unnerving.
Serene calculation.
The tooth-jarring pace swelled when the hilly track met open ground. Soon Ulashtu’s detachment of urrish warriors fell behind, unable to keep up.
No wonder some urs clans resented horses, when humans first settled Jijo. The beasts gave us mobility, the trait most loved by urrish captains.
Two centuries ago, after trouncing the human newcomers in battle, the original Urunthai faction claimed Earthlings’ beloved mounts as war booty, and slaughtered every one.
They figured we’d be no more trouble, left to walk and fight on foot. A mistake that proved fatal when Drake the Elder forged a coalition to hunt the Urunthai, and drowned the cult’s leadership at Soggy Hoof Falls.
Only, it seems horses weren’t extinct, after all. How could a clan of horse-riding folk remain hidden all this time?
And as puzzling—Why emerge now, risking exposure by rushing to meet Kurt?
It must be the crisis of the starships, ending Jijo’s blessed/cursed isolation. What point in keeping secrets, if Judgment Day is at hand?
Sara was exhausted and numb by the time morning pushed through an overcast sky. An expanse of undulating hills stretched ahead to a dark green marsh.
The party dismounted at last by a shaded creek. Hands aimed her toward a blanket, where she collapsed with a shuddering sigh.
Sleep came laced with images of people she had left behind.
Nelo, her aged father, working in his beloved paper mill, unaware that some conspired its ruin.
Melina, her mother, dead several years now, who always seemed an outsider since arriving in Dolo long ago, with a baby son in her arms.
Frail Joshu, Sara’s lover in Biblos, whose touch made her forget even the overhanging Fist of Stone. A comely rogue whose death sent her spinning.
Dwer and Lark, her brothers, setting out to attend festival in the high Rimmer glades … where starships were later seen descending.
Sara’s mind roiled as she tossed and turned.
Last of all, she pictured Blade, whose qheuen hive farmed crayfish behind Dolo Dam. Good old Blade, who saved Sara and Emerson from disaster at the Urunthai camp.
“Seems I’m always late catching up,” her qheuen friend whistled from three leg vents. “But don’t worry, I’ll be along. Too much is happening to miss.”
Blade’s armor-clad dependability had been like a rock to Sara. In her dream, she answered.
“I’ll stall the universe … keep it from doing anything interesting until you show up.”
Imagined or not, the blue qheuen’s calliope laughter warmed Sara, and her troubled slumber fell into gentler rhythms.
The sun was half-high when someone shook Sara back to the world — one of the taciturn female riders, using the archaic word brekkers to announce the morning meal. Sara got up gingerly as waves of achy soreness coursed her body.
She gulped down a bowl of grain porridge, spiced with unfamiliar traeki seasonings, while horsewomen saddled mounts or watched Emerson play his beloved dulcimer, filling the pocket valley with a sprightly melody, suited for travel. Despite her morning irritability, Sara knew the starman was just making the best of the situation. Bursts of song were a way to overcome his handicap of muteness.
Sara found Kurt tying up his bedroll.
“Look,” she told the elderly exploser, “I’m not ungrateful to your friends. I appreciate the rescue and all. But you can’t seriously hope to ride horses all the way to … Mount Guenn.” Her tone made it sound like one of Jijo’s moons.
Kurt’s stony face flickered a rare smile. “Any better suggestions? Sure, you planned taking the Stranger to the High Sages, but that way is blocked by angry Urunthai. And recall, we saw two starships last night, one after the other, headed straight for Festival Glade. The Sages must have their hands and tendrils full by now.”
“How could I forget?” she murmured. Those titans, growling as they crossed the sky, had seared their image in her mind.
“You could hole up in one of the villages we’ll pass soon, but won’t Emerson need a first-rate pharmacist when he runs out of Pzora’s medicine?”
“If we keep heading south we’ll reach the Gentt. From there a riverboat can take us to Ovoom Town.”
“Assuming boats are running … and Ovoom still exists. Even so, should you hide your alien friend, with great events taking place? What if he has a role to play? Some way to help sages and Commons? Might you spoil his one chance of goin’ home?”
Sara saw Kurt’s implication — that she was holding Emerson back, like a child refusing to release some healed forest creature into the wild.
A swarm of sweetbec flies drifted close to the starman, hovering and throbbing to the tempo of his music, a strange melody. Where did he learn it? On Earth? Near some alien star?
“Anyway,” Kurt went on, “if you can stand riding these huge beasts awhile longer, we may reach Mount Guenn sooner than Ovoom.”
“That’s crazy! You must pass through Ovoom if you go by sea. And the other way around is worse — through the funnel canyons and the Vale.”
Kurt’s eyes flickered. “I’m told there’s a … more direct route.”
“Direct? You mean due south? Past the Gentt lies the Plain of Sharp Sand, a desperate crossing under good conditions — which these aren’t. Have you forgotten that’s where Dedinger has followers?”
“No, I haven’t forgotten.”
“Then, assuming we get past the sandmen and flame dunes, there comes the Spectral Flow, making any normal desert seem like a meadow!”
Kurt only shrugged, but clearly he wanted her to accompany him toward a distant simmering mountain, far from where Sara had sworn to take Emerson. Away from Lark and Dwer, and the terrible attraction of those fierce starships. Toward a starkly sacred part of Jijo, renowned for one thing above all — the way the planet renewed itself with flaming lava heat.
Alvin
MAYBE IT WAS THE COMPRESSED ATMOSPHERE WE breathed, or the ceaseless drone of reverberating engines. Or it could have been the perfect darkness outside that fostered an impression of incredible depth, even greater than when our poor little Wuphon’s Dream fell into the maw of this giant metal sea beast. A single beam — immeasurably brighter than the handmade eik light of our old minisub — speared out to split the black, scanning territory beyond my wildest nightmares. Even the vivid imagery of Verne or Pukino or Melville offered no preparation for what was revealed by that roving circle as we cruised along a subsea canyon strewn with all manner of ancient dross. In rapid glimpses we saw so many titanic things, all jumbled together, that—
Here I admit I’m stumped. According to the texts that teach Anglic literature, there are two basic ways for a writer to describe unfamiliar objects. First is to catalog sights and sounds, measurements, proportions, colors — saying this object is made up of clusters of colossal cubes connected by translucent rods, or that one resembles a tremendous sphere caved in along one side, trailing from its crushed innards a glistening streamer, a liquidlike banner that somehow defies the tug of time and tide.
Oh, I can put words together and come up with pretty pictures, but that method ultimately fails because at the time I couldn’t tell how far away anything was! The eye sought clues in vain. Some objects — piled across the muddy panorama — seemed so vast that the huge vessel around us was dwarfed, like a minnow in a herd of behmo serpents. As for colors, even in the spotlight beam, the water drank all shades but deathly blue gray. A good hue for a shroud in this place of icy-cold death.
Another way to describe the unknown is to compare it to things you already recognize … only that method proved worse! Even Huck, who sees likenesses in things I can’t begin to fathom, was reduced to staring toward great heaps of ancient debris with all four eyestalks, at an utter loss.
