Dark of the Woods

VII

He managed to grasp the trunk of a thin, sturdy, yil tree — past which the rushing snow carried him — wrapped his arms around it and locked his hands together on the other side. The tree bent amazingly beneath the pressure of the small avalanche though it refused to snap. In a moment, the roar seemed to grow distant, as if he were hearing only echoes of the event, then abruptly ceased altogether. He rose, his legs shaky beneath him, and tried to get his breath and to still the fluttering of his heart. The air was so choked with mist that it was difficult to breathe, and he thought it would not be improbable for a man with an impaired lung or a cold and its subsequent stuffed nose to either drown or suffocate in seconds.

He wiped the dewy vapor from his face, squinted his eyes and tried to see through the water droplets that immediately beaded his eyelashes. There was a dense cloud of snow eddying in the air currents in the valley bottom, a couple of hundred feet below, and it effectively shielded anything down there from his vision.

Wiping his face once more, he stumbled foward, grabbing trees and shattered saplings for handholds, slipping, crashing into rock formations and yil trunks with his hips, but somehow managing not to fall. He was breathing well enough now that the vapor had begun to settle, but his heart still thumped wildly in his chest. He had recalled the dream he had had only a couple of hours before in which he had been imprisoned in a house of ice and Leah had come to release him by melting the walls down — and how she, in turn, had been led away, appropriated by the Alliance soldier without a face…

If she were dead, in this avalanche, it would be as much the Alliance's fault as if a blue suited, brass buttoned officer had come and taken her and shot her…

No. No, he had to face up to the fact that some of the blame would lie with him. He should have tied her to a tree, tied both of them firmly, to protect against the possibility of an avalanche. Never before in his life had there been another human being for which he had felt responsible. It had always been him, alone, against the world, and any cuts or wounds incurred were marks of pride to satisfy the sadistic trait in him. Now the “me” was “us” as he had been reminding himself ever since that day in the temple, in the corridors of God's mind, when the point of no return had been reached and passed at blinding speeds. And while one half of “us” was rather big and brutish and able to take care of itself, the other half was frail, light, and in need of help when the forces of the opposition were very large.

He cursed his mother and, to a lesser degree but still vehemently, his father. If they had been reasonable, open human beings instead of ego-bloated back-biters, perhaps he would have learned the concept of “us” when he should have, in his childhood. But from the very first days, when he saw that one or the other only took his side in order to goad the one who disagreed with him, he had realized it was Stauffer against them, Stauffer in the singular. Because of them and the lateness with which he had come to the discovery of love and the responsibilities it carried with it, he might very well have made a mistake in judgment that would cost him the other half of “us.” And so soon, before he had even had time to explore all the possibilities of the amplified self that now included this winged Demosian girl…

“Leah!” he shouted as he reached the edge of the wall of snow.

Silence. Except for the faint sigh of the wind.

“Leah!”

“Here,” she called half-heartily, thirty feet to the right and forty feet behind. She had been brought up against the thick base of an enormous, black-barked tree and had not suffered the ride clear to the bottom. She was struggling to get out of the imprisoning snow, but with little luck.

He started after her at a run, fell, cracked his head on a bared section of stony ground, got up a little dizzy. By the time he reached her she was half to her feet, and he had her clear of the mounds in seconds. He drew her to him, nearly crushed her, despite the padding of her survival coat. He wanted to say very many things, but there were not really words to frame them. They were emotions, formless thoughts of happiness. Instead, he kissed her and stood back to look her over. “In one piece?”

“No broken bones. Though I guess I'll ache pretty terribly by tomorrow.”

“An ache can be borne. I don't know quite how we'd handle a broken leg or something like that. The speedheal doesn't have the facilities.”

She turned and looked up at the top of the ridge. “Well, we've broken through right enough.”

“And if anyone is on the trail,” he said, “that should bring them running. Come on, let's get a move on.”

“The suitcase,” she protested. “It has the blanket and the plastic in it.”

He looked at the tons of snow at the bottom of the ravine. “We'd never find it, even if we had days to look. We'll just have to make do with what we have.”

“Not down there,” she protested. “I held onto it until after I was stopped by the tree. It's in this mound, right here somewhere.”

He looked up to the point where they had stood, where the slide had struck, them. “You held on to that heavy case all the way down?”

“I knew, if we lost it, we'd not have any heat when we slept and that would mean the end of it. Right?” She looked so serious and yet so elfin at the same time that he burst into laughter.

“What's so funny?” she asked.

“You. I had my rucksacks strapped on, and they were very nearly ripped off me. Yet you had presence of mind enough to clutch that damned suitcase and make it stay with you. Lady, remind me never to challenge you to a fist fight.”

The suitcase was near the surface, and they uncovered it in a few minutes. It had been dented when it struck the tree, but was otherwise undamaged. When Davis started up the hill with it, she insisted he let her take it. He tried to argue, realized that would lead him nowhere, and finally let her have it.

“Now, dammit, let's get going,” he said, grasping her elbow and helping her up the side of the ravine toward the top which was no longer drifted shut.

Proteus came behind. His plasti-plasma was gurgling quite a bit, and his cataracted sight sensors swiveled and twisted, as if something like the avalanche might strike again.

But something worse happened.

“What are they?” Leah asked as they pulled themselves onto level ground and began walking across the short table of the mountaintop.

Paralleling them to their right were three blue spheres, each as large as a one-man plane, painted with flat light-absorbing paint that did not gleam or reflect the slightest minim of dim sunlight. Even as he watched, they arced, changed course, angled in toward he and Leah. There were no men inside them, he knew, but that did not make the situation the least bit better for them.

“Sherlock robots,” he explained, watching the advancing balls of blue with fascination. “They must have brought them in and set them loose before dawn. I wouldn't have thought' a backwoods world like this would have any. They most likely released them at three different locations. They've been closing in on us all night, coming toward one another as their data was correlated, shared, and factored. They've got the most sophisticated tracking gear the Alliance possessses, all microminiaturized and stuffed in that shell. You can't escape one of them.”

“How do they kill?” she asked gloomily, her large, oval eyes fixed to the middle of the trio of globes.

“They don't. But don't look relieved about that. They're just as deadly as if they were killers. But with heat sensors, sound sensors, visual apparatus, infrared scanners, encephalographic trackers, and a complete library of card indices on every public act you and I have engaged in, they have no room for weapons. But they've certainly already radioed our position back to the Alliance soldiers. You can expect a squadron of police to be dropped in here within minutes— if the weather isn't too bad to permit that.”

The Sherlocks slowed.

The snow continued to fall.

“What do we do?” Leah asked. “Just wait to be picked up?”