Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  It was a good time, and the Hana dwarf now lived there often for a while before returning, strengthened, to the life of the moment and the knowledge of being among the Veen. There was little else to do. The Veen held it enclosed in a cage of energy, difficult to penetrate and opened only when they came with their prying minds and mind machines to seek out and enslave the captured Hana mind, precisely as they had done in other days. They’d learned much in the interval, if not greater wisdom and less arrogance. The Hana dwarf was aware of the manipulations which stopped its growth and prevented it from developing and distributing its seed. But such things were of no significance. They could be undone. The question was whether the Veen could reach its mind.

  It hadn’t believed they could. It was more formidably armed than any Hana had been in the times of the Veen War; if its defenses failed, the touch of its thought would kill other minds in moments. But it was less sure now. The Veen’s first probes barely reached its defenses, broke there; and a brief period of quiet followed. But they were persistent. Indications came that another attempt was being carefully prepared, with mind qualities involved which had not been noticeable before.

  It would warn them, though Veen had not yet been known to respond sensibly to a warning. They were the race which knew no equals, which could tolerate only slaves. If they persisted and succeeded, the Hana would emerge to kill, and presently to die. A single pulse would be enough to notify the Three Worlds, long since alerted, and waiting now with a massed power never before encountered by Veen, that the Veen War had been resumed.

  The Hana shaped its warnings and set them aside, to be released as seemed required. Then, with its several deaths prepared, it, too, waited, and sometimes dreamed.

  Toward evening, four days after Trigger and the Siren specimen moved into the Amberdon summer house, Telzey was on her way there by aircar. It had been a demanding day at college, but she was doing very well in the exams. When she left Pehanron, she’d felt comfortably relaxed.

  Some five minutes ago then, her mood shifted abruptly. An uneasy alertness awoke in her. It wasn’t the first time she’d felt that way during the past few days.

  The Siren? From behind a psi block and over all these miles? Not likely, but perhaps not impossible either. She hadn’t made much headway in the investigation over the weekend and the last two evenings, and hadn’t tried to. That was a strange being! Under the mechanical euphoric effect seemed to lie only the empty negation which had met her first probe. The Service’s translating machines had reported nothing at all, but most of the Service xenotelepaths also had sensed the void, the emptiness, the vacuum. Some of them eventually found something in the vacuum. They weren’t sure of what they’d found; but they’d stirred up a violence and power difficult to associate with the midget Siren. Mind shields had been hard tested. Some shields weren’t tight enough, or resistant enough; and as a result, the Service had a few lunatic xenos around for a while.

  Even without Trigger’s forebodings, it wouldn’t have looked like a matter to rush into. When the exams were over, she could settle down to serious work on the Siren. All she’d intended during the week was to become acquainted with it.

  In doing even that much, had she allowed it to become acquainted with her? She wasn’t sure. Something or other, at any rate, seemed to have developed an awareness of her. Otherwise, she’d had no problems. The addictive effect didn’t bother her; that could be dampened or screened out, and whatever lingered after a period of contact was wiped from her mind in seconds.

  The something-or-other did bother her.

  Telzey turned the aircar into the mouth of a wide valley. It was between winter and spring in the hills, windy and wet. Snow still lay in the gullies and along the mountain slopes, but the green things were coming awake everywhere. The Amberdon house stood forty miles to the north above the banks of a little lake . . .

  There was this restlessness, a frequent inclination to check the car’s view screens, though there was almost no air traffic here. Simply a feeling of something around! Something unseen.

  When it happened before she’d suspected there might be a psi prowling in her mental neighborhood, somebody who was taking an interest in her. Since such uninvited interest wasn’t always healthy, she’d long since established automatic sensors which picked up the beginnings of a scanning probe and simultaneously concealed and alerted her. The sensors hadn’t gone into action.

  So it shouldn’t be a human psi hanging around. Unless it was a psi with a good deal defter touch than she’d encountered previously. Under the circumstances, that, too, wasn’t impossible.

  If it wasn’t a human psi, it almost had to be a Siren manifestation.

  The feeling faded before she reached the house and brought her Cloudsplitter down to the carport. Another aircar stood there, the one Trigger had rented for her stay on Orado.

  During the past two evenings, they’d established a routine. When Telzey arrived from college, she and Trigger had dinner, then settled down in the room Gilas Amberdon used as a study when he was in the house. Its main attraction was a fine fireplace. They’d talk about this and that; meanwhile the Siren’s unshielded container stood on a table in a corner of the room, and Telzey’s thoughts drifted about the alien strangeness, not probing in any way but picking up whatever was to be learned easily. She soon stopped getting anything new in that manner; what was to be learned easily about the Siren remained limited. Some time before midnight, they’d restore the psi block, and Telzey went off to Pehanron.

  But before she left, they turned on the lights in the grounds outside for a while. The very first night, the day Trigger and the Siren moved in, they’d had a rather startling experience. They were in the study when they began to hear sounds outside. It might have been tree branches beating against the wall in the wind, except that no tree grew so close to the house there. It might even have been an unseasonal, irregular spattering of hail. The study had no window, but the adjoining room had two, so they went in, opened a window and looked out.

  At once, something came up over the sill with a great wet flap of wings and tail and drove into the room between them, bowling Telzey over. Trigger yelped and slammed the window shut as another pair of wings boomed in from the windy dusk with more shadowy shapes behind it. When she looked around, Telzey was getting to her feet and the intruder had disappeared into the house. They could hear it flapping about somewhere.

  “Are you hurt, Telzey?”

  “No.”

  “What in the world is that thing? There’s a whole mess of them outside!”

  “Eveers. They’re on spring migration. A flock was probably settling to the lake and got in range of the Siren.”

  “Good Lord, yes. The Siren! We should have realized—what’ll we do with the one in the house?”

  “The first thing we’d better do is get the Siren shielded,” said Telzey.

  Trigger cocked her head, listening. “The, uh, eveer is in the study!”

  Telzey laughed. “They’re not very dangerous. Come on!”

  The eveer might not have been a vicious creature normally, but it had strong objections to being evicted from the study and put up a determined fight. They both collected beak nips and scratches, were knocked about by solid wing strokes and thoroughly muddied by the eveer’s wet hide, before they finally got it pinned down under a blanket. Then Trigger crouched on the blanket, panting, while Telzey restored the psi block. After that, the eveer seemed mainly interested in getting away from them. They carried it to the front door between them, bundled in the blanket, and opened the door. There they recoiled.

  A sizable collection of Orado’s local walking and flying fauna had gathered along the wall of the house. But the creatures were already beginning to disperse, now that the Siren’s magic had faded; and at the appearance of the two humans, most of them took off quickly. Trigger and Telzey shook the eveer out of the blanket, and it went flapping away heavily into the night.

  It took them most of an hour
to tend to their injuries and clean up behind it. After that, they ignored unusual sounds outside the house when the container’s psi block was off.

  Other things were less easy to ignore.

  The night Telzey started back to Pehanron after the weekend was the time she first got the impression that something unseen was riding along with her. Psi company, she suspected, though her sensors reported nothing. She waited a while, relaxed her mind screens gradually, sent a sudden quick, wide search-thought about, with something less friendly held in readiness, in case it was company she didn’t like. The search-thought should have caught at least a trace of whoever or whatever was there. It didn’t.

  She remained behind her screens then, waiting. The feeling grew no stronger; sometimes it seemed to weaken. But it was a good five minutes before it faded completely.

  It came back twice in the next two days. Once in the house while she was in the study with Trigger, once on the way to the house. She didn’t mention it to Trigger; but that night, when it was getting time for her to leave, she said, “I think I’ll sleep here tonight and start back early in the morning.”

  “Be my guest,” Trigger said affably. She hesitated, added, “The fact is I’ll be rather glad to know you’re around.”

  Telzey looked at her. “You get lonesome at night in this big old house?”

  “Not exactly lonesome,” Trigger said. “I’ve never minded being by myself.” She smiled. “Has your house ever had the reputation of being haunted?”

  “Haunted? Not for around a hundred years. You’ve had the impression there’s a spook flitting about?”

  “Just an odd feeling occasionally,” Trigger said. She paused, added in a changed voice, “And by coincidence, I’m beginning to get that feeling again now!”

  They stood silent then, looking at each other. The feeling grew. It swelled into a feeling of bone-chilling cold, of oppressive dread. It seemed to circle slowly about them, drawing closer. Telzey passed her tongue over her lips. Psi slashed out twice. The feeling blurred, was gone.

  She turned toward the Siren container. Trigger shook her head. “The psi block’s on,” she said. “It was on the other times, too. I checked.”

  And the psi block was on. Telzey asked, “How often has it happened?”

  Trigger shrugged. “Four or five times. I’ll come awake at night. It’ll last a minute or two and go away.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you,” Trigger said. “It wasn’t as strong as this before. I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Siren.” She smiled, a trifle shakily. “An Amberdon ghost I could take.”

  “Let’s sit down,” Telzey said. “It wasn’t an Amberdon ghost, but it was a ghost of sorts.”

  They sat down. “What do you mean?” Trigger asked.

  Telzey said, “A psi structure. Something with some independent duration. A fear ghost. A psi mind made it, planted it. It was due to be sensed when we sensed it.”

  Trigger glanced at the container. “The Siren?”

  “Yes the little Siren.” Telzey blinked absently, fingering her chin. “There was nothing human about that structure. So the Siren put it out while the block was off. It’s telling us not to fool around with it . . . But now we will have to fool around with it!”

  Trigger looked questioningly at her.

  “It means you were right,” Telzey said. “The Siren has intelligence. It knows there’s somebody around who’s trying to probe it, and it doesn’t want to be probed. It’s tried to use fear to drive us away. Any psi mind that can put out a structure like that is very good! Dangerously good.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think anyone could say exactly what a whole world of creatures who can do that mightn’t be able to do otherwise!”

  “Three worlds,” said Trigger.

  “Yes, three worlds. So the Siren operation can’t just stop. They don’t know enough about us. They might think we’re very dangerous to them, and, of course, we are dangerous. The three worlds are there, and sooner or later somebody’s going to do something stupid about them. And something will get started—if it hasn’t started already.” She glanced at Trigger, smiled briefly. “Until now, I was thinking it might be only your imagination! But it isn’t. This is a really bad matter.”

  Trigger said after a moment, “I wish it had been only my imagination!” She looked at the Siren container. “You still think you can handle it?”

  Telzey shrugged. “I wouldn’t know by myself. But I’m sure Pilch gave that careful consideration.”

  Trigger reflected, tongue tip between lips, nodded. “Yes, she must have. It seems you’ve been pushed into something, Telzey.”

  “We both have.”

  Trigger sighed. “Well, I can’t blame her too much! It has to be done, and the Service couldn’t do it—at least not quickly enough. But I won’t blame you at all if you want to pull out.”

  “I might want to pull out,” Telzey admitted. “It’s more than I’d counted on. But I’d be going around worrying about the Sirens then, like you’ve been doing. We know more now to be worried about.”

  “So you’re staying?”

  “Yes.”

  Trigger smiled. “I can’t say I’m sorry! Look, it’s getting late, and you’ll have to be off to college early. Let’s talk about strictly non-eerie things for a little, and turn in.”

  So they talked about non-eerie matters, and soon went to bed, and slept undisturbed until morning, when Telzey flew off to Pehanron College.

  That evening, she slipped a probe lightly into the psi-emptiness of the Siren—an area she’d kept away from since her first contact with it. She thought presently it didn’t seem quite as empty as it had. There might be something there. Something perhaps like a vague, distant shadow, only occasionally and briefly discernible.

  She withdrew the probe carefully.

  “Let’s leave the psi block on until I’ve finished with the exams,” she told Trigger later. “I’ve picked up as much as I can use for a start.” She wasn’t so sure now of the psi block’s absolute dependability when it came to the Siren. But it should act as a temporary restraint.

  Trigger didn’t comment. Telzey slept in the house the rest of the week, and nothing of much significance happened. What remained of the exams wasn’t too significant either; she went breezing through it all with only half her attention. Then the end of the week came, and she moved into the summer house. In three weeks, she’d be attending graduation ceremonies at Pehanron College. Until then, her time was her own.

  VII

  It was early on the first morning after the exams that Telzey had her first serious session with the Siren. She had closed the door to the study and moved an armchair to a spot where she could observe the container. Trigger wasn’t present; she had stayed out of the study to avoid distracting Telzey, and to handle interruptions like ComWeb calls. Ezd Malion, the caretaker, usually checked in before noon to get shopping instructions.

  Telzey settled herself in the chair, relaxed physically. Mentally there’d be no relaxing. If the Siren entity followed the reaction pattern described in the Service reports, she shouldn’t be running into immediate problems. But it might not stay with the pattern.

  Her probe moved cautiously into the psi-emptiness. After a time, she gained again the impression of a few days before: it wasn’t as empty as it had appeared at first contact. Something shadowy, distant, seemed to be there.

  She began to work with the impression. What did she feel about it? A vague thing—and large. Cold perhaps. Yes. Cold and dark . . .

  It was what she felt—no more than that. But her feelings were all she had to work with at this stage. Out of them other things could develop. There was this vague, dark, cold largeness then, connected with the Siren on the study table. She tried to gain some impression of the relationship.

  An impression came suddenly, a negative one. The relationship had been denied. Afterwards,
the darkness seemed to have become a little colder. Telzey’s nerves tingled. There was no change otherwise, but she’d had a response. Her psi sensors reached toward the fringes of the darkness, seemed to touch it, still found nothing that allowed a probe. She had a symbol of what was there, not yet its reality. But the search had moved on a step.

  Then there was an interruption. She knew suddenly she wasn’t alone in the study. This was much more definite than any previous feeling that there might be someone or something about. She still sensed nothing specific, but the hair at the nape of her neck was trying to lift, and the skin of her back prickled with awareness of another’s presence in the room.

  Telzey didn’t look around, knowing she’d see no one if she did. Instead, she flicked a search probe out suddenly. As suddenly the presence was gone.

  She sat quiet a moment, returned her attention to the symbol. Nothing there had changed. She withdrew from it, stood up, turned the container’s psi block back on, and looked at her watch. About an hour had passed since she’d entered the study.

  She found Trigger in the conservatory, tending to the plants under the indoor sun. “Trigger,” she said, “did you happen to be thinking about me a few minutes ago?”

  “Probably,” Trigger said. “I’ve been thinking about you right along, wondering how you were doing. Why?”

  “Has there ever been anything to indicate you might be a psi?”

  Trigger looked surprised.

  “Well,” she said, “I understand everybody’s a bit of a psi. So I suppose I’m that. I’ve never done anything out of the ordinary though. Except perhaps—” She hesitated.

  “Except perhaps what?” Telzey asked.

  Trigger told her about the Old Galactics and her contacts with them.

  “Great day in the morning!” Telzey said astounded, when Trigger concluded. “You certainly have unusual acquaintances!”

  “Of course, no one’s to know they’re there,” Trigger remarked.