The Forerunner Factor

by Andre Norton

  There was a breeze moving under the trees, not to form any more specters out of Thorn’s past but to cool her body. Then Zass cried out from overhead and came to take position on her shoulder. Thorn really believed in his mission and in this lizard-faced humanoid he served. Of that she had no doubts at all.

  She crossed the empty ground at the cliff’s foot to set her back against the bole of a tree and relax. But the thoughts that were crowding in upon her were like sharp-pointed thorns from some vine ringing her around. Surely, her escape from the ship had been prudent? Who could be sure what outré weapon they might have used to cow her into obedience or drive all consciousness from her. Thorn believed in his own truth—but that was not hers.

  Simsa found herself listening, her head turned slightly to the north. The hum of a flitter! Thorn was so sure they would come hunting him. But if they found nothing, or only indications that the other machine had sunk, would they then linger? And if they went from this world . . .

  For the first time, something other than the nameless and unsorted fears of the girl from the Burrows ebbed, and she was confronted with something else. Spend the rest of her life here in this valley? She stared about her, wondering. Never in her life before had she accepted imprisonment—she had been wary enough to escape it when she had run the Burrows ways. No matter how strong the door barrier of one of those underground dwellings had been, there had also existed bolt holes, the secrets of which were jealously guarded. It had been through one such that she and Thorn had made their way to freedom on her last night in Kuxortal.

  There could be bolt holes aplenty here, also. But what lay beyond? Only the seared, scored land which could support no life such as her own. That was so to the north and east—there remained south and west.

  Intent on driving this new set of shadows back into oblivion, Simsa rose and began to walk, determined to make a complete circuit of the valley wall.

  Once more, she found the flight of steps down which they had come. She shrugged off any idea of another climb to the cliff top as yet. There would just be more rock, though twice that had been broken by crevices which might lead to caves such as they had left her to shelter in, or perhaps even to the mouths of passages—she marked each carefully in memory and continued.

  When she reached a fringe of vegetation beyond which she could hear the play of water, she was sure that the fountain she had discovered on her first visit was there. Simsa then became fully aware that the cliff side here showed a number of indentations—shallow yet forming a pattern that ran horizontally and not vertically as if meant for a ladder out. These were so rounded of edge, so worn by time, that she could not be sure of any of them or their meaning. That they were not just intended to be decorative she was sure.

  A little ahead, the cliff burgeoned out in a wider curve, cutting into the valley itself. Here that pattern was not so faint, so worn. It consisted of a number of holes of equal proportion bored into the stone in clusters, but in few of those did the same number of holes appear, nor were they arranged in the same grouping.

  Old Ferwar had been an avid collector of scraps of parchment, of any bits of stone bearing a strange design that could be writing. From her earliest essays into Burrow combing, Simsa had been alerted to find such, and many a sweet or copper piece had she earned from her old guardian when she’d brought one back.

  There had been a number of scripts of different kinds on those fragments out of the past—wriggling lines running without a break across a crumpled bit of rotting parchment, or words set out in stone, often broken in the middle and the rest missing, in some tongue she was sure even Ferwar did not know. Now she was certain that what she saw was an inscription of such importance that it had been painfully and carefully drilled into the rock.

  She rounded the outer bend of the invading rock point and once more faced the darkness of a break in the wall. The edges were uneven. It was apparent that the same hands that had carved a message into stone here had been busy again.

  But at the midpoint of the stone arching above that entrance was something more than mere pitted stone. Nearly as badly worn by time as the rest, it hung there, blind-eyed and anonymous. It could be intended either as a warning or a welcome. The triangular head of one of the valley inhabitants was depicted, eyes not to be mistaken, many times life size, and with the effect of a never-sleeping sentinel.

  With a hand gesture, the girl suggested to Zass that she invade that dark space. But the zorsal refused with a whimpering cry. Nor did Simsa herself want to go ahead. A temple, a palace, a prison—it could be one or all three. It was not in the least like the residence of that moundlike erection at the valley’s core.

  She sniffed. Temples usually, to her Kuxortal-trained nostrils, burned some forms of scent. There was no sound of any movement, no sign of any path recently used here. For there was a clear drift of leaves, dull brownish through death, right across the entrance.

  All peoples, Simsa had learned enough from traders to know, were jealous of the dwelling places of their gods or objects of power. For a stranger to enter such without the proper ceremonies was sometimes merely another and very unpleasant way of committing self-killing.

  In spite of every suggestion her mind made, there was another part of Simsa that would not let her move on past this place without learning more about it. Step by cautious step, she moved toward the entrance and, as her feet crushing the dried leaves gave forth the smallest of crunches, she halted between each step to listen, turning her head from right to left.

  Also, she held the rod well up and gave full attention to the horns. There was no warning heat, no coming of the light. Judging by this, there was nothing of alien power housed inside.

  Zass chittered in her ear and was ill at ease. Still Simsa could not break that compulsion which sent her on, over the threshold into the darker opening beyond.

  As wide as the doorway was, it proved to be funnel-shaped, narrowing steadily on both sides so that to go forward, she had to enter a passage that must have been designed to admit only a single one of the valley folk at a time. Being lesser than they in bulk, Simsa walked easily.

  There were no breaks in the walls that closed about her—no doors into dark, secret ways, as there had been in that other chill passage she had entered. Here, sheltered somewhat from the weather, both walls were studded with pits or the holes that could be warnings, exhortations, even hymns to be sung—or thought—to some greater form of life.

  The small amount of light that entered here from the valley was shortly gone. Simsa faced the dark with no light from her rod to supply her. Zass’s whimpering cries grew stronger. Yet the girl received no clear warning from the zorsal, only that there was something here the creature did not like. Simsa paused, waited for a long moment, curiosity and prudence at war. Then she opened her mind in the way she had learned to do since the Elder One had come to her.

  Thought quested ahead far faster than she could have run. And encountered—nothing. Or was there too much nothing? Simsa considered that thought silence carefully. She had discovered a mind shield on board the ship and at the port before they had lifted. Most of them the Elder One had contemptuously considered childish attempts and had let Simsa know that if she wished, they might be penetrated easily, not that the girl had cared to try them.

  But this was, in its way, very different. As Simsa considered why she believed so, the Elder One stirred. It would seem that she also could be moved by curiosity. Because there was more than just that emotion moving her, on sudden impulse, Simsa stood aside—not waiting to be overtaken by that other—to afford the Elder One a free passage through the channels of her mind.

  There were wisps of pictures, none of which she could seize upon long enough to clarify—buildings, places out-of-doors—temples, fanes, sanctuaries which the Elder One knew. Some with powers still there—others lost and forgotten, the powers dead with the people who had worshipped them.

  Then came a delicate kind of prickling—yes, Simsa of the Bu
rrows had been right. This was not one of those forsaken shrines—something waited ahead. Or did it slumber long past an awakening? The dark silence was far too deep.

  She was not surprised when the moons glowed with their tip lights again. Zass was suddenly silent, enough so that her head brushed against the girl’s cheek with every small snorting breath the zorsal drew. Once again, but for the first time since that hall when she had rushed into what she’d thought was completion, Simsa was with the Elder One, not pushed to one side, a spectator in her own body.

  Those inscriptions on the walls were thick here, the lines of pits crowding in upon one again. Then they came out of that passage into a cavern or hall which was so large, so cloaked in darkness, that the rod’s light was no more than a feeble candle end, showing no more than a few steps before her.

  To venture out into the middle of that, away from the small sense of security that the wall itself gave, was hard. But Simsa had courage to match the Elder One’s now. So they came to a large pit in which no fire burned, nothing stirred. Instead of light, the depression was filled with fold upon fold of thick black, and when she lowered the rod and went down on one knee to see the better there was a heaving and a stirring of that dark as the sand had heaved and been troubled by what dwelt beneath.

  “Sar Tanslit Grav!” The Elder One’s words—or call—or greeting—echoed, with each echo growing the louder instead of diminishing, until Simsa wanted to cover her ears with her hands and could not.

  “Sar!” As if that were a command which could not be disobeyed, the roiling of the dark grew. Faster spun the layers of it beneath.

  Up from the heart of that troubled mass of nonlight came a long finger of the same thick blackness. And finger it was, as much as one upon her own hand, marked by the joints, a pointed nail on its tip—and yet that finger was near as tall as she.

  It had risen straight upward and Simsa waited, shivering, for the hand to appear, but it remained a finger elongating itself as it rose. She caught another flashing picture from the Elder One of a finger that had once so risen from a grove of trees to beckon and she shivered throughout her body, waiting for that to beckon her, knowing clearly in the same way that if it did so, she must follow.

  It was beginning to incline in their direction.

  Simsa flung back her head. In her upraised hand the rod twisted and turned. That reaching finger quivered—flashed out. Hallucination? But what had triggered it?

  As she had done when the furred one began her spelling to bring down the flitter, so the girl began to hum, and that thrum was in some manner picked up by the rod and intensified. There was light now, fountaining forth from the rod itself, drawing a circle of radiance first around Simsa and then reaching out to encompass the pit. In its core there was the flood of black quiescence now—but only for a moment. As the hum grew louder and the light stronger, the pool of dark began to rise again within the stone cup that held it. There was a compulsion in that sound Simsa did understand. As if sound itself could accomplish that which she would believe only hands and body strength could bring about.

  Once more the Elder One cried aloud through her lips:

  “Sar—sar . . . Grav!”

  Something broke the surface of the pool. It was not a giant fingertip reaching out to seize what it might crush upon the rock. No, that which was relinquished slowly, reluctantly, was a vast mass giving forth a stench that was not of any organic thing rotten, but rather like the smells Simsa remembered from the spaceport, from the ill-running machines that her own people—or the people of Kuxortal—did not know how to tend properly.

  The bulk of it was nearly at the edge of the pit now, the blackness bearing it up. Then it washed forward so that Simsa had to leap back and away to escape the wave that brought it and then receded, leaving what it had so borne to drip ooze on the rock flooring. The Elder One moved her forward as a game piece again to stoop and touch the light of the rod to the black slime the thing was shedding.

  There was a flash. Fire, which was like honest flames burning, ran outward from that touch, ate greedily at the ooze and drip until all she could see was a huge mass of burning stuff, from which she staggered back coughing as the reek of it bit into her lungs and brought tears from smarting eyes.

  12

  The fire ran fiercely, then smoldered into dark patches with dull crimson gaps where the flames still ate as they died. This was no machine such as she had seen in company with the off-worlders, nor did it have anything of Kuxortal in it. It was a mixture of solid plates and branching ribs—a carcass and yet not one of any once living creature.

  Made by the hands of others, not born by the way of nature. Simsa was ready to swear to that. What it might be she could not have said. There was a rain of sooty bits flying from the structure as if it shook itself to get rid of the last fragments of that covering.

  “Yathafer . . .” It was not Simsa of the Burrows who had breathed that name, though her lips had shaped it. Just like all her touches with the Elder One, this was only part of a mystery. Looking upon that blackened thing, she saw it not, but rather a glider, soaring great wings against the sky, a sky that was not curtained in the haze that covered all here, a sky clear and faintly golden. And he who so winged about, using the upper drafts of air to raise and ride, he was—

  The faintest of memories struggled in her. No, it was not his name she had spoken a moment earlier. It was that of what he did—wind riding, freeing himself from the clutches of earth to soar and swoop and be borne by the breeze’s will. He was—

  “Shreedan . . .” Yes! That was the name, but where was that flyer? And how on this world of bare rock and traveling sand had Yathafer’s wings come to be hidden?

  That congealed darkness which filled the basin had drained away. She looked into a black hole where nothing moved. Yet before her was that which was of her people. Why had it arisen to her now? Or was this merely another manifestation of the rod she carried—that it could in truth control all of the foretime?

  Tarnished metal showed as the black ashes fell away. She saw the body swing and it was intact, as were the wings which had been closed, one overlapping the other, following custom when the Yathmen stored their craft.

  Deliberately, Simsa edged by that craft to point the rod straight down into the basin from which the thing had so emerged. There was no trickery or hallucination leading her to see what was not. She had already reached forth a hand and flicked more ash from the wing edge, felt the solid metal. So—what else might lie hidden below? Simsa was certain that the rider of the Yathafer could not lie here. Or, if he did, his life had long since fled. But she wanted to make sure—she had to! The excitement was like a lash laid about her shoulders, driving her along to more discoveries.

  Fixing her mind firmly on the problem, the girl summoned whatever else might lie before that was or had been made by hands. There was no roiling of the dark in answer, even though the light of the rod grew stronger as she poured into it all the energy she could summon, reaching a peak of power that she had held only during the ceremony with the valley seeress when they had summoned the whirlwind.

  She saw the sides of the bore and then there was utter dark which swallowed up her light. Either this was strong enough to hold any other prey, once it had been alerted, or else there was nothing left.

  At length, Simsa realized that she was expending power for nothing and she loosed control and concentration, turning instead to the machine so oddly revealed to her. Slipping her rod into the girdle about her waist, she caught with both hands at the edge of the folded wings and gave a slight pull. There was no resistance; rather, the wing moved easily. Nor did it fall apart as she half-expected it might. So she was able to push it before her, shedding more of the ash all the time, heading for the entrance.

  Her people—Simsa of the Burrows stirred. No, the people of the Elder One—they must have been here, too, in the forgotten past to leave this artifact of their own design. But why had they come? She was sure that this was
not the world that had first shaped them—what might the Great Memory be able to tell her concerning that past?

  She had to learn so much. From the star rovers of this day she had plucked some things, but always warily, afraid ever to reveal herself entirely. On Kuxortal, she had been an exile; was here another exile of her race awaiting discovery? Know—she must know!

  As the girl drew the long-hidden flyer into the open, she found herself no longer alone. Here squatted the strangely banded one who had been—who was—the Great Memory, renewed within the egg, ready once again to serve her people. On either side of her, two of the larger valley females reared high, their upper limbs free and claws clicking softly.

  Behind them was another party. Thorn, on his feet, his arms stretched wide apart, each of his wrists in the claw hold of a valley guard, stood there. Though human or near-human eyes could read no expression on those large-eyed faces, still Simsa was sure that peril was with him. Yet she did not pause—or that one within her would not let her, as she came fully into the open, pulling the machine behind her. The light caught painting on the upper of the folded wings—a spiral of blue flecked with glistening stars which did not appear to need direct sun rays to give forth diamond splendor in flashing points.

  “What—drew—you—from Pool of Forgetting—” The mind search of the Great Memory quavered in the girl’s head.

  “That which was of my own people,” Simsa replied. “How came it here?” Even as she asked that, her mind was busy trying to storm a door stubbornly shut against her. Blue—and diamond-bright sparks—those had a meaning—what—how—who?

  The Great Memory, still on all fours, advanced a single step. Her head turned up at an acute angle so she could center the gaze of her eyes on Simsa, hold the girl so. Simsa was aware of a steady and ever-strengthening thrust against her, as if the Great Memory would encompass her about and squeeze from her what the alien wanted most to know.