The Source

'You wouldn't,' she cut him short. 'Not on Starside, not at sunup. Now we're down toward Sunside you'll start to see animals and birds; on the other side of the range you'll see plenty of them. But not on Starside. Believe me, Michael - er, Jazz? - you really wouldn't want to see anything of what lives on Starside.' She shivered, hugged her elbows.

'Starside and Sunside,' he mused. 'The pole is back there, the mountains run east to west, and the sun is south.'

'Yes,' she nodded her head, 'that's the way it is -always.' She stumbled, said: 'Oh.' and went to one knee; Jazz reached out and caught her elbow, stopped her from toppling over. This time Wolf made no protest. Jazz helped Zek to her feet, guided her to a flat rock. He shrugged a pack from his shoulder, took out a twenty-four-hour manpack: food for one man for one day. Then he dumped the pack onto the rock and made Zek sit on it.

'You're weak from hunger!' he said, pulling the ring on a tiny can of concentrated fruit juice. He took a sip at the juice to clean his mouth, handed her the can and said, 'Finish it.' She did, with relish. Wolf stood close by, wagging his tail for all the world like a low-slung Alsatian. His great tongue was beaded with saliva. Jazz broke a cube off a block of Russian chocolate concentrate and tossed it. Before it could hit the ground Wolf's jaws closed on it crunchingly.

'It's mainly my feet,' Zek said. Jazz looked at them. She wore rough leather sandals, but he could see caked blood between the toes where they projected. The mist had cleared from the sun a little, and now Jazz could take in the rest of her. True colours were still difficult, but outlines, shadows and silhouettes made readable contrasts. Her one-piece was ragged at the elbows and knees, patched at the backside. She carried only a slim roll, hooked to her harness. A sleeping-bag, Jazz correctly supposed.

They're no kind of footgear for this terrain,' he said.

'I know it now,' Zek answered, 'but I'd forgotten. Sunside is bad enough, but this pass is worse. And Starside is sheer hell. I had boots when I came here, like you. They don't last. Your feet harden quickly, you'll see, but some of these pebbles and rocks are sharp as knives.'

He gave her chocolate, which she almost snatched. 'Maybe we should rest right here,' he said.

'Safe enough, with the sun on us,' she answered, 'but I'd prefer to keep moving. Since we can't use the sphere, and we can't stay Starside, it's best we get back to Sunside as soon as we can.' Her tone was ominous.

'Any special reason?' Jazz was sure he wouldn't like the answer.

'Lots of them,' she told him, 'and they all live back there.' She nodded back the way they'd come.

'Do you feel like telling me about - them?' Jazz unhooked one of his kidney-packs; he knew it contained, among other things, a very basic first-aid kit. He took out gauze bandages, a tube of ointment, plasters. And as Zek talked he kneeled and carefully slipped the sandals off her feet, began to work on her wounds.

'Them,' she echoed him, making the word sound sour; and again a shudder ran through her. 'The Wamphyri, do you mean? Oh, they're the main problem, it's true, but there are other things on Starside almost as bad. Did you see Agursky's "pet", the thing in the tank at Perchorsk?'

Jazz looked up, nodded. 'I saw it. Telling you exactly what I saw would be a different matter!' He tore off a strip of gauze, soaked it in water from his flask, gently wiped away the caked blood from her toes. She sighed her appreciation as he squeezed ointment from its tube and rubbed it into the splits under her toes and the pads of her feet.

'That thing you saw was what happens when a vampire egg gets into a species of local fauna,' she told him. She said it as simply as that, her voice quite neutral.

Jazz stopped working on her feet, looked her straight in the eye, slowly nodded. 'A vampire egg, eh? That is what you said, isn't it?' She stared at him, obstinately, until he had to look away. 'OK, a vampire egg,' he shrugged, began wrapping her feet in gauze. 'So you're telling me that the Wamphyri are oviparous? They're egg-layers, right?'

She shook her head, changed her mind and nodded. 'Yes and no,' she said. The Wamphyri are what happens when a vampire egg gets into a man - or a woman.'

Jazz put her sandals on. They'd been a little loose, tending to cause burns and blisters. Now they were tighter, stopping the feet from sliding about too much. 'Is that better?' he asked. He thought about what she'd just told him, decided to let her tell it all in her own time, her own way.

'That feels good,' she said. Thanks.' She stood up, helped him get his packs hooked up, and they set off toward the sun again.

'Listen,' he said, when they were underway. 'Why don't I just listen and let you tell me everything that's happened to you while you've been here? All you've seen, learned, everything you know. So far as I can tell we've got plenty of time on our hands. Vision's good, and we don't seem in any sort of immediate danger. The sun's up ahead, and we have some good moonlight...'

'Have we?' Zek answered. Jazz craned his neck, looked at the moon. It had crossed the pass and already its rim touched the eastern peaks. A few more minutes and it would be gone. The planetary rotation period is incredibly slow,' she began to explain. 'But on the other hand the moon's orbit is closer and much faster. A "day" here is about a week on Earth. Oh, and incidentally, this place is "Earth". That's what they call it. It isn't our Earth, of course not, but it's theirs. I thought it was strange at first, but then I thought: what else would they call it?

'Anyway, this planet rotates westward very slowly, and its poles are not quite lined up on the sun. So it's like the planet has a wobble. The sun is seen to revolve west to east - anti-clockwise, if you like - in a slow, small circle. Now, I'm not an astronomer or a space scientist of any sort so don't ask me the whys and wherefores, but how it works out is like this:

'On Sunside we get a "morning" of about twenty-five hours' duration, a "day" of maybe seventy-five hours' duration, an "evening" of twenty-five hours and a "night" of about forty. Midday or thereabouts is sunup, and all of the night is sundown.'

Jazz looked up again, saw the moon halved now by the sharp rim of the mountains. Even as he watched its glow lessened as it prepared to slip from sight. 'I'm no astronomer either,' he said, 'but still it's very plain we have something of a fast-moving moon up there!'

"That's right,' she answered. 'It has a rapid spin, too, and unlike the old moon shows both its face and its backside.'

Jazz nodded. 'Not shy, eh?'

She snorted. 'In some ways you remind me of another Englishman I once knew,' she said. 'He seemed sort of naive, too, and yet in reality he was anything but naive!'

'Oh?' Jazz looked at her. 'Who was this lucky man?'

'He wasn't that lucky,' she said, tilting her head a little.

Jazz looked at her in profile in the last rays of moonlight, decided he liked her. A lot.

'So who was he?' he asked again.

'He was a member - maybe even the head - of your British E-Branch,' she answered. 'His name was Harry Keogh. And he had a special talent. I have a talent, too, but his was... different. I don't even know if you could call it ESP. That's how different it was.'

Jazz remembered what Khuv had told him about her. That sort of stuff was so much baloney as far as he was concerned, but best not to let her see his scepticism. 'Oh, yes, that's right,' he said. 'You're a mentalist, right? You read minds. So what was this Keogh's talent, eh?'

'He was a Necroscope,' she said, her voice suddenly cold.

'A what?'

'He could talk to the dead!' she said; and coming to a sudden, angry halt, she drew apart from Jazz.