“There’s quite enough mountain for me,” Barron said. “If these are foothills, I’m not in any hurry to see anything higher.”
As if to refute what he had said, a picture sprang to swift life in his brain: I had expected Armida to be like this, a great gray peaked castle lying beneath the chasmed tooth of the mountain, beneath the snow-laden crag with its high plume of snow.
Barron let his breath out as the picture faded, but before he could think of anything to say, the door opened and Gwynn, now wearing what looked like a green and black uniform, came in, accompanied by two men carrying between them Barron’s crate of lens materials and grinding tools. They set it down, under his instructions, and removed the heavy straps, buckles and padding which had protected it on the trip. Valdir thanked the men in an unfamiliar dialect, Gwynn lingered to ask a couple of routine questions, and when the men went away, Barron was once more composed and in possession of himself. Okay, maybe I’ve had something like a nervous breakdown in the Terran Zone, and it’s still showing in intermittent brainstorms. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going insane, and it certainly needn’t inhibit the work I’m going to be doing. He was glad to have the chance to collect himself by talking about familiar things.
He had to admit that for men without a standard scientific education, Valdir and Lerrys showed a good deal of comprehension and asked intelligent questions about what he had told them. He gave them a very brief history of lenses—from microscope to telescope to refracting lens for myopia, to binocular lens.
“You realize this is all very elementary,” he added apologetically. “We’ve had simple lenses from our prehistory; it’s a pre-atomic development on most planets. Now we have the various forms of radar, coherent light devices, and the like. But when men on Terra first started experimenting with light, the lens was our first step in that direction.”
“Oh, it’s quite understandable,” said Valdir, “you needn’t apologize. On a planet like Terra, where the random incidence of clairvoyance is so low, it’s perfectly natural that men would turn to such experiments.” Barron stared; he hadn’t been apologizing.
Lerrys caught his eye and gave Barron a brief, humorous wink, then frowned slightly at his guardian, and Valdir caught himself and continued. “And of course, it’s our good fortune that you have developed this technique. You see, Mr. Barron, here on Darkover, throughout our pre-history, we were a world where the so-called ESP powers were used, in place of gadgets and machinery, to augment and supplement man’s five senses. But so many of these old powers have been lost, or forgotten, during what we call the Years of Chaos, just before the Compact, that now we are forced to supplement our unaided senses with various devices. It’s necessary, of course, to be very careful which devices we allow into our society; as the history of all too many planets will show, technology is a two-edged weapon, which can be abused more often than it is used. But we have studied the probable impact on our society quite carefully, and decided that with elementary caution the introduction of lenses will do no palpable harm in the foreseeable future.”
“That’s good of you,” said Barron ironically. If Valdir was conscious of the sarcasm he let it pass without comment. He said, “Larry, of course, has a fairly good technical education, and can make things clear to me if I can’t understand. Now, about power sources for your machinery and equipment, Mr. Barron. I trust you were warned that very little electricity is available, and only in the lowest of voltages?”
“That’s all right. I have mostly hand equipment, and a small generator which can be adapted to work by wind power.”
“Wind is something we have plenty of back here in the mountains,” said Lerrys with a friendly grin. “I was the one who suggested wind power instead of storage batteries.”
Barron began putting the various bits of equipment back into their case. Valdir rose and went to the window, pausing beside the carved ornament which hid the strange electronic gadget. He asked abruptly, “Mr. Barron, where did you learn to speak Darkovan?”
Barron shrugged. “I’ve always been fairly quick at languages.” Then he frowned; he had a good working knowledge of the language spoken in the city near the Trade Zone, but he had given what amounted to a long and fairly technical lecture, without once hesitating, or calling on the young man—Larry or Lerrys or whatever Valdir called him—to interpret. He felt strangely confused and troubled. Had he been speaking Darkovan all that time? He hadn’t stopped to think what language he was speaking. Damn it, what is wrong with me?
“Nothing is wrong,” said Lerrys quickly. “I told you, Valdir. No, I don’t understand, either. But—I gave him my knife.”
“It was yours to give, fosterling, but I don’t disapprove.”
“Look out,” Lerrys said quickly, “he can hear us.”
Valdir’s sharp eyes swept in the direction of Barron, who suddenly realized that the two Darkovans had been speaking in yet another language. Barron’s confusion made him angry. He said, with dry asperity, “I don’t know Darkovan courtesy, but among my people it is considered fairly rude to talk over someone’s head, about them.”
“I’m sorry,” Lerrys said. “I had no idea you could hear us, Dan.”
“My foster son, of all people, should know about latent telepaths,” Valdir said. “I am sorry, Mr. Barron; we intended no rudeness. Telepaths, among you Terrans, are not common, though they are not unknown, either.”
“You mean I’m reading your minds?”
“In a sense. It’s far too complex a subject to explain in a few minutes. For the moment I suggest you think of it as a very good sort of talent to have for the work you’re going to be doing, since it will make it easy for you to talk to people, when you know only a little of their language.”
Barron started to say, But I’m no telepath, I’ve never shown any talent for that sort of thing, and when the Rhines gave me the standard psi test for the Space Service, I tested out damn near flat negative. Then he withheld it. He had been learning a lot about himself lately, and it was certain that he wasn’t the same man he had been before. If he developed a few talents to go with his hallucinations, that was perhaps the law of compensation in action. It had certainly made it easier to talk to Valdir, so why complain?
He finished carefully putting the equipment in the crate, and listened to Valdir’s assurances that it would be securely wrapped and crated for the trip up to the mountain station where he would be working.
But when, a few minutes later, he took his leave and went down the hall, he was shocked and yet unsurprised to realize that Valdir’s voices and Lerry’s continued, like distant whispers inside his head.
“Do you suppose the Terrans chose a telepath purposely?”
“I don’t think so, Foster Father; I don’t believe they knew enough about choosing or training them. And he seems too surprised by the whole thing. I told you that from somewhere he had picked up an image of Sharra.”
“Sharra, of all conceivable!”—Valdir’s mental voice blurted out in astonishment and what seemed like dismay. “So you gave him your knife, Larry! Well, you know what that will mean. I’ll release you from your pledge, if you like; tell him who you are when it seems necessary.”
“It’s not because he’s a Terran. But if he’s going to be running around Darkover in that state, someone’s got to do something about it—and I can probably understand him better than most people. It isn’t all that easy, to change worlds.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, Larry. You don’t know that he’s changing worlds.”
Larry’s tone in answer sounded positive, and yet somehow sad. “Oh, yes, he will. Where would he go among the Terrans, after this?”
* * *
VI
« ^ »
MELITTA crept down the long, tunneled stairway, groping through the darkness. After the faint light from the cracks behind her had died, she was in total darkness and had to feel each step with her feet before setting her weight on it. She wished she had thought to bri
ng a light. But on the other hand, she would need both hands to find her way and to brace herself. She went carefully, never putting her full weight on a step without testing it. She had never been down here before, but her childhood had been soaked in stories of her Storn forefathers and the builders of the castle before them, and she knew that secret exits and tunnels could be honeycombed with nasty surprises for people who blundered through them without appropriate precautions.
Her care was not superfluous. Before she had gone more than a few thousand feet down into the darkness, the wall at her left hand fell away and left her feeling a breath of dank air which seemed to rise out of an immense depth. The air was moving, and she had no fear of suffocation, but the echoes stirred at such distance that she quailed at the thought of that drop to her left; and when she dislodged a small pebble with her foot and it slipped over the edge it seemed to fall forever before landing at last, a distant whisper, far below.
Abruptly her hands struck cold stone and she found that she had run into a blank wall. Taken aback for a moment, she began to feel about and discovered that she was inching, foot by foot, along a narrow shelf at the foot of the stairs. She felt her hands strike and break thick webs, and cringed at the thought of the unseen creatures in the darkness that had spun them; she had no fear of ordinary spiders, but who could tell what horrors might spawn here, out of sunlight since the beginning of the world, and what they would crawl over in the darkness and what ghastly things they would find to eat. She braced herself, setting her small chin, thinking, They won’t get to eat me, anyhow. She gripped the hilt of her knife and held it before her.
To her left, a small chink of pale greenish light wavered. Could she have come to the end of the tunnel already? It was no normal daylight or moonlight. Wherever the light came from, it was not outside. The ledge suddenly widened and she could step back and walk at ease instead of inching along.
The greenish light grew slowly, and now she saw that it came through an arched doorway at the end of the stone passageway along which she walked. Melitta was far from timid, but there was something about that green light which she disliked before she saw more than a glimmer of it, something which seemed to go beneath the roots of consciousness and stir old half-memories which lay at the very depths of her being. Darkover was an old world and the mountains were the most ancient bones of the world, and no man knew what might have crawled beneath the mountains when the sun first began to cool, ages ago, there to lie and grow in unseen horror.
She had been walking silently in her fur-lined boots; now she ghosted along hardly disturbing the air she walked through, holding her breath for fear it would disturb some hidden something. The green light grew stronger, and, although it was still no brighter than moonlight, somehow it hurt her eyes so that she slitted them to narrowness against it and tried not to let it inside her eyelids. There was something very awful down here.
Well, she thought, even if it’s a dragon, it can’t be much worse than Brynat’s men. At worst a dragon would only want to eat me. Anyhow, there haven’t been any dragons on Darkover for a thousand years. They were all killed off before the Ages of Chaos.
The doorway from which the green light emanated was very near. She felt the poisonous brightness as a positive assault on her eyes. She stepped to the doorway and peered through, holding her breath against screaming at the ghastly glare which lay ahead.
She could see that the green light came from some thick, poisonous fungus that grew in the slow currents of air. The room ahead was high and arched, and she could see carvings covered with fungus, and at the far end, blurred and overgrown shapes which had once been a dais and something like chairs.
Melitta took a firm hold of her nerves. Why should it be evil just because it’s green and slimy-looking, she demanded of herself. So is a frog, and frogs are harmless. So was the moss on a rock. Why should plants growing in their own way give me this overwhelming feeling of something wicked and sinister? Nevertheless, she could not make her feet move to take the first step into that arched room. The green light made her eyes ache, and there was a faint smell, as if of carrion.
Slowly, as her eyes grew accustomed to the green, she saw the things that crawled among the fungus.
They were white and sluggish. Their eyes, great and curiously iridescent, moved slowly in her direction, and the girl felt her stomach heave at that blind regard. She stood there paralyzed, thinking frantically, This must be new, they can’t have been here all along, this passage was in good shape forty years ago; I remember my father speaking of it, though he hadn’t been down here since years before I was born.
She stood back, studying the green stalactites of fungus and the crawling things. They looked dreadful, but were they dangerous as well? Even though they made her skin crawl, they might be as harmless as most spiders. Perhaps, if she could simply summon up the nerve to run through them, that was all that was needed.
A small restless rustle behind her made her look down. Near her skirts, sitting up on his hind legs and surveying her with curiosity, a small red-furred, rodentlike animal hung back from entering the cave. He gave a small, nervous chitter which seemed to Melitta to mirror her own apprehension. He was a dirty-looking little creature, but by contrast with the things in the green cave he looked normal and friendly. Melitta almost smiled at him.
He squeaked again and, with a sudden burst of speed, set off running through the fungus.
The green branches whipped down on the little creature. It screamed thinly and was still, smothered in the green, which seemed to pulse with ghastly light. Through the phosphorescence the small golden-eyed horrors moved, swarmed, and moved away. Not even the bones were left; there was only an infinitesimal scrap of pinkish fur.
Melitta crammed her fist in her mouth to keep from screaming. She took a convulsive step backward, watching the slow subsiding of the fungus. It took some minutes to subside.
After a long time her heartbeat slowed to normal and she found herself frantically searching for solutions. I wish I could get through here somehow and lure Brynat’s men down after me, she thought grimly, but that line seemed to go nowhere.
Fire. All living things fear fire, except man. If I could carry fire…
She had no light; but she did have steel and tinder in her pocket; on Darkover to be outdoors without the means of making fire in the snow season, was to die. Before she was eight years old she had known all the tricks of firemaking anywhere and everywhere.
Trying not to breathe hard, she pulled out her firemaking materials. She had nothing she could use for a torch, but she tore off her scarf, wound it round a small slab of rock, and set it alight. Then, carrying it carefully in front of her, she stepped into the fungus cave.
The green branches whipped back as the firelight and heat struck them. The sluggish crawling at her feet made her gasp with horror, but they made no effort to attack, and she began to breathe again as she began to walk, steadily, across the cave. She must go quickly but not too fast to see where she was going. The scarf would not burn more than a minute at most. Fortunately the patch of green seemed to be less than a hundred yards; beyond the further arch was darkness again.
One of the crawling things struck her foot. It felt squishy, like a frog, and she gasped, staggered a little for balance, and dropped the blazing scarf. She swooped to retrieve it…
A high shrill yeeping came from the crawling thing.
The green fungus near her feet moved, and Melitta held her breath and waited for it to strike.
The blazing scarf touched the green branch and it caught fire. A blaze of ghastly green-red light licked up to the ceiling; Melitta felt the blast of heat as the fire blazed up, catching branch after branch. In half a minute the walls of the cave were ablaze; the small crawling things screamed, writhed and died at her feet as the green branches, agitating violently, struggled to get out of range, were caught by the blaze and burned.
It seemed an eternity that she stood there in terror, trying to draw her
clothing back from the flames, her ears hurting with the screams and her eyes burning from the greenish tint of the fire. Rationally she knew that it must have been only a few minutes before the flames, finding nothing more to feed on, sank and died, leaving her alone in unrelieved, blessed darkness.
She began to move slowly across the cave, in the remembered direction of the other door, holding her breath and trying not to breathe the scorched, poisonous dust of the burnt fungus. Under her feet it crumpled unpleasantly and she hated setting her feet on the ground, but there was no help for it. She kept moving, numbly, in the direction of that remembered patch of darkness beyond the fungus cave.
She knew when she had passed through it, for almost at once the air was cleaner, and under her feet there was nothing but hard rock. There was also faint light from somewhere—a glimmer of moonlight, perhaps, from a hidden airshaft. The air felt cool and sweet; the builders of these tunnels had gone to some pains to make them pleasant to walk in. Far off she heard a trickle of water, and, her throat still full of the dust of the burnt fungus, it was like a promise.
She went down, moving toward the sound of distant water. Twice she shrank, seeing on the walls a trace, hardly more than a smear, of the greenish stuff, and made a mental note, If I ever get back I’ll come down and burn it out. If not, I hope it grows fast—and Brynat comes down here some day!
After what seemed like hours of slow descent she found the water—a trickling stream coming out of the rock and dripping slowly down along the stairs beside her path. She cupped her hands and drank. The water was good, and she drank well, cleansed her grimy face, and ate a few bites of food. She could tell, by the feel of the air on her face, that the night was far advanced. She must be safely hidden by morning.
Must I? I could lie hidden in the tunnel for a day or two, till pursuit quiets.