Promised Land

by Brian Stableford

  ‘Stay here,’ she said. She didn’t have to add anything. I knew perfectly well it was an order. I proceeded to disobey it. I marched out of the tent.

  Straight into the arms of Max Volta-Tartaglia.

  It just wasn’t my day.

  He didn’t give me time to speak. ‘It’s a good job you’re ready,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get back to Danel in a hurry. I wasn’t expecting to find him clapped out. He’s dead weight, and we’re going to have to carry him. The bugs have definitely got to him. He needs help quickly.’

  I was very tempted to lose my temper. But it would only have made matters worse.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ I said mildly, exercising masterful control, ‘that you could have notified us that you were going? Don’t you think that it would have been friendly to leave the caller? Also the gun? You’re playing silly games with our lives.’

  ‘I couldn’t leave the caller or the gun,’ he said. ‘You know I’ve got orders.’

  ‘Orders!’ I spat. ‘What about discretion? How about reason?’

  ‘I knew you’d be all right,’ he said confidently. ‘I was only going to be gone a couple of hours. It took a bit longer than I thought. I should have been back before morning, along with Danel. I was sure he’d stop when he found out he couldn’t make it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ I hissed.

  He shrugged. ‘Didn’t seem necessary,’ he said.

  I knew damn well that the reason he hadn’t told us was that we’d had an argument not long before he’d decided to set out on the joyride. But it didn’t make sense, even if it was the reason, and there was no point in airing it right now. We had to get back on the road.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s move. But this time leave the gun and the caller.’

  ‘Not the gun,’ he said. ‘They were very insistent about the gun. But I’ll leave the caller. Fair enough?’

  It wasn’t, but what was the point in arguing?

  We compromised, and we set off.

  It took me five miles to walk the burn out of my seething anger. It took another seven or more before the trail we were following suddenly thinned out.

  A glance at Max served to confirm my suspicion. We had got there. And the cupboard was bare.

  ‘This is where he was,’ said Max. ‘I swear it.’

  ‘What did you leave with him?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. He was out cold. There was no point.’

  ‘What did you take away from him?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said again. ‘I....’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘You didn’t see the point. So he still has the gun as well as the axe. But no food and no water.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Thanks for the confirmation,’ I said. ‘Well, there’s no point in hanging around. He went thataway.’

  I pointed in the direction of the trail. It was the same direction he had been heading before. It was a good direction. Straight as a die. Anyone else wandering around in a forest with trees so big that visibility was never more than thirty yards would have wandered about erratically. But without a compass, Danel was taking the shortest route to wherever he wanted to go.

  ‘He must be delirious,’ said Max.

  ‘Or determined,’ I said. ‘What’s he heading for, do you know?’

  ‘There’s supposed to be a mountain,’ said Max. ‘Not a big one. The ground rises quite a bit as we go into the forest from here. The trees still maintain total cover, but the undergrowth isn’t so thick higher up. But I don’t know for sure that’s where he’s headed. For all I know he’s just going on and on without any idea of a destination.’

  I decided to hope that wasn’t true.

  I began to walk on.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I think you ought to go back.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘They’ll be expecting us back at the camp. The situation’s changed and they ought to be informed. So should home base. We can’t just go on walking forever. We can’t rely on finding Danel today.’

  ‘This burst of consideration,’ I pointed out, ‘seems most out of character.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay, so I should have told you where I went last night. If you must know, I only intended to take a short walk. It wasn’t until I’d gone a couple of miles that I decided to keep going. That’s why I didn’t take any of the supplies or leave the caller. Well, now things are different, aren’t they? We have to think things out. I’ll find him, if possible. If it’s not, I’ll come back. You’ll be all right, if you sit tight. Base will send the copter out to you. If you complain about the arms situation, they might even relent enough to drop you another gun.’

  I didn’t want to go on alone, because this struck me as being a potential wild goose chase anyhow. Therefore, I decided, if anyone was going back it had better be me. And someone ought to go back—I was sure enough of that. I made a mental note to write the whole of the farce out of my memory at the earliest possible moment. Everything had gone wrong for some time now. The whole expedition looked like a washout. Not even a hard-fought failure. Just a deflatory collapse. I was in the right frame of mind to jack it all in and go home, at that particular moment.

  Wearily, I began to trudge back along the well-worn trail. I was far from happy. It seemed like a long way.

  About a mile from camp, I noticed a sudden profusion of cropper tracks criss-crossing the trail. They had not been there on the outward journey. We had seen cropper tracks often during the previous few days. They came in all sizes—the term just meant ‘harmless animal’ or something like it. They didn’t make anywhere near the mess of the ground cover that we did, of course, unless they were cow-sized and moving in sizeable herds, but they always left a noticeable track. The undergrowth was very quick to regenerate, but the track was always obvious for a day or two.

  There was nothing particularly sinister about finding a lot of cropper tracks intersecting our trail, but they did seem slightly odd. Herds of croppers moved in single file, as a rule, so that they didn’t trample more vegetation than was necessary. But this herd—if it had been a herd and not several groups—had been moving with a much greater degree of independence.

  Almost as if they had been in too much of a hurry to stick to the etiquette of the situation.

  Within half a mile of the camp, I began to hear noises. It was a distant rustling. It seemed to be coming from a fairly wide range of direction. I wasted no time in building up a healthy degree of fright. There was something nasty in the vicinity, and I was unarmed. So was the camp. I took the knife from my belt, not because I anticipated its proving useful, but because it made me feel better.

  I didn’t run, but I moved forward quickly.

  There was a noise of somebody running, and almost as I heard it, I saw who it was.

  It was Mercede, and she was coming toward me as fast as she could go. She didn’t seem to see me. She seemed to have every intention of passing right by me and running forever. She was running away from something that she was very frightened of indeed. My first thought was spiders, but then I remembered Max’s offhand dismissal of the things he called magna-drivers.

  Driver ants. Large ones.

  I moved into her way, and called her name. She looked at me, suddenly, without any expression in her face. Then she cannoned into me.

  I caught her and held her still. She didn’t struggle, but seemed glad of the opportunity to collapse, as though she were signing her fate over to me. I don’t know whether she knew me, or whether she thought I was Danel, or whether she cared.

  I stared into her face, and her blind eyes stared back. For a moment, I thought that she was simply stricken by fear, but then I began to suspect that she really was blind.

  But there was no time to explore the problem in depth. The enemy was coming. I didn’t know whether to go toward the camp, back the way I had come, or away from the general direction of the sound, which was almost at right angles to our course.

  ‘Where ar
e the others?’ I barked. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Mmmm...,’ she gasped.

  ‘Magna-drivers,’ I filled in for her. ‘I know that. What about Linda and Eve and Micheal?’

  She shook her head violently. I moved slightly, in the direction of the camp. She grabbed hold of me, and she wouldn’t let me go. I realised that the sound now filled nearly a full quadrant of direction. From just left of the trail to the camp to just right of an intersect across that trail. And it was getting louder.

  ‘We can’t stay here!’ I shouted at her.

  She clung hard to my arm.

  ‘I’ve got to go back,’ I told her. I lacked conviction. I didn’t want to go toward the sound of rustling.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘They ran. All ran. All ran.’

  And they hadn’t run together. The idiots. But there were the trees, of course. It’s far too easy to get separated in a forest if you’re in a hurry. Especially if you’re in a panic.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of the way,’ I said. Not to Mercede—she already knew that. I was talking out loud, to excuse the fact that I was about to turn coward and run away.

  ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Go fast.’

  And so we went. It was no time for hesitating, no matter how much doubt I was in. I glanced back over my shoulder, and I couldn’t see a thing. But I could still hear that rustling getting louder, and I could readily imagine it was the clicking of a thousand pairs of well-oiled scissors—a murmurous clickety-click. Jaws clicking.

  We turned and we ran, hand in hand. I steered us along our own personal highway. I don’t know how she managed to stick to the highway while she was running away from the camp, because it became quickly obvious that she was quite sightless.

  She kept dragging me away to the right, away from the noise. Two or three minutes served to convince me that she was probably right. There was no point in following the trail. Avoiding our pursuers had to take priority over all else. We began to put substantial distance in between ourselves and the nasties. They weren’t very fast. The sound did begin to die away.

  It didn’t matter too much that we were getting lost. We were all lost. The trip wasn’t just a washout any more. It was an incipient tragedy. The Zodiacs had overplayed their hand. They had insisted that it was all easy, all under control. They had insisted that there was no danger, that nothing would go wrong.

  If I ever survived to say ‘I told you so’—to Denton, to Max, or to anybody else—I would be lucky. Nothing short of luck could save us now. I felt sick, because luck is one thing I always hope that I never have to rely on.

  I don’t believe in it.

  We kept falling over. The root-ridges seemed to be deployed with the specific intention of tripping us up at every opportunity.

  Every time we fell over, we got scared about the amount of time it was costing us, the amount of wind it was knocking out of us, and the pounding it was giving our bones and our muscles.

  I don’t know how long we staggered and stumbled around after we were just too plain shattered to run any more. We kept going, certainly, for a matter of hours. There was nothing at all to be gained by stopping to think. I knew I might as well run off the adrenaline, and Mercede showed no inclination at all to stop. She seemed almost hypnotised, consumed by the same relentless determination which had taken Danel far away from us into the jungle.

  We lost the sound of the magna-drivers, but that didn’t affect the situation at all. We weren’t running because of magna-drivers. We were running because of fear and emotional momentum. You always run when you’re scared, and you keep running while there’s something you don’t want to look in the face, and it doesn’t really matter whether the thing you don’t want to stare down is a magna-driver or the idea of your own running away. Running breeds running, and you run till you drop for the last time.

  My heart hurt, my thigh muscles were knotted with cramp, but somehow I managed to keep going just so long as Mercede remained tireless. She wasn’t any more scared than I was, and certainly no fitter. It was her sickness that was doing her the favour of carrying her on and on without reference to her will. I knew that when she dropped she would drop for good—or for a good long while—like Danel had. I had to wait for that to happen, or it would lose her.

  The wind kept on going. My chest felt spring-loaded, my legs were red-hot. He was no painkiller. But I moved, and matched her movement. We finished up running uphill, and the undergrowth was getting thicker and deeper.

  It all ended when we fell down a crevice, and landed feet first up to our necks in the stuff. It held us up simply because it was too densely packed to let us fall.

  I let go of her hand.

  About an hour later, as it was getting dark, I contrived to extricate myself, and then to prise her loose. Instead of clearing—or attempting to clear—a patch of ground, I climbed up onto a big root, and pulled us slowly up to the junction of root and trunk. We were a comfortable two feet above the undergrowth, and the root was wide enough for us to lie full length without the danger of rolling off if we twitched. I laid Mercede out, but I elected to curl myself up in a foetal sitting position, with my back supported by the gigantic bole of the tree.

  Darkness fell. I had a flashlight in my pack, but I didn’t bother to fish it out. I was content to wait.

  For the morning or the monsters. Whichever arrived first.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The morning won. We heard nothing remotely suggestive of the whispering which threatened the approach of the magna-drivers. In all my time on Chao Phrya I never saw one of those supposedly loathsome creatures, but the fact of their existence nevertheless contrived to play a considerable part in the drama that was acted out upon that world. I have rarely been so scared, because I have rarely been so presumably helpless. What you can see is never quite so bad as what lurks outside your line of sight while maintaining the constant threat of a terrifying invasion. Nothing real is fearful. We are only scared of our images.

  When morning came, Mercede seemed to me to be very ill indeed. There was no great physical change manifest, save for the deepening of her skin colour from soft gold to angry red. She was neither hot not desiccated, so far as I could tell. Her breathing was laboured, though, and she was unconscious. She moved a little in her heavy sleep, but I never had to struggle to keep her on our perch above the threadbare sea of fungus. She moaned, but never coherently. It did not seem to me that she was moaning in the thin, shapeless language of her people.

  There was nothing I could do but sit and wait until she was well enough to wake of her own accord. I could not carry her—she was as tall as me and about as heavy—and I didn’t want to force her to wake and walk.

  We had some food, and a little water—they remained from the packsack I had taken with me on the abortive attempt to recover Danel—but they would hardly last us more than a day or two. Perhaps Mercede could live off the land, if she knew how to, but it would be very difficult for me. The fact that humans could metabolise a certain fraction of Chao Phrya’s produce only made it more dangerous to select potential foods at random. Where there are metabolites, there are inevitably poisons.

  You survived for two years on Lapthorn’s Grave, the wind reminded me.

  I had some gruel to help me, I said. I had some medical supplies. And I spent a great deal of time being sick. It was a long, hard process, clearing even that sparse vegetation which grew on the black mountain. I don’t think I can afford to be incapacitated here.

  I stared morosely up into the purple prismatic roof of the forest, letting my eyes drift along the branch lines and measure the spacing of the giant trunks. We were definitely on a considerable slope, but the forest took the declivity in its stride. I could see no gap in the translucent canopy, and no hint of an end to it as I looked up the slope. The hill was completely immersed, so far as I could tell.

  The undergrowth layer was very uneven on the slope, as Max had suggested with reference to the mountain where the wild Anacaona might be fo
und. I did not think that this might be that same mountain. We had not come far enough, and we had come in the wrong direction. I occupied some time in plotting a course which would eventually take us away from our vantage point up the hill without involving us with any clump of fungus of appreciable size. But it was a hollow pursuit. The twisting path would take in far too much wasted distance. Far better to plunge straight on through the fungus and the matted feeble stalks. They were too weak to obstruct our passage with more than a gesture of resistance.

  I found the waiting very wearing. The seriousness of the situation seemed to forbid any conversation with the wind. It was obvious that escape from the forest was now our only priority, and it was equally obvious that we were unlikely to be able to achieve it without substantial help—presumably from the wild Anacaona. The question of what to do resolved itself into the question of where to look. I had no idea. Mercede might know, but it was more likely that she wouldn’t. Our best hope seemed to be that one or more of the others might find, or be found by, the forest people, and that a search would be mounted for the rest of us. At least I had no reason to doubt the good will of the forest people. If the woman and the girl were with the forest people, they might be called upon to find us, rather than our finding them. This seemed an ironic eventuality, but I hardly knew what to expect of the Anacaona even after all the time I had spent trying to understand them, and somehow it did not strike me as being a particularly unbelievable outcome.

  As time wore on, however, my morbid general outlook on the situation as a whole was replaced by a more immediate concern for Mercede’s wellbeing.

  What are the odds, I wondered silently, that she stays comatose all day and we have to spend another night perched up here?

  It’s wait for her or leave her, commented the wind dourly. And you don’t have anywhere to go.

  I contemplated trying to make some kind of a signal.

  Only fools start fires in forests, was the wind’s only contribution to this chain of thought.