Critical Threshold (17 page)

Time extended itself, as it can so easily do. Instead of living the minutes at their steady, natural pace I becalmed myself within them, lost myself between seconds, disconnected myself from the intrinsic fabric of experience and took myself into some languorous dream-time wherein the fluting of a bird became a long-drawn moan and the soughing of the wind became thin and high—elastic moments, elastic sounds.

I had what is called a
premonition
—an insistent feeling that something dreadful was about to happen.

Sometimes, without the intervention of the supernatural or the long arm of coincidence, such feelings do precede real events. The juxtaposition of feeling born of fear and event born of chance can seal a feedback loop—the event magnifies the fear which magnifies the feeling, which invests the event with new fearfulness, and in a sudden crescendo which builds in the leisured space between elastic moments....

I saw the lamp, pale and lonely, high in a tree, seeming so far away.

And, simultaneously, I heard a curious kind of cough.

And as I whipped the beam of the flashlight upwards, tilting my face back to see even while the panic mounted exponentially, the cat-thing leapt, its claws reaching for my unprotected eyes.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I dropped the light.

As I turned my face away, my cheek was raked by a fistful of needle points, which slashed through the skin like trails of fire. I brought up the gun, thrusting with it as if it were a shield, but I couldn't shove the beast away. Somehow, it clung, trying to wind its body round the barrel and the butt.

With all my strength I heaved, trying to throw the creature aside so that I could at least fire off a shot. But its weight bore my arms down and my finger twisted inside the trigger-guard, unable to squeeze the trigger. I went down on my knees. The beast seemed to be all over me, its clawed feet still lashing out and tearing where they struck. Most of the cuts were mere scratches, but as I wrestled fiercely for the gun one set of needles sank deep into my right shoulder, tangled with the muscle, and then ripped thighs as it finally fell from the nerveless right hand as though it had been abruptly switched off. I reached out with my left hand, trying to push the predator away. I let go of the rifle with that hand, and felt it fall against my thighs as it finally fell from the nerveless right hand as well, unfired and useless. I tried to strike at the panther with my own feeble, absurd claws.

I crumpled up, dropping my head as I rolled up into a ball, leaving my arm still free. The needles danced on my back, pulling away strips of my clothing soaked with blood.

I was screaming and screaming, the pent up fear streaming out of me now like a flock of bats pouring out of the hollow of a rotten tree. My mind was whirling, utterly helpless in the furious pace of the event. I couldn't think, I couldn't react.

The gun was gone.

Hand to hand, I fought with the cat thing, trying to catch it with my one good hand and hold it at arm's length. It was not very big, if I could grip it and hold it....

But that was a forlorn and stupid hope. It could tear my arm to pieces. I could feel its hot breath, very close, and I could see in my inner eye the jaws gaping wide, groping to enfold my flesh, to crack my bones. I couldn't see with any but my inner eye—I couldn't even see the eyes—the eyes that would surely glow with the weird, fugitive light that seems to invest cats' eyes even in the darkest night.

It couldn't reach me with the teeth. I was bigger, stronger, with a better reach. The beast had the advantage of speed, surprise, a better natural armory and a lifetime of practice, but even at the level of tooth-and-claw a man can fight. I rolled sideways, and shot out a booted foot, which caught the creature somewhere in the body and brought a satisfying yelp of pain. It also stopped the claws raking at my good arm. I lashed out again, and missed, but the creature had retreated a little. It came forward again, but I intercepted it with the foot, locating it by sound and feel, reacting by sheer instinct. I kept it back, away from my soft belly, my throat, my groin.

Without any thought of how the battle might end I fought on, driven by panic.

I had the strength, but not the skill. I didn't have whatever it takes to wrestle a panther and strangle it or snap its neck. If my reflexes were following any inbuilt strategy at all, they were trying to do to the beast what I had feared in that first nightmare moment that it might do to me: rip out the eyes, tear away the precious, if presently useless, sense of sight.

I was lost somewhere in the pain, just as I had been when the butterfly pheromone had exploded in my mind. The hurting was already meaningless, spread throughout my body.

My screams were out of breath.

Then an unbearable light burst in my face. Sound exploded in my ears. I was deaf and blind.

The sound was repeated, twice more. My eyes had closed tight, but I could not have seen the light. In deference to the shock, I curled up tight again, hiding myself in a cocoon of arms and legs.

The cutting claws were gone.

I felt something being dragged from beneath my body—the rifle. I waited. I knew that someone knelt close to me, and I felt the glow of a flashlight on my cheek.

I heard her speak, and her voice sounded very faint, blurred, as though it came from a great distance. I missed the words, but I knew it was an exclamation of horror—an anguished whisper.

I knew that the light was shining on a mask of ribboned flesh, colored with blood.

Unseeing, I reached out for her. My fingertips, the left hand, found the flesh of her arm, but she flinched away. I knew why. My fingers were wet with blood. My blood.

There was nothing I could find to say better or more convincing than: “I'm all right. I'm all right.” Quite ridiculous. But I was all right, inside, where it counts. The surface was ploughed up, and I'd lost the feel of my right arm, but I was all right. With one exception the cuts were skin deep. I might not be beautiful but I wasn't dead, not by a long way.

I was hardly conscious of the pain. Or the shock. All that seemed past. I felt, in fact, strangely calm, and my mind was clearing even though my senses lagged.

“Get the medikit,” I said, slurring the words very slightly. “I haven't got it,” she said. “You have.”

I remembered. No dressings. No plastic spray to stop the bleeding, cover the torn flesh. No patches and thread. Only anesthetic. We still had anesthetic. A whole cartridge clip full.

I almost felt like laughing.

“Help me up,” I murmured.

I was still blind from the flash, but there was no permanent damage there. My senses would recover. My arm I could do without for a few days. Conrad, with the aid of the
Daedalus
's technical resources, could have put Humpty Dumpty back together again without the yolk spoiling. The one important question was whether I could walk. I'd lost a lot of blood. People in worse states had walked long distances in times past, but a lot of people had died, too. Karen helped me to my feet; getting herself all bloody in the process. I could stand. But I didn't feel safe. I felt perilously weak.

“Where is it?” she asked, speaking with exaggerated clarity, in case I couldn't hear. “The medical stuff?”

“Gone,” I whispered. “The savages. The kit and the radio. And it's...a bloody long way home.”

“On my God,” she said. I felt her arms gently pressing me back down again. I sat. I felt the light playing on my face again. I felt its warmth first and then, by degrees, its glow began to filter through my shocked optic nerves, making my brain frame blurred images again.

I couldn't see Karen yet, though.

“My shoulder's bad,” I said. “I can't use the arm. But nothing else is likely to cripple me. Look me over. If you find arterial blood I'm in trouble. If not....

I didn't know what, if not.

She began to look closely at my wounds. I began, then, to feel the pain again. Not that it had ever gone away, but it had become an unsteady background, like the sound of the wind in the trees. Now it began to be perceptible again in all its myriad elements. I could even feel the ripped shoulder. I glanced down at that—the worst of my injuries—and was surprised to find it so presentable. I decided that the nerve, in all probability, hadn't been cut, but merely shocked.

But there was blood everywhere. Too much blood. “I'm sorry,” I whispered, to Karen.

“For what?” she asked.

“I didn't find her.”

She didn't say anything to that.

“They stole everything,” I said, changing the subject. “We can't call for help.”

She hesitated for a moment, and then said: “We're going to need help, Alex. You'll never make it back to the ship. Not on foot.”

I was silent. I weighed up what she was saying. My mind was veering crazily. I was okay. I could walk for days. I was hurt badly. I couldn't walk a mile.

I didn't know. There was just no way I could guess from the way I felt. I felt so strange, so completely different from anything I'd felt before. I looked again at my shoulder, still feeling the same sense of idiotic objectivity.

“I'm not going to die,” I said, with naive conviction.

“No,” she said. “You're not going to die. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not in a week or a fortnight. But you're a big boy, Alex. I can't carry you. Not up and down that mountain. You've lost a lot of blood and a lot of skin. We can't dress the wounds and we can't stop infection. The pain is going to have you in knots.”

“Thanks,” I said, dully.

“Oh, hell, Alex, what am I supposed to say?” There was anguish in her voice. She felt that she was doing it all wrong. She hadn't much of a bedside manner.

“It's okay,” I said. “We stay here. For a while. I'll get better. I'll heal. There's not so much danger of infection. Do we still have the book?”

“The book?”

“The guide-book. I couldn't remember, do you have it or do they?”

“I have it,” she said. “It's back at the tent.”

“That's one to us,” I said. “How to survive in the forest. It has notes on the medicinal qualities of local plants. We can cope, Karen. I'll get better. And besides—”

“Well?”

“We have to wait for Mariel,” I whispered.

The world was sliding into focus again. In my eyes, in my mind. I couldn't see Karen's face. It was in the darkness, behind the glow of the flashlight. But I knew she was looking at me.

“You might lose the use of that arm,” she said.

Another thought, similarly dreadful, had just struck me. “And my face,” I said. “If these slashes heal, without help, I'll be scarred for life.”

She didn't answer.

“Lucky I wasn't handsome to start with,” I murmured.

Curiously, the thought of a scarred face seemed worse to me at that moment than the prospect of a crippled arm. I don't know why. Maybe vanity, but a face means a great deal. A face is an identity. We recognize people in their faces. Seeing is believing. If it came to a choice between a face and a good right arm....

But there wasn't any choice. None at all.

“We have to get to the tent,” said Karen. “I'll help you.” “How far?” I asked.

“Fifty paces,” she answered, and added. “But we'll take smaller steps.”

“I'll crawl,” I told her. I meant: if need be. I didn't have to say that.

She helped me to my feet again. I felt very weak, and was instantly attacked by vertigo. I leaned on her hard—so hard that it took all her strength to support me. We stood that way for a moment or two.

“The lamp,” I said. “The rifle....”

“I'll come back,” she promised. “For everything.”

She had something in her hand still, but she dropped it in order to help me stagger to the tent.

It was the flashgun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“The smell of blood,” said Karen dourly, “might fetch every damn cat for miles.”

“Unlikely,” I said. “It jumped me because I was moving, not because I smell good. Human blood can't be a familiar prey-smell hereabouts.”

“Neither was cooked meat,” she pointed out.

“If you want to worry,” I said, “worry. Just don't worry me.”

We were back at the tent, outside. I was laid out on my sleeping bag. Karen had cleaned me up somewhat with the aid of river water boiled on the heater. The operation had not been pleasant for either of us. She didn't like handling something that looked like a piece of butchered meat. But she'd done it. Carefully and painstakingly. The cutting edge was back in her voice, now. But that was all right because I knew it wasn't aimed at me. It was fate that was pressing down on her. It was fate she was lashing out at.

The small lamp was still high in the branches, acting as a beacon. The big lamp, beside me, wasn't giving much light, but it was producing a lot of heat, keeping the cool of the night easily at bay. Karen was sitting in the mouth of the tent, cradling the rifle in her lap like a baby.

We'd both tried to sleep, on and off. We hadn't had much success. Tension was running too high. We were tired enough, but our minds weren't about to let go. And we were both afraid.

Of whatever might happen next.

I was feeling the pain as an unsteady force running over me. It was superficial. It seemed to move in time with the wind in the treetops, cruel and uncertain, playing with my nerves and refusing me rest. When the wind blows, you have to grit your teeth and let it blow. There isn't anything you can do. I gritted my teeth, and let the pain flow, irresistible, unresisted.

“I could try to get the radio back,” she said. “Raid the village.”

“Single-handed?”

“I could try to get the medical kit, too.”

“Or recruit a set of stretcher bearers.”

“Maybe I could steal one of those boats.”

“And paddle it upriver—through the rapids backwards?”

“So what the hell
do
we do?” she spat out, with some asperity.

“Wait,” I said.

“For what?”

“A number ten bus.”

One conversation, stone dead. It had never been a particularly healthy animal to start with. There wasn't much hope for any dialogue born of a situation like ours.

We waited.

Karen took me inside, soon after that, out of the reach of the flies. She maintained her own position, on watch in the doorway of the tent, for a little while more, but then came in and sealed the flap. The hours of the night continued on their resolute way outside, determined to take their own time no matter bow we longed to be rid of them. She found the inner strength to surrender her talisman, the rifle, but she wouldn't ease her way into her sleeping bag. She remained on top of it. I don't know whether she slept—I suspect not—but she was still.

I looked back, in my mind, to the fright that had stranded me earlier, had left me marooned in time while the cat-thing stalked me. It seemed remote now, incomprehensible. All fear seemed alien to me now, even the fear which still lay awake in my mind: fear to death and disfigurement, of the uncertain day that was to follow. That fear was something that lay upon me, like a crumpled rag. It didn't seem to be part of the essential me.

My mind's eye was still in the forest. But it no longer saw a mass of grotesque and hostile shadows, replete with the ghosts that crept out from the failure of rational confrontation. It was something dead, now. Something distant. Something I could never get close to, no matter how I tried.

The whole meaning of the forest, as I perceived it, had changed. Its inner significance shifted, and could no longer be pinned down. The knowledge of the people of the forest and the metamorphosis which they had undergone had done that. They had taken the whole issue beyond understanding.

The hours dragged on, and I lost myself gradually in a liquid, placid delirium. One image perpetually returned to me—the image of the panther, suspended in mid-air, its little claws splayed, while simultaneously the lamp glowed distantly in the crown of the tree, caged in waxed wood, costumed in polished green leaves, a marker, a lure.

It was almost dawn when she came in through the flap. She moved silently, almost breathlessly. She might have been moving all night, going nowhere, seeing nothing, feeling her way, or she might have been close by for many hours, sleeping within the sound of the waves rippling against the river's shore.

It was dark in the tent. She couldn't see me. As she groped around I caught her wrist with the fingers of my left hand. They must have felt rough against her skin. She started.

“It's Alex,” I whispered.

“I came back,” she said, also whispering.

“I knew you would,” I said.

“I didn't,” she replied. “Not for a long time. That smell in the air—it did things to my mind. Before you shot me. Afterwards, I almost wished you hadn't. I think I might have torn off that mask. I don't know. It wasn't until then, afterwards, that I realized that it was the butterflies made them what they were. That fear, that repulsion, there was no need. If I could have....”

I waited my breathing very shallow. If Karen was listening, she was content to wait, content to hear what Mariel had to say.

“The butterflies,” she added, “were so beautiful.”

“I couldn't bear it,” I said. “The magnification of my senses. I couldn't take it.”

“I could,” she said.

“Didn't it hurt?”

“Like fire, hell, but only in the beginning. After that it began to seem not so strange. I don't know why. I don't remember what I felt. When I woke up, it was lost. It didn't make any sense. But I knew, or maybe I didn't know anything. I was confused. I had to get away. I had to. The smell was still there, in the air. Just a ghost. It was strange in my head, and I couldn't quite grasp something. I followed it. It didn't lead anywhere.”

“It doesn't,” I said. “Not to anywhere we want to go.”

“You,” she said.

“You too,” I told her.

She wasn't sure.

“They...,” she began, then faltered.

“It isn't the caterpillar that comes out of the cocoon,” I said. “It's something that defies a caterpillar's understanding.”

“If you
knew
,” she said. “If
I
knew—it all seemed so very
possible
, just for a while.”

“If I were a caterpillar,” I said, “and I
knew
—if I had the choice. I wouldn't ever spin a chrysalis. I couldn't. It would be contrary to every caterpillar thing I knew.”

“They chose,” she said.

“No they didn't. They had no choice at all. Neither does the caterpillar. But you do. Those people, those aliens, may have the forest. But that's all they have and all they ever can have. In winning the forest, they lost all the things that made the forest attractive, the beautiful garden. When you're
in
the Garden of Eden, the myth makes no sense. It can't. It has to lose its meaning.”

“I don't know,” she said.

But she did. Inside herself.

“You came back,” I said. “I knew you would. If only the drug hadn't blasted your mind, burned you out. You had to.”

“Suppose,” she said, “you hadn't got the mask on. Suppose you were too slow. We'd all be savages.”

“Or dead. Or crawling back to the settlement with idiot stares in our faces. Maybe. But you're okay. You have more than the forest, still. Infinitely more. All the worlds of the stars. And you're only fourteen years old. You have a long life, Mariel.”

“Fifteen,” she said.

“What?”

“Fifteen. I've been fifteen for three weeks, on the ship's clock.”

“You could have said.”

“So you could send flowers? Or maybe hold a party, with jelly and ice cream?” She tried to capture the acid edge of Karen's voice, but she didn't make it. Her voice, by nature, was so much softer. She didn't sound nearly sarcastic enough. Only slightly forlorn.

She moved. Her free arm bumped my side and I winced. “What's the matter?” she said.

“I got hurt,” I told her. “Cut up a bit. But now you're back, it should be okay. It may, take a fortnight to get back, but we'll do it. With two shoulders to lean on....

I broke off suddenly. “Why couldn't you tell?” I whispered. “Why didn't you know?”

“I can't see,” she said. “I have to be able to see, or touch. Can I touch your face?”

I guided her hand to my forehead, away from the cuts. “Well,” I said. “Can you feel the wheels turning?”

“Your face,” she said. Her hand hadn't move to touch the cuts on my cheek. “Your face is scarred.”

“It doesn't matter,” I said. “Compared with other things it really isn't that important.”