'Times and places?' Though Jake tried hard to understand, still it was beyond him. 'Make sense, can't you?' There was no anger now, just a need to know.
'A time on Starside, perhaps,' Lardis said, still staring hard at Jake, 'when a man and his changeling son laid waste to the aeries of the Wamphyri? Or a time when the same man lay in the arms of a wonderful woman, whose name was Nana Kiklu. Or a time when we met — met for the last time, that man and I — in the ruins of The Dweller's garden, when it was already far too late for him…'
Lardis's words conjured pictures that came and went. They meant something — Jake knew that much at least — but they were monochrome things; they flickered like the frames of some ancient silent movie… jerky scenes and twitching puppet figures. And despite that Jake thought he recognized some of them, still it was as if he saw them through someone else's eyes:
He looked down on a plain of boulders, lit silver-grey beneath a tumbling moon, where distant spires climbed to a sky of ice-chip stars. And that alien sky was alive with flying beasts whose weird shapes…! God, those shapes! Designs not of Nature but of Nightmare!
As quickly as it had come the scene was gone, disappeared, and another took its place.
A garden — The garden? — where a younger Lardis stood by a wall and gazed upon a scene of desolation. A windmill's crumpled vanes slumped all lopsided atop a skeletal, tottering timber tower; some of the roofs of low stone dwellings hadfalien in; the trout pools were green with algae., and the greenhouses were tangles of shattered frames, leaning or fallen flat, with clumps of bolted vegetation sprouting through their torn plastic sheeting.
The pictures continued to flicker and blur, and the oddly young Lardis turned jerkily to stare at Jake… or at the one gazing back at him through Jake's eyes. But in this not-so-Old Lidesci's eyes there was fear, and in his hands a shotgun that came swinging,frame byjlickeringframe — click, clickety-click — in Jake's direction. And the look in Lardis's eyes was no longer fear, or not entirely, but fear combined with deadly intent! Abruptly, the scene changed:
To the straining face of a handsome woman. Handsome, yes, but by no means beautiful — yet beautiful, too, in her way. Her body was beautiful, certainly. And hands (Jake's handsP) on her breasts where they lolled in his face. And her breath.like Jire in his (or some other's?) flared, nostrils, and. the sweat of her passion as slippery and hot on his hands as the wet core of her womanhood where it sheathed his jerking flesh. Nana?
'Nana!' Jake exclaimed, as the scene slipped from memory — but his memory? — and he found himself seated by the campfire, his hands before his face, perhaps to fondle (whose? What was her name?) the handsome woman's breasts, anyway, or perhaps to ward off Lardis Lidesci's shotgun. Well, there was the old man, sure enough, but now more surely the 'Old' Lidesci as Jake knew him; and he had no shotgun but a strange satisfied look on his face.
'And it's Nana, is it?' Lardis said, with a knowing nod, as Jake's mind swam back into focus and he slowly lowered his trembling hands. 'Took you back a ways, didn't I, my young friend?'
'What… what did you do to me?' Jake whispered, the words sighing out of him.
'I have an ancestor's seer's blood in me,' Lardis answered. 'It smells things out. And I think that it has smelled you out, too, Jake Cutter. For just as this art of my forebears has been passed down to me, so something has been passed to you. It's in you, man.'
Not in your blood, as it was in Nestor's and Nathan's blood, but buried in your mind and your soul for sure!' And now the look on the Gypsy's face was one of awe as much as anything else.
'It's in me, yes,' Jake agreed, knowing it was so. And then, coming very close to desperation, 'But what is it, Lardis? What is it?'
The other shook his head. 'No, no. Ben wouldn't want me to say any more. Indeed, he'd nag that I've already said too much! It will have to take its own good time, that's all. But what's in will out, of that you can be sure. And now, goodnight to you, Jake Cutter.' With which he backed off, and like the wild thing he was faded into the night…
Maybe Jake had been too tired to dream, or perhaps he had managed to fight it off this time. Whichever, he had slept deeply, soundly and dreamlessly, and remembered coming awake only once, when he'd thought he'd heard a vehicle's engine starting up. Then he'd eased his cramped body off the chair, zipped himself into a sleeping bag, and curled up right at the edge of the fire's cooling embers—
— And now came starting awake as the toe of a boot nudged him and Trask's voice rasped, 'Jake, get up. Have you seen anything of Miller? Obviously not. Well, the fat bastard's run out on us, and in your bloody vehicle! Damn, I thought for a moment you'd gone with him!'
Throwing back the mosquito net from his face, Jake unzipped the bag and struggled out of it. Now he remembered the engine starting up, dipped headlamps swinging faint beams out onto the road, and the cautious crunch of tyres on dirt and pebbles. He had thought at the time that someone was being very careful not to awaken the camp… and he'd been only too right!
'My vehicle?' he mumbled, but Trask had already moved on.
The entire camp was coming awake, and overhead the shrill, pulsing whistle of a jetcopter cutting its thrusters; the whup— whup — whup of its vanes lowering it down from a sky in which the stars were only just beginning to fade. And the first faint nimbus of dawn silhouetting the treetops and shining on rising, writhing wisps of mist.
'Hell's teeth.'' Lardis Lidesci groaned where he came stumbling from the direction of the big articulated Ops vehicle. As he came, his trembling right hand gingerly explored a blackened patch of bloodied, matted hair on the left side of his head. It looked ugly, and was made to look worse by a flow of blood that had run down and congealed around his ear. 'Damn the bloody man to hell.'' he said.
Meeting him halfway, Trask grunted: 'Miller?' 'Wouldn't you just know it?' Lardis nodded, then groaned and held his head again. 'I bedded down under the steps at the back of Ops. And I heard something in the dead of night, something breaking. But these damned short nights of yours… my system's all out of kilter with them… I'm used to sleeping, not these forty winks that you people take.''
'You didn't wake up till too late,' Trask grunted. I'm not a damned watchdog!' Lardis snapped. Trask shook his head. Tm not blaming you, Lardis. Hell, I didn't think the crazy bastard had enough guts to make a run for it! So if it's anyone's fault it's mine. I should have posted a guard on him.'
lan Goodly came loping, looking more than a little angry with himself. 'The camp's awake,' he said, sourly.
Trask looked at him and growled, 'You too? It seems we're each and every one of us blaming himself.'
'But I'm the precog,' Goodly chewed on his top lip.
'Right,' Trask agreed, 'but one man can't foresee it all. And let's face it, if you could anticipate everything that was coming…'
'… Then I would probably have killed myself a long time ago, yes,' Goodly nodded. 'But damn it, I did see this one!'
'You what?' Jake was wide awake now. 'So why didn't you do something?'
'I saw it in my sleep,' the precog answered. 'Saw it as a dream. Hub! When is a dream not a dream? When it's a glimpse of the future! But even if I'd known what it was, how would I have woken myself up? When you're asleep you're asleep. And the future guards its secrets well.'
'And I thought I was the only one who was having problems with his dreams!' Jake said. At which Trask looked at him very curiously… but only for a moment. There was too much to do.
'Okay,' Trask said, let's forget it. I'm to blame, Lardis is to blame, lan is to blame, and so is Jake—'
'Me?' Jake raised an eyebrow.
'For leaving the keys in your 'Rover,' Trask nodded. 'Anyway, no one is really to blame. The problem is we've grown too used to dealing with the weird, the abnormal, the monstrous. I mean, if it's mundane we tend to let it slide. And you couldn't ask for anything more mundane than Mr bloody Miller!'
'I beg to differ,' said Goodly.
'Eh?' Trask looked at him.
'Can I put you fully in the picture now?' the precog said. And when Trask nodded: 'Miller's a strange one,' Goodly continued. 'When finally I woke up I was worried about my dream. So I went to see if everything was okay. I missed Lardis where Miller must have pushed him back out of sight behind the trailer's steps, but I found the Duty Officer. He's going to be okay, but he, too, had been bashed on the head. He was lying in the corridor outside Miller's bunk with the door on top of him. They're pretty flimsy, those doors. The hinges had been worked
