Where Time Winds Blow, page 12
In the warm, spacious interior of the station Faulcon stepped out of his suit, and helped Lena from hers. The two on-duty station crew, ageing, rather unsociable men, remained at the Valley Monitoring Console, listening, always listening, for the sudden atmospheric crack, the electromagnetic symphony that heralded the abrupt appearance of a time wind. The winds did not begin at one end of the valley and blow through the gorge to the other. They could form anywhere, and though they usually blew east to west, they had been known to blow in the opposite direction as well. The valley was watched constantly and with great concentration.
“That was a stupid thing to do,” said Faulcon. They sipped hot soup and sat in a small circle close to the wide window overlooking the valley; the thick glass was tinted in some way, and the dome’s interior seemed slightly blue. On Kamelios, where the ageing sun cast a red shadow across everything, the effect was slightly disturbing.
“It was a bloody irresponsible thing to do,” snapped Lena glaring at Kris. “On my team you obey the rules. You’ve not only put your own life in danger, you inconvenienced and endangered me, and I resent that.”
Kris, quite pale, seemed unrepentant. He drank his soup, holding the cup in both hands, and stared out through the overlook. Finally he said, “I guess I’m sorry.”
“That’s a shame,” said Lena stiffly. “If you’d known you were sorry I’d have liked you a lot better.”
“I am sorry,” Kris amended, looking at her. “It was dumb of me. I’d ask you only to crawl inside my head for a moment, to have a sniff around and see what’s there.” Imploring eyes turning on Faulcon, reasonableness oozing from his youthful features. “You’ve got to know what it’s like … what it was like … to have come so far to find Mark, to see him, and to be denied access to him because of … because of a danger, a dangerous thing, that in my days here I haven’t seen, or heard, or even got wind of, if you’ll pardon the feeble joke.”
Lena dismissed the levity with a contemptuous glance. Kris tried to ignore her and looked at Faulcon. “I saw the phantom, Leo. I really did.”
“A lot of people have seen the phantom.” Faulcon could recognize that something in Kris’s expression testified to more than a distant sighting. He wondered how close the man had got, but he didn’t want to push Kris for information, not in the present hostile atmosphere.
Distantly the two observers laughed at some shared joke; their console had been making crackling sounds, the sound of communication with something or someone out on the planet. Faulcon watched them for a second, then let his gaze drop back to Kris Dojaan, who was chewing at his lower lip, distracted and thoughtful.
“I know a lot of people have made sightings from a distance,” he said, “but I’ve been right up close.”
Now Lena looked interested too. “How close?”
“As close as this,” said Kris. He was being infuriatingly unforthcoming. “The first night I didn’t get very close—I saw the figure and it ran away.”
Faulcon was horrified. “The first night? You mean you’ve been out every night since we came back?”
Kris grinned. “Do I get my wrist slapped?”
“Imbecile,” said Lena quietly, and Kris shrugged.
“I’m not the only man from the city who goes out at night. The first night I saw someone in a rift suit, running like a mad thing along the edge of the canyon, and yelling, I think. I could hear sounds coming from the helmet. I was a long way away, and he didn’t see me. I was hiding. But he was in a rift suit and if he was looking for the phantom he was destined to be unlucky. A rift suit moves too fast and the phantom doesn’t take a chance. Me, out there practically naked, well, I was trusted.”
Lena said, “I doubt he was looking for the phantom. A golden pyramid more like.”
“Commander Ensavlion, you mean? Yes, that makes sense.”
Faulcon watched him solemnly, quietly, and finally said, “What about the phantom? What did you learn?”
“Too much,” said Kris quickly, not meeting either gaze. When he had said no more for several seconds, Faulcon prompted, “Was I right, then? Have you come to understand a little more about this world?”
“Do you mean is it me out there, running around in rags?” Kris neither smiled, nor frowned, but his voice became sad for a moment. “It isn’t Mark, at any rate. I was so sure it was Mark, and it wasn’t, and so I’ve still got to go after him. But that’s all right. That’s why I came here, to Kamelios. It’s in my contract.”
Faulcon and Lena exchanged an uneasy glance. In his contract? His work contract? There was surely no such clause that required a man to sacrifice his life into Othertime. But Kris was not elaborating.
Putting that last cryptic statement aside for the moment, Faulcon persisted: “If it’s not Mark out there, who is it? You must know if you’ve spoken to him!”
“I’m not sure that I do know,” said the boy. “And I’m not saying what I think. Don’t press me, Leo. Please. I really don’t want to talk about it.”
Exasperated with him, Lena stood, smoothed down her tight-fitting undersuit and shook her head. “I’m going back to the city. There’ll be a cargo transport passing here in two or three hours, so I’m told; you’ll ride back on that. Is that clear?” Kris nodded. Lena looked at Faulcon. “Are you coming?”
“Later,” said Faulcon, and Lena was puzzled for a moment, watching him curiously. When he made no effort to explain further she turned abruptly and went to the alcove where her suit was standing. Before Faulcon could rise and help her she had swung into the machine and was walking to the airlock.
“I really don’t want to talk about it,” said Kris as she went, looking at Faulcon with an expression of slight embarrassment. He had obviously assumed Faulcon had stayed because he thought Kris was uneasy with Lena. He hadn’t. Faulcon smiled at his team mate, and observed how tired Kris looked.
“I’m dog tired. It’s true. The training—the sleepless nights—is taking its toll.”
“Then sleep,” said Faulcon, and Kris walked to a couch and curled up gratefully. Faulcon watched him for a while, then rose and fetched the face-mask from his suit. The two observers watched him sourly as he strapped the face piece on, and one of them said, “Against regulations to go out there without an r-suit.”
“Report me, then,” said Faulcon bitterly. “But first, let me out, will you?”
Reluctantly the station crew obliged.
Running. It was like running through time. It was an exquisite freedom, and experience so terrifying that it was almost intellectual; the relinquishing of responsibility, the dispensing-with of the protective suit, the running through this backwater of time’s great river was a religious thing, and Faulcon wanted to sing its praises, to scream the sweat that covered his body, to sing the tension of the wires that moved him.
He went down the canyon slopes, and the sun was lost to him; the cloak of deepening red became a darkening night, a land of shade, where structures and decay were highlit, then brightlit, then redlit, then instantly in darkness; and as he moved through alienness so he found an incomprehensible beauty in the moving of one ruin against another, the red crystal spire that was suddenly a towering dark shape, moving across his field of vision and showing him the wonder of mindless cubes and pyramids of green and red-lit colours of the rainbow.
Deeper; darker; a shard of life in the barren sediment of time, running through the ages of the world, crawling down the eons, the rocks and fossils of the strata scattering and crumbling and making their own way from some para-permian to a sterile cambrian, and deeper still, to the scar-ridden flat lands in the deepest part of the half-lit gorge.
Before he reached the bottom, more than an hour since he had started his descent, Faulcon’s resolve gave out, the thrill of fear overwhelming him, and he sat down heavily in the stillness. The smile behind his mask was of triumph—to have got so far, to have overcome fear to this extent! All his unease at being so close to Kris Dojaan had gone. The fear he faced was that terror of anticipation of being lost in time that had haunted him since his first days on Kamelios. Naked to the winds he could gauge the extent of his courage; in his months here he had never before dared to approach the valley without a suit, and gradually that suit had become a mask to his apprehension, a crutch that had almost grafted itself to his body. For the first time in a very long time he was starting to find out how it really was between him and VanderZande’s World. He felt the gusting, tugging fingers of some natural breeze that heralded the coming dusk. With a view down the valley, into the western distances, he sat as Kris had sat, and contemplated the farther wall of the canyon, and the minds that had designed this carnival of ruination; and he examined, too, the nature of his fear, and the sense of ecstasy, and excitement, that had suddenly greeted his contemplation of the alien land before him, a land he had observed so many times before, and always with a bored indifference, a mercenary-seeking of anything that might pay well.
Yes, much of the coldness was the fault of the rift suit, the stable environment, the human-made machine enclosing the fleshy thing that was the intelligence, and bearing it about its business secure in the knowledge that the suit was increasing its survival chances, to such an extent that the odds were highly favourable. And when the sense of danger goes, perhaps the sense of awe follows. A full appreciation of mystery demands the linking of the soul, and the r-suits cut off the soul as hard and definitely as they cut off the wind, the air, the waves of energy, the very breath of time itself.
He was free now, and his soul and his heart soared out across the void of the canyon, settling on this structure, then that, winging its way from city shard to city shard, never knowing whether there was a billion years of difference in the simple visual hop from a spire to a stone arch and back to the ground again.
Where are you then? Come on, show yourself. I haven’t got all day.
A long time passed and Faulcon remained still, searching the canyon and the buildings for any sign of movement. The day grew redder, darker. He knew that soon he would have to move back up the slope or risk spending the night in the valley, exposed to any time squall that might whip up over the next few hours, and exposed to the terrible night chill of Kamelios. His undersuit would keep him warm or cool within moderately intense fluctuations. But night would creep through the fabric with steady, ghoulish cold.
A movement, distantly, made his heart stop. He peered hard to the west, towards Steel City, seeing some few miles up the canyon before the curvature of the valley cut off his view. He gradually realized that the movement was caused by twelve rift-suited figures racing across the canyon bottom, and disappearing into some invisible structure on the far side. Faulcon could not imagine what they were doing here. He had always thought that all missions returned to a station or the city when dusk came down.
He had managed to worry over the distant figures for no more than a few seconds when he heard stones tumbling, and the unmistakable sound of something moving across the ledges above him. He remembered, with chilling hindsight, that this part of the valley was a favourite hunting ground for the male gulgaroth, and that unprotected humans were by no means outside the range of such creatures’ tastes if they had not fed for several days. He stood quickly, turned, and stared hard against the sky, seeking the sleek, gleaming shape of the creature. As he did so he suddenly felt his skin crawl, imagined for a moment that he was being watched from the deeper valley. The presence was so strong that he cried out, but when he turned there was nothing to see and the sensation faded. He looked back up the slope. For a moment he saw nothing but the rising cliff, and the waving motion of sparse vegetation clinging to the easier slopes. Then something, too small for a gulgaroth, darted off to the left. He thought it was another animal at first, but when it slipped slightly, and stopped, he realized he was staring at a man, an old man, wearing the ragged uniform of Steel City and a small survival mask. Faulcon knew without hesitation that it was the man he sought. He shouted for the figure to wait, but his own face mask inhibited the sound. He waved. The man turned to watch him briefly, then ran along the slope of the canyon, behind a jagged outcrop of sparkling rock.
Faulcon went in pursuit, up the incline, and calling as loud as he could. The phantom scurried away from him, but Faulcon came close, closer than he would ever have thought possible. Whoever this man was, he was reluctant to invoke the mechanism of his vanishing trick. He wanted Faulcon to come close, and yet was afraid to confront him, to face him.
“Please wait! You spoke to my friend, speak to me. For God’s sake wait …”
Why am I so afraid? My eagerness is fear, isn’t it? Of course it is.
Quite suddenly the phantom was before him, cowering, crouching, hands lifted to face, fingers spread and hiding those features of the aged face that the mask did not conceal. Faulcon wondered if he looked frightening, inhuman in the narrow mask he himself wore; perhaps to remove it, to show his full face, would emphasize to the phantom that his concern was genuine. He removed the faceted goggles, gagging on the atmosphere of Kamelios for a second before he could get the respirator back into his mouth. Now he could breathe but not talk properly. “I’m a friend!” Patronizing words, and difficult to achieve: remove respirator and speak without breathing; respirator back; blink away streaming tears; rack with the choking sensation induced by whatever organic compounds made the Kamelion atmosphere directly unbreathable. The cowering figure of the man was silent, all the whimpering, strangely animal noises gone.
“Who are you?” said Faulcon, learning how to speak and breathe without choking. “Please tell me.” Breathing. “I’m not just inquisitive, I really care.”
The shape turned away from him, the fabric of the tattered suit stretching tight across its back. The phantom held up a wrinkled, trembling hand, held it out towards Faulcon, stretched his arm for the most direct and fervent gesture possible: please stay away.
Faulcon approached, only to hear the phantom cry out, a strangely old, high-pitched voice, the voice of a very, very old man, almost child-like, almost desperate. The hand shook, then was snatched into the body, and the figure seemed to shrink even further. Faulcon drew his hand across his eyes, trying to clear his vision, horribly aware that less than a minute of exposure to the Kamelion atmosphere could start to corrode the cornea.
He realized he was about to lose the time phantom, and even as he shouted, “No, wait, please … I must know who you are …” so the figure blurred through his tears, seemed to dart out of sight, and was gone as abruptly as that, as cleanly, as completely as any fleeting breeze, Faulcon found himself staring at bare rock through his goggles, still in an attitude of appeal, still working to fix the mask on properly. He straightened and looked around. Bitterly disappointed, and yet elated somewhere inside that he had achieved so much more than for years had been believed possible, he began the slow climb back up the cliff.
A long while later, in the last hour of Kamelion’s rich red dusk, he re-entered the dome of Riftwatch Station Shibano, and dabbed a special ointment to his weeping eyes. Through his blurred vision he noticed that Kris Dojaan was not in the main lounge. He asked the crew of the station if the cargo-transport had taken him back to Steel City and was told that the transport had been delayed.
A pang of disquiet silenced Faulcon for a second and he regarded the observers with blank features. “Where is he, then?”
“One of the Section Commanders turned up. Just came, just this last few minutes.”
“Ensavlion?” asked Faulcon, and the man grinned.
“The very same. He’s been out looking for aliens, and he’s popped in for a drink.”
The observers found that very funny. Faulcon remained impassive. What was Ensavlion doing here? Coincidence? He would certainly have known that three of his team had checked in, the observers would not have broken regulations and not reported the arrivals. Or had the Commander followed them yet again? And what was he saying to Kris that he felt he had to hide away from the main lounge, and the possibility of being overheard?
“They’re back there,” Faulcon was told, and followed the man’s glance to the relaxation and tv room, now lit up. The door was slightly open and Faulcon walked quietly across the floor to stand just outside, carefully peering in.
Kris was seated, his back to the door. Commander Ensavlion was leaning against the ebony box that housed the tv player, looking away from the boy, and away from the watching stranger outside the room.
CHAPTER NINE
“I should have spoken to you before, I know that. I’m sorry about it. I was glad when Leo Faulcon suggested you go straight out on a mission. I thought it would help settle you psychologically to Kamelios, to come to understand the place to a certain extent. Then I thought it would be easy to talk to you about Mark, about the mission, about me … about why Mark died when I could have prevented it. But it wasn’t easy. I should have spoken to you when you came. I must confess that I am afraid to speak to you even now. I wonder what you must think of me …”
Kris sat stiffly and watched his Commander. For some minutes the conversation had been strained, and trivial. Ensavlion seemed incapable of looking at Kris Dojaan, but cast furtive, fleeting glances at him; and furtive, fleeting smiles, as if always divining for sympathy, always trying to elicit a warm and friendly response from the young man who sat so solemn, so passive, so embarrassed. And Kris was embarrassed. And he was also angry. He was confused, and this world and its people confused him worst of all. If Ensavlion would come out with his statement it would be so much easier for all concerned. If he would say: I let him die, I was irresponsible, I am to blame, I shot him, I pushed him … if he would just say whatever it was that was eating at his soul, the atmosphere in the room could become sweeter, and Kris would relax; and maybe then they could talk sensibly about a brave man, about a “dead” man, more accurately about the man who had gone into time … and had not come back. Mark had not come back; he was not the phantom, it had been a stupid dream, a clutching at straws of the first magnitude. Mark, nonetheless, was the survival type, and if anyone could survive the hostile future—or past—Kris was certain it was he. Mark’s survival instinct was far greater than that of either Leo Faulcon, or Lena Tanoway … far greater. He thought of Faulcon for a moment, a fleeting moment, a distracted instant in the silence following Ensavlion’s stilted, awkward confession. Poor Faulcon. Poor man. He felt close to Leo, close enough to regard him as a friend. He felt a sympathy for him that he could not have felt for Lena. Sweat prickled on his face and he tried to put the terrible thought aside, let his attention swing back to Commander Ensavlion.
