Balant: A Beginning

by Sam Smith

  The trail was easy to follow, led along the foothills on the same level as the lake, then turned abruptly up into the forest. Here there was a deep dark pass between the mountains — the same steep valley from which we had cut the four long poles for the sled. Climbing up one side of the pass, we looked out over the unbroken forest on the other side of the mountains. We could see no sign of them under that dense roof of trees, not even a wisp of smoke.

  The sun was setting when we reached the shuttle. Exhausted we ate and slept. I awoke from dreams of suffocation many times that night, looked over to my two friends twitching in uneasy sleep; and I wondered which hideous vision of the past two days had found a fearful niche in their minds.

  Our subconscious did its work that night, tagged the horrors and stored them in the depths of our psyche, and so we awoke the following morning almost back to our old selves. Save for one important difference; within each of us now there was an overwhelming sense of urgency: the sooner we left Balant the safer we would be.

  Yet the process couldn't be hurried. Food grew no faster nor was it any easier to find because of our increased dangers. Nor could we leave without sufficient food. Starvation in space was not a prospect that any one of us was prepared to risk. So we had to proceed at the same painstaking pace as before.

  First we dug up the roots and made the flagons. While they were hardening in the sun, we carried all the bags of food down from the cave, wrapped them in green leaves and stored them in the shuttle. Ronan's people now knew where we were: Ronan might not be able to keep them under control, and some might return to collect the cooking pots which had so fascinated them. With that in mind we refreshed the stores in our inner sanctuary cave, hid our cooking pots there every night.

  Soon, though, we were back to singlemindedly collecting food, Malamud and I travelling distances in a day that I would not have believed possible earlier. Then, while Malamud and I, in an adjoining cave, slept the sleep of the weary, Dag worked by torchlight late into the night over his steaming pots. Come the morning we again ventured out in search of ever more food.

  Malamud and I in our foraging inevitably, albeit unwillingly, had to pass the scene of the slaughter; and, because of the barricade of toppled trees, our path always took us past the woman and the child.

  The first time the outline of their skeletons was still discernible within the gel. The next time there was only an area of slime. On subsequent trips I noticed that, with every squall of rain, the slime had diminished. I guessed that the gel must be made of concentrated saline, hence its causticity; and that the rain was gradually diluting it.

  Whenever we had passed that way, for days afterwards, on hearing the whoosh of a bird, Malamud and I would glance nervously to the sky. And, whenever we went up near the deep pass, one of us would climb the mountainside to look out over the forest beyond. Neither of us saw any trace of Ronan or his people.

  The Nautili knew where our shuttle was, as did the inhabitants, so we no longer bothered keeping it covered. In our daily treks through the wooded slopes Malamud and I often used it as a gleaming landmark to find our bearings. But our lives were once again revolving around the caves. The only time we went down to the shuttle was to deliver more bags. Then we were off collecting food or leaves to wrap the bags in, sometimes returning to the cave long after nightfall.

  One morning we awoke to a sound other than the usual wailing and screeching. Stretching ourselves, rubbing our eyes, we sat up and looked questioningly to one another.

  Dag's eyes opened wide.

  “It's a siren!" he shouted.

  "The rescue ship!" Malamud began scrambling out of his bedding. In an instant we were all three on our feet and at the mouth of the cave.

  Standing on its landing gear in the desert, a hundred times larger than our tiny shuttle, was a streamlined ship. There was no mistaking its ululating siren now. The three of us shouted our joy, laughing hugged each other, slapped one another on the back.

  "The fire!" Malamud said; and, grabbing a torch, he stuck it into the embers of the fire in the cave. When the torch was lit he ran with it up to the top of the cliff.

  “Why aren't the crew out looking for us?” I wondered.

  "Probably waiting for us to come out of the shuttle,” Dag said.

  I imagined myself in space again, going home, telling my mother of my adventures. Going home...

  “It isn't a police ship," Dag said.

  “An ore carrier," I had already noticed it. “Probably been to a system near here. Like on the next planet out," I reminded him of the mine there.

  "!t hasn't got a name," Dag said.

  I glanced to him. The smile had gone from his face.

  “Probably..." I began, but was interrupted by Malamud's dancing return.

  “We're on our way. We're on our way. We're on our way," he sang, came to a skipping halt with his hands upon our shoulders.

  So were the three of us standing when, with a sudden flash, the ship fired into the shuttle. I watched bits of the shuttle go circling through the air, thought — an ore carrier with guns?

  “Eh?" Malamud stared dropjawed at the cloud of yellow dust and black smoke rising before the ship.

  “Why?” I said, in that single moment recalling all the painstaking repairs I had made to the shuttle. Only for it now to be in pieces.

  The ship started to rise from the desert floor.

  “Quick!" Dag pulled Malamud and I away from the mouth of the cave. "To the sanctuary. They will have seen the fire!"

  Malamud needed no further telling, ran ahead of Dag.

  “But...” I said, unable to believe what I had seen, unable to formulate my shock into a coherent statement. That our rescuers should become our attackers?

  "But..." I turned back, my arm stupidly lifted in protestation.

  Dag dragged me with him.

  “I’ll bring a torch," Malamud tried to squeeze back past us.

  “No time," Dag blocked his way, pushed him before us. "Go on."

  We were fumbling our way along the dark passageway to the sanctuary when the caves behind us exploded. The blast sent us all reeling. Rocks whistled past us. Gasping and coughing we crawled together.

  “Anyone hurt?” Dag asked.

  “Why?" I positively pleaded for enlightenment. “Why did they destroy the shuttle?"

  "No matter now," Dag said, "Let's go on."

  We crawled on into the sanctuary and blocked the entrance behind us. Although no-one now was likely to enter that way, it made us feel safer. And there we stayed.

  The water that we had left in the sanctuary was tainted. That did not immediately concern us. What was uppermost in our minds was the question why we should have been attacked; and attacked from the direction we had least expected — from space, by our own people?

  Malamud thought that he had the answer: in his travels on the Yilan he had heard many tales of the lawlessness that abounded on the edge of civilisation. He told of brigand ships, of unlicensed mining, of robbery, of murder... We were beyond the edge of civilisation. Yet to have destroyed the shuttle... If nothing else it was such a waste.

  I knew that we in Space had police and that, therefore, there had to be criminals, that the one didn't exist without the other. I knew that there were notorious penal planets, that there existed hospitals for the rehabilitation of offenders; but I had never dreamt that I would come into contact with any criminals, and certainly not with such destructive brigands as these.

  Yet Dag and Malamud seemed to accept the existence of such brigands with a stoicism verging on equanimity. I was in turn outraged and scandalised; and angry mostly at myself. For I too had heard those tales of lawlessness; but, because the tellers at those tales had appeared to take a vicarious delight in the misdeeds of which they spoke, I had attached little credence to them. Macabre inventions, I had dismissed them, exaggerations intended to shock.

  Yet those criminals truly did exist. I had just witnessed their handiwork with my own eyes. I wa
s indignant, embittered. In primitive planet dwellers, in the Nautili, I could understand such wanton destruction; and, understanding, possibly forgive it. They knew no better. But for a Spaceman to act in such a way... And why? To what end?

  So the day and the night passed wrapped in melancholy and miserable speculation. Each of us catalogued the work we had put into the shuttle, all the food that we had stored in it, the hopes that we had invested in it. And what now? What now?

  The night was cold. We had no bedding cloths. Above the dawn racket we listened for the sound of the siren — a sound which yesterday had filled us with joy, and which, this day, we listened for in dread.

  Dag proposed that he go up the tunnel, fetch us some fresh water, and see if the ship was still there. I wouldn't let him risk it, nor Malamud.

  "So we die of thirst?” Dag asked me.

  "No,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  "Why you?"

  So I told them that, being the most cautious, I was the natural candidate. Dag and Malamud were too reckless, were — at times — plain foolhardy. I, and of this I was certain, I would not knowingly put myself into any danger.

  Also entering my private reckoning was that, with the shuttle destroyed, I was now of little use to them. Both were better adapted, temperamentally and physically, for life on Balant than I. Added to that was that I felt that my civilisation, by throwing up those monsters who had destroyed the shuttle, that my beloved civilisation had betrayed me. If any risks were to be taken, I, therefore, was both the most eligible and the most expendable.

  I refused to participate in a game of chance to decide who should go; and, when I said that if necessary I would fight them both to stop them leaving the cavern, they reluctantly agreed to let me go. Malamud gave me his iron knife. I tucked it into my belt with the stone hatchet.

  Believing that our attackers might still be lurking nearby, I was trembling with apprehension as I crawled up the tunnel to the forest.

  Gingerly I poked my head out and looked about me. Being so low in the ground I could see only grass and trees. So, sliding out of the tunnel, I wriggled on my hands and knees through the grass to the nearest tree. There I slowly raised myself up. The forest around me was empty, a large gap in the trees where our cliff of caves had been.

  Crawling from tree to tree, I made my way cautiously down around the heap of rubble that had been the cliff. Through a gap in the trees I looked out over the desert. A blackened spot marked where the shuttle had been. The ship had gone.

  And now I knew what had happened to the Spaceman's ship. Now I knew that I too would spend the rest of my life on Balant, end my days as a skeleton in one of its caves. Without benefit of either valet or minder. The waste, I thought again, the waste...

  Birds twittered unconcernedly in the trees.

  Assured now that the ship had left, had gone back to space and had left us forlorn on Balant, I stood up and walked despondently down to the foot of the heap of rubble, looked up over it wondering if we could at least salvage the cooking pots.

  “Don't move,” said a voice behind me.

  I slowly turned to see a bald-headed man stepping around a tree. He was pointing a gun at me.

  “Boss was right," the man had a vapid smirk on his flabby face. “He said we might be dealing with some sly ones here."

  He shut his crooked gape, then began cursing me as he came towards me. He blamed me for his having spent a cold night on Balant. I realised that he was going to attack me. I put my hands to the knife and hatchet in my belt. The man saw the movement of my hands and raised his gun. I knew from his salacious leer that I was about to die.

  "Stay absolutely still whiskers," a croak of a voice said from behind me. I realised that it was I, because of my beard and hair, who was being addressed as Whiskers. "Now," the croak said, "throw whatever's in your hand down onto the ground."

  Again I slowly turned.

  This man was a good head taller than Dag, had thick black brows. He too had a gun.

  "Meet Zapper," the bald man cackled.

  "Onto the ground," Zapper said.

  I threw the hatchet and the knife onto the rubble. I had never before seen such a fearsome man. His black hair seemed to flare out from his head and his thin shoulders were hunched almost to his ears. He looked like a spindly insect poised to sting.

  Now that I was disarmed, the bald man heaped a mouthful of oaths upon me, a robust echo of the skeleton's description of Balant. Now I knew for certain that that Spaceman had been a brigand such as these two, that my pity for his plight had been wasted on him.

  "Your message said three,” Zapper croaked at me. "Which one are you?"

  They had homed in on our Mayday signal, on our call for assistance, and then they had attacked us. My outrage rose like bile and choked me.

  "Which one are you?” Zapper repeated his question. He displayed no impatience.

  "Pi Pandy," I heard myself meekly replying.

  “Where are the other two?"

  The bald man, reminded of their existence, glanced nervously about him. Pleased by his discomfort I didn't answer.

  Zapper's face was expressionless.

  "Can as easy zap you now as later Whiskers." His whisper was like a lizard's hiss.

  “They died of disease," the lie sprang unbidden to my lips. The bald man stepped away from me.

  "What was all that stuff in the shuttle?" Zapper continued unabashed with his interrogation.

  "Food. Dried food. I was going to fly it home."

  "You?" the bald man scoffed.

  "I am a technician," I told him.

  "Are you any good?" Zapper asked. I told him of my qualifications, haughtily informed him that the shuttle had powered off when we had crashed, that I alone had repaired it. (I did not mention our finding the minder and the valet.)

  "You've just saved your life,” Zapper said; and he spoke into his radio, telling 'Boss' that one of them was alive and that he was a technician.

  No sooner had Zapper returned the radio to his belt than the ship came roaring up over the mountain. Dag and Malamud could not but fail to hear it. I glanced to the hatchet and the glinting knife on the rubble. Dag and Malamud would see them there: would they know that I had been abducted?

  The ship hovered just above the treetops. From its belly a ramp was lowered to the ground.

  "Up!" Zapper motioned me with his gun. Trailing my feet — to leave tracks for Malamud to follow — I shuffled to the ramp and walked up it. Zapper and the bald man followed me.

  "Don't he stink!” the bald man said. We had had no time for baths lately.

  At the top of the ramp Zapper pointed to a door ahead of me. As I opened it I saw the ramp closing.

  The room I entered was long and of bare metal. Zapper closed the door behind me. The door had no handle on the inside. I stood there alone and looking around at the bare walls. As I walked away from the closed door I felt the ship rising up and up.

  Inset in the walls were some nozzles. I tottered to one wall as the ship switched to its own gravity; and I knew that we had left Balant.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Fallen among thieves and killers, forced to do their bidding, I am inducted into the crudities of life on the edge of civilisation. I know shame, the like of which I would not wish on any other. I am ashamed still.

  A smell that I could not place pervaded the entire length of the room in which I had been incarcerated. On closer examination I discovered that, apart from the nozzles, there were also inset into the walls what appeared, because of corresponding grooves on the floor, to be sliding partitions. Never having before been in the actual hold of an ore carrier, I surmised that the partitions' function was to stop the ore sliding about within the hold. But why then the nozzles?

  On the Yilan the ore had been loaded and unloaded by vacuum; and the holds had had only one small inspection door in the roof, not two doors as at either end of this room. Neither of which could be opened from within.

  No amount of
scrutiny could enlighten me to the purpose of the room; and, tired of pacing around its perimeter, I sat by the wall midway between the two doors.

  Sitting thus I fell to pondering what was to become of me. But, again, I had too little information on which to make even an uneducated guess; so I could only think back on what had happened; and, recalling the deliberate destruction of the shuttle and of our cave, anger rose within me. What kind of men were these who would so gratuitously destroy? Yet the question did not require an answer: I knew exactly what kind of men these were — criminals, who were prepared to kill me solely because of a night spent uncomfortably in the cold.

  And I knew now that it was men such as these who, with as little remorse as they had for the destruction of the shuttle, had come from the skies and had razed Balant’s cities. Compared to these criminals, the Nautili were innocent: the Nautili did have at least, according to their own mysterious lights, a reason.

  Hunger was rumbling like thunder around my stomach when all the partitions began sliding out of the walls. I started to my feet. But I was too late to do anything other than stare in horror as I realised that I was trapped within a narrow cubicle barely wider than my shoulders.

  I listened, could hear nothing. Then I heard the partitions — between me and the door through which I had entered — being, one by one, slid back into the walls. I tried to calculate how many partitions there were between the door and myself. I couldn’t remember. That worried me.

  The sound of opening partitions was now almost upon me. Telling myself that panic was of no use, I thought I detected another sound. I bent my head to listen.

  In that attitude I was surprised by the partitions before me springing apart. I looked up in terror at two men in spacesuits. They advanced silently upon me. Why spacesuits, I wondered; and I took a deep breath to test the atmosphere. While my mind was thus momentarily occupied one man grabbed my hair and jerked my head back. I screamed. The other man knocked my hands aside and pressed a soft mask over my nose and mouth. So deft were their movements that, despite my terror, one part of my mind realised that they were much practised in their brutal art.