Perilous Planets

by Brian Aldiss

  Karak sent him back, with a second man to help him. Zor and the remaining guard took the ullas. They were experienced hunters, Karak and Zor: they held their beasts to an easy, swinging pace that ate up the distance. But the great strides of the Star-Beast, clear in the sand before them, measured twice their paces. The ullas seemed less eager, too: the scent must be growing cold.

  Karak was no fool. The Star-Beast’s tracks were slowly filling with sand, with every breath of air that curled over the desert’s face. He stopped them at the crest of one gigantic dune that rose above all the rest.

  ‘You—Zor!’ he demanded. ‘Can you follow a trail in the sand?’

  ‘I have hunted with you,’ the man reminded him.

  ‘Then let the ullas go, and follow as you can. We’re losing ground.’

  Silently they bent over the straining beasts, plucking at the straps that muzzled them. Then like living shadows, the creatures leaped out on the Star-Beast’s scent.

  ‘Come on!’ shouted Karak, ‘if you want to see the kill!’

  Now they were running, with a stride that nearly matched the Star-Beast’s—pace for pace on the track of the hunting beasts. As the darkness lightened and the dawn-cone thrust up before them, paling the watching stars, Korul saw that the character of the ground was changing and a fierce hope sprang up in him.

  As the night passed they had seen the ullas from time to time, far ahead on the crest of some dune, skimming like shadows over the pale sand. Gradually they had drawn ahead, until Karak was following the trail of their clawed paws. Now the sand was giving way to a hard, gravelly plain, naked and flat, where the beast’s claws left no trace. What marks there were in the thin dust, that overlaid the ancient, sun-backed clay would be gone as the dawn-wind rose. By the gracious gods, they might escape!

  With the first arc of the sun above the far horizon, Karak stopped to stare ahead over the red expanse. It sloped down like a saucer before them, but in all that great waste nothing living moved. He grunted and ran on, Korul at his side matching stride for stride.

  As the sun climbed in the sky, the red plain came alive with flickering phantoms of the heat. Broad, shining lakes spread over the desert, like the seas of which Jim-Berk told, bordered with monstrous vegetable shapes. Weird, ruined cities hung against the distance, walls and towers that melted and changed as they looked and faded into a wash of crimson light.

  Looking back, Korul saw the long vanished dunes hung huge and inverted in the heavens, while over them crept two black dots—Karak’s men—and far behind another moving line the reinforcements which the wounded man had sent. Then before them the plain suddenly swelled and rushed to meet them with awful speed, its every detail growing with incredible swiftness, cracks swollen into gorges, pebbles into phantom holders twice their height—and caught up by the mirage, the ullas, running low and tirelessly on the track of their prey!

  ==========

  Karak cried out and pointed: the ghost-land shivered and was gone. But somewhere out there the hunting beasts were drawing closer to Jim-Berk and to Thorana.

  Slowly another shape began to take form in the red haze before them, wavering, looming in moments of mirage, sinking again, yet steadier and more solid than the ghost-shapes of the heat. Ragged arms ran out from it on either side, closing out the horizon, then began to draw together, shutting them in.

  Was this another trick of the desert and the heat, Korul wondered, or was it real? He saw uncertainty growing on Karak’s flat face. What were these crazy crimson towers, these shadowed crevices, these tottering spires of scarlet that flickered like tongues of solid flame against the black sky? Were they another phantom swimming in their heat-warped brain? If so Karak saw them too.

  Mirage or not, the heat in this rock-walled slot was terrible. Karak was tearing at his clothes, and his skin was beginning to redden and blister in the sun’s fierce glare, Korul drew his own mantle closer about him.

  The fine red dust that their plodding feet stirred up settled over them, sifting into the creases of their skin and between cloak and skin, setting their flesh on fire. Their sandals were thin: no protection for bruised and blistered feet. Remembering that other time, Korul knew what must come and hardened himself against it—but Karak ran tirelessly beside him along the wavering track of three-clawed feet. Karak was a man!

  A man—yes, but a man who had loved soft things, and taken them when he found them: good food from the Masters’ cupboards, wine from the Masters’ flagons, women from the Masters’ beds. As they came out of the broken land, into a place of packed white sand, white as the snow-cap at the pole, Korul saw that the other’s steps were beginning to waver. His breath rasped in and out of his open mouth in great, dry sobs. Slowly Korul began to draw ahead. There was a strangled command, then a scuff of gravel and a thump as Karak fell sprawling. Korul did not look back.

  He had become a machine like Karak now, tireless and unfeeling, that raced on and on along that shimmering track while the sun climbed higher and the white sands blazed about him with almost ponderable heat. He narrowed his eye to slits, but still the white fire burned into his brain. He felt the skin of his face tightening and cracking.

  Then far ahead, where the white sands melted again into red and rose in a vast, slow wave against the inky sky, he saw the ullas running on the track.

  Somewhere they must have lost the trail—in the soft sands, perhaps—in the broken land. They were tiring too, running slower, and a savage satisfaction woke in Korul’s throat as his dazed mind cleared and the thud of his pounding feet came crisper and faster from the packed white sand.

  The skimming shapes grew in his vision until he could make out every detail of their long, lithe forms, glistening with tiny scales as black as night itself.

  They vanished over the crest of the first sand-wave. Korul toiled up the slope behind them. From the top he saw a distant line of red hills, the sand rolling against their base. Halfway up the next slope raced the slim black shadows of the ullas—and at the very crest, silhouetted for an instant before he dropped into the hollow beyond, was the Star-Beast with Thorana cradled in his mighty arms!

  Up that long slope, and down, and up again—the Beast, the ullas and Korul far behind. As he topped each reaching wave,

  Korul could see that the hunting beasts were gaining steadily. Their prey in sight, their great legs had taken new strength. And the Star-Beast was stumbling—slowing—stopping!

  ==========

  The Star-Beast’s Lair

  Where the red sand-waves broke, against the base of the first range of hills, a flat-topped ridge ran out into the plain. With a heave of his great shoulders Jim-Berk lifted Thorana to it top, then crouched with his back against the rock, waiting.

  Far behind the racing ullas Korul raised one trembling arm and tried to shout. The Star-Beast saw him. His hand went up in a last salute; then the hunters were on him.

  He had wedged his broad back into a crevice where they could not come at him from the back or sides. As the first beast sprang, his foot lashed out and caught it in the belly, hurling it back into the pack. Before he could recover, he swung a fragment of rock above his head and sent it smashing into their midst, bowling two of the brutes end over end. One lay twitching, its flat skull crushed; the other writhed with a broken spine. Then, low under his guard, the other four closed in.

  For a moment he towered over them, his red mane and flashing eyes rising out of a heap of glittering black, then he was down and fighting for his life. One arm flung across his throat for protection, he fought them off with the other and with his feet. He lay on his back, one of them striking at his throat, the others circling for an opening. Coolly he seized the ulla by its skull, his blunt fingers sinking into its glassy eyes, and as it struggled back in agony he plucked it from his body and swung it, hard, against the rock.

  As the other beasts closed in, Korul flung himself, knife in hand, on the back of the nearest. The keen steel ripped out the monster’s throat. Then he to
o had his back to the rock and was fighting for his life.

  Berk was on his feet again, and as the first beast leaped he reached out with his long arms and caught it under the shoulders, thrusting it away. Hissing with fury it raked him with its long hind claws until the blood ran in stripes down his chest and thighs. Grimly he turned and drove it back against the ledge. There was a horrible crunching of bones and the thing went limp in his hands. Then, shouting encouragement, he pounced on the beast that had Korul down.

  The Murian had wrapped his forearm in the folds of his cloak and thrust it between the ulla’s ravening jaws. Striking under its grasping forepaws, he was stabbing at the creature’s horny belly, feeling for a vital spot between the armor-plates. Then the Star-Beast had the thing by its lashing tail and swung it in a great arc around his head, crashing its life out against the rock.

  Wearily Korul pushed himself to his feet. The ulla’s fangs had cut through the thin cloak and lacerated his arm. Jim-Berk’s huge hand came down on his shoulder with a hearty pat that nearly drove him to his knees again.

  ‘You’re a man, Korul!’ the Star-Beast boomed. ‘There’s not one on Erth could run all day, then go for a beast like that.’

  Stooping, he picked up a block of stone half Korul’s size and smashed the skull of the crippled thing that lay hissing with a broken back. ‘Dumb thing!’ he muttered. ‘Killing is all it’s ever known. It tried hard to do what it was trained for.’

  He turned back to Korul. ‘Do you think you can give blood now? The girl had more than she could take, and I had to carry her. She doesn’t have the strength you Givers have.’

  ‘She should have water, too,’ Korul said worriedly.

  ‘She’ll have water. It’s the reason we went down into the tunnels in the beginning. There’s a flask up there on the rock with her, still half-full. You little people don’t seem to have the need for water that we do on Erth.’

  ==========

  Laying Thorana in the shadow of the ledge where the heat was less, they gave her a little water and then blood until her strength came back. Scrambling to the top of the rock, Korul stared back over the dunes.

  ‘Karak is out there,’ he pointed out. ‘By this time his men will have caught up with him, and they may have ullas with them. We can’t stay here.’

  ‘We won’t—be sure of that,’ the Star-Beast told him grimly. ‘This is the way I came before, and my ship’s not far away. We’ll have food and shelter there, and if Karak and his lizrds

  haven’t had their fill of me, there are weapons that will make ‘em think again!’

  Helping Thorana to her feet, Korul took her arm and stepped out of the shadpw of the rock. As the sun struck him, a wave of sickness surged up through his vitals, leaving his leg weak and shaky. He took two steps, then the red haze swirled down on him and the world went black.

  ==========

  The hills rose high and rugged around them when Korul came to himself again. They were old and worn, their slopes gentled by time. They swayed and rocked with a smooth, jogging rhythm, and suddenly he realized that the Beast was carrying him.

  By all the gods, it was shamefull! Korul, First Man of Mur, carried like a child! Jim-Berk only laughed.

  ‘Be still about it,.‘he said. ‘I’m onlya beast by your standards, and on Erth we have beasts trained to carry us. You and this girl have trained me well enough. We were in a hurry, and she objected to leaving you there, so I brought you with us.’

  Deeper they went and deeper into the red, worn hills, following a trail that not even twenty of Mur’s years had erased from Jim-Berk’s memory. From time to time he would point out landmarks—an oddly shaped pinnacle of rock that was like some thing of Erth—a parti-colored cliff—the opening of a cave. Legend had it that the ancients had a sense of direction like this Erth-thing’s, Korul knew, but it had long since been bred out of the race. Without Jim-Berk he and Thorana would never find their way back to the cities of their race.

  At last they came to a cliff of deep red rock from which queer, lighter-colored, rounded knobs protruded.

  ‘We’ll be there in a jifi,’ Jim-Berk told them. ‘This is the first place I found after I left the rokt. There’s many a Searcher back home on Erth would be glad of a look at those bones. Your own kind too, I’ve no doubt.’

  ‘What bones?’ Korul demanded. ‘I see nothing.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ the Star-Beast admitted, ‘but no race would get where yours is without knowing about fossil bones. There’s no time now to fool with them, but those knobs and humps you’re looking at are the dead bones of beasts that lived here before Erth had a moon, like as not, and that were buried and turned to stone. Come on, now—up through here to the top and we’ll see what there is to see.’

  They climbed a winding crevice in the rock to the summit of the cliff of bones. A broad plateau stretched out before them, haunted with grotesque monsters of wind-carved stone. Everywhere lay the bones, bigger than a man and strangely shaped. True enough, Korul found, some of them lay together in the shape of some gigantic ulla or ganak— but how could Jim-Berk be so sure that these things were not fantasies like the wind-shaped spires of the plain?

  The Star-Beast was not concerning himself with bones. As he came out of the cleft, Jim-Berk took to his heels. Seizing Thorana’s hand, Korul raced after him. A moment later they rounded a spur of rock, and there in a little hollow was the ship!

  There had been nothing like it in all the long history of the people of Mur, Korul thought. Or had there been a time, long ago when the races were one people, when they too had wandered among the stars?

  It was long and blunt-nosed, fashioned out of steel. Terrible heat had scarred and blackened it, and pined it like the stones that sometimes fell out of the sky. Here and there small, heavy windows were set in the steel. Jim-Berk was working at one of them. It swung open, and he squeezed through into the dark interior. For a moment the two Murians hesitated, then as bright white lights blazed from the ports they crept up to the open hatch and looked inside.

  ==========

  They looked into a room tipped over on its side. Furniture, instruments, books were tumbled together in confusion. In what was now a wall, a metal ladder disappeared into the base of the ship, where twelve huge tubular jets showed on the outside.

  Tottering precariously on a metal table, Jim-Berk was fumbling with the fastening on a door set in the thickness of the ship above his head. It opened suddenly, deluging him with little metal cylinders. With a growl he tried another.

  Hanging in this compartment were a number of queer-shaped garments of coarse cloth.

  ‘I’ll be with you in a moment,’ he shouted. ‘After forty years it’s a great feeling to have on a pair of pantz again!’

  Perched on the rim of the hatchway, Korul and Thorana watched him dress. Two layers of heavy cloth covered his hairy body from head to foot. A peaked blue cap went on his head, and on his feet he tried to pull queer, stiff boxes. After forty Erth years of nakedness, his feet were beyond the wearing of these shuz.

  A queerly human figure in his stiff, dark garments, with the little cap set on his shaggy mane and his hands plunged into pouches in the sides of his pantz, the Star-Beast confronted his two guests.

  ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘what do you think of me now? Less like an animal, eh? Welcome to Terra!’

  ‘Terra?’ Thorana questioned, puzzled.

  ‘It’s the name I gave the ship,’ he explained. ‘There are hundreds of different languages on Erth, and “Terra” means “Erth” in one of them. What do you call yourselves as a lot—Masters and Blood-Givers together, I mean—the whole race?’

  ‘There is no such word in our language today,’ Thorana said slowly. ‘We haven’t been so ready to admit that the two peoples came from one stock. But I have seen a word in the old books…”

  ‘Murtas,’ Korul told him. ‘Sons of Mur.’

  ‘It’s a good name,’ Berk said. ‘Better than we have. Erth is a world with many races
and many languages, and a different name in each one. Mankind we say—or men— or man — for the kind of animal we all are—but its different in every language.

  ‘There’s an old word, though, in the legends, that I’ve always liked. It’s the name of a race of giants who were the sons of Erth. Titans, they were called, and there were some great men among them. One of them showed men how to make fire.

  ‘Now that we’re finding our way out here into the emptiness where the planets are, and the sun and stars, that’s a name I’d be proud to have used for men and men like me. Titan!

  Sounds big and powerful, doesn’t it—and that’s the way we men from Erth are and always will be. Do you like it, you two—Titans? What do you say?’

  ‘It is a good word,’ Thorana agreed. ‘Better than Star-Beasts. But for yourself, we must use your own name—Jim-Berk, the Titan.’

  ‘Not the whole of it,’ he pleaded. ‘Not Jim-Berk, run together like it was a name out of the Good Book. Jim, my friends call me—only Jim. Will you do that?’

  Little by little, the Titan, managed to put the confusion of his ship into order. The two Murians were of little help. Korul was greatly interested in the apparatus with which the craft was propelled, while Thorana poured over his books. They were printed on a rough white fabric which the Titan said came from the matted fibers from the stems of the huge plants of his world. Paypr he called it.

  Some of the books had paypr covers, and in them Thorana found pictures more wonderful than anything she had seen outside the museums of the Searchers. All the teeming life and civilization of Erth was there—people like Jim, dressed a strangely and gaudily as the little creatures he called brdz—towering buildings of stone and steel—machines that carried hundreds of people from place to place, as their tlornaks carried one or two. Once there had been such machines on Mur, Thorana knew before the world grew dry and the People retreated to the gorges.