World Enough, and Time

by James Kahn

  Good-byes were said, or not, as feelings went. Jasmine assumed the lotus position and meditated for ten minutes, to prepare for the continuation of the hunt. Josh primed his falcon quill, laid out paper on a flat rock, and set the record. Beauty waxed his Dragon-rib bow until it glowed like still water in the sunset. Camp activities resumed, animals played and dozed. Soon the trial was but one more poorly remembered festivity to most of the creatures, a pleasant pause in the flow of their lives.

  D’Ursu Magna accompanied the hunters out of the glen to the edge of the woods.

  “May we meet in the Great Forest,” said the Bear.

  “I wish you well, D’Ursu Magna,” Beauty replied.

  Josh and Jasmine bared their necks to the Chieftain; then turned and set off.

  By noon the three seekers made the shadow of the Saddleback range.

  CHAPTER 10: The Terrarium

  THE climb up the north face of Mount Orion was not difficult. It was one of the smaller Saddlebacks, and Jasmine knew all of the passes.

  They were quiet on the ascent, each following stray thoughts from here to there. In the cool silence of the afternoon sun, the mountain itself seemed absorbed in reverie. Sometimes the wind would pick up, keening through the canyons like a painful memory; then fall like a dying breath.

  The rock was igneous, the foliage sparse. As the air rarefied, the scarps became steeper, more glazed, less traveled. Yet in spite of the glassine surfaces, the climbers reached the summit quickly. A mere thousand feet above sea level, they looked back in the direction from which they’d come at the chiaroscuro of crisscrossing paths that had led them to this point; and then looked ahead, to the south: down four thousand feet into the jungle below sea level that was their future. Dundee’s Terrarium.

  The Terrarium was ten thousand square miles of rain forest, surrounded on all sides by the Saddleback Mountains; a full half-mile below sea level; simmering over pensive lava beds, pocked by hot springs: a steaming cloistered greenhouse. Every day the mists would burn off the rock beds, rise through the dense mosaic of light and leaf, reach the cooler air at sea level—still a thousand feet below the insulating peaks—then condense and rain down on the jungle, cooling things briefly. Until, an hour later, the steam would begin to rise again, and the process would repeat. All day, all night, an hour of rain, an hour of steam.

  It was difficult to see much of the Terrarium itself from where they stood, because of the patchy cloud cover five to six hundred feet below them. But they felt it, smelled it, a huge gloating pit waiting impassively for its next victims to drop in.

  Few who ever walked into Dundee’s Terrarium walked out: Jasmine knew this for fact. She’d spent years of her life learning a thousand twisting paths down there, she knew it as well as anyone alive, knew it certainly as well as Bal knew it. She had no doubt about her ability to track the Vampire and his hostages in the Terrarium, for Bal was not her most treacherous adversary—it was the jungle itself, now as always. A thousand twisting paths she’d learned there, yet she’d left, finally, knowing full well she’d barely scratched the jungle’s hide.

  “I’ve never been a pantheist,” she said as they began their descent, “but this jungle is alive. And sentient.”

  The climb down was relatively easy. Not too steep for Beauty, and plenty of ground cover to cling to. At six hundred to a thousand feet below the crests, they found themselves completely engulfed in the cloud bank. It was slow going here. Visibility was no more than a foot. Beauty hung on to Jasmine, and Josh to Beauty, so nobody would get lost. For a brief second, Joshua feared they would wander here in these cloying mists forever.

  Finally the trio emerged, like ghosts from a dream, below the cloud line, and saw it fully for the first time: the Rain Forest. They paused a moment to regard it, to address it; and then without further ado, took the last long leg of the descent down into the belly of the beast.

  They reached the first fringes of undergrowth about an hour before sundown. The temperature and humidity were both approaching a hundred, from two directions. It wasn’t raining, which meant it was steaming: wisps rose in sultry spirals from the ferns; water ticked patiently drop by drop from palm frond to rock, where it quickly evaporated once again. The air was palpable.

  Jasmine led the way in. She seemed to know just where she was going; even though no path was evident. Knee deep in feathery fern, then chest deep in bird of paradise, she took them; carefully, around bubbling hot springs, then quickly over a short table of baking slate; and finally under the first tree cover of sagging plantanos, laced through with a wild tangle of crawling vines.

  Joshua had a sense of foreboding. This unfamiliar vegetation had all the sinister odor of memories’ breath, and Josh wished he were once again running clear on open plain. He silently thanked the Word for crossing his path with Jasmine to lead him through this suffocating murk.

  Beauty, too, found himself grateful for Jasmine’s presence. She’d proved herself able on more than one occasion, and if she knew these woods, so much the better. He felt somehow more balanced, again, after the episode at Jarl’s—or at least, less teetering. He was ready to resume the quest. He thought to himself, “I may not yet know if I be Human or creature, invention or inheritor, but this I know: I am hunter.” It felt good now simply to look for sign among all the possible places the world can hide it.

  Jasmine alone kept her mind—at least temporarily—free of thought. She concentrated only on her senses; and of these, the predominating was the sense of return.

  They made it into the trees as the sun vanished below the mountains; but strangely, almost horribly, the nightfall was not dark—because filling the pools and rocks half submerged in the wet black soil clinging to the lower regions of the moist bark on the trees, was the glowing unreal aura of red phosphorescent algae. It seemed to seep from the earth, this glow, sitting like a motionless red tide, casting an eerie garnet hue in the waking shadows of the steaming night.

  For the first time, Joshua was scared. Inaudibly, he sang to himself—an old powerful incantation his mother had taught him many years before: “Ai bee see dee ee ef gee; aitch eye jay kay, el em en oh pee…”

  Dicey lay her head down in Rose’s lap as the rain continued its tepid drizzle.

  “I wonder what it feels like to be dry,” mused the young girl.

  “At least we’re warm enough,” answered Rose. She stroked the girl’s forehead.

  The other Humans around them dozed, or picked over the remains of the small lizards they’d been given to eat. On the other side of the clearing two Accidents made low gurgling noises, tearing apart and gnawing on a dead panther. Beside them, the Vampires slept.

  At the edge of the enclosure, a small forest pool was alive with raindrops, heavy with the red glow. Rose stared dully into its depths, trying to remember what it was like to be free and happy. She yearned for her Beauty. Behind her, her new friend Nancy sat wet-nursing Ollie, who was still mostly catatonic. Nancy’s own baby lay gaunt and sleeping in her other arm.

  Somewhere in the jungle a hyena chattered insanely. Nancy shivered, in spite of the heat.

  “Want my jacket?” asked Rose. She felt her own needs less urgently when she was helping others. She knew this about herself, and made use of the knowledge as a musician who soothes himself by soothing others with his music.

  Nancy smiled wanly, shook her head. She was slowly approaching the edge beyond which help lay.

  Dicey distractedly rubbed at the bruises on her neck, her eyes unfocused.

  A small bat suddenly flapped into the space, dove at them, bit Mary on the foot. Mary was Nancy’s sister, and her husband had been Fofkin the Elf. She swatted at it with her hand. It quickly flapped up into the trees, rested for a moment in the crux of a dead branch, laughed excitedly for a brief second, and flew back into the jungle thick. Rose looked at Mary’s foot: it was bleeding. They both glanced anxiously at the Vampires, who still slept, undisturbed. Rose put a handful of leafy mud on the wound; then
took off her jacket, put it around Mary’s shoulders. Mary sighed and lay back down. She searched for sleep.

  Eric, a gangling fair-haired lad, crawled over. “Will someone lie with me?” he asked plaintively. “I need to lie with someone.”

  There was a tired, empty silence. Mary regarded him and held out her arms. He smiled limply, lay down beside her. They held each other, motionless, belly to belly, cheek to cheek, she looking over his shoulder, he over hers; into darkness.

  Nearby, a bird screamed.

  The Accidents finished their meal and went to sleep.

  As the quiet rain stopped, the ground began to steam, like red death.

  “Here,” said Rose, passing garlic cloves to Mary, Nancy, Dicey, Eric. She’d stolen the bunch in the Forest of Tears, secretly eating a clove a day. It was said to make the taste of one’s blood unappetizing to the Vampire palate. Carefully, she chewed it.

  Mary ate her piece in a single grimacing gulp; Nancy sucked on hers meditatively. Eric put his clove under his tongue, and soon forgot it was there.

  Dicey brought the garlic to her lips, then dropped it in the dirt; then pretended to chew, as she covered the clove over with leaves and moss.

  It was raining again, Jasmine made slow headway through the matted overgrowth, her companions just behind her. Gnarling tendrils caught their feet, scraped their faces. Roots twined over the ground like bloated fingers. Branches dangled, vines twisted. The jungle pressed.

  Abruptly, a space seemed to open. Jasmine began to enter, caught a glint in the carmine glow, and stopped short; eight feet high, spanning the entrance to the clearing like a gauze door, a sticky spiderweb shimmered tautly, inches from the Neuroman’s face. She took a step back. From the geometric center of its sheer woven lair, the hairy, melon-sized spider eyed its would-be feast.

  “Back up,” said Jasmine over her shoulder. “We’ll have to walk around.” They veered right, chormping through the tangle with their blades every few feet. They passed an area fragrant with rotting fruit. A well-fed snake undulated over Joshua’s foot, then vanished once more into the brush. It stopped raining. Something flew overhead.

  They came to a wall of hanging vines. “Here we are,” Jasmine mumbled, and began hacking at them vigorously with her épée. The others sat back, resting, watching. Josh was tired. He’d never seen terrain like this, and he didn’t know what to expect from it. The constant physical duress, the protracted tension, the unknown dangers—these things were beginning to take their toll on the young hunter. He was beginning to jump at noises.

  Beauty was feeling less anxious, more purely distasteful. To him, the jungle smelled foul, decayed; self-strangulating. The creatures who thrived here seemed ill of spirit to him. Wryly, he realized he was not a creature of the Rain Forest—something else he was not; no closer yet to what he was.

  After fifteen minutes of chopping, Jasmine had cleared an inroad four feet deep into the viny wall, when suddenly the last creeper fell away; and revealed before them, a path.

  “My Word,” said Josh. Beauty was silently impressed.

  They entered the hidden trail. Its floor was white limestone, sanguine in the luminous algae. In width it measured ten feet, but felt more like a tunnel than a path, the jungle around it was so ‘dense. Jasmine began to relax as soon as they started walking.

  “Don’t mind telling you now, I was a little afraid I’d lost my bearings there for a while. Right on track, now, though. We used to call this the Yellow Brick Road.” She laughed.

  Josh looked confused. “Why?” he said, since it was obviously neither yellow nor brick.

  They walked with long, easy strides, releasing most of a night of thickening tension. Beauty even galloped a few paces down the gently curving footpath. “Why, indeed?” mumbled Jasmine. “A good question. Oh, I remember. In fact, that was how I met Lon, when we first started running together.” Her memory ran back to those days, poured over them like honey down a throat. “Now, wasn’t that a time,” she recalled.

  Josh waited a minute, but when Jasmine continued to remain silent, he finally prodded, “Yes?”

  “Ah,” she jumped back to the present. “Well. I had just come to the Terrarium. This was probably … oh a hundred years ago, give or take. Well after the Great Quake, though. I’d been lured here by rumors of a Lost City, a magical place, cached with riches. Stories like that brought a lot of prospectors down here. Most just got eaten by the jungle.”

  A determined column of blackish Ants cut across the pathway before them.

  “Step over them carefully,” Jasmine warned. “They’re missionary Ants.” Josh and Beauty did as they were told, jumping gingerly over the Insect procession, and continuing on down the lime trail.

  Jasmine went on with her story. “Anyway, I checked it out by myself here for a couple of years. Got to be a regular jungle-junkie, had a few close calls, discovered some nifty hideaways. Became a brigand. It was pretty easy pickin’s, all in all—there were a lot of dodos running around down here, most of ‘em ripe for harvest. And I was the reaper. Always left ‘em enough so they could make it back to the coast with their skin still on if they were smart and careful, though. Thought of myself as a sort of self-appointed evolutionary force—only the fittest survived after I lightened their load.” She laughed joyously at the recollection, then became quieter. “It was ray adolescence, down here, mine and the world’s, what the world had become. We were a rowdy lot, and never a thought about consequences.” Josh and Beauty let her walk in silence a while, to follow her thoughts. Finally her smile returned and she continued.

  “There were some tough nuts too, of course. This kind of place always attracts the hard case. Ovenhead Daley used to hunt these parts; Snake Alder, too. And of course, old Dundee himself. But that’s another story.

  “Anyway, I was walking down this very path one day, when what do I see in the distance but a big gorgeous Vampire dragging a wooden box out of the jungle, across the width of the trail, and into the jungle on the other side. Well, I just hopped right up, put my blade to his chest, and advised him that I’d be taking ownership of the box. He put his index finger on the tip of my sword, pushed it to the side slowly, and said with the utmost disdain, ‘You’ve made your point.’ Those were the first words Lon ever spoke to me.” “Lon? The Lon we met?” Josh asked. “The very same. I backed him off a few steps and opened the box with my blade. And what do you think was in there? Ninety pounds of raw flake cocaine. I knew immediately what it was for, of course—the Howlers. They were a tribe of insane commandos, had a little village on the Big Sticks, and they were always amassing an army for their next war. They just loved to kill and die. And they all snorted coke, especially before and during big battles, because it gave them so much strength and energy for the hand-to-hand combat. They howled when they fought, too, just to be scary. Had a lot of chi, those Howlers.

  “Anyway, Lon was a smuggler, I’d seen him around the ports once or twice, and he was obviously moving this shipment from the coca regions in the east, down to Howler-town. A big score, no question. Enough for both of us, I told him, but he wasn’t interested. So I turned him around and tied the box to his back so it bound both his arms and his wings down flat. ‘Start walkin’,’ I said. ‘Where?’ he said. ‘This trail goes right into Howler-town,’ I said, and pointed him south. Well, I tell you, he wasn’t too happy about the idea of walking down an open path with his hands tied. It’s always safer to stick to the brush. The path was faster, though, and my thought was the faster we unloaded these goods the better. Lon was pretty reluctant about the whole situation, so I had to prod him a bit with the talkin’ end of my saber. ‘Just follow the yellow brick road,’ I told him, ‘and the Wizard will reward you.’ So off we went, him in front, me behind.”

  Josh was astounded at this new picture of Jasmine as rogue and scoundrel. He stole a glance at Beauty, who was too engrossed in the story to notice.

  “Well,” Jasmine lowered her voice, “we’d walked about a day like
this, and we were both pretty tired. I was about to look for a tree to camp in, when suddenly a huge trapdoor opened in the walk, and we both dropped in. I was grabbed and spun ‘round by these horrible hairy legs, wrapped tighter and tighter in this sticky suffocating silky thread. By the time I got my bearings and looked around, I realized we were done for. Spiders, the size of cats, dozens of them. When I looked over at Lon, he was practically a cocoon, all wound up in webbing, spiders crawling all over him. It made me cold to watch, I tell you. Just before they wrapped his head up, he looked over at me and said with a smile, ‘Well, Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.’ Then they covered him over.

  “Several of them bit us—on the belly, on the face—and injected their poison. Painful it was, and paralyzing, though it didn’t affect me nearly so much as it did poor old Lon, since my plastic skin is so thick. Then they hung us upside down in netting, so they could snack off us at their leisure. Spiders never kill you outright, they just paralyze you and slowly eat you alive. Then when you’re about half dead, they eat little holes in your belly and lay their eggs in there, and then when the baby spiders hatch they live off you until you die. I tell you, my thoughts weren’t very pretty right about then.”

  She shivered at the memory. A snake hissed from somewhere out of sight, and they all jumped. The Forest glowed.

  “Something funny happened then,” she picked up. “The cocaine strapped to Lon’s back started leaking out, making a pile of flaky white powder on the ground at his feet. Some of the spiders circled around it, touched it, tasted it, tasted it some more, called over their friends—and before you know it, every spider in the cave was wired. And I mean righteously. They were zinging back and forth, spinning webs, fighting, chattering, really frenzied. Some of them started to run out of the cave, and suddenly, they were all running out of the cave, off to who knows what. With me and Lon left hanging.

  “Well, like I said, I’d only gotten a mild dose, so I was in pain but I could still move some. I finally pulled an arm free and tore myself down. Tore as much web as I could off my legs, grabbed Lon just as he was, slung him over my shoulder, and dragged us both out of there. I could hardly move, but I’d never been so scared, and that goes a long way to motivate you. I pulled us through the jungle for a whole day before I finally got to one of my own hiding places, in a cave behind a waterfall I know. I collapsed there. We both slept fitfully for about two days until the poison wore off. I nursed Lon for another week and we got to be pretty close in that cave, behind that waterfall.” The feeling was strong in her voice and her eye. “Anyway, ever since then, we called this the Yellow Brick Road.”