by Bill Adams
“But look at the social logic of the situation, Foyle,” Hogg-Smythe interrupted. “People do send their children to survival camps, and even to boot camps, but not to death camps. I refuse to believe that the Elitists meant this to be a plain of death.”
“I’m not suggesting it would kill everyone. But I do think it’s intended to winnow out—”
“The old and weak, is that it?” Hogg-Smythe rapped out.
Foyle continued in a more gentle voice. “The Hellway was meant for eighteen-year-olds, Helen. Future centurions. For all I know, it was the immature who got killed, the ones too thoughtless to keep scraping the moths off.”
“What do you think, Commissioner?” Hogg-Smythe asked.
“We don’t have to share all of Foyle’s assumptions to be pretty damn scared of these things,” I said. “They’re all around us now, but remember—when we started, we saw gourds nowhere except in the west. This could be the big western danger we were supposed to avoid. Maybe the moth territory has drifted northeast over the last six hundred years, across what used to be a safe path for pilgrims.”
“Why should the maintenance robots permit that?” Foyle asked. “But if that theory will keep you two wary tomorrow, that’s all I ask. Shall we table the discussion?”
Hogg-Smythe and I agreed.
The Hellway sky was even stranger by night than by day. It still pretended to be real in some ways. There were “stars,” for instance, and the ceilinged zenith had faded to the same black as everything else. But waves of color would come and go among the clouds. Spotlights would stab down toward random targets on the ground. A silent and invisible agency went skywriting in luminous green haze, and left a large, eyelike shape glowing over one horizon.
We watched for a long time in silence. As the fire burned lower, we wrapped up in the sturdy warm blankets we’d found in our backpacks.
“Should try to sleep soon,” Foyle suggested. “Won’t be too hard, after all that walking.”
“But first,” Hogg-Smythe said, “you were going to tell me more about Kanalism—from the inside, Commissioner.”
“Was I?”
“I hope you will. The subject fascinates me. They say eighteen out of twenty-two signers of the Free Compact were lodge members—and the whole Federal Alignment sprang from that.”
“It’s true,” I acknowledged. “Most schoolbooks relegate that to a footnote, though. Like the Masonic symbols in the Great Seal of the old United States of North America. History isn’t supposed to be made by secret societies—they don’t leave enough paper behind for the historians.”
“But then, a hundred years ago,” Hogg-Smythe said impatiently, “the fraternity quite openly lobbied for the First Column’s new constitution. And now I understand that Kanalist membership is almost a prerequisite for a high position in the Column.”
“You have to realize,” I said uncomfortably. “That’s Reform Kanalism.
“Under the Old Rite, the emphasis was definitely on individual fulfillment. We—they adopted a royal symbol, but not out of identification with the state. Rather, out of the feeling that we are all potentially kings and queens. An appeal to talent and heroism, rather than fear and duty like the fasces. An appeal strong enough to have had a liberating influence on civilization for centuries.”
Hogg-Smythe pursed her lips. Her next question was a little seditious, but I hadn’t disguised my sympathies much; in a semiautonomous fringe like the Blue Swathe an official could afford to show a little nonconformity. “What…went wrong?” she asked.
I shook my head. Then Foyle answered.
“They sold out.” She spoke as if with personal bitterness, though the Federal Alignment had crumbled a century before. “What always goes wrong? You can bring out the best in people, but once they’re the best, they expect to rule.
“The Nexus University chapter was the key—the oldest, most influential chapter. The only institution that spoke simultaneously to the schools, the young, the rich, and the powerful. Within Kanalism they called it a reform movement, so as to label whoever didn’t go along a reactionary. But the truth is, most went along with a will.”
She paused, eyeing my Column uniform a moment, then went on contemptuously. “The Shadow Tribunal itself was invented at Nexus U., over sherry and biscuits. And no one raised any resistance except a doggerel song:
Alignment dead without a mourner,
We all line up to watch the fight:
Right and Left in the same corner,
Against what’s left of the Old Rite.”
“You seem to know a great deal about it,” Hogg-Smythe said. “Are you…?”
Foyle shook her head, dark red hair breaking in waves. “But my late husband was a student of Kanalism. He was under the illusion it was worthwhile.”
“Real Kanalism was,” I said. “It was—”
“What’s real is what is,” Foyle insisted. “What most Kanalists choose to do. It’s inevitable. In real life, Christians will either become a Holy Roman Empire—or let another cult do it and throw them to the lions.”
She stood and gestured with both hands. “The proof’s all around us. Think of the Elitists on Avalon, Helen—chafing under dictatorship, galvanized by a threat to their children. And when they got a chance to start their own world, what did they build? This.”
The wind rippled her campfire shadow on the moth-flecked grass.
“A torture test to determine which of their children was fit enough to rule the state, the losers to perish. And even here, ‘a desirable mix of classes,’ so that the contending future masters would have future servants along to do the heavy lifting. This was where their ideals led, and it only took them a few hundred years to arrive. Their soul had already died here, before the plague killed their bodies.
“As for the Kanalists, they kept their virtue just about as long, the typical few hundred years, and that’s all. That’s all it ever takes, that’s reality. The rest, the Old Rite, is just beautiful, outworn, sentimental rubbish. Like a Larkspur play.”
I didn’t argue with her. It was too late in the day.
◆◆◆
I’d been dreading my dreams on that nightmare plain. But I had none, and woke oddly refreshed. Something was happening, down where the black currents allow only occasional messages to reach the surface. I accepted the gift without questioning it.
We started out early, through morning mists that would have seemed pretty and cheerful the previous day. But all was gray and sinister as we sidled past the moths we’d waded through without a thought before. It was funny, but no one laughed.
The dew had no sooner steamed off than a heavy overcast moved in. A general grayness hung on. I could see it in the sky, the grass, and Hogg-Smythe’s face; she looked her age for the first time, walking with a slight hunch, leaning more heavily on her staff when she had to pause. At least Foyle and I had talked her out of her backpack, and had split the most necessary items of her gear between us.
We were deep in balloon country now; in the first few hours we saw a dozen in flight, and passed one being inflated. Piñata gourds became more common again, the brown, six-legged variety indistinguishable at a distance from the hexen they once had been.
We stopped at each stone bridge to scrape off the moths that had collected on us. It seemed harder to do than it had the day before. One would curl up and drop from your arm, then open into a falling-leaf flutter that brought it into sticky contact with your leg. Bending down to remove it, you made your back available to the ones shaken from a comrade’s hair.
I found it hard to see the white variety against my uniform, and always left a few blues and pinks behind, too, in case there was anything to my color-imbalance hypothesis. So magic begins, in the hope that some intentional act, however unproven, is better protection than doing nothing.
But Hogg-Smythe’s outfit was the real problem, all those safari-style pleats and epaulets and pocket flaps, dozens of crannies for the moths to work themse
lves into. And they seemed to like her skin more than Foyle’s or mine; she was constantly brushing them off her face, until Foyle improvised a scarf for her. But I think that’s what started the argument, Foyle’s insistence on tying it herself. I’d pulled ahead for once, and didn’t hear all of it, but Hogg-Smythe apparently felt patronized by the tall beauty who leaned over her and brushed her off and complained about her choice of clothing.
I went back to break it up and noticed that Hogg-Smythe’s voice was a little slurred. I wondered what the cumulative effect of the moths’ skin toxin might be on us, with our Terran biochemistry. But the old woman’s mind seemed clear enough. “I resent being treated like a child, Commissioner,” she complained. “Why have I been singled out?”
“Let’s all calm down,” I said. “It’s going to be a long day. Right now, let’s just walk. The next river crossing’s not far; we’ll do another cleanup at the bridge. Foyle, why don’t you move ahead and set the pace? We’ll string out a little bit to make less of a disturbance as we pass. Helen can keep an eye on your back, and I’ll bring up the rear.”
There were two red spots of anger on the redhead’s cheeks, but she looked sorry, too. “Yes, all right,” she said. “Here, better let us give your backpack a scrape first, then.” I turned to let them brush me down, and then we set off again.
We walked and walked, passing another weathervane tower. My uniform boots weren’t made for hiking: hurt, two, three, four. Sometimes I heard the low whistles of some prairie birds in the distance. It was exactly the same sound as yesterday, but how much more frightened it seemed, now that I was sure.
The wind had become dangerous, stronger, with the sort of uneven puffs we’d seen agitate the moths the day before. It pushed away the overcast without a hint of rain. Things had shadows again. But hold on, two, three. Stop. That’s no shadow on the back of your calf, it’s a lining of blue—shit! feel it?—all the way up the back of the leg.
I peeled moths off in strips like old wallpaper, and as I bent over to do it saw how many white ones lay in plain sight across my front and clawed them off, too, shuddering. More of them than ever before, but they dropped fast enough, some fluttering down but none flying up, and when I had them under control I was glad I hadn’t cried out and made the women double back.
But when I looked ahead again I could see nothing of Helen Hogg-Smythe. Just a whirling cloud of pink confetti.
I shouted frantically for Foyle to turn as I shrugged off my heavy pack and ran. We reached her at the same time, began swatting and swiping. The wiry little woman was already more than half-covered, and new arrivals from tens of meters away had begun to meld glutinously with the first wave.
They came down on us like a blizzard, with the same snow-tingle of coldness when they bounced off hands or face. Few stuck to me or Foyle—she’d been right, the attractant was a pheromone, a powerful dead-grass stink emanating from the first wave of landers—but we were still hampered by them, half-blinded and half-deafened by the leafy pasting. Hogg-Smythe had gone limp under the onslaught, not stiff-legged at least. But our scraping efforts were pathetic, like bailing out the ocean. Helen was going under.
Ocean, water. The raccoon-rabbit washing itself. I remembered what the hex-ox had done the day before, when he’d found himself in this deadly hail.
I bent down and slung Hogg-Smythe across my shoulders, shouted “Water!” and took two lurching steps toward the nearest mudhole.
No good. I could see the cattle had retreated into a tight ring around it, a solid mass of flesh, insulated from the moth-grass by their grazed circle. Like yesterday’s ox, I would have to risk the river—so I changed course with a wrench, pulling the moths with me toward the dimly seen bank.
Foyle jogged alongside, flailing through the swarm that followed us, screaming something about eels. But I had a single thought in my head now, and held onto it like a talisman.
I felt the top-heaviness of my load with every shock against my knees and feet, but once I attained some speed the run became easier, the imbalance working for me, as if I were falling and falling and falling, but forward. Once or twice I pulled ahead of the hungry cloud, only to have the next patch of long grass I entered explode into pink shrapnel beneath my feet.
But here was a feather tree, sure sign of water, and Foyle suddenly darted before me, a flash of red hair as she jumped in first—a diversion for the eels?—and I was over the edge, toppling onto my face.
Green water crashed past me, loud then quiet, and cold.
Up on my feet, sputtering, just waist-deep—that was a break—I found Foyle at my side, her hair now a long brown slick, and we pulled Hogg-Smythe’s head out of the water. I don’t know what magic I’d expected; finished piñatas appeared rainproof. But at least new moths had stopped following, and now I had an instant to think, Cut off their air! Cut off the scent!
I felt across the pink oatmeal mask of Helen’s face for her nose, gripped it closed with one hand as I brought the other up beneath her chin, and forced her whole body underwater, straddling it to keep the legs down.
Foyle waded around us, peppering me with coolheaded questions to which I gave the reasoned reply, “Shut up, God damn you!”—and she did shut up. We stood there in clean air, watching dirty water flow over the pink mummy that had been our friend.
At first nothing happened. I’d held my own breath in sympathy, and just when I couldn’t do it any longer, the coating began to break up and dissolve.
I saw the first eel then, swimming a handsbreadth away from my downthrust arms; it took a long time to wriggle past, but there was nothing I could do but remain in place. Then it was gone, and Hogg-Smythe was clean, and Foyle helped me lift her onto the steep bank, safe.
But as I tried to climb out myself I tripped, because something heavy had tangled in my legs. Something long and thick and slimy. And even as the body writhed clear of me, the head darted back vengefully, its electrode prongs clamping onto my thigh.
Contact.
Lightning strikes the world-tree, burns the world-tree, becomes the world-tree, one of its secret roots trying to tear my leg out of its socket. I heave back at the roots of the world, every muscle rigid, as the sky strobes to black a thousand times in half a second, but the fiery whiteness is still too bright for all that, burning its way down every nerve ending until existence itself will flicker out, out—
Out of it, collapsing sideways against the bank. Blues and greens were coming back into the picture, but there was still a flickering above me. It was the eel. Foyle must have pulled it off me by the tail, and now she was stuck with it, whirling it as fast as she could in a lariat circle to keep it from coiling back at her. It was a heavy beast, and I heard her little grunts of effort as she spun around, until a final swing sent it flying out over the river. Even before the splash, she yanked me halfway up and then left me to crawl the rest of the way as she dropped beside Helen Hogg-Smythe to provide artificial respiration, and that was okay, crawling up through the mud was all I really wanted to do at the moment, besides closing my eyes…
I spat grass out of my mouth and rolled onto my side. “Thank God,” Foyle said, kneeling next to Helen not far away. “That’s both of you breathing. Are you burnt?”
“I don’t think so,” I said after feeling my leg. “The pants probably helped.” I stretched, trying to feel my way back into the mainstream of time. “Is Helen really all right?”
Hogg-Smythe sat up, coughed, and reassured me herself, then lay back heavily. For a few minutes there was nothing but the sound of our panting.
“So much for our immunity,” Foyle said at last. “So much for the overland route.”
“I’m not crazy about the swimming, either,” I said. “I had an idea, once, about using one of the big piñatas to make a boat, but—”
“But everything’s arranged to make a boat worthless,” Foyle said. “The current runs the wrong way, and the zigzag course would keep us from making real progress until our food ran
out. No. The land and water routes are out.
“You know what that leaves. Don’t you?”
Chapter Eighteen
Foyle threw the stone at me as hard as she could.
This time it got all the way across the river, passing just to one side of the squirming island of eels and the huge green globe they were inflating. It landed at my feet on the bank, and I picked it up and untied the end of the fine Elitist supercord that stretched back to her. Pulling the cord taut, I tied it to a shoulder-high branch of the tree behind me.
So much for the static line, the last connection we had to make. I waved, and a few minutes later, after crossing a bridge some fifty meters downstream, Foyle rejoined us. I untied another cord, the tension line, farther down the bank, and she helped me draw it in more tightly, despite an elastic resistance; then she tied it off again. “ ‘Night’ will fall soon,” she said. “For a time there, I was afraid we’d be too late. We might have had to cover some distance before we found another eel-mass so close to a bridge.”
“And the trees,” Helen Hogg-Smythe said a little faintly from where she sat in the grass nearby; her strength seemed to come and go since the moth attack. “Trees facing each other like this.”
She gestured at our theater of operations, the straight lines of cord on either side of the eel-mass, connecting feather trees on opposite banks. A puff of breeze set them to whispering, and we all flinched, inspecting ourselves for moths.
“Oh, the eels always mass between trees,” Foyle said when this latest false alarm had passed. “They need the windbreak during inflation. And our needs are considered, too.”
“You really think we’re meant to do this, don’t you?” I asked.
“Whether it’s safe or not, yes. Look at how all the details jibe. The lightness of the line, for instance—we couldn’t have made those throws with rope.”
