The Reaches

31

Benison

"This is the Mirror," said K'Jax.

The words brought Gregg up like a brick wall. He'd gotten into a rhythm in the darkness, tramping along close to Guillermo. The concept of distance vanished when each stride became a blind venture. The Molt's night vision was better than a human's, though occasionally Guillermo brushed a shadowed tree bole and Gregg collided with him.

Gregg edged closer with his left hand advanced. He instinctively gripped the flashgun close to his body and pointing forward, though his conscious mind realized there was no material threat before him.

His hand felt cold. He saw nothing, absolutely nothing, until the Molt uncovered the torch again. Gregg's left arm had vanished to the elbow. Only the degree of shock he felt kept him from shouting.

One of K'Jax's fellows must have gone ahead. The transition was hard to see because an image of the sidereal universe shimmered on it in perfect fidelity. The reflected forest appeared as real as the one through which Gregg had just stumbled.

"We've laid poles along the ground within," the Molt leader said. He pointed down. The crudely-chopped end of a sapling about a hundred millimeters in diameter protruded from the transition. "Touch one foot against them to keep your direction."

He clucked. The sound must be equivalent to a laugh. "Don't disarrange the poles," he added. "You can walk forever in the Mirror."

He vanished through the boundary. His fellow with the light followed, then Guillermo.

"Stephen?" Ricimer said.

"Sure," said Gregg. He stepped into nothingness, feeling as detached as he had when he aimed at the oncoming water buffalo.

The interior of the Mirror was not only lightless but empty. There was a feeling of presence everywhere in the sidereal universe, the echo from surrounding existence of the observer's being. Nothing echoed here, nothing was here. Gregg had to be standing on something, but there was no feeling of pressure against the balls of his feet when he flexed his body upward as an experiment.

He slid his left foot sideways, suddenly aware that he wasn't sure of direction. When his foot stopped, he knew that he must be in contact with the pole, but he couldn't feel even that.

"God our help in ages past," Gregg whispered. He shuffled forward, picking up the pace. Now that he had begun, there was nothing in life that he wanted so much as to be out of this place. "God who saved Eryx when the ground shook and the sky rained fire. Be with me, Lord. Be with me. ."

There was a gap between one sapling and the next. Gregg was a vessel for another's will, the will of the man who had stepped into the Mirror seconds ago. He wasn't afraid for the instant his boot wandered unchecked, only doubtful. It was as if he were falling, painless and even exhilarating until the shock that would pulp him, bones and spirit together.

He touched the next pole in sequence and stepped on.

Gregg's skin began to prickle. He wasn't sure whether the sensation was real or, like the flashes of purple and orange that crossed his vision, merely neuroreceptors tripping in the absence of normal stimuli.

Needles of ice. Needles driving into every cell of his skin. Needles sinking deeper, probing, penetrating his bone marrow and the very core of his brain. He could no longer tell if he still carried the flashgun. He felt nothing when he patted his left palm in the direction where his chest should be.

Gregg knew now why men so rarely entered the Mirror. Part of his mind wondered whether he would have the courage to cross the barrier again to return to realside, but only part. For the most part, his intellect was resigned to spending eternity within the Hell that was the Mirror.

The shock of the tree trunk was utter and complete. Gregg shouted and grasped the coarse bark that had bloodied his lip. The air was warm and there was enough light to read by, enough light to see Guillermo reaching in surprise to steady the young gentleman who had walked straight into a tree several meters beyond the edge of the Mirror.

Piet Ricimer appeared from nowhere, his eyes open and staring. Only when he tripped on a sprawling runner and flew forward did awareness flame back into his expression. Ricimer hit the ground, wheezing and chuckling in a joy that echoed Gregg's own.

The Molts watched, Guillermo and the locals together. Their expressionless faces could have been so many grotesque masks.

"How long were we. ." Ricimer asked as Guillermo helped him to his feet. Gregg held onto the tree with which he'd collided. He thought he would probably fall if he let go. "In there. In the Mirror."

Guillermo and the Benison Molts talked for a moment in a clicking language nothing like Trade English. "About four hours," Guillermo finally said to Ricimer. "It's nearly dawn on the other side as well as here."

Gregg tried to understand how long he'd been walking. His mind glanced off the concept of duration the way light reflects from a wall of ice. The experience had been eternal, in one sense, but-his thigh muscles didn't ache the way they should have done after so long a hike. Perhaps brain functions slowed within the Mirror. .

"How far is the nearest Federation colony on this side?" Ricimer asked. He tried to clean away the loam sticking to the front of his tunic, but after a few pats he stopped and closed his eyes for a moment.

Gregg deliberately let go of the tree and squeezed his cut lip between his thumb and forefinger. The tingling pain helped to clear his brain of the icy cobwebs in which the Mirror had shrouded it.

"Two kilometers," K'Jax said. He pointed his free hand eastward. "They build spaceships there. There are a few mines, some crops. Most of the settlements are on the other side."

The Molt leader nodded to indicate his fellows. "We stay on the other side, because the fields there are too extensive for the humans to guard well. When they bring in extra troops and hunt us there, we cross to here."

"Let's take a look at the settlement," Ricimer said. "I think I can walk." He looked at Gregg. "Are you all right, Stephen?"

"I'll do," Gregg said. Maybe. He wasn't sure that he could walk two klicks, but his intellect realized that he'd probably be better off for moving.

He wasn't sure he could bear to reenter the Mirror, either; and perhaps that would be possible also.

K'Jax and his fellows set off without comment, as they had done earlier at the Peaches. To them, the decision appeared to be the act. Gregg wondered whether Guillermo's less abrupt manner was a response learned as an individual when he was liaison to the Southerns for his clan rather than a genetic memory.

Ricimer threw himself after the Molts. Guillermo hung at his side, but after the first staggering steps both humans were back in control of their limbs.

"Don't the Feds conduct combined operations?" Ricimer asked. "Hunting you on both sides of the Mirror at once?"

"They try," K'Jax replied. "Their timing isn't good enough."

"Humans don't enter the Mirror," another of the local Molts added unexpectedly. "They send us as couriers. Molts." He made the clucking noise Gregg had decided was laughter.

The vegetation here was nothing like that on the sidereal side of the Mirror. The trees grew in clumps from a common base, like enlarged grasses. The foliage formed a dense net overhead, but the volume beneath was divided into conical vaults rather than the cathedral aisles of a forest whose trees grew as individual vertical columns.

After a time, Gregg shifted the flashgun from his right arm to his left. The weapon was less accessible there, but he couldn't bring himself to believe they were in serious danger of ambush. He wasn't a good judge of distances, certainly not in gullied forest like this.

Everything seemed profitless: this hike, this expedition; life itself. Passage through the Mirror had blighted his mind like a field ripped by black frost. He could only pray that the effect would wear off-or that the Feds would anticipate his own sinful consideration of looking down the short, fat barrel of his laser as his thumb stroked the trigger.

"K'Jax?" Gregg called suddenly. He supposed they shouldn't make any more noise than necessary, but it was necessary for him to blast his thoughts out of their current channel. "Does the Mirror bother you Molts? Does it make you feel as if. ."

"As if your mind had been coated in wax and sectioned for slides?" Piet Ricimer offered. It hadn't occurred to Gregg to ask his friend.

"Yes," said the Molt leader flatly.

"Does it go away?" Gregg demanded.

"Mostly," said K'Jax. He continued striding ahead, not bothering to look back as he spoke. The Molts took swifter, shorter strides than humans of similar height.

"Until the next time," said another of the locals. "We enter the Mirror only when we must, so it doesn't matter what it costs."

"But you entered it for us," said Ricimer.

"You are enemies of our enemies," the Molt explained.

From the head of the line, K'Jax stopped, knelt, and announced, "The settlement is just ahead. The humans call it Cedrao."

Gregg eased forward in a crouch to bring himself parallel with K'Jax. He noticed that one of the local Molts turned to watch their backtrail, his projectile weapon ready.

The trees grew up to the edge of a twenty-meter drop. From that point, the ground fell away in a series of a dozen comparable steps, about as broad as they were deep. The Peaches had overflown similar country as Piet brought her in, but it didn't lie within fifty kilometers of their eventual landing point. Divergence on the mirrorside of Benison included details of tectonics as well as biology.

Below the escarpment, the tilted remains of ancient sediments, lay a broad valley. Sunrise painted into a pink squiggle half a kilometer distant the river that had cut through the rocks over ages.

On the near bank was a straggle of two or three hundred houses. The community stank of human and industrial wastes even at this distance.

"Cedrao," K'Jax repeated.

Ricimer sighted through the hand-sized electronic magnifier which he carried. Gregg suspected that a simple optical telescope would have been nearly as effective and considerably more rugged, but Piet liked modern toys.

A steam whistle blew from a long shed at one end of the community. An autogyro was parked behind the cast-concrete building that appeared to be the Commandatura. A few pedestrians wandered the street between the river and the dwellings. All of those Gregg could see through the flashgun's sight were Molts.

Ricimer backed away from the edge of the bluff and stood up. "How many humans live in Cedrao?" he asked.

"A few score," K'Jax said. "Transients when a ship lands. And a few human slaves."

"Rabbits," Guillermo explained.

"You could capture the town by a surprise attack," Gregg said/suggested.

"If we attacked," said the Molt watching their backtrail, "the Molts down there would fight us too. They aren't Deels. They won't hunt us in the woods, but they'll resist an attempt on their clan."

"K'Jax and his fellows ran away from humans and formed their own clan," Guillermo said. "Others of my folk bond to their supervisors." He clucked as the locals had done.

Guillermo himself had bonded to his supervisor-as he knew very well.

Ricimer shook himself. "We can go now," he said. "Though-Stephen, would you prefer to, ah, rest on this side before we cross the Mirror again?"

"I don't want to think about it," Gregg said in a voice as pale as hoarfrost. "If I thought about it for a day, I'd, I'd. . It'd be harder."

K'Jax strode off in the lead as brusquely as he'd executed each previous decision of the human leader. The others fell into line behind him.

"Piet?" Gregg said.

"Um?" his friend said, grinning wryly back over his shoulder.

"Why did we come here at all?"

Ricimer looked front again and nodded his head. "Because I had to see," he said at last. "See the Mirror, and see how President Pleyal was really developing the worlds he claims."

He looked back at Gregg again. All the humor was gone from his face. "They can't be allowed to continue, Stephen," he said. "Everything here, everything on Jewelhouse and Biruta and everywhere the Federation squats-slavery, cruelty, and no chance of survival if there's the least shock to the home government. Mankind will return to the stars. President Pleyal and his henchmen can't be allowed to stop it, no matter what it takes."

"Oh, I know what it'll take," Stephen Gregg said, as much to himself as to his friend. His right hand rested on the grip of his flashgun, while his left gently rubbed the weapon's barrel. "And it can be arranged, you bet."