Orbit 2

“How do the natives get in and out of. . Alcheringa?” Kinross asked with quickened interest.

“They dance and sing their way, paint themselves, use churingas — oh, all sorts of rites,” she said. “No one must be about, especially no women.”

From the darkness overhead a weird, whistling wail floated down. Both men jumped to their feet.

“Sit down,” the girl bade them. “At home, on Chadwick Station, I would call that the cry of a stone curlew. They fly about and call in the darkness. The blacks call them the souls of children trying to break out of the spirit world in order to be born. What are they here, I wonder?”

She looked upward. Kinross and Garcia sat down again. Then a slender bird with thin legs and long, curving beak dropped into the firelight to perch on her shoulder.

“Poor little night baby,” the girl addressed it, “you’ll watch over me, won’t you?”

She rose abruptly, said good night and went into the hut. Kinross looked at Garcia.

“We’re responsible for her being here,” he said. “We’ve got to get her back to her people.”

“Kruger’s responsible,” Garcia said.

“Us too. If Kruger doesn’t come talk to me tonight I’m going in the cave in the morning. Will you come along?”

“Sure,” said the Mexican, yawning. “Pleasant dreams.”

Red dawn above the great slope up-valley woke Kinross from a dreamless sleep. He blew an ember into flame and built up the fire. Charred breadfruit rinds littered the ground and he reflected wryly that this world no longer policed itself. He put the rinds into the fire.

Somewhere on the hillside across the stream, Kerbeck shouted and brush crackled. Garcia got up and the woman peeped out of her hut as Kinross stood irresolute. Then Kerbeck came in view. He carried a stalk of yellow bananas over his left shoulder and with his right hand clutched a small man by the neck. He half pushed, half kicked the little man down the slope.

The huge Norseman hummed excitedly as he approached across the level. Suddenly Kinross, still half asleep, heard words in the humming, as he had sometimes heard wind-voices in the singing of telegraph wires when he was a boy on the high plains of Nebraska.

“I catch me a devil,” Kerbeck was saying.

The devil was a swarthy, broad-faced little man dressed in baggy gray woolen garments. His eyes were closed, his face screwed up in fear, and he was gabbling under his breath. Garcia listened, suddenly alert, and then spoke sharply to the man in Spanish. He got a torrent of words in reply.

“He’s a Peruvian,” Garcia interpreted. “He comes from the mountains above Tacna. He’s been wandering lost for days. He thinks he’s dead and that Kerbeck is the boss devil.”

“Seems to be mutual.” Kinross said. “Tell him he’ll be all right now. I wonder how many more. .”

Kerbeck went away, humming and buzzing. The little Peruvian, still badly frightened, crouched beyond the fire and ate bananas with them. Then Kinross, explaining his purpose to the woman, proposed to Garcia that they visit the cave.

“Not empty-handed,” the Mexican reminded him. “Remember, we got a duty.”

Along the way they gathered guavas and papayas into Kinross’ shirt, pushed through the grove and laid the fruits on the stone platform. Silva sat beside it, rocking and wailing almost inaudibly. Kinross patted his shoulder.

“Cheer up, Silva, old man,” he said. “We’re going in to see Kruger now. May have some good news for you.”

“Unholy,” the old man moaned. “Full of devils. You’re a devil.”

The two men walked to the cave mouth and stopped. They looked at each other.

“What are we waiting for?” Garcia asked.

“I don’t know. I expected Fay or Bo Bo to be on guard, I guess,” Kinross said. “Hell with it. In we go.”

The cave pinched sharply in to become a nearly round tunnel about fifteen feet high. The stream splashed along the bottom, forcing them to wade. The water shone with a soft light and moisture oozing through cracks in the black rock made luminous patches here and there on the walls. The rock had the blocky, amorphous look of basalt. The air was cool and utterly still except for the murmur of the stream.

The two men waded in silence for a good way before they heard a clear noise of turbulent water somewhere ahead. Then they came into an indefinitely large chamber with the luminous water cascading broadly down its back wall from a blackness above. Fay and Bo Bo were asleep on rough terraces beside the stream.

“What have you come to tell me, Kinross?” Kruger’s voice asked out of the dimness. It seemed to shape the noise of the cascading water into its words.

“We found a woman,” Kinross said.

“I know. There are many others, both men and women, still making their way here. I have been greatly strengthened. Have you noticed how the world has firmed up and become extended in time?”

“Yes. But how do these people get here? Is there more than one gate?”

“No. It must have shifted.”

“To where, then? One is from Australia, one from Peru.”

“So?” Surprise rang in the silvery, liquid voice. “Perhaps it moves then.”

“But Tibesti—”

“They didn’t know a rotating earth. The sun of Tibesti goes around a stationary earth. But when we — I— set up a succession of days here I must have put a spin into this world. Perhaps it is slightly out of phase with our old world. The gate would wander. .”

“You sound pleased,” Kinross said.

“I am. It takes many people to hold a world in place, Kinross. In a few centuries there may be enough here so that I can really rest. They will breed of course, and they will be long-lived here.”

“How big do you think the gate is?”

“About the size of the boat, I expect. Perhaps an ellipse thirty feet on the major axis.”

“How do people come through, not knowing—?”

“Several ways are possible. Perhaps it sweeps over them at a moment of intense world-loathing, those moments a man can’t support beyond a second or two. It snatches them up. Or perhaps daydreamers, with their sense of reality unfocused and their mooring lines to their real world slacked or cast loose. They want only to drift a little way out, but the gate comes by and snatches them. I don’t really know, Kinross. Maybe this world is going to be populated by poets and self-haters.”

“But the gate? Can we get through it the other way?”

“Yes. Some of the soldiers of Tibesti came back — or fled back or were driven back — the old tales are conflicting. But anyone passing back through this gate would risk dropping into an ocean. I suspect the gate sweeps the eighteenth parallel, or near it.”

“Kruger, the woman wants to go back. We have to find a way.”

“No. No one may go back. Especially not women.”

“Kruger, we have no right—”

“We do have right and beyond that a duty. She would not be here if she had not voluntarily, at least for a moment, relinquished or rejected her own world. She belongs to us now, and we need her.”

“Kruger, I may not obey that. I—”

“You must obey. You cannot pass the reentry barrier without my aid.”

“Let it go, then, for now,” Kinross conceded. “I have other questions. What are the black dwarfs and pearly-gray women?”

“Nature spirits, I suppose you could call them. I stripped them from Fay and Bo Bo, husked them off by the millions until only a bare core of nothingness was left. What those two are now I couldn’t describe to you. But the world is partially self-operating and my load is eased.”

Garcia spoke for the first time. “Tough on Fay, for all I hated the little rat.”

“Was that what you wanted to do with me?” Kinross asked, shuddering.