Land and Overland - Omnibus (78 page)

The very fact that Sondeweere knew of such things, she who until recently had been an unlettered agricultural worker, added to Toller's general misgivings. It substantiated her claim to have been sublimated into a superwoman, a genius beyond the ken of genius, and made him feel apprehensive about meeting her face to face. What would a goddess think of ordinary human beings? Would she look on them in much the same manner as they had regarded the gibbons which abounded in the Sorka province of old Kolcorron?

He would have expected Bartan Drumme to show some degree of concern over the same issue, but the youngster gave no sign of it. When not sleeping or taking his turn at the controls, he spent his time talking to Berise and Wraker, quite often swigging from one of the skins of brandy he had included in his kit. Berise had brought drawing materials and she devoted hours to sketching the others and making maps of the approaching planet, the latter mainly for the benefit of Zavotle. For his part, the little man appeared to be deteriorating at an increasing rate. He lay on his palliasse, forearms pressed against his stomach, and rarely became animated except when in communion with Sondeweere. Given the opportunity he would have questioned her for hours, but her visitations were always brief and her instructions terse, as though many other matters competed for her attention.

Unexpectedly, Toller got the most companionship from the crew member he knew least—Dakan Wraker. Although he had been born after the Migration, the soft-spoken man with the crinkly hair and humorous grey eyes had an intense interest in the history of the Old World. While helping Toller to grease and clean the muskets and five steel swords which had been brought on the mission, he encouraged him to talk for long periods about daily life in Ro-Atabri, Kolcorron's former capital city, and the practical arrangements by which it had spread its influence through an entire hemisphere. It transpired that he had ambitions to write a book which would help preserve the nation's identity.

"So we have an artist and a writer on one ship," Toller said. "You and Berise should form a partnership."

"I'd love to form
any
kind of partnership with Berise," Wraker replied in a low voice, "but I think she has her sights set on another."

Toller frowned. "You mean Bartan? But he's soon to be reunited with his wife."

"An ill-matched couple, don't you think? Perhaps Berise sees no future in the union."

In Wraker's comments Toller recognised an echo of his own thoughts, so it seemed that the only one who was not in doubt about the prospects for Bartan's strange marriage was Bartan himself. Mildly drunk for most of the time, Bartan appeared to live in a state of euphoria, supported by his monomania, buoyed up by the belief that when he met Sondeweere again all would be as it was before. Toller was at a loss to explain how the young man continued to nourish such naive expectations—but could any of the company claim to be displaying greater foresight?

Toller had noticed that even when Sondeweere used a word he had never heard before he nevertheless understood its meaning. It was as though the words themselves were merely convenient carriers, each one freighted with multitudinous layers of meaning and complementary concepts. When mind spoke to mind there were no misunderstandings or areas of vagueness.

No man who listened to Sondeweere's silent voice could doubt anything she said—and she had predicted that the rescue mission would end in tragedy.

It was dark when the skyship drifted down towards the plain—the kind of darkness Toller had previously known only during the hours of deepnight. While the ship still had some altitude there had been soft glimmerings of light visible here and there in the mysterious black landscape, indicative of scattered towns or villages. But this close to touchdown the only luminance came from the sky, and even the Great Spiral could do little more than add fugitive hints of silver to the mist which patchily shrouded the ground.

The air was seeded with moisture, and to Toller—equatorial dweller from a sun-scoured world—it seemed dauntingly cold, with a strange ability to draw the heat out of his body. He and the others had shed the cumbersome skysuits hours earlier, and now they were shivering and rubbing their goose-pimpled arms in an effort to keep warm. The air was also laden with the smell of vegetation, a dank essence of
greenness
more powerful and pervasive than anything Toller had ever known, and which told him more forcibly than his other senses that he was close to the surface of an alien planet.

As he stood at the gondola's rail he felt keyed-up, exhilarated, entranced—and also regretful that there was to be no opportunity to roam across Farland on foot in daytime and sample its wonders with his own eyes. If Sondeweere met the ship according to plan—and he had little doubt that she would—they would be able to take her on board within seconds. It would not even be necessary for the gondola's legs to make contact with Farland's soil before they headed skywards again under cover of night. By morning they would be out of sight of anybody on the ground, well on their way to a rendezvous with the
Kolcorron.

Not for the first time, the thought caused Toller to frown in puzzlement. There seemed to be a wide divergence between the actual course of events and Sondeweere's confident forecast of a disastrous end to the venture. Everything seemed to be going too well. Had she simply been doing her best to keep the would-be rescuers out of
possible
dangers, or were there other factors in the situation which Toller had not considered and which she had chosen not to divulge? The extra element of mystery, the hint of lurking perils, worked on him like some potent drug, stepping up his heart rate and increasing his brooding sense of anticipation. He scanned the darkness below, wondering if the enigmatic symbonites could have intercepted and silenced Sondeweere, if the projected landing site could be thronged with waiting soldiers.

Wraker was now firing frequent short bursts into the balloon, reducing the speed of descent to a crawl, and as the ground came nearer Toller's eyes began to play malicious tricks on him. The darkness was no longer homogenous, but was composed of thousands of crawling, squirming shapes, all of them with the potential to be what he least wanted them to be. They ran beneath the drifting ship, silently and effortlessly keeping pace with it, their upraised arms imploring him to come within range and be cut and clubbed and hewn and hacked into anonymous fragments of flesh and bone.

It seemed a long, long time before the encompassing gloom relented and yielded up something unambiguous—a tremulous mote of pale grey which gradually lightened in tone and resolved itself into the figure of a woman dressed in white…

"Sondy!" Bartan Drumme called, leaning far over the rail beside Toller. "Sondy, I'm here!"

"Bartan!" The woman was walking quickly to keep abreast of the ship. "I see you, Bartan!"

There was no awesome, mind-numbing telepathic contact—just a woman's voice charged with understandable human excitement—and the sound of it overwhelmed Toller with wonder. For the moment all cognisance of symbonite super-beings was gone, and he could think of nothing but the strangeness of this meeting. Here was a woman who had been" born on his home world and had lived an ordinary life there before being transported to another planet in bizarre circumstances. Every dictate of reason said that she should then have vanished forever from human ken, but her grief-crazed, drink-sodden husband had inspired a voyage across millions of miles of space, and—against all the odds—they had reached her. That woman, whose voice trembled with natural emotion, was only a few yards away from him in the alien darkness—and Toller spellbound by the reality of her.

The sound of the gondola's exhaust cone and legs swishing through vegetation snapped him back into a universe of practicalities. Bartan had climbed over the gondola's side and was perched on the outer ledge, reaching towards his wife with one hand. She caught hold of it and within a second was standing beside him. Toller helped her roll herself over the rail, marvelling as he did so at the simple bodily contact. Bartan came inboard again with a single lithe movement and clutched Sondeweere to him. Toller, Berise and Zavotle were spontaneously drawn to them, and arms were lapped upon arms in a gratifying multiple embrace. It ended when the gondola's legs glanced against the ground, sending a shudder up through the deck.

"Take us aloft," Toller said to Wraker, who at once began firing a long burst which was to revitalise the gigantic entity of the balloon waiting patiently above them.

"Yes,
yes!"
Sondeweere divorced herself from the cluster of bodies and stepped towards Wraker, her right hand extended in a gesture of greeting. He responded by raising his free hand, but the expected clasp did not take place.

Sondeweere reached past him and—before anybody watching could react—caught the red line connected to the balloon's rip panel and jerked it downwards with irresistible force.

There was no immediate reaction in the cramped microcosm of the gondola, but Toller knew that the balloon had been
killed.
Far above him a large trapezium of linen had been torn out of the balloon's crown, and the envelope would already be starting to wrinkle and sag as the hot gas which sustained it was vented into the atmosphere. The ship was now committed to setting down on Farland—possibly for ever.

"Sondy! What have you done?" Bartan's anguished cry was heard clearly through the general clamour of shocked protest. He lurched towards Sondeweere with both arms outstretched, as though belatedly trying to prevent her making an injudicious move. She fended him off and went quickly to an empty section of the gondola.
Sondeweere has gone.
Toller thought.
The symbonite superwoman is now among us.

"There was good reason for what I did," she said in a firm, clear voice. "If you will listen to me for…"

Her words were lost as the gondola struck the ground and tilted to a steep angle, hurling bodies and loose equipment against one wall, before dropping back to the horizontal.

"Get the struts off," Toller shouted, jolted out of his reverie. "The balloon is coming down around us."

He tugged the quick-release knots which were securing a strut to the corner nearest him and pushed the slim support away from the rail, hoping to prevent it taking the weight of the subsiding envelope. The gondola was being inundated with choking hot miglign gas which was belching down out of the balloon's mouth. A sound of splintering told Toller that at least one of the other struts had already been overloaded.

He climbed over the side, peripherally aware of others doing the same, and leaped down to the ground. He ran a short distance through what felt like ordinary grass and turned to view the collapse of the balloon. The vast shape was still tall enough to blot out part of the sky, but it had lost all symmetry. Distorted, writhing like a leviathan in its death throes, it sank downwards at increasing speed. The slight breeze deposited most of it downwind of the gondola where it lay flapping in the grass, raised into shifting humps here and there by gas that was trapped within.

A brief period of silence followed, then the crew members turned and closed in on Sondeweere. There was no hint of threat in their demeanour, nor even of resentment, but the courses of their lives had been profoundly altered by a single unexpected action on her part and they sought some kind of reassurance. Toller could see them well enough in spite of the darkness to note that he was the only one wearing his sword. Obeying old instincts, he dropped his hand to the hilt of the weapon and looked all about him, trying to penetrate the folds of alien night.

"There are no Farlanders within many miles," Sondeweere said, addressing herself directly to him. "I have not betrayed you."

"May I be so bold as to enquire what you
have
done?" he replied, falling back on sarcasm. "You will appreciate that we have a certain interest in the matter."

"We need to know," Bartan added in a quavering voice which indicated that he, perhaps more than anybody else, had been devastated by the turn of events.

Sondeweere was wearing a belted white tunic and she drew it closer around her throat before she spoke. "I invite you to consider two facts which are of paramount importance. The first is that the symbonites of this world are aware of my exact whereabouts at all times. They know precisely where I am at this moment, but their suspicions are not aroused and they will take no action because—fortunately for all of us—I am of a restless disposition and it is my habit to travel far and wide at irregular hours.

"The second fact," Sondeweere went on, speaking with a calm fluency, "is that the symbonites brought me here in a ship which can make the interplanetary crossing in only a few minutes."

"Minutes!" Zavotle said. "Only a few minutes?"

"The journey could have been completed in a few seconds, or even fractions of a second, but for short distances it is more convenient to proceed at a moderate speed. My point is that if I had gone aloft in the skyship the symbonites would very quickly have realised what was happening and would have intercepted us with their own ship. As I have already told you, they are not homicidal by instinct, but they will
never
permit me to return to my home world. They would have forced the skyship down, and in doing so would have killed everyone on board."

"Is their weaponry so much superior to ours?" Toller said, trying to visualise the aerial encounter.

"The symbonite ship carries no weapons as such, but in flight it is surrounded by a field—call it an aura—which is inimical to life. The underlying concept cannot be explained to you, but be assured that a meeting with the symbonite ship would have resulted in all our deaths. Whether the symbonites wanted it that way or not—we would have died."

A silence descended on the group of fliers while each assimilated Sondeweere's message. The breeze suddenly freshened, spanging the mute figures with chilling drops of rain which easily penetrated their light shirts and breeches, and clouds slid across the stars like prison doors closing.
Farland exults,
Toller thought, trying to repress a shiver.