The Forerunner Factor (35 page)

Simsa stood for a long moment, her head held high, her nostrils expanded to their full extent, as she turned very slowly about, testing each possible way. There were odors in plenty—none of them obnoxious, some close to the perfume of flowers. Then—water!

She had heard that certain off-worlders could not scent water, though all of the lesser life-forms could. Evil-smelling as the Burrows were, one must, for very life’s sake, cultivate an inward listing of odors in defense. There was water, not of the sea as it might have been back on Kuxortal, but rather stream clear—in that direction!

There was also no opening in the brush and she could not soar above its curtain in Zass’s way. Simsa worked with her blanket cloak—there were thorns on brush stems, she had seen that from the first. What protection she could give herself she would. She had already frayed and pulled a hole in the middle, now she let her head slip through and the other folds she draped about her, flipping the ends up to cover her arms.

Then, rod in hand as a tool to hold back the entangling sprays of leaf-covered vine or branch, she advanced into that wilderness. As she took her first steps, trying to hold aside what was too thorny to break and throw from her path, Simsa was at once aware of the rustling which was brought about by no wind. Only the branches and leaves were aflutter, the disturbance directly before her. It was as if these rooted plants and trees were communicating one with the other, resenting her coming, urging each other to a stiffer defense.

With her cloak covering held by a thicket of thorn branches, Simsa was brought to a halt. One such swinging stem, as thick as her forefinger, looped down before she could dodge and caught in her hair, its movement not concluded until the silver strands were well-entangled. Now she could not even move her head without an answer of sharp pain from her scalp. She had seen insects so captured by sticky cords produced and woven by creatures much smaller than their prey. Only here it was the vegetation to which she was prisoner.

Sharp pain in one cheek followed the flailing of another thorned tip and her cloak, which she had planned as protection, became her downfall. Something seized its folds so tightly that even were her hair unentangled, she could not have slipped free. The girl pursed her lips and whistled. Zass had found prey, she must have escaped this trap, therefore—

Only, before she heard any flapping of wings, there came again that sound which had saved her in the rock desert. The mist over this basin valley—she could only see a fragmented portion of it, her head held as it was now—was thicker than the haze above the desert. Not even a shadow showed through its padding of what should be open sky. Yet above that, sounding very near now, came the throb of a flitter’s passage. Nor was it only bound across the valley . . . Simsa thought that from the continued sound it was circling.

Persona signals—from the first, she had thought that perhaps without her knowledge, she might be carrying a direction clue for hunters. To her, many of the machines of the space people approached magic. And always it was machines that served them so. During her imprisonment on the ship, she might well have been subjected to a scanning, some strange and terrifying treatment that imprinted her scent, her person, the cast of her thinking mind, upon one of those machines.

One thing for this moment was more important than a possible captor out of sight above. The branches that had so efficiently captured her became motionless at the first sound of that off-world ship. A moment later, they went into quick and painful action. She was literally dragged forward; the clutches in her snarled hair used to pull her were enough to bring tears of pain to her eyes. Though she tried hard to free herself, flailing about with the rod, that action won her nothing but bleeding scratches, some of them so deep as to be close to wounds.

She could not see how those clutches on her hair and her body were transferred from one bush to the next, but somehow that happened. She was sure that bits of her hair, together with her scalp, were left behind. Blood dripped down her face. She could taste it as it touched her lips. Still the bush tore as one growth sent her stumbling to the next. Their rustling was a buzzing in her ears which seemed even to go deeper—into her very head, stirring her thoughts into wild panic.

Attack from creatures one could understand, but to have plants rise up against one was a kind of madness. Inside she cowered and tried hard to fight her fear. Then she was whirled, gasping, bloodied by scratches, half-deafened by the rustling, into an open space. Open as to the ground, but here were trees in a circle. Their branches met and interlaced over her head so that she could no longer view the haze. Though still, now that she was free of the side growth, she heard the flitter—the beat of its return growing louder as it seemed to head for the space just above the trees now roofing her in.

Simsa tripped and fell, the last of the brush having handled her so fiercely, and hit hard against stone. However, this was not the rock of the outer desert lands, rather a coarse gravel which skinned and pocked her knees and the palms of her hands. It was of a bright orange color and it helped to make a setting for what was undoubtedly a pool.

There was also the play of a fountain—though not one of fiery particles such as had arisen in the well of the tunnel. Rather, this leapt and then cascaded back into a wide, shallow basin, the heart of which was carved stone in the form of three loops, the center one footed between the sides of the other and wider two. Around the basin came a pattering of smaller feet on the loose gravel and Simsa faced her errant zorsal, who, by the dampness of her fur, had been sporting in the water.

Simsa crawled to the pool side to plunge both of her scratched and smarting arms into the liquid. It had not the clarity she associated with the water she knew, being faintly green, but the scent!

She cupped her hands and scooped up what she could, to drink and drink again. This water, if water it was, tasted like the potent wine old Ferwar had kept jealously for her own comfort on the wet and cold days of the leafless season. It was strength itself as she swallowed and felt it within her throat, somehow both comfortingly warm and refreshingly cool. Before she drank for the third time, she bathed her face. Those scratches burned with renewed fire for only an instant or two, and then the pain was gone and she could see in her reflection that even the most wicked of those tears in her skin appeared to have closed. Such comfort she had been able in the past to summon—or the Elder One had done—from the rod. Here, where nature was cruel, there seemed to be other kindness.

She was still bathing her throat and shoulders when the same brush that had used her so badly swung all to one side, without any forcing pull that Simsa could detect. Through the opening so made there came the alien, or an alien. At least it resembled to the last hair of its antennae, as far as she could detect, the one who had brought her here.

The creature halted beyond the edge of the basin, facing her across the play of the water. Zass, who had been paddling with both front paws in the fountain spray, gave a leap and flutter of wings to reach Simsa’s shoulder.

“These . . . are your hunters?” The alien did not glance upward at the sound’s source, which at that moment seemed directly overhead. “Or have you called them?”

The words dropped clear and cold from Zass’s thought to hers. Simsa believed there was an aura of menace about them. Words could deceive if the one who uttered them was clever enough, but thoughts . . . If they could only speak directly without the shifting through the zorsal!

Moved by some inner push that Simsa had no time to explore, she sat cross-legged on the gravel and thrust the smooth end of her rod into the loose stuff. When it was rooted firmly, she slid her fingers up, tilting the tips of the horns in the direction of the other, and, not now beaming directly to the zorsal as she had before, she began to present what she wanted to communicate as shortly and clearly as possible—pausing now and then to try and order her thoughts.

Her reason for escape from the spaceship, with no choice of a landing save such as the equipment of the Life Boat offered, her travel across the waste of rock, the battle with the sand-stream horrors—

As she marshaled all these into proper sequence, she strove to picture in her mind those actions and beliefs that were concrete, together with the nebulous things that were her own guesses, colored by her emotions. After all, she had no suspicion of that space officer, of the medic, that she could prove true. Though she herself was convinced that the fear that drove her from the galactic voyaging ship had very real roots.

If
she were reaching the alien in this way, and not through Zass, she had no evidence of success. But she was startled out of her concentration when she saw issuing from the brush and coming into the clearing of the fountain more of the green-furred creatures—at first glance complete duplicates of the one who had brought her into the valley. Their great faceted eyes centered on her and they squatted down, their large knees near up to the level of their heads—a silent and, to her, a disturbing circle, so that now her thought stream faltered and she held to sending by all the force her will could summon.

It was completely silent. Even Zass huddled down voiceless—quiet except for the buzz of the searcher in the air, whose passing sound grew stronger, then faded in a regular pattern. The flitterer must be circling, that circle growing the tighter with each passage.

Remembering what she had seen of the valley from the mouth of the tunnel, Simsa believed there was no cleared space wide enough to let the other-world carrier ground. Why did it remain above? Perhaps it was broadcasting directions for search to a party on foot.

“What have you that these want?” That demand was sharp and clear, and it had not come through Zass. She—or rather this other—had made contact at last directly with her.

“It is what I am.” Simsa stirred. The rod was warming in her hand. The Elder One who had withdrawn, leaving her alone as she had always been to fight this battle; surely she awoke again. Even more slowly and with greater effort, Simsa launched into the time before she had been escorted aboard the spaceship (“honored guest” they had been too quick to tell her, but her senses, honed to a fine edge in the always perilous Burrows, had answered “captive”).

Was this big-eyed nonhumanoid really able to catch and understand her tale? How much contact had this barren world ever had with spacecraft and those who flew from world to world? Might the whole concept be wild fancy in their minds?

There flashed into her thoughts now not the pictures she had been fumbling with, trying to build, but something else—a holding to her conceptions she did not understand at all. No! Simsa of the Burrows screamed noiselessly. She was being fast pushed into an impotent captivity once more. Each time the Elder One returned was with stronger hold, more in control. Simsa shook her head from side to side as if she were threatened by a winged creature flying for her eyes, her mouth, to attack. Only the attack was in her head—not without—and she could not so loosen the will of that other.

The flicker of truly alien thought was like a flashing light shone brutally into her eyes. She thought she saw fragments of strange pictures. Buildings stood and were gone in an instant; shapes that moved and might be either intelligent beings or threatening animals rose and vanished in the space of a breath. It was like listening to a speech one should be able to understand but was spoken so swiftly that thought could not translate word.

Now the rod was bending in her hands, making her battle for mastery over a length of metal. Only for a fraction out of time could she put up a show of defiance. Then her hands no longer obeyed her. The rod was inverted so that the points of the horns touched, bit into the gravel. Her fingers were under the control of that other one and with their support the horns dipped, pushed away, came back—swung to this side and that.

There were loose markings in the gravel now, half-seen patterns. Then five of the aliens were leaning forward, their eyes no longer holding Simsa’s gaze but fast upon that which the horn left as it moved. Also she could read that message, almost—though it caused sharp pain between her eyes when she attempted to hold those lines in sight and think of them.

Then—there was no trouble at all. What the rod of power had so drawn was a symbol of power, one from the far, far past. It was a mark of identity, a request for aid, a warning. Each small, stark line could have more than one meaning, and some such she could only inscribe because time beyond time had always made them so.

One of the aliens, not the one who Simsa believed had been her guide, moved around the edge of the fountain to squat opposite the girl, studying the lines. A hand claw swung out to alter two rays of the pattern in a modifying way. Then mouth mandibles sent up a loud clicking and two of the others thrust back into the brush and were gone.

The one who had recognized the pattern now began to gesture with its claws, opening them to their greatest extent, bringing them together with a rattling snap. Dimly Simsa recognized a rhythm in that crackle of horn-covered flesh. Not speech, something else, more powerful than words. Perhaps even a weapon.

She who was now in command of the girl’s body brought the rod back so that the horns touched her breasts. Through her body began a humming vibration which rose steadily until Simsa of the Burrows knew fear. Something had awakened in her to answer the claw-clicking. Humming linked with click. No, that vibration, she knew now, was not aimed at her body. It was fortifying whatever powers had been loosened and—waited.

Part of her answered the click and hum, but another bit of her, Simsa of the Burrows loosed for this duty alone, listened for another sound—the buzz of the off-world flyer. Surely it was louder again!

The clicking claws moved faster and faster, advanced out over the pattern. In her own grasp the horned rod dropped forward, once more pointing at that stretch of earth on which that design had been set.