Cloudcry by Sydney J. van Scyoc

Author:Sydney J. van Scyoc [Scyoc, Sydney J. van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780425058640
Google: BKS810SlHVYC
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Published: 1983-04-15T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Regaining his feet at the bottom of the mesa, Sadler tottered through a psychotic’s jungle of spastic greenery and epileptic vines, searching for Verrons. Before he had wandered far, dizziness and hunger gripped him, bringing cold sweat to his forehead. Testing reality with an extended hand, he stumbled to’ rest at the base of a moss-slimed tree. He jammed his injured wrist into his armpit and let his head sag forward against his knees.

Unexpectedly Verrons materialized beside him, his eyes red-rimmed in a gaunt, mudstruck face. "Are you hurt?”

Sadler raised his head. His jiggling eyeballs anchored desperately upon Verrons’ reassuring solidity. “I’ve hurt my wrist. Are you all right?”

“I collected a few bruises. Nothing more serious,” Verrons said, kneeling to examine Sadler’s injured wrist. ‘‘Seems to be a sprain,” he decided. “We should probably bind it up for a few days. Do you feel like walking?”

“I don’t know. I—” Sadler tongued dry lips, struggling to his feet. The effort set off fresh spasms of greenery. He touched his temples, trying to steady his vision. But more than exhaustion and hunger contributed to his giddiness. “The girl—”

Verrons’ eyelids shuttered his gaze. “She’s in the treetops just ahead. Doing Authority knows what.”

But Sadler knew what she was doing. The first flashes had touched his mind yesterday when he dozed against the wall of the mountainward courtyard—and suddenly found himself gazing into the distance with a fierce possessiveness that jolted him awake. The young female stood at plaza's edge, her body arched in fervent proprietorship of the jungled vista below. Standing, startled, Sadler had looked upon the same vista, but from a double perspective, hers astigmatically superimposed upon his own, splintering all elements into a confusion of line and color. And today he had charted the flying male’s fall with two pair of eyes: his own and hers, experiencing not just his own startled disbelief but hers as well, transmogrifying quickly to anger, then to sharp fear as the Ehminheer’s shimmering glare swam air to encompass——her, not him. Sadler had sucked a sharp breath anyway, muscles mobilizing. Then the young female had fled across the plaza, snapping the strand of communication. Now Sadler directed a covert glance at Verrons. If the older man were troubled with similar phantasmic snatches of image and emotion, he apparently preferred not to discuss it.

Verrons stretched erect, his brow creased with other concerns. “This diet you mapped out, Sadler—you didn’t leave out a few essential elements, did you? Or drop in something we can’t metabolize? Something that gradually accumulates to a toxic level?”

Pensively Sadler stared at the jungle floor. “I worked from half a dozen texts on human nutrition, supposedly reliable ones.”

“Which in turn calls into question the reliability of the tissue analysis data on local flora and fauna that you used,” Verrons suggested. Certainly their condition was not reassuring: emaciation, tremor, recurring spells of dizziness and voracious hunger. In appearance Sadler and Verrons had gradually assumed the aspect of two men who had survived a pestilence—or who were about to succumb to one.

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