Forty
The air smelled marvelously
clean. Rather than total darkness, there were stars overhead, more
than Wallace had ever seen in his life. Aside from the stars,
Wallace could see nothing at all.
"One of the Carn got through!"
Melanie cried out to him from nearby. "Where are you!"
"Here!"
Melanie crawled to him on hands
and knees. Wallace gathered both women into his arms.
Together, they huddled in the
darkness.
"What are we to do?" Sasha
whispered in his ear.
Wallace felt the texture of
lush grass at his feet. The Carn could be anywhere, no more than a
yard or two away and about to pounce and kill them all. Or, it could
be as lost and helpless as themselves. "I think maybe we should stay
put until daylight," he decided.
"I think we landed in someone's
bed," Melanie quipped nervously. "The ground is soft. It
smells like grass. I hope to God it's the park in Harthmore."
But Wallace had never seen so
many stars in Harthmore, nor such an intensity of darkness. At least
he could hear the distant sound of rushing water, a promise that his
thirst would be soon quenched.
"Rest," Sasha said, and curled
up at his side. Melanie sighed with her arms tight about his waist
and fell silent. Wallace closed his eyes, then found it too
difficult to open them again.
At some indeterminate time
later, an hour or a thousand years, Melanie was tugging at his arm.
The night felt a bit cooler as Wallace came to. A stiffer breeze
blew across the unseen landscape.
"Over there!"
Wallace looked about and saw
it. A sliver of gray light took form along the horizon, and slowly
turned to beige, washing out the stars in the process. The morning
breeze stirred a bit more vigorously in the dawn light.
"The sun's coming up," Melanie
said.
Sasha cooed in awe. They
huddled together in a torment of expectancy, awaiting the visual detail of
their new Earth.
Pink light formed along a
jagged horizon of mountains. The distance and angle was all wrong,
as if they were hanging suspended at an altitude and looking down thirty
degrees at the distant curvature of the Earth. And yet the
intensifying light illuminated a familiar stand of conifer trees no more
than a few yards to either side of them. Wallace looked behind him
and could see a low ledge of bright white rock a short distance away.
Melanie and Sasha shot to their
feet as the dawn exploded in a riot of color across the clouded horizon.
A much closer, irregular line of darkness warned Wallace that they were
standing on the edge of a cliff of enormous proportions. Three
thousand feet below, the morning sun spread over a landscape of primal
conifer forests and glittering rivers.
"Good thing we never went
wandering about in the dark," Melanie said. "I guess the Carn must
have gone over. Too bad. It's never the fall, though, always
that sudden stop at the bottom."
Trees of yellow-green laden
with beige pine cones towered into the starlit sky on all sides.
Beneath the trees, moss covered the bare earth, and from the moss sprang a
riotous assortment of flowering plants. As the sun finally cleared
the horizon, Melanie and Sasha stood silhouetted against a sky as clean
and clear as any Wallace had ever seen.
An enormous white bird flew
over, floating on thermals already rising along the cliff.
Dragonflies of various iridescent and metallic colors and sizes darted
about the landscape of flowers.
Tears came to Melanie's eyes.
Sasha dipped her head in misery. Or Qualin. She had survived,
but her people were gone forever.
"Food and water," Wallace said,
not wanting to dwell on the nightmare left behind. "This place is
pretty enough, but we're going to wind up a pile of bleached bones if we
don't find a fast food restaurant around the next corner."
Melanie ventured closer to the
cliff and looked down. "Food and water. Take a look at this."
Wallace joined her. Far
below, animals like white deer grazed the dark green grasslands. The
trees growing along the river and its tributaries were the same
yellow-green as their closer neighbors, although other species were in
evidence as well, including a brilliant silver species of tree that lent
an eerie, winter air to the far bank of the deep blue river.
"We could make a go of it way
down there, but we're way up here," Wallace said.
Melanie turned and eyed the
ridge behind them. "Let's have a look."
Wallace held tight to Sasha's
hand as they climbed the slope. They went over a low section of the
ridge of white rock and found a woodland beyond, a forest of young trees
resembling white birch with yellow-silver leaves, and a ground cover of
lavender flowers interspersed with a ruby and a blazing white variety.
Melanie ran her boot over an
outcropping of rock at her feet, then dropped to her knees with a cry of
astonishment. "Quartz! Wallace, look at this!"
The outcropping was like a mass
of jewels burst through the surface of the earth into the sunlight.
Melanie broke off a flake of a relatively drab stone and struck it against
the flat surface of nearby basalt. Sparks flew into the morning
light.
"A fire comes first," she said.
"Help me carry some of this."
Wallace accepted a double
handful of assorted rock and followed Melanie back to the ridge. She
walked along the flat face of rock with her eyes shielded by one hand
against the reflected glare of sunlight. "All these overhangs could
be lairs of God only knows what kinds of animals," she said excitedly.
This is a virgin world, Wallace, untouched by human hands. Nobody
has ever disturbed any of this."
Melanie found a protective
overhang hidden in the shadows of sapling conifers. She set down her
load of rock at the base of a small boulder embedded in the ground, then
hurried back into the sunlight and began pulling up the brown edges of
moss near the rocks and trees. Without asking for help, she
collected a pile of dried debris, then sat and began chipping away at a
flat stone with a piece of flint. Within minutes, she had a fire
burning.
She looked up with a smile as
bright as the morning sun. "If anything dangerous shows up, throw
fire in its face. I've gotta go find a stick to use as a spear."
Melanie had more enthusiasm for
the chore than Wallace could muster, so he let her go. She quickly
vanished along the face of the ridge, allowing him to attend to Sasha.
Sasha sat on the bare earth and leaned back against a wall of rock.
Wallace sat cross-legged facing her. "I'm sorry about the Saur."
She held out her arm to show
him her scaled flesh with its intensifying pattern of color. "Look
at what I am. I'm not Saur. I'm not human."
Wallace was thrown off balance
by the intensity of her self-hatred.
"Kill me if the Carn find us,"
she said. "Don't let it breed with me. I don't know what my
hatchling, my baby, will be. The Carn will try to feed it your
flesh, or Melanie's, and make it one of its own."
"The Carn is dead," Wallace
said. "He was moving at a pretty good clip, and that cliff wasn't
more than fifty feet away from us."
But Sasha wasn't listening to
him. "Maligoth was our god, our Creator," she said. "I can't
bear to think that he was responsible for what the Carn would have done to
your world. To think that it could start all over again."
Melanie returned, and a flock
of the white birds flew over, this time crying in harmonic voices that
sounded like angels singing. All three looked up and watched them
coast by until they were gone.
Melanie knelt by the fire.
She used a piece of the hard quartz to sharpen the spear, then charred it
in the fire to harden the tip. "I'm going to go back for supplies
and make a bow so that we have a weapon that can kill some rabbits I saw."
She looked up from her chore and grinned. "Big rabbits. And I
can hear a water fall going over the cliff not too far away, so we should
be fed and watered and sleeping like babies by nightfall."
She sat back on her haunches
lost in momentary thought. "I'd give anything for a motion detector
and a year's supply of batteries. We're going to have to stand watch
at night, one at a time, and I know damned well we're not going to be able
to defend ourselves even if we see it coming."
Wallace was reluctant to
discuss the subject. "If you're talking about the Carn, I think it's
safe to assume it's dead."
"I wasn't talking about the
Carn, but if it got through with us, maybe it was supposed to get
through."
"Only the Stik could have
brought us here," Wallace said, certain of his logic, "but I don't think
it was Maligoth. Ghaedor's on top of the situation. He was
from the beginning."
Neither women replied.
Wallace felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his gut that they had so
little faith in their only benefactor.
"According to what you told
us," Melanie said, "Maligoth screwed up by stealing somebody else's
handiwork to keep his own experiment going. I don't think he
understood us too well. That's why he failed so miserably with the
Carn and the Saur, because they were a hybrid from the beginning, half his
creation, half someone else's. That doesn't mean he's giving up
without a fight. I think he's just isolated Sasha with a Carn.
What nicer environment would he want to start that nightmare going all
over again?"
Wallace was sickened by the
thought.
"The Carn could kill us all
with less effort that he expends scratching his balls," Melanie said.
"All it needs is Sasha. And fresh meat to convert the hatchling to a
Carn.
"We'll have to keep on our
toes," she concluded She finished with her spear and rose to her
feet. "You two wait here. I ate some berries that didn't
poison me, so I've got a bit more energy than you two. I'll check on
our water supply and get us a rabbit to eat, or some more berries.
We'll finish this discussion over dinner tonight."
She patted Wallace on the arm
on the way out. "You're going to make a fine ASP agent, Wallace.
I can tell."
Sasha waited until she was gone
before she looked up from her place alongside the fire. "Make me
pregnant, Wallace. Don't let the Carn get me first."
Wallace was surprised by the
practicality of the suggestion. On the other hand, if Maligoth had
brought them here, there were time scales to consider. Maybe
Maligoth intended to work with his and Sasha's offspring. Maybe a
hybrid more human than Saur would breed with the escaped Carn twenty years
down the line and give birth to a Carn with a more manageable appetite.
Then again, maybe they'd never
live to see another dawn.
Wallace moaned in frustration.
There were other possibilities as well. Anyway he cared to look at
it, they were pawns in the hands of warring, inhuman gods, maybe
expendable pawns.
