Land and Overland - Omnibus (69 page)

Toller gave an involuntary cry of protest as the fighter streaked towards the gondola and it became obvious that Berise had no intention of changing course. Barely two seconds before impact she leapt off the machine. It sledged through the wall of the gondola and struck the centrally mounted engine, driving the entire structure forward in a tumbling movement which wrapped large pieces of the still-burning balloon around it. An acceleration strut broke free and flailed off to one side while tethered soldiers were snatched into the turmoil by coiling ropes. A moment later there came a series of whooshing explosions—typical of the pikon-halvell reaction—followed by a great billowing of greenish flame. Toller knew at once that nobody aboard the gondola could possibly have escaped death.

Berise, having kicked herself into a trajectory only slightly different from that of her fighter, had disappeared into the opaque seethings of smoke, becoming lost to Toller's view. Cold with apprehension, senses overloaded, he fed his engine and flew in a semi-circle around the slow-spinning chaos, reaching the dark blue serenity beyond. At first there was no sign of Berise, then he saw a twinkling white mote which was changing position against the background of stars and silver spirals. His glasses showed that it was Berise, perhaps a mile distant and still receding, still using up the energy imparted to her by the fighter's speed.

He went after her, dreading the prospect of finding a mutilated body, adjusting his speed and direction as he drew near. The fighter had begun to wallow as it closed in on Berise, and he had to raise himself on the footrest in order to grip her arm and pull her towards him. He knew immediately that she was alive and well because she expertly took command of their relative motion, guiding herself in such a way that she ended up astride of him, face to face, arms around his neck.

He saw the manic ecstasy on her face, felt the quivering tension of her body despite the bulkiness of her skysuit, and in that moment there was nothing they could do but kiss. Berise's lips were cold, even her tongue was cold, but Toller—the man who had forsworn sexual passion for ever—was unable to stop his groin lifting up against her again and again. She clamped her legs around him and rode him eagerly for the duration of the kiss, then used both hands to push his face away from hers.

"Was I good, Toller?" she breathed. "Was that the best thing you ever saw?"

"Yes, yes, but you're lucky to be alive."

"I know, I
know
!" She laughed and returned to the kiss and they drifted that way for a long time, lost among the stars and luminous swirls of their private universe.

For the most part it was quiet on board the skyship. Toller had carried out the inversion manoeuvre some two hundred miles below the weightless zone, and now the ship was gently falling towards Overland. During the next few days little would be required other than periodic injections of hot gas to give the huge balloon a positive internal pressure which would keep it from falling in on itself. The bitterness of the aerial element was mitigated to some extent by a crystal-powered heater and the fact that it was now standard practice for gondolas to be lined with vellum to prevent the ingress of chill air through chinks in the walls and deck.

It was, however, still very cold within the circumscribed space of the gondola, and when Berise removed her blouse her nipples gathered into brown peaks. Toller, who was already naked and ensconced in layers of eiderdown, extended an inviting hand to her, but she held back for the moment. She was kneeling beside him, gripping one of the transverse lines which were a vital safety feature in the virtual absence of gravity.

"Are you sure about this?" she said. "You haven't been at all discreet." She was referring to Toller having announced his intention of presenting her to the King, and—instead of returning to Overland by fallbag and parachute—commandeering a skyship for just the two of them.

"Are you delaying in this way to give me the opportunity to change my mind?" He smiled and glanced at the globes of her breasts, which were buoyantly beautiful in a way which would have been impossible in normal gravity. "Or is it to prevent me changing my mind?"

Berise placed a forearm across her breasts. "I'm thinking of the Lady Gesalla. It is almost certain that she will be informed, by somebody, and I have no wish for you to look on me afterwards with cold eyes."

"The Lady Gesalla and I live in different worlds," Toller said. "We both do what it is in us to do."

"In that case…" Berise squirmed her cold little body into the quilts beside him, making him gasp with the touch of her cold fingers.

In the days and nights that followed, while the meteors flickered all around, Toller rediscovered vital aspects of his being, learned the extent to which his life had become arid and deficient in recent years. The experience was unbearably sweet and unbearably bitter at the same time, because an inner voice informed him that he was committing a form of self-murder—a spiritual suicide—while the meteors flickered all around.

By the time Sondeweere had been away for eighty days Bartan Drumme had developed a new pattern of living.

Each morning he went out and made some attempt to cultivate the nearer portions of his farm—that was a duty he could not ignore—but his real preoccupation was with his hoard of glass and ceramic demijohns, the source of his sustenance and comfort. The production and consumption of wine claimed most of his waking hours. He had learned to dispose of such niceties as using fresh yeast and of waiting for the wine to clear, the latter being an exercise in pointless aesthetics which had no effect on a beverage's alcohol content.

As soon as a jar of wine had ceased working he siphoned it off the dregs and poured in a new batch of juice expressed from fruit or berries, restarting the fermentation with the sludge of the old yeast. The yeast quickly became contaminated with wild strains, yielding wines which were marred by sourness and off-flavours, but the method had the overriding virtue of being
fast.

Efficiency of production was all that mattered to Bartan. He frequently became ill and was racked by diarrhoea caused by drinking his murky potions, but that seemed a small price to pay for the ability to escape his guilt and to sleep the long night through. The bargain was enhanced by the fact that he had little need of solid food, the bubble-ringed glasses providing most of the nourishment he required to get through the weary succession of days.

Now that even the Phoratere family had left the Basket he had no companionship from other farmers, but he had given up riding into New Minnett to spend time in the tavern. The journey had begun to seem tedious and lacking in purpose when he had all he could drink at home, and in any case he could detect a new lack of warmth in his reception. Reeve Karrodall had counselled him about his drinking and personal appearance, and subsequently had become a much less congenial person with whom to while away the hours.

He was returning from the fields one day, just before sunset, when he noticed a flurry of movement ahead of him in the dust of the path. Closer inspection revealed that it was a crawler, the first he had seen in a long time. The glistening brown creature was labouring along the path in the direction of the house, with occasional flashes of pallid grey from its underside as it clambered over pebbles.

Bartan stared at it for a moment, his mouth twitching in revulsion, then looked around for a large stone. He found one which required two hands to lift, and dashed it down on the crawler. With his gaze averted in case he glimpsed the sickening result of his handiwork, he stepped over the stone and continued on his way. There were many varieties of small life forms to be found in the soil of Overland, most of them repugnant to his eye, but he usually left them alone to go about their business in peace. The sole exception was the crawler, which he had a compulsion to destroy on sight.

The house and outbuildings were bathed in a mellow red-gold light as he drew near, and he felt the familiar sinking of his spirits at the prospect of spending the night there alone. This was the worst time of the day, when he was met by silence in the house in place of Sondeweere's laughter, and the darkening dome of the sky seemed to reverberate with emptiness. The whole world felt empty at sunset. He passed the pigsty, which was also silent because he had turned the animals out into the wild to fend for themselves, and crossed the yard to the house. On opening the front door he paused, his heart beginning to pound as he realised the place
felt
different.

"Sondy!" he called out, giving way to an irrational impulse. He darted through the kitchen and flung open the bedroom door. The room beyond was empty, with no change in the squalor he had allowed to overwhelm it. Downcast and feeling like a fool, he nevertheless returned to the front entrance and scanned the surroundings. Everything was as usual in the sad coppery light, the only sign of movement coming from the bluehorn which was grazing near the orchard.

Bartan sighed, shaking his head over the bout of idiocy. He had a throbbing pain in his temples, legacy of the wine he had drunk in the afternoon, and he felt parched. He selected a full demijohn from the array in the corner, picked up a cup and returned outside to the bench by the door. The wine tasted less palatable than usual, but he drank the first two cupfuls greedily, pouring them down like water in order to win the blessed muzziness which dulled intellect and emotion. He had a feeling he was going to need it more than ever in the hours to come.

As darkness gathered and the heavens began to throng with their nightly display, he picked out Farland—the only green-tinted object in the firmament—and allowed his gaze to dwell on it. He still retained all his scepticism for religion, but of late had begun to understand the comforts it could offer. Assuming that Sondeweere was dead, it would be so good to believe, or even half-believe, that she had merely taken the High Path to the outer world and was beginning a new existence there. A simple reincarnation without continuance of memory or personality, which was what the Alternist religion postulated, was in many ways indistinguishable from straightforward death—but it offered
something.
It offered the hope that he had not totally destroyed a wonderful human life with his stubbornness and arrogance, that in the eternity which lay ahead he and Sondeweere would meet again, perhaps many times, and that he would be able to make amends to her in some way. The fact that they would not consciously recognise each other, and yet might respond as soul mates, unaccountably drawn to each other, made the whole concept romantically beautiful and poignant…

Tears flooded Bartan's eyes, expanding the image of Farland into consecutive rings filled with radial prismatic needles. He gulped down more wine to ease the choking pain in his throat.

Let me know that you are up there, Sondy,
he pleaded in his thoughts, surrendering to the fantasy.
If
only you could grant me a sign that you still exist, I too would begin to live again.

He continued drinking as Farland drifted down the sky. Now and again he lost consciousness through exhaustion and increasing intoxication, but when he opened his eyes the green planet was always centred in his field of vision, sometimes as a swirling luminous bubble, at others in the semblance of a circular chalcedonic gem, slowly rotating, striking a languorous green fire from a thousand facets. It seemed to grow bigger, and bigger, finally to develop a mobile core which displayed a creamy luminance, a core which by imperceptible stages evolved into the likeness of a woman's face.

Bartan,
Sondeweere said, not in an ordinary voice, but an inversion of sound in which one kind of silence was imposed on another.
Poor Bartan, I have been aware of your pain, and I am glad that I have at last succeeded in reaching you. You must desist from blaming yourself, and punishing yourself, and thus squandering your one-and-only life. You have no reason to reproach yourself on my account.

"But I brought you to this place," Bartan mumbled, unastonished, playing the game of dreams. "I am responsible for your death."

If I were dead I would be unable to speak to you.

Bartan replied in his fuddled obstinacy. "The crime remains. I deprived you of a life—the one we should have shared—and you were so lovely, so sweet, so good…"

You must remember me as I actually was, Bartan. Do not fuel your self-pity by imagining that I was anything but a very ordinary woman.

"So good, so pure…"

Bartan! It may help you if I make you aware that I was never faithful to you. Glave Trinchil was only one of the men from whom I took my pleasures. There were many of them—including my Uncle Jop…

"That isn't true! I have dreamed foul lies into your mouth." On another level of Bartan's drugged consciousness there came the first stirrings of comprehension and wonder:
This is not a dream! This is really happening!

That is so, Bartan.
The non-voice, the modulations of silence, somehow conveyed wisdom and kindliness.
This is really happening, but it will not happen again—so mark well what I am
saying. I am not dead! You must stop torturing yourself and dissipating your one-and-only life. Put the past behind you and go on to other things. Above all, forget about me. Goodbye, Bartan…

The sound of his cup splintering on the ground brought Bartan to his feet. He stood there in the star-shot darkness, swaying and shivering, staring at Farland, which was now just above the western horizon. It registered as a point of pure green light without fringes or optical adornments—but for the first time he saw it as another planet, a
world,
a real place which was as large as Land or Overland, a seat of life.

"Sondy!" he called out, running a few futile paces forward.
"Sondy!"

Farland continued its slow descent to the rim of the world.

Bartan went back into the house, fetched another cup and returned to his bench. He filled the cup and drank from it in small, regular, relentless sips as the enigmatic mote of brilliance gradually extinguished itself, winking on the horizon. When it had vanished from sight he found that his mind had acquired a strange and precarious clarity, an ability—which had to fade soon—to deal with unearthly concepts. Momentous judgments and decisions had to be made quickly, before a vinous tide swept him into lasting unconsciousness.