Where Time Winds Blow, page 7
“Mark?”
“My brother. Mark Dojaan. You know, the man who was such a tragic loss. Mark, for God’s sake!” The sudden anger disturbed Lena Tanoway who turned to watch Ensavlion’s reaction. Like Faulcon, all she saw was a stiff embarrassment on the Commander’s face.
“What about Mark? A good man.”
“So you already said. But your letter told us nothing. Just that he was lost, dead … but how, why? Who was with him, Commander? Did he go bravely? If you thought he was dead, couldn’t you have said that he had died without pain? You can’t know the agony that letter caused …”
“Mister Dojaan.”
“No! I’ll finish!” Ensavlion’s face was red, now, and his skin gleamed with sweat. To Faulcon’s surprise he stood his ground, watching the youth, watching the anger, taking it. “You told us nothing, nothing but his death.” Kris suddenly relaxed, glanced at Faulcon. “He’s not dead, you know.”
“Isn’t he?”
“I know he’s not. But that’s not the point. It’s taken me months to get here, months even to start to find out why he failed to ‘survive’, when you could have been so straight with us from the beginning. Mark was a strong man, a clever man; he was a natural survivor. So what happened, Commander? What went wrong for him?”
As if suddenly aware of the two listeners, Ensavlion glanced down the room at Faulcon. Faulcon and Lena rose from their seats and made “about to leave” gestures. It was appropriate; they would have to submit draft reports within twenty hours, and there was a lot of writing involved.
Ensavlion gently propelled Kris back across the room. “Kris, I can understand how upset you are. I really can. For the brevity of my letter, I apologize; and for failing to patch the information into the GHO network, yes, I apologize for that too. To be truthful, one gets forgetful … so many good men are lost here …”
“Right! You forgot about him. He was nothing to you but a name and a rank, that’s the truth of the matter, isn’t it? A routine loss. You don’t even remember him now—you just checked his records.”
Angrily, no longer prepared to tolerate Kris Dojaan’s emotion, Ensavlion silenced the man curtly and authoritatively. Kris fell sullenly silent, and when Ensavlion said quietly, “That will do, Mister Dojaan. That will do,” he began to look slightly abashed. Ensavlion relaxed again, smiled nervously as he moved with the group towards the door. “The sooner you get out to the valley the better, I can see that. Get in a few hours’ training in a suit, and get out there. Look for your brother, if you really think he’s still alive, and look for the travellers. Watch hard, watch constantly, watch carefully …” he glanced towards the darkness beyond the window, “… because they come and go, fleeting, like a breeze.”
The door slid back, squeakily. Cooler air from the neon-lit corridor was refreshing to Faulcon. Ensavlion shook his hand. “Look after the boy. Talk to him, explain to him. He’s bringing luck to Section 8—if a little impatiently.” Faulcon forced a laugh at the strained jokiness. “And maybe we’ll catch a glimpse of the travellers when he’s around. I’ve waited a long time, long months, and I’ve waited patiently; and now all of a sudden,” he shook hands with Lena and Kris, “I feel they’re just around the corner. Goodbye, gentlemen. Lena.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Are you always so tactful?” Lena led the way into a credit registration booth, barely wide enough for the three of them to squeeze in together.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Kris Dojaan watched as Lena operated the automatic teller. “This is a really stupid routine,” he observed as she slid the thin chits into a slot labelled with the same denomination and watched her credit tally mounting on a screen before her. She punched instructions—20 per cent to be transferred to her personal account on New Triton, 10 per cent to her tax account, automatic settling of her dream-dome bill.
“We like it,” she said.
“We certainly do.” Faulcon kissed his wallet, pocketed one of the smaller chits—“for a souvenir”—and shuffled round to gain access to the register. “That’s the trouble with progress; it forgets that people like the way they do things.” He started to register his bonus. “If I were you, young Kris, I’d salt some of those g.u.’s away for a windy day.”
“Why? I’m not going to need it.”
Sullen, depressed. Faulcon looked at him, and at Lena, who shrugged.
“It’s going to be a real fun evening, I can see that.” He punched buttons.
“Ensavlion’s a fool.”
“Yes, well there are those who say he is, and those who say he isn’t. Whatever you’ve got against him, somewhere there’s a man who would disagree with you—violently. So I’d keep my irritation to myself, if I were you. Your go.”
A while later they stood outside the registration console and watched the bustle of life within Steel City. Kris was fascinated by peering upwards through the vast central well of the core, to where the different levels could be seen; for several minutes he was content to watch the movements of men and machines, passing around the huge open space above the plaza. Lena suggested they ate dinner together after night-fall, to celebrate their new luck. She had had no time to herself as yet; she scratched her torso and murmured something about a dream trip, a quick freshening up of the dye of her hair, a long bath—did Faulcon want to join her? Was he sure? Okay, she wouldn’t press—and they could meet in the Star Lounge at chime nine, nine-thirty. Faulcon and Kris were agreeable, although both had stuffed themselves with junk food at the first opportunity earlier that afternoon. Faulcon explained that the Star Lounge was deliberately set aside as being too expensive for more than the very occasional visit, dealing as it did mostly in exotic imports and expensive trivia. It was Steel City’s most attractive prospect, at least as far as food was concerned, and it was the quickest and easiest way of recouping a bonus into City funds.
Lena slipped away, into the crowds; Faulcon thoughtfully watched her tall, lean shape, her body moving with the stiffness of fatigue, her long hair gleaming, blue-tinged gold, in the bright, artificial light. He felt a momentary pang of some emotion as he realized that because he had refused to go with her, now, she would probably spend time with someone else. He couldn’t help feeling that their relationship was getting a little too casual.
He turned back to Kris, his unease with the lad effectively damped by the protective walls of Steel City. His first panic gone, it was nevertheless with some misgivings that he anticipated the external training schedule that he would have to undertake with the new recruit. “Do you want to be alone until we eat?” Faulcon enquired, not certain, because of Kris’s quietness, whether he was intruding on the youngster’s solitude. Kris shook his head, and declared quite brightly that he wanted to get drunk. Drunk straight away? Or first laid, and then drunk? Kris thought for a moment, wiry body hunched as he looked about him at the restless population, perhaps seeking inside his mind and body for some stirring of interest at the prospect of going up to the dream-dome. He decided just drunk would do fine, so Faulcon led the way up to a sky bar, with an outlook towards the gloom-shrouded valley. Kris sprawled out in the quiet and relaxing lounge, watching the lights of the world come on, while Faulcon acquired two bottles of a green, translucent liquid that he told Kris was baraas, a rare distillation and among the most expensive drinks in the Galaxy. They tucked in with enthusiasm, although after a while decided that baraas would taste better flavoured with lime.
During the evening Kris met a handful of Faulcon’s acquaintances and section colleagues and exchanged increasingly slurred pleasantries with them. He perked up quite noticeably when Faulcon introduced him to a dark-haired girl called Immuk Lee, who sat for a while and shared a glass with them. She was an old flame of Faulcon’s, and Kris was quite evidently attracted by her. Down from the biology station at Chalk Stack, she was staying overnight. She’d brought in several specimens of gulgaroth body fluids for a more detailed analysis in the laboratories of the City. Kris Dojaan, for thirty minutes, discovered an amazing interest in the blood of native carnivores. When she left she invited them both to visit Chalk Stack. Kris watched her go, then slumped in his chair, mournful and distant. When he recovered from what he revealed had been an incapacitating surge of desire he began to ask questions, many of them conversational (and about Immuk), a few of them to answer things that had puzzled him since his arrival on Kamelios.
Why, for example, did Lena speak so peculiarly, so liltingly? Faulcon had long since ceased to think of Lena’s speech as being unusual, but of course she did have a strong accent, and that accent was colonial New Triton, her planet of origin. New Triton was a world where InterLing was spoken with reluctance, the main language being that primitive version of inter-Lingua, French: she had come to the Galactic language with facility, therefore, but had never bothered to try and work away the clipped, lilting accent of her natural tongue. Some people, Faulcon hinted strongly, found that trait attractive. He was slightly disturbed when Kris declared emphatically that he did not.
But why, he asked, did she wear her hair so long, like a man’s, with those ridiculous transplanted side-burns curving nearly to her cheeks? The way he described them, in an exaggerated, almost comic fashion, made both men laugh. But Faulcon pointed out the high incidence of transplanted cheek and chin hair on the female population, some worn bushy, some shaved very close, and he made it clear that Kris’s awareness of Lena’s modishness was only because he was more aware of that one woman among all the hundreds who inhabited Steel City.
Faulcon spent a while instructing Kris in the arts and versatilities of Steel City tastes, and how attitudes and clothes, make-up styles and hair arrangement, changed not from year to year, but almost from a fourteen-day to a fourteen-day. Sometimes a group aestheticism would emerge from the chaos of styles and modes, and then it would linger longer, and permanently establish a group of men and women who would forever wear that style, for although fashions changed frequently, there were always minority groups who settled for one “look”. At the moment, Faulcon explained, pointing out examples in the bar to illustrate his words, the mode was for women to wear their hair long, like Earth women, and to seek skin grafts with bright orange or red hair on them, to give their side-burns an interesting contrast to the green or purple staining of their natural locks. He pointed out the high incidence of male pigtails, with natural colours being more obvious than the occasional streaking of silver, an outdated fashion that had lasted several months, about a year ago. Body hair, of course, was dyed in personal choice colours, and often grafted or shaped into elaborate patterns. Faulcon opened his shirt slightly, and showed Kris the abstraction of his own chest hair. Kris laughed, frowned, and swallowed his baraas quickly, refilling his glass almost as if the stimulant would make him immune to Steel City’s bizarre behaviour. He had led a very sheltered life on Oster’s Fall.
He was glad to hear from Faulcon that, whereas on many civilized colony worlds voice and pigmentation transplants were common, on VanderZande’s World such extremes of body art were frowned upon.
Gradually Kris brought the idle conversation round to the subject of the great valley, and its ruins, and in particular its human ruin, the phantom. He repeated his feeling of urgency that he should get out to the lip of the canyon and look for that fleeting figure against the wreckage-strewn landscape. He glanced at Faulcon. Could he go out the next day?
Faulcon shook his head, concerned for the youngster, and concerned for the flaunting of Steel City rules. “I’m afraid not. It takes several days training in a suit … You can’t just put an r-suit on and away you go. And the rules of the City are quite explicit about it; we had a lot of difficulty clearing the Ilmoroq mission so soon after you joined us, but we never underestimate the danger of the valley.”
Kris looked first crestfallen, then angry. “But Commander Ensavlion said I should get out there as soon as possible.”
“Which is a three-day at least. Two if you really work hard.”
“Ensavlion implied quite strongly that he thought I should go out to the valley today! Tonight!”
One glance at the impetuous Kris told Faulcon that this was a lie. Besides which, he’d heard no such implication, although he had heard Ensavlion encouraging the boy to train quickly so that he could become a fully fledged member of the team.
“Steel City has the final say, not Ensavlion.” And by way of changing the subject and bringing the pressure down, Faulcon told Kris something of the team he’d joined.
When Faulcon had arrived on VanderZande’s World, Lena had already been here a year. He had come with more than a hundred other rookies, a very bad error of application on his part, since it meant he had been assigned to a large, inexperienced team, led by one old hand, well-satiated with the wonders of Kamelios. It had taken a month to get his first circuit of the valley, and two months more before the team was allowed its first run down to the cluttered lower slopes of the rift. Thereafter, for a few weeks, he had worked as part of Ensavlion’s ten-man team, the Commander at that time being head of Section 3. At his own request, and against Lena’s better judgement, he was finally taken on in Section 8, assigned to the team that had Lena as middle-runner and a man called Rick Kabazard as leader. By coincidence, Ensavlion transferred command at the same time.
Most of their trips down into the gash in the crust were for the purpose of investigating “hollow boats”, the City nickname for any building or structure with an r-suit-sized opening in it, and a very dark maw. Most of his work, he told Kris, had been spent walking or crawling in dark and cramped corridors from one boring end to the other, or perhaps to a dead end at which point, frustrated, the team turned round and came out again. Where entrance-ways were tight it was traditionally the middle-runner who climbed out of the r-suit and squirmed in naked.
There was precious little by way of bonus for that sort of work, and Faulcon, and indeed Lena herself, began to get very restless. In fact, what was happening to them was perfectly common, and their feeling of being a bad-luck team was shared by virtually every other team in Section 8. Then, just twenty days or so ago, a time squall had thrown up several oblong structures, piled in random, chaotic fashion, and thought at first to be crystal formations of geological interest only. With a geologist from Section 14 the three of them had “run the rift”, dropping down into the canyon some way from the object of exploration, and moving towards the destination in a wide line, wary for the sort of swirl of wind and time that had thrown the artifacts out of past or future. The obsidian crystals were some four hundred feet long, and forty wide, and were piled in threes, so that they towered well above the team. It was immediately apparent that the smooth surfaces were pitted in an artificial way, and that underneath, where the juxtaposed faces were not always aligned, there were knobs, buttons and panels.
Kabazard and the geologist discovered a low entrance-way, where the squall had unevenly fetched the object from its natural time; part of the back of the structure was sheared off, exposing thick, crystalline walls, and for men in r-suits an uncomfortably narrow tunnel-way in. The two men had entered, despite Lena’s protestations that because this was not a geological feature it should be she who went inside with the leader, and not the man from Section 14. Her protests ignored, she and Faulcon had continued exploring those parts of the outside of the feature that the view-probes in orbit and on the canyon-lip could not see.
The squall came back, a rising eddy of air and dust, and the dizzying blurring of features, and flashing of colours about an area of total black, that tells of the opening of the time gate. Faulcon could not forget Kabazard’s screaming as the first eddy had sheared part of the structure away, and part of the leader’s body. Faulcon was already hundreds of yards away, his suit obeying his unconscious instinct to run, and since he was now under total control of the cerebrally-linked servo-mechanism, he was able to turn and watch as the obsidian enigma was again swallowed by time, but in two bites, as if it were too large to be ingested in one go. And for that terrible instant, as the eddy veered away and then back, he saw Kabazard’s bloody figure, cramped up inside the warren of tunnels that penetrated the structure, his right side sheared clean through, and the suit jerking spasmodically as it tried to function and failed. A second later he had flickered out of sight. By that time their r-suits had taken Lena and Faulcon well out of range of that danger spot.
“We didn’t know it,” he said to the silent, attentive Kris, “but Ensavlion had just accepted your application form, and logged you down for Section 8; you were already on your way, of course.”
“I don’t understand … I don’t understand the connection.”
Faulcon grinned. “Your luck, man! Your luck. It had reached across space and wrapped its arms around me. By rights it should have been Lena in that object, with the geologist waiting outside. By rights both Rick Kabazard and Lena should have died. And on this world we have special rules, as Ensavlion tried to tell you. If two of a three-man team get swallowed up by time, well …”
He had stopped, but Kris had comprehended. “He has to go too; he has to sacrifice himself.”
Faulcon nodded. “It’s a tradition that has grown up over several generations; it’s a rule of the game, a code, an unbreakable code.”
“But it’s unhuman! It’s stupid!”
“It’s an inhuman world, Kris. It’s a hard world and makes hard rules.”
“I didn’t say inhuman, I said unhuman. It doesn’t sit right on man to agree to such self-sacrifice. It’s wrong for man.”
“This whole world is wrong, Kris. It’s a world of constant change and it changes man along with it. If you spend long enough here your body and mind will be twisted and torn until sometimes you’ll be walking when you’re sitting and awake when you’re asleep. Unless you fight it, like we’ve all fought it. Resist it, resist the change, resist until sometimes you’ll want to scream. We’ve adapted to Kamelios, all of us, all the survivors. We’ve worked out our relationship with VanderZande’s World, and we’ve mastered it. And the changes are all superficial, Kris—they don’t get in deep down. Like Ensavlion said, we’ve learned how to live here, what to expect, how to react. Now we can get on with the business of exploring the alienness.”
