Promised Land

by Brian Stableford

  I knew—and so did he—that doing absolutely nothing was as far from my style as one could possibly get. That’s why there had been such a deterioration in my personality during the two years I was stuck on Lapthorn’s Grave. My mind had been asleep during those two years, and I had been very slow waking up even after Axel Cyran and his merry men picked me up after mistaking me for the Lost Star. I wasn’t quite right yet, in some ways. I still had vague feelings of emptiness, although nothing like the vacuous days on the rock or the tortuous misanthropic time I went through on Earth almost immediately afterward.

  It won’t be too long, the wind promised. If she doesn’t come out of it soon to eat and drink, she’ll die. Then you’ll have to move on your own.

  Which was true enough, though very unpleasant. There was nothing I could do for her except try to pour a little water into her now and again, which I did.

  Eventually, to save the pain of waiting, I went back to sleep.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I awoke in the early evening. For a second or two, I did not know what had wakened me. Then I realised that it had been a sound. The sound was still there—it was very faint but it was quite unmistakable.

  It was the sound of Micheal’s pipes. It was a strong contender for the title of the sound which I most wanted to hear at that particular time. It signified new hope. If Micheal was near enough to be heard, then he was near enough to be found. If he was well enough to play, then he was well enough to think. His thinking stood a far better chance of getting us out of this mess than did mine.

  I stood up and yelled at the top of my voice. The abruptness of my movement made me feel suddenly giddy, and the giddiness cut off my cry in mid-syllable, strangling it to a whimper. But I called his name a second time, and listened to the echoes bounding off the tree trunks. I knew how deceptive distance and direction can be when you’re trying to follow a sound in a forest, so I kept shouting at five-second intervals, listening for the music of the panpipes in between.

  For an unbearably long time (at least two minutes) the sound of the music grew no louder at all. Then it stopped altogether. I took this as a sign that the import of my shouting had broken Micheal’s concentration at last, and that he would be free to respond. I continued shouting, trying as best I could to maintain the volume of my cries.

  Darkness was falling around us, and I grew scared that he might not be able to find us in the dark. That was a totally irrational fear, of course, but it made me kneel to fish in my packsack for the flashlight. I began to wave the light around in a wide arc, so that its light could flicker in between the tree trunks. It was not a very useful gesture—the trees would cut the light out completely less than forty yards away.

  But the shouting served its purpose. At last, Micheal appeared. He was moving slowly, almost drunkenly. His fingers snaked up and down the pipes even though they were no longer applied to his lips. It was as though he was following the series of variations which he had been playing, even though the sounds were purely theoretical.. His eyes seemed wide and staring, but that was probably an illusion of the light. He came closer and closer, moving like an automaton toward me. He couldn’t see me. Like Mercede, he was blind.

  I stopped calling, and listened to the echoes dying away.

  He faltered in his stride, and hesitated, waiting for another call to guide his steps.

  ‘Micheal,’ I said, in the best approximation I could manage to a normal voice. ‘We’re here. Up on a root. Can’t you see the light?’

  He heard me, and I saw his face change slightly as he realised that he had found me. His fingers slowed their sinuous silent dance, and I saw the effort of will which it took to order them to stop.

  He had no packsack with him. No food. No water.

  He looked up at me, and suddenly his eyes could see again. I saw him begin to see me. He nodded his head.

  ‘You can see me now,’ I said.

  ‘Not very well,’ he answered. ‘But I can see.’

  ‘Mercede’s blind,’ I said. ‘She’s been unconscious for a full day. We ran away from the magna-drivers.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘Have you seen the others?’ I asked. ‘Eve? Linda?’

  ‘I was with Eve,’ he told me. ‘I lost her.’

  ‘Was she hurt?’

  ‘No. Have you any food?’

  ‘A little,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know how much of it is good for you. Can you eat our food?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘We can get water from the river.’

  ‘River?’

  ‘It isn’t far. I was near it when you shouted. Can you let me have some food? Then we can take Mercede to the river.’

  He pointed away to his right, diagonally up the slope.

  I threw the packsack down to him, and jumped down to join him. He found a bare patch of ground and sat down to rummage in the pack.

  ‘I don’t know whether Mercede can be moved,’ I said. ‘Do you think it’ll be all right to make her wake up?’

  He put the pipes to his lips, and frowned briefly. Then he played a short tune—not in any way like the long, leisurely music which I had heard him play before. These notes were harsh and penetrating. The insistent quality in the music was answered immediately as Mercede revived from her semi-comatose state, shook her head and then slowly rolled herself around on the root-ridge, stretching her muscles. Then she oozed into a kneeling position and began to stand. I offered her a hand and helped her get down from the root.

  She joined Micheal, but I knew as I steadied her with my hand and passed her on to him that she was still blind. I directed the flashlight beam at her face, but there was no response.

  ‘Can you give her back her sight?’ I asked, feeling at that particular moment as if nothing ought to be beyond the power of the pipes.

  But he shook his head.

  We divided the food which remained equally between the three of us. Micheal inspected it all carefully, and decided that there was nothing which could not be equally appreciated by either of our races. There was not very much.

  ‘All right,’ I said, when we had finished, ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘The river,’ he said.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘We’ll find the forest people.’ Just like that. Micheal was supremely confident. And yet Mercede was still blind, and both of them were still sick.

  ‘Do you know anything at all about the others?’ I asked him. ‘Could the magna-drivers have caught up with them?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘We knew what was happening. We all ran. As long as they ran fast enough, they’re safe. From the magna-drivers, at least.’

  ‘What will happen to them?’

  He shrugged. ‘If they find the forest people, or the forest people find them, they’d be all right’

  ‘If not?’

  He shrugged his shoulders again. I knew as well as he did. It was a big forest. Danel could have reached the forest people by now. Or Max. But would they know where we were likely to be? And could they know that there was any urgency about finding us?

  As we set off for the river, he put the pipes to his lips again, and began to blow soft, whispering notes in a slow, languid melody. As he played, his eyes changed again. I waved my hand in front of them—first apologetically, then in earnest. He was blind again. He had resigned the effort of maintaining the connection between mind and eye. I realised that he must be able to use the music of the pipes as a sonar system. There had to be a direct mode of communication between the music and the mind—the mode by which he had made Mercede wake from her deep sleep, and the mode by which he hypnotised spiders for Danel.

  Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin he led us through the jungle, forcing his way through the deeper undergrowth with hips and elbows while his fingers never paused in their ceaseless ebb and flow. The music he played spun out into a modulated chain of delicate sounds which put me in mind of wind and water. I didn’t like it. In a concert hall or coming out o
f the HV it might have given me a nostalgic image of the great outdoors. But here we were actually at the mercy of the great outdoors and I was far from nostalgic. The mood of the music fit the moment too well. It was a bad moment. We were still in trouble.

  The water was very welcome, but it tasted sour. Micheal came back to the land of the living for a while in order to participate.

  ‘Do we rest until morning now?’ I asked him.

  ‘No.’

  It was the answer I wanted to hear. I didn’t like the idea of wasting any more time at all, but I would have been prepared to rest had he thought that Mercede couldn’t walk throughout the night.

  The fact that it was dark, of course, wouldn’t bother either of them.

  ‘Which way do we go?’ I asked.

  ‘Upriver,’ he told me. He didn’t add any kind of an explanation. The hill must be bigger than I thought—perhaps the slope went up into the mountains after all. The idea of walking uphill all night wasn’t too appealing, but our way would be fairly easy because there was a narrow strip on either side of the ‘river’—it was really only a stream—where the undergrowth grew horizontally rather than vertically. It was like a thick-piled carpet, and by no means a barrier to progress.

  I helped Mercede to rise as Micheal began fingering the pipes pensively.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked her. I was whispering, anticipating that Micheal would begin to play any second, and not wanting my voice to clash with the fragile spell of the pipes.

  ‘All right,’ she assured me.

  ‘We can keep going,’ said Micheal.

  I didn’t really want to start an intellectual conversation at such an inopportune moment, but I couldn’t resist saying, ‘How the hell d’you do it?’

  ‘We have to keep moving,’ he said.

  ‘Those pipes might put you in the right frame of mind,’ I said. ‘But they can’t give you the strength and the stamina. If you use them to drive you on and on, they’ll kill you in the end, surely?’

  ‘The sickness will feed me,’ he said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘It accelerates the breakdown of stored energy,’ he said.

  We had already got far enough for the point. I let the matter drop. If he said he could keep going, and Mercede too, I was willing to believe them.

  ‘I’d better go first,’ I said. ‘I don’t want either of you falling in the water. I can’t swim.’

  I thought it might be a good idea if Mercede placed her hand on my shoulder, and Micheal located himself in the rear, using his pipes. But Mercede apparently wasn’t keen on the idea of touching me. We’d held each other the previous night, but that had been while we were in the grip of panic. In cold blood, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  So I set off, and left them to make their own arrangements for sticking together.

  Well, I said to the wind, what price Captain Lapthorn, ace crimebuster, now? The Zodiac mob appears to have facilitated an almighty mess. Won’t Charlot be delighted?

  If you find the forest people, he said, you appear to have pretty much the same chance of finding Alyne and her kidnapper as you ever did.

  Maybe so, I said. But we’re still no closer to being able to guess what sort of a chance that was. We know next to nothing about the crime, the possible motive, and the possible reactions of any other parties who might come to be involved. What chance would Sherlock Holmes have, working under our conditions? Pretty slim, I’ll bet.

  Depends on his powers of deduction.

  Okay, Sherlock, I said. Deduce. Don’t just make patronising remarks. Explain all to me.

  I can’t.

  Thanks a lot.

  Suppose the girl were an Indris, he said.

  I’ve tried supposing it, I assured him.

  And?

  So what?

  So she’s a descendant of an ancient starfaring species which no longer maintains any kind of interstellar contact. They might be all dead, but it’s simpler to think that they just went home, or went somewhere else entirely. That’s irrelevant for the moment. The Anacaona are a degenerate line, adapted either by evolution or by engineering to this world. The girl is a throwback a long, long way. What does that suggest to you?

  Genetic interference, I said.

  He didn’t say anything else. His case was resting.

  The woman isn’t her mother, Charlot had told me. That made it kidnap. But who was the child’s mother? Anybody? The idea filled me with a wondrous inspiration for all of a minute before I realised that it didn’t really mean a thing. It didn’t advance our thinking one iota. It didn’t offer us a motive. It didn’t shed any new light on the attitude of the forest people.

  What it did do was cast a little new light on Titus Charlot. Even in my most cynical moods, I had never really believed that Charlot was taking gross liberties with his guests at the Anacaon colony. I had believed his assurances that he was working co-operatively toward a greater understanding between the species, and toward a synergistic commingling of knowledge and thought. But if what the wind thought was true, it cast new—and to my mind distasteful—light on the whole method of approach which Charlot adopted to these ends.

  I made a mental note to the effect that a cop named Denton owed me a drink.

  Possibly a double.

  Dawn came, eventually, and we had found no Anacaona. No nothing, in fact. We just went up and up, alongside the river. The slope was very gentle and very even, and we’d hardly noticed it. But up is up, and over long distances it would undoubtedly take a lot out of us. The music kept Micheal going, and presumably Mercede too. The wind kept me going. I was glad, in a way, that Eve and Linda hadn’t managed to join us. I hoped they were together, with enough food and water to keep them going, and enough sense to stick close enough to the old campsite to be found when and if a search was mounted. If they were really lucky, of course, Linda would still have the caller, in which case they wouldn’t even be in the same trouble I was.

  We rested briefly in the first daylight. Micheal didn’t want to, but he concurred in order to oblige me.

  He stopped playing.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘How much farther?’

  ‘Not much,’ he said.

  ‘We are going somewhere, then?’ I said. ‘An actual place. We aren’t just following the river out of pure optimism?’

  ‘There’s a place,’ he said.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘What place?’

  ‘It used to be a city,’ he said. ‘It’s buried now, under the forest. It doesn’t look like a city any more. But the forest people often use it. I think they might be there.’

  ‘A city? A city in the forest? An Anacaon city?’

  ‘No,’ he said calmly—almost absently. ‘An Indris city, of course.’

  ‘Linda said there weren’t any. No traces. No relics of any kind.’

  ‘She doesn’t know,’ he said.

  ‘You lied to her then. You hid it from her.’

  He shook his head. ‘Nobody told her any lies,’ he said. ‘She didn’t want to know.’

  So Linda didn’t want to know about the Indris. So much for the noble pursuit of pure knowledge. The idea of the Promised Land had already answered all the questions. Don’t confuse me with the facts, I’ve already made up my mind. I shook my head sadly.

  The city seemed like an exciting prospect. I’m not one of these people who flip over ruins, but I was ready enough to take a look at anything which offered an alternative to the incredible sameness of the forest. And the thought that it was a definite somewhere that we might possibly expect to find the elusive forest people was an undeniably welcome one.

  My natural pessimism, however, put in its usual sterling work in preparing me for disappointment. It doesn’t do to pin all your hope to one target. Whatever happens, you always have to keep going. The first principle of survival is the survival of effort.

  We found the city, all right. Another couple of hours saw us right into the city square.

  I
t didn’t look like a city. The trees grew, the canopy of purple was unbroken, the ground was still covered by the same sort of mess we’d been wading in for a week. But here and there you could scrape away the gunge and find that the surface underneath was stone. Smooth stone. Sculptured stone. The tree trunks and their big roots didn’t give a damn about stone—they’d pulverised it with no trouble. Ninety percent of the city was rubble and dust. No buildings remained. But here and there was the memory of a city street.

  The city had been dead, I guessed, on the order of tens of thousands of years. But who am I to guess about such things? It might have been a hundred times that. But those trees were big and old. They hadn’t worked their way to perfect mastery of that city in a matter of centuries. They’d invested some real time in it.

  The forest people had been there, all right. But they were riot there now.

  We’d missed the boat.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The sole occupant of the buried city was a dead cropper. It was about the size of a cow. I suppose that it fulfilled the same kind of function as a cow. It lay in an open space which had been methodically cleared of all undergrowth—the site of the Anacaon encampment. The trail that the forest people had left when they had decided to move on was like a major highway. It wasn’t wide—these people respected the country code and walked in a tight column, using each other’s footprints—but it had sure been walked on by a lot of feet. It would take the forest a week or two to reclaim it.

  ‘Is the cropper still fresh?’ I asked Micheal. It had seemed that way to me, but I thought I’d better check.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but we’d better cook the meat well.’

  ‘It didn’t die of anything horrible, did it?’ I asked. ‘Does it signify anything that the forest people left it untouched?’

  He shook his head slightly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘I think it might mean....’

  He hesitated, and I completed the thought for him. ‘You think they left it for us?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But we can’t assume that’