Deadman Switch (24 page)

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.”

C
ALANDRA 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.”

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?”

Calandra licked her lips. “You feel it too, don't you?” she asked quietly.

I waved my hands helplessly. “I don't know
what
I feel,” I had to admit. “Something here isn't right … but I have no idea what it is.”

Calandra took a deep breath. “Me neither. And I don't like not knowing.” She gestured to the lone thunderhead on our bluff, quivering in the breeze a half meter from the bluff's outer edge. “Let's have a look.”

Standing at my cubicle window in the Carillon Building, a hundred twenty stories above ground, I'd never had even a twinge of acrophobia. Walking in a steady wind toward the edge of an open-air bluff a tenth that height was something else entirely, and I had to force myself to go the last couple of meters. “Looks reasonably normal to me,” I said, dropping to my knees beside the thunderhead.

“Pretty hard rock it's dug into,” Calandra pointed out, scratching at the cracked rock at its base with a fingernail. “The spore or whatever must have found a crack or hollow to germinate in.”

I thought about that. “Maybe. On the other hand … there are an awful lot of cracks up here.”

She hissed softly between her teeth. “Or in other words, why is there just one.” Slowly, she shook her head. “I don't know.”

I looked at the thunderhead again. A fungoid plant, stuck all alone in the middle of a rocky clifftop without other plants or decaying material anywhere around. A deep root system, perhaps, tapping into some source of nutrients within the rock itself? “Maybe it just so happens that thunderheads
like
fusion drive emissions,” I suggested, only half humorously.

She shivered. “I don't like that idea at all,” she said quietly.

I thought about it. If we were, in fact, sitting on top of a smuggler hideout … “Neither do I,” I admitted.

Almost hesitantly, she reached out and touched the thunderhead's outer skin, resting her fingers there for a moment. Then, with a sigh, she lowered her hand and climbed back to her feet. “There's nothing here. Come on—let's go back.”

We headed back across the bluff to where the two ridges began their sloping way down. “You want to try the other one this time, or stick with the one we already know?” I asked.

“Let's stay with the known,” Calandra said. “I'm too tired to have to figure out new footing.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. Something on the second ridge caught my eye—“Hold it a second,” I said, catching hold of her arm.

“What?” she asked, her voice suddenly taut.

I pointed down the ridge. “Discolored spots in the rock, about twenty centimeters across each—there and there; see? In fact,” I amended, an odd tightness settling into my stomach, “they go all the way down.”

She stared down the ridge in silence for a long minute. Then, still without speaking, she started down toward them.

The second ridge was, fortunately, as easy to climb as the first had been. The nearest of the discolorations was perhaps ten meters down, and we reached it without difficulty. Squatting awkwardly on the slope, Calandra below the spot and I above it, we gave it a careful look.

It was clear right from the start that the discoloration hadn't been my imagination; equally clear was the fact that it wasn't just a chance placement of different colored rock. The patch was obviously a changed section of the stone immediately around it …

I reached out to touch it. Smooth, or at least smoother than the rest of the surrounding rock. Wind or water treating could account for that, possibly, except that there was no reason I could see why one section would be so affected and a nearby one not. Off-colored rock; with a shiny, almost glassy hint to it …

I looked up and met Calandra's eye … and I could tell she'd reached the same conclusion I had. “It's been heat-treated,” I said quietly.

Calandra licked her lips. “There's nothing here that could do that,” she almost whispered. “Nothing at all.”

The mountains melt like wax before the God of all the earth …

I swallowed hard, fighting back the dark, half-remembered fears of childhood. Spall was not—
could
not be—the seat of God's kingdom. Period. There was a reasonable explanation for what had happened here—a reasonable, scientific, non-miraculous explanation for what had happened here.

All I had to do was find it.

My probing fingertips caught something else. “Hair-line cracks,” I grunted to Calandra.

She nodded. “There's a whole network of them,” she said absently. “More visible from my angle, I guess. They seem to radiate from the glazed part outward into the surrounding rock.”

I leaned forward to see. “Cracks from the heating?” I hazarded.

She shrugged, oddly hunch-shouldered. For all her current rejection of her faith, she'd had the same upbringing I had … upbringing that would have included the same scriptures about God's fire and lightning that were currently bouncing around my own mind. “Maybe,” she said. “They look a lot like the cracks around the thunderhead up there, though.”

I looked back down again, chagrined that I hadn't made that connection myself. “Maybe that's the answer, then,” I suggested slowly. “Maybe these are spots where there were once thunderheads.”