by Dean Koontz
Hulann did not look back. He concentrated on the street ahead. He had succeeded in cutting off a warning. Even if the guard were soon found, they would have no way of knowing who had hurt him. Hurt? No, lulled. Hulann had killed the guard.
There was a spreading numbness in his body as the realization began to reach the depths of him. He, who had never killed, had never carried a weapon in anger against another intelligent being . . . He had murdered.
He drove with a hypnotic concentration now, unable to stop the car, unable to think of anything to do but run. Run not only from the naoli who would be searching for him as soon as Fiala or Banalog was found, but running also from the dead guard. And from his past. Faster, Hulann, faster. Booming through the darkness in the fluttering insect machine.
In the occasional flushes of light as they passed other naoli buildings along other parts of the city, Leo could see the traces of tears on Hulann's thick, gray alien hide.
The traumatist Banalog sat bound in his office chair. He had turned it so he could look out the window at the snow.
If the universe is truly as balanced as all our studies have indicated, he mused, then how fundamental a part of the equilibrium is a race? An intelligent race? One of the eleven races, for instance. The naoli? The humans? Would the destruction, the total extinction of a major galactic race have an influence on the overall balance? Would it be a large or small influence? Small. Yes. We think too highly of ourselves. The loss of a race will have but a small effect. Yet will that small effect snowball? Will more and more things change because mankind no longer exists? And will this snowball grow so large that, a hundred thousand years from now—a hundred thousand centuries, perhaps—it will roll over the naoli as well? Have we, in the last analysis, damned ourselves? Have we only managed to borrow a little time against the end of everything?
He would have thought on it more, but for the growing delusions of the sweet-drug. Outside the window, the snow was now crimson and yellow.
It formed faces.
Hulann . . .
A Human boy . . .
It was pretty. He watched, letting the unreality engulf him . . .
The Hunter sleeps. His is the death sleep of the naoli. He does not yet know that it will soon be time to stalk.
This time, his prey will be a lizard man, not a human. This will be unique for him. He will enjoy it. He has within him the seeds of destruction. He has longed to walk among his own kind with his sword of light and his permission to pass judgment. He will soon have that opportunity.
Now, he sleeps . . .
Leo was quiet for a long while, watching the wipers thrust the thickening snow to the ends of the windscreen. At last, he turned to Hulann and said, "Where are we fleeing to?"
"I told you. Just away from the city."
"We will have to stay away ten years. We should have a destination."
"There is no destination."
Leo considered a moment. "The Haven."
Hulann looked sideways, almost lost control of the craft. He pulled it back onto the road, then talked without turning his attention away from driving. "It is not even certain that such a place exists. It may be a myth. Even if there is a sanctuary for the last humans which we have not reached, its whereabouts is a well-held secret."
"There is a Haven," Leo assured him. "I heard it talked about in the days of the last stand. I knew of certain leaders and irreplaceable specialists who were ferreted out of the city to be taken to the Haven."
"You know where it is?"
"Not exactly."
"What does that mean?"
Leo scrunched down in the corner between the seat and the door, turned sideways. He played with the hole in the seat which let the naoli tail through to the rear floor. "Well, I know that it's on the coast. The West Coast. Along the Pacific Ocean."
"That doesn't pinpoint it."
"But it's a start" he insisted.
"How would we ever search so much coast once we got there? And avoid the naoli forces all the way across the country."
Leo did not seem perturbed by what seemed insurmountable obstacles. "We'll find a way. You're a naoli. You can bluff your way through if you have to."
"Not likely."
"Otherwise," the boy said, "we hang around here until they catch us. And they will, you know."
Hulann hesitated. "I know."
"Well, then?"
"I couldn't enter the Haven with you. What would I do?" The worst thing now was to be utterly alone. He" could not have put it in words, but it was the thing he most dreaded. To be an outcast, a murderer, and without friends on an alien world of which he could never hope to be a part of.
"I'll talk to them. You're different, Hulann. I'll make them see."
"Well—" he said.
"Please, Hulann. I want to be with my people again."
Hulann could understand that desire. "All right," he said.
They followed the markers over the beltway, eventually heading west across the great expanse of the North American continent. They did not see even one other car in the hours left of the night. In the silence and gently thrumming music of the blades beneath them, Leo fell asleep, once more.
Chapter Four
As Hulann drove, he allowed his mind to wander, for a deluge of memories seemed the only present manner of assauging his depression. Therefore, he raised up a monolith of the past and walled off the recent events, then studied the brickwork of his partition.
He had met his first human while aboard the naoli ship Tagasa which had been of the private fleet of the central committee. He had been a guest of the government, a writer of creative history then. The Tagasa had been en-route from the home worlds to a series of outlying colony planets in the Nucio System. The rich background of the Nucio colonies had been obvious material for a series of tapebook adventures, and Hulann had been quick to take the chance to investigate the worlds first-hand.
The Tagasa had been in port on the world called Dala, a place of vegetation and no animals. He had returned to his cabin after a day of exploration of the surrounding jungle. He had seen the snake vines which moved almost as fast as a man could walk, slipping oily over each other and the trees on which they grew, pollinating the flowers that grew on the bark of some of the larger pines. He had seen the plants which ate other plants (and which impolitely spat out his finger when, at the urging of his guide, he had stuffed it into the pulpy orifice). He saw the breathing plants with their baggy, lunglike flowers, busy spewing out carbon dioxide to continue the cycle that had started here eons earlier.
"An incredibly old culture," his guide had said. "To have evolved plant life this far."
"No animals at all?" he asked.
"None. They've found a few insects, little mites, that live between the outer and second layer of bark on the red-top trees."
"Ah . . ."
"But there's a question about those two. Seems the boys working on them in the labs have found traces of chlorophyll in them."
"You mean—"
"Plants too. Looking quite like insects. Mobile. Able to suck up nutriment from other plants and move about like animals."
The guide—an elderly naoli with a jewelry affectation: he wore a raw iris stone around his neck on a wood bead necklace—had shown him more. The Quick Ferns, for instance. Cute little, frilly, green things, lush and vibrant, swaying briskly under the slightest breath. They lined the forest floor, the shortest growth, a carpet beneath all else. As he watched, they grew, pushed up new plants, spread their feathery leaves—then grew brown, blackened, collapsed, gave off a puff of spores, and were gone. In a place where there was no animal feces, no animal decay, the vegetation had come to rely on its own death to give it life. For so much life—there was a wild, thick sprawl of growing things unlike anything he had ever seen before—a great deal of fertilizer was required. It was natural, then, that the Quick Ferns should have a total life span, from spore germination to death of the plant and ejection of the next spore cycle o
f fourteen minutes. At the end of each summer on Dala, there was a five foot layer of thick, black organic material lying on, the forest floor. By the following spring, it was decomposed, gone, and the Quick Ferns began their job again.
"No animals at all," he said to the guide, still amazed at the society of this primitive world.
"Not now," the guide replied, chuckling.
"What's that?"
"I said, not now. There used to be."
"How do you know?"
"They've found the fossils," he said, fingering the stone hanging about his withered neck. "Thousands of them. Not any that might have been possessed by intelligent creatures. Primitive animals. Some small dinosaurs."
"What happened to them?" Hulann asked, fascinated.
The old naoli waved his arms around at the jungle. "The plants happened to them. That's what. The plants just developed a little faster. They think the animals were a slow lot. When the first ambulent plants arrived on the scene, they ate flesh."
Hulann shivered.
The forest seemed to close in on him, to grow from just a pleasant patch of trees to something malevolent and purposeful. He felt himself backing away toward their shuttlecraft, stopped himself, and chided himself for his youthful superstition. "Yet now the plants are finally subservient to animals. To us."
"Wouldn't be so certain," the old man said. He pulled on the iris stone. The warmth of his gnarled hand made the black and green gem pulsate, the green iris growing larger and smaller with the changes in temperature.
"How so?"
"The plants are trying to adapt to us. Hunting a way to do us in."
Hulann shivered. "Now you're talking the kind of superstition I just got finished scolding myself for."
"It's not superstition. Couple of years ago, the first Concrete Vines showed up."
"They—"
"Yeah. Eat concrete. The wall of the central administration building fell in. Killed a hundred and some. Roof collapsed under the stress. Later, they found a funny thing. They found these vines, only as big around as the tip of your tail, honeycombing the wall. They had come in from the forest edge, growing underground until they reached the wall. Then they grew upwards until they had weakened it. Ate the insides out of that wall. After a few more cases like that, we started building with plastics ant plastic metals." He laughed an ancient, dry cough of a laugh. "But I suppose we'll be seeing some Plastic Vines before long. The jungle has had time to work it out, I guess."
Hulann had gone back to the Tagasa with a brooding idea for a speculative fiction work about what might happen on Dala when the plants finally launched a successful attack against the naoli colonists. The book had been a critical and financial success. Twenty-one million cartridges had been sold. Forty-six years after publication, the plants of Dala launched a successful revolt . . .
He had been making notes into his recorder about his day with the guide when a messenger had come from the captain's quarters with a private note that he did not want sent over the Phasersystem. It was a simple request to come to meet a few humans who had come to Dala to argue various trade contracts and whom the captain had requested aboard.
Hulann, having seen only seven of the eleven races (some are quite hermetic) and never having seen a human, was more than eager to comply with the request. Too, humans were the novelty of the many worlds, having only appeared in galactic society some twenty years earlier.
He had gone to the captain's quarters highly excited, unable to control the dilation of his primary nostrils, or the faint quivering of his interior eyelids. In the end, he had come away disappointed—and more than a little frightened.
The humans were cold, efficient men who seemed to have little time for pleasantries. Oh, they made all the gestures and did some customary small talk in broken naoli home-world tongue to prove their desire for cooperation. But the pleasantries ended there. They constantly steered the conversation back onto business topics whenever it strayed for more than a moment or two. They only smiled—never laughed. Perhaps it was this last quality which made them, in the final analysis, so terrifying. When those solid, phony grins were summoned to cover their faces, Hulann had wondered what laid behind the facade.
At first, this difficulty was deemed natural. None of the other races had been easily understood. It had taken as much as fifty years to break down the cultural lines and begin meaningful communications and day-to-day relationships. The naoli expected it would take at least as long with the humans.
Fifty years came and went. The humans moved farther into the galaxy, spreading out, founding colonies on unclaimed worlds (only the naoli, the glimm, the sardonia, and the jacksters wanted to compete for oxy-nitrogen planets; the other races considered such places at least undesirable, and at worst intolerable). Their rate of expansion into the many-peopled stars was slow by some standards, but the humans explained that they had their own method of pioneering. It was a not-so-polite way of telling everyone else to mind their business.
Fifty years came and went, and the humans that the naoli—and the other races—saw were still as withdrawn, cool, and unfriendly as ever. By the end of the second fifty years, various disputes arose between the naoli and the humans over trade routes and colony claims and half a hundred other things more petty. In not one case, could the races reach agreement. The humans began to settle many problems by force, the most expedient route —and the most illegal in the eyes of the naoli.
Eventually: the war.
It was not necessary to convince Hulann that the war was essential to the naoli's survival. He had always carried with him the memory of those humans on the Tagasa, the strange, smooth-skinned, hairy creatures with the brooding eyes and the quiet, solemn faces that argued for a shrewd and wicked mind within their skulls.
Long ago.
And this was the Here and Now. And Leo was beside him, sleeping, curled feotally. Why was the boy different? Why was the boy easy to reach? This was, as far as he knew, the first instance of intercommunication between naoli and man in the hundred and eighty years of their acquaintance. It went against all that was known of humans. Yet, here they were.
He abruptly broke his train of thought. It was leading him back through the events of the last two days, and he did not want to be plagued with those things again.
He blinked his large eyes and looked carefully through the wet glass at the road and the landscape around it. If anything, it was snowing harder now than when they had left Boston. Long, almost impenetrable walls of snow swirled by on both sides while the craft knifed between them, kicked up an even whiter inferno behind as its own draughts stirred the fluff on the road surface. The markers at the edges of the throughway were drifted over here and there. Elsewhere, just their orange, phosphorescent caps peaked out. The direction signs suspended overhead were collecting a film of the hard driven snow, becoming increasingly difficult to read.
If the storm grew worse and the drifts covered the roadbed, they would founder. A shuttlecraft could cross snow—as long as it was light enough to blow out of the way and give the down-draught a clear blow surface on the roadbed. Hard-packed drifts created an uneven surface, which invariably led to disaster.
Near Warren, in the human province of Pennsylvania, moving at a hundred and ninety miles an hour toward the province of Ohio, disaster stopped waiting and leapt at them . . .
Hulann was squinting through the snow, paying strict attention to the highway in order to keep his mind off things he would rather not ponder. It was this extra attentiveness that saved their lives. Had he been lax, he would not have seen the glow of the crater . . .
He made out a light, green flickering between the sheets of white that whirled by him. Then, through a part in the curtain of the storm, a brilliant ripple of emerald fire shot out into the distance.
He braked, fought the wheel to keep the tilted blowers from carrying them toward the guardrails and into the fields beyond.
The blades whined, ground as if tearing through metal
grit. The shuttle bumped, started a spin. They were going backwards now toward the shimmering green fire.
Then they were around, had swung an entire three hundred and sixty degrees.
He steadied them.
The speedometer read fifty miles an hour. The edge of the crater was only a few hundred yards away. He could see the great black depression, the sheets of energy shimmering and exploding across its vast length.
He pushed the brake into the floor, stomped and stomped it like a madman. The engine stalled. The blades clattered to a halt. He braced himself for the impact to come.
The rubber rim of the shuttlecraft sloughed into the ground as they dropped (now without an air cushion under them) onto the road. The craft bucked, leaped, came down hard again. Hulann was thrown forward, had the air knocked out of him as he struck the controls with his chest.
Then they were sliding. There was a jolt as the rubber cushion rim began to rip free. He saw a great snake of it spiral into the air and fall away behind them. The bare metal grazed the road, sent up sparks of yellow and blue.
The craft listed, then righted, turning sideways.
And then, they were still.
Hulann sat, his head bent over the wheel, taking in heavy loads of air which felt good in his lungs. It could have been the stalest, most polluted air in the galaxy, and yet it would have been a treasure to him. For, had they slid another fifteen feet, he would never have breathed again. That close, the rim of the crater gleamed with its jeweled flames . . .
"That was close," Leo said from his nook next to the far door.
Hulann sat up. "Very. Perhaps you don't know how close."
The boy leaned forward and stared out the window at the seemingly endless expanse of the crater. He watched it making its lights for a while, then asked, "What is it?" "Come," Hulann said. "I'll show you."
They got out of the car and hunched against the power of the winter night. Winter morning, now. Leo followed the naoli to the edge of the depression, stood with him, staring across the nothingness.