Tlad made no reply. As Jon watched him gaze into the fire, he noticed a worried frown on his face.
-XIX-
Jon sought out Tlad the next morning and learned that he had departed at first light, no destination given. He struck off into the forest and made for Tlad's hut. It was already mid-morning but he knew he could easily catch up. No human could move through the forests as quickly as –
He'd have to get used to classifying himself as human. He had come to accept that now, and he wanted the other humans around him to accept it. But Rab said go slow, go slow, go slow.
So he did. But it irritated him more and more each day to hide his intelligence. Previously taciturn by nature, he had now developed an insatiable urge to talk to other humans. But there was no one to listen. Rab was always busy or surrounded by Talents, and when Tlad arrived, he and Rab spoke of things that Jon could not understand. So he was forced by ignorance to remain silent.
So now he sought out Tlad – who was human yet did not seem to require the company of other humans. Perhaps he would accept the company of a tery who craved to be with another human on an equal footing. They were both aliens, outsiders, standing apart from the rest of the culture – Tlad by his own choice, the tery by heritage and decree of law.
Tlad was not at his hut, had not been there recently by all signs. Perhaps they had traveled different paths; the tery passing him on a parallel course. Jon waited for a while, then decided to scout through the area between the hut and the new camp of the psi-folk.
Eventually, he came to a familiar clearing. Looking to his left he saw what he had come to call the shimmering fear. And something else.
Someone was in the field. A man...
Tlad.
Jon watched him approach the shimmering fear. He moved quickly, steadily, like someone who knew exactly where he was going and was anxious to get there. He walked right up to the shimmer – and into it!
The shimmer enveloped him and he disappeared!
Jon ran forward with his heart thudding in his throat. Tlad was in danger and he had to help. But where was he? Had whatever hid inside the shimmering fear drawn him in and swallowed him? Or was Tlad immune to the fear? Was he part of it?
The questions fled unanswered as he felt the first tentacles of terror and revulsion coil around his chest and throat and begin to squeeze. But still he ran. He ran until he felt he could no longer breathe, until his legs became stiff and rigid. And when he could no longer run, he walked – slowly, painfully forcing each limb forward until he entered the shimmer.
Suddenly the forest disappeared. His vision shifted and melted into a blur. All that was left was the fear that buzzed around and through him. Still he forced himself on, one more step...one more step –
The shimmer was suddenly gone.
And with it, the fear.
He stood panting and sweating in a cool, odorless room that seemed to be made out of polished steel.
Not three paces ahead of him, Tlad sat with his back to him. He was staring at a portrait of a man on the wall above him. Jon opened his mouth to speak...
...but the portrait spoke first.
-XX-
"
I regret having to say this, Steven, but I'm going to have to turn down your request. As you well know, the Federation Defense Force intervenes only in strictly limited circumstances, and your request for intervention on Jacobi IV does not meet the narrow criteria set forth in the LaNague Charter. The imposition of a protectorate in this case would be at odds with the very purpose of the Cultural Survey Service, which is to preserve and promote human diversity. The psis you've described on Jacobi IV are well on their way to establishing a truly tangential society; intervention by an interstellar culture at this point would stifle them. Your talented friends will have to find their own way out of this predicament, I'm afraid. I wish them all the luck betweeen the stars.
You may help them, of course, but only with the native materials at hand.
Good Luck, Steve, and out."
#
"Damn!" he said through clenched teeth as he angrily cut off the playback.
No sense in running through it again. It was painfully obvious that this was an irrevocable decision on the part of the higher-ups. He had expected a rigid, by-the-rules response, but that didn't lessen his frustration.
"Of all the stupid narrow-minded –"
He turned and froze at the sight of the tery standing in the lock, staring at him.
"Jon?"
"You live within the fear?" the tery said, a tone of awed wonder in his gruff voice.
"The fear?"
He was so stunned by Jon's presence that he didn't catch the reference.
"The shimmer –"
"Oh, that!" He realized that Jon meant the craft's neurostimulatory repeller. "I use it to keep out people and curious creatures. But how'd you get past it?"
"I thought Tlad was in trouble. I came to help."
He saw how Jon was still panting and trembling, how his fur was soaked with sweat.
"You came through the field?" He was moved. The field induced an almost irresistible flight response in the autonomic nervous system of any mammal within range. Very potent. It took guts to get past it. "Thank you, Jon."
"But you are not really Tlad, are you?" Jon said.
For all his beastial appearance, this tery had such a quick mind. Dalt tried to match his quickness but could come up with no lie that would ring true enough to save his cover. He thought carefully before he spoke. The tery respected him, felt indebted to him – he had come through the fright field because he thought Tlad was in trouble. Why destroy that store of confidence with an obvious fabrication?
"No, I'm really Dalt. Steven Dalt."
"But you are still my friend, are you not?" Jon asked with a pleading innocence and sincerity that Dalt found touching.
"Yes, Jon, I'm still your friend. I'll always be your friend. I'm here to help the teries and the psi-folk, and I'll need your help most of all to do it."
Jon was staring around at the ship's interior.
"Can we leave here? I don't like it here."
"Of course. But first..." Dalt reached a hand toward the tery's right shoulder and removed a fine silver thread. "You won't be needing this tracer any more. I planted it on you before you went to Adriel's rescue. I've got them here and there among the psi-folk. Helps me keep track of things."
He laid the thread on one of the consoles, then picked a small disk from a slot by the lock and placed it in the tery's hand.
"Hold onto this as we walk through the ‘fear.' It will protect you from it. I've got one in my belt buckle."
Together they walked undisturbed through the shimmer that hid Dalt's craft, and the neurostimulatory field that guarded it. They stopped in the shade of some neighboring trees.
Dalt seated himself cross-legged on the grass and motioned for the tery to join him.
"Get comfortable and I'll tell you all about myself. After I'm done I hope you'll know enough to want to keep what you've just seen a secret."
"As long as it helps Adriel and the others."
"Good enough."
Where to begin? he thought. This isn't going to be easy.
He started with a historical perspective – how the mother world devised an ingenious method to colonize the stars and get rid of all its malcontents, dissidents, and troublemakers in a single stroke: a promise of one-way passage to an Earth-type planet to any group of sufficient size that wanted to set up the utopia of its choice. It became known as the era of the splinter worlds, and there was no shortage of takers. Soon most of the habitable worlds in a sphere around Earth were peopled with all sorts of oddball societies, most of which collapsed within a few years of landfall.
The Shaper colony proved an exception. Its pioneers were all well-grounded in science and technology and managed to build a viable society. Their goal of a world of physically perfect human telepaths was close to completion when the Teratol clique t
ook over. That was when teries were formed; that was when the Hole was started; and finally, that was when the virus that caused the Great Sickness – the pandemic holocaust – was born.
A small group of the surviving Shapers banded together during the plague. They saw their civilization coming apart and wanted something preserved, so they gathered samples of all the available technology of their time into one spot and sealed it up. They then wrote a brief history of the colony in five volumes and buried it for posterity. Before they, too, succumbed to the Great Sickness, they beamed the contents of the volumes into space.
The message was received. But this was in the days of the beleaguered outworld Imperium that had little interest in rescuing diseased Shapers. So the message was dutifully recorded and forgotten. After the LaNague Federation rose from the ruins of the Imperium, the Cultural Survey teams were started in an attempt to bring surviving splinter worlds back into the mainstream of humanity. That was when the transcript of the five-volume transmission was found.
Steven Dalt, fresh from his infiltration of the feudal splinter culture on Kwashi, was given the job.
"Are you following me so far?"
The tery neither shook his head nor nodded. "What is a planet?" he asked.
"What's a pla – ?"
Dalt then realized that for all his native intelligence, Jon's mind was too unsophisticated to grasp cosmological concepts. The stars were points of light, the planet on which they stood was "the world," and the primary it circled, "the sun." Dalt’s talk of the LaNague Federation and splinter worlds and interstellar colonization had been lost on the tery – like discussing the big bang theory with someone who still believed in a geocentric universe.
Yet Jon had listened patiently and with interest, whether through personal regard for Dalt or through a desire to have someone – anyone – address him as a fellow rational being, Dalt could not say.
"Let's put off that explanation for some other time, Jon, and just accept the fact that I was sent from a faraway land to see how things were going here."
Things were not going at all well, as he had discovered soon after landing and camouflaging his craft. A preliminary survey had located the population centers, made language recordings, and returned to Fed Central. Dalt absorbed the language – a pidgin version of Old Earth Anglic – via encephalo-augmentation and was readied to pose as one of the natives to assess their suitability to handle modern technology. Since they favored hard consonants in their male names, he’d turned his own around. And since he did not want too close contact with the locals, he posed as a reclusive potter deep in the forests.
His advent coincided with Mekk's order for extermination of the Talents and he found himself acting as potter and confidant to a unique group of telepaths. Here was something every Cultural Survey operative dreamed of finding: A group of humans split off from the mainstream of the race, developing a separate and distinct lifestyle. This was the very purpose for which the CSS had been formed.
But on this planet they were marked for extinction.
So Dalt had sent an urgent request by subspace laser for an intervention by the Federation Defense Force to protect these psis and let them follow their course. And had been turned down.
"It's up to you and me, my furry friend," he told Jon. "I'll get no help from my friends back in my homeland – and I can't even use a blaster, though I'll be damned if I won't carry one with me when we go to the Hole – so we're going to have to carry the show. Let's go see Rab."
-XXI-
"Here's an entry port to the observation corridor," Dalt said, pointing to a small, dark blot on the map. Then he sketched an arc with his finger. "And here's the perimeter of the routine patrols around Mekk's fortress."
The blot fell between the arc and the fortress.
"We can sneak past the patrols," Rab said.
"We need to do more than sneak. We're going to have to dig our way in. The port is buried."
Rab frowned. "That's a problem. They'll catch us sure."
"That's where your people come in. Can we count on them?"
"Of course. What do you need?"
"A war."
"Now wait just a –"
"A small war," Dalt said with a smile. "One played by our rules."
-XXII-
The Talents moved their camp deeper into the forest, putting more distance between themselves and Mekk's fortress. Then the archers moved forward and ringed the fortress in small groups.
The war began.
The Talents developed into a perfectly coordinated guerrilla force, striking then disappearing like fish in the sea. When Mekk's generals sent a hundred men out to search the surrounding trees, they found nothing. When they sent ten men out to investigate a minor disturbance, none came back.
The net result of these seemingly random skirmishes was a gradual withdrawal of the patrol lines toward the fortress, a tightening of the perimeters, just as Dalt had intended. This gave him, Rab, and Jon a chance to locate the old entry port.
Working all night and well into the next day, as swiftly and silently as they could, they moved rocks and dug through the dirt until they had made an opening just big enough for the tery to slip through.
Dalt nodded to Rab as he prepared to follow Jon. Rab was to wait by the entrance and use his Talent to summon help if necessary.
He squeezed through the opening –
And entered the anteroom to Hell.
Dalt had been expecting the worst, but nothing hinted at in his transcript of the Shaper history had prepared him for the sights that greeted him.
The forgotten corridor stretched before them with a gentle curve to the left. The left wall was composed of a thick transparent substance that jutted out into the Hole at a forty-five degree angle. A mixture of dried blood, excrement, and dirt, smeared its far surface, traces left by generations of Hole inhabitants trying to claw their way out.
But there was no way out. The rock of the floor, sides, and ceiling of the Hole had been treated by the Teratol clique to make it impervious to any digging or tunneling. The only access to the outside world was through the vertical shafts leading to the ventilation grates, and these were lined with the same impenetrable glassy substance that now separated Dalt and Jon from the Hole.
The porous rock that lined the inner surface of the Hole had been treated in another way: It glowed. The light arose from all sides, totally eliminating shadow, creating an endless twilight that added to the surreal, nightmarish quality of the hellish panorama before them.
For food, the Teratols had developed a rapidly growing fungus that hung from the ceiling of the Hole in stalagtitic abundance. For water there were a number of underground springs that fed into a large pool at the center of the cavern. The temperature was a damp, cool, subterranean constant. For those who required shelter, a hidey-hole could be dug into the porous rock that had not been treated against it. No wood, no fire, no tools of any sort.
None of the Teratol mistakes would ever escape, none would ever starve, none would ever die of thirst, none would ever freeze.
And none would ever know a moment's peace.
The Hole had no social order. The strongest, the fiercest, the ones that hunted best in packs – these ruled the Hole. The weak, the timid, the sick, the lame became either food or slaves. The sense of entrapment and foul living conditions, compounded by generations of inbreeding, had reduced the inhabitants to a horde of savage, imbecilic monstrosities.
"This is the darkest side of the human soul, Jon," Dalt said. "Anything that's good and decent within us has been banished from here."
With Jon gliding behind him, Dalt walked along the corridor, queasily watching as scenes of nightmarish barbarism that were a part of day-to-day existence in the Hole played out before him.
A creature with an amorphous body, six tentacles, and a humanoid head shuffled along, picking up morsels of fungus and stuffing them into its mouth. Without warning, a reptilian creature with horny plates projecting fr
om its back – and again, the humanoid head, always a humanoid head – launched itself from a burrow about a meter off the floor and landed on the tentacled creature's back. With sharp fangs it tore into the
flesh of its victim's neck until blood spouted over both of them. The victim rolled onto its side, however, and managed to wrap one of its longer tentacles around the attacker's throat.
Dalt could not bear to wait and see whether the first's blood supply could outlast the other's oxygen. He left the combatants writhing on the other side of the window and pressed on, trying not to watch the endless variety of depraved forms that skulked, leaped, crawled, shuttled, scuttled, and ran through the small area of the Hole that was visible to them. Yet he was unable to turn away.
"There's a door somewhere along here," he told Jon. "The Teratols made one entry from the corridor into the Hole. I just hope we can open it when we find it."
The tery said nothing and Dalt glanced at his companion, wondering if he could hold his own in there. Jon would have two advantages – his intelligence and his hunting club. Dalt had wanted to give him a blaster, but the tery had been too frightened of its power. He seemed more comfortable with the weapon that had protected him and helped feed him for most of his life. So a club it was.
I wouldn't go in there with two blasters, Dalt thought, glancing into the Hole again.
He estimated from the difference in light levels between the cavern and the corridor that the dwellers on the other side of the window probably didn't know the corridor existed. The light from the phosphorescent stone would reflect off the filth smeared on the window, making it look like an unusually smooth section of the wall. The Shapers had probably wanted it that way so they could watch without being seen.
Jon stopped abruptly and pointed to something on the window.
"What is that?"
Dalt saw a round, dark splotch, about the length of a man's arm in diameter, edging its way down the Hole side of the window. He tried to get a peek at what it looked like on the reverse but it must have been flat and disk-shaped. He could make out no protrusions from the other side.
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