Because the wayport was out of commission, they could not get to the planet the easy way. Instead, the shuttle had to be brought back into orbit to ferry them down, at great expense in both fuel and wear to the equipment. The shuttle space was so limited that there would be no room for either the security detail Atlabatlow wanted or the scientific contingent Sara would have favored. But the physicists argued so loudly for more data that Touli was once again assigned to deploy sensors. Director Gavere decreed that Mr. Gibb would take up the last slot.
Moth was bemused and astonished by their elaborate preparations. “Thy manner of wending is toilsome,” she said.
“We don’t normally do it this way,” Sara said. “Some of our equipment is broken.”
Sara tried to quiz her about the location of Torobe, so they could bring down the shuttle close to their destination, but Moth could not give a single geographic clue. Mountains, valleys, distances, and directions were all unknown to her—or, rather, irrelevant. North and south, east and west meant nothing, since she had never seen the sun or stars.
“Think of the day when you came here,” Sara coached. “Do you remember what you were doing?”
“Oh, aye, I was gathering whatnuts.”
“Were you close to Torobe?”
“Nay, not very.”
“Could you get back to Torobe from there?”
Apprehension crossed her face. “By songpath, you mean?”
“Well, through the forest.”
Resolve replaced her irresolution. “I am as brave as any wender. I can do it. No problem.” She was always picking up Capellan expressions.
To Moth, the crowning absurdity was the shuttle. When, on the day of their departure, she understood that they wanted her to get into it, she broke out laughing. “I knew thou did take pleasure in thy walls, but never did I think thou would bring them with thee! Marry, ’tis a crank and uncouth way to go. But I should have guessed thou would want to do thy wending in a box.”
Sara and Moth sat side by side, with Touli opposite. Atlabatlow, a tense and silent presence in his black uniform, chose a seat in the back. Mr. Gibb was last to join them. He was dressed in jodhpurs, his recording headset under his arm like a fashion accessory. Once on board, he popped it on to take a recording of the interior, then turned to get a shot of Sara and Moth. “Moth, how does it feel to be going home?” he asked.
“All right,” she said, sounding a little bored.
Moth’s ennui disappeared as soon as the journey began. Sara watched her enjoy the jerk of decoupling from the hull, the alternate push of deceleration and drift of weightlessness, the roar of the atmosphere. By the time they landed, she was quite won over. “Would that I could show this box to everyone in Torobe!” she said enthusiastically.
This time Sara was prepared for the dazzle and the tangy smell when the air lock released them. They had landed in a wide clearing in shimmery woods that looked more botanical and less geometric than the anomaly they had called “forest” before. Downed trunks and dead vegetation, left by the previous landing of the shuttle, were turning dull ash-gray on the ground. Sara nudged the toppled shank of a pillar with her boot, and it collapsed into a brittle rubble.
Moth stood listening a while, then shook her head. “This place’s voice is still. I know not rightly where I am.”
“This is where you were gathering whatnuts when they found you,” Sara prompted.
“Maybe,” Moth said, “but I am turned about. Hush.”
They all fell silent, watching her. She stood listening with great concentration, then moved cautiously twenty paces to her right. After listening a while in that spot, she walked forward another twenty paces and stood again.
“I have it now!” she said. “Torobe lies that way.” She pointed southwest.
Atlabatlow motioned them all to assemble. “We’ll go single file. Don’t get distracted; keep an eye on the person in front of you at all times. Moth will go first, I will take the rear. Any questions?”
Mr. Gibb said, “Can you say something about how dangerous it is?”
He replied icily, “You have all had your safety briefing. Remember it.”
Sara turned around to find Moth stripping off the flight suit they had given her. Underneath, she wore only Epco gym shorts and T-shirt. “What are you doing, Moth?” Sara protested. “You can’t go into the forest that way.”
“I cannot find my way all muffled up,” she said.
Sara winced to see that her feet were bare again. “At least put something on your feet.”
“Nay, I need my feet. They shall protect me. Now, not another word, nor a sound, or it will be very dangerous. I cannot do this if you give me not silence. Follow me exact.”
She began moving toward the forest with an odd, high-stepping gait, bringing her toes down before her heels, so that she looked like a dancer. Mr. Gibb fell into place behind her, to record her performance, and Touli followed him, then Sara. Moth’s graceful, birdlike steps took her forward with an even rhythm; she did not even pause when she passed into the scimitar jungle. Sara winced and almost called out a warning as Moth came within inches of amputating her patella on a razorlike leaf, but she gritted her teeth and obeyed the command of silence.
They all tried to obey, and step exactly where Moth stepped, but the rhythm of her movement was hard to pick up. She was humming or reciting to herself, and from time to time she would pause to give a kind of tuneless chorus. Then she would set off again, often in a different direction. The path she was following, if it was a path, staggered drunkenly around every point of the compass, skirting sharp groves, till Sara lost all sense of direction. When she glanced up to locate the sun, the sky above was crisscrossed with tiny, glinting threads floating on the air.
Sara came to a sudden halt. Her concentration had wavered for a second, and she was no longer certain of the path. Looking around, she had the disorienting sensation that nothing was cohering into a shape. She could see colors, edges, light, and shadow, but none of it made any sense. There were no trunks, no leaves, no near or far, just a jumble of light flowing into other jumbles of light. She dared not move, for fear the glints might cut. Just as panic was clutching her chest tight, she located something comprehensible: a shape, dark against the light, a human shape. She reached out toward it, unable to judge its distance.
“Magister Callicot?” It was Atlabatlow’s voice. Suddenly, the shape became him. Sara drew back. “I lost the path,” she said.
His eyes were unreadable beneath his dark goggles. He turned his back, and for an instant she thought he was going to leave. “Hold on to my belt,” he said.
Sara didn’t want to touch him. She had never touched him before. But he was the only landmark she could see; she had no choice. Slipping her fingers under his belt, she felt the heat of his body trapped there, the slight damp. As he moved away, she matched his steps, but tried to ignore the tactile proof that he had a body, and was therefore human.
They came across the others waiting in a clearing. They had not even noticed anyone was missing till they had stopped.
“Everyone check your emergency beacons,” Atlabatlow said. “Activate them at the first sign that you have become separated.”
They were all slightly winded. Mr. Gibb removed his headset and collapsed against a tree, panting. His jaunty silk scarf was soaked with sweat. “Can’t we go a little slower?” he asked. “I’m not seeing anything but the ground in front of my feet. It’s boring as hell.”
But Moth said, “Nay, if we go slower the song will not scan aright.”
“Is the song telling you where to go?” Sara asked her.
“Aye, it sings the notes of the orient bells,” she said, then hummed a note. “That is next in the song, over yonder.”
They were in the midst of a chime grove; as the wind passed through, the sound swelled up, first in one direction, then in another, like conversations in a crowded room. How Moth could distinguish a particular note from that fabric of noise was
a mystery to Sara. But when she said so, Moth laughed. “The only noise that doth boggle me is what you all make. Zounds! The pack of you walk like a pile of stones a-thumping down a hill. ’Twould be much easier if you would take off your shoes.”
It was just as well she could not see the blanched looks everyone gave.
“How much farther is Torobe?” Sara asked.
“About four verses, but they are not all the same length.”
“How many verses have we come already?”
“Two and a bit.”
The vow of silence was renewed as they continued on. The terrain became more hilly; now the forest was dominated by shaggy trees that put forth hairlike growths of long metallic wires, and by trees with enormous flat leaves that hung over their heads like silver platters. It was shadier, with less undergrowth. They stopped for lunch at the edge of a deep ravine with a stream running musically at the bottom.
Moth’s names for the new flora were “whish trees” and “drum trees.” “Touch not the whish tree,” she warned, “it will give thee the prickles.”
“We’re not touching anything,” Sara said, though in truth they were all a bit nicked in places where their concentration had failed. Moth seemed unscathed.
They dumped their packs and sat with their backs against them to eat—all but Atlabatlow, who moved away to be alone. “Friendly guy, isn’t he?” Gibb muttered.
“Oh, he’s just in hierarchy withdrawal,” Sara said. “He’s used to rigid relationships where his behavior is tightly defined.”
“And here I thought he was just being rude,” Gibb said.
When Moth had finished her lunch, she rose. “I must send a message from here,” she announced, and walked over to the nearest chime tree. Her movements were more relaxed and confident here than on the questship. She picked up an old branch that seemed left there for the purpose, and began to strike the hanging leaves like a xylophone. On the slope of the next hill, another chime tree echoed the tune.
When she was done, Sara asked, “Will the chimes pass on your message?”
“Aye, all the way home, if anyone there is listening.”
Atlabatlow had disappeared. Sara looked around for him, then exchanged a glance with Touli. Touli rose to search for him. When he returned a few minutes later, he whispered in Sara’s ear, “He’s doctoring his feet. Didn’t want us to see that he had blisters.”
“What did he expect, wearing military boots?” Sara said unsympathetically.
They had begun to think that the only Terran vegetation on Iris consisted of a ubiquitous ground layer of mosses, lichens, and other small vegetation, but as they climbed the hills, grasses, ferns, and bushes began to appear in amongst the Irisian trees. At last they came to the base of a sheer cliff from which they could look out across the glittering landscape. Touli set about assembling a satellite relay station. The rest of them tried to locate the spot where they had left the shuttle behind, but it was lost in the dazzle.
For some time they had been following a dirt track. Now Sara noticed a set of wind chimes hung from an upright pole as if to mark the spot. “Are we close?” she asked Moth.
“Aye. Here we leave the songlands. ’Tis downhill from here, and cooler.”
As soon as Touli had finished testing the relay and Atlabatlow had talked to the ship, Moth led them toward the cliff. Between two shoulders of rock, a steep cleft led to a narrow opening, and they passed one by one into the cave.
Sara chastised herself for not having figured it out sooner: of course Torobe was in a cave. It explained everything: why they had been unable to detect it from orbit, why they could not pick up Thora’s transmitter, perhaps even why Moth was blind. Everything echoed as the explorers removed their tinted goggles and searched their packs for flashlights. Atlabatlow was first to switch his on, and they all blinked at the display it made. They were in a large cavern with walls formed from some mirrorlike crystal that reflected the light and bounced it back and forth, so that there were a hundred light beams rather than just one, glinting from every angle. The floor was a talus heap of fallen blocks with reflective surfaces that broke up the light into a jewelline display.
“Hot damn!” Mr. Gibb said. “These visuals are incredible.”
Moth was waiting impatiently, unable to understand what was delaying them. The path wound through the crystal debris, sloping gently downward into the earth. As they passed into other chambers, the sights changed. In one room the crystals were all tinted emerald; in another there were stalactites and rippled curtains made of opal and jade. They came to an underground cascade that fell into a cobalt-blue pool, and thereafter the path followed the stream. They had walked no more than half a mile when Sara noticed a warmer thread of air, bringing the smell of cooking. They came to a halt at a precipice on the edge of a lightless pit and shone their flashlights down over the edge.
There, lying in the perfect blackness beneath them, was Torobe.
chapter eleven
Torobe looked like a tangle of tripwires, or a web woven by a demented spider. Most of the streets, pathways, and living spaces were defined by a cat’s-cradle tangle of silver-gray cords stretched between upright posts. There were no houses in the village, just campsites. In a few places, it looked as if rooms were partitioned off with flimsy screens or curtains, but they lacked roofs and walls.
The village lay at the base of a long flight of stone steps. As the explorers’ flashlights played over it, they heard a voice calling out from below, “Hello! Hello! Who is it?”
Sara thought she recognized that voice. “Thora?” she yelled back.
“Yes. Is it Sara?”
“Yes. Are you all right?”
“Yes!”
“We’ll be right there.”
Now that they had inadvertently alerted the entire town to their presence, they descended the stairs into Torobe. Thora met them at the base of the cliff, looking pale and strained but so joyful that Sara gave her a warm hug. Moth said, “Thora! I thought thou was coming to Escher. I tried to bemind thee, but to no avail.”
“Moth?” Thora stared at the girl as if seeing her for the first time. “I was … something happened. I got lost, but Hanna had told me to come to her if I needed to find my way back, so that is what I did.”
A slight young woman with short hair and a pleasant, heart-shaped face was standing behind Thora, a sleeping baby slung in a pouch against her chest. Thora now drew her forward. “Sara, everyone, this is Hanna. She has been my host here. I owe her a great deal.”
Sara held out a hand to shake, but then realized the young woman was blind, so touched her arm. Thora corrected her softly, “You greet a person by touching their face.”
Remembering, Sara ran her hands down Hanna’s cheeks, and allowed Hanna to touch hers. “We are all grateful to you,” Sara said. “Thora is very dear to us.”
“She hath pined for thee, too,” said Hanna.
A curious crowd had gathered behind Hanna by now. Sara saw that they were making way for three old women dressed in finely woven gray tunics and pants, who were coming to investigate. Sara stepped forward and introduced herself to each of them.
“Mighty Boxmasters, we welcome thee,” said the small, thickset woman named Songta-Min. “You come at a perilous time. But perhaps that is no accident.” She paused as if waiting for confirmation or denial, but Sara had no idea what she was talking about, and so settled for a conventional expression of sympathy.
“We have heard many tales about thee,” the elder named Anath-Not said. She had pure white hair and a noble, sculptured face that wore a strict and dour expression. “Which are true and which are fancies we could not tell. We never expected thee to come from the easebreath.”
“They had to bring a great box with them,” Moth piped up. “That is how they wend. Their box holds so many powers it was too big to bring close. We have spent a longtime coming here by songpath.”
The elders seemed to be listening for Sara to deny this, but she didn’t
want to contradict Moth, and it was true, in a bizarre way. So she said, “Elders, we are travelers from a place called Capella Two. We have come a very long way to meet you, and to learn from your wisdom.”
“Then come,” said Rinka-Doon. She was a thin, birdlike woman who looked more conciliatory than the other two. “Let us welcome you.”
The elders turned to lead the way. As Sara was about to follow, Atlabatlow was suddenly at her side. “It would be advisable to set up a base camp on the outskirts and reconnoiter before entering the village.”
Sara said, “Go ahead, if you want to. My job is with these people.”
“We can’t get separated,” he said.
“Then come with us,” Sara answered, and turned to follow the elders.
Thora walked at Sara’s side, staring in amazement at the ramshackle village. The street was paved in haphazard patches, as if people at different times had taken a notion to do it and then given up. The houses were delineated by racks strung with random pieces of laundry and matting. Nothing was straight or tidy, and everything man-made was a dingy gray color. The village looked chaotic, dilapidated, and dull.
“I’ve never seen this place before,” Thora said. “It’s always seemed so perfectly organized. How long have I been here?”
Sara calculated, then said, “Nine weeks. I’m sorry we didn’t get here sooner. First we couldn’t figure out where it was, and then the presence of natives complicated things a lot. We’re lucky you have been a good ambassador.”
“They thought I was an idiot, because I couldn’t see.”
For nine weeks she had been surviving without light. Sara glanced at her, and was struck again by the oddly fixed, inward-focused expression of her eyes. “That must have been horrible,” Sara said.
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