The Crystal World (18 page)

In the dining-room of the chalet he found one of the houseboys looking through the open window into the forest.

"What's going on?" Dr. Sanders asked. "What the devil are you doing in here? Where's Dr. Clair?"

The houseboy pointed toward the compound. "Dr. Clair with truck, sir. Trouble in forest, he go to look."

"What sort of trouble?" Sanders walked over to the window. "Is the forest moving nearer?"

"No, sir, not moving. Dr. Clair say you sleep, sir."

"Where's Mrs. Clair? Is she around?"

"No, sir. Mrs. Clair busy now."

"What do you mean?" Dr. Sanders pressed. "I thought she was on night duty. Come on, man, what is it?"

The houseboy hesitated, his lips soundlessly forming the polite formulas which Max had left him for Sanders's benefit. He was about to blurt something out when the sound of footsteps crossed the courtyard. Sanders went to the door as Max Clair came toward him, followed by two porters.

"Max! What's going on-are you starting to evacuate?"

Clair stopped in front of him. His mouth was clenched, his chin lowered so that the sweat on his domed head shone in the torch-light. "Edward-have you got Suzanne in there with you?"

"What?" Sanders stepped back from the door, beckoning Clair inside. "My dear fellow- She's gone! Where?"

"I wish we knew." Clair walked up to the door. He glanced inside the chalet, uncertain whether to take advantage of Sanders's gesture. "She went off a couple of hours ago, God only knows where-you haven't seen her?"

"Not since earlier this evening." Sanders began to button the sleeves of his shirt. "Come on, Max, let's go after her!"

Ciair held up his hand. "Not you, Edward. I have enough problems, believe me. There are one or two settlements up in the hills," he said, unconvincingly. "She may have gone to visit the sick-bays. You stay here and keep things together-I'll take the Land-Rover and a couple of men. The others can go in the truck and keep an eye on the Bourbon Hotel."

Sanders began to argue with him, but Clair turned and strode off. Sanders followed him into the drive and watched him climb into the car.

Sanders turned to the houseboy. "So she's gone back into the forest-poor woman!"

The houseboy glanced at him. "You know, sir?"

"No, but I'm certain all the same. Each of us has something we can't bear to be reminded of. Tell the driver of the truck to wait, he can give me a lift down to the hotel."

The houseboy held his arm. "You going, sir-to the forest?"

"Of course. She's there somewhere-that's a judgment on myself I have to acknowledge."

The antiquated engine of the truck had come to life, its din throbbing all over the hospital. As Sanders climbed over the tailboard it started off and made a slow circuit of the fountain. Half a dozen of the native orderlies sat up behind the driver.

They reached the main highway five minutes later, then rumbled on through the darkness towards the white hulk of the Bourbon Hotel. The truck stopped in the weed-grown drive, its searchlight playing on the forest. As it swept across the crystalline trees, like an immense tipping of broken glass, the white prisms glittered as far away as the river half a mile to the south.

Jumping down from the tailboard, Dr. Sanders went over to the driver. None of the men had seen Suzanne leave, but from their careful watch over the forest they obviously all assumed that she had entered it. However, from the confused melee around the vehicle it was equally plain that they had no intention of following Suzanne. When Sanders pressed the driver he made some muttered reference to the "white phantoms" that patrolled its inner reaches-glimpses, perhaps of Ventress and Thorensen in pursuit of each other, or of Radek stumbling toward his lost grave.

Five minutes later, when he saw that the search party was no closer to forming itself-the driver insisted on remaining by his searchlight, and the other men had moved off to the Bourbon Hotel and squatted down with their cheroots among the fallen columns-Dr. Sanders set off alone along the highway. To his left, the glitter of the forest threw the cold moonlight across the macadam at his feet, and lit up the entrance to a small side-road that ran toward the river. Sanders looked down this narrow defile that led away into the illuminated world. For a moment he hesitated, listening to the fading voices of the natives. Then he pressed his hands into his pockets and moved along the verges of the road, picking his way among the glass spurs that rose more and more thickly around him.

In fifteen minutes he reached the river, and crossed a ruined bridge that tilted down on to the frozen surface like a jeweled web, its girders hung with silver. The white surface of the river wound away around the frosted trees. The few craft along the banks were now so heavily encrusted that they were barely recognizable. Their light seemed darker and more intense, as if they were sealing their brilliance within themselves.

By this time his suit had begun to glow again in the dark, the fine frost forming crystal spurs on the fabric. Everywhere the process of crystallization was more advanced, and his shoes were enclosed within bowls of prisms.

Mont Royal was empty. Limping in and out of the deserted streets, the white buildings looming around him like sepulchers, he reached the harbor. Standing on the jetty, he could see across the frozen surface of the river to the cataract in the distance. Even higher now, it formed an impenetrable barrier between himself and the lost army somewhere to the south.

Shortly before dawn he walked back through the town, in the hope of finding the summer house where Thorensen and his dying bride were sheltering. He passed a small patch of pavement that remained clear of all growth, below the broken window of one of the mine depositories. Handfuls of looted stones were scattered across the pavement, ruby and emerald rings, topaz brooches and pendants, intermingled with countless smaller stones and industrial diamonds. This abandoned harvest glittered coldly in the moonlight.

As he stood among the stones Sanders noticed that the crystal outgrowths from his shoes were dissolving, melting like icicles exposed to sudden heat. Pieces of the crust fell away and deliquesced, vanishing into the air.

Then he realized why Thorensen had brought the jewels to the young woman, and why she had seized on them so eagerly. By some optical or electromagnetic freak, the intense focus of light within the stones simultaneously produced a compression of time, so that the discharge of light from the surfaces reversed the process of crystallization. Perhaps it was this gift of time which accounted for the eternal appeal of precious gems, as well as of all baroque painting and architecture. Their intricate crests and cartouches, occupying more than their own volume of space, so seemed to contain a greater ambient time, providing that unmistakable premonition of immortality sensed within St. Peter's or the palace at Nymphenburg. By contrast, the architecture of the twentieth century, characteristically one of rectangular unornamented facades, of simple Euclidean space and time, was that of the New World, confident of its firm footing in the future and indifferent to those pangs of mortality which haunted the mind of old Europe.

Dr. Sanders knelt down and filled his pockets with the stones, cramming them into his shirt and cuffs. He sat back against the front of the depository, the semi-circle of smooth pavement like a miniature patio, at whose edges the crystal undergrowth glittered with the intensity of a spectral garden. Pressed to his cold skin, the hard faces of the jewels seemed to warm him, and within a few seconds he fell into an exhausted sleep.

He woke into brilliant sunshine in a street of temples, where rainbows spangled the gilded air with a blaze of colors. Shielding his eyes, he lay back and looked up at the roof-tops, their gold tiles inlaid with row upon row of colored gems, like pavilions in the temple quarter of Bangkok.

A hand pulled at his shoulder. Trying to sit up, Sanders found that the semi-circle of clear pavement had vanished, and his body lay sprawled in a bed of sprouting needles. The growth had been most rapid in the entrance to the depository, and his right arm was encased in a mass of crystalline spurs, three or four inches long, that reached almost to his shoulder. Inside this frozen gauntlet, almost too heavy to lift, his fingers were outlined in a maze of rainbows.

Sanders dragged himself to his knees, tearing away some of the crystals. He found the bearded man in the white suit crouching behind him, his shotgun in his hands.

"Ventress!" With a cry, Sanders raised his jeweled arm. In the sunlight the faint nodes of the gem-stones he had stuffed into his cuff shone in the effloresced tissues of his arm like inlaid stars. "Ventress, for God's sake!"

His shout distracted Ventress from his scrutiny of the light-filled street. His small face with its bright eyes was transfigured by strange colors that mottled his skin and drew out the pale blues and violets of his beard. His suit radiated a thousand bands of color.

He knelt down beside Sanders, trying to replace the strip of crystals torn from his arm. Before he could speak there was a roar of gunfire and the glass trellis encrusted to the doorway shattered in a shower of fragments. Ventress flinched behind Sanders, then pulled himself through the window. As another shot was fired down the street they ran past the looted counters into a strong room where the door of a safe stood open on to a jumble of metal cash boxes. Ventress snapped back the lids on the empty trays, and then began to scoop together the few small jewels scattered across the floor.

Stuffing them into Sanders's empty pockets, he pulled him through a window into the rear alley, and from there into the adjacent street, transformed by the overhead lattices into a tunnel of vermilion light. They stopped at the first turning, and Ventress beckoned to the forest fifty yards away.

"Run, run! Anywhere, through the forest! It's all you can do!"

He pushed Sanders forward with the butt of his shotgun, whose breech was now encrusted by a mass of silver crystals, like a medieval flintlock. Sanders raised his arm. The jeweled spurs danced in the sunlight like a swarm of fireflies. "My arm, Ventress! It's reached my shoulder!"

"Run! Nothing else can help you!" Ventress's illuminated face flickered with anger, almost as if he were impatient of Sanders's refusal to accept the forest. "Don't waste the stones, they won't last you forever!"

Forcing himself to run, Sanders set off toward the forest, where he entered the first of the caves of light. He whirled his arm like a clumsy propeller, and felt the crystals recede slightly. With luck he soon reached a small tributary of the river that wound in from the harbor, and hurled himself like a wild man along its petrified surface.

For hours he raced through the forest, all sense of time lost to him. If he stopped for more than a minute the crystal bands would seize his neck and shoulder, and he forced himself on, only pausing to slump exhausted on the glass beaches. Then, he pressed the jewels to his face, warding off the glace sheath. But their power faded, and as the facets blunted they turned into nodes of unpolished silica. Meanwhile, those embedded within the crystal tissues of his arm shone with undiminished brilliance.

At last, as he ran through the trees at the edge of the river, his arm whirling before him, he saw the gilt spire of the summer house. Stumbling across the fused sand, he made his way toward it. By now the vitrification of the forest had sealed the small pavilion into the surrounding trees, and only the steps and the doorway above remained clear, but for Sanders it still held a faint hope of sanctuary. The casements and jointing of the balcony were ornamented with the heraldic devices of some bizarre baroque architecture.

Sanders stopped a few yards from the steps and looked up at the sealed door. He turned and gazed back across the widening channel of the river. Its jeweled surface glowed in the sunlight, marbled like the pink crust of a salt lake. Two hundred yards away Thorensen's motor-cruiser still sat in its pool of clear water at the confluence of the subterranean streams.

As he watched, two men moved about on the foredeck of the cruiser. They were partly hidden by the starting cannon in front of the mast, but one of them, bands of surgical tape dividing his naked body into black and white halves, Sanders recognized as Kagwa, Thorensen's assistant.

Sanders walked a few steps toward the cruiser, debating whether to reach the edge of the petrified surface and swim across the pooi. Although the crystals might begin to dissolve in the water, he feared that the weight of his arm would first sink him to the bottom.

There was a flash of light from the muzzle of the cannon. A moment later, as the ground shifted slightly, Sanders caught a glimpse of a three-inch ball crossing the air toward him. With a sharp whistle it passed over his head and crashed into the petrified trees twenty yards from the summer house. Then the loud boom of the explosion reached him from the cruiser. Reflected off the hard surface of the river, the echoes rolled around the walls of the forest, drumming at Sanders's head.

Uncertain which way to move, he ran toward a patch of undergrowth near the steps of the summer house. Kneeling down, he tried to conceal his arm among the crystalline fronds. The two natives on board the cruiser were reloading the cannon, the big mulatto down on one knee as he worked the ramrod in and out of the barrel.

"Sanders-!" The low voice, little more than a harsh whisper, came from a few yards on Sanders's left. He looked around, peering up at the sealed door of the summer house. Then, below the steps, a hand reached out and waved at him.

"Here! Under the house!"

Sanders ran over to the steps. In the narrow hollow below the platform of the summer house, Ventress was crouching behind one of the stilts, shotgun in hand.

"Get down! Before they take another shot at you!" As Sanders slid backwards through the small interval Ventress seized one shoe and hauled him in, twisting his foot with an irritable flourish.