J. F. Bone, page 13
There was no echo. The shuffling of feet, the sounds of an occasional grunt, or sigh, or muttered word were muted. I was conscious that someone had put a respirator on my face. Someone was walking beside me, and turning my head I saw Joe Riker. His arms were tied behind his back and there was a rope around his neck held in the hand of one of the shadowy figures I now recognized as a native. Riker watched me, his eyes glittering in the reflected lights of the torches.
“The damned autocontrols should have been operative,” he said. “I’m stupid. I shorted them out too soon. We hit a mine! I never figured they’d try for us topside.”
“Thank God you’re alive,” I said.
“That’s unkind of you. Me—I was hoping you were dead.”
“Is it that bad?”
“You should know the natives well enough to answer that. Of course, we may be lucky and die quick, but I don’t think we will. They’ll make us last. Look at the tender loving care they’re giving you.”
“You didn’t have to bring that up,” I said. “It was bad enough before.”
Riker chuckled hoarsely. “I’m glad I don’t have much imagination. If I could really imagine what’s coming, I’d be screaming.”
“You have enough imagination for me. Say something pleasant or shut up.”
“Pleasant for who? For us there’s nothing pleasant. For them, they’re high on happiness already. They’re planning for our future, figuring how to wring the last screech and groan out of our carcasses.”
“We’re going to be the centerpiece of the biggest celebration of the year. They’re taking us north to someplace where they meet.”
“Just what’d happen if we managed to escape?” I asked.
“Oh, they’d try to catch us, but if they didn’t, they’d make do. They have others. There’s always plenty of ‘breeds.” Riker grimaced. “I was a spectator at one of those affairs once. It wasn’t pretty.”
“But where—”
” ‘Breeds are always getting kicked out of the domes for one reason or another. There’s a good supply of victims. And though they’re crazy, the natives aren’t stupid. They don’t kill all of the ‘breeds they catch. I doubt if there’s a single tribe that doesn’t have at least five or six ‘breeds whom they keep for auguries or holy days.”
“Horrible,” I muttered. I had mixed feelings. Naturally, I wanted to be somewhere else than here, but I was oddly enough sympathetic toward the natives. Their egos were as scarred as my face, and unlike me, they had no hope of cure. I knew how they felt, why they wanted to rend, tear and batter at the smug, superior self-sufficiency of the Confeds. By our judgment they were vicious, savage and inferior, and by our actions we added fresh wounds to those they already carried. And the hell of it was that their disease was self perpetuating. Parents passed the attitudes to children and the whole nauseous mess went from generation to generation.
Then the graveyard humor of it struck me. Here I was wondering how the native’s problems could be solved, and here they were carrying me off to some bloody devilment in which I would be the principal. I laughed. I should be thinking of my own problems.
Riker grunted, “What’s to laugh about, Doc?” he asked.
“It wasn’t happy laughing.”
“So why do it? There’s other ways to be cynical. Save your strength and look for a break.”
It was good advice, and that’s one thing I never reject; so I relaxed and tried to make the best of my situation. We moved along at a good clip—about five kilometers per hour I guessed.
“Where are we?” I asked after a few minutes of silence.
“In one of the Shambra tunnels,” Riker said. “The whole planet’s honeycombed with them. Many are ruined, but many are still usable. The natives use them to move about without revealing themselves.”
“What were they for?”
“Transportation, I think. Maybe something like a train ran through them. The Legends call them the Doorway to Distance which would argue transportation. Some of them are still open, some are blocked. Only the natives know which.”
This wasn’t doing me any good. Riker was a mine of information, but it wasn’t useful. I wondered why I started talking about the tunnels.
“Do we have a chance of getting away?” I asked.
Riker shrugged. “There’s always a chance. The thing is to recognize it and to take advantage of it when it comes along.” He shrugged. “Of course, there’s no chance right now. The tunnel kills that. But tunnels end—and maybe then.” He was silent for a moment. Then he grinned wryly. “We’ve got motivation,” he said, “for if we don’t escape, the natives’ll take care of us. They’re very ingenious.”
“You do nothing to help my morale,” I said.
“What’s the sense of worrying? Either your number is up on the Big Board, or it isn’t. And nothing you can do can change it.”
“That’s a helluva philosophy. It leaves you no freedom at all.”
“Where did you ever get the idea that anyone has freedom to determine his fate? You had no freedom when that Geek burned you. And I didn’t have any say about it when that halfbreed cut my throat. The fact that I didn’t get killed just meant that my number wasn’t on the Big Board.”
“I suppose I could have let Dawson beat that man while you bled to death?” I said.
“No—you had to try to help both of us. That’s the way you’re built. But you didn’t keep the ‘breed from dying.”
“But I did keep you alive.”
“Like I said, my number wasn’t up. If it was, nothing you could have done would have saved me. And just for fun, figure the odds on what sort of chance I had to run into a combat surgeon who knew about battlefield expedients. The odds were a million to one against it. But I did. And if I hadn’t—”
“You’d be dead,” I said.
He shook his head. “No. Something else would have happened. I had to stay alive.”
“Why?”
“I dunno. I just did.”
“And you have to be here?”
“Uh huh.”
I sighed. Riker was one of those fatalists who figure everything is already decided. Ordinarily, they are good enough people, but when the going gets sticky, they have a tendency to sit down and do nothing—and trust in fate. I wondered if Riker was a sitdown type or the sort who struggled automatically. He’d better be the second, but nothing I knew of him gave much indication either way.
How long we went down that tunnel I never knew. I wasn’t in the best of shape. I kept drifting, half conscious of the unchanging monotony of my surroundings. Riker sank into a shell of silence and I didn’t try to rouse him. After a time we came to the end of the tunnel. I was unfastened from the cart, forced to my feet, and made to scramble out of a craterlike mass of jumbled rock where the roof had caved in. It was night—whether the same night or another I didn’t know, but on the horizon were chartreuse streaks of approaching dawn.
The natives seemed nervous. They kept glancing at the sky and muttering to each other in their outlandish jargon that flutters on the fringe of comprehension.
They feared the dawn, and the air search that would be made for us. They knew the effectiveness of our organic detectors, and the power of our weapons. I noticed a couple of Mark VII Kellys among them, plus a sprinkling of Mark IV’s, but their firepower was principally a chemical explosive that hurled metal slugs from the tube. I’ve never handled one of the things—rifles, I think they’re called—although for the life of me I don’t know why anyone would give them that name. A rifle is the mechanism that imparts the rotation to a space ship and gives it artificial gravity. Where that relates to a projectile weapon is beyond me.
Our captors hustled us along, up the rocky wall of the crater, over a stretch of desert, down the rimwall of a canal, into the brushy border of a stream, through a narrow pathway under the tangled growth, and into a long, colonnaded avenue covered with a viciously competing canopy of vegetation, but virtually devoid of ground cover save for the naked trunks of the trees and vines that formed the canopy overhead, and the thick mat of dead leaves underfoot.
The natives had their hand torches on again, and we moved forward at a brisk pace. My guard soon noticed my difficulty in breathing and in keeping up with the others, and attributed it quite rightly to the fact that my hands were bound and I could not adjust my respirator. So he loosened the ryk hide thongs about my wrists, but placed another about my neck—thus giving me an opportunity to adjust the compressor on my respiratory but gave me no chance to break away.
As the sun rose, the dark colonnades of the streamside forest lightened to a peculiar twilight. It quickly became hot and humid under the trees, even in this thin air, and I noticed with surprise that my respirator needed constant adjustment.
Riker appeared from somewhere behind me, grinned at me and pointed at my face. “Whycha try doing without that gadget?” he said. “You oughta be able to.”
I looked at him curiously. Was he crazy? Didn’t he remember how well I did in his truck?
“I know what you’re thinking,” Riker said. “But under the trees in the daytime it’s different. They should make enough oxygen to keep a Type “A” like you alive. Just try it.”
I did—and found he was right. The jungle overhead was a vast atmosphere plant, and with light it functioned well enough to let me breathe in relative comfort. At night, though, it would be a different story.
Its effect upon the natives was peculiar. From a taciturn lot, they began to exhibit signs of gaiety and lack of inhibition that I hadn’t previously seen.
“If we’re gonna try making a break for it,” Riker said, “we’d better do it when the sun’s overhead.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you see what’s happening, you stupid domer?” Riker hissed. “The natives are getting an oxygen jag. In an hour or so, they’ll be busting out all over. If they weren’t afraid of an air search, they’d be outside this forest belt. But a patrol craft or a drone would pick them up too easily, and they’d have the devil of a time trying to explain us. So they stay under the trees where the detectors can’t separate them from the rest of the animal life.”
“Clever,” I said.
“But dangerous. In maybe an hour the oxygen tension should be high enough for the gorrons to be coming out.”
“Out of where?”
Hiker kicked the soft, springy leafmold underfoot. “Out of here,” he said. “They dig in at night, using their big claw-tipped forelimbs to hollow out a nest in the leaves. The spadelike tip of their tail drags the leaves back over them, hiding them perfectly. You’ve been walking over them for the past half hour.”
“Oh,” I said. All of a sudden I remembered a story told me about ryks and gorrons. The gorrons are the Arthean equivalent of a tiger, huge six-legged beasts with a splotchy gray and black hide whose colors ripple and change as light strikes the fur. The hairs have some peculiar refractile qualities that make gorron pelts worth their weight in platinum. They’re no good to wear because gorron hide is nearly a centimeter thick and so homogenous that it is virtually impossible to split as we do cowhide or ryk hide, but they make beautiful rugs, and there is a constant demand for them.
But as for the gorron, hair and hide are only part of it and the least important. Imagine a flat, triangular, snaky head, fifty centimeters between a pair of cold gray eyes, crowned with two ears that form a low crest across the top of its head. The head bears as formidable a set of teeth as can be found in a carnivore anywhere. The short massive neck blends smoothly into the brawny primary limbs of the huge, claw-tipped pads. Ordinarily these legs are carried against the body and are used only to secure prey or for feeding or digging. The running legs, oddly slender in proportion to the massive body, are four in number and can propel the animal at great speed for short distances. The tail is moderately long, tapering toward the tip but just before it ends, the tip is expanded into a flat, hairless, disc-like plate of horny skin and cartilage. I never could understand what purpose it might serve until Riker mentioned its use to cover the animal. It has another use, but I didn’t know it at the time.
The ryk, the particular prey of the gorron, is a herbivore with a long neck crowned with a conical head that tapers to a needle-like tip. Its eyes are protected by heavy lids and strong, bony rings around their orbits. There are no visible ears and the lower third of the head is split by an enormous mouth containing a long, prehensile tongue and blunt stumpy teeth. The ryk’s four walking legs are short, its body cylindrical, its tail long and armed with a terminal ball studded with bony spikes. Like the gorron and every other native species of terrestrial life on Arthe, it, too, has six legs, but its anterior members are tiny, almost vestigial, and terminate in an oddly human pair of hands.
Despite its awkward appearance, the ryk is superbly adapted to life in the forest colonnades. Its long neck and armored head enable it to reach through the canopy and feed upon the leaves and fruits on the side exposed to the sun. Its low slung cylindrical body enables it to penetrate the densest of undergrowth, and its brutally armed tail and thick skin protect it from attack. It is one of the few tool-using animals that is below level six on the Mergenthaller scale. Its hands can and do use rocks, clubs and sticks to help it feed and protect itself from the gorrons.
Ryk hide is peculiar. It ranges from a centimeter in thickness at the axillae and groin to heavy plates four to six centimeters thick over the neck and shoulders. The skin is layered and splits readily into sheets whose thickness depends upon the keenness of the knife and the purpose for which they are split. Ryk hide is one of the toughest organic fibers known, comparing favorably with the best synthetics for strength, yet lacking their slipperiness and difficulty of fastening. Ryk hide will tie, and with a knot of the proper kind is almost impossible to untie, although a bowline or a reef knot will break readily enough. It has a number of commercial uses, principally in the making of fine furniture and serving as ties or lashing where strength and flexibility are at a premium. Thin splits are also used as a kind of vellum in the quality book trade.
Despite its clumsy, almost comical look, the ryk is intelligent. It has to be with the gorron for an enemy. And despite its awkward appearance, it is a formidable antagonist, with its mace-like tail and its conical spear-like head. In general, it is an inoffensive sort of beast, but one that is virtually impossible to keep in captivity because wherever it can insert its sharp nose, the rest of the ryk will almost inevitably follow. Zoos have them, of course, but domestication is impossible since the cost of pens capable of holding them would eat up any possible profit. Except for their hides, they have no known economic value.
The ryks, so Sofra told me, can stand low oxygen better than the gorrons, and in certain areas where the predators are too numerous, the ryks will band together to root them out of their leafy lairs and kill them with stabbing thrusts of their head or blows from their mace-like tails. Sofra had learned this from the Shambra Legends, and possibly it was truth. Anyway, it made an interesting story.
“Keep your eyes open,” Riker muttered in my ear. “Any minute now we should be getting some action.”
Our native captors were becoming ever more careless. The one holding the end of the cord attached to my neck was now as affectionate as a strange drunk in a skidrow bar. He wanted to throw an arm around my shoulder and tell me his troubles. I gathered, rather sketchily, that someone—wife, sister, mistress or motherin-law didn’t understand his loose-lipped jabber.
I managed to guide my guard close to another native who carried a Mark VII and a bandolier of spare charges. Riker, some ten meters off to one side, saw what I was doing, grinned and nodded. Unlike me, his hands were still bound, so he was unable to do much toward arming himself if a break came.
And it did. Although the natives had been walking carefully in four parallel columns, each man placing his feet where the other had stepped, some one of the oxygen drunks was bound to make a mistake—and one did. The man—one file in front, and one to the side of me—staggered, stepped sidewise to regain his balance, and stepped on the circular plate of a gorron’s tail. It was just as though he had stepped on the trigger of a trap.
There was a nerve-shattering scream, an explosion of leaves, and in the middle of this violent upheaval of humus appeared the raking claw-tipped forelegs and the gaping triangular head of a gorron. The man didn’t have a chance against those talons and crunching jaws. He didn’t even have time to scream.
Men leaned aside and other explosions among the leaves marked where more gorrons broke cover, attracted by the noise and smell of blood. Projectile weapons roared, blasters coughed, flat heavy explosions racked the air as I caught my confidential guard in the face with a whipping elbow smash, raked his Mark IV from his belt, and burned the head off the man ahead who carried the Mark VII. Riker was at my side, holding out his wrists. “Burn it off,” he said.
I snapped the Mark IV down to minimum aperture and laid a line of pure heat across the ryk-hide. Riker howled with pain, but grabbed the blaster I thrust into his hands and covered me as I removed the Mark VII and the bandolier from the dead native.
He spaced his shots, I noted with approval, firing only at natives who saw we were free. But most of them didn’t notice. They were too busy with the gorrons. After the first surprise had passed, the advantage was all with the men. Quickly they formed into a tight group and began cutting down the half dozen carnivores that had erupted from the humus.
But neither Riker nor I had time for more than a brief glance. We were too busy making tracks away from there. Fortunately, we stepped upon no gorron tails. I suppose the noise had attracted all the nearby ones, and since they run in prides, there were probably no more in the immediate neighborhood.
We finally plunged into a screen of brush near the edge of the growth, burrowed well into the bushes, and waited. For the moment we could do no more. I was panting like a winded dog, and Riker, despite being a Type C was almost as badly off. The firing behind us finally died down.
