Catseye (8 page)

“If the recaller worked,” Rerne answered, “it did so too well. The mop-up crew did not locate it—so the thing must have been planted well down. And no one hunted it there. It was shorted anyway as soon as we guessed what had happened. Ah—there is our beacon.”

Through the gathering twilight the quick flash of a ground light shone clearly. Rerne circled, set the flitter down neatly on a pocket of landing field within a fringe of towering tree giants that effectively shut off the paling gold of the sky except just over the heads of the disembarking men. The fussel on Troy's wrist fanned wings and uttered a new cry, not guttural in the throat, but pealing up a range of notes.

Rerne laughed. “To work, eh, feathered brother? Wait until the dawning and we shall give you strong winds to ride. That is a true promise.”

Two men stepped from between the trunks of the tree wall. Like Rerne, they were leather-clad, and in addition one had a long hunting bow projecting beyond his shoulder. They glanced briefly at Troy but had more attention for the bird on his wrist.

“From Kyger's.” Without other greeting Rerne indicated the fussel. “And this is Troy Horan who has the manning of him.”

Again each of the foresters favored him with a raking glance that seemed, in an instant's space, to classify him.

“To the fire, to the fireside, be welcome.” The elder of the two gave a strictly impersonal twist to what was evidently a set formula of welcome. Troy was aware that in this world he was an interloper, to be tolerated because of the man who brought him.

And while he had long known and accepted Tikil's evaluation of the Dipple dwellers, yet here this had a power to hurt, perhaps the more so because of the different attitude Rerne had shown. Now the Hunter came to his aid again.

“A rider from Norden,” he said quietly with no traceable inflection of rebuke in his voice, “will always be welcome to the fireside of the ‘Donerabon.'”

But inside Troy there was still a smart. “Norden's plains have no riders now.” He pointed out the truth. “I am a Dippleman, Gentle Homo.”

“There are plains in a man's mind,” Rerne replied obscurely. “Leave the fussel uncaged if he will ride easy. We shelter in the Five League Post tonight.”

There was a trail between the trees ringing in the landing clearing, firm enough to be followed in the half-light. Yet Troy was certain that the three men of the Wild ranger patrol could have found it in the pitch-darkness. It led steadily up slope until outcrops of rock broke through the clumps of brush and the thinning stands of trees, and they came out on a broad ledge hanging above the end of a small lake.

The lodge was not set on that ledge, but in the cliff wall backing it. For some reason the men who patrolled this wilderness had sought to conceal their living quarters with as much cunning as if they were spies stationed behind enemy lines. Once past the well-hidden doorway, Troy found himself in a large room that served as general living quarters, though screened alcoves along the back wall served for bunk rooms.

There was no heating unit. But a broad platform of stone with an upper opening in the rock roof supported smoldering wood, wood that gave off a spicy, aromatic fragrance as it was eaten into ashes. A flooring of wooden planks had been fitted over the rock beneath their boots, and here and there lay shaggy pelts to serve as small runs, while on the walls were shelves holding not only the familiar boxes of reading tapes, but bits of gleaming rock, some small carvings. Brilliant birdskins had been pieced together in an intricate patchwork pattern to cover six feet of the opposite wall.

It was very far removed from Tikil and the ways of Tikil. But in Troy old memories stirred again. The homestead on Norden had not been quite so rugged, but it had been constructed of wood and stone by men who relied more upon their own strength and skill of hands than upon the products of machines.

The fussel called and was answered from one of the alcoves—not in its own cry, but with a similar note. Troy's other hand shot out to imprison the legs of the hawk before it could fly. But the fussel, stretching out its red-patched neck, its black crest quivering erect, merely uttered a deeper, rasping inquiry. Rerne strode forward, pushed aside the screen. There were three perches in the alcove, one occupied by a bird very different from the one Troy bore.

Where the fussel was sunlit fire, this was a drifting shadow of smoke. Its round head was crestless, but the tufted ears stood erect, well above the downy, haze-gray covering on the skull. Its eyes were unusually large and in the subdued light showed dark as if all pupil. In body it was as large as the fussel, its powerful taloned claws proclaiming it a hunter, as did the tearing curve of its beak.

Now it watched the fussel steadily, but showed only interest, no antagonism. One of the foresters presented a gloved wrist, and it made a bounding leap to that new perch.

“An owhee,” Rerne said. “They will willingly share quarters with a fussel.”

Troy had heard of the peerless night-hunters but had not seen one before. He watched the ranger take it to the door of the lodge and give it a gentle toss to wing away in the twilight. And a moment later they heard its hunting call: “OOOooowheeee!”

Rerne nodded at the perches and Troy went to let the fussel make a choice. After a moment of inspection, the bird put claw on the end one and settled there, waiting for Troy to offer him his evening bait.

He who flew the owhee and his partner of the resident staff did not linger after Rerne, Troy, and their kit were in the ledge house. Each forest ranger had a length of trail to patrol by night as well as by day. They said very little, and Troy suspected that it was his presence that kept the conversation to reports, questions, and answers. He tended the fussel and tried to keep out of the way.

But when both had gone and Rerne brought out a pack of Quik-rations, they settled by the fire, which the Hunter poked into renewed life. There were no chairs, only wide, thick cushions of hide stuffed with something that gave forth a pleasant herbal smell when crushed beneath one's weight.

As they shared the contents of the food pack, the Hunter talked and Troy listened. This was the stuff of the other's days—the study of the Wild, the policing of it after a fashion, not to interfere with nature, only to aid her where and when they could, to make sure that the natural destruction wrought by man himself wherever and whenever he came into new territory did not upset delicate ecological balances.

There were stands of fabulous woods that could be cut—but only under the supervision of the Hunting Clans. There were herbs to be sought for the healing fraternities of other worlds, studies made of the native animals. The Wild was a storehouse to which the Clans held the keys—keeping them by force if necessary.

In the tree-filled valleys, on the spreading plains yet farther to the east, battles had been fought between poachers and guardians. And only because Korwar had been proclaimed a pleasure planet did the Clans have the backing to keep the looters out. Most of this Troy knew, vaguely, but now Rerne spoke of times and places, named names.

The story was absorbing, but Troy was no child to be beguiled by stories. He began to wonder at the reason for Rerne's talkativeness.

“There is no carbite on Korwar,” Rerne continued. “But let its equal be found here—and let the barriers against mineral exploration go down—”

“Is there any chance of that happening?” Troy ventured, suddenly aware that he, too, was now thinking as a partisan, ready to protect the Wild against willful destruction. Something in him was stirring sluggishly, pressing bonds he himself had welded into place as a self-protection. Like the hawk, he wanted to test his wings against a free and open sky.

Rerne's lips twisted wryly. “We have learned very little, most of our species. I can name you half a hundred planets that have been wrecked by greed. No, not just those burned off during the war, but killed deliberately over a period of years. As long as we can keep Korwar as a pleasant haven for the overlords of other worlds, some of them the greed-wrecked ones, we can hold this one inviolate. One does not want such desolation in one's own back yard. So far those of the villas have the power, the wealth, to retain Korwar as their unspoiled play place. But how long will it continue to be so? There may be other treasures here than those fabled to lie in Ruhkarv, and far more easily found!”

“You have had two hundred years,” Troy said, with an old bitterness darkening that elation of moments earlier. “Norden had less than a hundred—thanks to Sattor Commander Di!”

“No length of years will satisfy a man when he sees the end of a way of life he is willing to fight for. What does the past matter when the future swoops for the kill? Yes, Sattor Commander Di—who died of poison in his own garden house and whose murderer is yet to be found—and even the method by which the poison reached him determined—has to answer for Norden.”

How did Rerne know all that about Di? The fact of poison had not been broadcast on the general coms. Troy felt like a sofaru rat over which the shadow of a diving fussel had fallen, powerless before the strike of an enemy not of his own element. Was
this
behind Rerne's talk, merely a softening-up process to prepare him for subtle questioning about the kinkajou? Or was his own half-guilty feeling suggesting that?

But the Hunter did not enlarge upon the case of Sartor Commander Di. His explorations into the past were not so immediate. Rather now he led Troy to talk about his own childhood. Though in another Korwarian Horan might have considered that questioning presumptuous, there was something about Rerne's interest that seemed genuine, so that the younger man answered truthfully instead of with the evasions he had used so long for a shield—including the fact that his memories of Norden's plains and the free life there were hazy now.

“There are plains here, too. You might consider that,” Rerne suggested cryptically as he arose in one lithe movement. “Given time, the right man might learn much. The bunk at that end is yours, Horan. No evil dreams ride your night—” Again the phrase had some of the formality of a ritual dismissal. Troy looked in upon the fussel, saw that it was asleep with one foot drawn up into its under feathers after the manner of its kind, and then went to the bunk Rerne had indicated.

There was no foam plast filling its box shape. Inside dried grasses and leaves gave under him, then remolded about his body, and the fine scent of them filled his nostrils as he fell asleep easily. He did not dream at all.

When he awoke, the door of the big room stood ajar and from that direction he heard the calls of birds. Still rubbing sleep from his eyes, Troy rolled out of the bunk. The fire on the hearth was out and there was no one else in the room. But the clean smell of a new day in the Wild drew him out on the ledge, to stand looking down into the valley of the lake.

Something rose and fell with a regular stroke not far from the shore, and he realized he was watching a swimmer. A series of steps cut in the rock led down from the ledge, and Troy followed them. Then a loose sleeping robe draped over a bush beckoned him on and he shed his own in turn, testing the temperature of the water with his toes, plunging into it in a clumsy dive before he could change his mind because of that chill greeting.

Troy floundered along the shore, being no expert as was that other now heading, with clean arm sweeps and effortless kicks, back from the center. His threshings disturbed mats of floating blossoms shed by trees bordering a rill that fed the lake at this point, and the bruised petals patterned his wet skin as he found sandy footing and stood up, shivering.

“Storm-cold, Gentle Homo,” he commented as Rerne waded in.

The other stopped to wring water from his braided hair knot and then, surveying Troy's dappled body, he laughed.

“A new refinement—flower baths?”

Troy echoed that laugh as he skimmed the wet masses from him. “Not of my choice, Gentle Homo.”

“The name is Rerne. We do not follow the paths of Tikil here, Horan.” The other was using his nightrobe as a towel, kicking his feet into sandals. With the robe now draped cloak-wise about him, he stood for a moment looking out over the lake, and his face was oddly relaxed, much more alive than Troy had ever seen it.

“A fair day. We shall go to the plateau above Stansill and see just how good our feathered one really is.”

The flitter took them east and north again. And once more the vegetation beneath them thinned. But not to a waste scar such as that which held Ruhkarv, rather to open plains of tall grasses and scattered, low-growing shrubs. Twice Rerne buzzed the flyer above herds of ruminants, and homed heads tossed angrily before the heavy-shouldered beasts pounded away, tasseled tails high in wrath.

“Pansta,” Rerne identified them. “Wild cattle of a sort.”

“But they are scaled—or at least they look so!” Troy protested, thinking of his own lost tupan that had grazed so and might have run from a buzzing flitter in the same pattern.

“Not scaled as a fish or a reptile,” Rerne corrected. “Those are plates of hardened flesh—something like an insect's wing-casing shell. The herds are dwindling every year, fewer calves born; we do not yet know why. We have reason to believe that they were once domesticated.”

“By those of Ruhkarv?”

“Perhaps. Though who or what those of Ruhkarv were—” Rerne shrugged.

“Did they leave only one ruin behind them? I know only of Ruhkarv.”

“And that is another mystery. Why a single known city for a civilization? Were they only an outpost of some long-lost stellar empire vanished before man took to space? That was one theory Fauklow wanted to prove or disprove. There is one other trace of them on Korwar—north beyond the plains. But that is all—and that is a very small post. I do not think they were native here. Just as the pansta are so alien to the other animals of the Wild that they do not seem to be native either. The feral herds of a long-gone race, which have outlasted their unknown masters.”