by Lin Carter
Brant set up precautions against the dangers that he knew were all too present. This close to the crumbling side of the cliff there could well be many nests of rock dragons, so he unlimbered a protective fence made of aluminum pegs and a single strand of wire attached to a small dialectric accumulator. If anything touched the low fence during the night, it would suffer an electrical shock which should be sufficiently painful to drive off even the hungriest predator.
Fortunately, they did not have to worry about sandcats this close to the cliff, as those dreaded beasts preferred the vast expanses of the dustlands where they were wont to tunnel subterranean lairs.
The women went to their tent, but Brant lingered by the firepan, too bone-weary for slumber.
He heard low voices in conversation. Words rose to an angry pitch. There came the sound of a ringing slap and Suoli’s shrill squeak of pain.
Thereafter, the voices subsided.
Brant grinned wolfishly, and sought his own tent.
With dawn they rose from rest, and Brant observed, but made no comment upon the fact, that Suoli seemed more cowed and subdued than was usual.
She also had an ugly, purplish bruise beneath one eye.
Zuarra met his eyes flatly, but said nothing about the events of the night.
Brant saddled up the loper, struck the tents, and recoiled his protective fence into its niche in the saddlebags.
They rode on into the morning.
The Strangers
All that morning they rode along the clifflike edge of the ancient continent, where the loose rocks and debris made their footing far easier than the talcum-fine sands of the dustland would have afforded them.
Brant was looking for a deep, capacious cave in the cliffwall, one that would give them the ultimate protection from beasts and inclement weather. And, preferably, a cave that was not already occupied by one of the dangerous predators that abound on Mars.
The three of them took turns riding in the saddle, and this time Zuarra did not yield her turn to Suoli, who was therefore made to plod wearily along on foot as often as her companions. The weak little woman whined and snuffled a little at this lack of preferential treatment, but to her protestations Zuarra paid no attention, her face set in grim mien.
The big Earthsider made no comment and ignored the rift between the two women. A lover’s spat, he thought to himself sardonically.
Along toward midday, with the sun a cold ball of pale flame at the meridian, Brant was jolted from his lethargy when the loper suddenly lifted its’ head and sniffed at the cold air with its scaly snout high. It then gave voice to a harsh cry, almost a challenge.
“What is it, O Brant?” asked Zuarra, scanning the vicinity with alert gaze. The Earthsider shrugged; but something had definitely aroused the loper’s vigilance and, from the direction in which it craned its long, snaky neck, the source of the reptile’s discomfiture seemed to be out in the midst of the dustlands.
Brant was an old Mars hand, and knew that the deadly sandcat makes it lair, tunneled beneath the fine dust of the deserts, lying in wait to trap the unwary, who tread upon the thin surface of its hiding place, break through, and provide the predator with fresh meat. But something in the behavior of the loper made him think it had detected some other form of life than a sandcat.
He wondered what it might be. Then he unlimbered his pair of binoculars from the saddlebags and began to search the dreary flatness of the dustland.
The powerful lenses had been adapted to the dimmer daylight of the Red Planet, and could be adjusted to various degrees of distance. By their aid he soon ascertained the cause of the loper’s fretfulness.
“What have you seen, O Brant?” demanded Zuarra breathlessly.
“Strangers,” he said briefly. “Two of them, at least. In trouble of some sort.”
“Let us go on,” suggested nervous little Suoli in a timid voice, “and leave them to their problem, which is not ours.”
Brant grunted, saying nothing, but Zuarra shot her “sister” a scathing glance of pure contempt. Survival is a deadly struggle in the great dustlands of Mars, and even clan-war and blood-feud are ignored when strangers meet.
“Wait here,” he said tersely, mounting the loper and turning its head out into the desert.
“We will go with you,” said Zuarra, “to share together what may chance to befall.” Behind her words was the obvious fact that, without Brant and the loper, they would have no chance to live very long in this desolate and hostile region.
“Suit yourself,” Brant said flatly. “But keep up!”
They made slow progress in the thick, soft sands, which sucked at their feet like quicksand and impeded every stride. However, Zuarra made no complaint and little Suoli dared not even whimper.
The loper, with its flat, splay-footed stride, moved more quickly and easily atop the superfine sands than did the two women; however, an extended journey across the dustland would soon exhaust it, as well.
Brant was not overly familiar with these Argyre dustlands, cxcept that he was aware that they were vast in expanse and were cleft in twain by a very deep but very narrow canyon called the Erebus���one of those lesions in the rocky crust made eons ago when the planet dried and cracked and shrunk with the loss of its ancient oceans.
He hoped they would not have to travel as far as the canyon to reach the imperiled strangers, but doubted they could be that far off. Had they been, he did not think it possible for the loper to have scented them in the distance.
Fortunately, the newcomers were on this side of the Erebus, and not as far off as he had feared. Only a few minutes of hard riding brought Brant a closer view of them.
There were two men and two riding-beasts, and one of the lopers was clearly dead, the victim of a sandcat’s attack, from the clawed and torn condition of its carcass. Indeed, a moment later, Brant was able to observe the corpse of the predator, slain probably by the laser rifle the younger of the two strangers was holding. The sandcat was bigger than a Bengal tiger, and curiously catlike in appearance, for all that it was reptilian.
The two men he observed narrowly as he rode up to where they stood. One was a native, lean and wolfish, holding a bright new laser rifle at high port, not exactly pointing the weapon at the mounted man, but having it ready for action at need. He had hard, cold eyes and a cruel, thin-lipped mouth, and Brant noticed that his garment bore no clan markings, which suggested that he was aoudh-���an outlaw, exiled from his nation.
The other man, rather surprisingly, was an Earthsider, older than Brant by a couple of decades, probably, wearing a fresh nioflex suit but without a respirator, which meant his body chemistry and lungs had been surgically modified to endure Martian conditions. Brant himself had undergone these modifications years before, and knew that few colonists save for the Colonial Administration police can afford to have their bodies adjusted to life in the open on the desert world.
However, the older man did not look like a cop to Brant, and he would have been extremely surprised to have discovered that the police were looking for him this far from Sun Lake City. Nevertheless, Brant had not kept alive this long on Mars without learning how to take precautions.
He reined in the loper a little distance from where the two men and the dead beasts were stationed, and slid down from the saddle. He held one of his power guns in his left hand, the barrel pointing down, but ready for use if necessary.
The older man stepped forward, raising one hand in salute.
“Good day, citizen! I am Dr. Will Harbin, an Aresologist, and this is my guide, Agila. We are fortunate that you came along.”
“Jim Brant,” said the newcomer, with a curt nod to the native guide. “Prospecting. These two women are under my protection,” he added, as the two plodded up to where the loper stood.
He looked the scene over, noticing a second loper, seemingly unharmed, which knelt exhaustedly on the sand.
“Looks like you had a run-in with a sandcat,” he observed. “Lucky it didn
’t get all of your beasts.”
Will Harbin smiled wearily. “That we did, Cn. Brant. My man, Agila, brought it down just as it went after our pack-beast.”
Brant was a trifle puzzled. “Why are you just sitting here, instead of piling everything on the lopers? The cliffwall isn’t very far away���”
Harbin shrugged. “We’ve been riding across the dustland for days now, trying to make for the Regio before our mounts foundered. The beasts are too exhausted to travel farther, and we sure weren’t looking forward to spending another night out here���not with the chance of more sandcats on the prowl!”
“Right,” grunted Brant. “The scent of the slain beasts will bring them around by nightfall. Better chance it afoot and lead your beasts at any easy pace. We’ll accompany you, of course. No sandcat is going to be crazy enough to risk attacking three men and two women. The quicker we get started, the better.”
Harbin followed Brant’s advice, and, while Agila and the women loaded the saddlebags on the weary beast, the two Karthsiders drew aside for a brief conversation.
“Are you looking for anything in particular on the Regio, or just making a survey?” inquired Brant.
Will Harbin smiled: “Actually, I’m fossil-hunting, Martian paleontology being one of my fields. But as far as the Administration knows, I’m making a photo-survey of this part of the south.” He grinned. “What they don’t know, won’t hurt them, I figure!”
Brant chuckled. “Money’s scarce for fossil-hunting, I guess?” The older man soberly agreed.
“Mind telling me where you picked up this guide of yours?”
“In Dakhshan, the trade city,” he said. Brant nodded. Few and very far between were the permanent settlements of the People, but Dakhshan was the nearest���a sheltered spot where many merchant routes met.
“What do you know about him? Looks aoudh, to me. …”
“Yes, Agila was driven into exile by a powerful native chieftain who envied him his prowess and his wealth,” said Harbin. “Or so he says, anyway.”
Brant said nothing, chewing it over. Most outlaws profess innocence of any wrongdoing as a matter of course, whether they were actually innocent or not. He didn’t much like the looks of this Agila: the man had the hard, wolfish way of a bandit, to his observance.
All bandits are outlaws, of course. So … if he was right about this Agila, what possible crime could he have committed that was deemed so horrendous that even the bandits would force him into flight?
It was an interesting question.
And, as it had weight to bear on their immediate future, he decided to find the answer to it as soon as possible.
The Night
On their way back to the cliffwall, the two Earthsiders conversed further, getting to know each other. Brant was convinced that Will Harbin was no police marshal, hence he had given the older man his proper name. Marshals run to a younger breed, harder in the face, shrewder about the eyes.
Harbin cleared his throat at one point. “Ah, these women of yours … are they your���wives?”
Brant had to laugh. Then he explained how he had stumbled upon them, staked out to die in the ruined city on the plateau, Harbin nodded thoughtfully.
“That must have been Ythiom,” he murmured, “the best preserved of the ancient ruins atop the Ogygis Regio. I’d hoped to visit it on my return journey, for I’m planning to end up in Sun Lake City.”
They talked further, and, as they talked, Agila plodded along in the rear of the party, leading the pack-loper. More rested from its ordeal by now, the beast was spruce enough to bear plump little Suoli. Nor was Agila at all displeased by this turn of events.
He had been rather long without enjoying a woman, had Agila, and to happen upon two of them, both young and both, in different ways, desirable, seemed to him a stroke of luck. Perhaps the Timeless Ones were smiling upon his fortunes at last, he thought to himself���that being the People’s term for their mysterious gods.
The first woman, Zuarra, was too tall for his taste, and, with her close-cropped russet furcap, altogether too boyish.
But the second was a choice morsel, he thought to himself. He liked his women soft, plump, submissive.
Stealing a glance at her as she swayed listlessly in the saddle, clutching the saddle bow with both weak, ineffectual hands, he licked his thin cruel lips, dreaming of what might yet come of this chance meeting… .
When they reached the cliffwall, they unburdened the lop-ers and let the two women prepare the midday meal, for it was afternoon by now and they had long fasted and were hungry.
Squatting on his hams a few paces from the others, Agila studied the soft little woman narrowly, catching her startled gaze a time or two, on which occasion he gave her an admiring grin. Flustered, the girl blushed and looked hastily away; but, when she thought that the guide might not be observing, she stole a quick glance or two at him herself.
After the meal, Brant explained to the older man his intention of riding along the base of the cliffs until they discovered a large ravine in which to take shelter for the night. Harbin nodded, drew a microviewer from his gear, and flipped the dial for a brief time.
“There’s just the sort of place you’re looking for about two kilometers south of here,” he remarked. “That is, if the CA Air Reconnaissance photomaps can be trusted. At even a moderate pace, we should be able to reach it well before nightfall���that is, if you have no objections to our joining you?”
Brant shook his head. “Not at all; glad of some companionship,” he grunted. Always safety in number, he knew.
They mounted up and rode on, with Harbin mounted upon his own pack-loper and Zuarra taking her turn atop Brant’s steed. As they rode, the scientist studied the exposed rock-strata and the loose gravel which carpeted the sands at the base of the cliffwall. His sharp eyes discerned many interesting fossils, uniformly of marine life, left over from the time, eons before, when this had been the bottom of a long-forgotten ocean.
He eyed them a bit wistfully, but said nothing. True, he would very much have liked to take some samples, but in order to reach their destination and make camp before nightfall, they should keep moving. Besides, there would be many more fossils up ahead, he knew, and just as appetizing as these.
From time to time, Harbin studied the dials on the pack of instruments he wore slung about his chest, and made a small, neat notation on the pad he wore at his waist. The geographical relief map he would eventually create from these notes would comprise the most scrupulously detailed and accurate survey ever made of these uninhabited southern parts of the planet���the CA Survey maps having been put together in a photomontage of footage taken by one or another of the permanent satellite stations in close orbit about Mars.
The rest of the time, he studied Brant. He wondered who he truly was and what had brought him down to these inhospitable and desolate regions. He did not for one moment believe Brant to be a prospector as he had claimed to be: for one thing, he was completely ignorant of geology, as Harbin had shrewdly established during their earlier conversation with a few casual observations on the strata.
For another, he carried no geiger.
Well, he shrugged philosophically to himself, half the Earthsider denizens of Mars were exiled here for crimes or political offenses, or were at least the children of those earlier convict-settlers who had first established the domed Colonial cities. Brant could be anything from a gun-runner to a slaver, from a hunted thief or killer to a smuggler of archaeological treasures stolen from rifled tombs.
It didn’t much matter to Harbin. He rather liked the big, grim man with the hard face, rather admired the strength and toughness of him.
Time would tell if they were to be friends. For the moment, at least they were not enemies… .
As the sun was descending into the west, they reached a place where the massive plateau was deeply cleft by a wide ravine that might have been the bed of a primordial river. This was the spot Will Harbin
had suggested, and, looking it over, Brant felt satisfied. It would afford them a safe haven against the night, and the strata here were not as loose and crumbling as was the cliff they had descended when they had been attacked by the rock dragon.
It did not look to him as if they would have to worry about rock dragons here. While Agila and the two women unsaddled the lopers and set up the tents, Harbin and Brant combined their one-strand protective fences into one which was, by a narrow margin, just large enough to encompass the double-sized camp.
This was a natural precaution to take, although it was unlikely that any sandcats were to be found this close to the cliffs, as the great predators generally made their lairs and hunting grounds in the deep dustlands.
There were four tents to be erected, one for each of them, with the lopers tethered to pegs driven in the loose shale in the center of the encampment. This done, and the beasts set to munching on their plant-fiber cakes, the women lit liquid fire in the metal pan and prepared the evening meal.
There was still a few cutlets left over from the fat lizard that Brant had slain on the plateau, as well as the remnants of the canned goods and concentrates which Brant had brought with him from Sun Lake City. To these were now added the fresh supplies which Harbin had purchased in the native marts of Dakhshan much more recently.
All in all, they made a good meal and turned in for the night. With the electric fence switched on there was no real need to take turns at sentry-go, Brant knew.
Still and all, he felt restless and decided to take a turn or two about the perimeter of the camp before seeking his rest.
Others, as well, were not ready for sleep. From the tent wherein the two women had retired for the night, one came forth to stare at the starblaze. And from the inky shadows of another tent, Agila glided into the open, stopping short as he observed the woman come forth.
In the dim almost-dark of the Martian night, Agila could not at once be certain which of the two women had emerged from the tent to share the darkness with him. But he assumed it to be the soft, plump one whom he fancied.