Land and Overland Omnibus

CHAPTER 15



Toller stared at the woman, knowing without being told that she was Bartan Drumme's wife, and his inner model of the universe and all its ways flowed and was changed for ever. He felt cold and weak, but somehow unafraid. Berise and Zavotle had not moved, and although they were looking in different directions he knew they were seeing exactly what he was seeing. The woman was beautiful, and she was wearing a simple white dress, and she glowed like a candle in the dimness of the ship's interior. She spoke in anger shaded with concern.

At first I could not believe it when I sensed Bartan drawing nearer, and then I searched and found that it was true! You set out across space without even understanding the effects of continuous acceleration! How could you fail to realise that you were heading for certain death?

"Sondy!" Bartan had returned to the upper deck and was clinging to a handhold near the head of the ladder. "I am coming to bring you home."

You are a fool, Bartan. All of you are reckless fools. You, liven Zavotle, you who drew up the plans for the voyage—how did you expect to land on this world?

Zavotle spoke like a man in a trance. "We planned to slow our ship down by plunging it into Farland's atmosphere."

And that would have been the end of you! At the speed you would have attained on reaching Farland the friction with the atmosphere would have produced so much heat that your ship would have become a meteor. And even if by some miracle you had landed safely—had you simply assumed that the air would be breathable?

"Air? Air is air."

How little you know! And you, Toller Maraquine, you who style yourself leader of this ill-conceived expedition—do you accept full responsibility for the lives of those you command?

"I do," Toller said steadily. A part of his mind was telling him that he and the others ought to be cringing with fear or reeling with astonishment, anything but calmly answering questions put to them by an apparition, but it was in the nature of the mental communion that all normal human reactions were prorogued. He now understood Bartan's previous assertion that, by definition, anything which happens cannot be supernatural.

In that case, Sondeweere continued, if you retain any vestiges of a conscience, you will immediately abandon this wildest of ventures. I will give you the instructions and guidance necessary to effect a safe return to Overland.

"I cannot agree to that proposal," Toller said. "While it is true that I boast the title of commander of this extraordinary mission, its members have their individual and separate reasons for wanting to set foot on Farland. My authority is rooted in the common will to proceed, and were I to propose turning back my voice would become only one among many."

A slippery answer, Toller Maraquine. The vision regarded him with blue-seething eyes. Does it mean that you are prepared to lead your crew to their deaths?

"I see no need for that? If it is within your power to guide us safely to Overland you must be able to do the same with regard to Farland."

How little you understand! How little you know of the dangers that await you here! The silent words were now tinged with impatience. Many years ago you found Overland to be uninhabited, and now—blindly—you presume that Farland is the same. Has it not occurred to you that this world is peopled, that it has its own civilisation? Did you think I had an entire planet to myself?

"I had given the matter no thought," Toller said. "Until this minute I believed that Bartan was mad, and that you did not exist anywhere."

I see now that I should never have reached out to you, Bartan. It was a mistake I would not have made had my development been complete, but I must bear the responsibility for the jeopardy in which you and your companions have been placed. I beg you, Bartan—do not add to my remorse. You must persuade your friends to return to Overland.

"I love you, Sondy—and nothing will keep me from your side."

But what you contemplate is sheer folly! You cannot hope to rescue me with a force of only six.

"Rescue!" Bartan's voice became sharper. "Are you being held captive?"

There is nothing that anyone can do. I am content here. Turn back, Bartan!

In spite of the curious mood that had been induced in him, the casual and dreamy acceptance of the miraculous, Toller was aware of a growing clamour deep within himself as he listened to the exchange between Sondeweere and Bartan. Revelation was piling on revelation, and with each there came a host of questions which cried out for answers. What were the people of Farland like? Had they landed on Overland by stealth and physically abducted Bartan's wife? If so, what had been their motive? And, above all, how had an unremarkable woman living on a remote farm acquired the awesome ability to project her image and thoughts across millions of miles of space?

Seeking enlightenment, Toller tried to study Sondeweere's face and discovered that it was impossible to focus on any single aspect of her. The vision he had seemed to exist behind his eyes, and it was a composite of many images which continually shifted and merged, making it impossible to scrutinise any one in particular. She was standing a few paces away from him, and at the same time she was so close that he could distinguish the individual down hairs on her skin, and at the same time she was so far away that she had the semblance of a bright star which pulsed in harmony with the silent rhythms of her speech…

By refusing to turn back you place me in an impossible situation. The only way I can save you from certain death in space is by leading you to an equally certain death here on Farland.

"We are responsible for our own lives," Toller said, knowing that he had the full support of his crew. "And we are not easy to kill."

Sondeweere came to the ship many times in the days that followed her first visitation, and for the most part her concern was with discarding its stupendous velocity and altering the course.

After he had recovered from the shock of learning the vessel's true speed, Zavotle became absorbed by the mechanics of the operation. It had not simply been a matter of turning the ship over to reverse the direction of its thrust—numerous course corrections had to be carried out by tilting the ship and firing the engine at an angle to the line of flight. There was no means of looking directly aft, therefore Farland could not be seen and the crew had to take it on trust that they were steadily drawing nearer to their destination.

Zavotle found much to write about in his log, and was particularly intrigued when his spectral tutor explained to him what had been wrong with the plan to halt the ship outside the reach of Farland's gravity. The radius of a planet's gravity can be regarded as infinite, Sondeweere told him, and therefore the ship had to be placed in orbit, a condition in which it falls forever around the planet, in exactly the same manner as the planets circle their parent sun.

Toller tried to take an interest in the difficult concept, but found that his normal thought processes were inhibited by the essential strangeness of the situation. There had been too many revelations, and too many mysteries had been uncovered—all of them turning on the central enigma of Sondeweere herself.

He would have expected Bartan Drumme to be more taxed by that enigma than any other member of the company, but the youngster seemed too bemused by the prospect of being reunited with his wife to think much about what had so drastically interfered with the course of her existence. Allowances had to be made, Toller decided, for the fact that Bartan had spent a long time in an alcoholic twilight of the mind, living with the knowledge that his wife had somehow been transported to Farland and had communicated with him from that distant world.

Also, Bartan was drinking heavily again. With the realisation that the ship was vastly overstocked with all supplies, including brandy, Toller had given permission for the crew to drink freely—seemingly a small enough concession in the circumstances. It had soon become evident to him that Bartan was abusing the privilege, but he had lacked the will to issue a corrective. Matters of shipboard discipline, in which he would normally have been very strict, now seemed irrelevant and trivial in a universe where the impossible had become probable, and the bizarre had become commonplace.

Three days into the deceleration phase he found himself gazing through the forward porthole—which now faced aft—at the twin points of light which were Land and Overland, the worlds which had encompassed his entire life and which he had left far behind. They seemed more distant than the stars, and yet—from what he had learned—there was a human connection between Overland and Farland. What could it be? What could it be?

Toller's frustration was increased by the fact that, no matter how insistent were the questions hammering in his mind, each time Sondeweere established communication he was overcome by the same mood of passivity and acceptance, and she was gone before the questions could be put to her. It was as if, for reasons of her own, she had used her strange powers to smother his spirit of enquiry. If that were the case, a new mystery had been added to a surfeit of mysteries, and it all seemed so … unfair.

He glanced around the upper deck, wondering if the rest of the crew shared his frustration. Wraker was in the pilot's seat, holding the crosshairs on the current guide star, and the others were drowsing in their sleeping nets, seemingly unperturbed by their vulnerability, their total ignorance of what lay ahead.

"This is not the way things should be," Toller whispered to himself. "We are entitled to more consideration than this."

I have to agree with you, Sondeweere said, hovering before him, warping space around her to create strange geometries which defied perspective.

I confess that I have done my utmost to erect a barrier around your minds, but my concern was with your collective safety. You see, telepathy—direct mind-to-mind communication—is largely an interactive process. You have enemies here on Farland, powerful enemies, and I had to be certain that I could prevent the symbonites from becoming aware of your approach to the planet. That much I have been able to achieve, but it would still be best if you would agree to turn back.

We cannot turn back," Bartan Drumme said, forestalling Toller's response.

"Bartan speaks for all of us," Toller added. "We are prepared to face any foe, to die if need be, but by the same token we are entitled to be apprised of the terms of the conflict. What are symbonites, and why are they hostile to us?"

There was a brief pause during which Sondeweere's multidimensional image underwent several shifts and changes in luminosity, then she began to unfold a tale…

The symbons had been drifting in space for untold thousands of years before blind chance brought them into an unremarkable planetary system. It consisted of a small sun which had a retinue of only three worlds, two of them forming a closely matched binary. Under the influence of the sun's gravity the tenuous cloud of spores—many of them linked by gossamer-like threads—sank inwards over a period of centuries.

Almost all of them continued the slow descent to the heart of the system, where they were destroyed in the sun's nuclear furnace, but a few were lucky in that they were captured by the outermost planet.

There they settled in the soil, were nourished by the rain, and entered the receptive phase of their existence. They were doubly lucky in that all of them eventually came into physical contact with members of the planet's dominant species—a race of intelligent bipeds who had recently discovered the use of metals. They entered their hosts' bodies and multiplied and spread through them, showing a special affinity for the nervous system, and produced composite beings in which some of the characteristics of both species were enhanced to a great degree.

The symbonites were stronger and vastly more intelligent than the unmodified bipeds. They also had telepathic powers with which they sought each other out and formed a group of super-beings who easily dominated the indigenous species. The relationship was an amicable and peaceful one, bringing to an end the natives' tribal squabbling.

It could even have been thought of as beneficial to the host race, except that the bipeds were cheated of the right to follow their own evolutionary course.

There followed two centuries during which the symbonites flourished. The offspring of a coupling between a symbonite and an ordinary native was always another symbonite, and with that overwhelming genetic advantage the superbeings inexorably increased their numbers. They developed their own culture, secure in the knowledge that in time they would entirely supersede the native population.

But millions of miles away, on one of the pair of inner worlds, a new development was taking place.

As the original cloud of symbon spores was drifting towards the sun, two of its members had been intercepted by one of the twin worlds. After they had floated down to the lowest levels of the atmosphere their link had been broken by wind forces, but they had entered the soil close to each other in a fertile region of the planet.

A symbon has no powers of selection. It has to merge into the first living creature with which it comes into contact, and one of the spores was quickly absorbed by one of the planet's lowest life forms—a myriapod which combined some characteristics of scorpion and mantis.

The crawling creature reproduced itself, giving rise to a breed of super-myriapods. They had no brains as such, being controlled by groups of ganglia, so they could not become telepathic in the full sense of the word, but they had the ability to broadcast dim proto-feelings and images from their nervous systems.

They also perpetuated themselves on a downward evolutionary curve, gradually losing their special characteristics, because as organisms they were far too primitive to form a viable symbiotic partnership.

In the case of that symbon spore, nature's blind gamble had not paid off. The breed of super-myriapods was destined to revert to type within a few centuries, and their existence would pass unnoticed by the world at large—except for one relatively unimportant instance. The sub-telepathic emanations of their descendants caused disturbing mental effects among humans who chanced to settle in their locality.

In the case of the second symbon spore, however, the outcome was vastly different…

"Sondy!" It was Bartan Drumme who broke the spell cast by the cool overview of the reaches of time and space, and his anguish was apparent. "Please don't say it! That can't be what happened to you."

That is what happened to me, Bartan. I came in contact with the second spore—and now I too am a symbonite.

There was an awed silence on the upper deck of the ship, then Bartan spoke again, his voice quiet and strained. "Does it mean I've lost you, Sondy? Are you dead to me? Are you now one of … them?"

No! My appearance has not changed, and in my heart I am as much a human being as ever, but … how can I explain it? … raised to a power. I tried to persuade you to turn back, but having failed I can reveal that I long to escape from this cold, rainy world and live among my own kind again.

"You're still my wife?"

Yes, Bartan, but it is futile to dream of such things. I am a prisoner here, and it would be suicidal for you and your companions to try to alter that fact.

Bartan gave a tremulous laugh. "Your words have given me the strength of a thousand, Sondy—and I'm coming to take you home."

The odds against you are too great.

"There are things we must know," Toller put in, driven to speak in spite of the awareness that he was intruding. "If you are not allied to these … symbonites—why have you joined them in Farland? And how was it done?"

Once the spore had entered my system I was destined to become a symbonite, but the more advanced the host is in evolutionary terms the longer the process takes. I spent more than a year in a semi-comatose condition while the inner metamorphosis was taking place, and during that time my telepathic ability was not under control. At a certain stage the symbonites of Farland became aware of me, and they understood at once what was happening.

They are not a belligerent or acquisitive race—violent conquest is not their way—but they divined enough about human nature to fear the rise of human-based symbonites on Overland. They built a spaceship—one which operates on principles I could never explain to you—and flew to Overland.

They spirited me away from the midst of my people, anxious to do so before I could bear children. The action was necessary in their eyes because my children's children would also have been symbonites, and in time there would have been an entire planet populated with them. Springing from a higher evolutionary base, they would have been much superior to the symbonites of Farland. Although transmogrified, it is almost certain that they would have retained the human taste for exploration and expansion—and inevitably they would have set foot on Farland. So, here I am, and here they are determined I will stay.

"It would have been less trouble to kill you," Zavotle said, expressing a thought which had occurred to more than one of the Kolcorron's crew.

Yes, and that is precisely the kind of thinking which prompted the symbonites to abduct me. They are not a murderous race, so they were content to isolate me from my kind and wait for me to die of natural causes. However, they made the mistake of underestimating my telepathic potency. They did not allow for my being able to contact Bartan in an effort to assuage his grief.

And I in turn did not expect this terrible outcome—otherwise I would have remained silent. Sondeweere's indefinable face, simultaneously close and remote, expressed regret. I must bear the responsibility for whatever befalls you.

"But why should we come to any harm?" Berise Narrinder said, speaking to Sondeweere for the first time. "If your captors are as timorous as you say, they will be unable to stand in our way."

Readiness to kill is no yardstick of courage. Although the symbonites abhor the taking of life, they will do so if they adjudge it necessary—but they are not the ones with whom you will have to contend. The native Farlanders are the instruments of the symbonites … and they are numerous … and they are untroubled by any scruples over the shedding of blood.

"Nor are we when the cause is just," Toller said. "Will the symbonites become aware of us before we land?"

Probably not. No mind—telepathic or otherwise—can continue to function unless it protects itself from the spherical bombardment of information. I became aware of you mainly because of the special relationship with Bartan.

"Are you permitted freedom of movement?"

Yes—I roam the planet at will.

"In that case," Toller said, still dully astonished at his ability to commune with a mental apparition, "surely it is within your power to guide our skyship to some remote and lonely spot—at night, if need be—where we could meet you and take you on board our craft. A few seconds should suffice—it is not even necessary for the ship to touch down—and then we could be on our way back to Overland."

The extent of your presumption amazes me, Toller Maraquine. Do you dare to imagine that your analysis of the possibilities, carried out on the spur of the moment, is superior to mine?

"All I'm…"

Do not trouble yourself to answer. Instead, let me put another question to you—for the last time, is it totally inconceivable that you can be persuaded to turn back?

"We go on."

If that is the way of it, Sondeweere's image was retreating as she spoke, we will meet under your terms. But I guarantee that all of you will come to rue the day you left Overland.