Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (20 page)

Was it possible he had reached The Clivorn’s brow?

He rose to his knees, frightened in the whirling mists. Beside him was a smear of red. My blood with Clivorn’s, he thought. On my knees in the stones. My hands are dirty. Sick hatred of The Clivorn washed through him, hatred of the slave for the iron, the stone that outwears his flesh. The hard lonely job . . . Who was Simmelweiss? “Clivorn, I hate you,” he mumbled weakly. There was nothing here.

He swayed forward—and suddenly felt again the gluey resistance, the jolting crackle and release. Another energy barrier on Clivorn’s top.

He fell through it into still air, scrabbled a length and collapsed, hearing the silence. The rocks were wonderfully cool to his torn cheek. But they were not unweathered here, he saw. It came to him slowly that this second barrier must have been activated by the first. It was only here when something pushed up through the one below.

Before his eyes as he lay was a very small veined flower. A strange cold pulse boomed under his ear. The Clivorn’s heartbeat, harmonics of the gale outside his shield.

The changing light changed more as he lay there. Sometime later, he was looking at the stones scattered beyond the little plant. Water-clear gold pebbles, with here and there between them a singular white fragment shaped like a horn. The light was very odd. Too bright. After a while he managed to raise his head.

There was a glow in the mist ahead of him.

His body felt disconnected, and inexplicable agonies whose cause he could no longer remember bit into his breath. He began to crawl clumsily. His belly would not lift. But his mind was perfectly clear now and he was quite prepared.

Quite unstartled, as the mist passed, to see the shining corridor—or path, really, for it was made of a watery stonework from which the golden pebbles had crumbled—the glowing corridor-path where no path could be, stretching up from The Clivorn’s summit among the rushing clouds.

The floor of the path was not long, perhaps a hundred meters if the perspective was true. A lilac-blue color showed at the upper end. Freshness flowed down, mingled with The Clivorn’s spume.

He could not possibly get up it just now. . . . But he could look.

There was machinery, too, he saw. An apparatus of gelatinous complexity at the boundary where the path merged with Clivorn rock. He made out a dialed face pulsing with lissajous figures—the mechanism which must have been activated by his passage through the barriers, and which in turn had materialized this path.

He smiled and felt his smile nudge gravel. He seemed to be lying with his cheek on the tawny pebbles at the foot of the path. The alien air helped the furnace in his throat. He looked steadily up the path. Nothing moved. Nothing appeared. The lilac-blue, was it sky? It was flawlessly smooth. No cloud, no bird.

Up there at the end of the path—what? A field, perhaps? A great transspatial arena into which other such magical corridor-paths converged? He couldn’t imagine.

No one looked down at him.

In his line of sight above the dialed face was a device like a translucent pair of helices. One coil was full of liquid coruscation. In the other were only a few sparks of light. While he watched, one of the sparks on the empty side winked out and the filled end flickered. Then another. He wondered, watched. It was regular.

A timing device. The readout of an energy bank, perhaps. And almost at an end. When the last one goes, he thought, the gate will be finished. It has waited here, how long?

Receiving maybe a few sheep, a half-dead native. The beasts of Clivorn.

There are only a few minutes left.

With infinite effort he made his right arm move. But his left arm and leg were deadweights. He dragged himself half his length forward, almost to where the path began. Another meter . . . but his arm had no more strength.

It was no use. He was done.

If I had climbed yesterday, he thought. Instead of the scan. The scan was by flyer, of course, circling The Clivorn. But the thing here couldn’t be seen by a flyer because it wasn’t here then. It was only in existence when something triggered the first barrier down below, pushed up through them both. Something large, warm-blooded maybe. Willing to climb.

The computer has freed man’s brain.

But computers did not go hand by bloody hand across The Clivorn’s crags. Only a living man, stupid enough to wonder, to drudge for knowledge on his knees. To risk. To experience. To be lonely.

No cheap way.

The shining ship, the sealed Star Scientists, had gone. They would not be back.

He had finished struggling now. He lay quiet and watched the brilliance at the end of the alien timer wink out. Presently there was no more left. With a faint no-sound the path and all its apparatus that had waited on Clivorn since before the glaciers fell, went away.

As it went the winds raged back, but he did not hear them. He was lying quite comfortably where the bones of his face and body would mingle one day with the golden pebbles on The Clivorn’s empty rock.

THE WOMEN MEN DON’T SEE

I
SEE HER FIRST
while the Mexicana
727
is barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and lurch into her seat, saying “Sorry,” at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The younger blur in the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle, registering nothing. Zero. I never would have looked at them or thought of them again.

Cozumel airport is the usual mix of panicky Yanks dressed for the sand pile and calm Mexicans dressed for lunch at the Presidente. I am a gray used-up Yank dressed for serious fishing; I extract my rods and duffel from the riot and hike across the field to find my charter pilot. One Captain Estéban has contracted to deliver me to the bonefish flats of Belize three hundred kilometers down the coast.

Captain Estéban turns out to be four feet nine of mahogany
Maya puro.
He is also in a somber Maya snit. He tells me my Cessna is grounded somewhere and his Bonanza is booked to take a party to Chetumal.

Well, Chetumal is south; can he take me along and go on to Belize after he drops them? Gloomily he concedes the possibility—
if
the other party permits, and
if
there are not too many
equipajes.

The Chetumal party approaches. It’s the woman and her young companion—daughter?—neatly picking their way across the gravel and yucca apron. Their Ventura two-suiters, like themselves, are small, plain, and neutral-colored. No problem. When the captain asks if I may ride along, the mother says mildly, “Of course,” without looking at me.

I think that’s when my inner tilt-detector sends up its first faint click. How come this woman has already looked me over carefully enough to accept on her plane? I disregard it. Paranoia hasn’t been useful in my business for years, but the habit is hard to break.

As we clamber into the Bonanza, I see the girl has what could be an attractive body if there was any spark at all. There isn’t. Captain Estéban folds a serape to sit on so he can see over the cowling and runs a meticulous check-down. And then we’re up and trundling over the turquoise Jell-O of the Caribbean into a stiff south wind.

The coast on our right is the territory of Quintana Roo. If you haven’t seen Yucatán, imagine the world’s biggest absolutely flat green-gray rug. An empty-looking land. We pass the white ruin of Tulum and the gash of the road to Chichén Itzá, a halfdozen coconut plantations, and then nothing but reef and low scrub jungle all the way to the horizon, just about the way the conquistadors saw it four centuries back.

Long strings of cumulus are racing at us, shadowing the coast. I have gathered that part of our pilot’s gloom concerns the weather. A cold front is dying on the henequen fields of Mérida to the west, and the south wind has piled up a string of coastal storms: what they call
lloviznas
. Estéban detours methodically around a couple of small thunderheads. The Bonanza jinks, and I look back with a vague notion of reassuring the women. They are calmly intent on what can be seen of Yucatán. Well, they were offered the copilot’s view, but they turned it down. Too shy?

Another
llovizna
puffs up ahead. Estéban takes the Bonanza upstairs, rising in his seat to sight his course. I relax for the first time in too long, savoring the latitudes between me and my desk, the week of fishing ahead. Our captain’s classic Maya profile attracts my gaze: forehead sloping back from his predatory nose, lips and jaw stepping back below it. If his slant eyes had been any more crossed, he couldn’t have made his license. That’s a handsome combination, believe it or not. On the little Maya chicks in their minishifts with iridescent gloop on those cockeyes, it’s also highly erotic. Nothing like the oriental doll thing; these people have stone bones. Captain Estéban’s old grandmother could probably tow the Bonanza. . . .

I’m snapped awake by the cabin hitting my ear. Estéban is barking into his headset over a drumming racket of hail; the windows are dark gray.

One important noise is missing—the motor. I realize Estéban is fighting a dead plane. Thirty-six hundred; we’ve lost two thousand feet!

He slaps tank switches as the storm throws us around; I catch something about
gasolina
in a snarl that shows his big teeth. The Bonanza reels down. As he reaches for an overhead toggle, I see the fuel gauges are high. Maybe a clogged gravity feed line; I’ve heard of dirty gas down here. He drops the set; it’s a million to one nobody can read us through the storm at this range anyway. Twenty-five hundred—going down.

His electric feed pump seems to have cut in: the motor explodes—quits—explodes—and quits again for good. We are suddenly out of the bottom of the clouds. Below us is a long white line almost hidden by rain: the reef. But there isn’t any beach behind it, only a big meandering bay with a few mangrove flats—and it’s coming up at us fast.

This is going to be bad, I tell myself with great unoriginality. The women behind me haven’t made a sound. I look back and see they’ve braced down with their coats by their heads. With a stalling speed around eighty, all this isn’t much use, but I wedge myself in.

Estéban yells some more into his set, flying a falling plane. He is doing one jesus job, too—as the water rushes up at us he dives into a hair-raising turn and hangs us into the wind—with a long pale ridge of sandbar in front of our nose.

Where in hell he found it I never know. The Bonanza mushes down, and we belly-hit with a tremendous tearing crash—bounce—hit again—and everything slews wildly as we flat-spin into the mangroves at the end of the bar. Crash! Clang! The plane is wrapping itself into a mound of strangler fig with one wing up. The crashing quits with us all in one piece. And no fire. Fantastic.

Captain Estéban pries open his door, which is now in the roof. Behind me a woman is repeating quietly, “Mother. Mother.” I climb up the floor and find the girl trying to free herself from her mother’s embrace. The woman’s eyes are closed. Then she opens them and suddenly lets go, sane as soap. Estéban starts hauling them out. I grab the Bonanza’s aid kit and scramble out after them into brilliant sun and wind. The storm that hit us is already vanishing up the coast.

“Great landing, Captain.”

“Oh,
yes!
It was beautiful.” The women are shaky, but no hysteria. Estéban is surveying the scenery with the expression his ancestors used on the Spaniards.

If you’ve been in one of these things, you know the slow-motion inanity that goes on. Euphoria, first. We straggle down the fig tree and out onto the sandbar in the roaring hot wind, noting without alarm that there’s nothing but miles of crystalline water on all sides. It’s only a foot or so deep, and the bottom is the olive color of silt. The distant shore around us is all flat mangrove swamp, totally uninhabitable.

“Bahía Espíritu Santo.” Estéban confirms my guess that we’re down in that huge water wilderness. I always wanted to fish it.

“What’s all that smoke?” The girl is pointing at the plumes blowing around the horizon.

“Alligator hunters,” says Estéban. Maya poachers have left burn-offs in the swamps. It occurs to me that any signal fires we make aren’t going to be too conspicuous. And I now note that our plane is well-buried in the mound of fig. Hard to see it from the air.

Just as the question of how the hell we get out of here surfaces in my mind, the older woman asks composedly, “If they didn’t hear you, Captain, when will they start looking for us? Tomorrow?”

“Correct,” Estéban agrees dourly. I recall that air-sea rescue is fairly informal here. Like, keep an eye open for Mario, his mother says he hasn’t been home all week.

It dawns on me we may be here quite some while.

Furthermore, the diesel-truck noise on our left is the Caribbean piling back into the mouth of the bay. The wind is pushing it at us, and the bare bottoms on the mangroves show that our bar is covered at high tide. I recall seeing a full moon this morning in—believe it, St. Louis—which means maximal tides. Well, we can climb up in the plane. But what about drinking water?

There’s a small splat! behind me. The older woman has sampled the bay. She shakes her head, smiling ruefully. It’s the first real expression on either of them; I take it as the signal for introductions. When I say I’m Don Fenton from St. Louis, she tells me their name is Parsons, from Bethesda, Maryland. She says it so nicely I don’t at first notice we aren’t being given first names. We all compliment Captain Estéban again.

His left eye is swelled shut, an inconvenience beneath his attention as a Maya, but Mrs. Parsons spots the way he’s bracing his elbow in his ribs.

“You’re hurt, Captain.”

“
Roto
—I think is broken.” He’s embarrassed at being in pain. We get him to peel off his Jaime shirt, revealing a nasty bruise in his superb dark-bay torso.

“Is there tape in that kit, Mr. Fenton? I’ve had a little first-aid training.”

She begins to deal competently and very impersonally with the tape. Miss Parsons and I wander to the end of the bar and have a conversation which I am later to recall acutely.