The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Hjalmar gave the peaks a wistful look.

  “Wish we could climb them.”

  Regis grinned at him companionably. “Sometime—and you have the word of a Hastur, you’ll be along on that expedition.” The big fellows’ eyes glowed. Regis turned to me, and said warmly, “What about it, Jason? A bargain? Shall we all climb it together, next year?”

  I started to grin back and then some bleak black devil surged up in me, raging. When this was over, I’d suddenly realized, I wouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t be anywhere. I was a surrogate, a substitute, a splinter of Jay Allison, and when it was over, Forth and his tactics would put me back into what they considered my rightful place—which was nowhere. I’d never climb a mountain except now, when we were racing against time and necessity. I set my mouth in an unaccustomed narrow line and said, “We’ll talk about that when we get back—if we ever do. Now I suggest we get going. Some of us would like to get down to lower altitudes.”

  The trail down from Dammerung inside the ridge, unlike the outside trail, was clear and well-marked, and we wound down the slope, walking in easy single file. As the mist thinned and we left the snow-line behind, we saw what looked like a great green carpet, interspersed with shining colors which were mere flickers below us. I pointed them out.

  “The treetops of the North Forest—and the colors you see are in the streets of the trail city.”

  An hour’s walking brought us to the edge of the forest. We travelled swiftly now, forgetting our weariness, eager to reach the city before nightfall. It was quiet in the forest, almost ominously still. Over our head somewhere, in the thick branches which in places shut out the sunlight completely, I knew that the tree-roads ran crisscross, and now and again I heard some rustle, a fragment of sound, a voice, a snatch of song.

  “It’s so dark down here,” Rafe muttered, “anyone living in this forest would have to live in the treetops, or go totally blind!”

  Kendricks whispered to me, “Are we being followed? Are they going to jump us?”

  “I don’t think so. What you hear are just the inhabitants of the city—going about their daily business up there.”

  “Queer business it must be,” Regis said curiously, and as we walked along the mossy, needly forest floor, I told him something of the trailmen’s lives. I had lost my fear. If anyone came at us now, I could speak their language, I could identify myself, tell my business, name my foster-parents. Some of my confidence evidently spread to the others.

  But as we came into more and more familiar territory, I stopped abruptly and struck my hand against my forehead.

  “I knew we had forgotten something!” I said roughly, “I’ve been away from here too long, that’s all. Kyla.”

  “What about Kyla?”

  The girl explained it herself, in her expressionless monotone. “I am an unattached female. Such women are not permitted in the Nests.”

  “That’s easy, then,” Lerrys said. “She must belong to one of us.” He didn’t add a syllable. No one could have expected it; Darkovan aristocrats don’t bring their women on trips like this, and their women are not like Kyla.

  The three brothers broke into a spate of volunteering, and Rafe made an obscene suggestion. Kyla scowled obstinately, her mouth tight with what could have been embarrassment or rage. “If you believe I need your protection—!”

  “Kyla,” I said tersely, “is under my protection. She will be introduced as my woman—and treated as such.”

  Rafe twisted his mouth in an un-funny smile. “I see the leader keeps all the best for himself?”

  My face must have done something I didn’t know about, for Rafe backed slowly away. I forced myself to speak slowly: “Kyla is a guide, and indispensable. If anything happens to me, she is the only one who can lead you back. Therefore her safety is my personal affair. Understand?”

  * * * *

  As we went along the trail, the vague green light disappeared. “We’re right below the trail city,” I whispered, and pointed upward. All around us the Hundred Trees rose, branchless pillars so immense that four men, hands joined, could not have encircled one with their arms. They stretched upward for some three hundred feet, before stretching out their interweaving branches; above that, nothing was visible but blackness.

  Yet the grove was not dark, but lighted with the startlingly brilliant phosphorescence of the fungi growing on the trunks, and trimmed into bizarre ornamental shapes. In cages of transparent fibre, glowing insects as large as a hand hummed softly and continuously.

  As I watched, a trailman—quite naked except for an ornate hat and a narrow binding around the loins—descended the trunk. He went from cage to cage, feeding the glow-worms with bits of shining fungus from a basket on his arm.

  I called to him in his own language, and he dropped the basket, with an exclamation, his spidery thin body braced to flee or to raise an alarm.

  “But I belong to the Nest,” I called to him, and gave him the names of my foster-parents. He came toward me, gripping my forearm with warm long fingers in a gesture of greeting.

  “Jason? Yes, I hear them speak of you,” he said in his gentle twittering voice, “you are at home. But those others—?”He gestured nervously at the strange faces.

  “My friends,” I assured him, “and we come to beg the Old One for an audience. For tonight I seek shelter with my parents, if they will receive us.”

  He raised his head and called softly, and a slim child bounded down the trunk and took the basket. The trailman said, “I am Carrho. Perhaps it would be better if I guided you to your foster-parents, so you will not be challenged.”

  I breathed more freely. I did not personally recognize Carrho, but he looked pleasantly familiar. Guided by him, we climbed one by one up the dark stairway inside the trunk, and emerged into the bright square, shaded by the topmost leaves into a delicate green twilight. I felt weary and successful.

  Kendricks stepped gingerly on the swaying, jiggling floor of the square. It gave slightly at every step, and Kendricks swore morosely in a language that fortunately only Rafe and I understood. Curious trailmen flocked to the street and twittered welcome and surprise.

  * * * *

  Rafe and Kendricks betrayed considerable contempt when I greeted my foster-parents affectionately. They were already old, and I was saddened to see it; their fur graying, their prehensile toes and fingers crooked with a rheumatic complaint of some sort, their reddish eyes bleared and rheumy. They welcomed me, and made arrangements for the others in my party to be housed in an abandoned house nearby…they had insisted that I, of course, must return to their roof, and Kyla, of course, had to stay with me.

  “Couldn’t we camp on the ground instead?” Kendricks asked, eying the flimsy shelter with distaste.

  “It would offend our hosts,” I said firmly. I saw nothing wrong with it. Roofed with woven bark, carpeted with moss which was planted on the floor, the place was abandoned, somewhat a bit musty, but weathertight and seemed comfortable to me.

  The first thing to be done was to despatch a messenger to the Old One, begging the favor of an audience with him. That done, (by one of my foster-brothers), we settled down to a meal of buds, honey, insects and birds eggs! It tasted good to me, with the familiarity of food eaten in childhood, but among the others, only Kyla ate with appetite and Regis Hastur with interested curiosity.

  * * * *

  After the demands of hospitality had been satisfied, my foster-parents asked the names of my party, and I introduced them one by one. When I named Regis Hastur, it reduced them to brief silence, and then to an outcry; gently but firmly, they insisted that their home was unworthy to shelter the son of a Hastur, and that he must be fittingly entertained at the Royal Nest of the Old One.

  There was no gracious way for Regis to protest, and when the messenger returned, he prepared to accompany him. But before leaving, he drew me aside:

  “I don’t much like leaving the rest of you—”

  “You’ll be safe enough.” />
  “It’s not that I’m worried about, Dr. Allison.”

  “Call me Jason,” I corrected angrily. Regis said, with a little tightening of his mouth, “That’s it. You’ll have to be Dr. Allison tomorrow when you tell the Old One about your mission. But you have to be the Jason he knows, too.”

  “So—?”

  “I wish I needn’t leave here. I wish you were—going to stay with the men who know you only as Jason, instead of being alone—or only with Kyla.”

  There was something odd in his face, and I wondered at it. Could he—a Hastur—be jealous of Kyla? Jealous of me? It had never occurred to me that he might be somehow attracted to Kyla. I tried to pass it off lightly:

  “Kyla might divert me.”

  Regis said without emphasis, “Yet she brought Dr. Allison back once before.” Then, surprisingly, he laughed. “Or maybe you’re right. Maybe Kyla will—scare away Dr. Allison if he shows up.”

  * * * *

  The coals of the dying fire laid strange tints of color on Kyla’s face and shoulders and the wispy waves of her dark hair. Now that we were alone, I felt constrained.

  “Can’t you sleep, Jason?”

  I shook my head. “Better sleep while you can.” I felt that this night of all nights I dared not close my eyes or when I woke I would have vanished into the Jay Allison I hated. For a moment I saw the room with his eyes; to him it would not seem cosy and clean, but—habituated to white sterile tile, Terran rooms and corridors—dirty and unsanitary as any beast’s den.

  Kyla said broodingly, “You’re a strange man, Jason. What sort of man are you—in Terra’s world?”

  I laughed, but there was no mirth in it. Suddenly I had to tell her the whole truth:

  “Kyla, the man you know as me doesn’t exist. I was created for this one specific task. Once it’s finished, so am I.”

  She started, her eyes widening. “I’ve heard tales of—of the Terrans and their sciences—that they make men who aren’t real, men of metal—not bone and flesh—”

  Before the dawning of that naive horror I quickly held out my bandaged hand, took her fingers in mine and ran them over it. “Is this metal? No, no, Kyla. But the man you know as Jason—I won’t be him, I’ll be someone different—” How could I explain a subsidiary personality to Kyla, when I didn’t understand it myself?

  She kept my fingers in hers softly and said, “I saw—someone else—looking from your eyes at me once. A ghost.”

  I shook my head savagely. “To the Terrans, I’m the ghost!”

  “Poor ghost,” she whispered.

  Her pity stung. I didn’t want it.

  “What I don’t remember I can’t regret. Probably I won’t even remember you.” But I lied. I knew that although I forgot everything else, unregretting because unremembered, I could not bear to lose this girl, that my ghost would walk restless forever if I forgot her. I looked across the fire at Kyla, cross-legged in the faint light—only a few coals in the brazier. She had removed her sexless outer clothing, and wore some clinging garment, as simple as a child’s smock and curiously appealing. There was still a little ridge of bandage visible beneath it and a random memory, not mine, remarked in the back corners of my brain that with the cut improperly sutured there would be a visible scar. Visible to whom?

  She reached out an appealing hand. “Jason! Jason—?”

  My self-possession deserted me. I felt as if I stood, small and reeling, under a great empty echoing chamber which was Jay Allison’s mind, and that the roof was about to fall in on me. Kyla’s image flickered in and out of focus, first infinitely gentle and appealing, then—as if seen at the wrong end of a telescope—far away and sharply incised and as remote and undesirable as any bug underneath a lens.

  Her hands closed on my shoulders. I put out a groping hand to push her away.

  “Jason,” she implored, “don’t—go away from me like that! Talk to me, tell me!”

  But her words reached me through emptiness.… I knew important things might hang on tomorrow’s meeting, Jason alone could come through that meeting, where the Terrans for some reason put him through this hell and damnation and torture…oh, yes…the trailmen’s fever.

  Jay Allison pushed the girl’s hand away and scowled savagely, trying to collect his thoughts and concentrate them on what he must say and do, to convince the trailmen of their duty toward the rest of the planet. As if they—not even human—could have a sense of duty!

  With an unaccustomed surge of emotion, he wished he were with the others. Kendricks, now. Jay knew, precisely, why Forth had sent the big, reliable spaceman at his back. And that handsome, arrogant Darkovan—where was he? Jay looked at the girl in puzzlement; he didn’t want to reveal that he wasn’t quite sure of what he was saying or doing, or that he had little memory of what Jason had been up to.

  He started to ask, “Where did the Hastur kid go?” before a vagrant logical thought told him that such an important guest would have been lodged with the Old One. Then a wave of despair hit him; Jay realized he did not even speak the trailmen’s language, that it had slipped from his thoughts completely.

  “You—” he fished desperately for the girl’s name, “Kyla. You don’t speak the trailmen’s language, do you?”

  “A few words. No more. Why?” She had withdrawn into a corner of the tiny room—still not far from him—and he wondered remotely what his damned alter ego had been up to. With Jason, there was no telling. Jay raised his eyes with a melancholy smile.

  “Sit down, child. You needn’t be frightened.”

  “I’m—I’m trying to understand—” the girl touched him again, evidently trying to conquer her terror. “It isn’t easy—when you turn into someone else under my eyes—” Jay saw that she was shaking in real fright.

  He said wearily, “I’m not going to—to turn into a bat and fly away. I’m just a poor devil of a doctor who’s gotten himself into one unholy mess.” There was no reason, he was thinking, to take out his own misery and despair by shouting at this poor kid. God knew what she’d been through with his irresponsible other self—Forth had admitted that that damned “Jason” personality was a blend of all the undesirable traits he’d fought to smother all his life. By an effort of will he kept himself from pulling away from her hand on his shoulder.

  “Jason, don’t—slip away like that! Think! Try to keep hold on yourself!”

  Jay propped his head in his hands, trying to make sense of that. Certainly in the dim light she could not be too conscious of subtle changes of expression. She evidently thought she was talking to Jason. She didn’t seem to be overly intelligent.

  “Think about tomorrow, Jason. What are you going to say to him? Think about your parents—”

  Jay Allison wondered what they would think when they found a stranger here. He felt like a stranger. Yet he must have come, tonight, into this house and spoken—he rummaged desperately in his mind for some fragments of the trailmen’s language. He had spoken it as a child. He must recall enough to speak to the woman who had been a kind foster-mother to her alien son. He tried to form his lips to the unfamiliar shapes of words…

  Jay covered his face with his hands again. Jason was the part of himself that remembered the trailmen. That was what he had to remember—Jason was not a hostile stranger, not an alien intruder in his body. Jason was a lost part of himself and at the moment a damn necessary part. If there were only some way to get back the Jason memories, skills, without losing himself…he said to the girl, “Let me think. Let me—” to his surprise and horror his voice broke into an alien tongue, “Let me alone, will you?”

  Maybe, Jay thought, I could stay myself if I could remember the rest. Dr. Forth said: Jason would remember the trailmen with kindness, not dislike.

  Jay searched his memory and found nothing but familiar frustration; years spent in an alien land, apart from a human heritage, stranded and abandoned. My father left me. He crashed the plane and I never saw him again and I hate him for leaving me…

 
But his father had not abandoned him. He had crashed the plane trying to save them both. It was no one’s fault—

  Except my father’s. For trying to fly over the Hellers into a country where no man belongs…

  He hadn’t belonged. And yet the trailmen, whom he considered little better than roaming beasts, had taken the alien child into their city, their homes, their hearts. They had loved him. And he…

  * * * *

  “And I loved them,” I found myself saying half aloud, then realized that Kyla was gripping my arm, looking up imploringly into my face. I shook my head rather groggily. “What’s the matter?”

  “You frightened me,” she said in a shaky little voice, and I suddenly knew what had happened. I tensed with savage rage against Jay Allison. He couldn’t even give me the splinter of life I’d won for myself, but had to come sneaking out of my mind, how he must hate me! Not half as much as I hated him, damn him! Along with everything else, he’d scared Kyla half to death!

  She was kneeling very close to me, and I realized that there was one way to fight that cold austere fish of a Jay Allison, send him shrieking down into hell again. He was a man who hated everything except the cold world he’d made his life. Kyla’s face was lifted, soft and intent and pleading, and suddenly I reached out and pulled her to me and kissed her, hard.

  “Could a ghost do this?” I demanded, “or this?”

  She whispered, “No—oh, no,” and her arms went up to lock around my neck. As I pulled her down on the sweet-smelling moss that carpeted the chamber, I felt the dark ghost of my other self thin out, vanish and disappear.

  Regis had been right. It had been the only way…

  * * * *

  The Old One was not old at all; the title was purely ceremonial. This one was young—not much older than I—but he had poise and dignity and the same strange indefinable quality I had recognized in Regis Hastur. It was something, I supposed, that the Terran Empire had lost in spreading from star to star. A feeling of knowing one’s own place, a dignity that didn’t demand recognition because it had never lacked for it.