He was still surrounded by the same all-encompassing silence. Deathly silence.
It was clear now why there had been no attempt to rescue him. No one had tried to dig him out because there was no one left to do so. He and Pip were the only ones alive. All the others, every one of his new Tlel friends, lay entombed in the increasingly hard-packed snow. Zlezelrenn, Vlashraa, Healer Fluadann, Hluriamm—all dead, all gone, flicked away like ants and buried by the avalanche. Because they had tried to help him.
Don’t go there, he told himself firmly. Nature killed them. The avalanche. They could have perished the same way in Tleremot, or while out on a hunting expedition. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.
Those four words became a mantra. In spite of his exhaustion he rose and began searching. With the storm fading, any hint of color should stand out starkly amid the pale pink of the fresh snow. A shred of clothing, a suggestion of composite, a loose fitting—a limb—he ought to be able to spot it. What he chose not to acknowledge was the complete absence of emotion. Maybe, he told himself uneasily, he perceived nothing at the moment because his erratic Talent, shocked by his own ordeal, was not working. It was more encouraging to believe that than to concede that there was nothing left to perceive.
The longer he searched without finding anyone alive or sensing any other emotions, the more convinced he became that his own survival was due not to any special determination or unique ability but rather to a fortuitous bit of anatomical evolution. His gloves shielded and protected strong digits built of solid bone that were attached to equally robust arms. Working together, hands and arms were capable of steady digging. With their thin arms tipped by flexible but internally unsupported cilia, the Tlel would not be nearly as efficient at the primitive procedure. It was the ape in him that had been able to move snow and dig himself out. Differently built, differently evolved, the Tlel had been unable to emulate his disciplined tunneling.
In spite of this realization, a surge of hope rose within him when he spotted portions of a gaitgo’s protective cage work sticking out of the snow. Stumbling over to it, he began shoveling recklessly with his hands, throwing snow in all directions. He had excavated halfway down to the vehicle’s inclined seat when he realized that the driver had been pulled out of the torn and broken enclosure and swept downslope. Though he continued to dig in and around the machine until he had both it and a substantial area around it cleared of snow, he found no sign of its former occupant.
There was nothing more he could do. Properly searching the huge area that had been swept clean and buried by the avalanche would require either dozens of searchers or specialized rescue equipment capable of locating the bodies buried within the pink mass. He had access to neither. Even if he found someone, enough time had passed to reduce to near zero the chances of finding any of his friends alive.
He sat longer than he should have contemplating the shattered remnants of the gaitgo. Only when Pip shifted against him inside his shirt did he finally bestir himself. Having begun the journey in search of answers, he now needed to keep moving in hopes of finding something more prosaic—food and shelter.
The first revealed itself to him after a little work. The gaitgo’s storage compartment had stayed intact and was still packed with the supplies that had been intended to sustain its driver. There were bottles of a thick, almost gummy, but palatable protein-rich liquid; neat squares of various dried foods; some packaged nutrients he did not recognize but crammed into a makeshift backpack anyway; and assorted nutritional supplements. Enough to keep him alive for a number of days—if they didn’t turn his digestive system inside out. Some Tlel foods he could tolerate; others would be rejected by his body. While he disliked the idea of subjecting his stomach and organs south to satiation by trial and error, he had little choice.
Some of the tools he found in another compartment were simple and straightforward enough that he recognized their function immediately. There were others whose purpose he would divine by experimenting with them. Most welcome of all was the portable cooker that was included with the food. While provisions imported from offworld were usually self-heating or self-cooling, according to the nature of the item, the Tlelian victuals were not. Though at this point more than willing to sample raw any and all of the salvaged rations, he had another equally important use for the cooker. He spent the next fifteen minutes in a state of pure bliss, using the device to lightly heat first his face, then his hands, and lastly anything else he could warm without having to expose too much of it to the icy air.
Later, while Pip lay in a happy, tight, thawed coil atop the cooling cooker, Flinx sampled some of the Tlelian provisions. With the exception of something purple and puffy that momentarily made his insides feel the way it looked, everything went down easily enough. More important, all of it stayed down. Finally warmed within and without, he rose from the site of the ruined gaitgo with a renewed sense of purpose and a fresh resolve to press on. Having little choice in the way of destination he had no real option but to continue northward, his present position lying far closer to his intended target than to now distant Tleremot. It seemed that one way or another he was destined to find what he had come for or die trying.
It would hardly be the first time he had found himself in such a situation, he observed sardonically.
As he started for the near end of the canyon he entertained thoughts of someone arriving to rescue him. The Teacher’s shuttle, perhaps, or even his remarkable, inscrutable friends from Ulru-Ujurr. As he slogged onward through the deep snow, neither ship nor aliens magically materialized to extricate him from his present desperate situation.
It soon became evident, however, that he was no longer alone.
The feelings that began to tease the edge of his Talent were simple, basic, primitive. Barely perceptible. The kind of elementary emotions generated by something very low on the scale of sentience. Devoid of refinement or the distinctive overtones associated with higher cognizance, they were easy to interpret. Anticipation. Excitement.
Hunger.
Though he saw the first of them before he stumbled out of the pass, it was quickly evident that their habitat was not restricted to that deadly, snow-packed canyon. They followed him out and beyond as he began to make his way downslope and away from the worst of the accumulated pink drifts. Whenever he stopped to rest, they paused with him, maintaining their distance. Now that the sun was out, he had to squint to make out his new companions against the painfully reflective brightness. He could identify them, but he could not count them. There were too many.
Perhaps dozens, he decided. Maybe more than a hundred. They were unlike anything he had yet encountered on Gestalt. No avalanche-embracing ressauggs, no ominous vacuum-equipped predators these.
The largest of them stood no more than half a meter high on its two thick legs. Varying in mass from ten kilos down to one and completely covered in short, dense fur, they sported a surprising range of colors: everything from pale cerise to dark mauve. The broad panoply of hues would allow some of them to blend in perfectly with the snow, others with the varied vegetation, still others with the bare rock on which a number of them were presently standing. They contemplated him out of eyebands the thickness of his little finger. Parted jaws revealing rows of short, sharp, needle-like teeth were set in flattened skulls that reminded him of upside-down dinner plates. While different in several respects, the similarity to the skulls of his native friends could not be denied. Several members of the sprawling pack sported colorful, flexible crests. When not lying flat against the backs of their heads, these semaphored like so many miniature flags.
Though they stared at him with undisguised intent, he was not the sole focus of their attention. Some dug and kicked at the ground with their clawed feet, searching for anything edible. Others fussed and squabbled among themselves. They emitted a surprisingly wide range of sounds: from soft, almost imperceptible squeaks to an intermittent coughing that sounded like a metal file being slapped back and for
th across a log. There was something about them…
In spite of the obvious danger they posed, he found himself smiling when he realized what had tickled his imagination. More than anything, the pack brought to mind a bevy of miniature, many-toothed, blank-faced Tlel. The superficial resemblance extended beyond the similar shape of the skulls. Though it seemed unlikely there could be any kind of close relationship between the short-statured scavengers and the much larger, infinitely more intelligent masters of Gestalt, the physical resemblance could not be denied. Convergent evolution, Flinx found himself wondering, or simply coincidence? He did not think Hluriamm, in particular, would have found the comparison flattering.
Thinking of his recently deceased companions caused the smile to fade from his face. The pack of voracious little bipeds tracking his progress did not want to help him: they wanted to gnaw his bones. Peering out from beneath her master’s jacket, Pip studied them with undisguised animosity. He kept her restrained. Short of the creatures making a direct assault, it would be wasteful to have her harass the pack. If she was going to expend more venom on his behalf, they needed to wait until any such defensive exertions became unavoidable.
Would they attack? There was no misconstruing the ravenous desire their dozens of feral little minds were projecting. He had no weapons except his own hands, feet, mind, and Pip. The radiant cooker he had salvaged from the ruined gaitgo could not be turned up enough to expel harmful heat. Indeed, if he tried to modify it to do so, its integrated safety features would cause it to shut down completely. His ability to defend himself by projecting conflicting emotions on potential assailants depended on those assailants having developed a certain level of emotional complexity. Based on what he could perceive, the scavengers determinedly trailing him rated very low on that scale, even more so than other carnivores he had confronted on other worlds. Projecting onto even highly evolved animals as opposed to representatives of sentient species was always a hit-and-miss proposition. On the other hand, there were plenty of exposed rocks lying around.
Rocks. A citizen of the most technologically and scientifically advanced civilization in the history of his kind, and it was looking more and more like he was going to have to defend himself by throwing rocks.
Notwithstanding their ongoing attentions, it was possible he might not be reduced to such desperate measures. They might decide he was simply too big or too alien to take on. Or perhaps their preferences precluded predation and they would not attack, preferring to wait until he collapsed from exhaustion or lack of nourishment before trying to feed. If he needed further stimulus to keep him going, the pack’s persistent presence provided it.
For now, anyway, he chose not to dwell on what might happen when night descended and fatigue forced sleep upon him. In the event any of the two-legged carnivores came close enough to take an exploratory bite out of him, Pip would drive it off and the ensuing commotion would wake him. But her venom would last only so long. She could fight off and dispatch one or two dozen of the persistent little monsters, but not more. Certainly not hundreds of them, if others were trailing the main pack or hiding among the boulders and trees.
In that event his defense was straightforward: don’t sleep.
He didn’t, not all that night nor into the following morning. The whistling, skittering, restless pack settled down nearby for the night and was with him when the sun rose the next day. They stood or squatted in a respectful arc behind him, looking on as he warily cooked breakfast.
“See, you eyeless little bastards!” he yelled challengingly as he waved his heated food in their direction. “I’ve got plenty to eat and pink snow to drink. I’m not going to die here. Why don’t you go and dig up some nice smelly carcass somewhere else and leave me alone?”
Glancing up from where she was swallowing the bite-sized crumbs of food he had broken off for her, Pip eyed him gravely. In the absence of other voice-capable respondents, her master was not much given to talking out loud. It worried her. Her concern did not keep her from eating, however.
After finishing the last of the insipid but filling meal, Flinx badly wanted to relax with the cooker running and just bask in the limited heat it generated. That would be, he realized tiredly, a waste of time and fuel, neither of which he had to spare. Forcing himself to rise, he packed up the cooker and resumed the arduous downhill trek.
As if his situation was not bad enough, dark clouds began to spill over the eastern horizon, portending the onset of another storm close on the heels of its recent lethal predecessor. Fortune, which had been so kind to him on so many previous occasions on so many other worlds, seemed to have deserted him.
Too cold for Fortune here, he told himself as he shouldered his makeshift pack and strode grimly on. Too cold for me, too.
Thankfully, the new weather front brought no snow with it. Unfortunately, it hit with a solid wall of wind, hail, and sleet. He kept going, pushing himself onward, afraid that if he stopped to seek shelter and rest he might fall asleep only to be awakened as he was being torn to bits by his eager and unwelcome Gestaltian entourage. The pack was still with him, he saw through the freezing rain. Plodding along methodically in his wake, waiting for him to drop. The faint vestiges of comic ambience he had initially attached to them had long since fallen away. He no longer saw them as amusing downsized versions of the Tlel. In his mind’s eye their faces and feet had faded from view, leaving behind only the gleam of claw-equipped paws and razor teeth.
Pain flared in his right ankle. Looking down he saw that one of the creatures, bolder than the rest, had darted forward to try to take a bite out of his leg. Though sharp, its numerous teeth were too short to penetrate his winter attire. The pain had come from its nipping jaws pinching his flesh. The skin had not been penetrated. Sensing the attack, Pip struggled to escape his jacket.
Her assistance was not needed. Using his other foot, he pushed the determined scavenger off his leg. Bringing his boot down hard a second time snapped the vulnerable neck. Breathing deeply while angrily wiping moisture from his face, he looked up through the driving sleet. Having witnessed the short, deadly encounter, no other member of the pack showed any inclination to sacrifice itself in an attempt to exact revenge on behalf of a deceased comrade.
There were definitely more of them now, Flinx decided. Whether drawn to the pursuit by smell, or movement, or sound he could not tell. Hundreds of them, certainly: not dozens. At what point would some critical mass, some unestimatable number be reached when they felt there were enough of them to safely rush him? Turning and lowering his face into a blast of pitiless sleet, he resumed walking.
He could not tell the number of times he thought seriously of giving up. Food was sufficient to stave off, but not entirely mitigate, the effects of exhaustion. No matter how much he ate, however, the activity could not compensate for his ongoing lack of sleep. In some ways, eating only made it worse. It would be so much easier just to lie down in the soft, inviting snow, close his eyes, and finally embrace the rest that forever seemed to elude him. For him, for Philip Lynx, rest was all too often little more than an unattainable goal, a destination devoutly to be wished for but never to be reached.
Why was he bothering? Why did he continue to push himself, to voluntarily submit to the repetitive torment of responsibility? Civilization could look after itself without him, the menace posed by the Great Evil notwithstanding. What was worth such continued suffering? Even the Tlel, whom he had initially thought endlessly cheerful, helpful, and at peace with the cold world around them, engaged in murderous internecine conflict. GrTl-Keepers and NaTl-Seekers slaughtered one another—over sociophilosophical differences, of all things. Yet another in a too-long list of examples of sentience wasted on those whose social maturity had failed to keep pace with their achievements in technology.
The sleet had let up but the wind was still blowing hard. When one boot slid sideways on a rock buried in the snow, he stumbled and dropped to one knee. Reading his resignation, an alarmed Pip struggled to
free herself from his jacket. As soon as he went down a pair of scavengers, eyebands glistening in expectation, sprinted forward and started gnawing hungrily at his boots. Sensing the end, the rest of the swollen pack crept steadily forward, holding back only to see if these two most aggressive of their number met the same fate as the solitary individual who had attacked earlier.
Flinx’s head had started pounding. It looked as if his unremitting headaches would not even let him die in peace. He started to rise from the one knee, failed in the effort, and fell forward. Behind him a harsh, collective alien ululation rose from the pack as it surged forward in its hundreds. Trapped within her master’s jacket, a pinioned Pip fought frantically to free herself.
Flinx felt a sudden surge of heat. It came not from the crush of dozens of energized scavengers finally swarming over him, nor from an inadvertently activated cooker, but from a new source. It lanced one, two, four of the closely clustered carnivores, searing flesh and fur. He was barely conscious enough to recognize the coarse stink of smoldering tissue.
The heat had passed over him. It was followed by a second burst. This was enough to send the rest of the pack fleeing in panic, scrambling and scrabbling over one another in their frantic haste to find cover among trees, rocks, and snow.
A shape appeared in front of him: a large, irregular, looming shadow. Standing straight and tall, leveling an unusual weapon in both gloved hands, it defied the wind as audaciously as it had the threat posed by the now scattered pack. His conscious fading, Flinx heard a voice. It was as forthright and snide as that of a retired professor.