Orbit 2

First one giant and then the other was forced to his knees, only to rise again in thunderous shouting and howling. The fight drifted nearer to the cave mouth, entered and swirled out again, entered and stayed. Kerbeck’s hair and beard seemed to shine with a light of their own, dwindling sparklike into the depths. The gigantic battle shouts became a continuous hollow roaring under the earth. Kinross felt a hand shaking him insistently. It was von Lankenau.

“Go now,” he was saying. “For certain, the barrier will be down momentarily. I begin to understand. I almost — I do salute you, Mr. Kinross. Take the woman, if she will go.”

Kinross collected his thoughts. “Mary, will you go?” he asked.

“Too bloody right I will,” she said, “and take my birds off with me!”

Kinross looked at Garcia and held out his hand. “Part friends, Joe?” he asked.

“I don’t savvy this, Kinross,” the Mexican said, “but good luck and get out of here.”

Kinross shook hands with the two men. Then he and Mary Chadwick, arms linked, walked rapidly back toward the village.

The dark grove swarmed with Kabeiroi, but no more than a scattering of the ugly shapes could be seen on the open valley floor. The sky was overcast and the diffuse, watery light of the early days lay again on the valley. The old indefinite quality was back, nothing quite in full view.

“Mary,” Kinross said, “I do believe we’re already through the barrier. Space has drawn in around the cave mouth.”

“Good-oh!”

Kinross led her up the hillside, talking feverishly. They would marry, he said. He was quite well off, had a good job doing confidential work for the U.S. government. He had lots of back pay coming for his last job and a bonus, too, when he told them about it. They would live in California, it was a lot like Queensland. Trips, the theater, music, a fine home, gracious living.

Mary said little. Birds kept fluttering in to land on her head and shoulders but the number around her did not seem to increase. The light grew weaker as they climbed and the land more indefinite. When they reached the height of land and Kinross knew for sure that they had escaped, it was almost dark. From time to time a rippling quiver ran over the ground sending them sprawling, but they rose and pressed onward. As before, progress seemed timeless and effortless. There was no moon.

Mary lagged behind him and Kinross kept turning to wait for her. By degrees in the fading light he saw the strained malevolence of her expression give way to a vague and remote sorrow. The wide brow was smooth again, red lips dreaming. Once she said, “My birds. I can’t get back all my birds.”

Suddenly the wailing cry of a stone curlew reached down from the darkness. Mary stopped and looked up. Kinross turned back to watch. The forlorn, throbbing cry repeated. Mary raised her arms to the black sky and crooned. Nothing happened.

She looked at Kinross, both of them vague in shadow. “It won’t come down to me,” she whispered plaintively.

A third time the call floated downward. Mary dropped her arms.

“I’m going back,” she said. “You go on alone, Allan.” “No!” he protested. “You must come with me. I won’t let you go back!”

He seized her shoulders. She came stiffly erect and a light gleamed from her eyes. A touch, a twinge only, of the old feeling hit him and his knees turned to water. He collapsed, kneeling, clasping her around the thighs, pleading, “No, no, Mary! Don’t leave me alone here in the dark!”

“I must,” she said calmly. Then, with a touch of pity, “Be brave and go along now, Allan. It is all you can do.”

She raised him and kissed his forehead. He stumbled away, not daring to look back for fear of a renewed weakness. The sky rifted with silver as the overcast broke up and presently a full moon rode high ahead. He looked back then, but she was nowhere.

On to the great pit under the moon, leg over leg unthinking. It was all he could do now. He found the ravine and waded down it, outrunning the current. He heard the roar of falling water and saw the last rock shoulder that interposed itself between him and the brink. For just a heartbeat he clung to the rock and stared into the pit with all its silver beauty and its reflecting pool in the bottom. Then, not letting the water take him only, but rushing, pitching his body forward, he went over the edge.

It was not a sheer drop but rather a series of stages. Plunge and strike and roll, plunge and strike and roll, rhythmically, painlessly, with intolerable excitement of the spirit, down and down he went until the circle of sky above him smalled with distance and the silvery pool below waxed enormous. It was as if the great pit were reversing its dimensions, flexing through itself, turning inside out, as if he were falling into the moon. Then, on the very point of an unbearable instant, the waters closed over him.

Down, down through the water, pain and darkness and fear vise-clamping his chest, kicking and waving his arms and there was a dry crackling and a pain in his toe and he sat in the thorn scrub gasping. His skin was dry.

It was daylight. A stream ran nearby and above it reared a yellowish sandstone ledge with figures of paunchy kangaroos and stick men done in faded red and black. He picked up a handful of earth and looked at it. There it was, hard and sharp and clear in all of its minute particulars, deep as any microscope might probe, solidly there beyond all tampering forever. It was the old world. His world. Kinross stood up, feeling an overpowering thirst.

He went down to the creek and drank deeply and was as thirsty as before. He buried his face in the water and drank until he was near bursting and rose, wavering on his feet, thirst tearing at him unbearably. He tugged at his beard and wondered.

Sounds came, a jingle of metal and splashing. Then the creak of leather and low voices. Riders were coming up the creek. Suddenly he sensed them directly, horses and men, radiant with life, red, living blood pumping through veins and arteries. His thirst became a cloud of madness enfolding him, and he knew who and what he was.

He waited, wondering if they would be able to see him. .

Gene Wolfe (about whom more will be heard) spent a few months in the U.S. Army avoiding the half-hearted attempts of the Chinese Army to kill him. Thanks to this short stint as a D-handled shovel operator and Fire Control Private on an M-l, the government was forced to finish his education and. he emerged from the University of Houston as a B.S.M.E. He still works at the job he took after graduation, doing non-space R&D for a large corporation; has a wife and four children, is sunk in the “dull comfort of moderate middle-class success,” and claims it is impossible to make his life sound interesting. "Sir magazine essayed the same impossible task when they published my story ‘The Dead Man,’ and were forced to fall back on such falsifications as the statement that I wished to raise Afghan hounds. I can truthfully say that I have never desired to see an Afghan hound higher than it is already.”

“Trip, Trap” is pure science fiction, not fantasy. Nevertheless, there is a bridge in it, and under the bridge lives a troll. .

Giants were fighting in the sky; the roar and crash of their weapons and the wind-scream of their strokes reverberated even on the echoless steppe where there was nothing to fling back sound between the Rock of the Carath-Angor and the gorge of the Elbanda-Rhun, where the waters made their own thunder always, whether the skygiants fought or slept. And those were as far apart as a hard-riding traveler might go in three days.

The warriors had drawn their thick cloaks across their faces to protect them from the driving rain which was blown almost horizontally into their eyes, but their mounts had no such protection and stumbled forward scarcely faster than their riders could have walked. All were wet to the skin, cold, and nearly numb with fatigue. On an ordinary journey they would have halted hours ago, pitched their tents and waited out the storm in their sleeping robes. They did not do so now because they were going home, and because their leader, hurrying home too after three years of war, would not have permitted it.