Critical Threshold (10 page)

I trailed off into silence. It was a silence which suddenly seemed very profound. And then, breaking into it, came the sound of a cough. The sound came from
outside
the tent.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Karen began to reach for the rifle. I put my hand on it quickly, held it down. When she looked at me I shook my head. She shrugged, and reached, instead, for one of the packs, to look for one of the flashguns. I waited for her to dig it out, then I turned down the intensity of the light inside the tent. The larger lamp, outside, was not switched on.

I strained my ears, trying to catch the sound of any slight movement outside, but I heard nothing. I moved the flap aside tentatively, and peered out. Though it was not too long since sunset the night, aided by the trees, was already pitch dark. I was tempted to bring the rifle, but I left it, and took the flashlight instead. I eased my body out of the tent to let Karen take up a position by the open flap before switching it on and playing its beam in a low circle.

The moment I switched it on there was another barking sound, brief and explosive. This time it was less like a cough. I tried to follow the sound with the beam of the torch but couldn't quite catch up with it. I found a thicket, with the boughs of a tree trailing the top of the bushes, and something moved within. I couldn't see what it was. It had moved back, but it paused. All that the light picked out was the curtain of green.

“Ready with that flashgun,” I said, stepping forward. I held the torch out before me, ready to thrust it out to fend off anything that came out of the thicket at me. Experience told me there was nothing to be afraid of, but my heart was racing and I had second thoughts about the rifle.

I stopped, close to the bushes. Nothing moved. The stillness seemed strained and my spare hand began to shake. I rested it against my side, keeping it under control.

“It's in there,” whispered Karen. “I can feel it.”

It wasn't exactly a comforting remark. She had leapt swiftly to the conclusion that there was an “it” rather than a “he” or “she,” but I agreed with the judgment. The second cough had been the noise of a startled animal.

I looked around for a stone to throw into the bushes, but there was nothing near my feet except for a fruit-stone which had probably been abandoned by an animal earlier in the day. It wasn't heavy enough to make much impression on the thicket. I stepped backwards, making my way to the large lamp without turning my back on the hiding creature. I knelt, and carefully activated the fuel cell. The lamp glowed and slowly gained in brilliance until the beam of the flashlight became rather redundant.

Nothing happened.

“It's still in there,” said Karen.

“Thanks for reminding me,” I replied, dryly. There was still nothing close to hand which I might throw.

“Scream,” I said, suddenly.

“Do your own bloody screaming,” replied Karen.

It wasn't necessary. Perhaps the light and the conversation were too much, or perhaps it simply got bored. We heard the rustle of the undergrowth as the creature moved away. We didn't catch a glimpse of it.

“Didn't seem to like the look of us,” muttered Karen.

“I shouldn't think it'll come back,” I said, reassuringly.

She moved back to let me back into the tent. “I wouldn't bank on that,” she said. “It didn't exactly rush off in a panic. Maybe we should have given it something to remember us by—something to encourage it to stay away.”

“I
told
you to scream,” I reminded her.

She relaxed, lying back on her sleeping bag. She threw the flashgun back on the pack from whence it had come.

“What was it?” asked Mariel.

“A pig,” I said. “Maybe a monkey.”

“Or a ‘This animal is dangerous',” suggested Karen, referring to the legend in the book printed under the drawing of the cat-like predator.

“Maybe,” I said, shrugging my shoulders to show that it wasn't important.

It wasn't until I extended myself along the length of my own sleeping bag that I realized how tired I was. The exhaustion had crept into my body and the moment I relaxed completely I was overtaken, by the feeling that I'd not be able to rise again for some time. It seemed to take a great deal of effort just to work my way into the bag.

I think we all slept the so-called sleep of the just.

Morning seemed to descend upon us in no time at all. I was content to doze for half an hour, allowing myself the time for a little extra regeneration of body and spirit. There was no urgency in the way we finally roused ourselves, and it took us longer than it had the previous morning to pack up and make ready to move. But when we finally did set out to tackle the long climb we were physically and mentally prepared. We went at it with some determination, intending to reach the top that day.

It was hard going. I stopped paying any real attention to the surroundings and concentrated on my feet. The pack, which hadn't seemed so heavy during the previous two days, now began to weigh me down, straining my shoulders. The others were equally grim. Mariel's pack was by far the lightest but she carried it as if it was a millstone. We didn't find much to talk about. We took about ten minutes out to rest in every hour, but we generally spent the ten minutes getting our breath back, trying to restore the life to our bodies. This was the time when we were
all
regretting we'd come.

But the target did get nearer. Very slowly. The hard, steady slogging contracted time into one long blur. We weren't constantly looking up, so that every time we
did
look up the ridge was a little closer. That helped us to believe in ourselves. We knew that we'd make it.

The day started out warm and bright, but it clouded over. Within the forest neither the temperature nor the humidity altered at all, but we could see that there was a profound change up above. The clouds were ragged at first, and fast-moving, but heavy gray ones soon moved up and began to mass overhead.

I was sweating so hard that the idea of rain was welcome. It would cool us down. But at the same time I knew that it would also slow us down, and from the point of view of achieving our target I had to hope that it would hold off just long enough. If it started to pour, the runnels between the root ridges would fill with water very quickly, and we'd be awash with mud.

We ate on the march, silently and soberly—perhaps even sullenly. I, for one, didn't enjoy it much, hungry though I was. But in the end, we made it. We got to the saddle of the mountain.

There was maybe an hour to dusk, but the weather was such that we couldn't get much out of the view. From where we sat on the naked rocks near the lip of the gorge we could have seen for many, many miles on a clear day.

But the sky was so heavy that the very air seemed gray. The ocean of green stretched away on either of the ridge, but soon became lost in a haze of obscurity. There was no possibility of catching a glimpse of the
Daedalus
or the patch of bare earth where it rested, and certainly not a hope of seeing the glitter of water in the large lake which, according to the map, lay a couple days or more ahead of us.

We sat, too shattered to make camp, and watched the sky gathering over the limitless green sea. It seemed to be the sky, not the forest, which was alive now. The north-bound air stream was tangible here, at the exposed crown of the hill, and it cut through out light clothing, cooling the sweat trapped next to our skin by our clothing.

I studied the land which lay ahead of us. There was a long, shallow slope cut in two by the deep slit where the river ran into another valley. The valley was wide, its undulations gentle. Away to the east, on our side of the river, the hills grew into a whole range of mountain peaks. There may have been snow on one or two, but it may simply have been an impression given by the swirling cloud. Away to the west, and to the north, there was a great plain.

The curve of the river was hidden by the trees as soon as it emerged from the gorge, and in the poor light there no prospect of picking up its course from the occasional sparkle of light on the water.

“Well,” said Karen, watching me while I watched the forest, “there's our haystack. And still no sign that a needle's passed this way in living memory.”

“Look on the bright side,” I said. “It's downhill most of the way.”

She shrugged. “The rainwater's going to be chasing us,” she said, dourly.

And, in fact, the rain was already beginning to fall. It came in a rush—a few large droplets and then a torrent. We ran for the shelter of the trees, and then began to wrestle with the tent, cursing our idleness.

There was no way the canopy could keep the water off our necks while we got the tent erected—the boughs simply sagged beneath the assault. The raindrops rattled in the leaves like bullets.

When we were inside and dry it didn't seem too bad. The noise of the rain drumming on the canvas reinforced the sense of security we felt as we relaxed inside. But I knew that circumstances were conspiring to make sure we didn't have it easy tomorrow, downhill or no downhill. As Karen had said, the water would be on its way down with us, making the going sticky and treacherous. We couldn't cope with sprained ankles, so we'd have to be careful, and being careful is always one hell of a bind.

CHAPTER TWELVE

We had no difficulty keeping dry the next day—we had hoods and gloves fitted to our clothing and the sweat didn't build up inside—but that was just about the only difficulty we didn't have. The only way to
avoid
the water held and controlled by the forest's ingenious system of root-dam irrigation was to step from ridge to ridge over the puddles, but that played hell with the ligaments in the soles of our feet. The medical kit helped us counteract blistering and prevented any possibility of organic deterioration, but there's no repair for simple strain and the dull pain resulting from it.

We got no further that day on the downhill slope than we had the day before coming up. Our mileage total was miserable, but people can't travel as the crow flies and you have to do what you can on the day. Even on the fourth day, when we were beyond the region of treacherous roots, walking once again on grass and moss which cushioned our footfalls, we weren't in danger of breaking any records. The idea that the settlers had left their houses and their hillside for the simple life in the great green mansions began to seem rather more than slightly stupid.

The weather continued to have its effect on our mood. Karen, whose abrasive temperament meant that she was sometimes not a joy to be with even on her good days, tended to be morose, and the great majority of her remarks—to Mariel as well as to me—seemed to have a definite cutting edge. Mariel, who had hitherto been spared the sharper edges of Karen's tongue, seemed surprised, and slightly distressed. I made the occasional desultory effort to lighten the note of the proceedings, but the endless walking and the dullness of the conditions robbed me of any real enthusiasm. I couldn't find the energy to fight the pall of gloom. Until the vagaries at the weather were disposed once again to let the sun shine none of us felt like doing anything except waiting.

I always felt that the effect that weather has upon us is exaggerated beyond reason. We go through our routine lives closeted by our machines for living in, accustomed to their eternal weatherlessness, so that when we
are
exposed, by a combination of circumstances, we are vulnerable. Primitive man, it is said, used to interpret the behavior of the natural environment in terms of his own emotions: sunshine was equated with pleasure, rain with misery, a storm was seen as anger. We retain such assumptions in the way we think about nature but we have reversed the analogy. We interpret our own emotional inconstancy in terms appropriate to the weather. Pleasure becomes sunshine, misery rain and our anger is an internal storm. We no longer live within our natural environment, but our environment still lives within us.

And in the wilderness, we are at its mercy.

The fifth day, however, dawned clear, and the forest recovered with an alacrity which seemed to me to be almost magical. The rain which had fallen almost steadily for over forty-eight hours was lapped up, absorbed into the soil and the flesh of the forest. The balance of temperature and humidity was recaptured easily. It was amazing how competently the system worked, how efficient was its control. Its self-regulatory powers could only be compared to those of a warm-blooded creature such as a mammal or a bird. It was well beyond the cold-blooded dependence of the insects and the reptiles.

A couple of times during that day we surprised groups of the creatures I thought of as forest pigs. Each time it was a family group without a male parent, but the young were well grown. Karen wanted me to shoot one of the young pigs the first time, and became slightly angry when I declined not only that time, but the second time as well. She accused me, alternately, of hopeless sentimentality and outright cowardice, although the excuse that I actually offered was that it would be inconvenient carrying the meat, and far better, if we felt the need, to wait until we stopped for the night and then go stalking birds.

We had, by now—with a little help from the medical kit—adjusted metabolically to the vegetable produce of the forest, and it seemed quite natural to vary our diet a little more by going on to meat, but I was reluctant to start blazing away with the rifle. The reason I put forward to Karen was, in fact, a perfectly good one, but it was not quite the whole truth. I
didn't
want to start killing the forest-dwellers, because in a way I felt that I had no right. Perhaps it was, as Karen alleged, sentimentality, but I honestly didn't think that it was legitimate for us to take such liberties as a matter of course. I hold, deep down, a conviction that life, if not exactly sacred, at least deserves respect.

That evening, though, I had to carry out my promise. I went out into the quiet, warm evening in search of a large, fat bird. The kind I wanted was a flightless species which scuttled around the forest floor on big scaly feet. They lived on beetles and the occasional lizard, and they were pretty nippy on their feet. But I had the poor bastards at a terrible disadvantage. For one thing, I had the gun, and for another, they hadn't learned to be desperately and specifically afraid of people. They didn't stand around like the ducks in Cokaygne, ready roasted with EAT ME signs hung around their necks, but they were more than a little indiscreet

I didn't waste any bullets.

I wondered, as I carried it back to camp, whether the ease with which I'd felled it might be an indication of the fact that there weren't any people around these parts, and hadn't been for quite a while. It was difficult to say. Most of the forest mammals were distinctly shy of us, but that could well be because they were distinctly shy, period. I decided that the evidence was neutral, as neutral as no evidence at all.

Karen accepted with no more than token resistance the decision that as she had had the bird put on the menu it was up to her to prepare it. We still had time before sunset, and Mariel and I saw no reason at all to waste the only spare time of the first thoroughly pleasant day we'd had in what seemed a considerable time. And so we left her to it, and went down to the river bank. We'd not been out of our second skins for some time, except when we'd exchanged them for sleeping bags, and the stale sweat inside was beginning to smell more than we could bear. Our pores needed to breathe for a while, and were in desperate need of a wash. Skin can be infected by its own excreted poisons if it's too closely confined for too long.

The river ran slow and shallow here, and very wide. There were numerous small islands scattered in the middle, and occasional deep, clear pools formed close to the bank by the irregularity of the shoreline. We could see fish flashing silver as they slithered through the shallows and the air over the water was full of glittering flies and gaudy butterflies. The insects danced in spirals, giving the same effect, on a very small scale, as the ‘smoke' we had seen before.

The scents of this region seemed new, and the variety of tree species, now I had the time to look at them, seemed distinctly different. I could still recognize most of them, but one or two were new and the relative frequencies had changed. On the ground, especially near the river bank, there was an abundance of great circular cushions composed of a bushy lichenous species that was also new. Rushes grew in irregular patches where the water was less than a foot deep, especially around the larger midstream islets. There were large thickets of a coarse, stiff-stemmed plant with voluminous yellow inflorescences, which were continually addressed by a particular type of butterfly with black and red patterned wings.

I stripped naked and eased myself into the water, which was cold enough to send a chill running through my flesh. I couldn't help feeling rather uncomfortable. There was really no need, but it was, in fact, the first time that I had felt myself to be alone with Mariel, naked or otherwise. I couldn't help the sudden renewal of my anxiety, and remembering at the same time what Karen had said a couple of days earlier. There was no way I could avoid being unduly self-conscious.

I trod water close to the bank and watched her as she entered the water, moving smoothly into a lazy back-stroke swimming action. She was looking up at the sky, deliberately not meeting my eye. Her body seemed very white and very delicate. It did not seem to me to be in any way beautiful, but one cannot deny the consciousness of sexual attraction.

I recalled Karen's words—even if I was aware of no tension she would be....

Deliberate1y, I picked up the clothes from the cushion of lichen—both sets—and began to rinse them through. The cold had reached into my bones and cancelled itself. I was equilibrating, and the water now felt silky and good. After wringing the water out of the one-piece garments and spreading them out neatly I let myself fall backwards, while the water held me up, received me placidly. I rolled, and allowed the waves stirred up thus to splash my hair and face, wetting my whole body. I swam three or four strokes, and then floated on my back until my arm made contact with a branch drooping low over the surface. I gripped it hard, using it as a fulcrum while I brought my body upright.

There were insects swarming in the air around my head, settling in my moist hair. I ducked under to get rid of them, but they were there and waiting when I came up again. I had to move away from the shelter of the tree.

Mariel was still swimming in idle circles, going nowhere and not caring. She seemed to move very slowly, as though she were a piece of carved white wood drifting in a whirling current. Her eyes were turned toward me, and though they never dwelt on my face for more than a few seconds while her motion carried her round I felt that she was watching me closely—watching me watching her.

“You feel better?” I asked.

“It's cold,” she replied. It wasn't. Not really. Just cold enough to be pleasant.

“It's been rough these last few days,” I said.

“We managed,” she answered.

“Are you glad you came?” It was a stilted question, hollowly artificial.

“With the
Daedalus
?” she asked.

“With us. Out here in the forest...instead of staying in the settlement.”

“I like the forest,” she said. “It's real.”

“And the settlement isn't?”

“The people aren't.”

I smiled then. The comment, though trivial, seemed appropriate. It was a good, conversational remark. Easy. Not cloaked with too much meaning, or with too little.

She reached out to grasp the same branch I'd released a few moments before, but immediately discovered the same problem. Swatting at the insects with her right arm she drifted out again into the current. She tried to hold herself still in the water, but it couldn't be done, so she moved around me into the shallows, where her feet touched bottom and allowed her to stand shoulder-deep in the sluggish water. When we were both still, she looked calmly into my eyes.

Perhaps for the first time I didn't feel compelled to retreat inside my thoughts, to turn away from her supernatural ability. There was nothing inside my head to be hidden, at that moment. I was quite relaxed.

“You hated it back at the settlement, didn't you?” she said. The choice of phrasing was diplomatic.

I nodded.

“You were angry,” she said. “Knotted inside.”

“Because I knew that we'd find this colony had failed,” I added, not knowing whether it was necessary to explain or not, “and I felt bitter when I turned out to be right. Because if I could predict it, so could others. The colony should never have been sent. It was virtually a sentence of death on the original settlers.”

“But you still don't know why,” she said. “Do you.”

“Not yet,” I replied.

She ran her palms back over her head, draining water from her hair.

“You like it here, though,” she said. “You're not even afraid.”

I shrugged. “I like places like this.”

“Away from people.”

“Not necessarily.”

She didn't insist. “Why is it,” she went on, “that you can feel at home here on an alien world when you feel so strange and so dislocated on the ship?”

I lost my balance in the water, and let myself go sideways, toward the bank. I went far enough to be able to sit up in the shallows.

“I don't know,” I said. “I've never felt at home inside machines. What I know about is living things. In my mind, I suppose I always live among exotic creatures, alien environments. Those are the things which fascinate me. It's my life—the understanding of natural processes. 1 don't understand machines. I don't know how a radio works, or a fuel cell, let alone a starship. I don't understand the twisted laws of physics which let us cheat and duck out of spacetime to travel faster than light. I understand all this far, far better even though it's alien.”

“And what about other people?” she said, with decisive bluntness.

I was slightly startled, and had to hesitate. “I understand people,” I said “as biological entities. Living creatures interacting with their environment. That's the way I see them. But not just as animals, if that's what you....”

A butterfly brushed my face and I flipped at it with my band, blinking.

“Is that why you feel uncomfortable?” she asked. “Because people aren't just animals?” It was a wicked question, but her voice was still level—interested, but not probing. There was a world of difference between the way Mariel asked these questions and the way Karen might have.

“Maybe,” I said, prepared to play the game. “The trouble is that people don't tend to see
themselves
as factors in an ecological problem. Delusions of grandeur.” I deliberately made light of the issue. But she was serious.

“You're afraid of me,” she said—and here her voice quavered slightly as she moved on to dangerous ground—“because you think I can read your mind.”

“Can't you?” I countered.

“That's not the point,” she said, quickly, refusing to be deflected now.

“I can't help it,” I said, knowing that she must know that already. The circularity of the argument would always defeat it; all her attempts to communicate in the ordinary human way had to come to this. How can you talk to anyone, establish a meaningful flow of confidence and information, when you know all the answers and the other person knows that you know? How can communication not break down?