Echoes In Time Part 23

Her eyes were narrowed in amus.e.m.e.nt-and understanding. "If we hadn't gotten whatever this illness is. How long would we have guarded one another against taking risks- meanwhile getting more and more frustrated?"

"I-" Ross let his breath out in a whoosh. "I don't know."

Eveleen turned away, no longer smiling. "We should have found that old transport system, Ross. You and I-weeks ago. Misha and Viktor stumbled on it only because they were looking for some kind of shelter from one of those rainstorms. That station is right near us. We should have been out, exploring, ages ago. We two are action agents, not Vera and Irina. They are communicators, a.n.a.lysts. But they've been finding out data, much more than we have."

Ross sighed. "I know. It's just-"

"You don't have to say it, because I felt exactly the same. You're used to taking action-taking risks. And when you were risking only yourself, it was perfectly all right. I know because I felt the same way. But when it came to considering your safety, I couldn't stand the thought that something might happen to you, and I meant to stay with you every minute. Keep you safe. Keep you out of harm's way."

Ross laughed a little raggedly. "h.e.l.l, Eveleen."

"And we didn't even talk talk. Just heroically did our duty as spouses-guarding each other from doing our duty as agents." She gave him a troubled look. "If we can't work this out, we shouldn't be partners. If we were on our own again, we'd have that old freedom of action. And we're both action people- you have to admit it. That's what brought us together in the first place."

Ross said, "Don't think that."

"But we have to," Eveleen said. "If we can't handle the emotional consequences of our jobs, then we'd be better off working separately. We have to consider it-but later. Right now, we'd better get to work. Gordon said we don't want to alter our routines any."

Ross nodded, forcing himself to grab his share of the breakfast. He would munch it on the way, though he really didn't want to eat. Didn't want to work. Truth was, he felt heartsick. Anger would have been better than that logical calmness.

The worst of it was, he knew she was right.

Outside, the air was slightly cooler, a strong breeze smelling of rain bringing some relief. Eveleen walked beside him, her profile serene, as she made light comments in Yilayil.

Ross didn't talk. He thought about his night with the Jecc-and when they got to work, and the Jecc recommenced their little game, he thought about Eveleen.

On the way back from work, he said, "You're right. And I promise. No more hiding. Half and half, share fair and square, as we used to say on the streets when I was a kid."

"Share fair and square," Eveleen repeated, her eyes steady and bright with a sheen of unshed tears. "That, my dear, is real real trust." trust."

Ross didn't respond. As always, his deepest emotions were impossible to express. He looked forward to their being alone at last, so that he could at least try.

But when they reached the Nurayil dorm, they found Misha waiting outside their cell, pacing like a caged cat.

A small group of Moova trundled past, but he paid them no heed. As soon as he saw them he said abruptly, "Open up."

In mute surprise, Eveleen palmed the door open.

As soon as they were inside, Misha said, "The flyers. They got Viktor."

Ross looked to Eveleen. She looked back, question in her eyes.

"What are we waiting for?" Ross said. "Let's go get him back."

CHAPTER 24.

SABA SPENT THE day drifing in and out of consciousness.

Gordon called her once, and then again. His worry penetrated the strange dreaming wakefulness that she couldn't seem to escape on her own. Patiently, slowly, he bade her describe-in detail-her room, her hands, courses she'd taken in university. Anything to anchor her to reality.

But as soon as they quit conversing, she lay down again, exhausted, and the strange dreams seized her-always punctuated by Yilayil voices singing never-ending chants. Twice she rose to shut down the Yilayil computer, so that the sound would cease and she could sleep, but both times she found it dark. Was the sound coming from hidden speakers? Or- somehow-was she dreaming it, too? Except how could she dream language she only partially understood?

Her mind kept insisting on listening, and trying to pa.r.s.e the complicated levels of verb and modifier until she'd rise again, cram more anti-inflammatory meds into her dry mouth, and wash it down with long gulps of water.

Once she awoke suddenly, and Zhot seemed to be in her room. He demanded definitions for time and s.p.a.ce and insisted that she learn the terms for those who stood outside temporal reality...

She slept again, and when she woke a second time-now drenched in sweat-she wasn't sure if she'd dreamed the conversation or not.

As soon as she sat up, the sensors flicked the lights on. The lights seemed dim; she felt a sudden longing for the bright clarity of sunlight.

She looked up, about to reach for her medication-and there was Zhot, standing in the shadows of the corner.

"Are your senses one, or many?" Zhot's voice blurred in a scintillation of green-tasting rainbows-Saba knew the thought senseless, but it was the only description that fit.

"Many," she said slowly. Her lips felt dry and cracked. She reached for water, drank. When she looked up, Zhot was still there.

"Different modes of sensation, yes?" he insisted. Now she heard the wisp-wisp wisp-wisp of his slippered feet on her floor, the quiet hiss of his robe as he walked back and forth in front of her door. of his slippered feet on her floor, the quiet hiss of his robe as he walked back and forth in front of her door.

Her muzzy mind jumped to the musical modes, and she worried a moment at the problem of whether the taste of water was Dorian or Myxolydian.

When she looked up again, her vision had gone blurry; in Zhot's place she saw Katarina.

Katarina did not wait for an answer, or maybe it was an hour later. Saba didn't know.

"But you can imagine colors for tastes, sounds for shapes, different modes?" she continued. "Symbolically a.s.sociate them?" Katarina spoke in Russian, or was it still Yilayil?

Katarina was a warm slurpy column of melted licorice emitting blue bubbles that enveloped her head, each conveying a quantum of meaning.

Now Saba tried to a.s.sign the proper color to the modes, until she suddenly, but only for a flashing moment, realized that she was below the words, below the world of symbols, in a seamless unity of sensation. Then everything wrenched back into focus, intensifying her headache, and Katarina was gone.

Synesthesis, Saba realized.

Unable to think beyond that, Saba lay down, and slept.

Urgency bled through her dreams: there was something she had to understand, to learn, to know. Now! Now!

She gasped, woke up, fumbling with trembling fingers for her water.

As she drank, she realized that the sound that had wakened her was that of movement outside her door-not footsteps, but voices. Yilayil voices, chanting.

She levered herself painfully off the bed, all her joints aching. The room spun about her for a moment, then steadied. After some experimentation she found that she could walk, albeit slowly, as long as she did not move her head quickly. It took all her strength for her to pull on her robe, but she welcomed its warmth.

She opened the door, in time to see two weasel faces look directly into her eyes before pa.s.sing onward. They did not pause in the eerie whistle-punctuated chant, but pa.s.sed slowly onward, their robes swaying in time to their steps.

Saba turned her head-impossible that they would walk in that direction. There was nothing next to her room but a wall.

An unfamiliar glow lit the corridor. The adjacent wall was gone! In its place was an archway, its ceiling lit from beneath. Was it a stairway?

She waited, but no one appeared, and she became aware of a weird sound, almost like a heartbeat, but with strange musical overtones and harmonics. It seemed to come up through the floor, through her feet, but then she realized that some of the sound, the musical part, was more audible from the open door.

"Is this real?" she whispered, and then she reached for her com-her link to sanity. She clicked it on, and said wearily, "Is this real?"

She held it out, for a few seconds, but her arm could not bear the weight, and so she clipped it to her belt-and then forgot it as she concentrated on the difficult actions involved in standing on her feet.

She groped her way through the door, and stood in dismay. The stairs she had expected to find were apparently endless. She blinked feverish eyes. The perspective was odd, and her eyes wouldn't quite focus on the walls.

Only a few steps before her were in focus. The music crescendoed, echoing in cacophony-then it resolved, each voice, each instrument harmonious, the whole transcending melody into a form of mind-numbing beauty.

The music was more complex than any she had ever heard. It beckoned her downward.

Is this my fever? she thought. Am I really here? Only her trembling legs and pounding head and heart tied her to reality-but those too could be part of her dream.

Again the sense of urgency gripped her. She stumbled on.

Time was fragmented now; she had a vague sense that sunset had pa.s.sed, that it was no longer Yilayil time. She remembered the two Yilayil faces, so briefly seen.

Sight blurred, and she knew she had to be hallucinating, for now she saw ghosts: the First Team, all lined up along the stairs in a row. And then Gordon. He reached a hand toward her, but she pa.s.sed through his fingers. When she paused, swaying, on the stairs, she looked back-and he was watching her, his blue eyes mute with appeal, his sunbleached hair disarrayed as if he had been running. He's sick too, she thought, and she pa.s.sed downward.

Finally she reached the bottom, and found herself in a huge cavern, glittering with the light of torches, bioluminescent spheres, electric lights, and other sources of illumination she did not recognize.

All the races of the planet were represented there, distributed about the vast s.p.a.ce in a complex pattern whose geometry seemed to hold importance, but again the meaning escaped her.

The cavern was also full of stalact.i.tes and stalagmites, of fragile webs of rock, arrays of stone cylinders, and other forms, some natural, some obviously shaped, and some whose provenance she could not discern.

The beings danced among them, striking them with various instruments adapted to their sizes and physical nature. Big creatures held huge hammerlike strikers, little creatures carried small rods, or flexible drumsticks. Some struck the rocks, some stroked them, some tapped them. Some were on scaffolding high on the walls, some, the Jecc for instance, even swung on fragile trapezes, the length of the pendulum thus formed determining their rhythm: pulses of complex beats at long intervals.

This was but one aspect of the sound that pulsed in her head, her blood, and impelled her forward. She saw Zhot and stumbled toward him. He turned to her, welcome in his greenish face.

"We thought you too ill. Tonight we see."

"See?" Saba said weakly.

He waved one arm at the activity all around, while still stroking a stalagmite with the filelike rod in his other. It made a grating noise that made her teeth itch.

"Sensation! We anchor perception, achieve the unity of sensation that denies time, and those who dance-above-decay speak, we see, we hear."

Dance-above-decay. Again, he used one of those non-temporal verbs.

A tall Yilayil approached with deliberate step, its elongated body only remotely resembling an Earth weasel. The gowned creature studied her with large eyes that gleamed with intelligence and compa.s.sion; another approached on her other side.

The first Yilayil motioned for her to step forward. The second one held out a small rod, about two feet long. Her fingers closed round it. She glanced at the thing in her hand, confused.

Zhot turned back to his stalagmite, while the two Yilayil pressed her forward, gently, to a small fan of rock, so thin she could see light through it.

The first Yilayil pantomimed drawing the rod across the top of the rock-fan; she tried it, producing a melodic glis-sando. The Yilayil both nodded and whirled away.

For a time Saba stroked the fan at random, and then the pulse of the music penetrated her consciousness once more, sounds and voices rising and falling in a syncopation that caused her to grope for meaning within a context ingrained in memory, deep and abiding, from her earliest years.

The edho edho of the Dorze usually had five components. There was the of the Dorze usually had five components. There was the yetsu as yetsu as, the chorus-the chanting voices. Response, reaction, cohesion...

The Yilayil. They were the pile pile, the highest voices, and limitless in number, at once the most important and the least important of the harmonic pattern.

The kaletso kaletso-who was that? Was it Zhot? The kaletso kaletso was the youngest, extending the melodic interventions of the was the youngest, extending the melodic interventions of the aife aife- The bane. The "belchers," the percussive voices. Those were the ones making music on the stones.

The dombe dombe, those who cover. The other races, all singing sustained music to better the cohesion.

But who were the aife aife, the elder, the eyes?

Saba's mind reached, and reached again- And the pattern changed in her mind, and she abandoned the symbol of childhood, immersing her consciousness in the alien harmonics- -And the music resolved wholly into beauty such as she had never heard, and she was part of it. Her will fled, and she became one with the music. The sound became color became touch became scent and then all of them and the cavern dissolved into pure sensation for a moment, bereft of perception, then snapped back, and she was somewhere else.

She saw men and women, dark and stern of face, in the ancient dress of the great Ethiopian kingdom of Axum, and others bearing gifts of gold and myrrh and jewels. Then violence, war, men struggling, weapons lifted, chariots sweeping across sandy wastes, the legions of Rome, men in white with scimitars uplifted, women weeping, pale men in pith helmets, swarthy men in uniforms with archaic rifles, an old man dragged from a throne and cast into darkness, the bright line of a rocket traced against a full moon huge on the horizon...

Then she gasped as the sneering, hate-filled visage of a Baldy confronted her, but just as suddenly his face became fearful, terrified, and disappeared.

Now she saw the Earth, bright and small, dwindling to a point, and the sun with it, merely another point of light in the glory of the galaxy, but from that insignificance grew a web of light, like sap refilling the veins of a dying leaf, melding with other webs from other stars widely scattered, and to her eyes was presented the destiny of humankind, glory and shame together as humanity reclaimed the ruins of the star-spanning empire that had crumbled so long ago.

Something SomeTHING SOMETHING SOMETHING sang in her head... sang in her head...

The aife aife?

spoke in her head...

spoke in her head.

A vast pressure surged through her mind. It was too much to comprehend-to bear. She swayed, dropped the rod, and fell senseless to the ground.

"AS NEAR AS we can tell, they live off the island entirely," Misha said as they trotted through the darkening streets.

Rain tapped against Eveleen's face, cool and pleasant after two days of incessant heat. She ran at Ross's side, her jogging pace easily matching the taller men's strides.

Misha used his infrared scanner to detect body heat. Three times they ducked back behind shrubs or once a low wall, as beings walked by: once the tall green ones that functioned as guardians of the peace, and twice gliding Yilayil, talking swiftly in the language that was so melodic when they used it.

"All in the direction of the House of Knowledge," Ross observed, staring after the Yilayil. "Think something is happening?"

"How would we know?" Eveleen asked, thinking immediately of Saba. "We haven't been outside enough to put together any kind of pattern."