The Forerunner Factor (33 page)

Absently, Simsa answered as she always had, putting up her left hand to scratch between the roots of the zorsal’s antennae.

“Power—much power—”

No, that comment had not come from Zass, though in a way it had filtered through the zorsal’s limited mind. Simsa was sure of the origin of the words which had seemed to boom directly into her ears, though all she still really heard was the clicking of a set of mandibles.

“Who are you?” she asked aloud, because that still came the easiest, but at the same time she thought—tried to think—to Zass as if the zorsal were one of those communication devices she had seen in use by Thorn and the other space people.

“Come!” The big head leaned farther out of the rocky opening, loosing both appendages from their claw grip on the stone, stretching down toward her.

Simsa wavered to her feet. Her body still felt as if she had suffered a perilous illness. This ledge led no place and it would seem she really had no choice now. That she could once more make the inanimate obey her command, fashion a bridge, she doubted completely. The Elder One had withdrawn to her own place for now, only Simsa of the Burrows was here.

She looked at those claws which moved slightly, thinking of them curved about her wrists, choosing to tighten—to cut—Yet that instinct of awareness of danger which had been her shield so often in the depths under Kuxortal did not come to life now:

Simsa somehow knotted the cloak to hold about her waist, then planted herself facing the wall, outward from the overhang. Drawing a deep breath, she thrust the cloak’s edge between her lips and bit down fiercely on it. That she dared not lose. Then she extended her arms and hands as far as she could upward.

Zass had left her shoulder and was up there again with the alien. Simsa both saw and felt those claws close about her wrists, even as she had half-feared that they would.

4

She was wafted aloft as easily as if she wore one of those gravity-nullifying cubes Thorn had used during their exploration of the forgotten city in which she had found her other self. But this wafting was by no machine—rather, through the strength of the rock dweller who slipped back into the shadowed window hole even as Simsa was drawn upward so that when the grip was released, she stood on her own two feet inside a dusky hollow. There was a faint light which issued not from any crack in the rock walls now closing about her, but from the body of the creature who had brought her here.

It stood taller than she—perhaps able to match height with the untrustworthy officer on the spacer. There appeared to be no neck. The round ball of the head, with the still clicking mandibles and the huge eyes, sat directly on its rounded upper torso. That was a well-stuffed oval of the plush fur connected to the lower portion of the thing’s body by an overly narrow waist. The lower portion of the body was nearly twice the length of the upper and banded across the fur by stripes of a darker shade. The hind legs were the most strange of all. They were very long and powerful and, when the alien squatted back on the middle joints of the appendages, they reached above that thin waist. Like the upper “arms,” these bore no masking fur, only two rows of spikes erect and as menacing-looking as the claws which scratched the floor when it moved a fraction. The bottom of the lower portion of the body also touched the floor, apparently giving the stranger balance.

Zass had been flying in circles; now the zorsal settled down once again on Simsa’s shoulder, claws digging painfully into the girl’s skin. Bending her head closer, Zass rubbed cheek with Simsa.

“What do you?”

An abrupt question delivered with a sense of impatience. The girl looked around at the zorsal and then at the waiting monstrosity. It was plain that they could communicate after a fashion, but only through the aid of Zass. For when she tried with all her might to center thought toward the waiting stranger, Simsa received nothing in return but a sickening, whirling sensation which made her close her eyes for a moment and hold on tightly to that which was real—that she stood here with Zass and that—that—thing and was not tossing elsewhere in a place that had no safe anchor.

“I run,” she returned, simply because she felt that only the absolute truth was possible with this one. Zass could pick her thought out from her words, or her head, but enough of the old Simsa remained that she must speak aloud in order to hold on to reality at all.

“What runs behind?” At least the answering message relayed through the zorsal was logical.

What did run, in truth? Perhaps the officer from the ship she had fled, perhaps another of his humanoid species. But mainly, Simsa knew at that moment, she ran not from any person or living thing, but because of her own fear—her own determination that she would remain free within as well as without herself.

She could never free herself now from the Elder One. That she had faced and admitted. At first, she had been welcoming, aflame that she had found something, a part of her that had been lacking all her life and that she must have. Then she had realized that, to this new inner dweller, there must follow a surrender of that other Simsa whom she knew the better. Free? Inner freedom she could not control, but freedom without she could.

“I do not know.” Again it was the truth which that other drew from her.

There was no expression readable to human eyes on the big-eyed round of the greenish furred face. She would not try again to reach the other by straight thought. However, she did aim a question of her own, determined somehow to keep a kind of parity with the alien, not to be as a small child answering questions of an Elder.

“Who are you?” She tried to make that emphatic, hardly knowing how it might reach the other through the filter of the zorsal’s skittery thoughts.

“Fear.”

For a long startled moment, Simsa thought that that other had also answered simply and with a threat. Then the rest of it, fading in mind touch but still understandable, came through:

“You fear—” It would seem that the other was simply going to ignore Simsa’s demand. “There is a right to fear—”

Again, Simsa was startled, this time into jerking back a space and throwing out the hand that held the rod as a barrier against a wriggling blot struggling freely in space before her.

One of the sand swimmers in all its slimy ugliness, so real that she was almost certain she could touch and feel the soft pulpy body. Then, as instantly as it had made its appearance, it winked out. Hallucinations! Even as the sand swimmer itself had used that talent against her.

“You fear—” Again the words squeezed past her amazement to deliver their message.

No yellow blob this time. There was—the figure was not as clear cut or as well-materialized—perhaps it was too strange and alien to this other that it could not be fashioned sharply. But nonetheless she looked at a ship’s officer.

“It is strange.” That was conveyed to her although the thoughts coming through the zorsal had no expression of bewilderment. “This one—your kind?”

Simsa shook her head vigorously. “No kin.” How that definition would fare in Zass’s receptive thought she could not tell. The zorsals were mainly loners after they reached their second year, their mating being a hurried affair, immediately after which they separated, one sex from the other.

The tenuous form of the space officer did not blink out so quickly. It might be that the alien was either trying to refine it into better detail or was comparing it closely with Simsa to refute her own quick denial that it was like herself.

“What do you?” The first question of all was repeated.

Simsa took a deep breath. She would be guessing, but she believed that this creature wanted from her a deeper reason for her flight—for her fear—not just what had set her wandering across the stone-clad landscape.

“I have—power.” She cupped both hands about the rod of her power staff and held it a little out from her body. “He—wants that power.”

The light that came from the alien body flared as much as if it held one of the lights Thorn had carried months ago, much plainer and sharper than a torch.

And, in answer, for she had certainly not called upon any of the skill of the Elder One, the moon horns, the sun set between them, flashed into life also, giving off a radiance that warmed Simsa’s body where it reflected that gleam from her black skin. Once more, she felt her hair stir and guessed the ends of it were rising. But this time, there was no feeling of being drained. No, she was pulling strength from without, not from depths within her.

The glow of the alien’s body faded into a faint sheen, almost flickered. Now the life in the rod was withdrawing also, still not outward but inward so that she no longer felt any lack in her body. Simsa might have eaten well, drunk deep, slept soft. She was completely restored in her inner strength.

“You—have—the not-haze—” Zorsal folded her wings, shifting from one foot to the other on Simsa’s shoulder. The girl was not sure what was meant by that. Then one of the long spined “arms” moved at the center point, flailing forward, the claw at the end indicating without any mistake the rod.

Simsa clutched her treasure a little tighter. Was the alien striving to take her one weapon? But the claws did not quite touch the horned disc at the end, only held so for a few breaths, as if the creature were in some odd way measuring it. The joint creaked again and once more the long arm folded back as might that of an insect of her own home world.

The creature hitched around somewhat awkwardly, using that pointed end of its abdomen as a pivot. It did not turn its head to look at her again, but the order came clear enough from Zass:

“Come!”

The front appendages dropped to floor level and the back ones moved apart, giving the alien a strange likeness to an animal keeping its head down to sniff out a trail. The upstanding antennae smoothed backward, their tips well down on the wearer’s back. The alien no longer moved jerkily, even though its posture made it appear so, and it moved rather swiftly. Simsa, lingering only to gird up the folds of the cloak knotted about her middle, had to trot in order to keep up.

There was no light except that subdued lumination that came from the large furred body before her. They had entered a tunnel through the rock, smooth of wall and floor, slanting downward after a few more swift strides, so that Simsa had to move with caution for fear of a stumble, the clawed feet of her guide apparently finding this surface less slick than it looked to the girl.

At spaced intervals, there were other openings, but, though she peered into each as they passed, Simsa could see nothing. Therein the darkness was complete.

The gradual curve of the descending way became steeper and Simsa tried to find, first on one wall and then the other, some manner of handhold to which she might cling if she slipped. She was about to appeal to her guide when she was aware of a splotch of brighter radiance on the floor. Before she could step aside, her foot pressed a thick stuff which clung, even when she stepped, almost leaped, ahead.

When she planted the light-smeared foot again, she found that her skin clung to the stone and steadied her, yet it yielded easily enough when she would move forward. Then she noted that a second large drop oozed from the thick body before her. For a moment, she was revolted and would have tried to wipe the first coating from her foot with an edge of the cloak, but then, as if Zass had told her, she knew that this was not waste from the body ahead, but a gift meant to aid her.

Sure enough, as the creature deposited a third and final discharge, it turned and thrust its foreclaws deep into the mass, drawing them forth brightly shining. Then it flung these out to both walls, where they caught and held. The alien doubled its body in upon itself as if it were deliberately striving to break its own narrow waist, to bring chest and abdomen together, then hurled itself forward, the clawed forearms outheld to catch at something ahead.

A few steps farther on, the floor vanished in a great hole as dark as any of the doorways they had passed. Simsa gasped. The rock dweller had swung across with the ease of one long accustomed to such feats, but she could not follow.

Or—could she?

Light blazed up beyond and she saw the alien waiting at the far edge of that trap. That increase of light displayed to Simsa against the left wall a ledge, so narrow that only if one turned one’s head against the rock and squeezed along its surface could one pass that way.

The girl made sure that her cloak was knotted as securely as possible with the power rod in its fold still pressing warmly against her flesh. She studied the toehold path, liking nothing she could see of it, before taking a first cautious step forward. Perhaps it would have been easier to face the wall and not the abyss as she made her hesitant way onward. Except that a stubborn core of the Burrows Simsa was determined to look at danger in all its blackness, not to turn her back upon it.

She had no way of telling how deep that hole was. It appeared utterly black. The alien and Zass, who had already winged to the other side, were quiet; thus the dark was also silent except for her own breathing, which was in time with the fast beating of her heart.

That black hole so near her feet seemed to have a power of drawing her, so that she scrambled with outstretched arms on either side trying to find some hold, no matter how tiny, to sustain her. Thus she inched along. She was near enough to the far side where her two companions waited to feel the beginning of relief when the silence was broken by a sound. As if in the depths of that blackness something stirred—perhaps a creature winged as Zass but greater in size, beating those wings, about to take to the air.

Zass responded with a squawk that Simsa readily identified. It was not surprise—rather fear. Yet the zorsal did not fly away, but, on the floor of the farther side of the hole, jigged from one foot to the other, its mouth a little open, still uttering no sound. The alien creature which had been her guide this far raised one of those long jointed arms in a quick beckoning gesture, urging the girl to hurry. Simsa, her head snapping around so that she faced that well of darkness and what might move in its depths, slipped along one foot and then the other. The anchoring substance that the creature had exuded was wearing thin. She was losing her sense of being firmly rooted each time she put her weight fully on one leg so that she might either extend the other or draw it to her. Below, that sound grew louder. She could imagine wings stepping up action—some grotesque horror about to climb the air—for there was a distinct upper-reaching current from the hole.