Planet of Adventure Omnibus (26 page)

The route to
Cath lay across the Dead Steppe, south under the Ojzanalai Mountains, northeast
along the Lok Lu Steppe, across the Zhaarken or the Wild Waste, over Achenkin
Strait to the city Nerv, then south down the coast of Charchan to Cath. For the
raft to fail at any stage of the journey short of Nerv meant disaster. As if to
emphasize the point, the raft gave a single small jerk, then once more flew
smoothly.

The day
passed. Below rolled the Dead Steppe, dun and gray in the wan light of Carina
4269. At sunset they crossed the great Yatl River and all night flew under the
pink moon Az and the blue moon Braz. In the morning low hills showed to the
north, which ultimately would swell and thrust high to become the Ojzanalais.

At midmorning
they landed at a small lake to refill water tanks. Traz was uneasy. “Green
Chasch are near.” He pointed to a forest a mile south. “They hide there,
watching us.”

Before the
tanks were full, a band of forty Green Chasch on leap-horses lunged from the
forest. Ylin-Ylan was perversely slow in boarding the raft. Reith hustled her
aboard; Anacho thrust over the lift-arm-perhaps too hurriedly. The engine
sputtered; the raft pitched and lurched.

Reith ran
aft, flung up the housing, pounded the black case. The sputtering stopped; the
raft lifted only yards ahead of the bounding warriors and their ten-foot
swords. The leap-horses slid to a halt, the warriors aimed catapults and the
air streamed with long iron bolts. But the raft was five hundred feet high; one
or two of the bolts bumped into the hull at the height of their trajectory and
fell away.

The raft,
shuddering spasmodically, moved off to the east. The Green Chasch set off in
pursuit; the raft, sputtering, pitching, yawing, and occasionally dropping its
bow in a sickening fashion gradually left them behind.

The motion
became intolerable. Reith jarred the black case again and again without
significant effect. “We’ve got to make repairs,” he told Anacho.

“We can try.
First we must land.”

“On the
steppe? With the Green Chasch behind us?”

“We can’t
stay aloft.”

Traz pointed
north, to a spine of hills terminating in a set of isolated buttes. “Best that
we land on one of those flat-topped peaks.”

Anacho nudged
the raft around to the north, provoking an even more alarming wobble; the bow
began to gyrate like an eccentric toy.

“Hang on!”
Reith cried out.

“I doubt if
we can reach that first hill,” muttered Anacho.

“Try for the
next one!” yelled Traz. Reith saw that the second of the buttes, with sheer
vertical walls, was clearly superior to the first-if the raft would stay in the
air that long.

Anacho cut
speed to a mere drift. The raft wallowed across the intervening space to the
second butte, and grounded. The absence of motion was like silence after noise.

The travelers
descended from the raft, muscles stiff from tension. Reith looked around the
horizon in disgust: hard to imagine a more desolate spot than this, four
hundred feet above the center of the Dead Steppe. So much for his hope of an
easy passage to Cath.

Traz, going
to the edge of the butte, peered over the cliff. “We may not even be able to
get down.”

The survival
kit which Reith had salvaged from the wrecked scout boat included a pellet gun,
an energy cell, an electronic telescope, a knife, antiseptics, a mirror, a
thousand feet of strong cord. “We can get down,” said Reith. “I’d prefer to
fly.” He turned to Anacho, who stood glumly considering the sky-raft. “Do you
think we can make repairs?”

Anacho rubbed
his long white hands together in distaste. “You must realize that I have no
such training in these matters.”

“Show me what’s
wrong,” said Reith. “I can probably fix it.”

Anacho’s
droll face grew even longer. Reith was the living refutation of his most cherished
axioms. According to orthodox Dirdir doctrine, Dirdir and Dirdirmen had evolved
together in a primeval egg on the Dirdir homeworld Sibol; the only true men
were Dirdirmen; all others were freaks. Anacho found it hard to reconcile Reith’s
competence with his preconceptions, and his attitude was a curious composite of
envious disapproval, grudging admiration, unwilling loyalty. Now, rather than
allow Reith to excel him in yet another aspect, he hurried to the stern of the
skyraft and thrust his long pale clown’s face under the housing.

The surface
of the butte was scoured clean of vegetation, with here and there little
channels half-full of coarse sand. Ylin-Ylan wandered moodily across the butte.
She wore the gray steppe dwellers’ trousers and blouse, with a black velvet
vest; her black slippers were probably the first to walk the rough gray rock,
thought Reith ... Traz stood looking to the west. Reith joined him at the edge
of the butte. He studied the dismal steppe, but saw nothing.

“The Green
Chasch,” said Traz. “They know we’re here.”

Reith once
more scanned the steppe, from the low black hills in the north to the haze of
the south. He could see no flicker of movement, no plume of dust. He brought
out his scanscope, a binocular photo-multiplier, and probed the gray-brown
murk. Presently he saw bounding black specks, like fleas. “They’re out there,
for a fact.”

Traz nodded
without great interest. Reith grinned, amused as always by the boy’s somber
wisdom. He went to the sky-raft. “How go the repairs?”

Anacho’s
response was an irritated motion of arms and shoulders. “Look for yourself.”

Reith came
forward, peered down at the black case, which Anacho had opened, to reveal an
intricacy of small components. “Corrosion and sheer age are at fault,” said
Anacho. “I hope to introduce new metal here and here.” He pointed. “It is a
notable problem without tools and proper facilities.”

“We won’t
leave tonight then?”

“Perhaps by
tomorrow noon.”

Reith walked
around the periphery of the butte, a distance of three or four hundred yards,
and was somewhat reassured. Everywhere the walls were vertical, with fins of
rock at the base creating crevices, and grottos. There seemed no easy method to
scale the walls, and he doubted if the Green Chasch would go to vast trouble for
the trivial pleasure of slaughtering a few men.

The old brown
sun hung low in the west; the shadows of Reith and Traz and Ylin-Ylan stretched
long across the top of the butte. The girl turned away from her contemplation
of the east. She watched Traz and Reith for a moment, then slowly, almost
reluctantly, crossed the sandstone surface and joined them. “What are you
looking at?”

Reith
pointed. The Green Chasch on their leap-horses were visible now to the naked
eye: dark motes hopping and bounding in bone-jarring leaps.

Ylin-Ylan
drew her breath. “Are they coming for us?”

“I imagine
so.”

“Can we fight
them off? What of our weapons?”

“We have
sandblasts
[iii]
on the raft. If they climbed the cliffs after dark they might do some damage.
During daylight we don’t need to worry.”

Ylin-Ylan’s
lips quivered. She spoke in an almost inaudible voice. “If I return to Cath, I
will hide in the farthest grotto of the Blue Jade garden and never again
appear. If ever I return.”

Reith put his
arm around her waist; she was stiff and unyielding. “Of course you’ll return,
and pick up your life where it left off.”

“No. Someone
else may be Flower of Cath; she is welcome ... So long as she chooses other
than Ylin-Ylan for her bouquet.”

The girl’s
pessimism puzzled Reith. Her previous trials she had borne with stoicism; now,
with fair prospects of returning home, she had become morose. Reith heaved a
deep sigh and turned away.

The Green
Chasch were no more than a mile distant. Reith and Traz drew back to attract no
notice in the event that the Chasch were unaware of their presence. The hope
was soon dispelled. The Green Chasch bounded up to the base of the butte, then,
dismounting from their horses, stood looking up the cliff face. Reith, peering
over the side, counted forty of the creatures. They were seven and eight feet
tall, massive and thick-limbed, with pangolin-scales of metallic green. Under
the jut of their crania their faces were small, and, to Reith’s eyes, like the
magnified visage of a feral insect. They wore leather aprons and shoulder
harness; their weapons were swords which, like all the swords of the Tschai,
seemed long and unwieldy, and these, eight and ten feet long, even more so.
Some of them armed their catapults; Reith ducked back to avoid the flight of
bolts. He looked around the butte for boulders to drop over the side, but found
none.

Certain of
the Chasch rode around the butte, examining the walls. Traz ran around the
periphery, keeping watch.

All returned
to the main group, where they muttered and grumbled together. Reith thought
that they showed no great zest for the business of scaling the wall. Setting up
camp, they tethered their leap-horses, thrust chunks of a dark sticky substance
into the pale maws. They built three fires, over which they boiled chunks of
the same substance they had fed the leap-horses, and at last hulking down into
toad-shaped mounds, joylessly devoured the contents of their cauldrons. The sun
dimmed behind the western haze and disappeared. Umber twilight fell over the
steppe. Anacho came away from the raft and peered down at the Green Chasch. “Lesser
Zants,” he pronounced. “Notice the protuberances to each side of the head? They
are thus distinguished from the Great Zants and other hordes. These are of no
great consequence.”

“They look
consequential enough to me,” said Reith.

Traz made a
sudden motion, pointed. In one of the crevices, between two vanes of rock,
stood a tall dark shadow. “Phung!”

Reith looked
through the scanscope and saw the shadow to be a Phung indeed. From where it
had come he could not guess.

It was over
eight feet in height, in its soft black hat and black cloak, like a giant
grasshopper in magisterial vestments.

Reith studied
the face, watching the slow working of chitinous plates around the blunt lower
section of the face. It watched the Green Chasch with brooding detachment,
though they crouched over their pots not ten yards away.

“A mad thing,”
whispered Traz, his eyes glittering. “Look, now it plays tricks!”

The Phung
reached down its long thin arms, raised a small boulder which it heaved high
into the air. The rock dropped among the Chasch, falling squarely upon a
hulking back.

The Green
Chasch sprang up, to glare toward the top of the butte. The Phung stood
quietly, lost among the shadows. The Chasch which had been struck lay flat on
its face, making convulsive swimming motions with arms and legs.

The Phung
craftily lifted another great rock, once more heaved it high, but this time the
Chasch saw the movement. Venting squeals of fury they seized their swords and
flung themselves forward. The Phung took a stately step aside, then leaping in
a great flutter of cloak snatched a sword, which it wielded as if it were a
toothpick, hacking, dancing, whirling, cutting wildly, apparently without aim
or direction. The Chasch scattered; some lay on the ground, and the Phung
jumped here and there, slashing and slicing, without discrimination, the Green
Chasch, the fire, the air, like a mechanical toy running out of control.

Crouching and
shifting, the Green Chasch hulked forward. They chopped, cut; the Phung threw
away the sword as if it were hot, and was hacked into pieces. The head spun off
the torso, landed on the ground ten feet from one of the fires, with the soft
black hat still in place. Reith watched it through the scanscope. The head
seemed conscious, untroubled. The eyes watched the fire; the mouth parts worked
slowly.

“It will live
for days, until it dries out,” said Traz huskily. “Gradually it will go stiff.”

The Chasch
paid the creature no further heed, but at once made ready their leap-horses.
They loaded their gear and five minutes later had trooped off into the
darkness. The head of the Phung mused upon the play of the flames.

For a period
the men squatted by the edge of the precipice, looking across the steppe. Traz
and Anacho fell into an argument regarding the nature of the Phung, Traz
declaring them to be products of unnatural union between Pnumekin and the
corpses of Pnume. “The seed waxes in the decay like a barkworm, and finally
breaks out through the skin as a young Phung, not greatly different from a bald
night-hound.”

“Sheer
idiocy, lad!” said Anacho with easy condescension. “They surely breed like
Pnume: a startling process itself, if what I hear is correct.”

Traz, no less
proud than the Dirdirman, became taut. “How do you speak with such assurance?
Have you observed the process? Have you seen a Phung with others, or guarding a
cub?” He lowered his lip in a sneer. “No! They go singly, too mad to breed!”

Anacho made a
finger-fluttering gesture of fastidious didacticism. “Rarely are Pnume seen in
groups; rarely do we see a Pnume alone, for that matter. Yet they flourish in
their peculiar fashion. Brash generalizations are suspect. The truth is that
after many long years on Tschai we still know little of either Phung or Pnume.”