Part 8 (1/2)

Shaker Sandow sat down on the cool carpet of ferns before Richter, looked around at the verdant landscape. 'A geographic impossibility, wouldn't you say?' he asked.

Richter noticed how the old Shaker's fatigue seemed to have disappeared. Out of the mountains and the cold, finally in the east where knowledge waited, Sandow was almost young again. 'I hadn't noticed,' he said.

'Here we are but a short distance from the frost line of the Cloud Range, from a climate of snow and wind and ice. Less than half a day's travel, even by foot. And yet we find ourselves in a tropical world of palm trees and what appear to be orchids. I have only seen pictures in old books and stories about the flowers of the Salamanthe Islands, but I would say this is much like the land about the equator: humid, heavily grown, with its own breed of animals and insects. Geographically, such a closeness of opposite climes is impossible.'

'Yet it's here,' Richter pointed out.

'Aye, and I've been attempting to discover why.'

'And what have you found?'

In the jungle, strange birds called in ululating lullabies to each other while others squealed atonally and rustled in the high branches.

Sandow placed the palm of his hand against the earth after brus.h.i.+ng away the ferns that obscured it. Richter followed suit, looked perplexed a moment. 'It feels warm. But should that be unusual in a warm place such as this?'

'It is unusual,' Sandow said, 'when you compare it to the earth only ten feet farther on-there where nothing grows but a few mutant ferns that haven't adapted.'

'What is the difference?' Richter asked.

'There,' Sandow said, 'the earth is cool, almost chilly. I traced the temperature change and found a precise line where the warmth ceases altogether and where the cold begins. There is no melding s.p.a.ce at all.'

'And what do you make of that?' the commander asked, genuinely interested.

Almost too interested, Sandow thought, in such a minor mystery as this. To the Shaker, the old officer's motives were plainly obvious. In his desperation to forget the dead they had left behind them-the slit-throat boys buried in the snow and all the others back to Stanton's Inn where it had begun-Richter grasped at any diversion in order to remove the memories from the fore of his mind. It was a standard method of overcoming grief, of forgetting tragedy. If it should continue more than a day or two, however, it could swiftly become a psychosis that would endanger all the men in the expedition; Richter needed to be awake and alert with no regrets and no sorrows to dull the edge of his normally sharp mind.

'It seems to me,' Sandow said, turning his thoughts again to the earth and the jungle, 'that there is a heat source of some kind beneath the ground here which supports the tropical plants and animals, even through the winter months-though the top-most branches of the trees probably get frostbitten, wilt and die.'

'Artificial?' Richter asked.

'Perhaps. Or maybe natural conditions. One mystery would be as great as the other.'

'Do you think it would be of interest to us to attempt to unearth this heat source?' Richter asked, brus.h.i.+ng at the rich, black soil beneath the ferns.

'Even if it were possible,' Sandow said, 'I doubt that it would be worth our time. It was just an incongruity which I thought would-'

At that moment, the Squealer keeper, Fremlin, approached them and interrupted the quiet conversation. He looked keyed-up, his eyes bright, and his slim but powerful hands busy in each other, his fingers locking and unlocking, pulling at one another with his overabundance of nervous energy.

'Yes, Fremlin?' the commander asked.

'The Squealers, sir. I've already eaten, and I've had time to speak with them, to give them their orders. Do you think I could turn them loose now and set them about their work?'

'I suppose they're anxious, eh?'

'Aye, that they are, Commander. They're cursing at me with some of the words they've learned off the men, because they want to be gone.'

'Very well,' Richter said.

'Thank you, sir!' Fremlin said, turning and walking off toward the cages where the four black mites waited, making strange, low chortling sounds among themselves.

'Wait there!' Shaker Sandow called to the fair, well-muscled bird master. 'Could I come along to watch?'

Fremlin was glad for an audience and nodded approval as he continued on toward the birds.

At the cages, the Squealer master knelt and cooed to his charges in soft, pleasant tones that reminded the Shaker of wind blowing against the open ends of bottles or of long, hollow pipes.

'How many will you send?' he asked Fremlin.

'Just two,' Fremlin replied. 'I never risk them all at once. Besides, two will do sufficiently.'

He opened the wicker cage to his left, and the two black creatures hopped out, scratched at the earth with their three-toed feet, fluffed their feathers and shook themselves, as if getting accustomed to the world outside the cage. At some unseen and unheard direction from their master, they leaped onto his arms, one perched on each wrist, and clung there as he turned to the jungle and issued some last word of advice. Then they were gone in a flapping, brilliant display of smooth aerodynamics, up, up and over the roof of the rain forest, away from the eyes of the men below.

Fremlin watched even after there was nothing to see, then returned to the two birds in the other cage and spoke with them, consoling them for the necessity of sending only two and not all four.

When he came to the Shaker, he said, 'They hate the cages. It worries my heart to keep them there. Yet they were safer there in the mountains than they would have been on their own in those turbulent high alt.i.tude air streams. And down here! Well, who knows what sort of predator might lurk in those trees? Again, the cage is better. At home, beyond the Banibals in the Darklands, I let them fly loose by the cliffs, along the sea, and that makes them ever so much happier.'

'What will those two do now that you've released them?' Sandow asked.

'The commander wants to know how far the jungle extends to the north, how long it will offer cover to our march. They'll fly over the top of the trees, unless it seems to be too long a stretch. If they do not see some sort of end to it in short order, they'll fly high enough to look down and make an estimate of its size. Higher than we were when we came out of the mists on the Cloud Range.'

'May I stay to hear them speak of it when they return?' The Shaker had spent some time with Fremlin and the birds on the first leg of the trek, hoping the creatures would get to know him and trust him.

'I think so,' Fremlin said. 'But we'll see for certain when they come back. I cannot always tell when they are ready to give their confidence to a stranger.'

The two dark mites returned in short order, not fifteen minutes after their release. 'Which means,' Fremlin said as they soared in toward him, 'that they could have been back in five minutes. After being cooped as they were, they surely took an extra ten minutes of flight just for the joy of it.' They settled on his arms with the grace and gentleness of two tufts of cotton, pecked at their s.h.i.+ny feathers with their red and orange beaks, their crimson face swaths seeming to ripple as some hidden muscles did some unknown work beneath.

'Will you speak before the Shaker?' he asked them.

Both birds c.o.c.ked their heads toward Sandow, examined him with small, coal-dust eyes.

'I am a friend,' Sandow said.

'Weeewill, weeewill,' the Squealers affirmed in a whining imitation of English. 'Heees good freeend of feethered peepoleee!'

'Tell me then,' Fremlin said, nuzzling them with his face, like another man might nuzzle his lover's b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The creatures began a warbling, high-pitched conversation, sometimes speaking at once, sometimes one at a time. Their language was composed of trills and ripples, ascensions of the musical scale that stung the ear with their abruptness, descents of the same scale that sounded like the dying cries of animals.

Sandow could see why they had come to be known as Squealers. If one did not listen closely to the fantastic intricacy of the sounds they made, one might only hear a high-pitched squeal that sometimes rose and fell but was no more than the dumb sonorous cry of an animal. But it was not dumb. The intricacy, the complex arrangements of sounds, gave indication of a language every bit as complicated as the one the Shaker spoke or the one the Salamanthe Island people spoke. Perhaps even more complicated, since the combinations of the sounds were not the only things which gave meaning to what was said. As Fremlin had told him, the musical key in which a word was spoken by the Squealers was indication of an altogether different meaning for that word, so that they had a grammar not only of syllables, but of tones.

In time, the birds ceased their discourse and returned to pecking at themselves and to cooing quietly to each other and to the other pair of flyers which had been restrained all this while in their cage.

'Quite a strange report,' Fremlin said, his brow furrowed.

'How so?'