Promised Land (14 page)

As the steady scrape began again, the spider relaxed. But its movements were as tortuous as my own. The interference between the scraping of the slab and the music was so very slight that it barely gave the spider any freedom of will at all. All these movements were almost entirely the work of reflex.

Finally, the slab was clear of the spider's bulk, resting where the extended foot had been resting only a few moments before. I gripped it securely in my arms, and measured the position of the spider's head and thorax with my eyes, until I was sure I knew exactly what trajectory the boulder was to be called upon to take.

Then I began to lift. For one horrible instant I was afraid that my fatigued muscles were going to prove inadequate to the task. But my wind-assisted strength merely needed gathering. I lifted the slab, past my waist, past my chest, and finally above my head. Its sheer mass made me sway a little, and there was an inevitable pause between chest and head as I prepared my arms for the extension and shifted my grip. Both these factors modified the smoothness of the action, and by the time I released the missile into its downward course, the spider had moved, with a slithering shuffle of its eight legs, fully three feet toward me. The rock bounced, not onto the junction of head and thorax as I had intended, but onto the abdomen. It landed edge first, the exoskeleton cracked audibly, and the rock pivoted about the point of impact and fell forward. The other edge smashed the head into the ground only an inch from my toes. I had to move backward. The spider died instantly, but its reflexes did not. Its legs vibrated convulsively for ten seconds or more. One of them shook itself clean off the body.

Except for the panpipes, absolute silence followed the thud of the falling boulder, but the death throes of the crypto-arachnid and my backward step and the fall of the rock all added up to a considerable, if localised, flurry of movement.

When I turned around—slowly—to look at the other spiders, they were all several feet closer. They had been caught again in the restored stillness, but they had all made ground.

The nearest one was now only seven or eight yards from Micheal, and the most distant was not more than thirty. It would have taken a mathematical genius to work out how much each of them would gain every time I tried to kill one. At a rough guess, I thought I might just make it if I conceded them no more than the minimum each time. But I didn't have a monopoly on movement. Every time one of the creatures died, it would make its contribution to our collective downfall.

As I stooped to pick up the slab from the wreckage of the arachnid's foreparts, it responded to my touch with another burst of purely automatic movement. I saw another spider go through a half-shuffle which brought it eighteen inches forward in its course.

I knew, also, that the rock would get heavier the farther I carried it, that my movements must inevitably lose their smoothness.

And the tune faltered.

This shock was so totally unexpected and so hideously ominous that I failed to drown my reaction. I dropped the slab. If it had fallen on my toes, it would have been the death of me. But my legs were widely spaced, and it fell between them.

The spiders gained another stride apiece.

It was hopeless.

I froze immediately, but freezing didn't do much good. Micheal was losing the thread of his music. He was giving way. The disease was getting to him. His concentration was breaking.

He rallied, but I knew that any chance I might have had to kill the spiders was now stone dead.

I had one possible escape. I could walk away,
very
slowly, through the ring of predators, to the edge of the forest. I could duck between the trees and I could run like hell. Even if they chased me, I had a good chance of dodging them. I could cross the river. They couldn't.

I'm no hero. I never claimed to be a hero. If I'd started immediately, I could have made it. But I didn't start. Not because I'm a hero, but rather the reverse. I was scared. I hesitated. And lost my chance.

Micheal faltered again, and the spiders came on. They came very slowly, but they kept coming. They weren't in any hurry, and perhaps it was still worth a try at the dead run. But I couldn't help myself. I backed up in front of them, and before I had time to think I was right next to Micheal.

I looked down at him, and I looked over his shoulder at Mercede. He was just about to fall over. She was sleeping like a baby, oblivious to it all.

I took the panpipes from his lips. Gently. He didn't resist.

As the enemy prepared for the kill, I put them to my own lips.

I think it's your show, I said to the wind. I'm tone deaf.

The wind was good
. We weren't up to Micheal's standard, but we didn't have his trick fingers. We were good enough for the spiders, though—I guess they had simple minds. We didn't attempt to play exactly the same piece of music—we settled for something a little simpler and a lot more repetitive. We hadn't the time or the ability to sort out all the variations on our theme and string them together. Once we knew we had something that worked, we set about milking it to death. We tried to duplicate Micheal's style, and in that we seemed to be moderately effective.

I felt somewhat detached from the whole process. It was the first time I'd actually sat back within my body and let the wind do his stuff. I was unconscious in the Drift when he landed the
Hooded Swan
, and all the rest of his work had been covert or subversive.

It was an odd feeling to be a conscious passenger, but it didn't feel anywhere near as bad as I'd expected it might. It was almost as though I was frozen still, like the spiders—not against my will, but because I felt that I daren't move or even think too loudly in case the inner conflict wrecked the wind's co-ordination. I was bent on becoming a mental foetus—as small and as insignificant as possible.

The important thing was that I was willing, and that I was easy in my mind about the whole thing. I didn't exactly love the wind, but you don't have to be in love to know you're on the same side. I still had my lingering fears about being ‘taken over,' but familiarity had taken the edge off the fear. The wind and I had lived too long together to be at war.

I stared coolly through the eyes whose movements I no longer controlled. I could see four spiders. One was dead. That left three lurking behind us. I couldn't remember which one was which and which one was the closest. I thought it was one of the ones I couldn't see.

I felt Micheal sag to the ground beside me. He lay very still, his body curled around my feet.

Once the novelty of the situation wore off, I became uncomfortably aware of the fact that what we were doing had a distinct flavour of staving off the inevitable. It was difficult to believe that Micheal or Mercede could recover sufficiently within the foreseeable future to get up and start killing spiders, and equally difficult to believe that we could get the spiders before they got us even if they did. We couldn't keep playing forever, and the spiders certainly weren't going to go away if and when they got bored. I wondered what the galactic record for long-distance pipe-playing was, and whether the wind's ability to make better use of my body than I could would help us to break it.

Probably not, I decided. He had a lot more on his mind now than subtle tinkering with the autonomic nervous system. He probably wouldn't be able to exercise anywhere near the same fineness of control. While he was in full charge, he was probably only a shade more efficient than me. It was undoubtedly possible for me to take over his role as he was taking over mine.

But I didn't know how.

We were, implicitly, waiting for help. We had no reason to assume that any would be forthcoming in the near future. The forest people would undoubtedly return. But when?

The blackness of night arrived with its usual haste, and robbed us even of the small comfort that seeing the immobility of the enemy had afforded us. There was no light at all except for the mute red glow of the embers of our dying fire. As time went by even the redness faded away, and in the end we were left in the pitch darkness.

The song of the pipes went on and on.

I began to hate it.

Fear began to gather itself within me once again. My time sense seemed to be distorted, and logic told me that more time had passed than I had actually ‘experienced'. But the time factor was nevertheless beginning to get to me. In darkness, I was subjected to a very harsh exercise in sensory deprivation. It was not so much that I could not receive any sensory input, but that I had the feeling of not being able to use my senses. I was impotent within my own body—wilfully so—and the darkness heightened that feeling. It was a situation very conducive to fear, and I couldn't help gradually descending into it as it tried to take possession of my consciousness.

I knew that the fear itself was dangerous. Fear affects not only the mind, but also the physiology. The source of fear may be located in the imagination, but the process of
feeling
scared inevitably co-opts the resources of the whole body. In the body, fear is glandular imbalance—adrenaline, vasopressor hormone imbalance, followed by pituitary imbalance. The vascular system carrying the hormones is itself the major site of reaction, but you sense it primarily in your skin. It's hot or cold, dry or sweating, stretched or heavy. Ultimate fear can black you out, or stop your heart, or...

If the fear that I was allowing to grow got too powerful, it could rob the wind of his own presence of mind. If I lost control of myself, it would have exactly the same effect as his losing control. It could kill us both. He was in the driving seat, but I knew only too well that the man in the back seat was very much a part of what went on in the car. In the Halcyon Drift, I had been forced to black out before the wind could take over, because I was consumed and paralysed by stark terror, and there was nothing to be done with the body while my imagination was feeding it fear.

Something awful could happen here, if I allowed it to.

I fought.

Side by side, the wind and I waged war on circumstance and on our own weaknesses. If the wind gave me any active help, I was unaware of it. If I helped the wind in any way, it was not by conscious volition. But even if there was no overlap between the roles in our collective fight, the mutualism of the moment was obvious, and it made an impression on us both. It brought us far closer together than we could possibly have come by sensible and sane agreement. We were forced together, under pressure, welded to one another by desperation and the threat of bodily death.

The most logical and persistent of all my worries regarding the wind had always been the fact that bodily death was absolute only for me—he could go on to a new host. I had always feared that he might therefore be more careless of my life than I. That night, I found out that I was wrong. While attached to my mind the wind was
committed
, no less than I. He might have a cat's nine lives, but he lived them one at a time. In adapting to my brain for the purposes of living therein, he had become completely (but reversibly) humanised. He was forced by the nature of things to exactly the same level of commitment that I was. The logical, ‘objective' view of his priorities was quite wrong. I discovered that while we were fighting together in the forest.

After that, it was no longer possible for me to remain apart from the wind. Inevitably, this moment was the turning point in the pathology of my own alienation.

I knew that if we were to survive, I would never be exactly the same again.

I conquered my fear.

The music played on and on, and we were steady enough and stable enough now to be sure that we could play until we dropped or until we could no longer co-ordinate the music sufficiently to paralyse the minds of the spiders.

We began to look forward to morning. It was a useful target. We knew that in the morning we would have to play ourselves through the day looking forward to evening, but that didn't matter. We had to take our markers one at a time. There was no point in contemplating the infinite or the indefinite. The problem was very definitely finite.

Night on Chao Phrya, of course, was not nearly as long as night on most of the other worlds where I had spent time during my years of wandering with Lapthorn. But it passed even more quickly than that because of the disorientation of my temporal perception. I think that on many worlds, our collective mental strength might not have sustained us through the night. Dawn, however, gave us extra strength. It was a blessing to be able to see again, even though we already knew what we were going to see. It helped our hopes to rise.

That extra burst of hope might well have saved our lives.

A few minutes after dawn, Micheal revived, and rolled lethargically away from my feet. He didn't get up. He remembered the spiders, and lay quite still, with his eyes open. I was very glad indeed to see that he was alive and well.

Mercede awoke also. Before she had a chance to open her eyes and react, Micheal had gripped her arm, and was talking to her. The words tumbled out in a fast, hissing stream. She absorbed it all, and there was not the slightest sign of panic. She did not reply. She remained passive and quiet, and the crypto-arachnids did no more than stir throughout the entire exchange.

I could not see Micheal's face once he had turned his head to speak to Mercede, so I could not savour the expression which I imagined was there. I could only guess what he had thought on awakening to find that I had played the spiders into quiescence and kept them there all night.

I think that Micheal was gathering his strength. I feel sure that as soon as he was able he would have tried to do something. What it would have been, I don't know. He knew more about the spiders than I did, and he might know something which would enable him to kill them without permitting them the freedom which had resulted from my method of attempted extermination. It is far from impossible that he would have chosen simply to take Mercede into the forest and save himself and his sister. I wouldn't have blamed him. I might well have done the same myself.

But Micheal did not need his strength.

Just as I caught the first ostentatious hint of weakness and distortion in the relentless mournful cadence which the wind was repeating over and over again, a beam of light cut a line through the dim purple morning and one of the spiders burst into flame. My eyes were dazzled, and I didn't see the rest very clearly, but I know that the beam swung, and the spiders were freed from the spell.

They moved, but they had no chance at all. The gun stopped its constant stream of fire only once, while Danel moved it past us. Then he burned the three which were at our backs.

All seven were aflame within a matter of three or four seconds. It was a beautiful piece of gunplay.

My body was suddenly my own again, and I swung around to make sure that everything was still and safe. Then I whipped around again to face Danel.

It all happened too fast. I just collapsed. As I went down, I saw someone running forward from the trees, overtaking Danel.

It was Alyne.

The panpipes dropped from my fingers and my hip landed on top of them as I folded up.

They broke.

I fainted.