“I hope you’re not going to tell me that this is some kind of instinctive behaviour,” Dorthy said, fighting her own instinct to crouch down, get out of plain sight.
Kilczer clung by one hand to a tree as slim as himself, shaded his eyes with the other. After a minute he said, “There must be thirty or forty down there. I see no critters. Surely these cannot be them, cannot have changed so soon. It has been, I forget, only eight days or nine since they started their migration.”
“There were other groups before the one we were following,” Dorthy said, remembering her glimpse of a herder in the forest on the day of her arrival at the lakeside camp. Had that been newly changed?
“Of course, that I forget, too. Do you see, there at the water edge?”
Dorthy leaned against him, sighted along his pointing arm. Three small, regular structures drawn up at the silted edge of the river.
“Boats,” Kilczer said, pushing himself away from the tree. His uneasiness had been cancelled by sudden electric excitement: he saw a way out of the wilderness, a chance for action. He said, “I told you I try to get you a boat,” and started down the slope, moving with crabwise caution among the trees.
Dorthy followed, not at all affected by his sudden exuberant confidence. At bottom, he still believed that the herders were animals, and with the rifle he had proven his mastery over the animals they had encountered. When they reached the edge of the cleared part of the slope Kilczer stopped, looking through a screen of branches at the muddle of fallen trunks beyond, the slow river and the herders moving on the other side. Dorthy crouched beside him and took out the little dispenser from the breast pocket of her coveralls, popped a tablet of counteragent into her palm. Kilczer turned at the tiny click of the dispenser mechanism. “What is it you do?” he asked, and when she raised her hand to her mouth he lunged. But she jerked back, pressed the tablet into her mouth, swallowed.
He caught her wrist. “Crazy, you are! Last time you did this you went into a trance. I cannot carry you out of here if things go wrong.” His hair had fallen over his face and he shook it back, glared at her.
“Let’s hope there isn’t anything to go wrong, then,” Dorthy said. “It will take a while to work, anyway.”
Kilczer let her go, turned to look across the river. Most of the herders were working around one of the huge fires, banking it with earth. Two or three on the near bank were squatting over half-finished planks. “Stone tools,” he muttered. “Not so very advanced. Those fires, now, perhaps for making charcoal or rendering down wood. Resin to caulk the boats, maybe. But why do they want boats?”
“In half an hour or so I’ll be able to tell you,” Dorthy said, kneeling beside him.
“If you can understand them. If you do not go into fugue again. What the hell. I do not need to know why they build boats, all I know is that I want one. It is another week to hike around the lake to its source, longer if the way is difficult. In one of those boats we could get across in a dozen hours. Look at that stuff on the far bank. That is I think cloth.” He pointed.
“I can handle a sailboat. But those don’t have masts.”
“Not yet. But I do not wait for them to build masts. Look there, at the stern. Raised rowlocks, that is the word? There on the platform, long oars. Those creatures must be strong. Do you think we can handle them?”
Dorthy touched his arm. “Let’s be patient. I’d rather spend a week walking around the lake than be caught by those things.”
“There is only one pass through the rimwall into the caldera. We must reach it ahead of the herders, if that is truly where they are going.”
“That’s the only positive thing I got, at my last attempt.”
“So, then. They build boats to cross the lake, perhaps. They do not wish to walk through the forest, perhaps it is not even possible.” Kilczer looked sideways at her. “You should not try this now.”
“I can’t stop it; neither can you. If you’ll let me, I’ll prepare as best I can. If I know their intentions it can’t hurt our chances, can it?” She didn’t want to go down there at all; that was why she had taken the counteragent.
Kilczer shook his head, then smiled, the expression somewhat grim in his gaunt white face. “No, I do not suppose. You are right, I should not go off as I did. Better to mark our moment.”
Dorthy saw then that nothing she could say would dissuade him from trying to steal one of the boats, and she began to feel really afraid, a cold dread weighing down her stomach. She said, “I understand the impulse. I still think you’re crazy, though.”
Kilczer lay down in a crackling litter of branches, peering down the slope and taking account of the herders’ activities with something of the precise observational manner of old. Dorthy sat zazen, feeling her heart and breath slow. Nothing but alpha rhythms, self sinking through silver into darkness, darkness in which she dissolved as the lights of other minds began to flicker through the veil.
Kilczer’s analytical but edgy thoughts were a close distraction she must look through to discover the others. Down there were not separate entities, it seemed, but minds linked to a single purpose, like waves marching across the silver sea or like the fish that patrol coral reefs, glittering shoals turning in unison in a welter of precise tail-flicks, like an impulse down a nerve, all one nerve, turning again. Dorthy saw their common vision rise up: the tower, to the tower! This time she knew that it was another voice. She spoke out of her still centre. “They’re getting ready to move on, to the keep. It’s urgent, I don’t know why…”
“What will they do when they get there?” Kilczer’s words were an echo of the thoughts that rose like the bulging heads of dolphins from the complex currents of his emotions, fear and curiosity, resolve and impatience, everything running into everything else. No longer a calm surface but a fragmented three-dimensional mirror. Dorthy had to look past it now, not through it. Out, out to the unified purpose working at separate rhythms. Ittaikan, she thought. The bond of belonging.
Yet within the apparent unity individual thoughts flitted, swelled, and shrank. Briefly glittering edges of self as dangerous as the grinning barracuda that would sometimes sweep through a shoal’s synchronized school.
Dorthy said, “They’re not herders, or not like the ones out on the plain. Something else. Only a little time, coming together, moving on towards the keep. It’s difficult, not clear.”
“Please, stay calm.” Through the darkness she felt the hard grip of his hand on her wrist.
She opened her eyes. For a moment everything in her inner vision ran into everything in her outer.
“Can you move?” Kilczer asked. “They are all on the other side of the river now, dragging tree trunks. To build another fire, maybe.”
“I know. There’s something by the river…”
“They are all on the other side,” he said firmly. “Come, now.”
The litter of felled trees and stripped branches made the going difficult in the red half-light. Dorthy concentrated on her footing; it helped keep out the welter of Kilczer’s emotions, the ominous swell of the herders’ single purpose. Several times Dorthy and Kilczer had to crouch down when the herders on the other side seemed to turn towards them, but Dorthy knew that they were intent on the task of stacking the huge tree trunks and digging an outflow channel to collect the rendered resin. Each time she crouched behind Kilczer, she pushed at the earth with her own hands in unconscious imitation.
“Come on!” Kilczer said, tugging at her, and she followed. The river was close now, the boat nearest to them shivering a little in the wash of the slow current. No more than a large dinghy really, crudely clinker-built, its square stern crowned with a platform on which rowlocks raised on crude poles each supported a great oar. Dorthy’s split boots sank in ooze; then Kilczer gripped her waist and boosted her up. She caught the edge, pulled herself higher.
And when the herder that had been sleeping inside reared up she kicked back, sprawling half on mud and half in cold water, its panic meshing
for a moment with her own, then exploding apart as Kilczer brought the butt of the rifle around and slammed it into the herder’s narrow head so that it fell back into the well of the boat. He looked around, his thoughts frantic and shattered, picked up a discarded stone adze as big as his doubled fist and brought it down just as the herder began to struggle up again. It uttered a hoarse bleat and crumpled, black blood welling through the dark pelt behind its loose skin hood.
“We go, we must go,” Kilczer said urgently. Dorthy splashed into the water, lifted herself into the boat (tipping one way as she pulled over the gunwale, the other as she tumbled into the well, almost landing on top of the stunned herder and recoiling in revulsion) while Kilczer sawed through the hawser with his knife and vaulted in after her. She saw what he wanted even before he said it and clambered on to the stern platform, unshipped one of the huge oars, longer than herself, used it to push the boat out into the current. The other herders were scrambling down the bank; a few were running ahead, overtaking the boat as Dorthy pushed down again, the oar grounding on what felt like gravel, the boat’s prow shimmying as it was caught in the river’s flow. Kilczer was binding the stunned herder’s arms and legs with a sleeve he had torn from his coveralls.
Some of the herders were wading out into the river now, their loose hoods flaring about their faces. There was something wrong about their foreheads, but Dorthy didn’t see clearly because something flew at her from the bank and she ducked as the chunk of shaped stone flew past end-for-end, splashing into black water. Another tipped an edge of rough planking and spun over the side. Kilczer grabbed the rifle and snapped off a dozen shots, spume fanning across the water in front of the advancing herders, who scrambled back in confusion.
Dorthy leaned on the oar, trailing the long blade to steer at the end of each stroke. Ahead, the banks rose up on either side, and she saw herders working there, throwing ropes across to each other, weaving a slack cradle that trailed in the current. She shouted a warning to Kilczer as the boat bore down on it, understanding what the herders were about to do even as they pulled back and lengths of rope lifted into their path, shedding strings of water drops. Kilczer raised his knife and waved its buzzing blade through the strands. Once, twice. Most parted immediately; the rest gave way as the boat brushed through them amid a small hail of stones. And then they were past, and the lake was ahead of them.
Kilczer took the oars, having to lift on tiptoe at the beginning of each stroke because the poles that supported the rowlocks were as high as his shoulders. Dorthy cradled the rifle, dividing her attention between the dark mouth of the river among the trees that ran down along the shore, dwindling with each stroke of the oars, and the herder as it huddled in the well, up against the prow, its arms bound behind it. It was still dazed by Kilczer’s attack.
“We did it,” Kilczer said exultantly, as he laboured at the oars. “We show them, do we not, Dorthy?”
“We did,” she said, catching the edge of his jubilation. After all, they had lifted themselves out of their fate, if only for a moment.
There was no sign that the other herders were chasing them, and after a while Kilczer shipped the oars and came forward, took the rifle from Dorthy. “What do you make of our friend here?”
“He’s still more or less unconscious.”
“A male, you think?”
“They were all male.”
“Indeed. There is something funny about his head, you see? The forehead is swollen. Hydrocephalic. This is no normal herder.” Kilczer nudged the creature’s legs with the tip of the rifle barrel. The feet were long, and arched high, the heel protruding back from the ankle, the three toes splayed and tipped with broad claws. The black fur had a luxurious shimmer in the red light, as if each fine hair had a translucent, refractive tip. Kilczer said, “Perhaps this one is like you saw in the forest when you arrive. They must be coming up all around the edge of the hold, herds of critters, all of them changing.” For a brief moment his vision of a horde of these creatures moving on the black spire within the caldera overwhelmed Dorthy. “Look at it, a scrawny specimen, is it not?” Beneath the flow of his thoughts, an undertow of revulsion. He asked, “Is your Talent still functional?”
“Of course.”
“See what you can get out of it when it returns to consciousness,” Kilczer said, and handed back the rifle, returned to the oars.
The rocking of the boat and the regular creaking as Kilczer pulled and feathered, pulled and feathered, was lulling. Dorthy didn’t know precisely when the herder came round, but gradually became aware of its attention burning upon her. When she looked up the beast tried to scrabble back, jerking its legs. Beneath the bulge of its forehead its large eyes widened, membranes sliding sideways across black balls slit by a horizontal pupil: a panic reaction, she understood, and moved back, too, felt Kilczer take hold of her shoulder. The boat drifted, leaning a little in the current.
“I’m all right,” she said. “It’s scared of me. Of us.”
“Anything else?”
But the steady bright flame of its panic seared everything away, even the compulsive vision of climbing towards the tower of the keep. “It thinks we’re going to kill it,” Dorthy reported. “No, worse than that, kill everything. It sees us bringing the sky down. That’s as near as I can explain it.”
Kilczer pulled twice on the oars, then said, “It must have got that from its parents, us coming down from the sky. But I wonder how they knew?”
“It’s all mixed up with its fright. I can’t see anything too clearly.”
“You must try,” Kilczer said.
So, while he rowed, Dorthy sat zazen at the edge of the stern platform, her attention focused inward where the mind of the herder flickered like a reflected candle flame at her still centre. As Kilczer fell into the steady rhythm of rowing, the distraction of his thoughts lessened. She began to make out shapes, loci of being, behind the creature’s fear, each separate and starkly isolated like strange chess pieces on a great featureless board. Its mind held only a few experiences, a little learned knowledge, yet below the surface, shadowy areas to which Dorthy had no access hinted at as yet untapped reserves of wisdom. Its sensorium was a flickering screen above this deep core of memory, something like the mind of a recent amnesiac but with none of the sudden random associations such a mind possessed.
Surfacing, Dorthy opened her eyes. They were a long way from the shore now, turning towards the great inlet, kilometres distant, that fed the lake. Long low waves slapped the hull as Kilczer rowed steadily. The sun stood close to noon, a sullen lid to the dark sky, and at last the air was warm. After a while Kilczer stripped off the top of his coveralls, the action sending a flare of panic, followed by curiosity, through the herder.
“I think it wonders why you wear a false hide,” Dorthy said.
“It is still scared?”
“A little less. But I’m not learning anything useful, except it has reservoirs of knowledge it hasn’t tapped yet. Do you suppose they could be programmed into its brain somehow?”
“Instincts, you mean?” Pulling on the oars, Kilczer grunted. He had wrapped orange cloth around his blistering palms, tied an orange strip around his head to hold back his lank hair. This, and the scruffy beginning of a beard, made him look like a skinny bedraggled pirate.
“More than that. The herders could have been born, if that’s the right word, only a few days ago, yet they were cooperating on building boats so that they could reach the keep. I don’t think it has language yet, beyond a few signs and gestures maybe, but when the herders were working together it was as if they were all parts of a whole.”
“Hardwired knowledge. So they may later develop a language?”
“Given the right stimulus.”
“Like the writing in the keep.”
“Perhaps,” she said, seeing a concatenation of speculation run through his mind like a whirling collision of ice floes, familiar and almost comforting after the shadowy spaces of the herder’s mind.
“We must get to the keep before them, and warn Andrews.”
Curiously, Kilczer didn’t mind this demonstration that his thoughts were open to her. He was not a particularly private person. “Absolutely,” he said. “And the more you find out from our friend here, the better.”
“I’ll try. Keep rowing and don’t try to think.”
He did his best to comply.
But after trawling the shallows of the herder’s consciousness, mirrored in the directionless space of her centre, Dorthy was little wiser about its intentions. The enigmatic areas of knowledge were like shadows glimpsed far down in the sea, even their boundaries uncertain. In clear light were only the isolated flickerings of the creature’s brief existence: the trauma of its birth (or, more properly, its rebirth) from the chrysalis, a painful struggle into light; flashes of solitary hunting, more alive in its muscles than in its head; and the work at the river, urgent yet somehow peacefully contented cooperation, the blissful Rightness of belonging. And over and over, as a tongue returns to a nagging broken tooth, the sign that gripped its being, touched everything that it did: the vision of the keep rising out of its black lake. How could the herder know about that?
Dorthy mused on these few lacunae while the sun dropped warmth on her head and shoulders and Kilczer laboured at the oars. Her Talent was slowly fading. With its last residue, she became aware of the herder’s thirst, spreading across the surface of its fear like oil over water. She took the coveralls top that Kilczer had discarded and trailed it over the side of the boat until it was soaked through, then tossed the heavy bundle in front of the herder.
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 15
