The Fugitive Worlds (20 page)

Having derived an unexpected grain of comfort from the
discussion—a readymade reason to seek out Vantara, wherever she might be—Toller gave his attention to the
task of steering his ship around the edge of the disk. The
maneuver was not a difficult one in theory. AH he had to
do was pass the western rim by a short distance, carry out a
simple inversion and begin flying back into the thicker air at
the core of the atmospheric bridge.

Leaving Steenameert at the controls, he remained by the
rail in order to obtain the most advantageous viewpoint and
started giving detailed handling instructions. The ship was moving very slowly as it drew level with the rim, probably
at no more than walking pace, but after some minutes had
passed it came to Toller that it was taking longer than he had expected to reach the limit of the ice wall. Suddenly suspicious, he trained his binoculars on the rim. The sun was close to his aiming point, hurling billions of needles of radiance into his eyes and making the viewing difficult, but he managed to get a clear look at the icy boundary. It was now less than a furlong away in reality, and the image in his glasses brought it much closer.

Toller grunted in surprise as he discovered that the rim of the ice sheet was
alive.

In place of what he had expected—the inertness of frozen water—there was a kind of crystalline seething. Glassy prisms and spikes and branches, each as tall as a man, were sprouting outwards on the rim with unnatural rapidity. They were extending the boundary of the sheet with the speed of billowing smoke—each thrusting into the gelid air and glistening in the sunlight for a moment before being overtaken and assimilated by others in the racing, sparkling vitreous foment.

Toller stared at the phenomenon, tranced, his mind awash with the unexpected and incredible beauty of it, and it seemed a long time before the first coherent thought came to him:
The rim of the barrier is moving outwards at almost the same speed as the ship!

"Increase speed," he shouted to Steenameert, his voice strained by the bitter coldness and the inimical nature of the thinning air. "Otherwise you'll never see home again!"

Commissioner Kettoran, who had seemed almost a well man during the passage through the weightless zone, had been struck by a fresh seizure when the ship was only a few thousand feet above the surface of Overland. In one second he had been standing with Toller at the gondola's rail and pointing out familiar features in the landscape below; in the next he was lying on his back, unable to move, eyes alert and
 
afraid,
 
beaconing an
 
intelligence
 
trapped
 
inside
 
a
machine which no longer responded to its master's bidding. Toller had carried him to his nest of quilts, wiped the frothy saliva from the corners of his mouth, and had gone immedi
ately for the sunwriter in its leather case.

The lateral drift had been greater than usual, bringing the
ship down some twelve miles to the east of the city of Prad, but the sunwriter message had been picked up in good time.
A sizeable group of coaches and mounted men—plus a sleek
airboat in grey-and-blue royal livery—had been waiting in
the touchdown area. Within five minutes of the landing the
commissioner had been transferred to the airboat and sent
on his way to an emergency audition with Queen Daseene,
who was waiting in the overheated confines of her palace.

There had been no opportunity for Toller to pass on any
words of reassurance or farewell to Kettoran, a man he had
come to regard as a good friend in spite of the disparity in age and status. As he watched the airboat dwindle into the
yellow western sky he became aware of a sense of guilt and
it took him some time to identify its source. He was, of
course, deeply concerned about the commissioner's health,
but at the same time—and there was no getting around the
fact—one part of him was thankful that the older man's
misfortune had come along, like the answer to a prayer, exactly when he had needed it. No other circumstance that
he could readily think of could have placed him back on
Overland and within reach of Vantara in such a short time.

What sort of monster am I?
he thought, shocked by his
own selfishness. I
must be the worst. .
. .

Toller's bout of introspection was interrupted by the sight
of his father and Bartan Drumme descending from a coach
which had just arrived at the landing site. Both men were
attired in grey trews and three-quarter-length tabards gored
with blue silk, a formal style of dress which suggested they
had come straight from an important meeting in the city. Toller strode eagerly to meet his father, embraced him and
then shook hands with Bartan Drumme.

"This is truly an unexpected pleasure," Cassyll Maraquine
said, a smile rejuvenating his pale triangular face, 'it is a
great shame about the commissioner, of course, but we must assume that the royal physicians—a plentiful breed in these
times—will quickly put him to rights. How have you been,
son?"

"I am well." Toller looked at his father for a moment in
that unique gratification which springs from an harmonious
relationship with a parent, and then—as extraneous matters
crowded into his mind—he shifted his gaze to include Bartan
Drumme in what had to follow. The latter was the only
surviving member of a fabled voyage to Farland, the local
system's outermost planet, and was acknowledged as Kolcor
ron's leading expert on astronomical matters.

"Father, Bartan," Toller said, "have you been observing
the skies within the last ten or twenty days? Have you noticed
anything unusual?"

The older men exchanged cautiously surprised glances.
"Are you speaking of the blue planet?" Bartan said.

Toller frowned. "Blue planet? No, I'm talking about a
barrier
...
a wall
...
a lake of ice . . . call it what you will
. . . which has appeared at the midpoint. It is at least sixty
miles across and growing wider by the hour. Has it not been
observed from the ground?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary has been observed, but I'm
not even sure that the Glo telescope has been in use
since—" Bartan broke off and gave Toller a quizzical stare.
"Toller . . . Toller, you can't
nave
an accretion of ice at the
midpoint—there simply isn't the water. The air is too dry."

"Ice! Or crystal of some kind. I
saw
it!" The fact that he
was being disbelieved did not surprise or unduly disturb
Toller, but it caused an uneasy stirring in the lower levels
of his consciousness. There was something wrong with the
pattern
of the conversation. It was not going as it should have
gone, but some factor—perhaps a deep-seated unwillingness
to face reality—was for the moment paralyzing vital mental
processes.

Bartan gave him a patient smile. "Perhaps there has been a major failure in one of the permanent stations, perhaps an
explosion which has scattered power crystals over a wide area. They might be drifting and combining and forming
large clouds of condensation, and we both know that conden
sation can give the appearance of being very substantial. . .
like banks of snow or—"

"The Countess Vantara," Toller interrupted with a numb smile, keeping his voice steady to hide the fear that had been
unleashed in him as certain doors swung open. "She made
the crossing only nine days ago—had she nothing unusual to
report?"

"I don't know what you mean, son," Cassyll Maraquine
said, speaking the words which Toller had already prepared
for him on a parchment of the mind. "Yours is the first and
only ship to have returned from Land. Countess Vantara has
not been seen since the expedition departed."

Divivvidiv had had a very good dream, one in which he had savored every diamond-sharp second of a day in his childhood. The day chosen had been the eighty-first of the Clear Sky Cycle. His high-brain had taken his memories of the actual day as the basis of the dream, then had discarded those which were less than perfect and replaced them with invented sequences. The content of the fabricated sections had been excellent, as had been the merging of their boundaries with the rest of the dreamscape, and Divivvidiv had awakened with intense feelings of happiness and fulfillment. For once there had been no undertones, no stains of guilt seeping in from the present, and he knew he would return to the dream—perhaps with minor variations—many times in the years to come.

He lay for a moment in the weak artificial gravity field of his bed, enjoying a mental afterglow, then became aware that the Xa was waiting to communicate with him.
What is it?
he said, raising himself to an upright position.

Nothing of great urgency, Beloved Creator
—
that is why I waited until you had achieved a natural return to consciousness,
the Xa replied at once, using a mind-color similar to yellow for reassurance.

That was very considerate of you.
Divivvidiv massaged the muscles of his arms in preparation for a return to activity. I
sense you have good news for me. What is it?

The Primitives' ship is returning, with two males on board, and this time they will not pass beyond my perimeter.

Divivvidiv was immediately on the alert.
You are quite positive about this?

Yes, Beloved Creator. One of the males is emotionally
linked to one of the females. He believes that she and her companions have damaged their ship in a collision with my body during the hours of darkness, and that they have taken refuge in one of the habitats we found in the datum plane. It is his intention to find and retrieve the female.

How interesting!
Divivvidiv said.
These beings must have an unusually strong inclination towards single-partner reproduction. First we learn of their mind-blindness, and now this
—
how many handicaps can a race endure and yet remain viable?

Stated in those terms, Beloved Creator, the question is meaningless.

I expect so.
Divivvidiv turned his attention to matters of a
more practical nature.
Tell me, are the male Primitives becom
ing aware that you belong to a class of object totally outside their previous experience?

Object? Object?

Being. I should have referred to you as a being, of course. How do they perceive you?

As a natural phenomenon,
the Xa said.
An accretion of ice or some other crystalline form of matter.