by Lee Brackett
around it, grew higher in the direction from which the wind blew. Higher and higher, and beyond them, far beyond, were mountains, flung towering against the sky.
On the mountains, showing through the whipping veils of cloud, there was snow, white and cold and blindingly pure, and as Harker watched there was a gleam, so quick and fleeting that she saw it more with her heart than with her eyes . . . . Sunlight. Snowfields, and above them, the sun.
After a long time she clambered down again into the silence of the glade. She stood there, not moving, seeing what she had not had time to see before.
Rory McLaren was gone. Both packs, with food and climbing ropes and bandages and flint and steel were gone. The short spears were gone. Feeling on her hip, Harker found nothing but bare flesh. Her knife and even her breech-clout had been taken.
A slender, exquisite body moved forward from the shadows of the trees. Huge white blossoms gleamed against the curly blue that crowned the head. Luminous eyes glanced up at Harker, full of mockery and a subtle animation. Button smiled.
Matty Harker walked toward Button, not hurrying, her hard sinewy face blank of expression. She tried to keep her mind that way, too. 'Where is the other one, my friend?'
'In the finish-place.' He nodded vaguely toward the cliffs near where Harker and McLaren had escaped from the caves. His thought-image was somewhere between rubbish-heap and cemetery, as nearly as Harker could translate it. It was also completely casual, a little annoyed that time should be wasted on such trifles.
'Did you . . . is she still alive?'
'It was when we put it there. It will be all right, it will just wait until it—stops. Like all of them.'
'Why was she moved? Why did you ...'
'It was ugly.' Button shrugged. 'It was broken, anyway.' He stretched his arms upward and lifted his head to the wind. A shiver of delight ran through him. He smiled again at Harker, sidelong.
She tried to keep her anger hidden. She started walking again, not as though she had any purpose in mind, bearing toward the cliffs. Her way lay past a bush with yellow flowers and thorny, pliant branches. Suddenly it writhed and whipped her across the belly. She stopped short and doubled over, hearing Button's laughter.
When she straightened up he was in front of her. 'It's red,' he said, surprised, and laid little pointed fingers on the scratches left by the thorns. He seemed thrilled and fascinated by the color and feel of her blood. His fingers moved, probing the shape of her muscles, the texture of her skin and the dark hair on her breast. They drew small lines of fire along her neck, along the ridge of her jaw, touching her features one by one, her eyelids, her black brows.
'What are you?' whispered his mind to hers.
'This.' Harker put her arms around him, slowly. His flesh slid cool and strange under her hands, sending an indescribable shudder through her, partly pleasure, partly revulsion. She bent her head. His eyes deepened, lakes of blue fire, and then she found his lips. They were cool and strange like the rest of him, pliant, scented with spice, the same perfume that came with sudden overpowering sweetness from his curling petals.
Harker saw movement in the forest aisles, a clustering of bright flower-heads. Button drew back. He took her hand and led her away, off toward the river and the quiet ferny places along its banks. Glancing up, Harker saw that the two black birds were following overhead.
'You are really plants, then? Flowers, like those?' She touched the white blossoms on his head.
'You are really a beast, then? Like the furry, snarling things that climb up through the pass sometimes?'
They both laughed. The sky above them was the color of clean fleece. The warm earth and crushed ferns were sweet beneath them. 'What pass?' asked Harker.
'Over there.' He pointed off toward the rim of the valley. 'It goes down to the sea, I think. Long ago we used to go down there but there's no need, and the beasts make it dangerous.'
'Do they,' said Harker, and kissed his in the hollow below his chin. 'What happens when the beasts come?'
Button laughed. Before she could stir Harker was trapped fast in a web of creepers and tough fern, and the black birds were screeching and clashing their sharp beaks in her face.
'That happens,' Button said. He stroked the ferns. 'Our cousins understand us, even better than the birds.'
Harker lay sweating, even after she was free again. Finally she said, 'Those creatures in the underground lake. Are they your cousins?'
Button's fear-thought thrust against her mind like hands pushing away. 'No, don't . . . . Long, long ago the legend is that this valley was a huge lake, and the Swimmers lived in it. They were a different species from us, entirely. We came from the high gorges, where there are only barren cliffs now. This was long ago. As the lake receded, we grew more numerous and began to come down, and finally there was a battle and we drove the Swimmers over the falls into the black lake. They have tried and tried to get out, to get back to the light, but they can't. They send their thoughts through to us sometimes. They . . . .' He broke off. 'I don't want to talk about them anymore.'
'How would you fight them if they did get out?' asked Harker easily. 'Just with the birds and the growing things?'
Button was slow in answering. Then he said, 'I will show you one way.' He laid his hand across her eyes. For a moment there was only darkness. Then a picture began to form—people, her own people, seen as reflections in a dim and distorted mirror but recognizable. They poured into the valley through a notch in the cliffs, and instantly every bush and tree and blade of grass was bent against them. They fought, slashing with their knives, making headway, but slowly. And then, across the plain, came a sort of fog, a thin drifting curtain of soft white.
It came closer, moving with force of its own, not heeding the wind. Harker saw that it was thistledown. Seeds, borne on silky wings. It settled over the people trapped in the brush. It was endless and unhurrying, covering them all with a fine fleece. They began to writhe and cry out with pain, with a terrible fear. They struggled, but they couldn't get away.
The white down dropped away from them. Their bodies were covered with countless tiny green shoots, sucking the chemicals from the living flesh and already beginning to grow.
Button's spoken thought cut across the image. 'I have seen your thoughts, some of them, since the moment you came out of the caves. I can't understand them, but I can see our plains gashed to the raw earth and our trees cut down and everything made ugly. If your kind came here, we would have to go. And the valley belongs to us.'
Matty Harker's brain lay still in the darkness of her skull, wary, drawn in upon itself. 'It belonged to the Swimmers first.'
'They couldn't hold it. We can.'
'Why did you save me, Button? What do you want of me?'
'There was no danger from you. You were strange. I wanted to play with you.'
'Do you love me, Button?' Her fingers touched a large smooth stone among the fern roots.
'Love? What is that?'
'It's tomorrow and yesterday. It's hoping and happiness and pain, the complete self because it's selfless, the chain that binds you to life and makes living it worthwhile. Do you understand?'
'No. I grow, I take from the soil and the light, I play with the others, with the birds and the wind and the flowers. When the time comes I am ripe with seed, and after that I go to the finish-place and wait. That's all I understand. That's all there is.'
She looked up into his eyes. A shudder crept over her. 'You have no soul, Button. That's the difference between us. You live, but you have no soul.'
After that it was not so hard to do what she had to do. To do quickly, very quickly, the thing that was her only faint chance of justifying Sim's death. The thing that Button may have glimpsed in her mind but could not guard against, because there was no understanding in him of the thought of murder.
IV
The black birds darted at Harker, but the compulsion that sent them flickered out too soon. The ferns and creepers shook, and then w
ere still, and the birds flew heavily away. Matty Harker stood up.
She thought she might have a little time. The flower-people probably kept in pretty close touch mentally, but perhaps they wouldn't notice Button's absence for a while. Perhaps they weren't prying into her own thoughts, because she was Button's toy. Perhaps . . . .
She began to run, toward the cliffs where the finish-place was. She kept as much as possible in the open, away from shrubs. She did not look again, before she left, at what lay by her feet.
She was close to her destination when she knew that she was spotted. The birds returned, rushing down at her on black whistling wings. She picked up a dead branch to beat them off and it crumbled in her hands. Telekinesis, the power of mind over matter. Harker had read once that if you knew how you could always make your point by thinking the dice into position. She wished she could think herself up a blaster. Curved beaks ripped her arms. She covered her face and grabbed one of the birds by the neck and killed it. The other one screamed and this time Harker wasn't so lucky. By the time she had killed the second one she'd felt claws in her and her face was laid open along the cheekbones. She began to run again.
Bushes swayed toward her as she passed. Thorny branches stretched. Creepers rose like snakes from the grass, and every green blade was turned knife-like against her feet. But she had already reached the cliffs and there were open rocky spaces and the undergrowth
