How extensive was the route it followed? How many worlds could it access? Undoubtedly it offered a means of selecting one’s destination, but he didn’t have a clue as to how that might work. He’d found the ignition, but steering remained a mystery to him.
He might die of hunger or thirst before he twisted his way back to Senisran. Or it might be the next stop on a preprogrammed, alien itinerary. Meanwhile, as the old saying went, he might as well try to enjoy the ride.
Was the green glow fading slightly? If whatever powered the system failed, he would be marooned forever. Marooned by the side of a Parramati road, he mused, with no one likely to come along and offer him a lift. The source of the stone’s energy remained as much a mystery to him as its alien engineering.
Maybe the glow wasn’t weakening. Maybe the color change was due to some quality of the local atmosphere. Forcing himself to accept that comforting hypothesis, he took a deep breath and twisted hard on the stone.
His hands came loose and went drifting slowly off over the grass. They were followed by his forearms, which broke free at the elbows and began to spin lazily end over end in the direction of his peramubulating hands.
There was no blood, no pain. Just an unmistakable physiological parting of the ways. As he lunged instinctively after his escaping body parts, his torso detached from his hips and his legs came apart in sections. Last of all, his head popped free of his neck.
Obeying some unknown, unimaginable herding instinct, his component bits and pieces remained in the same general vicinity. Too focused to scream, he strove to will his corpus whole again. Though fully functional, his disembodied head no longer exercised any control over the muscles in his limbs. His hands seemed to have the most mobility. Fingers fluttering like thick cilia, they darted in and around the rest of him, kicking backward through the air. One hand latched onto a forearm and rested there like a bird taking roost on a branch.
As he stared dazedly, the yellow bushes began to detach themselves from the ground and drift off into the sky. Pulling themselves free of the soil, roots separated from branches and drifted off on their own. Indeed, the soil was beginning to separate from the ground.
Caught by a rising breeze, clumps of grass were whisked toward the eastern horizon. Elevated from their subterranean homes, burrowing creatures twisted helplessly in the air, only to be preyed upon by flying teeth that seemed to have no trouble coping with the jabber-wockean change in conditions.
Overhead, the orange-red sun was coming apart, fiery prominences dancing in all directions. In the distance he saw the handsome brown and yellow grazers coming apart, only to re-form as a spherical mass of floating eyes, legs, horns, and bodies.
This time only the absence of lungs prevented him from screaming.
In the center of rising chaos hovered his backpack, the stone pulsing peacefully within. It didn’t matter, since he was no longer in control—or even possession—of his hands. He closed his eyes. That he could still do.
When he opened them again everything was coagulating. The spherical herd of grazers separated back out into its component parts, reformulating animals instead of insanity. Branches returned to bushes, bushes to roots, and roots to their place in the earth. Feeding time over, the flying teeth disappeared.
The surface resolidified beneath him. Up in the sky, the local star became once again a familiar rounded ball of burning hydrogen. As he stared mutely, the rambling bits of his body re-formed. Only his hands resisted, waiting until the last instant to reattach themselves to his wrists. He had a bad moment when he thought they were going to hook up with his ankles instead.
Slowly turning to left and then to right, he found his head once more firmly positioned on his neck. Arms and legs responded to mental command. He took incalculable pleasure in being able to execute a short hop.
Next time the effect might last longer, the consequences prove more severe, the distances between liberated limbs turn out to be dangerously greater. Given another taste of freedom and independence, his hands might not return. As if in confirmation, they seemed reluctant to grasp the stone and twist on its ends.
Finding himself arguing with his own body, he forced them to obey. Chaos might be a liberating place to visit, but he didn’t want to live there.
Was he any nearer Senisran? Was he even in the same galaxy? The same universe? Already he’d visited corners of the cosmos that defied natural law as he knew it. He wanted out.
That’s what he got.
As his fingers relaxed on the stone, he found himself in a place of utter blackness. No, he decided, it was blacker than black. It wasn’t an absence of light so much as the fact that in this place it seemed never to have existed. It was an abstract concept, a fever dream, a product of delirium.
He could not see, could not perceive. Sensing that he was floating, he felt with his feet and hands for a solid surface and found none. There was nothing to orient himself against, no point of reference. He could not see but was not blind, could not hear but was not deaf. His nose wrinkled. That sense, too, was functional. He wished it wasn’t.
His incomprehensible surroundings stank of the charnel house.
He could still feel. The backpack was heavy against him, but for the first time he could not see what had come to be the solacing glow of the stone. Groping within the pack, he felt of its outline, its weight, reassuring himself of its reality.
Enveloped in an all-consuming shroud of tangible corruption, he drifted helpless and alone. Or was that a Presence he now sensed? Deprived of the majority of means of exploring the space around him, he couldn’t be sure.
It touched him.
Though he couldn’t see It, his eyes tried to shrink back into his skull. Though he couldn’t hear It, his mind was drowned in a chorus of horror. The suddenly overwhelming odor pierced the core of his being.
Disoriented and slightly deranged, he fumbled for the stone. Colossally indifferent, a minuscule portion of the Presence began to examine the insignificant splotch of protoplasm nearby.
This was not a place that was simply bad for him, where there was no water to drink or comforting sunshine to warm his bones. He had come to a blasted place in the cosmos, where any organic life-form, be it worm, human, or blade of grass, was not welcome, did not belong, and could not long survive. Could a blade of grass go insane? He knew that he could.
He Needed to Get Away.
As the infinitesimal extrusion of the Presence stepped between two dead stars to close in around him, his fingers twisted convulsively on the ends of the stone. A sickly clamminess enveloped him as he sensed something sandpapering his soul. It promised a primal and intimate experience worse than death. His self threatened to fly apart. In the Presence, even atoms could not long remain coherent.
It was evil incarnate, an evil that transcended theology, physics, and metaphysics. Possessed of a loathsome purity, it left no room in its Presence for anything that smacked of the natural universe. Only Pulickel’s insignificance saved him. Of next to no consequence, he was overlooked.
But that was changing.
He couldn’t run because he had no legs, couldn’t flail because he had no arms. In the absence of lungs he couldn’t scream, and in the absence of sanity he could not conceive. All he could do was react instinctively. More fortuitously than he could imagine, his reaction took the form of wrenching on the stone.
He knew a little about the subatomic forces that bind the cosmos together. There was taste, and there was flavor. There was up and there was down. Here was something else, something new. Something previously unqualified. A different state of not-matter, not-energy, not-plasma, not Einstein-Bose conjunction. He could not give a name to it because his mind was not working very well. He knew only that He Had to Get Away from It.
Insignificant speck that he was, it would annul him, reduce him to a single tiny scream that would float forever in this place. It wanted him nothing because it abhorred anything that was not itself. His fingers weakened in tandem wit
h his resolve.
In the distance, impossibly far off and yet proximate, a subdued flash of green. Beyond sickliness now, he felt little. Exit left, shrieking. But the Presence went away. Or rather, he went away from It.
Fawn stared down at him. She was not alone. Parramati stood on either side of her. Several were inspecting the station’s greeting lounge, examining the alien surroundings. Most, like Fawn, focused their attention on the figure that lay prone on the couch. Senisran’s comforting sunlight filtered in through the bank of windows that lined the station’s exterior.
“He looks better.” At the tip of his long snout, Massapapu’s black nose twitched as he inhaled of the reclining human. “His eyes are open.”
“Yes, but he’s still not reacting.” The expression on Fawn Seaforth’s face was one of grave concern. She waved a hand slowly back and forth over her comatose companion’s eyes. He blinked but gave no sign that he actually saw her. His gaze was locked otherwhere. Sight of a sort had returned, but not perception. “There’s eye movement, and he’s breathing, but that’s about it. I don’t like his color. He’s white as a sheet.” She turned to the Parramati clustered closely behind her.
“Has he been like this ever since you found him?”
Massapapu signed his agreement. “You know, F’an, that he had taken two stones.”
“Yes, you told me.” Uncomfortable, she looked away. So far the Parramati hadn’t implicated her in the thefts. Thus spared, she immediately denied any knowledge of them. If they accepted her protestations of innocence, then her work on Torrelau could continue unhindered. Despite his undeniable expertise and ability, Pulickel could be replaced.
What had happened to him? It was impossible to get a straight answer out of the Parramati who had brought him in. She thought she’d mastered the nuances of their language. Now she wasn’t so sure.
They claimed to have brought him back not just from the Vounea Peninsula but from another place entirely. Upon learning that two stones had gone missing, the affected stone masters had contacted their brethren across the island. Working in concert, Ascela had explained, allowed them to conduct a proper search for the thief. Or overeager researcher, as Fawn had striven to characterize her comatose companion, doing her best to exonerate him even in unconsciousness. With the aid of other stones, they’d found him and brought him back.
Jorana’s tone was admonishing. “We understand Pu’il’s thirst for knowledge, but he should not have taken the stones. He most especially should not have tried to use the stones that he did take.”
“That’s obvious,” Fawn conceded.
Ascela’s wizened eyes shifted periodically between the prone figure and that of the tall woman standing next to her. Luminous vertical pupils flexed. “He is fortunate that we were able to bring him back. He is very lucky.”
He didn’t look lucky, Fawn thought as she studied her friend and associate. He looked terrible. What had happened out there? Where had they brought him back from? When they spoke of it, the big and middle persons who had brought him in used verbs inflected in a fashion previously not encountered. She thought she knew what they meant but wasn’t entirely sure.
Standing out on the reef, studying its inhabitants while waiting for Pulickel to call in, she’d been alerted by a warning tone from the skimmer’s instrumentation. A check revealed that Pulickel’s transmitter had gone dead. She couldn’t even raise a carrier wave. While it was possible for a field transmitter to fail completely, it was highly unlikely. For one thing, the locator unit carried its own emergency power source.
But it was possible. For example, he could have dropped the unit and accidentally rolled a boulder on it. It would have to have been a sizable boulder, she knew, but such things did happen. Exhausting all efforts to raise a signal, she took the dangerous step of returning to the inlet and leaving the skimmer parked on hover while she searched the immediate vicinity.
Fatigued and frantic, she had finally returned to the station, only to find Ascela, Jorana, and Massapapu waiting for her outside the activated defense perimeter. They were accompanied by half a dozen Parramati she did not know. On a woven stretcher in their midst lay Pulickel: eyes open, visibly intact, but utterly unresponsive. They had carried him all the way across the island from the Vounea. Or from wherever it was that they claimed to have found him, she reminded herself.
A check of his person revealed that the stones he had taken were missing. No surprise there, she knew. Doubtless they had been returned to their appropriate resting places. When she had protested her ignorance of Pulickel’s intentions, several of the Vounea Parramati had eyed her suspiciously, but none challenged her openly. Ascela, Jorana, and the other Torrelauapans had vouched for her, bless them.
“It is not easy to find someone after they have used these stones,” Ascela was saying. “Particularly someone who has not been instructed in their use. The roads they open are difficult to travel.”
“It takes many, many generations to learn how to use the stones,” added one of the visiting Vouneans.
She desperately wanted to hear Pulickel’s side of the story, but he couldn’t even look in her direction, didn’t respond to her voice. He continued to breathe, slowly and evenly, his eyes staring off into the distance and blinking occasionally. He was present, and yet he was not. Something critical, something vital, was missing.
If he didn’t respond soon, she was going to have to hook him up to an IV and request medevac. She didn’t want to do that. For one thing, it would be an admission of failure. Nor did she want to deal with the questions that would inevitably accompany such a procedure. But if she was going to be able to avoid making the call, he had to react to her presence, had to show some progress. She couldn’t let him lie there and starve to death. Dehydration would be the first problem, she knew.
She turned to Ascela. Of all the Torrelauapan big persons, she felt the strongest rapport with the senior female. “I still don’t understand. The Vouneans claim they found him just lying in the jungle like this?”
“Not just like this.” A Vounean big person of equal stature stepped forward. Ears thrust forward, he swapped a series of rapid finger movements with Ascela, too fast for Fawn to follow. “When the stone masters found him he was screaming and kicking. This was understandable, as he was in a bad place. A very bad place.”
“What kind of bad place?” The xenologist tried to remember the proper gestures. “Did he fall and hit his head?” But that didn’t make sense, she thought. If he’d tumbled into a ravine or something, they wouldn’t have found him kicking and screaming. Besides, except for a few minor cuts and scrapes, he appeared unharmed. There was no blood showing, and the station’s medical scanner had revealed no broken bones or torn ligaments. If he’d suffered some kind of concussion or contusion, it was too subtle for the scanner to detect.
“The worst place,” the Vounean explained without explaining anything. “Our stone masters had to use other stones to bring him back. I am not a master so I did not participate, but those who did tell that it was a near thing.”
“Well, there was certainly something bad about it.” Whether through means chemical or otherwise, her companion’s previously jet-black hair was now streaked with white. Nor was the change superficially cosmetic. Close inspection had revealed that the color change extended right down to the follicular roots. It didn’t wash out when she was cleaning him up, either.
That had been her first priority, and it had been a job. The smells that clung to him didn’t want to wash off. No doubt he’d picked up several exotic odors while stumbling through the jungle in his attempt to avoid the Vouneans. With the aid of the Parramati, she’d managed to wrestle him into some clean clothes, and that had helped. But a faintly disquieting odor still hung about him, a miasma that wouldn’t go away. It seemed familiar but she couldn’t quite identify it. It made her skin crawl, and she had to work hard at ignoring it.
“We did what we could for him,” Jorana was saying.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Fawn responded. “I’m grateful for everything you’ve done, for bringing him back and doing your best to help him. I’m just trying to understand what happened and to figure out what’s wrong with him.” She studied the prone form. Perhaps he’d been bitten and paralyzed by some unknown denizen of the forest. But there were no bite marks that she’d been able to discover, no swelling or redness that would indicate the site of a sting. What was responsible for his present condition? Again she confessed her bafflement to the watching Parramati.
Jorana, too, was searching for an explanation. “Sometimes one who tries to use the stones cannot stay on the proper road. Then the stones may choose the road instead of the user. There are many roads and not all of them are benign.”
“I could’ve guessed that much.” Fawn spoke more harshly than she intended. “What am I going to do with him? What can I do?” Her colleague lay as limp as one of the dozens of cephalopods the Parramati fished daily from the ocean. It was as if all the bones in his body had melted away.
Perversely, she envied him that part of his condition. At least he looked at ease. His vital signs remained strong. Nothing critical would relax, she hoped. Like his heart.
“There must be something we can do,” she insisted.
“Perhaps a healing stone …” Massapapu began.
Fawn looked over sharply. “No! No stones. Not until I’ve exhausted the medical program’s recommendations.”
Unmoved by the sharpness of her reaction, the Torrelauapan big person indicated understanding. Turning away from her, he proceeded to discuss the matter with his companions and the Vouneans. Fawn strained to overhear, without much success.
She’d pumped an assortment of stimulants into Pulickel, but without knowing the cause of his condition, the station’s pharmaceutical program could only prescribe the most general range of medication. She’d even chanced a dose of buffered adrenaline. It made him twitch briefly but did nothing to restore awareness. At least the occasional blink meant she didn’t have to drop-treat his eyes to keep them moist.