Masters of Everon (11 page)

The flames caught at once on the dry needles and flared up, pushing back the darkness of the surrounding forest. The scent of the burning wood rose into Jef's nostrils; and suddenly he was seized by the same faculty of acute observation he had experienced as he stepped off the spaceship. The smell of the fire, the dance of its flames licking against the night, the leaping illumination playing with the colors of Jarji's rough clothes and lining her face with moving shadows... all these and the polished wood of the weapon and the movement of the night air made him feel as if he had fallen into a trance where everything about him was twice as real as reality—and twice as wonderful. This alone, he thought suddenly, was worth his coming to Everon to experience. This, alone—

He wrenched himself out of the moment of transport with an effort, and straightened his back, staring across the fire at Jarji. She sat still, the weapon lying a meter ahead of her, and less than that from the edge of the campfire. Jef's eyes focused on it. The dark wood of its polished stock and frame was of some kind he did not recognize. A backward-curving length of metal was set crosswise near the front of the frame; an arc of metal, like a short bow, with a wire for a bowstring.

The wire crossed the frame at a point where a metal groove ran down the length of the stock. There, guides caught it, and the guides seemed to be fixed to a pulley arrangement running back along the side of the stock to a drum holding eight metallic cartridges perhaps three centimeters in diameter, so that one cartridge at a time engaged one end of the pulley system through a slot in the cartridge's curved side.

"Never seen one of those before?" asked Jarji. "Called a crossbow."

"I... guessed that," Jef said, remembering illustrations of devices like this in his history books on the wars of the late middle ages in Europe. "But what are those?"

He pointed to the cartridges in the drumlike part of the weapon.

"Spring-pulls," she said.

As Jef watched, she leaned forward, picked up the crossbow and rotated the drum so that the next cartridge in line took the end of the pulley into its slot. She punched the outer end of the cartridge with a quick stab of her thumb, and the cartridge whirred abruptly, like an angry rattlesnake. The pulley wire spun back through the slot in the cartridge and out again; and the guides swiftly pulled the wire bowstring back the full length of the stock.

"Lucky for you I just rewound a full wheels' worth of spring-pulls," said Jarji. "Wouldn't want to spare one, otherwise."

She took one of the short arrows from her belt quiver, laid it in the groove along the top of the crossbow stock, and nocked its feathered end into the wire bowstring. Casually, she lifted the heavy weapon in one hand, pointed it off to one side, and fired.

There was the sharp, musical twang as the wire released, followed in almost the same instant by the sound of a solid impact.

"You see?" said Jarji, laying the crossbow down again. But Jef was still staring off in the direction the arrow had gone.

"What—what did it hit?" Jef managed to say.

"Hit? Oh, I shot the quarrel into a willy-tree trunk," she answered. "Don't mind showing it off to you; but I'm not going to go hunting all through the woods at night for a quarrel, just to demonstrate."

She got to her feet, walked off into the darkness and returned after a moment sliding the short arrow she had called a quarrel back into her quiver. She sat down again.

"Could you see that tree you shot it into?" demanded Jef unbelievingly.

"Of course not," said Jarji. "But I knew it was there. This is all my place, these woods. Didn't I tell you?"

She laid the crossbow down before her feet once more. Jef pulled his gaze away from it with an effort.

"Why do you use a thing like that?" he asked.

"Well, now—" Her voice was abruptly bitter and mocking. "You know none of us law-abiding upland woods ranchers would go using a real energy weapon."

Jef blinked across the fire at her. Jarji stared back, hard-eyed, for a moment. Then the tight line of her jaw relaxed.

"I guess you really don't know anything, do you?" she said. "There's a law against carrying regular weapons, any place but down in the city. Never mind... you were going to tell me about this brother of yours."

Jef pulled himself together. As briefly as he could, he told her essentially what he had told Martin about Will's death, disappearance and the difficulty his family had encountered getting details about it from the E. Corps.

When he was finished, Jarji sat without saying anything for a long moment, frowning and poking at the fire with a piece of pine branch from which the twigs and needles had been singed away. Finally she threw the stick aside, as if she had come to some decision, and raised her eyes to Jef across the fire.

"I guess I've got to say you're right, Jef," she said. The unexpected, familiar sound of his own first name jolted him after the formality of Martin and the Planetary Constable, down at Spaceport City. "I'd guess the chance is best your brother is buried up-country here somewhere. Might be, though, you're looking in the wrong place for him."

"Wrong place?" Jef stared at her.

"I mean—he might be buried down around the city, or on one of the wisent ranches," she said. "You see, I figure if Beau or one of us game people knew something about his dying, they'd have sent word to you and your family a long time since. That's maybe why you better be braced for Beau not being able to help you."

"But Beau's the only one I know to talk to, here on Everon," said Jef.

"Oh, sure. I don't mean you shouldn't try to talk to Beau. Just that you shouldn't go expecting too much from him right away. And that's another thing—" said Jarji. "You're going to have to find him first."

"Find him? But I thought he was at Post Fifty," said Jef.

"Had a ranch there, four years ago," she answered. "Wisent ranchers courted him out of it."

"Courted him?" said Jef. "I don't understand."

"Guess you don't," she said. She picked up again the stick she had been using to poke the fire and dug the stiff, charred end of it into the ground before him as she talked, watching the little tufts of earth she turned up, instead of Jef. "What do you know about wisent and eland ranching, here on Everon?"

"I know there were two large meat animals variformed to coexist in the Everon ecology, and that their embryos were imported to be raised here," Jef said. "The Ecolog Corps decided two species would be enough. The buffalo—I mean, wisents—"

"Call them buffalo, if you want," Hillegas said, frowning at the earth she was digging up with her stick, "we here call them wisents—but that's just Europe-type buffalo to someone like you from Earth."

"I meant to say wisents," said Jef. "I know they were brought in to graze the prairie and open country and the variform eland were brought in for wild-game ranching in forest areas like this. I don't remember how many were first brought in to seed Everon with the two species. But they were put here as part of your First Mortgage, weren't they?"

"Doesn't matter how many," Jarji said. "To start out, there was a balance of them—just enough wisent for the open land, just enough eland for the woods. Making allowance for natural increase, of course, as the human population increased and we moved beyond the boundaries for settlement that the E. Corps set up for us under the First Mortgage, wisent ranchers began crowding us wild-game raisers out."

Jef frowned, trying to understand, but finding that she made no sense at all.

"How could wisent ranchers crowd you out?" he said. "I mean, they're out in the open country and you eland ranchers are in the woods—even if the E. Corps would let them do anything, they just wouldn't in any case."

"E. Corps gave over direct control when we paid off Mortgage One," growled Jarji. "That's the rule. We didn't even have to take a Second Planetary Mortgage. We could have got on without people to teach us how to expand factories and plan highways and land spaceships—not saying anything against your brother; but we could've got on without a Second Mortgage and people like him. Other new worlds have done it."

"But the most practical thing—" began Jef, quoting almost word for word from one of the books he had studied, "is for a new world to take up the first three available mortgages offered under the Corps and Earth assistance plans. Every world needs the First Mortgage anyway, to pay for the original E. Corps survey, the seeding of needed variforms of Earth flora and fauna, and the direct E. Corps control personnel who have to be in charge until the First Mortgage is paid off and the new inhabitants have learned to handle their new world. But almost every world can benefit from a Second Mortgage too, which pays for teaching personnel and the professional help to expand the basic colony set up on the new world under the First Mortgage. What the First Mortgage sets up is primarily an agricultural-trading society; while the Second Mortgage helps this to expand into a semi-industrialized—"

The stick in Jarji's grip broke with a snap.

"What is this?" she snarled. "The sort of stuff they feed you back on Earth?"

Startled and somewhat embarrassed, Jef admitted it was.

"Well, forget it!" snapped Jarji. "That's all. Forget it. It doesn't go here in the wild. You understand me?"

"No," said Jef honestly.

"Well, you listen," said Jarji, dropping what was left of the stick and looking straight at him. "Every world's different, that's what. Every world's a brand new problem—to the E. Corps
and
to the colonists like us. That you were just quoting makes it sound like there's just one blueprint for all new worlds, like this, and things always go one-two-three. Well, they don't! Second Mortgage means not only E. Corps giving up direct control of a world—it means there's a lot of value that comes in, in the way of equipment and materials bought with Second Mortgage money to expand the colony. Means there's chances for some people to get rich. Means some people get the chance to be more important than others!"

The word "rich" rang oddly on Jef's ears. He remembered the elaborate home of Armage. "I still don't understand," said Jef.

"There's a law here on Everon—E. Corp's approved it," said Jarji. "If wisent don't do well on a certain range, then any wild rancher running eland in forest touching that area can go to court and sue for the right to plant the area to forest and increase his woods-range. Same way, if eland population drops in a forest area, any adjoining wisent rancher can sue to clear the area for wisent grazing."

She stared almost fiercely at Jef.

"Wisent ranchers been suing and winning the right to clear forest area ever since the E. Corps moved out of here," she went on. "You asked me why you probably wouldn't find Beau leCourboisier at Post Fifty, when you get there. I'm telling you why. His woods range got challenged for a wisent grazing area. It was condemned and cleared by a downcountry rancher a little over a year ago."

"But..." Jef puzzled over this information, "you said no one could take over forest unless the eland population was down. You mean Beau leCourboisier lost a lot of his eland—"

Jarji laughed shortly.

"Lost!" she echoed. "Lost, all right. You mean poisoned! Well, not all. Some drove off, some poisoned, some just plain disappeared—just as if five or six downcountry aircraft had come along, the night before the head count was made for the court—five or six cargo aircraft full of wisent ranchers armed with laser hand-weapons to kill and carry out every eland they spotted on their infrared scopes."

She laughed again, on a harsh note.

"It's because of things like that, that you radio ahead when you're coming through a person's woods nowadays."

"But," said Jef, "there's no aircraft allowed to fly this far up. The Planetary Constable told me so."

Jarji said nothing. She merely leaned deliberately and spat into the fire. Her spittle exploded with a sharp crack as it hit a red-hot ember.

"Then," said Jef after a few moments when it became clear that she was not going to say any more without prompting, "you say the wisent ranchers have been moving in on your forest territory under the excuse of some law. But I didn't know that; and even if it's true, there's nothing I could do about that You want to notify the E. Corps—"

"You really don't put two and two together too well, do you?" said Jarji. "Remember I was saying you might be looking in the wrong place for your brother? If he was a real good friend of Beau's, it could be the people who made your brother disappear were the same people who stood to gain by driving Beau out."

There was a long moment of silence. Then Jef heard his own voice speaking, as if it was somebody else's voice, some distance off.

"You don't mean that," he heard it saying. "What you're hinting at is the possibility of my brother being deliberately murdered. If that was the case, why would the E. Corps not tell us about it..."

"Not talking about any such thing!" said Jarji. "Just mentioning how things are here. You take it from there, if you want. Figure it out for yourself."

Far off in the night, a sound interrupted them. It was a low, moaning sound that rose gradually up the scale, and in volume, until it became a full-throated, if distant, roar. That roar rang about them for a full minute and then died away again slowly, as it had begun. Mikey shoved violently against Jef, almost crawling into his lap, shivering violently.

"Sure," said Jarji, looking at Mikey.
"He knows."

"What is it?" demanded Jef, his own voice a little shaky. "Was that—"

"What else? A male maolot, full-grown one. Mine, maybe."

"Yours?"

"Mine," said Jarji. "Oh, not like your pet there. I mean the full-grown male whose hunting territory overlaps my eland range. Up here in the woods we aren't like the wisent ranchers. We don't go out deliberately to hunt down the maolots. But that maolot old man out there keeps other male maolots away. He takes the eland he needs to eat and I don't complain. He and I got a truce on. He goes his way and I go mine—and we both kind of see to it the ways don't cross. He'll measure near two meters high at the shoulder as he stands on four legs. You'll see that for yourself if you ever come face to face with him."