Orbit 2 - Anthology

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “How do you know I won’t play Pied Piper and lead them clear out of Krugerworld?” Kinross asked, his thoughts beginning to mesh again.

  “Perhaps, now, that would be merciful. I truly do not know, Mr. Kinross. But let us see what may be done.”

  A distant scream came out of the dark grove, repeated, a volley of screams.

  “Silva’s voice!” Garcia exclaimed. “Por Dios, what now?”

  He started running back toward the grove. Kinross and von Lankenau ran after him. The screaming ceased abruptly.

  In the clearing, villagers stood in silent groups on either side of the stone platform and in small groups elsewhere. On the cairn lay the body of the old Portygee, looking fragile and collapsed. His head was crushed horribly.

  Garcia swore softly in Spanish. Von Lankenau said musingly, “Now, for as long as Krugerworld shall last . . . I must manage to understand. I must!” A dark memory itched in Kinross’ fingers.

  “Kinross,” came a whisper from close behind their heads. The men whirled as one, to see nothing.

  The whisper continued, still behind their heads so that they whirled again, vainly. “Thank you, Kinross, for teaching me how to relieve my thirst. My terrible thirst. I will purge my world of thirst, Kinross, with your service.”

  Von Lankenau gripped Kinross’ arm with iron fingers. “What have you done, Kinross?” he pleaded. “Tell me. I must know. What have you done?”

  “You’ll never know,” Kinross said harshly. “Look behind us.”

  The three men turned round again. The villagers had compacted into a mob with a concave front that was slowly closing in on them. Von Lankenau ordered them back in whiplash tones, to no effect. He turned to Kinross, his face pale and grim.

  “Command them under the name of the Herr Kruger, if you can, Mr. Kinross. We have no other chance.”

  “Stop, damn you, in the name of Kruger!” Kinross shouted. His hands were sweating and his heart was in his throat.

  They did not stop. The horns of the crescent met on the far side of the cairn. The solid front of the villagers, coming on in a slow amoeboid shuffle of hundreds of feet, was ten yards away. Kinross saw the girl Milagros, teeth bared. They had seconds only before, as Kinross somehow knew, they would join Silva on the bloody stones.

  “Quickly, Kinross,” von Lankenau said. “Tell me while there is time. What have you done?”

  “Heart’s truth,” Kinross whispered, “I don’t know. “I don’t know!”

  “Let’s give ‘em a fight,” Garcia growled, then, “Hey! They’ve stopped!”

  A cloud of birds came over the clearing, flashing in many colors, circling and shrieking. Brush crackled and water splashed in the dark grove. Then something went wrong at the back of the mob of villagers. It shuddered and broke into fragments which crept rapidly to either side, opening an aisle through its midst.

  It was Kerbeck, floating hair and beard ablaze with sunlight. Rags of clothing fluttered on the great, bronzed limbs. Sweeps of his massive arms knocked villagers a dozen feet through the air. Booming and buzzing, wide blue eyes two-dimensional and unknowing, he passed the three wonder-stricken men. In his wake ran Mary Chadwick, birds about her head.

  “He’s going in to kill Kruger’s body,” she told them, coming to a halt. The frightful malevolence still rode in her features and Kinross’ fear was not wholly relieved.

  “Madre de Dios!” Garcia gasped.

  They watched the giant Swede round the stone platform and head for the cave. From the darkness floated a gobbling howl that sent a hair-bristling shudder down Kinross’ back. The great form of Bo Bo emerged to block the entrance.

  Kerbeck ran forward with a shout. The Negro ran to meet him with his bubbling squall. The two massive figures shocked together and the world seemed to tremble. They swayed, stumbling back and forth, locked in furious embrace, and a great sighing moan went up from the fragmented mob of villagers. Kinross felt a hand on his arm and glimpsed von Lankenau’s white, rapt face beside him.

  Black giant with white strove and roared and howled and stumbled. They cannoned into the cairn and destroyed it, scattering and treading the stones underfoot like pebbles. They splashed into the creek and out of it, roiling the clear water to dark turbidity. Both giants were increasing in stature, to Kinross’ eyes, clearly superhuman now. The force of their roaring and howling beat down on him with physical pressure. He saw Mary Chadwick on his right, blue-violet fire blazing in her eyes, fierce red lips parted eagerly.

  First one giant and then the other was forced to his knees, only to rise again in thunderous shouting and howling. The fight drifted nearer to the cave mouth, entered and swirled out again, entered and stayed. Kerbeck’s hair and beard seemed to shine with a light of their own, dwindling sparklike into the depths. The gigantic battle shouts became a continuous hollow roaring under the earth. Kinross felt a hand shaking him insistently. It was von Lankenau.

  “Go now,” he was saying. “For certain, the barrier will be down momentarily. I begin to understand. I almost —I do salute you, Mr. Kinross. Take the woman, if she will go.”

  Kinross collected his thoughts. “Mary, will you go?” he asked.

  “Too bloody right I will,” she said, “and take my birds off with me!”

  Kinross looked at Garcia and held out his hand. “Part friends, Joe?” he asked.

  “I don’t savvy this, Kinross,” the Mexican said, “but good luck and get out of here.”

  Kinross shook hands with the two men. Then he and Mary Chadwick, arms linked, walked rapidly back toward the village.

  * * * *

  The dark grove swarmed with Kabeiroi, but no more than a scattering of the ugly shapes could be seen on the open valley floor. The sky was overcast and the diffuse, watery light of the early days lay again on the valley. The old indefinite quality was back, nothing quite in full view.

  “Mary,” Kinross said, “I do believe we’re already through the barrier. Space has drawn in around the cave mouth.”

  “Good-oh!”

  Kinross led her up the hillside, talking feverishly. They would marry, he said. He was quite well off, had a good job doing confidential work for the U.S. government. He had lots of back pay coming for his last job and a bonus, too, when he told them about it. They would live in California, it was a lot like Queensland. Trips, the theater, music, a fine home, gracious living.

  Mary said little. Birds kept fluttering in to land on her head and shoulders but the number around her did not seem to increase. The light grew weaker as they climbed and the land more indefinite. When they reached the height of land and Kinross knew for sure that they had escaped, it was almost dark. From time to time a rippling quiver ran over the ground sending them sprawling, but they rose and pressed onward. As before, progress seemed timeless and effortless. There was no moon.

  Mary lagged behind him and Kinross kept turning to wait for her. By degrees in the fading light he saw the strained malevolence of her expression give way to a vague and remote sorrow. The wide brow was smooth again, red lips dreaming. Once she said, “My birds. I can’t get back all my birds.”

  Suddenly the wailing cry of a stone curlew reached down from the darkness. Mary stopped and looked up. Kinross turned back to watch. The forlorn, throbbing cry repeated. Mary raised her arms to the black sky and crooned. Nothing happened.

  She looked at Kinross, both of them vague in shadow. “It won’t come down to me,” she whispered plaintively.

  A third time the call floated downward. Mary dropped her arms.

  “I’m going back,” she said. “You go on alone, Allan.”

  “No!” he protested. “You must come with me. I won’t let you go back!”

  He seized her shoulders. She came stiffly erect and a light gleamed from her eyes. A touch, a twinge only, of the old feeling hit him and his knees turned to water. He collapsed, kneeling, clasping her around the thighs, pleading, “No, no, Mary! Don’t leave me alone here in the dark!”

  “I m
ust,” she said calmly. Then, with a touch of pity, “Be brave and go along now, Allan. It is all you can do.”

  She raised him and kissed his forehead. He stumbled away, not daring to look back for fear of a renewed weakness. The sky rifted with silver as the overcast broke up and presently a full moon rode high ahead. He looked back then, but she was nowhere.

  On to the great pit under the moon, leg over leg unthinking. It was all he could do now. He found the ravine and waded down it, outrunning the current. He heard the roar of falling water and saw the last rock shoulder that interposed itself between him and the brink. For just a heartbeat he clung to the rock and stared into the pit with all its silver beauty and its reflecting pool in the bottom. Then, not letting the water take him only, but rushing, pitching his body forward, he went over the edge.

  It was not a sheer drop but rather a series of stages. Plunge and strike and roll, plunge and strike and roll, rhythmically, painlessly, with intolerable excitement of the spirit, down and down he went until the circle of sky above him smalled with distance and the silvery pool below waxed enormous. It was as if the great pit were reversing its dimensions, flexing through itself, turning inside out, as if he were falling into the moon. Then, on the very point of an unbearable instant, the waters closed over him.

  Down, down through the water, pain and darkness and fear vise-clamping his chest, kicking and waving his arms and there was a dry crackling and a pain in his toe and he sat in the thorn scrub gasping. His skin was dry.

  It was daylight. A stream ran nearby and above it reared a yellowish sandstone ledge with figures of paunchy kangaroos and stick men done in faded red and black. He picked up a handful of earth and looked at it. There it was, hard and sharp and clear in all of its minute particulars, deep as any microscope might probe, solidly there beyond all tampering forever. It was the old world. His world. Kinross stood up, feeling an overpowering thirst.

  He went down to the creek and drank deeply and was as thirsty as before. He buried his face in the water and drank until he was near bursting and rose, wavering on his feet, thirst tearing at him unbearably. He tugged at his beard and wondered.

  Sounds came, a jingle of metal and splashing. Then the creak of leather and low voices. Riders were coming up the creek. Suddenly he sensed them directly, horses and men, radiant with life, red, living blood pumping through veins and arteries. His thirst became a cloud of madness enfolding him, and he knew who and what he was.

  He waited, wondering if they would be able to see him. . .

  <>

  * * * *

  Gene Wolfe (about whom more will be heard) spent a few months in the U.S. Army avoiding the half-hearted attempts of the Chinese Army to kill him. Thanks to this short stint as a D-handled shovel operator and Fire Control Private on an M-1 the government was forced to finish his education and. he emerged from the University of Houston as a B.S.M.E. He still works at the job he took after graduation, doing non-space R&D for a large corporation; has a wife and four children, is sunk in the “dull comfort of moderate middle-class success,” and claims it is impossible to make his life sound interesting. “Sir magazine essayed the same impossible task when they published my story ‘The Dead Man’ and were forced to fall back on such falsifications as the statement that I wished to raise Afghan hounds. I can truthfully say that I have never desired to see an Afghan hound higher than it is already

  “Trip, Trap” is pure science fiction, not fantasy. Nevertheless, there is a bridge in it, and under the bridge lives a troll. . .

  * * * *

  TRIP, TRAP

  By Gene Wolfe

  Giants were fighting in the sky; the roar and crash of their weapons and the wind-scream of their strokes reverberated even on the echoless steppe where there was nothing to fling back sound between the Rock of the Carath-Angor and the gorge of the Elbanda-Rhun, where the waters made their own thunder always, whether the sky-giants fought or slept. And those were as far apart as a hard-riding traveler might go in three days.

  The warriors had drawn their thick cloaks across their faces to protect them from the driving rain which was blown almost horizontally into their eyes, but their mounts had no such protection and stumbled forward scarcely faster than their riders could have walked. All were wet to the skin, cold, and nearly numb with fatigue. On an ordinary journey they would have halted hours ago, pitched their tents and waited out the storm in their sleeping robes. They did not do so now because they were going home, and because their leader, hurrying home too after three years of war, would not have permitted it.

  Suddenly a spark struck from some giant ax lit up the sky from horizon to horizon and in the trembling instant the war leader saw far ahead the figure of a single rider spurring down the road as though blown by the storm. The leader watched him for a moment by the light of the flashes, then wheeled his animal to face his command —shouting to make himself heard above the wind. The warriors freed their short lances from the straps holding them to their pommels and fanned out to form an arc across the road. There was a chance, if only a chance, that the rider was a straggler from the enemy horde, trying to reach the fastness of his own country. Besides, they were soldiers, led by a hero, and would not be met like a gaggle of pedlars.

  The stranger made no attempt to evade them. Instead he came galloping into the center of their crescent and reined up before their commander. From his cloak he drew a rolled parchment covered with writing. . . .

  * * * *

  At the same moment Dr. Morton Melville Finch, Ph.D. (Extraterrestrial Archaeology), paused in the act of setting a coffeepot on his galley stove as he heard the communicator in the main cabin begin to chatter. With the percolator still in his hand, he crossed the galley to see what message had been hurled at his little ship across light-years of space.

  FROM: Prof. John Beatty

  Edgemont Inst., Earth

  TO: Dr. M. M. Finch

  UNworld spcrft MOTH (Reg #387760)

  Congratulations again on attaining your degree!

  Morton, I know you have planned to make this trip of yours a pleasure cruise before taking up your teaching duties here, but I have come across something so extraordinary, and so perfectly in your line, that I feel sure you will forgive an old man for trying to interrupt your jaunt.

  There, I’ve given the whole thing away before I meant to. That is always the way with us old diggers; we turn up the funeral ornaments when we ditch the tents, then get nothing else for years, like as not.

  I doubt if you’ve ever heard of Carson’s Sun, Morton; it is Sol type, but its habitable planet has been off-limits for colonization and trade because of a native race with too much intelligence to be counted mere animals (human-level intelligence in fact) and too little technology for their culture to hold its own in trade. It is open to scientific expeditions, however, although it appears that none have ever gone there.

  Now I have a correspondent, a W. H. Wilson, who is a captain in the merchant service. He is one of those enthusiastic amateurs who have contributed so much to our little corner of learning. Knows enough to spot a find when he comes across one and keeps his eyes peeled.

  Well, it seems that Wilson picked up a distress call from a life-craft on his last trip out. I doubt if I need tell you now, Morton, that it came from the habitable planet of Carson’s Sun.

  It seems that a spaceman who escaped the wreck of the Magna Vega (you may remember that it was originally thought that no one survived) was able to get his craft to Carson III. He spent a year and a half there before Wilson picked up his call. Naturally—or perhaps not so naturally, how many merchant skippers would have done as much?—Wilson questioned him about his experiences with the natives. I am forwarding Wilson’s full report to you, together with language tapes, but the important point is this: a number of the symbols used in writing the native language are identical with the ones found on those unclassifiable porcelain shards from Ceta II which furnished you with such fine material for your doctoral
dissertation! The points of correspondence are too numerous and too complete for this to be coincidence. I truly feel that Man has at last found evidence of a preceding interstellar technology.

  Morton, I would never have thought it possible for me to be so happy for a man I envy as whole-souledly as I do you. A few months’ investigation on Carson III may furnish you with a reputation which will make you a department head at thirty-five. Don’t let this get past you.

  Yours in hope,

  J. Beatty

  JB/sl

  * * * *

  The war chieftain had watched with impassive patience while his followers erected a tent for him using poles whose terminals were skillfully carved and painted to represent the heads of beasts, and a soft leather covering impregnated with oil. Only when this was up and his chief lieutenant had kindled a fire using stone and steel and tinder from a hoarded packet near his skin was he able to read the scroll.