Doomstar

8

Kettrick was glad when they came out of jump. It was always a dull, nerve-wrangling time, and he had been worried about Chai. She seemed better as soon as the heat abated, physically at least. She ate well again, and for the first time she began to groom herself, asking a brush from Kettrick and then spending hours brushing her coat to its old smooth gloss.

And still…

There was nothing he could put his finger on, except that ever since Khitu's death she had been quiet and withdrawn, and a broody Tchell was an unchancy thing to have around. Kettrick was well aware that they could become so morose as to be dangerous. The others were clearly unhappy in her presence, and he had nightmares about the possible consequences. He hoped that some relief from the confinement of the ship would help her.

He stood with her at the bridge window, showing her the big orange sun ahead beyond the safety screens. You could see the fire fountains leap up, see the flames shoot in beautiful plumed arcs a thousand miles long. You could see the whirlwinds, golden red and shining, dance and bow to each other along the burning equator. After a while a tiny bright ball came whirling out of the sun glare, and Kettrick said, "Gurra. We land there."

"Go outside?"

"Yes."

"Good," she said, and stretched her mighty arms as though she would break through the cramping iron walls. "We find Seri there?"

"I don't know," said Kettrick, startled. "Why?"

"You talk now, John-nee. Seri make Khitu die."

Her big round eyes met his, uncannily intelligent, pathetically animal, direct and fierce. "Why you not talk true before?"

"I was afraid you'd kill him."

"Why not kill?" she said, with a curious softness. "You still love Seri?"

This was what she had been brooding about. She had seen Kettrick's outburst in Boker's place, and she had heard them talk about Seri, recognizing the name even if she could not understand what was said. And all this time she had been puzzling in her half-human, half-animal mind, trying to make sense in her own way of the only partly understood behavior of the people around her.

The conclusion she had come to was frightening.

He said, "No, not love Seri. You forget. Seri make me die too, only you held me. But Chai, you listen. Man-law punish Seri. You try, they lock you in cage, for always. You hear?"

She continued to study him. Gradually the fierce light died out of her eyes, and she nodded.

"We catch Seri?"

"We catch him."

"You talk true?"

"We catch him. Maybe not soon. His ship runs faster than ours. But we catch him: And you not kill."

"Not kill." It was equivalent to a promise.

Somehow Kettrick did not entirely trust it.

The bright ball of the planet rushed to meet them, growing huge, blotting out the sun. Grellah stuck her blunt nose into the atmosphere and sank with a despairing shriek toward the midsection of the main land mass of the eastern hemisphere.

There were two trading ports, one in the east, one in the west on the other side of the world. Sekma had mentioned the eastern one as a center of the Doomstar rumor. Starbird might have landed at either and there was no way of telling until they were down.

Kettrick chose the east.

The dark land opened up below them, clumped trees, jungle tracts, mountain, valley, broad savannah, a winding river, all in shades of brown and ochre, yellow and dull red, the colors turning drab and strange as clouds boiled up against the sun. Grellah slid her puny fires down the great black belly of a thunderhead, a pinprick against the lightning. Boker brought her tottering in to a landing on a dirt field scorched and bullied with rocket fire, steadied her on her tripod gear, and cut his switches.

Chai was the first one out the lock. The men followed her, hurrying to try and beat the storm, and Kettrick saw her running in the wild gloom, a gray ghost stretched to the wind. Thunder rolled. Fat silver lightning threaded the sky. Except for Grellah and the rusting bones of an old wreck, the field was empty.

They took the trail to the village, sweating in the heavy heat. The air reeked with the overrich perfumes of growing things. Tall red-leaved trees on either side of the path shook down showers of petals from their massed white blossoms, so that the men seemed to move through a fall of snowflakes. Chai came up from behind them, panting, her fur dappled with the swirling whiteness.

The storm broke.

Kettrick fought through a blind smother of wind and rain, yearning to be out from under the trees that he could hear but no longer see. Then as the first edge of the storm passed he saw movement ahead, and heard laughter, and a few moments later he and the others were in the midst of a crowd of small, bright-skinned people who stretched on tiptoe to throw robes of woven fibre about the men's shoulders, shaking their wet hair and skipping like children in the rain. They ooh-ahed at Chai and left her alone, but the men they half carried, pushing and hurrying along the trail.

They came out into the broad square of the village, with the little high-peaked houses around it leaning their reed thatch into the wind, and they ran across it toward the Tall House where all strangers were brought because it was the only one built high enough to receive them comfortably.

Inside it was dry, with a raised floor of earth and fiber beaten hard. The air still held the stale prestorm heat. The roof rattled and the walls rocked, but Kettrick had been in this house before in a storm and it was welcome shelter.

He looked around and saw a small man coming toward them, wrapped in the red robe of office. There was no sign of age about him except that his boy's face was beginning to get a wizened look like a pink fruit kept past its time. Kettrick disengaged himself from the general laughing, shoving flurry and called out, "Whellan!"

The little man gave him a startled look and then cried, "Johnny!" He began to hug Kettrick and pound him with his small fists, gabbling all sorts of questions. Over the top of his head Kettrick saw the girl staring at him, and he stared back.

She had been little more than half as high the last time he had seen her. Her thin child's body had rounded into a slender miniaturization of womanhood, delicate and lovely as a sprite. But he knew her in spite of the change, and she had not forgotten him. Her amber eyes lighted up. She smiled and came to him, considerate of her new dignity, and put her hands in his.

"Welcome back, Johnny."

He wanted to pick her up and tousle her hair as he had used to do, just to spite her, but instead he bowed over her hands and said, "Thank you, Nillaine."

Whellan, with a father's disregard for such affectations, smacked her affectionately across the lower drape of her garment. "Go and fetch food for our guests, and wine, lots of wine. This is a time for celebrating." He grinned at Boker and Hurth and Glevan. "I am always happy to see you, thieves though you are. But this is a special, a very special day."

He turned again to Kettrick, looking puzzled. "But Johnny, how does this happen? Only three, four days ago Seri was here, your friend and partner. We asked him then about you, and he said it was the same as before, that the I–C would never let you come back."

Kettrick said in a flat, mild voice, "Seri trades with you now?" He did not look at Boker.

"Oh yes," said Whellan quickly. "In your place, Johnny, though it's not the same. Only I don't understand. Why didn't he…"

"The I–C haven't changed their minds, Whellan. So I just didn't tell them that I was back. I didn't tell Seri either. No reason to get him in trouble." Kettrick smiled, just a little savagely. "Only my three thieving friends know, and now you."

"Oh," said Whellan. He began to laugh delightedly. "Oh, ho! Good for you, Johnny! Good! We never loved the I–C here, you know that." Kettrick did indeed. Sekma's lads had been very firm about stopping the export of a certain drug that Whellan's people made and which had been their chief commodity. They had not forgotten it.

Whellan led the way across the room, and Kettrick followed him, and Boker said in Kettrick's ear, "So your old friend and partner trades with them now in your place? That's interesting."

"It is indeed. And obviously, this is not his first trip into space."

Three years ago, Whellan had never heard of Seri Otku.

Whellan waved them to the seats of honor on the wide bench that ran around the room. Kettrick sat cross-legged on the thick matting, feeling the house move at his back. Rain rattled like shot on the roof, and the thunder cracked. Chai settled herself tactfully close to the door, watching Kettrick. Whellan chattered.

Kettrick said, "It's bad luck, though, coming just after Seri. I suppose he's traded you out."

Whellan turned to take wine from his daughter's hands. "No," he said carelessly. "No, he offered poor prices. We didn't do much trade. Now, let's drink eh? We worry about business tomorrow."

They drank. Nillaine brought food and served Kettrick herself, and then sat close by him, studying his face.

"What are you looking for?" he asked her.

"Myself," she said. "Three of our years ago. You looked at me differently then."

"You were different then. Shall I rumple your hair and hold you on my knee, and feed you exotic sweets from other stars until you get the bellyache and your mother hates me?"

"I thought you were a god then." She had an exquisite smile.

"And what do you think now?"

"You're too big, your hands are coarse and your chin is bristly. You are most certainly not a god. But it's all right, Johnny. I still love you." She laughed and poured him more wine.

Much later, Kettrick asked if Seri had had a woman with him, and Nillaine said no.

They feasted in the Tall House until long after the storm was gone. Kettrick got pretty drunk on wine and the happy feeling of being there, and the drunker he got the more a peculiar clarity affected his vision, so that he saw in the laughing faces of the beautiful little people who danced and sang and ate and drank with him a salting of new malice, a new excitement burning just beyond his sight, gleaming in the quick sidelong glances and secret smiles. Sometimes when the young men danced they made gestures like warriors, stamping their feet and tossing up their heads, and then the girls would run in and stop them and they would all laugh together and turn to some other dance, a little too ostentatiously. They reminded Kettrick of children who knew a big secret. They were keeping it from the adults…himself, Boker, Hurth, and Glevan.

He wondered why.

When it was quite late and he was quite drunk, and Whellan was drunker, Whellan leaned over and looked at him with deep affection and whispered, "Johnny, you stay here with us. Eh? Just a little while. After that, the I–C…"

Nillaine interrupted. Whellan never finished what he was about to say. And Kettrick wondered.

After that, the I–C what?