There was a rustle under the wind. A warm breath, not unpleasantly scented—
He snapped awake and scrambled backwards out of his nest. In the starless gloom a huge shape hovered uncertainly.
He held out the knife with both hands. “Who is it?”
The voice was ill-formed, soft, and infinitely reassuring. “It iss me… Orange. I am so-ssorry to wake you…”
Teal let out a deep breath and lowered the knife. He found himself laughing softly, his eyes wet. How absurd.
Orange moved closer to the cow-tree, and Teal snuggled into her warm coat.
After that he slept for most of the night.
In the morning he breakfasted from the food teats clustered over Orange’s lower body. There were milk and water nipples, and meat buds that could be snapped off, without discomfort to Orange.
They set off just after dawn, with Teal munching on a still warm bud. Orange wore a saddle-shaped pannier into which Teal loaded his meager possessions.
The morning was chill but comparatively bright, and Home was a shining carpet overhead. Teal felt his spirits lifting a little.
“Orange… why did you follow me?”
“Your gra-grandmother told me where you were going. So I decided to follow.”
“Yes, but why?”
“To… help.”
He smiled and wrapped a hand in the coarse hair behind her ear. “Well, I’m glad you’re here.”
That evening Orange used her articulated trunk to gather handfuls of moss. She packed his aching feet with it and then licked it off. “My… saliva has healing pro-properties,” she said.
Teal lay back against her fur. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you…”
The reddening world folded away, and he slept.
They came to an abandoned City.
Teal walked through arches, into low cylindrical buildings. The walls were as smooth as skin and knife-thin, showing no signs of age. But the interiors were unlit and musty.
They walked on despondently.
“Did grandmother tell you what I’m trying to find?”
“Yess. The… Eight Roomss.”
“The trouble is I’ve no idea how to get there… or even how we’ll recognize it when we find it. We’re walking at random.”
Orange hissed, “From the ss-stories I have heard, you will… know it wh-when you ssee it…”
Teal looked at her carefully. Was there a trace of amusement in that clumsy voice?
“What stories? What are you talking about?”
But the huge round face was blank.
On the fifteenth day… or maybe the sixteenth… a blizzard hit them.
It was a moving wall that reached up to the clouds. It turned Teal’s world to a blur of huge flakes; the air was almost unbreathable.
“We must… must keep moving,” Orange trumpeted. He buried his face in her snow-laden fur. She wrapped her trunk around his shoulders. “F… follow me,” she said. “We will find… the Eight Rooms…”
He closed his eyes and struggled on.
The storm took days to clear.
Teal woke to a world silenced by snow. Brushing clear his clothes, he sat up to look around.
Orange was staring straight ahead, her fingers working in agitation.
“Wha…” Teal squinted in the direction she was looking, to the red-lit north.
There was something on the horizon: a patch of darkness amid the snow.
A structure.
It was a cube with sides about half as tall again as a man. The walls were unbroken save for a single large door set in the south-facing side.
The whole thing was hovering about an arm’s length from the ground.
“The s-songss,” hissed the mummy-cow. “That iss what… the songs describe…”
“The Eight Rooms,” Teal sighed. “You were right. It’s unmistakable.”
Orange quivered; he studied her curiously. She was paralyzed by fear…
He wondered uneasily how much else there was to learn about the world.
He stumbled to his feet, then patted Orange’s flank. “Come on,” he said. “Just a bit further…”
Orange wouldn’t come closer than a few paces to the structure. Teal approached alone. He knelt in the snow and passed his hand underneath the cube. “Must take an awful lot of hot air to hold this up…”
Teal walked up to the door and pushed tentatively. He found his chest tightening.
Orange whimpered and buried her eyes in her trunk.
He opened the door wide. The interior was pale blue.
Teal hadn’t seen blue for a decade.
Blinking away tears, he climbed into the room.
They spent the night under cover for the first time since Teal’s exile. He woke in comparative warmth and took a slow breakfast on water and a cheeselike bud.
It had taken a lot of coaxing to get Orange to clamber into the room.
“There’s nothing to fear — it’s just a big teepee.”
“No, it is-isn’t…”
“Well, maybe not…”
Now she huddled uncomfortably at the center of the floor, standing in her own muddy footprints.
Teal inspected the room. He’d found it empty save for a thing like a lamp bracket attached to the ceiling. There were doors leading out from all four walls — even hatches in the floor and ceiling.
The doors watched him like blank eyes.
He ran his hands over the blue walls. The material was warm, slightly yielding — disconcertingly skinlike. He thought of stroking his wife’s belly through a soft leather blanket.
He pushed the image away.
He took his coil of rope from Orange’s pannier. He tied one end round his waist. “Here,” he said. “Don’t let go of this. If you don’t hear from me… after a while, try to pull me back. Do you understand? And whatever happens, go back and tell my grandmother what you’ve seen. All right?”
The great head dipped. He stroked her trunk, once.
He turned to the door opposite the entrance to the cube. Orange shivered as she watched him.
He pushed at the door. It swung back smooth as a muscle.
There was another room beyond. It was like a mirror-image of the first: bare walls, single light pendant, doors all over it—
Maybe it really was a reflection.
No, that was stupid. He looked back at the trembling brown hulk of Orange. There was no Orange in the second room… and no Teal, for that matter.
He stepped through the door.
Well, the floor felt solid enough… and the air was just — air.
All his intuition told him he should have been hovering at waist-height somewhere outside the boxlike structure. Instead, here he was…
He laughed. So Allel’s old song had been wrong. The wonder of the second room wasn’t in what it contained, but in the fact that it was there at all.
Pulling the rope of twisted leather behind him he pushed at the door in the left-hand wall of the second room. Beyond was a third room, another copy of the first.
He decided he wasn’t surprised.
More confidently he walked through the third room and pushed at the door to his left. Beyond this he’d presumably find a fourth room, making up a square array of rooms, and then he could turn left again to find his way round the square back to Orange—
The fourth room wasn’t empty. It contained Orange. He was looking at her left side; she held a grubby rope that stretched forward through an open door.
She turned her head to him, eyes wide with astonishment.
He jumped back, trembling. Could he have miscounted the rooms?
His mind racing, he took Allel’s knife from his belt and placed it gently on the floor inside Orange’s room. Then he walked back through the third and second rooms.
In the first room, Orange was facing him. “Take it easy,” he murmured abstractedly to her. “It’s all right…”
The door to her left was ajar. A stone knife lay on the floor, just inside the first room. He walked across to pick it up, tucked it into his belt.
Well, it felt real. Were there two knives now?
He walked around to the third room again. The knife beyond the door was gone… of course.
So there was no fourth room to make up the square.
He sat on the bare floor of the third room and closed his eyes. If he wasn’t careful, the strangeness of the place was going to overwhelm him.
