“Talking files?” Hiero said, one eyebrow cocked. “I assume, of course, you’re not joking. We have begun to re-explore this radio thing, I know, but that’s just people and an instrument. You’re talking about a—well, a machine, a thing, holding all information and dispensing not just odd facts, but conclusions. Are you telling me such a thing is possible?”
The abbot sat back, satisfied. “Yes, son, not only possible, but well known at one time, in the years before The Death. The machines were called ‘computers.’ Some of the scientists doing research on the archives of the lost age are led to believe that certain computers existed that were larger than this building we’re in. Can you begin to imagine the possibilities?”
Hiero sat staring at the wall behind Abbot Demero, his mind racing. If such things existed, and he knew the abbot would not lightly mention a possibility as a fact, the world could be changed overnight. All the knowledge of the past might very well still be in existence somewhere. It was a frightening thought, for it meant that all the secrets of the age of The Death were presumably hidden and available as well.
“I see you’re beginning to reflect a little on the possibilities,” the old priest said. “The Science Committee has picked you to go south and east, far to the East, where we have reason to believe these things may still lie buried in certain of their lost caverns. Five other men will go elsewhere. It’s best none of you know the others’ plans.” He did not elaborate, nor need to. If any of the six should fall into the hands of the Unclean alive, the less they knew of their colleagues’ venturings the better.
“Now come over here, Hiero, and I’ll go over the maps with you. They have the latest information of these probable computer sites. You mustn’t expect to find a vast sort of library, you know. The information was apparently coded in different ways and put in the great machines in ways we only dimly comprehend. You’ll get a briefing from some scholars who’ve gone furthest into the field later …”
And so the tale had gone. Telling this all to the bear, clever as the animal was, was simply not possible, if only because bears, even mutant bears, didn’t read or write. But Hiero patiently and steadily made certain facts clear. In the blackest hours, before the first light of dawn, the man finally relaxed and willed himself to snatch a little sleep. Gorm now understood that his friend was on a long journey, but to Hiero’s gratification, he still wanted to come. Also, the bear had enough reasoning power to understand that there was knowledge he could not understand; in fact, he might have been the first of his species to grasp the idea of abstract knowledge. He knew that the man was a foe of the Leemutes and that they were seeking something in a far land to hurt these evil things. With this knowledge he was content, and now he also rested, occasionally letting out the faint, puffing snore of a sleeping bear. Standing over the two, still saddled, his legs locked tight at the knee joints, the great morse kept his unbroken watch, in a state perhaps between dreaming and waking, but with all his magnificent senses alert for the first sign of danger. Klootz was not tired, and his kind did not lie down to sleep in any case, although they sometimes rested with their legs tucked under them. But tonight he rocked and swayed, chewing his cud and missing nothing that passed in the night, a sentinel without compare.
At first light, Hiero felt a velvet touch on his forehead and looked up to see the great, damp muzzle an inch from his. Satisfied that his master was awake, Klootz carefully lifted his huge hooves from either side of the man’s body and moved out of the little grove into the gray dawn. In a moment the crunch of shredded bushes being devoured signaled that his breakfast had commenced.
Hiero rubbed his eyes. He was stiff, but not unduly so. It would have been better to have unpacked his bedroll and made a bed of spruce tips, but he had simply been too tired and too busy the night before. Besides, he was a seasoned woodsman, and a night spent on dry ground meant little to him. He looked over and saw Gorm was also awake and giving himself a wash with a long, pink tongue.
Any water about? he sent.
Listen (you can) hear it, came not from the bear but from the bull morse. A mental picture of a small stream a hundred yards off came to the man, and he rose and followed Klootz, who was ambling that way.
In twenty minutes, all had washed, eaten, and were ready for their new day’s travel. Hiero ruefully checked his pemeekan supply. The way Gorm ate, it would be gone in no time and they would have to stop and hunt. This, aside from carrying an unnecessary extra element of danger, would further delay them.
Gorm caught his thought, which was unguarded. Try and save the sweet food, he sent. I can find much of my own. Once again, the brains and unselfishness of the strange creature who had appeared in his life out of nowhere made Hiero blink.
Hiero next rubbed Klootz down with a double handful of thick moss. He felt guilty for having left the big animal saddled and packed all night, but the morse seemed none the worse for it, and a roll in the little brook, which sent water cascading up the banks, put him in fine fettle.
The sun was now fully up and the forest was alive with sound and movement. Birds were everywhere, and as they began to travel, the priest glimpsed startled deer and small rabbits, as well as a sounder of Grokon passing along a distant aisle of the pines, even the striped young hoglets considerably larger than Hiero himself.
Gorm, the night before, had attempted to explain the route he thought best to follow. The man could only grasp parts of it, but he gathered that a considerable marsh lay to the south and that it was necessary to cross it at its narrowest place. The road on which he and Klootz had journeyed for the last week was a place of great peril, watched by many unseen eyes. It was only luck that the two had come so far undisturbed, for no people had used that road in a long time, or if they had, they had not lived to go very far upon it. On no account must they return to it for any reason. The fact that so few human beings traveled alone through the wild might have dulled the watchfulness of the Unclean and allowed morse and man to come as far as they had. But now, surely the whole area would be on guard. And when the slain wizard was inevitably discovered, they could expect a hue and cry of massive proportions indeed to be set on foot by the enemy, so Gorm indicated. Once again, mind speech was to be halted, or at least understood by man and bear to be held to a minimum.
They had gone perhaps three hours from the night’s resting place when they received proof that they were not to journey undisturbed and unsought. The three were fording a shallow brook when Hiero felt the morse stiffen under him and at the same time saw the young bear come erect on the bank just ahead. A second later, his own, less alert senses were assaulted. He had never felt anything quite like it before. It was as if something strange clawed for his mind. A savage, questing force somehow probed at his inner being. He drew on all his own years of training and managed to make no response, keeping the pressure and the call, for there was an element of that too, away, repelling it by not acknowledging it. For what seemed like a long minute and was probably very little time, a mere instant, the searching presence seemed to hover over him in an almost physical way; then it moved on. He knew it had gone on elsewhere, but he was not absolutely sure he had managed to deceive or deflect it. He looked first at Gorm and in turn saw the bear’s weak little eyes fixed on him.
Something bad hunts, came the message. I was (only) a bear. It left me and did not (see) me.
I (think) it missed me, Hiero sent. And Klootz also, for it is not hunting four-footed animals, at least not yet.
There will be other things (like the) evil fur things of yesterday, came the bear’s thought. This forest is full of many creatures who (serve/hunt for) the evil power. Many of them go on four legs and have good noses.
The priest found less and less trouble understanding the bear. The whole exchange, plus a new decision, now to utilize the stream, was over in a split second.
All day long, they followed the brook, for it was little more, down its winding path. As much as possible, they stayed actually in the water,
so as to leave as few tracks as possible. The force or entity which had tried to locate them did not reveal itself further. They saw fewer animals, though, and none of the larger ones at all. Once a great, foot-long water beetle sought to bite Gorm with its savage pincers, but he avoided it easily, and Klootz, following close behind, brought a great, flattening hoof squarely down upon its armored back. Very few of the giant insects bred from The Death’s radiation were much of a menace, since they tended to be slow-moving and clumsy.
They made an early camp on an island. The stream which Hiero had not been able to locate on his maps, probably because it was too small, broadened a little, without getting more than two feet deep, and the little, willow-hung islet might have been designed for them.
While the bear went shambling off in search of food and Klootz, now unsaddled, wrenched succulent water plants from the stream bed, the man ate a frugal supper of biscuit and pemeekan while he tried to analyze what he had learned in the last few days. There was sunlight still, and Hiero had camped early because he needed light. He wanted very much to examine the various articles he had taken from the dead man, and this was the first opportunity.
The metal rod came first. A little less than an inch thick and about a foot long, of a very hard, bluish substance, not unlike patinated bronze, at first sight it looked unornamented. A closer look showed Hiero that four tiny knobs, set in a curved line, were sticking out of the sides. Hesitantly, he pushed one. At once an extension of the rod’s other end began. The thing was a cylinder, with many tubes beautifully fitting one inside the other. While Hiero watched, it extended itself until it was a slender wand about five feet long. He pushed the same button again and it began to retract into itself once more. He stopped it by pushing it a third time. Next, he tried another button, the central one of the three. Two flat, oval discs on the end of two delicate arms emerged from the supposedly featureless rod, and each stopped at a six-inch distance away from the rod, forming a prong set at right angles to the rod’s body. Hiero turned the rod over and examined it from every angle, but he could not fathom the purpose of the discs. He raised the rod’s lower end to eye level to examine the discs better, but they were featureless. He tried to look at the rod’s body again, while holding it upright, but he forgot the discs on their arms and - they banged into his forehead, just over his eyes. Annoyed with himself, he started to lower them when suddenly he stopped and gently put them back where they had been. They fit! Excited, he held the rod upright and extended it to its fullest length, keeping the two ovals on their extensions clamped to his forehead. He was now beginning to get an idea of what he held, and with great care, he slowly pressed the third tiny knob.
A tremendous voice slammed into his mind with overpowering force, almost physically knocking him over. Where have you been? Why have you not communicated? Some strange creatures or groups of them are moving through our area almost undetected. The normals may be assaulting us with something new. There was a sudden pause, and the dazed Hiero could nearly feel the almost tangible suspicion in the other mind. Who is this? came the mind voice. Do you hear, I—click. The priest had managed to shut it off.
He leaned back against a tree trunk, both frightened and angry with himself. The strange device was apparently both a communicator and an amplifier of great strength, obviously increasing the distance over which mental speech could be sent at least tenfold. He had never heard of such a thing, and he doubted any Abbey scientist had, either. He must get this object back to the Abbey research centers if he did nothing else. The thought that the Unclean even possessed a thing like this was nerve-racking. No wonder the abbot has the jumps, he thought. He looked at the rod again and then carefully made it shut and the two head pieces go back into the handle, noting as he did so that the machining was beautifully turned and that the metal was one he had never before seen. He was about to wrap it carefully and put it away when he remembered the fourth button. This was not next to the others but nearer the butt end and to one side. He considered it for a moment and then wedged the rod, extension end up, between two heavy rocks. Next he broke off a slender willow sapling about eight feet long and carefully positioned himself behind its parent willow tree, while reaching for the enigmatic button with his new pole. The thought that the sinister makers of this thing might have built in a self-destruct device was late in coming, he reflected, but might still save his life. He checked and saw that the morse bull was several hundred feet upstream and then, with only his hand exposed, probed for the button. Face pressed to the tree, he heard one swift metallic sound, as if a great spring had been released, and then silence. He waited an instant and then looked cautiously around the tree. He got up at once and tossed the stick aside. The amazing rod’s last trick was both simple and entirely unexpected. It had fully extended itself again, this time in a single instantaneous motion. But now, projecting from the end was not the blunt cap of before, but a two-edged, razor-sharp lance head. It was over half an inch wide and almost as long as the original, folded-up rod itself. Hiero bent the extended rod sideways, but the tough metal gave very little. He hefted the thing at shoulder height. It was a perfectly balanced javelin. Lowering it, he eyed the edges of the blade and confirmed his first impression that they were smeared with some sticky substance. Undoubtedly not a face cream, he reflected. He shut his new prize carefully up again and put it away.
Next came the knife. It was a short, one-edged thing in a leather sheath and had been used recently, being sticky with dried blood. There appeared to be nothing odd about it, and he cleaned it and put it away too, after ascertaining it bore no marks of any kind.
He now examined the rounded object which had looked to him earlier like a small compass. Many of his colleagues, indeed most people, still used compasses, but Hiero did not. He had a built-in sense of direction and while in school had won many bets by being blindfolded and always picking out the correct compass points.
It was obvious at once that if this was a compass, it was no compass he had ever seen before. There were no obvious compass bearings, no directions and their subdivisions. Instead, there was a thing like a circular wheel, or round track, under the glass plate on top. Set at intervals next to this track were symbols of some kind with which he was totally unfamiliar, for they were neither numbers nor letters he had ever seen before. On the circular track was a round, fiery bead of light, which swayed gently as he rocked the case in his hand, just like the air bubble in a carpenter’s level. Hiero examined the symbols again. There were four larger ones set where the main directions on a proper compass should be. He aligned the four symbols one by one to a map of his own and managed to pick the one near the loop end of the object as north. But the fiery bead was not fixing itself on north or any of the four points when so used! If the damned thing isn’t a compass, what is it? he wondered to himself. Reluctantly, he replaced it in its pouch and stowed it away again, determined to re-examine it again soon.
Last of all came the rolls of yellowish, parchmentlike material. He tried to rip a page corner experimentally and found that it tore, but with great difficulty. It was certainly not a paper, nor was it parchment either, but a synthetic material the like of which he had never before glimpsed.
Most of the papers bore writing, closely spaced and not printed, in a dark, reddish ink, which looked unpleasantly like dried blood, especially in the fast-waning light. Like the lettering or whatever on the compass thing, the symbols were totally unintelligible to Hiero. But one piece was mostly taken up by a large map, and this he studied with great care. It somewhat resembled his own map in general outline. The Inland Sea was there and, he thought, several familiar roads to the north. The main east-west Otwah road was quite clear. Most of the marks were obscure, though, especially many in the South. Rivers and swamps seemed to have been carefully drawn in signs he used himself, and he felt that the map might prove a useful guide. Many marks were thought-provoking. He was reasonably sure he had found some of the ruined cities of the pre-Death eras, for the f
ew such sites marked on his own map were in the same places. But the alien map had many more of them, as well as much else that was strange.
Eventually, that too was put away and he prepared a bed, digging hollows for hip and shoulder and spreading his bedroll. Without being ordered, Klootz was feeding close to the island, and his master knew he had nothing to worry about, at least that was physical, in the way of nocturnal danger. The bear had not returned, but Hiero had earlier agreed on a travel plan with him, and he was confident Gorm would be back when wanted. He curled up with a sigh and dropped off while the last light of day still. lingered in the west.
He was awakened by rain, a light spatter on his upturned face. It was very dark and the damp clouds had rolled out of the east, bringing moisture from the distant seas. He was about to pull his hood over his face and go back to sleep when a wet reek of fur strongly assaulted his nose. Gorm was standing next to him, and the bear’s whole manner demanded attention.
Something comes in the night (perhaps) many things, but one for certain (emphatic)! We must go the way we planned/discussed. Listen!
Sitting up, the man did indeed listen intently. He was conscious of Klootz standing quietly nearby, his great ears also belled into the rainy night. For a moment, the falling raindrops and the muted gurgle of the stream were all that was audible. Then, far away in the west, at the very limit of Hiero’s hearing, there came a sound.
It was a high, keening shriek, rising to almost the level of inaudibility and dying away then into silence. Twice it sounded, and then only the listening night could be heard. But no one, neither man nor beast, needed to hear it again. There was a menace implicit in that distant cry which raised the hackles on one’s back. It was a hunter and it was on a track. In the situation they were in, it was no time to debate on whose track was whatever had screamed. The long-expected pursuit was upon them, and it was time to go.
Hiero Desteen (Omnibus) Page 5