Dane whispered, "Wonder what happened seven hundred and thirteen cycles ago?"
Rianna said urgently, "Hush!"
"The Hunt will be suspended every evening at dusk in order that Hunters and Hunted may feed and refresh themselves; the areas lighted by yellow lights and patrolled by Servers are neutral areas, and from dusk until midnight no Hunter may approach them closer than four thousand yards." Dane's translator disk evidently had given the closest equivalent; evidently all the others comprehended the measurement. "Other areas are set aside for the Hunters and no Prey will be permitted to enter them on pain of instant and dishonorable death."
That was something. It indicated that the Hunt was formalized and ritualized to the extent where it seemed unlikely that Hunters would wait outside the neutral areas to pick them off as they came out, either.
The voice paused a moment, then continued, "In a few moments, the ship will come to rest. The Hunt will commence at dawn. Until we meet you in mortal combat, then, we salute you, and we honor you, our Sacred Prey. Those who live shall see how generously we reward the valiant among you; we wish you all an honorable survival and reward—or a bloody and honorable death."
The voice crackled into silence, and at that moment there was a slight jar, as if the ship had come completely to rest. There was a short hiss as of pressure chambers, and a deep murmur as the doors glided slowly open.
Dane grasped the hilt of his sword and moved toward the door, following in Aratak's wake. He could see the great proto-ursine, bearlike creature, lumbering toward the doorway. Dallith was grasping his elbow, Rianna and Cliff-Climber moving behind. Dallith said in a wavering voice, "Panic—every single identity going his own way—hang onto me, Dane. I—I want to run, to scatter—"
"Easy." He grasped her hand firmly in his. "It's not yours. You've nothing to panic about. You're picking it up from the others."
"But suppose—suppose I can't free myself from it... ?"
They were emerging through a narrow corridor at the top of a flight of steps; Dane paused for a moment before the crush of others at his back forced him down, to look out on the surface of the Red Moon.
He stood a few feet above a dark and ruined landscape, broken and hilly and, in the near-darkness, covered with a thick blackish underbrush. Dark hills rose behind him, and overhead a dark-blue sky lowered, with thinly scattered pale clouds barely perceptible across the face of the huge orb that hung above them: the Hunter's World, glowing brick red in the sky, and more huge, more crimson-lighted, more enormous than the Red Moon itself upon which they stood. In the glowing red world-light, brighter than the brightest Earthly moonlight, Dane saw dark forms, fleeing from one corner to another of the landscape. Dallith made a stumbling step away from the ship and he grabbed her by the hand; he found his other hand grasping Cliff-Climber's hairy forearm. He said tensely:
"Don't run! There's no percentage in that! Stop here and think! Think! Remember what we decided!"
Aratak was glowing faintly blue all over in the darkness. Calmly, Dane led his group of five until, moving at a slow and steady pace, they were about a quarter of a mile from the Hunters' ship.
"It's a good idea to get well away," he said calmly. "If it takes off again—well, I don't know what kind of fuel their ships use, but breathing it isn't likely to be very healthy. Now let's sit down here and decide what to do. We've got till dawn to work out strategy for the Hunt; judging by the way everybody else is taking off in all directions at once, I'd say we already have a good edge. There are five of us, not one; any Hunter who comes at us is going to find himself in trouble. Dallith—"
Her voice trembled, but she replied quite steadily, "I'm here, Dane. What can I do?"
"We found out too late, on the Mekhar slave ship, that it was a trap. If I'd listened to you, I might have known; you kept insisting that for some reason they wanted us to attack them. I think your main weapon for us is going to have to be your sensitivity. Do you think you'll be able to tell if someone's stalking us, and ready to attack?"
She said, "I'll try."
"Tell me. Did you ever sense anything—any kind of emotion or personal awareness—from any of the Servers?" If they were indeed the Hunters, Dallith should have been able to discover it, it seemed.
She shook her head. "They felt just about like any other robots. The thought of telepathic or emphatic contact with a robot—" She shook her head. "I can't even begin to imagine it, so I didn't try to pick up anything."
It was probably too late now in any case, so Dane let it pass, saying, "All right, then; Dallith is our early warning signal and long-range dispatch. Dallith, if you're aware of anyone definitely beginning an attack, don't wait; pick them off with your sling. Disable, if you can't kill.
"Aratak, you're the heavyweight fighter; anyone who gets past Dallith's warning, try to crush them by sheer weight, and I'll have the sword to cut down anyone who comes closer. Rianna and Cliff-Climber are there for close-in fighting, hand to hand. Among us, we should be able to match damn near anything they throw at us. Did you all stock up with something portable to eat, at the banquets?" Dane had put some sweets into the capacious pocket he had found in his tunic; he had advised the others to do likewise.
Suddenly there was a roar and a rush of crimson flame and the small ship which had brought them there rushed upward and was gone, briefly blinding them; but afterward, as their eyes adapted, they studied the brilliantly world-lit landscape. Hills, underbrush, valleys; at the edge of vision, a waterfall, gleaming with light as it rushed downward; and far out on the horizon, some dark and oddly regular structures. Dane wondered if they were buildings and if they were the Hunter areas into which no Prey could come on pain of instant-and-dishonorable death.
Strange that they should have used the Mekhar phrase, he thought. (Or was it entirely the same?) In any case if these Hunters had a concept of honorable death and dishonorable, maybe there was more of a chance than he thought.
Aratak said, "Are we going to wait here till dawn?"
"I don't know that one place has any advantage over another," Dane said slowly. "I suspect all the obvious bits of cover as being the places where the Hunters will wait to pick off their least wary Prey. This is a test too, remember. They probably kill off the easier Prey first, to leave more time and energy for an elaborate duel of strength—or brains—with the more dangerous ones; remember they paid something extra for us because we'd already been pretested and positively certified dangerous. Even on Earth, hunters differ in their approach to sport. There are probably a few here who just want to make an easy catch and go home with a trophy." He wondered, wildly and absurdly, what the game laws were and if there was some sort of "bag limit" for each Hunter. "Let me think. Aratak, what is your suggestion?"
The big saurian said, "There is no wisdom in weariness. I suggest that we sleep or rest until an hour or so before dawn, watching in turns so that the light will not take us unawares. When there is a somewhat stronger light—but well before sunrise—we can look about intelligently for a kind of cover which is not an obvious stakeout."
That struck them all as a good idea. Aratak volunteered to take first watch. "Since," he said, "it is purely formality; the beginning of the Hunt is hours away."
"And I will watch with him," Cliff-Climber said, "since my species is at least partly nocturnal and I am wakeful now."
Dane and Rianna and Dallith wrapped themselves in the warm cloaks which had been supplied with the fighting tunics and lay down. The ground beneath them just here was covered with an alternation of rocks and soft moss, rather more rocks than moss, and it took them a while to find comfortable resting places, but at last they stretched out side by side, Dane between the women. Rianna quickly slept, relaxing and breathing deeply, but Dane was too tense to rest. He trusted Aratak entirely—there were times when he forgot that the giant saurian was not a man in every sense of the word—but Cliff-Climber was another matter.
He drifted after a time into a dark and unreal daze,
shot with nightmares, but never more than half asleep. It must have been a couple of hours later when, starting awake again (the head of a samurai, fixed in a hideous nightmare grin, looked down from the wall of a Frankenstein laboratory; Hunters, with a thousand shifting shapes flowing into one another like water, saluted it with upraised goblets), he felt Dallith trembling, as if with cold. He drew a fold of his cloak around her, carefully so as not to disturb her sleep, but she turned and murmured, "I'm not asleep," and he drew her protectively against his shoulder.
"You should rest," he said softly. "Tomorrow's likely to be a rough day." He was conscious of the ridiculous understatement of the words as he said them and felt from somewhere an idiot laughter bubbling up, which he recognized as hysteria and quickly suppressed.
"I'm glad Rianna can sleep," she said, and they were silent. Dane lay still, racing images moving through his mind, very conscious of the girl's soft body, warm inside the cloak, against his. I want her. I love her. This is a hell of a time to be thinking about that. What did Rianna say? Blind instinct in the face of death. Why should I be any different than any other proto-simian? Dallith wouldn't want it to be this way, she said so... clutching at each other like animals in the face of death.
Her arms went around him in the darkness, gently and with infinite compassion. "What I want is what you want," she whispered. "I can't help it. Maybe it's not what I would want on my own. But it's real, Dane, it's real."
He strained her close to him, losing himself in her pliant yielding, and for a little while, for the first time in days, he forgot the great brick-red orb of the Hunter's World, forgot the samurai sword and the shadow of death and the Hunters themselves. Later she pillowed his head against her slender breasts and whispered tenderly, "Sleep a little, now, Dane. Sleep while you can," and he tumbled down a dizzying, bottomless abyss of silence and sleep.
The darkness had deepened considerably and the red Hunter's World was low on the horizon when Aratak's hand on his shoulder roused him. "Sorry to disturb you, Dane," he muttered, "but I'm half asleep. Cliff-Climber's been napping for a couple of hours."
He sat up, gently disengaging himself from Dallith, who slept quietly, encircled in his arms, and, covering her with her cloak, nodded to Aratak. "Good. Get some rest."
He took Aratak's place at the highest point on the slope; the great saurian lay down, covering his head with his cloak, and was still. Cliff-Climber was curled up, only a dark snoring ball. After a few minutes a dark form moved in the shadows; Dane was instantly alert but Rianna whispered, "I've slept enough. Let Dallith sleep; I think she was awake most of the night...."
He nodded and the girl lowered herself at his side and sat there, silent. After a time her hand—small and firm and slightly calloused—stole out and clasped his; he returned the pressure, gently, and they sat there in the thinning darkness, watching for the glow on the horizon which would mark the coming dawn. Once Rianna, looking across at Aratak, who had thrown off his cloak and was glowing blue all over in the dimness, said, "That could be dangerous. Before dark tonight, we've got to do something about it," and Dane nodded. But most of the time they sat silently, side by side and watchful.
"It's strange," she said once, into the complete darkness and silence, as the Hunter's World sank below the edge of a faraway hill. "I'm a scientist. I've spent most of my life studying the remnants of other people's lives, and I've been happy doing it. It never occurred to me that I could be so deeply involved in—in a struggle for my very life, I would have been horrified at the thought. I wonder if I'm less civilized than I thought?"
"Someone in my culture said civilization is only a thin veneer over the primordial ape."
"I'm afraid the layer in my case is pretty thin. I'm not really unhappy about this, Dane. Not—well, not the way Dallith is. She's really civilized."
Dallith. The feel of her was still on his skin. He said, "I wonder. She reacts so to what's around her. Perhaps she's civilized because she's with civilized people—"
"Maybe. Dane, how do you feel about this?"
"The Hunt?" He paused to consider. It occurred to him that he hadn't really thought about it. He'd been angry, scared, reluctantly conceding necessity. And yet, down at the bottom, beneath everything else, he became aware that from the very first, there had been a core of deep response.... All his life he had been an adventurer, kicking away from civilization to immerse himself in one far-out interest after another. The martial arts. Mountain climbing alone. Solo round-the-world sailing. And wasn't this the ultimate adventure, the last risk, a game played in deadly earnest, with his very life as the stake, and an opponent not blind and unaware like the storms at sea or the North Face, but alert, alive, wary, and playing the other side—an opponent worthy of himself?
"I guess," he said slowly, "I'm not very civilized either." And they were silent again.
It was another hour before the brightening light in the sky—they could see one another's faces clearly, now—made Dane say reluctantly, "We'd better wake the others." In an odd way he was sorry to bring this interval of quiet to an end, not entirely because of the urgent fear of the Hunt, but because, in the last couple of hours, in his own growing awareness of his own feelings, and Rianna's admission of her own deep response to the Hunt, he had realized that they had shared a deeper intimacy than the sexual contact of the last few weeks.
Rianna was right, he thought, and so was Dallith; it's human in the face of danger, it's natural and even inevitable and therefore nothing to feel guilt about. I was a fool about that. But it isn't all that important either.
Not now.
Just now, nothing exists except—the Hunt!
Cliff-Climber stretched, with a deep snarl in his throat, and woke. He flexed his claws and sprang up, briefly falling into a fighting stance. Then he relaxed and looked around with a fierce grin.
"There's water there," he said. "I'm for a quick wash and a drink and then—bring on the Hunters!" He bounded off toward the sound of the falling waterfall, and Dane, following slowly, glancing back to see Dallith rise and fasten her tunic and cloak, felt a sharp surge of kinship. Cliff-Climber was also a good one to have on his side.
He thrust his head under the waterfall, feeling the icy sharpness of the water like a pleasant shock, and realized that his system was flooded with adrenaline. Good, I'll need it. He looked with positive affection on Aratak as the ten-foot-tall saurian joined them. Everything looked very clear and sharp in the growing light, etched sharply on consciousness and with bright clean new edges, as if everything was new from the hand of Creation, himself included, new and just a little unreal.
Dane looked at all his comrades with something very akin to love before he said briskly, "We've got about an hour before full dawn. Let's start thinking about some kind of cover."
CHAPTER TWELVE
The day broke slowly, light growing on the horizon and the orange sun sliding up from behind a bank of cloud. The increasing light revealed a broken and desolate landscape, sharp treeless hills rising from valleys filled thickly with heavy spiky underbrush; rock-strewn slopes opening here and there in dark cave-mouths. Far away on the horizon were the dark regular shapes which Dane had identified by moonlight as buildings. But now in the light he could see that it was a city in ruins: the tall towers broken, the roofs gaping open to the sky.
It would be easy enough to take cover, Dane thought; what would be hard would be to avoid being trapped in whatever cover they chose. For that reason he vetoed immediately Rianna's suggestion that a cave-mouth would provide shelter in darkness and that the narrow entry could be easily defended. After nine-hundred-and-whatever-it-was Hunts, he told her grimly, he'd bet even money that the Hunters knew the caves like the very insides of their own pockets. Most caves had more than one entrance—and more than one exit. Maybe they could defend the cave-mouth where they were—but they would be wholly vulnerable to an attack from behind. The same was true of the ruined buildings. They would be no better than traps.
&
nbsp; From the waterfall they moved cautiously down through the valley, keeping the defensive pattern Dane had worked out, Aratak going in front with his great knobbed club, and the short ax—he called it a short ax, Dane didn't—girded at his belt. Dane thought of it as Paul Bunyan's Boy Scout Ax; the shaft was so thick that Dane could barely have gotten both hands around it, and it was so heavy that all Dane could have done with it was to lift it over his head and drop it. Although anything he dropped it on probably wouldn't get up again.
Dane went warily a few feet away from him, sword loose in its scabbard, and behind them, holding the center, Rianna with her long spear and knives. Just behind her right shoulder, Cliff-Climber moved softly, alert to either side; and at the left, Dallith brought up the rear with her sling. He had warned them all to avoid the thickest of the underbrush; only Rianna and the Mekhar were equipped for really close-in fighting. "Aratak and I need sword-room, and Dallith needs a clear field for a shot. But if they come at us, we've got to be prepared for anything."
So they moved across the deserted land, weapons at the ready, nerves drawn tight, scouting out for a piece of high ground—possibly the top of a steep slope—where nothing could come at them unseen. Dane had half expected that with the rising of the sun the land would explode into violence, battle cries, bloodshed; instead they moved through country that might have never known the print of any living creature, except themselves.
The Hunt lasts eleven days. Dane told himself. That's the hell of it. We can't relax for a minute.
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