Book Read Free

Blish,James - Midsummer Century

Page 7

by Midsummer Century (lit)


  Martels was almost as taken aback by the King’s candid­ness as by the impossibility of understanding what he was saying. In that moment of indecision, Qvant’s answer rushed smoothly forward with all the power of his ancient and con­tinuous sentience, as implacable as a locomotive about to cut down a buttercup between the ties. Something monstrously evil about the formed yet unreadable thought evidently reached 11am even faster than it did Martels. Together they clung about it, trying to close it in, like twin twinges of a weak and belated conscience.

  11am’s unexpected help seemed to be only about as ef­fective as would have been the interposition of an additional buttercup before the onrushing engine. Qvant’s voice said evenly, “I, Lord King, am the Qvant of Rebirth Three; and I spit upon your spittleless world and all its little lice.”

  This was certainly a speech Martels would have prevented

  Qvant from making, had he been able; yet Qvant’s mind was

  full of sullen rage as he fell back, as if defeated, leaving

  Martels nearly sure that it had not been the evil thing the

  Autarch had had prepared to say.

  The King bent his huge head and turned it slightly to one side.

  “Why would the Qvant so seek to provoke us?” he grated. “Here again is truth, yet not the whole truth. Were it wholly so, we should by no means release that ageless spirit into our future; but why does it go about in flesh, and further cumbered with lesser selves? Why this trif old disunity? Whom among you shall answer?”

  Under any other circumstances, Martels might have opted for the whole truth, in the hope of proving his harmlessness; but the Bird King’s own mind did not seem to be sufficiently analytical to understand the answer, even—which was doubt­ful—had he had enough historical background. Qvant, in turn, was apparently still sulking; and as for Tiam, though he was now to be regarded as a potential ally, he understood least of all of them what was going on. Perforce, they all stood mute.

  “Very well,” the King said. “We shall put the question to the Talons.”

  With a buffeting flash of gold and scarlet, he was gone. The vulturine guard resumed its perch.

  The night came rapidly—evidently it was technically winter in these high- southern latitudes—and with it came the sus­picion that the Birds were not going to provide any food or water. A change of guard brought Martels no relief, unless he counted a large, limey dropping left by the first sentinel, evidently in contempt, since the floor of the drum was other­wise clean.

  He scarcely worried; he had too much else to think about. Some of the new knowledge seemed quite useless: For ex­ample, it was now confirmed that “Qvant” was a title, not a name, but unless name-magic also counted for something in this millennium, the confirmation left him no better off than before. On the other hand, Martels’ impression that the Bird King’s mention of “the Talons” implied physical torture had

  been instantly and dramatically confirmed by a prolonged mental shudder from Qvant (no, the Qvant, never assume that any fact is useless until it is so proven)—which in turn at least suggested that Martels’ original guess that pain might prove to be a useful weapon against the Autarch was probably right. Good; put that one in the active file.

  The moon began to rise. Even low on the horizon, it was smaller than he had ever seen it before. Of course; tidal forces had been increasing its angular momentum for more than twenty-three thousand years since he had seen it last. He had not really been in any doubt of what century he was in now, but this confirmation gave him a small chill nonetheless. The pole star, it occurred to him, should now be back at the withers end of Charles’ Wain. That surely was useless knowledge, this far south.

  Now, what about the Birds? He thought he now had a fair idea of just how dangerous they were. They had retained all their nonrational gifts, such as flight and orientation, and their fast, high-temperature metabolism, both of which now served to implement their dawning intelligence. That their old instinctive craftsmanship, as evidenced in the basket-weav­ers and the bower-birds, had been greatly augmented was evident in the very Tower on the top of which Martels now turned restlessly like a jumping-bean upon a drumhead. They were now coming to parity with man, as man, perhaps through the discovery of what the Qvant had called “juganity,” slid gradually back toward what they once had been in esse— and without their undergoing any drastic change. Under the pressure of evolution, they had simply become more and more what they had always been in posse: Proud, territorily jealous, and implacably cruel—to which had been added, simply by bringing it forward, the serpent wisdom of their remotest ancestors.

  Yet a human brain at its best—say, that of the Qvant—

  could probably overmatch them even now. What was the Qvant playing for, anyhow? Had he actually tried to provoke the King into killing Tiam/Martels out of hand, thus promoting the Qvant to the dubious rank of a fading ancestor? Again, was he in Tiam’s skull, or still in the case? More and more, that was beginning to seem like the central mystery of them all.

  This was the mystery, in the abstract, of telepathy itself, now embodied in all three of them. Martels still did not want to believe in it, but brute experience of it forced him to, whatever his preferences. And it was remarkable how dif­ferent it was in immediate experience from the dubious, wholly statistical picture of it which had been built up in Martels’ own era. The card tests—highly artificial, Martels now saw, and thus bound to produce all kinds of nonsense—had seemed to indicate, impossibly, that it did not obey the inverse-square law, or even the second law of thennodynamics; the reality was that it was closely bound to both laws, and, in fact, required both parties to be physically visible to each other. Furthermore, it did not carry thoughts or even images, but only emotions; even three minds inside a single skull could not read each- other’s interior monologues or overt intentions to speak, but only their emotional reactions to their thoughts and projected actions, like the individuals in a mob—or at a performance. It was simply a field force which reacted in a generalized way to or against another field force; or like a detector which registers the presence of some given type of radiation, without being able to report whether or not the signal had been modulated, let alone how.

  All well and good, and almost certain to be useful, too; but first he had to get the hell out of here, and quickly, before the twin talons of torture and deprivation made that impossible. He looked up. The swift darkness had made his new guard invisible despite the rising, shrunken moon, but

  two faint spots of catlike luminescence made plain that the Bird was nocturnal, as was only to have been expected. And should Martels develop any sudden aggressive intent, the guard would sense that much, at least, and at once.

  It would have been a tight spot even without the brooding hostility of the Qvant at the back of his mind, and the es­sential incompetence of Tlam at its forefront, neatly bracket­ing his own ignorance of almost everything important about this era. Nevertheless, he had to try.

  He had no weapons and no tools, but gradually it dawned upon him that ignorance in the right hands can in itself be a weapon and a tool—and all four parties to this imbroglio, Tlam, the Qvant, Martels, and the Bird King were now about as ignorant of each other as they were ever likely to become. Tiam knew things to be impossible which were in fact not at all impossible for Martels; the Qvant, whatever his motives, had only just begun to recover from his lofty contempt for both Martels and the tribesman; while the King, whatever his doubts, could hardly yet believe in much more than what he saw, a naked and powerless human being in a sad state of physical and mental repair. The chances were fairly good, too, that the sentinel had little knowledge of any of this; the hier­archy in the black cylinder below seemed from this point of view to be nothing much more than a glorified pecking order, communicating little from one level to the next highest but a fierce pride of status.

  Something in Martels’ past, too, was now substantially in his favor. His irrational loathing for the whole avi
an kingdom, since childhood, had been well to the fore for days, and indeed, he had been hard put to keep it from incapacitating him during his questioning by the King. It was nonspecific; he harbored no more enmity toward the sentinel than he did for the entire phylum, and no less, either. Killing the guard would probably induce no more rise in the amount

  of emotional static he was already putting out on that subject; the thing might after all be caught by surprise. Here the very behavior of telepathy seemed for once to be on his side.

  But it would have to be done quickly. The shock wave of sudden death might well be masked by others in the surrounding jungle, or at least might seem so common as to be beneath notice, but it would not do to allow the creature even a moment to broadcast alarm. A karate chop to its neck would probably do the trick. He had never tried such a thing in his life—only seen it repeated ad nauseam in boob-tube serials—but a test made on his own left forearm with his back to the brooding guard quickly convinced him that the edge of the hand is indeed a far more dangerous weapon than the fist. And birds, no matter what their size, have hollow bones.

  The test evoked a silent yelp from the Qvant which made Martels grin. Better and better. Now, on deeper into igno­rance. The most important thing that the Birds knew about human beings that was false was this: Men cantwt f4,. The very circumstances of his present imprisonment testified to this deeply buried error, buried almost surely since the end of the Qvant’s era.

  His back still to the guard, Martels set Tiam’s nimble fingers to work in the moon-shadowed darkness, unknotting and slip­ping out laces from the nearest hides.

  It turned out not to matter a bit that Martels had never actually tried a karate chop, let alone used one in any sort of combat. Tiam knew what it was, whatever he called it, and the killing of the guard was satisfyingly and expertly sudden. He also turned out to know that the edge of the hand is even better at breaking canes than it is at breaking bones. Within a few minutes after the guard’s death, he had at hand five razor-edged bamboo knives.

  The main body of the carcass was quickly cut away under the backbone, and the head was discarded. The rest was lashed, pinions outspread, onto a bamboo T-frame, using thongs that Martels had been chewing at some dumb urging of Tiam’s for most of the preceding night. Such was his hunger by now that he almost enjoyed this part of the process.

  Once the thongs were tied, again using Tiam’s skills here, Martels directed that they be liberally coated with the Bird’s own blood. It would make a sort of glue as it coagulated, though probably far from a good one. There was, of course, nothing else at hand to serve the purpose.

  The whole process was launched just before dawn, when Martels guessed that the nocturnal sentinel would be at its most inattentive, and increasingly unable to see well. The unpleasant machine was finished in something under an hour, thanks to TIam’s deftness, right down to loops for Mar­tels’ feet, hips, chest, arms, and hands. While it dried, creaking as though in pain under its gathering stresses, he checked to see which side of the tower had the strongest updraft; that proved, not much to his surprise, to be the northeast.

  The Qvant had necessarily been watching all this, with what seemed to be baffled amusement. Apparently the killing of the guard had taken him, too, by surprise, and thereafter he had allowed himself to be bemused by Martels’ crazy taxi­dermy. He came charging to the fore with alarm only when Martels began to fit himself into the loops, but once again Tiam helped to oppose him, though a good deal more hesi­tantly. Like a blood-smeared figure of Icarus, Martels made a running broad jump on the surface of the drum. By the time the Qvant knew what it was he was fighting, machine and man had bounded out the northern window, tail and all.

  The new conglomerate creature fell like a stone. It took all of Tiam’s whipcord strength to keep his arms rigid, with almost nothing left over for wingtip warping. Martels bent

  his knees slightly, then straightened them again. Nothing had happened; he didn’t yet have flying speed. The floor of the meadow, still dark, rushed up at him.

  Then there came that faint but unmistakable sensation of lift which only the pilot of a very small aircraft ever comes to know. Now it was not the meadow that was swelling in his face, but the edge of the jungle; his fall had taken on a slant. Once more he bent his knees. Shedding pinfeathers like a dowdy comet, he found himself scudding just over the surface of a blurred, dark green sea. Jungle-trapped, misty warm air rising to greet the sun caught him in the chest; and then—O miracle!—he was actually soaring.

  Entirely uncertain of how long his fragile glider would last, how long his strength would allow him to fly it even if it stayed together, with his own resolve being steadily undermined by something close to terror emanating from the Qvant and inexorably changing the hormone balance of their shared bodies, he banked and turned southward, seek­ing another thermal which would give him more altitude. Before him in the early morning the wall of fog that marked the boundaries of Antarctica, behind which someone might exist, only might, to help him out of this extravagant night­mare, retreated, towering and indifferent.

  During the day, mountains began to appear ahead and to his right, and before long he was rising and falling precariously over ranges of foothills. Here he was able to climb very con­siderably, more, in fact, than he could put to use; shortly after a bleak noon he reached what he guessed to be close to seven thousand feet, but up there the temperature was so close to freezing that he had to go down about two thousand, stretching his glide as much as possible.

  He used a part of this airline approach to nothing in particular to make a complete turn; and sure enough, he

  was being followed. A formation of large, cranelike Birds was visible to the north, keeping pace with him.

  That was probably all they could do, for they looked to be as albatrosslike as he was—gliders all. Without much doubt, though, they could remain in the air longer than he could, no matter how long he managed to stay up, or how well his jury-rigged construction lasted. The machine was already showing multiple signs of failure—too many for him to essay an attempt at evasion by a long dive-stall-recovery maneuver, which would surely rip it apart completely. He would be extraordinarily lucky if he managed to remain aloft un­til dusk.

  Inside his skull there was a suspicious silence. There seemed, indeed, to be nobody present there but himself. The Qvant’s initial fright had dwindled and vanished; Martels might have suspected him to be asleep, did not the notion seem prepos­terous in the light of past experience. Tiam was equally quiescent; he was not even helping MarteLs with the flying, which was a pretty sure indication that no previous experi­ence of it had existed in his brain. Perhaps the trick had impressed him into silence, without alarming him as much as it initially had the Qvant . . . or, perhaps he and the Qvant were engaged busily in plotting, somewhere deeply below the level of Martels’ inexperienced attention. They had little in common with each other, but far more than either had with Martels—and this was their world, in which he was for everyone the most unwelcome and discomforting of intruders.

  He banked southwest, where the foothills were getting stead­ily higher. The distant formation of cranes banked and turned after him.

  By late afternoon he was down to somewhere around fifteen hundred feet, and the terrain had stopped helping him. The jungle had straggled out on the left and turned into a patchy

  temperate-zone forest, which in turn was being replaced by a cruel series of volcanic lowlands, like a red-and-black version of the Mare Imbrium . . . or that territory which Poe had described toward the unfinished end of Pym. To his right were the mountains proper. The two areas were divided by updrafts so sudden and decisive that Martels did not dare to enter them—his shedding craft would have been torn asun­der within the first few minutes.

  Resignedly, he slid downward toward a landing in the last scrubby patch of vegetation to slide toward him over the southern horizon. The cranes followed.

  At first he thought that be was going
to fall short of it— and then, abruptly, that he was going to overshoot it. He stalled out frantically and fell the last twenty feet in a welter of snapping branches and bones. The improvised airframe dis­integrated around him.

  Somewhere toward the end of the crash he was ffipped over, just in time to see the V-formation of his pursuers go silently overhead, very high up, like a flock of carets. Then he struck ground.

  11am and the Qvant chose exactly that moment to act in concert. The brutal pain of impact vanished as though it had been turned off, and with it the fatigue, the fear, and every­thing else.

  Once more, he had hit the bottom of the telescope of time, and was flung alone into the darkness.

  PART THREE

  REBIR’rF1 V

  10

  Being dead, Martels decided after an indefinitely long time, had had a bad press. It seemed to have certain advantages. At first he had simply drifted in a haze of painless disorienta­tion; this country had no landmarks, and indeed there had been no sensory input at all except for an occasional encounter with a sort of nexus of vague, dulling regret and despair which he judged to be another ghost like himself. But he did not feel depressed; he had been dislocated too many times already for this to be more, as yet, than extraordinarily interesting—or at least it might become so if he could just manage to fill in the parameters.

 

‹ Prev