Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra (46 page)

“Don't be angry with me.”

“Huh?” Treet raised his head. Yarden looked at him across the dying fire. The others were moving off toward the tents. He'd not heard the party break up. “I didn't—I'm not angry.”

Yarden cocked her head to one side. “No, maybe not—not yet. I had to tell them, you know. We agreed.”

“Sure.”

“But I didn't want you to feel like I was betraying you.”

“Why would I think that?”

“Not think, Orion.
Feel.
I sensed you were upset. Emotions have a logic of their own.” She rose and came around the ring of stones to him, bent over him, touched his chin, and raised his face to hers. She kissed him lightly on the lips.

“What was that for?” asked Treet, his voice thick and unsteady. He was genuinely bewildered by the kiss, but trying valiantly to cover it.

“That's for us. It's something I won't share with anyone else.”

She was gone then, leaving Treet to his befuddlement, still reeling from the kiss. When at last he took himself off to bed, he was no closer to an answer to the riddle of Yarden Talazac.

The better part of
the morning was spent filling the tent with water. After striking it for the last time, Pizzle arranged it loosely under the network of straps and they began hauling water from the river in their helmets. Pizzle oversaw the operation, keeping a tally of the number of helmetsful that went into the tent. By his calculation one helmet full of water equaled one day's water supply for the group. When they had seventy-five helmetsful he sealed the tent.

“But we can carry a lot more,” said Treet. “The tent isn't even half full.”

“That would be dangerous. Fill it any more, and we won't be able to steer the skimmer. Besides, the weight would snap the straps and the tent would roll off. This way it acts as ballast and lies relatively flat.”

“He's right,” said Crocker. “Let's leave well enough alone.”

They snugged down the rigging, packing the dried eels under the straps all over the surface of the orange bag. “It looks like something out of
The Gypsy Pirates of R'Enno,”
said Pizzle. “I hope it works.”

“We'll soon find out.” Crocker looked back at the river. “I suggest everybody take a good long drink of water. It could be the last fresh one we'll get until who knows when.”

They drank their fill from the crystalline river and somewhat reluctantly mounted the skimmers. Treet and Crocker rode one, Yarden and Calin another. Pizzle, despite his myopia, piloted the skimmer with the water bag, claiming he was the only one who understood the physics of it. They started up and slid away. At the top of the first hill, Treet looked back over his shoulder to the river valley below. We forgot to name it, he thought. Then the hump of the hill took it from view as the skimmer began its glide over the downward slope.

The land changed almost immediately. Once away from the river, the grass grew shorter, more sparse. At a distance of forty kilometers, the hillscape flattened, and the hills became less rounded and further apart, separated by long, ramplike inclines.

By midday the carpet of pastel grass was worn thin and patchy. Treet noticed that the soil showing through the sparse covering was lighter, drier, sandier. When they stopped late in the afternoon to erect the two remaining tents for the night, the sandhills had become small bluffs whose soft soil was cut away by blowouts on the windward side. The blowouts showed white-blue in the fading daylight.

“The desert can't be much farther,” remarked Crocker, scanning the barren countryside. “What a wasteland. It's so empty it scares me.”

“What do you suppose could cause it?” wondered Treet aloud. He peered into the distance, noting how the violet shadows deepened and slid up from the lowlands to swallow the heights.

“Cause it? What do you mean,
cause
it? It's a natural land-form. Lack of water is what causes it. Didn't you ever learn any physical geography?”

“I'm a purist.” Treet shrugged. “It just seemed very unnatural to me. Too empty. It's a total void. I've seen a few deserts, but nothing this completely—”

“Annihilated,” put in Pizzle, finishing his thought. “Even deserts have life, but this place is antilife.”

“You think this is something, wait till we reach minus eight,” Crocker snorted. “That'll make this look like a rain forest!”

Crocker's
prophecy came true two days later. The travelers climbed to the top of a long rise and stopped to stare upon a vista of white dunes. Like the endless swells of a milk-white sea, the humpbacked dunes swarmed to the horizon and beyond.

Speechless, the company viewed the spectacle in a silence broken only by the sound of their own breathing. The sun, behind them on its downward arc into the west, painted each dune a dazzling white.

After a while Treet turned his eyes back the way they had come. The barren hills showed light turquoise that smudged to powder blue in the distance. By comparison, the desolation they had passed through now appeared almost shockingly verdant, luxurious in its rampant fertility.

What a strange, wounded land, thought Treet, then wondered why the word
wounded
had come to him.

Minutes later, still without having spoken a word, the company began its descent to the desert floor. As the machines touched the sand, the blades sank deep. For an instant Treet feared they might founder. The sand buried the runners, making the craft grind ahead sluggishly. But Treet, remembering that the skimmers were designed specifically for desert travel, pulled back the joystick and leaned forward on the knee pedals, lowering the runner blades still further. The skimmer leaped ahead.

Amazed at the machine's response, Treet held the joystick back and allowed the skimmer to gather speed. Gradually the machine rose on its blades until it fairly sliced through the sand with all the effort of a skater flying over ice. Nothing they had experienced of the vehicles' capabilities had even hinted at the breathtaking velocity they could achieve.

Exhilaration flooded over him in an instantaneous gush—as if he had taken a plunge into a rushing cataract. His heart quickened; his blood raced as adrenaline pumped into his veins. He gulped for air and gripped the joystick tightly with both hands, then heard a long, high, wailing sound over the scream and whiz of the skimmer and realized Crocker was howling in pure delight as they dipped and glided over the undulating dunes. The still desert air snapped their clothing into sharp creases that rippled over their limbs.

Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed a shape gaining on him. He glanced over to see Yarden leaning forward over the joystick, her knees pressed to the pedals, crouched like a jockey in the saddle of a thoroughbred racehorse, features compressed into an expression mingling ferocious intensity with rapture. Her long black hair gleamed in the sunlight as it streamed out horizontally behind her.

She streaked past, her skimmer's wake a high, white plume as the tiny scoop-shaped depressions of the metallic wheels jetted the fine dry sand into the air. Treet leaned forward to cut wind resistance, clenched the joystick, and urged his machine to chase, willing it to go faster. When he looked at the speedometer it read 400 kilometers per hour. He gulped, astounded by the speed.

He made a good race of it, cutting back and forth behind Yarden as they swerved along, threading the bases of the dunes, back and forth like a water-skier zipping in and out of a speedboat's wake. Gradually Yarden pulled away from him; he watched as the plume dwindled, eventually shrinking to a mere white puff which disappeared behind a dune far ahead. There was no catching her.

“I've never felt anything so absolutely, ecstatically thrilling in all my life!” shouted Yarden when they finally found her again. She had stopped to wait for the others. Her face flushed and ruddy from the excitement, eyes luminous with pleasure, she raised her hands to her windblown hair and smoothed it. “It's like a dream—like flying in a dream.” She fairly hugged herself with ecstasy. “Isn't it wonderful?”

They all agreed it was indeed wonderful—Pizzle a little less enthusiastically than the others, feeling martyred by the necessity of having to drive the water bag at a snail's crawl while everyone else flew like eagles.

Treet was fascinated by Yarden's response. The flight of the skimmer seemed to have ignited an inner fire that burned from her eyes and made her whole body glow. He thought if he were to touch her skin it would sizzle. The sight was enchanting; he would have been embarrassed to stare so brazenly if not for the fact that Yarden was oblivious in her bliss.

“It reminds me of the first time I took a trainer up,” said Crocker reverently. “Suborbital jumpjet—little more than a rocket engine with a seat belt. I never wanted to come down.”

With difficulty Treet tore his eyes away from Yarden, but not before she noticed his look and returned it with a smouldering glance of her own. He noticed Calin standing off to the side, watching them. She, too, radiated live heat, but her expression was impossible to read—composed of too many emotions, or of one that Treet had never encountered before. Her almond eyes sparked strange fire in their depths.

“Well, what say we make camp here for the night?” he asked.

“There's still a lot of daylight left,” observed Pizzle.

“Oh, let's do go on,” Yarden said a little breathlessly. “One more ride—I want just one more before we stop.”

“This time
I get
to pilot,” Crocker stated firmly.

“Fine,” said Treet.

They rode for another hour or so. Epsilon Eridani bulged just above the horizon, a white incandescence that turned the sky and sand white gold.

Crocker was following Yarden's skimmer furrow in the sand. Treet sat in the passenger's position behind Crocker, clutching the handgrips and hoping Yarden would have sense enough to stop soon, when he saw the blue mist. At first he thought it a cloud of insects—it had that swarmy, diaphanous quality—but it was much too big. It looked like the rain edge of a thunderstorm viewed from a distance as it sweeps across the landscape, though closer and not as dense or dark.

It hovered directly in front of them, an immense curtain several hundred meters in the air and perhaps ten or fifteen kilometers wide. It was hard to tell exactly because the curtain lost itself in the dunes at the edges and faded into the air high above. Before Crocker could pull up, they were through it, proving that the misty curtain was much closer than it appeared.

Treet felt a splash of coolness on his exposed skin, as if he had been sprayed with rubbing alcohol from an atomizer. Then they were through, the veil of mist behind them, shimmering pale silver in the sunset.

Moments later they rounded the foot of a low-humped dune and came upon Yarden and Calin. The women had dismounted and were waiting for them on the shadow side of the dune. Circling once, Crocker brought the skimmer in. A few minutes later they heard the whine of Pizzle's machine as it came sliding around the dune to park beside them.

“Anybody notice that fog?” asked Pizzle as he climbed down from his vehicle.

“Yes,” said Yarden, “we noticed it. Rain do you think?”

“Not rain. At least not any kind of rain I ever saw,” offered Crocker. “No clouds.”

“It was wet like rain,” put in Treet. “Like mist. Maybe Pizzle's right—maybe it was a fog of some kind.”

“Fog in the desert?” Crocker scoffed lightly. “In bright daylight? That's a first.”

Treet lifted his shoulders. True, there had been no change in temperature as they went through the curtain, which would argue against any kind of fog. Yet, he felt an unmistakable dampness as they flashed through. His forehead and the skin on the backs of his hands still tingled faintly. He rubbed his forehead, but it was now dry. Whatever had been there had likely evaporated.

The company went about setting up camp, pitching the two remaining tents on the flat sand between dunes. Night came on quickly, the stars intense in the desert dome. They made a small fire in a depression in the sand, then gathered around to talk quietly, their voices drifting in the silent air. They sipped water and ate some of the dried eel, which, to their surprise, tasted just as good dried as fresh, though chewy in the extreme.

After eating, Treet got up to stretch and walk before turning in. He climbed to the top of a dune, his boots sinking and sliding in the fine, loose sand. He did some torso twists, toe touches, deep knee bends, and side bends, then stood with his hands on his hips gazing up at the velvety sky.

Here in the desert the sky appeared darker, the stars brighter, their light sharper, more intense. He was still watching them when a voice behind him said, “Ophidia is well up already, I see.”

Treet turned slowly. “Yarden, I didn't hear you come up.”

“Am I disturbing you?” She came to stand beside him, and Treet felt a flutter in the air, as if an electric current vibrated the molecules between them.

“No, you're not disturbing me.” He glanced skyward once more. “I was just thinking.”

“Tell me.”

“It was nothing.”

“I'd like to hear it anyway.”

“Well, I was thinking that this world, Empyrion, is far more different than it appears at first. It takes time to discover the differences; they're subtle.”