Big Planet

15 The Rebbirs

Nightmare flight, thought Glystra; was he asleep? Nightmare steeds, nightmare riders, the gray-white flat given depth only by the diminishing monoline: a nightmare vista permeated by fear and strangeness and pitilessness…

He broke free of the sensation, cast it away. Turning, he watched the Rebbirs over his shoulder. The whole army had streamed out, as if stimulated by the excitement of the chase. The first dozen had not gained appreciably; Glystra stroked the horny side of his mount with an emotion almost like affection. “Go to it, boy”

Miles, changeless miles: flat gray plains, thunder of pounding feet. Looking ahead, Glystra saw that they were near the region of mottled shadows—dunes of sand, white as salt, crystalline and bright as broken glass.

The Rebbirs had drawn closer, apparently able to extract the most frantic efforts from their mounts. Ahead—the dunes: sand swept off the flatland and piled in huge rounded domes.

Looking behind, Glystra saw a sight which thrilled him, one which might have been beautiful in other, less personal circumstances. The Rebbirs in the van had risen to their feet, standing in wonderful balance on the backs of their plunging mounts. And each, throwing back his cloak, fitted an arrow to a heavy black bow.

The bows bent; behind the arrows Glystra glimpsed keen faces: eagle cast to nose, forehead, chin. A chilling wonderful sight… He yelled, “Duck! They’re shooting at us!” And he crouched over the side of his beast.

Thwinggg! The shaft sang over his head. The dunes towered above. Glystra felt the feet of his mount sound with a softer thud, a scuffing, and they were coursing across white sand… The creature was laboring, breath was seizing in its throat. Very few miles left in the clogged muscles, then they would be at bay, the four of them. Their ion-shines would kill ten, fifteen, twenty, fifty— then there would be a sudden surge of hawk-faced men, a raising of swords, a chopping…

Over the dunes, down the soft round valleys, up to the milk-white crests. Then looking back to view the surge of black-cloaked riders pouring across the swells, like black surf.

The dunes ended, washed against black obsidian hills. Behind, the rumble of multitudinous feet, hoarse war-calls… Out of the dunes, into an old water-course through the flint, where possibly once or twice yearly water foamed. The zipangotes stumbled over chunks of fractured black volcanic glass with sagging necks, bent legs.

To either side gullies draining the side areas opened. Glystra swerved to the left. “In here!” He was panting, in sympathy with the gasps of the zipangotes. “Quick! If we can lose them, we’ve got a chance…”

He plunged into the gully; behind came Nancy, pale, white around the mouth, then Bishop, then Corbus.

“Quiet,” said Glystra. “Back into the shadows—” He held his breath as if he could control the rattling sobs of his beast.

Thudding sounded out in the main watercourse. Black things hurled past the opening. War-calls sounded now loud, now dim.

There was a sudden slackening to the sounds, an ominous change of pitch. Galls vibrated back and forth— questioning tones, answers. Glystra turned, looking behind. The ravine sloped at a near-impossible angle up to a ridge.

Glystra beckoned to Nancy. “Start up the hill.” To Bishop and Corbus: “After her.”

Nancy kneed her mount. It moved, mumbled, stopped short at the slope, lowered its skull, tried to turn.

Nancy hauled the reins, kneed the beast desperately. Coughing and whimpering, it set its first pair of feet above its head on the slope, scrambled up.

“Quick!” said Glystra in a harsh whisper. “They’ll be here any minute!”

Bishop and Corbus followed… The yelling sounded closer. Glystra turned his mount up the slope. Steps sounded behind him, a snuffling. Silence. Then a cry loud and brilliant, the loudest sound Glystra had ever heard. From all directions came answering calls.

Glystra kneed his mount up the slope. Behind came the Rebbir, leaning forward with his sword out-stretched, waving it like an eager antenna.

The gully was choked with hot-eyed men and their horny black beasts. The steep slope was a mass of clawing legs, hulking shoulders.

Nancy breasted over the ridge, then Bishop, then Corbus, then Glystra.

Corbus knew what to do. He laughed, his white teeth shining. His ion-shine was ready. He aimed it at the first Rebbir zipangote, squeezed. The white skull-head shattered into a scarlet crush. The beast threw up its front legs like a praying mantis, poised briefly, swung gradually over backwards, fell into the beasts behind.

A tangle of writhing flesh. White skull-faces, despairing eagle-men, a horrid tangle at the bottom of the slope—a talus of hot jerking flesh, the horny bodies of the zipangotes, the softer sinews of men, clotted together like hiving bees.

Glystra whirled his mount, led the way along the ridge. They rode with all the speed left to their beasts, threading the line of the ridge past the incursions of gullies, ravines, gulches. Caves and blow-holes opened under their feet.

After five minutes Glystra turned down one of the gullies, halted behind a heavy wall of vitreous slag.

“They’ll be a long time finding us now, if they even bother to look… We’ll be safe until dark, at any rate.”

He looked down at the heaving shoulders of his mount. “You’re not much of a looker—but you’ve been quite a friend”

After nightfall they returned to the ridge and stole eastward through the dark. The ridge crumbled into rotten gray rock, disappeared under a dim ocean of sand.

As they started across the flat, from far behind came a call, an eerie hooting which might or might not have been human. Glystra halted his zipangote, looked up toward the Big Planet constellations, listened. Silence everywhere.

The zipangote shuffled its feet, snorted softly. The distant call came once more. Glystra shifted in his saddle, kneed the zipangote into motion. “We’d better put distance between us and the Rebbirs while it’s still dark. Or at least until we find concealment of some sort.”

They set off quietly across the glimmering sand. Glystra watched over his shoulder. A spatter of meteorites scratched bright lines down the sky. From far back came the mournful call once more.

Big Planet rolled on through space, twisting its shoulder back toward Phaedra. Dawn came, a pink and orange explosion. By this time the zipangotes were barely able to stumble and their heads swung on long necks, sometimes striking the ground.

The light grew stronger. A silhouette, low in the east, appeared—vegetation, waving fronds, bearded stalks, tendrils trailing from splayed branches.

Phaedra burst up into the sky. Plain to be seen now was an island of vegetation ten miles long in a white sea. From the center rose a hemispherical dome, glistening as of pale metal.

“That must be Myrtlesee,” said Glystra. “Myrtlesee Fountain.”

There was no area of transition. Desert became oasis as sharply as if a knife had trimmed away any extraneous straggles of herbage. Blue moss grew fresh and damp; an inch away the clay lay as dry and arid as any twenty miles to the west.

Passing into the cool gloom was like entering the Garden of Paradise. The air smelled of a hundred floral and leafy essences, damp earth, pungent bark. Glystra slid off his mount, tied the reins to a root, helped Nancy to the ground. Her face was pinched and white, Bishop’s long countenance was loose and waxy, Cx>rbus’ eyes gleamed like moonstones and his mouth was pulled into a thin pale line.

The zipangotes nosed and snuffled in the moss, lay down, rolled over. Glystra ran to remove the packs before they should be crushed.

Nancy lay at full length in the shade, Bishop slumped beside her.

“Hungry?” asked Glystra.

Nancy shook her head. “Just tired. It’s so peaceful here. And quiet… Listen! Isn’t that a bird singing?”

Glystra listened, and said, “It sounds very much like a bird.” A shadow crossed his face; he frowned, shook his head. He dismissed the odd idea which had suddenly been inserted in his mind. And yet—hmm. Strange.

Corbus opened the commissary pack, mixed vitamin concentrate with food powder, moistened it, stirred it into a heavy paste, scraped it into Cloyville’s cooker, squeezed down the lid, waited an instant, lifted the lid and withdrew a cake of hot pastry. He contemplated it gloomily. “If we ever get back to Earth I’m going to eat for a month. Ice cream, steak, apple pie, swiss cheese on rye with lots of mustard, strawberry shortcake, corned beef and cabbage, fried chicken, spare-ribs—”

“Stop it,” groaned Bishop. “I’m sick as it is…”

Glystra lay down on the moss. “Let’s hold a council of war.”

Corbus asked lazily. “What’s the problem?”

Glystra looked up into the blue-green foliage, tracing the white veins of a leaf. “Survival… There were eight of us that left Jubilith, not counting Nancy. You, Bishop, me, Pianza, Ketch, Darrot, Cloyville and Vallusser. Nancy makes nine. We’ve come a thousand miles and there’s only four of us left. Ahead of us is first of all more desert, the main part of the Palari. Then mountains, then the lake and the Monchevior River, then God knows what-all.”

“Trying to scare us?”

Glystra continued as if he hadn’t heard. “When we left Jubilith, I thought the chances pretty good that we’d all make it. Footsore, bedraggled—but alive. I was wrong. We’ve lost five men. Our weapons are just about done for. I don’t know whether I’ve got a charge left in mine or not. Big Planet is meaner and tougher than we allowed for. The chances are that we’ll be killed if we go on. So— now’s the time. Anyone who wants to return to Kirstendale on the monoline has my blessing. There’s metal enough in those Rebbir swords to make us all rich men. If any of you feel that you’d rather be a live Kirster than a dead Earthman—now’s the chance to make up your minds, and no hard feelings.”

He waited. No one spoke.

Glystra still looked up into the leaves. “We’ll rest here in Myrtlesee a day or so, and then—whoever wants to start east—” He left the sentence hanging in mid-air. His eyelids were heavy. The warm air, the cool shade, the soft moss, fatigue—all induced drowsiness. He aroused himself with a jerk. Bishop was snoring. Nancy was lying on her side. Corbus sat with his back to a tree, eyes half-closed.

Glystra rose to his feet. “Looks like we’re planning to sleep,” he said to Corbus. “I’ll take first look-out. You can have the second, then Bishop, then Nancy”

Corbus nodded, stretched out full length.

Glystra paced up and down, clenching and unclenching his hands. It was as if his brain were a house and knocking on the door was a boy with a barrowful of thoughts. Somehow he could not find the key to the door.

He walked softly across the moss, looked down at his companions. Bishop snored, Corbus slept like an innocent child, Nancy’s hands trembled, quivered as if in a nightmare. He thought: the traders had killed Pianza, the man on watch, why had they stopped? It would have been perfectly safe to kill the entire party, and the traders apparently lacked qualms of any sort. The Earthmen wore valuable clothes, with many metal accessories. The ion-shines alone represented fortune beyond dreams. Why had not the entire party been slaughtered in their sleep? Was it that the traders had been prevented by someone who carried enough authority, perhaps in the shape of an ion-shine, to enforce his decisions?

Glystra kneaded his knuckles in his palms… Why? Had his enemy calculated that without trolleys, they might turn back to Kirstendale? If Pianza had been killed while someone stood acquiescently by, one of these three sleeping before him was not only a spy and a saboteur, but a murderer.

Glystra turned away, the ache of grief and uncertainty in his throat. He walked back into the grove. The moss was like a deep rug of marvellous softness. The air was murmurous, restful. Big Planet sunlight trickled through layers of leaves and open spaces, fell around him with the richness of light in a fairy-tale forest. Through the air came a sweet trilling, soft-flute-like. The song of a bird— no, probably an insect or a lizard; there were no birds on Big Planet. And from the direction of the dome he heard the mellow chime of a gong.

There was a soft sound beside him. He jerked around. It was Nancy. He sighed in relief. “You frightened me.”

“Claude,” she whispered, “let’s go back—all of us.” She went on breathlessly, “I have no right to talk this way, I’m an uninvited guest… But—you’ll surely die, I don’t want you to die… Why can’t we live, you and I? If we returned to Kirstendale—we could live out our lives in quiet…”

He shook his head. “Don’t tempt me, Nancy. I can’t go back. But I think that you should.”

She drew away, searched his face with wide blue eyes. “You don’t want me any more?”

He laughed wearily. “Of course I do. I need you desperately. But—it’s a miracle that we’ve come this far. Our luck can’t hold out forever.”

“Of course not!” she cried. “That’s why I want you to turn back!” She put her hands on his chest. “Claude, won’t you give up?”

“No.”

Tears trickled down her cheeks. He stood awkwardly, trying to formulate words of comfort. They stuck in his throat. Finally, for want of anything better, he said, “You’d better rest,” aware that the words sounded stiff and formal.

“I’ll never rest again.”

He looked at her questioningly. But she went to the verge of the oasis, leaned against a tree and stood looking across the white desert.

Glystra turned away, paced up and down the cool blue moss.

An hour passed.

He walked down to look at Nancy. She lay outstretched, head on her arms, asleep. Something in her posture, in the stiff turning-away of the back, intimated to Glystra that never again would their relationship be quite the same.

He went to where Corbus lay asleep, touched his shoulder. Corbus’ eyes flicked open instantly.

“Your watch. Call Bishop in an hour.”

Corbus yawned, rose to his feet. “Right.”

A sound. Hoarse throbbing sound. Glystra was very tired, very comfortable.

A harsh yammering penetrated the world behind his eyelids. It was a distant urgent sound. Danger, he must awake. He must awake!

He jumped to his feet, wide awake, clawing at his ion-shine.

Corbus lay beside him, asleep.

Bishop was nowhere in sight. Neither was Nancy.

A crackle of harsh voices. A thud. Another thud. Further voices, dying, fading out.

Glystra ran through the foliage, through vines with heart-shaped leaves, through a clump of red feather-bushes with green flowers. He tripped on a body, stopped short, frozen in terror.

The body was headless. Blood still pumped from the stump. The head was nowhere visible. The body belonged to Bishop’s head.

Where was that round head with its brain so full of knowledge? Where was Bishop, where had he gone?

He felt a grasp of his arm. “Claude!” He felt a string on his cheek. He looked into Corbus’ face.

“They’ve killed Bishop.”

“So I see. Where’s Nancy?”

“Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”

He turned to look, then halted his gaze, turned to look at the ground at his feet.

“Whoever killed Bishop took her with him,” said Corbus. “Looks like her tracks, here in the moss—”

Glystra took a deep breath, another. He looked down at the tracks. Sudden energy fired him. He ran off toward the dome. He passed a circle of slim cypresses, branches laden with golden fruit. He came out on a paved walk, leading straight to the great central dome. The whole face of the building was visible as well as the columned arcades to either side. Neither Nancy nor her captors were in sight.

For an instant Glystra stood stock still, then started forward once again. He ran through the gardens, past a long marble bench, a fountain spraying up six jets of clear water, down a walkway paved with diamond-shaped blocks of white and blue-gray stone.

An old man in a gray wool smock looked up from where he knelt with a trowel in flower-bed.

Glystra stopped, demanded harshly, “Where did they go? The men with the girl?”

The old man gazed blankly at him.

Glystra took a short step forward; the old man cringed.

“Where did they go? Answer me, or—”

Corbus came up behind. “He’s deaf.”

Glystra glared, swung away. A door opened into a wall at the end of the walkway; this was the door Nancy must have been taken through. He ran over, tried it. It was as solid as a section of the stone wall.

He pounded on it, yelling, “Open up! Open! Open!”

Corbus said, “Pounding on that door won’t get you much but a knife in your neck.”

Glystra stood back, stared at the stone building. The sunlight had lost its tingle, the gardens were drab and dismal. In a bitter voice he said, “There’s nowhere on this planet where a man can walk in peace.”

Corbus shrugged. “I guess anything goes anywhere— so long as they can get away with it.”

Glystra clenched his teeth; the muscles corded around his mouth. “There’s power in this gun to kill a lot of them, and by heaven, I’ll see the color of their blood!”

Corbus’ voice was tinged with impatience. “We’ll do better if we go at the matter rationally. First we’d better take care of our beasts before they’re stolen.”

Glystra glared defiantly up at the stone wall, then turned away. “Very well… You’re right.”

For a moment they stood by the headless body. “Poor old Bishop,” said Glystra.

“We probably won’t outlive him more than a day,” said Corbus in his flat voice.

The zipangotes stood grunting and growling, bumping the white carapace of their heads against the tree-trunks. Wordlessly Glystra and Corbus loaded the packs, handling the pathetic belongings of Bishop and Nancy with heavy fingers.

Corbus stopped in his work. “If I was running this outfit, do you know what we’d do?”

“What?”

“We’d ride out of here due east as fast as we could make it.”

Glystra shook his head. “I can’t do it, Corbus.”

“There’s something fishy going on.”

“I know it. I’ve got to make sure what it is. I’m fighting a lost cause now… You can still drift back to Kirstendale.”

Corbus grunted.

They climbed into the saddles, rode toward the dome.