gone. Cautiously, he mounted the stairs, unwilling, for once, to trust the evidence of his senses. The kerry was truly gone. His questing mind found it with a companion on the far side of the hill hidden in another pile of stones.

  Why had it not killed him? It could have lifted his head from his shoulders with one swipe of its paw, or it could have leaned slightly forwards, and bitten through his head, as a boy bites an apple.

  He had made a mistake. He had been careless. There was no excuse whatever for that. He had deserved to die, and had been spared only by the incomprehensible behaviour of the animal. That was not the way of nature. There seemed to be a shadow of fate upon him, but fate was a fickle ally, and seldom a friend to the careless.

  After a last look down at the darkness that hid the lonely dead, Wolf rolled a couple of great rocks to give them back the privacy he had invaded, and looked to his own resting place. There was little time to find one, and his confidence was still shaken. The first hill was not far back. He decided to make for it to use the old fireplace again.

  He set off with the kerries initially taking up a similar station to that of those of the previous day. But then a strange change took place. Before he was half way back to the hill, the animals had loped around ahead of him, and stopped, openly threatening his path. They met him, defiant, crouched, snarling. He approached carefully, sweeping about for signs of others that might lie in ambush. There was none. He got closer. They held their ground, their minds sharp with the anticipation of blood. He shot first one, then the other, reluctantly, wondering. They had not killed him when they could have done so with ease. What process of thought or instinct had so suddenly changed them into vicious killers?

  He stood for a few minutes looking down at the magnificent bodies, then he shrugged, and hurried on. This was a new world with new animals, and new laws. In time he would learn them. Once again he killed a couple of the bird-like diks to provide his meal, and it was quite late before he finished it. There were no more kerries in the vicinity, and he settled once more behind his barricade of sticks, but sleep did not come easily, and he lay a long time staring up into the darkness overhead, wondering on the people of the bones, and the kerries that shared their tombs.

  For most of next day he travelled quickly, unhampered by the attentions of the beasts. Towards evening, however, he began to lose the use of his mind-sweep. Each time he opened his mind, the power burst in, and threatened to overwhelm it. Each time he found it harder to shut it out again. Harder to forsake the pleasure, and accept the pain, for now there was a new aspect to the thing. The mere normal feelings of his body became uncomfortable, even his breathing began to take on the aspect of a painful task after he had bathed for a while in the glow of the power.

  He had left the eroded plain, and had climbed a low range of hills. As he descended into a wide, shallow valley which carried a winding river bordered by more jungle, two more kerries slipped into the now familiar station behind him. As had the others, they merely followed, not stalking, making no effort to hide or ambush.

  Wolf risked a quick glance at their minds, and found them unexcited. The effect on his own was such, however, that he determined not to use it again except in an emergency. It forced him to go much slower, to cover much more territory in his search for Leeli Pa'Lar, and made his descent into the valley more difficult. Night caught him in the jungle still trying to find a suitable crossing.

  The kerries had become invisible as soon as he had entered the tangle of growth, and he was forced to climb high into a tree, and tie himself into an uncomfortable fork. To make matters worse it rained, and a wind got up, and set his high roost swaying.

  Morning found him stiff and sore. The jungle, by the edge of the water was desperately thick, and interwoven with the debris of past floods. In places, he moved only about fifty metres in an hour. Always, when he broke through to see the water, it flowed wide and deep. When half the morning had gone, he was faced with the choice of using his mind, or swimming the river, and risking the fish. He chose to use his mind, and found a ford easily enough, but it took almost ten minutes of determined effort to close it again, and almost an hour before his body was back to normal.

  Knowing where the ford was, however, allowed him to move in a wide semicircle back from the worst of the jungle, and by mid-day he was again approaching the river. Just after he first heard the sound of the water on the stones of the ford, he broke suddenly onto a game trail, the first he had encountered on High America. He bent to examine the ground. Kerries had passed along it since the rain of the night, and it had been crossed by smaller animals, but it looked as though kerries had made it.

  The ford was a great shelf of rock, carved by the furious water into a fantastic lace-work of narrow, roaring, gutters, and blue-black, rock islands, matted and woven with the giant logs of a thousand raging floods, on which soil had gathered and seeds had grown. Wolf crossed with careful steps hearing the hungry roar of death below, and feeling the shiver of its fury invading his feet.

  On the far side, there was a great drift of timber through which he had to crawl. There, snagged to a great splinter on the broken end of a log, hung a thin ribbon of pale pink material, so light and fragile, that, when he picked it off the log, he could not detect its weight. Leeli had passed that way.

  For a couple of hours, he searched back and forth through the timber and the immediate jungle. Then he could only conclude that she had gone on. How she could have travelled so far, amazed him. That she could have gone further was almost beyond belief.

  As he came out of the jungle on the lower slopes of the northern side of the valley, two new kerries joined him. These, however, did not follow, but took up station one on either side. It was as though he had entered a new area, and a new relation.

  Up over the ridge they escorted him, and down onto a new plain—a different feature this. He had been crossing a series of ranges, too low to be called mountains, rather too high to be mere hills, separated by broad, flat-bottomed, valleys, each carrying a jungle bordered river, and each flowing into the east. Now, he entered a vast plain, almost unwatered except for some thin lines of greener vegetation that promised streams, where the trees were widely scattered, and the grass was relatively short. It had the look of dryness, and heat, with only vague touches of blue beyond the shimmering air to mark the farther side. He looked towards the west. Always there had been high mountains there. Now there was only a low line of hills indistinct in the haze. To the east there were more hills, but these seemed gapped or solitary, and even more remote. The power was stronger, suddenly. He could feel it like a bright light through closed eyelids.

  Wolf scanned the plain for any sign of Leeli. Nothing moved on its surface except the waves of heated air. He wondered again how she had managed to travel so far through such hostile country. On sudden impulse, he turned and began to retrace his steps. Immediately, the kerries blocked his path with menace. When he turned back, they fell in beside him, benign once more. He turned to the right, the animal on that wide pressed in closer, the one on the left fell back slightly. He swung to the left. That animal moved in, while its mate fell back. He turned back, and they again blocked him. He turned again and walked, as close as he could, equidistant from each kerry. He was heading north, north-east. Somehow, they were linked to the power, but not, it seemed, as masters, but more as dogs—sheep dogs. He thought back to the expedition with Cort. Kerries had stalked them on the way south. They had not been worried on the way home. They had guided Leeli Pa'Lar along the best route, possibly an ancient trail used by the people of the cellar. The people and the kerries were linked. Were the people and the power? If so, what was
its purpose? He shook his head. He didn't like to associate the two. One was heroic tragedy; the other was treacherous, malevolent.

  It seemed that, if he continued in the right direction, the kerries would not hurt him. It would be unwise to trust them too greatly, but they would keep him to the best path, and, on that path he would find Leeli Pa'Lar, or her body.

  He no longer attempted to kill his own food, but used the ration pack carefully. The kerries were patient with his delays, resting quietly when he rested, happy so long as he made no attempt to turn back. By late afternoon he was very tired. The heat was upon the plain, and everything swam in the treacherous waters of illusion. He could not tell how far off the hills were. Sometimes they seemed to float almost within grasp; at others they disappeared completely. About him was a great stillness. The only sounds were the dry rasp of his breathing, and the crackle of the brittle grass as it broke beneath his feet, and that of the kerries that now walked only a couple of metres on either side.

  Slowly, the sun turned red and sank towards the distant haze. The air cooled enough for shapes to take form, and distances to clear. Wolf appeared to be in the middle of the plain. The vegetation had deteriorated into a low-growing gnarled shrub, and short spiked grass. The only trees were the stark dead remnants of a better time.

  Wolf stopped and began to gather fire wood. The kerries did not seem to like the change in activity, but, while he did not move towards the south, they made no attempt to menace him. He thought of destroying both of them, but they had not moved in a straight line across the plain during the day, and the only hope he had of finding Leeli was to have the animals guide him to her. Once the heat built up, he could walk within ten metres of her, and not see her. He dare not open his mind. The power had grown steadily stronger all through the day. In the end, he made two fires and lay between them, setting his mind to wake him in a couple of hours. Despite the shadows of the kerries crouched just outside the fire light, sleep came almost at once.