"I see. Darla, you seem to have an accent I can't place. It sounds… well, mid-Colonial, for want of a better term."
"My mother worked for the Colonial Authority for years," Darla said, "and dragged me around from planet to planet. She was Canadian, my father Dutch. So, it was alternately Dutch and English at home, Intersystem in school, and Portuguese, Tagalog, Bengali, Swedish, Afrikaans, Finnish―"
We all laughed. The usual language salad.
"Thank God for Intersystem and English," John said. "Otherwise we'd have Babel out here." His face split into a yawn. "And speaking of sawing logs…"
Everyone agreed. We cleaned up the supper mess quickly and made preparations for spending a cold night in a shell of a rundown shack in the middle of East Jesus. (There's one for Roland.)
But before we turned in, a talk with John was necessary.
"John, I should have said something before… but there's a price on my head. You and your people could be in danger."
"I thought as much. The Colonial Authority?"
"Yes, them too, but that's the least of it."
"I see."
"How did you know?" I asked wonderingly.
"Those rumors we mentioned. They have it that everyone is after you."
Again, this mysterious shadow following us. I was getting fed up. "Everyone?" I tugged at my lower lip. "Perhaps we should leave."
"I am not about to drive to town at this hour. I'd never find my way back at night."
"We could walk it."
"What? Hike across this wilderness? A strange planet?" He slapped me on the shoulder. "Jake, we owe you our lives. Roland will take the first watch. We would have stood watches anyway, you know. Skywaymen about."
"Right. And, John…" He turned around. "Thanks."
"It's not often one gets a legend for a house guest." He looked around. "Or shed guest, I should say."
Darla and I watched her sleeping egg inflate. It grew and grew until it looked like a giant, fat green worm. I said so.
"Big enough to eat us both," she said.
We crawled inside. Chemical heat had already made the interior a warm, pillowy green womb, delightfully snug, lit softly by bioluminescence panels. Undressing was a little difficult, though. I felt the cold barrel of Darla's Walther against my back.
"I give up."
"Sorry."
"Darla, keep that thing handy."
"I will," she said.
"What about Winnie?"
"I gave her an extra blanket. She said she's not sleepy."
"Are you?"
"I was, but not now, love. Come here."
Music…
Music, not loud…
Music, not loud but omnipresent and overpowering, a single towering, shifting chord stacked with notes from the lower end of the keyboard to the top, covering octave after octave. It sounded over the mesa like a choir of lost souls bewailing then-damnation, drear and haunting. Violins sang with them, flutes, oboes, bassoons, more strings ― lilting violas, threatening double basses… a harp, a celeste tinkling contrapuntally. The structure changed, harmonies rearranged, and now it was God playing the church organ of the universe, beatific sonorities flowing from his hands, reverberating from the roof of Creation.
Darla awoke with a start, clutched at me.
"Jake!"
"The Wurlitzer trees," I said. "It's all right, lovely one."
She melted in my arms, sudden fear dissolving like frost before a flame. "I was dreaming…" she said in a lost little sleep-voice. The egg was dark. I passed a thumb gently over both her closed eyelids, kissed her warm, moist cheek. She exhaled, all tension flowing out. I drank in her breath, held her close.
Outside, the chord modulated from minor to major, back to minor again, then shifted once more and droned in a modal harmony as the wind passed its airy fingers among the pipes. There were solo passages, virtuoso performances. A concerto. Then the wind blew it all away and left an atonal chaos that resonated with the indeterminacy of existence… muddled, mysterious, in the end incomprehensible….
A great sinewy hand poised over the starless dark… waiting? Watching? The Hand of the Conductor. Or the Composer. Both? Neither? The void was formless and embraced all that was to be, would never be… infinite possibilities. Skeins of chromatic tones unspooled in the black, the raw stuff of being. Then structures began to build themselves as a diatonic order was imposed. (By what? By whom?) Fugues wove out of the deep, classic symphonies in sonata form drew together. The Hand withdrew, and a ponderous hymn resounded throughout the firmament, praising Oneness, Fullness, Positivity, the Plan, the Organizing Principle….
Strange light, a bundle of softness in my arms, the momentary, odd sensation of not knowing exactly where you are, when you are. The egg was dark, but tissue-thin walls leaked a shifting light.
The Hand… the Hand among the waste and void, at the heart of things, the womb of time…,
"Dawla! Jake!"
There in the secret center, the impenetrable core…
"Dawla-Jake! Dawla-Jake!"
… of nothingness… nothing.!.no thingness…
"Jake! Dawla! Up! Up!"
I jerked awake, groped for one of the biolume panels. I wiped one with a palm and saw in its glow a double-thumbed hand in front of my face.
The music had stopped.
I poked Darla.
Her eyes opened wide instantly. "What is it?"
"Winnie, 'sat you?" I whispered hoarsely, widening the birth-canal entrance to the egg. Winnie's face showed alarm.
"Big machines! Big machines! Get up! Get up!"
Darla swiped at the quick-exit seam with two stiffened fingers and the egg cracked us naked into a freezing night.
The fire was a huddle of glowing embers. Roland lay near it, asleep, swaddled in blankets. I went over and kicked him Sharply once, then grabbed folds of the other egg and flipped it. There were two bodies in there; good.
"Darla!" I said. "Get out the door, take your pack and gun!"
Moaning and mumbling inside the egg.
"Jake, I'm not going without you."
"Get!" I commanded. "Run that way." I pointed toward the rear of the house. "I'll find you."
Darla grabbed some things, threw me my squib, and ran.
"Get up!" I shouted. "John! Susan!"
Roland was struggling to his feet, bleary-eyed, disoriented. Outside, probing beams of light played over the ground near the house, and the darkness hissed with the exhaust of flitter-jets.
Roland straightened up. "I was just―" He saw the lights, heard the sound of approaching aircraft. "My God! Who is it?"
"Want to stay and find out?"
"Jake?" It was Sukuma-Tayler, head protruding from the end of the egg.
"Trouble, John," I told him.
The egg sprang open and Susan stood up, naked, arms wrapped around her ribcage, grimacing from the sudden cold.
"Everybody out and into the bush. Now! Scatter!"
John got to his feet unsteadily. Susan stooped to find clothes ― I rushed at them both, grabbed a blanket and flung it over Susan, and shoved both of them forward. Susan grunted, stumbled, and I caught her.
"Sorry, no time for that, Suzie. Run! Both of you!"
They ran.
On the way to the rear of the house I made a pass at the egg, came up empty, but happened to snag my jacket with a foot. I scooped it up and ran, struggling into it.
I ran into Roland at the back door, shoved him out, and aimed him in a direction ninety degrees off my course. A searchbeam hit the house, throwing stark shadows along the ground.
The brush had been cleared in a ten-meter strip about the house, and I sprinted for the edge. I was just about into it when a disk of light zagged crazily in from my right and swooped over me. I dove for cover behind a Wurlitzer, but knew I'd been spotted. An exciter beam raised flame and smoke from the ground very near. The light wasn't on me, but they knew my approximate position. I waited three heartbeats and dashed to the left, feeling tiny sharp things in the soil prick my soles. I ducked behind another tree and waited, watching the hard circle of light sweep the ground. The breath of the flitter was warm on my skin, conjuring dust devils around me. There was more than one craft. Constellations of red and green running lights plied the night sky, hovering, darting, pouncing. Spotlight beams waved through the brush on all sides of the house.