The Forerunner Factor (28 page)

She pointed to the cuff still about his forearm. Though he had shed all else of his clothing to bathe in the pool, still that was snugly fitted to him.

“Why did you not take that off?” she asked. “Do you expect still another attack?”

He glanced down as if a little surprised that he still wore it. Then his fingers fumbled, he turned it about and about, but the band would not slide from his forearm. It was not tight enough to pinch the flesh, neither would the cuff give enough for him to rid himself of it, in spite of his efforts, which she watched quietly until she said:

“It would seem that you, too, will carry a portion of the past with you. What will you do when you reach your home place? Cut off your hand that your kind may have what you wear to puzzle over? A lost hand, a lost freedom, neither will serve us. I shall perhaps talk to your seekers of learning, in my own time and place—if we ever leave this world. But I am to be no prisoner of theirs because they think me some ‘treasure’!”

“They will not.” He said that quietly, but in his eyes there was a stronger promise. How well he might keep that promise she could not tell. That, like all else, must be answered by time itself.

Suddenly, she laughed. “We speak as two who have the good will of fortune, we who are not even sure we shall be alive with tomorrow’s sun.”

He did not look dismayed. Instead, he stretched wide his arms, as one who awakens from a refreshing sleep to face the brightest of good days on a morning at the first of the dry-season.

“I shall swear by fortune, Lady Simsa, who is herself and no other, that is what I believe. We shall live—and we shall seek the stars in freedom.”

Now Simsa again smiled in return. She also nursed a promising lightness of spirit. Perhaps it was the influence of the pool’s renewing, perhaps it was something else—his promise? Or maybe—she shied away from following that thought any farther now. She must learn herself before she strove to teach others, especially this man from the stars to which Simsa would return.
Yes!
That she too believed now, even as she believed in the realness of the sand about her, the shining of the pool, the heaviness of the ring about her thumb—that a new day would come tomorrow!

THE END

FORERUNNER:
THE SECOND VENTURE

1

This was scraped land, laid bare to heat-roasted rock, lacking a single lift of withered leaf or stem to break the unending stretch of gray-blue stone seamed with darker cracks. Still a cloak-covered body crouched above a winding fissure, one that ran from horizon to horizon across the desert world. Only in that fissure itself was there movement, a thick, ever-forward lapping—not of liquid, but rather heaving sand, swirling slowly along.

There was no sun to beat and blast this wasteland, nothing but open sky overhead. Open until the eyes reached above far enough to mark that screen of haze lidding this simmering pot of a planet.

The cloak shifted a fraction. Within the cave made of its folds there was small movement. The soft touch of tight curled antennae, the sharp prick of a claw against pillar of arm.

“Think you I have been a fool, my Zass?” The voice was not a whisper or a murmur, rather came as a croak from dried lips, the words hard shaped by a mouth as moistureless as the land. “Ah, Zass—there is folly, and there is choice—against that which is worse.”

The mound of cloak heaved as the wearer it completely covered straightened, lifted her head to peer through the opening between two folds at that sliding of what was not water yet still passed walls of naked stone.

“Folly . . .” There was a bitter tinge to that single word. Even as she admitted to so much, another emotion arose, stark as the land, clear as the rock of any trace of life. Fear had moved her, brought her into this furnace of death, a greater fear than she had known before.

Again the cloak rippled. Simsa closed fingers tightly about that possession which, living, she would never discard. It was not a staff, not long enough for that—rather more a rod of office such as headmen of river towns in the world she had known might carry on occasions of state. Even under the folds of the cloak it shone—the disc at its head, the two curved horns on guard at the sides. Sun and two moons, she had once been told.

“Thorn!” Her tone made a spat oath of that name. The sound seemed to please her, for she said it once again with more force, a further unleashing of fury. “Thorn!” She did not call. Could any voice reach from world to world, lift upward through sky to the emptiness of space—wing from world to ship, ship to world, and bring it to the right ears?

It was Thorn who had introduced her to
them
—those cool-voiced, veiled-eyed men to whom he had shown respect, whom she had suspicioned from first meeting. She who was—

Again her shoulders shifted. Paws patted lightly against her firmly planted forearm, a small, sharp-snouted face turned up to hers. Those other thoughts, so alien and yet meant to please, to reassure, nibbled at the edge of her mind.

“I am Simsa . . .” She said that slowly with a space of a breath before each word. Simsa—and who else?

Once she had been a light-fingered errand runner for an old and crafty woman who knew much and told little enough. With Ferwar she had sheltered, as far back as her body memory reached, in the Burrows below the city pile of Kuxortal. She had soaked up, as might a sagser root given water, all that could be learned. Still she, even in Ferwar’s days of whining command over her, had been free—

Free as she could, would, never be now! There were degrees of freedom; at least she had come to learn that!

Freedom she had won from the Burrows, only because she had had her fortune twined for a space with that off-worlder who had sought his lost brother—and the secret that brother had hunted in turn. Though she had inwardly rebelled, the stubborn-held life spark within that Simsa had sent her with him into a trap of ancient death and new-come disaster.

Then . . . She lifted her rod of sun-and-moon, with a hand she had not consciously set to that task, so that the tips of the curved moons touched her small, high, near-childish breasts. Her head snapped up; the flow of energy that she thought had forsaken that ancient artifact was not exhausted! Into her now flowed, not the power of destruction she had once called upon, rather a sensation of drinking deeply, feasting well. Through her coursed that reviving surge.

The girl closed her eyes to the opening between cloak folds, seeing once again the waiting one—the other Simsa, a mirror copy of herself. Or, rather, perhaps she was a reflection of that one. At a single touch she had become two, who for a space were wary, jealous of their mutual possession—the Simsa whose black skin now contained them both.

Only for a space had that been so. Then she was one again, but a new one. Scraps of knowledge, of which a Burrows child could never even dream, found space and rooted. She had been triumphant, proud, a great one in those moments. Even Thorn had seen it. Yes, but in seeing it he had also been aroused to make of her—

Zass growled deep in her long thin throat, her wings, covered in ribbed skin, lifted a fraction. Zass had always been able to catch Simsa’s anger—or her fear. It had been Zass who had warned her into this last venture bringing them here.

“Forerunner,” Thorn had called her—talking much of very ancient star-roving peoples unknown to his later kind, who had left their touch on many worlds, still puzzles to all who strove to unlock forgotten mysteries. Forerunner—booty. As much a treasure for him and his fellows as anything grubbed from the earth, shaken clear of age-settled dust. Simsa was to go back to those who searched for such booty. None had asked her consent, nor even told her clearly what was to come.

Thorn had disappeared when she had been escorted to that gaunt, space-blackened man with the eyes that looked yet did not seem to actually see. He might be gazing beyond one to search for some value. In her then the Burrows Simsa stirred awake, and even the ancient Simsa had withdrawn to consider and study and plan . . .

Save that they had not had too much time together, that first Simsa and she from the past. The Burrows-born girl had extended claws and waited to defend herself. Though she had known she dared not call upon the destructive powers centered in that very rod she fondled now, as she relived what had happened. An animal threatened will flee or attack. Simsa—neither Simsa had ever fled. To attack—that was also wrong, the wrongness ground into her sharply. Violence was not the answer to these space people. There were wilier ways. Wait, learn, the Elder One cautioned. Learn what they have to offer—whether it will be of benefit or ill. Weigh the ill—if it be the greater, then plan secretly.

So she had gone aboard the ship without protest. Three zorsals she had had, the two young males she had loosed to their freedom in the skies of their own world—her world. But Zass clung to her and would not be sent away. And, in a way, she clung to Zass as fiercely, a reassuring fragment of the life she had always known.

Simsa had never been aboard a sky ship before. Much was strange there, made even stranger by the fleeting scraps of memory that had awakened in Elder One when led to compare with the far past. She surrendered to that second Simsa all save a scrap of her long-held will, evading questions of these strangers, asking others of her own. Thorn might well have been within the metal skin of the ship which lifted with them, but she had not seen or heard from him.

In the small cabin they had given her for her own place, she had discovered, to her great anger, held rigidly in check, certain small hidden things by which she could be overlooked whenever these space rovers wished. The Burrows Simsa would have torn them loose, smashed them. The Elder One cautioned otherwise. Before each of those hidden spies she had used her rod. Then it was clear that anyone seeking to overlook her would see what was most in their minds concerning her. Meanwhile, she was about her own business—that of escape.

The finding of the spy things had not only aroused hot Burrows anger, but implacable purpose. These off-worlders wanted her for what they could learn. Just as they desired the place from which her twinned self found a storehouse of knowledge, though it was a tangle of ancient wrecked ships being mined by outlaws for unique weapons to be sold to the highest bidders on many different worlds.

From her these strangers sought to draw knowledge not theirs to have or hold, which she was in no mind to surrender. Simsa lay on the sleep place in that prison of hidden eyes and ears, Zass curled by her. And, closing her eyes, she began questing as she would never have believed could be done, but which the Elder One, pressing with her stronger will, found natural.

There was a wild whirl of thoughts pulsing throughout the ship. To plunge into that was like jumping into high sea surf where currents broke about reefs. Simsa of the Burrows struggled feebly, lost. She was drawn along as that other sought her own way of keeping track of these voyagers.

There were two who had centered their innermost attention upon her own self. Sealing away all clamor of others, Simsa followed those thought trails to what lay behind. One was a healer of sorts—a woman whose pitifully small fund of knowledge was considered large and imposing by these others. She was concerned with flesh and bone, and only a little with that which the body obeyed. Also . . . Simsa’s eyes remained closed, but her lips lifted in the snarl of a Burrower’s child—this one wanted fiercely to slash, to study, to even mutilate if she must, in search of something truly indefinable which was the force of life itself and which she did not even know existed.

The other, who would learn . . . Ahh . . . The snarl relaxed. Instead, her tongue tip smoothed across the lower as one preparing to savor an exotic but promising bit of food. He did have a glimmering idea of that which had been taken from Kuxortal’s planet. Even now, he was considering one approach and then another. One could play sly games with such as he, if there were time.

Time! The very thought of that stung her. Thorn had told her openly that what she knew would be of great interest to a race allied with him, a people whose life-span was so long that they had turned long ago to the study of the rise and fall of species, keeping vast records. Yet the time before . . . ah, the time before was Simsa’s alone and she was the guardian!

Only this ship’s officer, who would make her prisoner even though as yet he had not shown his intent, had no idea of taking her to those of whom Thorn had spoken in awe. He would keep her, somehow train her, for himself alone. Now she laughed silently. Oh, little man, what would best shatter that plan of yours? She could do thus—or thus—Again she laughed without a sound, though Zass stirred against her and growled.

Let him play with his plans, that one. She had other business before her now. Just as she had sent forth seeking thought, so now she sought knowledge, not of what was living within this space-traveling shell but of the shell itself. Some things her older memory touched upon and recognized, yet the structure was different. As might well be, for long ages lay between the time of a ship that had once obeyed her and this one carrying a younger race.

She cared nothing about the source of its power. In the end, all such were not too different, and never had mechanics held any interest for her. There were other places—places that stored knowledge, places that might offer an escape.

The right knowledge she found while skipping randomly from mind to mind of the crew. Yes, there was an exit and those who were trained to use it. But as yet, she was not ready to bend another will to hers and through such a temporary captive learn—Success was again a matter of time.

Why that instinctive need for haste beat at her so, forcing her to wider and wider exploration, Simsa could not have said. However, the fear of her Burrower heritage melded with other uneasiness of the Elder One and thus she did no probing, made no attempt to bend any other mind within this shell to do her will. Not yet.