King of the Scepter'd Isle (Song of Earth) (42 page)

“It’s been many centuries since the last ship was observed. There’s a good chance the human race has run its course.”

As they made
their way toward the observer’s chamber Fang said, “They weren’t all bad, you know. There was a very nice giant called Nyneve, who was even quite pretty. And we created a giant ourselves, to look after our interests when things got tough. In the end we hardly had time to use him. He was kind and good and one hell of a bore, but you’d have liked him, Afah. We called him Galahad.”

“I’m sure he was a masterpiece,” said Afah dryly. The tunnels had narrowed, and some time later they were crawling through passages where the bat’s gravity had diminished, and Fang had to be careful not to bump his head on bony overhangs. “We are now inside the bat’s skull,” explained Afah. He squeezed through a narrow opening and Fang followed with difficulty. Now they were in a small chamber occupied by another kikihuahua, or something that looked very much like one. “Hello, Elahi,” said Afah.

Fang shivered as the observer turned their way. Elahi’s eyes were pale and empty, devoid of expression, apparently blind. Emerging from each temple, a glistening strand dangled between Elahi and the wall of the chamber. In some unpleasant way Elahi was plugged into the bat. He’d heard Fang and Afah, but he couldn’t see them. His brain was receiving images of the solar system. The strands were the bat’s optic nerves. “By the Sword of Agni!” Fang muttered in horror.

Elahi reached up and pulled the strands free, leaving small pink orifices in his temples. Simultaneously life returned to his eyes, and he focused on his visitors. Except for his bare temples, he now looked like a normal kikihuahua.

“Afah,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“Nothing is happening on Earth?”

“Nothing has happened for a long time.”

“No ships have come or gone?”

“Nothing at all. The planet seems to be dead.”

“There were no destructive wars of any kind? Earth is still inhabitable, so far as you can tell?”

“Yes
.”

“Let’s saddle up the Great Grasshopper!” cried Fang in delight.

“You are still willing to take your chances down there, Fang? I believe that a large proportion of gnomes are now happy where they are. Some of them become quite resentful when awakened to stand their watch. Some have refused.”

“You always get some rotten apples.”

“Kikihuahuas don’t get rotten apples.”

“I can believe it. We’ll take the gnomes who want to come. The rest can stay here, if that’s all right with you. First we must send down an exploration party. Just a handful of us, to scout out the situation. The Miggot, perhaps; and myself; and the Princess, of course. …”

“And I,” said Afah.

“You?”

“It is my duty. What we are proposing amounts to a colonization of Earth by the kikihuahua race, and I am the leader on this bat. I will go to Earth with you, and return to the bat when I’m satisfied everything is in order, and that the main body can be sent down.”

“That sounds fine to me.” Fang was already halfway out of the optic chamber. “I’ll go and wake the others.” Bouncing in the low gravity, singing a gnomish song of joy, he hurried to the hibernation pouch.

Sally was building a simple trap. She’d found the ideal spot the previous day when she’d been strolling the cliff path watching the gulls. She’d come across a recent rockfall where the cliff had crumbled, taking a bite out of the path so that she had to detour inland for a few meters. The pebbles still rattled down.

Bushes stood nearby, carved into cowering shapes by the wind. She broke off the longest sticks and laid them across the narrow gully. Then she gathered twigs and placed them crosswise. Finally, by late afternoon, she’d patted moss into place and scattered leaves over the hole until the deception was perfect.

Finished,
she straightened up, watched the soaring gulls for a few moments, then did a curious thing.

She unbuttoned her long-sleeved dress and pushed it off her shoulders so that it dropped and hung in folds around her waist. Her breasts were small and perfect, but there was nothing unusual in that, for a girl of her type. What
was
unusual were her arms. She stretched them out horizontally as though embracing the sea.

She had only four fingers on each hand.

The fifth, the thumb, was bent back and elongated as far as the shoulder. It held a pale bundle against her arm. At first glance this made her arms look unnaturally thick.

Sally shrugged her shoulders, her breasts rose, the thumbs sprang away from her arms, and her wings unfurled—large, white, the membrane covered with down, the larger feathers down-curved into an aerofoil. They were big and beautiful wings of which a swan might have been proud; but they were not big enough to carry Sally into the air.

She flapped them nevertheless; great, slow sweeps as she watched the gulls circling an incoming fishing boat. Then she held them extended and motionless. She felt the wind lift some of the weight from her feet, making her feel lighter but not light enough.

“I wish …” she sighed. “Oh, God how I wish that …” And she did not put her wish into words but allowed the tears to trickle down her cheeks as she watched the gulls in their effortless soaring. She dipped and curved her wings in imitation of the birds, her mind out there over the water, her eyes seeing the surface far below. …

“Sally!”

She stepped quickly back from the edge. She felt the wind on her breasts and looked down at herself. The human in her reasserted itself as she furled her wings and pulled her dress up, glancing around guiltily.

Marc was running along the path toward her, red-faced and excited. “Come and look at what I’ve found!” he shouted before he reached her.

Whatever it was, he obviously thought it was more interesting than her bare chest and bird envy. She followed him down toward the beach.

He was taller
than she, a year older, and quite different in build. His shoulders were broad and his arms long and extremely muscular, which had the effect of making his legs appear stumpy. He was dark-haired and handsome in a Cornish way. Sally found him attractive, which caused her parents some concern.

“He’s just an ape-boy,” her mother had said on more than one occasion. “Why can’t you hang around with boys of your own kind?”

Sally had tried, and failed, to explain that it was not the body of Marc that attracted her, powerful though it was. It was something about the way his mind worked. He always seemed to be in tune with her own thoughts. They both felt there were some questions somebody ought to be answering. Questions about the world beyond Mara Zion …

The path broadened at the beach. Marc took her hand and led her along a forest path. “This thing I found, it’s weird. And I mean really
weird,
Sally. You remember the savior that blew up? It was walking along, then suddenly it just exploded? Well, that’s nothing compared to what I’ve found.”

It was not far. Marc pushed his way through a clump of dense bush against a rocky face.

“A cave!” cried Sally in delight. “I’ve never seen this one before. How did you find it?”

“I was following Blackberry Nan one day, and I saw her go in here. After she’d left, I took a look.”

“But this isn’t weird. It’s quite exciting.”

“Wait till you’ve seen what’s inside.”

She followed him, ducking her head. Once inside, she could straighten up again; the cave was roomy. Soon her eyes became accustomed to the dim light.

“Over here,” said Marc.

He rolled aside a few stones, exposing the foot of the rock wall. “Look at that.”

Sally knelt and
stared at the rock. “It’s … transparent. There’s something behind it.”

“Feel the rock.”

She did. “It’s cold. It’s like ice, isn’t it? But it’s not wet. Ice would have melted away. It must be something else.”

“Look closely inside there.”

Sally peered at the rock. There was a dark patch near the surface of the transparent area. Beyond was a pale bump, but she couldn’t see farther than that. “What is it?”

His voice was husky. “It’s a man.”

“What!” And suddenly the dark patch sprang into focus. It was the top of a head, and the bump was a nose. Beyond that, a beard showed. Sally backed away hastily. She imagined she saw the head move. “Oh, God,” she said, scrambling for the daylight at the cave’s entrance. “What did you bring me here for?”

“I
did
warn you.”

“Yes, but there’s weird and there’s
weird.
This is as weird as you can get. What’s he doing there? How did he get there?”

They began to walk back toward Mara Zion village.

“I wondered if this was the end of a glacier. I remember learning that things come out of the end of glaciers, millions of years later, perfectly preserved. But there are no glaciers in these parts. He must be somebody from a previous civilization who got stuck in there somehow. But that doesn’t explain the cold rock.”

“We could ask a savior. Saviors know a lot.”

“Probably, but they don’t always tell.”

“This savior will. We’ll torture it until it does!”

He smiled indulgently. “Which savior is that?”

“The one that’s going to fall into my trap. The evening cliff patrol.”

“Oh, shit.” He regarded her in dismay. “What have you been doing now, Sally?”

“Well,” she said defensively, “why the bloody hell not? I’m really getting tired of the saviors running our lives for us. Do they think we’re stupid or something? And now the moors are off-limits.”

“What?”

“Yes,
didn’t you know? They’ve put up sentry posts and they’re stopping people from going up there. If we want to visit the wild humans at Meniot we have to go a roundabout way. And as usual, they won’t tell us why they’ve done it. ‘It is for your own good,” she mimicked in a tinny voice. “Well, I’m going to get the truth out of the evening savior. The truth about the moors and quite a number of other things. Some questions need answering, Marc!”

“Oh, shit,” he said again, helplessly. He knew better than to try to deter Sally from a course of action.

The Swingers’ village came into view. A group of children were playing kick-up, racing around the clearing and scampering up and down the trees in pursuit of a huge, hydrogen-filled ball. A knot of elders stood outside the schoolroom with their elbows resting on the window ledges, looking in at a teaching savior’s screen. A few dedicated athletes practiced for the Cornish Games, flinging themselves around their apparatus’ with confident abandon. Nobody worked. Nobody dug, planted or harvested, sewed or cooked. The saviors looked after that side of things.

“I’d better go, Marc,” said Sally. “I’ll meet you on the cliff path this evening. Be there.” She frowned at him, then ran off in the direction of the Wingers’ settlement.

Marc watched her go with some foreboding, then the screaming of a child caught his attention. She had fallen from a high branch. A savior appeared from nowhere, scooped her up, and examined her for broken bones. Apparently deciding she needed a more thorough examination, it set off at a run in the direction of the hospital, several kilometers away. The anxious parents unhitched their horses, climbed into the safety cages, and galloped off in pursuit. The game resumed more circumspectly.

Marc approached his father. “They’ll be banning kick-up now,” he said.

Adam smiled. “If they’d intended to ban the game, they’d have done so long ago. They’ve calculated the odds on injuries and decided the benefits to our health outweigh the risk. They know there will be an injury every seventy days or whatever, and Katie is just a statistic bearing out their projection.”

“Poor
Katie.”

“The saviors do their best. That’s what machines are for.”

“And they know what we’re going to do. They’ve got it all calculated.”

“More or less. They have an ancient word for it. The ifalong.”

“I just wish we could surprise them,” said Marc. He thought of Sally the way he’d sometimes seen her, when she hadn’t known he was looking. Standing on the cliff watching the sea gulls with naked longing in her eyes. Unfurling those pretty wings and waving them in imitation. “Sally says the saviors locked a whole bunch of people in the dome.” The dome was huge, looming into the sky north of Pentor like a silver sunrise.

“They went in of their own accord, as your friend Sally knows very well, if she’s watched her history lessons. They have dreams in there that are just like real life, but much safer. You’ve heard people speak of Dream Earth, Marc. It suits the dreamers and it suits the saviors. There’s nothing sinister about it.”

“And yet
we
can’t go into the dome.”

“The dome is for true humans.”

Marc and Sally watched in breathless silence from the cover of a bush. The savior came thudding along the cliff path in the twilight, head jerking this way and that as it checked that nobody was lying injured anywhere, that no child was lost or frightened, that the weather forecast had been correct, that the gulls were maintaining their population, and that everything else in the district of Mara Zion was in order. Meanwhile it hummed a merry little tune so that nobody would be startled by its approach. Thump … thump … thump … tootle, tootle, tootle.

Then the
watchers heard a snapping of branches, a scrabbling sound, and a rattling cascade of stones. The happy tune continued, but faintly, almost lost in the thud and splash of waves.

“We’ve got it!”

“Quiet, Sally. It may still be mobile. Wait here a bit longer.”

She shook herself free from his restraining hand. “Marc—it’s only a savior! It’s not a parent or anything. It doesn’t matter whether it’s mobile or not. It’s not going to blame us for anything.” She hurried to the rockfall and stared down into the gloom where the waves burst in frothy luminescence against the rocks at the foot of the cliff. “There it is, see? It’s not getting up. That’s a good sign.”

Spray was drifting over the twisted, humanlike figure. “So what do we do now?”

“We go down there and confront it, of course. We question it. We interrogate it. If necessary, we apply pressure.”

“It’s pretty steep for you, Sally. Shouldn’t we wait until morning? It’ll still be there.”