Hunters of the Red Moon

by Marion Zimmer Bradley,;Paul Edwin Zimmer

  "He found a couple of compatriots, and went off to join them."

  "I hope he stays with them," Rianna said emphatically. "I don't trust him. I've never liked any of the proto-feline species—they're stealthy sneaks, and you can't trust any of them, any more than you can a pet mouse-catcher!"

  "That's a very prejudiced attitude for a scientist," Dallith said in her grave way. "It's like blaming a proto-simian for being curious; it's a survival mechanism. Proto-felines evolved from hunting carnivores; stealth is a survival mechanism for them, too. Would your house-mouser be any good at hunting if he didn't catch his dinner quietly?"

  Rianna shrugged. "Anyway, our Mekhar is welcome to the society of his own kind—but no such luck, for here he comes."

  Cliff-Climber joined them, Aratak lumbering along behind, as they reached the building in which they had been lodged. The giant saurian said, "I have disposed of the stench which was inimical to your metabolism, Rianna." He managed to sound pitiful. She chuckled.

  "Thank you, Aratak. I'm aware of the sacrifices you philosophers have to make when traveling with us hypersensitive simian types!"

  Cliff-Climber was sleek and shining under his brick-red tunic, his lion-like mane of hair and beard combed into smooth and elaborate ringlets. Dane said, "I had expected you to remain with your kindred, Cliff."

  "My kindred?" Cliff-Climber made a hissing, spitting noise, halfway between derision and annoyance. "Common criminals! Common thieves who escaped from Mekharvin one pounce ahead of the Stalkers, fled here and sold themselves to keep from paying the price of their crimes! These are the folk who give the Mekhars a bad name all over the Galaxy!"

  "Of course," Rianna said with heavy irony, "slave stealers aren't in a class with common thieves."

  Cliff-Climber took her literally. "Of course not. I could not possibly join with such people. In the first place, I have given my word not to harm you, as my companions. In the second, honor will not permit me to associate with such beings. I prefer to keep my wrath and my killing for the Hunters."

  Dane asked—not with sarcasm, he was actually interested—"Does honor permit you to associate with proto-simians and slaves?"

  "Not usually," Cliff-Climber replied, as they passed into the building which was their temporary quarters, "but you are beings of proven bravery, and furthermore you are to be, it seems, my companions in the Hunt. So it is necessary that I cultivate a feeling of kindliness toward you, so that we may cooperate against our mutual foes."

  Dane murmured, "We must hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately."

  Cliff-Climber said, "Let us hope no such dishonorable fate awaits us."

  Aratak asked, "Did you manage to find out anything about exactly what fate does await us—and when?"

  "I did," Dallith said, and repeated what she had been told about the eclipses and that the Hunt would take place on this planet's satellite, the Red Moon. Cliff added, "We were brought here too late in the day to join the other Prey in the armory. But, I am told, tomorrow morning we will be taken there."

  They were interrupted by the robot, Server, returning through the long door at the end of the hall. His extensible arms—five of them, this time—held a variety of covered trays of food.

  "If you will arrange yourselves conveniently for your preferred style of dining," Server's mechanical voice informed them, "it will be our pleasure to serve you."

  The Mekhar brought a cushion from his couch, dropped to the floor; after a minute of thought Dane did likewise and the others, except Aratak, followed suit. The great saurian simply stretched out, half reclining.

  "It is good to dine in civilized surroundings again," he said.

  Server rolled noiselessly to Dallith. "Honored Prey, that it was you who requested food of vegetable origin. It is our pleasure to inform you that the proteins in this meal are entirely of leguminous origin, baked or boiled, and the fats are from the seeds of a tree." He extended a tray to Dallith.

  To Dane, and to Rianna, he gave slightly similar trays, whose contents, he informed them, were of mixed animal and vegetable origin. Dane, tasting it, decided it wasn't the steak dinner he had thought about, but it wasn't bad either. There was something like mushrooms, a salad of mixed greens, and a kind of meat loaf. There were also some mixed fruits, very sweet. Dallith had the same kind of fruits and salad but instead of meat loaf she had some kind of dark-red baked grains. The tray given to Cliff-Climber smelled strange and unpleasant, but the Mekhar made a soft purring growl of appreciation and began to tear at it with his claws. Aratak ate delicately, with the tips of his claws; his food looked and smelled almost as bad, to Dane, as the perfumed mud which was his delight, but Aratak positively glowed—blue around the gills, that same luminescence—and said to Server, "You have kept your promise to delight my palate as well as my metabolism. My deepest thanks. I have not been fed so well in a hundred light-years."

  Dane muttered, "The condemned man always gets a hearty meal."

  Cliff-Climber twitched his muzzle and murmured, "A hearty meal to one creature is garbage to his brother."

  Dane laughed, and at Rianna's inquiring glance said, "One man's meat is another man's poison. We were talking earlier of proverbs."

  Aratak asked Server, "Are you the same creature who came to serve us before?"

  "The question neither interests us nor has meaning."

  Dallith—Dane was seated on cushions between her and Rianna—murmured, "He always speaks of himself in the plural."

  "I noticed," Dane whispered. "Now, is he using the royal we, the editorial we, or the we of people with tapeworms?"

  Dallith giggled. "Could a robot have a tapeworm?"

  "Of course," Rianna chuckled, "a parasite that eats computer tapes."

  Aratak was cogitating, as Server rolled noiselessly away. "I must think about this. I asked him if he had Universal Sapience, and he did not, or could not, answer. There are many of these Server creatures, for I saw at least four in the confines of the park. Now the question before us at the moment is this." He paused as if he were addressing a seminar in philosophy. "Can a being with no individual sense of identity partake of Universal Sapience?"

  Dane was glad to have something to think about besides the impending Hunt. "Does sapience necessarily depend on a sense of identity?"

  "It seems to me it does," Aratak said. "For sapience evolves, it seems to me, when a creature begins to regard himself as individual rather than simply following the mass instincts of his species. When, in short, he leaves the general and begins to regard himself as being one of the particular."

  "I'm not sure it matters," said Rianna. "If Server is only one of a centralized intelligence, then wouldn't that centralized intelligence of which Server is part, partake of Universal Sapience? And if he can speak for all of them, or it, isn't any one of Server's parts, or bodies, a part of such sapience?"

  Aratak looked troubled. "I have always defined sapience as a sense of one's unique individuality. How do you define it, Rianna?"

  "The ability for time-binding," she replied promptly. "When any species reaches the point where it can pass along accumulated knowledge to its progeny, so that each generation does not recapitulate the whole race experience in itself, but can pass along history, I believe at that point a race is sapient"

  "Hmmm, possibly," murmured Aratak, picking his enormous teeth. "Cliff-Climber, how does your race define sapience?"

  The Mekhar did not hesitate. "A sense of honor—a code of ethics. We regard any race without such a code as animal, and any race which displays it as sapient." He bowed to them and said, "Naturally we so regard you all."

  Aratak said, "And you, Dallith? How does your race define sapience?"

  "Empathy, I think. I don't mean the developed psi talent, but the ability to think oneself into the other being's place. Maybe I simply mean imagination. No non-sapient animal has it, and every sapient species has it."

  "These are all very good answers," Aratak said. "Dane, we have not he
ard from you, and coming from a planet with only one known sapient species, has your race even evolved a concept of what constitutes sapience?"

  Dane said slowly, "It's a common enough point of philosophical speculation. We have two or three species—dolphins, great apes—who appear to have some, if not all, of the earmarks of sapience, and people have thought about it. Some people have suggested that the ability to create art, the aesthetic sense, is a mark of sapience." In his wildest dreams he had never thought he would sit around a dinner with two girls from alien stars, a lion-man and a lizard-man, discussing the possible sapience of a robot. Suddenly he felt ludicrously cheerful. "Probably the mark of sapience," he said, "is nothing more nor less than the ability to ask oneself what it is; in short, the ability to take part in philosophical discussions about sapience. That would cover everything." He raised his glass, full of some kind of faintly bitter and alcoholic drink.

  "I'll drink to that!"

  * * * *

  Once the sun had set the sky darkened quickly, and since there were no artificial lights inside the quarters, only the reddish moonlight, the five captives sought their beds. Dane could not sleep for some time. Once he went noiselessly to the door and tested it, simply to verify a theory he had. It was not locked. But where could they go? In any case, escape now would just mean the Hunters would hunt them down now, rather than later. And later, they would have weapons, or so Cliff-Climber had indicated with his talk of armories.

  Returning to his bed, he passed the two sleeping women. Rianna lay flung out on her back, naked and covered only with a thin blanket; Dane hurriedly turned away. Just like all the rest of the proto-simians. I've got other things on my mind, right now, though.

  Dallith slept quietly, her face half hidden in her long streaming hair, and Dane paused beside her, looking down in an agony of love and regret.

  I saved your life, Dallith—but only to bring you here. Rianna was right all along. He turned hastily away and stumbled toward his own bed. But it was a long time before he slept.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next morning, after a meal very like—in quantity—the evening meal, but entirely different in flavors and textures, the five captives were led through the great park, or preserve, by the mechanical Server, at last reaching a great windowless building. It was constructed of the same terra-cotta colored brick as everything else in this part of the planet.

  "This is the Armory," Server told them, ushering them over the threshold. "Here you may practice, every day, with the weapons of your personal choice."

  The idea brought Dane up short. Weapons. Armory. He realized that despite his brave words last night, he had been thinking more or less in terms of big game, or safari hunting back on Earth, where the game had no defense except to run and hide, or to charge with such natural weapons as claws, teeth or tusks, or sheer size and weight might give him. While the hunters, on the other hand, might be equipped with the most modern and dangerous weapons—guns, darts, special windowed shooting wagons—that science could provide. When he had spoken about a genuine risk for the Hunters, here, he had been thinking in terms of Earth's own game laws, aimed more at limiting the take, and preserving the breeding powers of the game, rather than giving them a better chance for life. Such things as the laws against shooting underage or breeding females; laws against jacklighting deer, or using explosive bullets against big game.

  But what he had said just might be literally true; in which case the Hunt laws were more analogous to the formalized, quasi-religious sport of the bullfight; a pageant of death, involving a serious combat, a duello of death....

  He followed Server into the great building.

  Inside, it was evenly lighted, padded underfoot, and divided into huge areas. It reminded Dane, very faintly, of a big gymnasium or practice field on Earth. Four or five Olympic teams could have worked out in it without ever coming close enough to study one another's styles.

  And all along the walls, lining them, up and down, for what seemed like acres and acres of space, were weapons.

  Weapons. Dane had never seen so many weapons.

  There were swords of every make and kind he had ever envisioned, from great two-handed Crusader and Viking swords to short slim rapiers to curved Persian-style sabers. Some were so tiny and slim that they would not have burdened a four-year-old child, and he found himself speculating curiously about the race which could grasp and hold their tiny hilts. Others, on the other hand, were so huge that he doubted if Aratak could have lifted them with both paws.

  With the swords there were daggers, and knives, again of every conceivable shape, form, or material. There were huge spears and smaller narrow ones. There were shields, great square or round or triangular ones, small light round ones of leather and wicker, oddly-shaped ones evidently meant for no human anatomy since they had at least three handles and could not conveniently be lifted with fewer hands. There were maces, and clubs. There were weapons Dane had never seen before and did not know how to describe.

  Aratak asked Server, "What are the rules of the Hunt about these weapons?"

  "You may choose what weapons you like, and practice with them from now until the day of the Hunt," Server said. "Then you may take with you whatever weapons you can carry."

  Dallith's hand slid into Dane's. She asked the question in his thoughts.

  "What sort of weapons do the Hunters carry?"

  Server's voice was expressionless, as always. "Some carry one weapon, some another. Each Hunter has his favorite."

  Rianna said, "Do they carry any other weapons? Nerve-guns, for instance, or explosive-propulsion weapons?"

  "They do not," Server said. "The rules of the Hunt, which are said to be older than their very race itself, prohibit the Hunter from carrying any weapon denied to the Sacred Prey themselves."

  That, thought Dane, was a great relief. "Then you mean no weapons will be used against us except those which are displayed here?"

  "None whatsoever. The Armory contains a full assortment of every permitted weapon."

  He rolled away toward another group of people in terra-cotta tunics who were working out at the far end of the Armory. Dane thought he recognized a couple of Mekhars among them; he wondered if they were the same with whom Cliff-Climber had arrogantly declined to associate, the day before. They seemed to be working out with something that looked, at this distance, like kendo sticks or short, blunt quarterstaffs.

  He went toward the walls of the Armory, looking closely at the array of weapons displayed there. A weapons collector would go mad in here, he thought. To say nothing of the curator of an arms museum!

  "I wonder if all these weapons were made by the Hunters for their Prey," Rianna said at his elbow, "or whether they were collected from all corners of the Galaxy?"

  "The question had crossed my mind also," Aratak rumbled, "but I do not suppose we will ever know."

  Dane smiled grimly. "As it happens, I think I can answer it," he said, staring with close attention at one long curved sword on the wall, in a polished black lacquer wooden sheath. "It's likely that some, at least, have been collected or kept in honor of some unusually dangerous or daring Prey." He reached up and took down the sheath.

  "Look," he said. "This particular sword, for instance."

  "It's not unique," Rianna said. "I can name four planets where this type of sword is used—the same general type, that is; I'm not a weapons specialist."

  "But on this, I am," Dane said, sliding the blade from its scabbard with what seemed exaggerated care, and holding it at arm's length. He looked along the bright, highly polished blade. "Note that the curve runs all along the length of the sword—in fact, it's bow-shaped. That may be common enough all over the Galaxy—it probably is, it's an efficient enough design. Curved swords are common even on my planet. But this particular blade—well, look. It's made of two kinds of metal; the core of soft iron which will bend without breaking; the outside of tempered steel. Do you see that wavy line?" Carefully, he pointed to where
the metal changed color. "That's where the steel was specially hardened, so it would take a razor edge—although, to be exact, the usual razor is dull by comparison. I've seen an expert cut a silk kimono off a human body, without harming the wearer. Notice the mirror finish—how highly polished it is. And of course, every culture decorates and finishes off their swords in some characteristic way, and this one is unmistakable. Look at the hilt; the grip of sharkskin, wrapped with silk cord in that particular pattern. This sword was made on Earth," he concluded. "It can't be coincidence. But if you want absolute proof—" Carefully he slid a tiny wooden peg out of the handle, and with a few deft movements he removed the grip entirely and stood examining the exposed tang. He turned the blade so they could see the markings. "This is a Japanese samurai sword, made by Mataguchi in 1572—and probably one of the finest ever made; I've seen other Mataguchi swords, but none this perfect."

  Dallith's breath caught. "Made on your world?"

  "On my world," he said grimly, "four hundred years ago. The samurai were a caste of the fiercest swordsmen who ever existed. And someone—or some thing—must have landed on Earth and taken at least one of them back here, to fight against the Hunters."

  He glanced caressingly down the length of the blade before replacing the grip; Rianna reached out as if to touch the blade and he stretched his hand to prevent her. "Do that and you'll be picking up your finger off the floor," he said. "I told you; a razor is dull by comparison. This one's been hanging here a long time, it's a little weathered, but still—those robots, or something, have been taking good care of it."

  He slid it carefully into the lacquered sheath.

  "I don't envy any Hunter—and I don't care what kind of creatures they are—who runs up against a samurai with this particular sword in hand. He may have been killed—he probably was killed—but he certainly didn't give up his life cheaply."