Vale of the Vole Part 27

"I admit I was curious about this," the centaur said. "But it means the route will no longer be familiar to me. At least this has been enough to show you the way of it; the path can be devious."

Indeed it could be! "But reasonably safe and easy," Esk repeated. He wished he knew what was considered reasonable in the strange world of the gourd! If striking zombie snakes represented safety, what would represent danger?

Chex stepped down into the pit, somewhat awkwardly. It was evident that centaurs were not made for stairs. There was a landing below, large enough for the four of them. Beyond it, a broad lighted pa.s.sage extended, and this was clearly the path.

They lined up four abreast and walked onward. This really wasn't very bad, so far; maybe the path was going to be easy by human definition.

Then they came to a rusty barred gate across the pa.s.sage. Behind it stood four grotesque zombies. One was a rotting man, another a decaying centaur, another a moldy vole, and the last a tattered skeleton.

"This has abruptly become specific," Chex remarked. "Something knows we are here."

"I am not reavvured," Volney said.

"It is not unknown," Marrow said. "We of the gourd are animations of the concepts of bad dreams. Now that you-and it seems I-have entered this realm physically, those dreams are coalescing. I suspect this will become rather unpleasant for you."

"Not for you?" Chex inquired.

"I do not dream, of course, so cannot have a bad dream."

"But that figure before you looks very much like a spoiled skeleton."

"Yes. This is odd. It must have mistaken me for a living creature. I am not certain whether to feel flattered or insulted."

"But what do we do now?" Esk asked. "Break through the gate? It has no opening, and the bars are too closely set to let us through."

"If, as I conjecture, these are animations from our minds, it will be necessary for us to face them directly," Marrow said. "They are of course intended to frighten us away. Bad dreams lose their power when the subject fails to flee in terror." He glanced around. "I hope you will not repeat that in the outside world. Trade secret, you know."

Esk would have laughed, if his knees hadn't felt so weak.

"Then I shall face my doppelganger," Chex said boldly. She stepped up to the gate.

The zombie centaur stepped up similarly, as if it were a mirror image. It met her right at the gate. She put out her right hand, and it matched her with its left. She touched it-and her hand pa.s.sed through its hand.

No, not through-into. The two merged, and disappeared.

Startled, Chex drew back her arm. So did the zombie, and both hands reappeared.

"Like water!" Esk exclaimed. "Like putting your hand into water! It disappears, and so does the reflection."

"That must be it," Chex agreed grimly. She spread her wings part way, as she tended to do when wrestling with a concept, and the zombie did the same.

Then she stepped forward, into the gate. The doppelganger duplicated the motion.

They merged. Their two front sections disappeared into each other, leaving a two-reared beast. Then the rears merged, leaving only the two briefly swis.h.i.+ng tails. Finally, the tails drew together in the center and were gone.

Then a picture formed, superimposed over the gate. It was of Chex, galloping through a forest, casting worried glances back over her shoulder. What was she fleeing from?

She entered a field. Now the pursuit came into view. It consisted of a herd of centaurs: males, females, and young ones, brandis.h.i.+ng spears and bows. They seemed intent on killing her!

The field terminated in a rough slope strewn with rocks. Chex had to slow to avoid cracking her hooves against the rocks, and the pursuing centaurs gained. One aimed his bow.

The descent became sharper, until she could go no farther without losing her footing entirely. Beyond was a drop-off to a raging river. There was no chance of fording that; if she tried, she would be dashed to death against the rocks in the river. Her plight and her terror were manifest.

"It's only a vision!" Esk called. "It can't hurt you! Just a bad dream!"

Chex heard him. She glanced at him with realization-and abruptly was back in the pa.s.sage with them, the dream gone.

The zombie centaur was back on its side of the gate, unchanged. The way remained barred.

Chex was breathing hard; she had evidently had quite a scare. "You saw it?" she asked.

"We saw it," Esk agreed. "You were being chased by centaurs."

"They condemned me because of my wings," she said. "They regarded me as a freak!"

"Exactly as the real centaurs do," Esk agreed.

"Then that is your deepest fear or shame," Marrow said. "The worst dream the night mares can bring you: rejection by your own kind."

She shuddered. "Yes. I try not to think about it, but it does hurt terribly. I want to be part of my species, and I cannot be."

"You must face it down," Marrow said.

"How can I do that? They will kill me if I do not flee them!"

"But a dream death is not a real death," Esk reminded her.

"I hope you're right," she said grimly. "Don't wake me, this time."

She marched back into her doppelganger. The two disappeared again into each other, and the dream reappeared.

Chex was fleeing through the forest, heading for the field. But this time she forced herself to stop, and to turn and face her pursuers. "You have no right to hara.s.s me like this!" she cried. "I am what I was foaled to be! It is no fault of mine!"

"Freak! Freak!" they chorused. "Death to all freaks!"

Then they stabbed her with their spears, and shot her with their arrows, and carved her with their knives, until only a shuddering ma.s.s of flesh remained.

Chex woke screaming. The second dream had been worse than the first! The threatened violence had been no bluff.

Esk jumped over to her and opened his arms. She reached down and clutched him to her, heedless of the physical or social awkwardness. "Oh, it was horrible!" she cried. "I died! They killed me, and it hurt, and I was mutilated and dead!"

"Terrible," Esk agreed, holding her as well as he could, though her pectorals were squeezing against his neck.

"That was evidently an improper way to face that fear," Marrow said.

"First I fled, then I faced them!" Chex sobbed hysterically. "Both were wrong. What else can I do?"

"That iv for uv to convider," Volney said. "Vhe hav tried the ekvtremev; what remainv between?"

Chex disengaged from Esk. "Here I'm acting like a silly filly! Of course this is a problem to be a.n.a.lyzed and solved. I was reacting in blacks and whites, when reality is generally in shades of gray. But the dream had such verisimilitude, it overwhelmed me!"

"Such what?" Esk asked, daunted by the six-syllable word she had used.

"It was realistic," she clarified. "It made me believe I was there even though I knew better."

"It made me believe you were there, at first," Esk said.

"And I thank you for your support," she said. "I am coming to appreciate the value of friends.h.i.+p."

"Friendv," Volney said, nodding in his emulation of human idiom. "Could we join you there, and oppove the ventaurv?"

"Say, yes!" Esk exclaimed. "Four are better than one! And Marrow could give them a real start!"

"I appreciate the offer," Chex said. "But I wouldn't want to put you into that sort of danger. Perhaps you could not actually be killed, but believe me, you could be hurt; I felt that pain! In any event, I believe this is my personal challenge to surmount; if I should do it with help, it wouldn't count."

They saw the justice in her position. "But if you can't fight them, or reason with them, or escape them, what can you do?" Esk asked.

"Reject them," Marrow said.

Chex's eyes widened. "I think you're right! I was treating them seriously both times, and so they had power. I gave them that power!"

"Yet you knew they were figments of a dream," Esk said. "They still attacked you. I'm not sure that just telling them you reject them will do any good."

"No, it won't," she agreed. "I have to prove it. And, since this is a dream, I think I know how." She faced the gate. "Wish me luck."

"Mountains of it!" Esk said.

"Cavev of it," Volney agreed.

"Rib cages of it," Marrow said.

She nerved herself visibly, then strode into the gate. She disappeared against the zombie centaur, and the vision formed.

This time she ran to the field, then braked and whirled. The horde of centaurs charged up, brandis.h.i.+ng their weapons.

"You have no authority here!" she cried. "This is my dream! I reject you and all you stand for-narrowness, intolerance, violence! That is not my way, and should not be yours."

They charged on her, weapons flas.h.i.+ng. Oh, no! Esk thought. It wasn't working.

Then Chex spread her wings and leaped into the air. The wings stroked powerfully, the downblast stirring up a cloud of dust and blowing back the manes of the centaurs. She rose above them, slowly, grandly.

She was flying!

The centaurs gaped. This was entirely unexpected!

"I reject your land-bound ways!" Chex cried. "You have no wings, so you condemn those who do! That is your fundamental failing-sour grapes!"

Now the centaurs began to recover. They lifted their weapons-and Chex accelerated her wing beats and launched up into the sky, quickly pa.s.sing out of range. "I don't need your approval; I don't fear your condemnation!" she called. "I have my own life to live! I leave you behind!"

Then she woke. She was back on the floor, panting, flushed with victory, and the dream was gone.

"But in real life, I still can't fly," she said sadly. "I recognized that the terms of the dream were different, and that if I had awful liabilities, I also had wonderful abilities. They go together; the extremes are feasible, in the dream. So I drew on the positive, and vanquished the negative. And do you know, it's true! I don't need the centaurs anymore! I'm free of my liability of false desire; I no longer want to be like them or accepted by them. I want to explore my own horizons, which are so much greater than theirs! Their reality is valid, for them; I could not flee them as long as I desired their acceptance, nor oppose them as long as I knew that their dream presentation was merely an exaggeration of their actual way. I could not defeat them on their own turf. But when I invoked my turf, they were helpless!"

She paused, realizing that the others were staring at her. "What's the matter? Do you disagree?"

Esk found his voice. "You're through," he said.

"I-" She looked around. "Why, I'm on the other side of the barrier!"

"Your victory," Marrow agreed.

"I came to terms with my worst fear or shame," she agreed. "It no longer haunts me. The dream was only the representation of it. The barrier was only another representation. Neither exists for me anymore." And she walked through the gate without hindrance, turned, and walked through it again. The metal bars had no substance.

Esk stepped up to touch the bars-and his doppelganger matched him, reaching out to meet his hand from the other side. Esk jerked his hand back; that barrier remained real for him!

"The vombie ventaur iv gone," Volney said. "But the otherv remain."

"We must conquer our own bad dreams," Esk said.

"I vhall tackle mine," the vole said, and marched into the gate.

The zombie vole met him snout-on. The two merged, and the dream formed. It was of a tunnel whose walls glowed prettily with colored fungus. He entered it by boring through the wall, the magic metal talons on his front feet gouging through the rock as if it were mud.

Another vole was there-no, Esk realized that there were subtle distinctions of form and coloration. It was a female, and not of precisely Volney's species. Her eyes and fur changed color as his did, but she differed too.

"The wiggle princess," Chex murmured. She had crossed the barrier again and now stood beside him.

Oh. Esk thought of the demoness Metria, and began to understand the nature of the vole's deepest shame Volney came to stand before the wiggle She approached, and they sniffed noses. There was a pleasant smell, as of blooming flowers. It reminded him somehow of Bra Bra.s.sie, and that was funny, because she was made of metal and smelled of polished bra.s.s.

Volney jerked away, and the dream ended. He was back in the pa.s.sage, on the near side of the gate. "I wav afraid it would be that," he said.

"You desire the wiggle princess," Chex said.

"But the trap-"

"Yes, you explained," the centaur said "But you avoided her, so you should have no shame in that connection. You did what you had to do, and we are on this quest for the containment spell because of it."

"Yet I came so clove to failing," Volney said. "Because of my un-worthynevv "

"Your what?" Esk asked. "You always struck me as a fine figure of a vole."

"I am not," Volney said. "The rejection by her kind that Chekv feared -iv alvo mine."

"This requires explanation," Chex said. "Aren't you on a mission for your folk?"

"I am-but it iv not becauve I am the bevt for it, but becauve I am ekvpendable."

"Expendable?" Chex asked. "How could that be?"