Collected Short Fiction, page 718
She handed the binoculars back, and he studied the whipped men straining on the ropes.
“Women seem superior.”
“What does that matter?” She shrugged. “I know your own Nggonggan bias, but all we need is their help to reach the space gate.”
“They look like the lowest sort of savages,” he objected. “Too backward to be much use to us.”
“Cultures differ.” She reached for the binoculars again. “You can’t draw sound conclusions from a single observation. These people may surprise you.”
She climbed on a rock as the sledge drew near, and spread her hands wide in what was meant as a gesture of peace. The natives stopped a hundred yards across the ice, however, well beyond translator range. The black-painted rider huddled with her two spear-carriers. Through the binoculars, Blacklantern saw them peering apprehensively at him.
“We’ll walk out to meet them,” Snowfire decided. “Move slowly. Keep your hands open and wide. Don’t touch the laser.”
When they started forward, the natives showed alarm. The rider whipped her team of men into a sudden turn, as if for flight. Her two followers stood behind, spears pointing at Blacklantern.
“They’re afraid of you,” Snowfire said. “Maybe they’ve never seen an actual black. Wait here. I’m going on alone. Whatever comes, don’t use the laser. There’ll be no violence.” Unwillingly, he waited.
Hands spread wide, she walked slowly out across the ice. The natives watched her narrowly. When she was still twenty yards from the sledge, the rider beckoned her to stop. The two followers moved a little forward, to face her with their spears.
He saw them speaking, but his translator picked up nothing. The rider beckoned Snowfire forward, and the others closed in beside her. Presently he saw them all looking back at him, saw the spears lifting toward him.
The talk went on a long time. He saw Snowfire waving at the clouds, pointing back along their trail, gesturing ahead toward the trench and the space gate. The rider frowned and stamped her boots on the snow and waved her whip toward him.
Snowfire came plodding slowly back at last. Her golden free looked bleak and tight, and the binoculars showed her tears of frustration. The natives followed her with the sledge, keeping a wary distance.
“Anyhow, we tried.” She gave him a small wry smile. “Not much luck. They won’t believe anything I say. About the gate and the Benefactors and the danger from the black hole.” Unconsciously, his hand had fallen to the laser.
“Don’t touch it!” Authority—edged her voice. “I promised not to let you hurt them. In return for their promise to be humane to you.”
“Why humane to me?”
The laser was not designed for combat, but its stabbing needle could be blinding. He fought a savage impulse to try for the eyes of the white-furred leader. Quivering with confused emotions, he almost lost Snowfire’s words.
“—let them take you prisoner. Otherwise, they’re determined to try to kill us both.”
“Why me?”
“Our bad luck. And their own, of course. They’ve identified you as an evil god they call Ghur. The dark destroyer. They blame you for all their recent catastrophes.”
“How—how can that be?”
“A whole train of disastrous coincidence.” Her slim gold hands fanned out in a gesture of futility. “Ghur, I gather, is a god of fire and machines, burned black with the smoke of his forge. The things that attacked us—the bomzeeth—are creatures of his.” Behind her, the spear-women were cautiously advancing.
“They saw our lander crash, with the bomzeeth swarming around it. We seem to be the fulfillment of a prophecy that Ghur will return in a season of storm and earthquake and signs in the sky, to destroy the world and all its people.”
She paused to wave the women back.
“These natives belong to a Ghur cult. Larlarane calls herself his bride—her official title translates as ‘bride of night.’ All their rituals seem planned to placate him. Black is his color. Metal is sacred to him. Only the cult members are allowed to touch it, and then only to offer it to him. Larlarane was crossing the glacier when our lander fell, collecting junk metal for his altars. She’s terrified now, because their rituals were meant to prevent your prophecied return. Your arrival means that their religion has failed. Now they don’t know what to do.”
She turned again, calling strange syllables she must have learned from them.
“I had a hard time persuading them not to attack us at once. We finally reached a bargain. I’m surrendering you, in return for agreement not to kill us. Not a very good arrangement, I know, but at least it buys us time to learn a little more about the situation and perhaps to frame some better plan.”
Warily, in spite of her gestures, the women were closing in.
“Sorry, Blackie.” She stepped quickly toward him, with a pale appealing smile. “I knew you wouldn’t like it, but this is the best thing we can do.” Her gold hand reached. “Now give me the energizer.”
4
HE RECOILED in dazed indignation, clutching at the laser energizer.
“Surrender?” he gasped. “To three women?”
“Not only to them,” Snowfire protested. “But to a total situation.”
“Two spears against my laser! I can wipe them out.”
“Perhaps you could. But what then? We’re still on this side of the trench. We’d never reach the space gate.” She reached again for the energizer. “Please, Blackie! Remember we’re Benefactors. This is the only way.”
Clutching the energizer, he faced them all. The black-daubed priestess with her whip. The half-black fighting women. The toil-stooped men huddled in front of the sledge, peering dully at him through matted yellow hair. Snowfire herself, whom he loved and suddenly hated.
The energizer lifted itself in his quivering hand. The women poised their stone-tipped spears. Larlarane flicked her whip at him, its crack a cruel explosion. Snowfire flung herself in front of the energizer, seizing it with both hands.
Shuddering, he let it go.
“Thank you, gunggee!”
The women closed in around him but kept a cautious distance, afraid to touch anything about him. Under their eyes, Snowfire was busy stripping him of everything metallic. His binoculars. His pack. The coiled climbing rope. The knife and tools from the pockets of his suit. Even his translator.
At a shrill command from Larlarane, the men came trotting with the sledge, which already carried a few shapeless bats of rusty iron. Snowfire piled his gear on the iron, secured it with pieces cut from his own rope, and finally came back to him with a length of the rope.
“Sorry, gungee.” Her voice was feint and strained. “Hands behind you now.”
“No!” he whispered bitterly. “I won’t be bound.”
“Blackie, please!” Her green eyes gleamed with tears. “If you resist, they’ll kill us both.”
“You’re a fool!” he muttered. “So am I.”
But he didn’t resist.
She tied his wrist behind him, knelt to tie his ankles. At another command from the black priestess, she ripped a stripe from the hood of his suit to make a blindfold. At that point, the women were brave enough to seize him. They dragged him from his feet, loaded and tied him on the sledge. The whip cracked, a man howled with pain, and they lurched into motion.
The old metal and his own lumpy gear made the sledge a painful bed. The ropes numbed his hands and feet. Arctic cold sank into his bones. But the crudest fact was his own spineless surrender, a rankling wound, harder to endure than anything physical.
He tried to imagine some chain of events that would set him free and let him open the gate, but imagination failed. Even if Snowfire somehow secured the willing aid of these degenerates, that appalling trench was still in the way.
Fighting despair, he seized and searched each new sensation. The hissing of the runners against the snow. The cracking of the whip and the crunch of running feet. The voices of Snowfire and the women, all stripped of meaning now, since she had taken his translator. Nothing permitted any hope.
“Dzanya Dzu!” he shouted once, calling Snowfire’s native name. “Where are they taking us?”
“Quiet, gunggee!” she answered sharply in his own Nggonggan dialect. “They’re afraid you! I cast some spell. If you try to speak again, they’ll gag you.”
He lay silent, hating her and hating himself. Trying not to brood upon his hopeless situation, he sought to recall brighter bits of the past. The first tly he had been able to bind, as a learner in the arena. The wild tly he once had trapped and tamed, on the Wind clan highlands. The earlier time in Nggonggamba, when a loud otherworlder kicked over his boot-cleaning box and he followed the man into a crowded shrine of Cru Creetha and escaped with his fat wallet. But such recollections were too fleeting and brief to ease his long anguish.
At last the sledge stopped. He caught a tantalizing scent of broiling meat and longed to be unbound and fed. But the whip kept cracking. Men shouted and yelped. Boots crunched the snow, and the sledge lurched on—now drawn, he supposed, by a fresh team of men.
A long time later, it stopped again—and shuddered under him. A grating vibration throbbed deep in the earth, heavier than thunder. The sledge pitched. The black priestess screamed, feet thudded, something sharp jabbed his chest. He heard Snowfire’s sharp protest echoed from her translator, then her quick warning in his own native Nggonggan.
“Quiet, gunggee! Don’t try to move or speak. Larlarane thinks you’re making the quakes.”
He lay silent. The quakes ceased at last. The jabbing spears withdrew, and the sledge rocked on—and on and on. His whole body ached. Thinking dully again of Cru Creetha, he cursed Snowfire and himself and all the Benefactors in that dark god’s name. His awareness faded slowly, before fatigue and cold and pain.
He came half-awake at last, somewhere in the dark. The ropes were gone, though his hands and feet still prickled and throbbed. He lay sprawled on something hard. Animal skins had been thrown over him, and he wasn’t quite so cold.
Wondering dimly where he was, he remembered being rolled off the sledge to some sort of litter, being carried on by running men, remembered swaying on a rope tied under his arms and falling on this hard floor. He rubbed his bruised wrists, pulled the skins around him, and went to sleep again.
“Wake up, gungee!”
For one happy instant, when her soft voice roused him, he thought they were safe in their bedroom in the compound on Nggongga, thought the whole mission to rescue the Earth-folk had been an incredible nightmare.
But then he smelled the reek of the untanned hides and heard their brittle rattle when he moved and felt the hard floor under him. Sitting stiffly up, he found Snowfire standing over him, holding a small clay lamp. Its flame lit a bare stone floor and a curving waif behind her.
“If things go wrong, gungee—” Trouble slowed her breathless voice. “If things go wrong, I hope you’ll try to forgive me.”
He stumbled to his feet, swaying painfully on swollen ankles, and stood staring blankly at her. Her yellow emergency suit was gone; instead, she wore white fur. Her golden skin was all dyed black.
“What is this place?”
As she hesitated, he peered around him. In the flicker of her tiny lamp, he saw that they were in a big circular room. He found no door or window. The domed ceiling was high, with one dark round opening at the center.
“A sacred place,” she said. “Sacred to Ghur, because of the machines that used to be here. From what I’ve seen, I think it was, once a launch point for the shuttles that carried our ancestors into space. This cell must have been a fuel tank.”
“So what happens now?” He searched her black-stained face. “Have you found any way to the gate?”
“I’ve tried.” Despair dulled her voice. “But all I say turns against me. Larlarane wants nothing to do with the space gate. The whole region around it is taboo. According to the legends, the men who built it were Ghur’s demons, trying to open a way from Earth into his dark inferno. These people are afraid to go anywhere near it.”
She bent to set the tiny lamp on the floor and sank despondently down beside it, as if too tired to stand.
“We tried, Blackie. Tried—and tried again.” Her voice quivered. “But everything about our arrival seems to justify their prophecy that Ghur will return in the last days, to tempt them to use his evil machines and destroy themselves. Larlarane rejects everything I say.”
“Don’t they remember anything?” He knelt urgently before her on the little pile of skins. “About their own great ancestors? And the scientific culture that put mankind in space?”
“They don’t believe in space.” The lamplight glittered on her exasperated tears. “Earth, to them, is the only world there is—except the smoky hell under the volcanoes, where Chur forges his machines. Tales of other worlds are lies told to lure people into his traps.”
“So we’re on our own,” He peered at the dark opening above. “We’ve got to get out.”
“They won’t let you out. You’re the only black man they’ve ever seen. Your color is proof enough that you are Ghur. They’re convinced that you brought the ice, and burned Mars, and dug that trench. They believe the bomzeeth are your children—born of a white princess you raped, who turned black in your arms. They think you have brought them back to haunt the dead world, after all humanity is gone.”
“Those flying things?” He peered into her pale-eyed face. “What have you learned about them?”
“They appeared only a few seasons ago—sent, Larlarane believes, to prepare the way for your return. They fear the light—she says they lurk in caves and old mines through the day. They fly out in the dark to look for food. Metal is the food they prefer—that’s evidence they really are your monster children. And why Larlarane was gathering junk metal. She was trying to appease them.”
“But you don’t know what sort of thing they are?”
“I—I’ve a theory, Blackie.” She hesitated, frowning through her mask of blackness. “You may laugh, but it fits the few facts I’ve been able to gather. I don’t think their vital energy comes from any ordinary biochemical process. I think it’s—gravitational.”
“You don’t mean—” A shock of intuition took his voice.
“I believe that engineer was. right with his notion that black holes come in swarms, in all sizes. I think each one of those creatures carries a tiny black hole in its belly. I think they live on the gravitational energy generated when mass is sucked into it. That’s why they seem so heavy, and why they’re able to eat metal and ice, and why they seem so hot inside.”
“How—how could such things evolve?”
“All life is an unlikely function of energy-flow,” she insisted. “The energy flow from a star takes a long time to evolve our kind of life. Perhaps the energy sink around a black hole can form life—or something that looks like life—just as well.” She shrugged forlornly. “Not that it matters to us now. The evolution of the bomzeeth can’t get us to the space gate.”
“I don’t know what can get us there.”
They sat for a time in abject silence. The yellow flame of the little lamp flickered slightly, casting huge unsteady shadows on the tall, unbroken wall. Listening, he heard no sound from anywhere outside. Once the stone floor quivered, as if to another after-quake, but even that his soundless.
“Forgive me, Blackie,” she breathed at last. “This isn’t what I hoped for.”
“I don’t like surrender.” Staring into her darkened face, he asked, “Why the paint?”
“The only way I could reach you.” She hesitated, almost shyly. “The purpose of the cult, you see, is to propitiate Ghur. The black paint is a sign of dedication. Larlarane is officially your bride—but naturally somewhat apprehensive about the consumation. She let me take her place.”
She swayed a little toward him, opening the white fur to show herself completely black. Beneath the rank muskiness of some native perfume, he caught a faint hint of her own sweetleaf scent.
“If you wish, gunggee—” she whispered. “If you love me—”
“It’s no time for love.” He shoved her back. “If you’re still a Benefactor, get me something to eat. Get me out of this pit. Help me find a way across that ditch to the space gate.”
“Forgive me, Blackie.” Shivering, she pulled the white cloak back around her. “I have been begging for the food in our packs, but Larlarane won’t trust us with anything. She doesn’t know what we might use for magic. Certainly she doesn’t intend to set you free.”
“l guess all our technology looks like black magic to her—but magic is what we need.” He stood up, swollen ankles still a little stiff, and caught her stained hands to pull her from the floor. “Go on back to Larlarane,” he told her. “Invent some magic for us.”
“I’ll try, Blackie.” She clutched the white cloak around her. “But what—what could it possibly be?”
“We’ll have to fly,” he said. “Nobody can climb and swim across the ditch.”
“Fly?” she gasped. “How?”
“Any way we can.” He paused to grope for the miraculous. “A fire balloon—if we can find paper to make it. A glider—if we can find anything light and strong enough. A kite, perhaps—the Wind clan hunters used to fly men on kites to reach the cliffs where the wild tlys nest. With cloth and a few sticks and our own climbing rope, we might make a kite.”
“In the few days we have?” She shrugged hopelessly. “With no tools? With nothing?”
“We can’t just sit. We’ve got to fight.”
“I’ll try, Blackie.” She turned uncertainly away, toward the center of the cell. “I will try.”
She called something through her translator at the dark opening overhead. A looped rope dropped. She stepped into the loop, waved a black hand at him as the rope hauled her upward.
Carrying the lamp, he explored the cell. The curving wall was seamless, slick and cold—forbidden steel, perhaps, but hidden beneath a yellow ceramic. The floor was rough masonry, with no drain or other possible exit.
Something came thudding down behind him.
