Many of the trees carried fruit—bright bulbous things coloured yellow or red—but they were high in the crowns, and none had fallen to the sand.
I did not know where I was going, but I strode out purposefully, never pausing. I do not know how long I walked. The sun did not move in the sky; it remained directly overhead.
There were outcrops of black rock about me now, some of which jutted four or five metres above the sand. Etched into the surfaces of these rocks were outlines representing various kinds of animals: horses, deer, some kind of cattle. I half-expected to see these beasts open their eyes as I passed, but they never did.
I had become very thirsty, and was glad to see among these rocks a pool of water, surrounded by wet mud in which I could see the tracks of many animals, though there were none in sight, and I could see no trail by means of which they might have come from the forest. I went to kneel by the pool and dipped the fingers of my left hand into the water, carrying a little of it to my lips—but it was brackish, too salty to be drinkable.
I turned back to the wall of vegetation that prevented my moving inland. It seemed that no good could come of moving along the line of the shore. I did not want to approach again, bringing those awful faces to baleful life, but I did not know what else to do. I was alone, without guidance of any sort. If those who had helped me required something in return, I did not know what it was.
Directly in front of me there was the trunk of a tree which stood straighter and thicker than the rest. I looked at the closed eyes engraven in its thick black bark, and felt a creeping unease rise inside me.
I looked down at the hand which I had unthinkingly used to bring water to my lips, and saw that the fingers were swollen. The skin was beginning to peel from the underlying flesh, which was an unhealthy colour, faintly tinged with gangrenous green. I was astonished by the sight, for I had thought myself whole and healthy.
The water in the pool had become quite still again, and now I knelt down for a second time, and leaned over to look at my reflection. My face had a pallor which seemed to me disgusting. The colour had gone from my eyes, and my hair was a muddy grey. The skin had begun to peel from my forehead, too.
It came to me very suddenly that although my intelligence had somehow been preserved from the oblivion of death, my body had not. My flesh was already showing the stigmata of corruption.
Then, almost immediately, another idea occurred to me. Perhaps this was not the touch of death after all, but the beginning of a metamorphosis. Perhaps I too was fated to become a part of the curious forest, extending roots into the soil. I stood up quickly, and looked again at the tree whose appearance had frightened me.
Did I know the face that was etched into its bark?
Knowing what kind of world I was in, I had not thought it possible for me to feel surprise. It would not have startled me at all to recognise in those carved features a furious face rimmed with poisonous snakes, or the stern glare of some divine countenance more terrible than any human face. But this was not Medusa, or any other character from any other mythology of Earth. It was, instead, something rather more familiar, and uncomfortably so.
It was not a human face at all, though it was humanoid.
As I examined it more closely, I realised that it gave the impression of being part human, but the other part was a confusion of the lupine and the crocodilian.
I took one step forward, and the eyes opened, leaving me with no doubt at all as to the identity of the soul which had been made captive by the hellish tree.
All vormyr look alike to the untutored human eye, but there was one name which always came to my mind whenever I saw a vormyran, or a picture of a vormyran, or heard the word vormyr spoken—and that was the name Amara Guur.
“You’re dead,” I said, very calmly. I did not expect to see the wooden lips move, having formed the impression before that they could not. But the surprises kept coming.
“So are you, Mr. Rousseau,” he replied silkily. “So are you.”
25
There was a long time to wait while Urania and Clio cooked up a surprise package for the monsters that were lurking down below. They quickly came to the conclusion that a bomb wasn’t the answer—it was likely to be very messy and wasn’t guaranteed to be one hundred percent effective. After examining the bits of alien flesh which had come up the shaft attached to the battered Scarid, the Isthomi decided that a biotechnological attack would be infinitely preferable.
While they were figuring out the details of its manufacture they programmed and dispatched a small swarm of flying cameras to reconnoitre for us. These electronic eyes were no bigger than the largest flying insects, but they didn’t have wings. Because they had to do the greater part of their flying in an evacuated shaft—we saw no point in sending them down in the car—they were powered by tiny rockets.
In the meantime, we opened up the other truck and carried our two invalids over there. We stripped it of weapons before depositing them, but I lingered for a while before leaving them alone. Urania had asked me to stay because she wanted to make sure that the Scarid was still on the mend, but I wanted to have a word with Jacinthe Siani anyhow.
She was more-or-less okay, physically, but she was still badly frightened. She didn’t want to be left alone, and was grateful that I didn’t just dump her. She hadn’t expected any favours, given the way she’d dealt with me in the past, but it would have been too cruel to abandon her without some kind of reassurance.
“You’re as safe here as anywhere in Asgard,” I pointed out to her. “If we get through, there’s still a slight chance that we may be able to get the power back on. If we don’t, there’s a slight chance it might come back on anyway. If it doesn’t, you should soon be fit enough to try to get back to the Nine’s worldlet. You have all the time you need to find the way. The Nine are the best friends you could ask for in this situation. You’ll be okay. I wish I could be as confident about my own future.”
“Why go, then?” she asked, in a whisper. She was a pragmatist, who didn’t believe in heroism for its own sake.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I always wanted to go to the Centre,” I told her. “And now something else wants me to go there too.”
That reminded me why I wanted to talk to her.
“Tell me about 994-Tulyar,” I said. “You do understand, don’t you, that he isn’t really Tulyar at all?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “He was hurt, when the machines attacked us. He wasn’t badly injured, but he had difficulty talking. He got better. He says that he knows how to switch the power on.”
There was no point in disputing the fact. She had no idea what had happened to me as a result of the interface with the alien. She had no idea that such a thing was possible. Even the two Tetrax, who must have been in as good a position as anyone to see differences between Tulyar present and Tulyar past, must simply have assumed that if Tulyar’s body was walking and talking, it was Tulyar inside it. If it had behaved peculiarly, they’d simply assumed, like Jacinthe, that it was the result of his injuries. They might think him mad if he behaved crazily enough, but the idea that his body was being operated by a biocopy of alien software sneaked into his brain while he was fast asleep lay beyond their conceptual horizons.
“He was guiding you, wasn’t he?” I asked, determined to stick to less controversial ground. “He knows the way to the Centre.”