He grew uneasy, however, as they rose into the last foothills and then onto the broken slopes of the mountains themselves. Here the pines were replaced by the odd gray-leafed trees that spread concealing branches over the road and brought a false dusk.
When St. Cyr asked what the trees were called, Dane said, "These are Dead Men."
"Because of their color?"
"Partly that." He hunched against the wheel and took his eyes from the road long enough to look at the low-hanging branches. "There's a native legend that says the souls of the dead pass from their graves into the roots of these trees, are drawn up the tree and sprout as leaves on the branches. When a leaf falls, it is indication that a dead man has been released from — well, purgatory."
"Quite fanciful."
"Anyway, since the natives call the trees Dead Men, we colonists have done the same. Somehow, even without the legend, it seems to fit them."
St. Cyr leaned back and stared at the road, trying to forget the trees. "Anyway, I wish it were autumn. I could do without this sort of foliage."
"They're never without leaves — except for two weeks in early spring and two more in late autumn. They grow two complete sets of cover in each calendar year."
"No rest for Dead Men."
"That's it."
The trees closed in as if in response, blocked the sun as the road grew worse. The graveled path had abruptly given way to a muddy dirt track full of ruts, potholes and sucking pits of black muck. The Rover plowed forward through it all, whined as it shifted its own gears, roared farther up into the mountains, where it was always early evening.
* * *
Two hours later, Dane said, "Not much farther now."
They had traveled slightly more than forty miles on a hideously inadequate switchback road that always appeared to be crumbling dangerously on the outer edge whenever it was flanked by a precipice of any depth. Now, far up the mountain but beginning to descend into a hidden pocket in its interior, they left the valley and the last vestiges of daylight far behind. A roof lay over them, a great arch of gray leaves interlaced like handwoven thatch. Now and again a hole opened in that canopy, never larger than a yard square and generally much smaller than that. Where there was a break in the cover, the sunlight came down like liquid, cutting straight through the unrelieved darkness and illuminating only the spot on which it splashed.
Dane had long ago turned on the headlights. The road had gotten progressively worse until it occasionally dropped a foot or more without warning. They ran into cross-ruts that jolted them like railroad ties, or like regular waves smashing beneath a ship.
"If you've got to have werewolves," St. Cyr said, "this is the best place for them."
Dane glanced at him, perplexed at his tone, decided not to answer.
"Doesn't the family have a helicopter — with all else it has?"
"Yes," Dane said.
"Why not come up here in that?"
"We couldn't put down anywhere nearer the village than an hour's walk; the trees are everywhere in these altitudes."
St. Cyr closed his eyes and imagined that he was somewhere else, anywhere else.
Shortly, Dane said, "Here we are."
St. Cyr opened his eyes and saw a tiny round valley, the brink of which they had just passed. Dozens of neat campfires filled it, threw flickering shadows on colorfully painted trucks, trailers and tents. Now and then, as fuel was added to a fire and the flames leapt higher, a tongue of yellow light licked the low, gray roof of vegetation, ruining the illusion of a vast hall with a ceiling several miles overhead.
"I'll bet Norya's expecting us," Dane said.
St. Cyr had not seen him this enthusiastic before, grinning, his eyes bright.
"You sent word that we'd be coming?" St. Cyr asked.
"No. But Norya will know about us. She has certain powers…"
The intelligent species native to Darma was not, in appearance at least, greatly different from mankind. They were of the same approximate height as a man, and of similar weights. They walked on two legs, one knee joint per limb, and they had two arms and two hands for the manipulation of tools. Each hand had six fingers, though this deviation from the expected was so inconspicuous as to hardly cause comment. They were dark-skinned, but so were a number of races of mankind. All of them that St. Cyr encountered were dark-haired, though they may have harbored a few blonds among them. Their eyes seemed either to be gray, the same shade as the leaves on the Dead Men, or a startling amber that caught the firelight like cat's eyes. Their ears lay flat against the skull and contained very little cartilage. Their noses were short, flattened, the nostrils somewhat ragged. Their mouths were not rimmed with lips but were sudden, dark gashes in the lower third of their faces, placed somewhat closer to the chin than in a human face. When they spoke Empire English, as St, Cyr and Dane did, their words were muffled, drawn thin and flat by the lack of lips to help shape the vowels. Their own language was one of consonants, clicks, and whistles that sounded to St. Cyr even more complex than formal Mandarin Chinese.
As the cyberdetective and the Alderban boy passed between the gaudy tents and trucks, walking briskly toward the silver trailer in which Norya lived, the Darmanians smiled and nodded, spoke an occasional greeting — but were, on the whole, watchful.
St. Cyr saw now that they had larger eyes than men, with enormous, pebbly lids.
They moved with feline grace as they passed the men, and often they seemed to go out of their way to avoid encountering the humans.
As they reached the silver trailer, the door opened. A stocky man, clearly of Earth-normal human blood, came down three metal steps and brushed by them without a word. He wore a full beard, odd in this day of electrolytic beard removal at puberty, and that bush of facial hair made his scowl seem twice as fierce as it was.
"Who's he?" St. Cyr asked.
"His name's Salardi. He came here with a team of archaeologists who were researching some native ruins, and when his job was done he decided to stay."
"A wealthy man?"
"No. He lives with the natives, eats off the land."
Salardi turned the corner at an orange and blue tent and disappeared.
"He doesn't seem to be happy here."
Dane said, "The word is that he's wanted in connection with a crime of some sort in the Inner Galaxy. He joined the scientific expedition to get free passage out here toward the rim, away from the Founding Worlds' laws." He started forward again, turned and said, "Come on. Norya's waiting."
Remember Salardi.
I will.
At the trailer door, which stood open, an old woman's voice greeted them before they had started up the steps. "Welcome, Dane. Please bring your detective friend inside."
Dane turned and smiled at St. Cyr. "You see? She has powers."
They went up the metal steps and into the main room of the trailer, closed the door after them. They stood in a candle-lighted chamber, the odor of incense heavy on the air. The furniture here looked hand-carved, each piece made from a massive block of wood. Dead Men wood? St. Cyr wondered. In the largest of the chairs, at the far end of the room, sitting with a blanket across her lap and legs, Norya waited for them.
"Here," she said, indicating a pair of chairs directly in front of her.
They sat down.
St. Cyr found it difficult to put an age to the alien face before him, though he was certain that Norya was old, inestimably old. Her eyes were nested in dark wrinkles; furrows cut her brown cheeks like wounds, bracketed her slit mouth. Her dark hair had long ago turned white, and it fell in ropy clumps over her narrow shoulders. When she smiled at St. Cyr, her lipless mouth looked like a gash made by a sharp knife.
"Norya, this is—"
Keeping her gaze fixed on the cyberdetective, she said, "Baker St. Cyr. I know. I've seen this entire meeting in a vision." Her voice was webbed with tiny cracks, like a piece of crumpled isinglass, yet it was loud enough and clear enough to be easily heard.
"Wha
t are these — visions like?" St. Cyr asked.
"They come to me at odd moments, when I am unprepared. It is as though, for a few minutes or hours, I am living in the future, not the present." She unfolded her six-fingered hands and placed one on each arm of the chair, as if she were bracing herself. "But you did not come here to hear about my visions. You want to know about the du-aga-klava."
"Yes" — St. Cyr.
"Please, Norya" — Dane.
"Move your chairs nearer me," she said.
They did this.
"Put a hand over my hand."
St. Cyr covered her left hand, Dane her right.
Her hands were warm and dry.
She closed her eyes.
"Now what?" St. Cyr asked.
"Now I show you the wolf." Crumpled isinglass.
It began insidiously, with a steady dimming of the candles. St. Cyr looked around the room and saw that none of the tapers had been touched — and yet they threw considerably less light than they had only a moment ago. And what light there was had changed from yellow to a gray-green shade that depressed him.
"It happened in my fourteenth year, in the autumn, before the leaves fell, many decades ago." Norya's voice was no more than a strained whisper now, faint, scratchy.
St. Cyr looked back at her, expecting some kind of change, though he could not guess what. She was the same as she had been: old.
He felt a breeze across his face, cool and pleasant.
When he turned to see if the trailer door had been opened, he found that he could no longer see a door. Midpoint in its length, the room grew hazy and metamorphosed into a forest, the slick trunks of the Dead Men rising on every side, sparse vegetation tangled across the woodland floor.
A telepathic projectionist.
Yes, St. Cyr thought. And she's a good one.
A moment later, the entire room was gone. He could not see Dane or Norya any longer. He was a disembodied observer, standing several feet above the earth, watching what unfolded at the gypsy camp below.
He saw a child playing in the forest a quarter of a mile from the last of the tents and trailers, a boy no more than seven years old, darting in and out of peculiar rock formations, poking into cul-de-sacs in hopes of finding some adventure. St. Cyr was aware that the boy was Norya's brother. In one of his spelunking efforts, he came across a cavelet that served as a wolfs den. It was occupied. Terrified at the confrontation with the wolf, the boy turned and ran. He did not get too far from the den before the wolf was upon him. Much larger than the boy, the wolf sank teeth into his shoulder and dragged him down. They skidded on fallen leaves, rolled, the boy screaming and the wolf snarling furiously as he worked at the hold he had secured… Since the camp was so close by, several men soon reached the boy and drove away the wolf. Though they carried guns, and though several were good marksmen who placed bullets in the wolf, it loped away, apparently unharmed. The du-aga-klava, unlike the ordinary wolf, can only be brought down with weapons that have been coated with the sap of the Dead Men… The rescuers carried the boy back to camp, where physicians stopped the bleeding and bandaged his arm. He had entered a coma, however, and he did not rise out of it for nearly two and a half weeks — except those times when his mother came upon him groveling on the floor like an animal. When she tried to touch him and put him to bed, he snapped at her, snarled like the wolf that had bit him. When these seizures took him, there was nothing to do but wait until they passed and unconsciousness again claimed him. Then he would be put to bed again. The leaves fell from the Dead Men, souls expelled from purgatory into heaven… The air grew cooler as winter approached. For long days the camp was bathed in light — the whole while that the boy lay stricken… When the new leaves had interlaced and the familiar canopy of darkness lay over them once more, the boy began to improve. He no longer howled, and did not snap at his loved ones; he had ceased to froth at the mouth. He had lost a great deal of weight, but he gained it back swiftly, his appetite ravenous. Completely out of his comatose state now, he slowly grew tolerant of bright lights, though he shied away from them when it was at all possible to do so, always choosing to sit in the most dimly lighted corner. Within another month, his sickness was all but forgotten, except when the family prayed and gave thanks for his recovery. At about this time, the first of the children was attacked and killed by a wolf. It happened at night, when some of the children were playing a form of hide-and-seek in the backlot of the trailers, while the adults were all in towards the center of the camp for a celebration. A week later another child was killed, also at night, but this time while he slept alone in his mother's tent. Though the men banded together to hunt down the rogue wolf, they found no trace of the animal. All the nearby dens had been deserted earlier as the animals moved into the low country for the winter. Soon they began to murmur among themselves, form theories based on legends. The wolf, they said, was more than an ordinary wolf. The third child to be attacked was playing with Norya's brother when the wolf jumped her. According to the boy, he frightened the beast off before it could do the girl much harm. She was hysterical, but spoke lucidly enough to point the finger at the boy. He was the wolf, she said. They had been playing, and suddenly he jumped her and he had fangs and his hands had become claws, and he had almost killed her… It was necessary, then, to execute the boy by forcing him to consume a cup of poison made from the bark of the Dead Men. And when he was gone, there were no more murders, no more—
The vision of the dead boy — face contorted by the poison, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling of the tent — faded from view, as if his flesh were nothing more than smoke.
It was, of course, even less than that.
Beyond the tent, the green-gray forest melted.
Reality intruded: heavy furniture, flickering candles, an old woman with a blanket across her knees…
"I would like to know—" St. Cyr began.
Dane said, "She's sleeping."
"When will she wake?"
"Perhaps not until morning. It was a hard thing for her to do, but she knew she had to warn us."
"What now?"
"We leave. What else?"
Outside, they stood against a thick Dead Man's trunk and breathed the stale air out of their lungs. "It meant nothing," St. Cyr said.
"How can you say that?" Dane turned to face him, angry. "You saw how the weapons had no effect on the wolf that bit her brother."
"The marksmen were nervous — at least, they were in the re-creation that we saw. They could easily have missed and sworn they hit to preserve their reputations."
"What about his sickness?"
"The same sickness that everyone got when bitten by a wolf. They carried bacteria. I have the report on them from Climicon."
"What about the aversion to light?"
"A symptom in many diseases where the eye may be infected."
Dane shook his head violently. "But that's not all. What about the second child who was killed, the one sleeping in a tent? Would a wild animal enter a civilized habitat for prey?"
"It might. It's more probable than Norya's werewolf."
"And the fact that the men searched but could find no wolf in the neighborhood?"
"They did not search well enough. Or it eluded them."
Dane said, "What about the child's story, the little girl who was nearly the third victim?"
"She knew she was playing with Norya's brother," St. Cyr explained patiently. "She was not expecting anything else. When the wolf jumped her, she became hysterical. She saw the boy driving it off, and in her hysteria, having heard the rumors about a du-aga-klava, it all became twisted in her mind until the boy was the wolf, the wolf was the boy."
"That's a shaky explanation, don't you think?"
"No," St. Cyr said. "When you're a detective for long, you learn that no witness ever reports things quite the way they were; sometimes they don't get it remotely as it was. A child of the girl's age is an even more unreliable source of information."
"You'r
e saying they killed an innocent boy, one who wasn't possessed?"
"I'm afraid it looks that way to me."
Dane struck one palm with the other fist. "But, dammit, you saw him metamorphosing into a wolf. You saw him trying to tear out the girl's throat!"
"No, all that I saw was Norya's re-creation of the way she thought it was. She was not present when the little girl was attacked; she was only replaying it as she was told it had happened."
"But she sees the future clearly — why not the past too?"
"She's precognitive, yes. But, like most precogs, she can't make use of that power at will — let alone employ it to dredge up bits of the past at which she was not ever present. She's a telepathic projectionist, Dane, one who produced some colorful fantasies for us, nothing more."
"I think you're wrong."
"I think I'm not. But I'm still glad that I came with you. Up until now, I had given the du-aga-klava theory more credence than it deserved — if only in the sense that I considered the possibility of a wolf-transmitted lycanthropic bacterium. Now, having seen the quality of the facts upon which these legends are built, I've rejected the werewolf notion altogether."
A fine decision.
Dane didn't agree with the bio-computer's analysis. "You'll see yet," he said. "Norya is right; I'm sure she is."
St. Cyr said, "I'm also glad I came along because I got to meet Salardi. Or I will meet him. Which tent or trailer is his?"
"There," Dane said, pointing to a yellow and green tent painted in swirling, abstract patterns. "But what do you want from him?"
"It's occurred to me that a man running from a criminal offense in the Inner Galaxy, living only a couple of hours from your house, might be a likely suspect."
"What would Salardi have against us? We hardly know him."
"Perhaps he has nothing against you. Let's go see if we can find out, though." He walked off toward the gaily colored tent.
Salardi came to the flap the second time they called his name, pushed through, and stood before them, obviously determined not to invite them inside. "What is it?" he asked.
St. Cyr introduced himself, though he saw Salardi's eyes narrow at the mention of "detective."
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