Another contributor to his disquiet was Sondeweere herself. Her telepathic visitations had been no surprise to Bartan; Berise and Wraker seemed to have accommodated her in their systems of belief without much difficulty—but Toller had spent too many years as a materialist and sceptic not to feel his inner universe quake every time he thought of her.
The story about the symbon spores had been truly astonishing, but at least he could comprehend every part of it, and with comprehension came acceptance. The notion of direct mind-to-mind contact was in a different category, however.
Even though he had seen the curiously elusive image of her and had listened to her silent voice, something within him rebelled each time he recalled the experience.
It smacked too much of mysticism. If there really were other levels of reality, not accessible to his five ordinary senses, who was to say—to choose but one example—that religious beliefs about the transmigration of souls were unfounded? Where was one to draw the line? Sondeweere’s private message for him was that his conviction that he understood the nature of reality, give or take a few minor areas of uncertainty, was and always had been a ludicrous conceit—and that was hard to swallow at his time of life.
Unsettling through Sondeweere’s manifestations were, he had little respite from them. She appeared to the crew many times during the descent, especially in the final stages, giving instructions to slow their downward speed, to hover, and once even to ascend for an hour. Her objective was to guide them down through wind layers and weather systems, which were more evident than on Overland, to a landing site she had chosen.
At one stage she correctly warned them of a region of intense cold, many miles in depth, in which the temperature was even lower than that of the weightless zone although the air above and below was relatively warm. In reply to Zavotle’s question she spoke of the atmosphere reflecting away some of the sun’s heat and of convection currents carrying more of it down to sea level, resulting in a cold layer.
The very fact that Sondeweere knew of such things, she who until recently had been an unlettered agricultural worker, added to Toller’s general misgivings. It substantiated her claim to have been sublimated into a superwoman, a genius beyond the ken of genius, and made him feel apprehensive about meeting her face to face. What would a goddess think of ordinary human beings? Would she look on them in much the same manner as they had regarded the gibbons which abounded in the Sorka province of old Kolcorron?
He would have expected Bartan Drumme to show some degree of concern over the same issue, but the youngster gave no sign of it. When not sleeping or taking his turn at the controls, he spent his time talking to Berise and Wraker, quite often swigging from one of the skins of brandy he had included in his kit. Berise had brought drawing materials and she devoted hours to sketching the others and making maps of the approaching planet, the latter mainly for the benefit of Zavotle. For his part, the little man appeared to be deteriorating at an increasing rate. He lay on his palliasse, forearms pressed against his stomach, and rarely became animated except when in communion with Sondeweere. Given the opportunity he would have questioned her for hours, but her visitations were always brief and her instructions terse, as though many other matters competed for her attention.
Unexpectedly, Toller got the most companionship from the crew member he knew least—Dakan Wraker. Although he had been born after the Migration, the soft-spoken man with the crinkly hair and humorous grey eyes had an intense interest in the history of the Old World. While helping Toller to grease and clean the muskets and five steel swords which had been brought on the mission, he encouraged him to talk for long periods about daily life in Ro-Atabri, Kolcorron’s former capital city, and the practical arrangements by which it had spread its influence through an entire hemisphere. It transpired that he had ambitions to write a book which would help preserve the nation’s identity.
“So we have an artist and a writer on one ship,” Toller said. “You and Berise should form a partnership.”
“I’d love to form any kind of partnership with Berise,” Wraker replied in a low voice, “but I think she has her sights set on another.”
Toller frowned. “You mean Bartan? But he’s soon to be reunited with his wife.”
“An ill-matched couple, don’t you think? Perhaps Berise sees no future in the union.”
In Wraker’s comments Toller recognised an echo of his own thoughts, so it seemed that the only one who was not in doubt about the prospects for Bartan’s strange marriage was Bartan himself. Mildly drunk for most of the time, Bartan appeared to live in a state of euphoria, supported by his monomania, buoyed up by the belief that when he met Sondeweere again all would be as it was before. Toller was at a loss to explain how the young man continued to nourish such naive expectations—but could any of the company claim to be displaying greater foresight?
Toller had noticed that even when Sondeweere used a word he had never heard before he nevertheless understood its meaning. It was as though the words themselves were merely convenient carriers, each one freighted with multitudinous layers of meaning and complementary concepts. When mind spoke to mind there were no misunderstandings or areas of vagueness.
No man who listened to Sondeweere’s silent voice could doubt anything she said—and she had predicted that the rescue mission would end in tragedy.
It was dark when the skyship drifted down towards the plain —the kind of darkness Toller had previously known only during the hours of deepnight. While the ship still had some altitude there had been soft glimmerings of light visible here and there in the mysterious black landscape, indicative of scattered towns or villages. But this close to touchdown the only luminance came from the sky, and even the Great Spiral could do little more than add fugitive hints of silver to the mist which patchily shrouded the ground.
The air was seeded with moisture, and to Toller—equatorial dweller from a sun-scoured world—it seemed dauntingly cold, with a strange ability to draw the heat out of his body. He and the others had shed the cumbersome skysuits hours earlier, and now they were shivering and rubbing their goose-pimpled arms in an effort to keep warm. The air was also laden with the smell of vegetation, a dank essence of greenness more powerful and pervasive than anything Toller had ever known, and which told him more forcibly than his other senses that he was close to the surface of an alien planet.
As he stood at the gondola’s rail he felt keyed-up, exhilarated, entranced—and also regretful that there was to be no opportunity to roam across Farland on foot in daytime and sample its wonders with his own eyes. If Sondeweere met the ship according to plan—and he had little doubt that she would—they would be able to take her on board within seconds. It would not even be necessary for the gondola’s legs to make contact with Farland’s soil before they headed skywards again under cover of night. By morning they would be out of sight of anybody on the ground, well on their way to a rendezvous with the Kolcorron.
Not for the first time, the thought caused Toller to frown in puzzlement. There seemed to be a wide divergence between the actual course of events and Sondeweere’s confident forecast of a disastrous end to the venture. Everything seemed to be going too well. Had she simply been doing her best to keep the would-be rescuers out of possible dangers, or were there other factors in the situation which Toller had not considered and which she had chosen not to divulge? The extra element of mystery, the hint of lurking perils, worked on him like some potent drug, stepping up his heart rate and increasing his brooding sense of anticipation. He scanned the darkness below, wondering if the enigmatic symbonites could have intercepted and silenced Sondeweere, if the projected landing site could be thronged with waiting soldiers.