"Why should that be?"
"Both ways you get into dust, and mutants. Plus on the seabed there's always groundquakes. Even the Oolite trail has been shifted twice these last ten years because quakes keep chopping bits off the Boneyard Headland."
Jon examined all the locations on the maps projected by the computer. It was more important than ever to get to Fort Pinshun in time to catch up with the Bey and the Orners.
Outside the portal it was full polar night. The skies blazed with stars. Red taillights trailed south toward the distant Meridian Gap. Dozens of expeditions, large and small, roved ahead of them leaving clouds of thin white dust behind them that blew away slowly into the dark bean fields.
The seats in the mantid were comfortable, if a little worn. The front windshield was split by a central divider. The passenger's side was cracked and pitted with the unmistakable trace of a bullet impact.
He concentrated on the map. Most expeditions headed south for Meridian Gap, a deep cleft in the mountain barrier lying between Quism and the rest of the Bolgol Continent. On the far side, the major trail doglegged back to the west and on down to the ancient coastlines where the city sites and Boneyards were. There, on a promontory overlooking the edge of the continental shelf, was Fort Pinshun.
"What if we avoided Meridian Gap?" said Jon.
"Sheer madness. On the other side of the West Mountains is the range of the Hardgrains Bluescabbies. They are led these days by Blood Head, a terrible warrior indeed. Only the most heavily armed caravans dare the direct western route to Fort Pinshon. Which is why Bengo's has done such a good business over the last few years."
"But it would be much quicker to go over the West Mountains, wouldn't it?"
"The trails are steep, it's bad on the engines. You know, the High West Pass is two thousand meters high. Gets damn cold up there too."
But Jon was sure the laowon would be watching the caravans coming into the Meridian Gap. "Nevertheless, I wish to go that way."
"Did you not listen? Are your ears defective? On the far side is Blood Head. Why do you wish to end your days in the Bluescabby meat herds?"
"We will defend ourselves. Perhaps if we drive quickly enough they won't even catch up with us."
Braunt began easing off the accelerator; the mantid slowed.
"What are you doing?" Jon said.
"I'm stopping to let you get out. If you want to go over the High West Pass I suggest you get yourself another car and driver."
Jon brought the Taw Taw longbarrel out and aimed it at Braunt's head. "If you don't get your foot back on that accelerator and keep it there I'll simply leave your body here at the roadside and drive there myself. I'm sure I could master the details as I went along."
Braunt paled. Jon gestured to the road ahead. The mantid surged forward again, Braunt angrily hunched over the steering wheel. A few colored lights appeared in the distance and slowly grew into a cluster of illuminated signs erected above a buried waystation called Last Water & Hydro.
Jon insisted that Braunt turn right and head southwest toward the mountains on a trail that was visibly underused. As Braunt drove, Jon ostentatiously took notes. Soon he felt reasonably confident of being able to keep the hovercraft in forward motion. There didn't seem to be much to it in fact since the controls were largely computerized.
They had left the bean fields behind. Oddly shaped trees and other mutant terrestrial plants grew in dark clumps beside the road. After an hour they had seen only three other vehicles, all coming from the opposite direction.
Very occasionally they would see a speck of light from some distant farm or mutant's shack. It was inherently peaceful. Jon allowed himself to relax a trifle, with the gun still ready should Braunt get any ideas. The tension of the last few hours began to fade. He realized he was really exhausted.
On reflection he decided that Quism was not a city he would in any way miss. He hoped Doctor Dawl was forced to undergo prolonged restorative dental surgery and that she would find Bompipi sharing the same hospital ward.
The dark prairies gave way to rocks, clumped with mutant forests.
"We approach the mountains. Now is the time to reconsider. Let us turn back. I could take a side road and rejoin the Meridian Highway in less than three hours. Don't sacrifice our lives for nothing."
"Drive on," Jon muttered.
Braunt, with increasingly gloomy looks to either side, began to take the hovercraft up a long sloping path, scarcely fit to be called a road so cut up with gulleys and loose stones was it. Eventually, as they curved around the side of a small mountain, Jon saw the first glimmers of dawnlight in the east. The long polar night of Baraf was ending.
"We'll be going across the foreland in daylight. The mutants won't bother with us. One vehicle, two bodies, and their supplies, it would hardly be worth it. They prefer to stay below ground in the daylight. Which is a sensible thing to do, I believe."
"And you don't have the brains of a mutant!" Braunt snapped.
"Exactly so," Jon agreed.
Braunt made no reply. They wound on higher into the bare flanks of the mountains, which were heavily scored by erosion. The light got progressively brighter. Jon could see the western ridge of peaks quite clearly. They were covered in frost and a dusting of snow. He looked eastward with his binoculars but could only identify the nearer of the mountains overlooking the Meridian Gap.
As they climbed farther the hovercraft engines protested.
"Of course, if we break down on the Hardscabbies' range then nothing we do will save us from joining the meat herds."
"Don't worry, Braunt, I'll save a bullet for each of us."
Braunt stared at him for a long moment then turned back to the track.
Slowly now they wound up the last, highest stretch and came into the Western High Pass. The light was getting strong, as bright as normal daylight on Hyperion Grandee.
Passing around a curve they were greeted by a vast vista of the plains of Bolgol, which ended in a dimness, a cloudiness that stretched from one end to the other of the horizon.
"What is that?" Jon asked, gesturing to the cloud.
"Any fool knows that's the Northern Dust Belt. Looks pretty quiet to me from here. I've seen it when storms twenty kilometers high come rolling right up to and even through the Meridian Gap. Winds can top two hundred kilometers an hour. Not as fierce as the equatorial belts, of course, but very hard to keep a hovercraft moving forward in."
Jon looked again at the distant line of haze. "Then our luck is definitely in today! Forward!"
They moved to the end of the pass and descended toward the arid plains below.
Jon wondered how anything, mutant or not, could survive on that terrain; it seemed absolutely barren.
The hovercraft swooped around the curves now, the computer fighting the craft's tendency to go out of control by angling the fans and tilting the bow up to get a braking action from the hoverflow.
Jon looked down into the grim gulleys. Jagged boulders filled the stream beds on their flanks. If they went over the edge he doubted that either of them would survive the impact below.
They came around a large rock that had been sundered in two by whoever had built the road.
On the top of the stone stood a tall figure wrapped in brown cloth. A heavy rifle boomed, the bullet smashed the already cracked window plate of the mantid. Glass flew inward.
Braunt gave a cry, almost lost control. Another bullet whined off the mantid's roof. Jon fired back through the window, holding the Taw Taw in both hands. The bullets whined off the rocks but succeeded in driving the marksman into cover.
Then they were past him and turning into another corner. A bullet smacked against the rear window, but the glass held, merely cracking radially around a small impact pit.
Another ricocheted off the boulders to their right and then they were out of the line of fire, sweeping down a long, gentle incline.
"We're dead if we get caught in a dust storm now," Braunt said with an angry
gesture at the smashed window.
Jon examined the map carefully. Several hours' driving lay ahead of them, across the foreland to Fort Pinshon. The sun was rising fast, and the dust would soon begin to kick up off the ancient seabeds as the first storm of the day began. He thought they would be lucky to make Fort Pinshon.
It was already painful to look out at the desert. Jon pulled down the polarizing goggles, noted that Braunt had done the same. Made a mental note to watch the driver.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Despite the fact that the light quickly built up to a fantastic brightness, the desert remained surprisingly cool for the first hour or so. Braunt and Jon were both forced to slip the big glare goggles down over their polarizers so they looked like huge insects rather than men. But to look outside with naked eyes now was to risk eye damage, possibly blindness. For a certainty, one would not see much in the tremendous glare generated by Pleione, now a blazing white fury well above the horizon.
The heat began late in the second hour. They were making good time traveling over endless dust flats. In the far distance heat devils were whirling the gritty dust into the air. Jon began to feel it, a breath of dry warmth from an inferno. A mind-sapping heat that flowed in through the broken front window like some alien force, permeating everything with its terrible power. Soon they were sweating heavily. Jon tried to shrug it off.
"If we continue like this, I calculate we'll reach the fort in another four hours."
Braunt gave him a withering look. "If the mutants haven't taken us under the ground. Besides, it hardly matters, we're soaking up radiation now. You weren't under any illusions about the roof of this vehicle were you? If so I must inform that it is not radiation proof."
"An uncomfortable thought I agree, but I have no choice. We serve a higher purpose than our mere personal wishes in the matter."
"Oh, do we now? And what the hell might that be other than the pockets of the tumor surgeons?"
Jon realized he couldn't tell the man, or trust him not to reveal what he might hear to others, including the Superior Buro.
"I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to tell you."
"Oh, wonderful. How did I get this crazy in my cab anyway? What did I do?"
"Save it, you'll understand soon enough. I just can't tell you now."
"Isn't that what religious fanatics always say?"
Jon shrugged, stared out at the sunbaked dust.
"Will you at least tell me what cult you represent? If I'm being sacrificed, it seems only fair that I know for which madness it is."
Jon realized that he, himself, barely knew what the tenets of Elchitism were beyond a veneration of things human and terrestrial, including the plan to regreen the Earth.
"I don't belong to any cult and this is not a cult affair." But as he said it, he felt a sudden loss of confidence in the whole enterprise. What if he had come all the way for nothing? If, for instance, Eblis Bey was wrong, was just some charming madman from Earth? Jon decided that the existence of the mote, which remained dormant, conserving energy next to his chest, was proof against his fear. The Bey spoke the truth; somewhere down there on the equator in the great dust belt lay their hope, the Hammer of Stars. They had to get to it before the laowon found it.
In the distance he saw a dark mass, and beyond it another. Soon he had made out several of the squat shapes many kilometers away to the south. They looked almost like office buildings or giant abstract sculptures.
Braunt gestured toward them. "The first big machines. We're on the fringe of the North Polar Machine Belt. Means we're on the lower foreland right in the Hardscabby country now, and naturally we've been under observation for the last hundred kilometers or so."
Jon peered around uneasily but kept one eye always on Braunt and the Taw Taw at the ready. Braunt sensed Jon's readiness. He stifled his own plans for revenge on the mad offworlder, concentrated instead on the dust flats ahead of him. It was much too late even to consider going back.
Jon continued to doubt that the mutants would be interested; the single mantid was too small a target.
They whistled east and south, across the dust.
Ahead of them an astonishing glow had begun. Bright beams began to shine into the cab of the hovercraft, some so bright they produced rainbows on Jon's goggles.
"What the hell is that?"
"Glass dunes, a feature of the north machine belt. Crystals that reproduce themselves when they receive sufficient solar energy. Some claim the crystals are the final evolutionary product of the ancient ones who built the machines."
"An interesting theory."
"As relevant as any of them—the truth is we have no idea what any of these remains are. Anyway, the dunes are pleochroic, they throw brilliant colors, different on each axis, constantly changing, flickering. They say it drives men mad in no time."
Beams green, orange, pink, blue, magenta, all flashed over them for a moment before falling behind. They were maddening, thrilling, stroboscopic. Jon had never experienced such intense sense of color. Braunt advised against looking out the broken passenger window too long.
Jon turned his head and glanced northward. He let out a gasp. Braunt whipped around. A black vehicle on huge balloon tires had suddenly caught up with them. At the windows loomed menacing shapes. A pennon fluttered from a long antenna above the cab, its device a scarlet skull on a black background.
"It is Blood Head! As I feared. They will run us down for meat."
"Accelerate!" Jon yelled. "How do I open this rear window?"
In response Braunt merely cursed. "Insanity, from the very beginning. I hope you are fattened for some special feast so that I can see your despair grow with the days. They always bake feast meat alive."
Jon fumbled the window bolt; finally it dropped open. Brilliant light flooded in but the Taw Taw longbarrel came up and Jon squeezed off a clip of explosive bullets that pocked the black cab's windscreens and tore big holes in the tires, without noticeably slowing it down.
He reached behind for a satchel charge and primed it, waited, and then tossed it into the path of the black cab.
The explosion fountained dust into the air. The cab rolled straight through it, but then it slowed, turned aside, and came to a shuddering halt.
Jon turned back to Braunt, who continued to drive at top speed into the pleochroic dunes.
"They've given up."
"Because we're going into their ambush. Look!"
Jon looked forward. Another black-cabbed machine on big wheels had rolled down the shining face of a giant dune to block their path. Light caromed madly in twinkling, dazzling arrays all around them. Jon pulled out the assault rifle and sprayed a burst of fire into the black cab. Explosive bullets made a halo of smoke and dust around it, while Braunt took evasive action, swinging the hovercraft up the side of a dune and passing behind the balloon tires.
Bullets whined off the hovercraft as Jon hurriedly fired back before closing the rear window.
They raced on through the gulleys between the dunes of glass, heading south and east whenever possible, eyes open for further black cabs.
After a while they realized that the pursuit had ended. Braunt climbed a long slope to the top of a dune and looked back. In the distance, through a riot of sparkling color like some desert composed of gemstones, they could see a pair of black dots, grouped together on a green glass dune.
"Onward to Fort Pinshon," Jon said with a grin.
Braunt stared at him for a moment, then returned to the controls.
The mantid continued to whistle down the dunes, through cascades of light so brightly colored that it penetrated even the heavy goggles and polarizers and produced rings and whorls of color in their vision.
Above them the sky had gone white as Pleione crept slowly toward the zenith.
The sweat ran freely inside their suits, and Jon felt his feet squelching in his desert boots. He rummaged about for a waterbottle. The wind coming in the window carried more and more grit. It was hot air,
perhaps 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It was hard to breathe.
Occasionally they passed the ruins of enormous machines. Only the parts made of eternite materials still stood, like the inexplicable shells of gargantuan molluscs. They formed spires, boxes, complex walls, folded columns, many were half buried in the drifting pleochroic crystal. Others reached two hundred meters into the air.
Gazing at the strange shapes, sometimes upright, sometimes piled loosely together, where the disintegration of less resistant materials had dumped them, Jon recalled Eblis Bey's saying that the ancients had grown their technological artifacts. Their strange organic quality was totally unlike the large-scale constructions of human and laowon.
Up ahead he spotted a wall of green eternite that had been cast in a spiral curve. On top of it fluttered a blue banner. A crude concrete box had been cemented to the top of the eternite wall.
"Fort Pinshon up ahead," announced Braunt.
"We made it, Braunt, we're going to make it."
Braunt grinned dourly and shook his head. "Damnedest, craziest thing I ever did."
Behind the green wall they found what appeared to be a heap of enormous plates, piled on each other in loose chaos. Each was fifty meters or more across.
Within and underneath this pile was Fort Pinshon. In front were several crude structures in concrete, with sandbag walls and embankments arrayed in a semicircle around them. The mantid growled down to the main gate and after a swift perusal by guards crouched behind a 20-mm cannon with nine rotating barrels, they were allowed into the outer compound.
Jon pulled out some laowon Mercantile notes. He gave them to Braunt, who pocketed them eagerly and then watched stonefaced as Jon climbed out of the mantid. There were no farewells.
Fort Pinshon was an exotic outpost of civilization, built where a unique coincidence of a spring and the sheltering pile of giant plates made possible a sizable human habitation.
Crops were grown on irrigated patches of dust in the rear. In the upper parts of the pile dwelled a tribe of settled mutants, many of them of the dwarf Japanese type so prevalent as slaves in the city of Quism.
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