The Game of Stars and Comets (4 page)

Even in this place the grass growth was calf high. By midseason it should reach well up a man's thigh. The grass equaled the grama covering of the Terran plains. Why had that been so important to Steel? Kade had had no chance to check the other's report tape before leaving the post. But there was one fact he did know, that Steel had been on just such an expedition as this when he had been found with an unidentified Ikkinni spear through him. Only last night Lik had made reference to that happening, had suggested the folly of any Terran leaving the hunting camp or wandering from the party on the march.

"These animals," the Overman had indicated his charges with a hooked thumb. "We can make them squeak to our piping." He patted his belt control. "But the lurkers in the mountains. Unless a man has a sonic, he is easy meat for them, never seeing his death until he has swallowed it."

"I thought all hunting parties were equipped with sonics," Kade observed.

"That is so. But such is the property of the Overman. Should one wander away too far—" Lik made a gesture like a Terran shrugging off the responsibility for such folly.

"I am warned." Kade had kicked his bedroll to the left, well away from Lik's vicinity. As he unsealed his sleeping bag he heard a faint rustle in the grass, guessed rather than saw Dokital had bedded down with the same avoidance of the Overman. Luckily since the Ikkinni was of the post crew Kade was reasonably sure Lik could not cause the young native trouble without his own knowledge and chance to interfere. Dokital's collar had been triggered by Buk against any run for freedom, but he could not be controlled by Lik's box.

Now, the morning after, the native drew even with Kade. Unlike his fellow slaves he held his head up, his eyes were fixed on the mountain peaks glistening white against the clear sky. Kade considered those peaks. There were three, set almost in a straight line, or so it appeared from the point where they now stood. And the Terran noted that their outlines suggested figures: Men, muffled in cloaks, folded in wings? He almost could believe that their party was under observation from that quarter, and for no friendly purpose.

"There is a name?" He nodded to the three sky-crowned giants.

"There are names," Dokital agreed. "Yuma, the Planner, Simc, the Netter, Homc, who strikes with a spear." He shifted the band which held Kade's field kit to his shoulders. "They wait."

"For us?" Kade asked on impulse.

"For that which will be." The Ikkinni's head came down, now aping the dull endurance of his fellows. But Kade had caught that half promise. Or was it a threat?

They camped at noon beside a stream which widened to pond proportions. A wiry Ikkinni, who had kept well to the fore all morning and who must be Iskug, the cliff man Abu had mentioned, hooked a fish out of the water. The creature was not scaled. Its rough, warty skin resembled that of a Terran toad, but bright red in color, and it had a spiky growth of hard blue mandibles about a narrow snout. Broiled over a fire it smelled far better than it looked and, feeling confidence in his immunity shots, Kade accepted a portion, discovering that the pinkish meat tasted better yet.

The Terran was alert to every sign of animal or bird life about them, making notes on his wrist recorder of two species of grazers they had sighted that morning, one equipped with a nose horn, the other apparently without any form of defense except fleetness. There were rodent things in the grass, and a flightless, feathered bird as fleet as the grazer but twice its size, which Kade was glad had not tried to dispute their passage. The spurs on its huge feet had been warning of a belligerent nature and, when it had opened its bill to squawk at them, he was certain he had sighted serrations like teeth set along the edges there.

But the impression remained that this was a rich game land not overcrowded with inhabitants. The Styor hunted some for sport, the lurkers for food, neither of them making big inroads on the native game. How true that was Kade learned a couple of hours later when they had made their way into the heights.

They had lingered for a breather on the top of a ridge, and ahead was a drift of mist—no, dust rising. Lik turned and two of the Ikkinni hastily moved to give him free passage.

"We stay."

"What is it?'

"One of the big herds of kwitu making the spring passage."

Kwitu, the horn-nosed creatures. But hundreds, thousands of them would have to be on the move to raise such a cloud as that. Lik sat down on a convenient ledge.

"They pass from south to north with the seasons. Sometimes it takes two days for a big herd to get through a gap." He watched the cloud of dust through narrowed eyes. "They head now for the Slit." His fingers went to his control box. Iskug, at the other end of the line of natives gave a convulsive jerk, his hands rising toward his collared throat, but he made no outcry in answer to that unnecessarily brutal summons.

Kade's hand balled into a fist, until he saw Lik's sly amusement spark in his yellow, reptilian eyes. Watch out! Lik might just double his collar pull for the pleasure of making the Terran show useless resentment. Kade's fingers relaxed, he brushed his hand across his hide field breeches, removing a smear of rock dust.

"There is a way into the mountains." Lik was not asking a question of the chief hunter, he was stating a fact. Iskug had better answer in the affirmative or suffer consequences.

"Such a one climbs high," the native's voice was husky.

"Then we climb high." Lik mimicked the Ikkinni. "And at once." He added an unprintable emphasis, but he did not give his guide a second collar jolt.

They did climb, from the back of the ridge, up a higher crown, and then by a series of ledges and rough breaks to the first slope of a mountain. The cloud of dust still hung heavy to the east and Kade thought that now and again the wind brought them a low mutter of sound, the bawling of the kwitu, the clamor of countless numbers of three split hooves pounding along the same ribbon of ground.

Close to sundown the hunting party reached a plateau where a stunted vegetation held tenaciously against the pull of the mountain winds to afford a pocket of shelter as a spring. Kade, kneeling beside the small pool that spring fed, was startled when he raised his eyes to the rock surface facing him. Carved there in deeply incised strokes into which paint had been long ago splashed, was the life-size representation of a kwitu, its broad nose-horned head bent until the pits which marked the nostrils were just above the surface of the lapping water. The unknown artist, and he had been truly an artist of great ability, had so poised his subject that the kwitu was visibly drinking from the lost mountain pool.

Kade sat back on his heels, held up his wrist so that he could catch the image, as it was now suitably lighted by the setting sun, on the lens of his picture recorder. Surely this was not Styor work; the aging and erosion of the stone on which it had been carved argued a long period of time, maybe centuries, since the figure had been completed. Yet who climbed to this inaccessible place to spend hours, days, perhaps months scraping into a natural wall of stone an entirely naturalistic representation of a plains animal drinking?

"Who made that?" His usual dislike for Lik's company did not hold now. The Terran asked his question eagerly as the Overman came down to pour water over his head and shoulders.

The other regarded the drinking kwitu indifferently. "Who knows? Old, of no value."

"But the Ikkinni—"

Lik scowled. "Maybe the animals make hunt magic. This is of no value. Phaw." He pursed his lips, spat. The drop of moisture carried across, to spatter on the rump of the kwitu. Then he grinned at Kade. "No value," he repeated mockingly.

Kade shrugged. No use trying to make the Overman understand. Filling his canteen the Terran tramped back to their camp. He watched the natives, apparently not one of them noted the carving. In fact that blindness was a little too marked. Once again his fighter's sixth sense of warning stirred. Suppose that drinking beast had some symbolic religious meaning? Kade's memory provided bits of lore, that of his own race and others, Terra born and bred. Far back in the mists of forgotten time were the men of his world who had wandered as free hunters, tribesmen who had drawn on the walls of caves, painted on hides, modeled in elastic clay, the shapes of the four-footed meat they wished to slay. And then they had made powerful magic, sending the spears, the arrows, the clubs later to be used in the actual hunting, crashing against the pictures they had fashioned, believing their gods would give them in truth what they so hunted in ritual.

He would not have credited the Ikkinni with the artistic ability to produce the carving he had just seen. But what did the off-worlders know of the free Ikkinni anyway? Their observations were based on the actions of cowered and spirit-broken slaves; on the highly prejudiced comments of masters who deemed those slaves no better than animals. Suppose that practices of that ancient hunting magic would linger on in a remote spot such as this, where perhaps no alien had ever walked? Lik had mocked such a belief in as filthy a fashion as he knew. But sometimes it was not a good thing to challenge the power inherent in things once venerated by another people. Kade had heard tales—

The Terran smiled quietly. An idea, an amusing idea was born from that point of imagination. He would have to know more of those Overman personally. Lik had mocked an old god thing. Kade began to fit one idea to another.

It was Lik himself who gave the Terran the first opening. They had eaten and were sitting by the fire, the Ikkinni banished to a suitable distance. The Overman belched, dug a finger into his mouth to rout out a shred of food eluding his tongue. Having so asserted himself, he stared at Kade.

"What matter old things to you, off-world man?" he demanded arrogantly.

"I am a trader, to a trader all things which are made with hands are of interest. There are those on other worlds who pay for such knowledge. Also . . ." he broke his answer with a calculated space of hesitation. "Such things are worth knowing for themselves."

"How so?"

"Because of the Power," Kade spoke with a seriousness gauged to impress the other.

"The Power?"

"When a man makes a thing with his hands," Kade held his own into the light of the fire, flexing his fingers slightly so that the flames were reflected from the rings which encircled the fore digit of either hand, "then something of himself enters into it. But he must shape it with his own flesh and not by the aid of a machine." A flicker of glance told him that he had Lik's full attention. The Overman was of Tadder and Tadder was one of the completely colonized worlds long held by the Styor. However, a remnant of native beliefs could still linger in a half-breed and Kade knew Tadder only too well.

"And because this thing has been made with his hands, and the idea of it first shaped in his mind, it is a part of him. If the fashioner is a man of Power and has made this work for a reason of Power, then it must follow that a portion of the Power he has tried to put into his work exists, at least for his purpose."

"This you say of those scratches on a rock?" demanded Lik incredulously, aiming a thumb at the shadows which now enveloped the spring and the carved wall behind it.

"So it might be said, if the fashioner of that carving intended it to be used as I believe he might have done." Because there was a measure of belief in Kade's own mind, his sincerity impressed the alien and the other's scoffing grin faded. "A man is a hunter and he wishes meat to fall before his spear. Therefore he makes an image of that meat, as well as he can envisage it, setting his choice of prey beside a pool where there is good water. And into this picture he puts all the Power of his mind, his heart, and his hands, centering upon his work his will that that prey come to where he had made such a carving, to fall beneath his weapon. So perhaps that happens. Wiser men than we have seen it chance so."

Lik played with his belt. His grin was quite gone. Perhaps he had a thinking mind as well as a driver's callous heartlessness. A bully was not necessarily all fool. But inducing uneasiness was a delicate and precise bit of action. Kade had no intention of spoiling this play by too much force at the start.

"It remains," he yawned, rubbed two fingers across his chin, "that there are those who have a liking for the records of such finds. And I am a trader." He returned the matter to the firm base of a commercial transaction, sure Lik would continue to think of the carving, consider its possibilities, in more than one field.

Kade succeeded so well that the next morning when he went to the pool to rinse and fill his canteen he discovered Lik standing there, studying the carving. In the brighter light of day the kwitu was less impressive, more weatherworn, but the artistry of the conception was still boldly plain.

That unknown artist had left no other trace of his passing or his living on the plateau which had survived the years. Although Kade examined every promising rock outcrop, there was not the slightest hint that anyone had crossed that expanse before their own party, though Iskug took a guide's lead with the assurance of one who knew his path.

On the far side of the plateau they descended an easy zigzag stairway of ledges to the bottom of a canyon where the sky was a ribbon of pale silver-green far above, and their boots gritted in a coarse amber sand which identified a long-dried river bed. Their journey in the half-gloom of the depths took on an endless quality, but when they halted for cold rations at mid-day Iskug indicated a new trail, another climb toward the heights. This was the hardest pull they had so far had and the ascent brought them to another ridge.

A murmur of sound filtered up, and with the noise a haze of dust thick as fog, not yet close enough to torment throats and eyes, hanging in a murky wave about a hundred feet below. Now and then the curtain wavered and Kade could see the bobbing, dust-grayed backs of the kwitu still headed north, filling the slit below from wall to wall, the constant complaint of their bellows echoed and reechoed into a sullen roaring.