Navigator was occupied with directing the flyers, maneuvering them within the Terran atmosphere in accordance with the directionals of the Remnants’ telepath.
All this went on for long and long.
“The signals are stronger now,” Seeker said. Her voice was a musical whisper that floated above the steady mechanical humming of the control room. “I have a closely approximate placement. They are in a wilderness terrain. The locator flyers send pictures of the area. Can Navigator direct a beacon landing near?”
He considered for a time. “Yes,” he said and described briefly the landscape at large, with particular emphasis upon a river in its midst and a high bluff that hung above its lower stretches. “But we must be secret and exquisite of touch. The plateau there is close upon a place where the Old Ones are laboring. I cannot make out exactly what they are constructing, but their presence will be strong there and the beacon cannot be placed any farther downstream. Even so, that plateau is the best choice.”
“Have the flyers recorded pictures Seeker can send?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Seeker?” I asked.
“Have forbearance,” she said. “Contact is complex.”
“The Old Ones are close upon them,” I said. “There is a concern of time.”
“Have forbearance.”
Then in another while she said she was contacting and the rest of us could not help directing much attention, though we did not neglect our urgent duties. How could we not watch our most precious sister when she must undergo the rigors of contact with an alien species? The mind- frames of otherworlders are so different from ours that sometimes they can tatter the rationality of both telepathic parties. The Great Ones had described Terrans as being much like ourselves, but complete likeness was not possible and the margin of unlikeness, the forceful tension of sheer otherness, would cause a fearful strain on the mind-spirit of Seeker and perhaps a worse consequence. She once said it was like plunging down and down into a boiling sea within which unknown creatures drifted and darted, their shapes and sizes ungraspable until after long acquaintance. If the Terran telepath was indeed deranged, there was a possibility that her condition would infect Seeker’s mind.
I believed I could not do the thing my sister was doing, even if I possessed her abilities. One must be strong of selfhood and sometimes that is insufficient. According to Alliance records, a number of telepaths have been contacted by Starhead minds. Those pale individuals lived out the rest of their days in the state that the English call catatonia, though the term falls short. In catatonia the mind is inoperable, but with Old-Ones’ telepathic damage, the mind no longer exists. Some other indescribable mode of unconsciousness supplants it.
“I am receiving more strongly,” Seeker said. “Is it nighttime where the signal emits? I think she may be sleeping. Some send stronger when they sleep, in particular if they are un-normal. Sleeping, they are less distracted.”
“It is nighttime at the emission point,” Navigator said.
“What does she signal?” I asked.
“She sends large smells of an animal friendly to her. It is not a slave organism, as we feared. It is a parasite or symbiote in complex and close relationship. I do not comprehend. Her name for it is a queenie. I think that must mean companion or helpmeet.”
“May it be telepathic, this animal? Is it of normal mind?”
Seeker said nothing for long and then made a hand gesture of disappointment. “I cannot know,” she said.
“But the autist is calmly receptive while sleeping. As soon as we find a beacon place, I can tell her where.”
“This Remnant group is safe from the Old Ones for the moment?”
Now she became more and more intent, enmeshed with Ship so closely in the mind-contact it was as if she were wearing the network of amplifiers and transceivers as a robe wrapped around her thinking. “Somewhere there is something perilous,” she said. Her expression was darkening. “I cannot say what as of yet.”
“Perhaps — ” I began to say.
“Seeker, withdraw!” Doctor said.
Her face grew even more white and her eyelids fluttered. She thrashed her hands against her upper arms.
“Seeker, withdraw now!” Doctor said.
Her voice was high and thin and shrill when she said the words the autist on Terra must have been hearing. “Tekeli-li.”
“Seeker!” cried Doctor and cried we all as well.
Vern was fairly pleased with the progress they had made today. His rough estimate was that he had brought Moms and Echo about a kilometer and a half along the streamside before evening came into the woods and visibility was hindered and the first faint pipings — Tekeli-li — were heard from the west. Now it was time to find shelter, the best hiding place they could discover.
They were following the stream as it ran south down the mountainside. The decline was steep enough that it kept a fairly straight course, though it curled around the bases of some of the prominent hills and widened out in some of the more level hollers. He had reasoned that if the picture Echo had guided him to draw were indeed a ravine with a stream at the bottom, that water would almost necessarily be the same under which their cave was located and, if that were the case, it would be to the south where the force of its falling would have carved deeply between the hills.
That was a big if and Vern trusted his reasoning less than Moms did. She had more faith in him than he had in himself. Or perhaps she only pretended to, bolstering his confidence.
In any case, they must find a place to eat and sleep and to try to hide. Tonight was not as cold as last night and they would be warmer if they went into the woods a little way from the cold stream. He wanted to get some distance from the sound of it too, so that they might better hear anything moving through the forest.
That thin shrilling, the nerve-wracking piping of the shoggoths, had not come closer and Vern estimated that the group of them must be at least two kilometers away. The dreadful sound carried far, especially at night in these otherwise silent mountains. But the sound was close enough to cause Echo fearful distress.
He did not know if she had ever seen one of the creatures. Probably she had not, for the sound of their shrilling would recall their image and that would send her into paroxysms. He had seen them only once, two of them, as they fell upon a deer and did not devour so much as absorb it. Shapeless or nearly shapeless they were, composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and these would be about fifteen feet in diameter when spherical. Yet they had a constantly shifting shape and volume, throwing out temporary developments — arms, pseudopods, tentacles — and forming, deforming and reforming organs of sight and speech. Tekeli-li was the word, as nearly as Vern could approximate the sound with human phonemes, that they spoke to one another almost continuously, though the slight variations in pitch and timbre he was able to perceive suggested that this one utterance was capable of a plenitude of meanings. That word had been recorded by the old historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
He had been stalking the same deer himself, a young doe that had not learned caution, and had been so horrified when the monsters burst out of the foliage upon their prey, that he swooned away for a few moments. That was a piece of good luck. If he had cried out, they would have made an end of him.
They would have ended the lives of Moms and Echo too — and of Queenie, for there was an intense detestation of those creatures for dogs and of dogs for them. Shoggoths, as the humans supposed, communicated telepathically with the Old Ones their masters, and the presence of Vern in that glade where the doe was ingested, or rather, digested, would have been made known. Then the Old Ones would come to search this part of the forest and they would unfailingly find Echo, though they might not comprehend the origin of her kind of mind-pictures.