Whispers on the Wind

by Judy Griffith Gill

  How could this, his first venture into joining an Octad, have gone so terribly wrong? Was it his lack of training? Was it because he’d been too anxious, too eager, too hopeful of finding Zenna, his bond-mate? Had his been the faulty concentration that broke the connection with the others, sending them all whirling away into a black abyss? If only he had dared use the second version of the amplifier he and Zenna had invented! But he had not. He knew it was too unstable, for the same reasons the prototype had been, which was why he was certain, had always been certain, she wasn’t using it willingly to translate with Rankin. Those who knew and loved her, but especially himself and Jon, her birth-mate, were sure of her innocence, and feared for her.

  Jon! He sent forth another probe into the night, felt it shoot away and dissipate into nothingness, meeting no other mind, no other soul, nothing to catch it, hold it, enhance and return it to him. He was blind, helpless, alone but for his Kahinya.

  It subtly directed him to turn to his right, to keep crawling. Head down, he obeyed and was stopped suddenly when his skull connected with something solid. Looking up, he saw what he at first thought was a man towering over him, but on second look proved to be a doll of some sort. A very large one made of cloth, he realized, struggling to his feet and examining it more closely. It wasn’t as large as he had thought, merely high, held off the ground a distance equal to its height by the pole his head had bumped into. Its feet, had it been so equipped, would have been about at his shoulder level. It was dressed in a one-piece garment from which some ragged, pale colored material protruded at both arm and leg openings. It wore a hat, but no shoes, and its arms and legs flapped in the chill breeze.

  Nevertheless, clothing was clothing, and since this...creature was not a human, but a parody of one, he felt no compunction in knocking it to the ground. He tore it apart, watching the hat, a gray thing with a wide brim, roll away in the wind. He lacked the strength to chase it. He struggled to tug out the stuffing that formed the creature’s body within the garment, then struggled even harder to get the clothing onto himself. Once pulled up, it covered his legs only to his shins. The back of it strained as he shoved his arms into the sleeves, pulling it up over his shoulders. It was far too tight, but he was grateful nonetheless for the covering it provided. He could zip it only halfway up his chest.

  The effort of clothing himself had exhausted him. He lay back down in the dry vegetation he had pulled from the doll, letting his Kahinya replenish him as best it could. Light would help, and heat. To generate the latter, he crawled on.

  Presently, there was also light, and faint warmth from a rising sun. He lay still, absorbing it.

  The ground under him vibrated. A humming sound filled his ears. He struggled to sit, fighting against the weakness that still held sway over his limbs. The act of sitting sent his brain swirling away into darkness again for long, unbearable moments where all he was aware of was being lost, being alone, being one, not part of a community of souls, not even part of the all important Octad. Falling back into the greenery, he shook his head, rose up more slowly, and sat, peering through the stalks of the plants at a large, orange machine. It bore down on him, creating detectable tremors in the ground, indicative of its weight and power—and danger.

  He fought to collect himself, to translate out of its way, but he had not enough strength left.

  Forcing his battered body, his bewildered mind, to action, he staggered to his feet, reeled sideways and stumbled out of the path of the machine. Before he fell again, he heard a shout. The noise of the machine changed, it came to a halt and the ground tremors stopped.

  A man leapt down from a high perch atop it, strode through the vegetation and stopped before him, looking up at Minton from under the brim of a hat.

  “Well, hell!” He planted large, work-worn hands on his hips. “What have we here? What are you, some kind of nut? Trying to make crop-circles or something in my winter rye? Gotta tell you, buddy, it works better when the stuff is ripe, like grain in the fall. Gotta tell you, too, it’s crazy to do it barefoot here in northern Minnesota, even in May. There was ice on the pond this morning and—hey, are those my old coveralls from the scarecrow I left out last fall?”

  The man waited for a moment, then tapped Minton on the chest, between the sides of the garment that failed to cover him. “Hey! You listening to me?”

  “I am...listening.”

  “Yeah, but are you understanding? What are you doing out here, anyway, dressed only in my scarecrow’s suit and your diamonds, Susie?”

  Minton tried to make sense of the man’s words. Scarecrow? “Diamondsusie?” he said aloud.

  “This.” The man reached for Minton’s Kahinya and Minton stepped back, clapping a hand to his necklace as he finally developed enough presence of mind to know he must not tell this man the truth. Or let him see it. All he said was “Please. Do not touch my Kahinya.”

  “Your...kah-what-a?”

  “Kah-heen-yah.”

  Desperately, weakly, he sought answers from within the man himself, chose one of the wild speculations from the brain that was spilling them out in an unending, uncontrolled stream.

  “I picked up a hitch-hiker. He knocked me out, high-jacked my...rig, stripped me and dumped me at the side of the road.”

  The man shook his head in disgust. “Too much of that happening nowadays. Used your chip to key your rig to his own, I suppose.”

  Not quite certain of how to answer, Minton shrugged noncommittally.

  “So here you are, two full sections away from the road. Whyn’t you stay where he put you? Better chance of getting help out there than in here. When this all take place, anyway?”

  Minton was unsure of the concept of time as it might be seen here. “Long...time.”

  “Like, last night? This morning? Yesterday some time?”

  “Uh...last night, I think. Maybe the night before.” How long would it take a man to find help in this part of Earth if he’d been dumped on the side of the road? He knew he couldn’t tell this man about the other solo translations he vaguely recalled having made, or how long he suspected it had been since his Octad had broken contact. “Maybe...longer,” he said.

  Another chill gust of breeze pushed against Minton. He wrapped his arms around himself, as closely as the too-tight garment across his shoulders would permit.

  The man gave his head a hard shake and reached up onto the machine, bringing down a jacket, similar to the one he wore, but heavier, longer. “Better put this on,” he said, tossing it to Minton. “Then climb on up there.” He stepped on a metal stair that lifted him easily aloft. He stepped off it, took his seat behind the controls, and the step sank back down. Minton clutched the side of the machine as he swayed with sudden weakness.

  “Hey! You gonna pass out on me?” The man looked sharply at Minton. “You sick? Hurt?”

  Minton steadied himself. “Hungry,” he said.

  “Well, come on,” the man said with an impatient bark of laughter. “That’s something can be dealt with easy enough, but I haven’t got all day. Get on up here. I’ll take you back to the house. My wife will feed you.” He grinned. “And she won’t even debit your chip.”

  Chip...that was something he should know about, but what, exactly, escaped Minton at the moment.

  “We can call the cops and get a line on your rig. What was it, anyway?” the man asked, as Minton allowed the step to lift him to the operator’s platform. There was only one seat, so he stood, clinging to the clear shield in front.

  “What was...what?” he asked, pulling the man’s jacket more tightly around him. Its warmth was welcome. Already he felt stronger, but only slightly less confused.

  “What kind of rig you drive?”

  Again he grabbed at a stray thought. “A...reefer. Taking Alberta beef to New York.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I figured. Price of beef nowadays, only politicians and the like can afford it. It’s worth anybody’s while to highjack a rig. Anybody ever tell you picking up a hi
tchhiker’s not smart? You shoulda just stayed on the main glideway all the way across the country.”

  He gave Minton a piercing look. “How come you left it in the first place? Got friends or family hereabouts?”

  Minton shook his head. “No. I just wanted to see some of the countryside.” That much, at least, was true. This, his first trip off Aazonia. It was also what he was supposed to say in such situations.

  The man laughed. “Not a hell of a lot to see, is there? Just fields and sky. Lots of that. In my old man’s day, there were telephone poles, too, and electrical lines. Not now, though.” He pulled up between two large buildings, one of which had a series of windows sweeping across its façade and a long stage, about shoulder-height, accessed by stairs. On that, visible through a clear barrier beneath a railing, Minton saw chairs and a table, both of which he recognized from the images experienced Earth-visitors had fed him, Jon, and the others during the few hours leading up to the abortive translation. People on Earth ate sitting on chairs, with their bowls on tables before them, not, as was the custom on Aazonia, reclining comfortably, sharing in a civilized manner.

  Much good all that information had done him. He was as lost as he would have been without the bits of useless knowledge he had garnered.

  He knew that he was going to have to come up with a better, more believable explanation for being found in the man’s field before the authorities were called. What his rescuer believed would not satisfy anyone who probed any deeper into the event. Jon, and the other law-enforcement officers who had helped train him for this mission, as well as more seasoned travelers, had impressed upon him the need for adequate “identification” in this society where mental communication and hence instant knowledge of who each person encountered was sadly lacking.

  The chip! It was coming back to him now as warmth and a small sense of security assisted his Kahinya in healing him. The identification used on the planet Earth in this time consisted of a chip that was implanted in a wrist bone of every individual on this planet at birth. It credited and debited its owner’s accounts, activated all manner of devices keyed to that individual—and identified its wearer to proper authorities.

  He did not have one. Nor did any of the others. The unexpectedness of the window to here and now had prompted such swift action that there had not been time to counterfeit and imbed such a device in the wrists of the Octad.

  “You’re a big fella, I have to say that about you.” The man interrupted Minton’s flying thoughts as Minton descended from the vehicle. “Name’s Harry Jenkins,” he added, shoving a hand out in front of Minton.

  Almost at once, Minton remembered this was a greeting, one that needed to be returned in kind. He extended his own hand and the man gripped it, gave it one quick shake, then released it, looking quizzically at Minton. “And you are?” Harry Jenkins prompted.

  “Oh! Minton. Minton, uh, Ames,” he said, remembering the man had offered two names for himself. “Ames” he took right out of Harry Jenkin’s mind because when he’d commented on Minton’s size, he’d thought about a family who’d once lived nearby, all big men, by the name of Ames, and wondered if Minton was related to them.

  “Well, Mint, come along in, then, and we’ll get some breakfast into you.”

  Minton agreed and followed the man inside, where he met Harry’s wife, Trinity, who served both men a huge meal, which Minton enjoyed far more than he’d enjoyed anything since Zenna’s disappearance.

  “Now,” Trinity said, setting down her coffee mug, “I guess we’d better get the law informed so our guest can lay his complaint. Shouldn’t be too hard to track down the rig with a satellite search for its chip, but the meat—” She looked at Minton and shook her head sorrowfully. “You know that’ll be long gone, don’t you?”

  Minton sought for some sense of what she was talking about. Theft. Theft of foodstuffs. Was there so little to go around that such theft was a frequent occurrence? He dared not ask, could only nod as if he understood.

  “Okay, hon,” Harry said. “You take care of that, and of Mint, will you? I’m back to plowing under that rye. One of my fallow fields,” he said to Minton, as if that would explain everything. It explained nothing, because Minton was too focused on what the woman was doing to give Harry much attention. The door slammed as the woman waved the back of her hand in front of a small, infrared dot on the edge of a table.

  At once, a holographic image leapt into being, a man with dark hair over the lower half of his face, as if to replace that which he did not have on top of his head. He held his fists linked before him on some kind of structure behind which he sat.

  “Jerry, this guy is Minton Ames. He’s got a tale of woe to tell you. Minton? Click your chip in right here, will you?”

  Knowing he could do no such thing, Minton gathered himself, narrowed his focus...and left.

  As Minton translated out of the sure danger of being found out by the local authorities, he heard distinctly, and felt strongly, Jon’s unmistakable signature behind the ragged sound of his own name: Minton! He fixed his focus on it, tried to home in, but it had come too quickly, broken off almost before he was fully aware of it.

  Where? He demanded of the ether. Jon! Again!

  But the only mind his met was one that, at the moment, carried far greater power than Jon’s weak and uncertain signature—and one that was infinitely more dangerous.

  Rankin! Minton reeled and fell from his translation.

  Rankin’s rage slammed into Zenna at the same instant as she responded instinctively to the unexpected surge of a cherished, familiar signature. Her psychic cry of Minton! was lost in the fury of being snatched from where she stood, snatched from her child, snatched into blackness that seemed never to end until she awoke to warmth, to safety, security, to being five years old.

  Without opening her eyes, she knew she was curled, cuddled on her grandfather’s lap, listening to the story he told while the scent of spicy nut-bread fresh from her grandmother’s oven wafted to her on the breeze. She snuggled closer into her grandfather’s cushiony warmth, reveling in the resonance of his voice taking on the character of each animal in his story. When his rumbled grumpion-voice changed to a falsetto, mimicking the sounds of a terrified welligan’s squeak, she giggled, opened her eyes and smiled up at him. “Say it again, Grandfather.”

  Sunlight, filtered through the leaves of a belgrina tree, played across his face. The wicker chair creaked as he rocked. She wanted nothing more than to stay there, to be safe, hidden in a place where nothing bad could ever happen. But slowly, agonizingly, adulthood returned and the knowledge that Rankin’s anger could destroy...someone? something? if she remained hidden in safety. At first, she knew not who Rankin was—only that he was an entity to fear, a presence to guard against. She didn’t know why he was angry. Nor was she fully aware of what or whom might be in peril if she failed to respond to his insistent probing, only that she must return to his where/when if she were to protect...someone.

  Her body lifted and slammed onto a hard surface, jolting the last of the safe image from her mind, leaving her gasping with pain as the toe of a hard boot kicked her side.

  “Open your eyes, woman!”

  It was Rankin. Of course it was. And she knew he was the enemy. She opened her eyes to prevent being lifted and slammed against the floor again. He bent over her, one hand fastened in the front of her clothing, black eyes glittering with malice, face drawn taut. In his other fist, he clutched a small, silver device she recognized, if only vaguely. Amplifier...

  “Where is he?” he demanded.

  Who?

  Breath knocked from her lungs, she was unable to vocalize, as he had—and she loathed knowing she had let Rankin into her mind without so much as an attempt at shielding. Luckily, his anger had kept him seeking only one thing from her. He had not probed deeper.

  “Speak, woman. You know who. You heard him. I heard him. Where is he?”

  Zenna pulled in a difficult breath and, clutching at a woo
den pillar of some sort, drew herself to a sitting position. She tasted blood in her mouth, on her lips, and knew Rankin had struck her face. One tooth rocked loosely as she probed it with her tongue. Swiftly, she called on her Kahinya to heal it, but the healing was already underway, as was the curing of the pain in her ribs. Her Kahinya was undamaged, which meant Rankin had no intention of killing her. Yet. Had he ripped it from her neck, though...

  She struggled to her feet, realized she had climbed up with the assistance of a table-leg, and leaned on its top, steadying herself as her vision swirled. The cold air, the low level of oxygen, and the view through the open door told her Rankin had translated the two of them to one of his other camps, this one high in the Andes. She sensed nothing of B’tar. Nothing of Glesta. And once more, as it had been for so very long, but for that one, unbelievable instant, nothing of Minton.

  Upright, she felt better, more able to face the man she hated, but still she refused to speak, kept her thoughts firmly cloaked from him. The amplifier, she knew, would be of little use to him for several more hours. She was surprised he had managed to translate them so far, with the amplifier as depleted as it must be by the recently completed trip from Aazonia to Earth. Only his rage and undoubted terror had permitted such an effort. She fixed him with a contemptuous stare. The only way to handle Rankin was to show no fear, to remain stronger than he. He held her daughter hostage, but despite that, she knew he needed her expertise to continue with his illegal practices. Without her to keep it tuned, the amplifier could fail at any moment. It could, anyway, but so far, she had been able to keep it working.

  “You refer, of course, to my devoted mate.” It was not meant as a question.

  Rankin returned her glare. Finally, as she had known he would do, he broke the silence she had imposed by refusing to speak further.