by Chris Walley
Merral waited at the foot of the cliff while Vero cautiously ascended and vanished from view over the edge. After a few anxious moments, he peered back over the edge and extended a hand down.
“Fine. Smooth, level, and deserted. An ideal landing spot. Come on up.”
Using his hands to help him, Merral scrambled over the blocks and, with Vero’s help, hauled himself onto the flat tabletop. His breathing was coming hard and fast and sweat was dripping off him.
“Vero, that was horrible!” he gasped. “Horrible! What was that thing I killed? Should I have done it?”
“Merral, priorities!” Vero shook his head. “Yes! But let me call for help and then we’ll patch up your foot. Then we can discuss what we have come across.”
He slid his diary off his belt. “Watch down below while I call us a ride home. Keep your head down.”
Merral crawled forward and looked down below at the dull rocks passing into the conifer woods with the gray lake waters beyond. Tattered wreaths of cloud drifted like smoke over the treetops as a weak sunlight tried to break through. There was nothing else to see, and the noises seemed to have died away.
Behind him, he could hear Vero talking in a low, urgent way. “Diary! Priority message to be repeated until countermanded. All emergency frequencies. Priority override all other traffic. Message thus: ‘Rescue immediately. Emergency.’ ” Vero paused. “Diary, transmit!” There was a slightly longer pause. “Transmit!”
With a terrible feeling of foreboding, Merral looked around to see Vero staring at the gray block, his expression a mixture of puzzlement, frustration, and alarm.
“Diary, transmit!” Vero looked at Merral. “Incredible! Of all the times to have the first diary malfunction of your life.” He stared at the object in his hand in bemusement.
“Merral, you try yours while I run diagnostics. A general emergency call will do. See who we can call down.”
Merral pulled out his diary, noting the dull green status light glowing normally on the diamond-coated screen.
“Diary, emergency rescue call! All available frequencies!”
He waited for the red signal light to flicker. Nothing happened. Merral, vaguely conscious of Vero tapping his screen, could barely believe what had happened. “Vero! Mine, too. But they always work! Always!”
Vero nodded furiously and kept flicking his finger at his screen. “It cannot or will not transmit. It is unheard of.” His voice was strained.
He put it away suddenly and, after scanning the plateau around them, turned to Merral, his face a strange, sickly color under the mud.
“My friend, I apologize. Again.” He gulped and shook his head. “I believe I have made a major error. A very major one.”
Then, without explaining further, he bent down, slipped toward the edge, and peered over. He slid swiftly back and stared at Merral, his brown eyes wide with anxiety.
“I have indeed made a serious error. I’d been prepared for one or two creatures, even a few. But I had assumed they were dumb animals, perhaps let loose. But this technology! We cannot do this. Although blocking diary transmissions on a dozen frequencies is not a skill we have sought.”
He shook his head and then said, “Perhaps we can get a message through. Low angle to Herrandown. . . .”
He peered forward again, looking over the edge of the cliff, and suddenly stiffened. “We’d better.” There was a chill edge to his words that made Merral crawl forward and join him.
Far down below them, just emerging from the trees and approaching the backpack they had left behind, were three tall, dark, and ominous figures. The creatures we saw down by the lake, Merral noted dully, the things with the fur and long limbs, the things with the height and the muscles: the things that kill dogs by stamping on them. As if suddenly conscious of being watched, the creatures stood still in their tracks and looked up at the cliff. There was a curiously regimented similarity in their movements that seemed almost uncanny to Merral. For a moment, he stared back at their faces, feeling he could make out large, dark brown, impassive eyes. Then, suddenly aware of his peril, he ducked his head out of sight. Perhaps a minute later, he peered over the edge again cautiously. The three figures had turned and were now moving back under the trees. There they stopped and stood in a fixed manner looking up again at the plateau.
“Ah! They have stopped their pursuit.” Vero’s voice was full of relief.
“But for how long?”
“I don’t know. We have probably only a temporary respite. Try this for a hypothesis: They do not like being out in the open in daylight.” He paused. “So, we may have till night before they pursue us.”
Merral looked around, seeing that the clouds were thinning fast and that he could make out the disk of the sun clearly now. He was now casting a faint shadow. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was now just after eleven o’clock. There were nine hours before darkness.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Alternatively, Vero, they are just waiting for reinforcements. They need to be sure we are trapped. But I know nothing about how these creatures think.”
Vero shrugged. “I know no more than you. I really don’t. These events have taken me by as much surprise as you. We face the unknown together.” He shook his head again and ran his fingers through his wet black hair. “I feel I have failed us badly. In letting us come out here to be so vulnerable. The evidence, of a sort, has been available for some days. Perhaps before. Oh, what a fool I’ve been!”
He stared out at the dripping green forests below them and the cloud-wrapped sharp peaks of the Rim Ranges to the north. Then his voice was more resolute. “But we have not totally failed yet. We must fight. We have got to warn Isterrane, the sentinels, the Assembly. And to do that we must think. ‘Tell them to watch, stand firm, and to hope.’ That was the message we had.” He shook his head. “I fear we have failed on the first, and the last seems a challenge. But stand firm? We can but try.”
He fell silent, squeezing his forehead as if trying to encourage his thoughts.
“I must look at your ankle. How does it feel? Your trousers look horrid. I take it that most of the blood isn’t yours?”
“No,” Merral answered slowly with revulsion. “It belongs to the thing. . . .” He touched his ankle and winced. “Painful. But it has stopped bleeding.”
“Okay.” Vero looked around. “I’d better check how we stand first. The way this hill is, I think that we can be attacked from only a few places. You keep an eye on our pursuers while I go round.”
Vero set off walking round the circumference of the summit. Merral glanced up every so often from watching the creatures below to see that his friend kept a sufficient distance from the edge so that he couldn’t be seen. Vero periodically dropped to his knees, crawled forward, and cautiously looked over the edge. The smallness of the summit area they were on was such that he was able to stay within calling distance all the time. In fact, Merral thought, you would have difficulty playing a decent Team-Ball game on this flat plateau without the ball falling off.
Below, the strange creatures continued to do nothing. Merral tried to call them animals in his mind, but the word did not seem right. He was certain that whatever they were, they were more than animals. The word creatures seemed more appropriate, but he wondered exactly whose creatures they were. Had they been fashioned by God, man, or the devil? If they were produced by either of the latter, he felt less guilty about killing one. But could the enemy make such things? And in this age of history?
His thoughts were interrupted by Vero’s return. “Still there?”
“They haven’t moved. So what’s our situation?”
“Hmm. Well, we could be in a worse situation. There is really only access on two points: one we came up, and the other—almost opposite—on the western side. At our south, we go straight off the entire Daggart Plateau. It’s a nasty drop: hundreds of meters. The north end appears vertical too, of course not as high. So, I think we only have two points to guard. But it’s pretty bleak
here. No water, no vegetation—just rock. Still, we must be grateful that it is not scorchingly hot. Although it is warming up.”
“No caves? lava tubes?”
“Other than the fact that there is a low ledge on the southern side, what you see is all we have.”
Merral surveyed again the flat, almost horizontal, plain of the summit surface. There were cracks in it in which a mouse or even a fox might hide, but nothing larger.
“Now,” said Vero, “let’s look at your foot. Do you think we can get the boot off without a painkiller?”
“Let’s try.”
Merral flinched as the straps were undone and Vero pried the boot off. He looked down to see that his sock was a mass of blood.
Vero reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small medical kit. He bent down and peered at the ankle.
“In the Divine mercy, the thing seems to have struck your boot more than your ankle, so it was unable to close tight around it. That extraordinary blade finger-thumb arrangement was sharp, but the wound is by no means as deep as it might have been. Here goes.”
Vero carefully exposed the flesh of the ankle and stared at it. “Not too bad. It has almost stopped bleeding. But you can see that it has actually cut partly through the dura-polymer shell of the upper boot sleeve. You would think it had been done with a knife.”
Vero washed the wound with a small amount of water, powdered it with a multi-potent wound powder, and then closed it with a self-suturing tape.
“That should be fine, unless they use some slow-acting toxin unknown to science. Let’s hope it washed its hands regularly.”
“Ugh!” said Merral, relieved that the wound was no worse. “Actually, that feels better already. I think I’ll try and put my sock and boot back on. This isn’t terrain for going barefoot in.”
Vero went and peered over the edge again and came back while Merral was painfully putting his boot on.
“They are still waiting under the trees. Like machines. How do you feel?”
“The wound’s okay,” Merral answered. “But inside I feel lousy.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m pretty shaken.”
“I was terrified, Vero! I mean it; it was extraordinary! But there was more than that; I killed something there. Something sentient, alive, thinking. More than an animal. It’s awful!”
Vero scratched an ear thoughtfully. “No, we—you—had no choice. I am totally convinced it was evil. But I understand your feelings. It was, though, an impressive action of yours. I would have slashed and slashed until I was exhausted. Why did you strike it there?”
“After my first blow bounced off, I realized that it was armored, shelled. Then—I suppose—I realized that there looked like there was thinner or missing armor just below the throat. I guess it made sense too; you can’t have thick armor everywhere. So when the opportunity came . . .” He ran out of words.
“You have a gift.”
“A gift! That is the stupidest thing you’ve ever said. A gift for killing!” Merral was surprised at the force and bitterness of his own voice.
Vero flinched and then began to speak again slowly. “But, my friend, if evil has returned in force, then there may be a place for such things. Many of the Old Covenant writers praise such skills.”
Merral, calming down, remembered some of the troubling verses in the Psalms that he had passed over as “of mainly historical significance only.”
“Maybe,” he muttered.
“Besides, even though you were terrified, you analyzed the situation brilliantly and acted on it. To evaluate rightly and to act in a crisis is a gift.”
“Well, if you say so.”
“I do. I was a failure.”
“Come on, Vero. You were badly shaken. And you distracted it so that I had a chance.”
“Teamwork, Forester. Just like your Team-Ball games. But let’s see what we have to defend ourselves with.”
Vero took his jacket off and began opening the one remaining backpack. “Three flares,” he announced and laid out the three stubby tubes next to his bush knife.
“And I have the tranquilizer gun,” Merral said, taking off his jacket and finding the gun in his pocket.
“I’m relieved. I thought we had left that behind.” Vero shook his head ruefully. “You know, it was a folly of mine leaving that pack behind. We had extra water in it, spare food, other things. . . .”
Merral felt sorry for him. “Vero, you can’t blame yourself. This is a unique situation. We needed to get out of there quickly.”
“I suppose you are right.” Vero frowned. “Funny, I’ve never really felt guilty about anything before. Perhaps this spiritual atmosphere—whatever we call it—is getting to me too.”
He was silent for a few moments. “But enough about the past. We have few weapons to defend us. Let us make twin stockpiles of rocks at either possible site of attack. Gravity can aid us. We must be prepared to use them to dissuade any attacker.”
He looked up at the sky. “I do think, though, it will be the night when we are attacked. Whether they fear the sun or whether they are just wary of being caught on any satellite or plane images, I do not know.”
Over the next half hour, as the remaining clouds disappeared and the top of the hill began to become warm in the sunshine, they scoured the surface of the plateau for hand-sized fragments of rock. They piled these up above the two points on the cliff edge where it seemed possible that an attack could come. Twice, Merral and Vero tried to make emergency calls, but each time, although incoming signals could be received, their diary messages out seemed to be blocked. They did find out that over distances of a few centimeters they could transmit between diaries, but beyond that any signal was disrupted.
“Formidable!” Vero commented. “I think whatever frequency we broadcast on they pick it up and absorb the signal within a few microseconds. I wonder what other technology they have? No wonder they are happy enough sitting under the trees waiting.”
Then they took out the fieldscope, which somehow had not been left behind, and spent some minutes watching the creatures below. With the sun now shining with undiminished force, their pursuers had retreated a few meters farther back so that they were under the shade of a large pine. Merral watched them with the scope, trying to assimilate some understanding of what they were. The strange heads of the ape-creatures, with their angled, almost noseless front and the marked overhang of the skull at the rear, struck Merral as odd. It is almost as if a human skull had been sculpted in wet clay and then—somehow—a board pressed against the front so that the whole upper part was deformed backward. Once he caught a glimpse of a wide-open mouth with two arcs of large, dirty whitish teeth. Are they vegetarians or carnivores? he wondered unhappily.
Vero spoke quietly. “So, Forester, what do you think?”
“These ape things—I am struggling for a name—seem much less strange than the other kind. These seem to be bad imitations of humans or gorillas. The other thing seemed just, well . . . weird. These I would classify as mammals, which fits with the DNA results. But what do you think?”
“I agree these things look like mammals, but do they—I ask you—have the organs diagnostic of mammals?”
Merral scanned the three as they sat on the ground. “I see no breasts. Perhaps all three are male?”
“Ah. But do you see any indication of the diagnostic organs of maleness?”
“Interesting. No, there seems to be an absence of external genitalia of any sort. I should have observed that. Are they sexless?”
Vero shrugged. “I do not know. If they are, that raises other questions. But this morning’s other creature?”
“Not as easy,” Merral answered, overcoming a reluctance to think about his assailant. “Definitely animal, but I can go no further. It fits into no known category of biological classification. There were elements of mammal and insect in it. That beetle-like exoskeleton is what puzzles me.”
“And me. What do we call these two sorts of creature?
”
Merral thought for a moment. “ ‘The naming of animals’? These things are ‘ape-creatures.’ ”
“I agree. And ‘cockroach-creatures’?”
“No. I am unhappy about creature.”
Vero nodded. “Very well. I suggest that we borrow the Ancient English word beast.”
To Merral, the word had echoes of the Dark Times with its wars and horrors, but then he realized that any such allusions were now strangely appropriate. “So be it,” he agreed.
“The cockroach-beast: the puzzle creature, the fusion of man and cockroach.”
“A disgusting thought.”
“I agree. Anyway, I shall take some images of these ape-creatures and dictate some notes. God willing, I will be able to transmit it to Anya in some way. And then onward. . . .” Vero paused and gestured with a thumb in the vague direction of Isterrane. “It just occurred to me: when will Anya start to get concerned about us?”
“No earlier than eight, when she finds she cannot get through to us.”
“What do you think she will do?”
“I don’t know,” Merral answered slowly. “We can only hope she gets worried and asks for a search team to come in. Fast. Then we fire the flares and they pick us up.”
Vero nodded thoughtfully. “Let us indeed pray it is so.”
While Vero linked his diary to the fieldscope and imaged the ape-creatures, Merral walked slowly around the perimeter of the hilltop, conscious of his aching ankle. He was becoming uneasily aware that the summit that he had thought might be their refuge was now in danger of becoming their prison. He paused at the southern edge of the cliff, noting the ledge that Vero had seen, and gazed southward over the dizzying drop off the plateau. Far below he could see where they had camped the previous night and traced the river southward until it disappeared into the haze. His eye caught the dark crescent-winged swifts as, with their effortless mastery of the air, they soared, dived, and raced noisily off the cliff edge. Merral decided that at this moment he would have given a lot to be able to fly as they could.
