Doomstar

10

They came scuddering like bright leaves on a'wind, up the slope, out from the trees. Kettrick retreated before them.

"This is not the sacrifice time," he said. Each year, he knew, the women chose a victim from among the young men and hunted him to this place and did to him what they felt was necessary, so that trees should again bear fruit and fields produce their grain. But that was in the spring, and it was now late summer, though in this golden place all seasons were much the same.

Nillaine answered, "This is not a sacrifice, not yet, though perhaps it will come to be one." She stood again by the pillar, her small face sober and pitiless. "This is something we could not trust to the men. They would think of friendship, and stay their hands."

The colored paving stones came hard beneath his feet. He was moving backward all the time toward Nillaine. He watched the women, and now he could hear the soft rustle of them treading the grass, the ripple of their draperies around their slender legs. He wanted to laugh, but he was terrified. There must have been fifty or sixty of them, their little knives all glittering.

"The men would think of friendship," he said. "What are you thinking of, Nillaine?"

"My village. My father. My husband and children. Seri promised that the Doomstar would never shine on us."

"There are other villages, other people."

"I don't know them. They are nothing to me."

"Let me go, Nillaine. I can stop Seri, so that the Doomstar will never shine for anyone."

"There are more than Seri, many more. You couldn't stop them. No, Johnny. Well be safe, and afterward we'll be strong, stronger than the Westpeople. They promised us."

"How will they make you strong?" asked Kettrick, and grasped her by the arm so quickly that she did not quite have time to get away. She sank her teeth and nails into his wrist, squealing all the while like a furious little animal. He slapped her head across the side of the head and she stopped all that. He picked her up and held her, a limp doll, across his body, and he said to the women,

"Your knives will strike her first."

They were already faltering, their eyes and mouths wide with astonishment. He imagined that it had never occurred to them that a male would commit such an act of blasphemy in this place where they were supreme. Probably no sacrifice had ever objected before.

"Chai!" he shouted. "Chai!"

The women made cat-cries of outrage. They screamed at him to put Nillaine down, and some of them rushed toward him again, waving their knives. He held Nillaine out, a kind of living buckler against the blades, and moved slowly backward, away from them.

"Chai?"

"Hroo!"

Out of the tail of his eye he saw her loping from the trees at the back of the cup. She had had to make a long swing around to keep out of sight, as he had told her to do when he had pretended to send her away. He had not really believed then that anything would happen; it was a matter of just in case. Now he backed toward her and they met beside a pillar pregnant with carved fruits.

The women stared at Chai fearfully. She looked at the women.

"Kill, John-nee?"

"Not unless you have to." The women were gabbling now, tossing their hands wildly as they argued between themselves what to do. It was a long way to the trees, a longer way to the village. Kettrick wondered if they could ever make it, and he tightened his grip on Nillaine.

"Hit?" asked Chai.

"Hit," he said. "Yes. And I don't care if you break a few of their pretty little bones."

Chai grunted. Nillaine whimpered abruptly, twisting in Kettrick's arms. He was briefly occupied in quieting her again. He heard a noise behind him, and then there was a demoniac shriek from the women and they surged forward in a body. He turned to see Chai finish uprooting the pillar.

"Big stick," she said, and swung it whistling around her head. She bounded at the women.

She was more than twice as high as they, and the pregnant pillar was eight or nine feet long. She swung it like a great flail. They screamed and fell, and ran, and scattered, screaming, and some of them lay on the ground and wept or moaned. Chai came back, breathing hard. The bulk of the women now stood in ragged clumps a long way off, looking at them in helpless rage. The bolder ones moved back to help the injured. Kettrick shouted at them.

"Let us alone, or I'll kill Nillaine!"

He raised her up and shook her at them so they would understand. Then he whispered to Chai, "For God's sake let's get out of here." They ran together for the woods, Chai with the carven fruits laid across her shoulder.

The tree shadows closed around them. Kettrick shifted Nillaine to a better position and went down hill with long strides. His heart was thundering and he felt sick, as though he had touched something unnatural.

They passed through the gorge and into the jungle. Nillaine's small body lay lightly over one shoulder, her loose hair brushing his neck. He had almost forgotten her. In the forefront of his mind was the image of the ship and the need to reach it. Apart from that he walked in the roaring blackness of nightmare, where nothing was substantial, where time and distance stretched maliciously into strange dimensions, and underneath it all was fear, the gut-twisting, breath-locking, sweat-running fear that came with a word, and the memory of a dream.

Doomstar.

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

He went down the shadowy tunnel, walking so fast that he was almost running, and there wasn't any end to the damned thing, it went on forever.

Nillaine was stirring. He thought, in a distant sort of way, that he would presently have to hit her again. All his attention was ahead, where he strained to see the end of the narrow track.

Chai barked. He felt a sudden buffet across his back, mingled with a stinging pain. Nillaine cried out. "What is it?" Kettrick snarled. "What the hell is it?" He was startled and shaking. Nillaine had begun to sob, hanging over his shoulder. He put his free hand up across his back. It came away bloody.

Chai held up a small knife. "Not hurt deep," she said. "I see."

He understood then that Nillaine had drawn a hidden knife and tried to kill him, and that Chai had slapped it away in the bare nick of time. Kettrick stopped and searched Nillaine, and she lay all limp and unprotesting, sunk in misery. When he was sure she had no other weapon hidden in the blue silk he picked her up again and went on, a little sicker than before.

He came out at last into the main track. There he stopped and said to Chai, "We can't go through the village, there are too many of them. See if you can find a way around."

Chai ran on ahead. Presently she vanished. Kettrick walked more slowly now, watching ahead for any sight of someone coming from the village, watching behind lest any of the women from the place of sacrifice should try to take him in spite of his warning. He pictured himself hamstrung by a sudden blow, waiting on the ground for the little bright blades to flash down. Above him the familiar trees were as friendly as ever, showering him with fragrant petals.

Chai appeared again, beckoning. He followed her into what at first appeared to be trackless jungle, and then became indubitably a path, narrow and carefully concealed with vines. He did not bother to ask her how she had found it, and she could not have told him anyway. It seemed to go in the right direction, toward the landing field, bypassing the town. It was a very odd sort of trail, obviously not much used, but carefully kept clear.

They hurried along it, and now Chai carried the pillar club dragging from one hand because it caught in the creepers above and on both sides. She would have dropped it, only Kettrick said no. Apart from Nillaine's little knife, it was the only weapon they had.

When they were, as near as he could judge, about even with the village and some distance east of it, they came to a cleared space not over ten feet in diameter. At one side of it was a little squat structure of heavy plastic sunk deep into the ground. Just recently it seemed to have been completely covered with vines and sods of mossy turf. These had been torn away and the top of the structure opened, revealing a metal-lined cavity below.

Something had rested there, like a strange jewel in an improbable case.

He set Nillaine down and held her by the shoulders. "Where?" he asked her. "Where will they take it?"

"I don't know. Seri wouldn't tell us." And then she cried out, "You can't stop him! How can you stop him when nobody knows where he's going?"

She covered her face with her hands, and they went on.

Kettrick was sure now that the path led to the landing field, and it did. They emerged from an innocent, vine-curtains section of the jungle wall no different from any other section, and there was Grellah shoving her dark rusky bulk into the sky, perhaps half a mile away. The little booths of the trading fair seemed to have packed up and gone away from around her feet.

"Let me go now," Nillaine whispered.

And Kettrick said, "Not yet."

He started out across the landing field with Chai, running over the black scars of old flames, stumbling on calcined rock and ridges of glassy slag like cheap obsidian, flawed and stained. He had gone only a little way when he heard the tumult of many people pouring down the broad path from the village.

They burst out from the avenue of trees to his left, far to his left but closer than he was to the ship, a bright-colored spate of running, leaping, shouting, crying men and women that spread and fanned across the landing field toward him. They carried knives and other things, but that many would not need weapons. In the end they could pull him and Chai to pieces with their little hands, like monkeys.

Grellah's hatches were all closed. He filled his lungs once and cried despairingly, and after that he kept his breath for running.

His legs were longer than theirs. But they ran swiftly. Their legs scampered like those of children in some wild game that would end only when they dropped exhausted.

He could have run faster without Nillaine. Nevertheless he clung to her as a last desperate resort until he saw Grellah's hatch slide open, and Boker and Hurth came out of it with two of the bell-mouthed heavy rifles that fired stun-gas shells. They began to fire into the forefront of the crowd. Puffs of dark vapor blossomed and spread. The movement of the crowd became suddenly broken and erratic. Kettrick paused and set Nillaine on her feet.

"You will never be strong," he told her. "Your brains are like feathers, and you have no more purpose than birds."

She appeared not to have heard him. She only whispered. "You have killed us, Johnny. You have killed us."

Chai let the pillar fall in the blackened dust beside Nillaine. She and Kettrick ran on and left her there, a tiny drooping figure by the profaned fruits, her blue silk garment soiled and torn, the flowers tangled in her hair. Her cheeks were dirty with tears and one small hand was streaked with Kettrick's blood.

Kettrick climbed the ladder with Hurth and Boker hauling at him and Chai pushing from behind. He heard the hatch shut and the warning hooter start to blow. He groped his way blindly to his seat, his own eyes hot with a stinging moisture.

The Doomstar poisoned more than suns.