Uncharted Stars (23 page)

There was the taste of blood in my mouth. I drooled it forth to flow stickily down my chin. When I opened my eyes I was in the dark, a dark which brought the terror of blindness with it. My whole body was one great ache which, when I tried to move, became sheer agony. But somehow I got my hand to my head, wiped it without knowing across the stickiness of blood. I could not
see!

“Eet!” I think I screamed that. The sound echoed in my ears, adding to the pain in my head.

There was no answer. The dark continued. I tried to feel about me and my hand struck against solid substance as memory stirred. I was in the LB, we had returned to the ship just an instant before it had gone into hyper.

How badly I was hurt I did not know. As the LBs had originally been fashioned to take care of injured survivors of some space catastrophe, I needed only get back to the hammock and the craft would be activated into treating me.

I felt about me, seeking the touch of webbing. But though my one arm obeyed me, I could not move the other at all. And I touched nothing but wall. I tried to inch my body along, sliding my fingers against that wall, seeking some break, some change in its surface. The quarters of the LB were so confined that surely I could soon find one of the hammocks. I flung my arm up and out, rotating it through the thick darkness. It encountered nothing.

But I
was
in the LB and it was too small for me not to have found the hammock by now. The thought of the hammock, that it was ready to soothe my pain, to apply restoratives and healing, so filled me that I forced myself to greater efforts to find it. But my agonizing movements, so slow and limited, told me that there was no hammock. And whatever space in which I now lay was not in the LB. My hand fell to the floor and touched a small, inert body. Eet! Not as I had seen him last, my exploring fingers reported. But Eet, the mutant, as he had been from birth.

I drew my fingers down his furred side and thought I detected a very faint fluttering there, as if his heart still beat. Then I tried to discover by touch alone whether he bore any noticeable wounds. The darkness—I would not allow myself to accept the thought that I was
blind
—took on a heavy, smothering quality. I was gasping as if the lack of light was also a lack of air. Then I feared that it was, and that we had been sealed in somewhere to suffocate.

Eet did not answer my thoughts, which I tried to make coherent. I felt on, beyond him, and sometime later gave up the hope we were in the LB. Instead we lay in a confined space with a door which would not yield to the small force I could exert against it. We must be on board the
Wendwind
—and I believed we were now imprisoned in one of those stripped lower cabins which had been altered for cargo transport. This could only mean that Ryzk had taken command. What he might have told the Zacathan I did not know. Our actions had been strange enough to give credence to some story that we operated outside the law, and Ryzk could testify truly that we had brought him on board without his knowledge. The Zacathans were esper—telepaths. Ryzk could tell the exact truth and Zilwrich would have to believe him. We could well be on our way now to being delivered to the Patrol as kidnapers and shady dealers with the pirates of Waystar. Yes, as I painfully marshaled the facts as another would see them I realized that Ryzk could make an excellent case, and Zilwrich would back him up.

That we brought back part of the treasure meant nothing. We could have done that and still planned to keep it, and the Zacathan, for ransom. Such deals were far from unknown.

If Ryzk had been black-listed, bringing us in might return him to the rolls. And if we underwent, or I underwent, deep interrogation—the whole affair of the zero stone would be known. It would be clear that we were guilty of what the Patrol might deem double-dealing. Ryzk had only to play a completely honest man at the nearest port and we would have lost our big gamble.

It seemed so hopeless when I thought it all out that I could see no possible counter on our part. Had we one of the zero stones we might—so much had I come to accept the unusual powers of those strange gems-have a fighting chance. Eet—if he were not dead—or dying—might just—

I felt my way back to that small body, gathered it carefully up so that Eet's head rested against me, and put my good arm protectingly around it. I thought now that I no longer felt that small stirring of a heartbeat. There was no answer to my mind-call. So there was good reason to believe that Eet was dead. And in that moment I forgot all my annoyance at his interference in my life, the way he had taken over the ordering of my days. Perhaps I was one who needed such dependence upon a stronger will. There had been my father, then Vondar Ustle, then Eet—

Only I would not accept that this was the end. If Eet was dead, then Ryzk would pay for that death. I had thought of the aid of the stone, and the aid of Eet, and both of them were gone. What remained was myself, and I was not ready to say I was finished.

I had always believed that I was no esper. Certainly no such talent was apparent in me before I met Eet. He had touched my mind for communication and I had learned that use from him. He had at one uncomfortable time given me mental contact with another human in order to prove our innocence to a Patrol officer. Then he had taught me to use the hallucinatory change and I had been the one to discover that the zero stone could bring about an almost total change.

But Eet—he was either dead or very close to it. I had neither Eet nor the stone. I was hurt, how badly I could not tell, and I was a prisoner. There was only one small—very small—spark of hope left—the Zacathan.

He was normally esper, as was Eet. Could I possibly reach him now? Make some appeal?

I stared into a dark which I hoped would not be my portion all the rest of my life, but in my mind I pictured the face of Zilwrich as I had seen it last. And I strove to hold that face in mind, not now for the purpose of making it mine, but rather as a homing point for my thought-seek. And I aimed, not a coherent thought, but a signal for attention, a cry for help.

Then—I touched! It was as if I had put tip of finger to a falder leaf which had instantly coiled away from contact with my flesh. Then—it returned.

But I was racked with disappointment. With Eet mind-touch had been clear, as it had been with the Zacathan when the mutant was present. This was a jumble of a language I did not know, poured at me in a wealth of impressions too fast for me to sort and understand, forming a sickening, chaotic whirl, so that I must retreat, drop touch.

Eet was the connecting link I must have. Otherwise I could only try until that whirl of alien thought drove my brain into mindlessness. I considered the chances. I could stay prisoner here for whatever purpose Ryzk had in mind. Or I could try the Zacathan again. And it was not in me to accept the helplessness of that first choice.

So, warily, as a man might seek a path across a quaking bog ready to swallow him up in a thousand hungry mud mouths, I sent out once more the mind-seek. But this time I thought my message—slowly, impression by impression, and doggedly held to what I had to convey as the stream of the alien mind lapped over it. I did not try to tell Zilwrich anything, as I would have “talked” to Eet. I merely thought out over and over again what I would have him know, letting it lie for him to pick up as he could. Though I feared my slow channel was as unintelligible to him as his frighteningly swift flow was to me.

Once, twice, three times, a fourth, I thought through what I made as my plea. Then I could hold no longer. The pain of my body was as nothing compared to the pain now filling my mind. And I lost contact as well as consciousness, just as I had when we had snapped into hyper.

It was as if I were being pricked over and over again by the sharp point of a needle. I stirred under that torment, which was small and far away at first, and then became so much the greater, more insistent. And I fought to remain in the safety of nothingness. Prick—the summons to what I did not want continued.

“Eet?” But it was not Eet—no—

“Wait—”

Wait for what, who? I did not care. Eet? No, Eet was dead. And I would be dead. Death was not caring, not needing to care, or feel, or think—And I wanted just that—no more stirring of life, which hurt both mind and body. Eet was dead, and I was dead, or would be if the pricking would only stop and leave me in peace.

“Awake—”

Awake? I thought it was “wait.” Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered—

“Awake!”

A shouting in my head. I hurt and that hurting came from outside. I turned my head from side to side, as if to shake out the voice in my mind.

“Keep awake!” screamed that order and the pain it caused me aroused me further from my stupor. I was moaning a little, whimpering through the dark a plea to be let alone, left to the death which was rest.

“Keep awake!”

Hammering inside my skull. Now I could hear my own whimpering plaint and was unable to stop. But also with the pain came an awareness which was a barrier against my slipping back into the nothingness.

“Awake—hold—”

Hold what? My rolling head? There was nothing to hold.

Then I sensed, not words echoing through my bruised mind, but something else—a stiffening, a support against which my feeble thoughts could find root and sustenance. And this continued until I stared wide-eyed into the dark, as much another person inwardly as I had been outwardly with the hallucinations born of the zero stone. For only a limited time, somehow I knew, would that support me. And during that time I must make any attempt I could to help myself.

XV

Somehow I got to my feet, still holding Eet against me with my good arm, my other hanging uselessly by my side. I was ready to move, but where, against what—or whom? Realizing I was still helplessly caught in this pocket of dark, I was ready to slump again into a stupor.

“Wait—be ready—” There was a sense of strain in that message, as if he who sent it were making a vast effort.

Well, I was waiting and ready, but for how long? And in this dark time seemed forever and ever, not measured by any standard I had known.

Then came sound, a small grating, and I knew a leap of heart—I was not blind after all! There was a line of light to my right. I lurched in that direction as that line grew from a slit into an opening I could squeeze through—though I was blinking against the discomfort of light.

I brought out and up against the wall of the well which was the core of the ship, too spent for a moment to turn and see who had freed me. But leaning one shoulder against the wall, I was able to face about.

Zilwrich, whom I had last seen lying on the pallet, supported himself with his two arms rigid against the floor, clearly at the end of the flutter of strength which had made him crawl to the door of my cell. He lifted his head with manifest effort.

“You—are—free—To you—the rest—”

Free but weaponless, and as near the end of my resources as the Zacathan, though not yet finished. Somehow I was able to lay Eet on the floor, get my good arm about Zilwrich, and half drag the Zacathan back to the bed he had crawled from. Then I stumbled out, picked up the mutant, and brought him back, nursed against me, though no tending would return life to that small body.

“Tell me.” I used the Basic speech, glad to be able to relinquish touch with that bewildering alien mind. “What happened?”

“Ryzk”—Zilwrich spoke slowly as if each word came hard—“would go to Lylestane—return me—the treasure—”

“And turn us in,” I ended, “probably as accomplices in Guild plotting.”

“He—wishes—reinstatement. I did not know you had returned alive—until your mind-seek. He said—you died—when we went into hyper.”

I glanced down at the limp body pressed to mine. “One of us did.”

I might be free inside the ship, but that I could do anything to change the course of events I doubted. Ryzk would return us to Lylestane and we—I—would find the balance of justice heavily weighted against me. Not only were circumstances largely in the pilot's favor, but under the scanner they would have out of me all that the zero stone meant. And—the zero stone!

Eet had concealed it somewhere in the LB. As far as I knew Ryzk did not suspect it. If I could get hand on it again—I was not sure how I could use it as a weapon. But that it had possiblities of this sort there was no doubt. The LB-but Eet had hidden the stone and Eet was dead.

The bowl—if I had that I could trace the zero stone by the fire of the one inlaid in it.

“The treasure—where is it?”

“In the lock safe.” Zilwrich's eyes were on me with piercing keenness, but he was ready enough with that information.

The lock safe—If Ryzk had sealed that with his own thumb, I had no chance of getting the bowl. The compartment would remain closed until he chose to release it.

“No.” It would seem that like Eet the Zacathan could readily read my mind, but that did not matter. “No—it is sealed to me.”

“He allowed that?”

“He had to. What is this thing you must have—that the bowl will bring you nearer to—a weapon?”

“I do not know if it can be a weapon. But it is a source of power beyond our reckoning. Eet hid it in the LB; the bowl will find it for me.”

“Help me—to the lock safe.”

It was a case of the lame leading the crippled. We made a hard journey of a short space. But I was able to steady the alien while he activated the thumb lock and I scooped out the bowl. He held it tightly to him as I guided and supported him back to his bed.

Before he released the bowl to me he turned it around in his hands, examining it closely. Finally one of his finger talons tapped the tiny zero stone.

“This you seek.”

“We have long sought it, Eet and I.” There was no use in concealing the truth any longer. We might not make the voyage we had planned, going out among the uncharted stars in search of an ancient world which was the source of the stones, but it was the here and now which mattered most—the finding of the one Eet had hidden.