Stardogs, page 16
“No. What?” Mark Albeer was hot, out of breath, and already beginning to be thirsty. He was regretting volunteering for this expedition. He didn’t have the build for rock-climbing and this was rapidly what the attempt to cross the ridge had turned into. Looking back you could see the others picking through the remains of the ship’s fittings.
“Sounded,” pause, “like a,” pause, “scream”, panted the third expeditionary and the reason that the bodyguard had volunteered. Caro Leyven was even less well suited to climbing than himself. They’d had to wiggle up several cracks and she’d loudly cursed her breasts several times. Mark had expected to have to help her back to the cave after a short distance, but despite her obvious exhaustion and the sweat gluing her blouse to her body in interesting places, she hadn’t complained.
Mark scanned and counted the people down in the valley below them. “All there. Nobody showing any signs of panic. Couple of them sitting down idling, mind you.”
“It came from over the ridge.” They were nearly at the crest now.
“Animal maybe? Something we could eat?”
“It sounded like a person to me.” Sam looked doubtful.
“Well, let’s listen for a few minutes.”
But the only sound was that of Caro trying not to pant. After a while they went on. About ten minutes later they could see into the next valley. There was no sign of life. It was a narrow, steep sided valley. Beyond it lay yet another ridge, higher than the one they were on, and lipped with cliffs.
Down in between the tortured valley boulders the source of their scream lay in a fetal ball, clutching the thing on his head. He whimpered from time to time as alien images and emotions he could not understand plucked and teased at his consciousness. The images were alien and expressed in colors which the human eye is blind to. The emotions, the love and the unfettered sexuality of a Denaari five were beyond his ken too. But there was no escaping the terrible sadness and sheer misery of what had happened. He wanted to keen and chitter and chew his wingtips.
When he’d put the crown onto his ill-suited cranium, he’d been a boy. When several hours later, he took it off and stood up, he was boy no longer. Part of him was a Denaari nest-minder. The crown lacked the ability of the Stardogs to reconfigure its output to human telempathic norms, but the recipient had been similar enough to comprehend the non-detail parts of the crown’s content, the images and raw emotions, tastes, smells and gentle touches. Juan’s head was full of tall towers bright with colors for which he had no words, of the spiral Denaari fives soaring in the sun-bright sky, of the feeling of wind beneath his own wings and of shaping and controlling it, of the taste and the scent of a rare spice which would kill humans instantly, so they could never know its wondrous and intense flavors. Worst, his head was full of the creeling and mewing of the beloved new hatchlings.
Lying down here in the thrall of the crown Juan had not seen or heard the noisy descent of the party from the ridge. They had failed to find water, although the bodyguard had realized that the debris he’d seen must be the product of flooding.
Later, back with the others, Mark held up his spoils. “It’s wood.”
The others examined it. The grey-black fragment was broken and abraded, but when cut with the bodyguard’s pen-knife showed wood-grain. Tanzo squinted intensely at it. She scraped the black end of it. Sniffed the residue. Finally tasted it. “It’s been burnt.”
“There are other people here!” Kadar was jubilant
“Not necessarily,” said the xeno-archaeologist. “There are natural fires, you know. And alien species also use fire. But at least there are plants somewhere upstream. If there are plants there is water.”
They stared at the wood fragment as if it was a sacred relic.
“Well. I think first things first.” Shari was as pragmatic as ever. “We must take ourselves to the source of this bit of wood. Can we get over that ridge the way you went? With a reasonable volume of supplies?”
Sam looked at the black ridge glowering in the afternoon sun. “You’d break your ass trying to get over ‘fore dark. Best to wait for morning, or maybe look for an easier way.”
They prepared packs. It was the right thing to do, even if the search for wood and water might be a vain one. Having a common purpose and direction to work in eased some of the underlying tensions. Still there was a near fight that evening about the water ration.
“I need more water than this! It’s been hot out there dragging stuff around in the sun. The ones who went for a walk can have less.”
“Shut up, Jarian,” said Shari dismissively.
“I won’t! What makes you in charge anyway, you old bag? I outrank you. I’ll give the orders! Give me some more water! Now!”
Nobody moved. Loyal oaths and common sense warred in Mark Albeer’s breast. Surely the Viscount? No, not after last night’s humiliation. Perhaps the Princess’s factotum who had called him to that scene, and let him take the frontal role while he skulked? That man was outranked too.
A similar, if less well defined, argument was going on in Lila’s head too. She was loyal to the Empire. It had taken her in, paid her, given her purpose through the degradation of being Johannes’s bodyslave. If it had been the League rising against the Princess she would have had no doubts.
Actually, Deo was merely coolly waiting. Any person who posed a direct threat to her would die, but in the meanwhile, let her foes be revealed.
“I could use more water too,” said Johannes, declaring himself in, and unwittingly swaying Lila toward the Princess.
Kadar started to open his mouth.
“Oh stop it, you two.” Tanzo stormed up to the Prince, and literally pushed him over. He sat, gaping at her. “We’re all thirsty. Nobody is getting any extra. And I don’t care, Prince Jarian, if you do outrank me. I’ll sit on you if I have to. The Princess, I mean, Shari, is doing a lot better than you could. As for working, why you’re laziest person I’ve ever met. You were forever sitting down and slacking off when the rest of us were working. The only one who came anywhere near you was your equally lazy supporter.”
“Well said! Oh, well said, Tanzo. I’ll help you if you need me to,” said Caro, clapping, surprising herself, and influencing a large bodyguard considerably.
The dumpy little woman looked slightly embarrassed.
“Yeah, Lady Locktickler. I reckon I’ll also give you a hand if you need one,” said Sam, having made his assessment of Deo’s readiness to kill.
“Is anybody loyal to me?” asked Jarian in a half-whimper. “I’ll have you all flayed…”
The Viscount squatted down next to Jarian and whispered in his ear. “Not now! Back down, or we’ll be killed.”
Jarian burst into angry, frustrated tears. “There. That sorted him out,” said Martin Brettan with a disdainful twist of the lip. “We really cannot afford to bicker about things now.”
“As for you Yak, if you call me ‘Lady Lock-Tickler’ again, I’ll sit on you, never mind call for help,” said Tanzo in a grim undervoice to the surviving hi-jacker.
Sam grinned his crooked grin at her. “Anytime, Lady Lock tickler. It could be fun. And I reckon I won’t need no help.”
The dumpy woman retreated in confusion, not knowing how to reply. First having to be grateful to that blond complete airhead she’d always despised, and now picking up, what, unless she was very much mistaken, were definite sexual signals from that wiry little Yak. Well, she reflected, in an economy of scarcity you couldn’t choose your friends, and it did wonders for making one attractive to the opposite sex. It was something she had never found herself being before. Unconsciously she straightened her shoulders, and pushed her chest out a bit. The make-up she’d always turned into a disaster area was lost somewhere in the debris. She’d made no effort to find it, but now she wondered… Well, it was probably buried by now. And she’d always hated the muck. She’d just have to do without. She couldn’t see her own face so she didn’t realize what a wise decision this was.
Concussion, the medical texts will tell you, can have many strange subsequent side-effects. Things like amnesia, black-outs, delirium, chronological distortion and character shifts have been widely reported. The blow to Deo’s head had been more serious than those who worried about him realized. His bio-control training had helped to make the severity of the injury less serious… in appearance. He should have been in a hospital, under observation, on strict bed-rest. As it was, his own powers of observation were most obviously diminished. His normally preternatural sensitivity to sounds or movements, even when he was apparently asleep, just weren’t at home tonight. He slept the deep, heavy sleep of the injured and exhausted. He didn’t even hear the tiny clink of glass on glass, which would normally have stirred him instantly to watchful wakefulness.
Otto did. He growled softly. In the wan light of the two sinking moons shining into the cave he could see a person drawing the cork from the wine-bottle with his teeth. The growl did not even make his mistress stir. The dog stood up as water, their precious water gurgled down a throat. Otto barked loudly and angrily. The bottle was dropped with a terrible crash, and the sound of more breaking glass.
A headlight snapped on.
Prince Jarian was trapped in midflight. The light reflected off his wet mouth, face and shirt. Then the torch swung to focus on the pile of bottles. At least five were broken, the precious water trickling down into the sandy cave floor.
CHAPTER 13
FAITH
The dynamics of a society are governed not by politics or even power but by belief. And if you believe, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. And faith isn’t the only thing that moves mountains.
From the collected sayings of Saint Sugahata the Reviled
An amazing number of people buy bridges
Scrawled in pencil in the margin of the original manuscript, attributed to the sister of Sugahata, the self-made multi-billionaire Dugra Schmitt.
It was a scene of angry barking and ugly recriminations.
“It’s that damned dog’s fault! He gave me a fright!”
“It was the dog’s fault that you were stealing water?” said Tanzo.
“I just needed a tiny drink, that’s all. I wasn’t stealing. I would’ve told you in the morning! Really!” Jarian whined.
“I will kill him.” Had anyone looked in Deo’s eyes they would have seen that his pupils were unevenly dilated. The man who normally moved with catlike grace lumbered clumsily to his feet. Jarian squealed in terror. Mark Albeer, himself still groggy from sleep, saw the scion of the Empire retreat whimpering towards his bedding. Deo advanced, hands slightly outstretched, his long fingers bent like claws, twitching convulsively. The bodyguard scrambled to defend the Prince. He didn’t like the boy, but he was raised loyal. It wasn’t his place to like or dislike. He believed in the boy’s right to command, to take… even their precious water. He raised his hands, watchful. He didn’t want to have to kill the Princess’s servant. He should be able to incapacitate the fellow.
Deo came closer. Then he stepped right with blurring speed. He was so unsteady he nearly fell over, before beginning to strangle an unoffending piece of air, with brutal efficiency. When it was done he stared at the corpse he plainly saw at his feet. “An’tchai. It is done.” He knelt and began to sing in a strange, keening fashion. The song was in Ghurkali, and would have been incomprehensible even if the singing was not so appalling. It was just as well the others couldn’t understand. The re-enactment of the Dagger of the Goddess’s first killing was unpleasant enough without the psalm from the Mass of blood. Tears trickled down the man’s agonized face.
“What…?” Martin Brettan still held his pistol ready, as well as the light he had trapped Jarian in.
Mark Albeer shook his head. “The concussion, maybe? Back in basic we had a fellow who had a pole fall on him. Cracked his skull. He lost his memory. Also had fits as I remember. They had to bandage his hands and tie him to his bed.”
“Shoot him!” said Jarian, his voice quavery. “He’s not safe! He might strangle us all!”
Shari got up. “Well, I wish he’d started with you, you little toad. I’m putting him back to bed.”
“Be careful. Leave him,” said Brettan, watchfully.
She ignored this piece of sound advice. “Deo has been my loyal servant since the last Emperor died. I’m damned if I’ll leave him like this.” She walked over to him, and gently took the sobbing, singing man by the shoulder.
He looked up at her with unnaturally wide eyes. “Dewa. You will is done. Will his rebirth be closer to you?”
“At my right hand.” She quoted from the words she had heard him use when forced to deal with her enemies.
A kind of peace came across the face of man in torment. “He was dearer to me than a brother. Why must I follow this path, Goddess? Surely Sugahata was no servant of the Denaar’ Demons?” The voice was querulous, and struggling between the tenor of a boy and the deep voice of the man who had served her.
She wondered how to answer this. Again she quoted one of his favourite sayings. “Like wanton flies are we to the Gods.”
He laughed. It was a strange, melancholy sound. “It is written. It will remain no matter what the priests say and do. They can wash the land with blood. It will remain.”
He allowed her to lead her to his blankets. He lay down, and his eyes closed. His breathing, ragged a few minutes before, gradually slowed and became regular.
Shari stood up. “He’s asleep, I hope,” she said quietly. She looked across at Prince Jarian, who had carefully climbed back into his blankets and was faking sleep with poor skill. “As for water thieves, I think we’ll discuss that in the morning. I don’t want to disturb Deo. If he should be woken up again…. He might not throttle ghosts. Otto.”
The small dog looked up from her heels, and cocked his head. She led him to the pile of bottles, took off her cloak and put it on the ground beside them. She scooped the dog up and put it on the cloak, first administering a kiss. She patted the bottle-pile. “Guard.” Then she went back to her own bedding. Otto, who always slept beside her, made no move from where he sat, watching, listening.
Under his bed-clothes Jarian fingered the small black case he had secreted there, and thought of death. That dog first. He tucked the case into his waistband, despite the discomfort.
Martin Brettan lay in his bedding and thought of his childhood and the perimeter patrol of the palatial estate where he had grown up. He remembered the Dobermans, and watching with his father a display put on by their handlers. “Guard!?” Who would have thought that the princess’s lap-dog was anything but a lap-dog? Yet the animal had plainly been trained, and trained well. Well, it was no Doberman. A little dog like that surely wouldn’t be nearly as alert. The Viscount didn’t know much about dogs.
The sun burned down from the pale sky. Juan was already up, gathering cirrith seeds. He wore the mnemonic-crown again. It balanced at a rather rakish angle on his odd-for-a-Denaari shaped head. It would not have occurred to a living Denaari to take off the crown while the crown still lived. It would have made the creature, which the Denaari had shaped into a memory repository, unhappy. The crown-beasts used body-heat as a source of energy. Juan didn’t know that it was finding him a trifle too hot, and finding his thought output difficult to codify. All Juan knew, with the Denaari nest-minder part of his memories, was that the crown of the dead one must go back to the memory-vaults.
His new memories could picture the planet from space. He now had some idea of where he was. This was probably the edge of the Repapaa-clan’s sheeter-herd grounds. The dune-fields would be the sand-fungus lands from which the Repapaa’s justly famed delicacies were produced. Not more than twenty-five zefts flight across the dunes was the tall Roost-Repapaa. The equatorial lands were still sparely populated. The wing of fortune had surely sheltered him in landing him in such close proximity to help.
Then the human part of his mind attacked the confusing alien matter with logic. It didn’t understand the image of the roost, even if it understood the concept of shared warmth, love and sex that were inextricably tied to it. But it did know that the Denaari were no more. Juan-human didn’t know what world he was on, but no human-discovered world had been populated by the silica-bat creatures of his new memories. As for a mere twenty-five zefts that Juan-Denaari recalled, what was a zeft? The distance imaged might be easy to those who rode thermals and to whom the understanding of air-currents was as instinctive as breathing, but the crown-bearer had no wings, just very sore feet. Those dunes were as un-crossable as a sea. Sea? Ah! that rather toxic hydrogen-oxygen compound that the Juan-human required. The mnemonic crown bearer was indeed very alien. Well, Juan-human would be wise to use his sore feet to get out of the low-country and into the high-places. There would be H2O precipitation there. They used it in the high-altitude terrace-paddies for growing some of the rarer crystalines. Besides, to a creature that didn’t fly, a sheeter herd might be dangerous.
With no way of carrying water, and no idea what a sheeter might be, except that it was big, flat, and nearly mindless, Juan set off up-valley. It was still early, but already it was warm. He welcomed the breeze.
The ‘cave’ was little more than a long overhang where the sand-crusted wind off the dunes had eaten out a segment of softer rock. At its deepest it was barely three yards deep, with the roof perhaps four yards up at its highest point. It offered little real shelter from the elements. Yet… it was airless and stuffy. And, although Juan was already walking with painful feet up-valley in the bright sunlight with sweat dripping off the rim of the crown and running down into his eyes, in the cave it was dark and cold.
“We’re shut in.” Lila’s torchlight wavered slightly as it shone on the white filamentous surface which totally sealed off the mouth of the cave.
“What is it?” demanded Johannes.
