Starfarers (72 page)

“You can’t … blame a poison snake … or a carnivore … if you come too near,” Jong said.

“But these aren’t dumb animals! Look at that braincase. At that knife.” Neri needed a little time before he had the lungful to continue his fury: “We’ve dealt with nonhumans often enough. Fought them once in a while. But they had a reason to fight … mistaken or not, they did. I never saw or heard of anyone striking down utter strangers at first sight.”

“We may not have been strangers,” Regor said.

“What?” Neri’s head twisted around to stare at the older man.

Regor shrugged. “A human colony was planted here. The natives seem to have wiped it out. I imagine they had reasons then. And the tradition may have survived.”

For ten thousand years or more?
Jong thought, shocked.
What horror did our race visit on theirs, that they haven’t been able to forget in so many millennia?

He tried to picture what might have happened, but found no reality in it, only a dry and somehow thin logic. Presumably this colony was established by a successor civilization to the Star Empire. Presumably that civilization had crumbled in its tum. The settlers had most likely possessed no spaceships of their own; outpost worlds found it easiest to rely on the Kith for what few trade goods they wanted. Often their libraries did not even include the technical data for building a ship, and they lacked the economic surplus necessary to do that research over again.

So—the colony was orphaned. Later, if a period of especially virulent anti-Kithism had occurred here, the traders might have stopped coming; might actually have lost any record of this world’s existence.
Or the Kith might have become extinct, but that is not a possibility we will admit.
The planet was left isolated.

Without much land surface it couldn’t support a very big population, even if most of the food and industrial resources had been drawn from the sea. However, the people should have been able to maintain a machine culture. No doubt their society would ossify, but static civilizations can last indefinitely.

Unless they are confronted by vigorous barbarians, organized into million-man hordes under the lash of outrage. … But was that the answer? Given atomic energy, how could a single city be overrun by any number of neolithic hunters?

Attack from within? A simultaneous revolt of every autochthonous slave? Jong looked back to the dead face. The teeth glinted at him.
Maybe I’m softheaded. Maybe these beings simply take a weasel’s pleasure in killing.

They struggled up the scarp and into the boat. Jong was relieved to get the thing hidden in a cold-storage locker. But then came the moment when they called the
Golden Flyer
to report.

“I’ll tell his family,” said Captain Ilmaray, most quietly.

But I’ll still have to tell Sorya how he looked,
Jong thought. The resolution stiffened in him:
We’re going to recover the body. Mons is going to have a Kithman’s funeral; hands that loved him will start him on his orbit into the sun.

He had no reason to voice it, even to himself. The oneness of the Kith reached beyond death. Ilmaray asked only if Regor believed there was a chance.

“Yes, provided we start soon,” the leader replied. “The bottom slopes quickly here, but gets no deeper than about thirty meters. Then it’s almost flat to some distance beyond the gate, farther than our sonoprobes reached when we flew over. I doubt the swimmers go so fast they can evade us till they reach a depth too great for a nucleoscope to detect Mons’ electronic gear.”

“Good. Don’t take risks, though.” Grimly: “We’re too short on future heredity as is.” After a pause, Ilmaray added, “I’ll order a boat with a high-powered magnascreen to the stratosphere, to keep your general area under observation. Luck ride with you.”

“And with every ship of ours,” Regor finished the formula.

As his fingers moved across the pilot board, raising the vessel, he said over his shoulder, “One of you two get into a spacesuit and be prepared to go down. The other watch the ’scope, and lower him when we find what we’re after.”

“I’ll go,” said Jong and Neri into each other’s mouths. They exchanged a look. Neri’s glared.

“Please,” Jong begged. “Maybe I ought to have shot them down, when I saw what they’d done to Mons. I don’t know. But anyhow, I didn’t. So let me bring him back, will you?”

Neri regarded him for nearly a minute more before he nodded.

The boat cruised in slow zigzags out across the bay while Jong climbed into his spacesuit. It would serve as well underwater as in the void. He knotted a line about his waist and adjusted the other end to the little winch by the personnel lock. The metallic strand woven into its plastic would conduct phone messages. He draped a sack over one arm for the, well, the search object, and hoped he would not need the slugthrower at his hip.

“There!”

Jong jerked at Neri’s shout. Regor brought the craft to hoverhalt, a couple of meters above the surface and three kilometers from shore. “You certain?” he asked.

“Absolutely. Not moving, either. I suppose they abandoned him so as to make a faster escape when they saw us coming through the air.”

Jong clamped his helmet shut. External noises ceased. The stillness made him aware of his own breath and pulse and—some inner sound, a stray nerve current or mere imagination—the hunter’s horn, remote and triumphant.

The lock opened, filling with sky. Jong walked to the rim and was nearly blinded by the sunlight off the wavelets. Radiance ran to the horizon. He eased himself over the lip. The rope payed out and the surface shut above him. He sank.

A cool green roofed with sunblaze enclosed him. Even through the armor he felt multitudinous vibrations; the sea lived and moved, everywhere around. A pair of fish streaked by, unbelievably graceful. For a heretical instant he wondered if Mons would not rather stay here, lulled to the end of the world.

Cut that!
he told himself, and peered downward. Darkness lurked below. He switched on the powerful flash at his belt.

Particles in the water scattered the light, so that he fell as if through an illuminated cave. More fish passed near. Their scales reflected like jewels. He thought he could make out the bottom now, white sand and uplifted ranges of rock on which clustered many-colored coraloids, growing toward the sun. And the swimmer appeared.

He moved slowly to the fringe of light and poised. In his left hand he bore a trident, perhaps the one which had killed Mons. At first he squinted against the dazzle, then looked steadily at the radiant metal man. As Jong continued to descend he followed, propelling himself with easy gestures of feet and free hand, a motion as lovely as a snake’s.

Jong gasped and yanked out his slugthrower.

“What’s the matter?” Neri’s voice rattled in his earplugs.

He gulped. “Nothing,” he said, without knowing why. “Lower away.”

The swimmer came a little closer. His muscles were tense, mouth open as if to bite; but the deep-set eyes remained unwavering. Jong returned the gaze. They went down together.

He’s not afraid of me,
Jong thought,
or else he’s mastered his fear, though he saw on the beach what we can do.

Impact jarred through his soles. “I’m here,” he called mechanically. “Give me some slack and—Oh!”

The blood drained from his head as if an ax had split it. He swayed, supported only by the water. Thunders and winds went through him, and the roar of the horn.

“Jong!” Neri called, infinitely distant. “Something’s wrong, I know it is, gimme an answer, for the love of Kith!”

The swimmer touched bottom too. He stood across from what had belonged to Mons Rainart, the trident upright in his hand.

Jong lifted the gun. “I can fill you with metal,” he heard himself groan. “I can cut you to pieces, the way you—you—”

The swimmer shuddered (was the voice conducted to him?) but stayed where he was. Slowly, he raised the trident toward the unseen sun. With a single gesture, he reversed it, thrust it into the sand, let go, and turned his back. A shove of the great legs sent him arrowing off.

The knowledge exploded in Jong. For a century of seconds he stood alone with it.

Regor’s words pierced through: “Get my suit. I’m going after him.”

“I’m all right,” he managed to say. “I found Mons.”

He gathered what he could. There wasn’t much. “Bring me up,” he said.

When he was lifted from the bay and climbed through the air lock, he felt how heavy was the weight upon him. He let fall the sack and trident and crouched beside them. Water ran off his armor.

The doors closed. The boat climbed. A kilometer high, Regor locked the controls and came aft to join the others. Jong removed his helmet just as Neri opened the sack.

Mons’ head rolled out and bounced dreadfully across the deck. Neri strangled a yell.

Regor lurched back. “They ate him,” he croaked. “They cut him to pieces for food. Didn’t they?”

He gathered his will, strode to the port, and squinted out. “I saw one of them break the surface, a short while before you came up,” he said between his teeth. Sweat—or was it tears?—coursed down the gullies in his cheeks. “We can catch him. The boat has a gun turret.”

“No—” Jong tried to rise, but hadn’t the strength.

The radio buzzed. Regor ran to the pilot’s chair forward, threw himself into it, and slapped the receiver switch. Neri set lips together, picked up the head, and laid it on the sack. “Mons, Mons, but they’ll pay,” he said.

Captain Ilmaray’s tones filled the hull: “We just got word from the observer’s boat. It isn’t on station yet, but the magnascreen’s already spotted a horde of swimmers … no, several different flocks, huge, must total thousands … converging on the island where you are. At the rate they’re going, they should arrive in a couple of days.”

Regor shook his head in a stunned fashion. “How did they know?”

“They didn’t,” Jong mumbled.

Neri leaped to his feet, a tiger movement. “That’s exactly the chance we want. A couple of bombs dropped in the middle of ’em.”

“You mustn’t!” Jong cried. He became able to rise too. The trident was gripped in his hand. “He gave me this.”

“What?” Regor swiveled around. Neri stiffened where he stood. Silence poured through the boat.

“Down below,” Jong told them. “He saw me and followed me to the bottom. Realized what I was doing. Gave me this. His weapon.”

“Whatever
for?
”

“A peace offering. What else?”

Neri spat on the deck. “Peace, with those filthy cannibals?”

Jong squared his shoulders. The armor enclosing him no longer seemed an insupportable burden. “You wouldn’t be a cannibal if you ate a monkey, would you?”

Neri said an obscene word, but Regor suppressed him with a gesture. “Well, different species,” the pilot admitted coldly. “By the dictionary you’re right. But these killers are sentient. You don’t eat another thinking being.”

“It’s been done,” Jong said. “By humans too. More often than not as an act of respect or love, taking some of the person’s mana into yourself. Anyway, how could they know what we were? When he saw I’d come to gather our dead, he gave me his weapon. How else could he say he was sorry, and that we’re brothers? Maybe he even realized that’s literally true, after he’d had a little while to think the matter over. But I don’t imagine their traditions are that old. It’s enough, it’s better, actually, that he confessed we were his kin simply because we also care for our dead.”

“What are you getting at?” Neri snapped.

“Yes, what the destruction’s going on down there?” Ilmaray demanded through the radio.

“Wait.” Regor gripped the arms of his chair. His voice fell low. “You don’t mean they’re—”

“Yes, I do,” Jong said. “What else could they be? How could a mammal that big, with hands and brain, evolve on these few islands? How could any natives have wiped out a colony that had atomic arms? I thought about a slave revolt, but that doesn’t make sense either. Who’d bother with so many slaves when they had cybernetic machines? No, the swimmers are the colonists. They can’t be anything else.”

“Huh?” grunted Neri.

Ilmaray said across hollow space: “It could be. If I remember rightly, Homo Sapiens is supposed to have developed from the, uh, Neandertaloid type, in something like ten or twenty thousand years. Given a small population, genetic drift, yes, a group might need less time than that to degenerate.”

“Who says they’re degenerate?” Jong retorted.

Neri pointed to the staring-eyed head on the deck. “That does.”

“Was an accident, I tell you, a misunderstanding,” Jong said. “We had it coming, blundering in blind the way we did. They aren’t degenerate, they’re just adapted. As the colony got more and more dependent on the sea, and mutations occurred, those who could best take this sort of environment had the most children. A static civilization wouldn’t notice what was happening till too late, and wouldn’t be able to do anything about it if they did. Because the new people had the freedom of the whole planet. The future was theirs.”

“Yeah, a future of being savages.”

“They couldn’t use our kind of civilization. It’s wrong for this world. If you’re going to spend most of your life in salt water you can’t very well keep your electric machines; and flint you can gather almost anywhere is an improvement over metal that has to be mined and smelted.

“Oh, maybe they have lost some intelligence. I doubt that, but if they have, what of it? We never did find the Elder Races. Maybe intelligence really isn’t the goal of the universe. I believe, myself, these people are coming back up the ladder in their own way. But that’s none of our business.” Jong knelt and closed Mons’ eyes. “We were allowed to atone for our crime,” he said softly. “The least we can do is forgive them in our turn. Isn’t it? And … we don’t know if any other humans are left, anywhere in all the worlds, except us and these. No, we can’t kill them.”

“Then why did they kill Mons?”

“They’re air breathers,” Jong said, “and doubtless they have to learn swimming, like pinnipeds, instead of having an instinct. So they need breeding grounds. That beach, yes, that must be where the tribes are headed. A party of males went in advance to make sure the place was in order. They saw something strange and terrible walking on the ground where their children were to be born, and they had the courage to attack it. I’m sorry, Mons,” he finished in a whisper.