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Cross Product, chapter 15: The eleutherophobe
Monday 30 August 2010 at 08:00 am. by mskala Used tags: crossproduct, fictionAgain Mella returned to the tripod and lantern. There were faint clinkings. Maybe she was cooking up a stir-fry in the wok. That wasn't really a very amusing thought; I was getting bored fast. I was tempted to turn around and see what was going on, but I'd been told quite explicitly not to do that, so I didn't. That moment was when I first noticed, what, a shimmer? a disturbance? in the forest in front of me.
I tensed up immediately, and my heart started to pound. Mella had said she expected trouble "only from the North", the quadrant where she'd set me to watch. Thanks, Mella! I didn't know what that statement meant, but trouble by definition isn't something nice. I took a deep breath and tried not to think about jumping up and bolting into the woods to the safety or at least the sanity of the Godstown subdivision. The Witch of the Mountain wouldn't have put me in a risky untenable position, right? But Mella's grasp on reality, and indeed the very nature of reality in this place, didn't exactly make me feel calm and confident.
I tried to put my finger on exactly what I was perceiving. There was the moderate, okay, the intense feeling of general uneasiness or fear. I set that aside and focused on my senses. What did I see, considering it dispassionately? What was different now from the forest I'd been looking at a few minutes earlier? I saw no movement, which was slightly reassuring. But I still felt like I was looking at something wrong. The photons from the lantern bounced back from the bark of the trees into my eyes, forming a harsh pattern of light and shadow. I scanned across it looking for any discrepancy.
There was a whitish glint I couldn't explain, near a tree trunk at what would be eye level if I'd been standing. I stared at it, and then everything snapped into focus, like one of those pictures that can be a duck or a rabbit, and I saw that the glint was the reflection of the lantern mantle in the dark eye of a human figure. Maybe that should be humanoid, I thought, although that possibility didn't bear too much thinking about.
The figure was standing in a stiff erect posture, absolutely still. It was staring over my shoulder, apparently ignoring me, but I knew that was only an act; if I showed any sign of permitting such a thing, it would be on and past me to interfere with the ceremony. I wondered if I ought to speak up and tell it to go away. I couldn't tell you exactly how it looked except that it seemed to blend perfectly and naturally into the trees, like it had grown there in the forest. But I had a distinctly unnatural impression that it was wearing a uniform, as well.
I heard a voice say "No!" loudly, and with another of those perceptual snaps the watcher was gone. I took a moment to realise that the voice hadn't been mine and hadn't been intended as a dismissal of the thing; rather, it was Rick, back behind me, responding to something Mella had asked him. His voice sounded tight and strange, strained; he had more to say but the words spilled out unevenly, all on top of each other, so I couldn't catch more than the gist of what he was saying.
It sounded like Rick thought that Mella, or whoever she was now, owed him something. He cited a long list of favours he had done her, most of which were omissions, things he hadn't done or opportunities he had given away. As far as I could tell. He seemed to be assuming that his listener already knew about the incidents, and he was just reminding her. He said a lot of stuff like "Remember that time - with the girl - Cepheid variable - I knew - and how I kept my mouth shut? Well, what about that?" His voice grew louder, but no more understandable, cracking and swooping all across the audio spectrum. He was alternately pleading and threatening, though for and with what, I couldn't tell.
The female voice interrupted. "Hold thy place, watcher!" "For how long? There was a bargain, remember." "Thou wouldst do well to remember it." "I've kept up my end; canst deny that? It is dark, my Queen." "It is very dark, it gets that way here thou knowest, but all I've asked for is a little time." "I'm just a human, much as I try to forget it, and I can't wait for the galaxies to turn. How long? Gray clouds race across the moon, dost expect me to keep up?" There was a long pause. Then, softly at the lower limit of hearing, she said, "No. Thou speakest truly, and I - stop, hold thy place!" There was a loud bang, and the sound of Mella weeping for several minutes.
She turned off the lantern and for a moment I could only see the ghostly afterimages of the trees, burned into my retinas. Those faded, and as my eyes started adjusting to the dark, I felt a grip on my shoulder. Mella was there with a flashlight, Taylor beside her. "Hurry," she said, "it's gonna start pissing down rain now, and we have to catch him." As if on cue, fat drops started falling. We were wet almost immediately.
Back along the cedar chip trail, but now stumbling along with only the flashlight and in the rain it was much stiffer going. The chips had become slipperly almost slimy, and although I knew it was only an illusion, the trail seemed much narrower and rougher than before. We reached the bend that I remembered as leading to the backyard of Mella's house in Godstown, but I must have remembered wrong, because the trail kept going.
Maybe the trail branched and I didn't notice, because the next thing I remember the surface had changed from cedar chips to mud. We were still hurrying as fast as the conditions would allow, slipping and sliding on the mud. My boots had a pretty good tread, but whatever Mella was wearing wasn't suited for this, and her sopping wet dress seemed to be slowing her down, too. It clung stickily to her body, and branches kept reaching out to catch in her long damp hair and skirt. Nonetheless, she was setting a fast, grim pace.
A gob of lichen suddenly slapped me in the face, and as I extricated myself from the snowberry bush that Taylor had carelessly let whip back at me, the others kept rushing on. I ran to catch up to them, slipped on something unseen without the light to guide me, and fell off the trail and down a leaf-covered slope.
I fetched up sitting on my bottom, against a rough tree. A sharp branch had scratched the side of my face, and I was surely bleeding from it, but I didn't dare reach up to check with my dirty hands. The rain would wash everything clean anyway. I stood up, leaning on the tree for support, and saw that I was on a lower curve of the trail.
I was knocked down again when something came down the trail and collided with me. There were several confused seconds of grabbing and self-defense, during which I recognized that I'd been run down by the large grey-haired defender of the subdivision's public morals. He looked as bad as I felt. One side of his uniform was caked with mud, and his breast pocket seemed to have been blown out from the inside, as if by some escaping explosion. He was breathing heavily and had a scared or pained look on his face. There was a smell of alcohol, sweat, and vanilla.
Uttering a fractured cry, he broke from me and charged through a gap in the bushes to one side of the trail; out into thin air. Looking through the gap I could see that the trail ran along the top of a cliff, a couple meters back from the edge. Maybe it was only a steep slope of bare rock, not a proper vertical cliff, but in the dark there was no practical difference. I had been saved from going over myself only by the tree I'd run into. The commissionaire was nowhere to be seen below.
Then I saw the flashlight coming down the trail, and it was Mella with Taylor. They stopped when they saw me standing there. Wordlessly I pointed out the gap in the bushes. Taylor stalked up to the opening and stared out into the rain. She took a step towards the edge, and another, and for all I know she would have walked right off the cliff too if I hadn't put my hand on her arm to restrain her. She shook her head and said, "Thanks." Mella called to us from further down the trail, and we followed her.
The trail wound back and forth and although we hurried, Taylor and I couldn't catch up to Mella. For a few minutes we could see her flashlight bobbing up and down in the woods ahead of us but it became harder to see as she outdistanced us and soon we were groping along in the dark, not even fully sure where the trail was. I kept half expecting to step out into empty space or smash face-first into a tree, but nothing like that happened. The forest and the chase and the starlight all merged into a blur and I couldn't say how much distance we covered or how long it took. When I regained my normal awareness I was standing at the edge of the flat space where we had seen the petroglyphs, so long ago it felt but, thinking about it, I realised it had been just a day and a half or so.
Mella's flashlight was nowhere to be seen, but by this time the sky had begun to lighten where the sun would rise a few hours in the future. As I walked out of the trees the light was just getting bright enough for colors to be visible. I imagined the three kinds of cone cells in my eyes waking up, muttering greetings to each other and my optic nerves, and rubbing their own little eyes in preparation for a hard day's work.
And there were colors to see, because someone had painted the cliff. I realised that this must be the same cliff where we had seen the petroglyphs on the way up. Then I had noted that it wasn't covered with modern graffitti like the other petroglyphs I had seen, but now that was no longer the case. Now the petroglyphs were enhanced with pinks, purples, browns, and blues, all glistening in the rain, but the artists hadn't stopped at coloring in the stone pictures that were already there. They'd redesigned the whole image.
Now the geometric designs on the cliff were wilder, more fantastic; spirals, triangles, shaded three-dimesional spheres, and something that could only be a projection of a hypercube. They were tied together with the kind of thing I've sometimes seen painted on buildings downtown: a dense semi-organized structure of tubes curving back on each other with arrows at the ends and drop shadows. Some of them looked like huge letters, but not in any alphabet I knew. Around and between the tubes coiled thin legless creatures, worms or snakes I guessed, with long snouts and rows of dots on their backs.
Down the center of the rock face was a huge vertical crack I didn't remember from before, and the painting curved up around it, enhancing the effect with shadings of darker pink and red around a deep oval at the center. Mella was standing on the ledge, facing into the cliff with her arms thrown wide above her head and her legs spread, squarely in front of the crack. It looked like she was trying to hold the two halves of the cliff together, to keep something inside. Her face was nestled into the slit at the top of the oval shape. The water poured down through her hair, carrying traces of the paint which didn't seem to be waterproof at all.
The sight of her there, body arched against the cliff, trying to hold on, filled me with a kind of bottomless sadness; it seemed like such a waste. Before I thought I had hopped up on the ledge below the painting and was edging out towards her. It seemed important to draw a line before things got out of hand.
The footing was trecherous. I took it one step at a time until I got within speaking distance of Mella, both of us squeezed under the slight overhang of the rock. I reached up and grabbed her wrist, mostly because that seemed the safest place to put my hand. A rivulet of water ran from our joined hands and down my arm. I could feel her pulse, fast and strong but steady. Not as fast as my own.
"Safeword, Mella!" I hissed, feeling a little bit silly. The witch giggled, and squirmed around to look me in the eye while keeping her grip on the cliff. "Stack underflow," she said, and stuck out her tongue. I understood her to mean that we were already in reality and couldn't wake up, but I was startled to hear her use computer jargon that way. "Oh, don't look so surprised," she insisted, "Of course I speak your language. You don't know who I am or what I can do." "Nor you me," I said, and tumbled her off the rock ledge.
Of course, it wasn't really that easy. My grip on her left wrist wasn't strong, and her grip on the cliff was. As she crowed at me about her unexpected vocabulary, her attention was slightly distracted. I abused the moment to slide my other arm up between the girl and the stone. My hand caught in the moist fabric of the front of her dress, but I had gone far enough to disrupt her balance. I gave her a quick shove in the abdomen, starting to fall into her body myself, and her far hand popped out of place.
For half a moment we both hung there supported by her other hand, then we dropped writhing into the mud below. Mella executed a perfect judo fall. I landed on top of her, our foreheads contacting painfully. I was overcome for a moment as she gracefully slid out from under me, bounced erect, and ran up to the base of the cliff again.
Taylor showed up almost from nowhere and helped me to my feet. She led me to the edge where the trees gave a bit of shelter, and hugged me. She was warmer than I expected. The pain in my forehead faded, leaving my mind clear. Although it was really still quite dark, I thought I could see each raindrop sharply outlined as it fell.
When Mella had gripped the rock so tightly it looked as if the cliff was likely to split in two, revealing some surprise inside. But now standing on the edge, I could see that the rock was perfectly solid after all; what had looked like a deep crack was just a narrow groove. If anything had escaped, it had done so while the witch and I were distracted, and only Taylor had seen it. The painting made the cliff look more spectacular than it really was, if it really was anything anyway. Maybe there was nothing there except the painting, skin deep and fleeting.
The rain was washing the pigment out of the scratches in the stone now; all the bright colors pooled on the ledge and poured down into the clearing, becoming duller as they gained entropy. Where the colors joined with each other they made a dull brown indistinguishable from the mud. Taylor and I waited at the edge of the clearing while Mella stood in its center, watching the painting dissolve until there was zero trace of its existence.
Then she came with us as we hiked back to the campsite and took down our tents, sparing not a glance at the now-empty concrete pads. She said it was time to leave, and I found a shortcut, and we all walked down the Mountain, back home. This planet's Sun isn't very bright by cosmological standards, so even with a radio telescope you'd never have seen if we walked faster than light.
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