The Witches of Karres

by James H. Schmiz

  “You said Cheel told you the Nuris were putting up new space barriers between the dead suns all around Manaret—”

  The captain nodded. “So he did.”

  “Never heard of but one place where you’d see dead suns all around,” Goth said. “And that’s in the Chaladoor — the Tark Nembi Cluster. There’re people who call it the Dead Suns Cluster. It’s another spot everyone keeps away from because when you don’t, you don’t come back. So the Worm World could have been sitting inside it all the time… And if it’s there,” Goth concluded, “we ought to be able to find Karres about one jump from Tark Nembi right now.”

  * * *

  The captain grunted. “I bet you’re right — and that could be our solution! If we get back and can make a break for the Cluster on the Sheewash Drive without being stopped by the vatch, we’ll give it a try!”

  “Right,” said Goth. “Looks like the vatch will have to move first, though.”

  “So it does,” agreed the captain. “Well—” He sighed. “You say you set up camp with Vezzarn and Hulik around here?”

  Goth came to her feet. “Just a bit behind the rise,” she said. “Quarter-mile. Let’s go get them — easier than moving the ship.”

  Halfway up the slope they turned aside to pick up some items she’d dropped when she caught sight of the captain — a sturdy handmade bow and a long quiver of tree bark out of which protruded the feathered shafts of arrows. Beside these articles lay a pair of freshly killed furry white-and-brown animals tied together by their hind legs. The captain lifted them while Goth slung bow and quiver over her shoulders. “Dinner, eh?” he said. “Didn’t take you long to get set up for the pioneering life!”

  “Forgot to tell you about that,” said Goth. “Can’t quite figure it, but while you were having a talk with the Cheel-thing we’ve been here eight days…”

  The captain couldn’t quite figure it either. Goth filled him in as they went on towards the camp. Neither Hulik do Eldel nor Vezzarn remembered anything between the crash take-off from the planet of the red sun and their awakening in a chill, misty dawn on Karres. Goth had come awake first, by half an hour or so, had known immediately on what world she was, and deduced the rest when the Talsoe Twins lifted above the mountains and the mists thinned enough to show her a small moon still floating in the northern sky. She hadn’t informed her companions of their whereabouts in space and time — both were upset enough as it was for a while. Hulik’s impulse, when she awoke and discovered Vezzarn stretched out unconscious beside her, was to blast him for a filthy traitor as he lay there. “Couldn’t find her gun though — or his — till she’d cooled down again,” Goth said with a grin. “Then Vezzarn came to — and he bawled like a baby for an hour.”

  “What about?”

  “Because you waited to let him get aboard before you took off. So then he was going to shoot himself rather than face you when you got back. Couldn’t find his gun either, though.”

  “Looks like you’ve had your hands full with the two!”

  “Oh, they settled down pretty quick. Hulik’s even speaking to Vezzarn again. She’s not the worst, that Hulik.”

  “No, she isn’t,” agreed the captain, remembering the bad moments on the ledge of the cliff. “What do they make of the situation?”

  Both seemed to have decided they’d gotten themselves involved in some very heavy witch business and the less they heard about it, the better, Goth said. They hadn’t asked questions. She’d told them Captain Aron would be rejoining them, but she didn’t know when, and they’d better settle down here for a perhaps lengthy stay.

  She glanced up at him. “Didn’t know if you’d show up, really! Specially when it got to be four, five days. Figured it must be the vatch, of course… and you never can tell with vatches!”

  But that was a private distress. Outwardly they’d had no problems. Vezzarn, doing what he could to make up for an enormity committed in panic, had a shipshape little camp set up for them on the banks of a creek before evening of the first day, kept it tidy and improved on it daily thereafter, fashioned Goth’s hunting gear for her though not without misgivings, tended to the cooking, and was dissuaded with difficulty from charging forth, waving his blaster, whenever sizable specimens of Karres fauna came close enough to be regarded by him as a potential menace to the ladies. Hulik stayed tightened up for some twenty-four hours, keeping a nervous eye on the mountain horizons as if momentarily expecting vast, nameless menaces to begin manifesting there. But on the second day, the autumn warmth of the Talsoe suns seemed to soak what was left of those tensions out of her, and she’d been reasonably relaxed and at ease since.

  “Any idea, by the way,” asked the captain, “what we ran into on that world? It does look as if something besides the robot was deliberately out to get us — and nearly made it finally.”

  Goth nodded. “Guess something was, Captain! From what Vezzarn and Hulik say, it sounds like you got a bunch of planetaries stirred up when you landed. And some of them can get mighty mean.”

  It appeared planetaries were a type of klatha entity native to this universe and bound to the worlds of their origin. They varied widely in every way. Most worlds had some, Goth thought. Karres definitely did; but they were mild, retiring beings who rarely gave indications of their presence. Sometimes they’d been helpful. The world of the red sun evidently harbored a high-powered and aggressive breed which did not tolerate trespassers on what it considered its exclusive domain.

  The arrival at camp was made briefly embarrassing by Vezzarn who began weeping at sight of the captain, then knelt and tried to kiss his hand. Not until the captain announced formally that everybody had forgiven him, this time, would Vezzarn get to his feet again.

  “I’m a rat, sir!” he told the captain earnestly then. “But I’m a grateful rat. You’ll see…”

  They left the camp standing as it was, returned to the Venture together. Goth and Vezzarn went off to see what could be done about tidying up the trail of destruction left by the Sheem robot, Hulik following them. The captain closed the lock and settled down at the control desk for a routine engine check.

  It turned out to be non-routine. There was no indication of malfunction of any kind, except for one thing. The engine systems were not delivering power to any of the drives.

  He chewed his lip. Vatch, he thought. It had to be that. Thrust was being developed — smooth, even, heavy thrust. By all physical laws, there was nowhere for it to go except into one of the drives. But it wasn’t reaching them.

  He shut the engines down again, reopened the lock. The vatch had made sure they’d stay here until it came for them. There was nothing wrong with the ship — they were merely being prevented from leaving with it. He decided it didn’t matter too much. In this time, there was no place they’d want to go in the Venture anyway.

  When he looked around, Hulik do Eldel stood in the entry to the control room, watching him.

  “Come in and sit down,” the captain said. “I’m afraid I never really got around to thanking you for helping out with the Agandar!”

  She smiled and came in. After the eight days she’d spent camping out on Karres, Hulik looked perhaps better than she ever had. And she’d looked extremely good in a delicate-featured, elegant way since the first time the captain had seen her. For a moment it became a bit difficult to believe those warm, dark eyes had been sighting down the gun which blasted death at last into the legendary Agandar.

  “I was helping myself out, too, you know!” she remarked. She added, “I heard the engines just now and wondered whether we were leaving.”

  “No, probably not for a while,” the captain said. He hesitated. “The fact is I don’t know when we’ll be leaving or where we’ll go when we do. We’re still in something of a jam, you see. I can’t tell you what it’s about but I hope things will work out all right. And I’m sorry you’re in it with us, but there’s nothing I can do about that.”

  Hulik was silent a moment. “Did you know I’m an
Imperial agent?” she asked.

  “Yango mentioned it.”

  “Well, he told the truth for once. I signed up for passage on the Chaladoor run in order to steal the secret drive you were supposed to have on this ship.”

  “Hmm, yes!” nodded the captain. “I gathered that… It isn’t something that would be of any use to you or the people you work for.”

  “I,” Hulik said, “had gathered that some two ship-days before the trouble with Yango began. At any rate, if I’m in a jam with you and our little witch, it’s because I’ve worked myself into that position. I suspect I can’t be of much further assistance in getting us out of it. If I can, let me know. Otherwise I’ll simply try to keep out of the way. I’m considered a capable person, but Karres matters have turned out to be above my head.”

  The captain didn’t tell her he’d entertained similar feelings off and on. He hoped that when this was over the do Eldel would be among the survivors, if any. But her future looked at least as uncertain as Goth’s and his own.

  That evening they had their supper outside the ship, camp-style, which was Hulik’s suggestion. She’d grown fond of this world, she said, felt more comfortable and at home here after a week than she could remember feeling anywhere else. Goth looked pleased in a mildly proprietary way; and Karres came through with a magnificently blazing sunset above the western ranges as the Talsoe Twins sank from sight. The wind died gradually and they sat around a while, talking about inconsequential things carefully remote from the present and themselves. The sky was almost cloudless now. The captain watched a dainty, clean-etched little moon appear, and tried again to think of something he might do besides waiting for the vatch to show its hand. The disconcerting fact still seemed to be, however, that they had to wait for the vatch to act. Goth might have shifted them and the Venture light-years away from here; but literally and figuratively that could get them nowhere that counted… He realized suddenly he’d just heard Goth suggest they all bunk out beside the ship for the night.

  He gave her a quick look. The troops obviously liked the idea at once; after everything that had happened, their cabins in the Venture’s passenger compartment might look somewhat lonely and isolated to be passing a sleep period in. But to detach themselves from the ship overnight didn’t seem a good notion. Depending on the vatch’s whims, they could awaken to find it permanently gone.

  Goth acknowledged his look with no more than a flicker of her lashes, but it was an acknowledgment. So she had something in mind besides reassuring their companions… but what?

  Then he felt his hackles lifting and knew the vatch had returned.

  It wasn’t close by; he could barely retain a sense of its presence. But it remained around. Goth had grown aware of it before he did — that much was clear. He still didn’t see what it had to do with moving out of the ship for the night.

  He waited while the others cleared away supper dishes and utensils, began hauling out bedding, and went back for more. The vatch came closer, lingered, drew back -

  There was a sense of a sudden further darkening of the evening air. Thunder pealed, far overhead. As the captain looked up, startled, into the sky, rain crashed down, on and about him, with the abruptness of an upended gigantic bucket of water.

  He scrambled around, hauling up the drenched bedding, swearing incoherently. It was an impossible downpour. Water spattered up from the rocks, doused him with dirt from instantly formed puddles and hurrying rivulets. Thunder cracked and snarled, lightning flickered, eerily festooning the thick, dark, churning mass of storm clouds which now almost filled what had been a serene, clear sky above the Venture less than a minute before. Vezzarn came sliding down the ramp to help him. Vatch-laughter rolled through the thunder, howling in delight as they slipped and fell in the mud, struggled back up with the sodden bedding in their arms, shoved it at last into the lock, scrambled in and through themselves. The lock slammed shut and the rain drummed its mindless fury on the Venture’s unheeding back.

  Chapter ELEVEN

  “Well, we’ve learned one thing,” the captain remarked grumpily. “The vatch evidently prefers us to stay in the ship…”

  Goth said that wasn’t all. “Never knew there were that many cuss words!”

  He grunted. He was dry again but still more than a little fed up with the unmannerly ways of vatches. “You just forget what you heard!” he said. He looked at the desk chronometer. It was over an hour since the downpour outside had begun, and it was still going on, not with its original violence but as a steady, heavy rain. The ship’s audio pickups registered intermittent rumbles of thunder; and the screens showed the Venture’s immediate vicinity transformed to a shallow lake. The captain’s nostrils wrinkled briefly as if trying to catch an elusive scent.

  “You’re sure you can’t get even a trace of the thing?” he asked.

  Goth shook her head. “Far as I can make out, it’s been gone pretty near an hour. Think you’re relling something now?”

  The captain hesitated. “No,” he said at last. “Not really. I just keep having a feeling — Look, witch, it’s getting late! Better run and get your sleep so you’ll stay fresh. I’ll sit up for another smoke. If that self-inflated cosmic clown does show up again, I’ll let you know.”

  “Self-inflated cosmic… pretty good!” Goth said admiringly, and slipped off to her cabin. The captain took out a cigarette and lit it, scowling absently at the screens. The door between the control room and the rest of the section was closed — Hulik and Vezzarn had chosen to bunk up front on the floor tonight. What with the vatch’s startling thunderstorm trick coming on top of everything else they’d experienced lately, he hadn’t felt like suggesting they’d be more comfortable in their staterooms. On the other hand, the night still might provide events it would be better they didn’t witness, if it could be avoided. He’d brought the strongbox enclosing the Manaret synergizer out of the vault with the ship’s crane and set it down against the wall in the control room — an act which probably had done nothing to help Vezzarn’s peace of mind.

  There was something vatchy around. That was the word for it. Not the vatch but something that seemed to go with the vatch. He wasn’t relling it. Goth figured his contacts with the vatch might have begun to develop some other perception. At any rate, he was receiving impressions of another kind here; and the impressions had kept getting more definite. The best description he could have given of them now would have been to say he was aware of a speck of blackness which seemed to be in a constant blur of internal motion.

  The muted growl of thunder came through the pickups again, and the captain reached over and shut them off, then extended the screens’ horizontal focus outward by twenty miles. Except for fleecy wisps to the east, the skies of Karres were clear all about tonight — once one had moved five or six miles away from the Venture. The inexhaustible bank of rain clouds the vatch had produced for them stayed centered directly overhead…

  The vatchy speck of blackness had begun to seem connected with that. The captain laid the cigarette aside, shifted the overhead screen to a point a little above the cloud level… Around here?

  And there it was, he thought. Something he was neither seeing — it couldn’t be seen — nor imagining, because it was there and quite real. It came closest to being a visual impression of a patch of blackness, irregular in outline and inwardly a swirling rush of multitudinous motion.

  Vatch stuff, left planted in the Karres sky after the vatch itself had gone. Not enough of it to excite the relling sensation. And what it was doing up there, of course, was to keep the rain clouds massed above the drenched Venture… The captain found himself reaching towards it.

  That again seemed the only description for a basically indescribable action. It was a reaching-towards in which nothing moved. He stopped short of touching it. A sense of furious heat came from the swirling blackness. Power, he thought. Vatch power; plenty of it. Living klatha…

  He put pressure against the side of the living klatha. Move, he
thought.

  It began to move sideways, gliding ahead of the pressure. The pressure kept up with it -

  The captain licked his lips, turned the horizontal screens back to close focus around the ship, picked up the cigarette and settled back in the chair, watching the steady, dark, downward rush of rain about them in the screens. The vatch device continued moving southwards. Now and then the captain glanced at the chronometer. After some nine minutes the rain suddenly lessened. Then it stopped. The night was clear and cloudless above the ship. But a quarter-mile away to the south, rain still poured on the slopes.

  He put out the cigarette and eased off the pressure on the vatch device. Stop there, he thought… While it was drifting away from the ship he’d become aware of a second one around. There would be, of course. A much smaller one… it would be that, too, for the comparatively minor purpose it was serving -

  It took a couple of minutes to get it pinpointed — down in the Venture’s engine room, a speck of unseeable blackness swirling silently and energetically above the thrust generators, ready to make sure that the Venture didn’t go anywhere at present.

  * * *

  A rock hung suspended in the clear night air of Karres, spinning and wobbling slowly like a top running down. It was a sizable rock — the Venture could have been fitted comfortably into the hole it had left in the planet’s surface when it soared up from it a minute or two before. And it was a sizable distance above that surface. About a mile and a half, the captain calculated, watching it in the screen.

  He let it turn end for end twice, bob up and down a little, then leap up another instant half-mile.

  There was a soft hiss of surprise from behind his shoulder.

  “What you doing?” Goth whispered.

  “Using some loose vatch energy I found hanging around,” the captain said negligently. “The, vatch left it here to keep us pinned under that rainstorm…” He added, “Don’t know how I’m doing it, but it works just fine! Like the rock to try anything in particular?”