She patted the old decaying trunk as if it might be a friend as well and saw how the briars and high-growing forest plants had gathered all around it, rallying to its defense, hiding it in its hour of indignity and need.
She rose from the trunk and went on up the hill, going slowly now, no longer running. She had left the doll and the tree had not spoken as it had before, but it had done something else, performed some other act and everything was well.
She reached the crest of the steep river slope and started down the reverse side, heading for the camp, and as she started to angle down the hill realized, suddenly, without actually seeing, that she was not alone. She turned swiftly and there he stood, clad only in a breech clout, his bronzed body smooth and hard and shining in the sun, his pack beside him and the bow leaned against the pack. A pair of binoculars hung from their strap about his neck, half hiding the necklace that he wore.
"Do I intrude upon your land?" he asked, politely.
"The land is free," she said
She was fascinated by the necklace. She kept staring at it.
He touched it with his ringer. "Vanity," he said.
• "You killed the great white bear," she said. "More than one, from all the claws there are."
"Also," he said, "a way to keep the count. One claw, one bear. A claw from each."
She drew in her breath. "Your medicine is strong."
He slapped the bow. "My bow is strong. My arrows true and tipped with flint. Flint is better than anything except the finest steel and where now do you find the finest steel."
"You came from the West," she said. She knew that the great white bears lived only in the West. One of her kinspeople, Running Elk, had been killed by one just a year or so ago.
He nodded. "Far from the West. From the place where there is big water. From the ocean,"
"How far is that?"
"Far? I cannot tell. Many moons upon the road."
"You count by moons. Are you of my people?"
"No, I don't think so. Were it not for the sun, my skin is white. I met some of your people, hunting buffalo. They were the first people other than my own I had ever seen. I had not known there were other people. There were only robots, running wild."
She made a motion of disdain. "We have no traffic with the robots."
"So I understand."
"How much farther do you intend to go? To the east the prairie ends. It is only woods. Finally there is another ocean. I have seen the maps."
He pointed at the house that stood on top of the great headland. "Maybe only that far. The people on the plains told me of a big house of stone with people living in it. I have seen many houses of stone, but with no one living in them. There are people living in it?"
"Two people."
"That is all?"
"The others," she said, "have gone to the stars."
"They told me that, too," he said, "and I have wondered of it. I could not believe. Who would want to go to the stars?"
"They find other worlds and live on them."
"The stars are only bright lights shining in the sky."
"They are other suns," she said. "Have you read no books?"
He shook his head. "I saw one once. I was told it was a book. It was said to me that it would speak to me if one knew the way. But the person who showed it to me had lost the way."
"You cannot read?"
"This reading is the way? The way a book will talk?"
"Yes, that's it," she said. "There are little marks. You read the marks."
"Have you got a book?" he asked.
"A big box of books. I have read them all. But up there," she gestured at the house, "there are rooms filled with nothing but books. My grandfather-many-tulles-removed will ask today if I may read those books."
"It is strange," he said. "You read the book. I kill the bear. I do not like the idea of a book. I was told the book would speak, but in olden magic, better left alone."
"That is not true," she said. "You are a funny kind of man."
"I came from far," he said, as if that might explain it. "Across high mountains, across great rivers, across places where there is only sand and too much sun."
"Why did you do it? Why did you come so far?"
"Something in me said go and find. It did not say what I should find. Only go and find. No other of my people have ever gone to find. I feel something driving me, as if I cannot stay. When the people on the plains tell me of this great high house of stone, I think perhaps this is what I go to find."
"You are going up there?"
"Yes, of course," he said.
"And if it is what you set out to find, you will stay awhile?"
"Perhaps. I do not know. The thing inside me that drives me on will tell me. I thought awhile ago perhaps I had found what J came to find without going to the house. The great oak changed. You made the oak to change."
She flared in anger. "You spied on me. You sat there, spying."
"I did not mean to spy," he said. "I was coming up the hill as you were coming down and I saw you at the tree. I hid so you wouldn't see me. I thought you would not want anyone to know. So I was quiet. I kept out of sight. I moved away, quietly, so you wouldn't know."
"Yet you tell me."
"Yes, I tell you. The oak was changed. It was a wondrous thing."
"How did you know the oak had changed?"
He wrinkled his brow. "I do not know. There was the bear as well. The bear that my arrow did not kill and yet it dropped dead at my feet. I am puzzled by all this. I do not know these things."
"Tell me, how did the oak change?"
He shook his head. "I only sensed it change."
"You should not have spied."
"I am ashamed I did. I will not speak of it."
"Thank you," she said, turning to go down the hill.
"Can I walk a way with you?"
"I go this way," she said. "You go to the house."
"I'll see you again," he said.
She went on down the hill. When finally she looked back, he still was standing there. The bear-claw necklace glittered in the sun.
5
The alien was a can of worms. It huddled among the boulders, close up against the clump of birch that grew from one side of the gorge, the trees bent and tilted to hang above the dry stream bed. Leaf-filtered sunlight shattered itself against the twisted alien and the substance of the alien's body refracted the rays so that it seemed to sit in a pool of broken rainbows.
Jason Whitney, sitting on a mossy bank, leaned back against a small ash tree, settling himself comfortably, letting himself relax. The faint, delicate smell of dying autumn leaves filled the glen.
It was a horror, he thought, and then tried to erase the horror from his mind. Some of them weren't bad; others of them were. This was the worst he had ever seen. If it would just be still, he thought, so a man could familiarize himself with it and thus become at least partially accustomed to it. But it wouldn't be still, it kept moving that can of worms around, the movement serving to emphasize its repulsiveness.
He started to put out his mind cautiously, reaching out to touch it, then, suddenly frightened, pulled back his mind and tucked it securely inside himself.
He had to settle down before he tried to talk with this thing. An old alien hand like himself, he thought, should be up to almost anything, but this one had him down.
He sat quietly, smelling the dying leaves in the secluded silence, not letting himself think of much of anything at all. That was the way you did it— you sneaked up on it somehow, pretending not to notice.