Summerland (38 page)

One of the figures, she saw, was carrying something in its hand, a kind of wand of light. As the figures drew nearer, the wand of light burned brighter and brighter, throwing out light in all directions. The patches of tree green and sky blue began to whirl around each other, mingling with purple and yellow and orange and red. The darkness dissolved in the swirl of color and light until it was spinning all around, a great rushing swirl of color in bands like the glowing stripes of Jupiter, and the light from the wand flowered and burst over everything. Jennifer T.'s ears hummed, and a burnt smell like tar filled her nostrils. The ground began to rumble and shift under feet, and she lost her balance and fell with a cry, throwing out her hands to break her fall. In the instant before the light of the wand filled every last corner of her vision she had the strange sensation of clutching two thick tufts of grass in her fingers.

CHAPTER 17

The Research of Mr. Feld

CUTBELLY THE WEREFOX HAD SPENT
a good portion of his very long life observing the habits and behavior of the interesting creatures known in the Far Territories of the Summerlands as
reubens
. As a shadowtail he had done a fair amount of traveling to the Middling. He had seen more of it than any reuben ever had, that much was certain. He had seen war and torment. He had seen illness and destruction. He had seen a lot of sad sights. But he had never seen anything quite like the case of Bruce Feld, Ph. D.

"Here," the werefox said, backing into the laboratory, carrying a tray laid with caribou-butter tea and a plate of those rude Winterlands biscuits known as cracknuckles. The makeshift laboratory in the bowels of the steam-sledge
Panic
rattled and lurched. The beakers and glass pipes chimed steadily, a carillon that never ceased. Cutbelly had often wondered if it were not the endless ringing of all those damned tubes and pipes that had finally driven Bruce Feld mad. "I brought you something to eat."

"No time," Mr. Feld said. He did not take his eyes from the flask whose contents he was heating with an autoclave. The autoclave (a kind of super-pressure cooker used by chemists), and all of the other fancy equipment in the laboratory, had been manufactured by Coyote's grayling smiths, to Mr. Feld's exact specifications. Coyote's plan was founded on Middling science. So his toxin-delivery system had to be created by Middling means. Except, of course, for the fact that all the electricity was provided by Coyote's herd of thunder buffalo. And except for the fact that the flasks and beakers had been blown by fire gnomes, and the tools wrought from walrus bone and Winterlands weird-iron.

"You have to eat something, reuben," Cutbelly said. "What good will it do your son to see you again if you've starved yourself to death first?"

"Later," Mr. Feld said. His conversation, never plentiful, had long since dried up completely. An elaborate skyline of glassware separated him from his assistant. "I'm in the middle of a trial."

"Which trial?"

"Number five hundred and twenty-seven," Mr. Feld said. "Get ready."

Dutifully Cutbelly set down the tray and scurried over to a wooden table in a corner of the lab. As Mr. Feld's assistant, his only real duties consisted of taking down Mr. Feld's laboratory notes and trying without success to get him to eat. Mr. Feld had been working nonstop for ages, without taking more than a nibble of a cracknuckle now and then, and a sip of caribou-butter tea here or there. He slept less than Cutbelly, and werefoxes need very little sleep.

Exhaustion had made deep bruises under Mr. Feld's eyes. His beard grew at Winterlands speed, half an inch per day, and it was a wild tangle. Someone had found him a real lab coat, and he wore it all the time. Because all he ever did was work.

"I observe picofiberization and it appears to be quite evenly distributed," he said in the dry, high, nasal voice he used when he was dictating his notes to Cutbelly.
P-fib distrib
Cutbelly wrote.
Even
. Mr. Feld held the beaker up to eyelevel and tipped it back and forth. The clear liquid it had once contained had turned a pale white color and thickened like a pudding on the cool. Mr. Feld poked at it with the tip of a long, thin probe. Inset into the bone handle of the probe was a spring-loaded gauge with a red wire needle. The probe slid in with ease but then when Mr. Feld tried to remove it, the thick white stuff refused to let go. Mr. Feld had to set the beaker down, clamp it to a brace, and jerk the probe out with both hands. "Auto-adhesion index off the chart," he said.

"Is this it, then?" Cutbelly said. His heart sank. "Did you do it?"

"It looks good," said Mr. Feld. There was little emotion in his voice. You would never have known that he had come to the moment he had gone for weeks without food and sleep to reach. The liquid in the flask condensed, turning thicker and shinier until at last it lay glinting in the flask like a pool of mercury. Mr. Feld tipped it from the flask into the palm of his hand. The shining stuff spilled outward in all directions and lay draped over his hand. But it did not drip or run out of his palm. It held together. He grasped it with the other hand and balled it up. Then he kneaded it a few times and smacked it against the workbench. It flattened into a disk. He lifted the silvery pancake and began to stretch it like pizza dough. He tossed it spinning into the air and it stretched and stretched until it hung silky as a parachute, then drifted, billowing, to the floor.

"Bring me a skriker," Mr. Feld said.

"I don't like to touch those things," Cutbelly said. "You know that, Bruce."

"Fine," said Mr. Feld. He went to a small metal door at the back of the lab. It looked like the door of a locker, narrow and slitted at the top. He opened it with a twist of a bone handle and then turned to one side to squeeze himself halfway in. There was a nasty yipping snarl from inside the dark closet. As Cutbelly watched Mr. Feld reach around inside the locker, he noticed something very odd about the back of Mr. Feld's head. It looked—well, it looked
flat
. As if his head were made of putty, you would have said, and he had been lying on his back too long. Mr. Feld jumped, and flinched. Then he smiled. It was a smile that made Cutbelly shiver.

Mr. Feld held out a large black wire cage, carrying it by a ring at the top. The skriker in the cage thrashed and snarled at Mr. Feld. It snarled at Cutbelly. Skrikers were reputed to feel no emotion but spite and no pain but hunger. But this skriker looked to Cutbelly very much as if it were afraid.

"Bruce," Cutbelly said. "Mr. Feld. Don't. Please."

"I have no choice," Mr. Feld said. It seemed to Cutbelly that his voice still had the nasal tone it took on when he was dictating notes. "If I don't do what he asks, I'll never see Ethan again."

"You may never see him again even if you do," Cutbelly said.

"Be that as it may," Mr. Feld said. The dry dictation voice was still there; it seemed to have become a permanent condition. He put on a pair of thick elk-hide gloves. He raised the restraining device, a pair of long handles with an adjustable noose at one end, which he would use to grab the skriker, and prepared to reach into the cage. Even though the skriker was injured—it had lost its wings in a skirmish with a tribe of wild shaggurts outside Grunterburg a few weeks back—it was still dangerous. "I have no choice."

He unlocked the cage with a weird-iron key and eased open the door, reaching in with the long-handled noose. The skriker cursed at Mr. Feld with the simple grammar and rich vocabulary of the skriker's palindromic tongue, which was called Azmamza.

"
Katnantak!
" the skriker cursed. "
Tav vatve gala gevtav vatkat nantak!
"

Then the noose snared the skriker by its neck. Mr. Feld jerked the creature out of the cage and in a single smooth movement tucked the skriker's body under his arm like a bagpipe, and gave its head a sharp twist. The skriker's head came off with a moist pop. From the joint of its neck a single black drop swelled into a shining bead.

"
Tawat!
" growled the skriker's head. "
Vizgon og zivtav vat!
"

Mr. Feld set the head down on the table beside him and then covered it with a towel. It continued to chatter for a moment longer, then fell silent. Mr. Feld turned his attention to the bead of black liquid at the tip of the skriker's dead neck. Lowering the body toward the surface of the table, he dabbed at the stretched crepe of picofiber he had just rolled out. The black stuff smeared across in a long streak. Almost immediately it began to steam and smoke. There was an awful smell of sizzling tooth.

"That's just the residue of my hands," Mr. Feld. "The oils and dirt."

Indeed as he said the words the steaming stopped, and the smoke curled to the ceiling and then began to disperse. Mr. Feld watched the black streak of skriker blood, the second most vitriolic stuff in the universe, as it lay on his shining silver stuff, cooling. The picofibrous material refused to react with it. That, as Mr. Feld had explained to the werefox, was what picofibers did: they refused to react. To Mr. Feld's picofiber pancake the skriker blood was as inert and uninteresting as a splatter of spilt coffee. It was not particularly interesting to Cutbelly, either. But Mr. Feld gazed at the streak of ichor as if it were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Tunelessly he sang to himself:

Na na na na
Na na na na
Hey hey hey
Goodbye

"Biosolvent test," he said after a moment, his voice higher and dryer than ever. "Negative. No indications of molecular interaction on any level." He glanced over at Cutbelly, who sat, not moving, the notebook neglected. "Take that down."

"No," Cutbelly said. "I'm not going to help you anymore, reuben."

Cutbelly liked Mr. Feld. He liked most reubens, as a rule, preferring their company to that of ferishers, among whom he had been born. Ferishers were spirited but shallow and incapable of pity. They were immortal. Only things whose lives were too short, like reubens, were able to feel pity. And he was grateful to Mr. Feld for having intervened to save his life at Betty's Bonepit. But he was increasingly uneasy around Mr. Feld. Something had to be done.

"Take it down!" Mr. Feld said through clenched teeth. "I'm extremely close now! Take it down! Don't you want me to see Ethan again?"

"What are you going to do, pop my head off? Take it down yourself!" Cutbelly said.

Mr. Feld set down the beaker, then snatched up the notebook and began furiously to jot.

"This has nothing to do with you seeing Ethan again," Cutbelly said. "You're doing this, sir, because you like what you're doing. You enjoy the work. Admit it. If Coyote walked in here right now and told you could stop, you'd keep on working, wouldn't you?"

"No," Mr. Feld said. "Of course not."

He looked away, and Cutbelly saw that the back of his head was flatter than ever. In fact, now that he considered it, the entire back of Mr. Feld's
body
looked flatter than it ought to. His buttocks looked as if they were pressed up against a clear sheet of glass.