Jack Vance - Gaean Reach 01 (7 page)

Jemasze went back for his pack; the party once more set out toward the north, leaving behind the dry watercourse and the Blue corpses.

Methuen sank behind the far Lucimers; the four made camp on the slope of a butte. To avoid attracting the attention of such Uldras as might still be near, they built no fire, and supped on emergency rations and water. The sky faded through phases of vermilion, scarlet, ruby and purple; dusk fell across the landscape. Schaine went to sit by Elvo Glissam. “How is your arm?”

Elvo looked down at the gash. “It aches a bit, but it could be far worse. I also resent that erjin kicking me in the ribs.”

Schaine said gloomily: “I wonder if you’ll ever forgive me for inviting you to Morningswake.”

Elvo Glissam replied and in so doing initiated a conversation which, when later he consulted his recollections, seemed more unreal and incongruous than any other aspect of the adventure.

“I forgive you right now,” said Elvo Glissam. “If nothing else, the trip is an education. I see myself from a new perspective.”

Schaine objected vigorously. “Not at all. The surroundings have changed. You’re the same!”

“It amounts to the same thing. Delicate sensibilities are of small assistance when a person is fighting for his life.”

Schaine glanced from Kelse, propped against a tree trunk with what she suspected to be a half-smile on his face, to Gerd Jemasze who sat on a flat rock, arms around knees brooding across the twilight; and she felt impelled to put Elvo Glissam’s self-deprecation into proper perspective. “In civilized surroundings it’s not necessary to fight for your life.”

Kelse chuckled mirthlessly. Schaine looked at him coldly. “Did I say something foolish?”

“A fire department isn’t necessary except when there’s a fire.”

“Civilization is a very normal ordinary condition,” said Schaine. “Civilized people don’t need to fight for their lives.”

“Not often,” said Kelse laconically. “But you can’t kill a Blue by invoking an abstraction.”

“Did I suggest as much?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I agree that I must be confused, since I have no such recollection.”

Kelse shrugged and raised his eyes to the sky, as if to indicate that he did not care to pursue the topic any further. But he said, “You used the word ‘civilization’, which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.”

Schaine was taken somewhat aback. She said: “That’s rather all-inclusive.”

“I don’t think so,” said Kelse mildly.

Elvo Glissam said, “I can’t understand your objection to ideas.”

“I can’t either,” said Schaine. “I think Kelse is indulging in whimsey.”

“Not altogether,” said Kelse. “Urban folk, dealing as they do in ideas and abstractions, become conditioned to unreality. Then, wherever the fabric of civilization breaks, these people are as helpless as fish out of water.”

Elvo Glissam heaved a sigh. “What could be more unreal than sitting out here in the wilderness discussing civilization? I can’t believe it. In passing, I might point out that Kelse’s remarks indicate considerable skill in urbane and civilized abstraction.”

Kelse laughed. “Also in passing, I might mention that urbane folk make up the membership of the Redemptionist Alliance, the Vitatis Cult, the Cosmic Peace Movement, Panortheism, a dozen more: all motivated by abstractions four or five or six times removed from reality.”

“Reality, so-called, is itself an abstraction,” Elvo Glissam remarked.

“It’s an abstraction with a difference, because it can hurt, as when your sky-car comes down in the wilderness with a hundred miles to walk. That’s real. Aunt Val’s chamber of winds at Villa Mirasol isn’t real.”

Schaine said: “You’re simply beating a horse to death. Because a person can deal with ideas doesn’t signify that, ergo, he’s helpless.”

“In an urban environment he’s quite safe; in fact, he prospers. But such environments are fragile as cobwebs, and when they break—chaos!”

Gerd Jemasze joined the conversation. “Reflect on human history.”

“I’ve done so,” said Kelse. “History describes the destruction of a long series of urban civilizations because the citizens preferred intellectualism and abstraction to competence in basic skills, such as self-defense. Or attack, for that matter.”

Schaine said in disgust: “You’ve become awfully crabbed and illiberal, Kelse. Father certainly stamped his opinions upon you.”

“Your theory has its obverse,” said Elvo Glissam. “From this viewpoint, history becomes a succession of cases in which barbarians, renouncing crassness, develop a brilliant civilization.”

“Usually destroying older civilizations in the process,” remarked Kelse.

“Or exploiting other less capable barbarians. Uaia is a case in point. Here a group of civilized men attacked and plundered the barbarians. The barbarians were helpless in the face of energy weapons and sky-cars—all contrived through the use of abstractions, and, incidentally, built by urbanites.”

Gerd Jemasze chuckled, a sound which annoyed Schaine. She said: “These are merely facts.”

“But not all the facts. The barbarians weren’t plundered; they use their lands as freely as before. I must concede that torture and slavery have been discouraged.”

“Very well then,” said Elvo Glissam. “Imagine yourself an Uldra: disenfranchised and subject to alien law. What would you do?”

Gerd Jemasze pondered a moment or two. “I suppose it would depend on what I wanted. What I wanted I’d try to get.”

Before dawn the party was astir and away. A great reef of clouds obscured the east and the party walked in maroon gloom. At noon lightning began to strike down at the buttes, now lonely shapes in the southern distance, and draughts of dank air blew north across the plain. Halfway into the afternoon a rain squall raced past, drenching the group to the skin and laying the dust; shortly after, the sun found gaps in the clouds and sent remarkable pink rays slanting down at the ground. Jemasze led the way, accommodating his pace to that of Kelse, whose limp had become somewhat more noticeable. Schaine and Elvo Glissam sauntered along to the rear. Had the circumstances been different, had her father been alive and Kelse not so obviously contriving each separate step by an effort of will, she might almost have enjoyed the adventure.

The land sloped down into a sink paved with pale hardpan. At the far verge stood a cluster of sandstone pinnacles and beyond, an irregular scarp of pink, mauve and russet sandstone. Schaine called ahead to Kelse: “There’s Bottom Edge!”

“Almost like home,” said Kelse.

Schaine excitedly told Elvo Glissam: “Morningswake starts at the brink of the cliff. Beyond is our land—all the way north to the Volwodes.”

Elvo Glissam shook his head in sad disapproval, and Schaine looked at him wonderingly. She thought a moment, reflecting upon what she had said, then laughed but made no comment. Clearly she was not a Redemptionist by instinct, or by innate conviction…How to reconcile her love for Morningswake with the guilty suspicion that she had no right to the property? Kelse and Gerd Jemasze had no such qualms. On an impulse she asked Elvo Glissam: “Suppose you owned Morningswake: what would you do?”

Elvo Glissam smiled and shook his head. “It’s always easier to relinquish somebody else’s property…I’d like to believe that my principles would dominate my avarice.”

“So you’d give up Morningswake?”

“I honestly don’t know. I hope that’s what I’d do.”

Schaine pointed toward a cluster of tung-beetle mounds about a hundred yards west. “Look: in the shadow to the right! You wanted to see a wild erjin—there it is!”

The erjin stood seven feet tall, with massive arms banded with stripes of black and yellow fur. Tufts of stiff golden fiber stood above the head; folds of gunmetal cartilage almost concealed the four small eyes in the neck under the jutting frontal bone. The creature stood negligently, showing neither fear nor hostility. Gerd Jemasze and Kelse became aware of the beast. Kelse stared in fascination, and slowly brought forth his gun.

Elvo asked in dismay: “Is he going to shoot it? It’s such a magnificent creature!”

“He’s always hated erjins—worse since he lost his arm and leg.”

“But this one isn’t threatening us. It’s almost murder.”

Gerd Jemasze suddenly turned and fired to the east at a pair of erjins lunging forward from a thicket of greasebush. One sprawled forward and fell only four feet from Schaine and Elvo Glissam, to lie with great six-fingered hands twitching; the other jerked up into a grotesque backward somersault and fell with a thump. The first erjin, who had acted as a decoy, slipped behind the tung mounds before Kelse could aim his gun. Jemasze ran off to the side to get another shooting angle, but the creature had disappeared.

Elvo Glissam stood looking down at the quivering hulk of the near erjin. He noticed the hand-palps, as sensitive as human fingers, and the talons which extended themselves when the erjin made a fist. He examined the tuft of bronze bristles on the scalp, which some authorities declared to be telepathy receptors. Another bound and the creature would have been at his throat. In a subdued voice he said to Gerd Jemasze, “That was a close call…Do the erjins often use tricks like that?”

Jemasze nodded curtly. “They’re intelligent brutes, and unforgiving. How they can be domesticated is a mystery to me.”

“Maybe the secret was Uther Madduc’s ‘wonderful joke’.”

“I don’t know. I plan to find out.”

Kelse asked: “How do you propose to do that?”

“As soon as we get to Morningswake we’ll fly back to the Sturdevant and rescue the log,” said Gerd Jemasze. “Then we’ll have an idea where he went.”

The afternoon waned. At sunset the party camped among the sandstone pinnacles, with the southern edge of Morningswake Domain still three miles to the north. Jemasze stalked, killed and cleaned a ten-pound bustard, the wild descendant of fowl imported from beyond the stars. Schaine and Elvo Glissam gathered fuel and built a fire, and the four toasted chunks of the bird on twigs.

“Tomorrow we’ll find water,” said Gerd. “Three or four streams cross South Morningswake, so I recall.”

“It’s about ten miles to South Station,” said Kelse. “There’s a windmill and maybe a few stores there. But no radio, worse luck.”

“Where are the Aos?”

“They might be anywhere, but I suspect they’re moving north. No help for it; we’ve still got sixty miles to go.”

“How’s your leg holding up?”

“Not too good. But I’ll get there.”

Elvo Glissam leaned back and lay staring up at the stars. His own life, he thought, seemed relatively simple compared to that of a land-baron…Schaine! What went on in her mind? One moment she seemed intensely subtle and sympathetic, then naïve, then caught up in some emotion beyond his knowing. Beyond question she was brave and kind and cheerful. He could well imagine passing the rest of his life in her company…At Morningswake? He was not so sure. Would she agree to live elsewhere? He was not sure of this either…Three days more of this arduous marching. He wished he could in some manner help Kelse. Perhaps in the morning he’d inconspicuously take part of Kelse’s backpack and hang it on his own.

In the morning Elvo Glissam put his plan into effect. Kelse noticed and protested, but Elvo Glissam said: “This is just simple common sense. You’re already working twice as hard as I am, and it’s in everybody’s interest that you stay healthy.”

Gerd Jemasze said, “Glissam’s right, Kelse. I’d rather carry your pack than carry you.”

Kelse said no more; the group set forth and an hour later reached the base of the South Rim. By a dry gulch they ascended five hundred feet, then toiled another hundred feet up a face of rotting conglomerate and finally stood at the lip. Behind spread the Retent, melting into the southern haze; ahead the ground fell away to a pleasant valley grown with green-gum, dragon-eye, slender black-green gadroon, and copses of orange vandalia. A mile to the north the sunlight glinted on a shallow pond. “Morningswake!” cried Schaine huskily. “We’re home.”

“With about sixty miles to go,” said Kelse.

Jemasze looked back over the Retent. “We’re past the worst of it. The going should be easier.”

There was a day of silent trudging across the south prairie; another day was spent toiling up and down the Tourmaline Hills. Kelse now moved in awkward hops and lurches. There was a long sweaty morning in the marsh north of Skyflower Lake. At noon the party struggled through a thicket of coarse vines to reach solid terrain. They halted to rest. Kelse looked ahead. “Fourteen more miles…We’ll never make it tonight. Perhaps you’d better go on to the house and send a wagon back for me.”

“I’ll wait here with you,” said Schaine. “It’s a good idea.”

Gerd Jemasze said: “It would be a good idea—except that we’re being kept under observation.” He pointed toward the sky. “Three times in the last two days I’ve seen a sky-shark hanging in the clouds.”

All stared toward the sky. “I don’t see anything,” said Schaine.

“Right now he’s in the fold of that cumulus cloud.”

“But what could he want? If he’s hostile, why doesn’t he try to shoot us?”

“I would guess that he wants to take us alive. Or some of us alive. If we separated, the chances would be much improved. There might even be another party of Hunge on the way to intercept us before we reach Morningswake.”

Schaine said in a hushed voice: “Would they dare come in so far from the Retent? Our Aos would kill them.”

“The sky-shark would observe the Aos and provide warning.”

Elvo Glissam licked his lips. “I wouldn’t care to be captured now. Or even killed.”

Kelse struggled to his feet. “Let’s get started.”

Twenty minutes later Gerd Jemasze once more searched the landscape. Looking to the northwest he became still. He lowered the binoculars and pointed. “Uldras. About twenty.”

Schaine peered wearily through the pink dust-haze. More fighting, more killing; and in this region of thickets and clumps of vandalia there was small hope—in fact, no hope—of beating off an attack. Fourteen miles to Morningswake. So near and so far.