Masters of Everon

by Gordon R. Dickson

  The work of the older maolots was done. They turned away on a line of march that would intersect in a few hours with the route along which Mikey was carrying Jef.

  Emotionally drained beyond anything in his life by the experience of riding in the mind of the mature maolot, physically worn out by riding Mikey and hollow with hunger, Jef slipped into a state that was part-faint, part-doze, lying along Mikey's back. He kept waking momentarily with the fear that he was slipping off. Finally Mikey got through to him.

  I'll keep your arms and legs tight, Mikey told him. You won't fall.

  Relieved, he let his mind relax, and actual sleep overtook him.

  He remembered how he had read about soldiers falling asleep on their feet while marching, but continuing to march. He had found it hard to believe, then. But now he accepted the fact that he could sleep while riding.

  When he woke at last, it was to find Mikey descending a steep, sparsely wooded slope, apparently one wall of a small rocky hollow in what seemed to be mountainous terrain. The air was cold and thin and it was just about daybreak; bright enough to see, but with the sun not yet showing over the surrounding heights of rock. Below them a tiny stream ran through a hollow. They were approaching that stream and, in a moment, they came through a barrier of scraggly native trees and stepped into a small open space beside the stream.

  A camp was waiting, sleeping bags laid out and a fire crackling. At the fire sat Jarji and Martin, Jarji facing Jef as he and Mikey arrived, and Martin with his back to them.

  Jarji jumped to her feet, and Martin rose, turning about a fraction of a second later, as Mikey came to a halt and Jef slid off the maolot's back, trying to stand upright. His arms and legs were stiff and he had to struggle to stay on his feet.

  "Jef—" began Jarji. She stopped and sat down again deliberately by the fire. "So there you are, Robini."

  "There he is indeed, Jarji," said Martin, now facing Jef also. "Welcome, Mr. Robini. We've been most patiently waiting you."

  Something popped in Jef.

  "Damn you both to hell!" he exploded. "What's the matter with me? Am I the only one on Everon no one'll call by his first name?"

  His knees gave way and he sat down, more or less cross-legged, on the ground where he had been standing. A sudden, warm, good feeling was flooding all through him. He was aware of the other two coming hastily toward him, helping him up, helping him over to a seat by the fire; but he paid no attention to what they were saying, his mind was so full of a new discovery.

  So this was what it felt like, he was thinking to himself. He had actually done it. After being formally addressed and verbally kicked about by these two from his first meetings with them. This time his resentment had not merely once again been buried in the non-feeling of a dreary indifference. Nor had it turned in him, curdling into the acid of that sad loneliness that had been his substitute for proper outrage all these years. He had actually gone off like a bomb. Without thinking.

  Of course, he had not been really angry. Just irritated. But he had reacted all the same—snapped back instinctively, just as anyone might do. Now they were fussing over him in reaction—if two such unlikely characters as Jarji and Martin could be imagined fussing—trying to make him feel better. He could not quite make out what they were saying because he was so woozy with exhaustion, but their words were unimportant. It was their intent that mattered and that was now coming through clearly.

  Actually, he felt fine. Weak, of course—but in all other ways he felt wonderful. The truth was, the way he was feeling was almost too good—there was a terrible sensation of power in knowing he was able to blow up at people like that. Now that he knew he might take anybody's head off for no reason at all, he would have to watch himself, be careful not to let the tendency get out of hand. He would not want to get into the habit of riding roughshod over others at the slightest excuse...

  Chapter Sixteen

  he woke. He had never been so exhausted. Coming fully alert at last, Jef could not remember clearly past the moment in which he had been so ridiculously pleased with himself, on discovering he could lose his temper like anyone else. Beyond that there had been nothing but a dark valley of sodden sleep, interrupted only briefly by a few blurred periods in which he had woken for short, necessary moments and been helped out of his sleeping bag, then back into it again. But these had been only minutes at a stretch.

  Meanwhile, time had moved—at least one day and one night had shuttered by—and around him the world had patiently waited. Martin and Jarji had tended the camp and occasionally got him to swallow some soup or hot drink made from one of the Everon herbs. Mikey had lain by the fire as if on guard, paws crossed, neck erect and blind head turned toward Jef. He had been in that position whenever Jef had been awake enough to notice. In effect, around Jef the universe in general had seemed to pause, waiting for him to wake and rejoin it.

  He had never been so exhausted. It was as if his bones had been dissolved and a vast emptiness had taken the place of his normal interior organs. He had been as weak as a baby sparrow. And yet... now that this was all behind him, he felt a great and peaceful sense of achievement. He was warm with it, almost as if he had gorged himself on a great meal of learning and was now busy digesting it, finding out what it actually was he had taken in.

  He was aware of knowing more than his conscious mind could handle. He had been exposed to a great deal more of information than he could have identified or expressed to anyone. He could feel it there, bulging against his awareness; but so far he had only the most limited understanding of what it could mean.

  Awake, now, he lay watching Mikey and the other two moving about the camp. The light-headedness from his recent weakness was undoubtedly to blame, he told himself, but he found he was deeply enjoying the simple activity of lying and watching the others. It was as if their ordinary movements about the camp were parts in some intricate ballet, commissioned solely for his pleasure.

  Martin glanced over and saw him watching.

  "Well now, Mr. Robini—Jef," he said, coming over and sitting down cross-legged, facing Jef in the sleeping bag, "here you are, alive again."

  Jef gazed at him for a long moment.

  "Yes," Jef said. His voice emerged from his throat a little rusty and effortful, but he found he could talk comfortably enough. "And speaking of being here, what are you and Jarji doing in this place?"

  Jarji, hearing their voices, also came over. She stood looking down at them for a second; then, almost reluctantly, sat down herself.

  "Back to normal, are you?" she said to Jef. "Yes. Thanks," he told her. She looked a little disconcerted.

  "Nobody did anything special for you." But her tone was a good deal softer than her words might have indicated.

  "I'm not surprised Mikey was able to find you," Jef said to both of them. "But how did you get here? And what are you doing together?"

  "Well, now!" said Martin. "Is there some law against our being in the same place at the same time?"

  "Never mind," said Jarji to Jef. "We're together because I flew out of Beau's camp with him."

  "True enough. No plan of mine, either," said Martin. "I reached my flyer and found her already there, waiting for me."

  "But I thought you were in the bunkhouse—" Jef stared at her.

  Jarji snorted.

  "Did you think I was just going to sit there with them all around me, so that I couldn't do a thing?" she said. "I told them I wanted to go to sleep early. Then, when they weren't looking, I left a blanket rolled up under my covers and slipped out. But Beau's got some woodswise people among that group of his. One of them heard me going and came after me. I had to take the first chance to get clear—which was Martin's craft."

  "That doesn't explain why you're both here, though," said Jef.

  "Waiting for you, of course," said Jarji.

  "Waiting for me?" Jef stared at her. "But how could you know Mikey would bring me here..." He ran down into silence.

  "Ah, you've touched it
, haven't you?" Martin said. "Your Mikey knows we're friends of yours—on a world where you've few of them, as I don't need to point out. We're in the only pass to the high country in either direction for a few hundred kilometers. You had to come this way; and when the maolot found us waiting here, he brought you to us."

  "How'd you know I'd be keeping on toward the high country?"

  "It's your stubborn nature, now," said Martin. "How could we doubt that having started for that place called the Valley of Thrones, on that map you told the Constable and myself about, you'd keep on in spite of all?"

  Something about this answer woke a feeling of suspicion in Jef's mind, though he could not exactly identify what about it should so affect him. He tried to remember when he had told Martin and the Constable about the Valley of Thrones. Yes, it had been on the morning he had left for the upcountry. His hope then had been that the Constable might have a more correct map he could use to find the Valley; but Armage had evidently never heard of the place, and he had dismissed it as being any one of a thousand of such areas in the Everon wilds, which might have one name or several, depending on the number of humans who had passed by them.

  If it was not the reference to the Valley of Thrones, then what had bothered him in what Martin had just said? Jef could not think what it might be. But something had.

  "Why would Mikey bring me to you, even if he knew you were here?" He looked over at Mikey and felt a wave of reassurance, broadcast by the maolot—which was heartwarming, but hardly informative.

  "You came in pretty chewed up," Jarji said almost sharply. "He may have thought you needed some of your own kind to keep you alive."

  Jef switched his attention to her.

  "Why are you still here?" he asked bluntly. "I'm all right now."

  "With Beau and his people blocking my way back down-country, where can I go but to the mountains?"

  Looking at her, he suddenly had a strong feeling that there was at least a chance she had stayed because she was concerned about him; but of course there would be no hope of getting her to admit anything like that.

  The memory of the nighttime drive and the counterattack of the maolots passed over his mind like the smoke of the campfire.

  "On the way here I saw the wisent ranchers clearing forest and trying to move a herd into it," he told them. A gust of his rediscovered ability to anger shook him suddenly. "This whole planet's at war! The wisent ranchers on one side, Beau and the woods-people on the other!"

  "Don't go thinking Beau and his bunch speak for all of us woods folk," said Jarji energetically. "And if it comes to that, even what Beau is, he was driven to."

  "Do you know he's trying to import an illegal shipload of eland embryos?" Jef looked over at Martin. "You know about that. Tell her."

  "Tell me nothing!" flared Jarji. "I'm no part of what Beau does. I just said he was driven to it in the first place. And he was! But what he's doing now's no part of me, or my family, or anybody else in the forest that I know. The trouble with you, Jef, is you've never been on a new world, never gone out to a new world, never probably even thought what it's like to go out to a new world. There's no going back to Earth from someplace like our Everon. Even if you could go back, you wouldn't. It's live or die with what you have—and that makes things different. It also makes it our business, not yours."

  "No," said Jef, almost to his own surprise. "I'm hooked to Everon, now. Whether it's something more than my connection with Mikey I don't know. But I'll tell you this—I may be closer to what Everon really is than you or anyone else, even if I did just get off the ship a few days ago. Maybe I haven't lived here; but I'm willing to bet neither of you've ever seen what I saw, between the time I left Beau's camp and when I ended up here!"

  On a surge of unexpected emotion he pulled himself out of the sleeping bag and stood up in his rumpled pants and shirt to tell them about the wisent drive and his long ride on Mikey.

  "... But it's more than that, between me and Everon," he wound up. "On my first day here I stood on the Constable's porch and watched a shower that turned into a hailstorm; and, even then, I was feeling something. Maybe it was those eight years of growing up with Mikey, as I say. I don't know. But this world and I can talk to each other, in a way I can't even explain to you."

  He paused, almost as surprised by his own words as they must be to hear them. Suddenly self-conscious, he wound up the lecture hurriedly.

  "So," he said, "it's my business, too, what the wisent ranchers and the woodspeople and the officials down in Everon City are doing. I couldn't be outside it and leave it alone, if I wanted to."

  He stopped, aware of having more or less run down rather than wound up with a strong, crashing statement. He half expected to find Jarji on top of him the minute he closed his mouth, ready and eager to cram his words back down his throat; but she did not, only stood frowning at him.

  "That's a fine sensitivity you have there. Very fine," said Martin after a very short moment of silence. "Now maybe you'll tell us how it briefed you on all the economic and political struggles involved in this same matter with the woodspeople, the wisent ranchers and all those other fine gentlemen and ladies in government down in Everon City. Indeed, maybe this insight of yours is just the thing to cut through all that tangle of enmity and competition that's been keeping us baffled here, and produce an immediate solution, acceptable and fair to all!"

  Jef opened his mouth, then closed it again. But Jarji turned on Martin.

  "Why don't you tell him, then," she demanded, "instead of standing back and crowing over him because he doesn't know?"

  "It's not something he could learn in a day—let alone in a few minutes," answered Martin.

  "How do you know?" She swung back to face Jef. "I just told you it's not everybody! Most of the woodspeople can get along with everyone else. So can most of the wisent ranchers; even if they mostly haven't taken the trouble to think beyond their own side of things. But it's Beau and his group, it's the sell-out ranchers, the politicians, and others like that who keep all this trouble going, and make more when this starts to die down. Sure, you'd have to live here ten years to learn all the ins and outs and who's with who, and for what, just like he says—"

  She jerked a thumb at Martin.

  "—But all you really need to know is that it's not the real planters, not the ones who look to see forty generations of their descendants here. It's the sell outs that go messing it all up for everyone else."

  "Sell outs?" Jef said. The word was awkward on his tongue.

  "It means what it says. You don't know anything, do you?" Jarji told him. "You think nobody ever went out to plant a new world with anything but stars in their eyes and a noble pioneering spirit, don't you? Of course you do. That's what they all think, back on Earth; because that's what all the ads and the articles say. Well, let me tell you—no one ever pulled their life up by the roots and went out to make it all over again in a howling wilderness just out of some noble feeling. My folks came out here because they couldn't breathe in Earth air, because they couldn't— even with both of them working—have anything more than a third-rate living place. They came out here because they saw there was no place decent for me and my brothers and sisters to grow up in, back on Earth. They came out and went through all the hell it took to stay alive and build something here, just so they could live for some purpose—and we, their kids, could live for some purpose, too."

  She stopped.

  "I see," said Jef.

  "No, you don't. You just think you do. Now, listen," said Jarji. "That's us—what we are, we Hillegases and the rest of the real planters. But besides us there's other people who came out, with other things they wanted. Some of them, like the Constable and —well, maybe even Beau; though, as I say, he had reason for what he did, to start with—came out here wanting to run things. They didn't have what it took to run things on Earth, but they figured to run things big, here. Others came to get rich, figuring to stay just to build up something, sell out and move on."
>
  "Sell out? But you can't transfer planetary currency off-world and have it worth anything," said Jef, "except maybe for some of the strong Earth currencies, and interstellar credits—and private parties can't use interstellar credits. Only a bank or a government—"

  "How thick is that head of yours?" said Jarji. "There's a few million ways to cash in, if you've really got something to cash; and the longer you hold something you've developed from the raw planet state, the more you've got to cash in. For every one like my folks, there's a thousand who haven't got the guts to be in the first wave of immigration; but they do have the wealth—in Earth and other world currencies—to lay back and wait until a planet is developed and safe. Then they buy in, in comfort, and the more they have to buy with, the longer they can wait to use it. Hell, didn't you know there're regular underground exchanges on Earth, where you can make illegal currency transfers, or get immediate quotes on any land or development you want, on any planet, anywhere? And with something like that going you think there aren't some who come in with the first wave, just planning to build up and sell out, then go on to the next new world they can find ready, and do it again? Do something like that three times over, Mister, and make it pay; and you can end up like a king on the last world you hit."