Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (38 page)

For a long time neither of them moved. Not until she began to shiver did Victoria realize how cold the night air had become. Reluctantly she stood up to look for sticks to build a fire. Hypothermia, Farley had said, could strike any time, summer or winter. She had watched him put several thick fire-starting candles in each pack. Deliberately she thought about the candles, not about Farley, who must be dead or lost.

After a smoldering start, the fire began to blaze. Victoria was still nursing it when Sam suddenly jumped up and shouted, “Come back! Wait for us!”

Victoria hurried to him and grasped his arm. “Who, Sam? Who did you see?” She peered into the forest.

“The Indian. Where is he? Which way did he go?”

“There isn’t any Indian.” But perhaps there was. He might have seen her fire, might have been attracted by the smoke.

“There was an Indian, Victoria! With one arm. He was taking me somewhere. You must have seen him!” Abruptly Sam stopped and rubbed his eyes hard. “I saw something,” he muttered more to himself than to her. “A path, a path of glowing light, and the Indian motioned me to follow him away from it. The path was the wrong way, that’s it. It was the wrong way, and he was going to take me the right way. With one arm! You must have seen him too!”

She shook her head. “He’s like Reuben. Your Indian, my Reuben.”

For a moment she thought he was going to hit her. Then he slumped and his hands relaxed. “What happened?” he asked dully.

“I don’t know. The lights came down the hill; you fell down, just like I did that other time. When you got up you were walking like someone in a trance, and I brought us out here.” She stopped while Sam turned to stare at the forest all around them. “I thought it would be like the other time, that I would go back out, be where our camp was, but…” When she stopped there was only the sound of the river, a constant muted roar in the background. “I made a line to show where the gate was,” she said, indicating it.

Sam hesitated only a moment, then took her hand and started over the stones. More afraid of their being separated than of whatever lay on the other side, she yielded and they moved into the strange area once more.

This time everything was different. The trees were skeletal, bone-white under the brilliant moon. No grass had grown here for many years; the ground was barren and hard, littered with rocks that made walking difficult. The wind was piercing and frigid; it was the only sound they could hear—a high wail that rose and fell and never stopped entirely. Suddenly Sam yanked her arm hard and she felt herself being pulled backward, back over the wall that no longer existed. She fell heavily.

Sam knelt by her and held her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you okay? I didn’t want to hurt you. The lights were coming down the hill. I couldn’t let them swarm over me again.”

“I know,” Victoria said. “I had nightmares about them.”

“I didn’t see them the first time,” Sam went on. “I saw a path, wide, easy, glowing. I knew it led to… to… I don’t know what I thought it led to. It terrified me and I wanted to get on it, follow it home, all the time thinking it would kill me if I did. Then I saw the Indian, and I knew he knew the way. I know that Indian. He
does
know the way.”

“We can’t be separated,” Victoria said. “Farley was separated from us. He must be in there somewhere, lost, maybe he fell over the gorge. Maybe they drove him over the gorge…”

“
Sh
.” Sam’s hand tightened on her arm. “Maybe he just came out somewhere else, like we did.”

Victoria looked around. Everywhere it was the same, dead grass, no signs of life, and the bitter wind that tore through her jacket. “The fire’s gone, the wall I made is gone. My pack. We can’t put anything at all down and expect it to stay. We can’t leave each other even a second, or one of us might vanish.”

Sam nodded. “It’s too damn cold,” he said slowly. “Every time we’ve gone in and out, it’s been different. Different climates, different scenery. Times.” He stopped and when he spoke again, his voice was strained. “We’re yo-yoing back and forth in time! That’s it, isn’t it! Come on, once more.”

Victoria’s ears were hurting from the cold and her toes were starting to go numb. “We should count our steps or something,” she said. “The wall won’t be there, no point in making another one. But we have to know how to get out again.”

Sam nodded, and hand in hand they started forward. There was no sense of transition, nothing to indicate change, but one moment they were in the frozen air, and then the air was balmy and sweet smelling, not from a rain forest this time, but from thick lush grasses that crowded down the hillsides, and from tangled vines, creepers, dense bushes that made nearly impenetrable thickets to their right. The river was there, not a furious roar of a cascade, but rushing waters singing over rocks.

“Here they come,” Sam muttered. “Out!”

The lights were coming in an elongated cloud, head-high, straight down the hill toward them. They took several steps, and the lights were no longer there. They had crossed the boundary.

They made a fire and huddled close together. “We need shelter,” Sam said finally. “The moon’s going down. While there’s still enough light we have to arrange something.” By the time the moon vanished over the mountains in the west, Sam had made a leanto with the Mylar space blanket from his pack, attaching it from bushes to the ground, and Victoria had gathered armloads of grass that made their mattress. They wrapped Victoria’s jacket around their legs, and Sam’s around their torsos, and after a long time they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

“We can’t stay here!” Victoria cried late the next afternoon. They had bathed in the clear river, had portioned out their scant rations, had hunted for berries to supplement their food, and now the sun was setting and she was hungry and tired.

Sam was standing just beyond their marker stones, facing the hill. Together they had explored the hill, the valley, the entire area repeatedly. They had crossed and recrossed the barrier without effect; nothing had changed.

“It’s not evil, not malevolent,” Sam said softly. “This must be what happened to the others who disappeared. They weren’t killed at all, just put out somewhere else, away from harm.”

They would starve, Victoria thought dully. Grazing animals would find this a paradise, but not humans.

“Once more,” Sam said abruptly and started up the hill again. Victoria didn’t follow this time. There wasn’t anything up there, nothing in the valley. It didn’t show itself by daylight, she thought, and suddenly realized that the only times anything had happened, there had been brilliant moonlight. She started to call Sam to tell him, but he was nearly to the top out of hearing.

When Sam came back it was twilight. “Think of the power!” he said exultantly. “It’s showing us what we can have. How many of those who vanished realized what was being offered? They probably came out and ran as far and as fast as they could and died out there on the desert, or in the cold, or of starvation. But the power’s there, down in that valley, waiting for anyone who has nerve enough to accept it. It’s ours, Victoria! Yours! Mine!”

He wasn’t hungry, he said, wasn’t tired, just impatient. “There’s a secret we haven’t learned yet, about how to call it, how to make it manifest itself. We’ll learn how to summon it.”

He began to stuff things back into his pack. “Come on. I’m going to wait for it this time down in the valley. Hurry up before it gets too dark.”

“It won’t be there,” Victoria said. “It’s never there until after the moon is up. Both times the moon was up.”

“Coincidence. Come on. The point is we don’t know why it decides to come and when it will decide again. I intend to be there when it does, with you or alone.”

They climbed the hill in the deepening, silent dusk, shadows moving among shadows.

“Unlimited power,” Sam said hoarsely. “Omnipotent. It can move back and forth in time the way you cross a street.”

But it was not omnipotent, Victoria protested silently. It was stopped by the invisible barrier. It had no power to control, only to observe. An observer, she thought, that’s what it was, no more than an observer. It came only when the moon cleared the cliffs that were the eastern boundary of the valley, not when it wanted to. She had been able to get out in the right time, the right place once; it could be done again, if only she could remember how she had done it then. They were descending the hill now; it was a gentle slope, covered with waist-high grass, no rocks, nothing to impede their progress. They might have been out for an evening stroll—if only she were not so hungry and so tired.

“You want to think of it as some kind of mechanism,” Sam went on, “subject to the same laws and limitations that restrict all machines you’re used to. It isn’t like that. It’s an intelligent being, a godlike being, testing us, for some reason we can’t begin to grasp.”

Each time they had talked about it, he had refused to hear anything she said. Now she shrugged and they finished their walk into the valley.

“Where was it?” Sam demanded. “Exactly where?”

“I don’t know. Everything is changed again. The center I think, but I don’t know. Remember, we can’t believe anything we see or feel in here. Your Indian, my Reuben, the dog, none of it was real.”

He was no longer listening. He considered the valley for a few moments, selected a spot, and spread his blanket on the ground. “Here,” he said. “We’ll wait here. Don’t speak now. Just concentrate on it, call it. Okay?”

Helplessly Victoria sat down also. The Indian and Reuben were the clues, she thought. “Sam, before we start concentrating, just tell me one thing. When your Indian was guiding you, why were you zigzagging?”

“We were making our way among the rocks and boulders,” Sam snapped. “Now just shut up, will you? Go to sleep if you can.”

“But…”

Sam caught her wrist in a tight grip and she became quiet. After a moment he released her and they sat side by side in silence.

But there weren’t any rocks or boulders then, she had started to say. Not for her, she corrected. They had been together and still had seen different worlds.

Sam had invented the Indian, just as she had invented Reuben; if she had not interfered, would Sam’s Indian have led him to the safety of his own time? It was as if within each of them there existed a core of consciousness that would not be fooled by the shifting scenery, a part of the mind that knew where they belonged and how to get back to it.
Come back
! she wanted to cry.
Reuben, Indian, anyone. Please come back!

The night had become very dark, and it was too hazy to see the stars. Maybe it would be too cloudy for the moon to light the valley later, she thought. What if there were weeks of cloudy weather? They would die. The land would change, the forests grow, fall, be buried in rocks from earthquakes and landslides, and somewhere deep in the earth their bones would lie never to be discovered.

In a little while she put on her jacket, and still later she stretched out on the blanket and dozed. She was awakened by an exclamation from Sam. She sat up. The valley was moonlit again, brilliant, sharply defined, and Sam was walking away from her, his arms outstretched, oblivious of her, of the need to stay together.

“Sam!” she cried, but he didn’t pause. From the corner of her eye she caught the flash of light coming down the hillside. She recoiled as the light dots touched her. Momentarily Sam was covered with them, a glowing crucifixion, and then he was gone.

“Sam!” She scrambled to her feet, and moved toward him, where he had been, and stumbled over rocks that had not been there only moments before. In panic she looked behind her: the blanket was gone, the pack; the valley was barren, with scattered clumps of desert grasses. In the distance there was a flare of light, and she thought of volcanoes, of earthquakes, and even as the thought formed, the earth shook beneath her, and she threw herself down, holding her breath. “No!” she said against the ground. “No!” She closed her eyes hard.

She didn’t open them again until she could smell forests and leaf mold and pungent odors of mushrooms and mosses and ferns. She was wet from the grasses under her. Very slowly, concentrating on forests, she got up. She could see only a few feet in any direction because of the trees, and she no longer knew the way out of the valley. She walked, accompanied by flickering lights that she ignored, and then she heard someone else walking through the forests.

“Sam!” she called “Farley!” There was instant silence and she held her breath, remembering the sloth she had seen before. There might be bears, or wolves, or wildcats… She eased herself around a mammoth tree, darted from its shelter to another one, then to a hill, and was starting to skirt it when across an open area, she stood face to face with an Indian, a young man, not the one-armed Indian Sam had talked about. He looked as frightened as she, and the unquiet lights were hovering about him. Before he could move, she ran, and could hear him running behind her. Suddenly before her there rose a rock wall, the cliff, and she turned to see the Indian no more than twenty yards away. She watched, frozen, until he had taken several more steps, almost leisurely, and the lights that had been with him vanished. The barrier, she realized, they had both crossed the barrier without knowing it. She darted back toward the trees, and after only a few paces, the forest was gone, and the valley was frost-rimed, blasted by an icy wind shrieking like a witch.

She stopped, backed up until she felt the cliff behind her, then stepped forward again, into a different time, with warmer air and junipers and grass. Now she sank to the ground and sat hugging her legs hard, keeping her eyes wide open.

A flash of light caught her eye and she watched the swarm settle over something small, possibly a mouse; it moved erratically, stopped, moved again, and the lights withdrew, flowed back through the valley, up the cliff and disappeared.

She stared.
Up
the hill? She had assumed they came from somewhere near the center of the valley. She got up and began to walk toward the cliff. She could think only: there must have been a time before it was like this. Momentarily she was aware of a kaleidoscopic effect, of moving through layers of time, of ceaseless change. She paused, closing her eyes, then moved on.