“You worked at the Kamali-Silver?” Dorthy wondered if he’d been there when she had.
But he hadn’t.
Kilczer did not ask much about Dorthy’s life, and for that she was grateful, fobbing off his few questions with the near-truthful repertoire she had long ago developed. His curiosity was only phatic anyway. He was more interested in talking about her Talent, something Dorthy didn’t mind so much—she had become used to describing its every nuance at the Institute.
As the pools that had collected here and there in the forest dried up, Dorthy and Kilczer had to resort to straining plant sap through cloth to obtain moisture. Dorthy’s lips blistered afresh. Between fits of delirium, she sat as close to the fire as she could, shivering and wondering vaguely if the illness would damage her implant, perhaps even kill it, allowing her Talent to flower to full and final glory.
It didn’t.
Once she awoke to find Kilczer gone, the fire died back. She piled handfuls of needles and dried fern fronds on to the warm ashes, managed to kindle weak flames that she carefully fed small bits of wood. The fire was life, the light of life countering the sullen red of the sun’s huge disc—close to noon now. It was warmer, although Dorthy in her sickness didn’t recognize it. She huddled beside the fire, feeding it and fighting to stay awake. To sleep was to risk losing it. Of course, Kilczer could easily rekindle it with his catalighter…but suppose he didn’t return?
He came back hours later, the carcass of a brownpelted animal held over his shoulder by its paddlelike tail. He walked slowly, head down, his face gaunt under a thin beard and long matted hair, white skin blotched by raised weals. He sat on the other side of the fire for a long time before telling Dorthy where he’d been: as far as the end of the long ride through the forest, to a large pool that fed the river in the canyon. That was where he had shot the creature, which he proposed to eat.
“A little, at least. This is four-legged, maybe from Earth or Ruby or Serenity if I am lucky. You recognize it? No? Well, I eat it anyway, and see what happens. Before you try it we must be sure it is all right.”
Dorthy had gone beyond hunger, simply shrugged and looked away as Kilczer went about the unpleasant rigmarole of butchering the carcass. He skinned a leg and skewered it on a fire-hardened stick, broiled it over the glowing wood in the centre of the fire. He ate only a few mouthfuls, then promptly fell asleep. Despite her best intentions, so did Dorthy.
She woke to the smell of cooking meat. Kilczer was hunched over the fire, licking his fingers. Dorthy rolled over and crawled forward, and he handed her a hot, greasy sliver.
When they had eaten as much as they could, they left the fire to smoulder to death and set off again. The track of the passing herd was almost obscured by new growth, a path of a lighter shade of violet woven into the luxuriant carpet.
They reached the pool after three hours, almost midnight by Earth time—but Dorthy had lost all sense of time to sickness and the constancy of the soft red light. She knelt at the mossy shore and scooped up water and drank, then rubbed her face, her matted hair.
Kilczer had finished drinking a while ago. He sat on a boulder, looking at the far end of the pool where water poured down in white foam from a narrow neck between high rock walls. Growths like indigo geodesic domes, some taller than Dorthy, studded the swerve of the shore, and stands of reedy plants, with flowering structures of filmy white spiralling a dozen metres into the air, waved like banners in the cool breeze. The carpet of moss on which Dorthy knelt was a red as dark as dried blood, stippled with nodes of faint luminescence like reflections of the day-stars in the dark sky; the water of the pool was clear all the way down to the clean sand bottom. It was a place of sombre alien beauty and Dorthy sat back, enjoying it.
At last Kilczer said, “We’ll rest another day, but we must go on. If we follow the canyon I think it leads to the lake where the camp is. You think maybe the herd has reached it yet? You do not see, but they took a path off through the forest behind you.” He kicked at the side of the boulder on which he sat, as if it were a recalcitrant mount. “Andrews must have forgotten we exist, I think, busy up there in the keep.”
Dorthy pushed wet hair from her eyes.
“Tomorrow we try to cover ten klicks at least. Are you able to do that? We have a long way to go yet before we are out of this damnable wilderness. I hope to hell they have not moved the camp, or we have to climb all the way up the rimwall mountains. I mean, I come to find out things here, but this is taking things too far!”
“Tomorrow,” Dorthy said, hoping to appease his restlessness.
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as your favourite writer has it. Whenever tomorrow is. Look, I will hunt something for us to eat, perhaps another of those flat-tails. You wait there?”
“I’ll come with you. Really, I think I’m better,” she said, and was rewarded with his smile. Never since the time she had crouched in the Australian bush with her sister while their father and his cronies had searched for them had she felt so close to someone.
The canyon, narrow and deep, meandered through the rising forest, the river at its bottom thrashing white water over boulders. As Dorthy and Kilczer climbed beside its edge, little streams from sources higher in the rocky, wooded slopes crossed their path and fell in brief arcs before being torn to pieces by the wind. Once they saw a flock of black shapes floating high on the updrafts in the canyon, double-vaned wings metres wide; once some great beast crashed away from them deeper into the dark forest. Dorthy glimpsed a long hairy flank disappearing into shadow among the pines; it must have been at least as big as the crawler. But for the most part the forest was deserted, as if they really had strayed into some carefully tended park. Fortunately, most of the animals they saw were small and quite unafraid. Kilczer shot at everything with a tyro’s enthusiasm, even at six-legged creatures, which if he killed he threw over the canyon’s edge. “Target practice,” he would explain, and Dorthy, knowing that the azide tape in the rifle held perhaps a thousand shots, a large number to be sure but still finite, in the interests of peace said nothing. After all, the lakeside camp couldn’t be many days away now. Still, after each meal she saved as much excess meat as possible by drying thin strips on a heated stone; they chewed the resulting jerky as they walked.
It took six days to reach the site of the lakeside camp.
There was a high waterfall shrouded in billowing clouds of mist that drenched Kilczer and Dorthy as they toiled up the long slippery slope beside it, pushing through vegetation more luxuriant than any they’d previously seen. They really had lost the herd’s trail now, even though Kilczer had insisted on casting about at the base of the waterfall, wasting half a day before giving up.
At the top, they had to pick their way through rock-strewn dense forest that grew right to the edge of the wide smooth sleeve of water which swiftly flowed towards the lip of the waterfall. Trees clutched porous blocks of stone with crawling humped roots, trunks sometimes bent at right angles at the base as they jutted up. The dense canopy filtered most of the dim red light so that it was difficult to distinguish a step down to level needle-strewn ground from one into a water-filled pit.
Then the forest fell away. Dorthy and Kilczer emerged on to a wide violet-carpeted shore, the calm black lake stretching away towards the distant cloud-capped mountains of the rimwall. Dorthy realized with a terrific sense of relief that she had been here before.
But no orange blister punctuated the long curve of the shore. The camp was gone.
Neither Dorthy nor Kilczer spoke as they walked on. There was a churned area scraped bare of vegetation, a hollow half filled with water, half a dozen tracks worn into the ground-cover, fanning away in every direction. Nothing else.
Dorthy sat on the springy ground while Kilczer kicked around the muddy site disbelievingly. Eventually he sat down, too. “We just have to go on,” he said.
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know. I suppose Andrews pulled Angel Sutter
out of here. It would be his style to concentrate everything at the keep when things started to change there. Him and his fucking lights!” He pulled at his hair, looked under the crook of his arm at Dorthy. “How are you feeling?”
“Disappointed would be putting it mildly.”
He laughed. “Your reserve is intact, at least.”
“Poor Arcady. You are still trapped with me, out in the wilderness.”
“I am in no mood for joking, believe it. If I had fucking Duncan Andrews here now I would be a step away from strangling him! Disappointed!” Abruptly, he stood and walked to the edge of the water, thumbed out his cock and began to urinate. Ripples spread across the black water, distorting his reflection.
Dorthy looked away. During the days of illness it hadn’t been possible to conceal their natural functions from each other, and afterwards Kilczer had been increasingly casual about it; still, heat rose at the back of her neck, along the rims of her ears. This coarse edge was something she hated: a dissipation of the cocoon of privacy about the secret core of self, an assertion she was too afraid to make.
Kilczer zipped up and walked back, picked up the rifle. “There is no utility to sitting around here. We—”
Dorthy looked around, because he had half raised the rifle to his shoulder.
The herder stood at the margin of the tangled shadows under the forest canopy, stooping so that its humped shoulders were higher than its head. Large eyes glinted in the shadows cast by its loose hood of skin. Dorthy felt a chill where a moment before the heat of embarrassment had been. And felt something prick in the still centre of her mind, as elusive and dangerous as a knife-blade seen point on, as complex as the eight-dimensional twistor equations that describe any given point in space-time. For a moment she almost had it, but her Talent was too subdued, and it was too strange…She closed her eyes and straightened her spine, tried to expand the still centre where her Talent focused; but the feeling was like mist, hung always at the same elusive distance no matter which way she went. And the mist began to fade. When she opened her eyes again, the herder was gone.
Behind her, Kilczer let out a breathy sigh. “We had better go,” he said, and he said it so softly that only now was Dorthy scared; for in all the long dangerous trek, no matter how much he had felt it, Kilczer had never outwardly shown fear before.
Later, they camped amid tall rustling stems near the edge of the water, screened from the ominous shadows under the close-packed trees. For once Kilczer did not suggest going off to hunt, but watched as Dorthy deftly wove the hollow reeds together to make a kind of narrow platform, squatting on his haunches less than a metre away. They had stayed close to each other as they walked the long curve of the shore between the lake and the forest.
“That looks comfortable,” he said, nudging the platform with his boot. “Where did you learn such a trick?”
“My mother used to weave mats.” Her death. And then that one terrible night with Hiroko under the huge sky of the Outback. Dorthy said, “I’ll do one for you, if you like.”
“Let me try it,” he said, and sat gingerly on the woven stems, then smiled and swung his legs up. His hand brushed Dorthy’s and it was as if a switch had been thrown, meshing the gears of desire in her belly. She grabbed his hand and they drew each other down. His knees got in the way as she tried to climb beside him; one of her palms sank in mud beside his head, the other was still in his grip, gripping him. She kissed him, stubble scraping her chin, and his arm came up around her, lifted her on top of him as his other hand let go of hers, reached down between them, pushed into her coveralls, his thumb slipping in her wetness as she tried to get his coveralls open while still kissing him, mashing his dry lips apart until her teeth ground his. His tongue pushed into her mouth as his cock pushed into her cunt and a moment later he came as she did, a long shudder that after a moment started to turn into a cramp. But didn’t. She relaxed on top of him, sudden desire still scraping a hollow in her chest, between her breasts. Discharge of their fear and desperation, a definition of the bond that had slowly grown between them. Her heartbeat mixed with his.
“By the beard,” he said, and chuckled, pulled his hand from between them and found her wrist, his grip totally encircling it. “I didn’t think—”
“You thought I was too reserved? Was I?”
“You know you were not. You are okay?”
“Move your knee. That’s better.”
“Suppose one of the herders came upon us when—”
“Don’t,” Dorthy said, and quickly kissed him to stop his talk. She didn’t want to talk, never had wanted to talk, in the aftermath of sex. In her worst moments she saw it as a biological reflex, something to be satisfied and no more; in her best as a mutual act of trust and gratification. But always she stopped short of exploration. All the spilling of hidden emotion, little inconsequential secrets and confessions; that was the part she hated. It reminded her too much of her childhood work at the Kamali-Silver Institute. She had made a rule once, never to sleep with anyone more than three times. In the mores of Greater Brazilian-dominated Earth, emerging from a long dark period of repression, that was still regarded as unusual, even perverted—even if she rarely slept with anyone, anyway. But if men took advantage of her because of it, she also took advantage of them. Besides, things had been different at Fra Mauro Observatory, more cosmopolitan. The people from the colony worlds, most of which had fallen into barbarism after having lost touch with Earth after the mutual near-destruction of the USA and USSR, barbarism only fifty years past, liked to mock the more staid students from Earth, and were not a little shocked by some of the attitudes of men towards women, would have been horrified if they had known that in some parts of Greater Brazil women were still openly sold into marriage. Dorthy preferred the views of the colonists, knowing well enough that it was in part a rebellion against her father’s strictness. But what mattered was herself, what she needed. Which, sometimes, only sometimes, was sex. What she didn’t need was the urge to spill the self afterward, more messy than the act itself. She had been bombarded with other selves for too long, at the Institute and during the year she had worked to raise the funds for her studies at Fra Mauro. Whore.
“I think,” Kilczer said, his mouth muffled against the side of her neck, “that we have more or less wrecked your lovely bed.”
“I’ll make another.” She pushed away from him, and avoided his grasp when he tried to pull her back. Don’t get too close. “I have to wash,” she said, “that’s all.”
When she came back he was standing, looking out in the direction of the forest. Dorthy began to bend reeds. “Are you worried about us getting back?” she asked him.
“Please, we do not talk about that now. I am tired.” He stepped out of the way as she wove stems together. She had unsettled him, and she smiled as she worked; she didn’t like being cast to type, even though it was often convenient to play the retiring neurotic Talent. Almost all the trivia shows had a character like that. Kilczer said, “Several years ago, now, I was on Elysium, I think I tell you a little bit of this already. I camped out in the wilderness, alone, and I like it then no more than I like it now, even though I had brought all the necessary comforts; but it was to advance my work, you understand. Here we make our own comforts, yes?”
Talk, talk. Always binding all time to the present moment. Dorthy worked on with her back to Kilczer, plaiting bundles of stems and weaving a single loop at either end to hold them together, while he told her about the grass plains of the Outback of Namerika on Elysium, the aborigine villages and their strange inhabitants, who stood stock-still whenever a human approached them—you could kill an abo that way, the local people used to say. Kilczer explained that he used to watch the aborigines from a distance, but never saw anything that hadn’t been described many times before. No one knew if the aborigines were properly sentient or not, and despite the six weeks in the field with his instruments, clumsy forerunners of the compact setup he’d lost to the herd of critters,
Kilczer hadn’t been able to form any positive conclusions either.
Tugging a loop tight, Dorthy asked, “Don’t sortie people say that the aborigines once built cities on Elysium?”
“It is legend only,” Kilczer said with sudden scorn, “worked up from wishes and a few ambiguous geological formations. In just the same way, it is claimed that there was once a civilization on Novaya Rosya, destroyed half a million years ago when a big asteroid struck the planet. I tell you that already, I think. Certainly it destroyed almost all of life, but as for anything else, well, zithsa hunters claim they sometimes see man-shaped creatures in the lowlands. Mist demons, the hunters call them, and say that they are the ghosts of the fabled lost race. I say they are half vodka, half imagination. Zithsa hunters are crazy kinds of people anyway. We wish not to be alone in the universe, Dorthy, and this drives people to invent things that are not really there. Even on Earth there are stories about ancient technologies. Atlantic or some such place.”
“Atlantis,” Dorthy said, pulling the final knot through. For some reason she remembered the hair-thin geological layer which marked the unexplained bombardment with nickel-iron asteroids. And at the same time felt a tingling touch as of uncontrolled expansion of her Talent…but after a moment it all faded.
She lay on the completed reed platform, and Kilczer looked down at her. “You look good enough to eat,” he said.
“There’s some jerky left, if you’re hungry.”
He knelt at the edge of the platform, stems crackling under his weight. “I am not that hungry. Tomorrow we go hunting, perhaps.” He lay down and put his arms around her; after a moment she hugged him back. “That was a nice idea you had,” he said.
“I thought that we both had it, at the same time. Don’t talk, it isn’t necessary.”
“You do not like to talk…afterward?”
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 13
