Lord of Thunder Part 10

Then light and another path to be walked, another spiral, this glowing-not to be taken by one booted foot set carefully ahead of the other but mentally. And with the same concentration he had given to his action on the wedge, so did he now do this. He was at its center, with another kind of light rising in a haze all about him.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

The process was like waking from a deep sleep. Hosteen fought a groggy disorientation, became aware of where he was and that he no longer stood in the open on a wedge under a starred sky. Instead, his boots were planted on a clock of gla.s.sy material, and around him was another kind of light, a rusty glow that had no visible source unless it was born out of the air.

"Logan!" He demanded an answer, yet knew that none would come. In this place he was alone, alone with the knowledge that his species was not of this place-or time-that he was in strange exile.

The training the Terran had had acted against panic. He had followed an alien road but one that had had purpose-and it had brought him here. Now he must discover where "here" was.

Leaping from the block, Hosteen looked about. He was in a very small room-a room of three walls meeting in sharply angled corners. And those walls were unbroken by any openings of windows or doors. Again panic threatened as he faced the possibility of being imprisoned in this box. There was no spiral path to lead him out, only the block, the three walls, the ceiling over his head, the floor under him. And to his sight, walls, floor, and ceiling were solid.

But eyes were not the only sense organs he possessed. Hosteen approached the nearest wall and ran his finger tips along its slick surface. It was gla.s.sy smooth to the touch and a little warm-where he had expected the chill of stone.

He walked the full length of that wall until his fingers pointed into the sharp angle of the corner. Then Hosteen turned along the second. He had reached the mid-point of that when there was a change in the surface not perceptible to the eye. Three depressions appeared, not quite the size or shape of his fingers, since he pushed in with room to spare. But he was reminded of the finger locks used on inner-system planets, locks that would open only to print patterns of their owners' flesh ridges. If this was such a lock, he had no hope, for the fingers-or appendages-which had set it had long since vanished from Arzor. But the Terran pressed his fingers into those hollows desperately, hoping for but not really expecting action.

A tingling in each of those three fingers, spreading up across the back of his hand, reaching his wrist, now into his forearm. A tingling-or was it a sucking-a pull of strength out of his tendons and muscles to be absorbed into those gla.s.sy pits of the wall? Hosteen supported his wrist now with his other hand because, when he tried to withdraw his fingers, he found them gripped in a suction beyond his power to break.

He leaned against the wall, twisting his right wrist with the aid of his other hand, striving to break that contact, feeling strength seep out of him as clearly as if he could watch the draining process in action along every vein, through every finger-tip pore.

Then the wall shivered, shimmered, to break from ceiling to floor. A strip of surface three feet wide where his hand had touched vanished, and he fell through, then crawled out of the triangular box to lie on the floor of another, much larger s.p.a.ce. At least he was out of the cage!

Logan! Logan left back there on the plain to await the sun-and the burning death of the Big Dry. Logan! Would he-could he-take the same escape road Hosteen had found?

The Terran wavered to his feet, nursing his right hand and arm against his chest. The skin was pallid, the hand itself numb, and his utmost efforts to move the fingers resulted only in a slight twitching. Heavy and cold, he thrust it inside his shirt against his bare chest. But for a moment he forgot that as he looked around him.

The dusky, reddish light of the box was lightened here into the golden radiance he had remembered from the Cavern of the Hundred Gardens. With the hope of another such find, Hosteen stumbled forward to a waist-high barrier just a few feet ahead. Then he was looking down from a gallery into, not the gardens of his hopes, but into a vast a.s.sembly of machines and installations. And from it rose a subdued hum, a vibration of air. These installations were not only in working order, they were working!

Yet, nowhere down those rows could he see any tenders, no human or robot inspectors as one might find in off-world machine plants.

"Started-then left to run-forever?" he whispered.

For what purpose?

He started, along the gallery, hunting a way down to that center hall. The room was a vast oval, and his entrance had been at one end. Now as he skirted that waist-high barrier, watching the s.p.a.ce below, Hosteen continued to marvel at the size and complexity of the installations.

The Terran's own training had been in psycho-biology. An Amerindian had an ancient tie with nature and the forces of nature, which was his strength, just as other races had come to rely more and more on machines. It was upon such framework that his whole education had been based, his sympathies centered. So, both inborn and special conditioning had made of him a man aloof from, and suspicious of, machines. One had to be anti-tech to be a Beast Master.

Now his disinterest in machines was growing to a repulsion as he looked down into the well of the vast chamber. The minds that had conceived and produced the Gardens he could understand. He might, though he did not find any kinship with them, grasp the motives of the pen keepers-they had dealt with living things. But these installations put a wall between him and those who had once been active here.

His growing dislike was not blunting his powers of observation. Hosteen believed that only a small number of the machines below were in use. He pa.s.sed by whole sections where there were none of those subtle waves of power rising or failing. Then he saw the platform.

It was raised not more than a Terran foot or so above the floor of the main hall, and it was backed by a tall boarding, reaching almost to the balcony on which he stood. There were lines in relief on that boarding, running in intricate tangles. One made an irregular circle, and it glowed-glowed with a pulsating light of the same mauve that made fair Arzor sky different from Terra's lost blue.

Two other lines also showed color. One, a golden yellow, began in a straight column near the foot of the board and ran up to a mid-point, where, though there was a many-branched channel of the same tubing above, it stopped. And this pulsated with a faster beat. The third-Hosteen caught sight of the third, his attention riveted on it, startled.

That was a spiral leading to a dot. And as he watched, the light grew brighter, until its brilliance was more than his eyes could bear. The light traveled along that spiral, approached the dot, flashed there for an eye-searing second or two.

Then, the whole pattern of spiral and dot was lifeless, dead as the hundred other designs of tubing on that board. But he had not been mistaken. The light had been there-had been so bright he could not watch it, any more than a man could watch the sun of the Big Dry.

Hosteen turned and began to run back toward the triangular box from which he had emerged.

Logan-that shining swirl on the board could mean that Logan had taken the spiral and circle path out of the valley! He could be coming here!

The Terran's wild pace was such that he brought up against the now solid wall of the cubby almost as he had crashed against the inner wall of the cave where the Norbies had sealed them in to begin this adventure.

"Logan!" he shouted and heard the sound deadened, swallowed up in the reaches of the hall. Hosteen pounded on the wall with his good hand, drew the still numb right fist out of his shirt and tried to feel for any hollows on this side of the wall.

Pits for fingers. He had found them-this time with the digits of his left hand. He hesitated to deaden that too, as the right now was-to render himself helpless. But to get Logan out-free from the desert trap. Hosteen pushed his left hand against the smooth surface, fitted three finger tips into the waiting depressions, and waited, not without an inward shrinking, for the tingling-the sucking.

This time the response came more quickly, as might a lock long unused respond more rapidly to the second turning of a key. The panel faded, was gone- He looked into the cubby to see bare walls, empty s.p.a.ce-nothing else.

Hosteen had been so sure he would again face Logan that for a moment he could not accept that emptiness.

"Logan!" Again the cry, which had come with the full force of his lung power, was muted, flattened into an echoing murmur of sound.

Already the gap in the wall was forming into its old solidity. He had been so sure. Hosteen lifted his numbed right hand uncertainly to his head. His distrust of the machines, of the power he did not understand, was a hot fire in him, a heat that reached into his cold, blanched fingers. He crooked them with a supreme effort, felt nails sc.r.a.pe the skin of his forehead.

The spiral on the board-it had been a miniature of the design in the valley, the pathway that had deposited him in this place. And he was certain that when the tube had glowed, it had signaled the use of that path, or another like it. So-perhaps that board held the secret!

Hosteen lurched away from the now solid wall and started along the other arm of the balcony, searching for a way down to the platform. In the end, he found the exit, an un.o.btrusive opening back against the hall wall, giving on a series of notched steps. He held the guard rail of that steep stair, noting with a fierce joy that the lack of feeling in his hand was ebbing-though to raise it was still like trying to raise a leaden weight attached to his wrist.

Now he was on ground level, picking a way among the machines to the platform. The majority of the installations were encased in block coverings, and these towered well above Hosteen's head as he hurried down the aisle.

There was no dust here as there had been in some of the tunnels, no sign that this chamber had been in existence for eons, perhaps abandoned for centuries. Yet, he was sure all of this was a part of the vanished Sealed Cave civilization.

Hosteen had almost reached the platform when he paused, took cover. A hum came from ahead, rising from a low note, hardly to be distinguished from the general voice of the machines, to a sound more impressive than his own shouts on the balcony-as if this sound was normal here, the voice of man not.

On the tube-encrusted board another design had glowed into life. First blue-then white, bright enough to make him cover his eyes. When he looked again, there was a man on the platform, facing the board!

"Logan!" His lips shaped the name, but luckily he did not call aloud, for that was not Logan.

The stranger was taller than Hosteen's half-brother, and he was not wearing Norbie dress. In fact, those green coveralls were familiar. That was the Service Center uniform Hosteen himself had worn for over a year at the Rehab station, where the homeless forces of Terrans had been held until they could either be a.s.signed to new worlds or put through psycho-conditioning.

Slowly the Terran edged around the boxed installation. The LB had been transporting Rehab men when it had crashed, out on the mountain. Could this be a survivor, driven into the maze as Logan and he had been? Yet, the actions of the man on the platform were not those of a lost and bewildered castaway; they were the a.s.sured motions of a tech on duty.

His head turned from side to side as if he studied the twists and turns of that web of tubing. Then he moved half face to Hosteen Unmistakable human features, but painted over with the patterns of a Norbie Drummer-red circles about the eyes, a complicated series of lines on each cheek-just as Hosteen had seen on the faces of the warriors of the Blue. And slung about the other's neck was a small "medicine" tambour. An off-worlder who united in his person the make-up of a primitive medicine man and the actions of one understanding and tending the complex controls of a vanished civilization!

The stranger stretched out both hands and moved them across a line of small bulbs in a carefully governed sweep. To Hosteen's watching, he did not actually touch any, merely pa.s.sed the flat of a palm over them.

And the board answered. That line of yellow light bubbling in the vertical shaft broke through whatever barrier had controlled it and threaded up and out through a dozen, two dozen filaments, each branching and rebranching until the lighted whole was the skeleton of a leafless tree. The soaring light reached the very top of the board. And around him Hosteen was conscious of an ingathering of energy, a poising of power to be launched.

Far away, but still awesomely loud, there was a clap of thunder, pounding on in a series of receding rolls. Hosteen cowered against the machine.

He closed his eyes for a second and felt as if he stood in the center of a storm's full fury. He could sense, if he could not see, the savage lash of lightning across a night-black sky under clouds as heavy as the rocks over which they cl.u.s.tered. And, small, weak man-thing that he was, he could only seek shelter from elements to which man was nothing.

Yet, when he opened his eyes again, there was only a man in a faded coverall watching a light pulse through a transparent tube. The stranger's hand swept again over the bulbs. And the tree began to die, the yellow shrinking, retreating along the filaments, leaving the tubes empty. Once more it was only in the trunk from which the branches arose.

The storm ended. But the stranger was still intent upon the board. He paced along it, sometimes pausing for long moments, inspecting this and that pattern of webbing. Once or twice he put out a finger to trace some loop of tube. And Hosteen thought that perhaps he was unfamiliar with the function of that particular hookup.

At last he came to the end of the platform nearest the Terran and stepped up upon a small dais. To his right now was another line of bulbs. Holding his hands a foot apart before those, the man brought palm against palm in sharp clap, as if applauding some triumph. Then- Hosteen stepped away from the shadow of the machine that had sheltered him. The dais was empty, just as empty as if the man was as immaterial as that which had hunted them in the dry valley.

The Terran could accept his journey via the spiral path. But this was something else, more akin to the old magic that his grandfather had talked of before Terra became a roasted cinder.

He made himself mount the platform, go to the dais. There was no break in the flooring, no possible exit for a solid human body. Just as he had recoiled in spirit from the machines in the hall, so was he repulsed by this device. Yet, as he had been impelled to follow the spiral path in the valley, so now his hands moved against his will. He copied the gesture the stranger had used, palm met palm in a halfhearted clap.

Again the terrible giddiness of being nowhere on earth, or in any dimension known to his species, held him. But a spark of triumph battled fear-again he had used one of the tricks of this place boldly.

Hosteen opened his eyes. Ahead was daylight-not the artificial light of a cavern but true and honest sunlight. He was in a mountain tunnel heading to the outer world.

A murmur of sound ahead, and Hosteen dropped to his hands and knees, making the rest of that journey with all the caution of his Commando training. Daylight-the hour was well into morning he believed. Yet, there was no glare as there had been in the valley of the wedge or that was common in the country outside the wall of the Blue.

Had the devices of the Sealed Cave people put some film of protection between this taboo world and the blistering Dry sun? Had the same knowledge that had bored the tunnels and the caverns also brought weather control to the open? But this was no time for speculations.

Hosteen lay belly-flat at the tunnel mouth, then chose a crab-like crawl to take him out into the open and behind one of the abutments guarding the doorway.

Norbies were drawn up downslope, not in serried rows but in small groupings, each fronted by a flagged truce pole, headed by a Chief and a Drummer. Such a meeting of clans and tribes would amaze any settler. There were Norbies standing clan next to clan down there between whom there had been ceremonial blood feuds from long before the first Survey scout ship had discovered Arzor for Confederation star maps. Only a very big medicine could bring about such a truce against all ancient custom.

Shosonna, Nitra, Warpt, Ranag from the south-even Gousakla, and they were a coastal people who must have crossed a thousand miles at the worst season of the year to appear here. There were other totems of both clan and tribe Hosteen had never seen or heard described.

Counting, Hosteen made that tally of different poles more than a hundred, and he knew he could not see them all without emerging from his hiding place. By rude reckoning, every tribe on this continent must be represented!

The Drummers were busy, the beat of their individual tambours blending into a rhythm that stirred the blood.

Lean yellow bodies swayed back and forth, answering that call, though not a booted foot stirred. Hosteen could smell the fug of burned vegetation, could sight trails of smoke. Only recently the whips of lightning had again been laid about the shoulders of the mountain.

Thud-thud-a crescendo of sound. Then, after a final crash, silence. Into that silence fell a delicate counter-tapping-as rain might come in a more gentle fashion after the growl of thunder.

Into the open some distance below came the man from the hall of machines. His fingers played on the taut head of his own drum, making that thin trickle of sound. And his tapping was picked up by first one and then another of the medicine men in that company.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The off-worlder threw both hands high above his head, a head that under the sun shown as brightly red-gold as the fires of the lightning.

He began to speak, and he did not use the hand signs of the settlers. The twittering bird notes-which authorities had sworn could not be shaped by human vocal cords or lips-poured from him. He was talking to the Norbies in their own tongue!

Shrill cries broke his first pause. Truce poles were tossed in the air until the fluttering of their totem streamers whirled in a crazy dance of ribbon strips.

Hosteen's mouth straightened into a hard line; his face was graven, without expression, save that his eyes were watchful, as watchful as those of a man facing a death peril.

The signs were the same from world to world, race to race, species to species. This orator had the Norbies in the grip of a spell woven by his words. And he was inciting them to action! Their "big medicine" was working-alive! The trouble Quade and Kelson had smelled in the plains now walked openly in the Blue. Walked? No rather spoke with drum and voice-to urge what?

Hosteen's own inability to understand more than the emotions being aroused was a torment. But his doubts were resolved. Magic, if you wanted to call it that-but something his own inheritance recognized-was drugging their minds to provide a free path for unreasoning action, which could be used by that man in the off-world uniform with a Norbie painted face.

"Ani'iihii-" Hosteen spat.

Sorcerer was the right name for this witch man shaping disaster and death out of words, as the witches of Terra long ago had shaped a man's death from a lock of his hair ceremoniously buried in a grave.

The drums replied with a beat that awoke a response in Hosteen's own hurrying blood. Just so, generations ago, halfway across the galaxy, had men of his own race drummed and danced before raiding. This was preparation for war.

And with such a collection of tribes, there could be only one answer to the ident.i.ty of the intended enemy-the scattered holdings of the plains settlers, strung out thinly with leagues of open range land between each Center House, ripe for plucking by strike-and-run fighters. Norbies were warriors by tradition and training. It would take very little to turn them into an efficient guerrilla force that would wipe off-worlders from Arzor before they were aware of their danger.

The very nature of the country would fight for the natives at this season. Their carefully kept water secrets would make them far more mobile than any Patrol expeditionary force the settlers could call in.

Hosteen rubbed bis forearm across his face. Nightmares out of the past provided spectres to follow a man for years. He had served on the fringe of war that had involved not only worlds but solar systems, had seen the blotting out of nations and planets. Yes, the Patrol could be called in to end such a hit-and-run war-but afterwards, Arzor, as they knew it now, would cease to exist.

There was a final boom of drum-the orator was returning to the ledge of the tunnel, the Norbies ebbing back into the valley. Back to their village-to arm, to plan? Why? Hosteen could not pick the answer to that out of their twittering.

He worked a grenade out of his belt pouch. The stranger was on the ledge. Hosteen waited for a challenge, for some attack. But the other was staring straight before him, his eyes wide. He walked with a stiff, rocking pace. If he had locked the Norbies in some spell of eloquence, he was as tightly enchanted himself. Glancing neither to right nor left, he entered the pa.s.sage.

This was the mountain on which the LB had landed. Hosteen watched the Norbies withdraw, tried to think. The LB-and Widders' story of those weak signals picked up by line camp coms. Just suppose the craft's com could still broadcast! A message might be sent to alert the plains!

The stranger could be hunted later-but to get to the LB now was worth the risk.

Surra-Baku-Gorgol. None of them had been brought to the village while Logan and he had been there. Were the three still at large?

Hosteen sent out once more that unvoiced, unheard rallying call of the team-tried to locate some mental radiation from bird or cat to reinstate once again their tight compact, so that man, cat, and eagle would not be three alone and adrift but a weapon, a defense such as Arzor, with all its hidden secrets, did not know.

"Baku!" He sent thought spinning like a la.s.so into the sky, striving to reach the mind behind those falcon-sharp eyes. But there was no answer.

"Surra!" Now he deserted the upper s.p.a.ces and withdrew to the ground in search of one walking velvet-footed. "Surra!"

The answer he had ceased to hope for came like a stab of fire.

"Where?" His lips shaped the word as the query flew back along that tenuous thread of thought connection.

Impression of dark-of rock-walled pa.s.sages. The cat must be somewhere within the mountain. Yes, Surra was there. And she lay in wait for some living thing now moving toward her. The orator?

The frustration that rasped Hosteen moments earlier vanished. He worked the numbed line of mental contact just as he had the fingers of his numbed hand. Surra was an important part of him; without her, the composite ent.i.ty that was the team was crippled, helpless as a man shorn of some important sense organ.

And he knew from the quality of her response, fierce, demanding, that that lack had been hers also.

"The one coming"-he sent his message-"trail but do not take. Keep in touch with me."

Surra would take the stranger under surveillance. Hosteen was free to reach the LB. He swung down from the ledge and worked his way along the slope, using every bit of cover and scoutcraft he knew.

Drums again, faint-they must be in the village. He used a springy bush to lower himself into the clearing, where the sweet-sick scent of decay hung heavy. The offerings were still heaped about the rounded sides of the craft; the escape port on the top was closed.