by Lee Brackett
feet, slowly, easily. She said, 'Hello.'
He did not move, nor make a sound, but quite suddenly a pair of enormous birds, beaked and clawed like eagles and black as sin, made a whistling rush down past Harker's head and returned, circling. Harker sat down again.
The boy's strange eyes moved from her, upward to the crack in the hillside whence she had come. His lips didn't move, but his voice—or something—spoke clearly inside Harker's head.
'You came from—There.' There had tremendous feeling in it, and none of it nephew.
Harker said, 'Yes. A telepath, huh?'
'But you're not . . . .' A picture of the golden swimmers formed in Harker's mind. It was recognizable, but hatred and fear had washed out all the beauty, leaving only horror.
Harker said, 'No.' She explained about herself and McLaren. She told about Sim. She knew he was listening carefully to her mind, testing it for truth. She was not worried about what he would find. 'My friend is hurt,' she said. 'We need food and shelter.'
For some time there was no answer. The boy was looking at Harker again. Her face, the shape and texture of her body, her hair, and then her eyes. She had never been looked at quite that way before. She began to grin. A provocative, be-damned-to-you grin that injected a surprising amount of light and charm into her sardonic personality.
'Honey,' she said, 'you are terrific. Animal, mineral, or vegetable?'
He tipped his small round head in surprise, and asked her own question right back. Harker laughed. He smiled, his mouth making a small inviting V, and his eyes had sparkles in them. Harker started toward him.
Instantly the birds warned her back. The boy laughed, a mischievous ripple of merriment. 'Come,' he said, and turned away.
Harker frowned. She leaned over and spoke to McLaren, with peculiar gentleness. She managed to get the girl erect, and then swung her across her shoulders, staggering slightly under the weight. McLaren said distinctly, 'I'll be back before she's born.'
Harker waited until the boy had started, keeping her distance. The two black birds followed watchfully. They walked out across the thick grass of the plain, toward the trees. The sky was now the color of blood.
A light breeze caught the boy's hair and played with it. Matty Harker saw that the short curled strands were broad and flat, like blue petals.
III
It was a long walk to the forest. The top of the plateau seemed to be bowl-shaped, protected by encircling cliffs. Harker, thinking back to that first settlement long ago, decided that this place was infinitely better. It was like the visions she had seen in fever-dreams—the Promised Land. The coolness and cleanness of it were like having weights removed from your lungs and heart and body.
The rejuvenating air didn't make up for McLaren's weight, however. Presently Harker said, 'Hold it,' and sat down, tumbling McLaren gently onto the grass. The boy stopped. He came back a little way and watched Harker, who was blowing like a spent horse. She grinned up at him.
'I'm shot.' she said. 'I've been too busy for a woman of my age. Can't you get hold of somebody to help me carry her?'
Again he studied her with puzzled fascination. Night was closing in, a clear indigo, less dark than at sea level. His eyes had a curious luminosity in the gloom.
'Why do you do that?' he asked.
'Do what?'
'Carry it.'
By 'it'Harker guessed he meant McLaren. She was suddenly, coldly conscious of a chasm between them that no amount of explanation could bridge. 'She's my friend. She's . . . I have to.'
He studied her thought and then shook his head. 'I don't understand. It's spoiled—'his thought-image was a combination of 'broken,' 'finished,' and 'useless'—'Why carry it around?'
'McLaren's not an it. She's a woman like me, my friend. She's hurt, and I have to help her.'
'I don't understand.' His shrug said it was her funeral, also that she was crazy. He started on again, paying no attention to Harker's call for his to wait. Perforce, Harker picked up McLaren and staggered on again. She wished Sim were here, and immediately wished she hadn't thought of Sim. She hoped Sim had died quickly before—before what? Oh God, it's dark and I'm scared and my belly's all gone to cold water, and that thing trotting ahead of me through the blue haze . . .
The thing was beautiful, though. Beautifully formed, fascinating, a curved slender gleam of moonlight, a chaliced flower holding the mystic, scented nectar of the unreal, the unknown, the undiscovered. Harker's blood began, in spite of herself, to throb with a deep excitement.
They came under the fragrant shadows of the trees. The forest was open, with broad mossy ridges and clearings. There were flowers underfoot, but no brush, and clumps of ferns. The boy stopped and stretched up his hand. A feathery branch, high out of his reach, bent and brushed his face, and he plucked a great pale blossom and set it in his hair.
He turned and smiled at Harker. She began to tremble, partly with weariness, partly with something else.
'How do you do that?' she asked.
He was puzzled. 'The branch, you mean? Oh, that!' He laughed. It was the first sound she had heard his make, and it shot through her like warm silver. 'I just think I would like a flower, and it comes.'
Teleportation, telekinetic energy—what did the books call it? Back on Earth they knew something about that, but the colony hadn't had much time to study even its own meager library. There had been some religious sect that could make roses bend into their hands. Old wisdom, the force behind the Biblical miracles, just the infinite power of thought. Very simple. Yeah. Harker wondered uneasily whether he could work it on her, too. But then, she had a brain of her own. Or did she?
'What's your name?' she asked.
He gave a clear, trilled sound. Harker tried to whistle it and gave up. Some sort of tone-language, she guessed, without words as she knew them. It sounded as though they—her people, whatever they were—had copied the birds.
'I'll call you Button,' she said. 'Bachelor Button—but you wouldn't know.'
He picked the image out of her mind and sent it back to her. Blue fringe-topped flowers nodding in her father's china bowl. He laughed again and sent him black birds away and led on into the forest, calling out like an oriole. Other voices answered him, and presently, racing the light wind between the trees, his people came.
They were like him. There were males, slender little creatures like young girls, and girls like Button. There were several hundred of them, all naked, all laughing and curious, their lithe pliant bodies flitting moth-fashion through the indigo shadows. They were topped with petals—Harker called them that, though she still wasn't sure—of all colors from blood-scarlet to pure white.
They trilled back and forth. Apparently Button was telling them all about how he found Harker and McLaren. The whole mob pushed on slowly through the forest and ended finally in a huge clearing where there were only scattered trees. A spring rose and made a little lake, and then a stream that wandered off among the ferns.
More of the little people came, and now she saw the young ones. All sizes, from tiny thin creatures on up, replicas of their elders. There were no old ones. There were none with imperfect or injured bodies. Harker, exhausted and on the thin edge of a fever-bout, was not encouraged.
She set McLaren down by the spring. She drank, gasping like an animal, and bathed her head and shoulders. The forest people stood in a circle, watching. They were silent now. Harker felt coarse and bestial, somehow, as though she had belched loudly in church.
She turned to McLaren. She bathed her, helped her drink, and set about fixing the leg. She needed light, and she needed flame.
There were dry leaves, and mats of dead moss in the rocks around the spring. She gathered a pile of these. The forest people watched. Their silent luminous stare got on Harker's nerves. Her hands were shaking so that she made four tries with her flint and steel before she got a spark.
The tiny flicker made the silent ranks stir sharply. She blew on it. The flames licked up, small and pal
e at first, then taking hold, growing, crackling. She saw their faces in the springing light, their eyes stretched with terror. A shrill crying broke from them and then they were gone, like rustling leaves before a wind.
Harker drew her knife. The forest was quiet now. Quiet but not at rest. The skin crawled on Harker's back, over her scalp, drew tight on her cheekbones. She passed the blade through the flame. McLaren looked up at her. Harker said, 'It's okay, Rory,' and hit her carefully on the point of the jaw. McLaren lay still. Harker stretched out the swollen leg and went to work.
It was dawn again. She lay by the spring in the cool grass, the ashes of her fire gray and dead beside the dark stains. She felt rested, relaxed, and the fever seemed to have gone out of her. The air was like wine.
She rolled over on her back. There was a wind blowing. It was a live, strong wind, with a certain smell to it. The trees were rollicking, almost shouting with pleasure. Harker breathed deeply. The smell, the pure clean edge . . .
Suddenly she realized that the clouds were high, higher than she had ever known them to be. The wind swept them up, and the daylight was bright, so bright that . . .
Harker sprang up. The blood rushed in her. There was a stinging blur in her eyes. She began to run, toward a tall tree, and she flung herself upward into the branches and climbed, recklessly, into the swaying top.
The bowl of the valley lay below her, green, rich, and lovely. The gray granite cliffs rose
