Doomstar

12

Long before they landed it was obvious that Starbird was not there. There was now only one field on that whole planet, and the scanners pictured it windswept and empty. As Grellah settled down on her ragged tailfires, Kettrick thought he saw through the whipped clouds of dust and smoke the fresh scar of a similar landing. That was all.

They opened the airlock. Kettrick and Boker went outside and waited. Hurth and Glevan were already at work in Grellah's bowels. Once again Chai stretched her legs like a hound let free of the kennel. The wind was cold and clean, blowing off the southern snowfields.

Here in this vast equatorial basin it was still warm enough to support life. Herds could graze and crops could grow in the summertime, and the winters were not unbearable. There was game, and water, and the deepest river hardly ever froze. Kettrick walked about, looking at the white snowbanks left from the coming winter's first fall. He crushed a handful of it and tasted it, and felt a pang of recognition. Here and on Earth, it was the same.

He passed by the burned scat he thought he had seen in the scanner. It was there, the edges clear and fresh.

He went back to the ship. Boker was bundled up in heavy coveralls, not much liking the chill. The Cluster worlds tended to be mild. Even Chai was shivering a little in spite of her thick fur.

"If it was Starbird" Kettrick said, "we're close on her heels."

Boker nodded toward the low range of hills that screened the west. "Here comes our welcoming committee."

A line of riders mounted on shaggy, thick-legged beasts came at a shuffling trot out of the hills.

Boker drew a long breath and straightened his shoulders. "It's easy," he said. "Just act as though you never heard of the Doomstar."

"Don't work so hard at it," Kettrick muttered. "You couldn't look any guiltier."

He knew that his own manner must be just about as strained.

The riders came thumping up, powerfully built men in woollen tunics and trousers, with fur-lined boots on their feet and hooded coats on their backs, the coats open and the hoods thrown back because of the warmth of the day. They carried a primitive but quite adequate type of rifle slung across their backs, and in their belts were heavy pistols as well as the ever-useful skinning knives. They were a dark-skinned people, of a greenish cast, with much hair, generally of rusty red.

There was no shouting, no welcoming with open arms. These were men of dignity. They formed a crescent, about twenty strong, in front of the ship and simply sat there on their broad beasts, which breathed heavily and peered through shaggy forelocks. The men examined Kettrick and Boker as though possibly they had never seen them before.

Kettrick and Boker stood with arms folded and stared at a point above the riders' heads. When enough time had gone by to prove to anyone that the men of Thwayne were not impressed by ships or traders, nor in any way anxious to do business with them, one man detached himself from the crescent and rode forward.

"May the Frost King spare your flocks," he said, in his own harsh tongue.

"And may the Sun King warm your croplands," answered Kettrick formally, in the same tongue. Then he switched to lingua. "Hello, Flay."

"Johnny," said the man. His rusty heard so long, braided in two braids, and his hair was braided too, and coiled above his ears. He smiled, showing strong yellow teeth. "Johnny, I'll be damned! Hello, Boker." Then he looked at Chai. "What is that?"

"My friend," said Kettrick, "and not so thick-pelted as you, Flay!"

Flay looked doubtful. "Can your friend ride?"

"She can run."

Flay grunted. "Well, keep her off my hounds. Where's the rest of you?"

Boker indicated the ship. "In there. We have trouble, Flay. The ship has broken her intestines. Look." He reached over and with Kettrick's help exhibited a heavy socketed bar that had been leaning against the tripod gear. One end was snapped off. "Can you forge us a thing like this? If not, we are your guests till the next ship comes."

Flay sat silent for a moment, considering the bar. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. The thick beard masked his face and his eyes were blank and pale, narrowed under heavy brows.

"Have you the missing piece?" he said at last.

"We have." Kettrick held it up. He had broken it off himself with a sledge. They did not really need the bar. They had two more like it in stores. It had seemed a good idea to make Flay think they did need it, just in case.

"Our forges," said Flay, "are second to none. We will make you a bar."

"Good," said Kettrick. "How soon?"

"A week," said Flay. "Are you in great haste?"

"Haste?" said Boker. "In this tub?" he laughed.

Kettrick said, "A week is fine. It will take us at least that long to fix the damage this did when it broke."

"Then," said Flay, "let us go into the city."

He beckoned forward two led beasts. While Kettrick and Boker mounted, other men strapped the broken bar to a third animal. Kettrick spoke briefly to Chai and she came up close beside his mount, frightening it into what was almost animation. The cavalacade went thumpeting off toward the hills.

The "city" lay in a sheltered valley. Compared to Ree Darva it was not much, either in size or beauty. But it had its own uniqueness. It was the only city on a whole planet, just as Flay's people were the only population.

Thawyn had been a dying world for a long, long time, and throughout the centuries her peoples had been cramped into smaller and smaller areas, fighting for survival there, fighting for warmth and arable land. Long ago the weak, the lazy, the tender-minded, the numerically or militarily inadequate, had either perished or taken their remnants thankfully to other planets when the advent of Darvan ships gave them that literally heavensent alternative.

Flay's people had held out, and now they had a planet all their own. Firgals, they called themselves, meaning in their own tongue The Ultimate Ones, and they intended to ride their world proudly to its end, refusing to leave the sacred soil where their ancestors were buried, and whence their seed was sprung.

From the crest of the hill above the town it was possible to see why they were so resolute about staying.

The lines of the opening valley guided the eye onward and outward until presently it was lost in the vastness of grasslands that rolled on to the horizon, red-gold under the huge red sun. In the spring they were green like a green ocean. Great herds of animals grazed on this richness. Here and there were lines of trees along a river bed, or isolated clumps that gave the cattle shelter. The shadowy, whale humps of distant ridges rose out of the grass and away behind them rose the smoke of little hamlets or scattered steadings. At the farthest reach of vision, hanging like dreams in the dusky sky, were the high peaks of mountains wrapped in eternal snow.

They stopped on the crest of the hill, to look over over this their world, and Flay looked up at the old red sun as a man looks at his father.

"He will last out my time," said Flay, "and the time of my youngest children's grandchildren, and they tell me perhaps a thousand or two years beyond. Why should a man worry longer than that?"

"Why, indeed?" said Kettrick, and they rode down into the city.

The houses were more like warrens of stone, some of them sunk into the ground like windowed storm cellars, others one or two or even three stories high, all huddled together as though for warmth and mutual assistance against snow and bitter winds, clambering in rows up and down the hills, thrusting their backsides into the slopes behind them. Chimneys poured up smoke. The most sheltered places were not for human habitation but for winter pens and cave shelters for stock. Shaggy creatures of various breeds and sizes clattered or rooted about in the straggling lanes. There were forges and tanneries, industries of various sorts geared to the materials and the needs at hand. It was the Firgals' boast that they were completely self-sufficient.

"We do not need the traders," Flay had told Kettrick on his first landing here. "We would live just as well if none of you ever came again." Kettrick had found that this was true, and he thought they were a very wise people.

The wisdom of their insistence on staying here was another matter, but that was their own business. And perhaps it was not as foolish as it seemed. Here they had the pick of what there was. On another world, they would have to fit themselves to what was left after others had already settled their order of dominance. Kettrick thought that any planet that took the Firgals in would live to regret its generosity.

People passing in the streets looked at Kettrick and Boker with polite unconcern. Meanwhile, Kettrick was chafing with impatience, sweating to ask Flay whether the last ship had been Seri's, and resolutely forcing himself to silence. These were not the little butterfly people of Gurra. One wrong word could finish Grellah's voyage right here and now.

Of course the Firgals might not be involved at all with Seri and the Doomstar. But Kettrick thought there had been an odd note to Flay's question about their being in a hurry.

The cavalcade began to break up. The parts of the broken bar were taken off to one of the forges. Flay halted in front of a three-storey dwelling, one of a long rambling line, its back wall melting into the hill behind it. They dismounted and went inside.

The room within was low and smoke-smelling, the blackened roof beams close over Kettrick's head. Low doorways led into other chambers at the back and at either end, and on to still other chambers. Flay's clan inhabited a considerable stretch of housing, and it seemed to Kettrick that the clan had grown since he had been here last.

Flay's brawny wives and daughters and daughters-in-law and their innumerable young swarmed about busily. From one room came the mingled clacking of looms and female tongues. In another place a group of youngsters were carding wool, making a game out of it with a singsong chant and much laughter, and another group, slightly older and stronger, took turns thumping at a churn. The one who first made butter got a special reward, and the children kept shouting, "Let me, it's my turn!" The older boys and the men were out with the stock now, or gathering fuel, or working in the forges or the tannery or some other industry. Four old women sat by a fireplace spinning yarn, their dark faces strong as weathered wood, their voices cheerful. Only the very little children tumbled about the floors like puppies with nothing to do.

Flay steered the two outlanders through the rooms and up a narrow flight of stairs that turned upon itself at right angles, requiring some nimble footwork. The upper levels were quieter. In a room with little shuttered windows Flay motioned them to seats in comfortable hide-frame chairs, and set a tall clay bottle and cups before them on a table.

Kettrick resisted the impulse to gulp down the fiery liquor. It was not proper manners. Even so, the warming sips steadied his nerves. The Firgals didn't fool around with effete wines and the like. They lived a hard life in a hard world, and when they wanted a drink they wanted a drink. They made the best whiskey in the Cluster, and kept it, being too short on grains for export.

"Well," said Flay, "and welcome." He filled their cups again and then said quite casually, "Seri didn't tell us you were back, Johnny."

Kettrick made a show of being surprised. "Seri? Seri Otku, who used to be my partner? Has he been here?"

"Only a day and a half ago."

"Well," said Kettrick, "if that isn't a strange coincidence!" He was afraid to pick up his cup, much as he wanted the drink. He was afraid his hand would shake.

"Coincidence?"

"Yes. That we should come so close to meeting here." Eagerly, with all the false sincerity he could muster, he asked, "How is Seri? Is he well and flourishing?"

"He is well," said Flay. "He did not tell us you were back."

"He doesn't know it."

"Oh?" said Flay. "Well, it is different in different lands. With us, a friend and partner would be the first to know."

"Not," said Kettrick, "if your friend and partner is an honest man and wishes to stay that way…and you contemplate a crime."

Now he reached resolutely for the cup and laughed to cover his unsteadiness.

"You knew, perhaps, that the I–C drove me out of the Cluster, under pain of arrest if I ever came back."

"I knew that. Seri himself told me when he first came here."

"Ah," said Kettrick. "Then you must understand that I came back secretly."

He drank, aware that Flay was watching him with eyes like two little bright hard stones. Aware of Boker drinking, desperately silent. Aware of Chai in a corner, always in a corner watching, and her muzzle twitching as it did when something smelled wrong to her.

"Secretly?" said Flay. "And yet you are trading."

"Boker is trading. My friend and I are only shadows." He grinned at Flay. "Boker is transporting shadows to a certain place, and in the meantime we're depending on my friends to keep the secret in case the I–C asks." He leaned a little closer. "Because of that the trading will be extra good…if you haven't already stripped yourselves for Seri. We can afford it, you see, because in a very short while we'll be rich."

"Shadows," said Flay. "Well, well. And when will the shadows come out into the light? Where does a trader who cannot trade go to get rich in the Cluster?"

"To the White Sun," said Kettrick, "to buy heartstones from the Krinn. That's where I was going when they caught me, just a hair's breadth away from a million credits. I couldn't forget that, Flay. That's why I came back, and that's why Boker is risking a stretch at Narkad to help me."

Flay's eyes opened wider, losing some of their hard glaze. "A million credits," he repeated. Suddenly he was roaring with laughter. "We don't give a hang for money here, but we like courage, and we like independence, and we don't greatly like the I–C, who come meddling with their damned spot-checks every so often to see if we're sending out drugs or poisons."

He leaned over and shook Kettrick by the shoulder. "Good luck, Johnny. I'm glad to see you again, and since I will not see you again after you go, we must make this week a special one, a sort of hail and farewell from the Firgals." He filled the cups again, all bluff good fellowship and honest joy. "How's that? We'll hunt, and eat, and drink, and shower each other with gifts, and we'll trade, even though Seri was just here. We'll do you better than you did on Gurra." He thrust the cup at Kettrick and another at Boker. "The women have been weaving a great deal of cloth, and last winter's pelts were especially…"

Kettrick caught it. "Gurra?"

"You just came from there, didn't you?" asked Flay. "I thought you said…"

"No," said Kettrick. "We came from Pellin—" naming one of the alternates to the Gurra route " — and the trading was good there."

"Pellin," said Flay, shaking his head. "I must have heard wrong. Well, it's no matter. No matter at all." He went to the stairway and hollered down it in his own tongue. While his back was turned both men tossed back their drinks and wiped the nervous sweat off their faces, and Boker's lips formed silently a word that meant, "There was a dirty one!"

The tension seemed to have disappeared. A buxom girl with thick red braids swinging down her back brought up a huge tray of food, and they ate, and Flay's strapping sons began to come in from their work, and they ate and drank, and after a while everyone was happy and roaring out songs.

At a quite early hour, because the Firgals went early to bed, Kettrick and Boker rode back to the ship in the dark blowing dusk, loaded with food and drink. Three of Flay's sons went along as escort, to keep them from straying in the hills. When they reached the ship the sons went in with them, smiling and interested, chattering in fluent lingua. They were fascinated by ships, they said, and wanted to look around.

They looked, while Hurth and Glevan stuffed themselves and fell gratefully into their bunks. Kettrick had half expected something like this, so the sons peered everywhere without finding the spare bars hidden among the cargo, seeing only the obvious break in the pump linkage that fed the air supply. They stood around watching for quite a while after Boker and Kettrick went to work on the jump unit, and Kettrick fumed inwardly because they had to keep the pace leisurely while the audience was around. Finally the sons got bored and drifted off to the bridgeroom and went to sleep on the seats. After that Boker and Kettrick worked like madmen.

When at last it was Kettrick's turn to sleep it was easy to believe that everything would go all right now. The sons would be a nuisance, but as long as that link bar was missing they would be content. Boker and Hurth and Glevan would work around the clock. Kettrick would do the trading and keep Flay happy, and help the others as much as he could. They would have Grellah jump ready in record time and…

And go on after Seri with their hands reached out to catch the Doomstar.

And how much chance did they have to catch it, or stop it, or even slow it down.

The Firgals were in on it. They knew. Perhaps somewhere in that honeycomb town they had hidden away a piece of another world's destruction, bribed by Seri's glibly friendly, subtly threatening tongue. Just one thing promised to them would be enough for these people…safety for their own sun, their own cherished world. "The Doomstar will never shine for us." They had given their lives, their devotion, and endless hard work to this dying land. It would be a little thing to them to sacrifice some other planet, some other sun, to the ambitions of other men, as long as Thwayn was safe. The quarrel was none of theirs. All they knew was what belonged to them, what they made with their own strong hands and kept at the price of their own blood.

He did not know that he could entirely blame them.

But he could and did hate Seri with a vicious and dreadful hatred.

He slept and dreamed, and this time he walked in the sick light of the Doomstar with Boker and Nillaine and Flay and a host of others, all led by Glevan beating solemnly on a muffled drum. Presently Kettrick left them and ran by himself, searching and calling through the twisted streets, because Larith was somewhere there and needed him. He heard her voice quite clearly, crying out his name. Once or twice he saw the vanishing flutter of her skirts. He did not find her.

Next day he began the trading. It was too cold for an outside fair around the ship such as they had had at Gurra. Long lines of pack animals carried the bales of boxes into the city, to the Council Hall, and carried the furs and woollens and raw yarns back to Grellah.

If Seri had actually done any trading here, it had not made a noticeable dent in the Firgals' wealth. Kettrick traded all day and then took his turn with the others at night in the rusty bowels of the ship, getting glassy-eyed for lack of sleep but pleased all the same that Grellah would be ready in a little over two days instead of four.

Next morning Flay came out to the ship with no pack animals, but with a dozen men accoutred for the hunt, and a gaggle of "hounds," hairy creatures all tooth and claw and snuffling eagerness.

"There is no haste, Johnny," he said. "My son the smith, and he is the best smith even though he is my son, says it will take him more than seven days to make your bar. Perhaps as many as ten, because he must get a special metal."

Kettrick allowed his face to fall, but not too far.

"So," said Flay, "let the trading wait for a while. The goods will keep, but my hounds are spoiling for a run. Come and hunt."

Kettrick hesitated. "Ten days," he said. "That's too bad."

"Why, Johnny?"

"It's still a long way to the White Sun."

"Learn patience. It will wait."

"Well, since there's no help for it…" Kettrick shrugged. "Maybe it's a good thing at that, when I think about it. Kirnanoc is the next jump from here…"

Flay appeared to be waiting politely for him to explain.

"I mean, Seri has to go there, too, so it's just as well for us to sit here for a while, give him time to do his business and clear out. I wouldn't want to run into Seri, especially on Kirnanoc." Kettrick's smile was dazzling in its sincerity. "Partner or not, I wouldn't trust him not to turn me in to the I–C office there. He had enough trouble on my account two years ago."

He knew that this possibility was exactly what was on Flay's mind, only in reverse. He was worried about Seri, not Kettrick, and he wanted no risk of a chance meeting.

Kettrick went hunting with Flay. Chai ran by his stirrup. The hounds did not like her, nor she them, and they stayed apart. The hounds killed twice. Something red and strange came into Chai's gaze. When they sighted a third quarry she said, "Kill, John-nee?"

He spoke to Flay and the hounds were leashed. The men watched while the great gray Tchell went coursing, transfigured with a deadly beauty. Her body bent and swayed and stretched itself in the steps of a ballet dancer with a horned and fleeing creature across the red-gold grass, a swift ballet climaxed with a single leap. Flay grunted, with mingled admiration and distaste.

"You have a peculiar friend."

"She is loyal," Kettrick said. "Her people are still too close to the beast for treachery."

They rode back toward the city with the lolling carcasses strapped behind saddles and Chai cleaned herself daintily with handsful of grass.

It was dusk and coming on to snow when they met a boy, riding like the wind.