Collected Short Fiction, page 712
“Sunsdeath?” the fat man wheezed. “What’s Sunsdeath?”
“A failure of our star. The cause is not clearly known, but the event has happened perhaps once in a long life span, ever since the colonists landed. There are rains of meteors. The darkness is commonly complete. It lasts sometimes for a whole day. On past occasions, however, the star has always been restored.”
“An eclipse!” the scrawny man scoffed. “Don’t you know about eclipses?”
“I know the lunar theory, sir. But Nggongga has no moon.”
“Have you another theory?”
“Our priests do,” the guide said. “They say the star is eaten by the red-eyed dragon-god Cru Creetha, whose symbol you see on the wall.”
“You mean the hunger of Cru Creetha is predictable?” The tourist squinted skeptically into the glaring sun. “Like the motions of a moon?”
“The priests do have foreknowledge, sir. Cru Creetha is believed to act from wrath. His present anger is said to be directed at the otherworld invasion of Nggongga, which has led so many of our people to forget their ancient ways. His most fanatic followers are preaching that the sun will not come back until the head of every alien has been piled around his altars.”
“Superstitious nonsense!” the fat man muttered. “I say your priests are ignorant fools—or more likely they are cunning rascals deceiving ignorant fools.”
“I myself am no believer in Cru Creetha.” The old guide shrugged blandly. “Yet I can show you reasons for the revival of his cruel faith. That’s why I brought you here.”
His crutch spun toward the smoke-darkened wall and its red-painted slogans.
“Here you see a chapter of our sad history, written in flame and blood. The tragedy of the Nggars. They’re a foundation family—the first Nggar was one of those bold adventurers who opened the space gate and came through to build Nggonggamba. He grew fat on the sweat and blood of a million poor blacks gathering muskweed in the desert to make his famous perfumes. The generations of Nggars have always ruled that rich trade. Though they’ve married native women, they’re still otherworlders, using their alien knowhow to plunder Nggongga. That’s why we don’t love them.”
With a startling savagery, his crutch slammed the smoky stone.
“That’s why today you find NggeeNggar—the current family head—hiding in his compound with these marks of terror on the wall. That’s why he has run off his black retainers and brought queer green speechless people from another world to be his bodyguards. That’s why he has sent his son away to be educated on another planet. The Night clan fanatics are howling for his head.”
“I think your whole stinking planet is sick.” The professor of exoethnography elevated her sun-blistered nose. “If you want my professional opinion, you’re too primitive for uncontrolled contact with civilization. You’re suffering from technological shock. I think you need the doctors of progress. The Benefactors.”
“I’ve known Benefactors.” Unimpressed, the old guide shrugged. “Sometimes they keep a resident agent here. They have taken two of our young men to be trained on Xyr. I suppose they mean well—but what can one man do for a hundred million?
“Or against Cru Creetha?”
His crutch stabbed at the red-eyed dragon-god.
“One of our cadets on Xyr is Lylik, the heir of Nggo Nggar. The other is now named Blacklantern—who fought tlys in our arena here before he had a name. They are brave young men. I’m sure the Benefactors are training them well. But I’m afraid they’ll find Cru Creetha harder to conquer than any unmilked tly.”
Xyr was a new-found ocean world, whose islands held the administrative complex of the Benefactors, with the schools and labs and computers and everything else that made it the nerve center for the planned new universe of galactic man. In his first year there, Blacklantern had chafed unhappily under the discipline of his instructors and the sophistication of his fellow cadets.
Things had gone better since Lylik came.
Fellow Nggonggans, they decided to room together. He liked Lylik’s shy modesty about his family and his fortune, and Lylik admired his skills in the arena. They soon discovered more things in common—impatience with authority and pleasure in a fight.
At an off-limits bar in the interworld zone, they disabled a gang of cargo handlers who didn’t like their color. On disciplinary probation for that, they exchanged daggers in the ritual of brotherhood that Blacklantern had learned in the arena, and Lylik began to share the native nuts and sweets that his mother sent from Nggonggamba.
In all his hard climb from the alleys and gutters of his childhood, Blacklantern had never enjoyed such a genuine friend. He was distressed when he found Lylik worrying about trouble at home.
“There’s always trouble on Nggongga.” He tried to be cheerful. “We’re too primitive to produce much but poverty and pain. That’s why I want to be a Benefactor. To help bring civilization.”
“The trouble is my parents.” Lylik was chewing a saltflower seed, and its narcotic sweetness filled their study room. “I can’t find out what is really wrong. My father’s too badly crippled to write, and he won’t make tapes because his voice is bad. My mother was hurt last year, when a Night clan terrorist tried to kill them. I don’t know how badly. The nurse keeps writing that she’s better, but I want to go home to see for myself.”
Before he got permission to go, however, the shadow of terror fell across the long light-years from Nggongga. Classes were over, that bright afternoon. Blacklantern had been teaching Lylik the weaves and feints and vaults of the arena, and they were jogging across the hexangle toward the gym for another lesson. A queer high voice quavered behind them.
“—Nggar!” Their translators took a moment to pick it up. “Cadet Lylik of Nggar! Spacemail parcel for you.”
They waited for the yellow-clad carrier. A squat pale hairless man, so massive that he looked monstrous. He gave Lylik the parcel and bounded away. Blacklantern glimpsed the stark ferocity on his face and sprang to intercept him. He snatched a dagger from beneath his flying cloak. Blacklantern danced in, grasping and twisting at the dagger arm as if it had been a tly’s venomous sting. They grappled and recoiled. Blacklantern stumbled backward, the red-dripping dagger in his hand. The dwarf slumped toward Lylik, all his ferocity erased.
“My good mother!” Still unaware of their silent brief encounter, Lylik was tearing his parcel open. “Never too ill to send more Nggonggan goodies. She must think the Benefactors are starving—”
A thundercrack cut off his voice.
A pale flash dazzled Blacklantern. A sudden gust slammed him forward. In the ringing calm that followed instantly, he turned to look for Lylik and the dwarf. Where they had been, a raw new crater was cut through turf and gravel and clay.
In the aftermath, he stood in a tower office above the hexangle, relating that shattering incident to Benefactor Thornwall.
“Am I to blame?” He saw disapproval in the old man’s eyes, and felt a surge of indignation. “The dwarf was killing Lylik and attempting to escape. As Lylik’s dagger-brother, I owed blood for blood.” A defiant satisfaction drew him erect. “The way things happened, I killed the killer.”
“Which has unfortunate consequences,” Thornwall said. “As violence commonly does. If the man had survived, he might have told us who sent him here.”
“Lylik’s parents have been attacked by the terrorists on Nggongga. I suppose the bomb came from there.”
“Evidently.” Thornwall nodded. “Though the device was not exactly a bomb. Our experts say it was part of a space gate. An ejection field circuit. Stolen, maybe, from some repair crew.”
“So Lylik was thrown somewhere out of space?” He scowled at the red-robed Benefactor. “With no nexus bonds or receptor fields to bring him back anywhere.” His black hands lifted as if to grapple with a tly. “When I get out of training, I want duty on Nggongga. I want to hunt the terrorists down—”
Thornwall held up a blue-veined hand.
“Cadet Blacklantern.” His tone turned formal. “I have something painful to say. Your mentors have voted to terminate your preparatory fellowship. That means your training here has ended. We’re sending you home—but not as a Benefactor.”
“Why?” He found breath at last. “Because I killed that murderer?”
Slowly, sadly, Thornwall shook his silvered head.
“The error was mine, when I brought you to Xyr. Or perhaps a blunder of the whole fellowship, when we offered our aid to Nggongga. I’m afraid the planet is still too primitive for us.”
“You promised—” he whispered bitterly. “Promised to make me a Benefactor.”
“But look at yourself.” The old man paused, biting thin blue lips. “Remember that we condone no violence—and think of the blood we found on that dagger. I do admire your courage. Even your skill at killing. But the mentors feel that you have always been too ready with every sort of weapon. I’m afraid you’re violence prone.”
“Where I grew up—” He drew a long uneven breath. “Where I grew up, you had to fight or die.”
“So I know.” Thornwall’s time-worn face twisted as if with actual pain. “But, as Benefactors, we are pledged to solve our problems with intelligence and compassion. I had hoped that our training might change you—but the violence shows you killed that man with no thought at all, almost as a reflex act.”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“That’s the trouble,” Thornwall said. “Precisely.”
“I want to be a Benefactor.” Desperation shook his voice. “I—I’ll try to learn, sir.”
“It is not only you.” Thornwall frowned at the winking signals on his computer terminal. “Your whole world seems prone to excessive violence. We’ve just received distressing news from Nggongga. When our resident agent there unlocked his office this morning, he triggered another implosion device.”
Blacklantern shivered inwardly, from a sense of secret and implacable evil more deadly than any peril he had ever faced in the arena.
“Sorry.” Thornwall gave him a stiff little bow of farewell. “The fault is only partly yours. We ourselves are not prepared to cope with terror. I might add, too, that I wanted to keep you here. I was overruled. There are too few of us and too many worlds where our aid is wanted.
“The Benefactors are pulling out of Nggongga.”
2.
The girl spoke to him as he left the portal dome in Nggonggamba. In the moment before his translator picked up her language, there was only the low-pitched music of her voice, which somehow recalled the midsummer songs of the Sand clan women. Eyes wide, he forgot that he had come home friendless and planless and almost desperate.
“—waiting for you,” she was saying. “Did you know a cadet Benefactor named Lylik of Nggar?” She was nearly his own height, with red-golden hair, pale-golden skin, green-golden eyes. Her garb was bright and oddly cut, too scant to shield her from the harsh Nggonggan sun, but he liked the way it displayed her clean athletic grace.
“Lylik was my dagger-brother.” The words stabbed him again, like an actual blade. “His killing is a debt of blood I hope to pay.”
“Perhaps I can help you.”
He stepped warily backward, recalling the traps for newcomers he had sometimes helped to set. Travelers to and from a hundred worlds were hurrying past, but he saw no eyes on them. Sharply, he peered at her.
“I am Dzany Dzu.” That was the sound of it in her own melodious language, but his translator said “Snowfire.” She showed him the name emblem of her ring: a gold flame rising from a white snow crystal. “You are Blacklantern?”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “What do you want?”
She moved so close he caught her faint perfume, a cool sweetleaf scent.
“We could be watched,” she murmured. “Let’s go where we can talk.”
“Why not?”
He followed her off the concourse, into a wide arcade walled with shops. She stopped beneath a sign that winked NGGONGGAN EXPORTS—TAX FREE!
“Stand close,” she whispered. “Act like you admire me.”
Still distrustful, he eyed two young blacks inside the shop. They were haggling for an antique mangun, and he wondered if he might be their intended target. An old woman in white-fringed mourning was sniffing and selecting dry yellow stalks of muskweed incense. Breathing the familiar heavy bittersweetness, he was swept back into his boyhood. Xyr was suddenly far away, and old Thornwall’s parting words no longer hurt so much. If he was really violence prone, Nggongga was where he belonged.
“Now what?” He tried to recall his caution. “What about Lylik?”
“I know how he was killed.” She caught his hand, to lead him along the displays. A tly’s egg—or the dusty shell of one—crudely painted with the black-fanged grimace of Cru Creetha. A tray of hand-forged table daggers. Rough brown pottery bottles of sea-berry wine. A shriveled black trophy head.
Cheap trash, he thought, laid out to trap arriving tourists. The egg was probably plexoid. The daggers were brittle cast metal. The wine would be a weak and evil-flavored imitation. The head had never been human. Yet he followed the girl, playing her game.
“I don’t like terror.” Her murmur was almost too faint for his translator. “Others don’t. We’re planning action. We need your talents and your training. If you really want to pay that debt of blood, you will join us.”
The old woman had paid for the muskweed sticks. He inspected the trophy head while she shuffled by.
“Perhaps,” he said then. “I need to know more.”
“That’s all I can say.” She studied Cru Creetha’s dusty snarl. “Until you have decided.”
When he looked around, the old woman was gone. One young black was testing the action of the old mangun, while the other paid. Drawing a deep breath of the fragrant muskweek cloud, he smiled at the girl.
“I’ll go with you,” he said.
Holding his hand, or walking so near that their hips and shoulders collided slightly, she led him out of the arcade into a long triangular park between two diverging ways that carried traffic from the portal. As they came into the open, he felt her flinch from the sun’s blinding glare, but he raised his face to it and inhaled again, enjoying the dry heat and the rich scents he had always known.
The park was almost empty, abandoned to the sun. At the far end, a tiny knot of listeners were gathered around a shouting speaker. Nearer, a big man sat alone on an unshaded bench. Like lovers strolling, they approached him.
“Hello,” the girl said. “I’ve found a friend.”
Fair-skinned, the man wore the bright shorts and sandals of an unwarned otherworlder. With neither the enormous flat hat the natives had invented nor the cooler cloak the tourists wore, he was already burning. His head was a huge bald egg, now pink on top.
“Clayman,” the girl murmured. “Blacklantern.”
The man looked up, through multiscopic glasses. They had heavy black rims, around wide blank lenses. They whirred faintly, changing focus to inspect him.
“I hate terror.” Clayman’s voice clinked like metal. “We fight it. I believe Snowfire has invited you to join us.”
“I—” Before the cold stare of those humming lenses, he had to catch his breath. “I want to join.”
“You understand our terms of enlistment?” The round pale face was almost genial, but the lenses looked inhuman and cold. “When you join us, you’re in for life. Beyond this point, you cannot withdraw.”
“I understand.”
With no show of approval, Clayman nodded at the opposite bench. They sat. Snowfire slipped her golden arm around Blacklantern. He breathed her sweetleaf scent.
“We call ourselves Counterkill.” Clayman’s voice was hushed, harsh. “Our emblem is lightning striking a coiled snake. We have all suffered from terror, but we strike back with a greater terror. Our discipline is strict. You will obey me absolutely. Is that clear?”
He glanced into the girl’s bright face, troubled at the contrast between Clayman’s flat deadliness and her appealing charm. When the lenses hummed, as if for a better focus, he realized that he had hesitated.
“Afraid?” the translator rasped. “You have already come too far to quit.”
“I won’t quit,” he muttered hastily. “I’ve a debt of blood to pay.”
Snowfire moved closer and murmured something, playing her role.
“One thing more,” Clayman rapped. “We protect ourselves. Our cells are small. We kill snoopers. You are not to ask about anything beyond your duty. You will never reveal anything you happen to learn. Understand?”
“I do.”
“A few facts you must know.” Savagely, Clayman slapped a fly on his fleshy knee. “We operate elsewhere. Recently we learned that a shipment of twelve ejector field units had failed to reach a new portal under construction. We knew they could be modified to make implosion devices. When they began detonating, we came here to offer our services. We are already in contact with people who need us. We’ll be meeting them later today.”
“So the terrorists have ten more bombs?”
“I’ll make the inferences,” Clayman snapped. “You’ll obey my orders.”
Blacklantern felt an urge to hit him, but the girl was clinging to his arm.
“We’re tourists here,” she chattered gaily. “With historic sights to see. Let’s begin.”
“You had better get out of the sun,” he told Clayman. “Or you won’t be fit for anything.”
Strolling down the park to the passenger ramps, they passed the white-robed speaker and his audience, all sweating beneath wide flat hats in the colors of their clans.
“—again I say it.” The hoarse shouting arrested him. “The dark god Cru Creetha has appeared to me. I was alone on a sacred hill outside the city, lighting a dawnfire to aid the return of the sun, when he came down from the sky.” Clayman went tramping on, but Blacklantern caught Snowfire’s waist and stopped to listen.
