by M. A. Foster
Fellirian looked at Kris blankly, saying nothing. After a time, she said, “Well, I suppose we can make some use of it. We can listen to it, and it may give us some warning; then we are that much more ahead of them. So keep it, although I wish you hadn’t taken it. And keep it out of sight, and whatever you do, whatever it does, don’t touch anything on it.”
Again she paused, as if she were thinking out something that was easy to conceive, but difficult to say properly. Fellirian had always been diplomatic and polite, sometimes even to a fault. At last she added, “And now let me offer some advice: were I to go adventuring in the deep forest in your company, Krisshantem, I would adhere to your guidance, obey your lead, for that is most properly your world. Just so, thus. And this world that we walk in now is, as much as it can be for one of us, mine. And this world is much more perilous than any of our reservation forests, our wild lands. This is for you Beth Mershonnekh, the house of the devil. If we meet any more forerunners, take nothing from them. Nothing. This is not the time for explanations, and I accept the error of faulty instruction. For the time.”
Kris nodded.
“Now,” she continued. “We must move. Walk briskly, as if you had somewhere to go, somewhere near, an affair to see to. No nonsense and no trotting or running. Schaeszendur, do you understand me?”
The girl answered distantly, passively, “Yes, fast enough.”
Then, Fellirian leading the way, they emerged from the kiosk and climbed the grimy, littered dim stairwell to the open-air street level of the terminal.
Complex Ten was one of the more industrialized places in the Region; and whatever products were manufactured in this concentration, it required a lot of lighting in the streets, and produced considerable dust. It was much dirtier, by and large, than had been Region Central. There were other differences: most of the structures here were clearly devoted to industry, not administration, as had been the case in Central. More, the atmosphere, the ambience, was suggestive of a cruder, more expedient system of order than had seemed to prevail in the almost overfastidious Central. Here there were no plazas, no intersections with planters, no streets that artfully went nowhere. Here, the streets were broad, straight, and long, and the building numbers followed one another in careful order, sometimes affixing additive letters to signify relationships; 242 was succeeded by 243, and immediately adjacent lay 243a.
Fellirian, who seemed to have some basic familiarity with the layout of this strange and seemingly now empty city, led them along a swift path through streets and lanes and freight alleys, dodging drains and gutter-runs brimming with black water floating an iridescent scum on its surface. Nowhere did they see heavy traffic, although there was plenty of evidence that everywhere the trafficways knew heavy and prolonged use; the main routes were generally free of trash and dust, blown clean by the fans of hovercraft and burnished to a dull sheen by thousands of rollers, bladders, and pounding wheels. Only rarely did they see any sort of vehicle at all, and even less frequently passersby.
They passed through empty streets flanked by large, flattened buildings whose purpose could not be determined from their shapes. All were illuminated within in various degrees, and as they passed each one, they sensed different orders of additional evidence: heavy thudding pounding, or grating, rattling sounds. Odors of hot metal, plastic reek, burning rubber, ozone, and hot grease. Smaller buildings were arrayed at random among the larger edifices, some housing units, barracks, small retail outlets, kiosks, stands. An occasional store; more rarely, offices. In the damp, smoky air, there was in the heart of the city a sense of desolation, abandonment, which sat squarely at variance with the obvious busyness of the place. They crossed canals, where drains trickled limply, dark water steamed, and lusterless surfaces eddied flaccidly.
Walking briskly, they soon crossed the more industrialized area and moved into another—this one devoted to dwelling-blocks, barracks, dormitories, flats—beginning to alternate with open, vacant lots and small fields. Near one such unit, apparently a housing unit, they passed a straggling group of people who were standing by a vendor’s kiosk, drinking steaming cups of some heated beverage. The patrons’ faces were lit by the brighter lights of the stand, and there was a certain sense of reserved camaraderie among them. Two older men made earnest conversation with three women, while a younger man stood aloofly to one side, making a small contribution from time to time, largely ignored. Mostly he seemed to brood upon affairs known only to himself, keeping his nose in his cup. The patrons took little, if any, notice of the ler as they passed across the street. Morlenden tried to imagine the whole of the scene before him; conjectures rose easily in his mind, but none of them were of any impressive degree of verity. It was a static scene, extracted out of time and life, held poised in a moment of cryptic significance.
After they had gone well past the group, he asked Fellirian, “They didn’t notice us?”
“No, not in Ten. Those are Midnighters, about to go to work, so I should guess; they are half asleep. If they thought anything at all, it would be that we are Midnighters just like themselves, going to work somewhere. And if they bothered to recognize us for what we are, the people, it probably would not bother them greatly. Some of the Institute ler sojourn here at times.”
Farther back in line, shepherding Schaeszendur, Krisshantem could be heard, muttering, “A vile place, this! Worse than the other. What business could our people have here?”
Fellirian said, back over her shoulder, “A lot. Ten is a kind of test site, where things are tried out; that’s why it looks so . . . transient, impermanent.”
“Still, vile,” Kris added, his distaste not to be denied, “You would not see many of us living in a place like this.”
Fellirian agreed, “Not now, no. But when Earth held only a few millions of forerunners I doubt if they would have lived so by choice, either. . . . And I am not so sure that in the end we would arrive in any more style, even though we say now that we’d choose a different destination. . . .” For the moment, she fell silent.
Morlenden said, “I’ll credit you with knowing them better than I, than most of us, their nature and history. You work with them. But we are conjecturing a very distant future.”
She looked back, saying, “Yes, a far future. And you know the legend as well as I, that someday the people will leave Earth, crossing the oceans of space to make our own world somewhere. . . . I wonder about that future, though I will not see it; if we would be exiles there, too, though we were lords there, when here we were only poor relatives, cast-off and restricted. Here, at least, artifacts though we may be to some, we still share chemistry with the other creatures of Earth. I often try to imagine those strange skies, the different odors on the wind. Would the skies be blue? How will we react to that? Not us, Olede, of course.”
Morlenden said nothing, preferring to let her mood take her where it would. She would return presently and become the practical Fellirian, Madheliya, once again, leading them as befitted head of Braid through a strange and dangerous world. A deep and brooding one, that Eliya, he thought. Always conjecturing serious things that at least for the moment were manifestly improbable, if not damned impossible. Ler living in factory towns! Crossing space to another planet in a spaceship! All that was legendary, true, but he had never pondered deeply upon it. Children’s tales, they were . . . tales to tell children under the stars of summer nights. But when he had looked back at the girl Schaeszendur when Fellirian had been talking about ships and journeys and futures, he had seen, just for a second, a trace, a print, an echo of an expression on her face which he could not identify, even as he had seen it. The remains of an odd little half-smile, and a lambent flicker in the dark eyes, a subtle tensing of that soft, full, pursed mouth, sweet as a ripe persimmon.
They walked on and on, now passing sections of cultivated fields, interspersed with fewer of the low, flat enigmatic buildings. The fields were empty, their crops harvested. And the air was changing, too; it was still every bit as heavy wi
th the tinctures and essences of the city, but now there was also a fresher undertone in it. They approached and passed what seemed to be a warehouse, or processing depot, now vacant. Morlenden looked back at Schaeszendur again; she had begun to trail them a little.
They stopped and waited for her to catch up; when she had caught up with all of them, he asked her, affectionately, “How do you feel, Schaeszen?”
“Tired,” she answered in a dull voice. “I hurt.”
Fellirian went to her and began to stroke the girl’s arms and shoulders, gently but firmly. She said, “I know. You haven’t walked so far in a long time. You have been very ill.”
“I have? Was I in the house of a healer?”
“You have been ill and those who looked after you acted as best they could according to their lights. Don’t worry now. I don’t want to force you to do more than you can, but we do have to go on as fast as we are able. I promise that when we get home, you can sleep as long as you want. We’ll take care of you. Rest now, here, this little bit. Then we’ll go on some more.”
The girl said softly, “I’m cold, too.”
Fellirian said, “Kris, warm her.”
Krisshantem, who had been standing alongside uncertainly, sat down on the roadside on the curb beside Schaeszendur and put his arm around her shoulders, tentatively, shyly. She adjusted to his contours, fitting herself to him, smiling and glancing at the boy from under her eyebrows, half-expectantly. There was also, in her face, something of a flickering smile, very like the one Morlenden could still see vividly in the image he had of Maellenkleth. Krisshantem looked back at her, smiling also, but weakly, and then looked away, blank.
Damn, thought Morlenden to himself. He’s the first male this Schaeszendur has ever seen in her real life, save me, when I put her to bed, and of course she wants him already for a little casual flower-fight. And her body needs it. What an irony! Or could there be something left over from before, from Maellenkleth; could she be remembering flashes of that which she had done before with this one? He moved close beside Fellirian, sitting, feeling the familiar contours and warmth of flank and thigh, buttock and shoulder, contours so ingrained in his own mind that he knew he could survive autoforgetting with them intact.
He whispered, so the younger couple would not hear, “Eliya, is there any way she could remember him from before?”
“I don’t think so. . . . Here, put your arm around me as well; I’m cold, too . . . there. And Schaes, remember? No, no way, according to all that I’ve heard. To autoforget is final. And even if there were mnemons left, pieces, the rebuilding would obliterate many of them, substituting things in their places. I suppose that she would catch some glimpses, but they would be meaningless to her; she might feel some familiarity, as with certain dreams, but she wouldn’t know why. Don’t trouble her, you’ll only disturb her. Poor thing, this Schaeszendur was only just born a couple of hours ago.”
“I’ve heard much the same about this as have you, Eliya, but I’ve been watching her: there’s something there.”
“Perhaps. Remember, neither you nor I have known a forgetty before. You could be mistaking what you see.”
Morlenden suddenly felt mulish, obstinate. He started to say, “True, true, but nevertheless I . . .” He had intended to continue in the infuriating manner he had often used to good purpose with Fellirian in their long days together, but he was interrupted by a sudden noise from Krisshantem’s waist-pouch.
The boy hurriedly dug out the tiny electronic unit, small enough to fit comfortably in his hand. Commnet Interconnect, Fellirian had called it. Krisshantem looked dumbly at the unit, while a speaker somewhere in it made an eerie wailing noise, not particularly loud, but a sound that carried, a repeating sliding tone that shivered up and down a short scale, rapidly, oscillating.
Fellirian started violently, tensing her whole body. “Kris, give it to me!”
Staring at the wailing unit, he handed it over to her carefully, as if it were about to explode. As he did, the wailing stopped, replaced immediately by a tired, bored voice, male from the sound of it, speaking Modanglic.
“Green system test call, green system test call, test call in the green system, system green, I say again. All operatives initiate roll on my mark . . . mark!” A tiny red light illuminated at the top of the unit Fellirian was holding in her hand, both near and far thumbs gripping it so her knuckles were white.
She looked frantically over the unit, trying to see if she could discover the correct button to press. But nothing on the Commnet Interconnect was lettered or numbered. She looked at it again in the poor light. Even if she could press the right one, what if anything, was she supposed to say? Again she went over the unit carefully. Then she laid it carefully on the ground, getting to her feet. The red light began winking on and off, on and off.
The speaker said, still in the same, bored voice, “B-fifteen, depress your acknowledge button.”
There was a long pause. Following Fellirian’s example, all of them arose, anticipating.
The speaker now said, “B-fifteen, procedure two.” This time an edge had crept into the voice.
There was another pause. Then the red light went out, to be replaced by two orange lights that flickered on and off, alternating in a hypnotic rhythm. The speaker said, with finality, “B-fifteen, ninety-eight. Alpha Alpha, break, out.” There was a pulse of static, a click, and the speaker went dead. The orange lights continued to alternate.
Fellirian began dusting herself off, scuffling the area where she and Morlenden had been sitting. “Get going, all of you. We have to move now, run if necessary. I don’t know how to operate that model, but I can guess what it is doing: it’s sending out a signal so they can locate it. So scuff your places well before we leave here; they’ll bring infrared trackers and in this cold weather our body heat will leave ground-glow like hot irons. And come on, move! We’ve got to get away from here, now!”
Krisshantem helped Schaeszendur to her feet, with some difficulty, and even after that she stood unsteadily, swaying and shivering while the rest of the party scuffed up their places, and hers. As if by an afterthought, Fellirian picked up the Commnet Interconnect, looked at it stupidly for a moment, and then turned, and in one flowing movement threw it into a nearby field as far as she could. Then they began their journey anew; Fellirian leading, Morlenden helping the girl along, followed by Cannialin and Kaldherman, with Kris guarding their rear, alert and awake. They immediately left the road and began an erratic, zigzag course among the accessways in the fields, always trying to keep a shed, or a clump of brush, between themselves and the place where they had stopped and rested. Whenever she could do so without delaying them too much, Fellirian led them through brush, and close by sheds and warehouses. At first, she paced them at a brisk walk, but after they had warmed up to that pace, she increased their speed to almost a half-trot, something more than a fast walk.
Morlenden, and especially Krisshantem, had no difficulty at all keeping the pace that Fellirian set, nor did the others, but they could tell easily that Schaeszendur was tiring fast now; she had used up almost all her reserves just to get as far as they had come already. Still, she was trying mightily to keep up and not slow them all, neither crying nor complaining. But as Morlenden helped her along from time to time, he could see her mouth moving, as if she were talking to herself. He could not hear words, nor make out what it might have been, but all in all, he knew that she would not make much more distance on her own.
They made better progress toward their unknown destination than would have seemed possible on foot. Moving in and out of shadows, brushlicks, odd little copses, groves, clusters of sheds; they were now moving through land almost completely given over to agriculture, and were beginning to hit patches and plots not completely recovered from the wild, or else perhaps returning to it again. The sky-glow from the lighting of Complex Ten was growing fractionally dimmer, to something nearer the light level one could see at night inside the reservation. And with thei
r gray winter overshirts and hoods and cloaks, they were close to being practically invisible, if their motion did not give them away.
And now that they were spread out somewhat, Krisshantem seemed at times to disappear, and reappear again, unless one watched him constantly, and with an effort of will. Morlenden looked back at the boy often, marveling at his facility; and also at the way Kaldherman and Cannialin were following his example; Krisshantem’s motions were almost the exact opposite of that of the humans they had seen earlier in the terminals—the jerky, learned, deliberately difficult motions, deliberately designed to make the user stand out against a background, and become obvious to a trained observer, deep in the secrets of the perception of motion. Kris, on the other hand, moved in a manner that could only be called transinstinctual, the sinuous weaving, looping, graceful, sine-curve motions, half random, the minimum energy curve, the motions of a feral creature who had carefully cultivated the little bit of natural wildness remaining to him. To glance at him casually, one would have seen only a person walking, but on the second scan across the target, Kris would not break the background, by pattern or motion. He was grass in the wind, a tree, a leaf, a branch, a bird. And Cannialin and Kaldherman were imitating him, following his example.
After a hard, fast walk, they reached at last the edges of the cultivated areas and entered the boundary woods, which in this place were composed of young pine trees, more or less regularly spaced. They all stopped as soon as they had attained the dense, furry growth, now on rising ground, and looked back over the fields in the direction from which they had come. It was a good distance; they had done very well, all things considered. And there across the fields was the suggestion of activity, blurred by the distance and the darkness: movement and lights. Distant hummings and fainter throbbing sounds. For the moment, the activity seemed rather random, purposeless, and undirected, but it was nevertheless in the exact spot where they had stopped to rest. Morlenden watched and felt a curious duality of emotions: complete disassociation from the meaningless motion and activity in the far distance, and simultaneously a personal feeling of dread, a definite suspicion that the activity was, under the muddled surface, very purposeful and highly intelligent. A semiliving gestalt organism whose entire consciousness was becoming focused upon their group, its prey. Yes, it was a predator taking shape back there.
