Breed to Come (14 page)

"Ah, yes, your Ancestor. I have heard of his strangethoughts—that all the People, clan upon clan, mustdraw together in a long truce. One of his messengersspoke so to our Elders. But we could not see the wisdom in that—not then."

"There has been a change in your thinking?" Furtig was interested. Did Gammage indeed have a strong enough message to convert those with whomhe had no kin tie? When his own clan would not listento him?

"In my thinking, though I am no Elder. You didnot leave me to die under Ratton fangs. Though earlier I left you and your kin brother so. And you tookthe knowledge I had given you and returned with what you found. Yes, one begins to see the worth inyour Ancestor's, suggestion. Together we have done something that neither might have succeeded inalone."

"Save -that we have not yet succeeded," Furtigpointed out. "Nor shall we until we are safely back inthat portion of the lairs held by the People. And withwhat we have found. Now we must do just that."

In the end Furtig made a blind selection from thetapes, knotting as many as he could into the bag.

Therest he stacked around the duct walls. This hollow ofa three-way meeting was as good a place as any tostore them. Having done this, he tried his powers of concentration for the last time, tried to contact Foskatt.

There was no way of knowing whether he gotthrough. In fact the farther he was in space and timefrom his contact, the more he doubted the worth oftheir communication. With Ku-La he ate and drankagain. There was very little water-left now—he wasnot sure it would last long enough to carry them bothto some source for more. But he would not worryabout that until it became a matter of real concern.

Rather he must keep his mind on what lay directlybefore him.

Again crawling with Ku-La's one hand hooked intohis belt, Furtig worked into the left-hand passage. Ifthey moved now behind the walls of separate roomsthere was no way of telling it, for there were no gratings. And distance in the dark and under such circumstances was as hard to measure as time. The duct ranstraight, with no turns or side cuttings. Furtig couldnot help but believe they must be heading back toward the lairs used by his own kind.

He tried to tap that directional sense which hadguided him so surely before. But whether he had exhausted his talent, if he had any special talent in message sending, he did not know. One thing only was certain: He had no strong urge in any direction andcould only crawl unguided through the dark.

Far ahead there was a glimmer of light. Anothergrating? He did not greatly care, he merely wanted toreach it, the need for light as much an ache withinhim as hunger or thirst. As he advanced, Furtig wassure it was stronger than the weak glimmers of theother gratings.

They reached the opening, which seemed, to eyesaccustomed to the black of the ducts, a blaze of light.It was a grating, but one giving on the open, eventhough they must be many levels into the earth.

Rainwas falling without, and the dampness blew throughthe grating to bead their fur.

Here a well had been cored through the lairs, largeenough so that with the haze of the rain they couldhardly see the far side. What they could make out ofthe walls showed them smooth, unbroken by morethan gratings. Only in one place the smooth wall wasblackened, broken with a hold of jagged edges.

Furtig thought of lightning and how it could rendeven rocks if it struck true. Also of the lightning ofthe Demon weapon. Perhaps that could not havecaused that hole. But suppose the Demons had similar but greater weapons, ones of such force as toknock holes through stone walls? Like giant rumblers? The old legends of how the Demons had turnedupon each other in the end, rending, killing—thismight mark such a battle.

On the other hand, that hole could well give thementrance into the very parts of the lairs they wantedto gain. Furtig was heartily tired of crawling throughthe ducts. There was something about being pent inthese narrow spaces which seemed to darken his mindso that he could not think clearly any more.

He wanted out, and the fresh air beyond was a restorativemoving him to action.

"But this place I know!" Ku-La cried. "I have seenit—not from here, but from above—" He crowdedagainst Furtig, pushing the other away from the grating, trying to turn his head at some impossible angleto see straight up. "No, I cannot mark it from here.But there are places above from which one can seeinto this hole."

Furtig was not sure he wanted Ku-La to recognizetheir whereabouts. It would have been far better hadthey found a place he knew. But he did not say that.Instead he pushed Ku-La away in turn to see moreclearly; he wanted another look at the wall break.Yes, it was not too far above the floor of the well. Hewas sure they could reach it. And he set to work onthe grating.

As he levered and pulled, he made his suggestionabout going through the break.

"A good door for us," Ku-La agreed.

The grating loosened, and he wriggled through intothe open. He was glad .for once to have the rain wethis fur, though normally that would have been a discomfort he would have tried to avoid. He droppedeasily, and water splashed about his feet. That gathered and ran in thin streams to drain through openings in the base of the walls.

Furtig signaled for Ku-La, turning his head fromside to side watchfully. Above, as the other had said,there were rows of windows. And he could see, higherstill, one of those bridges crossing from the wallagainst which he stood to a point directly opposite. Orhad once crossed, for only two thirds of it were still inexistence, and those were anchored to the buildings.The middle of the span was gone.

There were no signs of life. Rain deadened scent.However, they would have to take their chances. Furtig tugged the cord, which he had made fast above forthe second time. Ku-La descended by its aid, the rainwashing the crust of dried blood from his matted fur.as he came.

Those windows bothered Furtig. He had the feeling which was so often with him in the lairs, that he was being watched. And he hated to be in theopen even for so short a time. But Ku-La could not make that crossing in a couple of leaps. He hobbled,and Furtig had to set hand under his shoulder to support him or he would not have been able to make thejourney at all. It seemed long, far too long, beforethey reached the break and somehow scrambled upand into that hole.

Ayana lay pent in the web, staring up at the smallvisa-screen on the cabin bulkhead. So she had lainthrough many practice landings. But this was different—this was real, not in a mock-up of the ship while safely based on Elhorn II, where one alwaysknew it was a game, even if every pressure and possible danger would be enacted during that training.

Now that difference was a cold lump within her, alump which had grown with every moment of timesince they had snapped out of hyper to enter this system. Were the old calculations really to be trusted?Was this the home planet from which her species hadlifted into space at the beginning of man's climb tothe stars?

When one watched the histro-tapes, listened to thevarious pieced-together records, one could believe. Butto actually take off into the unknown and seek thatwhich had become a legend—

Yet she had been wildly excited when her name had appeared with the chosen. She had gone through allthe months of testing, training, of mental conditioning, in order to lie here and watch a strange solar system spread on the visa-screen in a cramped cabin—know that they would flame down, if all went well, ona world, which had not been visited for centuries of planet time.

She saw the shift in the protect web hung above hers. Tan must be restlessly trying to change positionagain, though the webs gave little room for such play.Even their rigorous training had not schooled thatrestlessness out of Tan. From childhood he had always been of the explorer breed, needing to see whatlay beyond, but never satisfied with the beyond whenhe reached it, already looking once more to the horizon. That was what had made life with Tan exciting—on Elhorn; what had drawn her after him into theproject. But what can be a virtue can also be adanger. She knew of old that Tan must sometimes becurbed, by someone close enough for him to respond to.

Ayana studied the bulging webbing—Tan safe, but for how long? His nature had been channeled; he hadbeen educated as a First-in Scout. Once they hadlanded, he would take off in the flitter—unless therewere direct orders against that. Now Ayana hopedthat there would be. She could not understand thedeepening depression that gathered as a fog abouther. It had begun as they had come out of hyper, growing as she watched the visa-screen. As if thosewinking points of light which were the world awaiting them marked instead the fingers of a great dark handstretching forth to gather them in. Ayana shivered.

Imagination, that was her weak point, as she hadbeen told in the final sifting when she had almost been turned down for the crew. It was only becauseshe was an apt balance for Tan, she sometimes thought unhappily, that she had been selected at all.

"Well—there they are!" There was no note of depression in Tan's voice. "So far the route equationshave proved out."

Why could she not share his triumph? For it was atriumph. They had had so little to guide them in thissearch. The First Ship people had deliberately destroyed their past. A search of more than a hundred years had produced only a few points of reference,which the computer had woven into the informationfor this voyage.

Five hundred planet years had passed since theFirst Ships—there had been two—had landed on Elhorn. What mystery had made those in them deliberately destroy not only all references to the world fromwhich they had lifted but some of the instruments tomake those ships spaceworthy? The colonists had suffered a slow decline into a primitive existence, whichthey had actually welcomed, resisting with vigorousfanaticism any attempt by the next generation to discover what lay behind their migration.

There were two—three such stagnated generations.Then, with all those of the first generation gone, theirstifling influence removed, again inquiry. Explorershad found a closed compartment in one ship with itslearning tapes intact; though those were spotty,sometimes seemingly censored.

After that came rebuilding, rediscovery, the need toknow now almost an inborn trait of the following generations. There had been a search lasting close to ahundred years, until at least nearly all the resources ofElhorn had been turned to that quest alone. Notwithout opposition. There had been those in eachgeneration who had insisted that their ancestors musthave had good reason to suppress the past, that toseek the source of their kind was to court new disaster. And those had been gaining followers, too.

Theymight have prevented the present voyage had it notbeen for the Cloud.

Ayana's face suddenly mirrored years of parchedliving when she thought of the Cloud. It had beensuch a little thing in the beginning. Scientists hadwished to get at the rare ores their detectors had located on the impenetrable South Island of Iskar,where volcanic action produced unpredictable outbursts of lethal gases. From the old records, they hadcreated robos like those the First Ship people hadused, and these had been dropped on Iskar to do themining. But the gases apparently had eaten away thedelicate robo "brains," in spite of all attempts toshield those against infiltration. Then the scientists had turned to chemical countermeasures. To theirown undoing. For the equipment the "dying" roboshad installed in the mines had malfunctioned. Andthe result was the birth and continuing growth of theCloud.

That did not rise far in the air; it crept, horribly,with a slow relentlessness which made it seem a sentient thing and not just a mass of vapor. So it coveredIskar, where there was little to die, but later it hadheaded out over the sea.

The water itself had been poisoned by the passing touch of that loathsome mist. Sea life died, but diedfleeing. And those refugees contaminated others wellbeyond. Those died also, though more slowly.

At last those who had resisted the hunt for thehome world capitulated. With their limited knowledge, lacking as it was in those portions the First Shippeople had destroyed, they could not deal with themonster from Iskar. And they must either find a wayto strike it a death blow, or else transport all theirpeople elsewhere.

Even as the Pathfinder had lifted, the rest of thelabor force (which now meant all the able-bodied dwellers on Elhorn) had been at work rehabilitatingthe two colony ships. Whether those could ever be putin condition to take to space again no man knew. ThePathfinder had been constructed from a smaller scoutwhich had been in company with the colony ships.

There were only four of them on board the Pathfinder, each a specialist in his or her field, and able todouble in another. Ayana was both medic and historian; Tan, a scout and defense man; Jacel, the captain,was their com expert and navigator; Massa, the pilotand techneer. Four against the whole solar system,from which the First Ships had fled in such fear thatthey had destroyed all references to their past.

Had there been a Cloud on the ancestral planet,too? Of worse still (if there could be worse), had menhunted other men to the death? For that, too, hadhappened in the past, the tapes revealed. At least onElhorn, they had not resorted to arms to settle differences in belief.

The closer the Pathfinder came to their goal, themore Ayana feared what they might find.

For days of ship's time their flight within the ancestral solar system continued. By common consent theychose their target—the third planet from the sun.From the computer reports, that seemed to be theplanet best suited to support life, as they knew it.

All this time Jacel tried to raise some response totheir ship's broadcast, but none came. That silencewas sinister. Yet the mere lack of a reply signal couldnot turn them back now. So they went into a brakingorbit about the world.

That it was not bare of life was apparent. Or atleast it had not lacked intelligent life at one time.

Vast splotches of cities spread far over the landmasses. They could be picked up by viewers in daylight, and their glow at night (though sections wereominously dark) provided beacons. Still there was noanswer to their signals.