Watchers of the Dark (18 page)

There were no people. As they came closer, Darzek revised his first impression and thought of the place as a ghost town. The yellowish grass grew in cracks in the pavement. The gardens around the dwellings were choked with riotous growths of tall, yellowish weeds.

Brokefa panted an explanation as they walked. He was obviously frightened, and he kept glancing about apprehensively. “Naturally the dirty work falls on me,” he grumbled. “I once had headquarters on Quarm, so I know the language. I obtained gems from this region, and I had two agents in this village. So I have the job of making contact with them. The others—” He gestured disgustedly. “They remain in the safety of the ship and share in the profits. It’s all your fault, really. You and your talk of trading with the Dark.”

“Then—this is your first attempt?”

“Of course. We had the monopoly of
Iwip
nuts. They won’t grow anywhere except Yorlq, and only the Quarmers have found uses for them. They extract their oil and use the pressed kernels as a confectionary. They even make a flour out of the ground kernels. It’s a favorite Quarmer food.”

“I didn’t know anyone had a favorite food.”

“Primitive peoples often have strange tastes. Anyway, the Dark took Quarm, and we were left with our commitment for the entire
Iwip
nut production on Yorlq, with no market for it. So when you produced your proof that someone was trading with the Dark, my maf-cousins determined that they could do the same, and dispose of our stock. And the dirty work falls on me.”

“Then that’s why there were no nuts available on Yorlq,” Darzek said. “When you decided to trade with the Dark, you took them off the open market. Isn’t anyone home?”

They had stepped from the central oval onto the coiling street, but there was still no sign of life. “They’re nocturnals,” Brokefa explained. “When the sun is highest, they sleep the slumber of midnight.”

Hesitantly Brokefa led the way along the cracked pavement to the first cluster of dwellings. He approached one of them and stepped onto a flat stone before the door.

“Something is wrong,” he said a moment later. “The call slab doesn’t operate.”

“What’s it supposed to do?”

“It makes a light flash. You can see it through the air vents.” He stomped heavily on the slab. Puzzled, he turned to look about him. “Something is wrong. I’ve never seen the ovals so overgrown. The gardens, too. The Quarmers are fond of night flowers, and they cultivate them with care.” He moved toward the nearest garden. “Look—there’s nothing left but weeds.”

“The place certainly looks deserted,” Darzek agreed. He turned back to the dwelling, heaved against the heavy sliding door—another mark of a primitive society—and opened it.

At first he could make out nothing in the dark interior. A damp, fetid odor smote him. Gagging, he took a step backward as a clicking sound approached the door. A Quarmer appeared in the opening and stood staring out at him. He wore no light shield, and the sunlight instantly made his large eyes drip copiously. Suddenly he lunged at Darzek, bleating a word, and Darzek backed away warily.

Brokefa called something in a strange language. The Quarmer ignored him and continued to mouth the same word until the sound became a blurred moan.

“What is he saying?” Darzek asked.

“Food,” Brokefa said.

“Is that what the words means?
Food?”

“Yes.”

The Quarmer stretched out multiple, segmented arms in a pathetic, pleading gesture. Others stumbled from the open doorway, cupping strange, handless fingers to protect their dripping eyes. Darzek looked about uneasily. Quarmers were staring down at them from the tinted cupolas of neighboring houses, or excitedly pouring into the street with light shields flapping.

Abruptly Darzek and Brokefa were surrounded by a crowd of bleating natives.

Brokefa said indifferently, “They ask for food. They say they are starving.”

“How can they be starving? Doesn’t this world produce food?”

“Ample food. Its principal exports were food. It imported only
Iwip
nuts.”

Quarmers filled the street and began to press closer, bleating their piteous cries and importuning with knobby, clicking arms. Their odd bodies did not look emaciated. The only evidence of malnutrition that Darzek could detect was the jerky unsteadiness of their movements.

“There is no trade here,” Brokefa said. “Let’s go.”

“They need food. They’ll certainly trade for your nuts.”

“They have nothing to trade. Let’s go.”

“We can’t leave them to starve.”

“Why not?” Brokefa demanded bitterly. “They ran us out, burned our warehouses, took our property. Now they bleat for food. Well—let them bleat!”

“Ask them why they have no food.”

Brokefa shouted the question, but the Quarmers could only sob brokenly for food. Darzek and Brokefa began to back away slowly. Darzek had his own bitter memories of the strength in those bristling arms, and though he very much wanted to feed these Quarmers, he vastly preferred to do it from the safety of the spaceship.

Surrounded by Quarmers, they moved along the street toward the central oval. No attempt was made to stop them, but the stumbling crowd matched their pace and mouthed its pleas with mounting frenzy. “Food! Food!”

Then the Quarmers saw the transmitter frame. They fell silent for a moment as they pondered the significance of this strange object. “Tell them we’ll send them food through the transmitter,” Darzek suggested.

He was too late. Brokefa could produce only an inarticulate sputtering as the Quarmers surged toward the transmitter with full-throated howls of rage. They deduced that these aliens were about to step into it and vanish forever, and all hope of food with them, and they sought to prevent that the only way they could. They tore the transmitter apart. The first Quarmer to reach it stumbled through and vanished. Others seized the frame and furiously bent and twisted it until its members parted.

“They may have something similar in mind for us,” Darzek observed. He turned the horrified Brokefa around and briskly walked him away.

The Quarmers abandoned the dismembered transmitter to chase after them, but they broke into a run and easily outdistanced their stumbling pursuers. They followed the curving street for a short distance and then veered off through a weed-choked garden. Brokefa, despite his quaking fright, could still mutter angrily as he ran. His indignation was directed mainly against his maf-cousins, Gudefa, Tizefa, and Linhefa by name. He had known what would happen. He had told them what would happen. He’d had his fill of running away from their smug Yorlqer safety—they had to trade with Quarm, and here he was: running away from Quarmers.

They crossed the spiraling street, circled a cluster of dwellings, crossed the street again. The Quarmers, tottering blindly in the bright afternoon sunlight, were left far behind, but from the dwellings they passed came a new horde, to string after them bleating, “Food! Food!”

“Will your cousins be able to see what is happening?” Darzek asked.

“I think so. Yes.”

“I hope they have another transmitter.”

“They have several. We didn’t expect to put one down safely on the first attempt.”

“May they be as successful on the second attempt. Let’s open up more distance, so they can try.”

They skirted another cluster of dwellings, and saw, around the buildings ahead of them, a group of Quarmers milling about uncertainly. Their pursuers were still huffing and staggering in their wake, and the cries grew louder.

“Is there a shortcut out of town?” Darzek demanded.

Brokefa, who was huffing himself, did not answer.

“We’re surrounded,” Darzek said bluntly. “If we don’t get clear soon, the ship won’t have time to connect with us before dark.”

“Dark!” Brokefa sobbed. “They’re nocturnals! They can see in the dark! We could never get away from them at night.”

“Come on.”

They turned back toward the dwellings they had just passed, picked their way through an overgrown garden, circled around to the front of a house. The door stood open; the oval was deserted, its inhabitants probably having drifted off to join one of the mobs. Darzek grabbed Brokefa’s shoulder and firmly steered him into the house.

“We’ll be trapped here,” Brokefa sobbed.

“They can’t all get through the door at once. I’d rather face a few at a time here than take on the whole village out in the open.”

Darzek pushed the door shut and they faced each other in a dim shaft of light from an air vent. A peculiar, sweetish, musky odor filled the room. From somewhere in the darkness came a steady drip, drip of water. Quarmers began to stream past the house with a noisy clicking of segments, still gasping feebly for food. Darzek nudged a chair into position and climbed up to peer through an air vent. Quarmers were converging on the oval from three directions.

“Is there a back door to this place?” he whispered.

“Back
door? No—”

“Then we’re stuck here until they get tired and go home.”

“They won’t get tired,” Brokefa said gloomily. “They’re nocturnals.”

“Even nocturnals have to get tired sometime, and these are starving.”

“You weren’t here when the Dark came. Once they’re roused, they stay active until the next morning. I
know.”

“We’d better see if there are any in the house.”

From the back of the room a curving ramp led up to the level above. Darzek started up; Brokefa, after a moment of hesitation, scrambled after him.

The odor became stronger as they climbed, and long before they reached the top its fetid pungency had sickened them. Darzek clenched his teeth to keep from gagging and peered into the dim light. Abruptly he turned, pushing Brokefa back toward the ramp.

“What is it?” Brokefa whispered.

“Dead Quarmers.”

They returned to the lower level. Darzek said soberly, “The Quarmers told the truth. They’re starving. The entire planet must be in the same fix. Why would the Dark take a world only to let its people starve?”

“We’re marooned here,” Brokefa whimpered. “We’ll starve, too.”

“Nonsense. Your cousins won’t go off and leave us.”

“Marooned,” Brokefa whined. “I’m hungry already.”

“Oh, be quiet! I want to think.”

He paced back and forth, occasionally going to the air vent for a look at the milling Quarmers. The dripping water irritated him. He went to investigate and found a queer type of water clock. Obviously there was no shortage of water; but even on a primitive planet the utilities, if properly automated, would continue to function long after there were people to use them.

It was the economic system that had collapsed. The socialism that assured life’s necessities to everyone had ceased to function as soon as its odd veneer of capitalism had been removed. “The Dark is a more horrible menace than anyone seems to have imagined,” Darzek announced thoughtfully. “I thought it was enslaving the populations of the worlds it has taken. Instead, it’s exterminating them. How could the Dark or anyone else possibly benefit from killing off every intelligent life form in the galaxy?”

He had no fear for their immediate safety; the house’s taint of death probably offered a better defense than any that he could devise. When daylight routed the nocturnals, the ship would put down another transmitter.

But the night, in a house reeking of death, would be a long one.

Most of the Quarmers went home at dawn. Those who did not lay dead in the tall, brittle grass. With the sun high in the sky Darzek and Brokefa walked quickly toward the central oval. A transmitter materialized as they approached, fell twenty feet to the ground, and smashed. Another was waiting when they reached the center of the oval, and they stepped through.

The first person Darzek saw was the Quarmer who had inadvertently stumbled through the transmitter the day before. He sat beside a pile of shells, happily munching on
Iwip
nuts.

“There is no trade,” Brokefa said bitterly, in answer to the
efa’s
first question. “They have nothing to trade. Let’s go home.”

“They have nothing to trade,” Darzek said quietly, “but they have a tremendous need. They are starving.”

“That is no affair of ours,” Brokefa snapped. “Let them starve.”

“It’s an affair of mine. Has the Quarmer given you any trouble?”

“Only at first, when we did not realize he was asking for food,” Linhefa said.

“Talk to him,” Darzek told Brokefa. “Find out what’s been happening on Quarm.”

Brokefa put the question, listened to the answer, and said disgustedly, “Nothing has been happening on Quarm.”

“Has he seen anything at all of anyone representing the Dark?”

“He says not. He says we’re the first strangers—foreigners—he has seen since the foreigners left.”

“Ask him if there is hunger in the other villages, and in the cities.”

The Quarmer jabbered excitedly, and Brokefa interpreted, “There is hunger everywhere, except that it is worse in the cities. The food ran out sooner in the cities. The villagers smashed their transmitter so people from the cities would not come to take their food.”

“Ask him why an agricultural planet ran out of food.”

“He does not know. Suddenly the food supplies were gone, and there were no crops to harvest.”

“We should congratulate Gul Darr for his brilliant deduction,” Gudefa said sarcastically. “The Dark worlds
do
need trade. Unfortunately, no one will trade with them if they have nothing to offer in payment.” He whipped his tendrils in a gesture of disgust. “We’ll return the Quarmer to his village and retrieve the transmitter.”

“I want to know why they have nothing to trade,” Darzek said.

“They have seen nothing,” Brokefa said scornfully. “They have done nothing. They know nothing. They have not operated their mines, nor planted their farms. Now they wait for the foreigners to return and feed them. When last I saw them they shouted
Grilf! Grilf!
meaning what they could not tell me themselves. Now they shout only
Food! Food!
Let us leave them to the fate they have chosen.”

“Their emotional orgy must have continued long after the foreigners left,” Darzek mused. “But that was—Great Scott!—a couple of periods ago, at least. I’ve had some personal experience of how emotional Quarmers are, but I hardly expected that. Do you suppose they went right on rioting until their food gave out?”

“It would seem so,” Brokefa said. “Then it was too late to produce more, and they starved. Whatever happened, it does not concern us.”

“Ask him why the Quarmers ejected the foreigners.”

Brokefa interpreted disgustedly. “He doesn’t know. He says he doesn’t remember.”

“If we could find out what got them worked up to such a peak of excitement, we’d be well on our way to understanding the Dark.” He moved on into the lounge and slumped wearily onto a chair. The suspenseful night had taken its toll; he felt utterly exhausted. “We can’t return to Yorlq with a shipload of food when all of Quarm is starving,” he said.