With no sense of time, she sometimes walked thirty kilometres between sleeps, sometimes managed less than five. Always, the rimwall was before her, rising into banked cloud. Sometimes she searched the dark sky for a sign of a thopter, knowing that she was being foolish but still nursing a faint hope. Sometimes she fantasized about abandoning the ascent, becoming an ascetic and chaste hermit in the alien forest, dressing in striped skins and finding some dry cave and carving texts from Shakespeare in rock so that the masters of this world, should they ever appear, might puzzle over the alien signs and her strangely shaped bones.
Dorthy saw the storm sweeping down upon her, a darkness covering the dark sky and the sullen face of the sun. The rain was a sudden deluge, a million silvery spears striking the ground, striking through the fanned branches of the trees where she sheltered so that within minutes she was as wet as she would have been had she remained in the open, and as cold. So she resumed walking, rain sluicing her face, plastering her coveralls to her skin. Thunder rolled low across the high sparse forest, and lightning leapt blue-white, making her squint; she had become used to the dim light of the sun. Wind rose, shaking the branches of the trees, blowing back her tangled hair. She laughed, suddenly exhilarated, and climbed on shouting quotations into the teeth of the wind. Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! Take in the topsail! Tend to the master’s whistle! Until, as suddenly as it had begun, the storm passed, rain becoming a hazy mist, faltering as the forest floor, drying, exhaled its own mist upward (Blow, till thou burst thy wind, if room enough!), a scent of pine resin, of the dead needles beneath her split, scuffing boots, bittersweet smell, honey and turpentine, of the barbed-wire bushes.
Higher and higher: the forest floor was more bare rock than carpet of needles now. She came to a bluff that rose above a turn in the river’s canyon, and found that it looked out across the vast curving slope she’d climbed. The sparse trees ran down brown slopes becoming denser, serried armies of arrowheads bristling darkly, here and there slashed by the winding of the river. Small and far was the eye of the lake, a polished ruby dropped in the dark folds of the forest. And farther still, at the dim limits of vision, the red hem of the plain where she’d started her journey. I alone have survived…
She turned and went on, sometimes singing as she climbed, her small clear voice winging out across the great airy spaces.
In this manner she passed the treeline and ascended into the mists, the ground riven slopes of ash hardened into rock an age ago. Nothing grew there but low, wind-twisted clumps of paddle-leaved plants and great blotches like crusty lichens. The river ran among rough boulders in a wide shallow channel; the great sun swam above the thickening mists like a dulled mirror.
The river split, split again, as she followed its course backward. Usually it was obvious which was the main channel and which was the tributary, but at last she came to a confluence where two similarly sized streams joined. She spent a long time casting up and down before choosing the left-hand stream, but after she had followed it for more than half a dozen kilometres, the channel narrowing all the time, it was clear that it was not the river she remembered Andrews following in the thopter before flying through the pass into the caldera.
She sat on a flat slab of rock and stared off at the way she had come. Shaly rock littering a bleak landscape, the little stream chuckling away between moss-covered shelves of stone, subdued beneath the low ceiling of mist. “What I need is a cup of coffee,” she said. “I’m used to drinking three or four cups a day, a good, rich, bitter Java preferably. That’s what I need, not all this fucking water!”
Her voice echoed and re-echoed, fading. “Christ!” she said, and shivered. She could feel an ulcer in one corner of her mouth; she was suffering badly from sores and boils and bleeding gums; the meat that was the sole item of her diet (but she had no meat now, couldn’t remember when she had last eaten) lacked the right combination of trace elements and probably most of the essential vitamins. Her feet were swollen in her boots—she was afraid to take off the boots in case she couldn’t get them back on. And she stank, she knew, and was deathly tired. But she couldn’t go to sleep, not here. Probably wouldn’t wake up again. She could imagine Kilczer patiently suggesting that they walk a little more and nodded to herself, pushed up from the rock and began to retrace her steps.
When she reached the confluence, a fine rain was falling, little more than a clinging thickening of the mist. She trudged on beside the clear swift-running water with her head down, fine drops pricking her hand where it gripped the strap of the rifle up by her shoulder. The river swung away sharply, and Dorthy, half remembering, looked around.
A grey slope of bare stone ran up into the mist, towards a cliff that loomed up and up, vanishing as it rose. She left the river and clambered up the slope, and saw that the high cliff face was riven here, an enormous gap through which a warm wind blew, for all that the rock beneath the thin soles of her boots was icy cold.
The pass was so wide that, following one lavic wall, stumbling among tumbled slabs of stone, Dorthy couldn’t see the other side through swirling mist. Warm wind sighed in her ears; freezing rock stung her feet. She’d been following it for about ten minutes when she came across an ashy hearth, the remnant of a small fire tucked within a loose kerb of small boulders that protected it from the wind. She sifted ashes through her fingers; cold as the stone around her. The long rib cage of some cat-sized animal lay to one side. Blackened slivers of meat still clung to the curving bones, but despite her hunger she didn’t dare scavenge from it.
Somewhere out there: herders.
As she walked on, the flakes of ash that clung to her fingers slowly blew away on the wind. She thought about taking a tablet of counteragent but decided against it because her Talent might slow down her reactions. So she walked with eyes straining to see through whirling white mist, the rifle loosely slung now.
The ground began to slope down, and the wind lessened. The mist was still around her, obliterating everything less than a dozen metres away; it wasn’t until she saw the first of the trees that she realized that she had crossed the pass.
She was inside the caldera.
She had made it.
Still she continued to walk, descending the shallow slope among the trees, low and wind-sculpted, foliage a mare’s nest of looped and relooped leathery belts with serrated edges, the inner strands lignified, rising from a broad stubby trunk covered with lapping palm-sized scales. There were not many of them. The mist was beginning to thin when she heard the sound, and she stopped walking.
It came from above, to her left. A soft quick thumping like a startled heart, the sound of a thopter. She saw the machine glitter through the mist and then its spotlight came on, white light burning through the mist and pinpointing her with uncanny precision, throwing her shadow backward across the shaly slope. It circled her once, the spotlight swivelling to keep her illuminated, then clapped its vanes as if in salute and dropped towards her.
She had climbed the rimwall and reached the caldera and won rescue. It had been sixteen days since the herd of critters had overrun the camp, down on the plain. The sun was only just beginning to decline from its noon station.
3. THE KEEP
They took Dorthy straight back to the high camp overlooking the keep, and without even asking her about Kilczer or the twins (she was too dazed and exhausted to volunteer anything) dumped her in the tank of an autodoc. Any halfway competent medical technician could have told them that there was nothing seriously wrong with her—electrolytes out of kilter, histamine reaction, malnutrition, scurvy—but the only medical technician in the survey team had been Kilczer, who was dead.
The autodoc was a military model. It bypassed her sensorium so that she drifted without sight or touch or taste or hearing, unable to lift even an eyebrow, and cut off her consciousness with Russian sleep while it replaced her blood with artificial plasma, cut in a liver bypass and began to dialyze the
toxins that slowly leaked from her cells, flensed away skin and subcutaneous tissue around her many inflammations and stimulated regrowth. A civilian machine would have fed her a diet of soothing induced dreams, of the beach at Serenity, perhaps, or of Tallman’s Scarp on Titan; but this model was efficient, no more. It sent her to sleep to stop her going insane from sensory deprivation while it worked, but it supplied no dreams; let her have her own.
Sometimes she was back with Kilczer on the other side of the hollow mountain, walking through pine forest with something shadowy behind them, something she couldn’t get him to see, or she was in her little singleship out where comets traced their long cold orbits, and Kilczer’s voice was crackling urgently from the receiver—but she couldn’t understand because he was speaking Russian. Or she was in the little clearing above the waterfall, seeing the herder rush through the tall grass and smash into Kilczer, or she was Kilczer, as the impact spun her out over the drop, or the herder. And sometimes she dreamed of hunting beneath a strange night sky, glowing with veils of frozen, luminous fog through which only a single, intensely bright star shone, the eye at the end of a long black rift. She was coming to understand that these latter visions might not be dreams at all, but something else, something trying to break through to her, when the machine decanted her.
All her senses rushed in on her at once. She was kneeling in a flood of blood-warm fluid, the same stuff stinging her nostrils as it ran out of them. Bright light rainbowed in the drops that clung to her lashes; beyond, someone reached out and gripped her arm at the elbow and helped her up. Cold tiles under her sticky feet. She coughed and coughed.
“Here, honey,” the tall woman, Angel Sutter, said, and guided her to a plastic mesh chair. “How you feeling?”
It was a small, brightly lit room, half of it taken up by the autodoc. A pump hummed somewhere, draining the amniotic fluid; the pallet that had tipped Dorthy out retracted into the machine’s hard white façade with a smug click. The wall opposite curved in as it rose; the wall of a bubbletent.
Dorthy hunched on the chair, naked, her skin slick with long-chain silicones and fluorocarbons, glistening like tarnished bronze. All the stigmata of her journey had been flensed away.
“Like a critter coming out of its chrysalis,” she said, as Angel Sutter draped a huge towel around her.
“You look better anyhow,” Sutter said, patting her shoulders dry. “When you came in I thought you weren’t going to make it, like some dried-up mummy maybe a thousand years old.”
“That’s how I felt,” Dorthy said. Then, shivering, “Arcady Kilczer’s dead.”
Sutter didn’t pause as she patted down Dorthy’s back. “We guessed. The twins, too, huh?”
“They died when, when…”
“You don’t have to talk right now, honey. Wait a while. You’re lucky this thing was brought up here along with everything else. I don’t think you would have made a flight back to Camp Zero. Been all sorts of changes going on here, not all of them to do with the keep.”
Dorthy touched the woman’s arm. “I have to talk with Duncan Andrews.”
Sutter stopped rubbing, disengaged herself from Dorthy’s grip. “There’ll be time for that later. You should rest first.”
“I’ve been asleep for”—Dorthy looked at her timetab—“for more than two days. There are things I have to tell him, things I’ve learned about the herders. What are you going to do, throw a hammerlock on me?”
“I couldn’t throw a hammerlock on anyone. Look, okay, wait a minute. I’ll get you something to wear.”
When Sutter returned, Dorthy had finished drying herself and had wrapped the huge towel around herself. The fluid spilled when she had been decanted from the autodoc had all drained away, leaving only a heavy cloying scent, just as her dreams had faded, leaving only a residue, the unsteady conviction that something, someone, was trying to tell her…tell her what?
Sutter handed Dorthy the bundle of clothing, holding back something else, a floppy sheaf of paper. As Dorthy pulled on crisp coveralls, Sutter said, “You didn’t have that thing with you, the Shakespeare book, so I had this printed out. Ramaro has a library about the size of that one in Rio, the Museum of Mankind? I had this printed.” She held it out, and Dorthy looked up from fastening her boots, It was The Complete Plays, in Portuguese.
“Thank you,” she said.
Sutter pulled at the puffball of her hair. Her regulation coveralls were belted with a nonregulation gold cincture. “I read in some of it. It’s not so bad when you get used to it, pretty archaic though. Why do you like old stuff like this?”
“It has everything in it, if you look hard enough,” Dorthy said, taking the sheaf. “Love, jealousy, avarice, loyalty, murder, madness…I find it reassuring that human nature is so constant.”
Sutter shrugged. “Let’s get something inside you anyhow, before you go see Andrews. Now don’t argue, I’m doing my best to look after you.”
The bubbletent was more than twenty metres across, most of it taken up by the central commons, a scattering of tables and chairs and a complex treacher. Circling it like so many orange segments were small rooms divided by fibrechip panels. A man in uniform coveralls slept at one of the tables, his head resting on folded arms, but otherwise the commons was empty.
Dorthy lingered over her choice at the treacher. Strong black Java of course, but selection of food was more difficult; the screen blinked up almost a hundred pages. At last she settled for a bowl of oyako donburi, rice with mother and child. When she sat opposite Sutter, the woman stretched and said, “So what have you got to tell Duncan, anyhow?”
“I think I can help him find out the truth about the herders.” For a moment the composite she’d built up from the mind of the captured herder lived again, and Sutter’s long, full-lipped, dark-brown face seemed a frightening mask, somehow swollen and naked. Dorthy sipped scalding Java, and as familiar bitter oils flooded her tongue the moment passed, leaving her dizzy.
“Now, Duncan already knows all about the herders, or he thinks he does. You know they’re coming up the side of the caldera, heading for the keep?”
Dorthy nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“Duncan has abandoned his theory that herders are the savage descendants of the enemy. Now he thinks they’re going to prepare the way for the true owners of this planet. Don’t say anything about it to me, argue it out with him. But that’s why this camp has become so important, the Navy is right behind him now, hoping to catch out the enemy just as they awake or whatever they’re about to do.”
“They’ve already done it,” Dorthy said.
Sutter shrugged, “You tell Duncan, I don’t know too much about it to tell the truth, security and so on. But there’s plenty else happening out there; we can all make our names here.”
Dorthy returned the other’s smile. She didn’t mind Sutter’s enthusiasm; it was innocent, without guile. She asked, “What’s going on? I can tell that you’re dying to tell me all about it.”
Sutter reared back in her chair, took a breath. “Where do I begin? The thing I’m interested in is a change in the lake around the keep; the past few days its level had been going down and a causeway across it has become exposed. But what’s really interesting is that stuff has begun growing in the water, a self-generating hydrocarbon just loaded with heavy-metal radicals, goddam weird stuff, let me tell you. It’s phosphorescent, too; I think it gets the energy to replicate from the quantum change state of trapped photons. The principle isn’t exactly new—we’ve maybe a dozen systems inherited from the Age of Waste. But those require a stable substrate, and can’t replicate. And the stuff out there is damned efficient, has to be I guess, given the low input of the sun.” Sutter grinned. “But you ask anyone else up here and they wouldn’t give you ten seconds for it. Ramaro calls it pond scum.”
Dorthy set down her chopsticks and pushed away the bowl of stirred food. Apart from a slight rubberiness to the flecks of egg, the oyako donburi was remarkably authentic
, but for all that her stomach was empty she wasn’t particularly hungry. The autodoc had kept her blood sugar high. She asked, “Do you know what that stuff is for?”
“Could be a food source, or maybe a base for manufacturing organics, like the alfalfa they grow on Novaya Zyemlya. But who the hell knows what anything really is out there?”
“And what else? What else has been going on?”
“I guess the main thing is that herders have been arriving, coming through the pass in the rimwall. That’s how you were picked up so quickly, that area is saturated with remotes. Duncan Andrews calls the herders caretakers now, by the way.”
“I know what he means, but he’s wrong.”
“Anyway, there’s a bunch of them in the keep right now, seem to be working their way towards the top, although they’re taking their time, reading every damn line of inscription as they go. They haven’t got very far yet.” Sutter scratched her flat nose. “That was when the crud started coming up, after they arrived.”
“There will be more arriving,” Dorthy said.
“Yeah,” Sutter said, “there aren’t any herds on the plain anymore. That’s why everything has built up here. Ramaro’s team has been doubled in size, and even so they’re having trouble keeping track of the arrivals, the caretakers. Chung even came here, with the new batch of equipment and technicians. She’ll be here again in a few days.” Her smile broadened. “Oops. I gave away the good news.”
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 17