The Crystal Variation Read Free Page A

position—friend or foe.
    So, he walked, and he strove to be alert, spending part of the time analyzing his surroundings, part watching the sky, and part in an on-going argument with himself—an argument he was losing.
    “Not going to do it, I bet. They can’t make me!”
    “Will, can.”
    “Won’t, can’t.”
    The argument concerned the growing fashion among the newer troops of putting their ID markers on their face. Fashion was something he didn’t deal with all that much, and besides, he felt that a commander should be making these kinds of decisions, not a troop. And yet, he had to own it was convenient to be able to tell at a glance which unit, rank, and specialty defined a particular soldier.
    “Shouldn’t!”
    He’d said this loudly—definitively—just before Tree Number Sixty-four, and it was while using the base of that tree as shade—and checking the angle of its fall—that the position locator in his pocket chuckled briefly.
    He grabbed the unit, watching the power-light—but there, that was silly. Unless things improved pretty soon the unit’s power would outlast him by quite some number of years. After all, it had been three days—four?—since he’d last had heard that sound . . .
    Live now, the sensor showed him to be somewhat closer to the pre-marked goal than he had expected; the map roughed in by the original orbital photos showed that he’d managed to miss an early valley entrance—likely by refusing to walk quite as boldly as he might have into the teeth of the gritty breeze—and had thus saved himself a half-day or more of trudging down a much longer hillside.
    The big question was becoming “saved” for what? There were no signs of life that was still alive; nor of water. The trees—
    Maybe the trees were worth the walk, after all. There was a theory growing in his head—that he’d come in part looking for great works, and he’d found great works. In the days he’d been walking with the trees he’d found evidence of purpose far beyond the probability of happy accident.
    For one thing, in places—not random places but specific kinds of places—the trees had fallen across the ancient watercourse, high ground to high ground, just where there was no marching forward to the ocean on that bank. They seemed to have preferred the left bank—which was generally wider, when it existed at all—and they sometimes seemed to have rested from their march and made a small grove, while at other times they’d hurried, stringing a long line of solitary trees.
    Too, they were getting smaller. It saddened him, but the later trees . . . sigh.
    Sloppy thinking. He didn’t have dated evidence. For all he factually knew, the first tree he had encountered was the youngest, not the eldest. And yet he persisted in believing that the trees had marched from the high ground down to the sea, and with purpose. And what other purpose could they have but to live—and by continuing to live fight the purpose of the sheriekas ?
    “As long as there is life in the Spiral Arm, especially intelligent, organized life, the sheriekas will not easily reach their goal!” The memory-voice rang in his ears, for the moment obscuring the sound of the wind.
    That had been . . . who had it been, after all?
    Song-woman.
    Right.
    Jela closed his eyes, saw the small troop of them standing on a hilltop like so many ancient savages, singing, singing, singing.
    He’d been part of a survey team then, too, his very first, and he’d laughed at their belief that they were fighting some space-borne invader by standing there singing, singing in the light and long into the night.
    In the morning, there had been three fewer of the singers, and word eventually came down from the frontier that three sheriekas world-eaters had simply vanished from tracking—gone, poof!
    The timer on his arm went off. He reached for a water bulb . . . and stopped before his hand got close to the pocket. Not yet. He’d been waiting a little bit