Deadman Switch

Chapter 18

Calandra had been correct about the gaps tunneling the wind. They did, and with a vengeance, converting the gentle breeze outside into a steady whistle that here in the shadow of the bluffs was already beginning to be chilly. Fortunately, I'd also been correct in the assumption that we'd be able to find someplace sufficiently sheltered from the blast. The northernmost bluff had two gentle ridges extending from its top all the way down into the mass of thunderheads, and between those ridges was a hollow with plenty of room for both of the shelters Shepherd Zagorin had lent us. The shelters themselves proved to be both simple and idiot-proof, and in perhaps twenty minutes we had a fairly cozy camp put together.

For a long time afterwards we just lay there on the ground, too exhausted even to talk. I watched the clouds passing overhead, framed by the towering buttes, and wondered if my legs would ever feel like walking again.

"Gilead...?"

"Hmm?" I said. There was no reply, and with an effort I turned my head to look at her. Flat on her back, her head propped almost vertical against a rolled-up sleeping bag behind her neck, she was staring down at the mass of thunderheads. Staring at them with a troubled expression on her face. "Something wrong?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said slowly. "What are they all doing here?"

"What, the thunderheads?" Feeling vaguely resentful at having to make the effort, I propped myself up on my elbows.

She had a point—even tired and irritated I had to admit that. Every other thunderhead we'd seen today, without exception, had been growing smack in the middle of heavy concentrations of plant and insect life, neither of which was present here in even moderate amounts. Not to mention the sheer unexpected number of the things growing together in the first place. "Could be there's enough shelter from the proper seasonal winds in here that spores don't get very far," I offered.

Calandra shook her head. "That might explain why there are so many here. It doesn't explain why they're alive."

I chewed carefully at a sun-chapped lip. "Maybe they can feed more than one way," I suggested. "Parasitic when they're out among other plants, something else when they aren't."

"Maybe."

For another moment we lay there in silence. Then, moving stiffly, Calandra rolled over and got to her feet, her sense that of someone bracing for unwanted but necessary activity. "What are you doing?" I asked, not at all sure I wanted to hear the answer.

She nodded up at the bluff towering over us. "There's a thunderhead up there, remember? I'm going to go take a closer look at it."

I looked up, a sinking feeling starting in my stomach and seeping down into my legs. It wasn't enough that we'd climbed forty million hills today already; Calandra wanted to do it some more. "Why?" I growled. "Or at least, why now?"

"You don't have to come," she said shortly. Glancing at the two ridges stretching to either side of us, she chose the leftmost and started up.

I watched her climb for perhaps a minute. Let every valley be filled in, every mountain and hill be levelled... As far as I was concerned, the fulfillment of that one couldn't come too soon. Swallowing a word I'd once been severely punished for saying, I got to my feet and followed.

It was, fortunately, not as bad as it had looked from flat on my back. Fairly gentle in slope to begin with, the ridge was also heavily studded with large and solidly inlaid rocks, giving it the appearance in places of a highly irregular staircase. Even so, it was a good fifteen minutes before we finally puffed up onto the flat top.

For a few minutes I just stood there in the brisk wind, well back from any of the edges, my eyes reflexively sweeping the horizon as my legs trembled slightly with fatigue. As usual, nothing that seemed out of the ordinary was visible out there.

"There's a thunderhead on each of the other bluffs, too," Calandra said in an odd voice.

I turned to look. She was right—precisely right, in fact. One thunderhead, exactly, perched atop each of the four bluffs.

From the top of the tall cedar tree, from the highest branch I shall take a shoot and plant it myself on a high and lofty mountain... A shiver ran up my back, totally unrelated to the wind. "All right, I give up," I said, trying to keep my voice light. "How did they get up here?"

Calandra licked her lips. "You feel it too, don't you?" she asked quietly.

I waved my hands helplessly. "I don't know what I feel," I had to admit. "Something here isn't right... but I have no idea what it is."

Calandra took a deep breath. "Me neither. And I don't like not knowing." She gestured to the lone thunderhead on our bluff, quivering in the breeze a half meter from the bluffs outer edge. "Let's have a look."

Standing at my cubicle window in the Carillon Building, a hundred twenty stories above ground, I'd never had even a twinge of acrophobia. Walking in a steady wind toward the edge of an open-air bluff a tenth that height was something else entirely, and I had to force myself to go the last couple of meters. "Looks reasonably normal to me," I said, dropping to my knees beside the thunderhead.

"Pretty hard rock it's dug into," Calandra pointed out, scratching at the cracked rock at its base with a fingernail. "The spore or whatever must have found a crack or hollow to germinate in."

I thought about that. "Maybe. On the other hand... there are an awful lot of cracks up here."

She hissed softly between her teeth. "Or in other words, why is there just one." Slowly, she shook her head. "I don't know."

I looked at the thunderhead again. A fungoid plant, stuck all alone in the middle of a rocky clifftop without other plants or decaying material anywhere around. A deep root system, perhaps, tapping into some source of nutrients within the rock itself? "Maybe it just so happens that thunderheads like fusion drive emissions," I suggested, only half humorously.

She shivered. "I don't like that idea at all," she said quietly.

I thought about it. If we were, in fact, sitting on top of a smuggler hideout... "Neither do I," I admitted.

Almost hesitantly, she reached out and touched the thunderhead's outer skin, resting her fingers there for a moment. Then, with a sigh, she lowered her hand and climbed back to her feet. "There's nothing here. Come on—let's go back."

We headed back across the bluff to where the two ridges began their sloping way down. "You want to try the other one this time, or stick with the one we already know?" I asked.

"Let's stay with the known," Calandra said. "I'm too tired to have to figure out new footing."

"Yeah," I nodded. Something on the second ridge caught my eye—"Hold it a second," I said, catching hold of her arm.

"What?" she asked, her voice suddenly taut.

I pointed down the ridge. "Discolored spots in the rock, about twenty centimeters across each—there and there; see? In fact," I amended, an odd tightness settling into my stomach, "they go all the way down."

She stared down the ridge in silence for a long minute. Then, still without speaking, she started down toward them.

The second ridge was, fortunately, as easy to climb as the first had been. The nearest of the discolorations was perhaps ten meters down, and we reached it without difficulty. Squatting awkwardly on the slope, Calandra below the spot and I above it, we gave it a careful look.

It was clear right from the start that the discoloration hadn't been my imagination; equally clear was the fact that it wasn't just a chance placement of different colored rock. The patch was obviously a changed section of the stone immediately around it...

I reached out to touch it. Smooth, or at least smoother than the rest of the surrounding rock. Wind or water treating could account for that, possibly, except that there was no reason I could see why one section would be so affected and a nearby one not. Off-colored rock; with a shiny, almost glassy hint to it...

I looked up and met Calandra's eye... and I could tell she'd reached the same conclusion I had. "It's been heat-treated," I said quietly.

Calandra licked her lips. "There's nothing here that could do that," she almost whispered. "Nothing at all."

The mountains melt like wax before the God of all the earth...

I swallowed hard, fighting back the dark, half-remembered fears of childhood. Spall was not—could not be—the seat of God's kingdom. Period. There was a reasonable explanation for what had happened here—a reasonable, scientific, non-miraculous explanation for what had happened here.

All I had to do was find it.

My probing fingertips caught something else. "Hairline cracks," I grunted to Calandra.

She nodded. "There's a whole network of them," she said absently. "More visible from my angle, I guess. They seem to radiate from the glazed part outward into the surrounding rock."

I leaned forward to see. "Cracks from the heating?" I hazarded.

She shrugged, oddly hunch-shouldered. For all her current rejection of her faith, she'd had the same upbringing I had... upbringing that would have included the same scriptures about God's fire and lightning that were currently bouncing around my own mind. "Maybe," she said. "They look a lot like the cracks around the thunderhead up there, though."

I looked back down again, chagrined that I hadn't made that connection myself. "Maybe that's the answer, then," I suggested slowly. "Maybe these are spots where there were once thunderheads."

She snorted. "Oh, certainly. What, no one ever taught them not to play with fire when they were seedlings?"

Under other circumstances I might have tossed out a pointed reference to God's lightning. But with a sense of creepiness growing steadily around me, I couldn't even resent her sarcasm. "It's not that crazy an idea," I told her. "I've heard of plants whose seeds germinate best after a forest fire has passed through the area. Why not one which spontaneously burns down at the end of its life to give that kind of seed a good head start?"

"Have you ever heard of a plant like that?" she countered.

"No. But neither of us is exactly steeped in botanical knowledge."

Her eyes seemed to defocus for a moment... as if trying to see something that still wasn't quite there. "True," she said at last. "I just hope it's really that simple."

—

There were housekeeping chores to be done when we reached bottom; chores that enabled me to temporarily ignore the odd feeling hovering at the edge of my mind. By the time we'd set up our firepatch flatlantern and gotten it started, the sun was down; by the time we'd sorted out and eaten our pac-heated meals, it was full night.

And as we sat quietly on opposite sides of the firepatch, lost in our own private worlds, the mystery inevitably returned to my thoughts.

"Any progress?" Calandra asked, her face eerie looking in the glow of the firepatch.

I shrugged. Irritating though Calandra could be, a portion of my mind noted dimly, it was sometimes nice to be with someone who didn't have to communicate entirely through words. "Maybe," I told her. "I presume we can eliminate right away the possibility of volcanic activity on those slopes?"

"I know even less about geology than I do about botany," she said dryly. "But I find it hard to believe this is volcanic rock."

I nodded. "Okay, then. Suppose, for sake of argument, that the thunderheads have a high metallic content."

"All right," she said after a slight pause. "I guess I can suppose that. So...?"

"So high metal content would imply good electrical conductivity," I said. "Which would make them likely targets during thunderstorms."

"So all the ones that happened to grow on the slope got blasted off, while the ones right on top didn't?"

"The ones on top might be younger," I reminded her. "We don't have any idea how old the heat-treated parts are, or how long a thunderhead's lifespan is."

She waved upward, the motion casting a ragged shadow on the ridge behind her. "It still doesn't make sense," she sighed. "None of it does. Why would one group of thunderheads prefer—no; insist on—living among a tangle of other plants out in full sunlight, while another group works very hard to drill its members into solid rock on cliff faces? While a third packs together in shadow like lonely walruses," she added, gesturing at the sea of thunderheads faintly visible in the reflected light.

I shrugged helplessly. "Maybe they're three different species," I said. "Maybe they behave differently at different parts of their life cycle. Maybe they're just highly adaptable and can live and grow no matter what happens around them. Some things are like that; others aren't."

I hadn't intended the comment to sound accusing... but it did anyway, and both of us heard it. "Sometimes that kind of struggle isn't worth it," she said quietly, her eyes steady on me.

For a moment we gazed at each other, and I felt the rush of suppressed emotion flowing like white-water through her. "What happened?" I asked softly.

Her eyes were still on me, but her attention had turned inward. To thoughts, and memories, and feelings... and, perhaps, to the need to talk about it all. "Aaron Balaam darMaupine happened," she said at last. "Do you remember what it was like to be sixteen?"

I thought back. Awkwardness, both physical and social. Confusion, and the questioning of things long taken for granted. A profound need to be accepted, to be like all the others. An equally profound terror that I wasn't, and would never be. "I remember enough of it," I said.

"I was sixteen when darMaupine's Kingdom of God was toppled," she said, her voice echoing old pain. "When the Patri and colonies began to truly hate the Watchers." She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "You were, what, ten when that happened?"

"Eleven."

"Eleven. Which meant you were still pretty much locked safely away in the Watcher womb." She shook her head. "I wasn't. I'd already spent a lot of time out in the non-Watcher world—darMaupine practically ordered us to do that. 'Do you not realize that the holy people of God are to be the judges of the world?'—that was one of his favorite quotes. I'd spent time out of the settlement. Made a lot of... friends."

She dropped her gaze to the firepatch, a hand coming up to daub briefly at her eyes. "I was sixteen, Gilead. I... couldn't take the hatred and... rejection I felt everywhere. And I couldn't believe a loving God would have permitted someone as gifted as darMaupine to be so badly corrupted."

I licked my lips. "We're creatures of free will," I said quietly. "By definition, that means God allows us to choose whether to use our talents for or against Him."

"I know all the arguments," Calandra said, shaking her head. "But arguments didn't help. I was hurting... and all the Watchers who were left were too busy fighting off their own destruction to care about something as unimportant as a teenager's crisis of faith. I left just as soon as I could."

"And have been running ever since?"

A bitter smile touched her lips. "But the running's going to stop now, isn't it? Can't run any more after you've been at the Deadman Switch."

"Calandra—"

"You suppose it's my punishment for quitting?" she asked, her voice trembling slightly. "You suppose God considers it heresy that I ran out when my questions outnumbered my answers?"

"If God were that impatient He would have rolled up the universe by now and put it away in a closet," I sighed. "We just have to trust that He's got things under some kind of control. Whether we understand what He's doing or not."

She raised her eyes back to mine again. "So why did you run away?"

I hesitated. I had promised myself never to tell this to anyone else... "I left because there wasn't any way to make money in Cana," I told her. "And I wanted to make money."

She stared at me for a long minute. "I don't believe you."

"Everyone in Cana believes it," I said, feeling a flicker of pain. Pain I thought I'd laid to rest long ago.

"Then they haven't seen you lately. Have they?"

I shrugged fractionally. "It's been about nine years."

Her gaze hardened. "Don't lie to me, Gilead. DarMaupine and his people lied to me; I won't be lied to again."

I took a deep breath. "I earn about a hundred fifty thousand a year working for Lord Kelsey-Ramos."

She snorted. "I've lived on as little as six."

"I live on five."

Silence. Then, slowly, she nodded. "Who knows?"

"Cana's chief elder. No one else."

"Why not?"

"What purpose would it serve? To save my reputation among them?"

"Your reputation's very important to you."

I bit at the back of my lip. She was right, of course. "So is their dignity as human beings," I said quietly. "Your Bethel settlement got crushed in the aftermath of darMaupine, Calandra—for Cana, it's a matter of being slowly strangled to death. Without my contribution, I really don't think they could survive as a community any more." I caught her eye. "You really want them to know that?"

Her lip twisted. But it was a soft sort of twist, with more sympathy to it than contempt. "And you risk throwing that away to help me?"

It was something I'd thought about a great deal lately. Usually late at night, alone in the dark. "I have a weakness for lost causes, I suppose," I said, forcing a smile.

She dropped her eyes, turned her head to gaze out at the thunderheads. "Can't get much more lost than I am..."

She trailed off, and abruptly her sense sharpened. "What?" I whispered.

For a half dozen heartbeats she didn't answer... but slowly her sense changed to disbelief. Disbelief, and quiet horror. "Do you feel it?" she whispered.

I followed her gaze, stretching out with all my skill. The thunderheads were a ghostly sea of faint white patches, some of them seeming to quiver in the breeze. The air about me was rich in subtle sounds... subtle aromas... subtle sensations...

And at last I saw what Calandra had seen.

I looked back at her. Our eyes met; and together we uncrossed our legs and stood up, picking up our survival pack flashlights as we did so. She moved around the firepatch, stepped close to me, her muscles trembling with emotion. For another moment we stood like that, holding each other tightly, our shadows stretching across the milky white sea. Then, setting my teeth, I raised my light, set it for tight beam, and flicked it on.

A narrow cone of light lanced out... and even as I squinted against it, I felt the responding ripple, and knew that what we'd both sensed had indeed been the truth.

The thunderheads were alive. Alive, and aware... and watching us.