The Game of Stars and Comets (56 page)

Was that mass of entwined vegetation a cover for a swamp? It could well be, though so thick a growth seldom was a part of any swampland I knew. And the beast we had fought off was of a size unsuited to the density of that maze men had not been able to force any path through as long as planet record existed.

Yet so sinister was the reputation of that massed growth I could well accept that it might give living room to any number of monsters. Not that that had any meaning for us now. We must concentrate on getting ourselves and my father to some civilized shelter. If we could not raise the mines with the com, then we must somehow trek south, back to the holding where we had been only days earlier.

I set about once more securing from the wagon such materials which might be of use. Spare of frame as my father was, we could not carry him between us and achieve any great distance, except at less than a usual walking pace. I believed that we had no time for that. Still there were other ways which we could attempt, and I salvaged gear, venturing gingerly time and again into the rocking, tilting wagon.

Water already washed into the front compartment and the wagon was near on its side as the stream gnawed steadily at the bank in which the back wheels were embedded. I had given Illo the second stunner and she had stationed herself to watch for any more water-dwellers.

The clouds had finally all gone and the sun made a dim showing, but it was already far down the horizon. I had so little time. Also I was so tired that my hands shook as I strove to unfasten lashings, bundle up all I could, perhaps bringing a lot which I had no need for in my desire not to miss anything which would be of value.

There was no lifting out the cargo. That, unless we could contact the mines and gain aid there, must be written off as a total loss. But the small stuff I bundled out hit and miss, passing up the awkward armloads I gathered to the girl who piled them about her sentry post.

I worked until the wagon gave a warning lurch so that I leaped clear just as it went over on its side while water boiled up and in. Somehow I won back up the slope and fell, gasping for breath with a band of permasteel seemingly fastened about my middle, drawing always inward as might the jaws of a slowly closing trap.

Illo had already carried some of the goods back to our improvised camp. Much I knew I could not deal with now. It was all I could do to stagger towards that flare which had now become a beacon, there to collapse again, my body one ache from head to foot.

I remember drinking from a pan Illo handed me, thinking dimly that we must set a guard for the night. Most of the grass plains had few predators, and all of those, as lopers knew, were not only night hunters but afraid of fire. However, there was still the water—and what could come out of it. Only I could not make any effort to so much as reach for the stunner which was thrust into my belt, even keep my eyes open. Instead fatigue settled on me in a smothering blanket, drew me in and covered me, as might the Tangle itself.

I awoke—The stars were brilliant overhead; the orange-red of Voor's moon was a ball hanging near directly over me. It was one of those instant awakenings which come to those who live always on the edge of the unknown, whose instincts and inner warning systems have become trained to signal alerts as potent as any a starship might possess.

There was the light on the ground—Three of our salvaged camp lamps had been filled, trimmed, and set out, burning sturdily. Beyond them lay an unsorted mound of all I had pulled from the wagon. After I had given out, the girl must have brought much of it here. The girl—!

She sat hunkered down beside the plank which served my father as a bed. The lamps gave her face a deceptive ruddiness. Her eyes were closed, but the hand lying beside her held grip on the other stunner.

I was ashamed at my own failure. At that moment my pride was cruelly hurt that I, who was supposed to be the toughened loper, had failed what was surely a good part of my duty. She had even pulled over me one of the gar fleece blankets. That I now hurled aside in my flare of temper at my own collapse.

Yet that temper only raged for an instant. Something had awakened me; my plains knowledge assumed control. I could hear the water in the gully, though that did not sound to me as if it were now made by any rushing stream. Perhaps that storm born flood was subsiding.

My loper's belt was about me, slung with those tools and aids any trekker must depend upon. Beside the stunner holster, the weight of my knife was against my hip as I stood up. My hand rested steadily about its hilt as I slowly turned my head from east to west, and then faced around to look north.

There was the night wind, yes, but it did not sing tonight through the long grass which had been so beaten down by the storm. Nor did it carry with it that strange odor which had been a part of it before the coming of the storm. If some scavenger prowled beyond the reach of our fire, the visitor made no sound.

For a moment or two I had a sudden leap of hope—the gars! Had Witol managed to find his way back, perhaps heading as herd leader the others of the team? I whistled softly that call which the massive beast always answered if he was within range of hearing.

There was no snorting, no sound of those hooves thudding on the plains ground. Yet there was something—a sound, a feeling had brought me out of sleep and now held me tense and listening. If my father—I knew that my hard-learned knowledge of the loper's world was nearly only the beginning of a child's first reading tape compared to his. I had seen him so alerted many times in the past, and always there had been excellent reason.

Sight was not going to serve me beyond the lantern glow; smell and sound had brought me nothing—yet. I crossed to where Illo huddled, stooped and drew the stunner from her lax grasp. With that at ready, saving my own for an emergency, I began a slow circuit of our improvised camp, stopping every few paces to listen, to stare out into the country with its moon-painted patches of light and dark.

Nothing to be detected. The grass was so heavy with water that it was beaten towards the ground. Anything trying to reach us through that would have made both sound and movement which I could easily pick up. There remained the stream. I unhooked my night torch from my belt. Its charges must be carefully conserved as there was only one small box of them which I had managed to drag away from the flood. Still I thumbed the control button on high and aimed the wide beam of frosty light down into the gully.

The weight of the wagon, its forepart pushed by the stream, had broken one of the embedded rear wheels, so now it lay on its side. Were my father whole and the gars to hand, its repair and return to the trek would have been a hard job but not an impossible one. Under the present circumstances I could not hope to draw the vehicle out again.

That river which had been such a force had greatly subsided. Though its surface was still opaque with silt and muddy swirls, the current had lessened and was no longer high enough to give cover to any such beast as had threatened us.

Though the dropping of the water would certainly have partly uncovered the bulk of the creature's body were it still inert from the ray, there was no serrated, scaled back showing. The thing had either been borne well down stream, or had swum away of its own accord. To my most searching survey nothing lay there but the wreck of the wagon and the steadily lessening flow of water.

I had made a circle about our camp without result. Yet—I knew. There was something which had awakened me, something out there somewhere—waiting—

I thought of what my mother's kinswoman had said—Shadow touched. Oh, I had heard the expression before but then it had not meant—me. What had happened when the death had come to the northern holdings? Why had a child here, some infants there—all second generation—escaped whatever doom it was which had blasted whole settlements out of existence? Why should we not remember?

Once more I reached back in my own mind—No, there was only riding the gar under the sun, my father tramping beside the beast. I could not even clearly remember him; the gar was far more vivid in my mental picture.

Was that because riding was strange and wonderful, an exciting thing for a small boy? The settlements and holdings used gars, yes—but those were lesser in size, in strength, in all that which might impress a small child, than the animals a loper trained and lived with most of his life.

I thought of my father's constant interest in the deserted and ruined sites where the Shadows had struck—risking his life to explore such. Why did men speak of "Shadows"? If there were no survivors who could report on the nature of the danger—then who had given them that name?

Again I searched memory and could find nothing to answer my own question. I had heard of "Shadows" as a danger, as doom and death, all my life—still, in spite of all my father's searching I had never been told why that unknown menace in the north had been so named. It was as if there was some inward flinching away in me which kept me from such speculation, a barrier—

As I slipped once more around our camp I not only searched the night-covered land for the reason for my waking, my uneasiness, but another part of my mind was busy—for the first time I could honestly remember—in asking those questions. Three times I went around just within the farthest gleam of the lanterns.

Instead of being able to reassure myself that nothing waited in the water-drenched, moonlit land, my feeling that we were under observation of some sort grew deeper. I found myself hunching my shoulders against my will, as if I expected a knife to come whistling through the air to strike into my flesh, a blaster to crisp me, skin and bone. I waited for a long space each time I stood at the edge of the gully, my torch beam striking down at the water which was reduced so rapidly now in its flow it was as if the ground itself was a sponge soaking up that fluid in huge quantities.

At last I turned aside from my self-appointed sentry's beat and went directly to where my father lay, covered with one of the blankets. In the light which was less glaring than my torch, his face was drawn, the bones seeming to stand out beneath the skin as if in these short hours some deadly illness had eaten through his resistance. And—His eyes were wide open. Not only open but aware. They met mine with intelligence, a compulsion which brought me to my knees beside him. I might have at that moment been no older than the small boy in my memory of the past.

Illo had washed the blood from his face, bandaged his wounds. The blanket was pulled up to his throat, masking the broken body. Pain must have made those lines so deep there now, but he had forced it away from him, under his control. I read that, and I do not know how I did it.

I saw his lips move with effort. There was a beading of sweat across what forehead the bandage did not cover. Driven by what lay in his eyes I leaned very low above him so my ear was close to those struggling lips. "North—to Mungo—" his words were a mere wisp of sound. "North—I—I—must—lie—in Mungo. Swear this, swear it!" Somehow he had gathered the strength to make those last four words ring out, above the tortured whisper, clear and strong as he might have given the signal for the gars to be on the move. There was a bubble of red again showing at a corner of his mouth. He coughed thickly, rackingly. The bubble burst, and blood spewed forth. But his eyes never loosed their hold on mine. His lips worked again—but there was only that terrible, tearing cough which brought out gouts of blood instead of the words.

"I swear—!" There was no other answer which could ease him in this time; that I understood.

The bright glint in his eyes still held strong and clear for a long moment after we made that pact. I reached beneath the edge of the blanket, found his hand and held it. In him there yet remained some strength, for his fingers tightened in my hold, gripping mine with a force I would not have believed he was still able to summon.

He did not try to speak again. But he kept his eyes open and on mine and we held that grasp. Was it for long? There was no measurement of time. I am not sure when it was that his head moved a fraction on the folded blanket we had used to pillow it, when he looked beyond me at something else. For that he did see something in that last moment I shall always swear. What it was remained his secret, but I think in some manner it was a comfort, for the pain lines lessened, and there was a new peace—an expression I realized I had never seen on my father's calm face before. He was in that moment younger, eager, a man I did not know, that it had never been for me to know.

I still sat by him as the moon dropped low in the night sky, but what I guarded now was nothing—an outworn coat, a forgotten and unneeded garment. My father was gone and left in me an emptiness which grew deeper and wider, making a space into which I thought I might even fall and never climb out of again. I had had no life which had not held him always there—what could I do now?

I started. The touch on my shoulder then was as if a blaster had seared across unshielded flesh.

"He has taken his own way, that lay in his mind from the beginning."

I looked up at the girl, my anger hot enough to burn away the uncertainty of moments earlier.

"He had strength—he would not have—done what you say!" I denied her words fiercely. For I had seen once or twice in my roving life those who died of what seemed minor illnesses or superficial hurts because they had no wish to live. My father was not to be numbered among them. I think at that moment my rage boiled up in me, fed by the hurt of my own loss, might have led me to strike out physically at her.

"He was tired—very tired, and he was one of those who know—"

She did not draw away from me. Her face and voice still held the calm of her calling. That serenity began to react on me as it always did when one came in contact with the healers.

"One who knows what?" I demanded.

"It is given to some of us to understand and know when the great change draws near. He was a man who has been driven many years by that which he could not accept—he had already begun to believe that he must reach beyond our life to understand."