To Save a World (28 page)

“Wake up!” Kyla whispered, and dug an elbow into my side. I opened my eyes on crowded blackness, grasping at the vanishing nightmare. “What’s the matter?”

“You were moaning. Touch of altitude sickness?” I grunted, realized my arm was around her shoulder, and pulled it quickly away. After a while I slept again, fitfully.

Before light we crawled wearily out of the bivouac, cramped and stiff and not rested, but ready to get out of this and go on. The snow was hard, in the dim light, and the trail was not difficult here. After all the trouble on the lower slopes, I think even the amateurs had lost their desire for adventurous climbing; we were all just as well pleased that the actual crossing of Dammerung should be an anticlimax and uneventful.

The sun was just rising when we reached the pass, and we stood for a moment, gathered close together, in the narrow defile between the great summits to either side.

Hjalmar gave the peaks a wistful look.

“Wish we could climb them.”

Regis grinned at him companionably. “Someday —and you have the word of a Hastur, you’ll be along on that expedition.” The big fellow’s eyes glowed. Regis turned to me, and said warmly, “What about it, Jason? A bargain? Shall we all climb it together, next year?”

I started to grin back and then some bleak black devil surged up in me, raging. When this was over, I’d suddenly realized, I wouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t be anywhere. I was a surrogate, a substitute, a splinter of Jay Allison, and when it was over, Forth and his tactics would put me back into what they considered my rightful place—which was nowhere. I’d never climb a mountain except now, when we were racing against time and necessity. I set my mouth in an unaccustomed narrow line and said, “We’ll talk about that when we get back—if we ever do. Now I suggest we get going. Some of us would like to get down to lower altitudes.”

The trail down from Dammerung inside the ridge, unlike the outside trail, was clear and well-marked, and we wound down the slope, walking in easy single file. As the mist thinned and we left the snow-line behind, we saw what looked like a great green carpet, interspersed with shining colors which were mere flickers below us. I pointed them out.

“The treetops of the North Forest—and the colors you see—are in the streets of the Trailcity.”

An hour’s walking brought us to the edge of the forest. We traveled swiftly now, forgetting our weariness, eager to reach the city before nightfall. It was quiet in the forest, almost ominously still. Over our heads somewhere, in the thick branches which in places shut out the sunlight completely, I knew that the tree-roads ran crisscross, and now and again I heard some rustle, a fragment of sound, a voice, a snatch of song.

“It’s so dark down here,” Rafe muttered, “anyone living in this forest would have to live in the treetops, or go totally blind!”

Kendricks whispered to me, “Are we being followed? Are they going to jump us?”

“I don’t think so. What you hear are just the inhabitants of the city—going about their daily business up there.”

“Queer business it must be,” Regis said curiously, and as we walked along the mossy, needly forest floor, I told him something of the Trailmen’s lives. I had lost my fear. If anyone came at us now, I could speak their language. I could identify myself, tell my business, name my foster parents. Some of my confidence evidently spread to the others.

But as we came into more and more familiar territory, I stopped abruptly and struck my hand against my forehead.

“I knew we had forgotten something!” I said roughly. “I’ve been away from here too long, that’s all. Kyla.”

“What about Kyla?”

The girl explained it herself, in her expressionless monotone. “I am an unattached female. Such women are not permitted in the Nests.”

“That’s easy then,” Lerrys said. “She must belong to one of us.” He didn’t add a syllable. No one could have expected it; Darkovan aristocrats don’t bring their women on trips like this, and their women are not like Kyla.

The three brothers broke into a spate of volunteering, and Rafe made an obscene suggestion. Kyla scowled obstinately, her mouth tight with what could have been embarrassment or rage. “If you believe I need your protection—I—”

“Kyla,” I said tersely, “is under my protection. She will be introduced as my woman—and treated as such.”

Rafe twisted his mouth in an unfunny smile. “I see the leader keeps all the best for himself?”

My face must have done something I didn’t know about, for Rafe backed slowly away. I forced myself to speak slowly. “Kyla is a guide, and indispensable. If anything happens to me, she is the only one who can lead you back. Therefore her safety is my personal affair. Understand?”

As we went along the trail, the vague green light disappeared. “We’re right below the Trailcity,” I whispered, and pointed upward. All around us the Hundred Trees rose, branchless pillars so immense that four men, hands joined, could not have circled one with their arms. They stretched upward for some three hundred feet, before stretching out their interweaving branches; above that, nothing was visible but blackness.

Yet the grove was not dark, but lighted with the startlingly brilliant phosphorescence of the fungi growing on the trunks, and trimmed into bizarre ornamental shapes. In cages of transparent fibre, glowing insects as large as a hand hummed softly.

As I watched, a Trailman, quite naked except for an ornate hat and a narrow binding around the loins, descended the trunk. He went from cage to cage, feeding the glowworms with bits of shining fungus from a basket on his arm.

I called to him in his own language, and he dropped the basket, with an exclamation, his spidery thin body braced to flee or to raise an alarm.

“But I belong to the Nest,” I called to him, and gave him the names of my foster parents. He came toward me, gripping my forearm with warm long fingers in a gesture of greeting.

“Jason? Yes, I hear them speak of you,” he said in his gentle twittering voice, “you are at home. But those others—?” He gestured nervously at the strange faces.

“My friends,” I assured him, “and we come to beg the Old One for an audience. For tonight I seek shelter with my parents, if they will receive us.”

He raised his head and called softly, and a slim child bounded down the trunk and took the basket. The Trailman said, “I am Carrho. Perhaps it would be better if I guided you to your foster parents, so you will not be challenged.”

I breathed more freely. I did not personally recognize Carrho, but he looked pleasantly familiar. Guided by him, we climbed one by one up the dark stairway inside the trunk, and emerged into the bright square, shaded by the topmost leaves, into a delicate green twilight. I felt weary and successful.

Kendricks stepped gingerly on the swaying, jiggling floor of the square. It gave slightly at every step, and Kendricks swore morosely in a language that fortunately only Rafe and I understood. Curious Trailmen flocked to the street and twittered welcome and surprise.

Rafe and Kendricks betrayed considerable contempt when I greeted my foster parents affectionately. They were already old, and I was saddened to see it; their fur greying, their prehensile toes and fingers crooked with a rheumatic complaint of some sort, their reddish eyes bleared and rheumy. They welcomed me, and made arrangements for the others in my party to be housed in an abandoned house nearby. They had insisted that I must return to their roof, and Kyla, of course, had to stay with me.

“Couldn’t we camp on the ground instead?” Kendricks asked, eying the flimsy shelter with distaste.

“It would offend our hosts,” I said firmly. I saw nothing wrong with it. Roofed with woven bark, carpeted with moss which was planted on the floor, the place was abandoned, somewhat musty, but weathertight and seemed comfortable to me.

The first thing to be done was to dispatch a messenger to the Old One, begging the favor of an audience with him. That done, (by one of my foster brothers), we settled down to a meal of buds, honey, insects and birds’ eggs; it tasted good to me, with the familiarity of food eaten in childhood, but among the others, only Kyla ate with appetite and Regis Hastur with interested curiosity.

After the demands of hospitality had been satisfied, my foster parents asked the names of my party, and I introduced them one by one. When I named Regis Hastur, it reduced them to brief silence, and then to an outcry; gently but firmly, they insisted that their home was unworthy to shelter the son of a Hastur, and that he must be fittingly entertained at the Royal Nest of the Old One.

There was no gracious way for Regis to protest, and when the messenger returned, he prepared to accompany him. But before leaving, he drew me aside:

“I don’t much like leaving the rest of you—”

“You’ll be safe enough.”

“It’s not that I’m worried about, Dr. Allison.”

“Call me Jason,” I corrected angrily. Regis said, with a little tightening of his mouth, “That’s it. You’ll have to be Dr. Allison tomorrow when you tell the Old One about your mission. But you have to be the Jason he knows, too.”

“So—?”

“I wish I needn’t leave here. I wish you were— going to stay with the men who know you only as Jason, instead of being alone—or only with Kyla.”

There was something odd in his face, and I wondered at it. Could he—a Hastur—be jealous of Kyla? Jealous of me? It had never occurred to me that he might be somehow attracted to Kyla. I tried to pass it off lightly.

“Kyla might divert me.”

Regis said without emphasis. “Yet she brought Dr. Allison back once before.” Then, surprisingly, he laughed. “Or maybe you’re right. Maybe Kyla will —scare away Dr. Allison if he shows up.”

Jay Allison pushed the girl’s hand away and scowled savagely, trying to collect his thoughts and concentrate them on what he must say and do, to convince the Trailmen of their duty toward the rest of the planet. As if they—not even humans—could have a sense of duty!

With an unaccustomed surge of emotion, he wished he were with the others. Kendricks, now. Jay knew, precisely, why Forth had sent the big, reliable spaceman at his back. And that handsome, arrogant Darkovan—where was he? Jay looked at the girl in puzzlement; he didn’t want to reveal that he wasn’t quite sure of what he was saying or doing, or that he had little memory of what Jason had been up to.

He started to ask, “Where did the Hastur kid go?” before a vagrant logical thought told him that such an important guest would have been lodged with the Old One. Then a wave of despair hit him; Jay realized he did not even speak the Trailmen’s language, that it had slipped from his thoughts completely.

“You—” he fished desperately for the girl’s name,

“Kyla. You don’t speak the Trailmen’s language, do you?”

“A few words. No more. Why?” She had withdrawn into a corner of the tiny room—still not far from him—and he wondered remotely what his damned alter ego had been up to. With Jason, there was no telling. Jay raised his eyes with a melancholy smile.