He told the others that he felt they had been approached by some invisible entity in the craters and that it had followed them. The dreams were its only successful attempts to establish contact.
The Black Presence? Tedesco 'pathed.
As I said before, this creature would not seem to be intelligent in the sense the Presence would have to be. It lacks order, coordination. If it were the Black Presence, it could contact us easily with its superior esp abilities.
But it must have some telepathic talent! Witness these awful dreams, Kiera 'pathed. She gnashed her pretty teeth in a show of dislike for the visions.
They could reach no conclusions.
By the tenth day out of the Smoke Den all of them could sense the straining nearness of the creature, could feel it drifting at the rim of their extrasensory perception, completely beyond the ken of their normal five senses.
Knowing it was there did nothing to suppress its emanations.
The five espers continued to sleep less than they would have liked, shocked awake again and again from the brink of that ultimate, unspeakable horror, which despite its vividness in dreams was never made quite clear enough to be remembered out of sleep.
They entered the Divide of Cessius, which marked the lower third of January Slash. They crossed its black-and-red marble floor, wending their way between the hundreds of upthrust steel spikes that dotted it, climbed its far wall and came out on the other side, into more sand and cactus.
The dreams continued.
At the edge of the desert they came upon the Vast Remains, the largest known ruins of prewar origins, wound through its blasted streets, past buildings that had fallen but had once stood two thousand meters high. They slept in the shadows of cylindrical buildings that had no entrances or windows; these monoliths still thrummed within and radiated a gentle heat by night, as a byproduct of some other, inexplicable task, filled by pointlessly functioning machinery that had been sealed against the ravages of time. They crossed the inner-city canals, which were filled with blood — or at least with some fluid that quite resembled ichor. They passed scattered robots that still stumbled through their programmed chores, oblivious of the end of their world and of the specterlike five who walked past them in the purple darkness.
And the dreams continued.
Having crossed the Vast Remains in less than a week, they camped by a clean brook, beneath a monstrous, mutated elm— the countryside having changed from its desert motif — and hoped that the ruins might somehow form a barrier between their unknown guest and themselves. All of them badly needed a good day's sleep.
As they lay beneath the gnarled elm, however, the unseen being pressed itself upon them more vigorously than ever: Melopina woke, crying out, with the feeling that some creature had hold of her and was pressing her down into the earth…
She kicked at it.
She flailed the air and snarled in fear.
She gasped for her breath. Jask could see that she was really having some trouble getting it, as if someone were choking her.
Mellie…?
Help me!
Jask bent over her and, as he touched her face to feel for a fever, he felt the… thing rise from her. A cold, damp force pushed over him, lingering long enough for him to recognize that distant psychic fuzziness, was gone without a trace.
When she had explained how it had felt, a formless mass of invisible flesh crushed into her, they discussed this new development.
It's getting bolder, whatever it is, Tedesco 'pathed.
Perhaps my grave robbing is finally being punished, Chaney 'pathed. Maybe this is the spirit of one of my victims, come to torture us.
No one laughed. They were willing to consider any possibility.
By the time they reached the abandoned port of Kittlesticks on the Hadaspuri Sea, they had all experienced physical contact — or something quite similar — with their unwanted companion. It approached them boldly now, while they were sleeping or while they were awake, as if it wished desperately to tell them something, to impart the essentials of a tale, an ethereal Ancient Mariner full of its own history of curses, calms and death.
The five espers walked through the cobbled streets of Kittlesticks, which was little more than a thousand years old but which had been abandoned more than eight centuries ago. Its inhabitants had reported that the ghosts of Indians could be seen in the streets at night, slinking from shadowed door to shadowed door and that in the morning skeletons were found in the beds of men who had gone to sleep with all their flesh. Whether Kittlesticks lay upon ancient Indian burial grounds or whether the sea had washed unclean spirits under the extensive docks in the harbor, no one could say. When half the town's population had died in this mysterious manner, the rest picked up their belongings and moved down the coast, where they founded the town of Last Resort, which had thrived as a Hadaspuri Sea marketplace for many centuries after.
They came out on the docks, where a hundred boats still lay, half rotten and sunken, others of metal and in relatively good repair.
Perhaps, 'pathed Chaney, the thing cannot follow us across water.
I fear that's an empty hole' Tedesco said.
By this time the women were staying close to their men, and the men continually cast wary glances over their shoulders. All of them were heavy-eyed and fuzzy-minded from lack of sleep.
We've nothing to lose by trying it, Melopina 'pathed.
She's right — Jask.
And by taking a ship, we would save days and days of marching around the shore of Hadaspuri — Kiera.
The water slapped at the docks.
The dead and dying ships caught pieces of the morning sun and shone in brief remembrance of their youth.
I've never sailed — Tedesco.
I have — Chaney.
You think you could teach us to man the rig of a ship like that one? Tedesco pointed at what appeared to be a sound, yellow alloy ship, which still rode high in the water after so many years and which contained three masts, all empty of sailcloth.
I could, I think — Chaney.
Jask? — Tedesco.
I'm for it.
Please! Let's try it! — Melopina.
They boarded the yellow ship, which was chained at the far end of the dock, and they found that she was in excellent condition. Her sealed engines, which had been placed in her hull during the Last War, were still functioning, monuments to the great technology of that age. Of its twenty robot tenders, twelve still rolled about the gleaming ship, polishing and repairing, scouring away the gradual erosions of time.
We could forget the sails, Jask said. The engines will carry us across the Hadaspuri.
Chaney stood on the bridge of the vessel, staring at the complex controls, his hairy fingers working them cautiously, his mouth twisted in concentration. Lights popped on; buzzers sounded; gauges registered levels of liquids and of power in the batteries. He looked away from all this for a moment and said to Jask, That's a bad idea.
We'd save a week or more if we didn't bother with sails.
Chaney smiled knowingly, returned to the controls. Then again, the engines might cut out on us when we're in the middle of all that damned water, leave us stranded there until our food and fresh water were gone. Maybe we could boil up a drinkable brew from seawater and survive a bit longer. In the end, though, we'd starve to death.
But those engines have been working for thousands of years, Chaney! Why should they suddenly quit on us when we need them?