Valeddom
3: contact

“Sir, what do we do now?” I asked. It was a dumb reflex thing to say; as though we were on some school trip, with Mr Bryce being responsible.
    As if he, too, were under the illusion that he must still be in charge, he declared:
    “What we do now, is we pool our data....”
    “What data, Sir?”
    “For Heaven’s sake don’t look so blank. I mean we tell each other our stories, and we check for clues.”
    “Er – clues to what?”
    His face rather slumped then.
    “Ugh,” he swallowed, letting out a tired breath. “Can we sit down?”
    We went to sit with our backs to one of the caches. Bryce rested his elbows on his raised knees, chin on hand, spear by his side. I noticed, now, that he seemed worn out. Not physically: Mercurian bodies, as I’ve already made clear, are enormously strong and almost tireless. But the mind can only take so much. Meeting me, his pupil, had woken the “teacher in charge” side of him, but only momentarily, and now all that had caved in.
    “Don’t ask me things,” he muttered, grumpily.
    So, instead, I told him things. He listened without comment while I related my experiences since my awakening on Valeddom.
    I finished by saying, “Your turn now, Sir.”
    “When I .... when it happened,” he began, “I awoke like a sleepwalker who comes to in the middle of taking a step.  Finding myself in this bizzarre landscape, I just kept walking.  On autopilot, as it were.  I was holding this spear....” He glanced at the object, shook his head and smiled sadly at the craziness of it all.
    “That’s more than I managed to do,” I encouraged. “I think I had a spear too but I must have let mine fall. I expect it’s still lying there, at the base of the rock, where this Mercurian self of mine was crouching when it happened.”
    “Ah, well,” he said with raised eyebrow, “I suppose I ought to be pleased, that this self of mine did something, even if it was only to keep hold of a spear.”
    His jittery, sarcastic tone didn’t surprise me, considering how hugely difficult it must be for a man in his forties, weighed down with maturity of outlook, knowledge of the workings of the world, decades of scientific training and encumbrances of that sort, to adjust to the fact that this stupefying adventure was real.
    “Look on the bright side, Sir – I mean to say, if your mind made the shift that smoothly, without your Mercurian grip letting go....”
    “Yes, yes, well,” he smiled thinly, “maybe I’m more the sleepwalker type than you are. Anyhow,” he continued, “because I didn’t know what to think or do, I just stayed on the trail, the same trail I had been following when.... when I became this ‘me’.”
    “Not a bad way of putting it, Sir.”
    “Hugh, you keep talking as though you are in a position to know something about all this.”
    “I am in a position to know something. And so are you.”
    “I? Hah! Very funny! Tell me, if you please: what do I know?”
    I took the risk of speaking sharply.
    “Something you don’t want to know, it seems, Sir.”
    His lips went tight. “Cornered,” he admitted. He looked at me sidelong, and I welcomed the grudging respect in his glance.
    “Now listen, Sir, I know how you feel, I felt the same way at first: guilt.”
    “Guilt?”
    “Yes! Guilt at having landed on top of another mind; at having trampled it down; taken its place! But fortunately it’s not really like that!”
    “Oh, isn’t it? Then you please interpret – since you know so much – those whispering dregs in here,” he knocked his head with his fist, “that keeps reminding me that I’m an interloper in someone else’s body....”
    It was vital to head him off from that line of thought. I had to convince him things weren’t as bad as he feared. For if I failed, I might find myself stuck with a useless hulk, instead of an effective friend and ally.
    “That’s a horrible picture, but it’s only a picture. If you think past the horror....”
    “Yes, go on. What is the score then?”
    “We haven’t stolen anything. It’s just that we’re more than we thought we were.”
    “That,” nodded Bryce, “sounds good. What does it mean?”
    I took great care to sound matter-of-fact: “These bodies, that we’re wearing now, are ours by right. They belong to us just as much as our Earth bodies do. This is because really we’re Mercurians – that’s to say, Valeddomians – just as much as we are Earthmen. Souls can belong to more than one world. Ours happen to be spread over two worlds. That’s all.”
    “Oh, brother!” he burst out. The rules about not using bad language in front of pupils still had a hold on him over fifty million miles from the classroom, otherwise he might have said something stronger.
    “Now come on, Sir, you know better than to deny, that what you’ve got lurking in your head, has a definite.... er....”
    “Familiarity,” he supplied. “Oh, all right. All right.” He chuckled. “You really are resolved to make me take my medicine, aren’t you, Hugh? I mean, I’ve got to believe all this, haven’t I?”
    “What choice do we have, Sir? Neither of us can afford to ignore the facts. If we slip back into thinking all this is a dream, we’re done for. So, face it. Look at it the nice way – it’s like coming into an inheritance.”
    “Hm. Reminds me of that poor fellow who finds he’s the owner of Baskerville Hall.... I tell you honestly, I’m not sure I want to know what I’ve ‘inherited’.”
    “Ah, but,” I insisted, “these Mercurian brains of ours, they’re like mansions full of heirlooms that could contain just what we need (that’s what I mean by the nice way of looking at it), and why not let’s start rummaging....”
    “Maybe,” he nodded. He was coming round, I could see.
    “For starters,” I suggested, “there’s the Mercurian language.”
    “Very well,” said Bryce, rolling his eyes; “let’s have a good rummage down in the basement. Fetch up this lurking language.”
    “Exactly! Fetch it up to the light, and it won’t be lurking any more.”
    “Provided we’re sensible.” He mulled it over. Abruptly he spoke again, and his words startled me.
    “My name is Semor Recrecd.”
    He had spoken in the language of Mercury.
    “And who are you?” he continued, still in the Valeddomian tongue.
    “Ren Nydr,” I said, astonished at myself. To hear my own voice utter my own name after such a heap of time in which I had never even once asked myself or thought at all about it! I suppose everybody is just “I” to himself.
    Bryce switched coolly back to English. “You’re right, it’s going to be simple.” His tone of intellectual authority had returned. “Just a matter of letting it seep up,” he declared, “from the aquifer of the subconscious. Gradually. Not too fast lest it swamp our identities. But fast enough to supply vital information and the means of communication when the need arises....”
    I realized that the dangerous few minutes were over. He was once more the Mr Bryce I used to know, the capable Mr Bryce whom I could reasonably expect to pull his proper weight in this desolate place.
    Doubtless his habits of mind still had some catching up to do, but the main thing was, I no longer had to worry that he might give up trying to face the truth.
    Still, I couldn’t exactly expect him to continue as a teacher, in a world that was equally new to us both. That would be too much to ask.
    Nevertheless I continued to address him as “Sir”. Though we both inhabited adult bodies now, so we were more like equals than before, it was still true that he had the older mind, the more mature personality, which ought to assert itself once the first shocks were over. Especially if I continued to remind him of his status by calling him “Sir”.
    Actually, let me admit that my main reason was, simply, that I found it comforting to have someone to call “Sir”. When I was speaking English, that is. When he and I practised conversation in Valeddomian, we addressed each other by first names, so that I called him Semor and he called me Ren.
    Hours went by, hours of a strange, waiting existence.
    Like the Dlukus, Bryce and I slouched around the area. Sometimes we stayed together and sometimes we wandered apart, eating when we needed to, and, whenever our poor minds got tired, sleeping on the hard ground – hard, not to our tough Mercurian bodies but to our Earth-born imaginations which weren’t so used to roughing it. And how we tired ourselves out with our endless speculation! After I had repeated to him the words “Ixli tmetl coming soon”, neither of us could stop racking our brains trying to guess what a tmetl might be, and what was going to happen to us when it came.
It was maddening, how slow was our access to our Valeddomian vocabulary. At first we had worried that the words and ideas might come too fast. Now we yearned to speed up our acquisition of them. Perhaps having an Earth-mind companion made us both less scared of getting swamped by Mercurian memories. But meanwhile, interference from the ideas of Earthly science fiction kept inviting us to picture all kinds of irrelevant cinematic stuff – tall riders on giant long-legged beasts striding towards us; anti-gravity sleds floating towards us; geometric cities towering high as they awaited us; caverns of hidden intelligences gaping wide for us...
    Bryce grumbled loudly, “You know the old saying, ‘the coward dies a thousand deaths’ – well, what I say to that is: the hopeful are doomed to live a thousand lives!”
    I touched him on the arm and said, “Sir....”
    He swung round. “What?” he said, raggedly. “Seen something? – Oh.”
    It was a lone Dluku, just a few yards away. One moment it had been scrabbling around among the boulders, in the apparently aimless fashion of its kind; now it had stood up and was staring at us.
    “Hmm,” said Bryce, voicing unease. “Showing some curiosity at last, are they?”
    “This one seems to be doing so, at any rate,” I said. “Maybe we should keep our voices down when we’re speaking English....”
    As we watched, the creature picked up a stone. Looking hard in our direction, it pressed the stone to its forehead, then lowered it.
    I was frozen by the thought that this might be some sort of attack signal. But the Dluku turned and walked away, and nothing else happened.
    “Oops,” muttered Bryce sadly, gazing off into the distance.
    I strained to hear him; his lips were moving; something had come to him. “Sir?”
    “The stone through the window.”
    And I knew what he meant! The stone through the window – renowned in folklore!
    Clear and cold, the Valeddomian proverb welled into the upper reaches of my mind.
    You sit at home in a cosy room. The room stands for safety, security, routine. It’s a haven where you have a reasonable degree of control; where you can trust events to occur in a predictable style. The room may be a real, literal room, or it may stand for a society, or for your own head with your habits of thought lounging inside it.
    Then comes the shock. Unpredictably – life on Mercury being what it is – the window is shattered as a stone comes hurtling through...
    That signifies the dread moment when reality breaks in, announcing that you have made a catastrophic misjudgement and that payment is now due.
    “Don’t think that, Sir, please,” I said – and heard how pathetic my own voice sounded.
    He shrugged, “It may be nothing. Or – things may be about to go bad. If the Dlukus decide to attack us, they can do so at any time; then we’ll know. Not before. Nothing we can do about that, since they don’t seem to want to speak to us, and since we can’t read their minds. But – we’ve made up our minds, haven’t we? We’ve decided that, come what may, we’re waiting here, because this is where rescue will occur if it ever does. So that’s that.”
    Then with a chuckle, he added: “Notice something quaint about that proverb? Somewhere on this planet there must be homes with glass windows! I find that comforting, don’t you?”
    As more hours went by, and we didn’t catch any more Dlukus making peculiar signs in our direction, we became less disturbed by the memory of that single gesture. To all appearances the creatures behaved as though we were of the same kind as themselves, for by and large they ignored us as they ignored each other.
    Which was just as well – as I can’t imagine how we could have coped with worrying about what they might do on top of our increasing anxiety about the tmetl.
    Our eyes searched the landscape till they ached, Bryce became ever jumpier and I felt quietly sick. I doubt whether anyone on Earth can experience this queasy sensation that something utterly unknown is on the way, something you have absolutely no idea how to picture. You want it and fear it at the same time, and this mixture turns one’s guts to water.

                                                  *****

Before I saw the tmetl I heard the sound of a far-off voice, a young, human-sounding voice cry out something in Valeddomian, and then other, fainter voices, and a strange tapping as of many hooves or paws on rock.
    At last! At last! I exploded into action, sprinted to our look-out rock and scrambled up. At the top, gasping, I stared around wildly, shivering despite the warmth, desperate to spot something.
    When I saw the bright magenta cloak, my throat was too dry to allow me to shout. I leaped down again and went and grabbed Bryce by the arm and hauled him up beside me and pointed.
    “I see nothing,” he said at first.
    The person wearing the cloak must have turned to speak to someone further back, which was why I had seen the blaze of colour swish round. Such a bright colour, it had seemed independent of the brown landscape – like a transfer rubbed onto it.
    “I see now,” Bryce admitted.
    “The binoculars!” I yelped manically and rushed down to get them. A third time I scrambled up the rock.
    We took turns in observing.
    A huge weight was lifted from my mind when I saw that the personnel of the tmetl looked thoroughly human in expression as well as in their bodily shape, their tanned, yellowish-brown skins and the loose gaily-coloured clothes they wore. As they got closer I imagined I could guess their individual characters and their relations to one another. The leader was a bearded, middle-aged man, a calm, stocky, capable-looking type; the woman his wife maturely beautiful; the young girl their daughter together with her man, a fine-looking couple. All this I saw almost as though I were experiencing a hallucination, so bright and dreamlike seemed the figures, in a bubble of humanity so amazingly secure, so detached from their desolate surroundings.
    Flowing into view behind them came a beast of burden the size of a small train.
    Ripples of rhythm passed along its flanks with the motion of its twenty pairs of legs. Pincers the size of garden shears projected downwards from its lowered head which quested from side to side as if sniffing the ground, while its antlers waved. It was touch and go, then, as to whether the sight of this colossal caterpillar-cum-centipede would throw me into the kind of terror and revulsion I would have felt upon meeting such a thing on Earth –
    The bad moment passed as my Mercurian brain named the thing. Name and place a monster, and with a bit of luck you cease to class it as a monster.
    “Tmetl,” I murmured.
    Think of the word caravan. You’ll most likely be thinking of a house on wheels. But the word can also bring up the quite different picture of a long line of camels plodding across the desert, plus the goods on their backs, the traders who owned them, the scouts and soldiers protecting them and the travellers permitted to accompany them.
    Tmetl likewise meant two different things. It meant the expedition as a whole, but it also referred to the beast on which the supplies were being carried.
    While I was grasping all this, partly through my Earth wits and partly through my native Valeddomian brain, some seconds went by during which my muscles were locked. Bryce nudged me.
    “Perhaps we should get down from here and wait for them on the ground.”
    “Right,” I croaked.
    “Come on then,” he urged; “we’ve got to behave like two good little Dlukus, until....”
    Until we’re a bit more sure of our welcome. “Right,” I repeated as I snapped out of my paralysis and followed him down, “and yet, they look like good people, don’t you think so, Sir?”
    “Of course I do, but that’s not the problem.”
    “What is the problem, then?” I hurried after him into the ring of caches, which seemed the best place to wait.
    “The problem,” he growled, “is that we’ve been foolhardy idiots. It’s too late to discuss it now, but the point is that we haven’t thought up a story to explain our presence here. What are we going to tell them when they ask?”
    “Well, yes, but,” I replied, “if we tried to invent a story, we might get into worse trouble....” I wished Mr Bryce hadn’t picked this moment to worry me that he might tangle us up in a lot of lies.
    My voice died away as the tmetl came into view from ground level. No point in arguing now – too many unknowns.
    The young man and the girl formed the vanguard. As they came forward I saw something I hadn’t noticed from the look-out rock. She and he were each towing a bright blue circular platform maybe five feet wide, laden with luggage, and floating about eighteen inches off the ground. For some reason I was reminded of people using metal detectors, though these platform-things were being towed rather than swept ahead; and their shapes put me in mind of frisbees, but larger.
    Behind these two came the older couple, the man guiding the monster tmetl with his right hand resting lightly on an antler.
    Bryce and I stood in full view as the newcomers advanced. We were assuming that we’d be taken for dopey, uncommunicative Dlukus at first. That way, we’d be able to choose our own moment to reveal our true identity (or as much of it as we chose). Meanwhile, we’d have the opportunity to make observations in our own time....
    These assumptions were shattered by a shriek from the girl.
    Her arms outstretched, her face beaming with delight, she ran towards me. Her mother and father strode after her, calmly and cheerfully waving at me. The young man waved too, though he stayed back, outside the clearing and the ring of caches, taking over the job of guiding the tmetl to a stop.
    “Ren!” the girl cried and threw her arms around me, hugging me and dancing me round.
    Where was my inner knowledge now when I most needed it? Where was the whispering prompter in the basement of my mind? Unreliable, to say the least.
    “Haff, Haff,” said her father, walking up to us, “calm down. He doesn’t know you. He’s a Dluku now, remember.”
    Haff stood back from me. “I don’t care – he’s still my brother. And he was waiting here! That must mean something!”
    I studied her, at a complete loss as to what to do. She was petite and chubbily pretty. Anyone’s idea of a cute sister – if only I could have taken it all in. I felt like a complete lout, unable to respond to her affection. But then at last the voice of knowledge did bestir itself in the basement of my mind, just enough for me to mutter:
    “Haffnem.”
    “Yeee!” she cried, “did you hear that, father? mother? He said my name, my full name.”
    It was almost as if a jolt of electricity shuddered through her parents.
    “It cannot be,” rasped the father’s voice.
    The mother then gave a look as if to say, Let’s risk it. She came forward, with the firm step of one who is casting off her shock and is determined to face the truth. She strode past Haff, came up to me and took hold of my arms and looked me closely in the eye. “Son,” she said, “you have awoken, have you not? Tell us all our names, and your father will believe.”
    Her husband protested, “The chances are several million to one against! Don’t torment yourselves!”
    I, meanwhile, was terrified of deceiving these people and of deceiving myself, and at the same time part of me was urging, go ahead, admit it, what are you waiting for? This is your Valeddomian family.
    I nodded, “Yes, mother.”
    She let me go and stepped back with a look of triumph.
    “Go on! Name us!”
    Firstly I pointed to her. “Opavedwa,” I said.
    “Perfectly pronounced. Go on! Your father next!”
    I turned to the older man. “Fnekt,” I said, and he gave up trying to look business-like and stern. Letting out a deep sigh, he closed his eyes as if offering thanks to Providence. Then I pointed to the young man who had come up to join us after tethering the tmetl. “You,” I said, “I do not know.”
    “Tmaeu,” he said. “Haffnem’s man.”
    I translate it as “man” but the Valeddomian word clalalc carried the meaning boyfriend/fiancé/young-husband-before-children-are-born.
It made me realize, by the way, that Haffnem must be older than she looked. Older than my Earth self. Eighteen, maybe, if they had had Earth years here. But this was still younger than the body of my Valeddomian self. So – confusingly – here, on this world, she was my younger sister, whereas on Earth she would have been the elder.
    Opavedwa and Fnekt embraced me, and then Opavedwa, looking around serenely, noticed Mr Bryce.
    “Ah!” she said gaily. “Another lost mind has re-lit itself in the wilderness!”
Bryce had hung back, but it was evident to my Mercurian family that he was no Dluku – his intelligent interest in what was going on was obvious to them.
    “Or perhaps,” amended Opavedwa graciously, “you, Sir, were never a Dluku? I hope you will favour us with your name, Sir.” Here I translate as “Sir” the Valeddomian title Cnelo, though it is for women too.
    In response to a certain courtliness in the lady’s manner, Bryce began to bow to her, but then he quickly straightened and I could guess what he was thinking. Better not. Why should they know what a bow is? Mustn’t give away my alien origin –
    “I am Semor Recrecd,” he replied. “A vagabond, a wanderer by nature.”
    Fnekt approached. “Yaer, Cnelo Semor,” he said in greeting.
    “Yaer, Cnelo Fnekt.”
    “You are not from Ixli.”
    “True,” said Bryce. Then to my surprise, and I dare say to his own surprise too, he added: “I am from Jempeldex.”
    “Bannam!” Haff cried (I translate this as “Wow!”).
    Fnekt said, “Jempeldex is several hundred miles to the south. We know no one who has ever seen it.”
    I bet Bryce is glad of that, thought I. He can invent what stories he likes.
Again I felt nervous lest he start constructing some flimsy tale that couldn’t stand up for long and would ruin our credibility in its fall. Not that I was in any more hurry than he was, to blurt out the truth about the Earthly origin of our minds; but I felt very strongly that we must keep from telling actual lies.
So I risked cutting in, “We don’t remember much as yet. Our minds are still blurred. Please do not ask us a lot of questions just yet.”
    “Of course we won’t,” soothed Opavedwa. “But you’re coming home with us, aren’t you?”
    “Willingly,” I said. “I am not a Dluku any more.”
    “You see,” she turned to Fnekt; “you see!”
    Fnekt in fresh wonder shook his head and remarked, “You were right all along; you were right to hope. And yet I was right to disbelieve. Or if not right, at least I was reasonable; only a very few Dlukus in all of history have ever reversed their decline, and it wasn’t an event I ever thought would happen in my lifetime. And now the glorious miracle has happened to my own son. And you, friend Semor – will you accompany us on our return to Ixli?”
    Bryce, suppressing his eagerness, replied in the dignified style of the Mercurians.
    “Jempeldex is so far, and the journey so hazardous, that rather than try to return there I will gladly accept your offer, if I can make my home in Ixli.”
    “You will be welcome among us, both as an able-bodied man and as a source of information.”
    “I thank you,” said Bryce.
    “Then that’s settled. As soon as we have carried out our duties here, we’ll set off for home. Come on, you two,” he addressed Haff and Tmaeu, “let’s unpack.”
    “Wait,” squealed Haff as though she had just remembered something supremely important, “I’ve got to tell Haderi.”
    “Can’t Haderi wait?” asked Fnekt.
    “No,” laughed Tmaeu, interceding; “she can’t, and neither can Haff. They tell each other everything. You shouldn’t have given her that crystal, sir.”
Indulgently her family watched as Haffnem skipped back to her hovering blue circular raft, while I revised my estimate of her age downwards – she seemed so full of little-girl delight. Rummaging among her belongings, she soon found something which she brought back held in her fist. It looked like a broken flint – at first. She showed it to me proudly and, to please her, I admired it. I fingered the smooth half, which was like a flint’s outer layer, and I turned it over and looked at the jaggedly exposed interior. The thing wasn’t actually flint, it was grey-green crystal with a beautiful inner glow.
    “This one is attuned to my friend Haderi and to a few others back in Ixli. Sorry, Ren, but you were never able to use it. Excuse me for a minute or two.” And she went and sat down cross-legged a few paces away, turned away from us, lifting the crystal to her forehead.
    I must confess that I was very, very slow on the uptake. I wonder how differently things would have turned out if I had put two and two together then. Perhaps not much. I like to think that my stupidity made little difference.
    Fnekt called to her, “You’ll be out of range, surely.”
    “Let her go ahead and try,” said Opavedwa.
    After a minute Haff rejoined us, smiling ruefully. “You’re right, father; we’re out of range.”
    Fnekt said, “Well then, let’s get to work. The sooner we get the job done the sooner we’ll get back home.”

                                                  *****

The tmetl lay resting, its legs folded under its dinosaurian length, while my Mercurian family bustled around the monster, un-strapping boxes from its back. I offered to help, but they were quite happy for me just to watch. So I watched and loafed while they replenished the Mercy Station. Using the little frisbee-shaped hover-platforms which they called balpars to take one load after another to its allotted store, they carried fresh spears with charged tips to be stocked upright in the weapons cache, gathered the discards whose charge had run down, and unloaded cases of concentrated rations of food and containers of water.
    Watching this neat job being done, I continued to marvel at how bright and clean were the people who were doing it. For it kep hitting me again – like when I first saw them – how fresh and spotless they looked; how immaculate their clothes, instead of being rumpled or travel-stained as one might expect after a trek all the way from their city.... a city which must surely be at a considerable distance, else Bryce and I would have noticed some other sign of its inhabitants before now.
    Between the lively people and the stern dead landscape was a contrast so drastic, that the mis-match sort of sprained my mind.
    The boulders, the bleak brown crags and the cracked lava plain, on the one hand, and the civilized folk doing their cosy unpacking and arranging of supplies, on the other hand – each picture could be viewed as sharp, at the cost of leaving the other unfocussed. The sense of contradiction grew. At first it was a nudge, then the tap-tap of unease, then it was like being shouted at, and finally the clash of views seemed as violent as the struggle for the steering wheel of a speeding car, between two drivers insisting upon opposite destinations, each of which meant life for himself and death for the other. While one voice in me cried, “How can I believe in these people, amidst the desolation of Yonnimay?”, the other cried, “But they breathe and move and speak in front of me; how can I not believe in them? They, not the scrubland or the dead boulders and lava, give weight to the scene. If something is wrong, it’s the landscape’s fault for looming larger than it should. Don’t be so impressed with its sternness. To a properly adapted person it must really be quite a tame, friendly place.”
    Bryce, some distance apart, was silently watching the replenishment of the caches. I went and stood beside him, out of earshot of the others.
    “Sir,” I said, thinking about something I could check on, “were you serious about coming from a place called Jempeldex?”
    “Oh yes,” he confirmed, and looked amused. “Thought I was being inventive, did you?”
    “Well, you came up with it rather quickly....”
    “Under pressure, yes.”
    “So it’s a fact,” I said.
    He shrugged. “It popped into my mind, unbidden, under the stimulus of questioning. So I suppose it must be true.”
    “Well then, that’s great, we can know something about a Valeddomian city!”
    “But I don’t know any more details. And fortunately, neither do they.... No, wait!” He put his hand to his head. “Something else.... something else is coming....”
    I watched him undergo his inward struggle. I trusted him – more or less – not to cry out or do anything stupid.
    He muttered, “This is like poking around inside a deep well.... I have an awareness of Jempeldex’s position.... some 600 miles to the south, across almost impassable country.” His voice fell lower still, to an awed murmur.  “Hardly any contact with other lands.... very occasionally we send messenger rockets over the mountains, and even more rarely we get some back.... And then I ask myself why I, a Jempeldexan, wandered so far.... it may have been because I was a refugee, but I don’t know; around the edges of the picture there’s just blankness.”
    Then to my surprise he perked up and said:
    “You know, Hugh, I don’t mind admitting that up till now I was pretty often scared. I mean to say, whenever I thought too clearly about these squashed Mercurian memories returning to the surface.... well, what are we but our memories? I don’t much fancy my old identity being buried and lost under a lava flow of new stuff! But this latest fragment about Jempeldex is such a feeble trickle of information, I can feel happy that at this rate my Earth ego is always going to stay ahead by a long stretch. So it looks,” he concluded, “that one thing we don’t have to fear is the danger of forgetting who we are – or who we think we are. We’ll always be ourselves.”
    It seemed he had finished. So I said:
    “Fine. Good. But.... being ourselves, that means we’re the aliens here. That’s going to be a problem when we start to mix with people!”
    “You said it, Hugh! If we’re going to stay like this.... as trespassing Earth egos in Mercurian bodies.... it brings up the big question of when, or whether, to confess. Do we tell them? And if we decide to do so, how soon do we do it? We need to make up our minds on this point before we reach their city. Once we’re inside Ixli, I don’t suppose there’s much chance we’ll get out again if they don’t like what we have to say.”
    “Maybe they’d let us go anyway. Just chuck us out in disgust.”
    “Possibly. But ask yourself what would most likely happen in a similar case on Earth.”
    I thought about it. I saw what he meant.
    “And then,” he went on, “this is a hard world, harsher than Earth; the margin of survival must be thinner. And from that, I’d guess, would spring even more fear, even more intolerance of differences. No – I think we’d better make sure we tell them the truth before we get to Ixli, if we’re going to tell them at all.”
    I was relieved; but to test him, I said: “You don’t reckon we might bluff it out without ever telling them?”
    “Well, that’s one of the questions we’ve got to decide.”
    We tried to thrash it out.
    To keep permanently quiet about our Earth identities was, obviously, the most attractive option, if it were possible. Could we get away with it? Our ignorance of local conditions might be explained away, for a while, as the natural dopiness of the recently awakened ex-Dluku (in my case) or foreign ignorance (in Bryce’s), while gradually our chances of successfully impersonating Mercurian minds would increase as we gained more experience of life here and as native memories continued to trickle up into our consciousness from the residue in our native brains. But during this slow process we might easily make a serious mistake, enough to give ourselves away, or at least sow grave suspicions.
    The alternative was to be honest and confess all. We could do it in the hope that, instead of showing horror at a member of the family taken over by an alien mind, my folks here would accept that different minds on different worlds can be part of the same soul.
    “Look,” I jogged Bryce’s elbow; “looks like they’ve finished their work.”
    Haff and Tmaeu, arms linked, were lounging by the tmetl. Its back had been lightened of its load. Opavedwa and Fnekt were walking towards us, obviously about to announce that they were ready to depart.
    “Darn,” said Bryce in an angry mutter. “We haven’t decided. We’re just going to let ourselves drift.”
    “We weren’t up to deciding,” I remarked. “We just don’t know enough.”
    “We could certainly have done with knowing more about this whole Dluku business, for a start. Why the heck do some undergo this degeneration and leave their cities and come to live out here in the wilderness?”
    “Maybe we’ll get our chance to ask,” I soothed.
    But could we ever ask such give-away questions?
    We were indeed simply drifting with the flow of events.
    Fnekt and Opavedwa came and stood before us.
    “Time to go,” the father said cheerfully.
    The mother added, smiling, “We’ll have you home again soon – won’t that be lovely? We’ve kept your room, Ren, just as you left it.”
    And then I blinked, as the contradiction which I’ve described – of people and landscape not fitting together – came at me in a renewed rush of clashing pictures in my mind’s eye, so that almost I didn’t know what I was doing. But I smiled back, “Let’s go, then,” for when it came to the point, I wanted to “go with this flow”. I wanted a family and a home on this world that was alien to my mind but home to my body.
    Mr Bryce came with us; what else could he do?

                                                   *****

The Nydr family, including myself as a member, with Mr Bryce as a guest, congregated at the front end of the crouching tmetl, now turned to face the way it had come. Positioning ourselves at its head, we were helping to impress upon its brain the idea that it was time to go.
    My brief previous horror of the creature was now quite gone; I was not in the least bothered by having to stand next to it. In fact its closeness was reassuring, for might not its huge size deter other monsters from attacking us on the way to Ixli? Each of us carried an eight-foot spear, but in the absence of anything that looked like a gun I was just as glad of the tmetl.
    Fnekt tapped the great beast on the head. “Roppippolix, raffd!” he spoke in a voice like a whipcrack.
    Rising on its jointed legs, Roppippolix launched itself forward and began to move off. We walked in single file beside it.
    We were going home – to a home that was mine and not mine; to a place my Mercurian eyes had seen but my Earth mind had never known.
    For the most part the six of us trudged silently. I sensed an unspoken agreement in favour of saving our breath for the effort of getting some miles behind us. That suited me. I needed time to adjust to my status as a member of a family on this world.
    Soon after we had left the Mercy Station out of sight Fnekt looked around and appeared satisfied that nothing unwelcome had lain in wait for our emergence from the sanctuary. He then announced that we need not carry our spears; we might place them on the racks on the tmetl’s back.
    Our direction of travel, I judged, was slightly East of North. I could feel a cool wind blowing on my right cheek, but overhead clouds were scudding the other way – West to East, from Day towards Night. Those everlasting winds, sometimes moaning and sometimes shrilling, forever wheeling over our boulder-strewn path, began to get on my nerves as we plodded on.
    Picture, if you can, walking along Striding Edge on Helvellyn, or along any other sharp mountain ridge, but with the rest of the world taken away.... you may have experienced this if you have ever been on a high ridge encircled by fog.
    I wasn’t on any kind of ridge, and there was no fog, but always in Yonnimay I had a deep and strong sense of walking a tightrope or ribbon or plank, a thin line of life in the midst of death. It was impossible to forget that my path was threading a belt of habitable terrain hemmed in by two immensities of heat and cold, even though the “ribbon” was wide enough to prevent me from actually seeing these lurking extremes on either side.
    Yes, the Twilight Belt felt thin. The planet is small to start with: just over 3,000 miles in diameter. Take a fifty or sixty mile ribbon out of that, and, if you wander in such a place, you’re going to feel the Beyond breathing down your neck, because smallness, ending sooner, brings bigness closer; ground and rocks look solid enough but they’re transparent to the haunt of infinity that lies in wait not far away.
    Pushing back against this awe that was leaning on my spirit, I sought to deduce the circulation pattern of those nerve-wracking winds that shrilled over my head – that would be something within my mental range, like an exercise in a Geography lesson. Hot air must rise at the edge of Dayside to our left, while cold air must blow in from Nightside to take its place. Delighted with my little bit of reasoning, I wanted to chat about it to Bryce. But I dared not. We could no longer speak to each other out of earshot of the others. To talk English would of course give the game away. And if I talked to him in Valeddomian, about the sort of thing we were probably supposed to know about already, that would give the game away too.
    Fortunately I wasn’t dependent upon speech with Bryce. I had the companionship of my Mercurian family. Walking with them, at first in a general silence and then, as the hours passed, listening as they began to chat with one another, without me being pressed to join in, was just what I needed. I was thankful that they were not trying to get to know me too fast; I was grateful for the quiet opportunity they were giving me, to adjust to them and their culture.
    You may be wondering how I found it possible to think of Fnekt and Opavedwa as my father and mother, considering that I already had a father and mother on Earth. All I can say is that some deep “click” convinced me that my Mercurian parents were truly what they claimed to be. Of course, it was only my physical self, that was descended from them. But – the thought hit me – this is likewise true of my parents on Earth! Minds don’t have chromosomes!  Minds are not genetic!  And so –
    Our minds have no relatives.
    Usually there’s no call to realize this. It’s only if you change bodies that the issue arises.
    It makes you think: who are we, really?
    Stop that, I said to myself. Save the philosophy for later. Keep to the point. The point is survival.
    In fact – I told myself – the point now is to live up to membership of this Nydr family. It makes a lot of sense to respect such people, and to try to imitate the way they can walk so cleanly in the midst of the unknown.
    A lot of it is unknown not only to me but to them, too, I realized. The lack of roads, vehicles and other busy signs of civilization made it seem likely that Mercurians did not travel much.
    But there was some mobility between cities. I gathered that Tmaeu, Haffnem’s young man, was not an Ixlian. He was from somewhere called Vutu, and hence he was “foreign” to us Ixlians. Perhaps it was for this reason that he struck up a conversation with the other “foreigner” among us, namely Mr Bryce, or rather Semor Recrecd of Jempeldex.
    Bryce succeeded in fielding Tmaeu’s questions, while encouraging the young man to talk about himself. From what I overheard, Tmaeu had taken the rare step of wandering away from home out of fear of something connected with its government or society. “I was the last to get out,” he remarked. “They’ve tightened their watch since then.”
    I let this information wash through my head without trying to filter any further insights out of it; I merely noted that it confirmed my previous train of thought – that this was a world of lonely, isolated cultures, where contact between them was rare but not unheard-of. A world of secrets and suspicions…. though the Nydr family seemed as frank and decent as one could imagine.

                                                  *****

We had been trekking for maybe five hours or so, when Fnekt brought Roppippolix to a halt and we all sat around on the bare rock plain, all of us pleased to stop for a break.
    Tmaeu and Haffnem had been towing the two balpars – the floating platforms on which the expedition’s luggage was loaded – and now they simply dropped the tow-ropes onto the ground. Without any further anchor than the weight of these ropes, the blue platforms floated motionless.
    The family reached for them and pulled open the packs that were stowed on them.
    Haffnem said to me, “Hungry now? Fancy a spoikovor?” She took a couple of large spindle-shaped orange fruits out of her pack and handed one to me. She bit into hers and encouraged me to try mine; I found it delicious, but it was difficult to eat without dribbling the juice, so she handed me a cloth, and at that point I was seized with an urge to laugh – I was having a picnic on Mercury! For a moment I felt madly carefree. Then I became jumpy again at the very thought of how relaxed I had allowed myself to become. If I let down my guard like this, what might I blab? Precisely now, sitting down with the family, I might be faced with my first real test.
    Opavedwa was saying to Bryce, “Instead of that messy stuff which Haff is inflicting on Ren, would you care for a drink from my flask, Semor?”
    “I don’t mind if I do,” Bryce replied – and that was when my nerves got really bad.
    I darted a furious look at him. I don’t mind if I do, indeed! The others chuckled, and no wonder: of course the phrase sounded funny when translated literally into Valeddominan. But what if it got them wondering where Semor Recrecd had picked up such an idiom? Bryce had been careful before; why couldn’t he go on being careful? Didn’t I have enough to worry about? One day, perhaps, he and I might have to admit that we had Earth minds, but I feared to reveal it so soon – far, far too soon.

                                                  *****

A few minutes later I tensed anew when I heard Haffnem ask, “Don’t you have balpars in Jempeldex, Semor?”
    I had already noticed Bryce eyeing the floating platforms; now my heart sank as I saw him fingering the edge of the balpar that hovered closest to him. A rapt expression showed on his face. After all, he was a science teacher, and here was a thing which looked very much as though it must be an anti-gravity device. What man of science on Earth could resist such a lure?
    He replied, “Er – what? Do we have balpars? I can’t say for sure. My memories of my home city are still jumbled and vague.”
    “Small wonder,” soothed the sympathetic voice of Opavedwa. “The wonder is that you both are as lucid as you are.”
    I next heard Fnekt musing – in a tone I did not quite like – “In fact, to find not one but two recovered from the Dluku state, is so amazing that the term ‘miracle’ seems inadequate.”
    I saw from the flicker of alarm in Bryce’s expression that he immediately saw, as I did, that his attempt to portray himself vaguely as a “vagabond” had evidently not convinced Fnekt, or Opavedwa either. But perhaps my old teacher drew confidence from his long practice at dealing with many kinds of awkwardness. At any rate he had the wit to say, with an off-hand shrug:
    “Perhaps we of Jempeldex are less prone to the Dluku process.”
    Good for you, I silently breathed, more than ever thankful for the fact that Bryce’s Mercurian self came from a remote, little-known city. Could I hope that his position as a Jempeldexan would provide us with a ready excuse for any weird impression he might accidentally give? It looked as though I could.
    The thought relieved me immensely – until I reminded myself that I didn’t have Bryce’s excuse. I wasn’t from Jempeldex. I was from Ixli, and I was returning there with my Ixlian family. How on Mercury was I going to keep up this imposture? It suddenly seemed insane even to try it. Even with the temporary advantage of being an ex-Dluku who was naturally “not quite himself”, wasn’t I walking into a heap of trouble I’d never get out of?
    If only I had a special excuse of my own, a cover for my alien mind.
    What happened next, gave me one.

                                                  *****

Let me be careful how I tell it. Let me not pretend to know more about it than I actually do.
    Perhaps I “asked for it”. Perhaps my unsteady mood, lurching from anxiety to relief, had so stirred the depths of my being, that it roused some guardian angel from the ooze – a rather murky guardian angel, I have to say. It’s not easy to describe in English the sense I had of the approach of a power so new to my Earthly experience, a dream-drumming beat, hudar, hudar, which froze me as it resounded inside my chest. Just a couple of moments it lasted, but it must have done something drastic to my face – at any rate I couldn’t hide the shock from the others. I became the focus of attention.
    Haffnem said, “Did you hear something, Ren?”
    “I thought I did,” I muttered.
    “And now you’re not sure?” probed Fnekt.
    I fielded this one with, “I’m not sure but I will tell you when I am sure.”
    “Was it in your chest?” asked Haffnem in her bright innocent voice.
    I looked at her and nodded. “I suppose so.”
    “Was it hudar, by any chance?” asked Opavedwa with a gentleness that stopped all my evasion stone dead.
    “Yes,” I sighed. “But it’s gone now.”
    The others looked at me with affectionate pity.
    “It’ll never go,” said Fnekt.
    “Don’t you remember even that, Ren?” asked my little Mercurian sister.
    “Quiet, Haff, of course he doesn’t remember,” said Opavedwa. To me she said: “Don’t worry about it for now.”
    “That’s easy to say, but please tell me – ”
    “Hudar,” said Opavedwa, “is a special talent which a few people are born with. It’s something to be proud of, but I don’t suppose you’re quite ready to handle it just yet. When the time is ripe, you will know it properly once more. But for the time being....”
    “Ah, we might as well tell him,” said Fnekt. “It can’t do any harm and it might save him unnecessary anxiety.” He turned to me. “Hudar is a special substitute for logic. It’s a force that comes to the rescue in situations where logic must fail. The way you in the old days used to describe it to me, it’s like a bulging portfolio of pictures and maps, or rather a power that could turn a crisis into pictures, maps, diagrams, pictograms, whatever – showing you where you are in your life, and showing what needs to be done.”
    I thanked them for telling me. They then had the good sense to leave me be for a while.
    So there I sat, faced with the latest scary-but-valuable thing thrown up by the residue of my Mercurian self.
    Part of me wanted it to sink back down. I wasn’t keen just then to have to adjust to possessing a power for which there wasn’t even a word on Earth – even if it was a talent which might save my life. Heaven knows, I might need it soon enough, but I wish I could take my time....
    But then, hadn’t I just been wishing for an excuse to help cover up my Earth identity? And here it was – hudar – something special, to prompt people to make allowances for me being a bit out of the ordinary. That’s why the inner drum had begun to beat when it did. It had sensed my need.
    Or so I thought at first. Then I began to suspect that the drum needed to beat anyway. It had more to say.
    Hudar.
    Thoughts and pictures came to me in a mingled stream, promising to build up gradually into a map...
    Hudar.
    I had misjudged Bryce. I had been wrong about why he had been so interested in the balpars. It wasn’t greed for the secret of antigravity.
    Hudar.
    It wasn’t just that the balpars were floating in apparent defiance of gravity. It was that they were always on the same level, the same absolute constant level independent of terrain, as though they slid always on the surface of an invisible sea. So when we came to a rise, a higher bit of ground that was an obstacle to this “sea-level”, we had either to skirt round it, or to drag and scrape the balpars over it manually. I had witnessed this procedure quite a few times by now, without its significance striking me.
    The ghost of a sea!
    Hudar.
    I suddenly felt much happier.
    Hudar.
    I had sensed some great truth. As yet all I knew about it was that it was part of the map of my life and in good time I would know why this knowledge had come to me.
    The drum-beats faded.

                                                  *****

We resumed our trek.
    More confident in my status, I gave my attention to the scene.
    Boulder-strewn plain gave way to an area of stunted, scrubby jungles in which by far the most numerous type of plant consisted of a thorn bush about four feet high. Its colours ranged from green through greeny-black to black; the darker, older ones were petrified – as a matter of fact these plants, I was told, spend their lives gradually turning into stone. Another, less numerous species of vegetation, about seven feet tall, looked rather like a magnified version of the stem of a bunch of grapes from which the grapes have been picked, though the stalks were more fleshy and had a cactoid look about them.
    Apart from the ever-present wail of the winds, these dwarfish jungles were silent. Each covered only a few acres. They were separated by areas of thinner scrubland which provided us with pathways, along which we were able to steer our way past the thickets. I saw no creatures, large or small. My impression was that animal life on Mercury was rare, and what there was of it was big, as if the big things had eliminated all the smaller competition.
I wanted to ask about dangerous life-forms, but I was too cautious to risk the question. I had the excuse of my amnesia, but still I didn’t want to overdo the business of revealing my ignorance. However, by keeping my ears open, I eventually gathered from family conversation that there was something comically named nuddle, which was no joke at all to meet. Probing into the depths of my Mercurian brain for scraps of data on this creature, I came up with some wisps of information, outlining what looked like a land-octopus with armoured legs. The thing’s appearance wasn’t the most significant datum. Sheer emotion seemed to be the main point – the conviction that it really was not a good idea to approach a nuddle. Well, yes, who’d be daft enough to approach the thing?
    I dismissed the matter from my mind.
    Eventually the jungles petered out and we came once more to another plain, more wrinkly than the one before, rather like the skin of a dried apple. This portion of the Mercurian surface must have shrunk drastically when it cooled. Here we had to haul and scrape the balpars over many of the higher ridges that poked up over what I thought of as the ghost-sea-level.
    Then after a further while the wrinkles came to an end and instead there were sharp crags jutting from the lava. Vegetation was now very scarce indeed. We had passed through many mini-ecologies already on our journey, showing me clearly by this time how Yonnimay, being ribbon-shaped, must be criss-crossed with isolated areas and local terrain types strung out along its line; though arching over all these variations was the same everlasting sombre mood of the Twilight Belt.
    I dare say I walked much further than I could have done on Earth, but at last even my ultra-tough Mercurian body became in need of rest. The same was true of the others. Fnekt, fortunately, was too wise to risk pushing on until we had become really tired and perhaps dangerously careless. In good time he announced that we would camp for a sleep-period.
    He halted the tmetl and got it to subside with its legs folded. He and Tmaeu unpacked from the balpars six folded items that looked more like plastic shopping bags than anything else. They placed them on the ground, three on one side of the tmetl, three on the other. When a stud was pressed the things blew up into shape – turning out to be self-inflating mattresses.
    It was explained to me that the positioning of the mattresses, and their spacing about four yards from each other, was designed to discourage the tmetl from moving off while we slept – and when I heard this, my thoughts wandered for some strange reason to Earth history, and I thought of the cowboys on the long cattle-drives from Texas to Kansas, riding round their herds at night to stop them from stampeding. What was my brain playing at, bringing up this far-fetched comparison? Maybe it was my hudar talent churning away in its mysterious fashion, or maybe I was just being woolly-minded – or maybe hudar can knit the woolly into something special on Valeddom.
    We sat around in a circle and ate a light meal together, then retired each to our pads.
    On the right-hand side of Roppippollix the arrangement was: Fnekt at the front, Haffnem in the middle, and Opavedwa at the rear.
    On the left were myself at the front, Tmaeu in the middle and Bryce at the rear.
    It was natural for Haffnem to be put between her parents. And if Fnekt wanted Tmaeu in a strategic position between the two ex-Dlukus, well, that was up to him. Tmaeu seemed to drop asleep straightaway, and I heard nothing from the others; in fact, to my surprise, there didn’t seem to be any plan for taking turns at keeping watch. In this wilderness, such lack of precaution seemed odd to me. But, I told myself, perhaps the people of this world waked with automatic ease at the approach of danger, or perhaps there was no kind of danger that would dare approach Roppippolix. It was the sort of thing I should have liked to talk over with Mr Bryce. By myself I was in no position to question Fnekt’s leadership.
    I lay down and got drowsier and drowsier.
    I was basically happy with the way things were going, though I still hankered after the freedom to consult Bryce and make sure we had our stories ready and consistent, in case we were questioned separately; I hadn’t ceased to be obsessed with the danger that the Valeddomians might discover the Earthly origin of our minds. I just couldn’t make a plausible guess as to how they might react if they knew.
    More vaguely, at the end of the first “day’s” trek I was suddenly aware of having lost something. I had to ask myself what it was. Something wasn’t there any more – some enclosing thing had gone.
    It was that confident sense that the Nydr family were somehow immune to the harsh landscape around them. That had gone. That bubble of contrast, that vision of carefree security, which had impressed me so much when I first saw them, was now just a memory. It had gradually dwindled during our trek, without me noticing until now. Now, when I was falling asleep amid this desolate scene, it came to me that Fnekt and the others were as vulnerable as I was. They would end up no less dead than I, if something lethal came upon us.
    Well, never mind, facts were a better bet than visions. This family didn’t possess any magical immunity, but they were brave and competent. I was proud to belong to them, and I was looking forward to seeing their home. And another thing I was proud of: my hands had become less claw-like, less Dluku-like. They were noticeably more like ordinary human hands. That did seem magical….

                                                   *****

I awoke at the sound of a whisper and a touch at my shoulder.
    Sudden and clear-cut was that awakening. The alarm system in Mercurian bodies has to be efficient.
    Hunkered down beside me were two figures: Bryce and Tmaeu.
    Bryce murmured, “Listen to Tmaeu: he says he needs to speak to both of us at once.”
    “I’m in big trouble,” Tmaeu asserted quietly.
    “Only you?” frowned Bryce.
    “I especially,” the young Vutuan shrugged.
    “What’s all this about?” I asked with a sharp edge to my lowered voice.
Like a climber hates fog, I hated the feel of mystery creeping around us, and I felt a great mistrust as I looked at Tmaeu and noted most clearly, for the first time, how foreign he looked in comparison with the Nydr family. My Earth mind was beginning to be able to tell one Valeddomian national type from another and to sense the “foreignness” of one individual to another.
    Tmaeu had a broader face, with higher cheekbones, than we Nydrs. He was as good-looking as any Ixlian but somehow looked more ruthless.... My Mercurian self certainly had its prejudices, but my knowing they existed did not make them go away: as an Ixlian I was apt to distrust non-Ixlians, and that was that.
    In reply to my question, he pointed southwards.
    Across the landscape of scattered crags, twenty or thirty feet high, which jutted like broken teeth from the plains, I saw, maybe a quarter of a mile off, what looked like the top of an enormous head passing behind some of these rocks.
    It was moving neither away from nor towards us. It was passing us – I hoped. Then, with a sinking of the heart, I realized it was circling us.
    As the thing crossed an open view I caught a glimpse of bunched, flexible silver limbs.
    A ridiculous, fearful name came to mind. I whispered, “Is it – a nuddle?”
    “And there,” Tmaeu added, turning and pointing in another direction, “and there.” Two other big heads – but these were motionless; they had taken their places behind other crags, north-east and north-west of us, again about a quarter of a mile away.
    Tmaeu then turned back to me with a short, bitter chuckle. “Nuddles, you call them? Nothing so easy!” (He said it as one might say in English, no such luck.) “Those you see over there are squarls.” The word meant nothing to me, and it would take time to dredge up the meaning – time which I sensed I did not have. Tmaeu was handing me the binoculars. I pointed them at the big north-western head and had a careful look.
    Under magnification my glance swept over a featureless leathery bulk until I spotted a bit of dark blue detail on top of the head – a bump which at first I took for an eye, like a frog or toad’s eye. Then the blue shape swirled a bit and I suddenly realized I was wrong. I was actually looking at a tiny cloaked figure, a man-sized rider on or behind the squarl’s head.
    “Time to wake the others,” sighed Tmaeu. “Perhaps you will both give me your moral support?” He stood up. “You, Semor, with your Jempeldexan culture, or you, Ren, with you hudar talent....”
    I still had no idea what he was talking about. Why should he be in more trouble than the rest of us? But I had no opportunity to enquire further as he vaulted across the back of the slumbering tmetl. I stood up too. I heard mutterings, the sounds of waking, the voices of Fnekt, Opavedwa and Haffnem.... Bryce and I went to join the group. The women were just scrambling to their feet.
    “Father,” said Haffnem, “why are you looking at Tmaeu like that?”
    Fnekt flung out his right arm and pointed into the distance: once, twice, thrice. Grimly he said, “Those are Vutuans.”
    Haffnem screamed as Fnekt then reached for a spear and pointed it at Tmaeu’s chest.
    Opavedwa put her arm round her, restraining her, drawing her back a step.
    The younger man stood still as Fnekt spoke his accusation:
    “You have brought this upon us.”
    “How? How am I supposed to have done this?” demanded Tmaeu.
    “Easily. You, a Vutuan, summoned your own people. Why shouldn’t they listen to you? Why shouldn’t they come when you call?”
    Haffnem sobbed, “Father! He couldn’t have meant – ”
    Opavedwa soothed her, “Dear, it’s no good arguing. Perhaps he thought he was doing right.”
    “Don’t defend me,” said Tmaeu without looking round at her. “I don’t need your defence.” To Fnekt he continued: “You still haven’t explained how I am supposed to have done this thing.”
    A snort of contempt. “You have easy access to Haffnem’s crystal. And now,” Fnekt glanced into the distance and then back to the target covered by his spear-point, “I see they have finished boxing us in. They are moving towards us. We’d better be rid of you before the fighting starts.”
    Access to Haffnem’s crystal – I clutched frantically at an idea that kept slipping from me like a loose cake of soap. Fnekt was drawing back the spear for a thrust and Tmaeu shifted on his feet, preparing to do his best to dodge the charged tip even though I could read the hopelessness in his face. And then I shouted:
    “Stop! The Dluku had a crystal! Back at the caches!”
    Fnekt froze. His hard glance flickered at me. “What? Which Dluku?”
    “One whom I saw raise a stone to his forehead. Semor can confirm!”
    Bryce, thank goodness, wasn’t slow in backing me up. “I can indeed! Yes I see it now, Ren is right. Back at the Mercy Station, we saw a Dluku raise a crystal – ”
    Fnekt withdrew the spear-tip.
    “If you saw a “Dluku” do that, it was no Dluku; it was a Vutuan agent. So that’s how we’ve been tracked. Apologies,” he growled with a tense grin at Tmaeu, “must be left for later – we have some fighting to do.”
    The rest of us grabbed spears and took up positions as ordered by Fnekt. We formed a circle, somewhat to the side of Roppippolix, who, it seemed, wasn’t expected to take part in the battle because tmetls (I was disappointed to learn) were placid herbivores, mere beasts of burden quite useless in combat. We six had nothing but our human muscles and our spears with which to face the squarls.
    My blood throbbed in my veins and my heart knocked loudly – but I felt proud as well as afraid, proud to be holding a spear in the company of the Nydr family. Ren Nydr, my Mercurian self, was obviously made of different stuff from Hugh Dent of Earth. I now had the good fortune to inhabit a body whose habits and reflexes were trained to cope with peril.
    Even so, I doubted we had any chance. The squarls seemed ever more colossal as they made their smooth rippling approach. Like vertical brushes being swept towards us, their serpentine limbs became increasingly visible below their heads as they swished through the stubby landscape.
    Were they living things? Were “squarls” live nuddles coated with metal armour? Or were they machines that had been modelled on the beasts? At first I wasn’t sure how to read the message in my brain’s Mercurian residue. Then I deciphered its warning. Metal all the way through, the monsters combined the strength of the nuddles which had inspired their design, with the extra power that came from being galvanised with the intelligence of a human pilot.
    Bryce wasn’t as overawed as I. He had some talk left in him. As we watched our enemies close the quarter-mile gap, he put the question: “Why are they coming for us like that? Are Ixli and Vutu at war?”
    Fnekt shrugged, “This is the wilderness. No rules hold sway out here.”
    “No peace beyond the line, eh?” mused Bryce.
    “What line?”
    “Never mind. Er – do we have to just wait for them? Can’t we run, dodge, scatter?”
    “They’re squarls,” Fnekt said. “You do ask some odd questions, Semor.”
    I could think of a good reason why we weren’t scattering. Three giant enemies had us boxed in, and were bound to get three of us at least; even supposing the rest of us might escape, could the lucky ones bear to leave the unlucky ones to their fate?
    Closer and closer flowed the artificial monsters until I could see them in their entirety from head to “foot”. My eyes kept fixing on the way the things walked. Their tentacle-tips, on contact with the ground, splayed into what looked like upside-down cups, then contracted into points once more as they lifted. There’s a special kind of horror in seeing things that should not happen: it should not be possible to witness something that looks vaguely like a giant squid walking upright. On land. Carrying a half-glimpsed rider.
    Finally the squarls towered over us within spear-reach and even my Mercurian courage was about to give way as I thought we might be crushed between them. But then they stopped. While each of them stood upon four or five of their limbs, the other limbs wavered, flexed, quivered. Fnekt cried out, “Strike!” and we lunged. Our spear-points hit the shiny metal. We heard a low hiss and felt a jar, otherwise no result: the squarls stood there unmoved. Then the finishing touches were put on our defeat. With blinding speed and uncanny deftness, each squarl whipped out two of its tentacles, wound them round our spear-shafts and then retracted, wrenching them from our grasp.
    We could only stand disarmed and futile, while the tentacles that held our spears lifted them up, up, and I expected the weapons to be flung away – but no: after holding them above our reach for a few tantalising seconds, the squarls released them, dropped them at our feet.
    The message could not have been more contemptuously clear.
    We were helpless. It made no difference whether we picked up our useless little toys or left them lying on the ground.
    We picked them up anyway – and the silence dragged on.
    I began to realize that we and our captors were engaged in a competition of will, to see who would give in first to the need to speak.
    More understanding came to me. This was a Mercurian cultural thing, this refusal to speak when cornered. For it is the general belief among Valeddomians (whispered the residue in my native brain) that a captive cannot ask questions without “losing place” in his captor’s eyes. Earth-style bluster, “What is the meaning of this?” and so on, doesn’t go down at all well on Valeddom. On Valeddom you keep quiet and watch for your chance.
    Fine by me – I didn’t want to speak anyway. My Earthly self retreated into the shell of its own ignorance, just glad to be still alive. I could hope that we were in some sort of political game in which we would be allowed to live, perhaps be ransomed....
    Suddenly, from the squarl that faced Bryce and me, came a snapping sound. A cowl or hatch had opened up in the thing’s head. The pilot was leaning out, looking down at us.
    I saw the lined face of a tough fiftyish man, staring at us as though we were just a job to be handled.
    Then he must have decided that he could afford to lose the keeping-quiet contest. He spoke – but though the words he used belonged to the same language that Ixlians use, he put them together in a different way.
    “Who to you, see I, tell me can, Vutu-ex, Dluku-ex, Ixli-tmetl?”
    Fnekt and Tmaeu exchanged quick whispers. “Do we admit we’re who they think we are?” asked Tmaeu. “Might as well,” replied Fnekt; “better not seem useless to them.”
    Tmaeu then called up, “You bagged us, Navon. You got what you came for.”
    Navon, the Vutuan, by way of reply raised his arm and pointed in a direction north-north-west; then he snapped back inside his cowl. Within seconds of this very brief conversation, the squarls spread out their tentacles and began to move.
    And we, trapped as we were inside a moving triangular enclosure, fenced with metal limbs, had to move with along them. We had seen how swiftly our spears had been snatched; we needed no other demonstration of the futility of trying to escape through small gaps in the “fence”. So, forced off our trail, we were swept towards Vutu.

                                                   *****

Walking, and walking, and nothing but hours of walking, during which I became demoralized most of all by the silence. I knew I didn’t understand much. I knew that I would reveal terrible ignorance if I asked anything. But I couldn’t bear to hold in my questions for ever.
    “Fnekt,” I hissed.
    “Speak up, Ren. Doesn’t matter if they hear us.”
    “Our supplies. Should we not have asked if we could bring some of our food….”
    “You have forgotten the code. Captives do not ask for anything.”
    “Not even food?”
    “If they mean us to starve, we will starve. But it would make no sense for them to kill us that way. Why should they go to such trouble?”
    I glanced up at the three metal titans that were shepherding us. “Is there any use guessing what they want?” I probed.
    “No need to guess. It’s you and Semor they want most of all,” smiled Fnekt. “And perhaps Tmaeu. The rest of us are less important. Your mother and sister and I are of use to them simply as hostages for your co-operation. Yes, it’s you three they want.”
    “But why?”
    “Tmaeu because he left them and they don’t like people leaving them. You and Semor – you’re a catch because of your Uromian minds.”
    Uromian – Urom – Earth –
    “WHAT?” It was the most stupid moment of my life. No wonder I brayed like an ass. “You knew all along....”
    Even our capture by the Vutuans was less of a shock than this.
    Bryce also, I could tell, was hard hit. Flinching at Fnekt’s words, he actually stumbled.
    Opavedwa said, “Ren, everyone knows that on the rare occasion when a Dluku wakes, he does so with a Uromian mind in control.”
    “Why,” I wailed, my brain whirling, “don’t you hate us, then? Me above all? Your son taken over by an Earth mind?”
    Haffnem piped up, “Don’t be silly, Ren. You are still you.”
    “That,” said Fnekt, “could not be better put. All that has happened is that we are getting to know a different side of you. The Earth side of you. Better than the Dluku side! How could we not be grateful? After all, remember we’d thought we had lost you altogether. This is a big improvement.”
    I shook my head exhaustedly, dizzy with the way the picture had changed. My entire situation would have to be assessed anew. Or maybe it was time I gave up trying to work out all the angles on Valeddom....
    But there was one thing that stood out painfully.
    “It’s because of me, then, that this has happened. To capture me, the Vutuans came, and netted you as well. Because of me.”
    (“And me,” I heard Bryce mutter.)
    Fnekt chuckled, “It’s hard being important, is it not? But then, it’s hard being unimportant, too. So you can’t win.”
    You can’t win. He spoke the Mercurian version of that phrase in such a kind and humorous way, it filled me with a warm sense that if you’re lucky you’ll find sympathy and wisdom anywhere in the universe.
    Opavedwa remarked, “Your father is cutting corners a bit. We are taught that when dealing with the Awakened, a period of adjustment is necessary, during which one isn’t supposed to tell them we know of their Earth minds.”
    Fnekt said, “Hear that, Ren – I’m being told off! Well, the Vutuans’ll be forcing the pace from now on, anyway.”
    The way he said this, it sounded as though he was assuming that nothing he did could matter any more.
    My head was still swimming and I could hardly think. But the idea had started to creep into me, that Bryce and I might have to take the lead, if we were going to escape from the Vutuans.

                                                   *****

Conditions were harsh on the trek. Not because we were manhandled – we never were – but because we were pushed close to our limit of endurance so that for the first time I experienced real weariness in my Mercurian body. The squarls knew just how fast and how long they could compel us to walk. We were fed enough to keep us going, for Navon occasionally tossed down to us some blocks of grey crumbly ration which tasted dismal. And above all there was the emotional pang of loss of freedom.
    I never learned the names of the other two captors apart from Navon, and I never heard them speak. From their silence and the regularity of their procedure I gained the impression that, whether or not they were cruel, the Vutuans must be a cold, tough people. And there was something else about them which was hinted at by the Mercurian residue in my brain. Something about Vutu that was – by Ixlian standards – nightmarish, but I couldn’t pin it down – the whisper of thought was not sufficiently informative. Naturally not. I, Ren Nydr, the young Ixlian, was almost as ignorant of Vutu as I, Hugh Dent of Earth, had been. Neither of my selves had had anything to do with the place.
    Though our stops were of insufficient frequency, our captors allowed us rest periods of reasonable length when we did stop. They simply halted without warning on these occasions, and then retreated a few paces, allowing us to settle on the bare rock as comfortably as we could. On a planet which rotates, these times of settling down would be called “evening”, but on Valeddom, where that term is meaningless, the settling times are named instead by a word I translate as “tireding”.
    On the last tireding before we saw Vutu, despite everything that I’ve just described, despite the hardships of the journey and the sinister repute of our destination, my own good spirits surprised myself. I was exhausted but no longer depressed. I had one good card to play – and I could play it quite openly.
    For quite a while after the other Nydrs had gone to sleep I lay awake, thinking, among other things, what a relief it was that I need no longer hide my Earth mind from my Valeddomian family. Or from anyone else. Why there should be this particular relation between these two worlds, was a total mystery, but I was glad that people here knew of it. Even the Vutuans knew: for that was why they had captured us. And so I got to wondering for the hundredth time what it was they wanted from Bryce and me. Did they think that we would give them treasures of Earthly knowledge that might give greater power to their city? Well, come to think of it, Bryce might know a thing or two that could profit them.... And as for me – I, also, could have a shot at preserving their belief that I was valuable. With this status, I might protect my Mercurian family until such time as we could escape together. I was thinking a long way ahead now. Even before I had seen the city of our enemies I was picturing what would happen after I had fooled the Vutuans and somehow got us all out of it, and found a way of eluding pursuit. And assuming all that, it still wasn’t going to be easy; especially as this part of Yonnimay seemed unusually barren – we’d have to pack supplies, we couldn’t count on living off the land....
    I heard a whisper. Bryce was still awake. He edged up to me.
    “Hugh, I’ve thought of something fantastic. Utterly fantastic. I don’t know why it never occurred to me before....”
    My heart beat faster as I guessed he had already hit upon a plan of resistance, or even escape.
    “You know Yonnimay, the Valeddomians’ name for the Twilight Belt – well, I’ve been rummaging, you know, exploring in the brain-basement, you know how it is....”
    “I know how it is,” I encouraged. “And?”
    “I’ve stumbled on how that name Yonnimay was derived.”
    Oh. Bryce was just being academic. So – no escape plan yet. Well, it had been a bit much to expect of him.
    “It’s an old compound word,” he continued, “which actually means Twilight Belt!” He paused, listening for my reaction, and when I didn’t give any he fairly blazed, “Don’t you see the implication?”
    “’Fraid not,” I whispered back.
    “Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. I don’t just mean the way the word is used now, describing a half-way region between light and dark. I’m referring to the original meaning of twilight in any language, which must denote a temporary stage between day and night as we understand day and night on Earth.”
    I did start to see the point then, or I thought I did. “You mean this world, long ago, once upon a time did rotate....”
    “Good, you see it.”  
    “Well, that’s interesting,” I said politely. It was, indeed, mildly interesting. “And the Valeddomian scientists know enough to have found it out....”
    “No, Hugh, I don’t think you get it after all. Listen. Think of your own feel for the language. Think of the word Yonnimay. It’s an old word, isn’t it? A very, very old word, yes? Organically part of the language, wouldn’t you say? Definitely not a scientific jargon word, eh? Just yonn, ‘twilight’, plus may...”
    I probed in my own mental residue to check, and found I agreed with him. Then all of a sudden it flashed upon me, what he was driving at. I would never have realized it on my own. But with Bryce’s prompting....
    “Wow,” I said.
    “Wow, indeed. It’s not that they found it out – it’s that they never forgot it. For millions or more likely billions of years, ever since the days when Valeddom had a real day and night, all through to when the rotation slowed and finally stopped and yonn was combined with may, meaning ‘belt’ – and then during further geological ages until our own time... for all those eons, cultural memory has persisted.”
    “But, Sir,” I protested, “can any culture, any race, last that long?”
    “No, I don’t suppose so,” said Bryce. “That’s too much to believe. But a sequence of intelligent Valeddomian life must have handed down the most basic words and ideas from species to species. That’s hard enough to believe, but it’s the only way I can explain the sense behind the word Yonnimay. Pheeeewwww! Ghosts, if they exist, must be piled miles thick by this time.”
    Oddly enough I didn’t at that time associate this with my hudar insight about the Mercurian ghost sea.

>>  4: Vutu