Eye of Cat Part 20

There was a long silence.

Well?

I don't see anything.

He turned the light toward the ground.

The trail's changing again. I'm going to follow it.

Wait. Why don't you probe?

I'm afraid to touch its mind.

I'd be a lot more afraid of the rest of it. Why not just take it very slow and easy? Just scan for its presence. Sneak up mentally. I'll help.

You're right, but I'll do it myself.

He reached out into the pocket canyon before him. Gin- gerly at first. Then with increased effort.

Not there. Nothing there, he said. I see the trail, but I don't feel the beast. Singer either, for that matter. They must have gone on.

It would seem...

He neared the corner, walking slowly, observing the markings on the ground. The markings were altered beyond the turning, forming a troughlike line. They narrowed, wid- ened, halted in the form of circular depressions.

He paused when he saw where they led, rushed forward when he saw something other than rock.

Singer's prints marked the ground before the rough cairn, near to the protruding limb. It was a longer while before he could bring himself to move a few stones and then only after probing thoroughly. He kept at it for several minutes, until he was sweating and breathing heavily. But at last he beheld the eye, dull now, in the sleek, unmoving head.

He got it, Fisher said. He nailed the thing.

Ironbear did not respond.

It's over, Fisher told him. Singer won.

He's beautiful, Ironbear said. That neck... the eye, like a jewel...

Dead, Fisher said. Wait while I check. I'll tell you where to climb out. We'll have someone pick you up.

But where's Singer?

I guess he knows how to take care of himself. He's safe now. He'll turn up when he's ready. Hang on.

I'm going after him.

What? What for?

I don't know. Call it a feeling. Say I just want to see the man after all this.

How'll you find him?

I'm starting to get the hang of this tracking business. I don't think it will be too hard.

It's all over - and that's a dangerous place.

His trail has run through safe spots so far. Besides, I've got a phone here.

Don't you flip out, too!

Don't worry about it.

Ironbear turned away, pushed up his goggles, shifted to normal spectrum, began following Singer's tracks.

I'm going to leave you for a time, Fisher said. I'm going to tell the others. Also, I've got to rest.

Go ahead.

Ironbear headed north. For a moment it seemed that he heard a train whistle, and he thought of his father. Fat snowflakes filled the air. He wrapped his m.u.f.fler around his nose and mouth and kept going.

Mercy Spender

when she heard the news, opened the bottle of gin she had brought along & poured herself a stiff one, humming "Rock of Ages" all the while; feeling responsibility dissolve, giving thanks, deciding which books to read & what to knit during her convalescence; offered a word or two for the soul of Walter Sands, whom she saw before her in the gla.s.s, suddenly, shaking his head; "Rest in peace," she said & chugged it, & when she went to pour another

the gla.s.s broke somehow & she was very sleepy & decided to turn in 8 save the serious part for tomorrow; k her sleep was troubled.

Alex Mancin

tripped home when he heard the news, the game being over, his side having won again; 4 after he'd said good-bye to the others & gone through, he visited the kennels & played with the dogs for a time, lithe, yipping & licking - he could read their affection for him & it warmed him - & then visited his console, a gla.s.s of warm milk at his right hand, taking action on the mult.i.tude of messages which had come in, as always; too keyed up to sleep, thoughts of the recent enterprise dashing into and out of his mind like puppies; & the smile of Walter Sands seemed to flash for a moment on the screen as he read a list of stock quotations & toyed with a pair of souvenir dice he'd found in the bottom drawer of the dresser in the back room.

Elizabeth Brooke

wanted to get laid, was surprised at the intensity of the feeling, but realized that the previous days'

pace & tensions, suddenly relaxed, called for some physical release, too; & so she bade the others farewell & tripped back to England to call her friend to join her for tea, to talk of her recent experiences, listen to some chamber music & lay the ghost of Walter Sands which had been troubling her more than a little.

Charles d.i.c.kens Fisher

in his room at the Thunderbird Lodge with a pot of coffee, looked out of the window at the snow, thinking about his brother-in-law & the Indians in western movies he had seen & wilderness survival A the great dead beast whose image he caused to appear before him on the lawn (frightening a couple across the way who happened to look out at that moment), recalled from a video picture he had summoned earlier,

eye blazing like Waterford crystal, fangs like stalact.i.tes; & then he banished it & produced a full-sized image of Walter Sands, sitting in the armchair looking back at him, A when he asked him, "How do you like being dead?"

Sands shrugged & replied, "It has its benefits, it has its drawbacks."

GOING. ALONG THE WESTERN.

rim of the canyon now, heading into the northeast. Turning, taking an even more northerly route. Away from the canyon, across the snows, toward the trees. His way had brought him over the water and up the wall nearly an hour before. Up here where the wind was strong, though the snowfall had lessened to an occasional racing flake.

He bore on. A coyote howled somewhere in the trees or beyond them, ahead. A woodland smell came to him as he advanced, and the sounds of rattling branches.

He looked back once before he entered the wood. It seemed that there was a greenish glow rising just above the rim of the canyon. He lost sight of it in a snowswirl a moment later, and then there were trees all around him and a diminishment of the wind. Ice fell with crisp and gla.s.sy sounds when he brushed against boughs. It was like another place, a place of perpetual twilight and cold, where he had hunted what he came to call the ice bears, the sun a tiny, pale thing creeping along the horizon. At any moment the high-pitched whistle of the bears might come to him, and then he would have only moments in which to throw up the barrier and lay down a paralytic fire before the pack swirled in toward him. Move the barrier then to preserve the fallen

before their fellows devoured them. Call for the shuttle ship....

He glanced overhead, half expecting to see it descending now. But there was only a pearl-gray folding of clouds in every direction. This hunt was different. The thing he sought would not be taken so simply, nor borne away for enclosure.

All the more interesting.

He crossed an ice-edged streamlet and his way swerved abruptly, following its course through an arroyo where something with green eyes regarded him from within a small cave. The ground rose as he advanced, and when he emerged the trees had thinned.

His way took him to the left then, continuing uphill. He mounted higher and higher until he came at last to stand atop a ridge commanding a large view of the countryside. There he halted, staring into the black north, into which his trail ran on and on for as far as he could see in the odd half-light which had accompanied him on this journey. Opening his pouch, he cast pollen before him onto it. Turning then to the blue south, way to the earth-opening from which he had emerged, he cast more pollen, noticing for the first time that there was no trail behind him, that his way to this place had been vanishing even as he walked it. He felt that he would be unable to take a step in that direction if he were to try. There was to be no return along the way that he followed.

He faced the yellow west, place where the day was folded and closed. Casting pollen, he thought about endings, about the closing of cycles. Then to the east, thinking of all the mornings he had known and of the next one which would come out of it. Seeing for a great distance into the east with unusual clarity, he thought of the land over which his vision moved, adding features from the internal landscape of mem- ory, wondering why he had ever wished to deny this Dinetah which was so much a part of him.

For how long he looked into the east he could not tell.

Suddenly the air about his head was filled with spinning motes of light accompanied by a soft buzzing sound. It was like a swarm of fireflies dancing before him. Abruptly they darted off to his right. He realized then that it was a warning of some sort.

He looked to the right. There was a green glow moving among the trees in the distance. He looked away, placing his gaze upon his trail once again, and then he moved off along it.

Shortly he was running, ice particles stinging his face, driven by gusts of wind which raised them in occasional brief clouds. The snow did not obscure the trail, however. It was visible through everything with perfect clarity. Continuing to follow it into the distance with his eyes, he saw that it ran into an arroyo twisting off to the left. It seemed to narrow as it entered that place. Following, he saw that the narrowing continued until it appeared the thinness of a Christmas ribbon toward the center of the declivity. Strangely, how- ever, the portion he was traversing appeared no narrower, though he knew that he had already reached and pa.s.sed beyond the place where the thinning had begun. Instead, he detected a new phenomenon.

At first it was only that the arroyo had seemed somewhat deeper and longer than his initial impression had indicated.

As he moved more deeply into it, however, the place itself seemed larger, a huge canyon with high walls. And the farther he progressed, the steeper the walls became, the greater the distance from wall to wall. It also was now.

strewn with ma.s.sive boulders which had not been apparent at first. Yet the red way he followed remained undiminished.

There were no signs of the contraction he had noticed earlier.

An enormous white wheel flew past him, sculpted and brilliant, five-limbed like a starfish. Immediately another moved slowly overhead, descending. He realized that it was a snowflake.

The place was larger than Canyon del Muerto, much- larger. In moments, its walls had receded into the distance, vanished. He increased his pace, running, leaping, among the huge rocks.

He topped a rise to discover a ma.s.sive gla.s.sy mountain looming before him, its prismatic surfaces retailing rainbows at peculiar angles.

Then he was descending toward it, and he could see where his trail ran into a large opening in its side, a jagged slash- mark through stone and sheen, like a black lightning bolt running from about a third of its height downward to the earth.

A gust of wind blew him over and he regained his footing and ran on. A snowflake crashed to the earth like a falling building. He raced across the top of a small pond which vibrated beneath him.

The mountain towered higher, nearer. Finally he was

close enough to see into the great opening, and he saw that it shone within as well as without, the walls sparkling almost moistly, rising in a pitched-tentlike fashion to some unseen point of convergence high overhead.

He rushed within and halted almost immediately. His hand went to his knife before he realized that the men who surrounded him were multiple images of himself reflected in the gleaming walls. And his trail running off in all directions ...Twisted images.

He b.u.mped into a wall, ran his hands down its surface.

His trail seemed to go straight ahead here, but he saw now where the real only seemed to join the illusory. It slid to the right, he could tell now.

Three paces and he b.u.mped into another wall. This could not be. There was nothing else for the trail to do. It pro- ceeded directly ahead here, with no deviations, reflected or otherwise.

He reached forward, felt the wall, searched it. His reflec- tion mimicked his movements.

Abruptly, there was nothing. His hand moved forward as he realized that only the upper portion of his way was blocked. He dropped to all fours and continued onward.

As he crawled, the reflections shifted in the shadows around him. For a moment, from the corner of his eye, to the right, it seemed that he was a slow, lumbering bear, pacing himself. He glanced quickly to the left. A deer, a six-pointer, dark eyes alert, nostrils quivering. Multiple reflections caused them all to merge then, into something that was bear and deer and man, something primeval, working its way, like First Man, through narrow, dark tunnels upward to the new world.

The reflections ahead showed him that the overhead s.p.a.ce was growing larger again, turning into a high, narrow, Gothic arch. He rose to his feet as soon as he noticed this, and the animal images slipped away, leaving nothing but the infinity of himself on all sides. All colors, in various intensi- ties, lay ahead. He went on, and when he saw that he was heading toward a way out, he began to run.

The area of light seemed to grow slightly smaller as he advanced upon it. The reflections which ran beside him now varied through prisms and shadows. And he noted that they were all differently garbed. One bounded along in a pressur- ized suit, another in a tuxedo; another wore only a loincloth.

One ran nude. Another wore a parka. One had on a blue

velveteen shirt he had long forgotten, a sandcast concho belt binding it above the hips. In the distance, he saw himself as a boy, running furiously, arms pumping.

Smiling, he ran out through the opening, along the red way. The canyon walls appeared and closed in on him, diminishing in height as he advanced.