They left the rocky plateau for lower woods, and the dampness grew and the light lessened. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Urson asked.
“We should be,” said Iimmi.
“It is,” said Argo. “We’ll come out at the head of the river. It’s a huge marsh that drains off into the main channel.”
Evening came quickly.
“I was wondering about something,” Geo said after a little while.
“What?” asked Argo.
“Hama said that once the jewels had been used to control minds, the person who used them was infected….”
“Rather the infection was already there,” corrected Argo. “That just brought it out.”
“Yes,” said Geo. “Anyway, Hama also said that he was infected. When did he have to use the jewels?”
“Lots of times,” Argo said. “Too many. The last time was when I was kidnapped. He used the jewel to control pieces of that thing you all killed in the City of New Hope to come and kidnap me and then leave the jewel in Leptar.”
“A piece of that monster?” Geo exclaimed. “No wonder it decayed so rapidly when it was killed.”
“Huh?” asked Iimmi.
“Argo — I mean your mother — told me they had managed to kill one of the kidnappers, and it melted the moment it died.”
“We couldn’t control the whole mass,” she explained. “It really doesn’t have a mind. But, like everything alive, it has, or had, the double impulse.”
“But what did kidnapping you accomplish, anyway?” Iimmi asked.
Argo grinned. “It brought you here. And now you’re taking the jewels away.”
“Is that all?” asked Iimmi.
“Well, jeepers,” said Argo. “Isn’t that enough?” She paused for an instant. “You know, I wrote a poem about all this once, the double impulse and everything.”
Geo recited:
“How did you know?”
“The dark chamber is Hama’s Temple,” Geo said. “Am I right?”
“And its twin is Argo’s,” she went on. “They should be twins, really. And then the twins again are the children. The force of age in each one opposed to the young force. See?”
“I see.” Geo smiled. “And the body’s floods, turning in and out?”
“That’s sort of everything man does, his going and coming, his great ideas, his achievements, his little ideas too. It all comes from the interplay of those four forces.”
“Four?” said Urson. “I thought it was just two.”
“But it’s thousands!” Argo exclaimed.
“It’s too complicated for me,” said Urson. “How far do we have to go to the river?”
“We should be there by evening,” Iimmi calculated.
“And we’re headed right,” Argo assured them again. “I think.”
“One more thing,” asked Geo. The ground beneath the fallen leaves was black and spongy now. “How did your grandmother get to Aptor?”
“By helicopter,” Argo said.
“By what?” asked Iimmi.
“It’s like a very small ship that flies in the air, and it goes much faster than a boat in water.”
“I didn’t mean the method of transportation,” said Geo.
“When she had decided her daughter was reigning steadily in Leptar, she just went to Aptor permanently. I didn’t even know about it until I was kidnapped. I’ve learned a lot since I came here.”
“I guess we have too,” said Geo. “But there’s still that one thing more, at the beach.”
“Then let’s hurry up and get there,” said Urson. “We’re slowing down, and we don’t have much time.”
The air was almost drenched. The leaves had been shiny before. Now they dripped water on the loose ground. Pale light lapsed through the branches, shimmered from leaf to the wet underside of leaf. The ground became mud.
Twice they heard a sloshing a few feet away and then the scuttling of an unseen animal. “I hope I don’t step on something that decides to take a chunk out of my foot.”
“I’m pretty good at first aid,” Argo said. “I’m getting chilly,” she added.
Urson humphed now as the trees thinned around them. The muddy forest floor for yards at a span was coated with water that became mirrors for the trees stuck in its surface.
“Start watching out for quicksand,” Geo said. They went more cautiously now. “Just keep within grabbing distance of a tree.”
“They’re getting sort of far apart,” said Argo.
Just then Geo, who was a bit ahead of the others, cried out. When they reached him he had already sunk knee-deep. He threw himself to the side and his good arm wrapped around the trunk of a thin black tree. He tried to grab on with his nub too, but he just scraped it on the bark.
“Hold on!” Urson called. He skirted the pool and grabbed the trunk of the tree with one hand and Geo with the other. Geo came up, coated to the thigh with gray. As Urson helped him to more solid ground, the tree they had grabbed suddenly tilted and then splashed forward in a medusa of roots. A nameless animal slithered from the matted, dripping stalks. Then the whole thing slipped beneath the mud and there were only ripples.
“You all right?” Urson still supported him. “You sure you’re all right?”
Geo nodded, rubbing the stump of his arm with his good hand. “I’m all right,” he said. They gathered together and began once more through the mud. The trees gave out.
Geo suddenly saw the whole swamp shiver in front of him. He splashed a step backward, but Urson caught his shoulder. Ripples appeared over the water, spreading, crossing, webbing the whole surface with a net of tiny waves.
And they rose: green backs broke the water. They stood now, torrents cascading their green faces, green chests. Three of them, then a fourth. Four more, then many more. Their naked bodies were mottled green.
Geo felt a tugging in his head, at his mind. Looking around, he saw that the others felt it too.
“Them…” Urson started.
“They’re the ones who…carried us….” Geo began. The tug came again, and they stepped forward. He put his hand on his head. “They want…us to go with them….” And suddenly he was going forward, slipping into the familiar state of half consciousness that had come when he had crossed the river, to the City of New Hope, or when he had first fallen into the sea.
Wet hands fell on their bodies and guided them through the swamp. They were carried through deeper water. Now they were walked over dry land where the vegetation was thicker. Slimy boulders caught shards of sunset on their wet flanks.
Dripping canopies of moss looped the branches. Water rose to their knees, their stomachs, their necks. A bright wash of pebbles and shells resolved through the water, as if their eyes had been pushed close to the sea bottom, sensitized to new light. The air was white, static, and electric. Then it slipped through blue to black. There were red eyes in the blackness. Through a rip in the arras of vegetation, they saw the moon push between the clouds, staining them silver. A rock rose against the moonlight where a naked man stared at the white disk. As they passed, he howled (or anyway, opened his mouth and threw his head back. But their ears were full of night and could not hear) and dropped to all fours. A breeze blew in the sudden plume of his tail, in the scraggly hair of his underbelly, and light lay on the points of his ears, his lengthened muzzle, his thinned hind legs. He turned his head once and scampered down the rock and into the darkness. A curtain of trees swung across the open sky. Eyes of flame glittered ahead of them. Water swirled their knees once more, then went down. Sand washed from beneath their feet along the dark beach. The beating of the sea, the rush of the river. Wet leaves fingered their cheeks, tickled their shins, and slapped their bellies as they moved forward. All fell away.