The skimmer's anti-gray drive whined and Hook balanced easily within the field, his boots in the stirrups giving height, speed and directional control as he leaned in the desired directions.
He lifted the clumsy flare gun and let rip a string of bursts that soared out, ahead. A thin pencil blast struck down past his right side, barely missing the skimmer, splashed coruscatingly off a rock half-buried in the mud. The rocks beyond lifting in gullies from the ferny bog concealed a hunter, then, and he was shooting with a Laranz-Pinner, there was no mistaking that intense and scorching beam.
The skimmer ducked down low and Hook crouched even lower, keeping his head down.
He had the skimmer going flat out, now.
At his back the freighter globe discharged a long string of skeeters. They peeled across the sky like an exploding pack of cards. Hook's skimmer went on over a ridge and then swooped down and the next pencil-thin beam from the Laranz-Pinner went wide.
That wild jolting ride finished with the skimmer hurtling beneath a frondy overhang of ferns.
Hook had created a bedlam out there. Foylty and others of the city bosses would be incensed. They'd come down to the planet to find out what was going on — and they'd guess Ryder Hook still lived. If that didn't smoke 'em out, nothing would.
There was no point in cutting into an apparat net. He knew with a sense of elation that came as an exhilarating drug that he was right. He knew what was going to happen ...
By the time he got back to the meeting place he was in the frame of mind to have blown star city out of the sky, if he could have done so. As it was, he took a great and evil glee in the grief he was going to bring to the Curlmen. Or — the grief he trusted he would bring to them.
Now he had only to knock away the last strut and then the whole edifice of the Curlmen's hideous pastime would crumble.
He stood on the central rock with its hieroglyphs and he lifted his arms and the assembled fernmen fell silent.
"You have heard my words over the days of the meeting. You know something of the stars, and the peoples of the galaxy, and you know you are a proud race. I have told you that there are people in the galaxy who joy in the agony of others, who laugh at another person's death."
Their reaction was as before, but accentuated, for they had had time to digest and to think on what he had told them. His ugly face chilled them as he went on.
"I grieve for you, for you are my friends. We are not made in the same shape. We are aliens to one another. But the star-men are made like me — and I am more alien to them than I am to you! "
There was much nodding of heads at this.
"You feel a scorn, a disdain, a contempt, for people who take life wantonly and joy in it, and regard it as a game. I tell you that the starmen do this! The starmen slay you for their sport, and laugh and glee in your agonies! "
The hubbub went on for a long time.
The Voydun could hardly believe that any intelligent being could behave thus. Their derision of that code of conduct rolled out.
"The starmen will be hunting you again, and soon, and here in the meeting place." He did not tell them why. That, he wished to spare them. "They will slay you and joy in it. You must not fear any more! You must not be afraid! What, how can a man be afraid of vermin who laugh as they kill him?" It was a specious argument; but what Hook wanted them to do hung on their refusal to feel fear. He need not have worried.
Torca said it for them all.
"How can a man fear such people? Death will come to us all in the end. We accept that ... They cannot be human beings, even if they are intelligent and can fly in the air and deal death with marvellous weapons. We scorn them, we despise them, we disdain them — and yet they are not worth contempt. They are beneath contempt. We pity them."
Hook looked at the multitude gathered, he saw their brilliant eyes beneath the bone ridges, he saw their fur, sleek now in honour of the meeting, their funny flat feet, their tails, and he felt a choking sensation that he knew had no part of the life style of Ryder Hook.
He checked the rounds left in the Zable-White's bandoleer, and he checked the Tonota Eighty, and he was ready when the Curlmen faded down through the matra and started to hunt Voydun.
The flying starmen swarmed over ... They shot down into the huddled masses of fernmen ... Ryder Hook found himself a nice little niche and he forced himself to sit there and not to shoot his weapons off and he made himself sit there and watch the slaughter. He saw Torca reel back with an arm blown off.
Torca lifted his alien head to the flying men above.
"You poor deluded souls!" shouted Torca, with the blood pouring from the arm stump. "Oh, how I pity you! You are beyond disdain, derided, outcast, unhuman!"
At last Hook could stand it no longer. He was inhuman himself most of the time; but this, he could no longer stomach.
He began with the rifle and he shot the damned Curlmen out of the air as he would have swatted flies.
The fires blazed back and forth, smoke roiled, and the fernmen screamed in agony when they were hit — for were they not human beings? But even though some of them broke down in fear and distress when a loved one was hit, their culture now that they saw the truth demanded their response could be nothing other than what it was. They could not hate. But their derision for the Curlmen pulsed in waves over the rocks and ferns.
Hook began using the Tonota and that decided the Curlmen whom, unable to spot him with their homotrops, at last broke off. They flew away. The shambles they left behind made Hook know he had no right still to be alive. But he was a rough tough spaceman, wasn't he? A barky galactic adventurer? So why did he feel like this?
Ryder Hook was out for number one. All the time. So why act like a maudlin sentimental fool?
The sun sank. The dead were prepared for burial, for what better place to bury the dear departed than in this place where the Saps of Death and Life so fatally intertwined?
The great summer solstice meeting was over. The tribes took their separate ways back to their homes.
Torca lived, with one arm. They went back to the caves.
Hook wondered and then rejected the thought. It would have been a temporary solution only to have shot the Curlmen out of the sky on their first attack. He could not stay down here on Voyden for ever. The Curlmen would have come back.
But he had no sure — no absolutely sure-fire absolute certainty — belief that what he had done would do what he wanted done. They went about the unending tasks of the fernmen's lives and they waited for the next attack. Hook withdrew into himself, and could not look at Torca without pain.
He had made up his mind.
He might have waited down there until he died of old age, or a monster of the swamps chomped him; he wouldn't leave until he was sure.
On a bright morning with the sun glinting off the water and casting a brilliance of green over the ferns he saw Terifia floating through the air towards him. She propelled a skimmer laden with supplies. She saw Hook as he waved and slanted down to him.
He managed a very nice smile for her.
"Oh, Hook! They said it was all your fault and I was to blame and they cast me away down here! Hook, we're stranded!"
He helped her through the ferns.
"Tell me what happened, Terifia."
"You don't seem surprised to see me."
"I am! Oh, I am, Tell me."
"It was terrible! Poor Lars! We went to the latest Exper and it was a special one, for they'd made the recordings at a big gathering — something they hadn't done before. And — it was horrible, Hook, horrible! " She clung to him. The fern-people flapped out on their flat feet and stood in a ring, silently.
"Yes, Terifia?"
"The Curlmen — star city is such a wonderful place and they are so proud and masterful —"
"Yes. They are a supercilious bunch."
"But the Exper — we were made to feel like vermin, like little children — beyond contempt, even. We were derided!
We were piti
ed! The star city — Oh, Hook — it was dreadful."
"It sounds highly enjoyable to me, Terifia. I'd like to have been there to hit that Foylty on the nose."
"It was far worse than that, Hook."
"Yes. I'm sure it was, I'm glad to say.
"And — Hook — Stellopolis! "
"What of star city, Terifia?"
"It's gone! The Curlmen couldn't stand the derision from the Exper. They knew the Voydun pitied them and they couldn't stand that. So they spaced out."
Hook lifted his arms and shouted to the assembled fernmen.
"Star city has gone! It has taken its evil back to the stars." Torca, thin and drawn, spoke slowly.
"We understand — a little — of what you have done for us, Hook. But — will not some other planet suffer our fate at the hands of the starmen?"
"If that is to be, then the Sap of Death cannot be gainsaid. But maybe the memory of what they experienced here will affect them. Who can prophesy the fall of spores?"
Hook had once been highly conscious of the incongruity of his actions, given the relative racial characteristics of his present friends and the men of star city. He knew he had acted out of motives not primarily connected with his own safety or well-being — actions almost altruistic in their implications — and that worried him. He couldn't go on like this. He had to be out for number one, what with the Novamen searching for his guts to rip out. Some other planet would have to deal with the Curlmen of Stellopolis, and perhaps blow them all up in the process. That wouldn't bother Ryder Hook.
He could at least take a grain of comfort from the fact he had saved the Voydun. Now they could break out from these miserable bogs and ferns, find a good clean land in which to live, search for their own destiny on their own planet. Terifia looked about on the crowding fernpeople. "They look — strange, Hook. Uplifted. I'm sure star city was bad for them."
Hook looked at her. She still had Bunji to worry over. She thought they were stranded down here. Well, until he could find a net and make a surreptitious and totally safe call to Shaeel so that ve'd come spacing in to hoist him out, they were stranded. On Terifia's skimmer would be a tiny radio and he might jolly that along to call out to the stars.
Either way there would be a little time to spend down here. He'd make damn sure he'd enjoy that with Terifia. Damned sure.
But first things first. He dragged out the skimmer's larger-scale med-pak and found an arm graft bud and so reassured Torca that he'd have a new arm growing back in no time.
"It is all very wonderful, Hook."
"Star city is off your backs. Now it's up to you. As for me, I've a little business with the lady."
He realised that Terifia had been wrinkling up her nose.
He knew why.
"Come on, love. Let's find ourselves a cave and set up house. We will soon be rescued, so we don't want to hang about."
"You're a plug-ugly, Hook, you really are." Terifia backed away. "And, Hook — you stink awful!"
"I know. Here, have a drink. You'll soon find the aroma irresistible."
Then Ryder Hook laughed. "You're better off down here with friends than you were on that Goddamned star city!"
Star City Page 13