Destiny Doll

TEN

The trail wound across the arid land, crossing flats of sand and little pools of cracked, dried mud where weeks or months, or maybe even years before, rainwater had collected. It climbed broken, shattered ridges, angling around grotesque land formations. It wended its way around dome-shaped buttes. The land stayed red and yellow and sometimes black where ledges of glassy volcanic stone cropped out. Far ahead, sometimes seen, sometimes fading in the horizon blueness, lay a smudge of purple that I thought were mountains, but could not be sure.

The vegetation continued sparse-little bushes that crouched close against the ground, the sprawling thorn that ran along the surface. The sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky, but it was not hot, just pleasantly warm. The sun, I was sure, was smaller and fainter than the sun of Earth-either that, or the planet lay a greater distance from it.

On some of the higher ridges were little, cone-shaped houses of stone, or at least structures that looked like houses. As if someone or something had needed temporary shelter or protection and had gathered up flat slabs of stone, which lay about the ridges, and had constructed a flimsy barrier. The stones were laid up dry, with no mortar, piled one atop another. Some of the structures still stood much as their builders must have left them, in many of the others stones had fallen out of place, and in still others the entire structure had collapsed and lay in fallen heaps.

And there were the trees. They loomed in all directions, each one standing alone and lordly in its loneliness and each of them several miles from any other. We came close to none of them.

There was no life, or none that showed itself. The land ran on and on, motionless and set. There was no wind.

I used both hands to hang onto the saddle and continually I fought against falling down into the darkness that stole upon me every time I forgot to fight it back.

“You all right?” asked Sara.

I don’t remember answering her. I was busy hanging on to the saddle and fighting back the darkness.

We stopped at noon. I don’t remember eating, although I suppose I did. I do remember one thing. We had stopped in a rugged badlands area below one of the ridges and I was propped up against a wall of earth, so that I was looking at another wall of earth and the wall, I saw, was distinctly stratified with various strata of different thicknesses, some of them no more than a few inches deep while others would have been four or five feet, and each of them a distinctive color. As I looked at the strata I began to sense the time which each one represented. I tried to turn it off, for with this recognition was associated a most unrestful feeling, as if I were stretching all my faculties to a straining point, as if I were using all my energy and strength to drive deeper into this sense of time which the wall of earth invoked. But there was no way to turn it off; for some reason I was committed and must keep on and could only hope that at some point along the way I would reach a stopping point-either a point where I could go no further or a point where I had learned or sensed all there was to learn or sense.

Time became real to me in a way I can’t express in words. Instead of a concept, it became a material thing that I could distinguish (although it was not seeing and it was not feeling) and could understand. The years and eons did not roll back for me. Rather, they stood revealed. It was as if a chronological chart had become alive and solid. Through the wavering lines of the time structure as if the structure might have been a pane of glass made inexpertly, I could faintly glimpse the planet as it had been in those ages past-ages which were no longer in the past but now stood in the present, as if I were outside of time and independent of time and could see and evaluate it exactly as I could have seen and evaluated some material structure that coexisted with me on my own time level.

The next thing I remember was waking up and for a moment it seemed to me that I was waking from that interval when I saw time spread out before me, but in a little while I realized that could not be so, for the badlands now were gone and it was night and I was stretched out on my back with blankets under me and another covering me. I looked straight up at the sky and it was a different sky than I had ever seen. For a moment I was puzzled and lay quietly, trying to work out the puzzle. Then, as if someone had told me (although no one did), I knew that I was looking at the galaxy, all spread out before me. Almost directly overhead was the brilliant glow of the central area and spread out all around it, like a gauzy whirlpool, were the arms and outlying sectors.

I turned my head to one side and here and there, just above the horizon, were brilliant stars and I realized that I was seeing a few of the globular clusters, or more unlikely, other nearby stars, fellows with the star about which the planet I was on revolved-those outlaw members of the galactic system which in ages past had fled the system and now lay in the outer dark at the edge of galactic space.

A fire was burning-almost burned down-just a few feet from me and a hunched and blanketed figure lay close beside the fire. Just beyond the fire were the hunched-up hobbies, gently rocking back and forth, with the dim firelight reflecting from their polished hides.

A hand touched my shoulder and I twisted around to face in that direction. Sara knelt beside me.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“I feel fine,” I said, and that was the truth. Somehow I felt new and whole and my head and thoughts were clear with an echoing, frightening clarity-as if I were the first human waking to the first day of a brand-new world, as if time had been turned back to the first hour that ever was.

I sat up and the covering blanket fell off me.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“A day’s journey from the city,” she told me. “Tuck wanted to stop. He said you were in no condition to be traveling, but I insisted we keep on. I thought you’d want it that way.”

I shook my head, bewildered. “I remember none of it. You are sure Tuck said that we should stop?”

She nodded. “You hung onto the saddle and were terribly sick, but you answered when we spoke to you. And there was no place to stop, no good camping spot.”

“Where’s Hoot?”

“Out on guard. Prowling. He says he doesn’t need to sleep.”

I got up and stretched, like a dog will stretch after a good night’s sleep. I felt fine. God, how fine I felt!

“Is there any food?” I asked.

She got to her feet and laughed.

“What are you laughing at?” I asked.

“You,” she said.

“Me?”

“Because you are all right. I was worried. All of us were worried.”

“It was that damn Hoot,” I said. “He drained my blood.”

“I know,” she said. “He explained it to me. He had to. There was nothing else to do.”

I shivered, thinking of it. “It’s unbelievable,” I said.

“Hoot himself,” she said, “is unbelievable.”

“We’re lucky that we have him,” I told her. “And to think that I almost left him back there in the dunes. I wanted to leave him. We had trouble enough without reaching out for more.”

She led the way to the fire.

“Build it up,” she said. “I’ll fix some food for you.”

Beside the fire was a little pile of brush, twisted branches broken from some of the desert trees. I squatted down and fed some of them to the fire and the flame blazed up, licking at the wood.

“I’m sorry about the laser gun,” I said. “Without it, we stand sort of naked.”

“I still have my rifle,” she pointed out. “It has a lot of power. In good hands . . .

“Like yours,” I said.

“Like mine,” she said.

Beyond the fire the heap of blankets lay unmoving. I gestured toward them. “How is Tuck?” I asked. “Any sign of him snapping out of it?”

“You’re too hard on him,” she said. “You have no patience with him. He’s different. He’s not like the two of us. We are very much alike. Have you thought of that?”

“Yes,” I said, “I have.”

She brought a pan and set it on the coals, squatting down beside me.

“The two of us will get through,” she said. “Tuck won’t. He’ll break up, somewhere along the way.”

And strangely I found myself thinking that perhaps Tuck now had less to live for-that since Smith had disappeared he had lost at least a part of his reason for continuing to live.

Had that been why, I wondered, he had appropriated the doll? Did he need to have something he could cling to, and make cling to him by offering it protection? Although, I recalled, he had grabbed hold of the doll before George had disappeared. But that might not apply at all, for he may have known, or at least suspected, that George would disappear. Certainly he had not been surprised when it had happened.

“There’s another thing,” said Sara, “you should know. It’s about the trees. You can see for yourself as soon as it is light. We’re camped just under the brow of a hill and from the hilltop you can see a lot of country and a lot of trees, twenty or thirty of them, perhaps. And they’re not just haphazard. They are planted. I am sure of that.”

“You mean like an orchard?”

“That is right,” she said. “Just like an orchard. Each tree so far from every other tree. Planted in a checkerboard sort of pattern. Someone, at some time, had an orchard here.”