To Conquer Chaos (5 page)

IX

Night-long, the people of the Station had waited anxiously in the dark and the cold, flashing their handlights occasionally to make sure a lurking shadow was simply that—a shadow.

The dawn washed, shell-pink, over the underside of morning clouds, and they stretched cramped limbs, wiped eyes stinging with sleeplessness and the dust that blew off the apparently infinite barrenness around them, and went to count the cost.

Still not fully recovered from the narrowness of the chance that had prevented anyone else knowing she had been overdue at her post—except Jasper, and he wasn’t likely to boast about
that
—Nestamay picked a path for herself through the eternal twilight of the main Station dome, bearing a big canister of hot broth and a bag half-filled with chunks of dry bread.

She had already called on three or four of the working groups busy assessing the damage. It hadn’t taken their reactions, but only the evidence of her own eyes, to tell her the bitter truth. Last night’s misadventure had set them back months of painstaking, backbreaking work.

She rounded the side of some large, inexplicable complex of ancient machinery dented in now by a blind charge of the intruding
thing,
and came on another working party in the centre of which her grandfather was standing. She stopped, knowing he would be angry if she tried to interrupt what he was saying for anything as trivial as food and drink.

Resting the heavy canister, still more than a one-arm burden, on a convenient support, she stared at the time-worn face of the grizzled old man, heard his harsh words echo away under the deformed curve of the roof.

“Now I’ve had reports already from Clagny,” Grandfather stated. “He went on directly after dawn, and lost the
thing’s
trail a couple of miles out, among the East Brokes. It might be lairing up there to lick its wounds. If it is, the chances are against it returning to the same side of the Station, but in favour of it coming back sooner or later—the current count for returns runs about six to four runaways. If we’re lucky, it may pick up the Eastigo Creek and work its way downstream, in which case we’ve seen the last of it. Nestamay!”

The girl gave a start. “Y-yes, Grandfather?” she said in a thin voice.

“How do I know it probably won’t follow the creek?”

Nestamay gulped. Grandfather was forever playing this kind of trick on her—shooting unexpected questions in public and demanding an answer that would shame the hearers. He was obsessively proud of the fact that his family was the only one in living memory to add significantly to the traditional stock of Station lore. Sometimes Nestamay wondered if it had been as a by-product of that well-founded pride that her father, whom she barely remembered, had been persuaded to undertake his foolhardy journey away from the Station and off into the vast unknown—the journey from which he had never returned.

For a long moment she stood confused. Then a stir of memory came to her aid. Something acrid about a scent which she had detected drifting into the air of the office late last night, when the
thing
had been driven away …

“The smell!” she said, suddenly positive she was correct. “When the heatbeams seared it, the smell it gave off didn’t resemble the smell of a water-seeking creature!”

Grandfather looked surprised for an instant. “Very good,” he said. “Anybody else spot that?” His fierce, bloodshot eyes swept the members of the working party. “No? Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? Here’s my granddaughter, only a few weeks past adulthood, knows it as well as I do, and you lot with all your combined years of experience have to be told! She’s perfectly right—the stink that comes off when a heatbeam hits a water-seeker is heavier, damper, a little sweetish at the back of the throat. The smell we got last night was acrid, dry, and eye-watering.”

He paused. Nestamay, relying on the momentary favour she was enjoying, caught his attention and indicated the refreshments she was bringing; a curt nod gave her permission to distribute them, and she proceeded to do so while he resumed his diatribe.

One or two of the men, dipping their hands in the bag of bread, looked dismayed as they felt its hard stale texture, and shot accusing glances at Nestamay as though to blame her for its condition. A little resentfully, she glared at them.

“Any idea how much power we used last night? There wasn’t anything left for the ovens this morning!”

That didn’t make them any more pleased, of course. Glancing skyward through the rents in the Station dome, they could see the cloudy sky which meant the recharging of the power storage cells would proceed extremely slowly today. Everything at the Station was so interlocked, Nestamay reflected; when a dangerous
thing
hatched, power had to be set aside for heatbeams or activating electrofences, which meant food became short, or had to be eaten cold rather than hot, clothing due for recycling had to wait no matter how dirty and torn it had become, and at night the people had to huddle together against the chill …

She served the last of the working party with his cup of broth and hunk of bread, and prepared to move on. Once again Grandfather interrupted her.

“Nestamay, don’t forget I’ll want to see you this morning. You’re due for a test on last week’s instruction!”

Nestamay nodded. She’d hoped Grandfather might be too preoccupied with the emergency to remember, for she was very tired now. Nevertheless, it was no use railing against events. This was the course the world had taken, and she knew of no way to change things for the better.

That was her last call on this side of the Station. From here to the other side, she would have to go circuitously. Only cautious, fully-instructed working parties dared venture into the central area under the monster dome, because it was there that the—the trouble, the problem, the danger, whatever one chose to call it—the central mystery, perhaps, was located.

On her way past, Nestamay checked and stared at the enigmatic bulk of the inaccessible zone. It was changed, and yet unchanged. It had been part of her life since she was born, and still it retained its aura of alienness.

Twisted now and sagging, the arch of the dome spanned a good three miles of ground. Huge gashes, five or six times a man’s height, gave limited access to its interior. In the north was the least inhospitable section—some thousands of square yards were safe even for children, and it was there that the machinery on which the precarious life of the people depended was situated. There was food—ovens for bread, cauldrons for broth, vast hydroponic trays yielding fruit and vegetables from which spores of alien plants had to be scrupulously excluded. The north, too, was the side from which it was relatively safe to pillage scrap, to build or repair the miserable one-room shacks which served as their homes. Every now and again a working party managed to push back the limits of the safe area, either permanently—which was rare—or long enough at any rate to salvage some useful odds and ends.

Just what was hidden in the rank heart of the dome, no one could do more than guess.

Over the rusting structure creepers swarmed, bearing black sticky fruits that, if left to themselves, burst after a few months and sowed spores over everything—clinging spores, able to use anything organic as food. Nestamay had heard from Grandfather about unwary people who were struck by the spores in the old days, and who could not even be buried but had to be cremated with heatbeams lest another plant spring from the grave.

Pullulating fungi, a sickly orange in colour, grew on the branches of the creeper. Flowers, some of them of incredible beauty—and incredibly deadly, because the scent they gave off dulled the senses and laid one open to attack by swinging plant-tentacles—shone out here and there. Great toothed pseudo-leaves sprawled over the ground below, ready to close like a shroud on any trespasser …

Nestamay’s heart turned over, for at this very moment one of those pseudo-leaves opened in sight of her, with a grunting, scratching sound, exposing to view a disgustingly slimy object which at first she thought might be human remains.

A second look reassured her. It was only a
thing
which the plant had found indigestible after much trying. Now it was a shapeless jellied mass which the pseudo-leaf was attempting to displace over its edge, by humping up and forcing it to roll. The spectacle nauseated her. She went quickly on her way.

Every so often, the idea came from a hothead like jasper that what was needed was to march straight into the central area under the dome, heatbeams blazing, and clear out the entire fetid jungle. Every time, Grandfather or someone else vetoed the idea instantly.

In some incomprehensible way, their existence depended on leaving that central area alone—driving back the vegetation, killing any
things
that emerged from it, but otherwise enduring its hateful presence. Something was inside there, behind the sporulating fruits, the fungi and the pseudo-leaves, from which they derived their food, clothing, warmth and other basic necessities. Nestamay had pestered Grandfather over and over when she was a child with questions about this strange hidden master of their fate, and the answers had been confusing.

It wasn’t a person, but it could think. It wasn’t a machine, but it was out of order. It was practically everlasting, but a single touch from a heatbeam might destroy it. It provided their food, but it also hatched out
things
to plague them in the night. To Nestamay as a little girl it had seemed rather like Grandfather on a vaster scale—capricious, often bad-tempered for no discernible reason, but a kind of rock in the turmoil of their lives, to which one must turn for support because there was nothing else available.

Now she was nominally an adult, she recognised that Grandfather must one day die, and when that happened it would be up to her and others of her age-group to apply the knowledge Grandfather had passed on from his father and his father’s father. And that knowledge was designed to overcome the arbitrary power of the not-a-person thinking there in the stinking green swelter under the dome.

There was no stability in this life, except the bareness of the desert ringing the Station. That didn’t change. It was disturbed occasionally, by footprints. But the wind wiped them in the night, and the next day the desert was the same as before.

For that reason, when Nestamay turned from contemplating the hideous tangle of the miniature jungle beneath the dome, she looked long at the unalterable desert—just as inhospitable, but not actively hostile. It was
there,
and it was a
fact,
and it
was.

Oddly comforted, she hurried to complete her rounds with the canister of broth and the bag of bread.

It was at the next call but one that she found Jasper, cursing and sweating over the removal of a large pile of scrap metal which the terrified
thing
had overset last night as it howled away from the torture of the electrofence. Tightening her lips, Nestamay left him till last of the party to receive his rations. He noticed the fact; he was meant to.

“Not looking very cheerful this morning, Nestamay!” he taunted. “Grandfather been scolding you—hey?”

“No,” Nestamay contradicted with a toss of her head. “As a matter of fact, he’s been praising me for a change. No thanks to you, you—!”

“Ho-o-o-o!” Jasper raised his eyebrows. “I suppose it’s my fault now, is it? I’m responsible for hatching out
things,
and I do it during your watch to make trouble for you!”

“You do your best to make trouble for me, and you can’t deny it!” Nestamay retorted. “Suppose I’d been taken in by your wheedling last night, and skipped my watch—what would have happened then?”

Jasper laughed. It wasn’t a friendly sound. He said, “You were the one supposed to be on watch, my dear, not me. I didn’t know. After all, you didn’t tell me that was where you were going!”

The barefaced audacity of the lie shocked Nestamay into paleness. Stamping her foot, she snapped, “Jasper, you make me sick to my guts!”

“Too bad,” Jasper said with a shrug, turning away. “A time will come when I make you literally sick for a much better reason—because my kid’s kicking you in the belly. And you don’t have much choice in the matter, do you? Not even if you go weeping to your precious grandfather. He doesn’t think tears are constructive.”

Unconstructive tears blurred Nestamay’s sight as she moved away. For, like it or not, what Jasper said was undeniable.

X

Yanderman ducked under the door flap of the Duke’s tent and saluted. The Duke leaned back so that his chair—as always—creaked with his weight, and smiled in the depths of his enormous beard.

“Well, Yan? What do you think of our progress so far?”

Yanderman ignored the question. He said curtly, “Ampier died in the night—did you know?”

“Of course. I was informed directly it happened; I’d given instructions.”

“Have you seen the body?”

“No.”

Yanderman shuddered. “I saw it. They were carrying it out for burning as I came by. He looked as though he’d simply rotted to death. He was completely covered in that filthy green mould.”

Duke Paul nodded. “So they told me. Obviously the beak of the
thing
he killed was infected, and poisoned his wound. The medics said they could find nothing that would stop the mould growing without killing the sufferer, so I ordered the burning of everything Ampier had touched—his bandages, the blanket he was wrapped in, his clothes, even the tent where he lay dying. And told all his attendants to burn their clothes and scrub themselves from head to foot with good strong soap. Does that answer what you were going to say?”

Yanderman took a chair. “I guess so,” he agreed, feeling conscious relief that the Duke had been so thorough. “But I’m afraid the death is having a bad effect on the men.”

“We mustn’t let it,” the Duke countered briskly. “We must keep them busy.”

“They’re busy already,” Yanderman pointed out. “With reconnaissance parties surveying the boundary of the barrenland, the fact-finding teams compiling data on the
things
that have been killed over the years by the people of Lagwich, and arms practice—in fact, I ought to be out-drilling my company right now, but I told Stadham to look after it.”

“Why?”

“So I could come and warn you about the way the men are being affected by Ampier’s death,” Yanderman explained with forced patience.

“Go on.”

“It’s probably contact with the townsfolk that’s doing it,” Yanderman said. “That, and the latrine rumours that were on their rounds even before we got here. Granny Jassy is doing a roaring trade in charms, too, despite all I can do to make the purchasers look foolish.”

“I don’t see much help for that.” The Duke frowned. “But contact with the townsfolk could be cut off if necessary. What strikes you as so bad about it?”

“They have small minds in Lagwich. They feel it necessary to brag about themselves to counter the natural boasting of our men about Esberg. So they magnify the danger of the
things
from the barrenland beyond all measure.
You’ve
heard them—you’ve talked to Malling and Rost and their other ‘wise men’.” Yanderman put a fine ring of sarcasm into the last words. “But you can’t cut off contact now, I’m afraid. It would be very bad for the men who’ve been too occupied so far to take time off and go into the town. The townsfolk seem to be treating our arrival as something like the visit of a marrying expedition, and they’re showing our men the best time they can and positively urging them to court the local girls.”

Duke Paul grunted. “Yes, I’d realised that,” he said. “I’ve been hoping that something pretty savage and large might come out of the barrenland so we could deal with it. It was a good idea of your lieutenant’s to bring that carcass into camp and peg it up for the men to look at. But there’s a psychological difference between just seeing a carcass, which could have been killed by an accident, and actually vanquishing a dangerous monster.”

“Especially since Ampier died of the encounter he had with a
thing,
” Yanderman agreed.

“Ye-es.” The Duke ran his fingers through his beard. A fat, buzzing fly which had somehow got in through the door-flap soared lazily past him. He swiped at it, but missed. “By the way, how was that
thing
killed—the one Stadham found?”

“I don’t know.” Yanderman shrugged. “One of the townsfolk must have tackled it, I guess. I didn’t think to inquire. I suppose I could ask around if you think it’s important.”

“Not really.” Duke Paul stared at the swinging canvas of the tent wall. “It just put me in mind of a possible way of—ah—arranging for a suitably savage beast to be killed in plain sight of some of the men. What would you say the chances are of going secretly to some of the more venturesome people in Lagwich and persuading them to guide a few picked men into the barrenland to find a
thing
and drive it towards the camp to be killed?”

“Absolutely nil,” Yanderman stated emphatically. “The townsfolk do not—repeat
not
—set foot on the barrenland. Most of them, for all their high-flown talk about their bravery, stay as well clear of it as possible. Which in turn puts me in mind of what else I was going to mention to you.

“Now that the townsfolk have made up their minds what the purpose of the expedition is, the men are getting the news from the worst possible source.”

The Duke blinked. He placed his hands on the arms of his chair as though about to jerk to his feet. He snapped, “What do you mean by that, Yan?”

Yanderman stared levelly at his chief. “Well … At first they were suspicious over in Lagwich, thinking we must be on a mission of conquest, for all our peaceful asseverations. They’ve recovered from that idea by this time. Now they’re beginning to suspect the truth, and naturally they’re passing it on to the soldiery.”

“What do you think the truth is, Yan?” The Duke spoke low.

“That you mean to march into, and probably across, the barrenland—and to hell with its population of devils and monsters.”

“And they’re telling the men this?”

Yanderman confirmed with a nod, feeling a momentary relief. From the Duke’s tone it seemed he was astonished, and that—he hoped—implied the story wasn’t true after all.

But the Duke stood up and started to walk back and forth on the woven-reed mats forming the floor. After a brief silence he said, “And what do you think of the plan, youself?”

“I?” Yanderman tautened. “I think it’s grandiose and—and ridiculous.”

“Why?” The Duke rounded on him. “The barrenland is a living sore on the face of the country, isn’t it? It’s been here far too long. Something should be done about it—and the first thing is to find out its true nature. Till the old fool Rost showed us his ‘devil’ I’d had nothing more in mind than the scouting of its confines and the gathering of folksay about it. But if there are people living within the barrenland, Yan, isn’t it about time someone went to the poor bastards’ rescue?”

“Living within the—? Oh, I see what you mean. Hmmm!” Yanderman rubbed his chin and cogitated for a while. At last, however, he shook his head. “It’s a conceivable explanation, but I’m not sold on it. I’m more inclined to think, despite what the local people say, that Rost’s ‘devil’ wandered into the barrenland from outside and then stumbled back again. And … what do you think your chances are of getting the men to march with you, anyway?”

“Excellent.” The Duke answered crisply. “I didn’t pick the riffraff of Esberg to make this trip, but the best and bravest men I could find. I chose you also, Yan—remember that.”

“That’s precisely my point,” Yanderman said. “Forgive me for being blunt. If you’d been heading for a battlefield, you wouldn’t have picked me for anything more demanding than supervising commissariat—correct? But this isn’t a straightforward military operation. It’s unique, unprecedented, and calculated to play hob with everyday ideas. My honest belief is that on the order to march half the men will immediately mutiny and lay down their arms, and the other half will use their comrades’ desertion as an excuse for refusing to go. Now they’ve heard the fables rife in Lagwich.”

Duke Paul was quite motionless, his gaze riveted on Yanderman. Now at last he spoke, his voice as soft and steady as before.

“Do you trust my judgment, Yan? If you don’t, why did you consent to come along in the first place?”

A bead of sweat trickled unpleasantly down Yanderman’s nose. He answered, “I’ll grant this—that if anyone walks the world who could lead this army into hell, it’s yourself. I just don’t want to see you discount the men’s present mood.”

“You’ve left me no room to do that,” Duke Paul grunted. “I’ll make sure they get accustomed to the idea—somehow.”

“Ah—it might help if they were given some hints as to the practicability of the project,” Yanderman suggested, feeling a sort of helplessness as though he had been hanging by fingertips over a precipice and hadn’t noticed till now that exhaustion had finally loosed his grip. “How are you going to take two thousand men across land without food, fuel or water?”

The lazy, irritating drone of the fly started again, and it buzzed up from the place where it had landed on the Duke’s night-couch. Again the Duke swiped at it and missed. He said, “The barrenland is three hundred miles around. So its diameter isn’t much over a hundred. If there’s anything there, it’s at the centre, one may presume. We’ll carry maximum loads a day’s march from the edge, transfer the unconsumed portion to those who are going on and send back part of the column. We’ll continue like this and come to the middle with a party of a few score, hand-picked, who can make it back to the outside world without further support on minimum rations and forced marches.”

“A few score? To cope with whatever hell’s brood we may find?”

“I’m
convinced
that people are still living in the barrenland!” the Duke snapped. “Think it out, Yan! We’ve learned from clues dropped by Granny Jassy that part at least of the barrenland was created deliberately, to serve as a quarantine area around some source of danger in the middle—correct?”

Yanderman shrugged and nodded.

“In that case, we don’t have to think of the barrenland as a natural desert with no resources at all. We’ve established that there are streams flowing out from it, which are drinkable when they emerge, so we’ll manage for water—our worst single problem. Fuel—well, this isn’t a long march, is it? A slow one, certainly, but it’s summer! And consider this, too.” He leaned on the corner of his big table.

“We know beyond doubt that the
things
from the barrenland are coming in smaller numbers than they used to. I’m sure this isn’t accident. If they were spawning and breeding in the barrenland, you’d expect them to multiply! No, I suspect that there are people living in the middle of the barrenland: a party of volunteers—or their descendants, by now—charged with preventing the
things
’ access.” Again he swiped at the annoying fly, missing it the third time. “And the diminishing plague of
things
here at Lagwich is a measure of their relative success.”

His eyes blazed at Yanderman, who moved uncomfortably on his chair. Foolish or not, it was a grand design to re-establish contact with such heroes. And hearing Duke Paul speak of it was enough, surely, to convert the most cautious audience. Maybe it could be done. It would certainly be magnificently audacious to try it …

The Duke’s hand flashed through the air and closed this time around the fly, squashing it. He glanced down at his palm before wiping off the messy remains, and in that pose he stiffened. Yanderman looked at his handsome profile, and likewise froze.

After a moment, he said, “Sir …” His voice sounded peculiarly cracked and squeaky.

“Yes?” The Duke didn’t look up.

“Sir, there’s a patch of green among your hair!” Yanderman leapt to his feet and came close. “It looks like the mould which was on Ampier!”

The Duke nodded and held out his hand with the fly on it. Yanderman tore his eyes away from the deadly fuzz he had seen on his chiefs head and examined the insect. On its hairy legs, quite distinctly visible, was more of the same green mould.

Two and two came together in Yanderman’s mind. The fly had circled the Duke’s night-couch—on which Ampier had been laid! He strode over to it and whipped aside the cushions.

There, perhaps where a drop of Ampier’s blood had fallen: there, where at night the Duke’s head rested, was a smear of the alien greenness, concealed to the casual glance by seeming to form part of the pattern on a multi-coloured blanket, but now blazing out at Yanderman so fiercely he felt its shape imprinted on his very brain, like a branding-iron.

“Bring me a medic,” the Duke said after a small eternity. “And—Yan! Tell nobody else! Do you understand? Tell nobody else!”