The Caterpillar's Question by Piers Anthony and Philip José Farmer (5 page)

There were, here and there, bushes and plenty of dead wood fallen from the trees. But the walking was almost as easy as if they had been in a well-kept park.

After an hour's walk, Jack said, "Let's rest. I don't know where you're going, Tappy, I hope you do, but whatever is there isn't going to go away."

That might not be true. Maybe it was going to go away, and, somehow, Tappy knew it.

He brought out a few of the butterscotch "cherries" from his jacket pocket and handed them to her. From another pocket, he took a half dozen he had saved for himself.

"We have to find something solid to eat, protein and carbohydrates. Or we'll start having diarrhea."

Soon after resuming their journey, they came across a broad and shallow stream. While hand-cupping its water to drink, Jack saw some foot-long salamanderoids in pursuit of tiny fishlike creatures. He stuck a hand in the water and waited, still as a fishing bear, until a salamander came close. He grasped the thing and lifted it, though its wrigglings and greasy skin made it hard to hold, and hurled it against a tree trunk. He ran after it just in time to seize it again as it crawled painfully back to the creek. He knocked its head against the trunk once more. It still tried to creep away, but he took his jackknife from his jacket pocket, opened it, and cut the thing's head off. Its blood was red.

After catching another, Jack took off its head and gutted both of them. He collected dead wood, made shavings from it, and used his cigarette lighter to start a fire. Then he skewered a salamander on a pointed stick and held it over the fire. Though the flesh was undercooked inside and burned on the outside, it was more than satisfactory.

"Tastes like greasy frog legs," Jack said as he started cooking the second animal.

After washing their hands and faces in the creek, they started to go on. Jack, however, called a halt so that they could check their possessions. Some of them might be useful.

Tappy had nothing except the nightgown, socks, and shoes she wore. That she had not automatically taken her handbag along showed how urgent her desire had been to get to the gate-rock. He had his wristwatch, and his pants and jacket pockets held a comb, a handkerchief, the jackknife, the cigarette lighter (he had quit smoking but still carried it), car keys, a leather holder with four pencils and a pen, a small notebook with unlined pages, and his wallet. This contained four hundred dollars, mostly large bills, credit cards, a driver's license, and photographs of his parents, sister, and of some of his better paintings.

There were also three quarters, two dimes, a nickel, and five pennies. Except for the knife and the lighter, the items seemed to be useless. But he decided not to discard them. They pushed on and did not stop until the half-twilight of the forest began darkening toward night. He told Tappy to wait while he climbed a particularly tall tree. Fortunately, there was a big boulder under it from which he could leap upward and grab the lowest limb. While he was climbing, flying mammals fled before him. He went by several nests with young in them, but did not touch them. The parents flew chittering at him, swooping around his head. He also had to brush off hundreds of long-legged insects which, however, did not bite him.

When he had gotten up as far as he could go, he looked westward. Though the sun had dropped below the crater wall, the sky was still bright, and a pale light lay over the upward-sloping land. He gasped, and he clung to the bending treetop to keep from falling.

The Brobdingnagian figures on the wall were moving.

He watched while they and the symbols around them marched along the wall as if in a slow-motion film. He stayed there for at least thirty minutes, shouting down now and then to reassure Tappy that he was all right. Finally, the figures and the symbols stopped moving. He did not know how far they had gone in their travel, perhaps a few miles. He wondered if they moved during every twilight and would eventually complete a circuit.

As he started down cautiously, he saw a pale round object with a dark crescent on its northeastern part slide up from above the eastern wall. He waited until it revealed itself as a moon slightly smaller than Earth's Luna. He was just about to tell Tappy about it when something huge and dark shot across the silvery face. It seemed to be circular and to be topped by a structure of some sort through which the moon gleamed here and there. Then the object was gone, though he had the impression that it had flown into the crater. If it could be seen from here, it must be enormous. And it must have a staggering power to be able to keep its bulk aloft.

When he got down, he waited until he had recovered his wind before he told her what he had seen. Surprisingly, Tappy nodded as if she understood what the titanic vessel was.

He said, "Well? Explain," but she did not, of course, answer.

"I know you can't help it, Tappy, or you appear not to be able to speak, though sometimes I wonder. But you really frustrate me."

She put out her hand as if to tell him that she was sorry or, perhaps, to get comfort from him. He took it and stroked the back of her hand, then pulled her to him and held her close for I a little while.

"We'll get through this somehow."

He hoped that he sounded convincing.

The dying light sifting down through the leafy canopy was presently replaced by a pale gloom shed by the moon. By now, the cries of the small animals, ever-present through the day, had died with the light. They were succeeded by a booming from far off, its direction undetectable, and, now and then, a roaring. He shivered from more than the cooling air.

He and Tappy had to find some relatively safe place to sleep, and that could only be up in a tree. He explained this to her before he climbed into several nearby trees. Finally, he gave up.

"There's just no way we could sleep up there without falling off the minute we went to sleep."

They passed a chilly and fretful night, often awakening suddenly, and most of the time dozing. For warmth and courage, they held each other in their arms, but their arms became numb. And, every time one moved, the other was startled out of sleep. During the night, Jack wished several times that Tappy was a big and fat girl. That thought gave him the only smiles of the night.

The booming faded away. Though the roaring filtered through the woods now and then, it did not come nearer. That was not so comforting, though. It seemed to Jack that a predator would quit roaring as soon as it smelled a prey and would then approach it very quietly.

Once, he heard a new sound, a hooting. It quit after a while, but he stayed awake for a long time after that. He thought of the silence of the forest during the day. It was not really silent; the noises were just different from those of the city and much less loud, but he could become used to them. There were no radios blaring rock or country- western that could be heard two blocks away from the cars, or ghetto blasters of youths who would tell you very sincerely that they were very concerned about people's rights and the need for protection from invasion of privacy. There were no vehicle horns blaring; no sirens wailing. No thunderous jets overhead. No flickering icons or voices and music from the TV sets.

At that moment, Jack wished to hell that he could be back among the ear-scratching screeches and unmelodious clashings.

When the darkness began paling, he and Tappy got up. They were tired and cross, though they tried not to show it. After squatting behind the bushes, they pushed on until the sun came up above the crater wall. Jack caught two salamanders, made a fire, and cooked them. These, with more berries and fruit, filled their stomachs. They took their clothes off, Tappy removed her leg brace, too, and they rolled, gasping and crying out, in the cold creek water.

Just as Jack stood up to go ashore, he saw the leading edge of a wave of red liquid coming from upstream. By the time he got Tappy out of the creek, the water was bright red from bank to bank. It looked like blood, but he could not imagine that any one animal could bleed that much. Was there a large-scale butchery going on up there? If so, what was being slaughtered and who were the killers?

After a few minutes, however, the water cleared.

Jack considered going east for a while to avoid whatever had reddened the creek. When he decided he would, he told Tappy they should make a detour. She shook her head and walked north. He shrugged, and he followed her. Maybe she knew what she was doing.

They did not come across the carcasses or corpses that Jack expected, except that of a rabbit-sized mammal lying half in the creek. Insects rose from it in a cloud as the two passed its stinking body. Though it was bipedal and looked mammalian, it had a long beak resembling a woodpecker's. Later, they heard a hammering and saw, back in the forest, a similar animal knocking its beak against a tree trunk. So, the animal was, in a sense, a woodpecker.

When the sun was straight above their heads, as seen through a break in the leafy ceiling, Tappy halted. She turned slowly, her nostrils twitching as if she were trying to catch some odor. Then she turned east. They walked for perhaps a mile before coming to another creek. Or, for all Jack knew, the same creek. After drinking again, they walked to the other bank, the water up to their knees in the middle, and they went up the bank, steeper on this side.

She stopped again, turning her head from side to side, her right hand extended and going back and forth across a vertical plane as if she were feeling an invisible wall. After a minute of this, she turned north, stopping only when Jack called out to her that she was heading for an immense and conical, anthill-like structure. When he followed Tappy around it, he was confronted by a big hole on the opposite side.

Within it sat cross-legged one of the creatures with a face like a knight's helmet. He was holding a large piece of cooked meat which he stuck at intervals into his mouth. His lower jaw did not move, but very sharp and tiny yellow teeth moved inside the mouth. They seemed to be in several rows, one behind the other, and to be moved by some biological mechanism inside the "visor," as Jack thought of it.

Jack looked around for some evidence of the fire that had cooked the meat, but he could see nothing.

A stone axe was by the honker, and so was a pile of different kinds of fruits and vegetables. There was also a liquid-filled gourd by the heap of steaks.

The honker did not seem to be startled or alarmed at the sudden appearance of the two humans. Its dark eyes, which were at least a quarter inch inside the bony face, looked steadfastly at them.

Jack described the honker to Tappy, though he had the feeling that she had known that he was in the structure. Jack was the one startled when she gave vent to a series of soft honkings. The creature did not respond until its teeth had ceased moving and the meat had been swallowed. Then it responded just as softly. Jack could see now that something white projected from the tip of its tongue, something as slim and as sharp as a thorn.

Tappy looked disappointed.

"What in hell is going on?" Jack said. "You can talk to this thing?'

Tappy shrugged. Then she felt along him, dipped her hand in his pants pockets, and drew out a coin, a quarter. She turned to the honker and held the quarter out to him while she honked more dots and dashes. By then, Jack had figured out that the creature spoke in a sort of Morse code.

The honker extended its hand. Without directions from Jack, Tappy walked up to the honker. He took the quarter from her, looked closely at both sides of it, rubbed it between his thumb and finger, then said something. Tappy held out both hands, which the honker filled with two large steaks and a pile of pancake-shaped and -sized green and purple vegetables. She honked something, the honker replied, and she turned and held out the barter to Jack. He stuffed the meat in one of his jacket pockets, the vegetables in the other.

The honker stuck its tongue far out, enabling Jack to see more clearly the white thorny projection at its end. Tappy stuck her tongue out, turned, and walked away.

Following her, Jack said, "Damn it, Tappy! If you can speak their lingo, why can't you speak English to me?"

She did not reply. Angered and bewildered, he walked closely behind her. He had to break his surly silence to warn her of a house-sized boulder ahead of her. As if she already knew that it was there, she walked up to it and began feeling its rough reddish side. Shaking her head, she went around it and walked on northward.

An hour before dusk, they stopped. He made another fire and recooked the meat, which was too rare for him. Its blood and grease had coated the inside of his jacket pocket and drawn a bloom of pesky flying midges that he had to keep brushing off. These also bit savagely, making him even more angry. After they had eaten, however-- the pancake-sized vegetables were raw but delicious, tasting like a mixture of cheese and asparagus-- he began reproaching himself. He should not have bad feelings toward her. He could have refused to go into that gateway- boulder with her, and she must be under some kind of obsession or compulsion or both. Under a "spell," so to speak.

He continued on the same path of thought while climbing trees to search for a place to bed down. When he found one, he kept only half his mind on the task of finding dead branches on the ground and getting them up into the tree and placing them with their ends across two limbs. The auxiliary branches and the knobs and sharp points were removed, smoothed off with his jackknife. His knife was getting duller, he noted. The time would come when it would be useless, and the lighter would be empty. That thought made him feel panicky. However, perhaps he could trade more coins with a honker for a flint knife or an axe.

Shortly after the moon had risen, they were lying on their platform of hard branches. These were far from comfortable, and they could get warmth and softness only in each other and the little protection their clothes gave. Tappy was in his arms, his jacket spread over their upper parts. She hummed a tune he had never heard before, then fell asleep. The leg brace, which she had taken off, lay between her legs. Though he was very tired, he could not sink as swiftly as she into merciful unconsciousness.