Dancing in Dreamtime (37 page)

“They've been jammed,” said Zee. “That took some doing.”

By reflex, hands touched the locators at the rescuers' own waists. Immune to almost any accident, these devices were like amulets guaranteeing eventual return to Earth, dead or alive.

Kerry studied the heap of belts, her face pensive. “They didn't want to be found.”

Benton turned to the doctor. “You still think they're alive, Cummings?”

“Well, sir, there've been cases—”

“Save it. I don't want to hear any miraculous survival tales. Let's just find them and get off this filthy planet. They can't have gone far without equipment.”

Piece by piece over the next few hours they turned up the missing tools. Everything the scientists brought with them had now been accounted for, except for the scientists themselves. Equipment was easily found, thought Benton, but the human body could be damnably elusive; it dissolved into the landscape. An empath could locate a living body, but not a dead one, and even a live one was hard to find if the competing life-fields were strong. He had brought an empath along to Memphis-12, but after one day in the swamp the man had been driven frantic by the waves emanating from the songtrees. Never fully trusting empaths, who seemed to wear their nerves outside their skin, Benton sent him back up to the orbiting ship. Eyes would have to do.

That night when Kerry stole into his pool of light her eyes were open. Earphones dangled like a necklace about her throat. For a
minute after sensing her presence Benton did not look up from the map he was studying. At length he said, “What is it?”

She hesitated, the minty sheen of her sleepsuit flickering at light's edge, like a specter on the threshold of materiality. “I couldn't sleep, sir, for thinking about those songs.”

“Isn't listening to them morning and evening bad enough?” he asked. “You've got to listen to recordings half the night?”

“I'm sure I can hear words in the singing.”

“You don't hear anything of the sort.”

“I
do
, Captain. Human speech. There are words in French and English and Chinese. Maybe some Russian, too.”

What was her game? She knew perfectly well the missing scientists included native speakers of all those languages. He studied her. She was awake this time, the gray eyes open wide, the fair face bright with excitement. Her voice and gaze were too fresh for someone on chemmies. “Don't hang back in the dark,” he urged. “Come, sit down, tell me about it.”

She edged closer. The overhead light cast shadows beneath her chin, her breasts. Without sitting down, she said, “They're sort of like nursery rhymes. Or nonsense poems.”

“Such as?”

She withdrew a notepad from a pocket and began to read: “Pop, popcorn, pickle, participle, pumpernickel, pharmaceutical—”

Benton cut in. “You heard this in that squawking?”

“And a lot more,” she replied, riffling the notepad.

“Strings of words beginning with ‘p'?”

“That's just a sample. The mocking-trees seem to love rhyming. Their words run in streaks, with a thread of sound stitching them together. ‘Raw, rarity, rhomboid, rib—'”

“I get the idea.”

Kerry sat down next to him, pressing palms together between her thighs and rocking nervously. “I noticed it the first time I went swimming at songtide. No, I thought, I'm just putting human words to alien music. But every time I swam, the impression grew stronger. I'd keep my head underwater, listening, and pretty soon I recognized words in the singing.”

Indulging her, Benton asked, “How do you tell these mocking-trees from the other kinds?”

“They're the ones with the shiny knees,” she explained, rubbing her own knees for illustration. “Kind of like cypress. Half the recordings are of mocking-tree arias. Like in opera, only in three or four languages, rhyming every way you can imagine.” Unclasping the headset from around her throat, she offered it to him, saying, “Here, listen.”

Reluctantly he took it, hoping to put an end to her raving. The pads against his ears were still warm from resting on her throat. She punched a button and the pandemonium of songtide crashed in on him. He tried to hear something intelligible, but could not. She watched him expectantly, her face uncomfortably close, the freckles a dusting on her cheeks. Her lips were parted, fleshy, pink. He imagined breath eddying in and out. He found himself inclining toward her, only half conscious of the babble in his ears.

Recovering, he tugged away the headset and pulled back. “It's nothing but noise.”

She stood up in confusion. “You didn't hear—”

“I heard bleats and warbles and screeches.”

“The words
are
hard to make out. It takes patience—”

“I have nine corpses to find and a crew to deliver home safely. So forgive me if I don't have energy left over to decipher gibberish in the middle of the night.”

“But, sir—”

“That's all.”

He listened to the scuff of her bare feet. He tried looking at the map, but a pang of guilt prompted him to call after her. “Kerry?” The scuffing halted. She was a slim silhouette in the lighted passage. “I know you're trying to help,” he said. “You could help me a lot more by forgetting this nonsense and sticking to your duties. Understood?”

Her reply was barely audible. “Whatever you say, Captain.”

During the next day's search, Benton noticed that some of the jutting roots did appear shinier than the rest, like knees gleaming with oil. He could not help recollecting how Kerry had rubbed her own knees while telling him about the mocking-trees.

Valdez broke into the memory. “Do we stop, Captain?”

Benton craned round and blinked at him. “What for?”

“The trees have been singing for several minutes now.”

The noise washed over Benton. How could he have failed to hear? The others were staring curiously at him. “Songtide,” he muttered. “Of course. Tie up here.”

As usual, Kerry was first in the water. Cummings and Zee followed her in, as they often did. But when Valdez forsook his nap in order to join them, Benton began to feel uneasy. The four of them drifted through the swamp, floating on their backs, legs scissoring
languidly, eyes shut in the bubble helmets. Their lips were moving and their faces wore a drugged expression of delight. Had they all caught some alien fever?

The clamor of the songtrees kept him from thinking clearly. In the din he fancied he heard a guttural “broom, doom, gloom,” then a rhyming chant that might have been Russian. He cleared his throat irritably. It was only noise. Imagining one heard words in that racket was like seeing shapes in clouds or beasts among the stars.

Kerry floated serenely by. Beneath the helmet her lips never stopped moving.

Benton sat rigidly at his post. He endured the songtide as he would endure any pain.

Once back on board, the four swimmers whispered among themselves, their voices like the scrabbling of insects. Before the craft had proceeded far, Benton spun round. “What are you all mumbling?”

Cummings turned on him that round, pasty face, which even the bloodiest mess could not perturb. “Nothing important, sir.”

“In the water your mouths were gaping like fish and now you're muttering. What
is
it?”

“Oh,” said Cummings, glancing at the others, “we were just discussing what we'd heard in the singing.”

“And what did you hear?

“Some old video jingles,” said the doctor.

“Opera for me, sir,” said Valdez.

“I heard show tunes,” Zee confessed.

Kerry clenched her jaw and said nothing.

The boat drifted through the glassy water, the calm air, the unbroken stillness of the drowned forest.

“Listen to me,” Benton said carefully. “You're all sick. You've caught some bug from swimming in that filth. It's causing you to hallucinate.”

The doctor's face cracked with a smile, like a flawed plate. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I'd say we're perfectly healthy. We just like the music. Nothing wrong with that.”

Benton checked his temper. If he lost control, they might all become bait for yet another rescue team. “Cummings,” he said in level tones, “by now even you've got to realize those poor bastards are dead. Their camp's a mess. Their food stores were left open, as if they'd given up eating. They abandoned their ship, their tools, their survival belts and locators. The log dwindles away into incoherent fragments, and finally to silence. Now
why
?” He fixed each of them in turn with a sober stare. “I think they went mad from listening to those damn trees.”

The five sat utterly still. Out in the bog, stumps had begun to glow, the only sign that purple dusk had fallen.

At last Valdez admitted, “Maybe you're right, sir. Maybe it's a sickness that makes us hear things.”

“I'll give everyone a thorough exam,” said Cummings.

Zee added regretfully, “No more swimming, I guess.”

“No more swimming.” Benton hunched his shoulders to ease the tension in his back. “No one goes in the water. And during songtide we wear earplugs and helmets to block the noise.”

The others nodded agreement, but with a show of reluctance.

Later, as they were finishing their last sweep in the lavender twilight, Kerry sidled up and crouched next to Benton. Her nearness quickened his breathing. “Yes?” he said.

“Sir, if we're deluded in thinking we hear words—”

“There's no ‘if' about it.”

“Then why does the impression grow stronger as we approach a particular sector?”

“Listen—”

“I think if we follow the sound gradient we can trace the words back to wherever the mocking-trees are learning them.”

A sandy tress curled below her chin. He had to make an effort to keep from brushing it away. “Kerry, the mocking-trees aren't learning words.”

“With all due respect, sir, they are. In four languages.”

He looked at her with a feeling close to despair. The delusion had penetrated her so deeply that it had the intensity of a religious conviction. Her flushed cheeks and burning eyes were those of a woman possessed.

Before songtide next morning Zee spied, across the water on a fern-covered hummock, a splotch of Day-Glo yellow, which proved to be nine shimmersuits tied in a bundle.

“The fools,” said Zee. “Why would they take them off?”

“That means the bodies could sink,” Benton grumbled.

For once, Cummings found nothing hopeful to say.

Benton glowered at the mirror-slick water, spiky vegetation, gnarled trunks, and stilt-like roots. The bodies could be tangled anywhere in those murky depths. The prospect of returning empty-handed oppressed him. VIVA scientists did not seem to worry overmuch about dying; but they wanted someone to know where and how they had died, as if their death were a crucial piece of evidence. He understood that desire to return, to be put back in place, if only as a corpse.