Where Time Winds Blow, page 16
“The betweenings? What’s that, slang for migrating olgoi?”
“Very perceptive,” said Leuwentok grumpily. Immuk smiled at Faulcon from across the animal room. The largest olgoi made a keening sound and came to the front of its cage, chewing the bars with the four, triangular cutting plates in its round, deceptively weak-looking mouth. Faulcon thought its four tiny eyes were all swivelled to watch him. “Aren’t they beautiful creatures?” Leuwentok continued, suddenly relaxed.
“Yes,” said Faulcon. “Do they bite?”
“Do they bite!” Leuwentok glanced, half amused, at Immuk. He held up his left hand; the little finger was missing, and still obviously healing, and there were deep, red-rimmed scars in the palm and on the meat at the base of the thumb. “Just occasionally,” he added.
And yet, despite these appalling wounds, the man abruptly opened the cage and shot his hand inside. The olgoi all hugged the back of the environment, but the bold one, the one that had come forward, was firmly grasped by its neck. Leuwentok closed the cage and held the shrieking, defecating animal up to Faulcon’s face. The smell was unbelievable, a richly chemical odour that turned his stomach—sweet, sickly, overwhelming. Leuwentok laughed. “You’ve probably never noticed, but that’s the way the world smells; up here, in the forests, at least.” The olgoi, in its ungainly attitude, dangling from the biologist’s hand, reminded Faulcon of a green and blue plucked chicken, save that its feet were viciously clawed; the animal made high pitched sounds of objection.
“That smell”, said Leuwentok, “is not its own. It’s gulgaroth. I caught this one as it began its run. Every year there’s a small percentage of olgoi that begin to move up into the mountains when only five moons are dancing. Merlin is the main influence, of course, but only when all six are thirty degrees or more above the horizon do the really big changes happen to the fauna here. I think it depends on the gulgaroth more than the olgoi. The olgoi are just carriers, as you know, and they’re programmed by the symbiont. When a male gulgaroth discharges its seed into the olgoi, the olgoi takes off, no matter how many moons are up.”
He held the creature close to Faulcon again, and pulled apart the muscular orifice that ran the length of its underside—Faulcon found himself looking at a slick, purplish grey cavity, covered with yellow-tipped nodules, and coated with a translucent and highly unpleasant jelly. “You know how many gulgunculi are in there, how many thrashing sperms? About four. Ridiculous isn’t it? Germ plasm in the throat, and four sperm; and they can’t even be bothered to inseminate the female themselves. How the hell do they expect that to work biologically?”
“But it does.”
“Of course it does.” At long last Leuwentok released the olgoi, which ran, panic-stricken and senselessly, around the cage. “Any eco-system that is literally programmed by the movements of six moons is bound to be weird, and bound to work in a weird way. This reproductive process, using a go-between, works—quite what would happen if a male and female gulgaroth ever got together is something I’d dearly like to know.”
Immuk had slipped out of the room, Faulcon noticed, and now Leuwentok led the way back to the cluttered workbenches. Coffee was stewing in a conical flask. Coffee! Faulcon bent to sniff the imported drink, and found the aroma to be everything he had imagined of such an expensive luxury—weird, but wonderful of necessity. He declined a beaker-full, however (he didn’t really understand why), and watched as Leuwentok sipped a half-glass himself. Immuk came into the room, holding several rolled charts which she placed on the small desk at the end of the room. “I hope these are what you wanted. They have to be returned within a two-day.”
Quite suddenly Faulcon felt out of place, an intruder. He had got away from Steel City, and for a while had forgotten about Lena and Kris Dojaan. But now Leuwentok had work to do. Faulcon excused himself and walked alone across the station grounds, and up the chalk bluff. He decided against risking a quick smell of the real, raw atmosphere. He sat there for a long time, watching the sun creep down towards the horizon, watching the wide land redden and darken and take on a very different appearance, somehow more alien than the familiar world of the day. At dusk he began to sense movement below him, in the forest, and in the deep shadows of several of the towering crags of white rock. He was on the point of returning to the station, for safety’s sake, when he saw Immuk a few hundred yards away, darting between the seemingly petrified trunks of ancient skagbark, among the strands of powdery sunweed. He rose, stretched, and scrambled down the easier slopes until he was on the spongy land that approached the thin forest. He couldn’t see her among the trees, but Altuxor’s red disc made a part of the forest un-seeable, setting everything into silhouette. He shouted through his mask, calling her name, and her answering cry was almost frightened. “Leo? Is that you? For God’s sake go back to the clear land!”
“Where are you?” A breeze had confused his senses. He wasn’t sure he knew where her voice had come from; in these conditions the mask’s small ear-plugs, designed not to affect sound reception, could not have helped. He stood among the skagbark, conscious of the darkness, aware of the surreptitious movements of small animals. It suddenly occurred to him that he was being very foolish indeed, and that he was unarmed. He had never, in all his sorties through these forests, seen a gulgaroth—but he had never been through at dusk.
He turned back to the bluff, intending to walk up to its top and wait for Immuk to come to him. He continued walking towards the cliff, noticing the dark area at its base, and thinking for a second that it was a shallow cave. The sound, as of several twigs snapping, brought him abruptly to a halt. Blood drained from his face. His heartbeat quickened. It was a familiar sound, that snapping sound—claws clicking out of their pads. The next instant an olgoi shot away from the patch of dark, shrieking horribly. Faulcon was so startled that he felt he had been punched; he froze. He was partly aware that he should be reaching for his holster, partly aware that he wasn’t wearing it, mostly aware of the huge shape that was rising onto eight, spider-like legs, and turning its head towards him.
Several eyes sparkled in the forest of black, spiky hair that covered its head; sensory tendrils on the bloated, shiny body quivered frantically, sniffing him out; a gaping hole opened in the face and cutting edges passed silently across each other.
The gulgaroth made a throaty, rattling sound, and took several rapid steps closer to Faulcon, then stopped and began to weave from side to side, its head turning from Faulcon to the sky. It should have attacked instantly, Faulcon knew. The male gulgaroth never hesitated. It should be chewing its way through him by now, not eating, just killing. It was twice as tall as him as it stood on four legs, its other limbs reaching towards him, stroking the air between them.
Behind Faulcon the forest rustled as two human forms darted out of concealment. The gulgaroth made a deep sound, a click-spitting noise. It took a step back! Faulcon heard the sound of a hand-weapon being made operational, and Leuwentok’s voice, “No. Don’t shoot it!” The man sounded disturbed as he called loudly through his mask.
“Are you mad?” Immuk; angry.
“Don’t shoot it!” Leuwentok insisted, and a moment later he tugged on Faulcon’s arm. “Move slowly, round to the right, and up the bluff.”
“Why doesn’t it attack?”
“Look behind you. Easily, not jumpily.”
As they edged away, the gulgaroth hesitantly turning with them, Faulcon looked over the forest; in the dusk sky five moons formed a diamond pattern—tiny Aardwind at the top, the heavily pitted twins Kytara and Tharoo at the sides, and green-glowing Threelight below; nearly fully emerged from occlusion by Kytara, the striated red disc of Merlin was an unfamiliar, and brilliant, addition to the pattern.
“It’s beginning,” said Leuwentok cryptically. They had put distance between themselves and the gulgaroth, and Faulcon noticed with some relief that the giant animal was slowly turning back to face in the direction of the moons.
“Saved by magic,” he said.
“Merlin’s magic,” Immuk murmured, expanding Faulcon’s point unnecessarily. They climbed the bluff—the gulgaroth had vanished by the time they were peering over the cliff for it—and watched the double moon slowly break away from the pattern, Merlin’s disc paling quite noticeably, and shrinking a little as Kytara came to cover it again. A few minutes later an eerie howling rose from the forestlands that dipped down towards the barren area of chalk stacks and scrubby, brush-like vegetation. Darkness was approaching quite rapidly, now, and the moons were assuming more dominance in the sky, only pale Aardwind dropping away to the horizon and losing distinction. Magrath was just visible to the north.
Leuwentok said, peering downwards, “I think that’s our gulga—quite a long way off. Let’s go back to the hide. But go quietly, and keep your eyes open. These masks don’t let us smell a gulgaroth like the other creatures can.”
The “hide” was a small, pre-fabricated hut, double-walled and strong enough to withstand an attack by the giant animals it was designed to observe. Grey stippling was its only attempt at camouflage. Inside was a single, spacious room, with wall bunks, desk area, eating area, and a closeted convenience that Faulcon used with much relief. When he stepped back into the main room, Immuk and Ben Leuwentok were sitting close together, poring over some figures. They were holding hands. Faulcon was aware, again, that he was still intruding. He wished he could be back at Steel City, and he wished above all that he could talk to Lena, right now; get her back on his side.
“You take the top bunk,” said Immuk suddenly, and in that moment all thoughts of leaving the hide were taken from Faulcon’s mind, although he said, “I’d thought of riding back to the city …”
“With Merlin showing so much of his face? I shouldn’t.” It was Leuwentok who spoke. “It’s coming time for the moons to part, and that’s hunting time for all you trigger-happy rifters—it’s also problem time for the gulgaroth. They’ll guard their little go-betweens quite savagely once they’ve broken Merlin’s spell. Like that fellow out there, right? High on Merlin, but only for a few minutes. You’re safer here. We don’t mind.”
So Faulcon found a chair and sat with them at the table. He was hungry, distracted by the gnawing emptiness inside him. As if reading his mind—or perhaps hearing the rumbling of his stomach—Leuwentok grinned and said, “Vegetable stew. It’s heating up; won’t be long. Meantime, come and look at this.”
As Faulcon moved around the table, to look at the several graphs, Leuwentok looked at him quizzically. “You’re hiding out, Immuk tells me. Is that right?”
“Lying low for a while. Personal difficulties.”
“I thought you might have been checking up on us. Steel City occasionally sends people out to see if we’re coming up with anything really interesting. Intelligent life, in other words. But you’re just curious, right?”
Faulcon shrugged. “Fascinated. Curious. Intrigued. It seems much more alive out here than the science section in the city.”
“It is,” said Leuwentok, in a tone of voice that suggested he had little more than contempt for the city scientists. “We’re a part of Section 2, the peripheral part. Oh, the city’s data is useful: migrations, sightings, specimens. But the real work is done here, in the field.”
The sheets of statistics were all concerned with the movements of the six moons, related to single and multiple behaviour patterns of the olgoi, gulgaroth and assorted other creatures. “The moons are really important—that’s something I never really understood; I knew it, but it had never sunk in, if you see what I mean.”
“Merlin is most important of all. Quite why I don’t know.” Leuwentok searched through the sheets until he found a plot of olgoi mating activity, related to the various emergence phases of Merlin from behind the disc of Kytara. He made his points one by one in rapid succession, stabbing the paper with his finger, giving Faulcon no chance to think hard about any single fact: that a hormone called attractin increased dramatically in the olgoi body fluids when Merlin was first seen as a crescent in the early spring months; that male olgoi responded to the first half-face of Merlin by producing quantities of germ cell fluid; that females held fertilized embryos in stasis until Merlin was more than half obscured again, in late summer, but that the final trigger for development was the first time that all the moons were in alignment, vertically, following the Merlin factor. And the gulgaroth, too, showed physiological and behavioural changes all closely related to the occlusion, waning and waxing of the red moon, in particular their seed-mating as Merlin was almost fully seen, the ritual insemination of the olgoi occurring—and there were many results for this conclusion—the moment Merlin’s full disc had emerged, and at a time when the olgoi’s own reproductive cycle had finished. Some, like the pair they had seen this evening, behaved differently, early, futilely, responding to a wrong sky-sign, perhaps.
“The moons form a highly intricate and complex programme. The pattern of movement is identical year to year—I can show you correlations between the colour change of whip-weed and bladderlash fronds and the distance above the horizon of Threelight. I can show you a thousand correlations—life on VanderZande’s World jumps to the pull of the moons’ strings, and does so to a degree that is quite staggering. But Merlin most of all—that’s the main force. Perhaps for no other reason than that it’s hidden for so much of its year. Certainly there are no measurable, or should I say yet-measured, rays from it, no forces reaching down to grapple with physiology. Visual cues are supplied simply by its appearance and disappearance, and Merlin’s combined gravitational tug with Kytara probably acts as a non-visual cue.” Leuwentok sat back and looked up at Faulcon, who shook his head, partly in bewilderment as he scanned and rescanned the columns of data, partly from a sense of guilt—after all, Leuwentok had explained all this during those early seminars—and partly from a sense of surprise. The question he had been burning to ask at last found voice.
“There’s nothing here about man. Do we escape?”
Leuwentok chuckled. “I could see that question coming a mile off.” He moved papers aside until he found what he was looking for. “This is a correlation between the so-called fiersig and the position of the moons. Inasmuch as fiersig affect man, the moons affect man. You can see that we get spates of the activity when there are four moons high. Fiersig tend to pass south-north as you know, they come from the direction of the mountains, and drift away across the valley. As they move they follow a line towards either Aardwind or Tharoo, changing direction as their target moon sinks or rises obliquely. And don’t ask me what any of this means, because I have no idea, and I don’t think anybody ever will—if we were going to demonstrate that the fiersig were life-forms I think we’d have done it by now. The whole thing is cosmic linkage, moon to world, moon to life. Earth experiences a similar linkage, but in a much simpler way since it only has the one moon, and most life on Earth is programmed by daylight. But that moon does have some effect—dogs howl at it, physiology can be shown to fluctuate with it, sea-tides are much the result of it. On Kamelios we have all of that six-fold.”
“That’s why there are no dogs here,” said Immuk knowledgeably. “They howl themselves to death.”
Faulcon frowned as he looked at her. “Really?”
She looked embarrassed. “It was a joke, Leo.”
Leuwentok went on, “Incidentally, there is no correlation between moon and the time winds—not as far as anyone has determined. Nor between moon and the time squalls, or eddy currents or swirlwinds—whatever governs the flow of time through the valley is responding to something other than the obvious climatic and environmental triggers.”
“And the sightings of the pyramid?” Faulcon felt a moment’s unease—he had stayed quiet about the pyramid for so long, tried to put it from his mind so totally, that he felt himself fighting against a powerful internal resistance to even mentioning the subject.
Leuwentok stared at him thoughtfully, and with just a hint of apprehension. Guessing what was the matter, and taking a chance that what he was doing was not against regulations, Faulcon drew out the small security disc. At once Leuwentok rose to his feet, walked up to Faulcon and took the piece of plastic. “Good God—he’s got a grey clearance. How did you get this? You are a rifter …?”
“I made a sighting. I’ve been sworn to silence on anything I see, hear or do, on pain of isolation.”
“Well, don’t take too much notice of that,” said Leuwentok, and showed Faulcon his own clearance. Immuk waved hers. “A grey clearance doesn’t mean much; it does mean I can talk to you about the aliens. Even so, nothing you hear on the subject of sightings should go out of this room. Olgoi, gulgaroth, moons—that’s fine, that’s education. But someone in Steel City doesn’t want the sighting, or our ideas on them, talked about. They’re trying to keep it all to rumour level; no hard facts. What they don’t want is a generalized belief in an alien presence. Not yet, at least.”
“Do you know, then, that Commander Ensavlion’s sighting—an alien machine, with travellers aboard—is a genuine sighting of genuine creatures?” Faulcon was hot, the flush in his face burning him.
“Have you experienced them?” asked Leuwentok quietly. “I mean the aliens, not these so-called humanoid creatures, these time-travellers. I mean the real aliens. Have you sat in that valley and sensed them?”
What do I say, Faulcon wondered, and his head whirled in confusion. Did he admit things or not? Did he make the decision now that the experience of the alien in the valley the previous evening—something he had felt several times before, but only when naked to the world, at times such as his hunting trips—that that experience was real? Or was it just imagination? He said, “I’ve felt something—something close. As if I was being watched. Yes.”
“Have you seen the phantom?”
“Certainly, More than once.”
