They did not pass directly over that
outcropping of alien handiwork, older than the first human landing
on Korwar, but headed north once more. Troy knew from reports that
what he saw now as lumpy protuberances aboveground were only a
fraction of the ruins themselves, as they extended in corridors and
chambers layers deep and perhaps miles wide under the surface, for
Ruhkarv had never been fully explored.
“The treasure—” he murmured.
Beside him Rerne laughed without any touch of humor. “If
that exists outside vivid imaginations, it is never going to be
found. Not after the end of the Fauklow expedition.”
They had already swept past the open land that held the ruins,
were faced again by the wealth of vegetation that ringed the barren
waste of Ruhkarv. And Troy was struck by that oddity of the
land.
“Why the desert just about the ruins?” he asked, too
interested in what he saw to pay the usual deference to the rank of
his pilot.
“That is something for which you will find half-a-dozen
explanations,” Rerne returned, “any one of them
logical—and probably wrong. Ruhkarv exists as it always has
since the First-Ship exploration party charted it two centuries
ago. Why it continues to exist is something Fauklow may have
discovered—before he and his men went mad and killed
themselves or each other.”
“Did their recaller work?”
Rerne answered obliquely. “The tracer of the rescue party
registered some form of wave broadcast—well under the
surface—when they came in. They blanketed it at once when
they saw what had happened to Fauklow and the others they were able
to find. All Ruhkarv is off limits now—under a tonal barrier.
No flitter can land within two miles of the only known entrance to
the underways. We do pick up some empty-headed treasure hunter now
and then, prowling about, hunting a way past the barrier. Usually a
trip to our headquarters and enforced inspection of the tri-dees we
took of Fauklow’s end instantly cures his desire to go
exploring.”
“If the recaller worked—” Troy speculated as
to what might have happened down in those hidden passages. Fauklow
had been a noted archaeologist with several outstanding successes
at re-creating prehuman civilizations via the recaller, a machine
still partially in the experimental stage. Planted anywhere within
a structure that had once been inhabited by sentient beings, it
could produce—under the right conditions—certain
shadowy “pictures” of scenes that had once occurred at
the site well back in time. While authorities still argued over
dating, over the validity of some of the scenes Fauklow had
recorded, yet the most skeptical admitted that he had caught
something out of the past. And oftentimes those wispy ghosts
appearing on his plates or films were the starting point for new
and richly rewarding investigation.
The riddle of Ruhkarv had drawn him three years earlier. While
men had prowled the upper layers of the underground citadel, they
had found nothing except bare corridors and chambers. The Council
had willingly granted Fauklow permission to try out the recaller,
with prudent contracts and precautions about securing to Korwar the
possession of any outstanding finds that might result from the use
of his machine. But the real answer had been a bloody massacre, the
details of which were never made public. Men who had worked
together for years as a well-running team had seemingly, by the
evidence, gone stark mad and created a horror.
“If the recaller worked,” Rerne answered, “it
did so too well. The mop-up crew did not locate it—so the
thing must have been planted well down. And no one hunted it there.
It was shorted anyway as soon as we guessed what had happened.
Ah—there is our beacon.”
Through the gathering twilight the quick flash of a ground light
shone clearly. Rerne circled, set the flitter down neatly on a
pocket of landing field within a fringe of towering tree giants
that effectively shut off the paling gold of the sky except just
over the heads of the disembarking men. The fussel on Troy’s
wrist fanned wings and uttered a new cry, not guttural in the
throat, but pealing up a range of notes.
Rerne laughed. “To work, eh, feathered brother? Wait until
the dawning and we shall give you strong winds to ride. That is a
true promise.”
Two men stepped from between the trunks of the tree wall. Like
Rerne, they were leather-clad, and in addition one had a long
hunting bow projecting beyond his shoulder. They glanced briefly at
Troy but had more attention for the bird on his wrist.
“From Kyger’s.” Without other greeting Rerne
indicated the fussel. “And this is Troy Horan who has the
manning of him.”
Again each of the foresters favored him with a raking glance
that seemed, in an instant’s space, to classify him.
“To the fire, to the fireside, be welcome.” The
elder of the two gave a strictly impersonal twist to what was
evidently a set formula of welcome. Troy was aware that in this
world he was an interloper, to be tolerated because of the man who
brought him.
And while he had long known and accepted Tikil’s
evaluation of the Dipple dwellers, yet here this had a power to
hurt, perhaps the more so because of the different attitude Rerne
had shown. Now the Hunter came to his aid again.
“A rider from Norden,” he said quietly with no
traceable inflection of rebuke in his voice, “will always be
welcome to the fireside of the s’Donerabon.”
But inside Troy there was still a smart. “Norden’s
plains have no riders now.” He pointed out the truth.
“I am a Dippleman, Gentle Homo.”
“There are plains in a man’s mind,” Rerne
replied obscurely. “Leave the fussel uncaged if he will ride
easy. We shelter in the Five League Post tonight.”
There was a trail between the trees ringing in the landing
clearing, firm enough to be followed in the half-light. Yet Troy
was certain that the three men of the Wild ranger patrol could have
found it in the pitch-darkness. It led steadily up slope until
outcrops of rock broke through the clumps of brush and the thinning
stands of trees, and they came out on a broad ledge hanging above
the end of a small lake.
The lodge was not set on that ledge, but in the cliff wall
backing it. For some reason the men who patrolled this wilderness
had sought to conceal their living quarters with as much cunning as
if they were spies stationed behind enemy lines. Once past the
well-hidden doorway, Troy found himself in a large room that served
as general living quarters, though screened alcoves along the back
wall served for bunk rooms.
There was no heating unit. But a broad platform of stone with an
upper opening in the rock roof supported smouldering wood, wood
that gave off a spicy, aromatic fragrance as it was eaten into
ashes. A flooring of wooden planks had been fitted over the rock
beneath their boots, and here and there lay shaggy pelts to serve
as small rugs while on the walls were shelves holding not only the
familiar boxes of reading tapes, but bits of gleaming rock, some
small carvings. Brilliant birdskins had been pieced together in an
intricate patchwork pattern to cover six feet of the opposite
wall.
It was very far removed from Tikil and the ways of Tikil. But in
Troy old memories stirred again. The homestead on Norden had not
been quite so rugged, but it had been constructed of wood and stone
by men who relied more upon their own strength and skill of hands
than upon the products of machines.
The fussel called and was answered from one of the
alcoves—not in its own cry, but with a similar note.
Troy’s other hand shot out to imprison the legs of the hawk
before it could fly. But the fussel, stretching out its red-patched
neck, its black crest quivering erect, merely uttered a deeper,
rasping inquiry. Rerne strode forward, pushed aside the screen.
There were three perches in the alcove, one occupied by a bird very
different from the one Troy bore.
Where the fussel was sunlit fire, this was a drifting shadow of
smoke. Its round head was crestless, but the tufted ears stood
erect, well above the downy, haze-gray covering on the skull. Its
eyes were unusually large and in the subdued light showed dark as
if all pupil. In body it was as large as the fussel, its powerful
taloned claws proclaiming it a hunter, as did the tearing curve of
its beak.
Now it watched the fussel steadily, but showed only interest, no
antagonism. One of the foresters presented a gloved wrist, and it
made a bounding leap to that new perch.
“An owhee,” Rerne said. “They will willingly
share quarters with a fussel.”
Troy had heard of the peerless night-hunters but had not seen
one before. He watched the ranger take it to the door of the lodge
and give it a gentle toss to wing away in the twilight. And a
moment later they heard its hunting call:
“OOOooowheeee!”
Rerne nodded at the perches and Troy went to let the fussel make
a choice. After a moment of inspection, the bird put claw on the
end one and settled there, waiting for Troy to offer him his
evening bait.
He who held the owhee and his partner of the resident staff did
not linger after Rerne, Troy, and their kit were in the lodge
house. Each forest ranger had a length of trail to patrol by night
as well as by day. They said very little, and Troy suspected that
it was his presence that kept the conversation to reports,
questions, and answers. He tended the fussel and tried to keep out
of the way.
But when both had gone and Rerne brought out a pack of
Quick-rations, they settled by the fire, which the Hunter poked
into renewed life. There were no chairs, only wide, thick cushions
of hide stuffed with something that gave forth a pleasant herbal
smell when crushed beneath one’s weight.
As they shared the contents of the food pack, the Hunter talked
and Troy listened. This was the stuff of the other’s
days—the study of the Wild, the policing of it after a
fashion, not to interfere with nature, only to aid her where and
when they could, to make sure that the natural destruction wrought
by man himself wherever and whenever he came into new territory did
not upset delicate ecological balances.
There were stands of fabulous woods that could be cut—but
only under the supervision of the Hunting Clans. There were herbs
to be sought for the healing fraternities of other worlds, studies
made of the native animals. The Wild was a storehouse to which the
Clans held the keys—keeping them by force if necessary. In
the tree-filled valleys, on the spreading plains yet farther to the
east, battles had been fought between poachers and guardians. And
only because Korwar had been proclaimed a pleasure planet did the
Clans have the backing to keep the looters out. Most of this Troy
knew, vaguely, but now Rerne spoke of times and places, named
names.
The story was absorbing, but Troy was no child to be beguiled by
stories. He began to wonder at the reason for Rerne’s
talkativeness.
“There is no carbite on Korwar,” Rerne continued.
“But let its equal be found here—and let the barriers
against mineral exploration go down—”
“Is there any chance of that happening?” Troy
ventured, suddenly aware that he, too, was now thinking as a
partisan, ready to protect the Wild against willful destruction.
Something in him was stirring sluggishly, pressing bonds he himself
had welded into place as a self-protection. Like the hawk, he
wanted to test his wings against a free and open sky.
Rerne’s lips twisted wryly. “We have learned very
little, most of our species. I can name you half a hundred planets
that have been wrecked by greed. No, not just those burned off
during the war, but killed deliberately over a period of years. As
long as we can keep Korwar as a pleasant haven for the overlords of
other worlds, some of them the greed-wrecked ones, we can hold this
one inviolate. One does not want such desolation in one’s own
back yard. So far those of the villas have the power, the wealth,
to retain Korwar as their unspoiled play place. But how long will
it continue to be so? There may be other treasures here than those
fabled to lie in Ruhkarv, and far more easily found!”
“You have had two hundred years,” Troy said, with an
old bitterness darkening that elation of moments earlier.
“Norden had less than a hundred—thanks to Sattor
Commander Di!”
“No length of years will satisfy a man when he sees the
end of a way of life he is willing to fight for. What does the past
matter when the future swoops for the kill? Yes, Sattor Commander
Di—who died of poison in his own garden house and whose
murderer is yet to be found—and even the method by which the
poison reached him determined—has to answer for
Norden.”
How did Rerne know all that about Di? The fact of poison had not
been broadcast on the general coms. Troy felt like a sofaru rat
over which the shadow of a diving fussel had fallen, powerless
before the strike of an enemy not of his own element. Was this
behind Rerne’s talk, merely a softening-up process to prepare
him for subtle questioning about the kinkajou? Or was his own
half-guilty feeling suggesting that?
But the Hunter did not enlarge upon the case of Sattor Commander
Di. His explorations into the past were not so immediate. Rather
now he led Troy to talk about his own childhood. Though in another
Korwarian Horan might have considered that questioning
presumptuous, there was something about Rerne’s interest that
seemed genuine, so that the younger man answered truthfully instead
of with the evasions he had used so long for a
shield—including the fact that his memories of Norden’s
plains and the free life there were hazy now.
“There are plains here, too. You might consider
that,” Rerne suggested cryptically as he arose in one lithe
movement. “Given time, the right man might learn much. The
bunk at that end is yours, Horan. No evil dreams ride your
night—” Again the phrase had some of the formality of a
ritual dismissal. Troy looked in upon the fussel, saw that it was
asleep with one foot drawn up into its under feathers after the
manner of its kind, and then went to the bunk Rerne had
indicated.
There was no foam plast filling its box shape. Inside dried
grasses and leaves gave under him, then remolded about his body,
and the fine scent of them filled his nostrils as he fell asleep
easily. He did not dream at all.
When he awoke, the door of the big room stood ajar and from that
direction he heard the calls of birds. Still rubbing sleep from his
eyes, Troy rolled out of the bunk. The fire on the hearth was out
and there was no one else in the room. But the clean smell of a new
day in the Wild drew him out on the ledge, to stand looking down
into the valley of the lake.
Something rose and fell with a regular stroke not far from the
shore, and he realized he was watching a swimmer. A series of steps
cut in the rock led down from the ledge, and Troy followed them.
Then a loose sleeping robe draped over a bush beckoned him on and
he shed his own in turn, testing the temperature of the water with
his toes, plunging into it in a clumsy dive before he could change
his mind because of that chill greeting.
Troy floundered along the shore, being no expert as was that
other now heading, with clean arm sweeps and effortless kicks, back
from the center. His threshings disturbed mats of floating blossoms
shed by trees bordering a rill that fed the lake at this point, and
the bruised petals patterned his wet skin as he found sandy footing
and stood up, shivering.
“Storm-cold, Gentle Homo.” he commented as Rerne
waded in.
The other stopped to wring water from his braided hair knot and
then, surveying Troy’s dappled body, he laughed,
“A new refinement—flower baths?”
Troy echoed that laugh as he skimmed the wet masses from him.
“Not of my choice, Gentle Homo.”
“The name is Rerne. We do not follow the paths of Tikil
here, Horan.” The other was using his nightrobe as a towel,
kicking his feet into sandals. With the robe now draped cloakwise
about him, he stood for a moment looking out over the lake, and his
face was oddly relaxed, much more alive than Troy had ever seen
it.
“A fair day. We shall go to the plateau above Stansill and
see just how good our feathered one really is.”
The flitter took them east and north again. And once more the
vegetation beneath them thinned. But not to a waste scar such as
that which held Ruhkarv, rather to open plains of tall grasses and
scattered, low-growing shrubs. Twice Rerne buzzed the flyer above
herds of ruminants, and horned heads tossed angrily before the
heavy-shouldered beasts pounded away, tasseled tails high in
wrath.
“Pansta,” Rerne identified them. “Wild cattle
of a sort.”
“But they are scaled—or at least they look
so!” Troy protested, thinking of his own lost tupan that had
grazed so and might have run from a buzzing flitter in the same
pattern.
“Not scaled as a fish or a reptile,” Rerne
corrected. “Those are plates of hardened
flesh—something like an insect’s wingcasing shell. The
herds are dwindling every year, fewer calves born; we do not yet
know why. We have reason to believe that they were once
domesticated.”
“By those of Ruhkarv?”
“Perhaps. Though who or what those of Ruhkarv
were—” Rerne shrugged.
“Did they leave only one ruin behind them? I know only of
Ruhkarv.”
“And that is another mystery. Why a single known city for
a civilization? Were they only an outpost of some long-lost stellar
empire vanished before man took to space? That was one theory
Fauklow wanted to prove or disprove. There is one other trace of
them on Korwar—north beyond the plains. But that is
all—and that is a very small post. I do not think they were
native here. Just as the pansta are so alien to the other animals
of the Wild that they do not seem to be native either. The feral
herds of a long-gone race, which have outlasted their unknown
masters.”
The edge of the plains where the pansta ran dropped behind them,
and now there were ridges and rising slopes once again, until the
flitter climbed to a tableland open to the sky, seeming otherwise
cut off from any contact with the lower stretches. Under the golden
light of a perfect morning there spread a patched flooring of
flowering grasses, a few scattered trees, so removed from any touch
of man’s passing that Troy thought they might have been the
first to find that place if his companion’s knowledge of it
had not argued otherwise.
Rerne brought the flitter down on a stretch of gravel beside
quiet water that was neither as large as a lake nor as small as a
pond. They climbed out and stood with the breeze pushing against
their bodies. The fussel spread wings, gave voice.
“Let him hunt! Ollllahuuuu!”
Troy gave the wrist flex that was a signal of freedom to the
bird he bore. And the fussel arose in great sweeps, beating into
the topaz sky until neither man could see him clearly.
They did not pass directly over that
outcropping of alien handiwork, older than the first human landing
on Korwar, but headed north once more. Troy knew from reports that
what he saw now as lumpy protuberances aboveground were only a
fraction of the ruins themselves, as they extended in corridors and
chambers layers deep and perhaps miles wide under the surface, for
Ruhkarv had never been fully explored.
“The treasure—” he murmured.
Beside him Rerne laughed without any touch of humor. “If
that exists outside vivid imaginations, it is never going to be
found. Not after the end of the Fauklow expedition.”
They had already swept past the open land that held the ruins,
were faced again by the wealth of vegetation that ringed the barren
waste of Ruhkarv. And Troy was struck by that oddity of the
land.
“Why the desert just about the ruins?” he asked, too
interested in what he saw to pay the usual deference to the rank of
his pilot.
“That is something for which you will find half-a-dozen
explanations,” Rerne returned, “any one of them
logical—and probably wrong. Ruhkarv exists as it always has
since the First-Ship exploration party charted it two centuries
ago. Why it continues to exist is something Fauklow may have
discovered—before he and his men went mad and killed
themselves or each other.”
“Did their recaller work?”
Rerne answered obliquely. “The tracer of the rescue party
registered some form of wave broadcast—well under the
surface—when they came in. They blanketed it at once when
they saw what had happened to Fauklow and the others they were able
to find. All Ruhkarv is off limits now—under a tonal barrier.
No flitter can land within two miles of the only known entrance to
the underways. We do pick up some empty-headed treasure hunter now
and then, prowling about, hunting a way past the barrier. Usually a
trip to our headquarters and enforced inspection of the tri-dees we
took of Fauklow’s end instantly cures his desire to go
exploring.”
“If the recaller worked—” Troy speculated as
to what might have happened down in those hidden passages. Fauklow
had been a noted archaeologist with several outstanding successes
at re-creating prehuman civilizations via the recaller, a machine
still partially in the experimental stage. Planted anywhere within
a structure that had once been inhabited by sentient beings, it
could produce—under the right conditions—certain
shadowy “pictures” of scenes that had once occurred at
the site well back in time. While authorities still argued over
dating, over the validity of some of the scenes Fauklow had
recorded, yet the most skeptical admitted that he had caught
something out of the past. And oftentimes those wispy ghosts
appearing on his plates or films were the starting point for new
and richly rewarding investigation.
The riddle of Ruhkarv had drawn him three years earlier. While
men had prowled the upper layers of the underground citadel, they
had found nothing except bare corridors and chambers. The Council
had willingly granted Fauklow permission to try out the recaller,
with prudent contracts and precautions about securing to Korwar the
possession of any outstanding finds that might result from the use
of his machine. But the real answer had been a bloody massacre, the
details of which were never made public. Men who had worked
together for years as a well-running team had seemingly, by the
evidence, gone stark mad and created a horror.
“If the recaller worked,” Rerne answered, “it
did so too well. The mop-up crew did not locate it—so the
thing must have been planted well down. And no one hunted it there.
It was shorted anyway as soon as we guessed what had happened.
Ah—there is our beacon.”
Through the gathering twilight the quick flash of a ground light
shone clearly. Rerne circled, set the flitter down neatly on a
pocket of landing field within a fringe of towering tree giants
that effectively shut off the paling gold of the sky except just
over the heads of the disembarking men. The fussel on Troy’s
wrist fanned wings and uttered a new cry, not guttural in the
throat, but pealing up a range of notes.
Rerne laughed. “To work, eh, feathered brother? Wait until
the dawning and we shall give you strong winds to ride. That is a
true promise.”
Two men stepped from between the trunks of the tree wall. Like
Rerne, they were leather-clad, and in addition one had a long
hunting bow projecting beyond his shoulder. They glanced briefly at
Troy but had more attention for the bird on his wrist.
“From Kyger’s.” Without other greeting Rerne
indicated the fussel. “And this is Troy Horan who has the
manning of him.”
Again each of the foresters favored him with a raking glance
that seemed, in an instant’s space, to classify him.
“To the fire, to the fireside, be welcome.” The
elder of the two gave a strictly impersonal twist to what was
evidently a set formula of welcome. Troy was aware that in this
world he was an interloper, to be tolerated because of the man who
brought him.
And while he had long known and accepted Tikil’s
evaluation of the Dipple dwellers, yet here this had a power to
hurt, perhaps the more so because of the different attitude Rerne
had shown. Now the Hunter came to his aid again.
“A rider from Norden,” he said quietly with no
traceable inflection of rebuke in his voice, “will always be
welcome to the fireside of the s’Donerabon.”
But inside Troy there was still a smart. “Norden’s
plains have no riders now.” He pointed out the truth.
“I am a Dippleman, Gentle Homo.”
“There are plains in a man’s mind,” Rerne
replied obscurely. “Leave the fussel uncaged if he will ride
easy. We shelter in the Five League Post tonight.”
There was a trail between the trees ringing in the landing
clearing, firm enough to be followed in the half-light. Yet Troy
was certain that the three men of the Wild ranger patrol could have
found it in the pitch-darkness. It led steadily up slope until
outcrops of rock broke through the clumps of brush and the thinning
stands of trees, and they came out on a broad ledge hanging above
the end of a small lake.
The lodge was not set on that ledge, but in the cliff wall
backing it. For some reason the men who patrolled this wilderness
had sought to conceal their living quarters with as much cunning as
if they were spies stationed behind enemy lines. Once past the
well-hidden doorway, Troy found himself in a large room that served
as general living quarters, though screened alcoves along the back
wall served for bunk rooms.
There was no heating unit. But a broad platform of stone with an
upper opening in the rock roof supported smouldering wood, wood
that gave off a spicy, aromatic fragrance as it was eaten into
ashes. A flooring of wooden planks had been fitted over the rock
beneath their boots, and here and there lay shaggy pelts to serve
as small rugs while on the walls were shelves holding not only the
familiar boxes of reading tapes, but bits of gleaming rock, some
small carvings. Brilliant birdskins had been pieced together in an
intricate patchwork pattern to cover six feet of the opposite
wall.
It was very far removed from Tikil and the ways of Tikil. But in
Troy old memories stirred again. The homestead on Norden had not
been quite so rugged, but it had been constructed of wood and stone
by men who relied more upon their own strength and skill of hands
than upon the products of machines.
The fussel called and was answered from one of the
alcoves—not in its own cry, but with a similar note.
Troy’s other hand shot out to imprison the legs of the hawk
before it could fly. But the fussel, stretching out its red-patched
neck, its black crest quivering erect, merely uttered a deeper,
rasping inquiry. Rerne strode forward, pushed aside the screen.
There were three perches in the alcove, one occupied by a bird very
different from the one Troy bore.
Where the fussel was sunlit fire, this was a drifting shadow of
smoke. Its round head was crestless, but the tufted ears stood
erect, well above the downy, haze-gray covering on the skull. Its
eyes were unusually large and in the subdued light showed dark as
if all pupil. In body it was as large as the fussel, its powerful
taloned claws proclaiming it a hunter, as did the tearing curve of
its beak.
Now it watched the fussel steadily, but showed only interest, no
antagonism. One of the foresters presented a gloved wrist, and it
made a bounding leap to that new perch.
“An owhee,” Rerne said. “They will willingly
share quarters with a fussel.”
Troy had heard of the peerless night-hunters but had not seen
one before. He watched the ranger take it to the door of the lodge
and give it a gentle toss to wing away in the twilight. And a
moment later they heard its hunting call:
“OOOooowheeee!”
Rerne nodded at the perches and Troy went to let the fussel make
a choice. After a moment of inspection, the bird put claw on the
end one and settled there, waiting for Troy to offer him his
evening bait.
He who held the owhee and his partner of the resident staff did
not linger after Rerne, Troy, and their kit were in the lodge
house. Each forest ranger had a length of trail to patrol by night
as well as by day. They said very little, and Troy suspected that
it was his presence that kept the conversation to reports,
questions, and answers. He tended the fussel and tried to keep out
of the way.
But when both had gone and Rerne brought out a pack of
Quick-rations, they settled by the fire, which the Hunter poked
into renewed life. There were no chairs, only wide, thick cushions
of hide stuffed with something that gave forth a pleasant herbal
smell when crushed beneath one’s weight.
As they shared the contents of the food pack, the Hunter talked
and Troy listened. This was the stuff of the other’s
days—the study of the Wild, the policing of it after a
fashion, not to interfere with nature, only to aid her where and
when they could, to make sure that the natural destruction wrought
by man himself wherever and whenever he came into new territory did
not upset delicate ecological balances.
There were stands of fabulous woods that could be cut—but
only under the supervision of the Hunting Clans. There were herbs
to be sought for the healing fraternities of other worlds, studies
made of the native animals. The Wild was a storehouse to which the
Clans held the keys—keeping them by force if necessary. In
the tree-filled valleys, on the spreading plains yet farther to the
east, battles had been fought between poachers and guardians. And
only because Korwar had been proclaimed a pleasure planet did the
Clans have the backing to keep the looters out. Most of this Troy
knew, vaguely, but now Rerne spoke of times and places, named
names.
The story was absorbing, but Troy was no child to be beguiled by
stories. He began to wonder at the reason for Rerne’s
talkativeness.
“There is no carbite on Korwar,” Rerne continued.
“But let its equal be found here—and let the barriers
against mineral exploration go down—”
“Is there any chance of that happening?” Troy
ventured, suddenly aware that he, too, was now thinking as a
partisan, ready to protect the Wild against willful destruction.
Something in him was stirring sluggishly, pressing bonds he himself
had welded into place as a self-protection. Like the hawk, he
wanted to test his wings against a free and open sky.
Rerne’s lips twisted wryly. “We have learned very
little, most of our species. I can name you half a hundred planets
that have been wrecked by greed. No, not just those burned off
during the war, but killed deliberately over a period of years. As
long as we can keep Korwar as a pleasant haven for the overlords of
other worlds, some of them the greed-wrecked ones, we can hold this
one inviolate. One does not want such desolation in one’s own
back yard. So far those of the villas have the power, the wealth,
to retain Korwar as their unspoiled play place. But how long will
it continue to be so? There may be other treasures here than those
fabled to lie in Ruhkarv, and far more easily found!”
“You have had two hundred years,” Troy said, with an
old bitterness darkening that elation of moments earlier.
“Norden had less than a hundred—thanks to Sattor
Commander Di!”
“No length of years will satisfy a man when he sees the
end of a way of life he is willing to fight for. What does the past
matter when the future swoops for the kill? Yes, Sattor Commander
Di—who died of poison in his own garden house and whose
murderer is yet to be found—and even the method by which the
poison reached him determined—has to answer for
Norden.”
How did Rerne know all that about Di? The fact of poison had not
been broadcast on the general coms. Troy felt like a sofaru rat
over which the shadow of a diving fussel had fallen, powerless
before the strike of an enemy not of his own element. Was this
behind Rerne’s talk, merely a softening-up process to prepare
him for subtle questioning about the kinkajou? Or was his own
half-guilty feeling suggesting that?
But the Hunter did not enlarge upon the case of Sattor Commander
Di. His explorations into the past were not so immediate. Rather
now he led Troy to talk about his own childhood. Though in another
Korwarian Horan might have considered that questioning
presumptuous, there was something about Rerne’s interest that
seemed genuine, so that the younger man answered truthfully instead
of with the evasions he had used so long for a
shield—including the fact that his memories of Norden’s
plains and the free life there were hazy now.
“There are plains here, too. You might consider
that,” Rerne suggested cryptically as he arose in one lithe
movement. “Given time, the right man might learn much. The
bunk at that end is yours, Horan. No evil dreams ride your
night—” Again the phrase had some of the formality of a
ritual dismissal. Troy looked in upon the fussel, saw that it was
asleep with one foot drawn up into its under feathers after the
manner of its kind, and then went to the bunk Rerne had
indicated.
There was no foam plast filling its box shape. Inside dried
grasses and leaves gave under him, then remolded about his body,
and the fine scent of them filled his nostrils as he fell asleep
easily. He did not dream at all.
When he awoke, the door of the big room stood ajar and from that
direction he heard the calls of birds. Still rubbing sleep from his
eyes, Troy rolled out of the bunk. The fire on the hearth was out
and there was no one else in the room. But the clean smell of a new
day in the Wild drew him out on the ledge, to stand looking down
into the valley of the lake.
Something rose and fell with a regular stroke not far from the
shore, and he realized he was watching a swimmer. A series of steps
cut in the rock led down from the ledge, and Troy followed them.
Then a loose sleeping robe draped over a bush beckoned him on and
he shed his own in turn, testing the temperature of the water with
his toes, plunging into it in a clumsy dive before he could change
his mind because of that chill greeting.
Troy floundered along the shore, being no expert as was that
other now heading, with clean arm sweeps and effortless kicks, back
from the center. His threshings disturbed mats of floating blossoms
shed by trees bordering a rill that fed the lake at this point, and
the bruised petals patterned his wet skin as he found sandy footing
and stood up, shivering.
“Storm-cold, Gentle Homo.” he commented as Rerne
waded in.
The other stopped to wring water from his braided hair knot and
then, surveying Troy’s dappled body, he laughed,
“A new refinement—flower baths?”
Troy echoed that laugh as he skimmed the wet masses from him.
“Not of my choice, Gentle Homo.”
“The name is Rerne. We do not follow the paths of Tikil
here, Horan.” The other was using his nightrobe as a towel,
kicking his feet into sandals. With the robe now draped cloakwise
about him, he stood for a moment looking out over the lake, and his
face was oddly relaxed, much more alive than Troy had ever seen
it.
“A fair day. We shall go to the plateau above Stansill and
see just how good our feathered one really is.”
The flitter took them east and north again. And once more the
vegetation beneath them thinned. But not to a waste scar such as
that which held Ruhkarv, rather to open plains of tall grasses and
scattered, low-growing shrubs. Twice Rerne buzzed the flyer above
herds of ruminants, and horned heads tossed angrily before the
heavy-shouldered beasts pounded away, tasseled tails high in
wrath.
“Pansta,” Rerne identified them. “Wild cattle
of a sort.”
“But they are scaled—or at least they look
so!” Troy protested, thinking of his own lost tupan that had
grazed so and might have run from a buzzing flitter in the same
pattern.
“Not scaled as a fish or a reptile,” Rerne
corrected. “Those are plates of hardened
flesh—something like an insect’s wingcasing shell. The
herds are dwindling every year, fewer calves born; we do not yet
know why. We have reason to believe that they were once
domesticated.”
“By those of Ruhkarv?”
“Perhaps. Though who or what those of Ruhkarv
were—” Rerne shrugged.
“Did they leave only one ruin behind them? I know only of
Ruhkarv.”
“And that is another mystery. Why a single known city for
a civilization? Were they only an outpost of some long-lost stellar
empire vanished before man took to space? That was one theory
Fauklow wanted to prove or disprove. There is one other trace of
them on Korwar—north beyond the plains. But that is
all—and that is a very small post. I do not think they were
native here. Just as the pansta are so alien to the other animals
of the Wild that they do not seem to be native either. The feral
herds of a long-gone race, which have outlasted their unknown
masters.”
The edge of the plains where the pansta ran dropped behind them,
and now there were ridges and rising slopes once again, until the
flitter climbed to a tableland open to the sky, seeming otherwise
cut off from any contact with the lower stretches. Under the golden
light of a perfect morning there spread a patched flooring of
flowering grasses, a few scattered trees, so removed from any touch
of man’s passing that Troy thought they might have been the
first to find that place if his companion’s knowledge of it
had not argued otherwise.
Rerne brought the flitter down on a stretch of gravel beside
quiet water that was neither as large as a lake nor as small as a
pond. They climbed out and stood with the breeze pushing against
their bodies. The fussel spread wings, gave voice.
“Let him hunt! Ollllahuuuu!”
Troy gave the wrist flex that was a signal of freedom to the
bird he bore. And the fussel arose in great sweeps, beating into
the topaz sky until neither man could see him clearly.