The Game of Stars and Comets (7 page)

The horse put by chance and blindness into the hands of born horsemen!

Had that been Steel's dream too? Feverishly Kade went back to his listening, ran through the whole tape. He was sure now he could pick out hints, that something of that idea had been in the dead man's mind. But only that one phrase was clear. Introduce horses into a horseless world, a world of plains where the grass would sustain the breed. Put the horse into the hands of natives now immured in the mountains. Make of them lightning raiders who could hit and run, darting back into mountain hideouts where the airborne reprisals of the Styor could not follow. A band of attackers who could split into individual riders only to regroup when the danger of pursuit was past, and how could an air patrol cover the scattering of half a troop of men all riding in different directions? Just as the outlying haciendas of the Spanish had fallen one after another to whittling raids, enemies striking without warning out of the plains, so could the lords of Klor, in their widely separated holdings, be victimized by raiders who had at their command a method of swift transportation which was not a machine to be serviced or to lack fuel, which would reproduce itself without any need for technologists or factories.

Kade's enthusiasm grew as his imagination painted a host of details. He believed he saw a way in which the High-Lord-Pac could be used to initiate the Styor downfall. A selection of tri-dees of horses, shown to an alien already enough interested in off-world animals to pay the fantastic fee for the importation of a bear, ought to do the trick.

Kade's enthusiasm grew as his imagination painted a might-be-easy. But horses for the Ikkinni—What proof had he that the native hunters of Klor would take as readily to the use of alien animals as his ancestors had done? Suppose the Ikkinni were neither natural born riders, nor could be made into passable horsemen? And they had no history of domesticated animals, even the dogs and cats which had accompanied his own Terran kind for so long were not to be found on Klor.

Yet Dokital had been fascinated by the bear, had asked about the relationship between it and the Terran. He could try some propaganda on the one Ikkinni with whom he had a tenuous bond approaching friendship.

Since their return from the hunt Kade had avoided the native mainly for Dokital's protection, since Buk, aroused by the death of his co-worker, had thrown off his lethargy and was now playing the slave driver with a harshness Abu did not challenge. Kade sensed that any special notice of the young Ikkinni now would bring him to the unfavorable attention of the Overman.

When at last Santoz came to spell him at the coms, he answered the other's small talk absently, eager to get to his room. But as he crossed the courtyard he caught a glimpse of faint light in a window slit which should be totally dark. And he threw back the door panel, to confront an Ikkinni, hairy back toward him, on his hands and knees beside the wall bunk, striving to open the storage place in its base.

Kade stood still, his fingers flexed not too far from the butt of his stunner. Then, without turning his head, the other spoke.

"It has been waiting."

"And searching. For what?"

"For that which was brought from the mountains." Dokital arose. As all the post slaves he was unarmed, spears issued only for hunting trips. Kade did not believe the other would attack against a stunner or attract a swift vengeance from Buk, but his attitude was far from friendly.

"And what does it want with the remains of the slave box?" Kade came into the room, shut the door panel.

"Buk wears a box also." Now Dokital turned, faced Kade, his shoulders slightly hunched, the look of an untamed thing about him, ready to offer battle if he could get what he wanted. "The starwalker can break the box of Buk, he has not done so. Nor has he given the box which was broken to others." The hostility was now in the open.

"Does it forget what happened when the box of Lik was broken," Kade kept his voice low, fearing that even a murmur might carry beyond the walls. Let a hint of what he had hidden reach Abu and he would be bundled off planet, his career ruined, perhaps a labor gang sentence waiting. And let that same rumor, even distorted, carry to the Styor and it could mean the death of every Trader on Klor, the banishment certainly of the only weapon the rulers allowed the Terrans to handle. "Some died because the box was broken," he tried to impress the native. "Let Buk's box feel this," he tapped the holstered stunner, "and maybe Dokital will be it who this time loses breath."

But the Ikkinni appeared unmoved by that argument. "Better it dies and some live." He held up his fingers and then deliberately folded those of one hand under. "Let this be so, starwalker. Yet still are these free." He wriggled the raised ones vigorously. "To lose breath is better than to run back and forth while Buks says 'do this, do that.'"

"Dokital says so, but will the others here agree?" Kade pointed to the fist of closed fingers. "Has it spoken to them concerning the broken box?"

"Had it spoken," Dokital answered with a deliberate spacing of words which gave a weight beyond their simplicity, "the starwalker might have lost breath—all the starwalkers—so that what they carry could lie here," he slapped the fingers of one hand across the palm of the other. "It waited but the starwalker had not broken Buk's box. Now it will talk, and things shall be done."

Kade slammed the full weight of his body against the Ikkinni, bore the native back to the bunk and held him there in spite of his struggles.

"Listen!" He almost spat into the rage-darkened face inches away from his own. "Buk will be taken at the right time. Move now and the Styor will blast us all into nothingness. Let me find out how the box is broken and perhaps we can move without men dying."

"Time! There is no time left, starwalker. A message comes from Cor. The starwalker is to go to the collar masters. When they discover what has happened it will lose breath and no starwalker can save—"

A message from the Styor city. But he had heard nothing of that. The Ikkinni might have read the Terran's puzzlement in the slight slacking of his hold.

"It speaks the truth!" Dokital's body arched under his in a last frantic attempt to gain freedom. Then they both froze at a sound from without, a rap on the door panel.

Kade loosed his hold on the native, pulled away from the bunk, edged to the door, his stunner out and centered at a point between Dokital's red eyes.

"Who is there?" he called over his shoulder.

"Buk."

Dokital, still sprawled on the bunk, tensed, his head turning from right to left as if he searched for sight of a weapon he had no hope in finding. Kade gestured imperatively. The Ikkinni slipped to the floor, opened the base storage space and pulled himself into hiding.

The Terran took his time about freeing the thumb lock on the corridor door, waiting to see that space closed. Dokital would have to double up painfully in such a small cranny, but discomfort was better than having Buk discover him here.

To Kade's surprise, the Overman, hesitating on the threshold, made no attempt to look about the room. If he had come hunting a missing slave he did not disclose that fact. Instead his attitude was uneasy and Kade's confidence grew.

"The Overman wishes?" the Terran demanded with chill crispness.

"Information, starwalker," Buk blurted out with little of his usual assumption of equality with the Traders. He slid one booted foot into the room and Kade guessed that he did not want to state his business in the open. The Terran stood aside and Buk oozed in, shut the door panel and set his plump shoulders against it as if to stave off some threatened invasion.

"There is a story," he began, looking none too happy. "Now there are those who say that Lik saw a certain thing by the water and mocked that thing openly, then he was slain by that which he mocked."

Kade leaned back against the end of the bunk. "There was an old, old carving on a rock by the pool," he spoke gravely, "which Lik spat upon and mocked, yes. Then with the next dawn the kwitu which was like unto that pictured by the pool, came and rent him. This is no story, for with my two eyes I saw it."

"And the thing by the pool. Who made it so?" Buk persisted.

"Who live in the mountains, Overman?"

Buk's tongue, thick and a brownish red, moistened his blubbery lips. His fat rolls of fingers played a tattoo on either side of the control box at the fore of his ornate belt. His uneasiness was so poorly concealed that Kade's half plan, shelved at Lik's death, came to life again. Now he decided upon a few embellishments. If Buk was superstitious the Terran could well add to his growing fears.

"I have been asking myself," Kade said, as if he were musing aloud and not addressing Buk, "why it was that the kwitu did not turn horn and hoof on me, for I was easy meat when the sonic failed us. However the hunt was not for me, but for Lik, and he was not the nearest nor the first that the bull sighted. It is true I had not mocked that which was carved beside the pool, rather did I speak well of it, since such old things are revered among
my
people."

"But to believe so is the foolishness of lesser creatures," Buk's tongue made its nervous lip journey a second time. "Such thinking is not for masters."

"Perhaps so," Kade made polite but plainly false agreement to that sentiment. "Yet among the stars many things come to pass which no man can explain, or has not found a proper explanation to fit the circumstances. All I know is that I breathe and walk, and Lik does not, where Lik mocked and I did not. Perhaps this adds to something of meaning, perhaps not. But while I am on Klor I shall be careful not to mock what I do not understand."

"Foolishness!" Buk grinned sickly. "The collared ones can not slay with a picture!"

"Not they, perhaps. But I have heard also of a Planner, a Netter, and a Spearman."

Buk laughed again, but this time there was no mirth in that sound, it was close to the snarl of a rat cornered and knowing fear.

"Rocks! Mountains!" he jeered.

Kade shrugged. "I have told you what I know, Overman. Is this what you would have of me?"

Buk fumbled with the door panel, stepped back into the courtyard corridor, still facing the Terran almost as if he feared turning his back upon the off-worlder. He muttered something and was gone, slouching, his bristly head sunk a little between his shoulders.

Kade slammed shut the panel as Dokital crawled out of his hiding place. For a long moment they eyed each other, but the will to struggle was gone. The Ikkinni whipped out of Kade's room, heading in the opposite direction to the one Buk had taken.

The Terran turned back to his tapes. Since the High-Lord-Pac had purchased the bear for collection there must exist some tri-dee from which the Styor had made his selection. And among them might just be one of a horse. Equines had been exported to a score of Terran colonized planets and should be listed on the Trade tapes.

Only a small portion of his mind was occupied by that search. Dokital's demand for action, Buk's display of superstitious fear, the attempt to murder him by the sonic failure; a hint there, a half-disclosed fact elsewhere—Kade had the breathless sensation of one confronted by a complicated tangle and ordered to have it unraveled within an impossibly short time.

How limited that time might be he learned only a few moments later. Commander Abu came across the courtyard with the news.

"They are sending a hop-ship from Cor to pick up the bear," he announced. "And since the High-Lord-Pac has asked for a report on the hunt trouble, you might as well go along with the transport. Here," he held a box of tri-dees. "We'll suggest to his lordship that, because of the trouble, the Service will be glad to offer him his choice of any of these items. But don't be too blatant. The Styor want their bribes shoved in their pockets around some corner when no one is looking, rather than slapped into an outheld hand."

"You are going, too?"

The other nodded. "Pomp and ceremony," he said wearily. "Commander speaks to planet governor. Oh, check your stunner in before you leave. No one wears an off-world weapon in Cor."

As Kade hurriedly packed his jump bag he had no time to check the box of tri-dees. Nor did he see Dokital when he went to leave his stunner.

When the Terrans reached the landing apron Kade stood aside to allow Abu to proceed him up the ship's ramp. And, as the younger man set foot on that slender link between ship and ground he experienced a sudden sharp pull at his scalp lock. Kade's trained body went into action, falling back at the pull, but not quickly enough to carry his attacker with him. The grip was released and he sprawled clumsily on his back. As he scrambled up he looked around.

There was nothing to be seen, his assailant had vanished. He examined his small twist of hair with his fingers. The tight braid worn by his people was intact, and he could guess no reason for that odd assault at the foot of the Styor ship.

Cor arose abruptly
from the rolling Klorian plain with insolent refusal to accommodate alien architecture to a frontier world. The city might have been lifted entirely from some other Styor-controlled planet and set down here bodily with all its conical towers, their glitter-tipped spearlike crests pointed into the jade sky. Arrogantly, they were not a part of the ochre landscape on which their foundations rested.

Since Styor ships were not adapted to Terran physique Kade had spent most of the trip trying to control a rebellious stomach and screaming nerves. Now he cultivated as impassive a set of features as he could while waiting on the landing strip for the arrival of the bear cage.

Gangs of Ikkinni slaves were at labor, with Overman halfbreeds from half a dozen different Styor-controlled worlds in command. But the lords themselves were not to be seen. The pilot of the ship which had brought the Traders must be of the pure blood, none other ever being given a post of authority. And the Portmaster, invisible in his vantage chamber somewhere in the heights above them, would be Styor.

Kade, seeing no official greeters, knew again the prick of anger at this deliberate down grading of the Traders. The omission of such civilities was more pointed when a slender private-flyer set down half the field away from the freighter and an almost instantaneous swirl of activity there marked deference paid to some outplains lordling. The Terran took tight grip on his temper, promising himself that this time nothing he saw in the Styor stronghold, no insult covert and subtle, or open and complete, would provoke him into answer. The only trouble was, as he knew very well, Kade Whitehawk was not and never would be a proper exponent of the Policy.