Where Time Winds Blow, page 23
Ensavlion clapped his hands together three times, slowly. “Bravo, Leo. Three cheers for the man who has stood up to destiny. And still you’ll jump into the path of a time wind, and still you’ll be swept to an unimaginable future. What you mean is, the persuasive, and hallucinogenic ways of the manchanged have rid you of apprehension; no, not even that. It’s made you accept that things are the way they are, that nothing will change, and you might as well go time-swimming with a smile on your face. I think that about sums it up.”
Irritated at the tone in Ensavlion’s voice Faulcon said, as coldly as possible, “I think you’re right, yes, that sums it up. Why the sarcasm, Commander? The approach a little too simplistic for you?”
Ensavlion prodded the leather amulet in Faulcon’s grip, his glassy eyes meeting Faulcon’s and doing their best to communicate reasonableness from mask to mask. “Simple or complex, who the hell cares? All I wonder about is a man who professes such acceptance of the inevitable, such control over circumstance, who stands fondling the one thing that promises to trip him butt over elbow the moment he takes a step. Throw the damned thing away. Don’t you think it’s been a weight about your neck for long enough? Throw it away, you fool, now, quick … quick!”
And Faulcon, his heart racing, drew back his arm and pitched the amulet out into space, watching the leather thong twisting behind as it plummeted out of sight and clattered off a ledge, somewhere below.
Faulcon returned to Steel City on his byke, following the towering form of Ensavlion’s r-suit. He reported to his section to terminate officially his unofficial official leave, and waited a few minutes in the lounge, aware that the silence in the place was the silence of embarrassment. He remembered the mistake he had made in the plateau township, the belief he had that he was regarded with hostility, a stranger, a threat to them. So he walked to one of the older Section men, who sprawled in an easy chair reading a news sheet. He acknowledged the man who looked up at him without a flicker of a smile and said, before Faulcon could initiate a conversation, “Get lost, Faulcon. And I mean lost.”
“In my own good time,” said Faulcon stiffly, feeling the flush rise to his cheeks. Around the room others, men and women both, had looked towards him, their faces pale and angry. The man he had addressed said, “We lost young Cal Reza to a wind because of you. The sooner you go the better. There’s not a rifter in this room can walk safe while you’re alive. If I had my way, you gutless wonder, I’d kick you over the canyon myself.”
A man whom Faulcon only vaguely recognized said, “You made an agreement, Faulcon … your integrity is on the line; you’re betraying your very humanness!”
“Do it, for God’s sake, Leo,” said a woman behind him. Faulcon felt instantly cold as he turned to face Immuk. She came into the lounge area and sat down heavily in an easy chair, spreading her legs and gazing up at him coldly.
“Do you think I don’t intend to?” he asked. She said, “I don’t give a damn what you intend to do, just do it. The sight of your face makes me want to throw up. I’ll like you a whole lot better when you’re dead.” She grimaced in disgust. “You’re such an appalling coward. You’ll end up with your neck being broken and your body being thrown over the edge, and I shan’t shed a tear for you, not one single tear.”
“It frightens me to hear you talk like that. It makes me realize how much this world has got into our blood, has changed us.”
Someone sniggered and Faulcon felt his face flush. Immuk said, “That’s fine, Leo—you didn’t think that way before, a few months ago when you helped escort Opuna Indullis down to the valley. But when it’s you who has to show the colour of his courage, oh it’s a different matter then. It suddenly seems so reasonable to remember that we have peculiar rules, peculiar rituals, and to invoke them as a sign of our madness. You make me bloody sick!”
Before Faulcon could retort, two section wardens appeared from the other end of the lounge. Faulcon turned away at the sight of their yellow uniforms, unwilling to make a scene, or be the cause of one. As he walked towards the door he was aware of the two men running quickly after him. He had hardly decided to turn before he was pushed hard in the back, and flung heavily against the wall, a hand on the back of his head making sure that his nose was blooded painfully before he was kicked twice in the groin and unceremoniously bowled out of the lounge, into the public way.
“See you in hell, Leo,” was the last voice he heard, Immuk’s voice, followed by her cruel laugh and the thud of the door sliding back into place.
He brushed himself off and limped to a san-closet to attend to the blood that was gushing from his nose. When the flow was staunched, and he had sealed the small gash in the membrane that had split, he went to his room, changed his clothes, and then made his way to Ensavlion’s office.
Gulio Ensavlion was expecting him.
“Can you blame them?” he asked, after Faulcon had briefly described the attack. “A rifter called Cal Reza was swept away by a time wind because of you, and these things escalate, as you well know.”
“Cal Reza was caught because he was careless,” said Faulcon bitterly, touching his nose tenderly. “He must have been careless. I’m beginning to despise all this ‘lucky’ crap.”
Ensavlion laughed. “That’s why the scene this morning with the amulet. Oh sure, Leo, you’ve seen the error of Steel City ways, sure you have.”
“Damn it all, why this hostility from everyone? I’ve made clear my intention to fulfil the agreement of my contract. I’m going to do it, but why should I be pressured?”
Ensavlion was cold and pragmatic. “Because you’re a coward. Oh, you may realize that you’re not, but your section doesn’t. Your team mates were swept away, and the correct thing to have done would have been to impart luck in a long and generous good-bye, and within a two-day to go down to the valley and wait. If you’d done that you’d have had every man and woman of the section down there with you, waiting with you, making sure that your last days and weeks in the valley were spent with the best of friends. But no, you had to run, up into the hills. And two days ago Cal Reza died in a squall, and that was because of you, and so is it any wonder that your section would like to string your guts across the canyon from one edge to the other?”
Faulcon brooded silently for a moment or two, staring at the huge maps of the world, letting his gaze flicker uninterestedly from picture to map to screen and at length down to his spread hands, resting lightly on his thighs. “It’s so bloody stupid,” he said, trying to forget the two occasions when he had participated in, and insisted upon, this exact same rule of life, the compulsory death of one man and one woman after circumstances not dissimilar to those that had now made his own “suicide” imperative. He knew, and he repeatedly told himself, that there was no hesitation or doubt in his own mind that he would perform the act of willing self-destruction; but this need to be hurried, this denial of a man’s right to pick his moment and place … this began to anger him. It especially angered him that he should be held responsible for a young rifter’s death, or loss, by carelessness.
He repeated this to Ensavlion, who shook his head and then banged his desk with a flat hand and almost shouted at the resentful form of his junior. “Cal Reza went out into the valley thinking of you, thinking of bad luck, the bad luck that you had become. In other words he went out there with death on his mind, with his survival attitudes blurred; you know how it is, you’ve been around long enough. Reza was vulnerable, and a man is always ten times as vulnerable as he thinks he is.”
Grimly, angrily, Faulcon accepted the reprimand, accepted the point. He felt an unaccustomed stubbornness jostling to remain the prime motivator of his behaviour, but gradually, breathing deeply and trying to rid himself of the sense of hurt and disloyalty he had received from his one-time friends, he came to experience a pleasant calm, a lingering moment of resignation. His willingness to face the time winds was reinforced, and the prospect seemed almost unworrying again … and exciting: the chance to find Lena and Kris, the chance for life beyond what appeared to be the dark wind of death.
Ensavlion seemed to observe the relaxation, for he too relaxed, toying with a small alien artifact that he used as a paperweight. “Is there any reason, any reason at all, why you can’t go out to the valley now, and sit there and wait for a time wind?”
There was, but Faulcon found his mind choking on the idea of telling Ensavlion.
“I’m waiting,” Ensavlion persisted, an edge of irritation showing in his voice. Faulcon refused to meet his gaze. There was perspiration on the Commander’s face again, the sign of his growing tension. “Any reason, Leo, any reason at all? If there is I want to hear it.”
Abruptly, tearing his gaze away from the corner of the room, Faulcon decided to be straight with his Commanding Officer. “One reason,” he said. “I want to see Lena before I go. I think she’ll be expecting me.”
Ensavlion frowned, staring at Faulcon. The paperweight turned faster in his fingers, the harsh room-lights reflecting sporadically from the uneven surface. “Lena? I don’t understand what you mean.”
“The phantom,” said Faulcon stiffly. “It’s Lena. She survived the sweep of Othertime, so can I. I’m going to minimize the risks by talking to her first.”
“The phantom is different things to different men. You know that.” But Ensavlion was deeply curious, almost shaking with excitement.
“Do I? Kris saw the phantom that night he went out alone. I thought he’d seen me, from the elusive way he behaved afterwards, but it was Lena. It must have been Lena.”
“You don’t know that. The way I read it, Kris saw a phantom that reassured him about his brother Mark’s survival. He saw someone who made it clear to him that beyond the time winds was life, survival … and Mark.”
Fleetingly, Faulcon remembered that flickering, devastating wave-front, the tiny, sprawled form of Kris Dojaan vanishing in an instant. He wondered where Kris had gone, and whether, moments later, he had struggled to his feet in an alien land: and he wondered what he had seen there.
To Ensavlion he said, “Then maybe there are many phantoms. Maybe you’re right. But I saw Lena. I saw her as close to me as you are to me now. And the young Lena saw her old self, and fell into the wind because of it. Don’t even think of that, about its implications. There’s something more than coincidence working here, Commander. It’s just too easy to see the phantom, and recently it’s been too easy to come closer to a phantom who turns out to be someone known to you.”
“The travellers, you mean; playing games with us.”
“Or something.” Faulcon couldn’t control the hint of a smile that he felt touch his lips; Ensavlion was in deadly earnest, his eyes bright, his body tense with expectation. “I keep asking myself what the hell was Kris up to? What was it about our encounter by the ocean that made him so secretive—or did he really not know he’d gone into the machine? He claimed to have had contact with Mark after Mark had been lost, but he never talked about any communication with Mark after he arrived here looking for the man. Games may be right, Commander—but Kris’s games? Mark’s games? Or something else’s, something using the wind, hiding behind its destructive front. Maybe there’s a whole world of time travelling beyond the wall of present.”
“Of course there is; I know there is.”
“Yes, but we also know the time winds can kill; perhaps they kill 90 per cent of the time. Perhaps someone, or something, only wants a few people to pass through them.” He leaned back, watching Ensavlion, but seeing only the valley. “That’s why I want to encounter the phantom before I go—I don’t know what it is, what it means, but it means something. I’m sure of that. I want a head start on everyone else who gets sucked into the void. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Very good sense indeed,” said Ensavlion. He stood up behind his desk and walked round to lean against the front edge of the table, close to Faulcon, folding his arms across his chest. “And I suppose you’ll want to be alone when you try and see her?”
Faulcon concurred. “She’ll not wait around while anyone else approaches. Why?”
Ensavlion said, “Because whether you like it or not, you’re part of the Catchwind Mission now. When you go into the valley, I’m going with you. Talk to the phantom—to Lena—all you want; but when the wind comes to take you, you’re going to have company.”
Faulcon rose from his chair and faced Ensavlion. He felt confused. He had been afraid of the prospect of his solitary trip for so long that for a moment or two he could not adjust to the idea of his “ritual death” becoming a part of a larger mission. Then pleasure, and security, and the warmth of excitement washed through him, making him smile, making him relax. Trying not to let too much relief show through, he said, “I can’t think of any better news I’ve had in months. Commander, we’re going to take time apart at the seams.”
Ensavlion grinned. “And we’re going to be the second to do that. But we’re not going to come back like the phantom, aged and withered. We’re going to breach time, explore time, and we’re going to walk up to Steel City afterwards and tell them a story that will blow their cosy world apart.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
And yet, the strength of his resolve to commit himself, body and soul, to the time winds was still a strength tempered by doubt, by the nagging voice of fear. The unexpected and welcome excitement of his visit to Ensavlion, the thrill of realizing that he would be a part of an expeditionary force into Othertime, soon passed away. It did not upset him that he could react so positively to the idea of a burden shared, for this is indeed what had occurred to him: that what happened to him in Othertime would happen to someone else as well; that the pleasure or agony of the exploration would be received in company, and not in solitary. Solitariness was the wall around his life that he feared to contemplate, the hell within his soul. The manchanged had significantly affected his attitude to aloneness, had reduced his isolation by making him accept it, rather than resist it. But the shadowy spectre of the Timelost chilled him, for he identified with the terrifying loneliness of men lost a billion years from their own kind. With Ensavlion, no matter what happened, no matter where he was flung, he would have the companionship of another soul. This made the prospect bearable; it did not alleviate the apprehension.
In a most impressive and determined fashion, Commander Ensavlion immediately set about arranging for the first, and most definite, plunge into the mysterious winds from Othertime. He told Faulcon to leave all the preparations to him, and to get out to the rift and seek out Lena. When he came back his r-suit would be fully provisioned, serviced and ready to go. Faulcon agreed to this and made his way from Steel City by byke, taking only enough supplies of food and water for two days. He made straight for the Riftwatch Station close to which, just days ago, he had seen the phantom for the first time at close quarters.
The valley was changed now; where it curved through sixty degrees, its wind-scoured bluffs and crags rising to obscure vision from the long, straight tract that reached towards the north-eastern horizon, here there was now an immense gate of dull metal and dark patterning; although it did not span the rift completely, it rose hundreds of feet above the dying vegetation that here, and in its own time, covered the valley floor. It was built into the rocks of the south wall, but sheered and broken a good way from the north; like the rising immensity of a dam, this gate watched him through the eyes of its doors, and the sparkling profusion of its tiny, circular windows.
Faulcon watched this bridge with interest. During the first day of his vigil on the rim of the canyon he saw movement in the body of the wall, the swift passage of some shape behind one of the open doorways. He rose from where he had been sitting and ran along the cliff top to where the span of the gate stretched away from him, and here he could see how wide was that wall, the width of a major roadway, and peppered with shafts and vents and small cylindrical structures. Braving the physical wind that blew strong and dangerous in the middle of the valley, Faulcon walked out across the gate, peering down into the gloomy interior of the structure, calling and shouting for Lena, and listening in vain for the hollow echo of his voice as it was sucked down into the alien place and lost. He returned to the edge of the valley and passed the night, frozen and uncomfortable, beneath the stars. Rift Station Shibano was close at hand, but he was apprehensive of asking for shelter; he was afraid of them refusing him.
He passed the second day in like fashion, walking slowly along the valley, riding to different access points, noticing, where he could, the new routes down that had formed since the last wind. For the most part he crouched within the span of the canyon, a few hundred yards from the cliff top, but close enough to the outer world to reach safety if a wind blew up. He had given up calling for Lena. He willed her to appear, but the canyon moved only with the dark shapes of rift suits, and the cumbersome and bored exploration by robots.
With two hours to go before the red twilight settled into black night he returned to his byke and, almost overwhelmed by his bitter disappointment, he rode back to Steel City. He ascended the access ramp into the towering, star-lit shape, and for a moment thought he must have approached the wrong entrance, for the door-seal failed to respond to his identity. He backed off a few yards and saw that he was in the right place. The sheer, curving wall of the traverse unit was a grey, monotonous surface above him, he a small, dark shape on the wide ramp, calling to be allowed inside.
The door remained closed.
He contacted the Watch on his mask speaker. He heard sour laughter, an obscenity, a curt instruction to get away to hell, and he knew that his disobedience of the unwritten rules of Steel City had reached to all corners of the installation. He was an outcast, now, and at the mercy of the world. He could not reach Ensavlion, although he tried, and his request to be put in touch with the man was greeted by a mechanical noise with a crude connotation. He was dirt in the eyes of the men of the Watch. Dirt was given no favours.
