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Six

"Where are your beam lasers and protect screens?" Ryzk asked in the voice, I decided, one used for addressing someone whose mental balance was in doubt. He even glanced at the control board, as if expecting to see such armaments represented there. And so convincing was his question that I found myself echoing that glance—which might not have been so fruitless had the ship still carried what scars proclaimed she once had.

"If you don't have those," he continued, his logic an irritation, "you might just as well blow her tubes and end us all right here without wasting the energy to take us to Sororis—if you do know what awaits any ship crazy enough to planet there. It's a rock prison and those dumped on it will storm any ship for a way to lift off again. To set down at whatever port they do have is simply inviting take-over."

"We are not going in—that is, the ship is not." At least I had planned that far ahead, drawing on my father's very detailed account of how his "friend" had made that single visit to the planet's surface. "There is the LB. It can be fitted with a return mechanism if only one is to use it."

Ryzk looked at me. For a very long moment he did not answer, and when he did, it was obliquely.

"Even a parking orbit there would be risky. They may have a converted flitter able to try a ship raid. And who is going down and why?"

"I am—to Sornuff—" I gave the native city the best pronunciation I could, though its real twist of consonants and vowels was beyond the powers of the human tongue and larynx to produce. The Sororisans were humanoid, but they were not of Terran colony stock, not even mutated colony stock.

"The temple treasures!" His instant realization of what I had in mind told me that his Free Trader's knowledge of the planet's people was more than just surface.

"It has been done," I told him, though I was aware that I was depending perhaps too much on my father's story.

"An orbit park for Sornuff," Ryzk continued, almost as if thinking aloud, "could be polar, and so leave us well away from the entrance route for anything setting down at the real port. As for the LB, yes, there can be lift-off modifications. Only"—he shrugged—"that's a job you don't often tackle in space."

"You can do it?" I demanded. I would admit frankly that I was no mech-tech and such adjustments were beyond either my knowledge or my skill. If Ryzk could not provide the knowledge, then we would have to risk some other and far more dangerous way to gain Sornuff.

"I'll take a look—" He was almost grudging.

But that was all I wanted for now. Free Traders by the very nature of their lives were adept in more fields than the usual spacer. While the fleet men were almost rigorously compartmented as to their skills, the men of the irregular ships had to be able to take over some other's duties when need arose.

The LB must have been periodically overhauled or it would not have had the certification seal on its lock. But it still dated to the original fitting of the ship, and so must have been intended to carry at least five passengers. Thus we were favored in so much room. And Ryzk, dismantling the control board with the ease of one well used to such problems, grunted that it was in better shape for conversion than he had supposed.

It suddenly occurred to me that, as on Lorgal, Eet had made no suggestions or comments. And that started a small nagging worry in my mind, gave me a twinge of foreboding. Had Eet read in my mind my decision for independence? If so, had he some measure of foreknowledge? For never yet had I been able to discover the limit of his esper powers. Whenever I thought I knew, he produced something new, as he had on Theba. So, possessing foreknowledge, was he now preparing to allow me to run into difficulty from which he alone could extricate us, thus proving for once and for all that our association was less a partnership than one of master and servant, with Eet very much in the master's seat? He had closed his mind, offering no comments or suggestions. Nor did he now ever accompany us to the lock where Ryzk and I—I as the unhandy assistant—worked to give us possible entry to a hostile world where I had a thin chance of winning a gamble. I began to suspect he was playing a devious game, which made me more stubborn-set than ever to prove I could plan and carry through a coup which did not depend upon his powers.

On the other hand, I was willing enough to use what I had learned from Eet, even though it now irked me to admit I owed it to him. The hallucinatory disguise was so apt a tool that I systematically worked at the exercise of mind and will which produced the temporary changes. I found that by regular effort I could hold a minor alteration such as the scar I had worked so hard to produce as long as I pleased. But complete change, a totally new face for instance, came less easily. And I must labor doggedly even to produce the slurring of line which would pass me through a crowd unnoticed for a short space. It was Eet's added force which had held that before, and I despaired of ever having enough power to do it myself.

Practice, Eet had said, was the base of any advance I could make, and practice I had time for, in the privacy of my own cabin, with a mirror set up on a shelf to be my guide in success or failure.

At the back of my mind was always the hope that so disguised I might slip through Guild watch at any civilized port. Sororis might be free of their men, but if I won out with a precious cargo, I would have to reach one of the inner planets and there sell my spoil. Stones of unknown value were only offered at auction before the big merchants. Peddled elsewhere, they were suspect and could be confiscated after any informer (who got a percentage of the final sale) turned in a tip. It did not matter if they had been honestly enough acquired on some heretofore unmarked world; auction tax had not been paid on them and that made them contraband.

So I spent our voyage time both acting as an extra pair of inept hands for Ryzk and staring into a mirror trying to reflect there a face which was not that I had seen all my life.

We came out of hyper in the Sororis system with promptitude, which again testified to Ryzk's ability, leading me to wonder what had grounded him in the scum of the Off-port. There were three planets, two, dead worlds, balls of cracked rock with no atmosphere, close enough to the sun to fuse any ship finning down on them like a pot to fry its crew.

On the other hand, Sororis was a frozen world, or largely so, with only a belt of livable land, by the standards of my species, about its middle. It was covered by glaciers north and south of that, save where there were narrow fingers of open land running into that ice cover. In one of these Sornuff was supposed to exist, well away from the outcast settlement about the port.

Ryzk, whom I left at the controls, set up his hold orbit to the north while I packed into the LB what I judged I would need for my visit to the ice-bound city. Co-ordinates would be fed to the director, and that, too, was Ryzk's concern. On such automatic devices would depend my safe arrival not too far from Sornuff and my eventual return to the ship, the latter being even less sure than the former.

If Ryzk's fears were realized and a high-altitude-conditioned flitter from the port raised with a pilot skillful or reckless enough to attempt a take-over of the Wendwind, it might be that the ship would be forced out of orbit in some evasive maneuvering during my absence. If so, I had a warning which would keep me planetside until the ship was back on a course the LB was programmed to intercept.

I checked all my gear with double care, as if I had not already checked it at least a dozen times while we were in hyper. I had a small pack containing special rations, if the local food was not to be assimilated, a translator, a mike call Ryzk would pick up if he were safely in orbit, and, of course, the stones from Lorgal. There was no weapon, not even a stunner. I could not have smuggled one on board at Theba. I could only depend upon my knowledge of personal defense until I was able to outfit myself with whatever local weapons were available.

Ryzk's voice rasped over the cabin com to say that all was clear, and I picked up the pack. Eet was stretched on the bunk, apparently asleep as he had been every time I had come in recently. Was he sulking, or simply indifferent to my actions now? That small germ of worry his unexpected reaction to my bid for independence had planted in me was fast growing into a full-sized doubt of myself—one I dared not allow if I were to face the tests of my resourcefulness below.

Yet I hesitated just to walk out and leave him. Our growing rift hurt in an obscure way, and I had to hold stubbornly to my purpose to keep from surrender. Now I weakened to the degree that I aimed a thought at him.

"I am going—" That was weakly obvious and I was ashamed I had done it.

Eet opened his eyes calmly. "Good fortune." He stretched out his head as if savoring a comfort he was not in the least desirous of leaving. "Use your hind eyes as well as the fore." He closed his own and snapped our linkage.

"Hind eyes as well as fore" made little sense, but I chewed angrily upon it as I went to the LB, setting the door seals behind me. As I lay down in the hammock I gave the eject signal to Ryzk, and nearly blacked out when the force of my partition from the ship hit.

Since I was set on automatics, using in part the LB's built-in function to seek the nearest planet when disaster struck the ship, I had nothing to do but lie and try to plan for all eventualities. There was an oddly naked feel to traveling without Eet, we had been in company for so long. And I found that my rebellion did not quite blank out that sense of loss.

Still, there was an exultation born of my reckless throwing over of all prudent warnings, trying a wholly new and dangerous venture on my own. This, too, part of me warned against. But I was not to have very long to think about anything. For the cushioning for landing came on and I knew I had made the jump to planetside and was about to be faced by situations which would demand every bit of my attention.

The LB had set down, I discovered, in the narrow end of one of those claw-shaped valleys which cut into the ice. Perhaps the glacial covering of Sororis was now receding and these were the first signs of thaw. There was water running swiftly and steadily from the very point of the earth claw, forming a good-sized stream by the time it passed the LB. But the air was so chill that its freezing breath was a blow against the few exposed portions of my face. I snapped down the visor of my helmet as I set the LB hatch on persona lock and, taking up my pack, crunched the ice-packed sand under my space boots.

If Ryzk's reckoning had been successful I had only to go down this valley to where it joined a hand-shaped wedge from which other narrow valleys stretched away to the north and I would be in sighting distance of the walls of Sornuff. When I reached that point I must depend upon my father's tale for guidance. And now I realized he had gone into exhaustive detail in describing the country, almost as if he were trying to impress it upon my memory for some reason—though at the time it had not seemed so. But then I had listened eagerly to all his stories, while my foster brother and sister had apparently been bored and restless.

Between me and the city wall was a shrine of the ice spirit Zeeta. While she was not the principal deity of the Sororisans, she had a sizable following, and she had acted for the hero of my father's story as an intermediary with the priests of the major temple in the city. I say "she" for there was a living woman—or priestess—in that icy fane who was deemed to be the earth-bound part of the ice spirit, and was treated as a supernatural being, even differing in body from her followers.

I came to the join of "claw" and "hand" and saw indeed the walls of the city—and not too far away, the shrine of Zeeta.

My landing had been made just a little after dawn, and only now were thin beams of the hardly warm sun reaching to raise glints from the menace of the tall ice wall at my back. There was no sign of any life about the shrine and I wondered, with apprehension, if Zeeta had been, during the years since that other visitor was here, withdrawn, forsaken by those who had petitioned her here.

My worries as to that were quickly over as I came closer to the building of stone, glazed over with glistening ice. It was in the form of a cone, the tip of which had been sliced off, and it was perhaps the size of the Wendwind. Outside, a series of tables which were merely slabs of hewn ice as thick as my arm mounted on sturdy pillars of the same frozen substance encircled the whole truncated tower. On each of these were embedded the offerings of Zeeta's worshippers, some of them now so encased in layers of ice that they were only dark shadows, others lying on the surface with but a very thin coat of moisture solidifying over them.

Food, furs, some stalks of vegetable stuff black-blasted by frost lay there. It would seem that Zeeta never took from these supplies, only left them to become part of the growing ice blocks on which they rested.

I walked between two of these chill tables to approach the single break in the rounded wall of the shrine, a door open to the wind and cold. But I was heartened to see further proof of my father's story, a gong suspended by that portal. And I boldly raised my fist to strike it with the back of my gloved hand as lightly as I could—though the booming note which answered my tap seemed to me to reach and echo through the glacier behind.

My translator was fastened to my throat and I had rehearsed what I would say—though the story had not supplied me with any ceremonial greeting and I would have to improvise.

The echoes of the gong continued past the time I thought they would die. And when no one came to answer, I hesitated, uncertain. The fairly fresh offerings spelled occupancy of the shrine, but perhaps that was not so, and Zeeta, or her chosen counterpart, was not in residence.

I had almost made up my mind to go on when there was a flicker of movement within the dark oblong of the door. That movement became a shape which faced me.

It was as muffled as a Lorgalian. But they had appeared to have humanoid bodies covered by ordinary robes. This was as if a creature completely and tightly wound in strips or bandages which reduced it to the likeness of a larva balanced there to confront me.

The coverings, if they were strips of fabric, were crystalled with patterns of ice which had the glory of individual snowflakes and were diamond-bright when the rising sun touched them. But the body beneath was only dimly visible, having at least two lower limbs (were there any arms they were bound fast to the trunk and completely hidden), a torso, and above, a round ball for a head. On the fore of that the crystal encrustations took the form of two great faceted eyes—at least they were ovals and set where eyes would be had the thing been truly humanoid. There were no other discernible features.

I made what I hoped would be accepted as a gesture of reverence or respect, bowing my head and holding up my hands empty and palm out. And though the thing had no visible ears, I put my plea into speech which emerged from my translator as a rising and falling series of trills, weirdly akin in some strange fashion to the gong note.

"Hail to Zeeta of the clear ice, the ice which holds forever! I seek the favor of Zeeta of the ice lands."

There was a trilling in return, though I could see that the head had no mouth to utter it.

"You are not of the blood, the bones, the flesh of those who seek Zeeta. Why do you trouble me, strange one?"

"I seek Zeeta as one who comes not empty-handed, as one who knows the honor of the Ice Maiden—" I put out my right hand now, laying on the edge of the nearest table the gift I had prepared with some thought—a thin chain of silver on which were threaded rounded lumps of rock crystal. On one of the inner worlds it had no value, but worth is relative to the surroundings and here it flashed bravely in the sunlight as if it were a string of the crystals such as adorned Zeeta's wrappings.

"You are not of the blood, the kind of my people," came her trilling in reply. She made no move to inspect my offering, nor even, as far as I could deduce, to turn her eyes to view it. "But your gift is well given. What ask you of Zeeta? Swift passage across ice and snow? Good thoughts to light your dreams?"

"I ask the word of Zeeta spoken into the ear of mighty Torg, that I may have a daughter's fair will in approaching the father."

"Torg also does not deal with men of your race, stranger. He is the Guardian and Maker of Good for those who are not of your kind."

"But if one brings gifts, is it not meet that the gift-giver be able to approach the Maker of Good to pay him homage?"

"It is our custom, but you are a stranger. Torg may not find it well to swallow what is not of his own people."

"Let Zeeta but give the foreword to those who serve Torg and then let him be the judge of my motives and needs."

"A small thing, and reasonable," was her comment. "So shall it be done."

She did turn her head then so those blazing crystal eyes were looking to the gong. And though she raised nothing to strike its surface, it suddenly trembled and the sound which boomed from it was enough to summon an army to attack.

"It is done, stranger."

Before I could give her any thanks she was gone, as suddenly as if her whole crystal-encrusted body had been a flame and some rise of wind had extinguished it. But though she vanished from my sight, I still lifted my hand in salute and spoke my thanks, lest I be thought lacking in gratitude.

As before, the gong note continued to rumble through the air about me, seemingly not wholly sound but a kind of vibration. So heralded, I began to walk to the city.

The way was not quite so far as it seemed and I came to the gates before I was too tired of trudging over the ice-hardened ground. There were people there and they, too, were strangely enough clad to rivet the attention.

Fur garments are known to many worlds where the temperature is such that the inhabitants must add to their natural covering to survive. Such as these, though, I had not seen. Judging by their appearance, animals as large as a man standing at his full height had been slain to obtain skins of shaggy, golden fur. These had not been cut and remade into conventional garb but had retained their original shape, so that the men of Sornuff displayed humanoid faces looking out of hoods designed from the animal heads and still in one piece with the rest of the hide; the paws, still firm on the limbs, they used as cover for hands and feet. Save for the showing of their faces they might well be beasts lumbering about on their hind legs.

Their faces were many shades darker than the golden fur framing them, and their eyes narrow and slitted, as if after generations of holding them so in protection against the glare of sun on snow and ice this had become a normal characteristic.

They appeared to keep no guard at their gate, but three of them, who must have been summoned by the gong, gestured to me with short crystal rods. Whether these were weapons or badges of office I did not know, but I obediently went with them, down the central street. Sornuff had been built in circular form, and its center hub was another cone temple, much larger than Zeeta's shrine.

The door into it was relatively narrow and oddly fashioned to resemble an open mouth, though above it were no other carvings to indicate the rest of a face. This was Torg's place and the test of my plan now lay before me.

I could sense no change in warmth in the large circular room into which we came. If there was any form of heating in Sornuff it was not used in Torg's temple. But the chill did not in any way seem to bother my guides or the waiting priests. Behind them was the representation of Torg, again a widely open mouth, in the wall facing the door.

"I bring a gift for Torg," I began boldly.

"You are not of the people of Torg." It was not quite a protest, but it carried a faint shadow of warning and it came from one of the priests. Over his fur he wore a collar of red metal from which hung several flat plaques, each set with a different color stone and so massively engraved in an intertwined pattern that it could not be followed.

"Yet I bring a gift for the pleasures of Torg, such as perhaps not even his children of the blood have seen." I brought out the best of the zorans, a blue-green, roughly oval stone which nearly filled the hollow of my hand when I had unrolled its wrappings and held it forth to the priest.

He bent his head as if he sniffed the stone, and then he shot out a pale tongue, touching its tip to the hard surface. Having to pass it through some strange test, he plucked it out of my hold and turned to face the great mouth in the wall. The zoran he gripped between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, holding it in the air at eye level.

"Behold the food of Torg, and it is good food, a welcome gift," he intoned. I heard a stir and mutter from behind me as if I had been followed into the temple by others.

"It is a welcome gift!" the other priests echoed.

Then he snapped his fingers, or appeared to do so, in an odd way. The zoran spun out and away, falling through the exact center of the waiting mouth, to vanish from sight. The ceremony over, the priest turned once more to face me.

"Stranger you are, but for one sun, one night, two suns, two nights, three suns, three nights, you have the freedom of the city of Torg and may go about such business as is yours within the gates which are under the Guardianship of Torg."

"Thanks be to Torg," I answered and bowed my head. But when I in turn faced around I found that my gift giving had indeed had an audience. There were a dozen at least of the furred people staring intently at me. And though they opened a passage, giving me a free way to the street without, one on the fringe stepped forward and laid a paw-gloved hand on my arm.

"Stranger Who Has Given to Torg." He made a title of address out of that statement. "There is one who would speak with you."

"One is welcome," I replied. "But I am indeed a stranger within your gates and have no house roof under which to speak."

"There is a house roof and it is this way." He trilled that hurriedly, glancing over his shoulder as if he feared interruption. And as it did seem that several others now coming forth from the temple were minded to join us, he kept his grasp on my arm and drew me a step or two away.

Since time was a factor in any trading I would do here, I was willing enough to go with him.

 

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