Star Hunters (18 page)

A silver-green hand rubbed his arm. Long silver-green legs slid under his head. Kitosime held him on her lap, slim arms comforting him, touching him, gentle and tender, mother and lover. He was alive again, wanting her, wanting, breathing hard, erect, ready, a man again. He pulled her down against his face, took her nipple in his mouth.

He heard the chill, mocking laughter of the star woman. “Baby,” she whispered. “Little boy.” She pulled her breast free and slapped at him. “Rude baby. You a man? Hah!” His head cracked against the floor as she jerked her legs from under him and danced away.

In his agony he lay on the floor helpless, watching her flow back and forth, alternately gentle and cruel, Kitosime flowing into Aleytys, flowing, sensual, fire and passion, compassion, ambition, gentleness, driving need to win, silver-green arms, golden body, green flowing over gold over green, tight blue fleece springing into long silken strands of hair, whirling light upon the air as she danced, hard and soft, gold and green, red and indigo, one woman burning like fire into another cool and elegant, constantly altering, narrow elegance blooming into the taut but lush flesh of the Star Hunter. Constantly altering, mesmeric, enchanting, commanding. He curled in on himself. Shrinking. Shrinking. Smaller. Weaker. Retreating. Sinking to nothing. Die. I want to die. No more. Can't endure. No. No more. I … I … I … will … die … shrinking … shriveled … retreating … to the embryo … to nothing … I WILL … WILL … NOT … BE …

No! The negation thundered into his dimming senses. No, the bell tolled again. No. No. The great bell would not let him rest. Dark water flooded his shrinking, withered form, water cool and filled with life. No! The bell tolled and the water, flowed faster over him. He straightened his body. The blended forms of Kitosime and Aleytys slid apart. Both came toward him. He shivered and drew back. No! the bell tolled. There was a pressure against his back. No more retreating. Kitosime touched him, her long slender fingers silver-green on green, warm, loving, supporting, mother and lover. Aleytys touched him. He stiffened. Her green-blue eyes were sad and soft. Her fingers ran along his arm, warm, gold, soft. The bell sang in his ears, drowning the ugly whispers, whispers he could not understand but whose evil intent was frustrated by the mellow tones of the bell. His body unfolded … unfolded … was hard and ready … a woman clinging to each arm … he pulled Aleytys against him … she flowed into him … gold flesh merging with green, the black water glowing, burning, expanding, driving outward … outward like a fireball expanding at the speed of light … destroying … burning … exploding.…

His mind returned to the lab. He was straining against the straps, the wave front of power still expanding. It seemed so slow, took years to move out, a glowing gold circle, it touched the console, seethed against it, brushed the metal with dandelion softness. Dallan, Songoa and Kell fell back, tumbling, blowing about, light as dandelion fluff. The console cracked apart, silent blue fire crawled, slow, slow, blue-white smoke crept out. Pieces of the machines sailed slow, slow, curving up, over, dropping light, skipping, skimming beside the splayed-out figures of Dallan, Songoa and Kell. And the anonymous white-coated attendants. And from somewhere outside came a great ear-numbing shriek of tormented metal and the hoarse scream of a man in torment that ceased with a dreadful suddenness.

Then everything moved faster; the pieces of the console slammed against the floor, flying debris slashing at the grunting, flailing forms of the men. The noise battered at him. Battered. His eyes rolled back. Blackness. Quiet. Nothing.…

Chapter XIV

Grey leaned against the bars, rubbed lightly the muscles of his arm though the itching was just below the shoulder muscles on his right side. The implant had made itself felt a little earlier. He closed his fingers into fists, then deliberately loosened them.
I want you loose to pry me out, she'd said
. He began prowling about the cage, muscles aching from his need to stay calm, in control. Control! He dropped beside the low door and stroked the cool metal. So easy, out of here in seconds. And then? He laughed suddenly, drawing a startled look from silent Faiseh sitting in the corner of the cage. Grey waved away the unspoken question and sat down, leaning against the bars.
In the trap now
, he thought. He closed his eyes and sought her. Twenty meters northwest, thirty meters up. Located in one of the cavities he'd plotted out before. Haribu's nest. He fidgeted, wondering if the time were now. Wondering if she wanted or needed his help. He looked up at an exclamation from Faiseh.

A figure was being carried on a stretcher from the gray-floored corridor. His bearers carted him into the lab. Grey raised his eyebrows. Faiseh nodded. “Manoreh,” he said. He frowned. “Now?”

Grey looked down at his shaking hands. “No,” he said suddenly. “Not yet.” He smiled. “Let her move first.”

Faiseh looked skeptical but went to watch the door into the lab.

Grey frowned.
Losing my center
, he thought.
Need to make the trek again
.

The trek. The winter trek into the Wildlands. A struggle to survive hunger, cold, fear, the endless dark solitude of the gray days and gray nights where night and day had no firm edges but merged with imperceptible slowness one into the other, where light was so diffuse most days that nothing had a shadow and all things took on the eerie unreality of nightmare. The trek. To make a great circle and lay his tokens on the cairns of Jothan and Linka and var-Himboldt. Add one more marked stone to the great stone piles at the three stages of the trek.

He could turn back with honor at the first, but forced himself on, taut with excitement and terror. He remembered looking into the gray haze over rock and snow, the endless cheating haze that tired the eyes and the spirit. He climbed carefully to the top of the cairn and added his stone to the others, then turned slowly. Without his Wolff-gift of direction he'd have lost himself a hundred times before he reached this spot. Circling cautiously on the unsteady top stones of the cairn, he saw nothing to mark the way ahead from the way he'd already crossed. Once again, he could turn back with honor. This time he hesitated. He was beaten fine by the ordeal, with little fat left on his bones. He stood on top of the cairn looking ahead into the haze but searching inside for the answer. The will … had he the will to go on?

When he made the third cairn he was a gaunt shadow in shadows. The mist had settled on the Wildlands, cold and chill, wrapping itself around him in clammy embrace. The sun was a pale ghost, a memory of a memory of warmth. A pack of silvercoats were close behind him, impossible to see, but he knew they were there, loping along his trail, bodies moving with clumsy grace over the snow. They were beautiful animals beautifully adapted to the winter. Two-layered coats, a dense white fluff hugging the long limber bodies and stiff silver-gray hairs lying sleekly atop the inner coat. Small round ears, a fluff of silver growing over mobile pink nostrils, double eyelids. Running on pads of fur, they moved in packs of four and five. Small animals, half a meter high at the shoulder, tireless and tenacious and disturbingly intelligent.

He climbed the cairn and placed his stone, then watched the silvercoats come out of the mist. He touched the darter at his belt, smiling grimly when he thought of his silent promise to himself that he'd return with magazine intact, supporting himself with knife and cord.
Thank god I didn't mouth that asininity
, he thought. He unsnapped the holster flap and touched the checking on the butt. The silvercoats faded into the mist. He was startled and misstepped, but caught himself before he fell. A twisted ankle here and his bones would roll about the plains in the summer winds.

High in pride, he leaped down the side of the cairn and went on into the fog. With taut excitement he looked around at the gray mist and the grey shadows of the silvercoats. He smiled with satisfaction, having at last decided on the name he'd take out of the Wildlands. “Grey,” he murmured. His whisper fell dead into the cold, still air. And the silvercoats circled closer. His body ached with a fatigue that was harder to endure than the cold. But he smiled and moved steadily on.

The ground was beginning to rise. The snow was deeper, treacherously soft in spots, catching the tips of his snowshoes. He moved slowly, senses alert as he'd never been alert before—as if his nerve ends stretched beyond his skin and tasted the air, the fog, the snow. He saw everything. At the same time, he was intensely aware that he had in Wolff a deadly opponent, an enemy who would kill him at the first slip he made.

When the faint sun glow dipped toward the horizon he stopped and built a shelter, cutting the snow with his snow knife and laying the blocks hi an ascending spiral. After settling the key block hi the center hole, he cut an entrance and rolled out, coming to his feet with a spring that disconcerted two silvercoats creeping nearer. He blocked the entrance and went out to hunt fuel and food.

He spent nine days there, eating greedily the fat of his kills for the energy he needed to fight off the debilitating effects of the cold. Nine days. Long, endless days, when after the excitement of the hunt, there was nothing to do but think. On the trail his body moved and was, and that was sufficient. His legs moved in a rhythm that blanked the mind until he saw and was not conscious that he saw, heard and was not conscious that he heard. Time flowed past him, serene and unnoticed, until the end of the day came to him with a degree of surprise. And on the hunt, he was focused on the prey, intensely aware of the moment, aware also, as an animal would not be, of the future, able to plan, both more and less than animal.

Now his body was quiet, retracted into itself. His mind awakened and brought black depression at first, a loneliness and a consciousness that he was a fool, a stiff-necked fool driven by pride to surpass his ancestors. To raise a new cairn, Grey's cairn, a marker to his megalomania, to force an acknowledgment from history of his existence. To raise a monument to his endurance and skill, when he knew he was a fool and that a pile of rocks would be a monument to his stupidity in letting his pride and his need for something that he couldn't explain even to himself drive him far beyond what he could reasonably ask of body, mind and luck. And he knew, despite his recognition of his stupidity, he would go on a full cairn-length and roll the stones together to mark his passage.

He sat in the quiet, chill darkness of his shelter and listened to the ice melt drip endlessly from the snow blocks, reliving a dozen times each humiliation he'd suffered in his score of years, until finally he moved beyond these into dreams of the future that grew wilder and wilder until he was hallucinating—moved beyond that into the simple contemplation of the contents of the shelter, seeing them in the uncertain flicker of the crude oil lamp with an abrupt new clarity and wonder.

On the ninth day he left the shelter, saluting the skulking silvercoats with a grave appreciation of their beauty and worth.

At the foot of a thirty-meter cliff swept clean by icy winds, he built his cairn and carved his name into the cliffside. He stepped back, examined the crude letters and thought he should add something to tell the passerby what he'd learned in the silence of the shelter. Then he shook his head.
Grey
. It was enough. Whoever came here would have found his own peace. In any case there were no words for what he wanted to say.

On the third day of his back-trek he was forced to kill two of the silvercoats. They came at him without warning as he rolled out of the snow shelter into the dim light of morning, came silent and vicious, hitting him from both sides. But they misjudged the speed of his cautionary roll and he was on his feet beyond them, darter in hand, before they could scramble around. He put darts into the snarling faces, feeling a deep regret when the dead predators crashed against his legs. The other silvercoats were hidden in the mist. He left the bodies lying in the darkening crimson of their blood and went on.

One by one the other silvercoats came at him, forcing him to kill them. But he was settled into the deep calm he fought for alone that nine days in the shelter. And he survived.…

In the cage he sat struggling to recapture some of that detachment earned fifteen standard years before. Fifteen years.
I need to make the trek again
. He repeated to himself.
With Aleytys this time, if she'll come, I've forgotten too much
.

“What about her? She was with him,” Faiseh said suddenly.

“She's here,” Grey told him. “Wait a bit more.”

The lift beside the hareblock opened and the Vryhh stepped out. He walked briskly to the lab and moved inside. Grey rose to his knees, hesitated, looked at Faiseh, brooding over the bit of lab he could see through the arch. Grey bent over the lock and began using the force fields in his fingers to coax it open.

Behind him the metal egg began to thrum. The sound shrilled higher and higher until the egg was shrieking. Then it sat silent and unmoved for a few minutes. After this pause it began humming again. The hum rose and fell, stopped altogether, then came again, louder and louder, shriller and shriller, until the egg shook on its base. The watuk controller clawed at his head trying to jerk the cap off but his hands shook so uncontrollably he couldn't get a grip on it.

Then the egg exploded, hurling shards of metal in all directions. Grey dropped onto his face. The watuk shrieked, then slumped over, as scores of the metal pieces sliced through him. Blood gushed from his twitching body then slowed and stopped as he died. Pieces of the egg slammed against the cage and ricocheted with a high, whining noise.

Grey was on his knees again before the metal stopped flying. He knelt by the lock and had it open when he heard Faiseh suck in his breath. He looked around. The Vryhh was running from the lab. He stopped by the shattered egg, flinging out his arms with a howl of rage that filled the cavern. “Bitch!” he screamed. “Bitch.…” Muttering wildly he ran into the lift and sent it upward.