The Game of Stars and Comets (63 page)

Once she was across she turned a little and I was quick not to let her believe that I held back where she had led, setting foot on the first pile of stone to follow. Some of those stones, as I made the same jumps over the gaps, appeared unsteady and I wished I had had the foresight to bring with me the rope which had lashed the burdens on the gars. Linked so together, if one of us tumbled into the noisome appearing water the other could lend a hand.

As is mainly true when one fills the immediate future with imagined forebodings, we had no difficulty after all in winning into Voor's Grove. Directly ahead of where the bridge had once given access to what must have been the main street of the town that spotted unwholesome vegetation was thin. We slashed a path with our knives, to find that it had formed only a slight wall and we were now without a barrier.

"The flowers—!" I pointed to where those did indeed stand in place of the once familiar gardens which must have divided dwelling from dwelling.

As in Mungo's the brilliant blooms had looked almost like flames shooting from eternal but hidden fires. But—They were quiet. Quiet until we moved forward. I caught Illo's arm, held her so for an instant.

"Watch them!" I ordered.

They were still no longer. Instead they swayed, dipped, turned their wide expanse of gaudy petals this way and that. I had an unpleasant thought that somehow they were alive with a life we did not understand, and that their present movements were struggles to loosen the earth's grip upon their roots so that they could advance upon us.

"They sense us—" her voice was quiet, she did not attempt to move out of my hold. "That must be the truth—that they sense our presence."

At least none of them grew near the open passage which was the main road of the settlement. My thought that they could in any way move to attack us was childish folly. One cannot reasonably give such motive and desires to a plant—or at least I could not.

"What are they?" the girl was continuing. "Sentries—guards—?"

She made as if to move from the middle of the road, closer to the nearest bed of those bowing, straining splotches of color. I held her back.

"I do not know what they are—but I feel we are better to remain at a distance."

"Perhaps you are right," she conceded.

Once again, as we approached the heart of the town, we could see that the ruin was not complete here. Houses stood sturdy enough though their once grey-white walls were stained green in places as if some mould or algae of sorts sought to defile them. For this vegetation was evil. I was as sure of that as I was of my own person. It was rotten, though that rot was not visible to the eye—it was the flowering of foul decay.

Suddenly Illo stopped short, her head swung about and she looked to a house on her right. It was no different from any of the rest we had passed—the same stained walls, the same mass of nodding, weaving flowers.

"What is it?"

"That—no—" she put her hand to her forehead. "For a moment, just a moment, I thought—Only I could not hold that thought. No, I can't remember!" Her voice arose a note or two, was a little desperate.

I suppose I should have suggested that we enter that dwelling, explore it. Perhaps it had been her home—But I could not possibly have forced myself, or allowed her, to cross into the territory of the flowers in order to reach the gap of the door.

We went on. Our pace was slow and I was sure that, even as I, she was listening, trying to make herself receptive to sound, sight, feeling—

The road brought us out, as in Mungo's Town, in the heart where stood the meeting hall. This one was different from that of the smaller town, for it had a series of booths erected to one side. I saw there piles of pottery, rotted streamers of cloth, the wares of merchants, now far gone in disintegration but making it clear that when the doom had come it had fallen on a market day, or perhaps a fair when traders from down river had gathered here to bargain.

That expanse of gravel about the hall was empty—there was no line of skeletons. I drew a breath of relief. Perhaps, judging by the fact that my father had never reported such a find in his explorations and since the signs of certain death were missing here, Mungo's had been an exception to the general state of the deserted villages.

Illo left my side, walked purposefully toward the hall. "The place of records," she said as I hurried to join her.

For the first time I realized the important omission of my exploration of Mungo's. Of course—there was a small record room in each hall! Why had I not remembered that? I might only plead that the sight of the dead had driven it out of my mind. Also that I had been absorbed in the task which had sent me into the doomed village, the answer to the promise I had made. To leave my father's body with the other dead—that of his friends, his family—had been the purpose which had obsessed me.

The hall was the same as that I had seen, there was more ornamentation here as became the meeting place of a village which aspired to become a city. I saw painted on the walls the star symbols of four planets—those from which Grove people must have originally come. There was also a plaque which caught the eye because it was stark black and on it inserted in a glowing silver color, untarnished, was an inscription.

"To the memory of Horris Voor, opener of worlds, all honor.

May this, the last of his discoveries, prove his quiet resting place.

Earthed the rover, furled the star wings—

Peace comes at the end."

"Peace comes at the end," I repeated and a sound, which was not laughter but a cry to challenge all which must have happened here, followed my words.

Illo had gone to stand closer to the plaque, now she put a finger to trace some of those shining letters.

"He wanted life for his people; what did they gain here?" She shivered.

"Death," I concluded for her sourly. "He must have died before the doom came."

"I hope that he did," she returned. "I hope he died still believing that he had given a gift to the homeless. See those symbols," she gestured towards the inlays about the edge of the plaque. "You know those worlds, you must have heard of them. Would you care to live on any one of them?"

"
No!
" I did not know them of my own knowledge, I had never been crowded, imprisoned, hopeless, on a world where breeding had gone unchecked, or one which lived under iron dictatorship, or one where the need for the very bare necessities of life was so great that each day was a slavery of unending toil. Yes, the people from those worlds must have looked upon Voor as a kind of paradise. What kind of a hell had it really proved then to be?

"I wish—" she said very softly and I believed I knew her wish though she did not speak it aloud. From which of those worlds had her own kin come? Had she had a family—how big—brothers, sisters—?

At least they had known who I was when I had been found; I had had my father. But Illo had no one, and by her own account she had been at the mercy of those who had tried to stimulate her child's mind, to perhaps even shock her in order to answer questions. That she had survived and become the person she was, was perhaps as great an achievement as any of Horris Voor's when he had discovered a new world to open to the homeless, the restless, the oppressed.

"The records," her tone was decisive now as she turned her back firmly upon the wall.

As was true of every building I had seen from the outside, even the record room here had no door. I looked carefully at the wall. There was a series of small holes which had perhaps once held hinges. Doors and windows, gone—though the rest of the building or buildings about were intact, seemingly in good order. There were even those remnants of trade goods in the booths. Why—doors and windows?

Illo stood in the middle of the small side chamber. The walls held the racks for tapes, a number of them. Not only the records of the village would be here, but information tapes for learning. Or such should have been there. But every rack was empty. The reason occurred easily enough.

"Whoever came here, found you and the rest—they must have taken the tapes—"

"But then they would have been kept at Portcity. And those other doomed villages and holdings—there were no tapes from them on file either."

She had a point. If such tapes existed my father would certainly have used them. He had made his own records of the places he explored. However, though he went every time we visited Portcity to the record office, now I never remembered his asking for anything to do with the other sites prior to their abandonment. Missing tapes—who would want them and why?

In Mungo's the villagers had died. Had it been different in other places? That woman who had been found here in Voor with a broken mind—the one they had traced after her escape to the Tangle. Had she known something after all, something which the experts had not been able to get out of her with their probing in the short time before she had managed her flight?

"Who would want tapes?" I asked myself aloud.

"Some one—or thing—" Illo's mind made the same leap mine was making, "who wanted to know more about—us."

"This was an open planet," I objected to my own conclusion. "There was not even a trace of Forerunner artifacts ever found. Our detects registered no intelligence higher than that of the gars and maybe the mountain corands."

"What if there was a distort—" she said slowly. "The Tangle—it acts as a distort—we've learned that much."

Always the Tangle! I did not want to believe that the solution lay within that. No one would ever be able to penetrate it—not unless one of the huge hell-burst machines, which had long ago been outlawed for war on any Confederation or League world, could be found and brought here, its devouring fury unleashed on the grey blot. But then, if the Tangle
did
contain any intelligent life, enemy or not, we would never learn it. What a hell-burst was loosed against it consumed, until nothing was left but the bare rock bones of a planet and clouds of ashy dust.

"If our answer lies in the Tangle—" I shrugged.

"If it does—" but she did not sound defeated. When I stared at her, my attention drawn by something in her tone, I saw that she was gazing thoughtfully at those empty racks.

"There has to be intelligence!" There was a sudden new energy about her as if, having been shown a problem, she was now eager to be about its solution. "Have you ever been to the Tangle—to the very edge of it?"

"No. There was no reason—and—well, I don't even know of any loper who has. I've read the records at Portcity—they were enough."

"Not always. Most of those records were compiled by off-worlders."

"
Trained
off-worlders," I reminded her quickly.

"Yes, trained. But they are trained to depend on equipment. You have loper instinct—you must have. Could an off-worlder take out a trek wagon and travel without a guide, a gars-trained man?"

"He'd probably end by sending a distress call," I returned. All I knew of off-worlders were the miners and the ship people, and some merchants settled in Portcity. None of them could live off the plains, steer a course cross-country—or set a gar team on the trail. I used off-world equipment—but it was simple stuff—and I depended first on my senses more than any machine. In that she was right. Just as she might be able to heal a case some off-world medic would mark off as hopeless.

"So? Since the days when the settlements were first alive here there has been very little
our
people have tried to learn about the Tangle. The truth is—we have been afraid of it."

"With very good reason. Nobody lost in there was ever found—there were the two mapping flights from Alsanban, they sent out their last reckoning over the eastern end of the Tangle. Then Hertzo's flyer and the Recki Company one—"

"Off-world—all of them."

"Lausur wasn't off-world," I pointed out. "His expedition made a sweep for forty days along the forepart back in 30 A.L."

"True. They made an edge sweep, but that was all it was—an edge sweep—"

"Sanzori!" I stared at her. "It was after Lausur that Sanzor was doomed!"

There might be nothing at all in the sequence of those two happenings, in fact no connection between them had occurred to me before, nor had I ever heard anyone speculate upon the fact that the doom of the first farthermost holding, a small one whose fate had then been ascribed to plague, had occurred just after Lausur's return from his long march, his tentative attempts to penetrate into the Tangle.

"If something was alarmed, made fearful—" Illo said slowly. "If to them—or—if we were as alien as that flood monster seemed to us—Lausur's march might have been taken as a threat, to meet with a counter."

"But it was two years before the next Shadow doom," I was trying now to remember my history. Luckily such facts had been well drilled into me.

"We might have been under observation—the fear or anger we aroused growing as we pushed farther north, closer to the Tangle. The first of the flyers crashed or was swallowed up during those two years—that was a Survey one. It would have had a great deal of equipment on board—"

What she said was making more and more sense, a kind of dark pattern. Threatened territorial rights was a very ancient cause for war. An animal—or a man—might fight before his own strip of country was invaded, or just at a suggestion that such an invasion threatened. And, supposedly if menaced by something wholly alien to himself, perhaps even in thought processes—fear would generate even higher to feed the anger.

"But why didn't someone figure that out—they've had plenty of time—years of it!" I near exploded.

"They were conditioned—conditioned to believe in reports, in the findings of machines—delicate and mainly accurate to be sure—but still machines, devised by men to help along our own process of thought, not perhaps wholly alien ones. Could such machines detect what their makers might not even be able to image exists?"

"The mine colonies have not been troubled. But they have the force fields. No village could afford to set up one, they would have no way of living inside. But if they strike at us—why not at Portcity—at the big places which are growing stronger—those south of the Halb? More settlers are coming in and settling in the south every season."