by Andre Norton
“There is no way then.” But Burr refused defeat. He was not to wait here tamely for what the unknown could bring into being as a threat against them.
“I do not know…”
At first her words hardly pierced through the milling thought in his own mind. But when their meaning did reach him, Burr turned on her swiftly, his controlled anger at the whole situation making his demand explosive in force.
“You may not know, but you are speculating… about what?”
“There is this, and it will be highly dangerous. She will make a move soon, you must have felt her rage when she could not force us to her desire. If we let whatever menace she sends against us develop fully, then there is just a chance I can connect with the thread of her dream weaving. But the dream then must be hers… not mine, nor a hybrid one which is half and half.”
“So you may be able to find the connecting thread… what then?”
“Just this, if I can fasten to it firmly, we can force our way out. These dreamers are fully programmed in one important factor… they must break the dream on the client’s order. I could not do that for you because this unlooked-for situation had arisen. The dream was secondhand and it was already overlaid, before I tried, by a blanketing force from another and very powerful dreamer.”
What she said made sense to Burr, after a fashion. But he did not like it at all.
“How far must the new dream go before you have a chance to do this?”
She did not meet his gaze. “I am afraid far enough to make the situation highly dangerous. You will have to face whatever peril she introduces, and hold it, until I have located the dream thread and can anchor us to it.”
There was a kind of desperate logic in that and Burr could understand what she suggested, even though it was far outside his experience. That the result of such action would be perilous he had no doubts at all. But neither had he any other choice that he could see.
“We wait then… until she moves.” That was not a question but a decision on his part. Then he did add a question, “Can you guess who ‘she’ is? The Foostmam?”
“No. She trains dreamers but she is not known to be a dreamer herself. You understand, many dreamers are almost completely locked away from reality; they must be tended as one tends an infant. Those who so protect and care for them are not dreamers for that very reason. There are two dreamers in the Hive who had their clients die. One was herself maimed in the dream world so that she lives, but just that… her dreaming mind is either dead or so shocked it cannot be reached.
“The other dreamer is unusual in that her potential was never realized until she reached adolescence. This has been known to happen, but very rarely. Any family which has produced a dreamer in the past knows the signs to watch for in early childhood and are eager to find one of their clan house with the ability. It means a large sum of credits for them. So a late developer has been found now and again, but it is an uncommon happening.”
“You think this is the one?”
Uahach shrugged. “How can I tell? Two men died in dreams she spun for them and she was not shocked herself. Those are the only facts I can give you.”
“Have you seen her? Talked to her?” Burr pressed.
“No. The Hive keeps all their dreamers of higher rank separated. A dreamer not in service is expected to build up her dreaming ability by the garnering of information, using the stored tapes to gather material for her dreams. It is a very lonely life for those who wake.”
“Each of those dead men provided reason to wish them dead,” Burr commented. “Either their wealth or their offices made them vulnerable. So if someone could tamper with a dreamer, perhaps even provide the proper background tapes…”
The girl was already nodding. “Yes, it could be done. Each one of us hides in his or her inner mind some personal and private fear. If the nature of that fear was known and it could be materialized to the highest wave…”
“They could well die, or wake raving! But that information would have to be supplied by someone close enough.”
“What of your fears?” she asked.
“They provided me with a tight background for identity,” Burr mused. “But hardly recorded anything such as that.”
He paced up and down beginning to wonder. Could a dreamer herself shift out of a man’s mind his greater fear and then materialize it?
As he turned to face the girl once more he saw she had changed position, her eyes fixed on the dark hole which remained open in the Tower. The tense rigidity was back in her figure. He needed no more warning than that There was something coming, their enemy once more moved. But so far all Burr could see was that deep darkness within. Breathing a little quickly he came to stand shoulder to shoulder with Uahach. He wanted to ask if she could give any hint as to what to expect, but feared to break her concentration. She had already made it plain to him that he must stand up to anything which awaited them long enough for her to reach the dream line lying behind it.
There was a curdling crawl of the black shadow. Some of it licked forward like a black questing tongue, striking out into the light and air in a pointed ribbon of darkness.
Instinctively Burr retreated, drawing his companion with him.
There was something about that evidence of strange life which churned his stomach, made his flesh roughen as if he stood in the midst of an icy blast The point end arose from the ground, weaved from side to side, as might the head of some reptile. Now there were bulges there. These popped with an audible sound to display red coals of eyes.
Burr could not identify the thing and, though the sight made him sick in an odd way he could not define, he fought to subdue his fear. Perhaps, since the unknown dreamer did not have any briefing as to his private fears she was producing now a fragment of her own most morbid imagining.
The black ribbon flowed forward slowly. Its head had stopped weaving, those coal eyes were centered on Burr. If the head was narrow, the bloated body coming into view through the hole door was slug fat, with a quivering hump forming most of it.
“No!”
The girl beside him cried out, raised her hands as if to push the crawling monster back into hiding. Her face was a mask of disgust and terror, the fear taking over.
X
Burr guessed what had happened. The enemy had not struck at him, but rather at Uahach, perhaps because already the opposition was aware that in such a battle as they faced the girl was the stronger opponent.
A fetid odor wafted from the crawler, thick and loathsome enough to make Burr gag. He had put out his left hand to grip the girl’s shoulder, and could feel the shudders running through her. Though this crawling monstrosity was unknown to him, it was not to her.
“Hold on!” He gave her a shake. “It is a dream… remember… a dream!”
She could not still her shivering, but he saw her head move. It was plain that she was in no condition at this moment to do what must be done… trace that thread of communication with the other dreamer.
Burr raised his hand from the roundness of her shoulder, grabbed for the throat buckle of the bulky cloak she wore. His fingers freed the latch and he gathered the long folds of material swiftly into his grip.
“Stand back!”
Setting the spear between his knees he took the cloak into both hands. The material was very closely woven, yet silky to the touch. He shook out the length and then, with what skill he could summon, he sent the outer edge snapping up in the air, spinning the goods out and down.
The folds settled over the crawler, masking the creature from view and, before the thing could free itself, Burr sprang forward to stab down again and again at that bulk heaving under the cloth. In his head, not his ears, shrilled a thin screaming which shook him, but not enough to make him retreat. There were growing splotches on the cloak, evil-smelling liquid oozing through the slits the spearpoint made.
Yet it would seem that the thing could not be killed for there was no end to the movement under the torn and befouled cloak
. Burr stabbed… stabbed. Could not the Thing be killed?
Once more he sensed the rise of strange fierce anger in the very air about him. But at last the monster no longer moved. Burr drew back warily from the bundle of stinking cloth, his spear ready for a second assault.
Uahach breathed in deep gasps, but when her eyes met his this time there was recognition in them.
“Were you able to get anything?” He thought that a very vain hope. She had been too shaken by the emergence of the crawler.
But she nodded. “Something… not enough. I must try again. That… I did not expect that.” Still shivering she pointed to what lay hidden from their eyes.
“That was your fear.”
She shook her head. “Not mine… hers… Uahach’s! It seems they implanted more than her memories in me.”
For a moment there was silence between them. That attack had been cunningly organized… not to get directly at Burr, but rather remove the support of his true dreamer. If he had been killed it would have served a double purpose. But now he was convinced that the girl with him had as much to fear as he did. And when she spoke, Burr knew that she realized that in turn.
“To shake me,” she spoke in a voice hardly above a whisper. “With me held, then you can be easily taken, or so she thinks!”
“What will she send next?” He knew the folly of asking that even as he voiced the question. Esper talented this pseudodreamer might be, but to be able to outsee the enemy dreamer was too much to expect of anyone.
There was a noise, not issuing from the dark bowels of the Tower but rather from the rock cliffs. Burr slued around, and his breath caught in his throat.
Perhaps the enemy did not have the proper knowledge of his personal fears, but what had been conjured up now, what was scrabbling over the waste of rocks would awaken sick fear in any one in whose veins even a trace of Terran blood now flowed.
Each planet has its own perils. But there was one overriding one which had led in the past to two desperate measures, the actual deliberate burn-off by force of whole worlds which had been infected, lest a horrible death spawned on the surface somehow be carried on to blight more of the galaxy.
This… this Thing which lurched with purpose toward them… Burr had seen its like in the tridees of warning each agent must memorize in first training. The mewling creature must once have been human, or humanoid enough to interbreed with Terrans. For their species alone in the galaxy was susceptible to what it harbored within it. And it was an added curse of that rotting disease that those victims who harbored it were driven in turn to infect their fellows. Touch, a whiff of breath from their half-dissolved throats… a myriad different things could transmit the virus… a virus which had a deadly life of its own, feeding not only on the victim’s body, but on his liquefying mind, so that it learned from its carrier where and when it could be most likely to pick a fresh victim.
The creature, dead as a man knows death, yet stumbling on, powered by the will of the thing which had killed it so horribly, lurched toward them. All Burr’s instincts lay toward flight, even though he knew it would do no good. Once the thing was set on their trail it would tirelessly follow. Since it was already dead, no weapon save a burner beam could destroy it. And it was a menace to both of them. So it would seem that the dreamer was now determined to slay them together in a single supreme effort.
Burr kept telling himself that this was a dream, that only his own acceptance of such action as being reality could give the thing the power of killing. But his indoctrination against the disease went so deep that the logic of that argument was far too feeble.
The sea… the sea was behind it and here the cliff was high. If there was only some way of hurling it back over that rise they could gain time, for it would take long for that broken, eaten body to climb such a barrier and be after them.
Burr, gritting his teeth, took a couple of strides forward and snatched up the cloak which hid the battered monster, paying no attention to the noisome mass beneath.
“You have another weighted cord?” he said over his shoulder.
She did not answer and when he looked around he could see his companion was caught again in a trance state. Apparently this time unaffected by the loathsome thing tottering inexorably toward them, she was striving to trace the nightmare creature back to its creator.
Dragging the torn, stained cloak, Burr leaped to her side. She did indeed have one of the weighted cords in a hook on her belt. He jerked it free, nearly dragging her from her balance by that sudden grab. Her attention did not shift to him, but he did have the cord in his hands.
Burr swung around to face the shambling horror. The weighted cord was a weapon new to him, but it was all he had. To let the thing come near enough to spear would avail him nothing for that body, until its legs rotted away under it, would pursue, it would even crawl as long as its bone-arms lasted.
He whirled the cord about his head as he had seen the girl do. This was such a slim chance, but the only one. He loosed the thong… to see it pass out through the air. It caught about the thing a little lower than hip-high, just at a moment when the thing teetered on a rock from which it could leap out and land close to them.
However, instead it fell under the impetus of the weighted cord. Instantly Burr moved, flinging the cloak over the floundering thing much as he had done over the slug-creature. It fought the folds of cloth. A limb which was half bone protruded through from one stained slit. But Burr was ready.
Twisting the spear he jabbed fiercely with its butt at the fighting thing. Twice his weapon thudded home, rolling it back toward the edge of the cliff. With a mighty effort, for it had somehow gotten to its knees again, he sent the spear in a third blow, into which he put all of the strength he could muster, straight into the middle of the muffled shape.
This time he hurled it well back. For a second or so he was afraid not far enough. Then, as it fought to rise, to balance, it teetered farther back and was gone… down into the sea beneath.
XI
“It is gone for a moment.” He could have shouted that in his relief.
But when he looked to Uahach again he saw she had not turned her head a fraction; she could not have witnessed his small victory. Her lips moved though…
“Come.”
She had not spoken that word aloud, he had only read it with his glance. Her left hand made a vague motion away from her body as if seeking something to grasp. Burr plunged forward and gripped her fingers within his. Had she done it… found the link with the enemy?… Could he dare to believe?…
The world of the Tower was blotted out by a burst of utter darkness, if one could imagine dark snapping instantly into being. Burr could not even feel if he was still hand-linked to the girl, that he had any anchor at all. There came a sensation of rushing through that darkness…
Was this how a dream ended? His lost feeling awoke new fear. Suppose they were now caught within this place of not-being… held forever here. Twice there were flashes of sight, a misty uprise of tower and rocks. Burr had the sensation of being drawn in two directions. And there came a pain in that which was not of body, but struck rather at some innermost core.
The dark held steady now. And the sensation of passage through this space was more intense. Then came a break in the blackness. What lay there, clothed in mist, was not rock or tower, rather a body stretched out on some support which did not come into visibility at all. And he was drawn to the side of that body.
This was a dreamer, her head half masked in the helmet which reinforced and held the dream intact.
And now Burr was aware of a strong emotion. Not the anger which had struck at him before… no, this was the need for action, imperative and demanding. It came not from the dreamer, but from somewhere about him.
He watched a hand materialize out of nothing, its fingers crooked as if it would claw at the helmet of the sleeper. And at the same moment there was a wordless demand…
“Now! Give me… now!”
In h
im arose, without his conscious volition an answer to that cry. He must give form and substance to that clutching hand with every particle of energy he could summon. There was a swift outrush of such strength as he did not even know that he could produce until he felt it drain from him.
The hand grew denser, more real. Still he was being drained, as it began to descend with infinite slowness, moving in small jerks as if fighting its way against some defensive covering, down toward the body of the dreamer.
He could not continue to give, yet he must! For unless that hand completed its mission he would be lost indeed. Burr did not know how he could be so sure of that, he only knew that he was certain of it as if it had been part of his briefing.
Slowly the hand moved… so slowly. He was so weakened by the drain it caused that he felt now only a tatter of man which any wind might bear away.
The crooked fingers straightened a little. They no longer resembled claws. The forefinger turned, pointed to the breast of the sleeper.
Burr held on. This was such a battle as nothing in his past had prepared him to wage. It all depended upon that finger… the touch… but that must come soon, very soon!
Still in jerks as if the energy which powered it flowed and ebbed the hand continued to descend. Then, the forefinger touched the misty figure of the dreamer, which had not taken on any substance at all during the long space of time, or so it had seemed to Burr, since he had come to its side.
The dreamer writhed. The finger could have been a point of steel well aimed. Then the mouth showing beneath the rim of the helmet grimaced, lips moving as if spewing forth some curse. Yet Burr could neither hear nor read words.
Again dark snapped down and he was… lost…