Critical Threshold (15 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“We've got to find her,” said Karen.

I nodded uncertainly. As a statement of intent it was fine, but in practical terms....

1 began signaling the
Daedalus
. Despite the fact that it was about four in the morning, local time, Nathan answered almost immediately. He'd been waiting up.

“All bets are off,” I said, wasting no time. “We know what did it. It hit us. Karen and I are unharmed except for minor injuries. Mariel's gone.”

“Gone where?” he asked.

“Don't ask stupid questions,” I replied, abrasively. “Gone. Of her own accord, I think. If she'd been snatched they'd have taken something else, and maybe we wouldn't have woken up at all.”

“Woken up?” he queried.

“We slept through the crisis. I used the anesthetic darts to put us out. But I didn't use enough on Mariel. She woke up first, and now she's not here.”

“What happened?” he demanded.

I told him, fairly succinctly.

“This pheromone thing,” he said. “Why did the survey team miss it?”

“Because it's only released at irregular periods, in a highly localized vicinity. You saw the report—thousands of trace compounds of biological origin. Many with nasty side-effects in large enough doses, but never any large doses. You could live on Dendra a year, maybe a decade without hitting upon a build-up like this. But once you're in the right kind of area—and in making for this lake and its environs the colonists delivered themselves right into such an area—you're bound to get caught eventually. We had filter masks and knock-out drops. They didn't. One whiff, and they were in trouble.”

“What about after-effects?” he asked. “On you, I mean.”

“The drug's biodegradable,” I said. “Breaks down pretty quickly in the bloodstream. And the effects are all in the mind. It's not a poison, even though it's rather more than a hallucinogen.”

“How much more?”

“About as much as you can imagine,” I told him. “All through history people have taken drugs in order to induce weird states of mind, in search of transcendental experience. Well, this is it. Authentic transcendental experience. Which destroys, and transforms. Miraculous transformation. Caterpillar mind into butterfly mind. Civilized man into savage.”

“Or schizophrenic.”

“Maybe,” I said. “The label doesn't mean a lot, at this level.”

“How come any got back at all?” he asked.

“Probably because they only caught a whiff. On the edge, maybe not within a quarter mile of the cloud. We're fairly exposed here—the wind took care of the traces. But in the forest, the air stands still, it doesn't circulate anywhere near as fast. This whole damn region is a trap—a trap they walked into. All of them. It was even baited, I guess. If you saw a million butterflies dancing in the jungle, wouldn't you go take a closer look?”

“And those that got the full dose were changed?”

“Those that didn't die. Don't get the idea that it was easy. Not for any of them. I'd say the experience was probably enough to kill seven or eight out of ten, directly or indirectly. The drug's not a poison, but there are other ways to die. Shock—and having your mind so burned out that you become so much fresh meat waiting for the scavengers.”

“It's not a very pretty picture,” he said.

I agreed with him.

“Could Mariel...?” he began. He stopped suddenly. He knew as well as I did that there were all kinds of ominous possibilities lurking in the wings. She could have taken in enough of the stuff to have her mind blasted one way or another. If she'd breathed too deep—if I hadn't managed to make the seal on the mask secure. And I wasn't sure. There was no way I
could
be sure. I had been working under pretty extreme conditions.

“You've got to find her,” said Nathan.

“And where do I start to look?” I answered.

He had no suggestions ready to hand. I glanced at Karen, and shrugged. I broke the connection. I didn't care if Nathan was finished or not. Apparently, he was satisfied. He didn't call back.

“We got it wrong,” I said. “The wrong way round.”

“What?”

“Finding Mariel. We don't stand a chance. We can try, we can do our damnedest. But in the end, it's she that has to find us. If she can. It's the only chance there is.”

She didn't need a guidebook to take her through the implications. There was an awful lot of forest. Mariel had gone without a light. And not only didn't we know
where
she'd gone, we didn't know
why.
We didn't know that the Mariel who'd woken up was the same Mariel that had been put to sleep by the dart. There was no way we could know.

“She may have changed,” said Karen, flatly.

I shook my head, but then shrugged.

“Why would she go off,” said Karen, “unless it had affected her mind.”

I shone the torch on a spot of blood that stained the stone beside my foot. I contemplated the spot absently. The blood was mine.

“I can make a suggestion,” I said. “Maybe because she felt pretty much the same as the colonists that left the settlement for the forest, in ones and twos. Maybe because she didn't have enough to keep her here.”

I paused. Karen didn't have anything to say. Maybe she was having difficulty thinking the unthinkable. For myself, I wished that I didn't find it quite so easy.

“We feel so superior to the colonists,” I said, quietly. “We talk about them, we tried to guess what happened to them, as if they're a kind of crossword puzzle. When we found out what happened back on the bleak hillside we expressed polite surprise, with a little sneer and a little anger, because they were so stupid. They didn't have what it took. They couldn't pull themselves together, live and work as a community. They let their colony disintegrate. How stupid, how weak, how ridiculous....

“But maybe there's another way we ought to look at it. Faced with the same choice—the settlement or the forest—which would we have chosen? Suppose that we'd come into the forest and found a carefree population of innocent forest dwellers living happy and pleasant lives? Suppose that the entry fee to the kind of life they did find here wasn't quite so high? Suppose there was a guarantee that we could go through the change, that the drug would reshape us, cleanse us, make us free.

“We don't have to choose. We have the
Daedalus
. This is only one stop on our way, a segment of our higher purpose. But they didn't have a way out. They had to make the choice as it lay. Either/or. Either they stuck it out, rebuilding the Earth from which they'd already fled, root by root and brick by brick, in the face of the alien forest, which couldn't and wouldn't co-operate, or they tried a new way, an alien way. They couldn't know how alien, but when they set off into the forest in ones and twos they'd
made
their decision, in principle. And in the circumstances, who are we to say that it was dead wrong? Who are we to judge?

“Think about it, Karen—if the
Daedalus
weren't here, if we had to make a life on Dendra, one way or another, what kind of a choice would we have? The settlement, or the lakeside. No compromise, no
deus ex machina,
just what the circumstances allow. And when you've thought that one through, think again. Think about what kind of a choice you might have if the
Daedalus
wasn't so attractive as a way out. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that to you
Earth
was an alien place, a place where you were a freak, without any place in human society. Suppose that in an idyllic corner of a pleasant alien world you found naked savages that were living a life that had, one way or another, something that attracted you. Maybe the savages communicated in the way that you communicate, maybe there was something in them that was curiously close to the thing in you which made you an alien among your own kind. And suppose, just for a moment, that you breathed something in and suddenly you
saw
, you
understood,
how it all might be....”

“You're crazy,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “So's Mariel, in her own sweet way.”

“That's a bastard thing to say.”

I nodded. I didn't much like saying it myself.

“So she's down there?” said Karen. “In the village. Going native?”

“She's in the forest,” I said. “Thinking very hard. Alone. Weighing it up. And we've no way of knowing—none at all—how the situation really looks to her.”

“I don't believe it.”

“A few days ago,” I said, “she said something to me. Maybe the only time she ever really
did
say something to me. She said that she wished desperately that her talent, just for a minute, would work the other way, so that just for that moment she could make contact with the world. When she first saw that boy, and the others, she was hit by some kind of horror. But now, maybe, she thinks that there's a way around that horror—a way to become like them, to enter
their
world. And maybe, just maybe, she can.”

Dawn was breaking in the east. The birds that sang in the daytime began an uneasy caroling which rapidly grew into a strident chorus.

I stood up and went to the lip of the ledge, to look down at the collection of crude hovels, gathered snugly between the aged trees. The color of the feathers was beginning to show in the faint silvery light. They might be emerging soon, to meet the day, to take up the threads of their lives.

Those lives seemed to me to be utterly pointless. They ate and drank and slept and made love and tripped out in an endless, goal-less closed routine. They found no need for language, no need for fire. But to them, it must all seem different. To them, my life must be pointless and derelict. With the basic pattern of need and life so easily supplied I had nothing in the world to do but make up complex exercises for my mind and body. Such futile, ridiculous things as learning about the universe and taking the human race out into its infinite reaches. Thinking, inventing purposes and motives, imagining crazy cosmic schemes into which it all had to fit, by which it all sought to validate itself. Instead of all that, I could simply be, and dream, and be happy or not, as the case might be. Everything my mind worked so hard on—believing and being, they got in a single orgasmic blast, just by gathering a multitude of amorous insects.

What's absurd? I wondered. When you're standing in the light of an alien sun, what's out of place? Where's the natural order? How do you pretend to fit in?

A couple of women emerged from one of the shelters. They looked ugly. They went about their daily business. I waited, while others appeared, men, women and children, all coming out into the daylight. A boat slid out on to the waters of the lake, yawing and dipping as the paddlers tried to bring it under control.

I watched, half hoping that I might see Mariel, and also half dreading it.

I didn't. She wasn't there. There had been no rational reason for thinking that she would be.

Karen came up behind me.

“Are we just going to stay here?” she asked. “Twiddling our thumbs and hoping for the best?”

I shook my head. “It's only a matter of time before they find out we're here. We can't expect to sit here forever while they ignore us. I don't know what happens if they do spot us, but it would be diplomatic to make sure they don't. We have to be in the place where Mariel would assume we'd be if she wanted to find us—five or six miles back upriver.”

“And do we just sit and wait there? Suppose she tries to find us and can't? Suppose she's lost in the forest? Suppose
they
find her before she finds us?”

“Suppose the sun goes nova sometime around midday,” I said. Then I hesitated, and finally added: “Okay, let's do what little we can.
You
go upriver and make camp. As soon as it gets dark hang out a beacon. I'll spend the day looking around, I'll go on around the lake a couple of miles, and then I'll cut into the forest. It's looking for a needle in a haystack, but if I stamp around enough I might just get lucky enough to get stabbing pains in my foot. She can't have gone far, and that dart wound won't be comfortable. Pity she hasn't left a trail of bloody drips, or even the dart, to show us which way she went.”

She looked at the tears in my trouser leg. “Is your leg up to it?” she asked.

I pointed at her thigh. “Is yours?”

She touched it briefly. “I don't suppose you could have used a hypodermic?” she said. “In the arm or somewhere? Or maybe a pill?”

“I could have made faces at you till you fainted,” I said.

She made something of a face herself. I didn't faint.

“You take the tent and the rest of the heavy stuff,” I suggested. “I'd better take the rifle. I'm more likely to need it.”

She didn't argue. “What about the small pack?”

“No point in sweating ourselves to the bone,” I said. “I'll stow it under a bush here and collect it on my way back tonight. Come to that, I'll stow the other pack with it—no point in my carrying that around while I'm not going anyplace.”

While she gathered up the camping equipment I began collecting the debris of the medical kit. When I'd recovered it all I put it into one of the spare packs and looked about for a convenient hiding place. I settled for a thicket that would be easy enough to locate even in the dark. All I kept for my long day's work was the rifle and a flashlight.

When we were both ready, I raised my hand in a mock salute. “Don't get lost,” she said, with a seriousness that suggested subtle insult.

“I won't,” I promised, sweetly. “And....”

“What?”

“Don't do anything I wouldn't do.”

She made another face. It was a better effort. I blew her a kiss, and we went our separate ways.