Star Hunters (6 page)

She yawned. “Damn, I'm tired. Look, Ranger.… What's your name?”

His first reaction was a stubborn refusal to speak to her, then a flash of humor lightened his mood. “Manoreh.”

She touched her breast. “Aleytys. Hunter.” She felt his withdrawal and frowned. “What's wrong?”

“You're a woman.” He beat his fists lightly on his thighs in his frustration. He could sense her reactions as well as she could his and her snort of amusement with its accompanying scorn defeated him. “Why do you do this?”

“Manoreh, I think we'd better simply accept that we come from different cultures. That's the kind of thing we could have endless arguments about with neither convincing the other.” She smiled at him. “Think of me as neuter if it helps.” She swept her hand in a small circle. “Do all your plants do that? Catch and reflect emotion?”

He turned from her with relief. He touched the bush beside him gently, separating out the dark nodes, pushing aside the foliage to show them to her as they sat in the branching of the small crooked limbs. “Small woody plants have these. Like the juapepo brush that covers the valley floor.” He stood and shoved aside the tree's branches, letting the dim light of the moonring strike through to touch the dark swelling where the twisted circle of trunks met. “Slower growing and more wise,” he said softly. Then he smiled. “There's a child's tale that says an old, old tree lives far to the south and is wiser than old men.” He let the branches swing closed and settled back on the bench. “Most animals have some degree of
FEELING
. Hares the most. That's the problem! Haribu has harnessed their gift and is driving them against us.”

“Haribu?” She leaned forward. “The Chwereva Reps said nothing about Haribu.”

“Haribu Haremaster.” His voice was somber, but there was an emptiness in him, a place where anger should have been and was not.

She waited but he said nothing more. “Well? Who is he? If you know his name, you must know something about him.”

“Harbiu.” He stared at the toes of his boots. “A name. A touch. Haribu … the harewalks started three years ago. My family … the first to go … harewalks … they told you about the harewalks?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “They told us.”

“The hares came at night. They were all asleep. They had no warning.…” He sank into a brooding silence.

Aleytys lay back on the grass, listening as he went on in that dull voice after a long silence filled with the buzzing, whispering noises of the garden.

“I was at the Tembeat, the last year of my training. The Director sent me home before my first short trek. Faiseh my friend … Faiseh went with me. The gate was knocked down, the stock moaning for water. We tracked them. My people. They walked until they fell and died. We buried them. One by one. We saw the hare pellets around the houses. We saw the tracks where hare feet had chewed the earth to dust, we saw the green bitten off to the ground. But how could we know … later more Holdings went … Holdings farther south. We learned this much more, that the hares had some connection with the horror. We lost every Holding south of the Chumquivir. We began to
FEEL
the touches of the directing mind behind these attacks. We named that mind Haribu. Haribu Haremaster. That's all we know.”

Aleytys turned her head and examined his face. “What's wrong?” she said quietly.

He hesitated. She sensed a touch of embarrassment then he said, “I split off a ghost.”

“I don't understand.” When he didn't explain, she sighed and sat up. “Enough of that. What do you think of Chwereva Company?”

“Why?” She felt surprise, curiosity and a touch of contempt stir in him.

“We—Hunters Inc., I mean—we think there's a strong possibility that Ghwereva is involved with this Haribu of yours. At least, someone inside Chwereva is conspiring to clear off the watuk population from this world and open it up for new ownership. Haribu was certainly waiting for us at the port. I don't know yet just how the connection runs, but there are things that make it sure.” She chuckled. “Which you will not ask about, if you please. We all have our privacies.”

He was puzzled, ignoring her attempt at humor. “The Eight Families wouldn't allow Chwereva to attack us. Even a hint of that and the Company would be dissolved. The Families protect their own.” His eyes moved restlessly about the shadowy garden. “The Vodufa society contracted with Chwereva for this world. The only immigrants permitted are strict Vodufa. Except Chwereva employees, of course, and they're only grudgingly allowed. Why should anyone else want this world?” Curiosity drove back the chill and he seemed briefly more human. “The Vodufa got it cheap since there were no large concentrations of minerals. It's a light-metal world, no good for high-tech groups, perfect for Vodufa because of their hatred of technology and their plans for a pure society, a return to the old ways of the stalwart and noble originators of the race.”

Aleytys laughed at the scorn in his voice. “That explains why the ones responsible for this attack have used such indirect means to clear the world. A couple of stingships could burn you all out of existence in moments.”

“Why attack us?” he repeated.

“Just have to ask Haribu that when we find him.”

The surge of life grayed out of him. When he spoke, his voice was dull and tired. “Not much time to find him. In a day or two the hares will be hundreds deep around Kiwanji. The psi-screen will hold awhile, but the men inside?” He rubbed trembling hands together. “How long will it take them to wear out?”

Aleytys shivered. She stroked her temples and grimaced when she felt no response. “I've read the Chwereva reports. Plotting the direction of the walks told you nothing. And the explorations you Rangers made have turned up no other form of intelligence.” She paused, then grinned. “Except a children's tale of a wise old tree. No truth in that, I suppose.”

“We looked and found no tree.”

His serious answer surprised a laugh out of her. “You're certainly thorough.” She sobered. “Is there anything else? Anything you can tell me that wasn't in the reports, or you haven't had time to report yet? Feelings? Little things apparently insignificant? Wild guesses?”

She could feel him prodding at his memories, could feel a growing impatience and a growing sense of frustration. “Nothing,” he said slowly. Then he lifted his head. “Except … coming back across the Jinolimas from the mapping swing this time, I saw hares coming down from the mountains.”

“So?”

“There were no hares in the mountains before.”

“Ah!” She felt a glow of excitement. “Any other Rangers come in recently? Have they too seen hares where no hares should be?”

He was on his feet and for a moment he stood over her, forgetting his dislike of her. “The first walk,” he said. “It was there, by the Chumquivir. And it was by the Chumquivir I saw them four days ago. And I never thought of that. I never thought of that.” He stretched his arms toward the empty sky, toward the jewel band of the moonring. “Ahhh! Meme Kalamah be blessed, it's a chance. A chance!” He ran to the door, turned there. “I have to go, Hunter. Thanks.” He plunged through the drapes. A moment later she heard the outer door of the apartment slam shut.

Chapter V

The hares moved slowly over the plain, a great white flood eating anything their teeth could tear out of the red earth. They swarmed over planted fields, stripping the plants from the earth, digging out even the roots. They tore at the juapepo, ignoring the blasts of pain and fear that ordinarily drove off attackers. They flowed along, leaving desert behind, eating, eating, eating, day and night, never stopping, swarming over the empty Holdings, leaving only the poison-thorned emwilea, turning the fragile valley from dry land to desert, on and on, endlessly, mindlessly moving north, flowing toward Kiwanji.

In the Fa shrine, high above the valley floor, the Fa-men gathered and beat their drums and looked down at the creeping hoard with fear and a queasy satisfaction. For them Fa was purifying the land, purging from the Sawasawa the weak-willed and the evil, leaving the strong survivors to throw aside the last remnants of corrupting technology. When the great haremarch was done, they would start the Vodufa again, living by the work of their hands, working with stone and iron and bronze. The Fa-men watched and saw themselves as the inheritors of the people, the blessed of Fa, the pure ones divinely destined to mould the remnant into a great people. And in the meantime, the Kichwash of the Fa-bands maneuvered subtly for higher places in the pecking order.

On the plain the two wings of the hare herd creeping down both sides of the river began to curve around to circle Kiwanji, visible in blue distance a day or two away.

Aleytys sat still for some time after Manoreh had charged off. The breeze was cool and the sharp green smells of the garden pleasant. She was very tired. The trip out had been difficult. Grey had been distantly friendly, a colleague not a lover. As if he'd never been a lover. She found it harder to flush out of her memory the good times and the bad. Especially the bad times. The quarrels and his demands on her, demands she could not really understand or respond to, that she was unwilling even to try to respond to. Sitting in the garden she felt again the suppressed anger and depression. No one to talk to about it. The Three.…

She stroked her temple. For the first time they refused to talk to her, those captive spirits of the diadem. Her friends. “I need you. Harskari? Shadith? Swardheld? I need you. Please?” She closed her eyes and sought them in the darkness of her head. Nothing.

Sithing, she unpinned her braids and combed her fingers through the red-gold mass, smiling with pleasure as the breeze lifted fine strands and blew them about her face. It was good to be back in touch with the feel and smell of living things. She pushed down her discomfort and tried to enjoy the moment of quiet. The garden was filled with quiet night noises, the rustling of the plants, the humming of invisible insects. She stroked the cool grass and felt her brief pleasure draining away. The bushes began stirring on their multiple stems, rattling seed pods in disturbing arrhythmic patterns that had little connection with the gusting of the breeze. They picked up her disturbance and tossed it back to her, snatched it again, and built it and built it until she was alone, unloving, unloved.…

She jumped up and ran to the long window-door, the garden turning sour behind her. Where the thick drape hung, the glass was a pale mirror. She touched her face and frowned, examining her features in the ghostly reflection. Her mouth was pinched, looked lipless. Her eyes were dull, set in spreading dark stains. She ran her hands nervously over her body. Her breasts sagged as her shoulders curved forward. There was a roll of flesh around her waist. She stood like a lump.

Shaking, chilled, hands and feet numb, mind numb, feeling bloated, ugly, she turned from the window and moved uncertainly about the garden. Her knees shook. She collapsed in a heap in the center of the grass, holding tight to herself, tears slipping silently down her cheeks, clinging to her skin.

She wept on and on, wallowing in her miseries, the cycle repeating over and over until her body chilled into a physical depression as deep as the mental one.

“Aleytys!” Harskari's annoyed voice cut sharply through the diadem's chime. “Stop this nonsense.” In the heavy darkness of Aleytys's mind, the narrow austere face of the long dead sorceress formed around snapping amber eyes.

Aleytys shivered. The diadem was once again the agonizing trap it had been for her in the beginning of her involuntary custody of this soul trap created by a jealous man a million years dead. And the three souls trapped inside were hell-born sprites haunting her, spying on her, never leaving her alone. She tried to block out the waves-of fear, anger, hate, despair that washed over her in beats, round and round on an ascending spiral that surged toward infinity.

“Aleytys!” Harskari's disembodied voice was filled with disgust. She waited a moment. “Stop this, daughter.” Then the imaged face nodded slowly. “So. I must. Obviously you can't help yourself.”

Aleytys felt a nudge. Then she was plunged into silence and darkness, shoved aside in her own body. She protested feebly and was ignored. Crouched in darkness, bathing in pain and horror, she felt her body rise and cross to the glass door.

The door clicked shut behind her and her body dropped heavily onto the couch. Harskari withdrew her control. “Take hold, daughter!”

Weakly Aleytys fitted herself back into her body. The experience in the garden had shaken her badly. In all the trials of a turbulent life she'd never come so close to losing herself. She sat gazing down at hands that opened, closed, and opened again. “You waited long enough to say something.”

“You were letting yourself drown.” Harskari ignored the complaint and frowned impatiently. “That was wholly unnecessary.”

“I suppose so.” Aleytys spoke aloud even though the other voice existed only in her head. “Well?” She touched her face, then crossed her arm over her breasts and closed her eyes.

Harskari's amber eyes seemed to retreat and the lines of her face grew hazy. Then other eyes opened. Purple eyes in an elfin face surrounded by flyaway red-gold curls. Shadith the poet-singer. And black eyes in a rugged scarred face. Swardheld Weaponmaster.

“I think it's time.” Harskari's voice was taut with distaste. The others nodded.

With her eyes closed Aleytys saw them standing as if in a dim room with guessed-at walls lost in deep shadow. The three were watching her. She had a sense of being on trial. “What is this?”

Shadith and Swardheld glanced at Harskari then retreated into shadow. Harskari's eyes narrowed. “Aleytys,” she said, “we've been with you for over five years now.”

“What can any of us do about that?”