AND I HAVE COME UPON THIS PLACE BY LOST WAYS
It was so beautiful.
Evan's too-muscular stomach tightened as he came into the Senior Commons and saw them around the great view port Forgetting his mountain, forgetting even his ghasdy vest he stared like a layman at the _white-clad Scientists in the high evening sanctum of their ship. He still could not believe.
A Star Research Ship, he marveled. A Star Science Mission and I am on it. Saved from a Technician's mean life, privileged to be a Scientist and search the stars for knowledge—
"What'll it be, Evan?"
Young Doctor Sunny Isham was at the bevbar. Evan mumbled amenities, accepted a glass. Sunny was the other junior Scientist and in theory Evan's equal. But Sunny's parents were famous Research Chiefs and the tissue of his plain white labcoat came from god knew where across the galaxy.
Evan pulled his own coarse whites across his horrible vest and wandered toward the group around the port. Why had he squandered his dress credit on Alde-baranian brocade when all these Star Scientists came from Aldebtech? Much better to have been simple Evan Dilwyn the general issue Galtech nobody—and an anthrosyke to boot.
37
38 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE
To his relief the others ignored his approach. Evan skirted the silence around the lean tower of the Mission Chief and found a niche behind a starched ruff belonging to the Deputy, Doctor Pontreve. Pontreve was murmuring to the Astrophysics Chief. Beyond them was a blonde dazzle—little Cyberdoctor Ava Ling. The girl was joking with the Sirian colleague. Evan listened to them giggle, wondering why the Sirian's scaly blue snout seemed more at home here than his own broad face. Then he looked out the port and his stomach knotted in a different way.
On the far side of the bay where the ship had landed a vast presence rose into the sunset clouds. The many-shouldered Clivorn, playing with its unending cloud-veils, oblivious of the alien ship at its feet. An'druinn, the Mountain of Leaving, the natives called it. Why "leaving," Evan wondered for the hundredth time, his eyes seeking for the thing he thought he had glimpsed. No use, the clouds streamed forward. And the routine survey scans could not—
The Deputy had said something important.
"The ship is always on status go," rumbled the Captain's voice from the bevbar. "What does the Chief say?"
Evan's gasp went unnoticed; their attention was on the Research Chief. For a moment the high Scientist was silent, smoke of his THC cheroot drifting from his ebony nostrils. Evan gazed up at the hooded eyes, willing him to say no. Then the smoke quivered faintly: Affirmative.
"Day after next, then." The Captain slapped the bar.
They would leave without looking! And no ship would ever survey this sector again.
Evan's mouth opened but before he could find courage Sunny Isham was smoothly reminding the Deputy of the enzyme his bioscan had found. "Oh, Sunny, may I touch you?" Ava Ling teased. And then a glance from the Chief started everyone moving toward the refectory, leaving Evan alone by the port.
They would process Sunny's enzyme. And they
And I Have Come upon This Place 39
should, Evan told himself firmly. It was the only valid finding the computers had come up with on this planet. Whereas his mountain ... he turned wistfully to The Clivorn now sinking behind its golden mists across the bay. If once he could see, could go and feel with his hands—
He choked back the Unscientism. The computer has freed man's brain, he repeated fiercely. Was he fit to be a Scientist? His neck hot, he wheeled from the port and hurried after his superiors.
Dinner was another magic scene. Evan's mood softened in the glittering ambience, the graceful small talk. The miracle of his being here. He knew what the miracle was: his old uncle at Galcentral fighting for an outworld nephew's chance. And the old man had won. When this ship's anthrosyke fell sick, Evan Dilwyn's name was topmost on the roster. And here he was among Star Scientists, adding his mite to man's noblest work Where only merit counted, merit and honesty and devotion to the Aims of Research—
Ava Ling's glance jolted him out of his dream. The Captain was relating an anecdote of Evan's predecessor, the anthrosyke Foster.
"—hammering upon the lock with these wretched newt-women hanging all over him," the Captain chuckled. "Seems the mothers thought he was buying the girls as well as their boxes. When he wouldn't take them in they nearly tore him apart. Clothes all torn, covered with mud." His blue eyes flicked Evan. "What a decon job!"
Evan flushed. The Captain was bracing him for the numerous decontaminations he had required for field trips out of seal. Each decon was charged against his personal fund, of course, but it was a nuisance. And bad form. The others never went out of seal, they collected by probes and robots or—very rarely—a trip by sealed bubble-sled. But Evan couldn't seem to get his data on local cultures that way. Natives just wouldn't ineract with his waldobot. He must develop the knack before he used up all his fund.
40 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE
"Oh, they are beautiful!" Ava Ling was gazing at the three light-crystal caskets adorning the trophy wall. These were the "boxes" Foster had taken from the newt people. Evan frowned, trying to recall the passage in Foster's log.
"Soul boxes!" he heard himself blurt. "The boxes they kept their souls in. If they lost them the girls were dead, that's why they fought. But how could—" His voice trailed off.
"No souls in them now," said Doctor Pontreve lightly. "Well, what do we say? Does this wine have a point or does it not?"
When they finally adjourned to the gameroom it was Evan's duty to dim the lights and activate the ser-vobots. He kept his eyes from the ports where The Clivorn brooded in its clouds, and went out to the laughter and flashes spilling from the gamdroom. They were at the controls of a child's laser game called Sigma.
"Turning in?" Little Ava Ling panted brightly, mo-mentarily out of the game. Evan caught her excited scent.
"I don't know," he smiled. But she had already turned away.
He stalked on, hating his own primitive olfactory reflexes, and pushed through the portal of the command wing of the Laboratories. Sound cut off as if closed behind him. The corridor gleamed in austere silence. He was among the high-status Labs, the temples of Hard-science. Beside him was the ever-lighted alcove holding the sacred tape of Mission Requirements in its helium seal.
He started down the hall, his nape as always prickling faintly. Into these Laboratories flowed all the data from the sensors, the probes, the sampling robots and bioanalysers and cyberscans, to be shaped by the Scientists' skills into forms appropriate to the Mission Requirements and fit to be fed finally into the holy of holies, the Main Computer of the ship, which he was now approaching. From here the precious Data
And I Have Come upon This Place 41
beamed automatically back across the galaxy into the Computer of Mankind at Galcentral.
By the entrance to the Master Console a sentry stood, guarding against Unauthorized Use. Evan tensed as he crossed the man's impassive gaze, tried to hold himself more like a Scientist. In his bones he felt himself an imposter here; he belonged back in Technician's gray, drudging out an anonymous life. Did the sentry know it too? With relief he turned into the staff wing and found his own little cubby.
His console was bare. His assistant had dutifully cleaned up his unprofessional mess of tapes and—embarrassing weakness—handwritten notes. Evan tried to feel grateful. It was not Scientific to mull over raw findings, they should be fed at once into the proper program. The computer has freed man's brain, he told himsel£ tugging at a spool rack.
From behind the rack fell a bulging file. That stupid business he had tried of correlating a culture's social rigidity with their interest in new information, as represented by himself and his waldobot. The results had seemed significant, but he had no suitable computer categories into which he could program. An anthrosyke had twenty-six program nouns ... Sunny Isham had over five hundred for his molecular biology. But that was Hardscience, Evan reminded himself. He began to feed the worthless file into his disposer, idly flicking on his local note-tapes.
"—other mountains are called Oremal, Vosnuish, and so on," he heard himself say. "Only The Clivorn has the honorific An or The. Its native name An'druinn or The Mountain of Leaving may refer to the practice of ritual exile or death by climbing the mountain. But this does not appear to fit the rest of the culture. The Clivorn is not a taboo area. Herdsmen's paths run all over the slopes below the glaciation line. The tribe has a taboo area on the headland around their star-sighting stones and the fish-calling shrine. Moreover, the formal third-person case of the word Leaving suggests that it is not the natives who leave but some others who leave or
42 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE
have left. But who could that be? An invading tribe? Not likely; the inland ranges are uninhabited and all travel is by coracle along the coasts. And the terrain beyond An'druinn seems imp—"
These were his notes made before he began to search the survey scans of The Clivorn for something to explain its name—a cave or cairn or artifact or even a pass or trail. But the clouds had been too dense until that day when he had thought he'd seen that line. Seen! He winced. Did he hope to do Science with his feeble human senses?
"—transistorized tar pits of the galaxy!" said a hoarse voice.
Evan whirled. He was alone with the tape.
"Computer of mankind!" sneered the voice. Evan realised it was the voice of his predecessor, the anthro-syke Foster, imperfectly erased from the old tape beyond his own notes. As he jumped to wipe it Foster's ghost-voice said loudly, "A planetary turd of redundant data on stellar processes on which no competent mind has looked for five hundred years." • Evan gasped. His hand missed the wiper, succeeded only in turning the volume down.
"Research!" Foster was cackling drunkenly. "Get their hands dirtyV A blur of static; Evan found himself crouching over the console. Horrified he made out the words. "Shamans! Hereditary button-pushing imbeciles!" More blur, and Foster was mumbling something about DNA. "Call that life!" he croaked, "the behavior of living beings?... In all the galaxy, the most complex, the most difficult ... our only hope ..." The voice faded again.
Evan saw the spool was almost finished.
"Scientific Utopia!" Foster guffawed. "The perfectly engineered society. No war. We no longer need study ourselves, because we're perfect." A gurgling noise blotted out the words. Foster had been drinking alcohol in his Laboratory, Evan realized. Out of his mind.
"And I'm their court clown." There was a long belch. "Learn a few native words, bring back some
And I Have Come upon This Place 43
trinkets ... good old Foster. Don't rock the boat." The voice made indistinct groaning noises and then cried clearly, "On your hands and knees! Down on the stones, alone. Simmelweiss. Galois. Dirty work. The hard lonely work of—"
The spool ran out.
Through the whirling in his head Evan heard brisk heel-taps. He stood up as his door opened. It was Deputy Pontreve.
"Whatever are you up to, Evan? Did I hear voices?"
"Just my—local notes, sir."
Pontreve cocked his head.
"On that mountain, Evan?" His voice was dry.
Evan nodded. The thought of their leaving flooded back upon him.
"Doctor Pontreve, sir, it seems such a pity not to check it. This area won't be surveyed again."
"But what can we conceivably hope to find? And above all, what has this mountain to do with your specialty?"
"Sir, my cultural studies point to something anomalous there. Some—well, I don't exactly know what yet. But I'm sure I got a glimpse—"
"Of the mythical Time Gate, perhaps?" Pontreve's smile faded. "Evan. There is a time in every young Scientist's life which crucially tests his vocation. Is he a Scientist? Or is he merely an over-educated Technician*} Science must not, will not betray itself back into phenomenology and impressionistic speculation . . . You may not know this, Evan," Pontreve went on in a different tone, "but your uncle and I were at Pre-Sci together. He has done a great deal for you. He has faith in you. I would feel it deeply if you failed him."
Evan's heart shrank. Pontreve must have helped his uncle get him here. Appalled, he heard himself saying:
"But Doctor Pontreve, if Uncle has faith in me he'd want me to have faith in myself. Isn't it true that useful discoveries have been made by men who persisted in what seemed to be only a—hunch?"
Pontreve drew back.
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"To speak of idle curiosity, which is all you really suffer from, Evan, in the same breath with the inspired intuition, the serendipity of the great Scientists of history? You shock me. I lose sympathy." He eyed Evan, licked his lips. "For your uncle's sake, lad," he said tightly, "I beg of you. Your position is shaky enough now. Do you want to lose everything?"
An acrid odor was in Evan's nostrils. Fear. Pontreve was really frightened. But why?
"Come out of this now, that's an order."
In silence Evan followed the Deputy down the corridors and back into the Commons. No one was in sight except three scared-looking Recreation youngsters waiting outside the gameroom for their nightly duty. As he passed Evan could hear the grunting of the senior Scientists in final duel.
He slammed on into his quarters, for once leaving the view opaque, and tried to sort the nightmare. Pon-treve's pinched face roiled with Foster's drunken heresy in his brain. Such fear. But of what? What if Evan did disgrace himself? Was there something that would be investigated, perhaps found out?
Was it possible that a Scientist could have been bribed!
That would account for the fear ... and the "miracle."
Evan gritted his jaw. If so, Pontreve was a false Scientist! Even his warnings were suspect, Evan thought angrily, twisting on his airbed in vain search of something tangible to combat. The memory of Ava Ling's fragrance raked hini. He slapped the port filters and was flooded with cold light.
The planet's twin moons were at zenith. Beneath them the mountain loomed unreal as foam in the perpetual racing mists. The Clivorn was not really a large mountain, perhaps a thousand meters to the old glacia-tion line, but it rose from sea level alone. Torch-glows winked from the village at its feet. A fish-calling dance in progress.
Suddenly Evan saw that the clouds were parting over
And I Have Come upon This Place 45
The Clivorn's upper crags. As only once before, the turrets above the glacier's mark were coming clear. The last veils blew by.
Evan peered frantically. Nothing .. . No, wait! And there it was, a faintly-flickering dead level line around the whole top. Say two-hundred meters below the crest. What could it be?
The clouds closed back. Had he really seen anything?
Yes!
He leaned his forehead against the port. Pontreve had said, there comes a time in every Scientists life ... in a million barren planets he might never have another such chance. The knowledge of what he was about to do grew in his guts and he was scared to death.
Before he could lose courage he flung himself back and slammed his sleep-inducer to full theta.
Next morning he dressed formally, spent a few minutes with his Terms of Grant codex and marched into Pontreve's office. The appointment ritual went smoothly.
"Doctor Deputy-Administrator," Evan's throat was dry. "As accredited Anthrosyke of this Mission I hereby exercise my prerogative of ordering an all-band full sensor probe of the terrain above five hundred meters indicated by these coordinates."
Pontreve's pursed lips sagged. "An all-band probe? But the cost—"
"I certify that my autonomous funds are adequate," Evan told him. "Since this is our last on-planet day, I would like to have it done soonest, sir, if you would."
In the full daylight bustle of the Labs, before the ranked Technicians, Apprentices and Mechs, Pontreve could say no more. Evan was within his rights. The older man's face grayed and he was silent before ordering his aide to produce the authorization forms. When they were placed before Evan he stabbed his finger on the line where Evan must certify that the scan was relevant to his Requirements of Specialization.
Evan set his thumbprint down hard, feeling the eyes
46 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE
of the Tech-staff on him. This would take the last of his fund. But he had seen the Anomaly!
"Sir, you'll be interested to know I've had more evidence since—since our meeting."
Pontreve said nothing. Evan marched back to his lab, conscious of the whispers traveling through the wing. The probe would not take long once the sensor configuration was keyed in. He told his assistant to be ready to receive it and settled to wait.
Endless heartbeats later his man came back holding the heavily-sealed official cannister before him in both hands. Evan realized he had never touched an original before; all-band scans were in practice ordered only by the Chief and then rarely.
He took a deep breath and broke the seals. It would be a long decoding job.
At shiftover he was still sitting, stone-faced at his console. Noonbreak had sounded, the Labs had emptied and filled. A silence grew in the staff wing, broken finally by Pontreve's footsteps down the hall. Evan stood up slowly. Pontreve did not speak.
"Nothing, sir," Evan said into the Deputy's eyes. "I'm . . . sorry."
The eyes narrowed and a pulse twitched Pontreve's lip. He nodded in a preoccupied manner and went away.
Evan continued to stand, mechanically reviewing his scan. According to every sensor and probe The Clivorn was an utterly ordinary mountain. It rose up in rounded folds to the glaciation limit and then topped off in strikingly weathered crags. The top was quite bare. There were no caves, no tunnels, no unusual minerals, no emissions, no artifacts nor traces of any sort. At the height where Evan had seen the strange line there was perhaps a faint regularity or tiny shelf, a chance coincidence of wind-eroded layers. The reflection of moonlight on this shelf must have been what he'd seen as a flickering line.
Now he was finished as a Scientist.
For an anthrosyke to waste his whole fund on scan-
And I Have Come upon This Place 47
ning a bare mountain was clear grounds for personality reassessment. At least. Surely he could also be indicted for misuse of Ship's Resources. And he had defied a Deputy-Administrator.
Evan felt quite calm, but his mind strayed oddly. What would have happened, he wondered, if he had found a genuine Anomaly? A big alien artifact, say; evidence of prior contact by an advanced race. Would it have been believed? Would anyone have looked? He had always believed that Data were Data. But what if the wrong person found them in the wrong, Unscientific way?
Well, he at any rate was no longer a Scientist.
He began to wonder if he was even alive, locked into this sealed ship. He seemed to have left his cubby; he was moving down the corridors leading to the lock.
Something was undoubtedly going to happen to him very soon. Perhaps they would begin by confining him to quarters. His was an unheard-of malfeasance, they might well be looking up precedents.
Meanwhile he was still free to move. To order the Tech-crew to open the personnel lock, to sign him out a bubble sled.
Almost without willing it he was out in the air of the planet.
Delphis Gamma Five, the charts called it. To the natives it was simply the World, Ardhvenne. He opened the bubble. The air of Ardhvenne was fresh. The planet was in fact not far from the set of abcissae Evan knew only as terranormal.
Beneath his sled the sea arm was running in long salty swells lit here and there by racing fingers of sunlight. Where the sun struck the rocks the spray was dazzling white. A flying creature plummeted past him from the low clouds into the swells below, followed by a tree of spray.
He drove on across the bay to the far shore by the village and grounded in a sandy clutter of fishnets. The sled's voder came alive.
48 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE
"Doctor Dilwyn." It was Pontreve's voice. "You will return immediately."
"Acknowledged," said Evan absently. He got out of the sled and set the autopilot. The sled rose, wheeled over him and fled away over the water to the gleaming ship.
Evan turned and started up the path toward the village, where he had come on his field trip the week before. He doubted that they would send after him. It would be too costly in time and decontamination.
It felt good to walk on natural earth with the free wind at his back. He hunched his shoulders, straining the formal labcoat. He had always been ashamed of his stocky, powerful body. Not bred to the Scientist life. He drew a lungful of air, turned the corner of a rock outcrop and came face to face with a native.
The creature was his own height with a wrinkled olive head sticking out of a wool poncho. Its knobby shanks were bare, and one hand held a club set with a soft-iron spike. Evan knew it for an elderly pseudo-female. She had just climbed out of a trench in which she had been hacking peat for fuel,
"Good day, Aunt," he greeted her.
"Good three-spans-past-high-sun," she corrected him tartly. Temporal exactitude was important here. She clacked her lips and turned to stack her peat sods. Evan went on toward the village. The natives of Ardhvenne were one of the usual hominid variants, distinguished by rather unstable sex morphology on a marsupial base.
Peat smoke wrinkled his nose as he came into the village street It was lined by a double file of dry-rock huts, thatched with straw and set closer together for warmth. Under the summer sun it was bleak enough. In winter it must be desolate.
Signs of last night's ceremonials were visible in the form of burnt-out resin brooms and native males torpid against the sunnier walls. A number of empty gourds lay in the puddles. On the shady side were mounds of dirty wool which raised small bald heads to stare at
And I Have Come upon This Place 49
him. The local sheep-creatures, chewing cud. The native wives, Evan remembered, would now be in the houses feeding the young. There was a desultory clucking of fowl in the eaves. A young voice rose in song and fell silent.
Evan moved down the street. The males' eyes followed him in silence. They were a taciturn race, like many who lived by rocks and sea.
It came to him that he had no idea at all what he was doing. He must be in profound shock or fugue. Why had he come here? In a moment he must turn back and submit himself to whatever was in store. He thought about that. A trial, undoubtedly. A long Reassessment mess. Then what? Prison? No, they would not waste his training. It would be CNPTS, Compulsory Non-Preferred Technicians Service. He thought about the discipline, the rituals. The brawling Tech Commons. The dorms. End of hope. And his uncle heartbroken.
He shivered. He could not grasp the reality.
What would happen if he didn't go back? What if the ship had to leave tomorrow as programmed? It couldn't be worth sterilizing this whole area just for him. He would be recorded as escaped, lost perhaps after a mental breakdown.
He looked around the miserable village. The huts were dark and reeked inside. Could he live here? Could he teach these people anything?
Before him was the headman's house.
"Good, uh, four-spans-past-high-sun, Uncle."
The headman clicked noncommitally. He was a huge-limbed creature, sprawled upon his lounging bench. Beside him was the young male Parag from whom Evan had obtained most of his local information.
Evan found a dry stone and sat down. Above the huts streamed the unceasing mist-veils. The Clivorn was a shadow in the sky; revealed, hidden, revealed again. A naked infant wandered out, its mouth sticky with gruel. It came and stared at Evan, one foot
50 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE
scratching the other leg. No one spoke. These people were capable of convulsive activity, he knew. But when there was nothing urgent to be done they simply sat, as they had sat for centuries. Incurious.
With a start Evan realized that he was comparing these scraggy hominids to the Scientists at ease in their ship. He must be mad. The ship—the very symbol of man's insatiable search for knowledge! How could he be so insane, just because they had rejected his data— or rather, his non-data? He shook his head to clear the heresy.
"Friend Parag," he said thickly.
Parag's eyes came 'round.
"Next sun-day is the time of going of the sky ship. It is possible that I-alone-without-co-family will remain here."
The chiefs eyes came open and swiveled toward him too.
Parag clicked I-hear.
Evan looked up at the misty shoulders of The Clivorn. There was sunlight on one of the nearly vertical meadows cradled in its crags. It was just past Ardhvenne's summer solstice, the days were very long now. In his pocket was the emergency ration from the sled.
Suddenly he knew why he was here. He stood up staring at The Clivorn. An'druinn, The Mountain of Leaving.
"An easy homeward path, Uncle." He had inadvertently used the formal farewell. He began to walk out of the village on the main Path. Other trails ran straight up the mountain flank behind the huts; the females used these to herd their flocks. But the main Path ran in long straight graded zigzags. On his previous trips he had gone along it as far as the cairn.
The cairn was nothing but a crumbled double-walled fire hearth, strewn with the remains of gourds and dyed fleeces. The natives did not treat it as a sacred place. It was simply the lower end of the Path of Leaving and a good place to boil dyes.
And I Have Come upon Tras Place 51
Beyond the cairn the Path narrowed to eroded gravel, a straight scratch winding over The Clivorn's shoulders to the clouds. The dead and dying were carried up this way, Evan knew, and abandoned when they died or when the bearers had had enough. Sometimes relatives returned to pile stones beside the corpse, and doubtless to retrieve the deceased's clothing. He had already passed a few small heaps of weathered rocks and bones.
Up this path also were driven those criminals or witches of whom the tribe wished to be rid. None ever returned, Parag told him. Perhaps they made it to another village. More likely, they died in the mountains. The nearest settlement was ninety kilometers along the rugged coast.
He topped the first long grade over the lowest ridge, walking easily with the wind at his back. The gravel was almost dry at this season though The Clivorn was alive with springs. Alongside ran a soppy sponge of peat moss and heather in which Evan could make out bones every few paces now.
When the Path turned back into the wind he found that the thin mists had already hidden the village below. A birdlike creature soared over him, keening and showing its hooked beak. One of the tenders of The Clivorn's dead. He watched it ride off on the gale, wondering if he were a puzzle to its small brain.
When he looked down there were three olive figures ahead of him on the Path. The native Parag with two other males. They must have climbed the sheep-trails to meet him here. Now they waited stolidly as he plodded up.
Evan groped through the friends-met-on-a-journey greeting.
Parag responded. The other two merely clicked and stood waiting, blocking the Path. What did they want? Perhaps they had come after a strayed animal.
"An easy home-going," Evan offered in farewell. When they did not stir he started uphill around them.
Parag confronted him.
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"You go on the Path."
"I go on the Path," Evan confirmed. "I will return at sun-end."
"No," said Parag. "You go on the Path of Leaving."
"I will return," insisted Evan. "At sun-end we will have friendly speech."
"No." Parag's hand shot out and gripped Evan's jacket. He yanked.
Evan jumped back. The others surged forward. One of them was pointing at Evan's shoes. "Not needful."
Evan understood now. Those who went on this Path took nothing. They assumed he was going to his death and they had come for his clothing.
"No!" he protested. "I will return! I go not to Leaving!"
Scowls of olive anger closed in. Evan realized how very poor they were. He was stealing valuable garments, a hostile act.
"I go to village now! I will return with you!"
But it was too late. They were pawing at him, jerking the strange fastenings with scarred olive claws. Dirty hair-smell in his nose. Evan pushed at them and half his jacket ripped loose. He began running straight up the hillside. They started after him. To his surprise he saw that his civilized body was stronger and more agile than theirs. He was leaving them behind as he lunged up from sheep-track to track.
At the ridge he risked a look back and shouted. "Friends! I will return!" One of them was brandishing a sheep-goad.
He whirled and pounded on up the ridge. Next moment he felt a hard blow in his side and went reeling. The sheep-goad clattered by his legs. His side—they had speared him! He gulped air on a skewer of pain and made himself run on. Up. No track here but a smooth marsh tipped skyward. He ran stumbling on the tussocks, on and up. Mist-wraiths flew by.
At a rock cornice he looked back. Below him three misty figures were turning away. Not following, up The Clivorn.
And I Have Come upon This Place 53
His breathing steadied. The pain in his side was localized now. He wedged his torn sleeve between arm and ribs and began to climb again. He was on the great sinew that was The Clivorn's lowest shoulder. As he climbed he found he was not quite alone in the streaming wraith-world; now and then a sheep bounded up with an absurd kek-kek-kek and froze to stare at him down its pointed nose.
He was, he realized, a dead man as far as the village was concerned. A dead man to the ship, a dead man here. Could he make the next village, wounded as he was? Without compass, without tools? And the pocket with his ration had been torn away. His best hope was to catch one of the sheep-creatures. That was not easily done by a single man. He would have to devise some sort of trap.
Curiously uncaring of his own despair he climbed on. The first palisades were behind him now. Before him was a steep meadow moist with springs of clear peat water, sprigged with small flowers. Great boulders stood, or rather hung here, tumbled by the vanished batteries of ice. In the milky dazzle their cold black shadows were more solid than they. The sun was coming with the wind, lighting the underside of the cloud-wrack above him.
He clambered leaning sideways against the wind, his ' free hand clutching at wet rocks, tufts of fern. His heart was going too fast. Even when he rested it did not slow but hammered in his chest. The wound must be deeper than he'd thought. It was burning now and it hurt increasingly to lift his feet. Presently he found that he had made no progress at all but marched in place drunkenly for a dozen steps.
He ground his teeth, gasping through them. The task was to focus on a certain rock ahead—not too far— and push himself up into the sky. One rock at a time. Rest. Pick another, push on. Rest. Push on. Finally he had to stop between rocks. Breath was a searing ache. He wiped at the slaver on his jaw.
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Make ten steps, then. Stop. Ten steps. Stop. Ten steps...
A vague track came underfoot. Not a sheep-track, he was above the sheep. Only the huge creatures of the clouds ranged here. The track helped, but he fell often to his knees. On ten steps. Fall, Struggle up. Ten steps. On your knees in the stones, someone had said. There was no more sunlight.
He did not at first understand why he was facing rocky walls. He looked up, stupid with pain, and saw he was against the high, the dreadful cliffs. Somewhere above him was The CHvorn's head. It was nearly dark.
He sobbed, leaning on the stone flanks. When his body quieted he heard water and staggered to it among the rocks. A spouting streamlet, very cold, acid-clear. The Water of Leaving. His teeth rattled.
While he was drinking a drumming sound started up in the cliff beside him and a big round body caromed out, smelling of fat and fur. A giant rock-coney. He drank again, shivering violently, and pulled himself to the crevice out of which the creature had come. Inside was a dry heathery nest. With enormous effort he got himself inside and into the coney's form. It was safe here, surely. Safe as death. Almost at once he was unconscious.
Pain woke him in the night. Above the pain he watched the stars racing the mists. The moons rose and cloud-shadows walked on the silver wrinkled sea below him. The Clivorn hung over him, held him fast. He was of The Clivorn now, living its life, seeing through its eyes.
Over the ridgeline, a hazy transcience. Moon-glints on a forest of antlers. The beasts of Clivorn were drifting in the night. Clouds streamed in and they were gone. The wind moaned unceasing, wreathing the flying scud.
Moonlight faded to rose-whiteness. Cries of birds. Outside his den a musky thing lapped at the stream, chittered and fled. He moved. He was all pain now, he could not lie still. He crawled out into the pale rose
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dawn hoping for warmth, and drank again at Clivorn's water, leaning on the rock.
Slowly, with mindless caution he looked around. Above die thrumming of the wind he heard a wail. It rose louder.
An opening came in the cloud stream below. He saw the headland beyond the bay. On it was a blinding rose-gold splinter. The Ship. Thin vapor was forming at its feet.
While he watched it began to slide gently upwards, faster and faster. He made a sound as if to call out, but it was no use. Clouds came between. When they opened again the headland was empty. The wailing died, leaving only the winds of Clivorn.
They had left him.
Cold came round his heart. He was utterly lost now. A dead man. Free as death.
His head seemed light now and he felt a strange frail energy. Up on his right there seemed to be a ledge leading onto a slanting shield of rock. Could he conceivably go on? The thought that he should do something about killing a sheep troubled him briefly, died. He found he was moving upward. It was like his dreams of being able to soar. Up—easily—so long as he struck nothing, breathed without letting go of the thing in his side.
He had reached the slanting shield and was actually climbing now. Hand up and grasp, pull, foot up, push. A few steps sidling along a cleft. The Clivorn's gray li-chened face was close to his. He patted it foolishly, caught himself from walking into space. Hand up, grasp. Pull. Foot up. How had he come so high? Handhold. Left hand would not grip hard. He forced it, felt warm wet start down his side. Pull.
The rocks had changed now. No longer smooth but wildly crystalloid. He had cut his cheek. Igneous extrusion weathered into fantastic shelves.
"I am above the great glaciation," he muttered to the carved chimney that rose beside him, resonating in the
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gale. Everything seemed acutely clear. His hand was caught overhead.
He frowned up at it, furious. Nothing there. He wrenched. Something. He was perched, he saw on a small snug knob. Wind was a steady shrieking. Silver-gold floodlights wheeled across him; the sun was high now, somewhere above the cloud. One hand was still stuck in something above his head. Odd.
He strained at it, hauling himself upright.
As he rose, his head and shoulders jolted ringingly. Then it was gone and he was spread-eagled, hanging on The Clivorn, fighting agony. When it ebbed he saw that there was nothing here. What was it? What had happened?
He tried to think, decided painfully that it had been an hallucination. Then he saw that the rock beside his face was sterile. Lichenless. And curiously smooth, much less wind-eroded.
Something must have been shielding it slightly for a very long time. Something which had resisted him and then snapped away.
An energy-barrier.
Bewildered he turned his head into the wind-howl, peered along the cliffs. To either side of him a band of unweathered rock about a meter broad stretched away level around The Clivorn's crags. It was overhung in places by the rocks above. Invisible from a flyer, really.
This must be the faint shelf-line he had found on the scans. The effect of long shielding by an energy-barrier. But why hadn't the detectors registered this energy? He puzzled, finally saw that the barrier could not be constant. It must only spring into existence when something came near, triggered it. And it had yielded when he pushed hard. Was it set to allow passage to larger animals which could climb these rocks?
He studied the surfaces. How long? How long had it been here, intermittently protecting this band of rock? Millenia of weathering, above and below. It was above the ice-line. Placed when the ice was here? By whom?
This sourceless, passive energy was beyond all hu-
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man technology and beyond that of the few advanced aliens that man had so far encountered.
There rose within him a tide of infinite joy, carrying on it like a cork his rational conviction that he was delirious. He began to climb again. Up. Up. The barrier was fifty meters below him now. He dislodged a stone, looked under his arm to see it fall. He thought he detected a tiny flash, but he could not see whether it had been deflected or not. Birds or falling stones would make such sparkles. That could have been the flickering he had glimpsed.
He climbed. Wetness ran down his side, made red ropes. The pain rode him, he carried it strongly up. Handhold. Wrench. Toehold. Push. Rest. Handhold. "I am pain's horse," he said aloud.
He had been in dense clouds for some time now, the wind-thrum loud in the rock against his body. But something was going wrong with his body and legs. They dragged, would not lift clear. After a bit he saw what it was. The rock face had leveled. He was crawling rather than climbing.
Was it possible he had reached The Clivorn's brow?
He rose to his knees, frightened in the whirling mists. Beside him was a smear of red. My blood with Clivorn's, he thought. On my knees in the stones. My hands are dirty. Sick hatred of The Clivorn washed through him, hatred of the slave for the iron, the stone that outwears his flesh. The hard lonely job ... Who was Simmelweiss? "Clivorn I hate you," he mumbled weakly. There was nothing here.
He swayed forward—and suddenly felt again the gluey resistance, the jolting crackle and release. Another energy-barrier on Clivorn's top.
He fell through it into still air, scrabbled a length and collapsed, hearing the silence. The rocks were wonderfully cool to his torn cheek. But they were not un-weathered here, he saw. It came to him slowly that this second barrier must have been activated by the first. It was only here when something pushed up through the one below.
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Before his eyes as he lay was a very small veined flower. A strange cold pulse boomed under his ear. The Clivorn's heartbeat, harmonics of the gale outside his shield.
The changing light changed more as he lay there. Some time later, he was looking at the stones scattered beyond the little plant. Water-clear gold pebbles, with here and there between them a singular white fragment shaped like a horn. The light was very odd. Too bright. After a while he managed to raise his head.
There was a glow in the mist ahead of him.
His body felt disconnected, and inexplicable agonies whose cause he could no longer remember bit into his breath. He began to crawl clumsily. His belly would not lift. But his mind was perfectly clear now and he was quite prepared.
Quite unstartled, as the mist passed, to see the shining corridor—or path, really, for it was made of a watery stonework from which the golden pebbles had crumbled—the glowing corridor-path where no path could be, stretching up from The Oivorn's summit among the rushing clouds.
The floor of the path was not long, perhaps a hundred meters if the perspective was true. A lilac-blue color showed at the upper end. Freshness flowed down, mingled with The Clivorn's spume.
He could not possibly get up it just now ... But he could look.
There was machinery, too, he saw. An apparatus of gelatinous complexity at the boundary where the path merged with Clivorn rock. He made out a dialed face pulsing with lissajous figures—the mechanism which must have been activated by his passage through the barriers, and which in turn had materialized this path.
He smiled and felt his smile nudge gravel. He seemed to be lying with his cheek on the tawny pebbles at the foot of the path. The alien air helped the furnace in his throat. He looked steadily up the path. Nothing moved. Nothing appeared. The lilac-blue, was it sky? It was flawlessly smooth. No cloud, no bird.
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Up there at the end of the path—what? A field perhaps? A great arena into which other such corridor-paths converged? He couldn't imagine.
No one looked down at him.
In his line of sight, above the dialed face was a device like a translucent pair of helices. One coil was full of liquid coruscations. In the other were only a few sparks of light. While he watched, one of the sparks on the empty side winked out and the filled end flickered. Then another. He wondered, watched. It was regular.
A timing device. The read-out of an energy bank perhaps. Arid almost at an end. When the last one goes, he thought, the gate will be finished. It has waited here, how long?
Receiving maybe a few sheep, a half-dead native. The beasts of Clivorn.
There are only a few minutes left.
With infinite effort he made his right arm move. But his left arm and leg were dead weights. He dragged himself half his length forward, almost to where the path began. Another meter ... but his arm had no more strength.
It was no use. He was done.
If I had climbed yesterday, he thought. Instead of the scan. The scan was by flyer, of course, circling The Clivorn. But the thing here couldn't be seen by a flyer because it wasn't here then. It was only in existence when something triggered the first barrier down below, pushed up through them both. Something large, warmblooded maybe. Willing to climb.
The computer has freed man's brain.
But computers did not go hand by bloody hand across The Clivorn's crags. Only a living man, stupid enough to wonder, to drudge for knowledge on his knees. To risk. To experience. To be lonely.
No cheap way.
The shining Ship, the sealed Star Scientists had gone. They would not be back.
He had finished struggling now. He lay quiet and
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watched the brilliance at the end of the alien timer wink out. Presently there was no more left. With a faint no-sound the path and all its apparatus that had waited on Clivorn since before the glaciers fell, went away.
As it went the winds raged back but he did not heat them. He was lying quite comfortably where the bones of his face and body would mingle one day with the golden pebbles on The Clivorn's empty rock.