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"Whatever he wished," said Jarry.
That day, they cruised over Deadland in the flier, but the only signs of life they saw were each other. They continued to search in the days that followed, but they did not meet with success.
Under the purple of morning, however, two weeks later, it happened.
"They've been here," said Sanza.
Jarry moved to the front of the installation and stared out.
The snow was broken in several places, inscribed with the lines he had seen before, about the form of a small, dead beast.
"They can't have gone very far," he said.
"No."
"We'll search in the sled."
Now over the snow and out, across the land called Dead they went, Sanza driving and Jarry peering at the lines of footmarks in the blue.
They cruised through the occurring morning, hinting of fire and violet, and the wind went past them like a river, and all about them there came sounds like the cracking of ice, the trembling of tin, the snapping of steel strands. The bluefrosted stones stood like frozen music, and the long shadow of their sled, black as ink, raced on ahead of them. A shower of hailstones drumming upon the roof of their vehicle like a sudden visitation of demon dancers, as suddenly was gone. Deadland sloped downward, slanted up again.
Jarry placed his hand upon Sanza's shoulder.
"Ahead!"
She nodded, began to brake the sled.
They had it at bay.
They were using clubs and long poles which looked to have fire-hardened points. They threw stones. They threw pieces of ice.
Then they backed away and it killed them as they went.
The Catforms had called it a bear because it was big and shaggy and could rise up onto its hind legs...
This one was about three and a half meters in length, was covered with bluish fur and had a thin, hairless snout like the business end of a pair of pliers.
Five of the little creatures lay still in the snow. Each time that it swung a paw and co
Jarry removed the pistol from its compartment and checked the charge.
"Cruise by slowly," he told her. "I'm going to try to burn it about the head."
His first shot missed, scoring the boulder at its back. His second singed the fur of its neck. He leapt down from the sled then, as they came abreast of the beast, thumbed the power control up to maximum, and fired the entire charge into its breast, point-blank.
The bear stiffened, swayed, fell, a gaping wound upon it, front to back.
Jarry turned and regarded the little creatures. They stared up at him.
"Hello," he said. "My name is Jarry. I dub thee Redforms--"
He was knocked from his feet by a blow from behind.
He rolled across the snow, lights dancing before his eyes, his left arm and shoulder afire with pain.
A second bear had emerged from the forest of stone.
He drew his long hunting knife with his right hand and climbed back to his feet.
As the creature lunged, he moved with the catspeed of his kind, thrusting upward, burying his knife to the hilt in its throat.
A shudder ran through it, but if cuffed him and he fell once again, the blade torn from his grasp.
The Redforms threw more stones, rushed toward it with their pointed sticks.
Then there was a thud and a crunching sound, and it rose up into the air and came down on top of him.
He awakened.
He lay on his back, hurting, and everything he looked at seemed to be pulsing, as if about to explode.
How much time had passed, he did not know.
Either he or the bear had been moved.
The little creatures crouched, waiting.
Some watched the bear. Some watched him.
Some watched the broken sled...
The broken sled...
He struggled to his feet.
The Redforms drew back.
He crossed to the sled and looked inside.
He knew she was dead when he saw the angle of her neck. But he did all the things a person does to be sure, anyway, before he would let himself believe it.
She had delivered the deathblow, crashing the sled into the creature, breaking its back. It had broken the sled. Herself, also.
He leaned against the wreckage, composed his first prayer, then removed her body.
The Redforms watched.
He lifted her in his arms and began walking, back toward the installation, across Deadland.
The Redforms continued to watch as he went, except for the one with the strangely high brow-ridge, who studied instead the knife that protruded from the shaggy and steaming throat of the beast.
Jarry asked the awakened executives of December: "What should we do?"
"She is the first of our race to die on this world," said Yan Turl, Vice President.
"There is no tradition," said Selda Kein, Secretary. "Shall we establish one?"
"I don't know," said Jarry. "I don't know what is right to do."
"Burial or cremation seem to be the main choices. Which would you prefer?"
"I don't--No, not the ground. Give her back to me. Give me a large flier...I'll burn her."
"Then let us construct a chapel."
"No. It is a thing I must do in my own way. I'd rather do it alone."
"As you wish. Draw what equipment you will need, and be about it."
"Please send someone else to keep the Deadland installation. I wish to sleep again when I have finished this thing--until the next cycle."
"Very well, Jarry. We are sorry."
"Yes--we are."
Jarry nodded, gestured, turned, departed.
Thus are the heavier lines of life sometimes drawn.
At the southeastern edge of Deadland there was a blue mountain. It stood to slightly over three thousand meters in height. When approached from the northwest, it gave the appearance of being a frozen wave in a sea too vast to imagine. Purple clouds rent themselves upon its peak. No living thing was to be found on its slopes. It had no name, save that which Jarry Dark gave it.
He anchored the flier.
He carried her body to the highest point to which a body might be carried.
He placed her there, dressed in her finest garments, a wide scarf concealing the angle of her neck, a dark veil covering her emptied features.
He was about to try a prayer when the hail began to fall. Like thrown rocks, the chunks of blue ice came down upon him, upon her.
"God damn you!" he cried and he raced back to the flier.
He climbed into the air, circled.
Her garments were flapping in the wind. The hail was a blue, beaded curtain that separated them from all but these final caresses: fire aflow from ice to ice, from clay aflow immortally through guns.
He squeezed the trigger and a doorway into the sun opened in the side of the mountain that had been nameless. She vanished within it, and he widened the doorway until he had lowered the mountain.
Then he climbed upward into the cloud, attacking the storm until his guns were empty.
He circled then above the molten mesa, there at the southeastern edge of Deadland.
He circled above the first pyre this world had seen.
Then he departed, to sleep for a season in silence the sleep of ice and stone, to inherit the Alyonal. There is no dreaming in that sleep.
Fifteen centuries. Almost half the Wait. Two hundred words or less....Picture--
...Nineteen mighty rivers flowing, but the black seas rippling violet now.
...No shallow iodine-colored forests. Mighty shag-barked barrel trees instead, orange and lime and black and tall across the land.
...Great ranges of mountains in the place of hills brown, yellow, white, lavender. Black corkscrews of smoke unwinding from smoldering cones.
...Flowers, whose roots explore the soil twenty meters beneath their mustard petals, unfolded amidst the blue frost and the stones.