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gasp and brought on an intense feeling of danger and irrational distaste that
was like nothing she had ever experienced.
Two creatures were in some sort of vehicle that was making a whining noise. It
seemed to sway from side to side as it turned into the small road up to the
farm. The ve-hicle was basically an open cabin mounted to a thick oval slab,
but while it bounced along, it seemed to be hovering an elbow s length above
the road, with nothing touching the road itself. It was the sight of the two
creatures that caused her overpowering sense of dislike.
They looked like two giant beavers, each the size of a man; one was dressed in
some sort of waistcoat, and the other wore a flowered bib and a silly-looking
hat with a big flower sticking out of it.
The hovercar pulled up finally in front of the house and settled to the
ground, its whine now cut off. The driver with the waistcoat got out,
stretched, and walked around to open the door for its companion with the hat.
Standing and walking, they looked less like beavers than like something
entirely new. It was just the rodentlike head and prominent buckteeth that
gave the initial impression. They were covered with thick brown hair, they
walked up-right on thick bowed legs extending from wide hips, and they were
like nothing human.
She wanted to meet them even less than she had wanted to meet that purple
polka-dotted dragon. Just
as curious was her nearly instant reaction to the vehicle, the bright clothing
the creatures wore, even the buildings. Somehow all of them were wrong.
This was far more than the aversion the People had to things they did not make
themselves; it was more general, as if anything artificial or manufactured by
anyone was wrong. She did not even wish she had some sort of weapon; that
would be wrong as well.
It was time to eat and run.
It was getting easier all the time to process information and think in this
new way, which didn t seem like thinking at all but was in fact as complex a
method of reasoning as the one she d been raised on. The trick wasn t not to
think, Jack L. Chalker after all; it was not to fight doing things in your
head in a whole new way.
She came down the tree almost as easily as she d gone up it, jumping the last
couple of meters and landing ex-pertly on her feet. For someone who had no
idea where she was, her sense of direction seemed absolute. She headed to-ward
the edge of the trees, paused to take stock of all her wide-open senses, and,
perceiving nothing nearby, darted out into the open and across the road to the
rows of thick bushes beyond. The bushes bore some large pear-shaped,
cream-colored fruits, but she never gave them a second glance. Something, more
of that new inner knowledge, told her that none of the strange-looking fruits
were ripe and ready to eat yet.
She began to make her way through the groves at a steady pace, pausing only
now and again to check the smells, sounds, and other bits of information that
the gentle breeze might bring. Darkness was falling quickly now, yet she
proceeded on, drawn by some inner road map of the re-gion. She had no idea
where she was or where she was go-ing, but somehow she knew how to get there.
Finally she came to a shallow stream that burbled over a bed of rocks. She
paused, crouched, and took some water in her cupped hands and sniffed it. It
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smelled right, so she drank deeply, discovering a fierce but previously
suppressed thirst. After she drank, she relaxed for the first time since
leaving her tree, and, seeing very little around in the dark-ness, she looked
up and gasped.
There were countless stars up there, in some places so thick that they seemed
to be a single burning mass, and parts of the sky were bathed in clouds of
gold and magenta and deep royal purple, all seemingly frozen in midswirl.
There were more stars than she d ever seen before, and fea-tures out of deep
space astronomical photographs right there, sitting in the night sky.
She did not have to gaze but an instant upon the incred-ible beauty of that
vast fairyland starfield to know that there was nowhere on Earth from which it
might be seen. The sight and that knowledge fell upon her instantly,
generating a sense of awe, excitement, and some fear.
Alama had not lied. This was another world, far, far away from the one she had
known.
And still there was that inner urge to press on, to proceed as quickly as
possible to wherever it was that was calling her. Tearing her eyes away from
the spectral scene, she waded across the creek and went on through the brush
on the other side.
Even pushing her pace as much as she dared, it took hours to reach that
shimmering boundary glimpsed much earlier from the top of the tree. It wasn t
easy to see even in the bright starlight, but she could sense it, almost feel
it. And yet it could be seen, for on this side of the barrier things had a
brighter, more orderly look, while beyond it things seemed much darker. She
had no sense of it as something dangerous or even unusual, but it was unique
in her experience, and she could not be absolutely certain that it was safe.
She approached it cautiously, then stood right up to it, fi-nally putting out
a hand to touch it. It radiated warmth and a sense of thicker air, and after
hesitating a moment, she thrust her right hand into it.
It passed through with no resistance, but the feeling on the other side was
quite different. Hot and wet were the two impressions that came to mind, and
the sense of something striking and tickling her caused her to withdraw the
hand. It seemed all right, and when she touched it, the hand was wet; what
she d felt were raindrops.
Her new self did not react, but her old self caught the immediate sense of
incongruity. She looked up and, to the very boundary itself, the starfield
shone in a cloudless sky. Rain? From where?
Taking in a deep breath, she walked straight through the barrier feeling a
change in environment but no resist-ance and into a pitch-dark land of steady,
gentle warm rain. The temperature was considerably warmer than it had been on
the other side, almost steamy and very reminiscent of the Amazon jungle. The
rain, however, was more sub-dued, which was actually a welcome change from
what she d been used to.
She turned and stuck her head back through the barrier. Although it hadn t
seemed cold to her, the shock of suddenly going, wet-faced, from a steam bath
to a spring night made it feel almost frigid. It was fascinating, as if the
whole world were one huge house and each room in the place had its own [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]