Oberheim (Voices) Part 12

When he had taken the quest, he knew only that he must somehow continue the labors of Shannon's life---find some way to avenge the death of it.

He had wandered alone for a period of days, remembering, until one morning, at the rising dust of a fiery dawn, he had felt the North calling to him. He felt it still, though less strongly, and he deemed that this was right. What he hoped to find there he could not say. He only knew that he must find it.

The most difficult aspect of his journey thus far had not been the long flight on short provisions. To the mai such things meant nothing.

They lived to work and serve the greater need, that was all. No, it was more the feelings and emotions that the long pilgrimage evoked in him, seeming almost to rise from the vast loneliness of his world. For though the man's spirit had died or moved on, his sensations and experience had not. They lived on within Simin, and sometimes puzzled or even frightened him. He understood, and knew this was necessary; but the knowledge did not make it easier.

WHAT A TORTURED RACE THEY MUST BE, he thought. SO TORN BETWEEN DESIRE AND FEAR. THEY ARE GIVEN NO ROLE, NO CLEAR PLACE. THEY MUST FIND IT, AS WE MUST FIND MOISTURE IN AN ARID LAND.

It was this fear of frustration and fruitless searching that he felt most deeply, because it had for so long been a part of his own existence. Through all his twenty months he had sought after some intangible, some elusive quality of being, with no more guide than a restless and smoldering hunger inside him. TO NOT KNOW, really not know who he was or where he was going.

This, he decided, must be the doom of humanity: to be born a burning question of itself, a paradox of beauty and destruction, love and loss.

To take personally and introspectively the irresolvable conflict of life and desire over stillness and the void. Again, he felt it so deeply. That the struggle could also be beautiful he knew. But still, such a hard and lonely fate.....

When dawn came he crawled out of the niche and looked about him. The great crack was shadowed and still. He felt the presence of many creatures, but they were not yet near him. The rockface offered little resistance as he climbed, and soon he stood atop a hooked spire that sprang from the pillar's crumbling eastern shoulder, high above the plain. Two long lines of wingless wasps were mounting towards him.

The first of their number touched the spire. He took one last taste of the dawn, then flew out beyond their reach.

He flew staunchly and steadily northward, now that he had some plan.

For the clarity of first-sun had told him what he must do. Stopping to rest along the top of a shallow ridge, he ate part of a darkening bush-bulb, nearly as large as himself. Its taste was bitter, but it gave him strength. Then he set out again.

His mind had determined to search the farthest North. Shannon's memory told him what he might find there: great frozen wastes of ice and earth, underground hollows left from times when the water had been greater. Sometimes as he pondered these, at the edge of thought he would feel a sound, a sensation: deep throbbings in empty places beneath the ground, a golden light that drew him onward. But then it would vanish and leave him, wondering. He must find its source, if it were real.

Three days more he journeyed toward it, till on the fading edge of the third the wind forced him to land. It had been gathering strength since the morning of the spire, and now carried with it a bitter and biting cold that would not rest. His strength beginning at last to fail him, he determined to go on on foot, until he found some shelter, or a reason to stop. He felt the presence of no other creature, yet still he was uneasy. He had reached the edge of the mighty tundra that formed the cap of Newman's world.

Now more and more he reached into Shannon's past, trying to find the thing that had kept him going. Genuine physical weakness, other than simple hunger, thirst and fatigue, was something he had never known, and dealing with it frustrated all the lessons he had learned as a mai.

Being alien to his experience, he had a.s.sumed that it did not exist---that there was only weakness of will, and that so long as his desire held, no barrier of the flesh would ever stop him. This lesson in perspective he accepted, though grudgingly. It seemed that everything he had known in three seasons of life must be relearned, altered to fit this new reality. But his will remained undaunted.

He traveled many hours into the darkness of night, until he found a small hollow of earth and root of stone at the base of a pummeled and wind torn boulder. A thin lacing of ground-snow, carried by the wind, swirled around him and whistled in its cracks, making a melancholy sound that he felt still deeper for the la.s.situde of his body. Here he rested, and tried not to think, until the coming of morning.

The morning was much the same as the night, with only a patchy gray light to tell him when the day had come. He moved out of the shelter and walked, across shallow hills, rising in monotonous rhythm through a bleak and barren landscape. The earth was a dull and frozen brown, broken now and again by rock, or gnarled scrub, or nothing. The thin snow blew over all, trailing and whirling about in long wisps like the twisting hands of witches. He continued on for many hours, until the wind relented just long enough for him to exhaust himself in flight.

He landed again, and found the earth covered intermittently with thin patches of ice, sometimes deepening and joining together into shrunken, unmoving streams, or withered oak leaves of many fingers.

He continued and night came again but he did not stop. He had eaten what hard and knotted brush he could find, and there was now no lack of moisture; and though it was his mind he feared, denying it had not yet become unbearable. He rested a short time, went on the next day. And the next, walking because he could not fly, into the growing cold, and thicker snow, and ice that began to dominate the ground. Until he was alone.

Time pa.s.sed.

He had reached the farthest North. The world was ice, layered with snow. The wind blew the white softness above into dunes, sometimes foaming against islands of rock, huddled together in groups or branching straight like disjointed coral reefs, while its gusting blasts wrapped veils over all, swirling and howling in relentless defiance. The day lasted but four short hours, then all was swathed in darkness, so that the swirling sheets were blind and crashed over him like spray of drowning surf on the deck of a floundering ship. He was utterly alone.

Simin's strength was gone; he did not know what kept him going.

Perhaps because he had never known defeat..... But surely it was more.

Through the numb slowness of his near-frozen body a heart beat that carried no blood. He was dangerously crippled by the cold.

He had pa.s.sed wide cracks in the ice, chasms and fissures that he knew must lead down: sometimes he could almost see, or sense, uncovered earth or the edges of rock far below. And this was what he sought.

But always the feel of them was cold. He sought an entrance, which led to a pa.s.sage. He must find it soon or perish.

On the seventh day since entering the tundra, an hour after the disappearing of light, a vast abyss opened before him, wider and emptier and deeper than any he had yet come across. Like a crushed cylinder of otherworldly proportions, it yawned directly in front of him, dropping deep into the earth. His forelegs hovered trembling above the void.

This must be the pa.s.sage, or he would die. He no longer trusted his judgment; it had fallen in the snow many miles behind him. It could well be madness, but he felt a presence far below, some wild hope.....

No. He must find shelter. Perhaps it was there. A shelter. If he could find it. MUST CONTINUE ON. NO, HERE. IT MUST BE HERE, OR I AM DYING. SO. . .EASY TO SURRENDER. LIKE FALLING ASLEEP. LETTING GO.

NO!

He turned his sinking body around, and forced it to descend: hooking and digging, sc.r.a.ping into ice, forelegs stretched to the limit, trying not to slip. To slip was death. Down. Down farther. A little farther. THE WIND IS LESS HERE. Here. KEEP MOVING. MUST KEEP MOVING. NO STRENGTH. . .BUT WARMTH COMING BACK. YES, WARMTH. MOVE.

FARTHER.

DON'T SLIP! DON'T SLIP. An overhang. CAREFUL. MUST STRUGGLE PAST SOMEHOW. SOME WAY. PAST. WARMTH. IT MUST BE WARMER. KEEP MOVING.

IT WILL BE WARMER, OR I AM DYING. I AM DYING. IT IS WARMER.

After the long and grueling climb, stopping many times to marshal strength, he found himself at the bottom. The cylinder had narrowed, so that now it was scarcely thirty meters broad, a sharp cleft of stone, rising sheer into ice that overtook it for perhaps a thousand meters more. He rested there, his body pulsing, spent. The cold was not as intense, and the wind was less, and the movement had warmed his limbs.

But he was weak and near dead from hunger and exhaustion. He needed sustenance badly, soon. Or it was over. He moved to a tiny pool of snow that had formed from a trickle of the torrent above, and with his trembling foreclaw worked small bits of it into his mouth. All done in pitch darkness, and very little feeling left. Then moved to examine the corners of the cleft.

The first was blocked, solid stone. He turned about. He did not know he had reached the opposite wall until he pa.s.sed through it, was inside. A cave had opened blindly and taken him in, narrow and not high, but a cave nonetheless. A pa.s.sage. After a time he knew instinctively that he was underground, but was far too weary for the knowledge to have much effect. He continued forward. He must find some kind of sustenance. Sustenance. He thought of his foreclaw, but remembering the man..... No. Not yet.

He wandered on, stumbling, raising himself up to go on. Plodded forward, sinking ever deeper, and onward, until the air around him suddenly grew larger. A loosened rock rolled off another, and the echo did not return for some time. He moved to his right, sensing something, and stroked the tip of his claw against the slanting surface which met it. The surface was sometimes soft and not smooth; it was not part of the stone. He tried to break off a small piece. The layer was thin, and it crumbled. He tried again, brought the wretched substance---some kind of dried blood, or excrement---to his mouth. Its taste was bile and bitter and acid. Then swallowed. Throat burning, he repeated the motion perhaps a dozen times, then collapsed, half holding, to the floor. And lay unmoving.

Simin woke from his delirium many hours later, somewhat stronger, but still dizzy and confused. The little nourishment he had taken lifted his mind back to awareness, strong, if subtly altered by the thick aura of the place, and by the strange and pressing reality of his quest. He rose slowly, careful not to spend the wavering hope he had found, and looked around him.

Looked around him. There was a dim light in that place, that region of vastness. And whatever the source, though all before had been darkness, it was undeniable. The light was dim and surreal, softly yellow and fallow gold, but nonetheless afforded him a glimpse of this underground world, if it did not end, which he must now traverse. For here, more than ever, he sensed a presence that was greater than his own life, if distantly, not calling him but aware of his need.

Strangeness.

He was not alone in that ribbed, spine-ceilinged enclosure. Around a far turning he caught movement, and was sure as an ebb and flow motion of body and legs rounded the inward corner that was the edge of his sight. He was still too weak to fight, or to go on, as the many legged creature approached him blindly, unaware of his presence. It drew closer, then seemed to slow in its movements, coming gradually to a halt. Descendant of the centipede, it studied him from a distance of forty meters, its poisoned forward spikes twitching with unease.

Though the centipede was longer, its bulk and his were nearly equal.

He had no strength for a fight, nor did he seek one. But perhaps his quivering opponent could be daunted, backed down. Yet as he continued to watch he felt no aggression, only puzzlement, coming from the other: He was not part of its food chain, nor was its territory threatened.

It was only frightened, why so strongly he could not guess. He also knew, with sudden sureness, that it was one of many. Somehow he knew.

He took a step forward, and it retreated swiftly along the way it had come, moving onto the wall, perhaps instinctively, where it felt a greater measure of safety. He followed it as best he could in the half light, the flexing striped-brown body, hoping to find the source of its food.

He pa.s.sed the narrowing corner at the back of the high, curving chamber and descended a long, often twisting, downward tunnel that branched off from it. The other's speed was considerable, moving through the regions of its birth, and try as he might he could not keep up. He soon found himself alone in a roughly spherical vault, not large, with five knife-slash pa.s.sages opening off it.

The light here was thicker, and in a swift moment of recognition he realized the reason for it. The soft glow was neither greater nor weaker anywhere around him: it did not have a true source, nor did it cast a single shadow. He felt a slight pulsing of moisture across his face, like a fine drizzle-rain touched by the wind. The light was in the mist itself. Also, there was the sensation of his flesh lightly touching, warming against the inner edges of his armor. His senses were heightened, and he was acutely aware of his hunger.

His antennae began to twitch, almost without his knowledge, turning him to the left. He followed to a shallow rift at the lowest point of the enclosure, where he found a tiny pool of dark water, sponged by a thick and brackish black algae. He immersed his jaws and tasted. Again. He filled his mouth, and painfully swallowed wave after wave of the wet and mud sustenance.

Then he backed away and lifted himself up, feeling alive once more. He moved to hide himself behind a jagged plate of rock, and waited for his strength to return.

III

Simin stood before the flat porous surface of a section of a wall of stone. The pale light which illuminated it was the same as ever, perhaps a little brighter, or his eyes had dulled in growing used to it. But through the worn blankness of his mind (though a fair measure of his physical strength had returned, yet having no will to drive it) he felt a spark of emotion, almost human, that held him there with a hollow aching in the center of his chest. He stood before a fading portrait, a mark left on the uncaring stone.