The Game of Stars and Comets (64 page)

"It may just be," Illo was frowning a little, "that they cannot for some reason act at that distance—"

I noted that she now said "they" and not "it" or "something" as she had before. Our enemy was taking on a kind of nebulous shape which it had lacked. That this was all guesses was true, but at least it provided us with a starting point.

However I did not see yet how we could hope to explore the Tangle—or why we should try. There are born into our species certain fears, rages, desires. These may be overlaid by the conditioning we receive during youth, still they can be awakened, and, once awakened, can drive us to action.

I had spent all I could remember of life trailing my father, who was, in turn, driven by an obsession concerning the Shadow doom. He had died because of an accident of nature, yes, but in his dying he had bound me to the same search, for the sight of the deaths in Mungo's had helped to shape me, too. Illo had come to the same path by more subtle means, but she would not, I knew, be turned aside.

What we could do at the Tangle I did not know; there was no solving its mystery. At least I could see none. Only piece by piece between us, we had built reasoning which would send us there.

Illo left the empty records room, came back into the open. I took a quick turn along that line of booths, peering at the remains of what had lain in each. There had been no attempt to cover over, put away, any of the wares. Improvised display counters had been fashioned of piled up transport boxes, and their tops were crowded with merchandise. Though time and weather had dealt hard with most of that.

I picked up a belt knife, to discover its length of tressteel, metal which could withstand years of constant use and exposure in the ordinary way, pitted, part of its length a lace of fine holes. A fast inspection of other metal wares showed that they all bore like signs. I clanged the knife down on the box on which it had lain. It shivered in my hand, splitting into small pieces.

The hilt I tossed from me and then wiped my hand along the leather of my breeches at the thigh. That easy collapse of a metal which I well knew and had used all my life, trusting in its endurance, shook me badly. There had been that necklet which had lain for a long time in the grass and yet had shown not the slightest sign of wearing—except the brown links which had parted. Yet here the hardest of metal forging which I knew had not endured for even twenty years—far less—for Illo had come out of Voor Grove and she was younger than I. This fair must have been in progress on the very day the Shadow doom struck.

"You—the two babies—the woman—" I strode back to join her for she had not followed me but rather remained at the door of the hall, surveying the whole of the scene which she could sight carefully by a slow turn of the head, "were you all found together?"

"No." She shook her head. "It was a Voorloper who came. He was bringing an order from the port for—for—I cannot remember the name. But he saw what had happened, knew it when his wagon beasts refused to enter. I think he was a brave man for he came alone, knowing that sometimes the children were spared. He found the babies together in one house—I was trying to lead Krisan out, pulling at her hand. Only I was like one as witless as she then, crying, and babbling some strange words—He said later I was—singing—"

"Singing?"

"So he told it. He had to put restraints on Krisan for she would have run from him and she screamed terribly. I—I can remember that—only we were free of the town then. I was in the wagon wrapped in a blanket. Krisan lay on the floor of the wagon, rolling from side to side, trying to get free. First she screamed and I was very frightened—then she grew quiet all of a sudden and later she sang, sang and called—but her words were all strange and I was so afraid of her. The Voorloper headed across country to the mines and they took us out by flyer—only that night she chewed through the restraints—they had left her hands and feet roped because she was so wild. And she went—they trailed her to the Tangle—and reported her lost when they saw she had burrowed into that.

"The Tangle—it must be the Tangle!"

I showed her the broken knife and I saw her astonishment—"But that is tressteel—" she exclaimed.

"And it breaks like rotten wood! Those devilish flowers—look at them!" A flutter of color had caught my sight. I whirled.

The flowers still moved a little, but not as they had. Only all their heads were pointed in our direction. Illo's suggestion that they could be watching us stood to the fore of my mind. How dared I deny that anything—even the least probable—could be true? I had lived on Voor all my life, been born here—but I was the alien—and there could be a thousand, a million secrets which my kind could not, dared not, penetrate. If we were wise—

"The Tangle—" Illo said with the same resolution she had had when she insisted that a calling for need had brought her north.

"The Tangle—" I repeated heavily, knowing that there was no other way I could go—but this was indeed a road I might not have chosen but one I must follow to its end.

We had traveled along the edge of the Tangle now for a full day, studying that massive barrier of intertwined vines, thorn edged bushes, thick branched, low growing vegetation. There were no flowers here—no sinister blooms which swung without air to stir them, petaled eyes to watch. Though the plants varied in shade, all were a darkish green-grey—near black and utterly unwholesome—at least to my eyes.

Oddly enough the gars had not held off as we drew near this alien stretch of country, as they had when we approached the Shadow doomed villages. Though they did not graze near the barrier, they seemed content to accompany us.

"Not a single break—" I pointed out in the later afternoon—

For some reason the Tangle appeared to radiate heat. I mopped my face with my arm, feeling as if I had been trudging miles under a midsummer sun, when I knew well that we were not far from the time of the frost bearing winds out of the north. What would those do to this mass of growth—or was it impervious to cold?

We had not attempted to touch it. Those finger-long spines on most of the outer rim bushes were enough to warn one off from such folly. If I packed a blaster instead of the tangler and stunner I might have experimented a little. But from all reports one could not even ray a way in. This whole expedition was folly and the sooner we admitted that the better.

Though one part of my mind kept assuring me over and over of that folly there was something else which kept me pacing doggedly on, scanning the Tangle. I had not the slightest idea of what we sought, yet I went. Illo, a little ahead of me, would stop every few steps and face the brush and vine wall, her expression that of one listening.

We camped that night a little away from the somber blot which seemed darker than any land ought to be. It was after we had eaten and drunk, crouching close to a very small fire fed from twists of dried grass which I fashioned out of my loper knowledge, that she said suddenly:

"The necklet—"

My hand was at my belt pouch—there was only one necklet. Now, in spite of a firm feeling that this was a dangerous thing, I brought it forth. Only to discover that it had another attribute, one which nearly made me drop it. We had found the chain under the sun, in the full light of day. Now dusk turned swiftly into dark, and in that dark the broken circlet glowed! I flinched. Yet the metal gave forth no heat, only that steady gleam of blue, enough to tint the fingers which held it.

"Give it to me!" Illo ordered.

"It—it may be a carrier—" I moistened my suddenly dry lips with tongue tip. There were alien metals said to radiate and that radiation reacting against a human body—acting upon human flesh—This had ridden against my body for hours—a couple of days. What could I have absorbed from it? For the skin of my pouch could not have shielded me from any radiation.

"It may be far more. Give it—!" Her voice was sharper, her fingers reaching to pluck the chain from my grasp.

"No!" I coiled my hand tightly around it. "If there is radiation—"

"Who could better judge such than a healer?" she asked.

She was right. Still, remembering how this find had affected her before, I did not want to yield it.

"What do you think that this has to do with the Tangle?" I hedged.

"Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything. It is old—it may go back to a beginning. It belonged to another people, perhaps
they
had a way, knowledge—Don't you see," her tone was near fierce now, "we must have a key, a guide—"

"To what? We have no way of knowing—"

"We must learn." She snatched then, her fingers pried at mine, and, rather than struggle with her, I had to allow her the chain.

She held the metal links closer to our pocket of fire. When the flame light touched the metal its own radiance dimmed. Illo slipped the chain back and forth, pulling at each link as if she wanted to test its strength, as a man tests a rope to which he is about to entrust his life.

"There is no radiation—as we know it," she reported. "There is energy, yes, but it is of another kind."

"What?" I wished mightily now that I had hurled that find from me back on the plains, sent it to be hidden once more under the thick growth of grass.

"Energy akin to an esper talent," she returned calmly. "You must know that when a sensitive uses such he radiates energy. That has been measured in a healer's work."

She spoke the truth, so much I could accept. However, that an inanimate object, such as this chain, could contain such energy—that was another matter. Illo still slid the links back and forth between her fingers. Then she laid across her palm the curved plate covered with intricate engraving which was as much a tangle of lines as the growth barrier we had been tramping by all day.

"Not yet." Slowly she opened the fingers she had curled around that plate. "But it will!" There was triumph in her voice, a light in her eyes which not just a reflection from the fire. "This—this
is
a key! Let me sleep with it and I shall know more." Once again her hand closed tightly over the coil of metal and I knew that she would not yield it to me. Still I was more than just uneasy to see that in her grasp.

A key—to what? I looked over my shoulder at the black blot which was the Tangle. The growth arose, a wall against all my kind. If this chain were a key to the opening of that wall—Only such a thought was folly.

She did not speak again, her mask was back in place, and she curled up at once on her grass bed. As she settled her head I saw that the hand holding the chain rested against her cheek. It was wrong—the act meant danger—both thoughts were fast fixed in my mind. Only I dared not move to take that from her. I could have been somehow caught on the edge of her own concentration of her talent, which walled her off from any interference.

I walked away from the fire to where the gars grazed. Witol lifted his big head and whiffled at me, the snorting sound he made as a greeting. I drew my hand along his warm back where the patches of thicker winter hair were already growing, some near long enough to catch my finger tips.

Witol was part of the sane world I had always known. There was comfort in standing so beside the big animal, smelling the scent of his hide, feeling his hair under my hand. This was real. But picking at me eternally—since I had entered into Mungo's—sharper and sharper now, was an emotion which was part fear (I faced that squarely) and part something else, of which I was not yet sure—curiosity, a loper's desire to learn a new trail, a need for revenge on whatever had made this wide country a land of death for my kind? Perhaps a little of each.

I knew that I would go on in the morning, follow the useless path along the Tangle, hunting what never existed—a way in. Why—? This was like some tale from a story tape in which an impossible quest was laid upon some unfortunate and he was compelled by nonhuman pressure to continue to the end.

Voor's world. The planet had once seemed so open and welcoming—but perhaps my kind were never meant to—I shook my head vigorously as if I could so flip away that insidious conclusion. Each and every world which my species had colonized had had one problem or another. That quality of need for mastery, which was a birth-part of us, was always so awakened into life to set us hammering some very hostile planets into earth-homes. No world was ever a paradise without any danger. In fact such might have been far worse a pitfall for my kind than the worst stone-fire-airless hell. We would only have atrophied there—become nothing.

I scratched the upstanding tuft of coarse mane-hair between Witol's ears and he snorted happily, butted me with near strength enough to knock me from my feet. Our fire was like a fading eye—and weariness reached into me. Anyway our exploration would be limited by our supplies, as I had already made clear to Illo. We must turn south as soon as the water in the tanks Witol shouldered during the day reached a level I had scarred across the sides.

Back at the fire I added the last of my twisted faggots of grass, and then stretched out, my blanket over me. Though that curious warmth which had been with us all day still seemed to reach out even this far into the plains.

I shifted unhappily on my bed. Though I was tired enough to sleep, and to a loper strange places were no deterrent to rest—as long as they were in the open (for we of the trails find it difficult to rest easy within confining walls)—still my busy thoughts would not still. I turned upon my back and lay looking up at the stars. So had I seen those on many nights. Only then I had not been—alone—I had tried to keep from me that feeling which had struck, attempted to overcome me, at my father's death.

Now I fought that battle once again. From the time I had been small—the time I could remember at all—he had worked to prepare me for this kind of loneliness. There are many accidents and ills which whittle away at the numbers of lopers. A man may be asked for at Portcity, perhaps spoken of when one loper met another on the trail—but his fate never known. I had been taught as best my father could manage to be self reliant. If he had mourned my mother, others dead in Mungo's Town, he had never done so openly. As I have said he was not a follower of religious belief which was built upon a formal creed and ritual. Yet he had said at one or two rare moments that he believed the life essence we knew was but a part of something else which had an existence beyond our comprehension, and that we must accept death as a door opening and not a gate slammed shut.