It was a long walk to the forest. The top of the plateau seemed to be
bowl-shaped, protected by encircling cliffs. Harker, thinking back to
that first settlement long ago, decided that this place was infinitely
better. It was like the visions he had seen in fever-dreams--the
Promised Land. The coolness and cleanness of it were like having
weights removed from your lungs and heart and body.
The rejuvenating air didn't make up for McLaren's weight, however.
Presently Harker said, "Hold it," and sat down, tumbling McLaren gently
onto the grass. The girl stopped. She came back a little way and
watched Harker, who was blowing like a spent horse. He grinned up at
her.
"I'm shot," he said. "I've been too busy for a man of my age. Can't you
get hold of somebody to help me carry him?"
Again she studied him with puzzled fascination. Night was closing in,
a clear indigo, less dark than at sea level. Her eyes had a curious
luminosity in the gloom.
"Why do you do that?" she asked.
"Do what?"
"Carry it."
By "it" Harker guessed she meant McLaren. He was suddenly, coldly
conscious of a chasm between them that no amount of explanation could
bridge. "He's my friend. He's ... I have to."
She studied his thought and then shook her head. "I don't understand.
It's spoiled--" her thought-image was a combination of "broken,"
"finished," and "useless"--"Why carry it around?"
"McLaren's not an 'it.' He's a man like me, my friend. He's hurt, and I
have to help him."
"I don't understand." Her shrug said it was his funeral, also that
he was crazy. She started on again, paying no attention to Harker's
call for her to wait. Perforce, Harker picked up McLaren and staggered
on again. He wished Sim were here, and immediately wished he hadn't
thought of Sim. He hoped Sim had died quickly before--before what? "_Oh
God, it's dark and I'm scared and my belly's all gone to cold water,
and that thing trotting ahead of me through the blue haze...._"
The thing was beautiful, though. Beautifully formed, fascinating,
a curved slender gleam of moonlight, a chaliced flower holding the
mystic, scented nectar of the unreal, the unknown, the undiscovered.
Harker's blood began, in spite of himself, to throb with a deep
excitement.
They came under the fragrant shadows of the trees. The forest was open,
with broad mossy rides and clearings. There were flowers underfoot, but
no brush, and clumps of ferns. The girl stopped and stretched up her
hand. A feathery branch, high out of her reach, bent and brushed her
face, and she plucked a great pale blossom and set it in her hair.
She turned and smiled at Harker. He began to tremble, partly with
weariness, partly with something else.
"How do you do that?" he asked.
She was puzzled. "The branch, you mean? Oh, that!" She laughed. It was
the first sound he had heard her make, and it shot through him like
warm silver. "I just think I would like a flower, and it comes."
Teleportation, telekinetic energy--what did the books call it? Back
on Earth they knew something about that, but the colony hadn't had
much time to study even its own meager library. There had been some
religious sect that could make roses bend into their hands. Old wisdom,
the force behind the Biblical miracles, just the infinite power of
thought. Very simple. Yeah. Harker wondered uneasily whether she could
work it on him, too. But then, he had a brain of his own. Or did he?
"What's your name?" he asked.
She gave a clear, trilled sound. Harker tried to whistle it and gave
up. Some sort of tone-language, he guessed, without words as he knew
them. It sounded as though they--her people, whatever they were--had
copied the birds.
"I'll call you Button," he said. "Bachelor Button--but you wouldn't
know."
She picked the image out of his mind and sent it back to him. Blue
fringe-topped flowers nodding in his mother's china bowl. She laughed
again and sent her black birds away and led on into the forest, calling
out like an oriole. Other voices answered her, and presently, racing
the light wind between the trees, her people came.
* * * * *
They were like her. There were males, slender little creatures like
young boys, and girls like Button. There were several hundred of
them, all naked, all laughing and curious, their lithe pliant bodies
flitting moth-fashion through the indigo shadows. They were topped with
petals--Harker called them that, though he still wasn't sure--of all
colors from blood-scarlet to pure white.
They trilled back and forth. Apparently Button was telling them all
about how she found Harker and McLaren. The whole mob pushed on slowly
through the forest and ended finally in a huge clearing where there
were only scattered trees. A spring rose and made a little lake, and
then a stream that wandered off among the ferns.
More of the little people came, and now he saw the young ones. All
sizes, from tiny thin creatures on up, replicas of their elders. There
were no old ones. There were none with imperfect or injured bodies.
Harker, exhausted and on the thin edge of a fever-bout, was not
encouraged.
He set McLaren down by the spring. He drank, gasping like an animal,
and bathed his head and shoulders. The forest people stood in a circle,
watching. They were silent now. Harker felt coarse and bestial,
somehow, as though he had belched loudly in church.
He turned to McLaren. He bathed him, helped him drink, and set about
fixing the leg. He needed light, and he needed flame.
There were dry leaves, and mats of dead moss in the rocks around the
spring. He gathered a pile of these. The forest people watched. Their
silent luminous stare got on Harker's nerves. His hands were shaking so
that he made four tries with his flint and steel before he got a spark.
The tiny flicker made the silent ranks stir sharply. He blew on it. The
flames licked up, small and pale at first, then taking hold, growing,
crackling. He saw their faces in the springing light, their eyes
stretched with terror. A shrill crying broke from them and then they
were gone, like rustling leaves before a wind.
Harker drew his knife. The forest was quiet now. Quiet but not at rest.
The skin crawled on Harker's back, over his scalp, drew tight on his
cheekbones. He passed the blade through the flame. McLaren looked up at
him. Harker said, "It's okay, Rory," and hit him carefully on the point
of the jaw. McLaren lay still. Harker stretched out the swollen leg and
went to work.
* * * * *
It was dawn again. He lay by the spring in the cool grass, the ashes of
his fire grey and dead beside the dark stains. He felt rested, relaxed,
and the fever seemed to have gone out of him. The air was like wine.
He rolled over on his back. There was a wind blowing. It was a live,
strong wind, with a certain smell to it. The trees were rollicking,
almost shouting with pleasure. Harker breathed deeply. The smell, the
pure clean edge....
Suddenly he realized that the clouds were high, higher than he had ever
known them to be. The wind swept them up, and the daylight was bright,
so bright that....
Harker sprang up. The blood rushed in him. There was a stinging blur
in his eyes. He began to run, toward a tall tree, and he flung himself
upward into the branches and climbed, recklessly, into the swaying top.
The bowl of the valley lay below him, green, rich, and lovely. The grey
granite cliffs rose around it, grew higher in the direction from which
the wind blew. Higher and higher, and beyond them, far beyond, were
mountains, flung towering against the sky.
On the mountains, showing through the whipping veils of cloud, there
was snow, white and cold and blindingly pure, and as Harker watched
there was a gleam, so quick and fleeting that he saw it more with his
heart than with his eyes....
Sunlight. Snowfields, and above them, the sun.
After a long time he clambered down again into the silence of the
glade. He stood there, not moving, seeing what he had not had time to
see before.
Rory McLaren was gone. Both packs, with food and climbing ropes and
bandages and flint-and-steel were gone. The short spears were gone.
Feeling on his hip, Harker found nothing but bare flesh. His knife and
even his breech-clout had been taken.
A slender, exquisite body moved forward from the shadows of the trees.
Huge white blossoms gleamed against the curly blue that crowned the
head. Luminous eyes glanced up at Harker, full of mockery and a subtle
animation. Button smiled.
Matt Harker walked toward Button, not hurrying, his hard sinewy face
blank of expression. He tried to keep his mind that way, too. "Where is
the other one; my friend?"
"In the finish-place." She nodded vaguely toward the cliffs near where
Harker and McLaren had escaped from the caves. Her thought-image was
somewhere between rubbish-heap and cemetery, as nearly as Harker could
translate it. It was also completely casual, a little annoyed that time
should be wasted on such trifles.
"Did you ... is he still alive?"
"It was when we put it there. It will be all right, it will just wait
until it--stops. Like all of them."
"Why was he moved? Why did you...."
"It was ugly." Button shrugged. "It was broken, anyway." She stretched
her arms upward and lifted her head to the wind. A shiver of delight
ran through her. She smiled again at Harker, side-long.
He tried to keep his anger hidden. He started walking again, not as
though he had any purpose in mind, bearing toward the cliffs. His
way lay past a bush with yellow flowers and thorny, pliant branches.
Suddenly it writhed and whipped him across the belly. He stopped short
and doubled over, hearing Button's laughter.
When he straightened up she was in front of him. "It's red," she said,
surprised, and laid little pointed fingers on the scratches left by the
thorns. She seemed thrilled and fascinated by the color and feel of his
blood. Her fingers moved, probing the shape of his muscles, the texture
of his skin and the dark hair on his chest. They drew small lines of
fire along his neck, along the ridge of his jaw, touching his features
one by one, his eyelids, his black brows.
"What are you?" whispered her mind to his.
"This." Harker put his arms around her, slowly. Her flesh slid cool and
strange under his hands, sending an indescribable shudder through him,
partly pleasure, partly revulsion. He bent his head. Her eyes deepened,
lakes of blue fire, and then he found her lips. They were cool and
strange like the rest of her, pliant, scented with spice, the same
perfume that came with sudden overpowering sweetness from her curling
petals.
Harker saw movement in the forest aisles, a clustering of bright
flower-heads. Button drew back. She took his hand and led him away, off
toward the river and the quiet ferny places along its banks. Glancing
up, Harker saw that the two black birds were following overhead.
* * * * *
"You are really plants, then? Flowers, like those?" He touched the
white blossoms on her head.
"You are really a beast, then? Like the furry, snarling things that
climb up through the pass sometimes?"
They both laughed. The sky above them was the color of clean fleece.
The warm earth and crushed ferns were sweet beneath them. "What pass?"
asked Harker.
"Over there." She pointed off toward the rim of the valley. "It goes
down to the sea, I think. Long ago we used to go down there but there's
no need, and the beasts make it dangerous."
"Do they," said Harker, and kissed her in the hollow below her chin.
"What happens when the beasts come?"
Button laughed. Before he could stir Harker was trapped fast in a web
of creepers and tough fern, and the black birds were screeching and
clashing their sharp beaks in his face.
"That happens," Button said. She stroked the ferns. "Our cousins
understand us, even better than the birds."
Harker lay sweating, even after he was free again. Finally he said,
"Those creatures in the underground lake. Are they your cousins?"
Button's fear-thought thrust against his mind like hands pushing away.
"No, don't.... Long, long ago the legend is that this valley was a
huge lake, and the Swimmers lived in it. They were a different species
from us, entirely. We came from the high gorges, where there are only
barren cliffs now. This was long ago. As the lake receded, we grew more
numerous and began to come down, and finally there was a battle and we
drove the Swimmers over the falls into the black lake. They have tried
and tried to get out, to get back to the light, but they can't. They
send their thoughts through to us sometimes. They...." She broke off.
"I don't want to talk about them any more."
"How would you fight them if they did get out?" asked Harker easily.
"Just with the birds and the growing things?"
Button was slow in answering. Then she said, "I will show you one
way." She laid her hand across his eyes. For a moment there was only
darkness. Then a picture began to form--people, his own people, seen as
reflections in a dim and distorted mirror but recognizable. They poured
into the valley through a notch in the cliffs, and instantly every
bush and tree and blade of grass was bent against them. They fought,
slashing with their knives, making headway, but slowly. And then,
across the plain, came a sort of fog, a thin drifting curtain of soft
white.
It came closer, moving with force of its own, not heeding the wind.
Harker saw that it was thistledown. Seeds, borne on silky wings. It
settled over the people trapped in the brush. It was endless and
unhurrying, covering them all with a fine fleece. They began to writhe
and cry out with pain, with a terrible fear. They struggled, but they
couldn't get away.
The white down dropped away from them. Their bodies were covered with
countless tiny green shoots, sucking the chemicals from the living
flesh and already beginning to grow.
Button's spoken thought cut across the image. "I have seen your
thoughts, some of them, since the moment you came out of the caves. I
can't understand them, but I can see our plains gashed to the raw earth
and our trees cut down and everything made ugly. If your kind came
here, we would have to go. And the valley belongs to us."
Matt Harker's brain lay still in the darkness of his skull, wary, drawn
in upon itself. "It belonged to the Swimmers first."
"They couldn't hold it. We can."
"Why did you save me, Button? What do you want of me?"
"There was no danger from you. You were strange. I wanted to play with
you."
"Do you love me, Button?" His fingers touched a large smooth stone
among the fern roots.
"Love? What is that?"
"It's tomorrow and yesterday. It's hoping and happiness and pain, the
complete self because it's selfless, the chain that binds you to life
and makes living it worth while. Do you understand?"
"No. I grow, I take from the soil and the light, I play with the
others, with the birds and the wind and the flowers. When the time
comes I am ripe with seed, and after that I go to the finish-place and
wait. That's all I understand. That's all there is."
He looked up into her eyes. A shudder crept over him. "You have no
soul, Button. That's the difference between us. You live, but you have
no soul."
After that it was not so hard to do what he had to do. To do quickly,
very quickly, the thing that was his only faint chance of justifying
Sim's death. The thing that Button may have glimpsed in his mind but
could not guard against, because there was no understanding in her of
the thought of murder.