Dreamsnake (28 page)

Snake was beginning to understand why her own strong will had so
often exasperated the older healers, when she was Melissa’s age. But at
the station there had never been much serious danger, and they could
afford to indulge her.

Snake sat down on a fallen log and motioned to her daughter to sit
beside her. Melissa did so, without looking up at Snake, her shoulders
set in defiance.

“I need your help,” Snake said. “I can’t succeed without you. If
something happens to me—”

“That’s not succeeding!”

“In a way it is. Melissa
…
the healers need
dreamsnakes. Up in that dome they have enough to use them for play. I
have to find out how they got them. But if I can’t, if I don’t come back
down, you’re the only way the other healers will be able to know what
happened to me. And why it happened. You’re the only way they’ll know
about the dreamsnakes.”

Melissa stared at the ground, robbing the knuckles of one hand with
the fingernails of the other. “This is very important to you, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Melissa sighed. Her hands were fists. “All right,” she said. “What do
you want me to do?”

Snake hugged her. “If I’m not back in, oh, two days, take Swift and
Squirrel and ride north. Keep on going past Mountainside and Middlepass.
It’s a long way, but there’s plenty of money in the case. You know how
to get it safely.”

“I have my wages,” Melissa said.

“All right, but the other’s just as much yours. You don’t need to
open the compartments Mist and Sand are in. They can survive until you
get home.” For the first time she actually considered the possibility
that Melissa might have to make the trip alone. “Sand is getting too fat
anyway.” She forced a smile.

“But—” Melissa cut herself off.

“What?”

“If something does happen to you, I couldn’t get back in time to
help, not if I go all the way to the healers’ station.”

“If I don’t come back on my own, there won’t be any way to help me.
Don’t come after me by yourself. Please. I need to know you won’t.”

“If you don’t come back in three days, I’ll go tell your people about
the dreamsnakes.”

Snake let her have the extra day, with some gratitude, in fact.
“Thank you, Melissa.”

They let the tiger-pony and the gray mare loose in a clearing near
the trail. Instead of galloping toward the meadow and rolling in the
grass, they stood close together, watchful and nervous, their ears
swiveling, nostrils wide. The crazy’s old horse stood in the shade
alone, his head down. Melissa watched them, her lips tight.

The crazy stood where he had dismounted, staring at Snake, tears in
his eyes.

“Melissa,” Snake said, “if you do go home alone, tell them I adopted
you. Then—then they’ll know you’re their daughter too.”

“I don’t want to be their daughter. I want to be yours.”

“You are. No matter what.” She took a deep breath and let it out
slowly. “Is there a trail?” she asked the crazy. “What’s the quickest
way up?”

“No trail
…
it opens before me and closes
behind me.”

Snake could feel Melissa restraining a sarcastic remark. “Let’s go,
then,” she said, “and see if your magic will work for more than one.”

She hugged Melissa one last time. Melissa held tight, reluctant to
let her go.

“It’ll be all right,” Snake said. “Don’t worry.”

The crazy climbed surprisingly quickly, almost as if a path really
did open up for him, and for him alone. Snake had to work hard to keep
up with him, and sweat stung her eyes. She scrambled up a few meters of
harsh black stone and grabbed his robe. “Not so fast.”

His breath came quickly, from excitement, not effort. “The
dreamsnakes are near,” he said. He jerked his robe from her hand and
scuttled up sheer rock. Snake wiped her forehead on her sleeve, and
climbed.

The next time she caught him she grabbed him by the shoulder and did
not let go until he sank down on a ledge.

“We’ll rest here,” she said, “and then we’ll go on, more slowly and
more quietly. Otherwise your friends will know we’re coming before we’re
ready to have them know.”

“The dreamsnakes—”

“North is between us and the dreamsnakes. If he sees you first will
he let you go on?”

“You’ll give me a dreamsnake? One of my own? Not like North?”

“Not like North,” Snake said. She sat in a narrow wedge of shade,
leaning her head back against the volcanic rock. In the valley below, an
edge of the meadow showed between dark evergreen branches, but neither
Swift nor Squirrel was in that part of the clearing. It looked like a
small scrap of velvet from this distance. Suddenly Snake felt both
isolated and lonely.

Nearby, the rock was not so barren as it appeared from below. Lichen
lay in green-gray patches here and there, and small fat-leaved
succulents nestled in shady niches. Snake leaned forward to see one more
closely. Against black rock, in shadow, its color was indistinct.

She sat back abruptly.

Picking up a shard of rock, Snake leaned forward again and knelt over
the squat blue-green plant. She poked at its leaves. They closed down
tight.

It’s escaped, Snake thought. It’s from the broken dome.

She should have expected something like this; she should have known
she would find things that did not belong on the earth. She prodded it
again, from the same side. It was, indeed, moving. It would crawl all
the way down the mountain if she let it. She slipped the rock’s point
beneath it and lifted the plant out of the crevice, rolling it upside
down. Except for the bristle of rootlets in its center, it looked just
the same, its brilliant turquoise leaves rotating on their bases,
seeking a hold. Snake had never seen this species before, but she had
seen similar creatures, plants—they did not fit into the normal
classifications—take over a field in a night, poisoning the ground so
nothing else would grow. One summer several years before she and the
other healers had helped burn off a swarm of them from nearby farms.
They had not swarmed again, but little colonies of them still turned up
from time to time, and the fields they had taken over were barren.

She wanted to burn this one but could not risk a fire now. She pushed
it out of the shadows into sunlight and it closed up tight. Now Snake
noticed that here and there lay the shriveled hulls of other crawlies,
dead and sun-dried, defeated by the barren cliff.

“Let’s go,” Snake said, more to herself than to the crazy.

She chinned herself over the edge of the cliff to the broken dome’s
hollow. The strangeness of the place hit Snake like a physical blow.
Alien plants grew all around the base of the tremendous half-collapsed
structure, nearly to the cliff, leaving no clear path at all. What
covered the ground resembled nothing Snake knew, not grass or scrub or
bushes. It was a flat, borderless expanse of bright red leaf. Looking
closer, Snake could see that it was more than a single huge leaf: each
section was perhaps twice as long as she was tall, irregularly shaped,
and joined at the edges to neighboring leaves by a system of
intertwining hairs. Wherever more than two leaves touched, a delicate
frond rose a few handsbreadths from the intersection. Wherever a fissure
split the stone, a turquoise streak of crawlies parted the red ground
cover, seeking shadow as deliberately as the red leaves spread
themselves for light. Someday several crawlies at once would overcome
the long sloping exposed cliff face and then they would take over the
valley below: someday, when weather and heat and cold opened more
sheltering cracks in the stone.

The depressions in the surface of the dome retained some normal
vegetation, for the crawlies’ reproductive tendrils could not reach that
far. If this species was anything like the similar one Snake had seen,
it produced no seeds. But other alien plants had reached the top of the
dome, for the melted hollows were filled randomly, some with ordinary
green, others with bold, unearthly colors. In a few of the seared,
heat-sunken pockets, high above the ground, the colors warred together,
one not yet having overcome the other.

Inside the translucent dome, tall shapes showed as shadows,
indistinct and strange. Between the edge of the cliff and the dome there
was no cover, nor was there any other approach. Snake became painfully
aware of her visibility, for she was standing silhouetted against the
sky.

The crazy clambered up beside her. “We follow the path,” he said,
pointing across the flat-leaves that no trail parted. In more than one
place dark veins of crawlies cut the line he indicated.

Snake stepped forward and put her boot carefully on the edge of a
flat-leaf. Nothing happened. It was no different from stepping on an
ordinary leaf. Beneath it, the ground felt as solid as any other stone.

The crazy passed her, striding toward the dome. Snake grabbed his
shoulder.

“The dreamsnakes!” he cried. “You promised!”

“Have you forgotten that North banished you? If you could just come
back here, why did you look for me?”

The crazy stared at the ground. “He won’t like to see me,” he
whispered.

“Stay behind me,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”

Snake started across the barely yielding leaves, placing her feet
cautiously in case the wide red sheets hid a crack the blue creepers had
not yet taken over. The crazy followed.

“North likes new people,” he said. “He likes it when they come and
ask him to let them dream.” His voice grew wistful. “Maybe he’ll like me
again.”

Snake’s boots left marks on the red flat-leaves, blazing her path
across the outcropping that held the broken dome. She only looked back
once: her footsteps lay in livid purple bruises against red all the way
back to the cliff edge. The crazy’s trail was much fainter. He crept
along behind her, a little to one side so he could always see the dome,
not quite as frightened of this person North as he was attracted by the
dreamsnakes.

The oblong bubble was even larger than it looked from the cliff. Its
translucent flank rose in an immense and gentle curve to the highest
point of the surface, many times Snake’s height. The side she approached
was streaked with multicolored veins. They did not fade to the original
gray until they reached the far end of the dome, a long way to Snake’s
right. To her left, the streaks grew brighter as they approached the
structure’s narrower end.

Snake reached the dome. The flat-leaves grew up along its sides to
the level of her knees, but above that the plastic was clean. Snake put
her face up close to the wall, peering between a stripe of orange and
one of purple, cutting off the exterior light with her hands, but the
shapes inside were still indistinct and strange. Nothing moved.

She followed the intensifying bands of color.

As she rounded the narrow end, she saw why it was called the broken
dome. Whatever had melted the surface had a power Snake could not
comprehend, for it had also blasted an opening in a material she
believed indestructible. The rainbow streaks radiated from the hole
along buckled plastic. The heat must have crystallized the substance,
for the edges of the opening had broken away, leaving a huge, jagged
entrance. Globs of plastic, fluorescent colors glowing between the
leaves of alien plants, lay all over the ground.

Snake approached the entrance cautiously. The crazy began his
half-humming moan again.

“Sh-h!” Snake did not turn back, but he subsided.

Fascinated, Snake climbed through the hole. She felt the sharp edges
against her palms but did not really notice them. Beyond the opening,
where the side wall, when intact, had curved inward to form the roof, an
entire archway of plastic was slumped to barely more than Snake’s
height. Here and there the plastic had run and dripped and formed ropes
from ceiling to floor. Snake reached out and touched one gently. It
thrummed like a giant harp string, and she grabbed it quickly to silence
it.

The light inside was reddish and eerie; Snake kept blinking her eyes,
trying to clear her vision. But nothing was wrong with her sight except
that it could not become accustomed to the alien landscape. The dome had
enclosed an alien jungle, now gone wild, and many more species than
crawlies and flat-leaves crowded the ground. A great vine with a stem
bigger around than the largest tree Snake had ever seen climbed up the
wall, huge suckers probing the now brittle plastic, punching through to
precarious holds in the dome. The vine spread a canopy across the
ceiling, its bluish leaves tiny and delicate, its flowers tremendous but
made up of thousands of white petals even smaller than the leaves.

Snake moved farther inside, to where the melting, less severe, had
not collapsed the ceiling. Here and there a vine had crept up the edge,
then, where the plastic was both too strong to break and too slick to
grasp, dropped back to earth. After the vines, the trees took over, or
what passed for trees inside the dome. One stood on a hummock nearby: a
tangled mass of woody stalks, or limbs, piled and twisted far above
Snake’s head, spreading slowly as it rose to shape the plant into a
cone.

Recalling the crazy’s vague description, Snake pointed toward a
central hill that rose almost to touch the plastic sky. “That way, hm?”
She found herself whispering.

Crouched behind her, the crazy mumbled something that sounded
affirmative. Snake set out, passing beneath the lacy shadows of the
tangle-trees and through occasional areas of colored light where the
dome’s rainbow wounds filtered sunlight. As Snake walked she listened
carefully, for the sound of another human voice, for the faint hissing
of nested serpents, for anything. But even the air was still.

The ground began to rise: they reached the foot of the hill. Here and
there black volcanic rock pierced the topsoil, the alien earth for all
Snake knew. It looked ordinary enough, but the plants growing from it
did not. Here the ground cover looked like fine brown hair and had the
same slick texture. The crazy led on, following a trail that was not
there. Snake trudged after him. The hillside steepened and sweat beaded
on her forehead. Her knee began to ache again. She cursed softly under
her breath. A pebble rolled beneath the hair plants she stepped on and
her boot slipped out from under her. Snake snatched at the grass to
break her fall. It held long enough to steady her, but when she stood
again she held a handful of the thin stalks. Each piece had its own
delicate root, as if it really were hair.