Catch a falling star, p.6
Catch a Falling Star, page 6
“Leave him be,” Chalyth ventured. “His long loneliness has turned his brain; he will never be a proper man again.”
“No!” Madal flared. “I’ll make use of him, I swear I will! Did he not claim to know in which direction the path lay? Then he can lead us to it, at the very least. Come on, you stinking manure-pile!” She delivered another vicious jab at Vence’s back, and he forced himself wavering to his feet.
“Do you think it’s safe to leave this fire?” Chalyth asked, with a doubtful glance at the tall dry grass around them.
Vence moaned, eyes rolling, but the words would not pass his injured jaw in clear language.
“I think he wants it left alight,” Madal interpreted. “In which case—you’re right, aren’t you? Cover it with dirt and let’s be gone!”
With the tips of his fingers Creohan stirred the piled bones until he came on a flat shoulderblade, which he used to dig up a few scoops of soft earth. The fire died, hissing. Madal checked Vence’s attempt to prevent the act with a kind of vicious satisfaction.
“Now, take us to the trail!” she snapped at last.
He turned and broke into a stumbling trot, following a line along which the grass-stems parted very readily, and Madal hurried at his heels, lashing him on with the bone for a goad. Creohan and Chalyth had all they could do to keep up. At last they came to the track again, the broad clear gap in the grass where it was trampled flat so often by the meat it had no chance to grow to normal height—and Vence seemed not to see it, but dashed straight ahead and was immediately lost among the grass on the other side.
“Good riddance!” Madal exclaimed, panting. She leaned on the bone like a staff and glowered at the stalks which now were springing back to the vertical.
Arriving at her side, Chalyth said, “You’re going to let him go? You’re going to leave him to starve with a broken jaw here in the wilderness?”
“He left me to eat out my heart with longing,” Madal said with contempt. “I’m doing no more than setting the account to rights.”
“Whatever he did to you,” Chalyth said obstinately, “with a broken jaw he’ll starve! And we who are seeking a way to save the lives of people yet unborn should not so lightly condemn the people of the present to a lingering death!”
“Lightly?” Madal echoed. “Ten stolen years, and you say I do this lightly? Oh, go after him then-for all I know you’re fit company for the dirty brute!”
But the fierceness of her rage was leaking away, and in one more instant she had let the bone fall and stumbled blindly to the comfort of Chalyth’s arms, her slim frame racked with sobbing.
“It’s horrible, it’s horrible!” she wept. “I did love him, truly I did, and he was kind and thoughtful and he played the flute so well!”
“We don’t doubt it,” Creohan said. “It must indeed be that long loneliness has broken down his mind. That’s not your Vence who’s fled into the sea of grass, but another in his body, who has become much less than a man.”
“Even so, should we not save him from that awful fate?” Chalyth said. “Starving because he cannot bite his food?”
“I think it would do no good,” Creohan sighed. “You’ve seen how hard it is to spot someone among this grass, and we were only looking for Madal, who was waiting in the same spot. To pursue someone who is trying to get away would be fruitless, and we ourselves might never find the trail again.”
“I guess you’re right,” Chalyth said after a pause. “But… Well, there’s no help for it, I must agree. So what will you do, Madal—turn and head for home?”
The yellow-haired girl wiped away her tears. She said, “I think I’d rather find a reason to go on. Going back on my own, who’s to say I might not suffer the same fate as Vence? He was a strong good man once, I swear he was! But equally what profit lies in going forward? There was one of him and we are three; three times as far from home as he reached, will we become like him?”
“No, we have a purpose,” Creohan declared. “Vence must have left home from simple restlessness, and in the end found he had not enough knowledge of himself to discover a purpose for his travels. But we set out for a very pressing reason.”
“To save the world?” Madal gave a sarcastic laugh. “One man, one woman, to divert a star?’
“No, that’s not the thing that drives us,” Chalyth said with naked honesty. “The truth is—we’re afraid.”
“Of what? A disaster that will happen when you’re both long dead?”
“I know what makes me fearful,” Chalyth said. “The world is so large, and I so small, and I may die before I understand a tithe of it. You, Creohan?”
“Yes, I’m afraid,” Creohan admitted. “Though I may be forgotten by choice on the part of those who come after us, I do not wish that there should be no one at all who might choose to remember me. And you, Madal? Have you a fear that will make you continue in our company?”
“If fear will serve for reason,” Madal said at length, “you already know the answer. I’m afraid to go back alone. So I’ll go on. Which way, Creohan?”
Creohan glanced up at the sun and calculated. “That way,” he said, and began to stride determinedly along the path again.
IX
Late in the day the ground across which the path was leading them began to take an upward turn, and the nature of the vegetation changed. Among the grass, which was here scattered in clumps a few feet wide, there appeared shrubs with pale blue flowers, thick-boled miniature trees not as high as Creohan with peculiar stiff leaves that tinkled against each other, and groups of colossal puffballs as translucent as frogspawn. Something could be dimly seen inside each ball, but they found that they preferred not to examine the contents too closely; the shapes were disquieting.
Madal, it seemed, would not have been distracted by a lightning strike at her feet, so depressed was she at their encounter with Vence. She went in silence, eyes fixed on the path, and her companions respected her desire to be left in peace. However, they talked between themselves as they walked, for they were already seeing many strange things.
“Creohan, how is it that plants can change so rapidly?” Chalyth demanded, having plucked one of the blue flowers to sample its odour, and, dismayed, seen it turn rotten-brown on the instant. “We’ve not moved to another climatic zone, yet I’ve never seen such growths around our home city. Is it some shift in the nature of the soil?”
“That may contribute,” Creohan replied. “But this is a matter I once discussed with Molichant, and he told me it was a testament to the fantasy of man—that a thousand centuries of meddling with them and letting them be by turns produced this incredible variety of plants.”
Astonished, Chalyth gestured at one of the clumps of puffballs they were passing. “But what conceivable purpose could anyone have in creating a species like that—if it is indeed artificial?”
“Maybe there was no purpose,” Creohan shrugged. “Maybe there was only curiosity. Most likely, though, there was a purpose which to us now is inaccessible. We seem to have invented many improbable goals for ourselves. When I think of the way the Gerynts …” He swallowed hard. “Well, that woman who attacked me in the tavern, as I described to you: I find it impossible to understand her motivation, yet she was a citizen of our own age.”
“Contaminated,” Chalyth said.
“Yes.”
There was a pause. During it, he glanced back to see if Madal was still keeping up, and realised that now the slope had carried them high enough to see the yellow grassy plain like a sea, its surface rippling to the touch of a breeze. Nothing further away could be discerned; haze masked the horizon and blended the juncture of earth and sky into a vague shimmer of blue.
. “Creohan,” Chalyth said, “something puzzles me. Do you see anything odd about this section of the road?”
“Odd?” Creohan echoed, and stared ahead and around. It was a moment before he hit on what she was referring to, but then he was surprised at not having seen it for himself. Up till now the track made by the meat had never been straight for more than a hundred paces or so at one time, but it had always gone roughly in the same direction, curving a few degrees this side, a few that, and maintaining its general course by average.
Along this stretch, however, it was distinctly zigzag, with unprecedentedly sharp angles at frequent intervals, and there were rather steep banks on either side.
Creohan stopped. Behind him Madal did the same, her face blank of any reaction. Taking a knife from his pack, he tried to drive the point into the bank nearest him, and met resistance an inch below the surface. He tried elsewhere, with the same result, then scraped away the masking vegetation and threw it down.
Revealed was the face of a large polished stone, with a crack running corner to corner and the hair-fine tendrils of fungal mycelia threading out of it. Some insects, fearing light, scuttled for shelter before he could see what they were.
“I thought so,” Chalyth said softly. “Where we stand, Creohan, was there not once a city of the ancient style, with man-made walls instead of self-grown houses?”
“There must have been,” Creohan agreed, and shook his head in wonder. “And no trace of it remains visible, except the sketched line of those straight streets that the meat-creatures have chosen to follow, making the nearest approach they could to a direct course across the site.”
“It’s a fearful thought,” Chalyth muttered. “How can Historickers bear to delve into the past, knowing what fate overtook the builders, the inventors, the rulers and the common folk?”
“Perhaps it gives them a sense of superiority, being still alive themselves,” Creohan answered cynically. “Despite the evidence with which the world is littered, I think few men—or women either—can honestly believe the inevitability of death.”
He sheathed his knife, and concluded, “Anyway, I suspect we’ve hit on the reason for the sudden change in the nature of the plants around here. As you proposed, there’s a change in the nature of the ground. Possibly the folk who built this city liked to have things like these monstrous puffballs growing in their gardens.”
“Monstrous is an apt term,” Chalyth said. “Have you noticed that one, looming up ahead past the next corner?” She pointed, and Creohan looked where she indicated. He saw a vast swollen bubble, so over-taut that it seemed on the verge of bursting, strained to such transparency that it was only detectable against the air thanks to the glint of the declining sun on its exterior. And the dark shape inside was moving.
Creohan felt a pang of irrational alarm, but told himself brusquely that the motion must be due to the breeze. He gestured for them to continue forward, taking the lead and setting a brisk pace. Drawing closer to the giant puffball, however, his feet slackened without intention. There was something about that all too clearly visible form which made the hairs rise prickling on his nape.
“Hurry, Creohan!” Chalyth urged. “Let’s pass that thing as quickly as we can.”
Relieved to know his alarm was shared, Creohan complied, keeping to the side of the path further from it, for its vast dilated bulk was trespassing down the bank and in a short while would probably bar the way completely. Reflexively he reached behind him for Chalyth’s hand, and murmured that she should take Madal’s, there being irrational comfort against irrational fears in the simple contact of skin.
He drew level with the puffball and began to sidle, for a strange desire possessed him to see the shape within. He made out that there must be fluid as well as gas inside, for there was a roiling of dull yellow-grey matter near the base, and it was from the middle of this that the central form protruded. A sort of irregular dome, with two dark pits beneath, and then another pit like an inverted half-moon, and barely above the level of the yellow-grey substance a horizontal slit with indistinct whitish vertical bars crossing it. The whole was about half as high as himself, so that with the bank to raise it above the path the dark pits were on a level with his eyes—
Eyes?
In the same instant as himself, Chalyth recognised the object’s true shape, disguised until now by its excessive size, and cried aloud.
“Oh, Creohan, it’s a face!”
As though the words were a signal, the covering of the twin dark pits split raggedly and fell in drifting flakes to the roiling fluid at the base. Revealed were two huge white staring orbs each with a dark vertical slit. They were confronted with a hideous inhuman gaze that froze them to the spot.
The head tilted back, and the whitish bars were exposed as teeth, great spiky fangs with liquid dripping from their tips, and Creohan recovered the power to move. He dragged Chalyth away, and she Madal, both stumbling, for some ten paces. There a large rock lying loose on the ground caught his eye; he let go Chalyth’s hand, seized the lump of stone, whirled and flung it with all his force at the bulging membrane of the puffball.
It gashed the upper surface, and instantly the gas within began to leak away, causing a high sighing moan, a vegetable cry of despair. The ballooning globe collapsed inwards, wrinkled, became opaque as it dwindled, and finally draped like a grey shroud around the horrible head. They stood in silence until they were sure it was inert.
Then Chalyth passed her hand across her forehead wearily. “That was no natural plant!” she said. “But what incredible twisted human mind could conceive it, let alone actively desire its existence?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Creohan grunted. “All I want is to get out of the region where these horrors grow. Madal, are you all right—? Why, girl! Your feet are stained with blood!”
Indeed, there were reddish marks on both of Madal’s shoes.
“We’ll go on,” she said dispiritedly. And, when the others wavered, she added in a fiercer tone, “I said go on! I too want to leave this area, sore feet or no!”
Doubtfully, Creohan offered to take her burdens from her, but she refused the offer with a curt headshake and strode away, face very white, lips pressed together as though to repress a moan of pain. Accepting her decision, the others followed her.
Not long after their way began to slope upwards more sharply than ever, so that they were compelled to go slowly and seek handholds for fear of slipping. But once more the vegetation had changed, with no more of the strange puffballs or blue-flowered shrubs. Instead, they encountered purple moss and dull lichens clinging to otherwise naked rocks; here and there a red-leaved tree made obscene gestures at the sky with its branches. It was approaching sunset, and Creohan was minded to suggest finding a place to camp, when all of a sudden he heard a noise at the edge of audibility.
“Listen!” he said, halting and raising one hand. “Is that not the laughter of the meat?”
“I think it is,” Chalyth confirmed after a moment. “But there’s so much of it!”
Creohan studied the lay of the nearby land, and snapped his fingers. “I think we must be close to the breeding-ground,” he announced. “Look how this hill we re climbing forms a curve. Beyond I foresee a valley shaped like a bowl, and we hear the laughter reflected by the hard rocks enclosing it.”
“Quick then! To the top!” And Chalyth scrambled upwards more vigorously than ever. She, of course, was used to fighting ocean currents in the dark and the exercise had made her body as tough and supple as a good sword-blade. Creohan, on the other hand, was beginning to be amazed at the way his own body had answered his demands, and feared to wear himself out. He came up more slowly, lending Madal a hand over the most difficult sections of the climb.
Ahead, Chalyth vanished between two boulders. In a moment her cry came back urging them to join her.
“You were right, Creohan. This is—enormous 1”
There was indeed a bowl-shaped valley beyond the hill. It was not very deep, but it was wide, and they could not see the other side of it because a huge weathered hump rose in the middle. Creohan looked at the way the hills were piled up about them, like mud splashed by a blow from a hammer, and remembered certain features on Mercury which had passed into the field of his telescope. So interested did he become at the realisation that he was on the lip of a meteoritic crater that he almost forgot to look at the hordes of meat which roamed its floor, tearing ripe white chunks from the stem of a kind of cactus which grew everywhere in clumps. They gobbled with feverish ecstasy, as if dimly aware that the more they ate the sooner would they be fat and ready to be themselves eaten.
“You are they who have been despoiling my flock,” said a voice behind them harshly. “Deny it if you dare!”
They swung around. Facing them from an overhang of rock was what at first looked like one of the meat-creatures; in fact, it was a man of ordinary stature, who had taken the whole hide, grey fur and all, from one of the brutes and after shortening the limbs had tied it round himself. His muscular arms held taut the string of a bow, and the arrow nocked to it looked sharp enough to pierce all three of them at once.
X
“You have been robbing me!” the man shouted. “Prepare to die!”
“No, no!” Creohan exclaimed, and added with sudden inspiration: “The one who has been robbing you is wandering in the plain of yellow grass, his jaw so injured that he cannot eat!”
“See for yourself if we have taken any of your meat,” Chalyth chimed in, unslinging her bag and opening it to display what little provisions still remained to her. Cautiously, to avoid alarming the aggressive stranger, the others copied her.
“Indeed I see you have no meat,” the man agreed at length, sounding puzzled. But he lowered his bow. “Where do you come from, and why are you here?”
“We come from the city which lies yonder, over the plain and close beside the sea,” Creohan replied, and pointed as nearly as he could judge by the sun in the correct direction.
