Universe Twister - Keith Laumer [185]
He started to scramble to his feet, felt a stab of pain that started at least ten feet beyond his fingertip and shot like a hot wire all the way up to his neck. Turning his head, he saw a great, sorrel-feathered pinion spread along the wide bough on which he lay, its feathers bedraggled and in disarray. He twitched his shoulder blades tentatively, saw a corresponding twitch of the unfamiliar members, accompanied by another sharp jab of pain—reminiscent of that occasioned by biting down on a bone-chip with a sensitive tooth.
"It's real," he said wonderingly. He sat up carefully, leaned over, looked down through level after level of foot-wide leaves. The ground was down there, somewhere.
"And I'm up here. With a broken wing, Zorp only knows how high in the air. Which means I have to get down the hard way." He studied the two-yard-wide branch under him, saw how it led back among leafy caverns to the shadow-obscured pillar of the trunk.
"It must be fifty feet in diameter. And that's impossible. There are no trees that big in Artesia—or anywhere else, for that matter, especially with leaves like an overgrown sycamore."
"Right," he replied promptly. "Nicely reasoned. The tree's impossible, your wings are impossible, the whole thing's impossible. So what do we do now?"
"Start climbing."
"Dragging a broken wing?"
"Unless you have a better idea."
"Take your choice, O'Leary," he muttered. "Try it, and fall to your death, or stay here and die in comparative comfort."
"Correction," he reminded himself. "You can't afford to be dead—not while the Red Bull is itching to sell Goruble's hoard to any unsavory character with the price of a chicken dinner."
"Besides which," he agreed, "I have a few chicken dinners to eat yet myself."
"That's the spirit. Up and at 'em. I saye and I doe."
Painfully, Lafayette got to his feet, favoring the injured member. The wings, he saw by craning his neck, sprouted from his back between his normal shoulders and the base of his neck. His chest was puffed out like that of a pigeon; hard muscle, he found, prodding himself with the long, lean fingers he now possessed. His face—insofar as he could determine by feeling it over—was narrow, high cheek-boned, with small, close-set eyes and a widow's peak of bushy hair. Somehow, without a mirror, he knew that it was glossy black, that his eyes were a lambent green, his teeth snowy white in a sun-dark face.
"Good-bye, Zorro," he muttered. "It was a mixed pleasure being you. I wonder who I am now? Or what?"
There was a flutter among the leaves, a sharp kwee, kwee! A small white bird swooped on him. Lafayette batted at it in surprise, almost lost his balance, yelped aloud at the stab from his wing as he grabbed for support. The bird hovered, kwee!ing in a puzzled way. A moment later two more joined in. Lafayette put his back to a branch, fended off their repeated attempts to dart in close.
"Get away, blast you!" he yelped. "Don't I have enough trouble without being pecked by meat-eating cockatoos?"
More birds arrived; squawking indignantly, they circled Lafayette's head. He backed along the branch; they followed. He reached the giant bole. A dozen or more of the birds fluttered around him now.
"At least wait till I'm dead!" he yelled.
There was a sudden, shrill whistle from near at hand.
Abruptly, the birds flew up, scattering. The branch trembled minutely under Lafayette's feet. Leaves stirred; a small, slender figure stepped into view, swathed in a cloak of feathers—
No, not a cloak, O'Leary corrected his first startled impression.
Wings.
It was another flying man who stood facing him from ten feet away.
3
The man was narrow-shouldered, narrow-faced, with a long, pointed nose, tight lips, peaked eyebrows above pale, glistening eyes. He was dressed in close-fitting green trousers, a loose tunic of scarlet decorated with gold loops at the cuffs. His feet were bare; his long, slim toes clutched the rough bark.
"It ik ikik;riz izit tiz tizzik ik?" the newcomer said in a musical voice.
"Sorry,"