Collected Short Fiction, page 725
Suddenly, wonderfully, they could talk.
“You’re as strange as Nggongga.” She stared at him with red-rimmed eyes, leaning close to the translator in his hand. “You could have gone a long way alone. Why do you wait for me?”
“Sometimes I wonder.” His grin hurt his sunburnt lips. “I guess it’s because I’m still Nggonggan.”
He saw her flush beneath the fireweed sap. Her pale gaze fell to the corpse and fled toward the hot horizon.
“What now?” she whispered. “What will happen to us now?”
“That old she-tly named Redflower will have her chance next, starting when the sun goes down. She’ll be using nearmen to trail us, instead of mechanical sensors. Paragas to take us. She wants your body.”
“Can we—” Snowfire shuddered, shrinking away from the humming flies above the corpse. “Can we get away?”
“We’re still on foot,” he told her. “Nggooth is still ten days ahead. Tomorrow night, old Flintbreaker will be joining Redflower on our trail. He hunts with a striker tly, and he likes to boast that nobody has ever escaped his last day of justice.”
She stood looking at him solemnly.
“You are honest,” she said at last. “I like you for that. I like you for many things.” Impulsively she reached her dark-smeared hands to touch his face. “If we are going to be killed,” she breathed, “I think we should have love first.”
A tremor of old emotion shook him.
“I—I’m sorry! She drew quickly back. “I never understand you.”
“Why not?” he muttered. “Now there’ll never be anybody else.”
In the cushioned comfort of the air-conditioned vehicle, they made love. They slept and woke, ate and drank again. She found a medical kit, used it to clean and dress their damaged feet.
By then the sun was low. Laden with canteens and fruit and dried food, with binoculars and compass from Goldforge’s survival kit, with his hunting knife and translator, they left his bloating corpse beside his vehicle and plodded on across the wind-billowed sand.
All that endless night, they toiled on. By day, each sand hollow became a solar furnace, and still they labored on. In the fiery sunset they paused at the top of a crescent dune.
“We’ve a chance?” Snowfire whispered. “Haven’t we a chance?”
He pointed back down the long yellow slope they had climbed so laboriously, at their footprints lying like two wavering trails of ink-black dots.
“We’re still alive.” He kissed her dust-caked lips. “We’ll keep on trying.”
But he stood a long time staring into the reddened sky. Another sunset. Old Flintbreaker would be joining Redflower, and their trail was impossible to. hide.
They came out of the dunes late that night, into a flow of old lava so rough they stopped to wait for daylight. When dawn broke, they found a salt flat beyond the volcanic ridge, a dry lake bed so wide they couldn’t: see across it. Snowfire shrank back from its empty level immensity, but he grinned hopefully.
“Maybe—” he whispered. “Maybe we do have a chance.”
They struck boldly out across the white waste of hardened brine, circled slowly to the right, doubled back at last toward the lava cliffs.
“Our tracks on the salt are hard to see,” he said. “And the heat should kill our scent.”
They slept through the afternoon in a shallow lava cave. When the hot dark had fallen, to hide them from Flintbreaker’s striker tly, they drank half the water in their last canteen and pushed out again across the salt.
Snowfire seemed strong at first, rested and hopeful. She kept glancing at the blazing constellations, trying to place her own home world and the white sun of Xyr and the farther star of Old Earth. But the lava had shredded her moccasins, and the salt now burned her bleeding feet. Though she uttered no complaint, her limping became so painful that at last he let her stop.
He cleaned her feet with the ointment from Goldforge’s kit and tried to repair the moccasins. They lay on the hardened brine. Though he hadn’t meant to sleep, dead exhaustion overcame him. Dawn had dulled the stars when he woke. Their salt bed had cooled, and Snowfire had snuggled against him. He was turning gently to draw her closer when he heard the nearmen baying.
It was a faint, far wailing, as tiny as the stifled screaming of a hatchling tly in an egg not yet pipped. To Blacklantern, it sounded sad as death. Snowfire sprang up to run when she heard it, but he called her back.
“Nowhere to go.” He gestured into the snowy flatness that reached unbroken into the red sunrise, as far as they could see. “We’ll wait.”
They drained the last sips of water. He leaned down to hone his looted hunting knife on the nearman leather of his looted boots. Gravely, Snowfire kissed him.
“The Fellowship of Benefactors is a well-intended undertaking.” He tried to grin into her tragic face. “But, for a planet so primitive, with progress so hard, I think we need a few more fellows.”
He felt her quiver, heard a tiny laugh that became a sob. They waited. The baying pealed across the sunlit salt, broken now and then when the increasing heat dimmed their trail, but always flowing nearer, wilder, higher, its somber melancholy breaking into yells of fierce elation when the nearmen found a stronger scent. Snowfire gasped and clutched her spear when the first fleet gray shape burst out of the milky glare.
“They are trained not to touch us,” he told her. “Unless we try to run.”
Shuddering, she stared at the pale-furred creatures racing around them, running sometimes erect, sometimes on all four limbs, sniffing after their blood, peering with strange wild bone-hooded eyes, baring bright fangs to bay. Their odor fouled the cool dawn air.
“Are they—” Her troubled voice caught. “Aren’t they—men?”
“Their ancestors were,” he said. “But the old starships were poorly shielded. The passengers got a lot of radiation, and the nearmen sprang from mutations. The real men settled and stayed in the north hemisphere. In the great depression around the sea. The nearmen fell heir to this dry hemisphere, which nobody wanted. They’ve been evolving here for a thousand generations. Roving like wild tlys. Often hunted. Sometimes domesticated.”
“Aren’t they protected?”
“The early Benefactors got a token agreement written into the treaty of entry. The clans promised to keep them out of Nggonggamba—along with their flesh and their hides. But it’s hard to change the ways of a world.”
“Do you mean—” She turned to stare at the gray howling things. “People ate them?”
“They’ve always been game.” She had moved too far from the translator, and he had to repeat. “Except for the tlys, they’re the only big animals here. I guess neither will last long now, since Goldforge’s excavators are eating up their lands.”
“We must look into that. If we live—”
“If we live.” He looked at the baying beasts and thoughtfully back at her dark-stained face. “Which is better, on the scales of the Benefactors? A handful of nearmen, fighting off the wild tlys and feeding on carrion? Or the billions of civilized spacemen who might live richer lives in swarm vehicles built from all the miles of metal in the core of the planet beneath us—”
The howl of the manpack was suddenly hushed, and they turned to find Dr. Killbird and his client emerging from the blinding whiteness. Each was carried by a pair of loping nearmen. Both wore wide flat Nggonggan hats and steaming cooler suits.
The doctor’s fleshless body sagged against the rods and straps of his metal exoskeleton, as if the hunt had been too much for him, but he was leaning from his saddle to hand the woman a stubby paragas gun. He slowed his bearers, and Redflower came on alone. At his hissed command, she dismounted to shoot.
Blacklantern saw Snowfire standing silent, simply watching him. Her utter trust seemed suddenly ironic. He knew the range was impossibly great, but he fitted a pebble into his lancegrass sling. It whistled three times around his head. As he let fly, something exploded at their feet. He caught the sour stink of paragas.
Snowfire gasped and clutched at him and slid slowly down.
Exhaling, Blacklantern reeled two steps toward the cool dawn wind and dropped on his face. The salt pitched beneath him, and a freezing numbness washed him. Grimly, he fought not to breathe.
He made his dead hand grasp his knife. Clumsily, he gouged into the crusted brine beneath his head. When he couldn’t help breathing, he forced his face into the stinging alkali, inhaled its bitter dust.
Lying still, he listened.
Set for Snowfire and himself, the translator was dead. He heard Redflower’s alien squalling, loud with elation and quavery with age. He heard Dr. Killbird’s rasping sibilants, more distant, more cautious. He heard the nearmen growling, their hard feet thudding on the salt, at last the hurried crunch of Redflower’s boots.
The salt dust was tainted with her synthetic scent, and her shadow fell across him. He knew she was bending to contemplate the fair new body she was claiming for herself. He heard the doctor’s anxious hiss, knew it must be a warning to make sure of him.
Rolling upright, he threw the knife.
It missed!
Alerted by the doctor’s hiss, the woman had spun when he moved. He watched her raising the slim mangun she clutched in her red-taloned claw. The gun wavered and dropped. She was crumpling toward the salt before his flung blade flashed by her face. By the time he reached her body, diving for her scrawny throat, she was already dead.
He twisted the mangun out of her relaxing talons and whirled back to face Dr. Killbird. The fleshless otherworlder sat in his swinging saddle, drooping against his humming supports, weakly clutching the paragas gun the woman had used. His skull-face scowled uncertainly.
“Careful, sir!” Blacklantern bent to snatch the translator from behind Snowfire’s ear. “Break the rules and you make yourself fair game.”
His haggard eyes blinked. He hissed something the translator failed to catch. His motors whined suddenly, and his skeletal fingers clutched for a whip. His nearmen yelped and clattered away. The respected Redflower was left where she had fallen. Her old heart had simply failed, before she got the new one.
Now her own nearmen snorted and ran, dropping her saddle and all her gear. The whole pack howled away behind the departing doctor. Snowfire and her dead hunter lay side by side on the hard-caked brine.
6.
The first effect of paragas was close to death. Blacklantern was a long time finding Snowfire’s pulse, and it was noon before she woke. Even when the hot evening fell, she was still too weak to walk.
Yet they went on. Blacklantern put her in Redflower’s saddle and carried one end of the flexing poles, letting the other slide on the glassy salt.
Redflower they left for the tlys or nearmen to scavenge. They took her translator, canteen, and food pack. Blacklantern tried and left her mangun, which was thumb-keyed and useless, but her boots were a fair fit for Snowfire’s swollen feet.
He had been half blind from the savage dazzle of the salt, but at sunset he saw one high black dot against the dusty crimson. A wild tly, he wondered, seeking carrion? Or the Elder Huntsman’s striker, already on their trail?
To confuse the pursuit, he veered left till dark, then right again. When they stopped to rest at midnight, Snowfire refused to ride again. They limped on and on together.
Scattered boulders began to break the starlit level, and at last the starlit salt gave way to darker sand. Beyond the old lake shore they climbed a rough slope of weathered granite. The scarlet blaze of another dawn found them stumbling across a high plateau of bare red rock. Suddenly it ended.
He heard Snowfire’s gasp. In his own dead fatigue he had been aware of nothing beyond the next painful step. When he looked up, all he could see was a dozen yards of wind-worn sandstone, broken off with a jagged fracture line.
Beyond was the pit.
It jolted him wide awake. Beyond that broken edge he saw the same chasm he had seen in the tank beneath the crystal floor of Toolsmith’s office—but the reality was unbelievably vaster than its projected image. To right and left, the jagged lip ran on as far as he could see. He couldn’t find the farther side.
Creeping fearfully closer, they dropped flat to look over the edge. The sheer rock face dropped straight down, so far it made him giddy. Broken rubble sloped on down from its foot, down and down into the thick brown haze that hid the bottom of the excavation.
“Mechanical maggots!” Snowfire peered at him, her eyes dark with shock. “The metal worms! I was coming to investigate them when the clansmen caught me.”
He inched forward to look where she was pointing and saw two great bright worm-shapes creeping side by side along a wide rock shelf that broke the rubble slide. As they devoured boulders, more broken stone ran down around them, veiling them in thick gray dust. Even at that vast distance they looked enormous.
After a long time he gave Snowfire a shaken glance.
“The Deeplode pit.” He was hoarse with awe. “Back in Nggonggamba, I talked to an engineer. The company is digging here for metal to build space vehicles. Toolsmith says they own the mining rights. He says everything is legal.”
“You can imagine how the natives feel!” She laughed bitterly. “Mechanical maggots eating up their planet!”
“Toolsmith says the job will take ten thousand years. I wish we had that sort of time.” He shoved himself and turned to look behind them, searching the dusty air for the striker tly. Snowfire lay flat, still staring into the pit.
“I’ve found another—thing!” she gasped. “It isn’t eating, like the others. It’s climbing the rock slides. Listen! You can hear it coming.”
Leaning toward the pit, he heard a far sound, faint but deep. If all the flying, humming, stinging things of Nggongga had been rolled into one immense monster, he thought, this would have been its roaring.
“It’s climbing straight toward us!” Her voice turned sharp. “Do you think it saw us?”
“I don’t think we could matter—”
He had bent to search the pit, when something rumbled in the wounded world beneath them. The rock shuddered. A sudden shock toppled him toward the brink. He was reeling on the rim, fighting for his balance, going over, when Snowfire caught him.
They fled back across the quaking rock. It shivered and pitched. It rang like a world-sized gong, as if to deep explosions. Black Assures opened all around them, spitting dust. A widening crack spread open ahead. Snowfire stumbled into it, almost swallowed. He snatched her up, jumped desperately.
Beyond the crack, they fell face down and lay there limp and gasping. The hard rock shivered and boomed beneath them. A vast thundering came out of the pit behind, swelling and swelling until it battered them with an avalanche of sound, cresting incredibly, sinking slowly back into that impossible abyss.
When they found breath and strength to stand, they were on a new brink. The rock where they had stood beyond the crack caved away. Daring to look down, they found a new rubble slope far, far beneath, with an enormous apron of orange-colored dust still spreading down from its foot into that thick brown haze.
Those three great bright worms were gone. For a moment he thought the rockfall had buried them. But then, as that distant thunder kept on dying, he heard the monstrous bellow of the nearest worm, undiminished. Rolling onward, that orange cloud uncovered all three worms. Two were still consuming talus. The third still climbed.
“It has seen us!” Snowfire trembled. “It’s after us!”
“Not likely,” he muttered. “We aren’t that important.”
They retreated beyond the risk of another rockfall and sat together on a sandstone ledge. Snowfire looked up at him, her face sick with dread.
“We’ve come so far.” Her dust-roughened whisper wavered. “We’ve tried so hard.” Tears welled out of her sun-reddened eyes. “What now?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever reach Nggooth,” he said. “I’m not even sure it still exists—it may have already fallen into the pit. But still we’re going on. I guess that’s all we can do, with old Flintbreaker and his striker tly behind us.”
His painful lips tried to grin. “We’ll follow around the rim of the pit—Flintbreaker won’t come too close. We’ll try to stay alive. Our captured supplies are pretty well gone, but we can hope for more. With luck enough, we’ll find a waterhole, or perhaps a wild tly’s nest.”
She searched his face, abruptly leaned to kiss him. Suddenly busy, he opened the last frozen meal from Redflower’s coldpack and set it on a rock for the sun to warm. He inspected their footgear, retied the flint point on a spear. Carefully, he kept himself from looking at Snowfire, or up at the dust-hazed sky where Flintbreaker’s striker would be flying.
It struck that afternoon.
They had shared that final meal and a few measured sips of water, had slept till the sun’s blue fury goaded them on. They were stumbling down a red-walled canyon that a lost stream had cut in some kinder time, when the hot sky howled.
Blacklantern swung drunkenly and saw the diving tly. Sunlight glanced on arrowed black wings, burned on crimson armor. The five-jawed mouth was a wide black chasm, five great bright fangs unsheathed to strike. The tapered tail was whipping into a graceful curve, already reaching to poison them.
Lovely, deadly! All the emotions of his arena-struck youth came flooding back, as intoxicating as a great draught of sea-berry wine. Filled and lifted with it, he felt all the wonder and terror of his first step upon the raked and patterned sand. His dead fatigue fell away.
“Drop!” he called to Snowfire. “Flat!”
Dancing away from her, he loosened his braided sling. Twirling it like a binding rope, he stood balanced on the balls of his feet, waiting breathlessly. That fiveangled mouth howled again, its yell meant to paralyze its prey.
With all his old cunning, he measured its dive. Deftly, at the ultimate instant, he flicked the sling to draw its black-tipped sting aside. He crouched to bring it lower, sprang to meet it. With both hooked hands, he caught the tendons at the base of its slanted wings. Its own reflex lifted him, twirled him to its armored back.
