Masters of Everon (10 page)

Jef followed thoughtfully. He checked his compass, but he was right on course. Another puzzle had been added to the long list that Everon had already visited on him since his landing from the spaceship. Some clue to what had happened undoubtedly lay in the behavior of the galushas. Jef wished that he had his reference tapes on Everon life forms, but these of course were with the equipment that was to follow him later. He tried to remember what he knew about the galushas, in hope of turning up some insight—but nothing came. The galushas were merely upland predators who made the staple of their diet out of the oversize insect life forms of Everon. There was no help in that knowledge to an understanding of what had just taken place.

All the same, as he went along, now it seemed to Jef that he was conscious, in a way he had not been before, of being watched.

There was not the slightest visible or auditory sign to justify this feeling, but it persisted. He could almost feel himself being watched as he went, of being at the center of a ring of eyes that viewed him from all angles and traveled with him as he moved, so that he was continually under observation.

He could not shake this feeling. Still... he looked at Mikey gamboling on ahead and then dashing back occasionally to touch base briefly with Jef before taking off again. Mikey was showing no awareness of such a watch upon them, or in fact any awareness of any difference in things since they had started. If something was going on, Mikey certainly ought to be able to sense it.

Or should he?

Could it be that Mikey's being raised on Earth had deprived him of some Everon-normal sensitivity... Jef made an effort to shake the whole question out of his mind. He was getting away from the area of reasonable speculation and into such areas that he might as well be dealing in fantasies.

Still, these and similar questions continued to throng his mind as he and Mikey made their way through the gold-tinged greenness of the Everon forest. But by the end of the day he still had answers to none of them. He had, in fact, even stopped watching Mikey's dashes and runs by the time they came to the ford of the Voral River and set up camp on the near bank. It was already growing dark, and while the map showed the ford was nowhere more than a meter deep, and with a level, gravel bottom, the idea of crossing the considerable width of that dark stream once the sun had gone down did not appeal to Jef.

So, by the time the light had completely gone and before one of Everon's two small moons had risen, he had his shelter tent up and his fire built. He fed Mikey and himself with the concentrated rations he was carrying. There was not enough bulk in such for Mikey, but it would do for the two days they were taking to walk to the first supply post. Once there he could buy some eland meat, if nothing else—and if Mikey did not rediscover a hunting ability in the meantime.

With Mikey curled up across the fire from him, Jef sat, staring into the flames. His sleeping bag was laid out and waiting, but it was barely past sunset and he did not feel ready for sleep yet, in spite of the long day's walk. The curious sensation of being observed was still with him, but now it was as if the observer or observers had drawn back, respecting his small circle of privacy marked out by the firelight. Strangely the feeling had not, from the start, been one of being watched by anything inimical. It was more as if a circle of shy but curious woodland animals had become fascinated by him.

He was free to ignore the feeling; and, effectively, he had. Something else—a feeling of sadness and something like loneliness—was affecting him now. He had been thinking for some time about the puzzle of the mileposts, and the fact that they seemed to contribute nothing to the ecosystem; and from that his mind had veered off to consider the colonists, here and on other newly-planted worlds, and his fellow humans back on Earth.

In one sense he had been like an alien among the others of his own race all his life. He had spent his time as much as possible in the outdoors of the wild parks, and at the zoos, mingling with his fellow humans only as necessary to live, to get himself an education and to find a job. He had always felt, instinctively, that a life should be lived to some purpose; and, lost among the endless hordes of people on Earth, he could not believe that he would ever find any purpose to his own existence as long as he swam as one of their endless multitude, one minnow among countless other duplicate minnows.

He would not have minded being one of those uncountable billions if he could have found his own people something to like and admire. But, in the mass, they had never evoked those emotions in him. As individuals, they could be kind and sensitive and responsive; but the moment they banded together in anything from a community to a nation, they began to react according to the lowest common denominators. The impulse to kindness became the impulse to selfishness, sensitivity was lost under callousness, and responsiveness gave way to a frantic urge to compete, to survive at the expense of anything and anyone else. In his own lifetime the two giants of governmental bureaucracy—which employed sixty per cent of the work force—and organized crime, which dominated, if not employed, twenty per cent—had been locked in an endless power struggle on the battlefield created by the existence of the great mass of unemployed, living on citizen's benefits.

Only in the small fringe area of the international services, and in the research areas, could altruism and hope for a higher sort of humanity exist. And even here—as it had in the case of Will's death—the selfish concerns of governmental authority could step in and interfere.

Twenty-three years of life on Earth should, he told himself now, have taught him that the human race, transplanted to the other worlds, would be no better. But still he had come to Everon expecting just that. He should not be disappointed in the characters he had discovered in Martin, Armage, and the others he had met at the Constable's. Illogically, though, he was.

Moodily, now, he poked the fire with a branch; and a stream of red-gold sparks shot up into the dark like the rocket-trail of some tiny, invisible spaceship. Humanity, in the final judgment, was even worse than the milepost. Not only did it not give, it had no intention of doing anything but taking. Here on Everon, and back on Earth, where a whole world had been carved and altered to support a human race multiplied like a plague virus, his racial fellows offered nothing and planned to take everything.

Still, it need not be that way. In the midst of all that his race had done, down the red-dyed history of mankind, a spark of warmth and gentleness, like that Jef had found in the members of his own family, had continued to exist—chronicled in story and picture and music, taught in quiet comers, clung to in little corners of the mind. The other side of the coin from human selfishness had always been there, too. Only—it never seemed to gain the upper hand, never conquered—

Unexpectedly, Mikey, who had been lying still all this time, leaped to his feet. With one swing of his heavy head, he knocked Jef flat and stepped forward to stand over him, while for the first time since they had left Earth, from the maolot's throat came the deep, rumbling drone that was a true equivalent of a warning snarl.

"Mikey!" said Jef, and tried to get up. Mikey put one heavy forepaw on him and held him down, still staring blindly off into darkness, still rumbling his drone of warning.

Then, eerily, from the darkness came the sound of a high-pitched, human voice, shouting.

"All right!" it called. "Peace—nobody hurts nobody—I'm coming in. All right?"

Mikey took his paw off Jef and stood back. The droning in his throat ceased. Jef scrambled to his feet, staring at the maolot, and then off into the utter darkness of the forest into which Mikey was still facing.

There were a few seconds of waiting, and then a faint rustle from the obscurity was followed by the sudden appearance into the firelight of a slim figure a head shorter than Jef, dressed in leather jacket and green-brown check pants of thick-woven local cloth, with something slung on its back so that a gunstocklike end showed above the left shoulder. There was a quiver of what looked like short arrows at the belt. Jef blinked. It was some twelve-year-old: No—it was a young woman with close-cut brown hair and a lean, tanned face.

"Peace," she said again, stopping on the far side of the fire. "All friends—nobody hurts nobody like I said. But you're real lucky you've found how to make a watchdog out of a maolot. Before I saw that, I'd half a mind to put a bolt into you first and ask questions after."

"Put..." Jef shook his head. The words made no sense. "Why?"

"Why you're on my place—and no message sent you were coming through!" the girl said.

Jef blinked again. Her place? She looked to be somewhere between a dozen and sixteen years old.

"Strangers," she was saying now, "get shot on sight in these woods nowadays, when they show up without warning. Everybody knows that. Why don't you?"

Jef stared at her.

Her question was a good one. Why didn't he?

"Nobody told me," he said. The words sounded foolish in the quiet night above the crackling fire. There was that difference in her speech that he had noticed with the Constable and others, the faint pause in a sentence every so often. "Your place?"

"That's right," she said. "I'm Jarji Jo Hillegas; and this is my ranch—from Silver Meadow to Way Down Creek. I've got over six hundred head of eland running these woods. All the ranches around here are Hillegas ranches. My oldest sister's got the next one south, and my next-to-youngest brother's got his just north of mine. My dad's land backs us all up, eastways."

"Oh," said Jef. "You're an upland game rancher. But—" he hesitated, "you're young for that, aren't you?"

"I'm twenty-two—Standard."

"Oh." Jef continued to stare at her, uncertain as to whether she had simply taken him for an outsider who would believe anything, or not. In no way, he told himself, could she be only one Standard year younger than he was. Not the way she looked.

"And who the hell are you?" she was asking.

"Jef Aram Robini," said Jef automatically. "I'm—I'm here on a research project. I'm headed for the trading post—Post Fifty-right now. But I'm taking Mikey here—" He gestured at the maolot.

"—up to the mountains. He's been raised under observational conditions on Earth; and now I'm trying to find out how he'll adapt, back on his own world."

"The mountains? Why didn't you ride up with one of the supply-truck trains?"

"I wanted to get Mikey back into his natural environment as soon as possible. He's actually eight years old—"

"No, he isn't."

"As a matter of fact he is."

"I don't know who told you that, Robini, but anybody who knows maolots can tell you he's not more than four years, Local. If he was eight years old—"

"As it happens," Jef found an actual pleasure in interrupting her for a change, "he is. That's one of the reasons I brought him all the way back here. On Earth he didn't mature as he should have. If you'll let me explain..."

She listened while he talked, but without shedding the air of general skepticism that seemed to wrap her like an invisible poncho.

"Now, I didn't know I was trespassing on your territory, or that I was supposed to check with you first," he wound up. "But in any case, I'd have wanted to come this way. I've been hoping to find out about my older brother's death. He died here on Everon eight years ago—"

"Died? How?" An edge of hardness had come into her voice and Mikey droned abruptly on a note of warning. "What do you mean—'died'?"

Jef felt the sad bitterness gathering in him. For too many years he had, suffered the misunderstandings of other people where William's death was concerned.

"I mean
died!"
He came down hard on the word. "There was a man named Beau leCourboisier who was there when it happened. I'm hoping he can tell me more about it than the E. Corps could. My brother was a Colony Representative for the E. Corps here on Everon—"

"He was, was he?" The hard edge in Jarji Jo Hillegas's voice sharpened. "Beau know you're looking for him?"

"No. But since he was a friend of Will's—"

"Oh... friend." The edge went out of Jarji's voice. The warning note singing in the back of Mikey's throat faded away. "Still, if you were coming through here, you should have radioed ahead."

"Nobody said anything about that, I told you," said Jef. "Do you shoot anyone at all who happens to come through here, if you don't know they're coming?"

"Now and then," said Jarji dryly. "But if your brother was a friend of Beau's I guess I might hold off—in your case."

"Thanks," said Jef grimly. "Weren't you the one who yelled 'peace' just now? I'm not going just to stand here if you try to use that thing you've got. Neither is Mikey."

"Oh, I think I might handle the two of you, if I had to—the maolot first, of course," she said. "It wasn't any doubt in my mind about being able to do that, that stopped me when I first saw you. It was trying to figure out why anybody from the city or the wisent ranches would come up here with a maolot as a pet. They make pig-food out of maolots on sight down in wisent territory."

Abruptly she came right to the edge of the fire so that only its flames were between her and Jef. With a single smooth motion she swung her weapon off her back and sat down cross-legged, laying the device out before her on the ground, beyond easy reach. Seated so, on the green moss-grass, painted by the red-yellow colors of the firelight, she seemed so much a part of this nighttime forest scene that she looked more like some creature of Everon herself, rather than a human, twenty-two-year-old, game rancher with a killing machine on the ground before her.

"I said peace, and I meant peace," she said. "Sit down. Let's talk."

Slowly, and more clumsily, Jef sat on his side of the fire. Mikey crouched beside him, one heavy shoulder against Jef's leg. Reaching out with one arm, Jarji picked up a dry branch of variform pine from the pile Jef had accumulated, and tossed it on the blaze.

"A little more light, here," she said.