Perilous Planets Part 25

Sweeping Thorana behind him, he leaped back into the open Pit. Above them, huge and repulsive, the Star-Beast clung to the bars of its cage and glared down at them with little, glittering eyes.

The thing's head and body were s.h.a.ggy with tangled reddish hair. It's legs and arms were thick and crooked; its body squat and brutish. It had narrow, club-like feet and stubby fingers. There were little, crumpled ears half-hidden in its matted hair - flabby, s...o...b..ring lips - a nose which was a bulbous snout set between two tiny bloodshot eyes that glared palely out of the darkness. A foul animal reek came from the filth of its cage.

The Beast had come out of the desert, twenty years and more before. Thandar, Korul's father and First Man in his time, had trapped it among the high levels. They netted it, like any of the great carnivores in the Pit, and chained it but it burst its chains and crushed its captors in its mighty arms. It ran wild in the upper city and broke into the Hall of the Masters, trampling them underfoot in its efforts to escape, beating off its pursuers with a metal shaft that it swung like a club.

Some how the thing had found its way into the maze of corridors deep under the city where the water-conduits ran. It had lurked there for ten days, eluding the search parties with animal cunning, fighting savagely when cornered. Then it burst out into the secret cells of the Searchers, and with their cunning they made a gas that brought it down.

The thing was senseless when they brought it into the Pit and built this cage around it. They found it would eat flesh, and there they left it, raging and beating at its bars and bellow-ing its b.e.s.t.i.a.l gibberish at the stars.

Star-Beast they named it. When it had grown quiet and people came to look at it, it would mouth and mutter and gesture with its fore-paws at the mists above the Pit" - and when they laughed, or shrank away, it would fly into a furry and shake the bars of its cage and roar. Then the novelty wore off, and only occasional visitors came to see it - children, for the most part. When it roared and gibbered, they would mock and gibber back, and run off laughing.

The Beast grew sullen. Time and again it tried to leap on its keeper when he came with food, or to clean its cage. Finally no one would go into the cage, and it lay in its filth staring up through the mists of the gorge at the dim, haloed stars.

It had been docile enough during all the nights they had been meeting on the bench under its cage. It would pace to and fro as caged beasts do, or squat against the bars above them, staring down, listening, watching, mumbling or whining to itself.

Thorana had grown fond of the thing; often she would bring food for it from the Masters' kitchens. It showed no in-clination to harm her, but growled in pleasure and made half-hearted efforts to groom itself as other beasts do. Now it clung against the bars, huge, s.h.a.ggy, monstrous, yet no longer re-pulsive. They were growing tolerant of life and its many forms, Korul thought, now that death was so near.

Thorana clutched his arm. 'What was it?' she whispered.

'Up there, I think.' Korul pointed to the lowest terrace, above them in the dark.

Perhaps there are some who still con-sider Korul their First Man, he thought grimly. 'Korul!' It came again, close to them. 'Here!'

Thorana's fingers dug into his muscle. 'Korul - the Beast The Star-Beast!'

He stared at her. 'It's true,' she insisted. 'I was watching it. I saw its lips move!'

Korul's grip tightened on his knife. What trickery was this? Was there a hidden speaker, an eavesdropping pick-up in the cage? Was one of Karak's bullies there in the cage spying on them, disguised in the Beast's flayed pelt?

He climbed up on the stone bench and peered at the Beast through the bars. It towered over him, fully a third again his height - huge, hairy, hideous, staring at him with eyes that seemed to try to speak. And its lips moved, clumsily, spewing out blurred, uncouth sound that were somehow twisted into words: 'Korul! I - not - speak - good. I - hear. I - understand. I - sad.' Then, hesitantly: 'I - help!'

G.o.ds above! Crudely, roughly, mouthing the syllables and ignoring the simplest rules of grammar, the Star-Beast was speaking in the ancient language of Mur!

The Star-Beast Thorana was there beside him. 'What are you?' she demanded. 'How can you speak our tongue?'

'Slow. Slow,' pleaded the Beast. 'I - not - understand -good - too. Speak - slow.

Slow.'

Korul repeated what she had said.

'I - hear - you,' the thing explained. 'Many - days -I - hear - you - speak. I - understand - your - words. I - learn - slow. Now -I - hear - your - trouble. I - will - help.'

'But - what are you?' It was Thorana again. 'How can you help us?'

'Stay - here - tonight. Speak - slow. Show - me - words. Stay - tomorrow. Tell - me - all. I - tell - you. Tomorrow -night -I help.'

Weird, unnatural words from that hairy brute, caged here in the Pit as a monstrosity, tormented by children and malicious men and women. Weirder still the story that he told.

All that night and the next day they sat by the cage, talking slowly, using simple words, ill.u.s.trating with gestures. The guards at the archways were puzzled, and faces peered down curiously from the terraces that encircled the Pit. Perhaps Karak did not dare attack in daylight, in the open, with the People looking on. Perhaps it was Turun who remembered his old friendship with Thandar and Thandar's son.

They were not molested.

The Beast was wonderfully quick to learn. From the be-ginning it had tried to remember words - couple them with gestures - understand their meanings. For half a year now it had spied on Korul and Thorana almost every night. It had had twenty years to lay the foundations of the language of Mur; now, in a day, they must raise the superstructure -grammar, p.r.o.nunciation, distinctions of meaning.

The thing's throat and tongue were ill-fitted for their rapid, sibilent speech. It spoke ponderously. By straining it could make the words clear, if dull and heavy as an idiot child might speak them. But this beast from the stars was no idiot!

Jim-Berk it - he - was called, in his own tongue. He had come from a world nearer the sun than Mur, in a metal sh.e.l.l driven by explosives. He had lived twenty of his own years then. Here on Mur - Mars, he called it - the years pa.s.sed twice as slowly.

Jim-Berk's sh.e.l.l had landed safely in the low hills beyond the desert, far to the North. From his world, Searchers had been able to see the straight clefts of the gorges that criss-crossed Mur, and watch them grow green in the spring as the first vapors boiled up out of them to moisten the clinging plants along the desert's edge.

Such clefts must be the work of an intelligent race, they thought, and Jim-Berk had been sent to find that race.

He started for the nearest rift and was lost in the "desert. Exhausted, starved, half mad with heat and thirst, he stumbled into the upper levels of the city. Far below, from the lip of the gorge, He had seen the lights of the living levels, smelled the warm mist, heard the twitter of voices and the throb of the heatpumps that beat through all the foundations of the city. Then he was found - a monster out of the desert. They attacked, and he fought back - and in the end was caged.

For a long time, he told them, he tried vainly to make some-one understand, calling to curious sightseers in his own tongue or in what seemed to him to be theirs, flying into a blind rage when they ran away in horror from his bellowing. He tried to escape, beating at the bars, ambushing his jailer - all without avail. In the end he gave up hope and became the beast they thought him. Then Korul came with Thorana.

'You were young,' he said painfully. 'You weren't afraid like the others. You sat where I could hear you, and you talked a lot. Young people like you didn't talk so much when they were alone, on my world.

'Hearing the same voices helps when you are learning to talk. I got so I could understand a lot of what you were saying. Last night, when Korul told his story, I had to speak. On Earth we're more used to violence than you seem to be here on Mars. Maybe I can help.'

'Why do you want to help, Jim-Berk?' Thorana asked. 'Think how we have, treated you through all these years - a beast, caged in the Pit for the curious to torment! My parents threatened me with you, and some of our young men use your name as a curse. That Erth of yours must be wonderful, Jim-Berk, to breed such as you!'

'I think so, Thorana,' he rumbled softly. 'Here in this cage with only the other animals for company - not even the stars at night, or a moon like Erth's - it was lonely. I used to lie back and try to look up through the mist at the bright spots where the stars would show through, and wonder if one of them was Erth, and if people there remembered me and were waiting for me to come back.

'Erth is a world you could never imagine, Thorana, you on this dry, dead ball of sand. Its deserts are rolling water, blue and green and gray, breaking against great cliffs and over white smooth sands. Its plains are green as your eyes, Thorana, and the forests that go up over the hills are darker green, and the sky as blue - well, as blue as my own eyes used to be. And now it's only a silver speck shining in the night, with the gray mist hiding it from me. But by Erth herself, I'm forgetting you two!'

'There's nothing you can do,' Korul told him. 'We're trapped here, all three of us, but if Turun will speak to me I'll tell him your story. He'll let you go, I'm sure - back to your Erth, away from our bleeding and our bickering.'

'Don't cackle like an old woman!' he growled. 'Who is First Man in this place if you're not? Who has the key to every-thing? I'm no more caged than your infernal Karak, if you'll take the trouble to unlock this cage. Listen to me - will they kill you if you come out alone?'

'There's nothing you can do.'

'They might. Karak hates me, and they are his men. But he's afraid of Turun and the Elders, and I think he's been looking forward to seeing my knife in Thorana's throat. I think I could go free, for another night at least.'

'Then do it, and leave Thorana here with the key. I'll promise to have her out of here in the wink of an eye, once it's dark enough. It's you they'll be watching anyway, not us. Now then, have you a map of the place anywhere?'

There was a mosaic on the floor of the Pit that showed the entire world of Mur.

Thorana copied it on a bit of cloth torn from her mantle. Jim-Berk crumpled it in his big paw.

'What place is-there you'll be safe?' he demanded.

'Torkul, our leader at the northern sluices, is like a brother,' Korul told him. 'But to him you're a wild beast, and Thorana one of the Masters, whom he's sworn to kill. Besides, it is too far...'

'That's my affair,' he snapped. 'I'm big enough, I think, to take care of myself and of her too. Where are there cities, now? We must keep away from them.'

Korul pointed them out in dimming light. Jim-Berk's little eyes grew thoughtful.

'Look here,' he said finally. 'I'll go the way I came, over the desert and through the hills - here - to where I left the ship. There'll be water there, and food, and clothes for me, though it makes little enough difference what I wear after twenty years of running naked in this zoo of yours!

Then we'll follow the height of the land to your other rift, here, and follow it to the pole. Is that clear?'

'I can follow you,' Korul a.s.sured him, 'but how will you find the way? Mur is a strange world to you, and this map is no more than a scrawl copied from an artist's crude picture. There have been no surveys in the memory of man - we don't go into the desert, and haven't for centuries.'

'So much the better!' he grunted. 'There'll be no one there to see us. As for steering my way, there's the sun and the stars, and forty years haven't changed them beyond remembering. The skies are higher and older than you people dream, Korul. You've forgotten a lot that we on Erth never knew, perhaps, but I'll bet you were never the men for the open that we are. Little folk like you are safest close to home.'

'Don't wait for me,' Korul warned him. 'I'll be watched for days after the - Change. Keep Thorana safe for me, and if I'm alive I will come to the sluices. I trust you, Jim-Berk.'

'I'll keep her safe enough,' he grinned, 'arid it'll give you something to come after, so you'll not forget. Unlock the cage now, and get out of here.'

The cage door locked with a combination. Korul set the key and tugged, but nothing moved. He tried again, and still again the master combination should open the lock, but the door had not been touched for years, since Berk had killed his keeper.

Then the Star-Beast grasped the bars. His rolling muscles swelled; water stood out on his hairy pelt in droplets, and drip-ped from the end of his snout. And the door moved! He shoved it open and slipped out into the night.

'Argh!' he grunted. 'It's good to smell fresh air again!'

As far as Korul could see, he had no more air than before, and as for smell... But he was of a different world and another race: things would be different to him. With a squeeze of the hand he left Thorana and strode warily toward the nearest entry.

Two men with bows and arm-long knives stepped out of the shadows. 'Karak wants to see you,' growled one of them.

'I want to see Karak!' Korul snapped. 'It has to do with the girl, Thorana. She will be kept here in the Pit, as he said. It should amuse our children to have one of the Masters caged with the other beasts. Let no one into the Pit without my word or Karak's. This woman is our affair. Now take me to Karak or Turun, quickly.'

The Hunting of the Beast By luck, it was Turun. His old eyes narrowed as he saw Korul. Karak's plan must have been plenty definite.

'Karak or no Karak,' .Korul told him when the guard had left, 'I am First Man of Mur until someone lets my blood. What I do and think is my affair, unless the People are harmed by it.

'I've left the girl in the Pit. She can't leave or warn the Masters, and there is no need to kill her before the signal is given. I ask that you leave her there until the killing is over. If you grant me this, I will lead as you wish, and if the Elders still say she must die, I will take her life myself. Otherwise you may do as you please - without your First. I do not trust Karak!'

Turun was on his feet in a rage. 'By the G.o.ds you talk boldly for a man who has betrayed his race! Be you First or last, you have no claim on the People or their Elders now. If Karak agrees, you may lead the attack. Until then, if you wish, the girl is safe where she is. Now go away. I want to remember Thandar, and forget he had a son!'

It suited Karak to have Korul as his puppet-leader. The Elders would reward him in any way he asked, when the time came - and a thrust from behind was as quick and quiet a way of letting a First Man's blood as open combat. In the hubbub of killing, who would say which Master had done it?

Korul read his thoughts, and swallowed his own fury. From the Hall of Elders, Karak's grinning face behind him, he explained the plan of attack to the people - knowing all the while that it had all been done, and done thoroughly, long be-fore, while he and Thorana were wandering through each other's dreams.

Karak was feeling his power. 'Turun's growing old,' he boomed, 'and he can't see beyond his nose. When it's all over, and the Givers are in the Master's halls, there'll be concessions for those who have cooperated with the Elders. As I recall this Thorana, she may be worth saving. I'll look her over tomorrow.' Better the knife for Thorana, if Karak was taking an interest in her. But if he knew the man, there would be other beautiful daughters of the Masters safely spirited away when the killing started.

'What news from Torkul?' he asked, to change the subject.

Karak frowned. 'None,' he muttered, 'nor from Tatok. They struck without my order, and we have rumors that they're holding the Masters prisoner and giving them blood when they need it.' He glared suspiciously at Korul. 'You know them pretty well don't you?'

'I know, Torkul. We were young together. He was head-strong and dreamy - wanted to be a Searcher. Maybe he wants to experiment with the Masters a little before he lets them die.'

That thought seemed attractive to Karak. 'What about Tatok?' he demanded.

'Wasn't his" father a friend of your father and Turun?'

Korul let his eyes shift away. If Karak could see just far enough into a ruse, but not too far...

'I haven't heard from Tatok in a year,' he insisted. 'Our fathers were friends, but I never knew him well. You know yourself the story they tell - when a spy for the Masters caught him shirking, he ran away and hid for twenty days in the de-serted levels. He had food only twice before they caught him. No - Tatok is loyal enough.

The Masters may have been able to cut the signal lines before he killed them.'

Tatok was a bl.u.s.tering bully very much like Karak himself, as Korul knew very well. If he refused to answer questions, it was probably because he had no fondness for taking orders from anyone when he had power of his own. If Karak's sus-picions could be turned to him, and away from Torkul, per-haps he could be kept away from the nearer pole.

Whether the bluff had worked, Korul never knew. There was a shout in the corridor outside and a guard flung open the door. It was the man from the Pit.

'The Star-Beast is loose!' he shouted. 'It's got the girl!'

Karak's mouth hardened. He stared thoughtfully at Korul, then turned to the guard. 'What happened?' he demanded. 'Who's let the thing out?'

'I don't know,' the man told him. 'There wasn't a sound after Korul left. Then the thing showed up out of the shadows and strangled the guards at the other archway.

The girl ran after him, and he picked her up and disappeared. We shot at them, but it was too dark to aim, and he was running very fast. You remember, they say that when he was captured he could jump very high and run faster than any man.'

'This could be bad,' Karak said slowly. 'If the woman gets away, she may warn her friends and make the killing a bit messier than we'd planned. What do you suggest, Korul - find them first, or call the signal now?'

'Find them!' Korul snapped. 'I've seen that thing close up. Let it run wild and it can kill more of our men than a score of the Masters can, warned or not. Remember your history, man - what happened when it was wild and scared of us? Now it's been caged for twenty years. If hates our blood and bones, and it will hunt us down as long as we leave it alive!'

He sensed Karak puzzling over what he said. Was it a bluff? Was there some scheme afoot delaying the Change - giving the Masters time to protect themselves, or escape?

'We'll use ullas,' Karak decided. 'Whether it's gone down into the tunnels, as it did before, or headed back for the desert, they'll follow it. Zon, get three men who can handle "the things and meet us in the Pit.'

He wheeled to look at Korul again. 'If your stomach won't stand for hunting this girl with ullas, perhaps you'd like to stay behind - under guard.'

It would have taken more than Karak to make Korul stay behind, but he had been sure that the bully would see the irony of the situation and make him join the hunt.

If he could pro-tect Thorana, it would be there.

Zon and three like him met them with the ullas. There were six of the things, leashed two and two, ugly scaly things with their flat heads and frill of savage- looking spines. They were as vicious as they looked. Korul knew: men like Karak trained them to fight and hunt small creatures bred in the cages of the Pit.

The reek of the Star-Beast was strong in his cage, and the ullas were off like streaks on the trail. From the pit it led deep into the tunnels under the city, twisting back and forth, going ever deeper until the heat and stench of the Under-Fit was choking in their throats. Jim-Berk knew ullas well: he had been caged with them for two thirds of his life - but their scent was too keen for his tricks.

When the trail led to one of the secret lifts, Korul felt Karak's suspicious glare on his back. A beast using lifts?

They had no way of knowing where the lift would stop. The ullas were split into two packs, muzzled still, and set to scout out every level while Karak waited in the car. It was a stupid performance, but it gave the Beast and Thorana time to hide their trail.

At the very top of the city the creatures struck a hot scent.

The Star-Beast had scrambled straight up the wall to the rock slope above, trying to confuse the pursuit. The hissing ullas hurled themselves again and again against the wall, fell back and leaped again, until Zon's men clubbed them back and dragged them hissing and struggling, to the nearest steps.

From the wail, Berk's trail led raggedly up through the rocks to the desert. Where his hunters squirmed and struggled through crevices and over jagged boulders twice their height, the Star-Beast had climbed like a zannak in great, straddling leaps that carried him from block to block. Karak's temper was rising fast. He would never leave the trail now, Korul realized.

On and on they went over the swelling sand-sea of the dunes - up one great, sweeping, gentle slope, then down in a rushing slide - up again, then down. The glow of the gorge was sinking in the sky behind them when one of Zon's men stumbled and went down, dragging his ullas with him in a hissing, clawing tangle that rolled in a river of sand to the foot of the dune. When they reached him, he lay still, bleeding from the gashes of the monster's knife-sharp claws. They crouched over him, probing with their muzzled snouts, running out their forked tongues to lap at his oozing blood.

Karak sent him back, with a second man to help him. Zor and the remaining guard took the ullas. They were experienced hunters, Karak and Zor: they held their beasts to an easy, swinging pace that ate up the distance. But the great strides of the Star-Beast, clear in the sand before them, measured twice their paces. The ullas seemed less eager, too: the scent must be growing cold.

Karak was no fool. The Star-Beast's tracks were slowly filling with sand, with every breath of air that curled over the desert's face. He stopped them at the crest of one gigantic dune that rose above all the rest.