Collected Short Fiction, page 741
“Maps!” Excitement took his breath. “Maps of the planet.”
The world chart showed a single great continent—with wide white stretches and long gaps where not even the coasts had been explored. One huge river drained most of it, flowing to the east coast from a southwestern mountain range. Only two places were named. Station One, an ink dot near the river mouth. Station Two, on another dot on a cape beyond the mountains, at the south tip of the continent.
“We must be here.” He pointed. “Where the river bends.”
“Maybe they moved to Station Two.” She looked at him. “Would there be a reason?”
“The weather, maybe. Two is in the other hemisphere. It would have summer of a sort, in spite of the orbit, when winter comes here.”
“It must be coming now.” With a little shiver, she looked out at the ice. “The goddess has taken our people to Station Two.” Her grave eyes came back to him. “Can you carry us there?”
He shook his head. “I’ve no image to guide me.”
“We have to get there.”
“I don’t see how.” He scowled at the chart. “It looks like eight or ten thousand miles. Rivers and mountains to cross. No roads and no bridges. No food anywhere, except the little we found.”
“But we must—fast!”
Her breathless desperation startled him.
“The dream I had.” Her frightened eyes met his. “I didn’t want to tell you, because it was so dreadful. The gods had sent a thing to kill us. A demon thing—if there are any demons.”
Her icy fingers gripped his arm.
“Davey, I’m afraid! Afraid it wasn’t just a dream.”
3.
The storm raged against the Asian temple, wild as some ill-created monster of the chaos that prevailed before the gods were made. Blinding lightning burned behind the transceiver pillars. Thunder crashed and rolled and moaned against the high dome.
Nimbus crimson, the Lord Belthar yelled against wind and thunder, grilling Zhondra Zhey for more than she knew about the fugitive demons. How had the male got out of his cell? How had he managed to murder Quelf? How had he carried the drugged female away? Where were they now?
Her aura faint and cold, she said she didn’t know.
Were there other premen who might carry the demon genes? Was it possible that they might survive on Andoranda Five? Or even escape from it, to threaten the immortal gods?
“Nothing can live there long,” she answered. “Nothing except the creatures of its seas, which want no life on the land. Your own Polarians failed to defeat them. I don’t think the premen can.”
How long did she expect the premen to survive?
“The supplies we landed with them will be gone in half a Terran year. The cargo we carry now is not much larger, and they can’t grow more. The planet is now approaching its cold aphelion. They can’t live through their next long winter, unless they get relief—”
“Relief?” His incredulous bellow pealed through the sleety fog. “They’ll get no relief.” He glared down at her. “I suppose it is useless to forbid you to unload the food you have aboard for them, but I’ll see that you get nothing more to take them—”
Her image dimmed as if fading from the column.
“Hear me, child!” he bawled. “You belong to the race of gods. Pampering demons, you bring peril to yourself—”
“No great risk.” Her aura glowed again. “I know no demons.”
“We know them,” Belthar boomed. “Well enough to burn them! We won’t allow your sentimental follies to threaten the rest of us. In that, at least, I believe we stand united.”
When his gaze swept the columns, they colored with assent.
“Hear this, my dear.” He smiled paternally through scarlet sparks. “You yourself may feel no danger from your demoniac pets, but you stand in peril from us.”
Silent, her image winked out. Divinely indifferent, he turned to question his remaining guests about the weapons they had developed to clear useless native life from their own residential planets. Few of the answers pleased him.
One of Kranthar’s twin sons—sons by Cynthara and so twice nephews of Belthar himself—had showered neutron bombs from space to soften the urban and industrial centers of an insectoid civilization. The other son had designed muman look-alikes to infiltrate a culture of green-winged, half-plant beings—
“It’s demons we’re hunting!” Impatience glared through his nimbus. “Mumen are no good against them—they’ve already killed mumen enough. Neutron bombs might be better—but we have to find them first.”
He turned to his daughter, who sat straight in her own golden aura, blue eyes smiling as if she liked the storm and admired his eternal vigor and found some wild delight even in fighting preman demons.
Her own chosen world, Belphera said, had been still barbaric, ruled by a race of hunters. Pleased with their ferocious folkways, she had joined the game with no weapons save her own transvolutionary gifts, shifting just outside their space to make herself invisible in ambush, levitating in pursuit, killing with her nimbus.
“I hope you get to meet the demons.” He grinned his approval of her own feline perfection. “But their trail may be difficult to follow.”
One hostile world had been sprayed with a short-lived catalyst that utilized solar energy to fuse atmospheric nitrogen and carbon into clouds of poisonous cyanogen. Another had been seeded with a virus that consumed everything organic, leaving only sterile dust when it died.
A silver-nimbused goddess told how she had bred marine mumen to conquer a race of ecology-minded sea-dwellers who had left the virgin forests on their continents as a source of oxygen. The mumen located the undersea cities and guided nuclear torpedos to neutralize them.
“I had to fight a higher technology,” Kranthar reported when his turn came. “The militant natives had conquered every planet of their system and begun to plan interstellar adventure. To exterminate them, my muman engineers sowed their worlds with self-replicating machines designed to attack everything that moved.”
“Useful toys.” Belthar nodded. “If we can find the demons.”
He looked at a handsome junior god, waiting eagerly in a cloud of diamond dust.
“The world I claimed was even stranger,” the youngster said. “Its aborigines were golden-winged things of the air, small and happy as children, so like us in their beauty that I felt almost reluctant to destroy them. Their symbiotic homes were great solitary fruit-bearing trees that gave them food and drink and shelter. Though they may have aided the evolution of those trees, they had no visible technology.
“I found one building—the only artificial structure on. the planet. Beautiful and wonderful—the first glimpse of it almost stopped my heart. It was all precious stone and precious metal, shaped by genius and devotion into a soaring expression of the soul of the race.
“A temple, they told me, consecrated to a fantastic concept I never tried to understand. Dedicated, they said, to the creator of all the universe—it would have been the whole multiverse, I suppose, if they had ever heard of that.
“They loved and worshiped that imaginary being—an impossible deity who somehow managed to combine cosmic omnipotence with a tender personal concern for every individual worshiper. The maker and defender of all they called good. The implacable enemy of what they called evil. They called me evil!”
The young god laughed.
“They wanted me to worship him. They were so charming in their innocence and beauty that I invited them to worship me. I might have saved them, in fact, if they had ever welcomed me. But they clung instead to that ridiculous heresy.
“There was a caste of priests who had memorized a set of silly myths about their incredible god. They attempted to deny my own divinity. I believe they had begun to discover transvolutionary powers, with which they tried to protect the temple. Outraged when I burned it, they promised that their unseen god would humble me.
“All it took to humble them was a prolific mutant stinging wasp designed to lay its eggs in the blooms of those magnificent trees. The wasps spread fast. Within a year the creatures were falling like rotten fruit, stung or starved to death.
“Though I had admired the trees, they died too.” Diamond glitter swirling, he shrugged off that small misfortune. “It’s still a splendid planet, and that universal god has never troubled me.”
“He never will,” Belthar said. “I think the premen had some such folktale once. Not that it matters. To deal with these demons, we need something deadlier than wasps.”
He bowed to Cynthara.
“At last, Bel dear! My Gleesh is the creature you need.” She flowed to her feet in her mantle of emerald motes, still as sleekly pantherine as when they had been lovers. “I’ve always been restless, you’ll recall. I’ve had a good many planets, and left them when they bored me. The last I took had evolved the most ferocious beings I’ve ever met.
“The supreme predators on a world of cruel predators. They must have come from something like the great cats of Earth, but some chance mutation had given them transvolutionary capacities. Though they had not yet reached any other stars, they had learned to jump from planet to planet in their own system, and their auras were as powerful as ours.
“Others had avoided them, but I enjoy that kind of challenge.” Green sparks danced in her long pale hair when she flung it back. “I designed deadlier things to kill them out. The deadliest—”
A howling gale drowned her voice, and the blinding ice-fog dimmed her nimbus. Belthar bent forward, his own red aura blazing higher, until the blast was gone.
“Rulers of all their worlds,” she went on, “they had turned to fighting one another. In ceremonial games. I got live cells from the body of a defeated champion, tossed into the sea. From those, and cells from myself, my engineers created killer things—”
Protest was blazing across the columns; in divine concord, the gods had pledged themselves to create nothing that might supplant them.
“—but not without precaution,” she explained. “We made them sexless, sterile, and self-destructive. When they had done their work for me, they turned on one another. Only one is left alive, a pet I keep on the grounds of my favorite temple.” Fondly, she smiled through emerald dust.
“My beautiful Gleesh. Gentle enough with me, though it has developed a regrettable appetite for truman priests. A supreme demon, really. Quite a match, I’m sure, for your young premen. It has the extrasensory capacities to track them and the transvolutionary effectors to pursue them anywhere.”
“Can it kill them?”
“If anything can.” Framed in the haze of her aura and the ice, her loveliness was luminous with pride. “Gleesh is the ultimate killer, endowed with the power and the lust and the cunning to turn every defense of its prey into another weapon of its own. It would love another hunt.”
“Then bring it to Earth,” Belthar begged her. “We’ll let it take the trail at my dead son’s Redrock estate.” When his imaged guests had flashed their farewells and faded out of the columns, he rose from the throne and dived back through the storm of his ice-crusted skimmer, his halo ablaze with triumph. Gleesh should have no trouble with any two teenaged premen. Even if they had a demon taint. Even if a foolish baby goddess was attempting to befriend them.
4.
Like a black wall falling, another sudden starless night caught them in the cupola. Buglet was still haunted by her dream of the demon, afraid for both of them to sleep. He lay restless on the floor beside her, searching for some way across the cruel continent to Station Two, discovering none. Daylight was a golden explosion.
“I had a better dream.” She woke refreshed and radiant. “About how to reach our people. We’ll fix that skimmer by the strip.”
“A pretty wild dream.” He stared at her, astonished. “If the monks couldn’t repair it, how can we?”
“We need it worse than they did.”
“We’ve no tools. No parts. No skills.”
“We’ve got to try. Unless—” She paused, probing him. “Unless you can teleport us?”
“I can’t.” He shrugged unhappily. “Getting us here was a freak of luck. I still don’t understand the process. I do know that it takes a clear image of the destination. Without that—”
In the yellow dawn, they took the map the monks had left and slogged back to the shuttle strip. Dismay checked him when he saw the wreck again, all of it except the tilted tail buried under old snow and windblown dust.
“No good,” he muttered. “No good for anything.”
“We’ll see. When we dig it out.”
“With just our hands?”
“We have spades.”
She ran to the hollow where they had found the survival pod and brought back the empty plastic halves. With one of them for a tool, she attacked the hard-crusted snow.
“Okay.” Still doubtful, he went to work with the other half. “I don’t know what else to do.”
On Andoranda Five, no task was easy. The heavy gravity dragged at them. The atmosphere denied them breath enough. When the wind rose, the bitter dust stung their eyes and burned their throats and set them both to coughing. The murky days and savage nights flashed by too fast for their tiny hoard of food.
Red mud grimed their faces and stiffened the coveralls in which they worked and slept and lived. Under the mud, Buglet’s face grew gaunt, her eyes hollowed and inflamed. Sometimes he heard her moan or cry out in her sleep and knew that she was dreaming again of that demoniac creature sent by the gods to stalk them down.
But they reached the pilot’s door. Chopping with the splintered relics of their makeshift spades, they broke through stubborn ice and pried it open far enough to let them squirm into the cockpit. He lit the signal lantern to explore its frigid gloom.
“Less damage than I expected.” She sank into the pilot’s seat to get her breath. “Everything looks as if the crew just got out and walked away. Our problem now is to find out what went wrong.”
Though neither had ever flown a skimmer, they had ridden in those the Polarians had brought to Redrock. Davey spent several Andorandan days working through the operations manual and maintenance records they found under the console. Buglet sat unwontedly silent most of the time, her eyes dark and distant—watching, so she said, for the demon. When he was ready at last to begin testing the equipment, she woke from her somber trace, suddenly cheerful.
“We’re lucky again.” Watching the dials, she smiled happily. “There’s power left.”
“Too little, I’m afraid.” He stopped to scowl again at the unfamiliar instruments. “Too little for the indicated weight. I think the skimmer is overloaded—at least for Andorandan gravity. I think the cargo caused the wreck.”
“If that’s the problem, we must unload it.”
The cargo had puzzled him, from his first glimpse of it. It was heavy equipment which must have been brought to level and pave the shuttle strip and build roads about the station. Somehow, it had all been burned to scrap metal, not worth moving anywhere. When the skimmer fell, it had all been thrown into a twisted mass against the forward bulkhead.
At first he saw no way to get the blackened tangle off the skimmer, but under Buglet’s urging he found the undamaged boom and null-G tackle that must have been used to drag the burned machines aboard. The hazy days flickering by, they toiled again to clear away the layered ice and dust outside the cargo hatch, digging now with scraps of junk metal.
An Andorandan storm delayed them. A red dust-cloud, rolling out of the west, blinding when it struck, acrid and unbreathable. Howling gusts and roaring thunder. Clanging hail, that he though might smash the hull. Deep new drifts outside the hatches.
They sat through it in the cockpit, and Buglet dropped into a fitful sleep when the wind and hail subsided. Once she cried out so sharply that he thought she had been hurt. He caught her arm to wake her.
“It’s no dream, Davey!” He felt her trembling. “I get a sense of something hunting us—something powerful and cruel, sent by the gods to kill us. It’s not here yet—not even in this universe. But I feel it getting closer. Always closer. Somehow, it can follow our trail.”
“Bug, couldn’t you be wrong? You haven’t been sleeping enough or eating enough. You’re worn out with work and strain. People can imagine—”
“Don’t kid me, Davey.” She tried to laugh. “I know what’s real—and I’m dreadfully afraid. I hope we can get to the other station before the demon catches up. The goddess should be landing there soon—”
“If she hasn’t already come and gone.”
“We’ve got to hope she hasn’t.” Buglet shuddered. “I think perhaps she could protect us.”
The storm gone, they found most of their work undone. The cargo hatch was buried again, and they had to dig once more through heavy layers of ice and dust and mud. They found it damaged when they reached it, jammed and hard to open. When at last it was lifted, they rigged the cargo boom. One by one, they dragged the burned machines out of the hold and through the hatch and off the ramp.
“It still bewilders me.” Davey freed the null-G tackle from the last mass of junk metal. “Unless the monks had lost their minds. This wreckage is good for nothing, and it was loaded in a way that made it sure to shift and tip the skimmer.”
“No matter. We’re ready to fly.”
The hatches closed again, they sat at the controls. She monitored the console while he energized the gravitic inverters, gingerly at first, slowly pushing them to full lift. The skimmer refused to move.
“So it wasn’t just the load,” he muttered. “Something else is wrong.”
“Perhaps we’re frozen down. Try the thrusters.”
He tried the thrusters. Something snapped and creaked. When he tried again, the skimmer shook. He rocked it. Ice outside cracked and rattled. The deck pitched. Suddenly they were in the air.
