Doomstar. Part 7

They would think of friendship, and stay their hands."

The colored paving stones came hard beneath his feet. He was moving backward all the time toward Nillaine. He watched the women, and now he could hear the soft rustle of them treading the gra.s.s, the ripple of their draperies around their slender legs. He wanted to laugh, but he was terrified.

There must have been fifty or sixty of them, their little knives all glittering.

"The men would think of friendship," he said. "What are you thinking of, Nillaine?"

"My village. My father. My husband and children. Seri promised that the Doomstar would never shine on us."

"There are other villages, other people."

"I don't know them. They are nothing to me."

"Let me go, Nillaine. I can stop Seri, so that the Doomstar will never shine for anyone."

"There are more than Seri, many more. You couldn't stop them. No, Johnny. Well be safe, and afterward we'll be strong, stronger than the Westpeople. They promised us."

"How will they make you strong?" asked Kettrick, and grasped her by the arm so quickly that she did not quite have time to get away. She sank her teeth and nails into his wrist, squealing all the while like a furious little animal. He slapped her head across the side of the head and she stopped all that. He picked her up and held her, a limp doll, across his body, and he said to the women, "Your knives will strike her first."

They were already faltering, their eyes and mouths wide with astonishment. He imagined that it had never occurred to them that a male would commit such an act of blasphemy in this place where they were supreme. Probably no sacrifice had ever objected before.

"Chai!" he shouted. "Chai!"

The women made cat-cries of outrage. They screamed at him to put Nillaine down, and some of them rushed to-ward him again, waving their knives. He held Nillaine out, a kind of living buckler against the blades, and moved slowly backward, away from them.

"Chai?"

"Hroo!"

Out of the tail of his eye he saw her loping from the trees at the back of the cup. She had had to make a long swing around to keep out of sight, as he had told her to do when he had pretended to send her away. He had not really be-lieved then that anything would happen; it was a matter of just in case.

Now he backed toward her and they met beside a pillar pregnant with carved fruits.

The women stared at Chai fearfully. She looked at the women.

"Kill, John-nee?"

"Not unless you have to." The women were gabbling now, tossing their hands wildly as they argued between themselves what to do. It was a long way to the trees, a longer way to the village. Kettrick wondered if they could ever make it, and he tightened his grip on Nillaine.

"Hit?" asked Chai.

"Hit," he said. "Yes. And I don't care if you break a few of their pretty little bones."

Chai grunted. Nillaine whimpered abruptly, twisting in Kettrick's arms. He was briefly occupied inquieting her again. He heard a noise behind him, and then there was a demoniac shriek from the women and they surged forward in a body. He turned to see Chai finish uprooting the pillar.

"Big stick," she said, and swung it whistling around her head. She bounded at the women.

She was more than twice as high as they, and the preg-nant pillar was eight or nine feet long. She swung it like a great flail. They screamed and fell, and ran, and scattered, screaming, and some of them lay on the ground and wept or moaned. Chai came back, breathing hard. The bulk of the women now stood in ragged clumps a long way off, looking at them in helpless rage. The bolder ones moved back to help the injured. Kettrick shouted at them.

"Let us alone, or I'll kill Nillaine!"

He raised her up and shook her at them so they would understand. Then he whispered to Chai, "For G.o.d's sake let's get out of here." They ran together for the woods, Chai with the carven fruits laid across her shoulder.

The tree shadows closed around them. Kettrick shifted Nillaine to a better position and went down hill with long strides. His heart was thundering and he felt sick, as though he had touched something unnatural.

They pa.s.sed through the gorge and into the jungle. Nillaine's small body lay lightly over one shoulder, her loose hair brushing his neck. He had almost forgotten her. In the forefront of his mind was the image of the ship and the need to reach it. Apart from that he walked in the roaring blackness of nightmare, where nothing was substantial, where time and distance stretched maliciously into strange dimen-sions, and underneath it all was fear, the gut-twisting, breath-locking, sweat-running fear that came with a word, and the memory of a dream.

Doomstar.

Don't bother about it, Johnny. It's only a myth.

He went down the shadowy tunnel, walking so fast that he was almost running, and there wasn't any end to the d.a.m.ned thing, it went on forever.

Nillaine was stirring. He thought, in a distant sort of way, that he would presently have to hit her again. All his atten-tion was ahead, where he strained to see the end of the narrow track.

Chai barked. He felt a sudden buffet across his back, mingled with a stinging pain. Nillaine cried out.

"What is it?" Kettrick snarled. "What the h.e.l.l is it?" He was startled and shaking. Nillaine had begun to sob, hanging over his shoulder. He put his free hand up across his back. It came away b.l.o.o.d.y.

Chai held up a small knife. "Not hurt deep," she said. "I see."

He understood then that Nillaine had drawn a hidden knife and tried to kill him, and that Chai had slapped it away in the bare nick of time. Kettrick stopped and searched Nillaine, and she lay all limp and unprotesting, sunk in misery. When he was sure she had no other weapon hidden in the blue silk he picked her up again and went on, a little sicker than before.

He came out at last into the main track. There he stopped and said to Chai, "We can't go through the village, there are too many of them. See if you can find a way around."

Chai ran on ahead. Presently she vanished. Kettrick walked more slowly now, watching ahead for any sight of someone coming from the village, watching behind lest any of the women from the place of sacrifice should try to take him in spite of his warning. He pictured himself hamstrung by a sudden blow, waiting on the ground for the little bright blades to flash down. Above him the familiar trees were as friendly as ever, showering him with fragrant petals.

Chai appeared again, beckoning. He followed her into what at first appeared to be trackless jungle,and then became in-dubitably a path, narrow and carefully concealed with vines. He did not bother to ask her how she had found it, and she could not have told him anyway. It seemed to go in the right direction, toward the landing field, bypa.s.sing the town. It was a very odd sort of trail, obviously not much used, but carefully kept clear.

They hurried along it, and now Chai carried the pillar club dragging from one hand because it caught in the creepers above and on both sides. She would have dropped it, only Kettrick said no. Apart from Nillaine's little knife, it was the only weapon they had.

When they were, as near as he could judge, about even with the village and some distance east of it, they came to a cleared s.p.a.ce not over ten feet in diameter. At one side of it was a little squat structure of heavy plastic sunk deep into the ground. Just recently it seemed to have been com-pletely covered with vines and sods of mossy turf. These had been torn away and the top of the structure opened, re-vealing a metal-lined cavity below.

Something had rested there, like a strange jewel in an improbable case.

He set Nillaine down and held her by the shoulders. "Where?" he asked her. "Where will they take it?"

"I don't know. Seri wouldn't tell us." And then she cried out, "You can't stop him! How can you stop him when no-body knows where he's going?"

She covered her face with her hands, and they went on.

Kettrick was sure now that the path led to the landing field, and it did. They emerged from an innocent, vine-cur-tains section of the jungle wall no different from any other section, and there was Grellah shoving her dark rusky bulk into the sky, perhaps half a mile away. The little booths of the trading fair seemed to have packed up and gone away from around her feet.

"Let me go now," Nillaine whispered.

And Kettrick said, "Not yet."

He started out across the landing field with Chai, running over the black scars of old flames, stumbling on calcined rock and ridges of gla.s.sy slag like cheap obsidian, flawed and stained. He had gone only a little way when he heard the tumult of many people pouring down the broad path from the village.

They burst out from the avenue of trees to his left, far to his left but closer than he was to the ship, a bright-colored spate of running, leaping, shouting, crying men and women that spread and fanned across the landing field to-ward him. They carried knives and other things, but that many would not need weapons. In the end they could pull him and Chai to pieces with their little hands, like monkeys.

Grellah's hatches were all closed. He filled his lungs once and cried despairingly, and after that he kept his breath for running.

His legs were longer than theirs. But they ran swiftly. Their legs scampered like those of children in some wild game that would end only when they dropped exhausted.

He could have run faster without Nillaine. Nevertheless he clung to her as a last desperate resort until he saw Grellah's hatch slide open, and Boker and Hurth came out of it with two of the bell-mouthed heavy rifles that fired stun-gas sh.e.l.ls. They began to fire into the forefront of the crowd.

Puffs of dark vapor blossomed and spread. The movement of the crowd became suddenly broken and erratic. Kettrick paused and set Nillaine on her feet.

"You will never be strong," he told her. "Your brains are like feathers, and you have no more purpose than birds."She appeared not to have heard him. She only whispered. "You have killed us, Johnny. You have killed us."

Chai let the pillar fall in the blackened dust beside Nil-laine. She and Kettrick ran on and left her there, a tiny drooping figure by the profaned fruits, her blue silk gar-ment soiled and torn, the flowers tangled in her hair. Her cheeks were dirty with tears and one small hand was streaked with Kettrick's blood.

Kettrick climbed the ladder with Hurth and Boker hauling at him and Chai pushing from behind. He heard the hatch shut and the warning hooter start to blow. He groped his way blindly to his seat, his own eyes hot with a stinging mois-ture.

The Doomstar poisoned more than suns.

11.

They were in jump again. There was the same sweating heat, the whine and hum of the unit, the blindness of not-s.p.a.ce. They had gone into jump long before the prescribed distance out from Gurra had been reached on conventional, impelled by a great desire to hide themselves in this nothing-ness where no star could shine at all.

Now Boker was doing a second and much more careful job of patching up the cut on Kettrick's back. The others hunched about on the bridgeroom seats, Glevan looking gloomily triumphant, While Hurth, like Boker and Kettrick, looked just plain scared.

"They tried to get us to leave the ship," Boker was saying, for perhaps the third time. "Wanted us to come in and have a feast, and I guess we'd have gone if you hadn't said that about sticking close. Funny.

Even though I thought there was something wrong..."

"You warned me," said Kettrick.

"I know. But I guess I couldn't quite believe."

Kettrick felt the sting of the antibiotic and shook his head. "Neither could I."

"They'd have killed us all," said Glevan. He leaned for-ward, his intense dark eyes fixed on Kettrick.

"So Seri has the Doomstar."

Kettrick said, "I think rather he has a part of it. A com-ponent. I saw the hiding place, and it was small."

Glevan said heavily, "How great a thing does it take to kill a star?"

"Oh, shut up that bull," said Hurth. "Something bigger than what Johnny said, it would have to be."

He pulled at his white mane with nervous fingers and laughed a curious little laugh. "And here I am talking about the d.a.m.ned thing as though it was ordinary as cheese and a few hours ago I didn't even believe it existed."

"Neither did I," said Kettrick. "Not really."

Only a myth, said the mocking voice in his dream, echoing his own carelessness. He thought of Seri, somewhere ahead of them in s.p.a.ce, speeding somewhere with his load of death, and suddenly he was furious.

"He used my name," he said. "He used my friendship with those people." Another thought struck him. "I wonder how many more of my friends he's bribed and frightened and lied into helping him."

"There must be more," Boker said. "That would make good sense. They couldn't keep the wholemechanism together, whatever it is; it'd be too dangerous, too likely to be found. And whatever stuff it is they use to, well, to make the change in the sun cycle, they wouldn't want that around, either. I'll bet they've got caches scattered all around the Cl.u.s.ter, a bit here and a piece there, so it could never all be found and destroyed before they were ready to use it."

He finished with the cut and began to put the first aid box neatly back together again. About some things Boker was scrupulously neat.

"Primitive people," Kettrick was muttering. "People with no science, with a lot of superst.i.tion, and no knowledge of anything in the whole wide universe outside their own villages. It would be easy to use them, easy to frighten them and make them feel important at the same time. They're all human, they're all greedy little thieves, every one of them with something in his mind he'd like to have without really going to any trouble to get it. Seri promises to give them what they want, threatens to destroy them if they don't help and promises them safety if they do...'The Doomstar will never shine for us,' Nillaine said...and all they have to do is keep a small thing safe for him until he wants it."

"Pride," said Glevan. "That is the great sin. They feel that they are G.o.dlike with the power to destroy."

"Very likely," said Hurth sourly. "I take more pleasure in creating, and better for them if they did too, but that's all by the way. The thing is now, what are we going to do about it?"

A silence fell, accentuated by the drone-whine-clack of the ship. They looked at each other, their eyes oddly glistening in the sickly light.

"I mean," said Hurth, "like you said, Johnny, he's going somewhere with that thing, and there could be only one reason. They're going to use..."

"Whoever they are," said Boker.

"Well, we know one of them, Seri Otku, and he's going to use it. So what do we do? Mix in or stay out? Me, I'm scared. Who knows, we could come out of jump by Thwayn and find it's already poisoned."

"You could go anywhere and find that," said Boker. He paced up and down the cramped floor, runnels of sweat creeping down his chest and back. "Maybe we ought to go back to Tananaru. What do you think, Johnny? We could tell somebody there about it and let them do the worrying."

Kettrick had been wrestling with the same problem. It was not possible just to send a message from where they were to, say, Sekma. There was no communication at all in jump, and out of jump it took too long, even at the speed of light. By the time the message got there it would be out of date by several years. Communication between the Cl.u.s.ter systems was carried on by fast ships which moved in a constant stream between the worlds that had use for them. A world like Gurra or Thwayn, on the other hand, which had few or no messages to send, depended on traders to carry what mail they had. There had not been any other traders at Gurra; they had radiochecked with the still primitive but growing s.p.a.ceport in the western hemisphere, because Kettrick had had some idea of trying to get a message back.

So it might be better to return to Tananaru, find Sekma or someone else in authority...

Then he shook his head. "It would take too long. There wouldn't be any chance then of stopping Seri. Even with fast I-C ships, he'd have had too big a start, and anyway we don't know where he's going, for sure. I think we've got to try and keep track..."

"Thwayn, Kirnanoc, Trace. It could be any of those sys-tems," Boker said, and shuddered. "G.o.d.

All those planets."

"It wouldn't have to be any of them," Kettrick said. "We only know where he said he was goingwhen he posted his i-t."

Hurth said, "But he has to follow it! Or the I-C will d.a.m.n well want to know why."

"The I-C?" said Kettrick. " 'After it's over,' there won't be any I-C."

"That's right," muttered Hurth, more shaken than he had been at the thought of any other change.

And Glevan ob-served that they were armed with a mighty power.

"We have one advantage, maybe," Kettrick said. "Seri doesn't know we're following him...a.s.suming that we are, of course. He doesn't even know I'm alive. And no wonder he didn't want me meddling around! If the I-C had caught on to me and started investigating him..." Kettrick groaned. "Oh, lord, if they only had! Well..."