Masters of Everon (28 page)

Faintly he sensed a response from Mikey, a feeling of sorrow and regret that he could not be with Jef at this time. It was not clear, but Jef got the impression that Mikey was telling him to go forward alone.

With that understanding, a new calmness filled him. He became certain that his going on alone from this point was inevitable, had been inevitable from the moment of his landing. Everything he had done from that moment, from the first sight of Everon that had arrested him at the head of the landing stairs, had directed him to this place and time in which he would have to go forward alone to whatever had been waiting for him from the beginning.

The realization brought a feeling of peace to him. He breathed deeply of the damp air, taking it into his lower lungs. He let go of the rock he was holding and went on down the slope.

As he went, the mist thickened; and he was not surprised that it did. The mist was as much a creature of this moment as the hailstorm had been that he had watched from the Constable's porch, and that other mist that had obscured the moonlight just before the maolots' attack on the wisent drive. Very soon he could see no more than the next spire closest to him. Then he could see nothing at all but whiteness. He continued to grope his way forward, feeling the slope still angling downward under his feet, until finally he began to realize that either he had come out from among the spires, or he was in some open area where they now stood back a distance from him. He had not touched one for minutes, and still the slope led down.

But even as he realized this, the slope began to lessen. It became more gradual by degrees as if it was leveling out into a plain. The loose rock underfoot grew less, until now, more often than not, his bootsoles fell upon bare rock. At last a time came when he was walking on unrubbled surface that seemed perfectly level.

A burst of feeling from Mikey stopped him. He was there— wherever he was supposed to have come to.

He stood. For a moment there was nothing, only the mist around him. Then it started to lift and thin. It rolled back from him like sky-high curtains being drawn back, gradually revealing a vast amphitheater of rock surrounding him. He stood in a wide, circular depression in the mountains. The floor of that depression was flat, clean of loose rock and open. All around the sloping sides surrounding that central floor, however, rose the rock spires, but here they were broken off short, like a rubble of massive, flat-topped columns broken and shaped by the frosts of unbelievable winters.

As far as his eye could see, the rocks had tenants. One to each rock, the great adult maolots lay—as the last of the mist cleared—under an ice-blue sky, looking down at him. And he did not need to ask the name of this place to which he had come at last.

The valley of thrones.

In no way could it have been accidental that a young maolot cub had been found abandoned here, in this place where, he could now feel, as he felt his own breathing, nothing had been abandoned or mislaid for thousands of Everon years. This was no area of accident or chance. As the mist rolled back and he felt the pressure of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of mature maolot empathies, he knew this beyond any need for further proof.

There was no way to tell how many of the great beasts surrounded him. He could, either with Mikey's help or on his own, move in his mind's eye to a close-in point of view with any one of them, but he had no means to count them one by one or take an overview that would show all of them to him at once. But in fact it did not matter how many were physically present; for any not present could look at him through the point of view of any of those that were actually there. Still each one turned a massive head away, or closed eyes when he looked closely. But this, too, did not matter. In effect the Valley of Thrones held the presence of all the adult maolots of Everon—and this piece of knowledge, too, rode to him on the wave of the assembled empathies he felt as certainly as if it had been a physical pressure against him.

They were all here; and they were here because of him—to judge him.

He had never felt so tiny, so insignificant, in all the years of his life. He did not physically shrink from the watching multitude; but inside him his courage faltered; and he looked around helplessly and almost desperately for Mikey.

There was a movement among the bases of the columns to his left, and Mikey came from among them, his eyes still as closed as that of any of his elders, though he had now grown so that size alone no longer distinguished him from the others. He crossed the open floor of the natural amphitheater to Jef.

"Mikey—" said Jef gratefully, when the maolot stopped in front of him. He reached out to touch Mikey's neck, but his hand dropped. The name of Mikey sat awkwardly now on this old friend of his, who had grown out of the diminutive address and role of playfellow-pet. Mikey was an equal, and more, now. He reached Jef and turned to sit down beside him, facing the surrounding watchers.

Jef felt Mikey being questioned on some matter by those who lay on the columns. He responded, rejecting whatever had been asked, and stayed where he was.

"What do they want, Mikey?" Jef asked.

Mikey indicated that he should be patient and wait. There were things yet to happen.

"What?" asked Jef.

Mikey directed his attention to the columns at the very edge of the open space a little to his left. Looking, he caught sight of figures emerging from between the rock uprights and beginning to cross the space toward him. Some of the figures seemed to be aware of what they were doing. Others moved as if dazed or under some silent order that gave them no choice. They were both human and animal; but with one exception all of the animal ones were Earth variforms.

In the lead were Martin and Jarji. They were two of those whose eyes were clear and sensible, and who appeared to know what they were doing here.

"Are you all right?" Jef asked as they got close.

"Of course," said Jarji.

"How did you get here?"

"Martin flew us in," said Jarji. The two reached Jef and halted. "In that craft he flew away from Beau's."

"Yes," said Martin. "I knew you'd end up here."

Jef looked past Jarji at him and their eyes held together.

"Of course you did," said Jef, and was surprised at the calmness of his voice. "You're Will, aren't you?"

"Yes."

They continued to look at each other for a very long moment. Jef had not seen William in over fifteen years; but now, staring at him, he could still wonder at the change in appearance of the brother he had known. The height was essentially the same, the thickness of bone was similar. In everything else, Jef looked without success for what he remembered.

"How long have you known?" asked William at last, a little hoarsely. All the rhythm of Martin's speech had dropped from his voice.

"Just since I woke up in your camp at the pass," Jef said. "Something about you bothered me from the first—I found myself liking you more than there was reason to. But I didn't know until the camp."

"What did I do at the camp?"

"It wasn't just what you did," Jef said. "Something's happened to me here on Everon, and I can see deeper into everything than I ever thought I could, or anyone could. Right now, I feel strange—sort of detached from everything, but with my mind very clear. Part of it seems to come from the fact Mikey hasn't let me eat or rest."

"But the camp?" said Martin. "What happened at the camp to make you sure about me?"

"It was when you called me Jef that I knew for certain," Jef said. "I remember hearing about that once—or reading it, or something—that the voice and the walk are the two hardest things for any actor to disguise. You must have known that, because you made a point all along of calling me 'Mr. Robini.' But I suppose you thought it'd be more likely to wake my suspicions if you kept on doing that after I'd blown up about you and Jarji calling me Jef. Only, you just couldn't manage to call me Jef without sounding like Will."

His brother nodded slowly.

"I thought it must have been something like that," he said. His eyes were dark. "Jef, you know it's my doing? I'm the one who got you into all this?"

"It's all right," said Jef. "It's what I would have wanted."

"All right!" said Jarji. "I think you both owe me at least some idea of what you're talking about!"

They turned to her.

"I started something when I sent Mikey to Earth—started it deliberately," William said. "I began something then that had to end here, with Jef, now. I didn't plan on you and other people being here, too. I couldn't see that kind of result from eight years beforehand."

"Then," said Jarji, "you came here the same time as Jef to make sure he got to this Valley of Thrones."

"Yes," said William. He looked back at Jef. "Jef..."

"I tell you, it's all right," Jef said. "But how could you have been sure I'd get a grant to come here, in the first place?"

"Oh, that," said William. "That just took a little wire-pulling. Anybody with my job could do that, in five minutes."

"Who else knows?"

"Only five other people, with the other four back on Earth at E. Corps headquarters. Even that many was a risk. None of this was official."

"You've lost me again," said Jarji.

"I'm a test case," Jef told her. "He took Mikey back to Earth to grow up with me, as an experiment."

"We couldn't talk to the maolots directly—" William nodded at the inhabitants of the rock columns. "It was an experiment on both sides. They gave me one of their children; I gave my younger brother, to see if we couldn't raise our own interpreters."

He looked at Jef.

"But it's worked, hasn't it?"

"Yes and no," said Jef. "But if you couldn't talk to them, how could you make the deal with them to take Mikey back to Earth?"

"I don't know," said William. "I don't really know how I did it. All I know is that, in the early years on Everon—even before the first wave of colonists was allowed in, I began to see that the maolots seemed to be showing more intelligence than animals should have had. I tried to observe some closely. They led me into the woods—you might as well say, they captured me—and brought me here. I was here, where we are now, for three days and nights with nothing to eat or drink. I think you're right, Jef. Something about being light-headed from exhaustion and deprivation makes communication with them easier. On the fourth day I started to go out of my head, and that's when they brought me Mikey. He looked like a fat, overgrown kitten that couldn't keep his balance even on four legs, he was so new. And then, somehow the other maolots and I got together on what I should do with him. It seems they'd noticed a difference in me, just as I'd noticed something more in them; and so they made this try to bridge the gap between us. They thought at first they could break the barriers just by wearing me down with hunger and thirst; but that didn't work. We're too different, we and they, to talk directly. But there's no doubt what they are. They're the first human-equivalent intelligent aliens we've met out among the stars. It's wonderful. They're our opposite numbers here, in the Everon life-chain."

"Not exactly," said Jef.

William stared at him.

"Why do you say 'not exactly'? What do you mean?"

"I mean that's not quite right," said Jef. "In a way, I think, the truth's even more wonderful than what you say. You see, they don't really talk at all in the sense we do—they
feel,
for and with each other, but what that
feeling
is to them, compared to what we're capable of, is like our speech compared to the grunts or howls of a chimp. Believe me. I've just touched the edge of that sort of feeling, once or twice since I've been on Everon. Even at that, I can't really feel with them, but I can come close to feeling with Mikey..."

He stopped.

"I'm sorry. There're no words in our way of talking that even come close to describing it. You'll just have to take my word for it."

"But if we can't communicate at all, then everything we've tried is no good!" William said. His face suddenly looked gaunt and old. "If the whole business has only got you to where you can barely communicate with Mikey, then the experiment's failed. We were dreaming of developing methods for talking to whoever, or whatever, is at the top of the ecological chains on the other new worlds. But if all we've managed to come up with is a special case—"

"It's better than that," said Jef. "It's just that it's too big a thing for me to see more than the edges of it. There're all sorts of good possibilities, if things go right here. A lot of bad ones if they don't."

"What do you mean?" Jarji demanded.

He looked at her. He found himself shrugging helplessly.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't really understand what I get from them—or even from Mikey—the way you understand someone who speaks to you in words. There's never that concrete certainty that something's been said. I just sort of absorb a feeling—"

Exasperation and frustration came close to waking his recently rediscovered ability to anger for a second.

"You know what a feeling's like!" he said. "There's no shape or size to it, no hard and fast terms to it. It's like that."

"But go on," said Jarji. "You were saying you absorb a feeling—"

"Yes." He tried to explain it to them. "I soak up the feeling, the emotion or whatever they're putting out to me; and then, inside me, in my own mind, little by little, I make sense of it. You know what it feels like to have something on your mind you can't quite grasp; and have it there, and have it there until suddenly it begins to make sense. What I get from them, and Mikey, is like that."

"What do you get from all this, then?" William swung his hand about to indicate not only the three of them, but the other humans and the variform animals that had come to cluster close around them.

"We've all been brought here so they can come to some kind of decision about us all—not just about me and Mikey. Something more than... We're a part of..."

Jef ran out of words and abandoned them. He looked around beyond the immediate circle of Will, Jarji and himself. All together, the group surrounding him made a small, tight gathering. A bull wisent, his heavy head lowered, his hair-shaded eyes clouded and dulled, stood only a step or two away from Jef. Almost as close were Armage and Beau, but on opposite sides of him, so that there was space between them. The two big men looked at each other with less of the stunned expression than was shown by the wisent and many of the others, but still without full understanding of where they were—although as he watched, with his new sensitivity Jef could feel them slowly coming back to full consciousness.