Where Time Winds Blow, page 8
Warmed and slightly dizzy from the baraas, Faulcon felt a peculiar sense of pride in being on the world. Kris Dojaan watched him carefully, perhaps looking for some facial gesture that would belie the words. He said, “So man has no fear of Kamelios, or of time, or of the ruins.”
“There is a gut fear of the time winds—they’re dangerous. You don’t treat danger in a casual, careless fashion. I’m afraid of the time winds, I’m afraid of being swept away—and I behave carefully, respectfully. That’s how I behave with loaded weapons, with gulgaroth, with everything that has a dangerous potential; especially with the winds. Nobody wants to go into time.”
Kris’s eyes lowered and he swirled the drink in his glass. “Nobody?” he said. “Surely there must be a few adventurers, men sufficiently disillusioned with our world to kiss it goodbye and go to other ages.”
Faulcon said, “You might think so. I think I remember thinking so myself. I think. To be honest it’s hard to remember, but it certainly seems a ludicrous idea to me now. And a terrifying one. You’d literally have to be out of your mind to risk being swept away … The evidence of what animals we pick up in the valley, and where other winds blow, is enough to tell us that the atmosphere of Kamelios has altered vastly over the ages. You’d have to be mad.”
“Or obsessed?” Kris was looking hard at his team mate, his youthful features tense, almost agonized, Faulcon thought. Was he referring to Ensavlion?
“Commander Ensavlion wouldn’t risk it,” he said. “The man is obsessed with his aliens, but he wants to see them here and now; he wants to invite them to Steel City for drinks and supper. He wants the glory, and you don’t get glory if you’re stuck a billion years in the past, or embedded in primeval sedimentary rock, with just your face plate gleaming through as erosion works its way down to you. There is such a corpse, Kris. It’s at the farthest end of the valley, and it’s been there a long time. I tell you, one look at that ‘fossil’ is enough to put anyone off stepping deliberately into the path of a squall; it lets you know that the time winds are death winds … when they take you, you die. Forget the romance. I can’t forget Kabazard.” Faulcon hesitated, conscious that his voice had risen, and his speech had begun to slur. “Besides,” he said, “back to Ensavlion for a moment. He believes in the travellers, the alien time-travellers. Why risk death in the unknown when the travellers could teach us all we want to know? It’s neat. That’s why Ensavlion is not alone in his belief.”
Silence, then. A brooding silence, despite the babble of conversation, and clatter of glasses in the extensive bar. Faulcon was thinking of Mark Dojaan. Was it Kris’s brother who was emerging from the valley wall under the eroding influence of rain and ordinary wind? Most unlikely. And it was not Mark who was scurrying darkly about the canyon, Faulcon was sure of that as well. When Kris found the fact out for himself, what would his next step be? Faulcon was almost certain that it would be a step into the path of a wind, a deliberate suicide in the hope that it would not be suicide, but rather a mission of rescue.
Which of course it would not be. It could not be.
“How do you know”, said Kris quietly, “that hundreds of men and women, trained people, people fully aware of the dangers, and the certainty of being forever lost, how do you know that there aren’t hundreds such going out to the valley every night and slipping away into Othertime?”
It was a disturbing thought, and Faulcon felt the hair on his neck prickle as he tried to picture such teams slipping out in the darkness, descending the canyon walls, and stringing out, grabbing squalls and winds with joy, popping out of sight, some perhaps being sheared completely in half, or losing limbs, or bits of protective clothing. He had been out at night, and had never seen any such movement. There was no talk in Steel City about such events. But the rift valley was hundreds of miles long, and there were stations along its rim every twenty miles or so, stations big enough to accommodate a large population if that population was just passing through. And some of them had landing sites for the cargo shuttles from orbiting supply ships.
He said, “I give up. What’s the answer?”
Kris laughed. “You don’t know, is the answer. You can’t know. Nobody in this steel-hulled hell-hole knows anything about what’s really going on on VanderZande’s World. You get up, go out, get a bonus, get drunk, get laid, go to bed … sleep. And in the night the world could stop, do a somersault and spit a hundred explorers into the world’s Cambrian, and in the morning Leo Faulcon would still be thinking of money for artifacts, and how to survive another day, and what’s he going to have for breakfast.”
Faulcon poured himself another drink and wondered what was coming—hysteria, contempt, anger? It was difficult to gauge a man whom he had only known without a mask for a matter of hours.
He said, “I’m sorry if you’re angry, but that’s the way it is. I don’t believe in your moonlight missions, because I don’t believe that Steel City has a secret side to it. We hear about everything that goes on—”
“And don’t give it another thought, right?”
“That’s as may be,” Faulcon agreed mildly, settling back and staring hard at the boy. Kris’s face was white, his lips pinched, and Faulcon guessed that it was a recurrence of the grief he had felt at losing his brother, a grief now tempered with desperation … and yes, maybe a little contempt for Faulcon’s mercenary, easy-going attitude. “That’s as may be,” he repeated, “But the point is, we’ve heard nothing. There are three-man teams, there are eight-man teams, there are solo riders, there are sections set up for liaison, for geology and chemistry, and there’s a section kept ready for that much desired first contact. There are no time-travelling sections. I could account for every room, every level, every section, every Commander, every man, woman and child in Steel City and its environs. I could stop anyone and get a response from them as to what they’re doing on the world, and it would fit with the routine scheme of things. Kamelios is not the last great frontier, Kris. There are no pioneers here, no covered wagons heading through the misty wall of years, back into the untamed lands of yesterday …” he briefly shared Kris’s smile at the purple shade of his prose, “… the planet is an anomaly. The people here are monitoring that anomaly. A few are trying to understand it. Earth awaits their findings with interest, but hardly with baited breath.”
Kris Dojaan shook his head, as if in sympathy with Faulcon’s short-sightedness. “I can only assume that something about this place, or the society of men in Steel City, blinkers people like you. I hope it doesn’t happen to me. I shan’t be around long enough to find out if it will.”
Faulcon waited quietly, watching his colleague. “What does that mean?”
“I mean, when I find Mark I’m going home. That’s Mark out there … old, frail … maybe no longer the brother I knew in mind, or experience. But it’s Mark, and I’ve come to take him home. To find him and take him back, because that’s what my family wants, and it’s what I want, and it was what Mark said to us before he left. He said to find him if anything went wrong, and when it went wrong he called to me and repeated his plea.” Seeing the quizzical expression on Faulcon’s face, he shrugged. “We have this thing, this contact … a talk-space in our heads. As kids we played chess across half a planet’s distance … we lived apart for a while, when our parents were split up. I’d always know the move he wanted to make, and he’d know mine. We’re not twins, we just have talk-space. I heard him, Leo. I don’t expect you to believe me, but believe that I think I hear him … he communicated with me, he called to me. And I’ve come a long way, and practically signed my life away, to get him back.”
Quietly, Faulcon said, “Is a brother so important then?”
Kris’s eyes were tearful. “Yes, he bloody well is.”
Faulcon thought: what do I do? What do I say? The man is right to be wary of my motives, to be contemptuous of me. But what do I say to him to convince him he’s being foolhardy? Kris Dojaan had reached across and was draining the baraas into Faulcon’s glass. He smiled thinly, almost ashamedly. “I’m sorry, Leo. I shouldn’t take it out on you. It’s not your fault. I’m sobering up too fast. Let’s have another bottle—this stuff’s good.”
Before he could turn to attract the attention of a waiter, however, Faulcon said, “That’s not your brother out there, Kris. That’s not Mark.”
“You’ve implied that before.” Kris was not hostile, just quiet, thoughtful. “If it’s not Mark, then who is it?”
Faulcon stumbled on the words, not really wanting to antagonize the boy, to spoil the evening’s celebrations; he was aware that Kris would probably react scornfully to the idea of Faulcon’s truth, but he was afraid that the boy would be contemptuous, almost aggressive at what he might see as Faulcon’s delusion. Before he could verbalize that truth he felt he should tell Kris, Kris said, “It’s Mark. I just know it is. Mark had that survival streak in him, you know what I mean? He was a winner, a natural winner. It made me mad, sometimes … jealousy, envy, call it what you like. But others fed on his strength. You talk about luck, and me spreading luck; with Mark around, as kids, even in national service, everything went right; he was so confident, Leo. He made life a challenge, and he made it rich. And if anyone came back from Othertime, it was Mark. That was the sort of man he was. He was a winner, Leo, an absolute, survival-orientated, winning-streak of a man.” He smiled. “That’s why I know instinctively that it’s Mark … he came back, Leo. He was lost, and he came home again. And he communicated to me … mind power, his mind power reaching across all those light years.”
“Is he talking to you now?” asked Faulcon, but the dead tone of his voice was a sufficient indication of his cynicism to make Kris’s face darken. The point went home. Faulcon moved quickly, sensing that it should be now or never, prepared for as many reactions from Kris Dojaan as he could foresee. “Kris, that’s not your brother out there, it’s you. You. Kris Dojaan, the young man of twenty who, in a few weeks’ time, or a few years’ time, will be snatched away by the winds, and will somehow make it back. The time phantom is you, yourself.”
If Kris was momentarily stunned, laughter soon swept through him “Me? Me? Oh come on, Leo, come on. That’s nonsense and you surely know it. Don’t you think I could have sensed myself out there …?”
“You sense your brother,” Faulcon said stiffly. “But what you sense is something personal, and you are rationalizing it as your brother.”
“I don’t believe it. Anyway, what makes you so sure it’s me? What makes you so sure it’s anyone? I’ve got an empathy with Mark, and whilst I wouldn’t call that any sort of psychic power, it’s strong enough to … you know, it’s an affinity. That’s what I mean, an affinity, a spiritual affinity between us …”
“Talk-space.”
“That’s right, that’s what we called it at home. And it communicates in some way other than by senses. But what are you using to be so damned sure it’s me, and not Mark, or you yourself?”
Faulcon almost shouted with frustration. He placed his glass down on the table, glanced around guiltily as he realized that Kris’s outburst had caused an embarrassed silence in this part of the bar. Gradually heads turned away, conversation resumed, and Faulcon faced Kris’s aggressively triumphant features. The boy was drunk, that was clear enough. He was also getting very angry, very concerned. Faulcon didn’t want to talk seriously in conditions such as this, but he felt he had no choice.
“Look, Kris. On the one hand you’re claiming powers of empathy, on the other you’re denying them. If you can believe an affinity between two brothers, living light years apart, why can’t you believe in a heightening of extra-sensory powers on a world like this one, whose second name is Kamelios, think about that … Chameleon, the inconstant one, a world of changes, a world where nothing remains the same when it gets here. And that goes for people too. I came here thick and dull, sensually that is. Within a year my senses are sharp. I can hear better, I can see better, I can smell better even though I wear a mask outside, and I can sense better. Everybody here can do it. No, that’s not true. Not everybody, perhaps not even half. But so many people experience it that it is a definite phenomenon. We develop special senses. Come on, Kris, it happens all over the colonized galaxy. Worlds have auras, and those auras impose different psychological constraints or enlargements upon an alien population.”
“I know about that,” said Kris, testily. “Homing, the shroud, all of that stuff.”
Faulcon had not thought of Homing for a long time, and now, just briefly, he experienced it again in all its clenching, nostalgic, desperate sharpness—fields, cities, the smell of earth, the aura of Earth: the earth shroud within which man had evolved, the aura of the world that had become so deeply interpenetrated with the cells and substance of the animal body. It had marked humankind as belonging to a single world, and when they left that world the tie of the shroud was only broken with difficulty—it tugged at heart and mind, and could break spirit; it could destroy, and yet it could be destroyed itself. Homing. Homesickness. The voice of the earth, weakening, but always there.
“All that stuff,” Faulcon echoed quietly. “That’s right. And how do I know it’s you out there? I felt a strong sense of familiarity myself. I felt it suddenly, and agonizingly. A little voice in my head told me that you were doomed. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but it’s one of the phenomena of this world that when someone gets ‘marked down’ for taking by the winds, when fate decides you’re going to be lost in time, it communicates to some of those around you. It really does, Kris. I can’t explain it, all I can say is that if you’re here long enough you may well come to feel it yourself.”
Kris stared at Faulcon, expressionless, but obviously intent. “What are you saying, Leo … that suddenly, a few hours ago, you felt, you sensed, that one of these fine days I’m going to slip into Othertime?”
“And the coincidence of your own familiarity with that phantom … it seems to add up, Kris.”
“What I want to know is, why didn’t you sense the impending doom of Kabazard? Your old leader.”
“Rick Kabazard. Yes, a good point, and one I did wonder about … briefly. A man like Kabazard, doomed, doesn’t sort of ’radiate’ his fate; perhaps I gave that impression. There is a moment when your life takes a turn, links up with Kamelios. It’s at that moment that you can ‘feel’ his fate, sense it. It had happened, with Kabazard, before I met him, before I spent time with him. He knew it, he must have known he was doomed, but he said nothing about it.”
“All right, Leo. I’ll accept that. I don’t want to talk about it now, but Leo …” he smiled and leaned forward; the amulet swung free and struck against the glass he held with a short, ringing sound. Kris raised the star to his lips just briefly. “Leo, it should be obvious to you that I’m going to slip into Othertime. For God’s sake, that’s the whole reason I came here. I’ve got to find Mark. I came quite prepared to chase him through Othertime, to seek him out. I still am, and I know that I may have to pursue his withered body through the years, to give him the confidence to return. I shall do it. So of course you sensed my impending ‘doom’. But what makes you so sure that the phantom is me? I don’t understand that.”
Faulcon shrugged, baraas dimming his vision and his faculties.
How to explain that sudden surge of understanding, that moment’s intuition? And how often that intuition had been proven wrong. “You identified with the phantom, I identified you as fated to be lost to time. I think two and two make four. I agree, we could both be very wrong. You want to find Mark, and I don’t comprehend the way VanderZande’s World affects my mind. Or anybody’s mind, come to that.”
“Here’s to madness!” Kris, having replenished their glasses from a new bottle of baraas, raised his drink towards Faulcon, who responded, smiling. “To madness.”
The long Kamelion dusk ended, the light outside Steel City deepening from red to grey as the ancient sun was swallowed by the mist-shrouded mountains of the west. The nearby land was an eerie nightscape of scattered lights and winking green signal-points, marking danger zones and trackways through the jagged rocks. Steel City was a brilliant jewel, glowing with internal light, yet still reflecting the redness of Altuxor; a fire-lit ruby, the installation entered its evening phase. From the bar where Faulcon sat he could see the warm glow of life in the cabins and restaurants below them, and in shops and workplaces in two of the traverse units. But as yet, though he tried, he could not see the stars.
At the musical disturbance of nine chimes they rose from the bar and made their way to where Lena Tanoway had just arrived in the Star Lounge. She was dressed more casually, now, in wide trousers and a green, many-layered shirt, the folds of cloth tumbling across her breasts most erotically, as far as Faulcon was concerned. She had trimmed her hair, and tightly curled it about the rim of her skull. The sideburns that Kris found so idiotic were hardly in evidence. She smelled faintly of musk, faintly of soap, and Faulcon felt his mouth go dry. Raw jealousy, the belief that Lena had been up to the flesh farm since he had not gone with her, made him angry with himself; the drink made him emotional; his maleness made him resentful.
Inside he twisted up as he said, with affected relaxedness, “It’s good to see you. And you look gorgeous.”
Lena smiled at the compliment, and as they took their places in the lounge she cast a cynical glance at Faulcon and said, “One bottle or two? Each?”
Faulcon made a gesture with his hand: more than one, less than two.
“You reek. Both of you. I’m surprised you’re still standing.”
