The Forerunner Factor (39 page)

“Will!” That command was like a shout, cutting through the tangle of her thoughts and fears. “Will!”

Will the broken machine to her? Simsa of the Burrows could see little aid in that. But ruthlessly this other was taking over more and more of her mind, centering all her thought upon the wreck.
Will
—yes, let it come to her, come to her. It rang like a chant and, though she did not know it, she was sitting up, her face frozen in a mask as she intoned aloud, though not even her own ears—only her body—knew the rhythm of that call:

“Come—come—come!”

She knew nothing of the forces that other commanded. Seemingly, she was now the tool in place of the spent rod. Her hands raised from her knees, weakly wavering, but still motioning, emphasizing her chant.

“Come!”

There sounded the cry of a fighting zorsal. Simsa heard it only from a distance and as something that had no meaning now. All that did matter was that dark core of the haze moving toward this bank.

Splashing, a sucking, coughing sound. Still Simsa was not free to look, to break the compulsion holding her.

“Come!”

Something moved within the haze—something that hunched along the length of the flyer, answering to her beckoning even as the flitter appeared to do.

“Come!” One small, helpless part of her shivered, if a thought, a memory, could shiver. Did she summon one of those blob-things which had climbed to ride the wreck? In spite of that tremor within her, she waved and called for the last time: “Come!”

The crushed nose of the wreck must be now against the rock shore below her. Once more she was herself, the power flowing out of her and leaving only a weakened husk of a person behind. The haze was fading, but that which crawled along the dark shape reached out for the rock—reached with a hand, not tentacles.

Simsa stumbled to the very lip of the rock, caught those groping hands in hers, then was herself thrown backward, another larger and hard-muscled body covering hers. She looked up into the face of Thorn.

In that face, the eyes were still closed. Blood trickling from his mouth spattered on her. She had strength enough to wriggle out from under his inert body, leaving him facedown and unmoving now upon the rock.

There was a sound as if some great creature had sucked or inhaled. The haze was abruptly gone. She could see the yellow horrors from the river climbing in a solid mass upon the wreckage, bearing it down the faster with their weight. Luckily, they were more conscious of this invader of their own place than they were of those on the bank.

Zass cried again—a battle cry that brought Simsa’s attention to where the zorsal cruised back and forth upstream. The whole surface of the sand there was pocked and heaped. There seemed no end to the creatures moving toward the wreck.

She crept forward and caught Thorn by one shoulder. To turn his body over was a task almost beyond her much-impaired vitality, but she managed it. Now she unsealed the uniform he wore, much as she had seen him do, in a search for injuries. Catching up the rod once again, she passed it slowly over him, hoping that through it, she might learn if his hurts were critical. She thought a rib was broken, there was a contusion on his head just above the nape of his neck, and the blood, she discovered when she was able to pry his mouth open, did not come from a punctured lung as she had feared, but rather from a tear in his lower lip.

Ferwar had been, in her time, one wise enough to care for hurts such as come easily to the Burrowers. Simsa now stripped off a section of the rope she had made for crossing the other stream and tightly bound the rib. She washed the graze on his head, separating the short strands of blood-matted hair. A second piece of her rope went into the dressing of it. Last of all, she dribbled a little of the water from the valley’s fountain into his slack mouth, holding it shut until she felt him swallow.

When she loosed that last grip on him, he stirred and muttered in a language strange to her. His eyes opened and he looked up at her, but they did not focus or show any knowledge that she was with him.

Zass flew in from the river. Now she streaked back and forth, shrieking on a note so high that Simsa’s ears could barely catch it, and the girl knew that the zorsal was aroused to the peak of rage and fear.

Just as the attack of the river-thing had earlier summoned its fellows from the inland fissure, so did the uncommon commotion about the wreck, which had nearly disappeared beneath the sand, draw the others once more.

Simsa and Thorn were on a small height of the rock and the nearest fissure lay some distance away. Still the girl could see weaving yellow ribbons of unclean life streaming, jerking up into the air, across the stretch between her and that pile of rocks which had once formed the outer point of defense of the valley. They were cut off. Even if she could get Thorn aware and on his feet, she could see no chance of their escaping in that direction. And the fissures lay north and south, as well as west, while the river was east. They were boxed in.

There was a thing with a handgrip fastened to the belt she had unbuckled and thrown to one side when she had searched for the spaceman’s hurts. Undoubtedly, a weapon of sorts, but how one used it and whether it would be effective against the sand river monsters the girl had no idea.

Only they could not remain tamely where they were, to be pulled down, torn by those deadly weaving ribbons. And she could not carry Thorn. It would seem that the Elder One had given her this duty and then withdrawn—again, leaving her exhausted and without resources.

There must be a uniting between the two of them. Simsa at last accepted that, though all her normal instincts rebelled. Back when the Elder One had first entered her, she had been exultant, feeling whole and full of such energy and power as she had not known could exist. Her disenchantment had come little by little—to have one full memory and another that was only shatters of half-seen, never understood pictures, had been a true and growing torment. And then, when the off-worlders had thought to take her apart as it seemed, to shatter
her
for that broken memory, she had thought of the Simsa of the Burrows as her shield and escape—having from then on fought to contain those complete memories as well as she could.

Which had sent the Elder One into hiding and brought her, Simsa, into choices and action that was left unfinished—weak, drained, unable to fight—

Zass swooped down and settled on Thorn’s body, her wings fanning, her head slanted so her feather antennae were turned straight at the girl.

“Go!” That was as potent an order as her own “Come!” had earlier been.

Go she might be able to do, yes. Though at the moment she did not feel she had the strength to take more than a step or two away from this one stretch of unfissured rock. But though Thorn’s eyes were open and he rolled his head back and forth against her knee, crying out whenever the bandaged head wound touched the rock, he was certainly not conscious of where he was.

She leaned over him, trying to sight some knowledge of her in his open-eyed gaze. Then she thought out carefully the speech she had learned from the ship people. To speak to him in that tongue might have some effect.

“Thorn Yan!” Once he had told her that that was a “friend name,” used only in comradeship with those he trusted and his kin. “Thorn Yan!”

The blankness of his face was troubled by a frown.

“We must go. There is trouble.” She spoke slowly in the ship language, making each word as emphatic as she could. Reaching out, she drew that unknown weapon from the belt holder.

“Trouble—” She dangled the weapon before his eyes. A handgrip together with a tube. What would issue from it and how one could make it work she did not know.

Thorn’s lips moved. He turned his head to spit a mouthful of blood onto the rock. That small bit of action seemed to recall him to himself. Now he looked at her and his frown grew the stronger.

“Simsa—”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Thorn!” Now she dared take him by the shoulder and give him a small upward pull, once more holding out the weapon.

“Look!” Purposely, she did not point to the riotous scene at the wreckage, but rather to those things issuing from the fissures inland—the ones that drew their slimy bodies purposefully toward their own perch.

She had steadied his head as he lifted it against her arm, and now look he did. Then his hand fell on hers and twisted the weapon out of her grip, striving to steady it as he viewed their attackers.

8

“Greeta! Greeta!” Thorn shouted the name of the dead woman—but even that part of the flitter which contained her body was lost to view. The creatures of the sand crawled and heaped themselves most thickly on that section of the wreckage and had, by their weight, pushed it completely under so that although here and there, an end of broken metal might be seen and the tail of the fuselage was still tilted above the surface, the rest was only a writhing struggle of the yellow things.

“She is dead,” Simsa said sharply. “You cannot bring her forth from that!” She waved a hand toward the struggling mass of ovoid bodies and tangled tentacles.

Thorn gave her a quick glance, and there was certainly no sign of friendliness or gratitude beneath those knotted brows or in that rage-thinned mouth. That deep anger filled him, making him forget the pain of his own hurts, Simsa sensed without being told.

He crooked his left arm at eye level, used it so to steady the barrel of his weapon. Down into that heaving mass of filthiness shot a ray of fire so brilliant Simsa closed her eyes for an instant that she might not be blinded.

Deep inside of her mind arose a scream—not from any fear or torture wreaked upon her own body, but surely coming from those sand-dwelling things now feeling the searing pain of the attack.

That faint stench which had first guided her in this direction was now a fetid cloud.

She reached up, averting her gaze from that beam, to catch his elbow with a fierce grip.

“No!” Both by word of mouth and in her mind she shouted that. “She was dead when I found you—you can do her no service, only bring those things upon us now. Would you sacrifice your life for the dead who are safely past the Star Gate and no longer aware of this world, or any other men know? She was dead! By this”—with her other hand she waved the rod before him—“will I swear it!”

For a long moment, he either did not hear or else had no belief in what she said. Then that beam of deadly light was cut off, and his weapon-holding hand fell to his side, though Simsa kept her grasp on his other arm. She dragged Thorn around, his back to the river, to face the long space that lay between them and that outcrop of rock which was the tricky entrance to the valley.

She had been very right to fear those fissures. Now, as she looked out over the broken surface of the plane, most of them were throwing out gouts of sand, or there were tentacles fastened on the rock that bound them at the surface, and here and there a gob of yellow was already well out of the depths and turning toward the two.

“What are they?” For the first time, Thorn spoke to her with a rational voice.

“Death,” she returned briefly, and then added, “Here they rule. There”—she pointed to the pile of rocks which was throwing a longer and longer shadow across the plain, reaching for the very foot of the small rise on which they now stand—“there is hope—a little . . .” She was bitterly frank, for she was sure that his useless attack on the flitter’s blobs had done much to arouse even the most sluggish of the crawlers. “If we can reach there. But how? Can you burn us a path, out-worlder?”

He raised his weapon again to closely examine the butt of it. Simsa was able to see a thin bright red line there, as a hidden line of fire might show.

“I have half a charge still.” He might have been speaking aloud to himself, for he had not looked toward her at all or made any comment on what she had said. His free hand broke out of the loose hold she had kept on him and went to a row of tubes set endwise along his belt. “Two others—that is it.”

For the first time, he at last regarded her.

“If we reach there”—he gestured to the distant hump of stone—“what then?”

What then indeed? She had purposely tried not to think beyond reaching the rocks. Back across the river—finding the tunnel—the valley? But the dwellers therein had already attacked Thorn once—would they raise a single, jointed, hook-haired leg to aid him? This might be only a perilous interlude between two deaths. Since the Elder One had helped to raise the storm that had brought down the flitter, the valley people might be a little more merciful to Simsa. However, could she count on that? You could not guess the many turnings of the path in any alien mind. By her act in saving Thorn—momentarily—she could well have condemned herself in their understanding.

Yet she had nothing else to offer but the ruined block tower—beyond the faintness of the hope that, if they could hold off the crawlers for a space, the valley people might just be moved to take a hand.

All this had passed swiftly through her mind, so she could not be sure that her words of answer did not follow directly on his question.

“I do not know—for the future”—she gave him the stark truth—“but it was once a place of protection, and I feel that these crawlers cannot venture too far from their holes.” She said nothing of the valley dwellers.

She saw that he was continuing to watch her from under scowling brows.

“Was it of your raising?” he asked grimly.

Simsa did not understand. “What of what?” Had he acutely and correctly connected the storm that had downed the flitter with her fellow dweller in this body? She pressed the rod against herself and withdrew one step and then another, her attention divided between his scowling face and the weapon in his hand.

“Yes!” His scowl smoothed away, but now there was a sharp purpose in his face as his weapon swung around and up to cover her. “It
was
you!”

She retreated no farther. Confrontations back in the Burrows had taught her something of such a game, though this was no time for the playing of games when the yellow ovoids on the plain and their kin in the stream closed in.