The Forerunner Factor (30 page)

Had she been an utter fool? There was still the craft down on a shelf of this same rock, and it would afford shelter of a sort, as well as the beacon calling for help. Simsa caught her lower lip between her teeth and bit down hard. To be forced to return, to be proven a failure—neither part of her welcomed that, as sensible as such a solution would be.

Below her, the sand eddied in a wider sweep. There puffed up into her face such a vile stench as set her coughing, gasping for air to clean her nostrils and lungs. Simsa raised herself on her hands but still did not withdraw from the stream side.

There was ancient rot in that puff of air. However, with it also a hint of moisture, befouled beyond belief, perhaps, but still moisture. Now she sat upright, allowed her cloak to slip away while her hands went to the single garment she wore. Since that Simsa of the deserted city had reached out to her, the Burrows Simsa, while standing alone in her gemmed crown, necklet, and bejeweled metal-strip kilt, she had taken the garb of that image from which the spark of life had come to mingle with her own. After, she had worn proudly the dress of that Elder who had ruled a people long since forgotten. Now she loosed one of the strips of the kilt, began to bend and twist it where it was made fast to the girdle until it snapped, giving her a silver metal strip studded with gems that could be cloudy or awake under certain lights to brightness. It was longer than her arm by a little. She held it firmly by the portion twisted free of the intricate linkage to plunge into the disturbance of sand which spread farther both up the river and down.

For a very long moment, she hesitated. Certainly that whiff of foulness was no invitation to investigate further. But the sliding sand was all that might stand between her and an impotent trip back to the Life Boat.

Her Burrows memory was wary, yet that also could give way to impatience. And now it did. As she might have used a short stabbing spear on some of the beshelled crawlers of Kuxortal’s faraway coast, so did she bring the gemmed strip down with all the force of her arm.

It entered the sand easily enough, but—

Simsa flinched. Somewhere below that curling of gray brown, she had struck opposition. Something she had attacked was moving, first threshing wildly about so that its frenzied struggle caused an upheaval not unlike a minor eruption. A bubble of the thick stuff broke in the parched air, releasing concentrated odor so foul that Simsa felt instant nausea.

There was nothing else moving, not even when she tried to draw forth her improvised probe. The metal held as stiff and straight and opposed to her strength as if it had pierced whatever it had first encountered, pinning it to the rock bed.

Simsa shrugged off the last part of the covering across her shoulders and arose to her knees, hands tightly clutching the strip. No strength she could put forth moved it. She began to weave the probe back and forth. At first, the obstruction was so great she could not stir her metal length no matter how hard she tried. Then it began to give. There was a sudden falling away on one side. Simsa answered that with as sharp a twist as she could deliver. Almost she lost her balance as the final release came. The strip popped up into view, scattering great sand droplets in all directions, bringing a miasma of the stomach-turning stench which it intensified to the hundredth part.

It did not come cleanly, though the sand of the stream did not cling to it. Rather, there was impaled on the tip, a thing as large as her two fists together. It was of that thick yellowish color shown by pus draining from a wound. And it moved constantly in a wild writhing, as if it strove to tear itself from the metal centered in its body.

In shape, it was an ovoid with no marked features nor any head or tail parts. From its underside spread, to lash in the air, eight tentacles all of the same size.

Simsa knew the dark spinners of the Burrows. But those were well-favored compared to this noxious blob. She held it well away from her and the rock shore, studying it as best she could. This was the first life she had seen since she had crawled out of the craft.

It was contracting those legs or limbs, wrapping them about its body as if, having found it could not escape through its original efforts, it was protecting itself as best it could.

Simsa blinked.

This nasty yellow blob was her captive. Had the constant heat, the lack of food or more than a sip or two of water so taken over her senses that she was seeing dream projections, like those the crax chewers were said to have haunt them in the latter stage of their addiction?

It was not true! Loosing the grip of her right hand, though still balancing the improvised spear with the other, she rubbed her fingers across the heat-tormented eyes in her seared face. There was now clinging to her rod a man! Fully humanoid, clothed, and no more than two fingers high. And when the man turned his face to look to her, she knew his face—too well.

To the credit of the toughness of the Burrows Simsa, and the command of the Elder One, she neither cried out nor dropped the rod. Instead, her wrist wavering a little in spite of all her efforts at strict control, she pulled the strip back from above the sand river and tossed it to the bare rock at a point as far from her as she could send it.

Zass’s hissing, which had begun when Simsa first probed into the opaque flood, arose to a scream. In spite of the heat, the zorsal took to the air, flying over the girl’s strange catch in the narrow circle of her species when attracted to some prey. Yet she made no move to launch herself into a swoop.

Simsa had to move the strip and shake it vigorously to detach her impossible catch. The little man lay on the rock, his chest heaving, his tiny hands pressed tight to his middle, the blood of a wound spurting a red flood over his body. His head turned so that he looked at her with such an accusing face that she dropped the strip, clasped her hands together so that her claws blood-scored her own skin. This was not the truth! Both Simsas clamored in her mind. She had not brought out of that sandy river this living miniature of Thorn!

Still the thing looked upon her as Thorn might have appealed for her help and she remembered all their wanderings and those days in the city of ruined ships, days in which, in a way she still did not understand, he had come to mean more to her than any one she had ever known—closer in a new way than even Ferwar, who had protected her since childhood.

“You are
not!”
She was not aware that she spoke aloud until she heard her own voice. Zass had fallen silent though she still circled in the air about the wounded thing which was not, Simsa insisted, real.

The Elder One within her now struggled for command. This once, Simsa of the Burrows did not instinctively brace herself in defense. Perhaps things as strange as this were common off-world, perhaps it was—

“It hides!” Again she spoke out loud, only now in the singsong that was the Elder One’s own tongue. “It bends the sight, taking from the mind some favorite image to hide behind. But it is a foolish thing, else it would know the difference—”

So far had the reasonable explanation of the Elder One proceeded when the shock of new happening hit the Burrower girl. Even she could not believe in a manikin as big as her flattened hand. But—that was gone! Here was a full-sized man no different from the Thorn she had known, save that he writhed on the rock where his blood pooled. And there was the glaze of coming death in his dark eyes.

“Small to large!” chattered Simsa, her body ashake. “I know,” she told herself, told the Elder One, “that this is not true!”

She grabbed at the strip of metal and used it fiercely to prod the dying man-thing—rolling it backward toward the river. It did roll—which, she told her dazed mind, no true man of proper size would do! So rolling, it was edged by a last push out over the sand flow, to strike the solid-appearing surface and be sucked under. While Simsa, breathing in deep gasps of the burning air, stared downward.

Illusion; both her memories, united, held to that stubbornly. Nothing but illusion. But what kind of thing could reach into
her
mind without her being aware and pick out such a memory, use it to protect itself? Was it in truth even that blob of yellow which she had first drawn forth? Or was its true body pattern something else again? Had it worked upon her with intelligence or by instinct? She thought of how she had kept so close to the sand river in all her travel across this barren world and felt more than a little sick. Her imagination was only too ready to paint for her what might happen to someone who lay asleep, who had no barriers. Suppose the projected Thorn had come across her in the early morning when she had made her rough camp here? Supposing he could have spun some tale of following her—yes, she would have been wary of him, of any spaceman now—but was wariness such as that enough?

Zass alighted on the rock not far from the puddle of blood left behind by the river-thing. It had been swift-flowing crimson when it had worn the seeming of Thorn. Now it was a dirty yellow, looking like rancid grease that had gone uncleaned from a pot far too long.

The zorsal extended her neck. Her feathered antennae pointed to the slight depression in the rock where that fluid had been cupped. Her pointed snout quivered. Then she gave a half-leap into the air, instantly stabilized by wing spread—and her hissing was sharp, so that she even seemed to spit in the direction of the congealing stain.

Simsa pulled up to her feet, drawing the cloak in folds over her shoulders. The place where the captured thing had rolled, to be once more hidden in the river, had not smoothed. There, the surface of the sand flow was troubled as a larger excrescence rose above the general level.

Bigger—larger—sand sloughed away from it. A thatch of closely cut dark hair first and then a face with those curiously tilted eyes that had been the first strangeness she had marked in her initial sighting of Thorn. The head arose until the sand formed a frill about the throat. The mouth opened, something that might even be akin to a voice topped the swish of the flowing sand:

“Simsssa.” A hiss near in pitch to Zass’s one of anger, a slurred attempt at her name.

The girl dropped her hold on the cloak so it fell to the rock, and the heat generated by the haze above lapped the black skin on her back and shoulders. She forced herself a single step closer to that thing in the turgid flood. Between her hands, both tightly grasping it, the rod of Elder One’s near unknown, untested power pointed directly at the forehead of that illusion.

“Not!” She still had control of her voice. “You are not Thorn—you are not!”

As she began to concentrate her will upon action, she half-expected that the fire which the rod, the tips of the moon, the mirror of the sun, projected would come to her call and blast the sand creature into nothingness. Only there was no warming of the metal cradled so between her palms—no flash of energy. Once more, the mouth of the head worked.

“Simssssa . . .”

Her name—it could somehow have picked that out of her own mind. She held no wonder too unreal after what she had seen since she and the Elder One had fused, or not quite fused, into one. But she had not thought of Thorn, not that she could remember, since she had begun this journey across the endless furnace of the plain. If it drew upon her memories, old or new, why not Ferwar, or half a ten-ten of others she had known all her life, and known better than the spaceman with whom she had traveled so short a number of days?

The head—it blurred, as if her questions had somehow weakened the control of that which had set it—perhaps for bait. Still a man’s head, but the black hair had blanched to pure silver to match the long strains now sticky with sweat that lay on her own shoulders, sprang wiry and alive from her scalp. White brows, which lashed about dark eyes—the skin as dark as a starless sky.

“Zzzzaaaaa . . .” that dark thing called.

“No!” Not the Burrows girl who answered this time, but the Elder One. Simsa held a fan of fleeting memories which reached from her to that bodiless head, strove to weave swiftly as a chain between them. The girl whom Thorn had known drew aside, the Elder One was there, and in her a new emotion stirred until she ruthlessly locked it tightly away.

“No!” She made no lengthy speech as the Elder One filled her. Instead, her hands moved independently of her conscious will, weaving back and forth so that the moon tips of her power rod might be scrawling some unseen pattern on the air between them. From her throat arose a low hum broken in rhythm now and then, as if she did voice words she made no attempt to speak aloud.

That black and silver head wove back and forth also, straining upward until there appeared the outline of a shoulder breaking from the shifting sands—black shoulder bare of any covering. Though the head kept its eyes fixed upon her, the mouth no longer moved. Yet its writhing against the hold of the sand, the arising and slipping back of shoulders, gave credence to a struggle, as mighty a struggle as Simsa had ever witnessed.

“Aaaah—Zaaazzza!” Thrown back, the head opened wide jaws to give utterance to a scream like that of a hunting zorsal. Its eyes were now pointed heavenward. It might have been demanding aid from some presence unseen to those from off-world. If it did so, it was not favored by the answer which it sought. For it was sinking back. The shoulders had already disappeared, now sand lapped up over the chin, sought the open cavity of the mouth.

The head was gone. A head was gone. Simsa would have flung up her arm to hide that hideous change from sight had it not been that she could not unhinge her fingers from their tight grip upon the shaft of the rod.

No head now, but a stretch of obscene, greasy yellow skin that was wrinkled about a single great eye. While the whole surface of the river tossed gobbets of sand into the air, spattering over the rock. A thing or a multitude of things was rising to the surface. Simsa of the Burrows would have fled. The Simsa of the Elder Ones only stepped back so that the spattering sand could not reach her. She watched the thing narrowly while the younger, lesser Simsa shared memories again—strange and horrible—of monsters and creatures so far from normal life that even to hold them fleetingly in mind made her shrink from a wash of foulness.