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they said made no sense and was like the banging of drums and hollow
rocks, reverberating back and forth into a babble.
And yet he knew, he'd always known, that it was some sort of
speech, that this was their language, their tongue, and that they
heard and spoke and thought in ways far dif-ferent from humans.
Words ... ? Littlefeet couldn't call such a cacophony words or thoughts, but
occasionally through the din he would get other things: pictures that
partly related to things he could understand, and sometimes even odd
feel-ings. Like now, he was convinced that the din was some sort of argument.
Not a violent argument, or a heated one, but an argument nonetheless.
And, occasionally, in the flashes of color and rippling patterns that
floated through his sleeping mind, there were pictures, almost
snapshots of events rather than full observations. Most made no sense, at
least he couldn't make sense of them, but sometimes there were faces. Human
faces. Faces in many cases filled with fear, or, worse, worshipful
devotion to something he could not see, but with eyes that showed little or no
thought, just an achingly single-minded desire to please.
And they were in some ways like no humans he knew. They were humans without
scars, without blemishes of any kind, with smiles full of perfect teeth and
proportions that said they had never been hungry or had to keep in the kind of
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
trim that a Family member must to survive. They also had no tattoos, and the
only jewelry they all had was a kind of shiny diamond thing in their foreheads
that seemed to pulse off and on, almost like the city itself had seemed to
pulse when he'd looked at it.
The other images were of the demon flowers, those great flowers whose rippling
rows covered the center of the region and possibly much of the
continent beyond for all he knew. Gigantic
flowers, planted in perfect rows, growing to two or three times the height of
a man, with varicolored stalks and even more exotic patterns in their huge
petals. Every color of the rainbow was there and more, and patterns made
of those colors in almost any va-riety or configuration. Unlike the
confusing and scary other scenes, these were very pretty, although the view
was distorted and the groves were being seen from a van-tage point that was
moving very, very fast over their tops. He began to get dizzy, even a little
sick, and he felt sud-denly that he was not alone, that someone or something
was there with him, and that the thing was now abruptly aware of
his presence and turning to look at him, to reach out for him... .
He woke up in a cold sweat. It was not quite dawn, and there was a thick fog
all around them that made seeing nearly impossible and soaked everything and
everybody right through.
Unable to see much of anything, even in the predawn light, he used his other
senses and was glad that he wasn't on sentry duty right then.
His hearing could place those nearest him fairly easily, and because the
Family tended to make camp in the same pattern each time no matter what the
lay of the land, it was also easy to find his way through, using hearing and
smell to avoid walking into things or over people.
He was heading for a specific spot just outside of camp and downwind, and he
had even less trouble finding that place by smell. One of the last jobs that
some were assigned to do before camp was broken was to bury the pit so that no
one could smell it and begin to map out camp locations.
He took his acute senses of smell and hearing for granted, and just about
everybody his age did as well, but he knew that the older people did not share
the abilities, at least not to the degree his age peers took them for granted.
Father Alex in particular would be helpless in this soup, even to make it to
piss or crap on his own. The heightened senses had not escaped his
notice, either; he had wondered for some time if it was being born and
raised in this new element, or just age, or if, in fact, this newly remade
world was changing the people who lived in it into something slightly,
subtly, different.
Littlefeet's parents could do it, although not quite to the same degree, and
the same could be said of their parents. There were also other survival senses
that seemed to be emerging. Many, although not all, of the younger
generation seemed to be able to sense the direction and location of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]