Rork! (5 page)

From where they then stood the terrain sloped gently enough into a shallow bowl, and beyond the rim of the bowl it vanished. Past there and an incalculable distance beyond and below stretched a great plain towards the misty horizon where the land fused with the sky.

And to the right and to the left, before and behind, as far as the marveling eye could reach, all the land was blazing and aflame with redwing.

For many minutes the sheer wonder of it — the great empty heart of the neglected and all but unknown continent — and the sheer beauty of it — held him silent. And then (afterwards he was to reproach himself for it, curse the fact … if it was a fact … that he was a Guildsman at heart; seek excuses like “medical necessity”; recall the instructor at the Academy: “What is Man, young aspirants? Man is an animal that trades … ”) and then, almost explosively, angrily —

“Why don’t you gather your redwing
there
?

“There! There!

“Look at it! It must be as thick as grass! Why — ”

And Rango looked at him with openmouthed, gap-toothed astonishment. “Why … Why, Mist Ran … Why, this all
rork
country! This Rorkland! Whence Cold Time,
then
wece goin. But nah now, Mist Ran. Nah now.”

Rorkland! All rork country. And the rork was the bogeyman, the curse, the devil, and the terror-in-the-night.

“Are there any down there now, do you think? Any rorks? In sight?”

“Ah. Spiders. You wahn see em. Yace. Irina lookin-glahs.”

Looking glass … surely Rango didn’t mean a mirror? Was he supposed to turn around and gaze in a reflection? Did the rork turn the viewer to stone, like Medusa? Not till the Tock pointed to the farseer, did Lomar understand. He unbuckled the case at his belt and lifted the instrument to his eyes. Haze leapt into clarity. The redwing was no longer a single massy carpet, but, still, the plants appeared more thickly, were visibly larger, than they were in Tockland.

And then, by that curious little trick of the mind, whereby we often (or so it seems) become aware of the sound of an engine just the merest moment before it stops, so Ran Lomar observed the rork only in the second before it rose and walked. His first rork!

How large was it, he could not say, having nothing to measure it against but the redwing, and in that excited moment no longer sure at all that the plants at that distance were really larger. Like a great black boulder, it seemed, shading into dark grey below. Spider! Yes, that would have been the obvious comparison, and the term would lead to no confusion since Pia 2 was without arachnids of its own. There was no separate head, and the body was underslung, lower than the knees of the creature’s legs, so that it hung — so to speak — from its own thighs, rather than being supported upon them. A daddy longlegs type of animal, with body much larger in proportion to legs than that harmless wee creature of Old Earth (still quietly surviving when all the great saurians and mammals had passed off the scene, the elephant as extinct as the baluchitherium), and … legs … yes. There was no doubt of it. In this respect, at least, the old books were right. The roark was quadruped.

This one now proceeded to shake itself, then to groom itself first with one long, limber foot and then, by turn, the others. Then it paused as if listening. Now he could see the stalked eyes. Then it moved leisurely down the ranks of redwing until it was partially concealed and he could not see what it was doing when it stopped. The body dipped a bit. A frond of redwing shivered, shook, seemed to shoot up, then down. The rork came fully into sight again, the plant in its mouth … he assumed that was its mouth. … If the beast would only turn —

It turned, giving him for the first time a clear sight of the so-called “mask.” Difficult to believe that this was not a face! The yellow markings, enclosed in a sort of cartouche of the same color, so perfectly counterfeiting eyes, nose, mouth: but, whatever it was, it was no face. The eyes, like a snail’s, were on top. The old books said that the rork breathing outlet was on top, too. And the mouth lay well beneath the bottom line of the mask.

As he watched, something appeared at the mouth, dropped to the ground. He thought it was a root, could not be sure. The great red leaf trembled and, as the rork munched and mumbled the stalk, was drawn slowly towards the indistinct dark cavern of the mouth —

Rango jostled his arm. The rork was lost to sight. Angered, Lomar turned to the guide, who, not looking at him, pointed below, much closer by.

“Sst, Mist Ran — aim the lookin glass down there … you seece eh big-big tree near brook?”

Lomar, after a moment, did. In the farseer, so quickly that he gave a start, appeared an animal utterly unlike a rork, and much, much smaller. Something was in its mouth, either a small leaper or a large crybaby, perhaps. It was there but an instant, then, suddenly, it scuttled away. First another, then another, the same kind of creature, passed rapidly before his gaze. The grass quivered a bit. Then nothing more. After another minute he put down the farseer.

“What you seece, Mr. Ran?” the Tock demanded — somewhat anxiously, it seemed. “Rips?”

“Was that what they were? Long and low?”

His guide nodded vigorously, his long, dark, now clean hair shaking. “Yace. Rips … How many you seece?”

“Three of them … why?”

“Three? No more? For-sure?”

Lomar assured him there were no more. The Tock reflected, clearly — by his expression — uncertain whether this was good or bad. Then he gestured towards Pia Sol, whose sullen blood-orange disk seemed to hover just a bit over the horizon. “Time to goce make a housey for hide en sleep.”

Rango took considerable pains, stripping the loose, soft bark from chosen trees, trimming branches with his hack; but it was small enough for all that, and had to be entered on hands and knees. Lomar was glad that they had both bathed. Rango insisted on making a fire despite the heater and the ward lamp in Lomar’s field pack, and, as they sat by it after supper, he began to talk.

One star was brighter than all in that black sky, blazing with a blue-white brilliance while the crybabies wailed and sobbed all around them. Rango flung out his hand towards it. “Old Earth,” he said, awe in his voice.

“What’s that?” Lomar was startled.

“Old Earth, Old Earth.”

“World as gives our fathers birth,

“Wish a-may, wish a-might,

“Haves the wish a-wish tonight,”

chanted Rango.

It was, of course, Lomar very well knew, nothing of the sort. It was Pia 3, the ball of slag officially known as Ptolemy Philadelphius, but unofficially called (in the cleaned-up version) “The Dung Heap.” But, being touched by both the fellow’s innocence and the verse which, in one form or another, was old when “our fathers” were still bound to the surface of their native world, he would not for the world have disillusioned him. The Tocks had little enough; they had, in fact, almost nothing.

Except this.

• • •

Had it been possible to plunge at once that next morning into the rufous jungle below, Lomar might have done it. But the descent of the off side of Last Ridge was obviously even a heavier undertaking than the ascent of the nigh side had been. Rango’s frequent noisy swallowing and thong-clutching as they viewed the prospect showed that he was probably far from anxious to put his new-bought charm to the test. And then, suddenly, suddenly, it seemed to Lomar that he had to find out a lot more about the rorks before meeting any of them face (so to speak) to face.

Up till now it had seemed that the Tocks were the one and the only key to the redwing matter. Now it seemed that there was another key — the rorks.

Rango received the sudden change of plans with relief, and hastened eagerly into talk. “Yace, Mist Ran, no-good now. You waist an see — comes Cold Time, wece goin nen. Nen spiders changen skins. Assen gahst no strengths. Lossa Tocks, some men, too, wece comin down to Rorkland. You come, too, Mist Ran. You come, too.”

And Lomar had thought that it might not be until then that he would be coming back to Last Ridge and its tremendous views.

But he was wrong.

The Station Library echoed to his steps. It was free enough of dust and dirt, the clean up Tocks saw to that. But no one was there. Catalogs, stacks and files were open to his touch. The two viewing rooms were as empty as the rest of the place. He threaded the spools to allow for continuous showing, sat back in his seat and depressed the cam on the arm of the chair.

Some of the spools were text clear through, others were 3D and narrative. The words had been written, and the voices spoken, by men and women long, long dead, and were marked throughout with little touches of the archaic. Nothing had been done to add to the material for centuries. However, there was no reason to assume that the rorks were any different now than they were then. And the unworn condition of the repro now unfolding before his eyes gave no reason to assume that many people had ever been interested in learning about them.

There it was, in three dimensions, sound, and color: Rorkland. And there were the rorks, much better, clearer, longer views than he’d gotten with just his farseer.
“… fearfully intelligent….”
Now, that was odd … He watched with bemused fascination a speed-up of the skin-shedding process the creatures gradually went through in winter, as they lay in their nests, moving sluggishly, when at all. Why, if the ancient observers had been correct, — why, if the rork were strictly herbivorous and attacked only in self-defense, should they be described as
fearfully
intelligent? Had the author-narrator been suspicious that his contemporaries were wrong and others right? — that the rork ate men, as well as attacking them on sight? And did they indeed venture into Tockland to capture human babies for a more grisly diet than mere redwing?

There was something stirring, tragic, in the views of the original settlers, forebears of the Tocks: clean, alert, vigorous, full of intelligence and zeal. To what had their descendents come!

He emerged from the library slowly and thoughtfully.

And to find the Station in an uproar.

• • •

No one, that month, thought of redwing at all. The Tocks came pouring in from all quarters of their small homeland — some of them from so far off that their grubby-faced and naked brats screamed in terror at the strange sight of Station personnel. The force fields were set up and all Guildsmen supplied with arms and — wonder of wonders! — Manton, the Motor Aide, even parted with several of his precious skimmers. And Edran Lomar found himself in one of them with Tan Carlo Harb, the Station Officer.

The shrill sound of the alarm still seemed to echo in his ears as he looked over the side. Height had been set for ten feet as soon as the vehicle passed out of the treelined streets. “I’m a rather good shot at rips,” the SO said, “but when things are like this, there’s no point in trying for individual kills. No sport in it when you can hardly miss…. I’m upping speed, boy. Hold on. Hold … on.”

After the lurch the ride was smooth again. “How often are things like this?” Lomar asked. “When the rips swarm?”

A new light was in the SO’s eyes, a new color in his cheeks. “Oh, every so often,” he said, vaguely. “If the north end of the continent wasn’t on a plateau, things would be much worse. As it is, well, to tell you the truth, it’s chiefly a rather exciting but hardly a dangerous period. Not for us. Gives us a chance to get the kinks out of our buttocks and the stale air out of our lungs, run around and skim around and shout … and all that.
Ha!
Look there! Below, left —
there!
”

There, where the SO’s plump finger pointed, a bush seemed suddenly to explode as at least a dozen leapers sprang out of it. And springing after them were the yellow-grey brindled bodies of the rips. They were perhaps no larger than large hares, and in shape were not very much unlike them, save for the batlike ears and stiff, erect tails. One of the leapers alone managed to make its escape, its great, terrified bounds covering at least five meters at a time. While other rips ravaged and worried their prey, another set off in pursuit, teeth bared, clods of earth flying from the sharp and non-retractable claws capable of the dreadful damage which gave the beast its name.

“Hold control,” the SO said, abruptly, pressing the release toggle. Lomar hastily activated the instrument set on his side. Scarcely had he time to notice Harb seizing the weapon, when it snapped, releasing the tiny but telltale little burst of mist, and the rip — already dead — stumbled, whirled, and fell.

“Not bad,” said the SO. “Return control.”

Lomar looked back to see the rip pack tearing the body of its mate to bloody pieces. One of them raised a reddened snout and seemed to gaze back toward him with milky eyes. He shuddered.

“Lemmings,” said Harb, his voice reflecting satisfaction.

“Sir?”

“Don’t you know the natural history of your own world, Lomar?
Lemmings.
An extinct mammal that lived in Iceland or Greenland … was it Scotland? … never mind, doesn’t matter. Lemmings; I’ve been trying to think of that name ever since I stepped into the skimmer. I thought that you’d be able to tell me something about them. Too bad. Well. The lemmings used to swarm now and then, just as the rips do. Something about their metabolism, or am I thinking of something else? Suddenly they’d increase in numbers, incredible, tremendous increase. And then they’d pour out, over-running the country until, according to the quaint old legends, they would reach the sea — ”

“I bet that stopped them.”

“If so, Lomar, you would lose your money. No, as a matter of fact — or fancy, as it may be — that did
not
stop them. They had swum across ponds and lakes and rivers and so they assumed — one would suppose — that the ocean was just another of the same. So, in they’d plunge, millions and millions of them,” Harb said, enthusiastically, “and swim until they drowned…. Oh, I suppose some of them must have gotten back to shore or else never went in the water at all, otherwise there would’ve been no more to carry on the species. But the rips, on the other hand — see them? Look. See? See? In-cred-ible.”