Collected Short Fiction, page 722
Only the freightways were moving, locked containers creeping past the ramp. He was still waiting for a passenger float, bathed in the hot fragrant brightness of his boyhood, when a high-pitched voice spoke beside him.
“—newcomer?” His translator took a moment to uncode the alien speech. “I said, are you a stranger her?”
“Not quite.” He turned to face a huge copper-colored man in a blue cooler suit. “I was born here.”
Through pale wisps of condensation, yellow cat-eyes scanned him. “What’s your clan?”
“I have no clan.”
“Then you’re in trouble.” The big man swayed clumsily forward, his voice falling familiarly. “No clan, no job. No clan, no girls. No clan, nothing. These clumsy natives don’t like otherworlders.”
Blacklantern edged cautiously back along the empty ramp. The blue giant shambled after him, grinning without mirth. When the arrival gong sounded, he swung off the ramp into a roofless passenger float. The big man followed.
The lone passenger on the float was the big man’s twin, cloaked in a fog-veiled black. Both had the same massive angularity, the same copper skin, the same raw-boned alien face.
“Got a twenty, friend?” Barging to meet him with the same tipsy-seeming arrogance, the second man thrust a horny red paw out of his cooling cloudlet. “For portal fare—”
Caught between the two, Blacklantern moved warily aside. He sniffed the cold mist. High as they seemed, he got no scent of drink or drugs.
“Where to, friend?” the blue cloak was whining.
“Anywhere.” The other answered with the same alien nasals. “Away from the worms. I hear they’re boring under the city. I want to get away before it all caves in.”
His yellow eyes flickered at his twin. Glancing behind him, Blacklantern found the blue cloak reeling oddly backward. Silence exploded in the blinding heat, and the stifling air had a sudden sour taint. Struck with a real alarm, he stopped breathing and reached for the buckle of his heavy belt.
“Listen, friend!” The black cloak’s squeak turned frantic. “D’you want to feed the worms—”
That was all he heard. The narrow float had become a sun-washed arena, and the identical giants were unmilked tlys. He knew what to do. Spinning, he found the one behind him tossing back the stiff blue cloak to pull an odd, thick-tubed handgun.
He slashed with the belt. Like a tly-binding rope, it whipped around the gun hand. He hauled on it, grabbed the gun, twisted the muzzle upward. The gun coughed softly. The giant yelped and folded to the deck, the mist from his cloak soiled with a spreading cloud of yellow paragas.
Still not breathing, Blacklantern whirled out of the gas cloud. His eyes stung and blurred, caught the hot glint of sun on steel.
The dagger became the sting of a tly. He lunged and grasped and thrust, to make the tly sting itself. A cleated boot kicked at his hand, but he ducked as if it had been a tly’s hard claw. With all his will he fought the need to breathe, With all his strength he wrestled the descending blade.
His eyes streamed scalding tears. His lungs caught fire. The float began to tilt and spin. But the giant faltered first. Blacklantern heard him gasp for breath, felt his muscles slacken to inhaled paragas.
The twisted dagger slid home.
With a dying moan the giant wilted down. In Blacklantern’s blurry eyes his blue shadow dissolved into the spreading yellow cloud. Side by side, the alien twins lay very still.
Blacklantern had to breathe. With one last savage act of will, he vaulted out of that sour cloud, over the wall of the float. He came down on his feet, staggered into the empty passenger way, stopped at last to gasp for air.
When his burning eyes could see again, he looked for the float. It had glided on, followed by a string of big containers. He saw no movement from it. Stumbling on to the wall of a wine bar, he leaned weakly against it, drinking great gulps of clean air.
Before he could go on, brakes squealed beneath the freightway. The line of containers rumbled to a halt. Police sirens began screaming in the brassy sky. Dazzled men and women began straggling into the street, squinting at the police flyers dropping.
He pushed past an off-duty street cleaner, into the dark tunnel of the bar. Folded in its thick scents of alcohol and seed spittle and sour piss, he felt safe until he reached for a coin and felt his belt missing.
He had left it on the float with the gassed giant and the dead one. Dismay chilled him. On the ornamental buckle the police would find the fire-drill emblem of his college on Xyr. If they caught him now, he could suffer Nggonggan justice.
2.
He found a dark booth in the barroom and ordered a beaker of sea-berry wine. When the waitress had gone, he thumbed his ensign and whispered, “Wildworm.”
Instantly, his golden crescent lit the sleek black oval. Leaning to whisper his report, he waited for the computer signal that Xyr was standing by. What he heard was the dull drone of a recorded voice: “Portal relay service suspended by order of the elders.”
He sat a long time staring into the dark beaker. After all, he reflected wryly, he really had nothing to report. He had failed to learn who those identical otherworlders were or what lay behind their paragas attack.
A blind musician in the entry hall was chanting the saga of the starman who tamed the first tly. Beside the complex hazards of his own mission, those ancient heroics seemed childish. Abruptly, impatient with himself, he gulped the wine and walked back into the street.
The white night was ending. Though the hot air held a bitter hint of paragas, the police were gone. The passenger ways were moving again, still nearly empty. He boarded the radial way, changed to an arc strip that took him toward the Fellowship office.
The agency was on the top floor of an old stone tower in the interworld sector, built in an earlier era of insecurity. As he swung to the unloading ramp, he saw two white-kilted police officers inspecting people at the street door.
Feeling tly-stung, he jumped back to the moving strip. If the police were here, they would also be watching the residential compound where Snowfire lived. Shut out of the office and that compound, he knew only one way to turn—to Flintbreaker.
From his own boyhood he knew the Game clan sector. A radial way carried him out of the central city toward a range of bare brown hills. The lower slopes were lined with native markets and rock-walled compounds, but the clan elders camped like nomads on the high flat mesa beyond.
He left the glideway at the last dusty terminal. When two sleepy lancers in the dust-colored kilts of the clan came out of a tent, he asked to see the Elder Huntsman. They searched him for weapons and sent him up a rocky trail.
No longer used to the cruel Nggonggan sun, he was breathing hard when he came to a low flat building, just below the mesa rim.
High barred windows overlooked the trail. He heard the animal grunts and squeals of stabled nearmen, hurried on through their foul smell.
A sudden whistled bellow triggered responses he had learned in the arena. He crouched and ducked aside, snatching for his missing belt, and felt a little foolish when he couldn’t see the screaming tly. In a moment, though, it squalled again.
Beyond the bend he found it perched above the trail on a lancegrass log between two upright posts. Though its five eyes were hooded with nearman skin, it had sensed him. Red armor blazed when its black wings spread, and the hot air was thick with the odor of its fury.
He walked on beneath it, avoiding the green slime of its droppings. The mesa beyond lay open and flat, scattered with a few white tents. He waited at the gate, curse on us all, brought by the greedy men who sold our world to meet him, saddled on flexing poles between two trotting nearmen.
In his boyhood the treaty of entry had outlawed the use of nearmen inside the city, as well as all traffic in their hides and flesh. The first he remembered were a mangy pair in the park zoo, hardly equal to the horrifying tales of their cannibalistic ferocity. Still fascinated by their dark-furred halfhuman strangeness, he stood staring until the clansman asked what he wanted.
“I beg water from the Elder Huntsman.” Bowing, careful to use the Game clan dialect, he recited the formalities he had learned long ago. “I beg shadow. I beg wisdom.”
“The Huntsman is admired for wisdom, loved for generosity.” The clansman bowed with an equal formality. “His proper name is Tlongga Tlong, which means Flintbreaker. He will ask for yours.”
“He knew me in the tly arena, before I had a name.”
“Come.”
The clansman flicked the lead nearman with his whip. Blacklantern followed across the rocks to a long white tent. Its skirts lifted against the heat, it was empty. “Wait.”
The clansman trotted his nearmen away. Blacklantern entered the tent, grateful for shade. Bedrolls were laid for seats around a worn brown carpet of nearman hair. He sat down. to wait, wondering what to say. Flintbreaker was chief of the Game clan, which roamed and claimed the barren vastness of all the upland hemisphere. Living on their nearmen hunts and the profits from their traditional games of justice, his followers had never welcomed the interstellar culture. He seemed unlikely to be helpful.
Three nearman teams came clattering across the rocks. Two armed riders remained in their saddles. Unarmed, Flintbreaker walked into the tent with a wary readiness, almost as if Blacklantern were some dangerous prey. Ridged and seamed with clan tattoos, his face wore an appalling scowl, until suddenly his white teeth flashed.
“The nameless challenger!” His formal bow held a sudden respect.
“We saw you in the arena. You worked your tly well, till the accident when you were stung. We welcome you to shade and water.” They sat on the bedrolls. His eyes still searched, but he asked no questions until one of the clansmen had brought a ritual water-skin. When they had drunk, Blacklantern bowed his thanks and asked if Benefactor Snowfire had come to speak with the leaders of the clan.
The tattooed mask stopped trying to smile.
“We don’t converse with women out of the clan.” The voice turned as bleak as the mask. “It’s true the female otherworlder came here. She spoke with one of our women. We are told that she asked impertinent questions about the justice of the hunt, which has been our law for five thousand years.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“She came to beg permission to visit the sacred game grounds. We denied that permission. We also sent her a warning. If she is caught in Game clan territory, she will be subject to Game clan justice.” Blacklantern blinked.
“She was investigating—” A sense of absurdity checked him. “Some wild tale of big worms! Eating up the planet—”
“We ourself have seen the worms,” Flintbreaker shivered, his black eyes dilating. “We do not wish to see them again.” A bitter violence shook him. “They’re a curse on us all, brought by the greedy men who sold our world to strangers.”
He paused to offer a little pouch of nearman leather. Blacklantern declined, with a bow of thanks. He rolled a small purple seed into his palm, licked it into his mouth, crunched it hungrily. The sweetish odor filled the hot tent.
The lips of his mask turned savagely purple. “Our own foolish elders! Back in our grandfathers’ time, when the portal was new. For a few guns and toys and tales of other worlds, they sold mining rights to all our lands. The buyer was a clever otherworlder named Ironforge. They thought he wanted gold. Now the worms are eating everything. The land itself.”
“So the worms are mining machines?”
“If machines can be so large.” A fearful wonder hushed his voice. “If machines can make a pit deeper than the sea. If machines can eat the world.”
“Did Benefactor Snowfire know about Ironforge?”
With deliberate skill, Flintbreaker spat a bright purple jet at a rock outside the tent.
“She asked many questions. She was told about Ironforge and his heirs. His son was called Copperforge, by their queer way of naming. His grandson is Goldforge. She was told of him.”
“Perhaps she went to him?”
“His ways are not ours.” The mask of scars turned grimmer. “Even when he hunts, he uses neither nearmen nor tlys. Perhaps he does talk to women.” He spat again, expertly. “If you wish to see Goldforge, his firm is the Deeplode Mines.”
“Your water revives the body, your wisdom the spirit.” Murmuring the ritual words, Blacklantern bowed and rose to go. “I’ll look for Goldforge.”
“You are still our guest.” With a bleak black courtesy, Flintbreaker waved to detain him. “For yourself, do you desire hunting rights?”
“I have never hunted nearman,” he answered. “Nor men.”
“Perhaps you don’t approve?”
“I grew up here,” Blacklantern answered carefully. “I knew about the hunts and I accepted them. But now I’ve been away to other worlds. I’ve learned what other peoples feel—that they are wrong and cruel.”
“We affirm our ancient justice.” The old huntsman stiffened with indignation. “The accused has always been remanded by preliminary trial. He is always hunted fairly, according to all the old tradition, with every right of escape to the refuge oasis.”
His angry lips were stained with purple froth.
“We may seem stern to your female agent and all the prying otherworlders, but justice should be stern. The ritual of the games has been good for Nggongga. It weeded out the evil and the weak, for many hundred generations. It taught our people to fear the law and love the truth—until strangers came to corrupt them. As long as I live, the games will go on.”
He offered the water skin once more, as a sign of dismissal. Under the savage sun, Blacklantern picked his way back beneath the tethered tly and down the rocky trail. The shriek of the baffled tly echoed after him.
Deeplode Mines was one of the great “first companies” that had guaranteed traffic when the new portal opened. As a boy, he had cleaned boots and sometimes picked a pocket on the narrow ramps below the Deeplode building, a huge cube of plain stone and steel.
A gold-kilted guard stopped him now at the door, frowned haughtily, let him in at last to see a slim black girl in a bright gold skirt. With a distantly arrogant smile, she informed him that Manager Goldforge was out. He saw nobody. He accepted no messages. He made no gifts.
“I’m a Benefactor.” Blacklantern decided to risk what she might tell the police. “We are investigating a report that your company is consuming the planet with big metal worms.”
She nodded loftily. If he wished to discuss mining operations, he might speak to Engineer Toolsmith. A tall black boy in a stiff yellow kilt escorted him down a cavernous hall, into a huge room that didn’t belong on primitive Nggongga.
The floor was crystal, nearly invisible.
Three walls were stereo tanks. One contained an enormous solid model of a planet, cut away to show its inner structure in color-coded layers, from cool blue crust down to red-glowing core.
The opposite wall was a window into space. It showed a queer machine—a bright silver disk, spinning like a slow wheel against starry darkness, sprouting black and angular wings from its hub. It looked toylike, until he saw a space craft docking at the hub and felt a dazing sense of its immensity.
The third tank was shallower, set back behind a long computer console. It was alive with shapes and signs he didn’t understand—glowing lines, sheets of color, geometric solids, luminous symbols, all appearing and vanishing in a fluid dance of bewildering information.
The crystal underfoot covered yet a fourth tank. Glancing down, he saw an enormous excavation, walled with fractured cliffs and long slopes of broken stone, floored with a thick brown haze. Its bottomless depth turned him giddy.
“Here he is, sir.” The black boy pointed at a man walking across that dizzy pit from the console. “Engineer Toolsmith.”
Blacklantern caught his breath and stepped out across nothing he could see. Toolsmith himself looked nearly as strange as the room. Too fair for Nggongga, he was splotched with yellow freckles and peeling from sunburn. His sparse hair was short and stiff and white. His eyes were shaded with huge blue goggles that bulged like the compound eyes of a giant insect. Yet he nodded readily when Blacklantern showed his ensign.
“Of course we recognize Benefactors.” Though his accent was odd, he spoke fluent city Nggonggan, needing no translator. “I regret the wave of feeling against your Fellowship here. I’ll help if I can.”
“I do need help.” Blacklantern smiled gratefully. “I’m looking for a missing agent—”
“The girl Snowfire?” He frowned with a quick concern. “She was here yesterday, asking for Manager Goldforge. I spoke to her.”
“Do you know where she went?”
Toolsmith spread his sun-reddened hands in a falling gesture that meant nothing to Blacklantern. “She was inquiring about our mining operations. She wanted to inspect the site. I told her I couldn’t take her there without permission from Manager Goldforge.”
Despite the air of sympathetic candor, the blue goggles still looked like insect eyes. Toolsmith began to seem a clever opponent in a strange arena. An angry tly might have been simpler to cope with.
“I’m new here, of course,” he was saying. “I’ve taken over a good deal of routine. Manager Goldforge spends most of his time with his hobbies, but he still holds control. Without his approval, I can’t do much for anybody.”
“Do you think—” Blacklantern flinched from a sudden stab of alarm. “Do you think Snowfire tried to enter Game clan territory?”
“I advised her against it.” Toolsmith repeated that falling gesture. “I warned her that the natives have become pretty hostile to our whole operation, but I’m afraid she wasn’t impressed. If she’s caught out there, I’m afraid she’d be subject to their peculiar justice.” The blue goggles stared. “I suppose you know what that is?”
“I know.” But he didn’t want to think of that. “One more question.” His throat felt rough and dry. “Can you tell me about this—this mining operation?”
