The ranger station was only a shell. The roof had crashed into the interior; the building was plainly derelict and must have been so for some time. I think I must have cried out, not being able to believe, yet aware that this was no dream. It was as real as the wind blowing about me, the grit that chafed my feet.
A warm hand slipped under my elbow to steady me. I clutched at Jorth Kosgro, clung to him, just as Bartare and Oomark had clung to me.
“Please!” My voice was small and frightened, too. “What, oh what has happened? This – this was the park, that the station. It was, I tell you, it was!”
“There is only one explanation. I didn’t want to believe it. But you’re right. This was once just what you say it was.”
“Then what has happened, what did happen to change it? We can’t have been away for more than a few days – ”
His arm was about my shoulders, and the warmth and strength so near to me was steadying. I shook uncontrollably, and I felt as if I would never be warm again.
“There is another part to those tales from old Terra – the ones about the changelings, and the world of the Folk. I didn’t really think of that before. Now it seems that it must be true also – ”
“What – what do you mean?”
“That some of those who went or were taken into that gray country did return after what seemed a day, or a month, or perhaps a year. But when they came to their own place again, they discovered that years or centuries had passed – ”
“No!” Such a thing seemed utterly beyond reason. I closed my eyes and refused to look at the desolation about me, to believe that it was indeed the work of time and that we had been lost for years upon years.
Then he held me a little away from him, his hands heavy on my shoulders. He even gave me a small shake as if to summon my full attention, so that I was forced to open my eyes and meet his level, penetrating stare.
“Kilda, when you entered the gray world – what was the date – galactic, not planet time?”
“It was-it was the year 2422 After Flight – ”
“The year 2422,” he repeated. “But, Kilda, when I planeted here, the year was 2301 After Flight.”
“One hundred twenty-one years earlier! I don’t believe it!” I wanted to deny it, I had to! Yet when I looked about me, the evidence was plain. Now I met his eyes fearfully. “What – what can it be now, then? How long?”
“We cannot find out here – that is certain. We shall have to reach some settlement.”
“They didn’t reach this far.” I ran my tongue over suddenly dry lips. “We are a long way from Tamlin without a flitter.”
“But not from my ship,” he countered. “And even a hundred and twenty-one years will have had little effect on a Survey scout. Let us go.”
I was willing enough. The less I saw of this place, the better, until I could adjust to the thought that time had been our enemy. But I saw Kosgro as a young man, tired and worn-looking, certainly, but young. And the children, they were as they had been when we had gone through the gate. My own skin was smooth, with no sign of age. I ran my fingertips over my face. I could not be sure, but by touch the skin there was as smooth and unfurrowed as that of my hands and arms.
“Where do we go?”
“Back there – ”
“Kilda, where are the flitters? Why is this all broken?” Oomark broke in. “I want to go home.”
Bartare rounded on him. “There are no flitters, and maybe no city,” she shrilled. “It’s all, all gone! You would come back – now see what’s happened!”
“Stop it!” For the first time in a long period I spoke to her harshly. “We are not sure of anything, Bartare. Oomark, we shall go to Kosgro’s ship. Perhaps be can take us in that, or else his scouting flitter, back to Tamlin.”
But though we tramped at a faster pace, all of us being eager to reach the ship, we did not find it. Instead, we came to an open space, and there Kosgro stopped short, swinging about, plainly looking for landmarks. When he turned to me and spoke, his voice was dull and empty of emotion.
“It is gone.”
“I know. It is in the museum park at Tamlin.”
We both looked to Oomark. “What?” “How do you know?” Our questions intermingled.
“‘Cause when Gentlehomo Largrace flew our class out here, he made a swing over here to tell us about the mystery ship. When the settlers first came, they found a scout finned down here. It had been here a long time, ’cause it had a shape they didn’t use any more. But they never found out anything about it – it was locked. So finally they moved it in town to the museum. He promised to take us to see it on our next observe trip.”
“If it’s in the city, we’ll have to go there.”
“How? We have no supplies, and it is a long trek through wilderness country to the nearest holding, if the holdings are still here.”
“Do we have any choice now?” he asked, and I knew he was right. We did not – save of dying where we stood. And tired as we were, that was not our choice of an ending.
The rest of that nightmare passage exceeded anything we had faced in the gray world. Not that we were menaced by monsters out of a mist, but hunger was our constant companion. Kosgro used his survival training, and it was only his skills that kept us alive.
We lived on meat from animals he snared, brought down with a well-aimed rock or knocked over with a club. He fought animals and birds for berries that were already half dried up. The rags of our clothing became tatters that did not cover us, and we wove very perishable substitutes out of grasses and reeds. Our feet grew sore and then slowly toughened, and we lost all track of time, save we could count the days since we had first found the ruined ranger station.
And in all that time we saw no flitters, no evidence there were still any of our kind on this world. I could not think what had happened. When I had left Dylan, there had been a small but steady flow of emigration. More and more plantations and grazing land had been in use each year. Now we several times saw herd animals but quickly learned to avoid them. They had gone totally wild and were smaller, more wiry, and very alert, as if they had learned to defend themselves in order to survive.
On the twentieth day of our wandering, we came to the first sign that man had once tamed part of this land. Tangled vines grew around a hill, and the fruit they bore still hung in dry and withered bunches, decimated by birds and insects, plainly never harvested. We broke the shrunken, wrinkled things to eat. They were bitter and much smaller 5 than the ones I remembered, but they were food, and we not only ate our fill, but also made bags of leaves pinned together with thorns to carry come with us.
The vines had overwhelmed and half buried buildings. So entangled and covered were those walls that we did not try to get inside. It was evident nothing remained we could use.
But even with this evidence of the collapse of civilization on Dylan, I held to the hope that there was still a city, a port. If we could reach that, we would find people – if not those we had left – how long ago? – then still people.
Oddly enough, the farther we traveled, the more Bartare lost whatever she had brought with her out of the gray world, the more she became a normal child. Though Oomark had asked troubled questions at first, he, too, came to accept this strange thing that had happened. And I thought that both, being young, could better adapt than could Kosgro and I. For me it was an endless nightmare, and I struggled to wake from it.
Luckily for my sanity and perhaps for Kosgro’s equilibrium also (though by the nature of his training he was better prepared to meet strange strokes of fortune), the very mechanics of keeping alive and moving and seeing to the well-being of the children filled our days. But I nearly broke as we worked our way through more of the derelict and overgrown holdings and came to the outskirts of Tamlin.