The Forerunner Factor (51 page)

An aching loneliness closed in, flooding her mind as the fatigue tore upon her body. Was this how the flyer had felt when the past was cut from his life and he had been left here alone? She herself had cut off her past deliberately, and now—Was it worth what she had done? That was her last thought before sleep, deep and dreamless, closed upon her. Did she dream? If she did, there was no memory upon awakening. It was Zass’s shrilling cry that pulled her out of that depth. The zorsal walked up and down the ledge within an arm’s length, her antennae weaving furiously. Plainly, she was disturbed or highly excited. It was midday by the look of the haze overhead.

For the second time, Simsa had awakened so cramped and sore of body that it was a minor agony to move. Before prudence ruled again, she had taken up the leaf carrier that held water within—the other being already flattened and dry—and drank deeply to clear her throat of the dust of this place which still choked her.

Zass’s talons clicked against the rock of the wide step as she came to squat before the girl, looking up into her face with an interest that demanded attention.

“Others—”

“Others?” queried Simsa. What others could there be, unless that wide stretch of vegetation to which the steps led was another inhabited valley. She tried to pick up from the in-and-out emissions of the zorsal’s mind some hint.

But while she looked to Zass for aid, there came another sound out of the haze overhead, one that made her drag herself up, striving to find the last rags of energy to carry her. Where? Back into the place of the long dead—or forward down the stairs into that green-gold covering? A flitter! She could not mistake that!

But Thorn—surely he had been firmly under the altered memories when he had left her. When? Days earlier? In this haze, it was easy to lose all track of time. What else would he do but quietly and obediently return to the outer world, wait for his people? There had been no break in the shell she had built about him—that she could swear to. Or dared she swear to anything? Hallucinations might have betrayed her instead of him. Still, she was not ready to confront any off-worlder.

Simsa pushed a heavy lock of hair out of her eyes. She made her decision quickly as the sound of the flitter grew stronger. There was an odd glow on the haze some distance to the north—as if the machine itself was emitting light in order to break up the haze. Or perhaps these off-worlders with all their bits of knowledge regained from the shattered past could use some mechanical means to so penetrate that curtain which cocooned this part of the planet.

At any rate, these tall bushes and trees ahead promised better hiding. Were those aloft in the flitter to sight the buildings, she was certain they would land, perhaps upon the very ledge above her, for exploration. Her cramped body protesting every movement, she started running for the end of the second ledge where she had slept, then across the next one. Three such she descended without seeing more of the off-world machine than that spot in the haze, but the sound of the engine was steady—a heavy beat—and it was moving at a pace no faster than a walking one. They were spying below—they had to be.

She had seen on screens within the spaceship pictures taken from at least six different worlds. They had tried to interest her so, she had thought, that she would not be aware of their intentions concerning herself.

Her foot came down on a rotted fruit, perhaps one of those she had flung to the winds earlier, and she skidded, flailing arms to try and retain her balance. Her efforts brought her to the right-hand side of that wide flight of stairs so that when she fell it was not on the worked stone but on the earth beyond. She had only a second to ball herself as well as she could. Then she struck with a jolt that drove the air out of her lungs and rolled on down until she hit against the thick stem of a plant that was tree tall and tossed its leafed head from the shaking she gave it.

For a moment, she could only lie there. Somewhere Zass was airborne and calling to her. But she believed that the zorsal was wary enough to keep away from the flitter still, by the sound, cruising overhead. As soon as she got her breath back fully, paying no attention to bleeding scratches or abrasions, she crept on her hands and knees farther on until she was sure that she was under cover. Then she rolled over on her back and stared up at the leafed branches overhead trying to think, to subdue her rush of panic.

Why had she believed that the ceremony of the forgotten people had made her invincible? That independence which had been hers from birth had made her believe that she was a worker of wonders—

All right, let her now work one of those wonders on this hovering sky spy. Dared she try to reach any aboard that flyer with a talent that she admitted now she was untrained to use? Had it been her seeking for Thorn at the hall of thrones that had brought the space rovers out again to hunt? Her foolishness was enough to shame her many times over. To attack an enemy when you did not know the range of any weapon that might be brought against you—to overestimate your own . . . Yes, she was a fool and they could be only playing with her in order to cow her into their hands to do their will with even less freedom than a zorsal on a flying leash.

Thorns tore at her shoulders. A vine, locked about her throat, brought her close enough to the choking point to make her fight vigorously. But all this was under the reaching roof of the trees, and perhaps she passed unseen. Or did they have such spy weapons as could pierce through that leafy covering, center on any life-form that moved below? Simsa all her life had heard so many tales of the invincible machines and installations of the spacemen that she could believe anything might be true.

There were no paths here, or at least she had not chanced on one.

One path—just one path—she had no idea why that meant so much to her, unless it promised speed. What did she flee? Some reaching bolt of energy from that flyer overhead? The sound of its engine deepened, almost like the roar of a canzar from her home world.

Then there was wafted through the moist air that hung under the larger trees such a putrid stench that the odor alone halted her mad flight. She eased back on her heels and sent a short mind call for Zass.

Deep within her mind something stirred. This was no longer the Elder One awakening—she
was
the Elder One—but that fragment of other memory was not hers by right. She gained a fleeting mind picture of what? Not a reptile, for it had no marked head, only a round pulpiness of wriggling grayish body. Then it raised one end of that body and she saw an opening, a dark red maw surrounded by two circles of crushing teeth.

“Wuul!” Not her own memory—that other’s wuul! She snatched at what that other knew concerning the loathsome crawler.

Killer—with no mind to be touched, to command, although those who had built the ruins behind were long gone, this creature of their own world was free and coursed the mangled planet left to it.

Panting, Simsa set her back to the nearest of the tree-sized plants, readied the rod. The smell was choking in its nauseating heaviness. She retched in spite of her fight for control.

“Wuul!” Frantically, she tried to gain more from those two who had accompanied her to this outpost—the Elder One, that far-faded remnant of the exiled flyer. All she received in return was the wariness of one, the stubborn desire to fight of the other.

She purposely tried to put the hum of the flitter out of her hearing and settle upon the here and now. The bushes were rent as a tree fell to her right. Small things skittered and ran blindly, most of them making for other trees. There was a sullen crunching as the tree that had been downed thrashed from side to side. Its root end was being furiously and thoroughly shaken.

Simsa slipped back, putting the bole of the growth under which she sheltered between her and the thing. Then she turned and ran back the way she had come, branches lashing at her, blood welling from cuts across her arms and legs. There came the crash of another tree just as she reached the end of the vegetation that lapped about the bottom ledge. She threw herself out and forward on the stone and scrambled somehow onto the next higher.

That blot in the haze hung just about her now, pulsating. Another tree went down—she gasped and made it up a third ledge. Of Zass there was no sign and she hoped that the zorsal would have intelligence enough to keep off from both the flyer and her own position.

Once before she had seen Zass and her two sons fight and kill a monstrous thing out of the wilderness. But that was on another planet and the thing was not a wuul. The stench of the creature preceded it as another tree, this time on the very edge of the opening where lay the bottom ledge, crashed.

Wuuls could eat anything, even rock that bore such lichens as she had seen before the other entrance to the ruins. But all would infinitely prefer meat—and she was meat!

She thought of the ruins, of that maze of hallways. No, to be trapped in there by a wrong turn or choice—that she dared not chance. Not in haste now, but as one making a last stand against impossible odds, Simsa stood ready. She held the rod tightly—it was her last hope. Yet both the Elder One who had carried this and the lost flyer feared the wuul.

Into the open pushed a mass of gray, unwholesome flesh, heaving as the jaws ground along the tree it had brought down. It had no eyes—

No, meat it hunted by heat, the other part of her memory supplied. There was no way she could shut off that kind of body radiation which was drawing the thing. She was a large section of meat raising in it a stronger call. The pulp of vegetation leaking down it, the thing raised the blind end that faced her. The roll of the jaws never stopped, though now they spat forth green sludge which had filled its mouth, preparing for the far more attractive prey ahead.

As it reared part of its forelength from the ground, the end weaving back and forth, Simsa could guess that it was near the length of four or five of her own kind, monstrous as the things that bedded in the sand river.

The things that bedded in the sand river?

No! Hadn’t her building of hallucinations failed drastically once with Thorn even after she had given her full stretch to their weaving? This thing had no eyes. It sensed by other means, although it seemed now to be in no hurry, as if it savored her disgust and strictly controlled fear as another part of the feast.

The things that bedded in the river—

Simsa ran a tongue across the dryness of her lips. That would not leave her mind! She could not be sure whether it was the last stupid thought of the Simsa who had been—or a part of the new Simsa who was.

The things that bedded in the river! But she must withdraw, put aside thought and fear of the wuul, if she would try this. And that might condemn her from the start.

Nevertheless—the people of the Elder One, her people if she believed that she was of a freak birth that brought into being one of the true Forerunners. If all Thorn had said was the truth—if that were so—and if she had passed the initiation by the pool, then—

Simsa deliberately closed her eyes to the weaving forepart of the wuul, to build in her mind the largest, the most active of those things that had threatened her from the fissures of the rocky plain or had crawled from the river. Its leprous yellow hide, so swollen of belly until it seemed all stomach and guts with only a vestige beyond, save for those sucker-pocked arms—many of them—reaching out.

“Come,” she demanded, putting into the order all the strength she could summon. If the fissure thing was as well-protected as Thorn—if she failed—

Something stirred. She touched and clung with her thought, prodded and pricked. It was not too far away! Perhaps there were fissures here as well as on the plain, having each their inhabitants.

“Come!” This time she reinforced her mental order with a shouted word.

Along the side of the slope, away from the ledges, there was a crumbling of earth. Lumps fell outward, there was a trickle of running sand which edged out and down.

Why did the wuul hold off its attack? She wondered for an instant or two, then realized that she must concentrate instead on that which she called.

More and more of the earth was slipping downward. Then, as if an inner dam had given way, a whole cascade of the running sand washed aside two lumps of earth near as large as her own body. From that hole which had hidden there waved the end of a tentacle.

Shock struck Simsa. Somehow she had not believed entirely, she had expected failure in one small part of her. Now her will soared like the battle cry of fresh troops sent in to make or mar the victory.

“Come!”

She waved the rod in a wide gesture as if she would clear the way for the creature. The bubbling, flowing sand was now a torrent. Tumbling rather than swimming in it came that which she had called. Big—the biggest she had seen.

It passed the ledge on which she stood, reached, with the flowing of sand, the small level space between the last step and the beginning of the vegetation. And either through some motion of its own or because it had been carried by the sand and strove now to fight its way loose, it crawled forth on the ground, hunching its fat bag of a body together, sending forth reaching arms.

The wuul moved at last, a slow, relentless descent of its head, the mouth extending open to the farthest extent, ready to engulf the sand-thing. Tentacles tossed, slapped across and around the pulpy gray body. There was no sound aloud, but the wuul projected a fury, a pain. The wuul was gone!

On the flattened vegetation the sand creature sprawled. Simsa could also sense its vast surprise and rage. There were the trees downed by its opponent. On the air still lingered the reek of the wuul—only it was gone as one might snuff out the flame of a lamp!

Then she knew!

Trick—someone in that hovering flyer had worked this trick, one as intricate in its way as the false memory she had so carefully built for Thorn. Something (she still believed in the expertise of these makers of machines) had been in her head!

Simsa snarled as might any cornered animal. In
her
head! Someone had learned the first fear of the Forerunners and had turned that thread of memory against her—to hunt her into the open where she would be easy prey. They must have tested her in turn—for the wuul had waited, they had waited to see what she could command against their threat. And easily had she supplied them with that answer. She should have been aware that she was being fought with weapons close to her own, laughed at their wuul and kept in hiding.