Dark of the Woods

system was thinking — if it were capable of initiating a thought on its own. Cold was another quantity/condition which it could not protect him from. He could freeze to death, if he had not remembered this blanket, and Proteus could do nothing to stop the slow but certain progress for even a fraction of a second.

He was struck with, the thought that Proteus was a fugitive now too. Proteus was running with them, was here to protect them so they could escape from the Alliance government. That made him a traitor and a fugitive from “justice.” He wanted to laugh but did not have the energy, and he fell asleep before he could frame even a fragment of another train of thought…

It was not a quiet sleep.

This was not the time for that.

There were dreams:

He was in a house made of ice, each room a frigid cubicle without differentiation. He was naked, and his skin was growing blue, numbing, lacing over with glittering particles of frost…

He was trying to find the doorway…

There did not appear to be one.

It grew colder and colder until, shimmering out of nothingness, stalactites and stalagmites formed in the room, made of ice, effectively barring his way and making him a prisoner of this one chamber.

Then, as he crumpled on the floor and felt his strength ebbing out of him, one spot in the wall began to melt, the water running down and puddling around him, warm and pleasant, life-giving. A portal appeared in the wall, and Leah was there, smiling. She walked toward him, seeming to skim on the water, and the ice melted around her and the cold air became warm. He grasped her, and feeling returned to his flesh.

And just as they were kissing, a man without a face, dressed in a blue uniform with brass buttons, tapped Davis on the shoulder, separated him from Leah, and started leading her away.

The ice began to reform.

The flesh that had been warm grew cold again.

He raced frantically after the uniformed man and the girl, trying to regain her, but his feet kept freezing to the floor, slowing his progress, while they moved swiftly, the ice melting before them and solidifying behind…

He wasn't going to catch her.

Never…

Ever …

He opened his mouth to scream, wondering if that would crack the ice watts of his prison …

… and was awakened by the boom of a pistol shot fired very nearby…

He grabbed for his own gun, slapping his hand against an empty holster. He had confiscated the weapon from the Alliance representative at the Sanctuary, and now someone had confiscated it from him, in turn. He looked about the lean-to and saw Proteus; nodes gleaming all colors as the machine bobbled irritably, swayed from side to side as it tried to ascertain just what sort of role it should play in the transpiring events. Leah was near the left opening of the shelter, and it was she who had lifted his pistol from the holster and had been using it. She held it in both hands, as if it were too heavy for her to manage in one, and pointed it at the white landscape beyond the entrance.

“What is it?” he asked. Suddenly, it seemed as if they must have been mad to stop and sleep.

“Wolves,” she said.

He relaxed a little. Wolves might be cunning and powerful, but not so cunning and not so powerful as a man with a gun or a vibra-beam weapon working as a soldier of the Alliance. He moved over to where she sat, looked through the opening. Not more than six feet away, a great gray-brown wolf, much like those that Proteus had fought off the day before, sprawled in the thick carpet of snow, great red blotches of blood staining the purity around it. Its mouth was open, its tongue lolled to the side.

“I didn't want to wake you,” she said. “I thought this might be equipped with a built-in silencer. It wasn't.”

“I didn't know you could use a gun,” he said.

“Everyone was a soldier in the last days of the war.”

“I guess so.”

“There are others,” she said quietly, staring intently at the clumps of brush that pushed through the snow.

“Where?”

“They scattered when I shot. But they're not too far away. You can be sure of that.”

“Proteus—”

“I discovered something unsettling about your Proteus,” she interrupted, looking behind at the grav-plated weapons system which floated above the earth in absolute silence.

“What?”

“He's your protection robot, not mine. The wolves kept coming closer. He kept scanning them, very attentively, but I realized that he was not going to shoot any of them unless they went for you. If they attacked me, it was perfectly all right.”

He nodded, a quiver of horror running through him as he contemplated the serious oversight in their preparations he had made. He had been thinking of Proteus as their guardian, not as his own private soldier, for he had been extending the new concept of “us” everywhere the old concept of “me” had prevailed. But Proteus would be oblivious of emotional developments such as that and would stand blithely by and watch her perish if her own life was not imperiled by the same enemy and at the precise same instant as Davis's own.

The cataracted eyes of the spherical defender stared out into the winter wasteland: white viewing white.

“From now on,” he said, “well tie the plastic down so that there's only a single entrance instead of two. If I hadn't been so tired this morning, I would have done that. Then I'll sleep near the open side, with Proteus near the entrance.” He pushed up the sleeve of his coat and the sleeves of the two sweaters which he wore beneath it. “We've been asleep for about five hours. It's getting on toward the end of the morning. If we're going to make use of the daylight to walk, we'd better get started.”

They drank more water and ate some chocolate, then carefully folded the blanket to unalign its heat emanators so that they could cool, packed things away, took down the plastic sheet that formed their shelter and stowed that. In fifteen minutes, they were ready to move out, with Leah carrying the suitcase and Davis toting both rucksacks. They set out down the mountainside with a great deal more ease than they had managed in their sleepiness and exhaustion the first time, five or six hours ago.

The terrible winds had died, though there were now and then gusts that startled them and unbalanced them, toppling them into snowbanks. The snow was still falling, rather heavily but in less than a blizzard pace. They could see some distance ahead, and the way looked uniformly easy down this ravine and up the other side, at least. There were drifts of snow as high as their waists in some spots, though these could most always be circumvented if they took time and patience to find their way. Everywhere, the white stuff was up to mid-calf on Davis and up to the girl's knees, which slowed and tired them and made them wonder whether they would be able to make the sort of time necessary to stay well ahead of the Alliance forces that must — at dawn— have struck out on their trail.

When they reached the bottom of the depression and started up the opposite slope, they found that going down through the waves of the drifts had been far easier than pushing upwards through them. They were required, now, to fight the angle of the earth, the treacherous and unseen footing beneath winter's blanket, and the stiff resistance of more than a foot of fine, tightly packed snow. Near the top, they were presented with yet another obstacle: an overhanging drift that crowned the last twenty feet of their path and made reaching the top of the second mountain difficult if not impossible. At Davis's suggestion, they worked to the right, moving horizontally now, searching for a break in the overhang through which they might struggle to achieve the blessed levelness of the summit. But they found, three hundred yards along, that the ravine dropped into a sheer cliff where there was no toehold and that the overhanging drift continued beyond even this. They were forced to backtrack, following their