Xenopath (35 page)

The light from
the valley soon gave out, but the period of darkness lasted only a
few minutes. From up ahead came the wan glow of twilight.

They emerged on
a wide ledge cut into the side of the mountain, which afforded a
spectacular view of peak after snow-clad peak as they receded into
the interior.

The ledge,
Vaughan saw, was merely part of a long winding track, which followed
the side of the mountain, disappearing inland between distant rock
faces. Vaughan could only assume that this track, too, had been
constructed by the Hortavans. It was the inland access to the hidden
valley, though the narrowness of the corridor had precluded the
flier's entry.

A cold wind blew
along the ledge, cooling Vaughan's sweat-soaked face.

They stopped,
laying the racks on the ground and resting.

"What now?"
Vaughan asked, staring along the track.

"Now,"
Breitenbach said, "we place them." He indicated recesses
chiselled into the face of the rock above the ledge. Each recess was
a metre from the next, and they receded along the side of the track
for perhaps twenty metres.

Breitenbach
eased a stone from the rack and approached the closest recess,
holding the gem before him with something like awe.

He paused before
the chiselled niche, then reached up and inserted the stone. To
Vaughan's amazement it slid home as if precision cut to fit the
inlet.

Vaughan took a
stone and slid it into the next inlet, ignorant as to what he was
doing and yet, at the same time, aware that he was taking part in
something vitally important. The perfection with which the hollowed
rock accepted the stones seemed natural and right, and each insertion
filled him with a certain inexplicable satisfaction.

Ten minutes
later the racks were empty, and the row of ruby gems set into the
mountainside caught the last of the day's light.

"And now?"
Vaughan asked,

"Now we
eat," Breitenbach answered, and then, with a smile as if aware
of what Vaughan had meant, he went on, "And in the morning, at
first light, they arrive... If you wish, you may stay and watch the
ceremony at sunrise."

And with that he
turned and entered the corridor through the mountain. Vaughan
followed, a little dazed.

Could it be,
then, that the Hortavans had survived? Would he witness an
extraterrestrial ceremony involving the stones as the sun came up on
an alien world seventy light years from Earth? The idea was too great
for his imagination to grasp. He wished suddenly that Sukara could be
with him to witness whatever was about to happen.

He followed the
radical through the mountain and back into the valley, and they sat
outside one of the small dwellings. Breitenbach gathered wood and
built a fire, igniting it with a lighter, and in a primitive cooking
pot boiled a broth of pulses, vegetables, and herbs.

A single moon
rode high, casting opal light across the valley.

Vaughan ate the
stew, surprised at how good it was, and fetched the canisters of
water from the flier, along with the remaining pre-packed meals as a
gift for the radical.

Vaughan opened
the whisky he'd bought in Mackintyre and offered Breitenbach a shot.
The oldster's eyes lighted. "Perhaps just one," he said.
"It would be sacrilege to greet such a momentous day with a
hangover."

Vaughan poured a
generous measure into Breitenbach's scratched plastic mug, and a
smaller quantity into his own.

He took a
mouthful. It was rough, but warming. He wondered if he had brought
out the alcohol with the express purpose of loosening the old man's
tongue.

He said, "I'm
not who you think I am," and watched Breitenbach's reaction.

To his credit,
the oldster kept his calm.

"And who,"
he said, "did you think I thought you were?"

Vaughan smiled.
"One of the radical cell, working against Scheering-Lassiter,
working on behalf of Grayson's pachyderms."

Breitenbach
inclined his head. "I assumed so, yes. But, then again, you
don't have the air about you of a government agent."

'Tm on your
side, Breitenbach. Rest assured on that score. I'm as opposed to the
ruling regime here as you are. But... well, it's a long story."

The old man
smiled and raised his mug. "Well, I like long stories, sir, and
we do have all night, after all."

Vaughan smiled.
He refilled his glass, offered Breitenbach another. He accepted a
shot.

As the firelight
flickered around the valley, illuminating Breitenbach's long face,
his eyes which seemed to have experienced so much, Vaughan told the
radical that he was a telepathic detective investigating three
killings on Bengal Station.

Breitenbach
leaned forward. "And these killings?"

"Kormier,
Travers, and a few months ago a woman called Mulraney."

The radical
nodded. "I knew they'd got Mulraney," he said. "I was
hoping Travers would finish his report, before..." His
expression bleak, he looked at Vaughan. "You know who is
responsible, of course?"

"Well,
there's no doubt in my mind that Scheering hired the assassin. I'd
like to implicate the bastard, but..." He smiled and shook his
head. "But that'd be impossible. The best I can hope for is to
get the assassin." He looked up. "It would help if I knew
exactly why Scheering wanted these people dead. Weiss—my
contact on Mallory—told me about the pachyderms. He claimed
they were sentient, or at least some of them were."

Breitenbach
stared into the flames. "Travers was an independent
xeno-biologist. Eco-Col brought him in to monitor the cull. We got to
him, told him what we knew, proved to him that certain of the
Grayson's pachyderms could be classed on the Baumann scale as
sentient. That of course had massive implications for the
colonisation, the exploitation, I of the planet. He presented his
findings to Scheering' when he returned to Earth—we
advised him against this course of action, by the way." The
radical shrugged. "Travers was an academic, and like so many
academics he lived in his ivory tower, blind to the machinations of
the outside world. I think he was oblivious to the lengths someone
like Scheering would go to in order to safeguard his interests."

"He learned
the hard way," Vaughan said. "And Kormier? He was a friend
of Travers—he knew the truth about the pachyderms, right?"

Breitenbach
smiled. "Oh, he knew the truth, very well."

Vaughan stared
at the radical, puzzled by something in his tone. "What do you
mean by that?"

Breitenbach
said, "I mean, Mr Vaughan, that Kormier found out in the very
same way that I did, all those years ago." He fell silent,
staring at the fire but seeing something else, long ago.

"What
happened?" Vaughan murmured.

Still staring at
the flames, Breitenbach said, "I came to Mallory as an
independent naturalist almost fifteen years ago. Not much was known
about Grayson's pachyderms back then. I'd made a study of the African
elephant, shortly before its extinction, and the elephant analogue of
Charybdis. When I read up about Grayson's, I knew I had to come here
and study them. Of course, at that point there was no cull. Scheering
had no idea how dangerous the pachyderms would be to his plans for
the planet."

Vaughan finished
his whisky. He refilled his mug while Breitenbach contemplated the
past, then offered the radical another shot. The old man nodded, lost
in reverie.

"And?"
Vaughan prompted.

"Oh, I
bought a cheap flier—they weren't proscribed then—and
toured the southern continent. I observed the animals. I grew very
close to them. I came to understand them, respect them. And then I
came to suspect that they were more intelligent than I or anyone else
had assumed. At least, some of them were. Even then, though, I was
reluctant to fully believe that I had stumbled upon a sentient race.
At first I ascribed my suspicion of sentience to my becoming too
close to the animals, identifying too personally with individuals."

"What made
you suspect intelligence?"

Breitenbach
smiled. "It was a cumulative effect— not just one
incident. I'd been living among a herd of three families for six
months—they are peaceable creatures, Vaughan. They accepted me.
I became..." He shook his head, as if in retrospective wonder.
"I became very close to a particular cow. She seemed... well, I
thought I was taking leave of my senses at the time, but she seemed
able to empathise with my emotions."

Nursing his
whisky, Vaughan smiled and shook his head.

"While I
was living with the herd, I had news from Earth that my father had
died. That evening, as I sat alone outside my tent, the cow—I
called her Lucy, for some reason—came up to me and quite simply
laid her trunk on my shoulder. I know it sounds
ridiculous—anthropomorphising random actions of alien
creatures—but it was as if Lucy were communicating to me,
commiserating with my loss."

Vaughan frowned.
"That's hardly evidence of sentience," he began.

Breitenbach went
on, "That was the first incident, the gesture that made me
wonder. A few days later 1 left my camp and trekked into the nearby
mountains. I walked for a few days, making notes on local fauna. On
the way back I slipped and fell down a ravine, breaking my leg."
He looked up at Vaughan. "I knew I was dead. I had sufficient
food and water for a couple of days, the break was bad, and I'd left
my com back at camp, sixty kilometres away."

"And?"

"And the
following morning I heard a noise further down the ravine, the
clatter of rocks. The mountains are home of some predatory
lion-analogues." He smiled. "The irony wasn't lost on me:
the naturalist, devoured by native fauna."

"But it
wasn't a lion."

"It wasn't.
A couple of pachyderms plodded into sight down the ravine. Imagine my
amazement when I realised that one of them was Lucy. She approached,
inspected my leg with her trunk. Between them they managed to get me
onto Lucy's back and carry me back to camp."

"Some
story," Vaughan said.

"Lucy
knew," Breitenbach said. "She knew I was in distress and
came to me."

"Are you
saying the pachyderms are telepathic?" Vaughan tried to keep the
scepticism from his voice.

"Telepathic,
empathetic—the terminology doesn't matter. She knew. She saved
my life."

Vaughan stared
into the fire. He shrugged. "I don't want to come over as the
sceptic, Breitenbach. But her saving your life doesn't prove
sentience. You could claim that some animals on Earth, certain dogs,
are empathetic."

Breitenbach
nodded. "I could. Of course, you're right. However, by that
time, I was certain in my mind that the pachyderms were sentient, and
then I found out for certain that they were."

He excused
himself, climbed slowly to his feet and made his way around the back
of an alien dwelling. As the old man relieved himself, Vaughan
wondered about his story. Could it be that the old man was deluded,
that the pachyderms were no more than merely clever? But, then, why
the cull, and why had Scheering ordered the murders of people
convinced of the pachyderms' sentience?

There had to be
something to Breitenbach's story, bizarre though it was.

The old man
returned, lowering himself with creaking bones into a cross-legged
position before the fire. He took up his whisky and contemplated the
liquid, then sipped.

"A few
months later I left the herd," Breitenbach said in a soft voice.
"I wanted to study others. I was curious as to why one
individual in a herd should evince signs of intelligence, when the
members of the same herd showed no such indications. I found another
herd, just north of where we are now, and a couple of days later it
happened."

He finished his
whisky and held out the mug for Vaughan to refill. Replenished, he
continued, "I was following the herd south—the pachyderms
migrate from the central plains to the edge of the southern continent
around this time every year. The way through the mountains is
treacherous, and a number of the creatures perish with every
migration. On this occasion I saw an old bull stumble and fall down a
steep drop. He must have fallen fifty metres. I was in the flier—I
descended to the foot of the cliff, though I knew there was nothing I
could do bur be with the bull as it died. I... I approached him,
knelt beside the animal. It was horribly injured, its skull stove in,
back broken. It was still alive. Its massive eyes regarded me..."
Breitenbach paused, reliving the event. Tears filmed his eyes.
Vaughan looked into his drink, waiting for the old radical to resume,
and at the same time wondering quite what proof the dying bull
vouchsafed Breitenbach as to its sentience.

He continued,
"Before it died, Vaughan, the bull communicated with me. It
showed me that it was an intelligent, conscious, morally aware
creature, worthy of equal status with all other sentient beings the
galaxy over."

Vaughan leaned
forward. "How did it do this?"

The radical took
a long drink of whisky, pursing his lips around the mouthful. He
nodded, staring at Vaughan as if wondering how to go about telling
him what had happened next.

At last he said,
changing the subject, "What did your contact—Weiss, was
it?—tell you about the Hortavans, the alien race which
crash-landed here thousands of years ago?"

Vaughan blinked,
put out by the sudden change of tack. "Not much, only what he'd
heard from Jenna Larsen, who'd heard it from you."

"But what
did he say?"

Vaughan
shrugged. "He claimed you knew about the aliens—he didn't
even know what they were called. He said you knew about the star
charts, the crystals."

"And how do
you think I know about the Hortavans?" Breitenbach said.