Destiny Doll (16 page)

SEVENTEEN

So we went on, northward, up the trail.

We left the desert and the badlands behind us and climbed steadily for days up a high plateau, while ahead of us the mountains steadily climbed higher in the sky, great, mystic, majestic ramparts that still were touched with the blue of distance.

There was water now, flowing streams of it that ran cold and musically along the pebbled beds. We cached our water tins in one of the stone beehive huts that still sprouted, at intervals, along the trail. Since the badlands none of us carried packs; the packs we had carried were strapped on Roscoe's sturdy back. Feeling a bit sheepish about it, I traveled with the shield slung behind my shoulders and the sword buckled to my waist. It was no kind of fighting equipment for a grown man to carry, but there was in that shield and sword a certain swashbuckling feeling of importance—a throwback to some old ancestor of millennia ago who had taken pride in a warrior's outfit.

We marched, it seemed, with more purpose now. While at times I doubted that Roscoe had known what was going on when he had pointed north (and continued to point north each time we asked him) his seeming confidence gave us at least a feeling of assurance that we no longer were fumbling blindly, but had a track to follow.

The vegetation increased. There was grass and flowering plants, a vast variety of shrubs, and at times groves of stately trees along some of the water courses. And always of course, the sky-scraping trees that towered far into the distance. The air grew chilly and where there had been no wind, there now was wind, blowing with a knife-edge bite. Rodentlike creatures abounded, sitting up and whistling at us as we passed, and occasionally small herds of herbivores. Sara shot one of these and we butchered it and drew straws to see who would be the guinea pig. The long straw fell to me and I ate a few bites of the steak we fried, then sat back to wait. Nothing happened and all of us ate. We had found a food supply and could hoard the little stock we carried.

There was about this high land an ecstatic mysticism and at times I found myself feeling that I was walking through a dream. It was not this high plateau itself, but the total impact of the planet that seemed to come crashing down upon me— the wonder of who had been here before and why they'd left and what might be the purpose of the orchard they had planted and then abandoned, along with the great white city. Huddling close to the campfire, grateful for its warmth against the chill of night, I watched Hoot and wondered at the brotherhood that lay between us, binding us together. He had cleaned my blood of poison and had later asked me for a loan of life and when Tuck had snatched him from me had accepted the loan from Tuck, although I suspected it had been taken as a proxy of my life, for between him and Tuck there was no such thing as brotherhood.

Now, more than ever, Tuck walked by himself, no longer even pretending that he was one of us. He almost never spoke except on those occasions when he mumbled to the doll and once the evening meal was done sat by himself away from the fire, apparently unmindful of the cold. His face became thinner and his body seemed to shrink within the muffling folds of his robe, shrinking not into a skeleton, but into tough rawhide. He took on a gray quality, a shadow sense, so that one became unaware of him. There were times when I'd look around and see him and be surprised to find him there and even wonder, momentarily, who he was, and that strange wiping-out-of-memory was, as well, a part of this high blue land through which we walked. Past and present and the thought and hope of future would seem to blend into a terribly logic feel of time that was in itself eternity, a never-beginning never-ending state of being that hung suspended, in duration and yet had about it a continuing and a sparkling sense of wonder.

So we moved across that great plateau, Paint rocking along in silence except for the occasional click of a rocker against a stone protruding from the trail; Hoot ranging out ahead, a dot against the distance, still working at his scarcely-needed role of scout; Tuck stumbling along like a dim gray ghost muffled to the throat in brown, and Roscoe stumping sturdily, muttering to himself his endless string of rhyming words, never making sense, a vocal moron who trundled happily through an alien never-never land. And I, stalking along with the shield upon my back and the sword banging at my leg, must have appeared as strange as any of the rest. Sara probably was touched the least of all, but she changed as well, regaining the old flare of adventure which had been sheared from her by the toil and monotony and the tension of crossing the desert with its badlands stretches. I saw in her again the woman who had met me in the hallway of that aristocratic house in the midst of its sweeping lawn and who had walked with me, arm in arm, into that room where it all had started.

The mountains loomed higher and lost some of their blueness and we could see now that they were wild and fearsome and breathtaking mountains, with soaring cliffs and mighty canyons, clothed with heavy woods that extended almost to the rocky peaks.

"I have a feeling," Sara said one night as we sat beside the campfire, "that we are nearly there, that we are getting close."

I nodded, for I had the same feeling—that we were getting close, although I could not imagine close to what. Somewhere in those mountains just ahead we would find what we were looking for. I did not think that we would find Lawrence Arlen Knight, for he must long since be dead, but in some strange manner for which I could not account, the conviction had crept into me that we'd find something, that somewhere this trail must end and that at the end of it lay the thing we sought. Although I could not, for the life of me, put into words the sort of thing we sought. I simply did not know. But not knowing did not suppress the excitement and anticipation of what lay just ahead. It was all illogical, of course, an attitude born of the mystic blue through which we journeyed. More than likely the frail would never end, that once it reached the mountains it would continue to go snaking up and around and through that upended country. But logic had no place here. I still continued to believe that the trail would end somewhere just ahead and that at the end of it we'd find something wonderful.

Above us lay the glow of the galaxy—the fierce blue-whiteness of the central core, with the filmy mistiness of the arms spiraling out from it.

"I wonder," Sara said, "if we ever will get back. And if we do get back, what can we tell them, Mike? How is one going to put into words the kind of place this is?"

"A great white city," I said, "and then the desert and after that the highlands and beyond the highlands mountains."

"But that doesn't tell it. That doesn't begin to tell it. The wonder and the mysticism . . ."

"There are never words," I told her, "for the wonder and the glory, never words for fear or happiness."

"I suppose you're right," she said. "But do you suppose we will get back? Have you any idea of how we can get back?"

I shook my head. I had one idea, but it might be a very bad one and there was no use in telling it, there was no use in giving rise to hope that had only a fraction of a chance of ever coming true.

"You know," she said, "I don't really care. It doesn't seem to matter too much. There is something here that I've found nowhere else and I can't tell you what it is. I've thought and thought about it and I still don't know what it is."

"Another day or two," I said, "and we may find what it is."

For I was under the spell as well as she, although perhaps not so completely under it. She may have been more sensitive than I, she may have seen things that I bad missed, or placed different interpretations upon certain impressions that both of us had experienced. There was no way, I realized, that any one person might hope to realize or understand, or even guess, how another person's mind would operate, what impressions it might hold and how those impressions might be formed and how they might be interpreted or what impact the interpretation might have upon the intellect and senses of the owner of the brain.

"Tomorrow, maybe," she said.

And, yes, I thought, tomorrow. It might be tomorrow.

I looked at her across the fire and she had the appearance of a child who was saying, not being sure at all, that tomorrow might be Christmas.

But tomorrow was not trail's end, not Christmas. It turned out to be the day that Tuck disappeared.

We became aware that he was not with us in the middle of the afternoon and, try as we might, we could not recall if he'd been with us at the noonday stop. We were certain that he had started with us in the morning, but that was the only thing of which we could be certain.

We stopped and backtracked. We searched and yelled, but got no response. Finally, as evening fell, we set up camp.

It was ridiculous, of course, that none of us could remember when we had seen him last and I wondered, as I thought of it, whether he had actually left us, wandering off either intentionally or by accident, or if perhaps he had simply faded away, as George may have faded away that night when we were penned by the bombardment of the tree in the red-stone structure at the city's edge. It was the growing grayness of the man, I told myself, that had made it possible for us not to miss him. Day by day he had grown more distant and less approachable, had progressively effaced himself until he moved among us as a ghost would have moved, only half-seen. The growing grayness of the man and the half-sensed enchantment of this blue land through which we made our way, where time ceased to have a great deal of sense of function and one traveled as if he were walking in a dream—these two factors, teamed together, had made his disappearance, I told myself, quite possible.

"There is no point in looking for him anymore," said Sara. "If he had been here, we would have found him. If he had been present, he would have answered us."

"You don't think that he is present?" I asked, thinking that it was a strange way of saying he was not around.

She shook her head. "He found what he was looking for. Just the way George found what he was looking for."

"That doll of his," I said.

"A symbol," Sara said. "A point of concentration. Like a crystal ball in which one can lose himself. A madonna or some ancient and effective religious belief. A talisman . . ."

"A madonna," I said. "You mentioned that before."

"Tuck was sensitive," said Sara, "down to his fingertips. In tune, somehow, with something outside our space-time reference. An offensive sort of man—yes, I'll admit that now—an offensive, sort of man, and different in a very special way. Not entirely of this world."

"You told me once he wouldn't make it," I said, "that somewhere along the way he would break up."

"I know I did. I thought that he was weak, but he wasn't. He was strong."

Standing there, I wondered where he had gone. Or was he gone at all? Had his grayness progressed to a point where he simply disappeared? Was he still with us, unseen and unsuspected, stumbling along at the edge of a twilight world into which we could not see? Was he out there even now, calling to us or plucking at our sleeves to let us know that he still was with us, and we unable to hear him or to feel the plucking? But that, I told myself, could not be the case. Tuck would not pluck or call. He wouldn't care; he wouldn't give a damn. He would not care if we knew he was there or did not know. All he needed was the doll to clutch against his chest and the lonely thought that jangled in his skull. Perhaps his disappearance had not been so much a disappearance as a growing grayness, as his utter and absolute rejection of us.

"You now be only two," said Hoot, "but strong allies travel with you. The other three of us still stand fast with you."

I had forgotten Hoot and the other two and for a moment it had seemed, in truth, there were only two of us, two of the four who had come storming up out of the galaxy to seek in its outland fringes a thing we could not know—and even now did not know.

"Hoot," I said, "you sensed George leaving us. You knew when he left. This time . . ."

"I did not hear him go," said Hoot. "He gone long back, days back. He fade away so easily there be no sense of leaving. He just grow less and less."

And that was the answer, of course. He'd just got less and less. I wondered if there had ever been a time when he'd been wholly with us.

Sara was standing close behind me, with her head held high, as if she might somehow be defiant of something out there in the gathering dark—the thing, perhaps, or the condition, or the interlocking of circumstances which had taken Tuck from us. Although it was hard to believe that there was any single thing or any specific set of circumstances involved. The answer must lie inside of Tuck and the kind of mind he had.

In the light of the campfire I saw that tears were running down her cheeks, weeping silently, with her head held high against whatever might be out there in the dark. I reached out a tentative hand and put it on her shoulder and at the touch she turned toward me and I had her in, my arms—without planning to, surprised that it should happen—with her head buried in my shoulder and now sobs were shaking her while I held her close and fast against myself.

Out by the campfire stood Roscoe, stolid, unmoving, and in the silences punctuated by Sara's sobbing, I heard his whispered mumbling: "Thing, bring, cling, sting, wing, fling . . ."

EIGHTEEN

We arrived the second morning after Tuck bad disappeared-arrived and knew that we were there, that we had reached the place we had struggled to reach all the endless days that stretched behind us. There was no great elation in us when we topped a little rise of ground and saw against a swale the gateway where the trail plunged downward between two great cliffs and recognized that here was the gateway to the place we had set out to reach.

Beyond us the mountains climbed up into the sky—those mountains which back at the city had first appeared as a purple smudge which could be seen fleetingly on the northern horizon. And the purple still remained, reflecting a dusk upon the blue land through which we had been traveling. It all felt so exactly right—the mountains, the gate, the feeling of having arrived—that I seemed to sense a wrongness in it, but try as I might I could not tell why there was a wrongness.

"Hoot," I said, but he did not answer. He was standing there beside us, as motionless and quiet as we were. To him it must have seemed entirely right as well.

"Shall we go?" asked Sara, and we went, stepping down the trail toward the great stone portals which opened on the mountains.

When we reached the gate formed by the towering cliffs between which the trail went on, we found the sign. It was made of metal, affixed to one of the cliff walls, and there were a dozen or more paneled legends that apparently carried identical information in different languages. One was in the bastard script that went with space patois and it said:

All Biological Creatures Welcome, Mechanicals, Synthetic Forms, Elementals of Any Persuasions Whatsoever Cannot Be Allowed to Enter. Nor May Any Tools or Weapons, of Even the Simplest Sort, Be Allowed Beyond This Point.

"I care not," said Paint. "I keep goodly company of great lumbering mumbler of rhyming words. And I watch most assiduously over rifle, sword, and shield. I pray you not be long, for following extended sojourn upon my back I shiver from apprehension at absence of biologic persons. There be strange comfort in the actual protoplasm."

"I don't like it," I said. "We'll be walking naked down that path."

"This," Sara reminded me, "is what we started out to find. We can't quibble at a simple regulation. And it'll be safe in there. I can feel it. Can't you feel the safety, Mike?'

"Sure I can feel it," I told her, "but I still don't like it. The way you feel is no sure thing to go on. We don't know what we'll find. We don't know what is waiting for us. What say we pay no attention to the sign and . . ."

"BEEP," said the sign, or the cliff, or whatever.

I swung around and there, on the panel where the regulations had been posted, was another message:

The Management Will Not Be Responsible for the Consequences of Willful Disregarding of Regulations.

"All right, Buster," I asked, "what kind of consequences do you have in mind?"

The panel didn't deign to answer; the message just stayed put.

"I don't care what you do," said Sara. "I am going on. And I'm doing what they say. I didn't come all this way to turn back now."

"Who said anything about turning back?" I asked.

BEEP, said the panel and there was another message:

Don't Try It, Buster!

Sara leaned the rifle against the wall of the cliff underneath the, sign, unfastened the cartridge belt and dropped it at the rifle's butt.

"Come on, Hoot," she said.

BEEP, and the panel said:

The Many-Legged One? Is It a True Biologic?

Hoot honked with anger. "Know it you do, Buster. I be honest hatched!" .

BEEP!

But You Are More Than One.

"I be three," said Hoot, with dignity. "I be now a second self. Much preferable to first self and unready yet for third."

The sign flashed off and there was a sense of someone or something pondering. You could feel the pondering.

BEEP! and the panel said:

Proceed, Sir, With Our Apology.

Sara turned around and looked at me. "Well?" she asked.

I threw the shield down beside the rifle and unbuckled the sword belt and let it fall. Sara led the way and I let her lead it. It was, after all, her show; this was what she'd paid for. Hoot ambled along at her heels and brought up the rear.

We went down the trail in a deepening dusk as the towering walls of stone shut out the light. We moved at the bottom of a trench that was less than three feet wide. Then the trench and trail took a sudden turn and ahead was light.

We left the towering walls and the narrow trail and came into the Promised Land.