Starwolf (Omnibus)

by Edmond Hamilton

  Really? asked one little mote of him, of the rest of him. Has the Starwolf truly become noble ... or is he lying to himself? Does he want secretly to taste a little more of this Free-Faring that so revolts him?

  Chane hung shivering while the toppling blaze of the Perseus Arm swept toward him ... or was he sweeping toward it? How did you move in this Free-Faring, how did you direct yourself?

  Vreya's laughter came to him, faint and distant. "This way, Chane. It's easy, if you would only stop fighting it. Can't you feel the currents? Like great winds ... This way ... This way ..."

  He felt the currents. They ran between the suns, between the galaxies, lacing the whole together. You caught one and rode it, in the wild twinkling of a second, across distances that would take even a swift Starwolf ship months to span. You fetched up, dazed and shaken, to dance in the whipping corona of a green star, and then go sliding down the little currents that held the green star's worlds around it, calling for Vreya, looking for her, finding her and chasing her through an atmosphere that was the color of a smoky emerald, above strange seas and stranger continents, and there was life there, and her voice made running streaks of silver across his consciousness, crying, "Oh ... oh ... oh!" in wonder.

  And you went on again, pleading with her. You shot a nebula, wrapped in cold fire, and you peered at the drowned suns and the worlds that never saw any other star but their own and no sky but the perpetual icy burning of the cloud. Some of the worlds were barren and some were not, and once Vreya made such a darkness of fear against his mind that he thought she would listen to him and return. But she only darted away, riding the currents like a fleeting spark, toward a cluster of orange suns all mellow as grandfathers, with pretty little planets around their knees. After a while you forgot to plead. You did not really care any more whether Vreya came back to her beautiful body or left it to rot in the crater on Arkuu. You did not even care whether you went back to your own body or not. Because you realized that Vreya was right, and you were wrong.

  You realized that the Free-Faring was worth everything. What was the death of a body, a mortal body that would die anyway? What was the death of a city, or a culture, or even a planet—though the planet wouldn't really die, of course, just because men were gone from it. What even was the joy of being a Starwolf, compared to this?

  For a Starwolf was planet-bound and ship-bound.

  Everywhere he went he must take with him air and water and food and atmospheric pressure, or he would perish just like the lesser breeds. He could only go so fast, and so far. Compared to this Free-Faring, it seemed to Chane that he and his fellows had been no more than weak and clumsy children on those Starwolf raids. Now he was free of all those limitations, the frail and dragging flesh and the heavy shell of iron in which it must huddle, ignominiously. Free, Vreya had said, of the stars and the whole universe, and it was true. He could possess it all, comprehend it all. He could go anywhere he wanted to, fleet, disembodied, safe, timeless.

  Anywhere.

  Even to Varna.

  And he went, forgetting Vreya.

  He rode the currents swift as a dream, and the remembered sun blazed before him, tawny gold. He had seen it countless times before but always through a screening viewport or from the planet itself; never like this, undimmed, naked and true. He watched the great storms sweep across it, flaming whirlwinds as big as continents. He watched the bright corona, the whipped banners and the darting, arcing falls of fire. The voice of the sun spoke to him, and even though he knew now that the stars spoke to the whole universe and not to tiny bits of it, he took it for a welcome.

  Varna came rolling from behind the sun, a blue and copper ball. He sped to meet it, and on the way he met a Starwolf squadron coming in.

  How many times, he thought. How many times!

  He went in with them, pacing them down, though he could have left them far behind. There were five ships. They must have run into trouble, because two of then^ showed fresh scars. But he knew how it would be inside the ships, and he was pleased, remembering.

  They went with a rush, the five ships and the little patch of glowing motes, down through the atmosphere, screaming, ripping the clouds asunder, sending a long roll of thunder crashing down the sky. And then the city was below them, Krak, the chief city of the Star-wolves, a vast loose-jointed sprawl of stone buildings scattered broadcast over a craggy countryside. Each wolf must have his own den, each Varnan his castle, with breathing room around it and a stout wall against predators, in case of a falling-out.

  The starport was east of the city, where the rough land fell away to a great plain, burned golden-brown with summer. Chane hung aside and watched the ships go in for a landing, and there was a sadness in his attenuated being. This was home.

  The flags broke out from the buildings of the city, bright spots of color against the dull red stone. Traffic began to move down along the road to the starport; ground-cars, people on foot, long vans for the loot.

  The ships' ports opened, and Chane slipped lower, weightless, soundless, riding the air.

  The Starwolves came out of the ships.

  My people. My brothers. My fighting mates. I know them. Berkt... Ssarn ... Vengant... Chroll...

  My brothers.

  But they drove me out!

  He watched them, the tall powerful men who walked like tigers, muscles gliding under the fine gold-furred skin. He saw the bright-skinned women come from the city, strong women fit for men like these; they laughed and hung the men with garlands of late flowers and brought them the Varnan wine to drink. Chane remembered the pungent dusty sweetness of the garlands and the lovely violence of the wine. No Earthman could drink that wine and stand. None but he, who was Varnan born.

  But they drove me out!

  He flitted over them, proud and contemptuous. I am here. You cannot keep me out, you cannot hold me, you cannot kill. For I am greater now than all of you. I see the weakness of your iron bodies, the dullness of your iron ships. I am a Free-Farer, and already I have done things that your feebleness could not endure.

  It was too bad that they could not see him, could not hear his words. They went on drinking and laughing and kissing the women, tossing their heads and squinting their bright cat eyes against the sun. Men and boys from the city brought the loot from the ships and piled it on the long vans. The raiders climbed onto big open ground-cars and rode with their women back into the city, singing as they went.

  You have seen them, Chane thought. Their weakness and their worthlessness. It is time to go now, back to the stars.

  But he did not go, and he wondered if it was possible for a Free-Farer to weep. And that was a strange thought, for he had not once thought of weeping since he was a tiny child in that house, there by the marketplace, the one with the snarling masks carved on the rainspouts. Starwolves did not cry.

  He moved closer to the house. The little church beside it had long ago fallen into ruin. He hovered outside a tall window, remembering how his mother had tried to furnish the great barren room exactly like the parlor in Carnarvon, and how dwarfed and pallid the furniture had looked compared to the untidy splendors he saw in the rooms of his Varnan playmates. The Reverend Thomas would not have one scrap of the sinful loot beneath his roof.

  There was plenty of it there now. A Varnan family had lived there many years, since the outworlders died. Chane himself had lived in the bachelor's quarters, a long sprawling sort of barracks on the other side of the market-place, since he was old enough to go out with the raiding ships.

  And they drove me out. Because I killed, in a fair fight, one of them—and they could remember only that I was not of their blood,

  He felt not like a Free-Farer but like a ghost.

  Time to go ...

  It was night, and the great market-square was a blaze of light. Varnans from the ships and from all parts of the city thronged it, making the stone walls ring. They looked at the heaped loot in the center of the square, and they talked to the raiders and gave them wine
and listened to the story of the raid. Berkt had been the leader this time, and he was a great story-teller. Chane listened, rocking on the night wind. How they had struck three different systems, and fought, and come away. Berkt's deep voice rang as he talked. His eyes were yellow and bright, and the other raiders shouted with him, and drank, and held their women. The loot sparkled. Chane rocked like thistledown on the wind, a misty nothing lost in the blaze of light, ignored in the hot vitality of life.

  Physical life. They had done. They had felt; the hammering of the blood, the exquisite visceral pain of mingled fear and excitement, the shock of battle, the joy of physical mastery over body and mind and ship when those elements became a single organism dedicated to survival. Now they were here, breathing the night wind, enjoying their triumph. They could drink, and hold their golden women in their arms; they could laugh and sing, the Varnan songs that made him remember another place and another song, far away.... Even in Carnarvon, those men were better off than he. They were not Starwolves, but they too could drink and laugh and fight, and take another man's hand in friendship.

  And he ... he was nothing. A wisp, a sterility, to wander forever looking at wonders he could neither touch nor experience; a useless ghost gathering futile knowledge with which he could accomplish nothing.

  He remembered Helmer. He remembered his own body, not as beautiful as these gold-furred brothers of his, but a good strong able active body, tossed away like a discarded glove on an ash heap. He remembered Vreya. And he was sick, in every fleck of this that was now his being.

  Sick, and in a panic. What might have happened to his body, while he was busy playing among the stars?

  Now indeed it was time to go.

  He went, with the roaring voices of the Starwolves echoing in his memory, drowning out the vast impersonal singing of the stars.

  Riding the currents, driven by fear, whipped by a wild necessity to be clothed again in flesh, he rushed toward the Perseus Arm. And as he rushed, he called.

  "Vreya! Vreya!"

  For what seemed an eternity she did not answer, and then he heard her, far away and petulant.

  "What is it, Chane? 1 thought you'd left me."

  "Vreya, listen. You must come back ..."

  "No. Too much to see ... No end, Chane, never an end, isn't it wonderful? Never ..." Now he knew what he had to say.

  "But there will be an end, Vreya. Very Soon."

  "How? What?"

  "Helmer. He will destroy the Free-Faring if we don't go back and stop him. It will be gone forever, and we with it. Hurry, Vreya!"

  She said crossly, "What about your friends?"

  "There aren't enough of them. They need us, all of us ... Raul, and Sattargh, and Ashton too. Call them, Vreya. Search for them. Tell them to come back, tell them to hurry, before Helmer destroys them."

  Some of his panic had communicated itself to her. He could feel it. "Yes, he would do that. He said he would. Destroy the Free-Faring, destroy our bodies ... and we would die. He mustn't do that. ..."

  "Then hurry!"

  "Where are you going, Chane?"

  "Back," he said. "Back to help them fight."

  And he fled, a bodiless terror, back across the singing stars to Arkuu and a hollow mountain, where a man named Morgan Chane lay dead, or sleeping....

  XVI

  Chane woke to a sound of thunder. It echoed away and then came again. It did not sound exactly like thunder, though. He tried to open his eyes to see what it was.

  His eyes?

  Yes. He had eyes, human eyes that flinched from the glare of the sun. He had human flesh again, and bones that ached from being too long in one position, sprawled heavily on the unyielding grid.

  He was back.

  He lay still for a moment, listening to his own breathing, the sound of the blood moving in his veins. Just to be sure, he clenched his hands, gripping his humanness, so thankful that he could feel it as a kind of joyous pain. Then he got his eyelids open and stared dazedly upward.

  He saw the circle of yellow daylight at the top of the shaft, the sun-blaze that made him blink and squint. Daylight? Then time had passed ...

  A small, flying object came slanting down into the shaft from above. He raised himself a little to see, and as he did so, the object hit the upper wall of the shaft and exploded. The sound of the explosion reverberated horribly in the great well. This was the thunder he had heard, and now that he was awake it threatened to crack his eardrums. Small bits of metal whizzed close by him.

  "Chane!"

  It was the voice of John Dilullo. It sounded frantic, and a long way off.

  "Chane—get up!"

  Chane turned his head drunkenly and saw Dilullo. He was not a long way off at all. He was standing right at the edge of the grid, on the metal walkway over the abyss.

  Chane said, quite sensibly he thought, "You shouldn't stand there, John. You'll get hit."

  Dilullo leaned toward him, dangerously close. "Get off that grid! You hear me, Chane? Get off the grid." He shook his head impatiently and swore, and shouted louder. "McGoun says if you stay there much longer the Free-Faring force will start the cycle all over again. Get up. Come here to me."

  Chane looked around. Vreya still lay there unmov-ing. So did Ashton and Raul and Sattargh. She had not yet been able to find them, then, to coax them back ...

  "You want to go out there again, Chane? Has it got you, too—like these others you were so busy sneering at?"

  "No," said Chane. "Oh, hell, no! Not again."

  He got onto his hands and knees and began moving. Presently he was on his feet, and then he was on the walkway with Dilullo's arm holding him as he staggered.

  Another crash of thunder went off overhead.

  "What... ?" mumbled Chane.

  "Helmer's three planes," said Dilullo. "They can't go right over the shaft but they're firing missiles into it from a little distance. Trying to destroy the Free-Faring—and us."

  Chane looked all around, and then up. He could not see even a mark on the shining metal walls up there.

  "No damage yet," said Dilullo, still supporting and guiding him as they went along the walkway. "We've taken shelter in the tunnel. But sooner or later, the missile fragments will hit those people on the grid."

  "She's bringing them," Chane said. "Vreya. At least, I think she is."

  They reached the mouth of the tunnel. Inside, McGoun and Garcia and the three other Mercs were sitting. Chane sat down and leaned his back against the wall, and they looked at him in a strange way, almost in awe.

  "What was it like?" asked Bollard.

  "Oh," said Chane. "You believe it now."

  "I guess I have to. What did it feel like."

  Chane shook his head. Hedidn'tanswerforamoment. Then he said, "When I was a little boy, my father used to tell me about heaven. I didn't like the sound of it. The beauty and the glory part of it were all right, but the rest of it, the not having any physical being and the sitting around doing nothing except to feel holy— that seemed awfully useless. It wouldn't be you. Not really."

  He paused, thensaid, "Outthere, it was something like that kind of heaven."

  He looked back at the distant grid, shimmering in the sunlight. None of the four figures on it had stirred.

  There was another burst of thunder high in the well, and a second one followed it almost instantly.

  "From the way those bursts come," said Bollard, "Helmer must be using all three of his planes."

  McGoun caught at that. "Then why don't we get out through the tunnel and get away while they're busy up there?"

  "Because," said Dilullo, "we haven't got what we came for. We haven't got Ashton."

  "But don't you realize," pleaded McGoun, "that Helmer will never let any of us get away from here alive?"

  "I realize it," said Dilullo. "But we don't go yet."

  "Then I'll go by myself," raged McGoun. "The hell with Ashton. I'm going!"

  "Go right ahead," said Dilullo. "I'd be glad to be rid of
your babblings. But I have to warn you that Helmer has undoubtedly left a couple of men to blast anybody who comes out of the tunnel."

  McGoun sat down again, and was silent.

  "I think somebody out on that thing stirred a little," said Bollard, staring out at the grid.

  "Come on, then," said Dilullo. "Not you, Chane— stay here and get your strength back. I think you'll be needing it pretty soon."

  Dilullo, Bollard, and Garcia ran out along the walkway. Chane looked after them. He did not feel particularly weak. But his brain seemed a little numb, and would not quite clear.

  Dilullo and the other two stood just outside the grid now, making beckoning motions. They blocked vision. It was not until they turned around, supporting two people, that Chane could see who had awakened.

  Raul and Ashton.

  Both men seemed so weak and nerveless that Dilullo and the others had to half carry them along the walkway and the ledge and into the tunnel. There they set them down, exhausted by even that small effort.

  Ash ton stared around him in a dazed, unseeing fashion. He seemed perplexed by the unfamiliar faces.

  "Who... ?" he started to say, and stopped and shook his head, and began again. "Someone told me ... if I didn't come back, the Free-Faring would be destroyed. Who... ?"

  He ran out of breath again. Chane looked at him and thought that Bollard had been right, and this Randall Ashton they had come so far to find was not worth the effort. He looked a bit like his brother, only darker, younger, more handsome. But the good looks were spoiled by a petulant weakness in his expression.

  Just now the weakness was physical as well. He was thin and wasted as though by a long illness. Chane thought that if this was what the delights of the Free-Faring made of a man, the thing was no damned good.

  Raul spoke now, for the first time. "Vreya?" He too was looking at these strangers, puzzled, confused. Once, Chane could see, he had been as fine a physical specimen as Helmer, but now his tall frame had fallen away to bone and ropy muscle, and his great blond head drooped as though his neck no longer had the strength to support it. "Vreya," he said again. "Vreya!"