The Many-Coloured Land - 1 (33 page)

"This is it," Claude said. "We deflate the dinghies and hike from here."

Richard extracted himself from the mass of stalks and branches in his boat and surveyed the site with disgust. "Jesus, Claude. Did you have to land us in a fuckin swamp? Talk about the green hells! This place is probably crawling with snakes. And will you look at those footprints? Some mighty ugly mothers been cruising through here!"

"Oh, stuff it, Richard," Amerie said. "Help me get Felice ashore and I'll try to revive her while you guys..."

"Get down, everybody!" the old man whispered urgently.

They crouched low in the boats and stared in the direction from which they had come. Out beyond the marshy little islands, where the lake was deep and the breeze blew unimpeded, were a pair of seven-meter catboats that bore no resemblance to any of the craft launched by the escapees. They were slowly tacking northward.

"Well, now we know where the fort must be," Claude remarked. "South of here and most likely not very far away. They've probably got oculars on board so well have to stay down unI'll they get around that point"

They waited. Sweat trickled down various body surfaces and made them itch. The frustrated midges whined and went on sorties against their unprotected eyeballs and nostrils. Claude's belly rumbled, reminding him that he had not eaten in nearly twelve hours. Richard discovered a sticky gash hidden in the hair above his left ear, and so did the local variety of blow-fly. Amerie made a desultory attempt to pray; but her memory bank refused to pay out any withdrawals except the grace before meals and "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep."

Felice moaned.

"Cover her mouth, Richard," Claude said. "Keep her quiet for just a few minutes longer."

Somewhere, ducks were quacking. Somewhere else, an animal was snuffling and slurping and breaking the giant bamboos like twigs as it sought its lunch. And elsewhere still, the silver sound of a horn sang on the limit of audibility, to be followed seconds later by a louder response farther north.

The old paleontologist sighed. "They're out of sight Let's deflate these boats and move on."

The power-inflators, used in reverse, swiftly sucked both air and water out of the decamole membranes, reducing the boats to spheres the size of Ping-Pong balls. While Amerie revived Felice with a dose of stimulant, Claude rummaged in his pack for survival-ration biscuits and fortified candy, which he shared with the others.

Felice was listless and disoriented but seemed well enough to walk. Claude tried to get her to remove her leather cuirass, greaves, and gauntlets, which had to be acutely uncomfortable in the muggy atmosphere of the marsh; but she refused, only agreeing to keep her helmet stowed in the pack when Claude pointed out that its plumage might betray them to searchers. As a final ritual they daubed each other with camouflaging mud, then set off with Claude in the lead, Richard following, and Amerie and Felice bringing up the rear. The ring-hockey player had appropriated the bow and arrows.

They went quietly along the trail, which was wide enough for them to travel in comfort, a circumstance that pleased Richard and the women but rather alarmed the more wilder-ness-wise Claude. For nearly two kilometers they slogged through stands of bamboo, alder, willow, and semitropical evergreens, some trees laden with fruits of russet and purple, which Claude warned them against sampling. To their surprise, the only wildlife encountered was birds and giant leeches. The ground became higher and drier and they passed into dense forest, loud with bird and animal voices. The trees were draped in vines and the undergrowth formed a mass of impenetrable thorn bushes on both side of the trail.

At length the gloomy greenness gave way to sunlight as the trees thinned. Claude held up his hand as a signal for them to stop. "Not a peep out of you," he breathed. "I was half expecting to meet something like this."

They gazed through a thin screen of young trees into an open meadow with scattered clumps of bushes. Cropping the shrubbery was a herd of six adult and three juvenile rhinos. The full-grown specimens were about four meters in length and might have weighed two or three tons. They had two horns, piggy little eyes, and quaintly tufted ears that waggled as flies buzzed around them.

"Dicerorhinus schliennacheri, I'd say," Claude whispered. "This is their trail we've been using."

Felice stepped forward, nocking a razor-sharp arrow. "It's a good thing the wind is with us. Let me feel around their minds for a while and see if I can move them."

Richard said, "Meanwhile, we can hope they don't get thirsty."

Leaving Felice to experiment with her coercive power, the others withdrew back along the trail into a sunny glen at one side, where they sat down to rest. Richard planted a straight stick about as long as his arm upright in a patch of soil, marking the position of the shadow's tip with a small stone.

"Making a sundial?" Amerie inquired.

The pirate grimaced. "If we stay here long enough, we can get a fix. The tip of the shadow moves as the sun seems to travel across the sky. You wait, mark the new position of the shadow tip with another stone. Connect the two stones with a line and you got an east-west bearing. If we want to reach those highlands by the shortest route, I think we've got to bear more to the left than we've been going on this trail. It was nearly an hour before Felice returned to tell them that it was safe to cross the meadow. They chose a new route according to Richard's aboriginal navigation; but without a convenient animal track to follow, they were forced to go cross-country through the tangled, thorn-choked forest under-storey. It was impossible to travel quietly and the wildlife was making a racket like feeding time at the zoo; so they threw caution to the winds and broke out the vitredur hatchets and Claude's big carpenter's axe and hacked a trail. After two exhausting hours of this, they came upon a sizable creek and were able to follow it upstream into a slightly more open section of forest.

"We're on the bench above the lake now," Claude said. 'The trail to the fort must be near. Be very quiet and keep your ears open."

They crept onward, skulking in the shadows of giant conifers, cycads, and ferns. Anticlimactically, they blundered right into the trail when they had to alter course to avoid a spider-web the size of a banquet tablecloth. The bush-constricted track was deserted.

Felice bent over a pile of chaliko dung. "Cold. They must have passed here two hours ago. See the prints heading north? "

"They'll be coming back," Claude said. "And if they have amphicyons, they'll be able to track us. Let's blot out our own prints and get out of here. Once we get higher, there should be fewer trees and easier going. We'll have to follow another stream somewhere to kill our scent."

The trees did become more widely separated as they continued upslope, but the going was hardly easy. They followed a dry watercourse for most of an hour before the gentle grade above the bench steepened to a bluff studded with house-sized chunks of rock. The wind died and the heat of mid-afternoon smote them as they climbed.

At times when they rested, they could see out over the great lake. There were sails far to the south, apparently motionless on the water. It was impossible to tell whether they belonged to the gray-torc marines or to the escapees. They wondered out loud about the fate of Basil and his contingent, about Yosh, and about the Gypsies and their quixotic foray against the guard post; but the trail talk dwindled as they were forced to save their breath for more difficult climbing. Hope that they would be able to cross the first high ridge began to fade after one of Richard's plass-and-fabric running shoes was slashed by a rock and he had to put on the more awkward seaboots of his original costume. Then Amerie's saddle sore legs betrayed her on a treacherous slope and she lost her footing, dislodging several large stones that tumbled down upon Claude and bruised his arm and shoulder.

"Well never make it to the top today," Richard groused. "My left heel is one big blister and Amerie is ready to collapse." Felice said, "It's only a couple of hundred more meters. If you can't climb, I'll carry you upl I want to get a view of the terrain we're heading into tomorrow. With luck, we might be able to see the bonfires from the fort or even trail beacons below us once it gets dark."

Claude declared he could manage on his own. Felice gave one hand to Richard and the other to the nun and hauled them up after her by main strength. It was slow going, but they were finally able to reach the top shortly after the sun descended behind the hills on the other side of the lake.

When they had regained their wind, Claude said, "Why don't we hole up on the eastern side of these big boulders? There's a nice dry shelter in there and I don't think anyone below could spot a fire if we lit one after nightfall I could gather some wood."

"Good idea," said Felice. 'I'll scout around a bit." She went off among the crags and gnarled savin junipers while the others tended their wounds, inflated decamole cots and weighted the legs with earth, because there was no water to waste, and regretfully laid out a meal of biscuits, nutrient wafers, and cheesy-tasting algiprote. By the time Claude had assembled a pile of dry branches, Felice was back, her bow resting jaunI'lly over her shoulder, swinging three fat marmot-like animals by their hind legs.

"hail, Diana!" chortled the old man. 'I'll even skin and clean 'em!"

They lit the fire after it was completely dark and roasted the meat, devouring every gamey morsel. Then Richard and Claude collapsed onto their cots and were asleep in minutes. Amerie, her brain buzzing with fatigue, still felt obliged to shake the grease and scraps off the dinnerware, sterilize them with the power source, then shrink and stow them away. There's my big, helpful girl!

"I can see the fort," came Felice's voice from the nearby darkness.

Amerie picked her way over the rocks to where the athlete was standing. The ridge fell steeply to the southwest. The young moon hung over the lake and an incredible profusion of Pliocene stars reflected upon the water, differentiating it from the black land. Far to the south on their side of the lake was a cluster of orange specks.

"How far away is it?" the nun asked.

"At least fifteen kloms. Maybe more. As the vulture flies." Felice laughed, and Amerie was suddenly wide-awake, experiencing the same feeling of fear and fascination she had known before. The woman beside her was an indistinct silhouette in the starlight, but Amerie knew that Felice was looking at her.

"They didn't thank me," the athlete said in a low voice. "I set them free but they didn't thank me. They were afraid of me still. And that fool of a Dougal! ... None of them, not even you, sympathized or understood why I wanted to..."

"But you couldn't kill Dougal For the love of God, Felice! I had to put you out."

"Killing him would have been a comfort," said the young girl, coming closer. "I was working on my plans. Plans I never told to the rest of you. The golden torc was the key. Not only to free us, but to rescue the others, Bryan, Elizabeth, Aiken, Stein. To free you of the human slaves! Don't you see? I really could have done it! With the golden torc I could have tamed this thing inside me and used it."

Amerie heard herself babbling. "We're all grateful to you. Felice. Believe me. We were simply too stunned by it all to say anything after the fight. And Dougal, he was just too fast for Basil and Yosh to stop, and too crazy to realize what he was doing when he threw the torc away. He probably believed he wouldn't be safe from Epone's power unI'll the torc was separated from her body."

Felice said nothing. After a while the nun said, "Perhaps you could get another."There was a sigh. "They know about me now, so it will be very dangerous. But I'll have to try. Maybe waylay another caravan, or even go to Finiah. It'll be hard and I'll need help."

"We'll help."

Felice laughed softly.

"I'll help. I won't be retiring to any hermitage for quite some time yet"

"Ah. That's... good. I need your help, Amerie. I need you."

"Felice. Don't misunderstand."

"Oh, I know all about your little vow of renunciation. But that was made six million years ago in a different world. Now I think you need me as much as I need you."

"I need your protection. We all do."

"You need more than that"

Amerie backed away, tripped over a rock and fell, tearing open the scabbed cuts on her hands.

"Let me help you up," said Felice.

But the nun scrambled to her feet unaided and turned back toward the glowing remnants of the campfire where the others were sleeping. She stumbled and clenched her fingers into the lacerated palms so that her nails opened the cut even more, while behind her Felice laughed in the darkness.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"He's ready, Sukey. You must take the final discharge." "But, can I? I could botch it again, Elizabeth." "You won't. You'll be able to handle this aspect of his healing. He wouldn't let me, but you can do it. Don't be afraid." "All right. Just let him come out of the torc's neural bath slowly. I'm ready."

... Illinois cornfields, flat as a table and stretching from horizon to horizon, with the toy farmhouse and outbuildings lonely amid the immensity. Sitting in one of the cornrows, a three-year-old boy and an Alsatian bitch. The boy, clever with his hands and mischievous, circumvents a childproof fastener and removes a beeper-trace from his jeans. He offers it to the bitch. She is pregnant and of capricious appetite, and so she swallows it. The boy rises from the ground and toddles off down the row toward an interesting noise in the far distance. The bitch, unsatisfied by her electronic snack, runs toward the farmhouse where lunch is being prepared ...

"No! I can't go there again!"

"Hush. Easy. You're close, so close."

.... A robot harvester, nearly as large as the farmhouse and bright orange, moves along, swallowing the corn plants in a thirty-row swath, grinding the stalks and leaves to useful pulp, shelling the ears, long as a man's forearm, and packing the rich golden kernels into containers for shipment to other farms all over the Galactic Milieu. This new maize hybrid will yield twenty cubic meters of grain to the hectare...