The Best of Leigh Brackett

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The Best of Leigh Brackett Page 35

by Leigh Brackett


  They knew Jen, or most of them did. She called them gladly by name, and demanded, “Hugh. Where is Hugh?”

  One of them nodded toward the farther wall. “Up there in the caves. He’s all right. Who is this man, Jen?”

  She turned to study Trevor.

  “I don’t know. They were hunting him, too. He came to help me. I couldn’t have escaped without him. He killed the hawks. But…” She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “He says he came from beyond the mountains. He knows of Earth and speaks our tongue. And when he killed the hawks he smashed the skull of one and took the sun-stone.”

  All six started at that. And the tallest of them, a young man with a face as bleak and craggy as the rocks around them, came toward Trevor.

  “Why did you take the sun-stone?” he asked. His voice held an ugly edge.

  Trevor stared at him. “Why the devil do you suppose? Because it’s valuable.”

  The man held out his hand. “Give it to me.”

  “The hell I will!” cried Trevor furiously. He backed away, just a little, getting set.

  The young man came on, and his face was dark and dangerous.

  “Saul, wait!” cried Jen.

  Saul didn’t wait. He kept right on coming. Trevor let him get close before he swung, and he put every ounce of his strength behind the blow.

  The smashing fist took Saul squarely in the belly and sent him backward, doubled up. Trevor stood with hunched shoulders, breathing hard, watching the others with feral eyes.

  “What are you?” he snarled. “A bunch of thieves? All right, come on! I got that stone the hard way and I’m going to keep it!”

  Big words. A big anger. And a big fear behind them. The men were around him in a ring now. There was no chance of breaking away. Even if he did he was so winded they could pull him down in minutes. The stone weighed heavy in his pocket, heavy as half a lifetime of sweat and hunger and hard work, on the rockpiles of Mercury.

  Saul straightened up. His face was still gray, but he bent again and picked up a sharp-pointed implement of rock that he had dropped. Then he moved forward. And the others closed in, at the same time, quite silently.

  There was a bitter taste in Trevor’s mouth as he waited for them. To get his hands on a sun-stone at last, and then to lose it and probably his life too, to this crowd of savages! It was more than anybody ought to be asked to bear.

  “Saul, wait!” cried Jen again, pushing in front of him. “He saved my life! You can’t just…”

  “He’s a Korin. A spy.”

  “He can’t be! There’s no stone in his forehead. Not even a scar.”

  Saul’s voice was flat and relentless. “He took a sun-stone. Only a Korin would touch one of the cursed things.”

  “But he says he’s from outside the valley! From Earth, Saul. From Earth! Things would be different there.”

  Jen’s insistence on that point had at least halted the men temporarily. And Trevor, looking at Saul’s face, had suddenly begun to understand something.

  “You think the sun-stones are evil,” he said.

  Saul gave him a somber glance. “They are. And the one you have is going to be destroyed. Now.”

  Trevor swallowed the bitter anguish that choked him, and did some fast thinking. If the sun-stones had a superstitious significance in this benighted pocket of Mercury—and he could imagine why they might, with those damned unnatural hawks flying around with the equally unnatural Korins—that put a different light on their attitude.

  He knew just by looking at their faces that it was “give them the sun-stone or die.” Dying at the hands of a bunch of wild fanatics didn’t make sense. Better let them have the stone and gamble on getting it back again later. Or on getting another one. They seemed plentiful enough in the valley!

  Sure, let’s be sensible about it. Let’s hand over a lifetime of hoping to a savage with horny palms, and not worry about it. Let’s…Oh, hell.

  “Here,” he said. “All right. Take it.”

  It hurt. It hurt like giving up his own heart.

  Saul took it without thanks. He turned and laid it on a flat surface of rock, and began to pound the glinting crystal with the heavy stone he had meant to use on Trevor’s head. There was a look on his lined, young, craggy face as though he was killing a living thing—a thing that he feared and hated.

  Trevor shivered. He knew that sun-stones were impervious to anything but atomic bombardment. But it made him a little sick, none the less, to see that priceless object being battered by a crude stone club.

  “It won’t break,” he said. “You might as well stop.”

  Saul flung down his weapon so close to Trevor’s bare feet that he leaped back. Then he picked up the sun-stone and hurled it as far as he could across the ravine. Trevor heard it clicking faintly as it fell, in among the rocks and rubble at the foot of the opposite cliff. He strained to mark the spot.

  “You idiot!” he said to Saul. “You’ve thrown away a fortune. The fortune I’ve spent my life trying to find. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have any idea at all what those things are worth?”

  Saul ignored him, speaking bleakly to the others. “No man with a sun-stone is to be trusted. I say kill him.”

  Jen said stubbornly, “No, Saul. I owe him my life.”

  “But he could be a slave, a traitor, working for the Korins.”

  “Look at his clothes,” said Jen. “Look at his skin. This morning it was white, now it’s red. Did you ever see a slave that color? Or a Korin, either. Besides, did you ever see him in the valley before? There aren’t as many of us as that.”

  “We can’t take any chances,” Saul said. “Not us.”

  “You can always kill him later. But if he is from beyond the mountains, perhaps even from Earth—” She said the word hesitantly, as though she did not quite believe there was such a place. “He might know some of the things we’ve been made to forget. He might help us. Anyway, the others have a right to their say before you kill him.”

  Saul shook his head. “I don’t like it. But—” He hesitated, scowling thoughtfully. “All right. We’ll settle it up in the cave. Let’s move.” He said to Trevor, “You go in the middle of us. And if you try to signal anyone…”

  “Who the devil would I signal to?” retorted Trevor angrily. “Listen, I’m sorry I ever got into your bloody valley.”

  But he was not sorry. Not quite.

  His senses were on the alert to mark every twist and turn of the way they went, the way that would bring him back to the sun-stone. The ravine narrowed and widened and twisted, but there was only one negotiable path, and that was beside the stream bed. This went on for some distance, and then the ravine split on a tremendous cliff of bare rock that tilted up and back as though arrested in the act of falling over. The stream flowed from the left-hand fork. Saul took the other one.

  They kept close watch on Trevor as he slipped and clambered and sprawled along with them. The detritus of the primeval cataclysm that had shaped this crack in the mountains lay where it had fallen, growing rougher and more dangerous with every eroding storm and cracking frost.

  Above him, on both sides, the mountain tops went up and still up, beyond the shallow atmosphere. Their half-seen summits leaned and quivered like things glimpsed from under water, lit like torches by the naked blaze of the sun. There were ledges, lower down. Trevor saw men crouched upon them, among heaps of piled stones. They shouted, and Saul answered them. In this narrow throat no man could get through alive if they chose to stop him.

  After a while they left the floor of the ravine and climbed a path, partly natural and partly so roughly hewn that it seemed natural. It angled steeply up the cliff-face, and at its end was a narrow hole. Saul led the way through it. In single file the others followed, and Trevor heard Jen’s voice echoing in some great hollow space beyond, calling Hugh.

  There was a cave inside, a very large cave with dim nooks and crannies around its edges. Shafts of sunlight pierced it here and ther
e from cracks in the cliff-face high above, and far at the back of it, where the floor tipped sharply down, a flame burned. Trevor had seen flames like that before on Mercury, where volcanic gases blowing up through a fissure had ignited from some chance spark. It was impressive, a small bluish column twisting upward into rock-curtained distance and roaring evilly. He could feel the air rush past him as the burning pillar sucked it in.

  There were people in the cave. Less than a hundred, Trevor thought, not counting a handful of children and striplings. Less than a third of those were women. They all bore the same unmistakable stamp. Hard as life must be for them in the cave, it had been harder before.

  He felt his legs buckling under him with sheer weariness. He stood groggily with his back against the rough cave wall.

  A stocky young man with knotted shoulder-muscles and sun-bleached hair was holding Jen in his arms. That would be Hugh. He, and the others, were shouting excitedly, asking and answering questions.

  Then, one by one, they caught sight of Trevor. And gradually a silence grew and spread.

  “All right,” said Saul harshly, looking at Trevor. “Let’s get this settled.”

  “You settle it,” said Trevor. “I’m tired.” He glared at Saul and the unfriendly staring crowd, and they seemed to rock in his vision. “I’m an Earthman. I didn’t want to come into your damned valley, and I’ve been here a night and a day and haven’t slept. I’m going to sleep.”

  Saul started to speak again but Jen’s man, Hugh, came up and stood in front of him.

  “He saved Jen’s life,” Hugh said. “Let him sleep.”

  He led Trevor away to a place at the side where there were heaps of dried vines and mountain creepers, prickly and full of dust but softer than the cave floor. Trevor managed a few vague words of thanks and was asleep before they were out of his mouth.

  Hours, weeks, or perhaps it was only minutes later, a rough persistent shaking brought him to again. Faces bent over him. He saw them through a haze, and the questions they asked penetrated to him slowly, and without much meaning.

  “Why did you want the sun-stone?”

  “Why wouldn’t I want it? I could take it back to Earth and sell it for a fortune.”

  “What do they do with sun-stones on Earth?”

  “Build gadgets, super-electronic, to study things. Wave-lengths too short for anything else to pick up. Thought-waves, even. What do you care?”

  “Do they wear sun-stones in their foreheads, on Earth?”

  “No…” His voice trailed off, and the voices, or the dream of voices, left him.

  It was still daylight when he woke, this time normally. He sat up, feeling stiff and sore but otherwise rested. Jen came to him, smiling, and thrust a chunk of what he recognized as some species of rock-lizard into his hands. He gnawed at it wolfishly while she talked, having discovered that this was not the same day, but the next one, and quite late.

  “They have decided,” she said, “to let you live.”

  “I imagine you had a lot to do with that. Thanks.”

  She shrugged her bare shoulders, with the raw wounds on them where the hawk-lizards had clawed her. She had that exhausted, let-down look that comes after tremendous stress, and her eyes, even while she spoke to Trevor, followed Hugh as he worked at some task around the cave.

  “I couldn’t have done anything if they hadn’t believed your story,” she told him. “They questioned you when you were too far gone to lie.” He had a very dim memory of that. “They didn’t understand your answers but they knew they were true ones. Also they examined your clothes. No cloth like that is woven in the valley. And the things that hold them together—” he knew she meant the zippers “—are unknown to us. So you must have come from beyond the mountains. They want to know exactly how, and if you could get back the same way.”

  “No,” said Trevor, and explained. “Am I free to move around, then—go where I want to?”

  She studied him a moment before she spoke. “You’re a stranger. You don’t belong with us. You could betray us to the Korins just as easily as not.”

  “Why would I do that? They hunted me, too.”

  “For sun-stones, perhaps. You’re a stranger. They would take you alive. Anyway, be careful. Be very careful what you do.” From outside came a cry. “Hawks! Take cover, hawks!”

  3

  Instantly everyone in the cave fell silent. They watched the places in the cave wall where the sunlight came in, the little cracks in the cliff-face. Trevor thought of the hawk-creatures, and how they would be wheeling and slipping along the ravine, searching.

  Outside, the rough rock looked all alike. He thought that in that immensity of erosions and crevices they would have a hard time finding the few tiny chinks that led into the cave. But he watched, too, tense with a feeling of danger.

  No sound at all came now from the ravine. In that utter stillness, the frightened whimper of a child came with the sudden loudness of a scream. It was instantly hushed. The shafts of sunlight crept slowly up the walls. Jen seemed not to breathe. Her eyes shone, like an animal’s.

  A black shadow flickered across one of the sunlight bars—flickered, and then was gone. Trevor’s heart turned over. He waited for it to come back, to occlude that shaft of light, to slip in along it and become a wide-winged demon with a sun-stone in its brow. For a whole eternity he waited, but it didn’t come back, and then a man crept in through the entry hole and said, “They’re gone.”

  Jen put her head down on her knees. She had begun to tremble all over, very quietly, but with spasmodic violence. Before Trevor could reach her, Hugh had her in his arms, talking to her, soothing her. She began to sob then, and Hugh glanced at Trevor across her shoulders.

  “She’s had a little too much.”

  “Yes.” Trevor looked at the shafts of sunlight. “Do the hawks come very often?”

  “They send them every once in a while hoping to catch us off guard. If they could find the cave they could hunt us out of it, drive us back into the valley. So far they haven’t found it.”

  Jen was quiet now. Hugh stroked her with big awkward hands. “She told you, I guess. About yourself, I mean. You’ve got to be careful.”

  “Yes,” said Trevor. “She told me.” He leaned forward. “Listen, I still don’t know how you people got here or what it’s all about. After we got away from the Korins, Jen said something about a landing, three hundred years ago. Three hundred Earth years?”

  “About that. Some of us have remembered enough to keep track.”

  “The first Earth colonies were being started on Mercury about then, in two or three of the bigger valleys. Mining colonies. Was this one of them?”

  Hugh shook his head. “No. The story is that there was a big ship loaded with people from Earth. That’s true, of course, because the ship is still here, what’s left of it. And so are we. Some of the people on the ship were settlers and some were convicts.”

  He pronounced the word with the same hatred and scorn that always accompanied the name “Korin.” Trevor said eagerly, “They used to do that in the early days. Use convict labor in the mines. It made so much trouble they had to stop it. Were the Korins…?”

  “They were the convicts. The big ship crashed in the valley but most of the people weren’t killed. After the crash the convicts killed the men who were in charge of the ship, and made the settlers obey them. That’s how it all started. And that’s why we’re proud we’re slaves—because we’re descended from the settlers.”

  Trevor could see the picture quite clearly now, the more so because it had happened before in one way or another. The emigrant ship bound for one of the colonies, driven off its course by the tremendous magnetic disturbances that still made Mercury a spaceman’s nightmare.

  They couldn’t even have called for help or given their position. The terrible nearness of the Sun made any form of radio communication impossible. And then the convicts had broken free and killed the officers, finding themselves unexpectedly in comma
nd of a sort of paradise, with the settlers to serve them.

  A fairly safe paradise, too. Mercury has an infinite number of these Twilight valleys, all looking more or less alike from space, half hidden under their shallow blankets of air, and only the few that are both accessible and unmistakable because of their size have permanent colonies. Straight up and down, by spaceship, is the only way in or out of most of them, and unless a ship should land directly on them by sheer chance, the erstwhile prisoners would be safe from discovery.

  “But the sun-stones?” asked Trevor, touching his forehead. “What about the sun-stones and the hawks? They didn’t have the use of them when they landed.”

  “No, they came later.” Hugh looked around uneasily. “Look, Trevor, it’s a thing we don’t talk about much. You can see why, when you think what it’s done to us. And it’s a thing you shouldn’t talk about at all.”

  “But how did they get them in their heads? And why? Especially, why do they waste them on the hawks?”

  Jen glanced at him somberly from the circle of Hugh’s arm. “We don’t know, exactly. But the hawks are the eyes and ears of the Korins. And from the time they used the first sun-stone we’ve had no hope of getting free from them.”

  The thing that had been buried in Trevor’s subconscious since last night’s questioning came suddenly to the surface.

  “Thought-waves, that’s it! Sure!” He leaned forward excitedly, and Jen told him frantically to lower his voice. “I’ll be damned. They’ve been experimenting with sun-stones for years on Earth—ever since they were discovered, but the scientists never thought of…”

  “Do they have the stones on Earth, too?” asked Jen, with loathing.

  “No, no, only the ones that are brought from Mercury. Something about Mercury being so close to the Sun, overdose of solar radiation and the extremes of heat, cold, and pressure while the planet was being made, that formed that particular kind of crystal here. I guess that’s why they’re called sun-stones.”

  He shook his head. “So that’s how they work it—direct mental communication between the Korins and the hawks, by means of the stones. Simple, too. Set them right in the skull, almost in contact with the brain, and you don’t need all the complicated machines and senders and receivers they’ve been monkeying with in the labs for so long.” He shivered. “I’ll admit I don’t like the idea, though. There’s something repulsive about it.”

 

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