Eye of The cat, page 3
Back when Nayenezgani and his brother were in the process of disposing of the monsters the People had found in the new world, there were some—such as the Endless Serpent—who were, for various reasons, spared. Yet even these were tamed to a degree in their acknowledgement as necessary evils. The world was indeed becoming a safer place, though some few yet remained.
There was”, for instance, Tse’Naga’Hai, the Traveling Rock, which rolled after its victims to crush and devour them. Nayenezgani traveled on a rainbow and the crooked lightning in search of it. His brother having counseled him to take the magic knives with him, he had all eight of them about his person.
When he came to the place called Betchil gai, he took out his two black knives, crossed them and planted them. Beyond, he planted the two blue knives, crosswise. Farther along, he crossed the two yellow knives and planted them. Farther yet, he planted the two knives with the serrated edges, also crosswise.
He moved then in sight of the giant Rock.
“What are you waiting for, Tse’Naga’Hai?” he asked it. “Do you not pursue my kind?”
With a crunching, grinding noise, the mossless boulder he had just addressed stirred. It moved slowly in his direction, gaining momentum noticeably after but a few moments. It almost took him by surprise with the speed with which it approached.
But he whirled and raced away. It came on rapidly at his back, gaining upon him.
When he reached the place of the serrated knives, Nay-enezgani leaped over them. The Rock rolled across them and a big piece broke away.
He continued to flee, jumping over the yellow knives. Tse’Naga’Hai rolled over them also, and another fracture occurred; more pieces fell away.
By now, the Rock was bouncing from side to side and rolling in an irregular pattern. And when Nayenezgani leaped over the blue knives and the Rock crashed into them and bounced over, more pieces fell away. By now, its size was considerably reduced though its velocity was increasing.
Nayenezgani sprang over the black knives. When he heard the Rock grating and cracking itself upon them, he turned.
All that remained was a relatively small stone. He halted, then moved toward it.
Immediately it swerved, altering its course to bound away from him. Now he pursued it into the west, beyond the San Juan River. Finally, there he caught it, and much of the life and wit seemed gone out of it.
“Now, Tse’Naga’Hai,” he said, “the power to harm me is gone from you, but you are not without a certain virtue I noted earlier. In the future you will serve to light the fires of the Dineh.”
He raised what remained of the Rock and bore it off with him to show to First Woman, who otherwise would not have believed what he had done.
Finally he sighed and rose.
He crossed to the console beside the area enclosed by the shining bars. He pushed the “Messages” button and the display screen came alive. edwin tedders called, it read, followed by the previous day’s date and the time—the time when his unit had signaled in the wilderness. Below, it listed six other attempts by Edwin Tedders to reach him, the most recent only a few hours ago. There was an eastern code and a number, and a request that he return the call as soon as possible, prefaced by the word urgent.
He tried to recall whether he had ever known an Edwin Tedders. He decided that he had not.
He punched out the digits and waited.
The buzzing which followed was broken, but the screen remained dark.
“Yes?” came a crisp male voice.
“William Blackhorse Singer,” he said, “returning Edwin Tedders’s call.”
“Just a moment, please.” The words hurried and rose in pitch. “I’ll get him.”
He tugged at a turquoise earring and regarded the blank screen. A minute shuffled its numbers on a nearby clock-display. Another…
The screen suddenly glowed, and the heavily lined face of a dark-haired man with pale eyes appeared before him. His smile seemed one of relief rather than pleasure.
“I’m Edwin Tedders,” he said. “I’m glad we finally got hold of you, Mr. Singer. Can you come through right now?”
“Maybe.” He glanced at the gleaming cage to his left. “But what’s this all about?”
“I’ll have to tell you in person. Please reverse the transfer charges. It is important, Mr. Singer.”
“All right. I’ll come.”
He moved to his trip-box and began its activation. It whined faintly for an instant. Zones of color moved upward within the shafts.
“Ready,” he said, stepping into the unit.
Looking down, he saw that his feet were growing dim. For a moment, the world was disarrayed. Then his thoughts fell back into place again. He was standing within a unit similar to his own. When he raised his head he looked out across a large room done up in an old-fashioned manner—dark paneled walls, heavy leather chairs, a Chinese rug, bookshelves filled with leatherbound volumes, drapes, a fireplace burning real logs. Two men stood facing him— Tedders, and a slight, blond man whose voice identified him as the one with whom he had first spoken.
“This is Mark Brandes, my secretary,” Tedders stated as he watched him step down.
He inadvertently pressed his palm rather than clasping hands, in the old way of the People. Brandes looked puzzled but Tedders was already gesturing toward the chairs.
“Have a seat, Mr. Singer.”
“Call me Billy.”
“All right, Billy. Would you care for a drink?”
“Sure.”
“I have some excellent brandy.”
“That’ll be fine.”
Tedders looked at Brandes, who immediately moved to a sideboard and poured a pair of drinks.
“Early spring,” Tedders said.
Billy nodded, accepted his glass.
“You’ve had a fascinating career. Both freezing and time-dilation effects kept you around till you could benefit from medical advances. A real old-timer, but you don’t look it.” Billy took a sip of his brandy.
“This is very good stuff,” he said.
“Yes. Real vintage. How many trackers are there around these days?”
“I don’t know.”
“There are others, but you’re the best. Old school.”
Billy chuckled.
“What do you want?” he asked.
Tedders chuckled also.
“The best,” he said.
“What do you want tracked?”
“It isn’t exactly that.”
“What, then?”
“It’s hard to know where to begin…”
Billy looked out the window, across the moon-flooded lawn. In the distance, the prospect was broken by a high wall.
“I am a special assistant to Secretary-General Walford,” Tedders finally stated. “He is here—upstairs—and so are the Stragean ambassador and consul—Stango and Bogarthy. Do you know much about the Strageans?”
“I’ve met a few, here and there.”
“How did they strike you?”
He shrugged.
“Tall, strong, intelligent…What do you mean?”
“Would you want one for an enemy?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They could be very dangerous.”
“In what ways?”
“They’d be hard to stop. They’re shapeshifters. They have a kind of mental control over their bodies. They can move their organs around. They can—”
“Walk through walls?”
Billy shook his head.
“I don’t know about that. I’ve heard it said, but I’ve never—”
“It’s true. They have a training regimen which will produce this ability in some of them. Semireligious, quite arduous, takes years, doesn’t always work. But they can produce some peculiar adepts.”
“Then you know more about it than I do.”
“Yes.”
“So why ask me?”
“One of them is on her way here.”
Billy shrugged.
“There are a few thousand around. Have been for years.” Tedders sipped his drink.
“They’re all normals. I mean one of those with that special training.”
“So?”
“She’s coming to kill the Secretary-General.”
Billy sniffed his brandy.
“Good that you got word,” he finally said, “and can turn it over to the security people.”
“Not good enough.”
Throughout the conversation, Tedders had been struggling to obtain eye-contact. At last Billy was staring at him, and he felt some small sense of triumph, not realizing that this meant the man doubted what he was saying.
“Why not?”
“They’re not equipped to deal with Stragean adepts,” he said. “She could well be too much for them.”
Billy shook his head.
“I don’t understand why you’re telling me about it.”
“The computer came up with your name.”
“In response to what?”
“We’d asked it for someone who might be able to stop her.”
Billy finished his drink and set the glass aside.
“Then you need a new programmer or something. There must be a lot of people who know more about Stragean adepts than I do.”
“You are an expert on the pursuit and capture of exotic life forms. You spent most of your life doing it. You practically stocked the Interstellar Life Institute single-handed. You—”
Billy waved his hand.
“Enough,” he said. “The alien you are talking about is an intelligent being. I spent much of my life tracking animals— exotic ones, to be sure, some very crafty and with tricky behavior patterns—but animals nevertheless, not creatures capable of elaborate planning.”
Cat.…
“…Sol don’t see that my experience is really applicable in this situation,” he concluded.
Tedders nodded.
“Perhaps, and perhaps not,” he said at last. “But in a matter like this we should really be certain. Will you talk with the Stragean representatives who are visiting here? They can probably give you a clearer picture than I can.” “Sure. I’ll talk to anybody.”
Tedders finished his drink and rose.
“May I get you another of those?”
“All right.”
He replenished the snifter. Then, “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, and he moved off to the right and departed the room.
Billy set down the glass and rose. He paced the room, regarded the titles on the bookshelves, felt the volumes’ spines, sniffed the air. Mingled with the smell of old leather, a faint, almost acrid aroma he had not been able to place earlier came to him again, a scent he had experienced upon meeting Strageans in the past, in another place. They must have been about this building for some time, he decided, or have been in this room very recently, to mark it so with their presence. He remembered them as humanoid, over two meters in height, dark-skinned save for silvery faces, necks and breasts; flat-headed, narrow-waisted beings with wide shoulders, collarlike outgrowths of spiny material which serveu as sound-sensors and small, feral eyes, slitted, usually yellow but sometimes cinnamon or amber in color; hairless, graceful in a many-jointed, insectlike way, they moved quietly and spoke a language that reminded him vaguely of Greek, which he did not understand either.
It is language, he decided, that sets the sentients apart from the animals. Isn’t it?
Cat.…?
He moved to the window, stared out across the lawn. Difficult to cross there without being detected, he concluded, with even the simplest security devices in operation. And this place must have plenty. But she could assume almost any guise, could penetrate the place in an innocuous form…
Why be furtive, though? That is what they would be expecting. While the defenders were concentrating on the sophisticated, why not hijack a heavy vehicle, come barreling across the lawn, crash through a wall, jump down from the cab and start shooting everything that moves?
He shook himself and turned away. This was not his problem. There must be plenty of people more qualified than himself to second-guess the alien, no matter what the computer said.
He returned to his chair and took up his drink. Footsteps were approaching now from the direction in which Tedders had departed. Footsteps, and the soft sound of voices, accompanied by a faint ringing in his ears. The language of the Strageans ranged into the ultrasonic on the human scale, and though they narrowed their focus when speaking Terran tongues there were always some overtones. Too long a conversation with a Stragean normally resulted in a headache. He took another drink and lowered the glass as they rounded the corner.
The two Strageans wore dark blue kilts and belts which crossed their breasts like bandoliers. Ornamental pins or badges of office were affixed to these latter. Between Tedders and the aliens walked another man, short, heavy, with just a fringe of dark hair; his eyes were jadelike under heavy brows; he wore a green robe and slippers. Billy recognized him as UN Secretary-General Milton Walford.
Tedders introduced him to Daltmar Stango and Orar Bo-garthy as well as to Walford. Everyone was seated then, and Tedders said, “They will tell you more about this.”
Billy nodded.
The Stragean known as Daltmar Stango, staring at nothing directly before him, recited: “It has to do with the coming of your people to stay on our world. There is already a sizable enclave of them there, just as there is of our kind here on Earth. There has been very little trouble on either world because of this. But now, with my present mission to negotiate political and trade agreements, it appears that the settlements will become permanent diplomatic posts.”
He paused but a moment, as if to refocus his thoughts, and then continued: “Now, there is a small religious group on Strage which believes that when Terrans die there, their life essences foul the place of the afterlife. Permanent posts will guarantee that this group’s fears will be realized with increasing frequency as time goes on. Hence, they are against any agreements with your people, and they would like all of them off our world.”
“How large a group are they?” Billy asked.
“Small. Fifty to a hundred thousand members, at most. It is not their size which is important, though. They are an austere sect, and many of them undertake a severe course of training which sometimes produces spectacular effects in the individual.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“One such individual has taken it upon herself to correct matters. She commandeered a vessel and set a course for Earth. She feels that an assassination at this level will disrupt our negotiations to the point where there will be no treaty—and that this will lead to the withdrawal of Terrans from our world.”
“How close is she to the truth?”
“It is always difficult to speculate in these matters, but it would certainly slow things down.”
“And she’s due to arrive in a few days?”
“Yes. We received the information from other members of her sect, and they could not be more precise. They did not learn the story in its entirety until after her departure, when they informed the authorities. They were anxious that it be known she was acting on her own initiative and not under orders.”
Billy smiled.
“Who can say?” he said.
“Yes. At any rate, since a message can travel faster than a ship, the warning was sent.”
“You must know best how to stop one of your own people.”
“The problem seldom occurs,” Daltmar said. “But the customary method is to set a team of similarly endowed adepts after a wrongdoer. Unfortunately…”
“Oh.”
“So we must make do with what is at hand,” the alien went on. “Your people will try to intercept her in space, but projections only give them a twenty-seven percent chance of success. Have you any ideas?”
Cat?
“No,” Billy replied. “If it were a dangerous animal, I’d want to study it in its habitat for a time.”
“There is no way and no time.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”
Walford produced a small parcel from the pocket of his robe.
“There is a chip in here that I want you to take back with you and run through your machine,” he said. “It will tell you everything we know about this individual and about others of that sort. It is the closest thing we can give you to a life study.”
Billy rose and accepted the package.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll take it home and run it. Maybe something will suggest itself.”
Walford and the others rose to their feet. As Billy turned toward the transporter, the Stragean called Orar Bogarthy spoke.
44 Yours is one of the aboriginal peoples of this continent?” he said.
“Yes,” Billy replied, halting but not turning.
“Have the jewels in your earlobes a special significance? Religious, perhaps?”
Billy laughed.
“I like them. That’s all.”
“And the one in your hair?”
Billy touched it as he turned slowly.
“That one? Well…it is believed to protect one from being struck by lightning.”
“Does it work?”
“This one has. So far.”
“I am curious. Being struck by lightning is not the most common occurrence in life. Why do you wear it?”
“We Navajos have a thing about lightning. It destroys taboos. It twists reality. Not a thing to fool around with.” He turned away, moved ahead, punched a series of numbers, stepped up into the unit. He glanced up at the expressionless humans and aliens as the delay factor passed and his body began to melt.
Traveling the distance from hill to hill,
passing from place to place as the wind passes,
trackless. There should be a song for it,
but I have never learned the words.
