Doomstar

by Edmond Hamilton

  Then he breathed.

  The breathing hurt. He strangled and coughed, and that hurt even more. He opened his eyes. Through a wet blur he saw that he was up to his chin in water, with nothing under him or around him but more water, and panic came clawing at him because when he tried to put out his arms and swim the pain doubled him up and his head went under again.

  Something, somebody, held him. Somebody dragged his head up into the air.

  "John-nee, stay still. Not fight…"

  Somebody. Wet fur, a powerful arm around him.

  "Khitu…"

  "Khitu dead. It be Chai."

  Strange to hear a furry throat sob like a woman's, to know that tears were running salt into all that fresh wetness that was trying to drown them both. Strange to be so fog-brained that only the pain in his side was real.

  "Here. Hold."

  "I can't…"

  Chai told him fiercely, "Hold!" And he held, with his left hand, to some buoyant scrap of wreckage she thrust at him. He could hear her sigh, as though relieved of a too-heavy burden, and the grip of her arm on him slackened. For a time they hung there together, panting, and Kettrick's head cleared a bit. He began to understand that the launch had for some reason exploded and dumped them both into the lake, that Khitu was dead — dead? So quickly, between breaths? Dead. And Chai had kept him from being dead too.

  "You hurt?" he asked her.

  "Only little."

  He could feel her treading water strongly, and he thought she was telling the truth. She had been in the stern, farthest from the blast. Poor Khitu would have been right on top of it.

  Poor Khitu. Poor Chai. She was still sobbing, though more quietly now. He laid his head against her shoulder, the only gesture he could make, and said, "I'm sorry."

  He felt her shiver. Then she said, "What we do now, John-nee?"

  "Can you see the shore?"

  She let go the bit of wreckage and raised herself high in the water, dropping back again with a splash.

  "I see."

  She laid hold of the wreckage and began to swim slowly, strongly, pushing it and Kettrick ahead of her.

  "Give me a minute," he said, "and I can help."

  "Bad?"

  He tried to figure just how bad it was. "Broke some ribs, I think." Everything else seemed to work all right, and if he did not breathe too deeply or thrash about too wildly the pain was bearable. He began to kick, helping Chai as much as he could.

  They churned slowly through the water, while the moons dropped one by one out of the sky and it grew darker.

  The lake was illimitable, the shore an illusion. Kettrick became very tired and discouraged. But every so often Chai would lift herself up seal-like and tell him that she saw the shore and that the lights were closer, and then her big powerful body would be close beside him again, urging its strength into him, and he would continue to kick and gurgle along, ashamed to think that his human manhood was endowed with less than her courage.

  He realized that after the explosion she must have had to search for him, perhaps even dive for him, stunned as she must have been.

  "I'm grateful, Chai. I won't forget."

  She swam in silence for a time, and then she asked him, "What made boat kill Khitu? He go in it many times…"

  Kettrick shook his head, "I don't know. An accident."

  An accident.

  For the first time his brain came fully out of shock and began to function.

  An accident?

  Perhaps. Certainly accidents did happen, volatile fuels did explode. People had died in the lake before this and would again.

  But suppose it wasn't an accident.

  Suppose he had been too sure of Seri, too sure of himself. Suppose he had forced on Seri a set of problems so great that Seri had felt there was only one way to solve them.

  Erase Kettrick, and the problems vanish as though they had never been. Erase Khitu and Chai, and Kettrick vanishes as though he had never returned to Ree Darva, leaving only Seri and Larith to remember in discreet silence.

  And Sekma. But of course Seri didn't know that.

  Khitu and Chai, the simple creatures who loved Johnny Kettrick and who could not be trusted to keep their mouths shut about his having come to Seri's house. Put them and Kettrick literally into the same boat, and arrange to have that boat destroyed…

  Kettrick groaned, stabbed by a pain much sharper than the one in his ribs. If that were true, he himself would be responsible for the death of Khitu.

  "John-nee?"

  He did not dare tell Chai what he was thinking.

  And anyway, no, he thought. Wait now. Seri had said, "Suppose I say no?" And he had answered, "I'll make other arrangements."

  He hadn't backed Seri into a corner. He hadn't faced him with anything worse than a decision. All he had to do was say no.

  So why kill?

  Unless there was some other reason.

  Larith? Was Seri afraid she would leave him and go back to her old love?

  Maybe. They had both wanted him to go away and he had refused. Perhaps that strange mask Larith had worn had been designed to hide from Seri how she still felt. Perhaps Seri had seen that, and decided to remove the threat for good and all.

  He would like to think that Larith still loved him that much.

  Maybe, though, it wasn't Larith at all. He remembered Seri's rage at the first sight of him. "You'll ruin me," he had said. Maybe he was so afraid for his position and profits that he felt Kettrick would be safer at the bottom of the lake than anywhere in the Hyades.

  Whatever the reason, he had stepped into something, all brash and cocksure, and now his brilliant planning had literally blown up in his face.

  He began to get angry. It was the first time in his life that anyone had tried to murder him, and that was enough to make him angry, but the business of Khitu and Chai really made him see red. They had nothing to do with any of it. They had served Seri faithfully for nearly eight years. Yet he could do this to them, as casually as he would swat a couple of flies.

  It was very strange. He did not remember Seri as this kind of a man. If he had, he would never have been his partner. It must be that he had simply not known Seri Otku as well as he thought he did.

  Or else Seri Otku had changed.

  "Look," said Chai.

  There were lights in front of him. He could see the more solid blackness of the shore, the outlines of buildings, the outward-jutting shape of a pier marked at its end with warning lights. A breeze began to move from off the land, brushing Kettrick's face, and in the east there was an imperceptible lessening of the darkness.

  Chai swam more strongly, steering them toward the pier. "Get help, John-nee."

  "No."

  He felt her check and stare at him. He was exhausted. His head felt as dry and empty as an old jack o'lantern, and he wanted nothing more than to be hauled up and taken away somewhere to be tended and comforted of his hurts. If it had not been for his anger against Seri he might have quit and let that happen, because at the moment he could not have cared less about the Doomstar or the White Sun or any part of the Hyades. He didn't care about deportation or a term on Narkad. He did not even care about Larith. Love, greed, ambition, and duty had all soaked away out of hirn into the lake.

  But he was mad, and being mad made him stubborn, and vengeful, and mean. He was determined to see Seri in hell, and in order to do that he had to be both alive and free.

  He explained to Chai that he had broken a human law and that if men saw him they would take him and put him in a cage. She understood that well enough.

  "Where, then?"

  He pushed on toward the pier. "Go underneath. Quick. The day is chasing us."

  They swam in under the pier, into black shadow that began to lighten even as they came there. They moved carefully among the steel pilings, and the husk of Kettrick's mind continued to spin off ideas.

  Most of them were beyond him right now. He would consider them later. Only one stood out cle
arly in the thickening haze that was rilling up the emptiness inside his head.

  For some reason, Seri wanted him dead. So the smart thing to do was to be dead. Then he could do what he liked about Seri, and Seri would all the time believe that he was safely at the bottom of the lake.

  The piece of wreckage in his hands was important. He stared at it as he paddled along, trying to think why. The reason refused to come clear, but instinct made him drag the fragment with them out of the water when they reached the land end of the pier, a quiet cave only just high enough to crawl in, floored with dry sand and sibilant with the rubbing of the lake against the piling.

  He made Chai understand that they would hide there until dark. She accepted that with animal patience, shaking the water from her fur, and made a kind of burrow in the sand, taking Kettrick into it with her and holding him against the clammy dampness of her body.

  He was cold and miserable. And he began to tnink that he had been a fool. Why would Seri want to kill him? "I won't see you again, Johnny," Larith had said. "Goodbye." And she was gone. And what threat could he be to Seri if he went to the White Sun in somebody else's ship? Even if he got caught, it would be obvious that Seri had had nothing to do with him.

  Shock made him imagine things. Of course it was an accident. Just a clean, simple accident. He felt greatly relieved. He thought of Seri's house, of food and liquor and a warm bed. There was no reason at all to huddle here in this hole. He would send Chai to get Seri…

  He spat sand out of his mouth and started to speak, but it was already too late. The heavy mist rolled over him and blotted out the words.

  For a long while it was dark and cold in the mist. There was no shape to anything, no time, no place, nothing. He hung in the deep heart of nothing, buoyed by the packed nothingness beneath him, pressed by the weight of it above, in such delicate balance that he could not rise nor sink, nor even turn.

  Then it began gently to grow warmer.

  The warmth felt good. He stirred on his bed of nothingness, desiring to move toward the warmth, and the nothingness split apart. He could see it tearing, though no sound came to his ears. The riven edges curled away as clouds curl on the wind, and then he knew why it had grown so warm.

  A huge sun burned in the sky, burning away the nothingness with its kindly fires. He felt very happy and pleased with the sun. It was a tawny orange like the sun of Tananaru, and he loved it. He wanted to be closer to it. He began to walk. There was a landscape around him now but it was quite vague, as though none of the detail had been filled in yet. He walked happily toward the big orange sun on the horizon.

  He had no idea how far he had come when he realized that there was something wrong with the light.

  He paused, staring at the sun. The tawny orange had turned murky and evil, staining the landscape with ugly colors. He thought that the sun writhed and pulsed, and breathed out evil. And now its poisoned light began to sting him, and he was naked, without shelter, in a vast open place.

  He cried out in panic, "What is it?" And Sekma said casually, "Oh, that's the Doomstar."

  He was standing quite close to Kettrick, though Kettrick had not seen him before. He smiled and waved his hand at the sick sun. "Don't bother about it, Johnny. It's only a myth." He walked away, whistling.

  Kettrick ran after him. "It isn't a myth!" he cried. "Can't you feel the burning?"

  Sekma did not hear him. He continued to walk, whistling, and though Kettrick ran as hard as he could he could not catch up with him.

  He kept screaming, "It is not a myth! It's real."

  Nobody heard him. The sick light intensified and filled his throat like water. He ran and ran down the streets of a city, shouting. He knew that no one heard him because the people in the streets were already dead, and the Doomstar came down upon them like a flood.

  He woke to Chai's efforts to quiet him.

  Still webbed in the dream, he thought that the Doomstar was there, just beyond the end of the pier, and he started up in terror. Pain lanced through his side. Chai's big hands gentled him. The dream ebbed away. He clung to the animal warmth of Chai and trembled with relief. The Doomstar was only the sunset, lighting up the space beneath the pier.

  "Don't bother about it, Johnny. It's only a myth."

  Why would he dream that? Guilty conscience?

  No matter now. It was only a dream.

  The sun went down. It was night, and he was hungry. He put his hand on Chai's shoulder.

  "Let's go," he said, "and see what it's like to be dead."

  6

  They moved like ghosts. The darkness shrouded them. They kept to areas that had finished the day's business, where lights and people were few. By night, in the distinctive Darvan dress, Kettrick could pass for a native if the observer didn't come too close. And Chai's huge gray shadow towering beside him discouraged closeness. The semi-human Tchell were familiar enough, but their chief employment was as bodyguards, and no one cared very much to tangle with them.

  Chai asked where they were going.

  "To the house of a friend."

  "Seri?"

  "No. Not Seri."

  "Why? Seri friend."

  Kettrick said, "Yes…" He was over the shock now. He was light-headed with hunger and his untended injury, but he could think clearly and calmly. He was not at all sure that the explosion had been an attempt to kill him and the two Tchell. He did not want to believe it had been because he did not want to believe that his old friend and partner could so casually bend himself to murder. Also he had no evidence and no real motive to support the murder theory.

  On the other hand, it was not a situation you took chances with.

  "I told you I broke a law, Chai. If I go to Seri again, they will put him in a cage too."

  He heard her sigh in the darkness. "I go with you, John-nee. Seri no good without Khitu." They had been hired as a pair, and Kettrick could imagine that she would not want to go back alone. It was Tchell custom anyway to change huts when one died.

  Then she added, "No one to love but you."

  He was deeply touched. "I'll take you home, Chai. Back to your world."

  "No." She shook her round smooth head. "I go with you."

  "All right," he said. "You go with me." And muttered in his own tongue, "I could do worse."

  He was glad of her when they passed into the squalid alleys that fringed the Out-Quarter. He was in no shape to fight off even the casual riff-raff that slunk here, prowling for small change, a bottle, a pinch of narcotics. With Chai beside him he passed unmolested, into wider and better-lighted streets.

  And now he deliberately sought the crowds. In the Out-Quarter of Ree Darva one Earthman more or less was nothing to stare at, unless he happened to meet someone who knew him. There were people here from every world in the Hyades and a dozen or two outside of it, human and non-human, of every shape, size, and color, sporting every kind of costume along with the conventional Darvan dress. These were people who lived more or less permanently on Tananaru, connected with one or another kind of business, legal or illegal, and preferring the polyglot anonymity of the Quarter to the Darvan city.

  The mixture of building styles was as fantastic as the population. When they built, each group tended to build as far as it was practical in its own familiar fashion, and there were streets of towers, and domes, and truncated pyramids, circles, squares, pentagons, great ugly masses with no discernible shape to them at all, plastered or painted in every color the solar spectrum was capable of producing.

  Kettrick had always loved the Quarter. He knew it like the back of his hand. He led Chai through the thronging streets, past shops and marketplaces where the lights never went out, past the joy streets where every sin known to forty breeds of man was available and the sunlight never came in, past theaters and gambling halls and certain obscure buildings where no one was admitted except those of one particular race and only the members of those races knew what went on in them. Kettrick had let his imagination play with these bar
red places, picturing all sorts of exotic goings-on, knowing that actually most of them were full of middle-aged people drinking their tribal intoxicant and listening to the tribal screechings of some bard, or else were engaged in the perfectly innocent and wildly uninteresting rituals of their particular faiths.

  There were many eating places, all spilling their fruitful odors on the night. Chai stopped a couple of times. He knew she must be even more ravenous than he was, but he had no small money, and the last thing he wanted was trouble. He promised her food in just a little time, and she came willingly enough.

  There was a section where the buildings were chiefly conical monstrosities with outside stairways giving access to innumerable openings — something between a Babylonian ziggurat and a dove cote. They were as murmurous as dove cotes, with voices and laughter and jarring snatches of music, some in the native mode and some in the popular jingle jangle that came over the home entertainment circuits. The native mode was, to Kettrick's ear, quite hideous, and he preferred the jingle jangle because it didn't force you to listen to it.

  He found the particular building he was looking for and began to climb the steps, feeling very weak in the knees.

  Now that he was here, he was assailed by a thought that he had resolutely suppressed. Suppose Boker were gone…moved away, deported, in jail, dead, or in a ship somewhere on the other side of the Cluster. What was he going to do then? Turn himself in to Sekma and give up?

  The prospect made him feel physically sick. He kicked his way resolutely upward through an accumulation of trash, and small weird beasties that yipped and hissed and scuttled for doorways at the sight of Chai, and numbers of small blue-skinned children who howled and scuttled for doorways at the sight of Chai. Once he swayed and almost lost his footing, and Chai held him. He shut his jaw tight and went on, damning Boker for living up on the tenth level, as though damning him would ensure his presence there.

  On the tenth level he found the low round doorway that had been Boker's. It was open to the warm night. He had barely enough strength left for the ritual knock, and then he bent and went in, with Chai behind him doubled down on all fours to get under the lintel.