Where Time Winds Blow, page 22
“I don’t understand how these things work, but I always thought they programmed the mind to accept the form, the new form …” He had imagined she was distressed because she was abnormal in appearance, compared to the appearance of Faulcon, the natural human form. He had even thought: “So much for acceptance.”
Allissia said, “They don’t. Part of the adaptation is to evolve psychologically. Here on the plateau, in all the communities in the high lands, we have come to accept what is, and we live and we are alive, and when we have doubts and fears we accept that we are doubting and fearful, and experience it. Nothing about us is so contrived that we cannot cry, or feel an agony at the ugliness we must appear to people like you. And I feel it very badly, Leo. I had to tell you this, I am so afraid of what I look like to you.”
“You look … lovely,” he said. “Your eyes are not lovely, but you are lovely.” It was true, he thought. It’s what I’ve been feeling.
“You are like gods to us,” she said, and reached to touch his face. Faulcon waited for the gentle touch on his skin, and realized the moment he sensed her fingers on his mask that what she was seeing was a man in glasses and breathing tube. He frowned, wanting to remove the mask for a moment, but there was an expression of such passion in Allissia’s face that he made no move; she moved her fingers over his cheeks and the glasses, across his hair, and the leathery binding of the mouth-piece; she curved her fingers about the ridged pipe that extended two inches from the mask, where the filters were housed; she seemed to caress something that was to her more erotic than lips.
“I dream of faces like this, real faces, the faces of men,” she said.
“I’m a man wearing a mask,” he said. “The real me is underneath.”
“In our stories the great men are masked, the masks are golden or red or black or white, and some of them are strange, and some look like faces over faces; but this is how we remember the time of the first men, unrevealed, and yet unchanged by the masks that conceal them, just as we are real and unchanged. You are beautiful, Leo, and I am going to miss you so much.”
“That sounds perilously close to regret, Allissia. I thought regret was frowned upon.”
She shook her head, “Not regret, Leo. Just honesty. Just true feeling.”
I look like an insect, he thought, and this is how she knows me, and this is how she will remember me and miss me. I must show her my face, all of my face … not once while I’ve been here have I taken off my mask …
He reached up to remove the eye-covers that kept the stinging atmosphere of Kamelios from his sensitive corneas; Allissia made a sound of panic and raised her hand to stop him taking the action.
Faulcon took her hand gently and smiled, wondering if she could see that smile, wondering if she had ever realized he had smiled. “There is a greater distance between your people and mine than even you admit …”
“Perhaps.”
“You would never come to Steel City, never mix with rifters.” It was neither question nor statement. There was something of regret in his tone.
“No, I don’t suppose we would. This is our living place. When we trade we go on the long walk down, and if any of us felt like staying, then he would stay. Usually we just want to make the long walk up.”
Faulcon leaned forward, close to the strange eyes that regarded him with such warmth. “But can’t you see how frustrating it is—how difficult—when you stay up here, and we stay down there, and come to regard each other with fear and contempt?”
“Speak for yourselves, Leo.”
“But you have things to offer—life to offer, warmth, experience. Don’t you ever regret that no one can share the experience of your life, the love of life?”
“We don’t regret it, Leo. What more do we need than you to take our life beyond the plateau? You share our lives for a while, and experience our love and our minds and our traditions, and you go from us and take that with you. You will never lose it. What more could we need? What more could we ask for? A few people carrying our lives in their hearts.”
Outside there was a great cheer, and laughter, and the two of them turned towards the door, the intimacy suddenly broken, the night of celebration stretched before them, suddenly demanding their attention. They both laughed, nervously, perhaps with a certain relief. Arm in arm they went out into the compound; the fire burned high, blue and yellow, with the occasional licking of a deep red flame into the night. Sparks flew up to the stars, and the skagbark crackled and charred, noisy and alive. Faulcon wished he could smell the wood, and the sizzling joints of meat, but his mask allowed him only a hint of a smoky odour, and a continuing memory of Allissia’s perfume.
And so they celebrated Moondance Eve, the night of the hunters’ return. The meat they ate was exquisite, like nothing Faulcon had tasted before; it was not the grey meat he had eaten for several days, nor was it the meat of imported terrestrial food animals; it was, he was told, the flesh of some creature they called a pathak, a large, fleet, man-eating predator that had been evolved for Kamelios from the stock of old-earth cats; it was an experiment in domestication that had gone wrong. Faulcon ate so much of the non-poisonous meat that he was sick anyway, leaning against the wooden walls of the house as he held his mask clear and voided his stomach contents with an amazing force; Allissia laughed at him and wagged a finger at him for his unnecessary indulgence. The drink was good, too, mostly calcare, but supplemented by three large china flagons of baraas. He threw up some more, and his mind grew euphoric with happiness, alcohol and a clearer understanding of what he was and what he had to do; he would experience everything, from the revolting sensation of nausea, to the final, heart-pounding moment when he stepped into the path of the time winds. Not a moment would pass when he would not be alive and aware of the simplest, most transient sensation. He would go to his death more alive than he had ever been in his thirty-two years. And when he died he would be dead, and there would be no resistance, there would only be fear, and that fear he would experience and know that he died Leo Faulcon, and not a man denying the innermost agony of that final moment when he found out what really lay beyond Old Lady Wind. Perhaps not death at all, but a new freedom; and Lena.
The fire was burning low, and all the meat had gone; the drink was as bountiful as ever, probably because half the community was slumped quietly, or chattily, about the brazier, or in shadows, by the houses. It was well after the midnight hour, and Faulcon was on his back, close to the dying warmth of the skagbark bonfire, half listening to Allissia talking to her husband, half watching the incredible spread of stars, the wide, white band of the galactic centre, the twenty dazzling blue stars that were the Twioxna Lights, a cluster with an abundance of inhabitable worlds. He was just deciding that he would close his eyes and sleep, right there beneath the sky—even though he would wake up dew-covered and frozen—when distantly there was the low rumble of thunder, and the terrifying crackle of an atmospheric disturbance. Above him the stars seemed to ripple for a moment, as if seen through a pool of water.
“A fiersig,” he said aloud, and sat up, then stood up, staring into the night, watching carefully until at last he saw the purple glow, moving towards them across the hills. It was a wide band of flickering light, with golden and red whorls chasing each other in frantic displays about the night sky. Below the activity, the land was eerily lit with an iridescent green, that changed to yellow and blue each time the thunder rolled and the leaping shards of lightning struck down to the earth.
Around him the manchanged had fallen quiet, and slowly, one by one, were standing, watching towards the south and west. But as Faulcon looked around him he realized there was none of the apprehension, or fear, or defensiveness that he would have expected as these strange manifestations of Kamelion interference approached. People watched as if impatient, as if the approaching phenomenon, and all it implied, was something that was interfering with their celebration, and which they would be pleased to get over with as soon as possible. Allissia was still murmuring quietly to Audwyn. Audwyn noticed Faulcon watching them, and a moment later Allissia turned as well, and the two of them rose to their feet to approach him.
“Are you afraid?” Allissia asked, and Faulcon said, “Not at all. But it will end the pleasantness of the evening. These changes hit so hard that it’s easier just to go off alone. I’m disappointed, that’s all. I was enjoying the tranquillity.”
“Don’t resist it,” said Audwyn. “Just let it happen, let it pass. It’s irritating that one of these things has to come tonight of all nights, but so what? It’s here, let it pass through. The best part of the celebration is yet to come … at dawn, you’ll love it.”
Faulcon thought to himself that at dawn there wouldn’t be a person in the compound talking to anyone else, because there was no way of resisting the ferocious, mind-tearing effects of these electrical storms. But he said nothing, turned back to the thunder, and the flickering lights in the heavens.
Faulcon’s skin began to tingle; he felt a wave of change pass through him, the alertness, the freshness, the turmoil in his head seen through a crystal glass; he held onto his amulet, focusing upon it, concentrating on it. At once he felt bright and cheerful, then a wave of sadness, then a sudden terrible panic, emotion piling upon emotion, over and over again panic insisting its way into his heart so that it raced and his palms began to sweat coldly. Around him there was silence for a long while and he was aware of the community watching restlessly as the lights swept steadily towards and above them, the centre passing out across the fields, but the full sweep of the flickering area of the disturbance taking in the clustered houses and huddled peoples of the plateau.
Quite suddenly they began to wail, the sound starting softly, a few heads hanging forward, only a few voices participating in the rising wave of despair; the wailing grew louder as more of the manchanged joined in, and soon Faulcon was in the centre of a howling mob, resisting his own emotional upheaval and fascinated by the racket that surrounded him. He saw Allissia, her head thrown back, her eyes closed and bulging against the thick lids, her mouth open, her voice lost in the greater sound of screaming. But Audwyn, standing near her, was angry, shouting, his voice insisting its way through the noise so that Faulcon could make out his words, the incoherent babbling of his fury; others still were laughing, or weeping, but over all there was the whining sound of a hundred manchanged experiencing some common feeling, and as Faulcon thought of this so he began to understand what might have been happening.
The change passed over and left Faulcon alert, slightly apprehensive, a small alteration to his previous mood of relaxed acceptance. He was nervous as Allissia, smiling broadly, came up to him and suggested a drink. Around him people were shuffling back to the fire or the places where they had been sitting, and the sound of laughter and chatter was loud and unexpected. Even those who had been crying were wiping the wetness from eyes and cheeks, and talking as if they were doing no more than brushing a stray hair back into place.
No lingering after-effects, he thought. They went through it and emerged unchanged.
When he said this to Allissia she frowned and shrugged, “Why do you always question things, Leo?”
“Because I’m puzzled, and interested. You seemed in deep despair, but now nothing has happened to you. I feel all tight and on edge. I know people in Steel City who would have been knocked out by that change; for days. I know, I know … people in Steel City are not the best examples in the world.”
“You said it,” said Allissia, and added, “I feel a little tense, now, but that doesn’t matter. It’ll pass away in a few minutes; most of it passed through me as the fiersig passed overhead. These changes aren’t permanent, but the more you resist them the longer they stay.”
“But in Steel City it was proved that if you didn’t fight the things you got addled for weeks—upset for weeks … There must be a reason …”
“Reasons!” Allissia snapped the word, a touch of that residual tension emerging in a moment of frustration. “You can work out reasons for anything, Leo—it’s the human facility. Reasonableness can kill you quicker then anything. Reason is a liar.”
Faulcon said no more, nor asked another question. Allissia drifted away from him to talk with friends, and take part in a quiet, almost sleepy dance in the dying glow of the fire. Faulcon crept into the house and curled up in a corner, sleeping quite heavily; at dawn he was woken by the sound of laughter, and, peering out of the window, watched the manchanged dancing almost frantically, carrying colourful paper, or cloth, streamers. He did not feel in the mood to join in, and returned to sleep, his last wakeful thought being of the time winds, and of Lena, and of the way he would go to follow her soon, and of the excitement that he was suddenly feeling, the determination to fulfil the terms of his agreement without fear, without restraint, without tears.
He slept late into the morning and rose to find the house and the village deserted. The hunters had moved back into the hills again; the fire still smoked greenly, a wide patch of charred ground and ash showing where it had spread beyond the metal brazier. There was no sign of Audwyn or Allissia, and Faulcon felt quite pleased about that. He wrote a brief note on a piece of torn paper he found in the house, and then walked to where his byke stood in the shelter of a small, empty barn.
The noise of its motor must have resounded about the silent village, but no one appeared to watch him go. He rode slowly through the fields, winding along the tracks towards the wide, dirt road that led to the steep, descending path to the lower lands. Several manchanged were working here, and those that saw him stood and waved. He waved back, increasing his speed all the time. The last of the villagers that he saw was a woman, bent to her work, her back to him, her body slim and small beneath the wind-whipped garment she wore. She remained unmoved by the sound of the byke, and Faulcon remembered that Allissia was supposed to be working in the high fields. He waved anyway.
PART FOUR
Walking on the Shores of Time
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
At the first break of dawn Faulcon rose from his damp and chilly sleeping place and walked to the edge of the canyon. Here he stood for a few minutes, staring down into the gloom of the valley, discerning the shapes and structures, watching as the slow rise of Altuxor brought shades of pink, then yellow, to the alien confusion below and beyond him. The wind was fresh on his naked cheeks, and the dampness of his night’s sweat was obtrusive and cold beneath his outfit. He watched the heavens as the stars expired, noticing that the last to vanish behind the red-streaked day were the winking lights of the geo-stationary satellites, watching the rift valley, probably watching him.
He felt no fear. He ached for Lena.
In his hands he held his old amulet, the small fragment of leather, smoothed and worn by his constant touching. He had carried this object of art around his neck for far too long; it had come to embody Mark, he realized now, and to throw it from him would be to detach one of Mark’s fingers from their frantic grip upon his arm. Around his neck, now, he wore the crystal shard, carefully contained within an unobtrusive, platinum holder and slung upon a strip of the dark linen that had once bound the gash in his hand. He was not a man to spurn the slightest sentiment, not Leo Faulcon. Allissia was in his mind, and she was slightly in his heart. In the days since he had left the manchanged, she and Audwyn had grown in his life. They were warmth to the planet’s cold; they were certainty to VanderZande’s uncertainty; they were resolve to the inner fear he acknowledged, experienced, and realized could not control him.
And yet he could not cast away this strip of leathery skin, this piece of him, this part of his past. He dearly wished to consign it to the oblivion of the canyon, to watch its fall into the vast unknown, to await the next time-sweep of wind from beyond.
“Throw it you fool; break the spell once and for all.”
Faulcon had been unaware of Ensavlion’s approach. He turned, now, and saw the man in similar garb to his own, an off-white service outfit, reasonably warm, designed for less risky environments than the canyon edge. Ensavlion’s rift suit stood awkwardly a few hundred yards back along the track; Faulcon could see it, standing twisted as if staring at him.
“Commander,” Faulcon acknowledged. “What brings you here?” Yet another chance for the Catchwind mission missed, quite obviously, but Faulcon said nothing.
“You, of course,” said Ensavlion, his face working behind the thin mask, his eyes clearly narrowed behind the goggles he wore. “I tried to find you in the City, but you must have spent only a moment there. I wondered where the hell you’d got to these last few days.”
This declaration of Ensavlion’s concern for one of his junior rifters disturbed Faulcon; what he had to do, what he faced, was something solitary, something that no man could be a part of. But he said, hoping to pacify his commanding officer, “I took absence without leave.”
“That I know. I signed papers giving you official leave. You’re off the hook, but where did you go?”
Cynically Faulcon glanced at the older man. “You mean you genuinely don’t know? I thought you had eyes everywhere, Commander. You certainly had them in Lena’s room.”
Ensavlion appeared unabashed; the area of cheek that showed beside his mask did not flush; on the contrary, Faulcon thought the man was positively amused. Ensavlion said, “I heard nothing myself. I make no apology. Consider us to be square, me for allowing Kris Dojaan to eavesdrop your conversations with Lena, you for taking unofficial leave. Where did you go?”
“Up to the lower plateaux, in Hunderag Country. I stayed at a manchanged colony. They made me realize the foolishness of bending to fear … of bending to anything. They made me aware that I, Leo Faulcon, am ten times bigger than fate. Fate may call the tune, but I dance the way I want to dance.”
