Rediscovery (11 page)

MacAran bent to look beneath the shuttle. “We may all be okay, but the landing

gear sure isn’t,” he said. “And let’s not even talk about the holes in her hide.” He looked at the shuttle and shook his head. “I sure never expected to be the one to make the actual test of those crash protections—”

“You did fine, son,” Commander Britton said, putting a fatherly hand on

MacAran’s shoulder. “I don’t think anyone could have managed a better landing in conditions like this.”

MacAran straightened, and took a deep breath, gathering his authority around

him. “Well, crash procedures say you should all get your gear while I break out the survival equipment. So go in there one at a time and get what you can. Take your time.

We’re not going anywhere soon, that’s for sure.”

Dr. Lakshman grimly surveyed the snow blowing freely through what was left of

the shuttle’s cabin. “We’ll have to go somewhere,” she said. “In this weather, we won’t last long if we don’t find better shelter.”

Ysaye shivered, and not just from cold; she felt a chill of new fear. Out of one peril and into another. Had they come all this way only to freeze to death?

“No!”

Leonie started up out of deep sleep, sitting bolt up-right and staring into the

darkness.

She had fallen, from a great and terrible height—she had hit the ground at a

dizzying speed—

She still trembled with fear, and her head rang with the impact.

Except that there hadn’t been an impact. She was here, safe in her bed, in her suite in the Tower.

She held one icy hand against the side of her head, and blinked into the darkness.

A dream—or was it?

A dream of falling…one that left her trembling with the shock of a real blow.

Slowly her mind began to work again as she struggled back to reality. All her life she had heard that, if in a falling dream you stayed asleep and dreamed of striking the ground, you would not wake, but die in your sleep. She was obviously not dead, yet she had definitely struck something hard.

There was still a feeling of real collision, although—she had also heard that the will of a powerful enough telepath could transform illusion into reality. Which leant a certain verisimilitude to the tale of dying from a dream fall.

She shivered, her head aching. Had it been a dream, or could it have been an

earthquake, that had given her the illusion of falling in sleep and triggered the nightmare?

No, it could
not
have been an earthquake; she realized that as soon as the thought occurred. The Tower around her was altogether quiet. Without even thinking about it, reflexively, her mind scanned the Tower residents. Fiora slept quietly, and the little girls slept in Melora’s room, curled up together like kittens. Only the single young woman in the relays was awake, and she was so far from ordinary consciousness that she might as well have been on one of the faraway moons. The room around Leonie was cool and

quiet, a wind from outside barely ruffling the curtains. Yet the sense of disaster persisted, the feeling that somehow, she had struck hard against something.

As her shivering stopped, and she began to analyze her vague memories, strange

and alien phrases rang in her mind.

Landing gear’s gone…we’re not going anywhere…

But what was “landing gear,” and why would she want to go anywhere?

And now that her own fear was ebbing, why was she filled with this sense of

confusion? Why was her mind filled with a feeling of failure?

This was Dalereuth, not the mountains—there would be no snow here for some

time—so why were her memories plagued with the impression of bitter, punishing

winds, against which she must somehow battle for survival?

Wind shear.
Another alien phrase. What was that? And why did it fill her with such a sense of panic?

As she sought to wrest meaning from these unfamiliar words, she realized

suddenly that they were not in a language
she
knew, and that somehow she had sensed their meaning without knowing precisely how they were spoken.

That simple fact gave her a grasp on a portion of the truth, and the beginning of understanding; the thoughts, perhaps even the falling and the impact, were not her own.

Somehow she had picked them up from someone else.

Leonie relaxed a trifle. As a telepath, although she was not yet formally trained, she was more or less accustomed to thoughts creeping into her mind from unexpected sources. In fact, she was so used to thinking of the meaning of what was being said that she all too seldom thought at all about the actual form of words.

For a moment only, she felt calmed by the solution to her puzzle. But then she

thought again: she had
not understood the words.
Foreign thoughts, couched in words she did not understand—that frightened her all over again.

“What is happening to me?” she asked aloud, clutching her bedclothes to her

throat.

She recalled the night before she arrived at the Tower, and her feeling, while

watching the four moons, of impending peril.

Something threatens us; something is coming to us; it is coming to us from the
moons.

She did not know what she had meant by it then; she did not know now, but she

did
know that something threatened her world, her whole way of living.

She closed her eyes, and tried to isolate her sense of foreboding. She could

identify only an unfamiliar snow-covered landscape which might as well be one of those same moons she feared.

But there is no air on the moon…

Leonie had never known that the moons were worlds until her brother had told her

—but this was different. She had never pictured the moons as worlds, had never thought about it. But now she knew it, as a fact, from that same unknown source, and the
knowing
frightened her.

No air—people could not live there. Why should the moons be a source of peril?

And how could they be linked with
this?

For a telepath of Leonie’s skill, learning often came with little or no effort, as she assimilated the thoughts of those around her. She acquired things from obscure sources and frequently the origin of those things never became clear to her; that was nothing new. There was no reason why something so familiar should frighten her now.

But it did; it was the unknown nature of the information, and not the unknown

source, that frightened her. She had somehow picked up a link with an—an—
alien
mind.

That was not the least of it. She continued to analyze her fear. That was when she knew; the moons and this thought-source
were
linked. Something about the source of these strange thoughts threatened her; not her alone, but the very existence of all she knew and cherished.

She lay down, composing herself as if for sleep, but instead of sleeping, she tried to focus on the unknown source of the threat. In the darkness, she trembled, afraid to brave the over-world. But where else could she seek a danger coming from the moons?

Danger from the moons—a danger that came with thoughts she could hear, if not

understand. It made no sense, even to her. Until recently she had believed that the moons were no more than lamps hung in the sky, a benevolent provision of the Gods to light the night. Now she knew them for what they were, as certainly as she knew the geography of her own Domain; barren, lifeless, airless balls of rock. Yet somehow capable of sustaining some kind of life—

She calmed herself, and firmed her will to her quest. Then, with a thought, she

was out of her body, entering that strange realm she had essayed only a time or two before, and then, not for long. The overworld, as she imagined it and therefore now saw it, was a flat, featureless, formless gray plain, without landmarks—

No, behind her the Tower rose, not quite Dalereuth as she knew it, but still

recognizable. It was smaller, without distinguishing marks, and seemed to be shrouded in a haze that obscured details; probably, she thought, because she had never really looked at the Tower clearly from the outside, and she saw it here as she conceptualized it. Far away, but not nearly as far away as it truly was, a second Tower rose, which she knew to be Arilinn. This was her first real demonstration to herself that in this space, thought was real, and everything would appear as she believed it to be.

Was this why she had been warned always to think positively?

Does this mean that here there can be no dangers unless I believe in them?
she asked herself.

No, that would be too simplistic, too naive; but it did mean that a fearless attitude could keep her from inventing dangers for herself.

She stretched, noting with a touch of surprise that in this environment she was

physically—if that word could apply here—different than she was in her ordinary world.

For one thing, she seemed older, and filled with a poise that she had often attempted to simulate, with varying degrees of success.

This must mean that this older, adult version of herself was her true self. It need not trouble her when she pretended to be more like this—after all, she was only

pretending to be more like her best self.

And wasn’t that what most teachers and mentors wanted?

Her long hair, glowing bright red, and usually braided neatly, hung loose and wild nearly to her waist, as if she were some kind of heroine from an ancient tale. Perhaps—

some great
leronis
from the Ages of Chaos—

But she was here on a matter of urgency, not to admire this fairy-tale self; no

sooner did her mind fashion this thought, then she was off and away, skimming like wind through the overworld, searching for the source of her unexplained fears. In these realms she could move very nearly at the speed of thought; she passed over the plains she had traversed on the way here, traveling in a few seconds the miles it had taken her and Lorill nearly three weeks to travel by road. In the distance she saw Castle Hastur, at the edge of the Hellers, and she thought of Lorill. She wondered if her twin brother, possibly dreaming himself, would join her in her travels. It was terribly lonely here; she wished fervently that he would, hoping that her wishes would have some force here to bring him to her.

But she did not see him, and she went on alone.

There were other travelers in the overworld this night: silent forms, wandering

aimlessly or on unexplained business, drifting past her. None of them spoke to or approached Leonie, and she wondered if they even saw her. Were they dreaming or

seeking something in this astral world?

Whether they saw her or not, it really mattered very little, for they were none of her concern tonight. It would be far too easy to be distracted here, and perhaps become lost; she focused herself and her will on whatever had wakened her, and found herself among mountains, and conscious, more than anything else, of icy winds.

She realized that she was perceiving wind and cold through someone else’s mind,

for here in the overworld, there was neither wind nor weather.

But whose mind?

She did not know; it was wholly unfamiliar. It was human, not catman or the half-legendary
chieri,
but there was more of an alien quality about this mind than she was accustomed to. And one thing was absolutely certain; it was no one and nothing she had ever touched before.

Abruptly she was conscious of the cessation of wind; it was still roaring outside, but she was protected from it. She became aware that she was inside a little shelter, a rude sort of dwelling.

Then she recognized it, although the mind she was watching did not, as one of the travel shelters abounding in the mountains. It was crammed, filled almost to capacity, with human beings.

In this weather? Why would such a large party go out into this storm? She groped after more clues as to the identity of her contact, trying to reach for anything that might help.

Sight came to her then, and with astonishment she found herself looking at men

and women who were dressed in bizarre and highly unfamiliar garments. Both men and
women
wore heavy rough trousers and jackets, of some kind of strange and oddly slick fabric. But the garments were not all that was strange about them. Some of the faces were like enough to her own to have been distant kin, though few were as fair-skinned as she, but some of the men and women had skins of
dark brown.
They looked as if they had rubbed some kind of dye over themselves, but why would anyone do that?

Were they even human, she wondered?

The mind linked with hers dismissed the question with incredulity;
yes, certainly
we’re all human.

But the dark-skinned ones seemed to Leonie completely unlike any men or

women she had ever seen. She was so completely astonished that she almost fled back at once to her body, and to the security and familiarity of the Tower. But her surprise and interest—not to say curiosity—triumphed, and Leonie remained, watching silently—for in this situation she could neither be seen nor make herself known, except perhaps by
laran,
to the strangers.

“We may be here for quite a while,” someone was saying. “The landing gear is

shot, and those holes in her hull aren’t going to make her terribly spaceworthy. I’m afraid we’re stuck here until the ship can send another shuttle down with parts and equipment for repairs—or just send down a crew to take her apart and destroy what can’t be salvaged, and bring us back. Since no one was hurt, we’ll do what useful work we can before rescue; it will probably be at least a day before a shuttle can be landed safely.”

“More like a week,” someone muttered. “That’s a killer storm out there.”

Leonie felt the fear that statement caused in her contact-mind. And also got the impression from the woman that this talk of “useful things to be done” was just make-work, designed to keep these people from panic, or from the troubles that could arise when so many people were confined in so small a space for a long time.