Vonda McIntyre - Dreamsnake

“But—” Melissa cut herself off.

“What?”

“If something does happen to you, I couldn’t get back in time to help, not if I go all the way to the healers’ station.”

“If I don’t come back on my own, there won’t be any way to help me. Don’t come after me by yourself. Please. I need to know you won’t.”

“If you don’t come back in three days, I’ll go tell your people about the dreamsnakes.”

Snake let her have the extra day, with some gratitude, in fact. “Thank you, Melissa.”

They let the tiger-pony and the gray mare loose in a clearing near the trail. Instead of galloping toward the meadow and rolling in the grass, they stood close together, watchful and nervous, their ears swiveling, nostrils wide. The crazy’s old horse stood in the shade alone, his head down. Melissa watched them, her lips tight.

The crazy stood where he had dismounted, staring at Snake, tears in his eyes.

“Melissa,” Snake said, “if you do go home alone, tell them I adopted you. Then — then they’ll know you’re their daughter too.”

“I don’t want to be their daughter. I want to be yours.”

“You are. No matter what.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Is there a trail?” she asked the crazy. “What’s the quickest way up?”

“No trail… it opens before me and closes behind me.”

Snake could feel Melissa restraining a sarcastic remark. “Let’s go, then,” she said, “and see if your magic will work for more than one.”

She hugged Melissa one last time. Melissa held tight, reluctant to let her go.

“It’ll be all right,” Snake said. “Don’t worry.”

The crazy climbed surprisingly quickly, almost as if a path really did open up for him, and for him alone. Snake had to work hard to keep up with him, and sweat stung her eyes. She scrambled up a few meters of harsh black stone and grabbed his robe. “Not so fast.”

His breath came quickly, from excitement, not effort. “The dreamsnakes are near,” he said. He jerked his robe from her hand and scuttled up sheer rock. Snake wiped her forehead on her sleeve, and climbed.

The next time she caught him she grabbed him by the shoulder and did not let go until he sank down on a ledge.

“We’ll rest here,” she said, “and then we’ll go on, more slowly and more quietly. Otherwise your friends will know we’re coming before we’re ready to have them know.”

“The dreamsnakes—”

“North is between us and the dreamsnakes. If he sees you first will he let you go on?”

“You’ll give me a dreamsnake? One of my own? Not like North?”

“Not like North,” Snake said. She sat in a narrow wedge of shade, leaning her head back against the volcanic rock. In the valley below, an edge of the meadow showed between dark evergreen branches, but neither Swift nor Squirrel was in that part of the clearing. It looked like a small scrap of velvet from this distance. Suddenly Snake felt both isolated and lonely.

Nearby, the rock was not so barren as it appeared from below. Lichen lay in green-gray patches here and there, and small fat-leaved succulents nestled in shady niches. Snake leaned forward to see one more closely. Against black rock, in shadow, its color was indistinct.

She sat back abruptly.

Picking up a shard of rock, Snake leaned forward again and knelt over the squat blue-green plant. She poked at its leaves. They closed down tight.

It’s escaped, Snake thought. It’s from the broken dome.

She should have expected something like this; she should have known she would find things that did not belong on the earth. She prodded it again, from the same side. It was, indeed, moving. It would crawl all the way down the mountain if she let it. She slipped the rock’s point beneath it and lifted the plant out of the crevice, rolling it upside down. Except for the bristle of rootlets in its center, it looked just the same, its brilliant turquoise leaves rotating on their bases, seeking a hold. Snake had never seen this species before, but she had seen similar creatures, plants — they did not fit into the normal classifications — take over a field in a night, poisoning the ground so nothing else would grow. One summer several years before she and the other healers had helped burn off a swarm of them from nearby farms. They had not swarmed again, but little colonies of them still turned up from time to time, and the fields they had taken over were barren.

She wanted to burn this one but could not risk a fire now. She pushed it out of the shadows into sunlight and it closed up tight. Now Snake noticed that here and there lay the shriveled hulls of other crawlies, dead and sun-dried, defeated by the barren cliff.

“Let’s go,” Snake said, more to herself than to the crazy.

She chinned herself over the edge of the cliff to the broken dome’s hollow. The strangeness of the place hit Snake like a physical blow. Alien plants grew all around the base of the tremendous half-collapsed structure, nearly to the cliff, leaving no clear path at all. What covered the ground resembled nothing Snake knew, not grass or scrub or bushes. It was a flat, borderless expanse of bright red leaf. Looking closer, Snake could see that it was more than a single huge leaf: each section was perhaps twice as long as she was tall, irregularly shaped, and joined at the edges to neighboring leaves by a system of intertwining hairs. Wherever more than two leaves touched, a delicate frond rose a few handsbreadths from the intersection. Wherever a fissure split the stone, a turquoise streak of crawlies parted the red ground cover, seeking shadow as deliberately as the red leaves spread themselves for light. Someday several crawlies at once would overcome the long sloping exposed cliff face and then they would take over the valley below: someday, when weather and heat and cold opened more sheltering cracks in the stone.

The depressions in the surface of the dome retained some normal vegetation, for the crawlies’ reproductive tendrils could not reach that far. If this species was anything like the similar one Snake had seen, it produced no seeds. But other alien plants had reached the top of the dome, for the melted hollows were filled randomly, some with ordinary green, others with bold, unearthly colors. In a few of the seared, heat-sunken pockets, high above the ground, the colors warred together, one not yet having overcome the other.

Inside the translucent dome, tall shapes showed as shadows, indistinct and strange. Between the edge of the cliff and the dome there was no cover, nor was there any other approach. Snake became painfully aware of her visibility, for she was standing silhouetted against the sky.

The crazy clambered up beside her. “We follow the path,” he said, pointing across the flat-leaves that no trail parted. In more than one place dark veins of crawlies cut the line he indicated.

Snake stepped forward and put her boot carefully on the edge of a flat-leaf. Nothing happened. It was no different from stepping on an ordinary leaf. Beneath it, the ground felt as solid as any other stone.

The crazy passed her, striding toward the dome. Snake grabbed his shoulder.

“The dreamsnakes!” he cried. “You promised!”

“Have you forgotten that North banished you? If you could just come back here, why did you look for me?”

The crazy stared at the ground. “He won’t like to see me,” he whispered.

“Stay behind me,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”

Snake started across the barely yielding leaves, placing her feet cautiously in case the wide red sheets hid a crack the blue creepers had not yet taken over. The crazy followed.

“North likes new people,” he said. “He likes it when they come and ask him to let them dream.” His voice grew wistful. “Maybe he’ll like me again.”