by Timothy Zahn
Perhaps that was how Aaron Balaam darMaupine had managed to get as far as he had.
A stray fact ticked at my consciousness: the Seeker out there had been wearing gloves. “Are the valeer plants sharp-edged?” I asked Calandra, as much to change the subject as anything else.
She glanced out at the Seeker again, and I could tell she was also relieved that another argument about Adams’s group had been deflected. “It could be just the plants themselves. The Mustains told me that Spall’s soil is highly acidic.”
I grimaced. Great. And us about to go out poking around in it without any protective clothing. “How acidic is acidic?”
“Oh, it’s not dangerous or anything like that,” she assured me. “Just gives you a rash if you dig around in it too much.”
Yes—the Seeker had been wearing the same general style of daywear clothing we’d seen at the settlement dinner the previous night, which hadn’t struck me then as particularly thick or chemical-resistant. “I suppose that means they have to lay down some kind of alkaline solution before planting their own crops,” I commented.
“Probably,” Calandra nodded. “Whatever the method, it seems pretty effective—I haven’t seen any signs at all of native plants where the soil’s been treated. I wonder,” she added thoughtfully, “if that means it’s the chemicals in the fusion drive exhaust, after all.”
My stomach tightened as academic curiosity faded and the huge task facing us flooded back on me. “Could be. Speaking of which, I suppose we’d better get down to business.”
“Right.” Calling up a map of the area on the car’s display, she tapped for a contour overlay. “I presume you’d planned to do as much searching as possible from high ground?”
I nodded. “Unless, of course, we spot some place straight out that looks like it would be a good hiding place for an illegal shuttle or starship.”
She peered at the display, then slowly scanned the landscape around us. “Not really. Anyway, we’re still too close to Myrrh.”
“Agreed.” I tapped a spot on the display, ahead and to our left. “That’s probably that hill over there,” I said, pointing to a small rise in the distance. “Ten to fifteen minutes away, I’d guess. Shall we start there?”
She shrugged, and I could sense her brace herself. “Might as well.”
With only the unfamiliar plant life around to judge by, the distance proved deceptive, but we still made it to the hill in under half an hour. The only slope gentle enough for the car to manage was unfortunately also too rocky for me to want to risk the tires on, and so we wound up spending another ten minutes struggling to the top on foot.
Shepherd Zagorin had been right: both the landscape and the flora facing us were remarkably different from that which we’d seen on the drive between Shekinah and Myrrh. Added to the basic blue and gray-purple we’d already seen were touches of red, dark yellow, and even a delicate lavender. Most of the color seemed to belong to flower-like structures, but some was simply the plants themselves.
There was animal life out there, too, the first we’d yet seen on Spall. Dozens of tiny spots flitted low over the ground or circled the flowers in the semi-random pattern of insects everywhere, and I discovered that if I watched the nearest foliage carefully I could see the subtle leaf movements that implied small ground animals underneath.
And in the midst of the thickest and richest patches of plant life stood the thunderheads Zagorin had mentioned.
Even never having seen one before, I had no doubt as to their identity. Growing up to probably a meter in height, standing singly or grouped together in twos or threes, their oddly asymmetric, flat-topped breaking-wave shapes towered over the shorter plants surrounding them. Their shape, coupled with their dirty-white color, made the name “thunderhead” practically inevitable.
“They seem to prefer the lusher areas,” Calandra commented into my thoughts.
I dug out the noculars from our ship’s survival pack and studied a quick sampling of the thunderheads within view. She was right—each one was indeed surrounded by several meters of colorful plants, making a sharp contrast with the thunderheads’ own whiteness. “Lusher areas, or the presence of some particular insect,” I offered, lowering the noculars. “I can see small clouds of something surrounding each one.”
“Probably coincidental,” she shook her head. “More likely the insects are going for the more attractive plants around them.”
“Though who knows what’s attractive to an insect?” I shrugged. “You suppose they’re some variety of fungus?”
“They sure don’t have whatever the local equivalent of chlorophyll is,” she said. “I don’t know, though—those don’t exactly look like ideal places for dead vegetation to have collected.”
“Maybe a parasitic fungus, then,” I said, reaching back as best I could into the classroom biology I hadn’t used in years. “It would make sense—any parasite that size would have to have a lot of host material around to live off of.”
Calandra nodded thoughtfully. “Sounds reasonable. If so … it may mean they’re a sort of reverse indicator for fusion-damaged plants.”
I considered. “Maybe,” I agreed. “Assuming the pattern here also holds further out, anyway. We’ll have to keep an eye on that.”
“Right. Well …” Straightening her back, she took a deep breath and fell silent. Taking the cue, I raised the noculars again and began my own search.
Nothing. No indication of the sort of inhibited plant growth we’d seen at the landing area near Shekinah Fellowship. Also no scorch marks, no landing skid tracks, and no odd reflections that could be from plastic or metal.
I didn’t have to look to sense Calandra’s disappointment. “Like you said,” I reminded her gently, “we’re still pretty close to Myrrh.”
Her eyes, when I turned to look, were haunted. Haunted with the threat of failure … or with the threat of the death that would follow that failure. “Come on,” I said softly. “We can do it.”
She closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them the haunted look was gone. “Sure,” she said. Almost as if she believed it.
Biting the back of my lip, I slipped the noculars back in their case. Taking her hand, I led her carefully down the hill and back to the car.
I don’t know how many hills we drove or climbed up that day. There were at least ten—that many I remember clearly—but much of the ordeal remained afterward little more than a fatigued blur in my memory. The pattern of that first attempt remained with us the rest of the day: choose a local high point, drive there across bumpy ground, climb or drive up—driving being the rare exception—and gaze out at the landscape until our eyes ached. Climb or drive back down, head for the next spot, and repeat.
It was incredibly draining. Physically, it was clear that neither of us was in shape for this kind of activity, and by the time the first fluffy clouds began to form about noon my eyes, head, and legs all ached with fatigue. Calandra, with the normal woman’s higher stamina in such things, fared a shade better, but not enough to really matter. By midafternoon she was stumbling as much as I was, and leaning on me for balance as much as I leaned on her.
But as bad as it was physically, it was even worse emotionally.
I’m not sure really what I was expecting when we started out that morning. That God had guided me in a lucky guess, I suppose, and that within a couple of hours we would spot the telltale signs of fusion-drive damage and could scamper back to Shekinah and call Commodore Freitag down on them. But it wasn’t happening. To gaze at an unfamiliar landscape and try to pick something “abnormal” from it took incredible amounts of both painstaking attention and equally painstaking imagination. The existence of the thunderheads helped, but not as much as we’d hoped it would. The dirty-white plants grew in small clumps, never with more than three or four together, and never in the kind of widespread daisy field that would eliminate large sections of territory from our consideration.
And as the work continued—as the hours dr
agged by without even a hint of what we thought we were looking for—the optimism slowly faded … to be replaced by depression and finally despair.
We both felt it—both tried to hide it from the other for pride’s sake, if for no other reason. But as the sun dipped toward the horizon, and Calandra started us toward yet another distant hill, she finally gave up the pretense.
“It’s not working, Gilead,” she sighed, abruptly letting her foot off the accelerator. The loud background swishing of the plants against the car faded to a half-imagined ringing in my ears as we rolled to a stop. “We’re not going to find anything this way, and we both know it. Let’s give it up and go back.”
I ground my knuckles into my eyes, trying to rub the soreness out of them. Watching the landscape from a bouncing car, we’d discovered, was even harder on the eyes than repeatedly sweeping the horizon from the tops of hills. “We can’t do that, Calandra,” I told her, hearing her same tiredness in my own voice. “Besides, we’ve just barely reached our main target section. All this up to now has been practice; tomorrow is what really counts.”
She turned to face me. “Do you really believe we’re going to find anything?” she asked bluntly.
“There’s always hope—”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I clenched my teeth. “You’ve given up on faith completely, haven’t you?”
“What I believe or don’t believe isn’t the issue,” she said stiffly. “And if it comes to that, don’t forget that you’ve left the Watchers, too.”
My stomach tightened. “It’s not the same.”
“Oh? Tell me how—and don’t forget to include how much Carillon’s paying to rent your soul.”
I took a deep breath, trying to will my anger and depression away, and broke my eyes away from her glare. A short ways ahead, a little off to our right, was a rocky pair of close-set bluffs rising out of the vegetation surrounding them. “I don’t think either of us is in the mood for a rational discussion at the moment,” I said. “Tell you what; let’s drive over to those bluffs over there and make camp for the night.”
She hesitated a long minute, then shrugged. “I suppose we might as well,” she agreed with a tired sigh. “It’s probably too late to get back to Myrrh before dark, anyway.”
We headed out … and as we approached the bluffs I discovered that my original guess had been wrong. There were, in fact, four bluffs in the group, not two, sitting closely together in a rough square. Probably with a fair amount of reasonably sheltered space in the middle of the formation, judging from what little of their shapes I could see. It would indeed be a good place to spend the night.
Perhaps an equally good place for a smuggler to spend the night. Possibly even a good place in which to hide a small shuttle …
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stiffen. If there were smugglers in there, watching our approach …
Beside me, Calandra stirred. “There’s a thunderhead on the top of the bluff,” she said.
I felt heat rise to my face as I squinted against the bright sky behind the bluff. She was right, as usual; in fact, I could see one of the large plants on each of the two bluffs whose tops were visible from here. “Oh, well,” I said. “It was just a thought.”
“Yeah. How close do you want me to get?”
“Might as go all the way in, if you can,” I told her, pointing to the nearest of the gaps. “If last night was any indication, it’s likely to get pretty chilly tonight, and those bluffs may at least break the wind for us.”
“Or funnel it right down our throats,” she muttered.
“So we’ll find someplace out of the line of fire,” I growled. “Let’s just go, okay?”
She flashed me a glare and drove on in silence.
The place was clearly not being used by smugglers … but the closer we got, the more I realized it could easily have been. All four of the bluffs were tall and—from this side, at least—unusually straight-walled, which meant the gaps between them remained narrow all the way up. A cozy hideaway, indeed, with virtually no visibility except from directly overhead. The ground leading to our target gap began a gradual rise about a hundred meters out from the bluffs, and from glimpses I caught through the opening I got the impression that the ground fell away again toward the center of the enclosed area.
“What do you think?” Calandra called over the swishing of plants around and beneath us.
I studied the gap and the terrain in front of it. “Looks like we can get in all right,” I told her. “Let’s try it. We can always stop if we hit a patch of sharp rocks or something.”
She nodded. We passed the outer edges of the bluffs, the sunlight from behind us cutting off abruptly as we passed into shadow. The walls of the bluffs curved toward us, and I could see now that the narrowest part of the opening would indeed be large enough to admit us. Calandra saw that, too, and kept going. A couple more meters of slope up; and then we were through the gap, angling down now toward the slightly depressed center—
And Calandra slammed on the brakes. “God in heaven,” she breathed, almost mechanically.
Directly ahead, filling the enclosed area from the base of one bluff to the next, was a literal sea of thunderheads. The plants which always before we’d found in the centers of lush vegetation … and never in groups larger than four.
I took a deep breath. “Offhand,” I heard myself say, “I’d guess we’ve found a very healthy place to camp.”
The words seemed to break the spell. “Right,” Calandra said dryly. “At least if you’re a thunderhead.” She stared at them for another minute before shaking her head. “Well, come on, then,” she growled, getting stiffly out of the car. “Let’s get those shelters put together before the sun goes down.”
Chapter 18
CALANDRA HAD BEEN CORRECT about the gaps funneling the wind. They did, and with a vengeance, converting the gentle breeze outside into a steady whistle that here in the shadow of the bluffs was already beginning to be chilly. Fortunately, I’d also been correct in the assumption that we’d be able to find someplace sufficiently sheltered from the blast. The northernmost bluff had two gentle ridges extending from its top all the way down into the mass of thunderheads, and between those ridges was a hollow with plenty of room for both of the shelters Shepherd Zagorin had lent us. The shelters themselves proved to be both simple and idiot-proof, and in perhaps twenty minutes we had a fairly cozy camp put together.
For a long time afterwards we just lay there on the ground, too exhausted even to talk. I watched the clouds passing overhead, framed by the towering buttes, and wondered if my legs would ever feel like walking again.
“Gilead … ?”
“Hmm?” I said. There was no reply, and with an effort I turned my head to look at her. Flat on her back, her head propped almost vertical against a rolled-up sleeping bag behind her neck, she was staring down at the mass of thunderheads. Staring at them with a troubled expression on her face. “Something wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “What are they all doing here?”
“What, the thunderheads?” Feeling vaguely resentful at having to make the effort, I propped myself up on my elbows.
She had a point—even tired and irritated I had to admit that. Every other thunderhead we’d seen today, without exception, had been growing smack in the middle of heavy concentrations of plant and insect life, neither of which was present here in even moderate amounts. Not to mention the sheer unexpected number of the things growing together in the first place. “Could be there’s enough shelter from the proper seasonal winds in here that spores don’t get very far,” I offered.
Calandra shook her head. “That might explain why there are so many here. It doesn’t explain why they’re alive.”
I chewed carefully at a sun-chapped lip. “Maybe they can feed more than one way,” I suggested. “Parasitic when they’re out among other plants, something else when they aren’t.”
“Maybe.”
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For another moment we lay there in silence. Then, moving stiffly, Calandra rolled over and got to her feet, her sense that of someone bracing for unwanted but necessary activity. “What are you doing?” I asked, not at all sure I wanted to hear the answer.
She nodded up at the bluff towering over us. “There’s a thunderhead up there, remember? I’m going to go take a closer look at it.”
I looked up, a sinking feeling starting in my stomach and seeping down into my legs. It wasn’t enough that we’d climbed forty million hills today already; Calandra wanted to do it some more. “Why?” I growled. “Or at least, why now?”
“You don’t have to come,” she said shortly. Glancing at the two ridges stretching to either side of us, she chose the leftmost and started up.
I watched her climb for perhaps a minute. Let every valley be filled in, every mountain and hill be levelled … As far as I was concerned, the fulfillment of that one couldn’t come too soon. Swallowing a word I’d once been severely punished for saying, I got to my feet and followed.
It was, fortunately, not as bad as it had looked from flat on my back. Fairly gentle in slope to begin with, the ridge was also heavily studded with large and solidly inlaid rocks, giving it the appearance in places of a highly irregular staircase. Even so, it was a good fifteen minutes before we finally puffed up onto the flat top.
For a few minutes I just stood there in the brisk wind, well back from any of the edges, my eyes reflexively sweeping the horizon as my legs trembled slightly with fatigue. As usual, nothing that seemed out of the ordinary was visible out there.
“There’s a thunderhead on each of the other bluffs, too,” Calandra said in an odd voice.
I turned to look. She was right—precisely right, in fact. One thunderhead, exactly, perched atop each of the four bluffs.
From the top of the tall cedar tree, from the highest branch I shall take a shoot and plant it myself on a high and lofty mountain … A shiver ran up my back, totally unrelated to the wind. “All right, I give up,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “How did they get up here?”
