Collected Short Fiction, page 715
“A wild accusation,” Clayman snorted. “I see no proof.”
“I have none,” Champ admitted. “Just muskweed talk.”
“You haven’t connected Squaremark with the terror,” Clayman persisted. “He may have been unethical, but he is still an otherworlder. What could he hope to gain by turning the blacks against his own kind?”
“We’re only talking.” Champ shrugged. “But I think Squaremark brought a habit of using terror when he came to Nggongga. From the time the syndicate got into the business, Nggar’s buyers have been ambushed in the desert. His waterholes have been poisoned. His ricks of curing weed have been burned. He had to turn his own compound into a fortress and send his son away to Xyr. His wife was murdered—”
“Murdered?” Blacklantern echoed. “I thought she was only hurt.”
“Killed,” Champ said. “By explosives planted in their flyer. About the time the son was sent away. That was when Nggar locked out his own blacks, because he didn’t trust them, and brought in his green dwarf slaves.”
“He never told Lylik she was dead,” Blacklantern muttered. “I wonder why?”
“A strange man.” Champ wiped his purple mouth. “I hated him once. When we both were young braves about the tly arena. Still whole men. He was part white—and too proud of it. Sometimes nasty. Perhaps I was glad to see him stung.”
His eyes rested on the darkened desert, where red-black shadows had begun to clot.
“I’ve pitied him since,” he went on. “Because he has suffered too much. I would like to know how he came to lose the Sand clan essence.”
“There’s a girl—” Blacklantern leaned sharply forward. “Living with him now. She used to be with Squaremark, when his name was Wheeler. She’s—she could have been beautiful. She has been a thief.”
“What girl?” Clayman stared, lenses buzzing. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Her new name is Diamond Dust,” he said. “I decided that Nggar’s private life was none of my business.”
“She’s my business,” Clayman grated. “I’ll find what she’s up to.” The unnatural dark grew denser, until meteors streaked the sky again with Cru Creetha’s whiskers. Snowfire snapped a switch, as they neared Nggonggamba, and a tight voice blasted from the Cybernet:
“. . . sabotage! The portal is closed. Disorder is reported on the traffic ways. Though municipal authorities will not confirm rumors of an extremist plot to destroy the portal and massacre aliens, police are urging light-skinned individuals to avoid public places. . . .”
Pillars of smoky flame stood here and there about the city. As they came down toward the Nggar compound, Blacklantern had a glimpse of passenger ways jammed with people in panic flight.
“Wait here!” Clayman rolled clumsily out of the flyer. “While I find Nggar and get the truth about this woman. If she has been a spy for Squaremark, I think we’ll find the master station in the tower of his bank.”
They waited. Nggar’s green guards had disappeared. The dusty sweetness of cured muskweed drifted from the dark yard below, mixed with a bitter smoke reek. Shrill voices came faintly from the traffic way. Champ calmly chewed his seed. Snowfire sat very quiet; again he thought her too clean and fine to be involved in Counterkill—
He saw her start. Her mouth gaped open. She crouched back from the window of the flyer, pale hands lifted. Jumping out, he heard a descending roar in the meteor-needled sky. In a moment he found the proxy box, diving at them.
An armored oval, painted like that tly’s egg in the shop with Cru Creetha’s black-fanged grin. Two wide-spaced camera eyes, ringed with red lamps. Two manipulator arms hanging from it, one steel hand clutching the small bright implosion bomb.
He clutched for a weapon, but all he found was Clayman’s useless dagger. Snowfire and Champ had scrambled out behind him, the girl unarmed, the old man waving his yellow crutch.
“Champ!” A great metal voice drummed from the fiery sky. “Your gift from Cru Creetha!”
The manipulator hurled the implosion device.
For an instant Blacklantern felt nakedly defenseless. If he had ever been violence prone, this was too much violence. But the twin lamps were flashing as red as the armor of a fighting tly; the black-and-yellow bomb came slashing down like a stabbing sting.
He vaulted past old Champ, as if to meet a diving tly. He reached to seize the sting. Very gently, yielding to the force of the falling bomb and letting its own mass move him, he pivoted and tossed it back. He saw it strike the black-fanged head.
The darkness winked and crashed.
A smoky gust struck him, and the proxy box was gone. His head ringing from the blast, he turned to lean against the flyer door. His knees were quivering. He saw Snowfire speaking, but he couldn’t hear what she said.
Smiling palely, she bent to place one finger on his lips. Again he had to shake his head, wishing he understood the folkways of her world.
Clayman came back across the airpad at a stumbling run. He was breathing hard, gripping his mangun. His lenses whirred as if hunting for a focus in the flickering dimness.
“The bomb?” he panted. “What got hit?”
“The proxy box.” Snowfire’s voice came faintly through the roaring in his ears. “With its own bomb. Thanks to our Benefactor.”
“But we’re too late—too late to help Nggar.” Clayman’s lenses lifted toward the fire-bearded sky, and Blacklantern heard the quivering desperation beneath his stiff white mask. “Can’t find him. Can’t find the girl. Only those green slaves—some of them scared white—barricaded in a muskweed warehouse. They took a shot at me!”
He wheezed for his breath.
“Another implosion crater. Down in the freight yard. A hole in the wall of the perfume factory.” The multiscopic glasses settled on Snowfire. “The way I see the picture, Squaremark and his girl were trying to escape. Alarmed, I think, by Counterkill. Nggar tried to stop them. They hit him with a bomb.”
“I think I see a different picture.” Blacklantern turned. “I think I can find Nggar—if we’re quick enough.”
Clayman muttered doubtfully, but followed him at Snowfire’s urging. He ran down the stair, hurried through the echoing corridors of the vacant palace. His masked key-stirp let him into Lylik’s old room, where he had stayed, unlocked the farther door.
He flung it open.
In Lylik’s childhood playroom beyond, they found Nggar standing at a workbench beneath the hanging model spacecraft that Lylik must have built. On the live half of his scar-hardened face, shocked surprise became a sheepish grin.
“More terror than I can take!” His voiceless laugh rattled like dry seed in manskull pod. “When that last bomb crashed, I ran in here to hide.”
“I know why you’re here.” He was shuffling toward the flight simulator built on the old study desk, and Blacklantern sprang to block his path. “This is your master station for the proxy boxes. You came in here to kill us.”
“You can’t think that!” Wildly, his mismatched eyes darted to Clayman, to Snowfire, back again to Blacklantern. “You’re the terror-fighters I hired!”
“The riddle now is why you hired us.” Blacklantern danced to keep him from the simulator. “Maybe you will tell us that?”
“I brought you here to stop the secret war that has been waged against me,” his harsh whisper hissed. “We Nggars had been princes of Nggongga, owners of the muskweed trade, perfumers to the galaxy. For two years now, some unknown enemy has been killing my agents and burning my posts, stealing my secrets, harming my wife, murdering my son. I brought you here to defend me, not to make insane accusations.”
His eyes rolled at Clayman. “You left me naked here,” his plaintive hiss went on. “Today I was robbed again—by a man I trusted and a woman I loved. Squaremark and Diamond Dust. I found the wall blown out of my strongroom. They’re gone with a fortune in perfume. Into the desert or more likely through the portal before it closed. If you can catch them for me—”
“They’re dead,” Blacklantern broke in. “Killed. Like your wife and Lylik. You are the killer!”, “How can you imagine that?” His harsh whisper fell. “My son’s best friend!”
“I didn’t want to think it.” Blacklantern shook his head. “But the facts are pretty plain.”
“He’s crazy!” He was scuttling painfully toward Clayman. “Dangerous! You’re in command here. I order you to kill him.”
Clayman retreated uncertainly toward the shelves of Lylik’s old toys.
“We’re employees,” he muttered at last. “We were well paid. We have invaded a private room. Perhaps we have no business here.” His mangun wavered toward Blacklantern. “Your accusation lacks any visible basis—”
Nggar’s sound hand was creeping beneath his cooler cloak. “Don’t do it!”
Blacklantern swept the dagger back to throw and watched Nggar’s twitching hand drop into view. In his peripheral vision, Snowfire’s sudden movement was only a blur. Her voice held a cool force he had never heard in it before.
“Counterkill has changed command!”
When he glanced at her, she had Cayman’s mangun. Clayman was staggering backward, still off balance.
“Another traitor!” Gasping with his startled fury, Cayman swung to Nggar. “Believe me, sir! I’m still loyal. Counterkill is loyal. Trust me to deal with this incredible treachery—”
“Quiet!”
He looked at Snowfire and stood still.
“You may speak.” She nodded at Blacklantern with a new authority. “Make it brief.”
“Nggar used to travel,” Blacklantern said. “To peddle perfume. His story of his perfume war with Squaremark is probably half true. When the syndicate began to hurt him, he brought back the dwarf slaves and the proxy boxes and the ejector circuits. All three, I imagine, from the same construction site. He didn’t know that Diamond Dust was Squaremark’s spy, and he was pretty desperate. Built his master station in this room, out of Lylik’s old flight simulator—”
“Liar!” Nggar crouched closer to Cayman. “Stop him!”
“State your evidence,” Snowfire commanded. “Keep it brief.”
“When I found the girl here, I suspected Squaremark. I began to guess the rest today, when I learned that Nggar had lied about his wife’s death. I wasn’t sure till just now—when Clayman said he found the green slaves scared partly white.”
“The man’s insane!” Nggar hissed. “That makes no sense.”
“A white dwarf killed Lylik. When I learned that Nggar’s slaves were sometimes white, that finished the picture. A master station here couldn’t operate a proxy box on Xyr. When Nggar wanted to kill Lylik, he had to send a dwarf to carry the bomb. A dwarf somehow bleached—”
“Natural, more likely,” Snowfire said. “I believe the green is an artificial pigmentation, against the sunlight here.”
“Lunatics!” Nggar clutched at Clayman’s chalky arm. “Why should I kill my own son?”
“Because he was coming home,” Blacklantern said. “Because you had to keep him from discovering that you had murdered his mother. I suppose she objected to Diamond Dust, and you put her out of the way?”
Nggar swayed away from Clayman, shaking his blighted head.
“Monstrous nonsense!” His unmatched eyes rolled toward Snowfire. “You’re still sane. You can’t believe such flimsy lies. Look—look at the holes in the story! There were no implosion bombs before I employed Counterkill. If you want the true terror-master—there he is!”
His sound arm thrust toward Clayman.
“We’re no dupes!” Clayman plunged at him, glasses buzzing. “If you hired me for a sacrificial fool—”
Clayman’s dagger flashed.
Nggar reached beneath his cloak.
Darkness flickered.
Groggily, Blacklantern sat up. His head ached and a fading gong rang in his ears. His mouth was salt with blood, the air sharp with dust. Lylik’s old toys and the wreckage of Nggar’s master station lay scattered around him. Broken beams fringed a dark crater in the floor, where Nggar and Clayman had stood.
He looked for Snowfire, but he was alone. Both doors had been blown in. The rush of air must have carried her into the ejection field, he thought, into some unknowable void beyond visible space.
Desolation fell upon him, as cruel as that abrupt implosion. Now he could never discover what sort of world she came from, or how she had been trapped in the savage madness of Counterkill, or why she had acted her role of lover with such exciting zeal. Now they could never really love, and he felt a deep ache of loss—
Sounds broke faintly through the roaring in his ears. Lights flickered over the wreckage. Turning dully, he saw men in uniform. They pushed into the shattered playroom, peering at everything, calling to him, pointing into that dark pit.
They tried to lift him into a stretcher. He pushed them away, stood up unsteadily. He staggered again when he saw Snowfire.
Blood had oozed from a scratch on her chin, but she looked alert and well. He swayed toward her, trying clumsily to take her in his arms. She caught his hand to keep him from falling. Gravely, she put one finger on his lips. He saw her speaking, but all he heard was the din in his ears. A black policeman tried to help him toward the splintered doorway, but he stood fast, holding to her.
Other men searched the demolished room and came back to her with empty hands. He saw a black officer shouting to her.
“No bombs left.” Faintly, now, he caught the words. “All ejected. The end of the terror.” The man gave them both a formal Nggonggan bow. “Thanks to you Benefactors.”
Startled, he peered at her.
“Yes, I am a planetary fellow.” Her voice came through the ringing, still whisper-thin. “When we learned about Counterkill, I was asked to infiltrate it. For all of Cayman’s talk, I think his cell was the only one. We’re done with Counterkill.”
He had leaned to listen, and she bent closer to help him hear.
“Your mentors on Xyr told me you were violence prone.” She gave him an odd small smile. “If that was ever true, I think Nggar and Counterkill have cured you. I think you’ve proved that you’re a fine potential Benefactor. If you like, I’ll ask Thornwall to restore your preparatory fellowship.”
He swayed unsteadily from the impact of that; again he had to wave away the men with the stretcher. Her voice was clearer now, and a bright hint of her sweetleaf scent was mixed with the stinging smoke and dust.
“I’d like that,” he told her. “Very much!”
When he felt like walking, they left the imploded room and climbed back into the fire-needled night. They found old Champ impatient to get home. When the police were done, they flew him back to Krongkor.
The meteor streaks had begun to fade before they landed, and a rose-colored patch was growing in the west, around a faint red spark of the rekindled sun. The roaring was gone by then, and he could hear the husky softness of Snowfire’s voice when they sat again in the old high-beamed dining room with a bottle of Champ’s tangy wine.
Alone with her, he felt his pulse quicken. Yet, when he leaned eagerly to exchange their wine glasses, she merely looked perplexed. The Nggonggan signal meant nothing to her, and he had a sudden painful sense of the wide gulf between their cultures.
Her expectant smile puzzled him.
“Of course you had to be mysterious.” Hopefully, he sipped the glass that had been hers, set it back before her. “But now, with Clayman gone—”
He faltered again, afraid of losing her. If she had been a wild tly, he thought, he would know better how to act. Yet, when he looked up, her green eyes told him to go on.
“You’re still a mystery,” he whispered. “I want to know about your world and you. About your customs and your language and your gestures.” He moved a hesitant finger toward her mouth.
“What does this mean?”
“Nothing alarming.” Laughing, she leaned to touch his lips again.
“In matters of love, our ways are not so rigid as yours. As a woman, I enjoy more freedoms than the clans of Nggongga allow. The touch is an invitation.”
They went upstairs together.
1976
The Dark Destroyer
Jack, Williamson has been active as a writer of science fiction for four decades and has contributed memorable stories to each of those four decades. It’s a pleasure to welcome him back to our pages with a new story in many ways as memorable as any he has ever written . . .
1
PASSAGE through a major space gate was only a shock of shifting gravities and a wink of suspended sensation, but the one-way, one-person terminal on the Earth probe hadn’t been engineered for comfort. Blacklantern was wrenched and squeezed and twisted through the narrow ring-fields, instantly ejected into the coffin-sized receiver, his breath squeezed out and a sharp taste of blood in his mouth.
“Blackie!” Snowfire’s bright voice rang out of the dark. Though she had come through only hours ahead of him, her tone held no trace of pain.
“Are you okay?”
He wasn’t. His strength was gone. His bones ached. Not yet used to free fall, he was whirling down a dark vortex of giddiness. But he had no breath to say anything.
Blindly, he was groping for the laser energizer. He had worn it into the sender cell, bolstered like a weapon to the belt of his stiff survival suit, but he couldn’t find it now. Panic caught him.
“Here we are!” Somewhere over his head, Snowfire sounded intolerably cheery. “Sale in Earth orbit, with thirteen days to open the space gate and complete our rescue—”
“Las—laser!”
That took all his breath, but the energizer was their key to the space gate on Old Earth. Without it, they would be trapped there when the planet fell through the black hole. Fumbling wildly, he couldn’t feel it anywhere.
Her laughter rippled.
“I’ve got your gadget. Floated out to meet me. Now reach!”
