Where Time Winds Blow, page 9
“We’ve been arguing,” Kris observed politely. “And now we’re friends again. Isn’t that right, Leo?”
“Kris won’t believe that we sense certain things,” explained Faulcon, and Lena stared at him hard. “Won’t he?” she said, and it was apparent to Faulcon that she was less bothered by the cause of the argument than by something in Faulcon’s demeanour, his behaviour; he sobered quite abruptly, met her gaze coolly. Please don’t say anything, not yet, not yet. She said, “That’s enough of that, anyway. I want to eat, to talk about our next few days—we have to train Mister Dojaan here to ride an r-suit, but on the other hand it is our vacation, and only three days to offload a vast number of g.u.’s. That’s going to take some organization, gentlemen.” She looked at Faulcon again, but the hardness was gone; Faulcon felt himself go tense, and then warm with love. She was smiling very faintly, but her eyes communicated more than she ever allowed her words to say. “After dinner, Kris, you will excuse us I’m sure.”
“I suppose so,” Kris said glumly. “But haven’t you got a sister?”
They toasted a good week’s work. The two meat-eaters ate snails in their shells, imported from the farms on nearby Cyrala 7 and cooked in garlic and tasselroot sauce. Faulcon indulged himself, then, with a white meat called beliwak, from a non-terrestrial animal with an analogous amnio-acid structure to Earth animals (the beliwak had probably been seeded in the early days, and no record kept), which had a strong taste, and made Kris blanch as Faulcon offered him a morsel. He said it smelled rotten. Faulcon explained that it was allowed to deteriorate in a special liquid containing herbs and bleaching for nearly two months. Kris blanched even further. He himself, being a principled vegetarian, ate a spiced dal made from lentils grown in the colonial communities hereabouts. He was particularly taken with coddleneep in red wine sauce, a native root plant and a recipe acquired from the manchanged colonies, high in the foothills of the Jaraquath mountains. Its flavour was not unlike strong game-bird (although only Faulcon recognized this fact). Kris thought it was excellent, and seemed doubly delighted to be eating an “alien” plant, since on Oster’s Fall everything was earth-seeded.
The meal for three came to eight hundred g.u.’s, ten times what they would normally have expected to pay.
Kris excused himself eventually, and Lena and Faulcon walked hand in hand down to the occupation levels, and to Faulcon’s quarters. Lena was warm, communicative. Perhaps the tension of leading the team for a seven-day had drained away, leaving her relaxed, aware of those parts of her body and mind that were not concerned with VanderZande’s World, and work, and aliens; parts concerned with love, and Leo Faulcon.
In the soft light of Faulcon’s room her body lost much of the hardness imposed upon it by training and life on Kamelios; they stood in each other’s arms, close, warm, eyes shut, lips playing gently on each other’s skin as they fed on the peace and tranquillity of this first embrace since the mission.
Lena kissed Faulcon on the mouth, then said, “You followed me to this world …”
“I wasn’t going to lose you. I was determined about that.”
“I know. You followed me here, I suppose it’s only right that I should follow you away from here, to your own world.”
Faulcon smiled. “I don’t mind where we go. The problem is, how can we break with Kamelios?”
They drew apart and hand-in-hand stood by the window, looking out across the brilliantly-lit slopes and surface walks of the city. The nightscape beyond was visible only as a series of red and green lights; their own shapes moved, ghostly, tenuous, in the glass. Above the land Merlin showed its face from behind bright Kytara, the two planetoids skipping ahead of tiny, pale-faced Aardwind—the moons were insubstantial half-discs, seen as in a pond.
“Do you realize”, Faulcon said quietly, “that we have just acknowledged how trapped we are by this planet?” It was something they had never discussed, something, a knowledge, that all on VanderZande’s World denied. Faulcon realized, now, that the denial of this particular reality had been a barrier between them, indeed, was a barrier between all men on Kamelios.
Perhaps trapped was the wrong word, with its connotation of imprisonment and desire to escape. Lena said, “We’ve become masters of Kamelios, we’ve learned to live on the world, to use the world, and we’ve changed. We’ve both changed, Leo. Our ambitions are the ambitions of just about everybody who ends up in Steel City, and not on the farms: discovery, investigation, the finding of something …”
It was a feeling with which Faulcon was well familiar—the sense of having a goal, of seeking something, even though he could not voice, or articulate, exactly what it was he was seeking. And the thought of leaving Kamelios was terrifying—the thought of distance between himself and the valley and time and ruins. What contrary creatures we are, he thought—on the one hand cold, contemptuous, uninterested in time’s derelicts, but trapped by the need to discover something within those remains.
“Perhaps we should just go—right now,” he said. “People have left Steel City. We should just drive out to the landing strip and wait for a shuttle. What do you think?”
Lena said, “That would be the only way. Just up and go. Don’t think about it, don’t think of the valley. Just leave; Leo, I truly want to leave here, to go somewhere dull and simple, Earth perhaps, or any farming world. Why don’t we do it?”
Faulcon found himself in the grip of a sudden panic, a claustrophobic sensation, the room closing in, the air straining his lungs, the beast of blood through his head loud and physically violent. “We should do it tomorrow,” he said, and there was no real heart to his words. “Why don’t we see how we feel in the morning?”
If Lena felt like laughing she restrained it well. Hugging Faulcon, she agreed quietly. “We change our minds so often, Leo—we really will have to move fast when we move.”
“We’ve adapted to the world, as you say. We’re in control here, but the price has been heavy, very heavy.”
Sometime during the early part of the night a fiersig drifted from the hills, and across the valley, causing a change to pass through Steel City. Faulcon felt it without realizing what it was for a while; the shivering sensation, the sudden change of mood, the sudden feeling of irritation, excitement, a quickening of heart and mind, a livening of the spirit.
Immediately he began to breathe deeply, heavily, his eyes shut, his mind fixed on the idea of permanence. With each second that passed he felt the vaulting, tumbling mix of emotions, a confused and frightening jumble of anger and fear, of humour and indifference. He bit the flesh inside his mouth as he resisted the probing fingers of the fiersig, fought to keep the mood of love and determination he had shared with Lena just hours before.
He began to groan, then cry with the effort of resistance, but he was winning—he sensed he was winning, he knew he was beating it. His cries woke Lena. “It’s all right,” he said, and then was quiet, deciding against further words, for words were dangerous while the fiersig passed.
Lena sat up, not looking at him, disturbed by the change herself. Faulcon stepped down from the couch and dressed. His mind was fresh and alert, as it always was during a mood disturbance; he left the room without a glance back, aware of the sounds of Lena’s efforts to block the change, and walked up to the Skyport at the top of the Riftwatch Tower.
The strange lights in the alien sky were brilliant, and crowds of people were drifting up to the lounges to observe them: streaks of red and green breaking across the night and fading, then the spirals and circles of yellow, sparkling gold, zigzagging between the stars, racing across the nightscape from one horizon to another, it seemed, in the twinkling of an eye … more reds, breaking and dividing, curving about and dissipating in startlingly bright explosions; then winking, flashing purples, drifting between the gold and red-streaked chaos in serene fashion. The whole fiery display of atmospheric energy passed above the city and away into the night in a little over half an hour.
Faulcon heard laughter, then, and some shouting: the usual heated debates as to whether the fiersig might be intelligent life-forms; the usual empty arguments. The restaurants and bars were closing down as temperaments altered and relationships shifted in the delicate balance of intellect and instinct that had brought people together a few hours before. People needed time to adjust, time to think. Clothes were shed, bodies and souls bared to the unseen, unknown fingers of Kamelios, defying them to try and wreak change upon the individual. Figures walked naked, unsure, through the corridors and across the softly undulating floors of the relaxation lounges.
Faulcon saw Lena there, moody, depressed. He walked across to her, and tried to speak to her, but she shrugged him away and walked back to her own quarters, all her earlier energy dissipated in an instant.
PART TWO
The Phantom of the Valley
CHAPTER SIX
An immense black shape, manlike yet not a man, passed out through Steel City’s southern gateway and moved swiftly across the brightly lit land surrounding the silent installation. Within seconds it was entering darkness, its form visible only by the occasional reflection of light on its smooth metal bulk. Soon it was gone.
An r-suit could move fast under direct human control, but at night the terrain between the City and the deep canyon was hazardous, and the man moved slowly, following, after a while, the lines of green and red lights that marked out smoothed trackways to the lip of the gorge. In the windless night the servo-mechanisms of the suit made distinct whirring sounds, but as he drew near to the valley a fresh and gusty breeze blew up, and only the fleeting glimpse of a tall shape, or a momentary rattle of rocks, told of the passing of the stranger.
At length the alien canyon yawned before him, and even the suddenly activated light from the helmet of the suit showed only blackness. Bright stars, and the glow of the moon Three-light, permitted glimpses of the structures below … Here a gleaming, greenish plate, there a twisting spiral of blue and silver, fragments of sparkling red catching the eye from among large, amorphous areas of nightblack.
The man turned and began to run his suit along the trackway that bordered the canyon’s edge. Soon the city was a long way behind, an area of bright yellow light that reached up into the sky, and gave the horizon behind him an eerie glow. In the distance, on both sides of the valley, were the smaller, less inviting lights of the Watch Stations. A sedately moving light in the sky, passing across the Kamelion constellation of the Axe, was the great orbiting refuge known as Night Eye Station, but it was well to the west, and its banks of cameras would not be directed here, not so far away from its present route across the world.
The rift suit moved on, seemingly of its own volition. The man inside relaxed physically, but remained watchful for movement on the canyon’s rim, and for movement and light in the darkness below him. The suit had run this route many times before. It reached into the man’s mind, snatched its instructions from the imprinted repetition of activity it found there. It powered the legs and the helmet, it kept the arms comfortable, and it sniffed and probed the ground ahead, all in the twinkling of a star, each movement a coordinated movement, happening between mind and machine, taking the man on his circuitous pilgrimage about the gorge.
Soon it stopped, bracing itself almost at the very edge of the drop. Although viewing from within was easy through the wide, outwardly curved face plate, the helmet turned. Through the darkness the man could almost see the shapes and shards that crowded the deep cut in the world, the cubes and spheres, the girders and jagged edges of once-proud, once-living structures. But to his eyes, and to his immediate awareness, there was only blackness.
And yet not so long ago …
His eyes, and the helmet of the r-suit, found the place where the creatures had come, where the golden glow of their machine had lit the dusk with a different fire to the red light of Altuxor. The emanation had seemed to fill the valley, to radiate to heaven itself. The glow had been warm. His r-suit had consciously adjusted its temperature to maintain the comfort of the startled, overwhelmed occupant within. Then the shapes had gone, the golden machine had vanished into time. The moving creatures, glimpsed so quickly, so imperfectly as they stepped through the sloping side, had taken their minds and their awarenesses elsewhere in the cosmic vastness of the single world; to times beyond.
Darkness. He watched that darkness, and hours came and went, and soon he moved on, further from Steel City, disappointment drying him, and choking him, nagging him as it always nagged him, distracting him as it had distracted him a hundred times before. They had not returned; but surely one night they would. They had to return, they had to.
And so as he ran, as the darkness passed him by, as the r-suit plundered the miles, its monotonous movement regular and steady, so his mind went out: upwards to the stars, downwards to the earth, sideways and inwards to the rift, to the unconscious minds that he knew must be listening from the eternal void of time.
I’m here, I’m here … please show yourselves … please come back … please communicate …
But Kamelios answered him as it always answered him, with wind, with stillness broken by a gusting breeze, with the cold light of stars, with the chasm and the dead things that lay therein.
He passed widely by the ruined Riftwatch Station Eekhaut, and returned to the edge of the world of man. Suddenly he began to run faster, looking away from the valley, away across the hills to the north where—had he the necessary magnification on his face plate—he might have seen the tiny lights and fires of one of the human townships.
And gradually the suit stopped, and turned back to the gorge, though the man inside the machine was anxious to pass on. And yet he had sensed it would stop, just as he sensed that there was some meaning to the sudden hastening of the suit’s progress whenever he passed the ruined Riftwatch Station.
It stood there and watched the darkness of the deep void, and the man watched that same darkness, and felt the suit’s arm raise and point to a place in the emptiness where he knew he had been before.
Aloud he said, “Move on,” but the suit stayed still, its arm pointing, its helmet turned sideways, looking down, so that he could stare through the clearest part of the visor at the place where the wind … where the screams …
He could hear the screaming now, a banshee wailing, the sound of awareness of death, the sound of a drowning man.
“Move on!”
Standing silent and still, the r-suit disobeyed the verbal order, but in truth it disobeyed nothing, for it drew its power and its commands not from the voice but from the mind, and in his mind the man did not want to move; he wanted to stand here and remember, and relive, and become aware again of that thing which he had forced from his mind, that inaction that he had expunged from his existence, and had thus taken from that area of responsibility and morality that dictated to his conscience.
The time winds broke distantly, booming and thundering, darkening the sky. They swept close, bringing time and change, bringing destruction and creation, driving away the ordered ruins in a fleeting moment of visual chaos, only to vanish westwards up the gorge leaving a new order, a new stillness. The arm of the suit pointed in the darkness, the stiff metallic finger an arrow of guilt drawn tense in the bow, ready to discharge itself into the man’s heart. Through the dark quiet he could hear the wind, he could see the struggling shape of the man, caught in the tight angle of two alien structures. Through the suit receiver the voice was hysterical, fear-filled, terrified: help me, for God’s sake don’t just stand there, help me!
They might come, they might come behind the wind
Help me!
I saw them before, golden creatures in a golden machine, they came behind a wind for
For God’s sake!
a second, they were there, a second, golden, creatures, second
Don’t just!
after the wind, watching me, watching them, intelligent time-travelling beings
Stand there!
I must watch, I must watch, I can’t go down … the wind too strong too fast … I can’t go down … get free, wriggle free … creatures coming, golden machine
HELP ME! HELP ME!
I can’t. I won’t! I might miss them!
The arm of the suit dropped. In the stillness the man’s voice was a strange keening, that broke into the sound of sobbing, that suddenly cried out through the dark night, that gave vent to its frustration and fear and guilt. “He had to come! He had to remind me!”
The suit moved away, running fast and furious, the man’s legs drawn up to his chest so that he rode within his machine in a crouched position, the mechanical legs pounding the cliff top at speeds faster than a human limb could tolerate. He tried to race his shame, to outrun his fear, to leave behind the need to tell the boy, to say something, to tell him how his brother had died, and how he had seen the death, and how he had stood there and done nothing. But all these things were carried by the suit as well, and the faster he ran, the faster they spun in his mind, and blurred his vision, and dulled his senses.
But soon his blood cooled and the tears on his face no longer tickled their message of weakness. The suit slowed, and stopped, and turned about, facing the distant glow of the city, staring there now because the man wished to stare there. And when it moved it was because he wished to go home.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kris Dojaan’s impatience to go out to Kriakta Rift, and seek out the time phantom, made him a willing trainee, a hard worker, and an exhausting student; it also boiled over, on several occasions, into an anger of frustration, against which Lena was forced to pull her rank. Much of the next two days was spent in silence, the sullenness almost physical. And Kris was tired, too, Faulcon couldn’t help but notice that, the weariness and pallor in the youngster’s cheeks. Yet he worked hard, and could give his team mates no cause for dissatisfaction.
Lena and Faulcon took it in turns, three hours a session, to teach the boy the function, structure, use and dangers of the rift suits, the protective armoured mobile-environments that were often all that stood between a man and the endlessness of Othertime.
