Echoes In Time # with Sherwood Smith

by Andre Norton

  Her mind kept insisting on listening, and trying to parse the complicated levels of verb and modifier until she'd rise again, cram more anti-inflammatory meds into her dry mouth, and wash it down with long gulps of water.

  Once she awoke suddenly, and Zhot seemed to be in her room. He demanded definitions for time and space and insisted that she learn the terms for those who stood outside temporal reality…

  She slept again, and when she woke a second time—now drenched in sweat—she wasn't sure if she'd dreamed the conversation or not.

  As soon as she sat up, the sensors flicked the lights on. The lights seemed dim; she felt a sudden longing for the bright clarity of sunlight.

  She looked up, about to reach for her medication—and there was Zhot, standing in the shadows of the corner.

  "Are your senses one, or many?" Zhot's voice blurred in a scintillation of green-tasting rainbows—Saba knew the thought senseless, but it was the only description that fit.

  "Many," she said slowly. Her lips felt dry and cracked. She reached for water, drank. When she looked up, Zhot was still there.

  "Different modes of sensation, yes?" he insisted. Now she heard the wisp-wisp of his slippered feet on her floor, the quiet hiss of his robe as he walked back and forth in front of her door.

  Her muzzy mind jumped to the musical modes, and she worried a moment at the problem of whether the taste of water was Dorian or Myxolydian.

  When she looked up again, her vision had gone blurry; in Zhot's place she saw Katarina.

  Katarina did not wait for an answer, or maybe it was an hour later. Saba didn't know.

  "But you can imagine colors for tastes, sounds for shapes, different modes?" she continued. "Symbolically associate them?" Katarina spoke in Russian, or was it still Yilayil?

  Katarina was a warm slurpy column of melted licorice emitting blue bubbles that enveloped her head, each conveying a quantum of meaning.

  Now Saba tried to assign the proper color to the modes, until she suddenly, but only for a flashing moment, realized that she was below the words, below the world of symbols, in a seamless unity of sensation. Then everything wrenched back into focus, intensifying her headache, and Katarina was gone.

  Synesthesis, Saba realized.

  Unable to think beyond that, Saba lay down, and slept.

  Urgency bled through her dreams: there was something she had to understand, to learn, to know. Now! Now!

  She gasped, woke up, fumbling with trembling fingers for her water.

  As she drank, she realized that the sound that had wakened her was that of movement outside her door—not footsteps, but voices. Yilayil voices, chanting.

  She levered herself painfully off the bed, all her joints aching. The room spun about her for a moment, then steadied. After some experimentation she found that she could walk, albeit slowly, as long as she did not move her head quickly. It took all her strength for her to pull on her robe, but she welcomed its warmth.

  She opened the door, in time to see two weasel faces look directly into her eyes before passing onward. They did not pause in the eerie whistle-punctuated chant, but passed slowly onward, their robes swaying in time to their steps.

  Saba turned her head—impossible that they would walk in that direction. There was nothing next to her room but a wall.

  An unfamiliar glow lit the corridor. The adjacent wall was gone! In its place was an archway, its ceiling lit from beneath. Was it a stairway?

  She waited, but no one appeared, and she became aware of a weird sound, almost like a heartbeat, but with strange musical overtones and harmonics. It seemed to come up through the floor, through her feet, but then she realized that some of the sound, the musical part, was more audible from the open door.

  "Is this real?" she whispered, and then she reached for her com—her link to sanity. She clicked it on, and said wearily, "Is this real?"

  She held it out, for a few seconds, but her arm could not bear the weight, and so she clipped it to her belt—and then forgot it as she concentrated on the difficult actions involved in standing on her feet.

  She groped her way through the door, and stood in dismay. The stairs she had expected to find were apparently endless. She blinked feverish eyes. The perspective was odd, and her eyes wouldn't quite focus on the walls.

  Only a few steps before her were in focus. The music crescendoed, echoing in cacophony—then it resolved, each voice, each instrument harmonious, the whole transcending melody into a form of mind-numbing beauty.

  The music was more complex than any she had ever heard. It beckoned her downward.

  Is this my fever? she thought. Am I really here? Only her trembling legs and pounding head and heart tied her to reality—but those too could be part of her dream.

  Again the sense of urgency gripped her. She stumbled on.

  Time was fragmented now; she had a vague sense that sunset had passed, that it was no longer Yilayil time. She remembered the two Yilayil faces, so briefly seen.

  Sight blurred, and she knew she had to be hallucinating, for now she saw ghosts: the First Team, all lined up along the stairs in a row. And then Gordon. He reached a hand toward her, but she passed through his fingers. When she paused, swaying, on the stairs, she looked back—and he was watching her, his blue eyes mute with appeal, his sunbleached hair disarrayed as if he had been running. He's sick too, she thought, and she passed downward.

  Finally she reached the bottom, and found herself in a huge cavern, glittering with the light of torches, bioluminescent spheres, electric lights, and other sources of illumination she did not recognize.

  All the races of the planet were represented there, distributed about the vast space in a complex pattern whose geometry seemed to hold importance, but again the meaning escaped her.

  The cavern was also full of stalactites and stalagmites, of fragile webs of rock, arrays of stone cylinders, and other forms, some natural, some obviously shaped, and some whose provenance she could not discern.

  The beings danced among them, striking them with various instruments adapted to their sizes and physical nature. Big creatures held huge hammerlike strikers, little creatures carried small rods, or flexible drumsticks. Some struck the rocks, some stroked them, some tapped them. Some were on scaffolding high on the walls, some, the Jecc for instance, even swung on fragile trapezes, the length of the pendulum thus formed determining their rhythm: pulses of complex beats at long intervals.

  This was but one aspect of the sound that pulsed in her head, her blood, and impelled her forward. She saw Zhot and stumbled toward him. He turned to her, welcome in his greenish face.

  "We thought you too ill. Tonight we see."

  "See?" Saba said weakly.

  He waved one arm at the activity all around, while still stroking a stalagmite with the filelike rod in his other. It made a grating noise that made her teeth itch.

  "Sensation! We anchor perception, achieve the unity of sensation that denies time, and those who dance-above-decay speak, we see, we hear."

  Dance-above-decay. Again, he used one of those non-temporal verbs.

  A tall Yilayil approached with deliberate step, its elongated body only remotely resembling an Earth weasel. The gowned creature studied her with large eyes that gleamed with intelligence and compassion; another approached on her other side.

  The first Yilayil motioned for her to step forward. The second one held out a small rod, about two feet long. Her fingers closed round it. She glanced at the thing in her hand, confused.

  Zhot turned back to his stalagmite, while the two Yilayil pressed her forward, gently, to a small fan of rock, so thin she could see light through it.

  The first Yilayil pantomimed drawing the rod across the top of the rock-fan; she tried it, producing a melodic glis-sando. The Yilayil both nodded and whirled away.

  For a time Saba stroked the fan at random, and then the pulse of the music penetrated her consciousness once more, sounds and voices rising and falling in a syncopation that caused
her to grope for meaning within a context ingrained in memory, deep and abiding, from her earliest years.

  The edho of the Dorze usually had five components. There was the yetsu as, the chorus—the chanting voices. Response, reaction, cohesion…

  The Yilayil. They were the pile, the highest voices, and limitless in number, at once the most important and the least important of the harmonic pattern.

  The kaletso—who was that? Was it Zhot? The kaletso was the youngest, extending the melodic interventions of the aife—

  The bane. The "belchers," the percussive voices. Those were the ones making music on the stones.

  The dombe, those who cover. The other races, all singing sustained music to better the cohesion.

  But who were the aife, the elder, the eyes?

  Saba's mind reached, and reached again—

  And the pattern changed in her mind, and she abandoned the symbol of childhood, immersing her consciousness in the alien harmonics—

  —And the music resolved wholly into beauty such as she had never heard, and she was part of it. Her will fled, and she became one with the music. The sound became color became touch became scent and then all of them and the cavern dissolved into pure sensation for a moment, bereft of perception, then snapped back, and she was somewhere else.

  She saw men and women, dark and stern of face, in the ancient dress of the great Ethiopian kingdom of Axum, and others bearing gifts of gold and myrrh and jewels. Then violence, war, men struggling, weapons lifted, chariots sweeping across sandy wastes, the legions of Rome, men in white with scimitars uplifted, women weeping, pale men in pith helmets, swarthy men in uniforms with archaic rifles, an old man dragged from a throne and cast into darkness, the bright line of a rocket traced against a full moon huge on the horizon…

  Then she gasped as the sneering, hate-filled visage of a Baldy confronted her, but just as suddenly his face became fearful, terrified, and disappeared.

  Now she saw the Earth, bright and small, dwindling to a point, and the sun with it, merely another point of light in the glory of the galaxy, but from that insignificance grew a web of light, like sap refilling the veins of a dying leaf, melding with other webs from other stars widely scattered, and to her eyes was presented the destiny of humankind, glory and shame together as humanity reclaimed the ruins of the star-spanning empire that had crumbled so long ago.

  Something SomeTHING SOMETHING sang in her head…

  The aife?

  spoke in her head…

  spoke in her head.

  A vast pressure surged through her mind. It was too much to comprehend—to bear. She swayed, dropped the rod, and fell senseless to the ground.

  * * *

  "AS NEAR AS we can tell, they live off the island entirely," Misha said as they trotted through the darkening streets.

  Rain tapped against Eveleen's face, cool and pleasant after two days of incessant heat. She ran at Ross's side, her jogging pace easily matching the taller men's strides.

  Misha used his infrared scanner to detect body heat. Three times they ducked back behind shrubs or once a low wall, as beings walked by: once the tall green ones that functioned as guardians of the peace, and twice gliding Yilayil, talking swiftly in the language that was so melodic when they used it.

  "All in the direction of the House of Knowledge," Ross observed, staring after the Yilayil. "Think something is happening?"

  "How would we know?" Eveleen asked, thinking immediately of Saba. "We haven't been outside enough to put together any kind of pattern."

  "True," Ross said, but his tone temporized—and Eveleen knew, without asking, that he felt the same sense of danger that gripped her.

  "Come." Misha jerked his head, impatient to be gone.

  No one spoke again until they had descended to the ancient transport station that the Russians had found.

  "We spent three days riding this thing. Finding where it went. Where it still works," Misha said as they waited for one of the flat cars.

  When it came up, they squeezed in, lying flat as Eveleen had the first time, and once again commenced a long ride, swooping downward. Concussions of air at intersections testified to the size and complexity of the system. It was miraculous that it still worked—that, somehow, there was still energy to run it.

  Finally Misha stopped the car, which hummed beneath them. In the dim bluish light, he looked back at them. "This station here"—he gestured upward at an archway and glowing light—"is on the west coast of our island. As you see, the transport goes on. I think it crossed beneath the bay to a smaller island off to the west. We have seen the flyers retreating there when the sun sets; we think that is where they live. And I assume that this transport goes there as well, but I don't know. Want to test it, or find another way across?"

  Eveleen said, "Test it."

  At the same moment Ross said, "I'm not in the mood for a night swim."

  Misha smiled faintly. "Then we go."

  He faced forward again, leaned back—his yellow hair brushed over Eveleen's knees—and activated the car.

  Again it dove downward, so fast her stomach seemed to drop. Then, quite as suddenly, it swooped up again, and she had to swallow to keep her ears from popping painfully. There were no intersection concussions this time.

  When the car stopped, all three climbed out.

  "Here is what happened," Misha said as they walked toward the ramp leading upward. "We circled back for one last check at the Yilayil graveyard—just in case. We were careless—not enough sleep, maybe too sick." He shrugged. "It was clouding up, and we forgot to check for shadows. They came on us quite suddenly. I got under cover, Viktor did not. When I came out, I saw two of them holding him in a kind of net. They flew west, high, fast."

  "So it's probable they took him here," Ross said.

  Misha shrugged again. "Where else?"

  And why? Eveleen thought—but she didn't speak out loud. They were here to find out why.

  Cold air fingered their faces, and Eveleen pulled her rain jacket tight against her. Misha paused, checking his infrared and his flashlight.

  Ross and Eveleen also had flashes clipped to their belts; in silence, Eveleen gripped hers, but she did not turn it on.

  Misha led the way, scanning with the infrared. No warm bodies showed up on the screen.

  Ross murmured, "Why do I think that the First Team ended up here?"

  "There were no flyers in their time," Eveleen whispered back. "Not in any of the records—or were there, Misha?"

  He shook his head. "No. No flyers."

  Ross grunted. "Well, it was a nice solution."

  "This mission has no easy solutions," Misha retorted in a sardonic voice.

  "It's had no solutions at all, so far," Eveleen shot back.

  Misha laughed softly, then paused again. They'd reached the entrance to the station. It was nearly overgrown with ferny plants. They tromped over thick moss and scrubby brush, then pushed through the hanging boughs.

  Obviously the flyers did not know about the station, or if they did, they didn't use it. The three were the first ones in centuries to step that way, Eveleen could tell even in the darkness.

  Misha had fixed his flashlight so that it emitted a thin pinhole of light. He sinned it carefully, then clicked it off. Eveleen blinked in the sudden darkness, until her eyes began to adjust; whatever he'd seen was enough to orient him, but he was used to moving about in jungle at night. She was content, for now, to follow.

  They found themselves on a rocky ledge that was once some kind of road. Flat portions, broken by hearty plants, made walking easier.

  The road was built into the side of a cliff. They rounded a hill, and below them, quite suddenly, they saw dancing lights.

  Too late they heard the swoosh of great wings beating; Eveleen looked up sharply, to see five long shapes dive down on them.

  Misha's hand went to his side—his weapon. He didn't unclip it, though. Eveleen kept her own hands away from her sides, balancing lightly on her f
eet. Adrenaline flooded her system, temporarily banishing malaise, headache, tiredness.

  Ross had gone still. "Wait," he said.

  Misha gave a short nod; he'd decided the same.

  The five winged creatures surrounded them, and one of them gestured below. The distant yellow light outlined a sharp face with bluish highlights; the creature looked excited.

  It opened its mouth, and began to speak. Eveleen heard a stream of non-Yilayil gibberish, and wondered what was being said. It sounded hauntingly familiar.

  Then she heard a sharp indrawn breath from Misha.

  Ross looked up. Eveleen's heart thumped. "What?" she croaked.

  "This language," Misha said, his voice suddenly hoarse. "It—it is—Russian."

  CHAPTER 25

  GORDON SAW SABA lying on the ground.

  No one else was in the cave. His footsteps hissed and grated as he ran heedlessly down the worn stone steps to the vast floor.

  There Saba lay, utterly quiescent, her body, slender and graceful the last time he had seen her, now dangerously thin and frail.

  "Saba. Saba," Gordon breathed, and knelt at her side.

  He placed fingers to her neck, and gratitude flooded through him when he found a pulse—rapid and light, but steady.

  She sucked in a deep, shuddering breath, and opened her eyes.

  In the weird glow from the multiple light sources, she stared up at him, her black eyes reflecting the harsh light.

  "Saba."

  "Gordon? Are you real?" The whisper was the merest ghost.

  "I am." A strangled laugh escaped him. "You left your com on. That was quite a concert."

  "It was real, then?"

  "Well, I heard real sounds, all right—but I don't yet know what you heard that might have been different. Can I help you?"