The Forerunner Factor (53 page)

“A place of power.” Something in him quieted all the uneasiness, even the stiffness of her mistrust. “A place of initiation.”

“And you have passed that?”

He was very quick to catch her up, she thought. “Yes.” Never would she enlarge upon that. What she had done by that poisonous pool was hers alone—not to be shared.

“I will warn you,” she said swiftly, “that there are matters here best left alone. Thrusting too deep into ancient secrets can bring—death!”

His lizard jaws spread apart in what could only be thought a smile, showing formidable teeth. “There is always peril in the unknown,” he returned. “If one listens to the whisperings of dangers to come, one remains in the shadow of danger without profit. Be sure we do not go recklessly upon any trace of that which we search for all our days. And—”

What more he would have added she would never know. For beneath her feet the ledge swayed. That hole from which the sand gushed was growing large. As on another world released floods of water could undermine bands and cliffs, so here the moving sand was carving itself a greater runway.

Out of the sky flashed Zass—the zorsal giving tongue as she flew straight for Simsa. The flitter lurched nearer to the sand flood and there was a rumbling from out of the ruins. Without a word, Thorn sprang at her as she jumped in turn away from the forepart of the ruin. She had no time to defend herself against his grasp, to even move the rod, for he had her in a tight hold, the heating rod against her own body as he jerked her down the three ledges which were now tilting on the very brink of a raging flood, if one could so describe that wash of sand. And in it there moved more creatures, their sucker-grown and tentacled legs reaching out as they were borne along, some grasping the edge of the ledges for anchorage.

There came a crash that silenced even Zass’s hoarse screams. Behind, some strained wall or floor had given way. But the Zacathan was waiting at the flitter and Thorn bundled her forward into the hands of the lizard man. Those closed upon her in the same tight hold as Thorn had used, and she was pulled into the outworld flyer, Zass streaking before her, Thorn pushing at her from behind, so she sprawled backward into the luggage space behind the two seats at the fore of the bubble. Thorn was in the pilot’s seat and the bubble snapped down as he triggered a small lever on the board before him. The flitter arose so suddenly that Simsa, still unable to completely understand what had happened, flopped back again on the floor as the machine took to the air.

“Over it—on hold!” The Zacathan leaned far forward in the seat, his snouted nose pushed against the transparent covering of the cockpit. “No, not all of it—praise be to Zurl and Zack—a settling, but not all lost!”

Simsa edged up to a crouching position and endeavored to look below. She was in time to see the ledged stairway slip down to rise on the other side. And there had indeed been a toppling of some walls within.

“Cruise!” the Zacathan ordered again. “Let us see how bad it is.”

Under Thorn’s control the flitter began to circle about the spread of the ruins. From this perch aloft, the girl could see how extensive the structure had been. For it was no town, she knew that. This had been something of a temple, something of a school—and even more a legend. The Elder One had never been here. Her initiation had taken place on another world. But she had heard of this doorway to even greater knowledge all her past life.

There sounded another roar above the noise of the flitter. Simsa shrank in upon herself as she watched a full quarter of the structure below her tremble and slide in. There was a new gushing on the side of the mound. Where the sand still poured and puddled there came a green flood to cut into that thick mixture, in a spate of energy that carried it on and over the sand toward the vegetation beyond.

Simsa was not aware of her own small cry until she heard it. The water of the initiation pool was flooding out—sinking into the sand, vanishing forever from ruin or day. There would never be another to come and submit to its testing, to open thus the realm beyond the world.

“Sooo—” The Zacathan’s voice was close to a hiss, yet when she glanced at him there was nothing in his eyes but a shadow of loss and of pity.

She resented that pity for an instant and then she knew what lay behind it. Not that there was lost to him and his kind another discovery, perhaps one of the greatest they might ever make, but rather that she had lost something that was worth much to her.

“It is gone.” She voiced the only thing she might say. “The life is gone.”

And she spoke the truth. It seemed to her that now lay only the broken or rapidly breaking stone, that what she had sensed in the walls bled from the past glories, as the water of dreams bled from whatever buried channel contained or refreshed the pool. She was as sure as if she had walked again within or could see through that maze of walls, that the great hall was no more—that those thrones which had once served the leaders of her kind had toppled and gone the way that the years prevailed.

“No,” the Zacathan said slowly in trader’s speech, as if at this moment he had no wish to invade her tangled and sorrowing thoughts. “You live. What was once here only waited to serve the last of those who had laid its first stones upon stones. Let it be, Yan—”

Simsa was about to ask who Yan was when she realized the Zacathan had been speaking to Thorn, using his friend name. He still did not acknowledge her presence and as the flitter wheeled outward and away from the ruin, she wondered if the choice the Zacathan had really made for her so forcibly back on the terraces was the right one.

As that exile of the valley had been before her—alone—so was she now. On Kuxortal, she had had ties, tenuous as those had been. But old Ferwar had been a part of her life. There were those of her own generation in the Burrows who knew her, even though she had no close relationship with any of those outcasts. The Elder One had had her friends, companions, her clan-kin—now she had nothing except this thing that had happened to her by chance.

By chance? Zass chirruped in her ear and she reached up her right hand to smooth the zorsal’s small furred body. Was it chance that had brought the Life Boat to this forgotten world out of all the rest? She had always scoffed at the superstitions of the Burrowers and of those who followed the “gods” of the upper city—that anyone could be influenced by some unknown power about which they were largely ignorant was folly beyond folly.

Yet, she had met with Thorn merely by chance—had she been there at their meeting place a few breaths later, never would she have been drawn into the race across the haunted wilderness and therein met that which was the other part of her. And, had she not picked up the thoughts concerning her on the spacer and taken off . . .

It was indeed folly to think that this was all part of some greater plan, that she had been moved by another will as a gaming piece might be shaken and moved! She was Simsa, she made
her
own choices—went her own way. But why had that way, seemingly by chance again, become her path to this place of the past wherein those of the Forerunners had achieved adeptship and the greater knowledge?

What had in turn given her the power to summon the river of sand and in the end bring about the destruction of that which had endured so long? The Zacathan—She hunched herself into a small space, both the rod and Zass clutched to her—all that remained truly her own was in that grasp. She could sense no guile in him. He had not wanted her power—only her knowledge. And the two of those were not one and the same but separate. She was warned and she was armed—not only by what the Elder One had done with her, but by the place of initiation. She had very much to learn—whereas when she had first met that other Simsa she had felt ready to conquer the world itself, now she was humble and a little afraid. Though that was within her, outwardly she must wear the mask of the Elder One’s own imperturbable self.

The feathery softness of the zorsal’s antennae brushed the ebony skin of her cheek, and Zass nipped lightly, caressingly, at the hand holding her small body. Zass . . . she was thankful for Zass and—

Once more, she eyed the Zacathan measuringly. His head was turned a little away from her and he watched the last of the ruins slide by beneath them as they headed out over the barren rock that covered so much of this world. Yes, in him she could feel only some disappointment, a disappointment for the loss of that ancient seat of strange learning.

As if her very gaze upon him was like a touch on his shoulder or arm to summon his attention, his head swung around, the frill still erect and showing a faint shimmer of color over the scales there. He smiled.

“Not such a loss?” he asked strangely, as if he could read a thought that had not yet crossed her own mind. “A thing having served its purpose, can it not be discarded?”

Was that the truth? Had that invisible finger of fate pointed her straight to this place, in spite of all her belief in her own freedom, that she might be the last of her kind—

“Or the first, gentle fern?” Yes, he was reading her thoughts! For a moment, she felt the heat of temper flash and then she shrugged. She was without kin or country, or even world. If they found a place for her, why should she quarrel with that? She had never before put down roots—

“Why should you, if you wish it not?” the Zacathan continued. He read her thoughts but he spoke aloud, she was not certain why. “You are free to come or go, or stay—” He made a small gesture with his hand to indicate the country lying before them. “If that is your true wish?”

“No,” she answered him also aloud this time. “I would . . .”

She hesitated. Would what? Go with these two and devote herself to their search for ancient knowledge? She studied the back of Thorn’s dark head. He was the first off-worlder she had ever met—and she had once thought that they were all alike. Now she knew that they were different, different as an upper city lord from a Burrow-dweller. She had meddled—tried to fight him. Now, now she was glad that she had not been skillful enough to have accomplished her purpose. There was the officer and Greeta and there was Thorn and this lizard man—Doubtless there were many other gradations of thought and feeling out among the stars and on other worlds. Who was she to sit in judgment over what she did not know?

“I would go with you.” It seemed to her that she took long to make that decision, but perhaps it was only the space of a breath or two. Now she added, not using thought speech but the tongue of the spacemen and speaking directly to the back of Thorn’s head, “I would go with both of you.”

“Well enough.” That was the Zacathan. Thorn had said nothing; he might be a mindless, uncaring part of the machine he guided. She waited.

It was important that he say some word, make some gesture. But he did not and she began to question the wisdom of her own choice. After all, what did he have to judge her by? He had his own people, he was no exile.

The flitter hummed on across the fissured bareness of the rock plain, but they were lifting higher into the haze. Now she could make out only patches of the rock as mist began to draw around them, cutting off the solid planet beneath. Zass moved uneasily in her grasp. She loosed her hold on the zorsal and the creature gave a small leap, first to land on the forearm of the Zacathan, then into Thorn’s lap.

The spaceman’s hands were busied. Then he raised them from the board, but the flitter raced on. Apparently, no controls were needed for a set course. His head turned a little, but she could only see one eye and a part of his cheek, and the corner of his mouth that had been set in so stern a band.

“No more tricks?” He asked that slowly, with a measured interval between each word.

She stiffened. Tricks? There had been no trickery between them ever. What she had always done was what had seemed right and just to her. Then the humor that underlay his question reached her.

There had been little of that emotion in the Burrows. She was awkward about responding to it, as strange in its way as some of the thoughts of the Elder One. But now it was also the Elder One within her who knew what he would do—he was purposely belittling what she had done, making it a thing of little account so that it could be dismissed, perhaps forgotten except as an object lesson for her to live with for a while (though she did not believe that he meant that, either!).

“No more tricks.” She smiled, and the movements of her lips then felt strange and new, but this was good, this strangeness. “There is one . . .” She spoke, now, in a language she had not known until the words rose from some place deep within her. “There was one and another—and another—”

She left the rod lying across her bent knees and, leaning, she did something that Simsa of the Burrows would have shrunk from, what the Elder One would not perhaps have countenanced in her own time. What did it matter concerning those two? She was herself—still herself and what she chose to be. Her fingers touched with the lightness of Zass’s antennae those two shoulders nearest herself—the scaled and the suit-covered one—just for an instant. But it was enough.

THE END

Table of Contents

FORERUNNER

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