She nodded. Ile had told her his general plan, which was too obvious to
conceal. The problem was to make contact with the aliens, if they
existed. Hitherto, they had only revealed themselves, at rare
intervals, to one or a few backwoodsmen at a time. An ability to
generate hallucinations would help them in that. They would stay
clear of any large, perhaps unmanageable expedition which might pass
through their territory. But two people, braving all prohibitions,
shouldn't look too formidable to approach. And . . . this would be the
first human team which not only worked on the assumption that the
Outlings were real but possessed the resources of modern, off-planet
police technology.
Nothing happened at that camp. Sherrinford said he hadn't expected it
would. The Old Folk seemed cautious this near to any settlement. In
their own lands they must be bolder.
And by the following "night," the vehicle had gone well into yonder
country. When Sherrinford stopped the engine in a meadow and the
car settled down, silence rolled in like a wave.
They stepped out. She cooked a meal on the glower while he gathered
wood, that they might later cheer themselves with a campfire.
Frequently he glanced at his wrist. It bore no watchinstead, a radio-
controlled dial, to tell what the instruments in the bus might register.
Who needed a watch here? Slow constellations wheeled beyond
glimmering aurora. The moon Alde stood above a snowpeak, turning
it argent, though this place lay at a goodly height. The rest of the
mountains were hidden by the forest that crowded around. Its trees
were mostly shiverleaf and feathery white plumablanca,
ghostly amidst their shadows. A few firethorns glowed, clustered dim
lanterns, and the underbrush was heavy and smelled sweet. You could see
surprisingly far through the blue dusk. Somewhere nearby, a brook sang
and a bird fluted.
"Lovely here," Sherrinford said. They had risen from their supper and
not yet sat down again or kindled their fire.
"But strange," Barbro answered as low. "I wonder if it's really meant for
us. If we can really hope to possess it."
His pipestem gestured at the stars. "Man's gone to stranger places than
this."
"Has he? I . . . oh, I suppose it's just something left over from my outway
childhood, but do you know, when I'm under them I can't think of the.
stars as balls of gas, whose energies have been measured, whose planets
have been walked on by prosaic feet. No, they're small and cold and
magical; our lives are bound to them; after we die, they whisper to us in
our graves." Barbro glanced downward. "I realize that's nonsense."
She could see in the twilight how his face grew tight. "Not at all," he
said.
"Emotionally, physics may be a worse nonsense. And in the end, you
know, after a sufficient number of generations, thought follows feeling.
Man is not at heart rational. He could stop believing the stories of science
if those no longer felt right."
He paused. "That ballad which didn't get finished in the house," he said,
not looking at her. "Why did it affect you so?"
"I couldn't stand hearing them, well, praised. Or that's how it seemed.
Sorry for the fuss."
"I gather the ballad is typical of a large class."
"Well, I never thought to add them up. Cultural anthropology is
something we don't have time for on Roland, or more likely it hasn't
occurred to us, with everything else there is to do. Butnow you mention
it, yes, I'm surprised at how many songs and stories have the Arvid motif
in them."
"Could you bear to recite it?"
She mustered the will to laugh. "Why, I can do better than that if you
want. Let me get my multilyre and I'll perform."
She omitted the hypnotic chorus line, though, when the notes rang out,
except at the end. He watched her where she stood . against moon and
aurora.
`-the Queen of Air and Darkness cried softly under sky:
"'Light down, you ranger Arvid, and join the Outling folk. You need no
"lie dared to give her answer: I may do naught but run. A maiden waits
me, dreaming in lands beneath the sun.
"'And likewise wait me comrades and tasks I would not shirk, for what is
ranger Arvid if he lays down his work?
"'So wreak your spells, you Outling, and east your wrath on me. Though
maybe you can slay me, you'll not make me unfree.'
"The Queen of Air and Darkness stood wrapped about with fear and
northlight flares and beauty he dared not look too near.
"Until she laughed like harpsong `
and said to him in scorn:
'I do not need a magic
to make you always mourn.
"'I send you home with nothing except your memory of moonlight,
Outling music, night breezes, dew and me.
"'And that will run behind you, a shadow on the sun, and that will lie
beside you when every clay is done.
"'In work and play and friendship your grief will strike you dumb for
thinking what you are-and-what you might have become.
"'Your dull and foolish woman treat kindly as you can. Go home now,
ranger Arvid, set free to be a man!'
"In flickering and laughter
' the Outling folk were gone.
He stood alone by moonlight
and wept until the dawn.
The dance weaves under the firethorn."
She laid the lyre aside. A wind rustled leaves. After a long quietness
Sherrinford said, "And tales of this kind are part of everyone's life in
the outway?"
"Well, you could put it thus," Barbro replied. "Though they're not all
full of supernatural doings. Some are about love or heroism.
Traditional themes."
"I don't think your particular tradition has arisen of itself." His tone
was bleak. "In fact, I think many of your songs and stories were not
composed by human beings."
He snapped his lips shut and would say no more on the subject. They
went early to bed.
Hours later, an alarm roused them.
The buzzing was soft, but it brought them instantly alert. They slept
in gripsuits, to be prepared for emergencies. Sky-glow lit them through
the canopy. Sherrinford swung out of his bunk, slipped shoes on feet
and clipped gun holster to belt. "Stay inside," he commanded.
"What's here?" Her pulse thuttered.
He squinted at the dials of his instruments and checked them against
the luminous telltale on his wrist. "Three animals," he counted. "Not
wild ones happening by. A large one, homeothermic, to judge from the
infrared, holding still a short ways off. Another . . . hm, low
temperature, diffuse and unstable emission, as if it were more like a . . .
a swarm of cells coordinated somehow . . . pheromonally?. . .
hovering, also at a distance. But the third's practically next to us,
moving around in the brush; and that pattern looks human."
She saw him quiver with eagerness, no longer seeming a professor. "I'm
going to try to make a capture," he said. "When we have a subject for
interrogation-Stand ready to
let me back in again fast. But don't risk
yourself, whatever happens. And keep this cocked." He handed her a
loaded big-game rifle.
His tall frame poised by the door, opened it a crack. Air blew in, cool,
damp, full of fragrances and murmurings. The moon Oliver was now
also aloft, the radiance of both unreally brilliant, and the aurora
seethed in whiteness and ice-blue.
Sherrinford peered afresh at his telltale. It must indicate the directions
of the watchers, among those dappled leaves. Abruptly he sprang out.
He sprinted past the ashes of the campfire and vanished under trees.
Barbro's hand strained on the butt of her weapon.
Racket exploded. Two in combat burst onto the meadow. Sherrinford
streaming silver and rainbow flicker that the other was nude, male,
long-haired, lithe and young. He fought demoniacally, seeking to use
teeth and feet and raking nails, and meanwhile he ululated like a satan.
The identification shot through her: A changeling, stolen in babyhood
and raised by the Old Folk. This creature was what they would make
Jimmy into.
"Ha!" Sherrinford forced his opponent around and drove stiffened
fingers into the solar plexus. The boy gasped and sagged. Sherrinford
manhandled him toward the car.
Out from the woods came a giant. It might itself have been a tree,
black and rugose, bearing four great gnarly boughs; but earth
quivered and boomed beneath its leg-roots, and its hoarse bellowing
filled sky and skulls.
Barbro shrieked. Sherrinford whirled. He yanked out his pistol,
fired and fired, flat whipcracks through the half light. His free arm
kept a lock on the youth. The troll shape lurched under those
blows. It recovered and came on, more slowly, more carefully,
circling around to cut him off from the bus. He couldn't move fast
enough to evade it unless he released his prisoner-who was his sole
possible guide to Jimmy
Barbro leaped forth. "Don't!" Sherrinford shouted. "For God's sake,
stay inside!" The monster rumbled and made snatching motions at
her. She pulled the trigger. Recoil slammed her in the shoulder. The
colossus rocked and fell. Somehow it got its feet back and lumbered
toward her. She retreated. Again she shot, and again. The creature
snarled. Blood began to drip from it and gleam oilily amidst
dewdrops. It turned and went off, breaking branches, into the
darkness that laired beneath the woods.
"Get to shelter!" Sherrinford yelled. "You're out of the jammer
field!"
A mistiness drifted by overhead. She barely glimpsed it before she
saw the new shape at the meadow edge. "Jimmy!" tore from her.
"Mother." He held out his arms. Moonlight coursed in his tears.
She dropped her weapon and ran to him.
Sherrinford plunged in pursuit. Jimmy flitted away into the brush.
Barbro crashed after, through clawing twigs. Then she was seized
and borne away.
Standing over his captive, Sherrinford strengthened the fluoro
output until vision of the wilderness was blocked off from within
the bus. The boy squirmed beneath that colorless glare.
"You are going to talk," the man said. Despite the haggardness in his
features, he spoke quietly.
The boy glared through tangled locks. A bruise was purpling on his
jaw. He'd almost recovered ability to flee while Sherrinford chased
and lost the woman. Returning, the detective had barely caught him.
Time was lacking to be gentle, when Outling reinforcements might
arrive at any moment. Sherrinford had knocked him out and dragged
him inside. He sat lashed into a swivel seat.
He spat. "Talk to you, man-clod?" But sweat stood on his skin, and
his eyes flickered unceasingly around the metal which caged him.
"Give me a name to call you by."
"And have you work a spell on me?"
"Mine's Eric. If you don't give me another choice, I'll have to call
you . . . m-m-m . . . Wuddikins."
"What?" However eldritch, the bound one remained a human
adolescent. "Mistherd, then." The lilting accent of his English
somehow emphasized its sullenness. "That's not the sound, only
what it means. Anyway, it's my spoken name, naught else."
"Ah, you keep a secret name you consider to be real?"
"She does. I don't know myself what it is. She knows the real names
of everybody."
Sherrinford raised his brows. "She?"
"Who reigns. May she forgive me, I can't make the reverent sign
when my arms are tied. Some invaders call her the Queen of Air and
Darkness."
"So." Sherrinford got pipe and tobacco. He let silence wax while he
started the fire. At length he said:
"I'll confess the Old Folk took me by surprise. I didn't expect so
formidable a member of your gang. Everything I could learn had
seemed to show they work on my race-and yours, lad-by stealth,
trickery and illusion."
Mistherd jerked a truculent nod. "She created the first nicors not
long ago. Don't think she has naught but dazzlements at her beck."
"I don't. However, a steel jacketed bullet works pretty well too,
doesn't it?"
Sherrinford talked on, softly, mostly to himself: "I do still believe the,
ah,
nicors-all your half-humanlike breeds-are intended in the main to be seen,
not used. The power of projecting mirages must surely be quite limited in
range and scope as well as in the number of individuals who possess it.
Otherwise she wouldn't have needed to work as slowly and craftily as she
has. Even outside our mind-shield, Barbro-my companion-could have
resisted, could have remained aware that whatever she saw was unreal . . .
if
she'd been less shaken, less frantic, less driven by need."
Sherrinford wreathed his head in smoke. "Never mind what I experienced,"
he said. "It couldn't have been the same as for her. I think the command
was simply given us, 'You will see what you most desire in the world,
running away from you into the forest.' Of course, she didn't travel many
meters before the nicor waylaid her. I'd no hope of trailing them; I'm no
Arctican woodsman, and besides, it'd have been too easy to ambush me. I
came back to you." Grimly: "You're my link to your overlady."
"You think I'll guide you to Starhaven or Carheddin? Try making me, clod-
man."
"I want to bargain."
"I s'pect you intend more'n that." Mistherd's answer held surprising
shrewdness. "What'll you tell after you come home?"
"Yes, that does pose a problem, doesn't it? Barbro Cullen and I are not
terrified outwayers. We're of the city. We brought recording instruments.
We'd be the first of our kind to report an encounter with the Old Folk, and
that report would be detailed and plausible. It would produce action."
"So you see I'm not afraid to die," Mistherd declared, though his lips
trembled a bit. "If I let you come in and do your man-things to my people,
I'd have naught left worth living for."
"Have no immediate fears," Sherrinford said. "You're merel
y bait." He sat
down and regarded the boy through a visor of calm. (Within, it wept in him:
Barbro, Barbro!) "Consider. Your Queen can't very well let me go back,
bringing my prisoner and telling about hers. She has to stop that somehow. I
could try fighting my
way through-this car is better armed than you know-but that wouldn't free
anybody. Instead, I'm staying put. New forces of hers will get here as
fast as they can. I assume they won't blindly throw themselves against a
machine gun, a howitzer, a fulgurator. They'll parley first, whether their
intentions are honest or not. Thus I make the contact I'm after."
"What d' you plan?" The mumble held anguish.
"First, this, as a sort of invitation." Sherrinford reached out to flick a
switch. "There. I've lowered my shield against mind-reading and shape-
casting. I daresay the leaders, at least, will be able to sense that it's
gone.
That should give them confidence."
"And next?"
"Next we wait. Would you like something to eat or drink'?"
During the time which followed, Sherrinford tried to jolly Mistherd along,
find out something of his life. What answers he got were curt. He dimmed
the interior lights and settled down to peer outward. That was a long few
hours.
They ended at a shout of gladness, half a sob, from the boy. Out