The Iron Breed (48 page)

Yes, they could hide in the caves. But what if the Demon took up patrol so they could not come forth again? What if the flyer swept low along the very edge of the cliffs, attacking the cave mouths? Furtig had a hearty respect now for Gammage's warnings against Demon knowledge. One could expect them to do anything!

“This affair concerns not only the caves and their defense,” the Chooser of Fal-Kan's cave, she who was of the Ancestor's blood, said throatily. “It also concerns our young. And this matter of the Tuskers' young whose mothers could not defend—”

“We live in the caves, the Tuskers in the open,” growled Fal-Kan. And his warriors added a rumble of approval.

“Younglings cannot live in caves all their lives,” the Chooser continued. “I would listen to this Chooser from the lairs; let her tell us of the younglings there and how they are cared for. What knowledge have they gained beside that of knowing better how to fight, which is always the first thought in the mind of any warrior?” Fal-Kan dared not protest now, nor interrupt.

So Liliha spoke, not of battles or the need for fighting, but of life within the lairs as the Choosers would see it. She spoke much about the ways of healing which had been discovered, how Choosers about to bear young went to places of healing, and how thereafter the young were perfect in form and quick and bright of mind. She spoke of the new foods which ensured even in the times of poor hunting that there would be no hunger, and told of the many things a Chooser might do to make her own life of greater ease and interest.

Some of what she said Furtig had seen with his own eyes, but much of it was as a Chooser would explain it to a Chooser, and this talk in a mixed assembly was new. At first the Elders stirred, perhaps affronted by the breaking of custom, yet not able to deny it when the Choosers themselves, who were even sterner guardians of custom, accepted it. Then Furtig could see even the males were listening with full interest.

She talked well, did Liliha. Foremost in the line of Those-Who-Would-Come-to-Choose sat Eu-La, her eyes fast on the almost hairless face of the female from the lairs. Furtig looked from his clanswoman to Liliha and back again. Then he caught a glimpse of Foskatt.

Perhaps the other had heard Liliha's information many times over, for there was an abstraction about him. He was leaning forward a little, staring at—Eu-La! And there was a bemusement on his face which Furtig knew for what it was. Just so had he seen the Unchosen look at Fas-Tan when she passed with a slow swing of her tail, her eyes beyond them as if, as males yet Unchosen, they had no place in her life.

Eu-La—but she was hardly more than a youngling! A season at least before she would stand with the Choosers. Startled, Furtig studied her. She was no longer a youngling. He had seen that when she had met them outside the caves, but it had not really impressed him.

Eu-La a Chooser? There was a small rumble of growl deep in his throat as he thought of her perhaps in the open with a Demon flyer above. Furtig's fingers stretched and crooked involuntarily, as if he wore his fighting claws.

But he had no time to consider such things now, for Liliha had finished and the Elder of the Choosers spoke:

“There is much to be thought on, kin sisters. Not yet, Elders, warriors, Unchosen, are the cave people ready to say that this or that will be done.”

Never in his life had Furtig heard a Chooser speak so before. But perhaps the Elders had, for not one of them protested her decision. And the gathering broke up, the Choosers threading into the caves, Liliha following the Chooser who had spoken.

Furtig and Foskatt gathered the sample weapons into their carrying bag again. The warriors padded out into the dark, making no sound as they moved. And the guardian of the lamp had come to stand beside it as if impatient for Furtig and Foskatt to follow.

“What do you think?” Furtig asked in a whisper. “Has Liliha made the right impression?”

“Ask me not the way of a female mind,” returned Foskatt. He was tightening the cords about the bundle. “But it is true that when it comes to the general safety and good of younglings it is the Choosers who decide. And if they believe that the lairs promise more than the caves, then these people will go to Gammage.”

* * *

Had Tan thought about the advantage this cabin gave her? Ayana sat up on the bunk in the medic-lab. She had no idea how long she had been asleep, but she awoke with a mind free of that fear and despair which had held her. Was it the fact that she had been selected, even conditioned, to be the other half of Tan that had made her so helpless?

But, if they had selected, conditioned, her so, that preparation had not endured. She would think for herself, be herself—and not Tan's mate, Tan's other part, from now on.

Looking back at the years on Elhorn, even the days of the voyage, Ayana could not understand the person she had been. It was as if she had slept and was now awake. And Tan—certainly Tan had changed too! It could not be only the alteration in herself which had caused the break between them.

She had known him to be impatient of restraint, curious to the point of recklessness. But now all his faults were intensified; never before had he been ruthless or cruel. It was as if this world, the long-sought home of their kind, had acted on him—on her—

And if that was so—what of Jacel, Massa? Were they, too, other people? If they were now four others, their old, carefully cultivated close relationship broken, how could they work as a unit, do their duty here?

Ayana looked at the small kit she had put together before she had slept, and she shivered. What had been in her mind to seek out those particular drugs and want to hide them—or use them? She had been more emotionally disturbed than she could believe possible, in spite of all her training.

If she, a medic, one supposedly dedicated to the service of life, could, in some wild moment of terror, contemplate such an array of armament, what would the others do? She might do well now to destroy all which lay there, so that if such wild thoughts came to mind again there would be nothing—

Save that which lay there could help as well as harm. The drugs were specially selected for this voyage and they could not be replaced. No, not destruction; however—concealment.

No one knew this cabin, its fittings, better than she did herself. Ayana began a careful search for a hiding place, finding it at last, and strapping the packet on the underside of the bunk.

That done, Ayana faced her ordeal. She must leave the safety of this cabin, go out into the ship. Somehow she must be able to pass off what had happened as a temporary emotional storm, and present to all eyes, including Tan's, the appearance of firm self-control.

As she forced herself to her own cabin, she met no one. There was no sound in the ship. Twice she paused to listen. Without the vibration, the life which had coursed through its walls while they were spaced, this whole complex of cabins had a curious hollow and empty feeling.

It—it was as if she were encased in a dead thing! Ayana caught her lip between her teeth, hit upon it hard that that small pain might be a warning. Emotions rising, fear—What was wrong with her?

She would have no armor against Tan's charges, against the others, until she could face this objectively. Was it herself—or this world? Was there something about this planet that upset her, forced her out of her pattern of living? It was better to believe that than to think that there was a flaw so deep in her that she was breaking because of it.

No one in the cabin. But Tan's protect suit was gone. He must have taken off again. And where—when—?

Ayana climbed to the control cabin. No one there—had they all gone and left her? Alone in a dead ship, on a world which their ancestors had fled after some disaster so great that it must be erased from all records?

She almost fell down the steps in her hurry to seek the cabin of Jacel and Massa. But now she smelled food—the mess cabin!

Massa sat there alone. Between her hands was a mug of hot nutrient. Of the two men there was no sign.

“Massa—”

She looked up and Ayana was startled out of asking the question she had ready. Massa was older than Ayana by a planet year or two. She had never been a talkative person, but there had been about her such an air of competence and serene certainty that her presence was soothing. Perhaps that was one of the factors the home authorities had considered when they made the final selection of the crew. She had always been detached, held people at arm's length. What she was in private to Jacel must have satisfied him. However, Ayana had held the other girl in awe, had not seen in her any ally against Tan.

But this was not Massa's usual serene and untroubled face. She looked as if she had not slept for a long time, and her eyes were red and swollen as if she had been crying. The way she stared back at Ayana—hostile! That very hostility brought an end to the wall between them. Had Massa, also, discovered Jacel to be another person?

“Where is Tan—Jacel?” Ayana slipped by to the heating unit, poured herself a mug of nutrient, and seated herself to face Massa, determined now not to be driven off by a forbidding look. In fact, the signs of the disturbance in the other girl acted on her in an oddly calming way.

“You may well ask! Tan—he is like a wild man! What did you do to him?”

“What has Tan done?”

“He has persuaded Jacel to go in—on foot, not in the flyer. On foot! Into what may be a trap. He—he is unmotivated.” She spat forth the worst she could find to say about a supposedly trained colleague.

“On foot!” Ayana nearly choked on the mouthful she had taken. Two men in that huge expanse of ruined buildings! They could easily be lost, trapped—

“On foot!” Massa repeated. “They have been gone”—she consulted the timekeeper on the cabin wall above them—“two complete dial circles.”

“But the coms! Why are you not monitoring the coms?”

“The hook-up is in.” Massa laid her hand on the wall com. “They have not reported for a half-circle. I have the repeat demand on automatic. If they answer we can hear them at once.”

“We can trace their way in then, through that.” Ayana nodded to the com.

“Yes. But dare we try to use it so? I was trying to decide.” Massa set her elbows on the table, leaned her head forward into her hands. “Trying to decide,” she repeated dully. “If we leave the ship and go hunting and are caught by those creeping horrors—”

“Creeping horrors?”

“Tan went out early this morning. He returned with recordings. The picture was blurred, but it showed small life forms, in an open place between buildings. They signaled him with one of the old recognition codes—though it did not quite make sense by our records. There was no place near that point where he could land the flyer. That's why they went on foot. But I say that those things—they were not people!”

“But to go out like that, it is against everything we have been taught, against all the rules of safety.”

Massa shrugged. “It seems that home rules do not apply any more as far as Tan is concerned. And—he came and talked at Jacel—not to him but at him! It was almost evil the way he worked on Jacel, made him believe he was not a real man unless he would go to meet those signaling things. They, neither one of them, would listen to me when I tried to urge some sense. It was as if they were different people from those I had always known. And sometimes, Ayana, I feel different, too. What is this world doing to us?”

There was nothing left of her serene confidence. Rather the eyes now looking into Ayana's were those of someone lost and wandering in a strange and frightening place. So—she was not alone! Massa felt it also, that this world was somehow altering them to fit a new pattern, one which was for the worse, compared to that they had known.

“If we only knew,” Ayana said slowly, “the reason why the First Ship people left here. That reason—it may be that we have to face it again now. And we have no defense, not even guesses. Was it invasion of furred creatures like those on the bridge, or like these others who now signal in our own old codes? Disease? It could be anything.”

“I only know that Jacel has changed, and Tan is a stranger, and I no longer understand myself at times. You are a trained medic, Ayana. Could this air here, which our ship's instruments tell us is good, be some kind of subtle poison? Or is it something from those rows of dead buildings, standing there like bones set on end to mark old graves which must not, for some terrible reason, be forgotten—something reaching out to send us mad?”

Her voice rose higher and higher, her hands began to twitch. Ayana put down her mug, caught those hands to hold them quiet.

“Massa! No, do not imagine things—”

“Why not? What have we left us but what we imagine? I did not imagine that Jacel has taken leave of his senses and gone out to hunt evil shadows in those buildings. He is gone, Tan is gone, and both for no sane reason. You cannot say I have imagined that!”

“No, you have not.” By will Ayana kept her own voice level and steady. “But are you of any help now? What if—”

She had no time to see if that argument had any effect on Massa. For at that moment there was a clicking from the com, and they both looked to it, tense, reading in that rattle of sound the message.

“Need aid—Ayana—medic—”

“Jacel!” Massa jerked from Ayana's hold, was on her feet. “He is hurt.”

“No. That was Jacel's sending. Did you not recognize it? And if he is sending, he cannot be the one in need.”

Clicks might not have any voice tone, but they had practiced so long together that they were able to distinguish the sender by rate of speed.

And it would only fit the pattern that Tan, driven by whatever beset him on this world, had gotten into difficulty—bad—or Jacel would not have sent for her.

“Keep on that direction beam.” Now that she was being pressed into action, Ayana knew what to do. “We may need a beacon call back.”