Land and Overland - Omnibus (48 page)

After a few minutes of uneventful flight Bartan began to cease worrying about his safety. The intermittent sound of his jet was fading quickly in the pervasive stillness, and he had little to do but hold his course, now and then pumping the pneumatic reservoir which force-fed crystals to the engine. He might have been able to enjoy the sortie had it not been for Jop Trinchil's parting words, and once again he found himself regretting that he had never been able to persuade Sondeweere to leave the Birthright group.

He had been only two years old at the time of the Migration and had no real memories of the event, but his father had told him much about it and had given him a good understanding of the historical background. When the ptertha plague had forced King Prad to build an evacuation fleet capable of flying to Overland from the sister world, Land, there had been strong opposition from the Church. The basic tenet of the Alternist religion had been that after death the soul flew to Overland, was reincarnated as a baby, lived out another life and returned to Land in the same way, part of an eternal and immutable process of exchange. The proposal to have a thousand ships physically undertake the voyage to Overland had been an affront to the Lord Prelate of the day, and the riots he led had threatened the whole enterprise, but the Migration had been accomplished despite adverse conditions.

When Overland was found to have no human inhabitants, no counterpart to Land's civilisation, religious conviction had largely ceased to exist among the colonists. The fact that it had not disappeared entirely was, according to Bartan's father, a triumph of stubborn irrationality.
All right, we were mistaken,
was the argument advanced by the remnants of the devout.
But that was only because our minds were too puny to appreciate the grandeur of the plan devised by the Great Permanence. We know that after death the soul migrates to another world, and so inadequate was our vision that we presumed that other world to be Overland. We now realise that the departing soul's actual destination is Farland. The High Path is much longer than we realised, brethren.

Farland was roughly twice as distant from the sun as the Land-Overland pair. It would be many centuries before ships from Overland would be able to undertake that kind of journey, Vlodern Drumme had concluded—passing his natural cynicism to his son—so the high priests had made a good choice. Their jobs were safe for a long time to come…

He had been wrong on that point, as it had transpired. In designing Overland's infant society, King Chakkell—an old enemy of the Church—had made certain it contained no vestiges of a state religion. Satisfied with having abolished the clergy as a profession, the King had occupied himself with other matters, careless of the fact that his edicts had created a vacuum to be filled by a new kind of preacher, of whom Jop Trinchil was a good example.

Trinchil had embraced religion late in life. At the age of forty he had willingly taken part in the interworld migration, with no qualms about desecrating the High Path, and for the most part his life on Overland had been one of unremitting hard work on a smallholding in the Ro-Amass region. On nearing his sixties Trinchil had become disillusioned with the normal pattern of agricultural life and had decided to be a lay preacher. Unlettered, uncouth in word and manner, inclined to violence, he nevertheless had a raw force of personality which he was soon exerting over a small congregation, whose donations handsomely supplemented the rewards of his own physical toil.

Finally, he had conceived the idea of leading a flock of the faithful to a part of Overland where they could practise their religion without interference—especially from busybodies who might report Trinchil's illegal activities to the prefect in Ro-Amass.

It was during the preparations for the Birthright Expedition that Trinchil's and Bartan Drumme's paths had intersected. Bartan had been earning a reasonable, if irregular, income by selling cheap jewelry of his own design and manufacture. Normally his commercial judgment was sound, but for a brief period he had allowed himself to become infatuated with the appearance of the newly discovered soft metals, gold and silver. As a result he had been left with a batch of trinkets he found almost impossible to sell in his normal markets, where there was a conservative preference for traditional materials such as glass, ceramics, soapstone and brakka. Refusing to be discouraged, he had started touring the rural areas around Ro-Amass in search of less discerning customers, and had met Sondeweere Trinchil.

Her yellow hair had bedazzled him more than gold had done, and within minutes he was hopelessly in love and dreaming of taking Sondeweere back to the city as his solewife. She had responded favourably to his overtures, obviously pleased by the prospect of marrying a man whose appearance and manner contrasted so sharply with those of the average young farmer. There had been, however, two major obstacles to Bartan's plans. Sondeweere's desire for novelty stopped short of any interest in changing her way of life—she was adamant that she would never live anywhere but on a farm. Bartan's reaction had been to discover within himself a hitherto dormant passion for agriculture and an ambition to work his own plot of land, but the second problem had been far less amenable to a quick solution.

Jop Trinchil and he had taken an immediate dislike to each other. There had been no need for a conflict of interests, or even for a word to be spoken—the mutual antagonism had sprung into existence, deep-rooted and permanent, on the very instant of their first meeting. Trinchil had decided at once that Bartan would be an abject failure as husband and father; and Bartan had known, without having to be told, that Trinchil's only interest in religion was as a means of lining his pocket.

Bartan had to admit that Trinchil was genuinely fond of his niece, and although he seized every opportunity to complain about Bartan's shortcomings he had not forbidden the marriage. That had been the situation up to the present, but Bartan had a feeling that his future was in the balance, and his state of mind had not been improved by Sondeweere's behaviour at the impromptu meeting. She had acted as though her love was beginning to waver, as though she could turn away from him if he failed to make good his latest promise.

The thought caused Bartan to concentrate his gaze on the irregularity at the far edge of the swampy basin. Now that he was closer and higher he was almost certain that it indeed represented an extension of the marsh into an arroyo, in which case the chances that he actually was recalling an aerial view were somewhat improved. Wishing his memory was more trustworthy, he fed several bursts of hot miglign into the gasbag which swayed above him, and slowly he gained the height he would need for crossing the hills. The spires of rock rearing up from the pale surface shrank to the semblance of black candles.

In a short time the boat was scudding over the marsh's ill-defined boundary and Bartan was able to confirm that a narrow finger of it ran due west for about two miles. With increasing confidence and excitement he followed the course of the ancient waterway. As grassy contours rose up beneath the boat he saw groups of deer-like animals, disturbed by the sound of the jet, make swerving runs, with white hindquarters beaconing their alarm. Frightened birds occasionally erupted from trees like wind-borne swirls of petals.

Bartan kept his eyes on the slopes ahead. They seemed to form a barrier which was being raised higher and higher to block his view, then he was crossing a ridge and with dramatic suddenness the horizon receded, fleeing into the distance before him. The intervening space was revealed as a complex vista of savannahs, gentle hills, lakes and occasional strips of woodland.

Bartan gave a whoop of glee as he saw that the territory, spilling out in front of him like a rich man's hoard, was a homesteader's dream translated into reality. His first impulse was to turn the airboat and head back to Trinchil and the others with the good news, but the hillside was shelving away beneath him now in a silent invitation to fly onwards. He decided it would do no harm to spend a few extra minutes in getting a closer and more detailed view of the nearer tracts, and perhaps to locate a stream which would afford a good preliminary stopping place. It would help impress on the farmers that he was a competent and practical man.

Allowing the boat to lose altitude naturally through the cooling of the gasbag, Bartan continued sailing west, sometimes laughing aloud with sheer pleasure, sometimes sighing in relief over the nearness of his escape from humiliation and expulsion. The clarity of the air defeated perspective, stacking geographical features on top of each other as in a meticulously executed drawing, allowing him to pick out details of rock formations and vegetation at ranges he would normally have considered impossible. Thus it was that—although he was a good five miles from the white speck on the hillside when he first noticed it—identification was immediate.

He was looking at a farmhouse!

His pang of disappointment seemed to darken the sky and chill the air, drawing an involuntary moan of protest from his lips. Bartan knew that King Chakkell's first major decision on ascending the throne had been to establish Kolcorron as a single world state. To that end, a fleet of large airships had been employed to disperse the newly arrived migrants around the globe. Those seedling communities had served as nodal points for vigorous expansion, but it had been Bartan's understanding that this southerly part of the continent was as yet untouched. To help maintain the impetus of growth, farmers moving into new territories were entitled to claim much larger plots than were granted in comparatively settled areas—a consideration which had motivated Jop Trinchil—and now it seemed that the selfsame factor could thwart Trinchil's ambitions. Bartan's own plans could be similarly affected unless it transpired that settlement of the region had only just begun, in which case there might be ample land for new families. Definite information had to be obtained before he returned to the expedition.

Encouraged by the flickering of hope, Bartan altered his course slightly to north of west, aiming directly for the minuscule white rectangle of the farmhouse. In a short time he was within a mile of the house and could discern drably coloured sheds around it. He was preparing to shed buoyancy for a landing when he began to notice something wrong with the general aspect of the place. There were no people, animals or vehicles in sight, and the ground slipping beneath the prow of his boat did not look well tended. Faint variations in coloration showed that crops had once been planted in the familiar six-strip pattern, but the edges of the sections were blurred and there seemed to have been an invasion of native grasses which showed as an overall green haze.

The realisation that the farm had been abandoned took Bartan by surprise. It was possible that there had been some kind of epidemic, or that the owners had been tyros who had become discouraged and had returned to urban life—but surely someone else would have been glad to take over a unit in which all the gruelling basic work had already been done.

His curiosity aroused, Bartan shut off the jet and floated his craft down on to the level ground which surrounded the house and its outbuildings. The slightness of the breeze enabled him to make an accurate landing within yards of a patch of wryberry vines. As soon as he stepped out of the boat the craft as a whole became lighter than air and tried to drift away, but he held it down by one of the skids until he had thrown a tether around the nearest vine. The boat gently rose to the full extent of the rope and came to rest, wallowing a little in weak air currents.

Bartan walked towards the farm buildings, becoming further intrigued with the mystery of the place as he noticed a dust-covered plough lying on its side. Other smaller implements could be seen here and there. They were made of brakka, but some had rivets of iron, a metal which was becoming generally available, and from the degree of rusting he guessed the tools had been lying around untouched for at least a year. He frowned as he estimated the practical value of the abandoned equipment. It was as though the owners of the farm had simply walked away from their livelihood—or had been spirited away by some unknown means.

The notion was a strange one to come to Bartan while he was standing in the full flood of the aft day sun, especially as he had never had anything but scorn for credulous people who heeded stories of the supernatural. Suddenly, however, he was uneasily conscious of the fact that his kind had been on Overland for only twenty-four years, and that much on the planet remained unknown to them. In the past the knowledge that he was a newcomer on a largely unexplored world had always exhilarated Bartan, but now he felt strangely chastened by it.

Don't start acting like a child,
he told himself.
What is there to be afraid
of?

He turned towards the farmhouse itself. It was well constructed of sawn timbers caulked with oakum, and the whitewashing showed that somebody had taken pride in it. Bartan frowned again as he saw that yellow curtains still hung in the windows, glowing in the shade of the wide eaves. It would have been the work of only a moment to snatch them down, something he would have expected any home-lover to do, no matter how hasty the departure.

Is it possible they haven't departed? Could a whole family still be in there? Dead
of
some disease? Or … or murdered?

"Neighbours would have been around before now," he said aloud to block the flow of questions. "Even in a place as remote as this, neighbours would have been around before now. And they would have taken all the tools—farmers don't let much go to waste." Comforted by the simple logic, he walked quickly to the single-storey farmhouse, unlatched the green front door and pushed it open.

His eyes were attuned to the fierce sunlight, therefore it was several seconds before they adapted to the shade of the eaves and the comparative dimness within the house, several seconds before he clearly saw the nameless beast which was waiting for him to enter.

He sobbed, leapt backwards and fell, mind's eye brimming with the dreadful vision … the dark, slow-heaving pyramid of the body, upright and tall as a man … the sagging, dissolving face, with wounds in place of eyes … the single slim tentacle, gently groping forward…