The Star Fox (17 page)

Above the crashing and enormous rustle he heard Jocelyn
scream again, not in startlement but in mortal terror. He knelt to get under the leaves and peered wildly about. Through swaying, lurching trunks, snake-dancing branches, clawing twigs, murk, and incandescent sunlight spears, he saw her. She had fallen. Two trees had her pinned. They could break bones or rip her suit when they crawled across her body.

His blade flew in his hand. A battle cry burst from his mouth. He beat his way to her like a warrior hewing through enemy lines. The stems had grown rigid, as if they had muscles now tightened. His blows rebounded. A sticky fluid spurted from wounds he made. ‘Gunnar, help!’ she cried in sightlessness. He cleared brush from her until he could stoop and pull her free.

‘You okay?’ He must shout to be heard in the racket. She lay against him and sobbed. Another tree bent down upon them. He yanked her to her feet.

To me!’ he bellowed. ‘Over here!’

Uthg-a-K’thaq wriggled to join him. The Naqsan’s great form parted a way for Bragdon. Vadász wove lithely through the chaos.

‘Joss in the middle,’ Heim ordered. The rest of us, back to back around her. We can’t outrun this mess, can’t stay here either. We’d exhaust ourselves just keeping our feet. Forward!’

His blade caught a sunbeam and burned in its arc.

The rest was chop, wrestle, duck, and dodge, through the moving horror. Heim’s awareness had gone coldly lucid; he watched what happened, saw a pattern, found a technique. But the strength to keep on, directly across that tide, came from a deeper source. It was more than the simple fear of death. Something in him revolted against his bones being tumbled forever among these marching trolls.

Bragdon gave way first. ‘I can’t … lift … this … any more,’ he groaned, and sank to the earth. Wooden fingers closed about one leg.

Uthg-a-K’thaq released him. ‘Get in the middle, then,’ the Naqsan said. ‘Hel’ him, you Lawrie.’

Later in eternity, Vadász’s machete sank. ‘I am sorry.’ The minstrel could barely be heard. ‘Go on.’

‘No!’ Heim said. ‘We’ll all get out, or none.’

‘Let me try,’ Jocelyn said. She gave Vadász into the care of Bragdon, who had recovered a little, and took his knife herself. Her blows were weak, but they found she could use the tool as a crowbar to lever a path for herself.

And … sunlight, open sky, turf under Lochan’s holy peak. They went a few meters farther before they toppled.

Heim woke a couple of hours afterward. For a while he blinked at heaven and found curious shapes in the clouds, as if again he were a boy on Gea. When memory came back, he sat upright with a choked oath.

The trees were still moving past. He thought, though, they had slowed down. Northwestward, opposite to their direction, he saw their trail of crumbled earth. The most distant part that he could spy was overlaid with pale yellow, the first new growth.

Uthg-a-K’thaq was the only other one awake. The Naqsan flopped down beside him. Well, skiwwer, now we know what the Walking Worest is.’

‘I’d like to know how it works,’ Heim said.

Rest had temporarily cleared his mind. An answer grew. ‘I’m only guessing, of course,’ he said after a minute, ‘but it could be something like this. The ultraviolet sunlight makes plant chemistry hellish energetic. That particular species there needs something, some mineral maybe. Where faulting exposes a vein of it, a woods appears.’

‘Not likely mineral,’ Uthg-a-K’thaq corrected. ‘You cannot hawe liwe dewendent on sheer geological ac-cident.’

‘Geology operates faster on a big planet than a terrestrial one, C.E.,’ Heim argued. ‘Still, I’ll agree it makes poor ecology. Let me think. … Okay, let’s say you get bacteria laying down organic stuff of a particular kind, wherever conditions are right. Such deposits would be fairly common, exposed fairly often. Those trees could broadcast spores that can lie dormant for centuries, waiting for a chance to sprout. All right, then; they consume the deposit at a tremendous rate. Once mature, such a forest has to keep moving because the soil gets exhausted where it stands. Reproduction is too slow; the trees themselves have to move. Evidently sunlight starts them on their way, because you remember they didn’t begin till mid-morning and now in the afternoon they’re coming to a halt.’

‘What hawwens when they hawe eaten out the whole wein?’

‘They die. Their remains go back to the soil. Eventually everything gets reprocessed into the material they need, and the spores they’ve left wake to life.’Heim grimaced. ‘Why am I trying to play scientist? Defense mechanism? I’ve
got
to believe that thing is natural.’

‘We came through it aliwe,’ Uthg-a-K’thaq said calmly. ‘Is that not suwwicient?’

Heim didn’t reply. His gaze drifted west, whither he had yet to go. Did he see a vague plume of mist on the lower steeps of Lochan? It was too distant for him to be sure. But – Thunder-smoke?
Whatever that is. No need to worry about it now. First we’ve got to get past the Slaughter Machines
.

T
WO
more days – twenty kilometers? They could not have done that much were they not crossing a flat space, a plateau on the lap of Lochan.

It was dreary country, treeless, rock-strewn, sparsely covered with low yellowish scrub. Many streams ran down toward the Morh, their tinkle the only sound except for an endless whittering wind; but the banks held no more life than the dusty stretches beyond. Alone the ranges that hemmed in the world on three sides, and the splendid upward leap of the snowcone ahead, redeemed this landscape.

The first evening they camped in sight of a crater. Its vitrified walls gleamed reddish black, like clotted blood, in the last sunlight. Vadász pointed and remarked, ‘I thought this region is barren because runoff from above leached the soil. Now I find otherwise.’

‘How so?’ Heim asked, incurious in his fatigue.

‘Why, yonder is plain to see as bombwork. There must have been an industrial center here once, that was destroyed in the war.’

‘And you’d let the same happen to Earth!’ Bragdon’s accusation was the first word he had spoken in more than a day.

Heim sighed. ‘How often must I explain?’ he said, more to Jocelyn than to the Peaceman. ‘Earth has space defenses. She can’t be attacked – unless we drift on from crisis to crisis till matters get so bad that both sides have to build fleets big enough to take the losses in breaking through. All I want is to head off that day by settling with Alerion now. Unfortunately, Alerion isn’t interested in a reasonable settlement. We’ve got to prove to them that they haven’t any alternative.’

‘Womwardment does not account wor the inwertility here,’ said Uthg-a-K’thaq. The war was three or wour Earth centuries ago. Radioactiwity disawweared long since. Something else has kewt nature ‘rom recowering.’

‘Oh, to hell with it,’ Jocelyn moaned. ‘Let me sleep.’

Heim lay down too. He thought with a dull unease that they should set a watch – but no, everyone was exhausted. … Unconsciousness took him.

The next day they saw two metallic shapes at a distance. There was no question of detouring for a closer look, and in any event they had something else to occupy what small part of their minds could be spared from the ever more painful onward march. The end of the plateau was coming into sight. Between the edge and the mountain’s next upward slope was an escarpment. Right and left stretched those obsidian cliffs, sheer, polished, not high but unscalable in this gravity without equipment the party didn’t have. To go around them – at whatever unseen point they stopped – would take days; and the survival drugs could not last for such a journey.

Only in the center of view was the line broken. A bank of vapor roiled from the foot of the scarp for several kilometers up the mountainside above. Like an immense curtain it hid the terrain; plumes blew off the top, blizzard color against the deep sky, and a roaring grew louder as the walkers neared.

‘That has to be Thundersmoke,’ Vadász said. ‘But what is it?’

‘A region ow – I hawe not the English,’ Uthg-a-K’thaq answered. ‘
Tsheyyaka
. The ground weneath is hot, and water woils out.’

‘Geysers and hot springs,’ Heim said. He whistled. ‘But I’ve never seen or heard of anything their size. They make Yellowstone or Dwarf’s Forge look like a teakettle. Can we get through?’

‘We must.’ Uthg-a-K’thaq bent his head so that all three eyes could peer through his faceplate. Evolved for the mists of his own planet, they could see a ways into the infrared. ‘Yes-s-s. The cliwws are crum’led. Makes an incline, though wery rugged and with water rushing ewerywhere.’

‘Still, thank God, a high gravity means a low angle of repose. And once into those meadows beyond, we should have a chance of meeting hunters or patrollers from the Hurst.’ Heim straightened a little. ‘We’ll pull through.’

A while later he saw a third gleam of steel among the bushes.
This one was so near the line of march that he altered course to pass by. They didn’t know exactly where they could best start into Thundersmoke anyway.

The object grew as he plodded. During rest periods he found he could not keep his gaze off. The shape was no uglier than much else he had seen, but in some indescribable fashion it made his spine crawl. When at last he dragged himself alongside and stopped for a look, he wanted to get away again, fast.

‘An ancient machine.’ Vadász spoke almost too softly to be heard through the grumble and hiss from ahead. ‘Abandoned when the bomb struck.’

Corrosion was slow in this atmosphere. Paint had worn off the iron, which in turn was eroded but still shiny in places. The form was boxlike, some two meters square and five long, slanting on top toward a central turret. The ruins of a solar-power accumulator system could be identified, together with a radar sweep and, Heim thought, other detector instruments. Several ports in body and turret were shut, with no obvious means of opening them. He parted the brush around the base and saw that this had been a hovercraft, riding an air cushion and propelled by net backward thrust in any direction.

‘A vehicle,’ he said. ‘After the war it just sat, I guess. Nobody can have moved back to the Lochan region for a long time. Those other things we glimpsed must be similar.’

Jocelyn clutched at his hand. He was reminded of his daughter when she was small and got frightened. ‘Let’s go, Gunnar,’ she begged. ‘This is too much like dead bones.’

‘I wonder,’ he remarked, carefully matter-of-fact, ‘why the metal wasn’t salvaged. Even with atomic energy, I should think the natives on a fireless planet would value scrap iron.’

‘Taboo?’ Vadász suggested. ‘These wrecks may well have dreadful associations.’

‘Maybe. Though my impression is that the Staurni look back on their war with a lot less horror than we remember our Exchange – and Earth got off very lightly.’ Heim shifted the burden of air system and supply pack on his shoulders. ‘Okay, we’ll push on. The sun’s low, and I don’t fancy camping among ghosts.’

‘Can you give us a song, Endre?’ Jocelyn asked. ‘I could use one.’

‘I shall try.’ The minstrel’s voice was flattened as well as distorted in tranmission, but he croaked:

While goin’ the road to sweet Athy, harroo, harrool!
—’

Engaged in helping the woman along, Heim paid no attention to the words at first. Suddenly he realized that Vadász was not singing When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ at all, but the cruel old Irish original.

‘—
Where are the legs on which ye run

When first ye went to carry a gun?

Indeed your dancing days are done.

Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye
.

With their guns and drums and drums and guns the enemy nearly slew ye.

Och, Johnny, me dear, ye look so queer, Johnny, I hardly knew ye!
’

Heim glanced at Bragdon. One could almost read the thought in that helmet: How can these devils admit to themselves what war really means? The gloved hands clamped into fists: I know! I had to bury it.

‘—
Ye haven’t an arm and ye haven’t a leg,

Ye’re an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg.

Ye’ll have to be put in a bowl to beg.

Och, Johnny, I hardly knew ye
.

‘
With their guns and drums and drums and guns
—’

It was not good to hear in this slain land. But maybe Endre had no choice. Whatever haunted the machine receding too slowly into distance, had touched him likewise.

Everyone was unspokenly glad of the exhaustion which tumbled them into sleep that night. Yet Heim rested ill. Dreams troubled him, and several times he started awake … what noise? A change in the geysers? No, something metallic, a creak, a rattle, a buzz, far off but limping closer; imagination, nothing else. He sank back into the feverish dark.

Dawn was wet with mists blown from Thundersmoke, a bare three or four kilometers away. White vapors coiled along the ground and hazed the countryside so that vision faded shortly into grayness. Overhead the sky was a bowl of amethyst and
Lochan’s cap too bright to look at. Heim closed his chowlock on a mouthful of concentrate – the rest was a lump in his stomach – and stared blearily around. ‘Where’s Joss?’

‘She went yonder,’ Vadász said. ‘Um-m … she ought to be back now, eh?’

‘I’ll go find her.’ Heim settled the weight on his body and lumbered into the fog.

She hunched not far off. ‘What’s the matter?’ he called through the gush and burble of water.

Her form scarcely moved. ‘I can’t,’ she said thinly.

‘What can’t you?’

‘Go any further. I can’t. Pain, every joint, every cell. You go on. Get help. I’ll wait.’

He crouched, balancing on hands as well as feet. ‘You’ve got to march,’ he said. ‘We can’t leave you alone.’

‘What can hurt me worse? What does it matter?’

Remorse smote him. He laid an arm across her and said without steadiness, ‘Joss, I was wrong to make you come. I should have left you behind for your friends—But too late now. I don’t ask you to forgive me—’

‘No need, Gunnar.’ She leaned against him.

‘—but I do tell you you’ve got to make the trek. Three or four more days.’
Can’t be any longer, because that’s when we run out of supplies
. ‘Then you can rest as much as you want.’