The Loranth (Star Sojourner Book 1) (6 page)

But his Call was strong. Perhaps only death was stronger.

I laughed as I pictured jellyfish and plankton and all those mindless creatures that cast their evolutionary fates with the great current wheels of the seas. My search for mammals seemed ludicrous now. Now that the best of the mammalian species had been reduced to puppets yanked on mindstrings by some hidden life form of an aboriginal world.

“Go on, Jules, don't be afraid,” Christine whispered. “You'll learn to love Him. I know.”

“What if I don't? Will he kill me?”

She shook her dark curls. “Oh, no.”

I continued dully toward the opening. Ahead, and heard water splash.

“You'll kill yourself,” she said. We reached a vast dark cavern at the tunnel's end.

I put a hand to my throat. Patches of blue light glowed on walls like blind windows. Claws scratched rocks in shadows. Eyes low to the ground shone green and yellow. The ancient air was a filthy blanket smothering me.

“Come, Jules,” Christine encouraged. “It's all right. It's home.”

My breath rasped in my throat as I descended the loose shale leading to the cave's granite floor. I picked up a rock and squeezed it tight in my fist. “What is he?” I asked hoarsely.

“Our Master,” she said, surprised. “You'll see.”

When my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I saw a large pool in the cavern's center. The water stirred, spread oily waves like cool rings of fire. My heart kept a frantic pace, trying, I think, to awaken my numbed brain. The stone I held cut as I squeezed it.

Something huge and white and ugly came through the pool's surface and I turned and stumbled toward the tunnel.

A rumbling sound.

My feet jerked beneath me. With a gnash of grinding stone, the tunnel closed. Only a fused fault line remained. Rocks bounced down.

“Jesus! Open it!” I scrambled to the sealed fault and tore nails clawing at it. The cavern seemed to shrink down till the air itself was too close for breathing. “Open it!” I screamed and pounded the wall.

“Jules, please don't.” Christine grabbed my ankle and tried to drag me back down. “You'll only make him angry.”

“Fuck you!” I kicked out, hit her across the face with my boot. “Fuck you and that parasite!”

She rose with a hand pressed to her cheek, threw anxious glances at the pool and backed away from me. Blood seeped between her fingers.

My neck prickled and I hammered at the breach. “Open it, you bastard!”

Behind me, Christine prayed softly. There was a scrape of metal on rock. Red flame flared against granite as she lit a small fire.

You're thirsty, searcher. Come to my pond and drink.

I dug at the sealed wall. “You goddamn slug!”

Twice in my life I've known thirst so searing I feared death. Once Jack and I walked Desolation Flats on a bet. We both filled our canteens with scotch without checking with each other, then couldn't locate our cache of water and supplies at the eastern border of the valley. We were brick dry and we sobered up fast when darkness fell. We searched halfway through that frosty night, out there between nowhere and Lost Peaks, before we uncovered the right rocks and found our stuff.

Then there was the time back on Earth when I'd gotten lost on a fossil hunt in the high plains of Arizona. I'd been so thirsty I was tempted to drink my own urine before they found me. But these were pale experiences compared to the thirst the Loranth conjured for me.

I don't know what I expected as I approached his pool. I no longer cared. Water was life. That's all.

But I paused when he lifted his bulbous head. It was large, white, rubber smooth. Where eyes should have been if he were a natural creature of light, there were only pinhole patterns circling his head, like pits lining bodies of electric eels. My stomach churned. I saw the snakelike curve of a long upper lip. On either side of his head, low, fanlike gills protruded from folds of lumpy skin. He stayed low in the water, to keep his gills wet, I think. Mercifully the rest of him was submerged.

He was not mammalian and I was glad.

Christine was on her knees near the water's edge, lighting wicks that floated in bowls filled with oil.

I went to the pool, fell on my stomach and brushed aside foam. Silver creatures wiggled away as I drank. I hardly noticed the chemical taste or the bitter coating in my throat.

By the time I sat back and stared at the Loranth, I was His creature. Perhaps it was a neurochemical secreted from his body into the water, a chemical that attacked the nervous system or the brain itself and broke down will.

I pressed my hands over my eyes as thoughts, concerns, the sense of self sloughed off and left me empty and open to his mindlink. There came a warm sense of wholeness. I don't know how else to describe it. But in that delicate balance of imagined fulfillment and freedom from pain and fear there came joy. And I knew His mindlink was love.

Love of serving him, dying for him if necessary. I lowered my hands from my face and watched my master. I longed to wrap his power and glory around me like a protective cloak. His name was Sye Kor, and His name was holy.

I crawled on hands and knees to Christine, smiled and eased the lit match from her hand. A thin line of blood, diluted by water she had just drunk, trickled from her cut lip, down her chin and neck, her left breast. She didn't wipe it away. Her smudged face wore an expression of such bliss it reminded me of angels on Christmas cards.

I tried to light a candle, too, but my hand shook. I stared enviously at the ones she had lit. Each candle wore a halo of yellow mist. In the center of her small altar, hanging from a Tree of Enlightenment woven of twigs, was a gold pendant with a figure of the ChristLotus.

She smiled and steadied my hand by the wrist. I was grateful as she guided it to light all the unlit wicks till smoky warmth and golden light played on our faces and kept away the evil that surely waited outside our sanctuary. Somewhere water dripped on stone.

We were family; Sye Kor, Christine, me, and all the reptilian and amphibian hunter brothers and sisters. Perfect family, without petty jealousies and resentments to turn us away from the pure diamond of our happiness.

And free. Free of all desire. Except the desire to serve our Master, which was the purity of desire.

It saddened me to think of all the foolish mistakes I'd made in the past, mistakes that had driven Althea away from me and caused Lisa sorrow. No, I'd never belonged to such perfect family, except when my younger sister and I… I felt pain in the pit of my stomach. Why couldn't I ever remember her name? Her face? Why couldn't I forget her!

Our Master watched me. I felt him probe my thoughts.

“Welcome, Jules,” Christine said solemnly.

The pain faded. Or was covered. What did it matter?

“Thank you!” I took her hand in both of mine and kissed it. I sighed happily, sat back and stared at the candles.

I can't ever remember being so exquisitely aware of each moment of existence. Except that time Jack and I spent a night in an illegal lotus lair down in the subbasement of Leone's council chambers, smoking from bowls that held the seeds of Nirvana in their crusted innards. Of course the next day Jack and his spikers raided the lair and closed it down. What a shame.

“What a shame. Thank you!” I whispered again to Christine. If only Althea and Lisa were here with me. If only they could share our joy.

In the weeks that followed my baptism, Christine and I left our home only for hunts, of which there were many, accompanied by our reptilian brothers and sisters, and returned with much game, to the greater glory of our Master, who had a voracious appetite for such a sedentary god.

It was raining the day Christine was almost killed. A landscape-carving rain that gouged the earth with silver spears of water and dug saplings from out their holdfasts. It sent mud slides down to rivers where dead animals floated. Lightning lashed the land and thunder shook it to its granite roots.

Pru pa, the Cleoceans, who came from their homeworld's milky seas, would call this storm. Those water folk say that storms are God's reminder of our humble beginnings in the primordial ooze at the bottom of seas. His warning to shun pru zae paeii which best translates as the ancient Greek word hubris, that excessive pride which residents of Mount Olympus took great glee in kicking out of mortal man like stuffing.

But these thoughts were not really thought so clearly on that day of the humbling storm. Sye Kor was still replacing my own mundane desires for survival and such with the grand cause of feeding Him.

Rain crashed down in freezing waves against my ripped clothes, my body, as Christine and I hunted with our motley crew of reptiles and amphibians. Rain hissed past my ears and whispered of pru zae paeii with every clammy breath I drew. It drummed against the ground, drowning out all other sounds so that Christine and I had to shout to hear each other.

“Water is life,” I murmured, but felt guilty as I drank from a hollow in a boulder. After all, the Master had ordained that we drink only from His Sacred Pond. Mud sucked between my bare toes as I knelt and tied a noose of slippery twine around the ripe carcass of a snuffler we'd killed for bait two days ago. Three days? Maybe four. I dunno.

There was a strong stinging odor to its decaying flesh. But the family was hunting yellow fang, and fang was known to relish such rotted fare. Yellow fang is the Terran bastardization of Yeth F'Aron, stelspeak for “terrible fauna of alien planets.” Tartarus' fang is a cousin to grunithes, only bigger, much, and meaner, also much.

“But not as crafty.” Something in my core rebelled at killing this animal just to use as bait, but Sye quickly covered that emotion with the need for nourishment. Relieved of guilt, I chuckled as I set a notched wooden branch under the snuffler's body and laid the noose around it. I squinted into rain, checking the strong twine tied to the bent narctressus trunk. It was held by a stake in the ground that kept the tree bowed tautly. With any luck, fang would blunder upon the tasty morsel along this game trail that led to yon water hole, dislodge a loosely tied crosspiece above the bait, spring the snare and neatly hang himself. If the noose didn't snap his powerful neck, I'd finish him with a harpoon thrust to the heart.

I hefted the harpoon, felt its weight and balance. It was a good weapon, hardwood shank, stone tip. I'd worked on it for days and I think the Master was pleased. But I would've preferred my stingler. Sye Kor wouldn't let me have it, though.
Taboo
, He'd said in my mind when I looked for it.

The game trail ran streams of mud. I don't think I once considered why fang should seek a water hole in this deluge. But the Master had said fang would come, and the Master was always right. About all things. My only anxiety was that fang might be diseased, like so much of the game we brought down, and unfit for the Master's plate.

I listened for grunts and/or growls through the seething rain. Some of our swifter hunters would run ahead of fang in a bait game to lead him to his last supper.

I brushed water from my eyes, smiled as I pictured the great reptile lumbering toward his doom, thinking he moved under free will, imagining himself the hunter. I felt a shiver of excitement at the prospect of presenting the Master with this flesh gift of our hunt, of our reverence for Him. It brought tears to my eyes, or was that rainwater?

Soon now, Master!

My hands felt numb as I checked knots in the snare. My fingers were stiff with cold, the knuckles red and raw. Water ran off them the way it did when Sye Kor surfaced.

Soon! I would be with the family soon, huddled around the Master's Pond, His presence radiating love and warmth to all His children as He nourished Himself on our offering and threw us bones that still held meat!

My work finished, I stood, let rain stream off my body and felt only a dull ache as I stepped back against a rock and ripped off a scab on the swollen heel of my left foot. A yellow liquid ran out. Blood mixed pinkly with brown rain-dappled water around my feet. The way blood would streak the Master's Pond as He ate.

There is a giving in blood, a sacrifice of self. I raised an arm, watched raindrops bounce off my puckered skin. Between flattened hairs bruises showed like pink windows to the river of hot blood that rushed beneath, that burned to mix with the cleansing rain. Rain snapped like cold snakes, like multitudes crying out for the purifying sacrifice of the blood.

I lifted my face, smiled into the blizzard of water, and filled my mouth like an overflowing crucible, and let it pour down my beard. I swallowed the holy water into my body and felt it wash clean that inner slate.

I drank.

I drank it through my mouth and it seemed through the pores of my body until I felt that I could finally be forgiven, to have the guilt of my sister's death torn from me in a pouring of blood sacrifice. Only then could I approach my Master unflawed, a diamond reflecting His great and perfect light.

I leaned against the bowed narctressus trunk, my Tree of Enlightenment, spread my arms out until the backs of my wrists pressed branches.

And drank again.

But this sacrifice needed blood, the blood of nailed wrists that tear from the weight of the body. 'Sye Kor! This is my body! Take the blood from it for I have sinned! Forgive me my sins. Ginny? Virginia! Oh, Ginny!” I cried and ripped the back of my wrists across rough bark to ease the sudden agony within me. “Ginny. Oh Great Mind!” She had wanted to look down at mountains. I fell to my knees in the mud.

Her giggles and laughter fill the small cockpit of the Hornet Cub I'd flown as a teenager, with Ginny beside me. But a sudden updraft. The Cub lurches. “No!”

“Jules!” I heard Christine shout and felt the ground shake. But that was not my reality.

The cub plunges. I release wing chutes. Too late. The scent of pine. Too late! Boulders at impossible angles as the cub tumbles.

Too late!

“Ginny,” I moaned as I remembered and didn't want to. Had never wanted to. “Oh, forgive me. I'm so sorry!”

“Jules! What are you doing?” Christine yelled. “He's coming! Get away from the bait!”

The Hornet Cub plunges to rocks below. Rocks that jut past the canyon's edge. Too far. Terror drags at her small mouth as she slides away from me and down a boulder.

Too far.

“Ginny! Grab my hand. Grab my hand!” Her nails streak gray rock. They claw at my outstretched straining fingers. Our fingertips touch. This can't be happening to her. She's so young. Oh my God. “Ginny!” She slides from my sight. Below, the canyon waits. Her screams echo across rock walls and mix with mine as she plunges down.

“For God's sake, Jules, run!” Christine shouted and yanked me away from the tree. Her eyes were wild as she stared back to where a rumbling sound like a small plane tossed in wind rode treetops. Wind whipped Christine's tattered shirt and pants. Something big stamped ground, shook down leaves the storm could not loosen.

I fell to my knees, wrapped my arms around myself and cried tears that mixed with rain.

Christine backed away from me and the snuffler bait. “Did the Master command you to sacrifice self?' she shouted through rain.

“There are other Masters.”

“There's only one!” She threw a frightened glance at the great dark shape ripping through sheets of rain and causing the ground to tremble.

“He's coming!” She pressed her head between hands. “He's coming.”

“Get away from here! I don't want your death on my soul too.”

'You're a fool!” she screamed, 'Only the Master decides when we die.”

“I've decided for him. Go!”

Yeth F'Aron's dark form tore holes in rain. I watched his massive brown neck ripple. He dipped his great thorny head, exhaled steaming mist up there among the tree crowns.

Christine turned and fled through a stand of trees.

I wondered, as I got up and stepped into Yeth's path, as I tried to numb fear, to numb all emotions except a desire to end the pain in my soul, if he'd like the salty taste of a Terran.

There is a coldness deeper than rain.

Soon now. “Rest easy, my little sister.” I closed my eyes and shivered as Yeth turned toward me. His roar rolled over my head. And receded.

He was after the wrong human!

I shouted to get his attention, picked up the harpoon, ran and threw it with all my strength. “Here!” I yelled. “Here, you dumb box of rocks.”

Fang bellowed as the barbed spear pierced his tail and hung there, then turned quicker than I thought he could and snapped the harpoon's shank, dislodging it like a toothpick. He fixed me with a coal-black eye. His tongue flicked. Then he turned and lumbered after Christine. “Here, you solid-brained crote!” I threw a rock at him.

I'd heard of sharks on Earth that repeatedly attacked one person, though there were many in the water. Sheer stubborn stupidity? Or a preference we just can't understand? I scooped up the broken harpoon and ran after him, sliding in mud.

Christine screamed as he closed the gap, this mountain of wet mottled flesh with muscles like bridge cables moving beneath a thick rough carpet of skin.

This time I reached him before plunging the sharp end of the broken harpoon into his barbed tail. Blood spurted. I ripped out the smoking shaft. He turned and grunted, then snapped a tree with his lashing tail. I aimed for his genital sheath. If I castrate the bastard, my reasoning went, I might just get his attention.

Christine was past the trees and out of sight.

Yeth's roar vibrated through me as though I were a tuning fork. But he swung his hindquarters away before I could thrust. I think I know how earth's first small mammals felt, scrambling to avoid the great piston legs of prehistoric giants. He bowed his forequarters, lashed out at me with his small forepaw. The blow sent me reeling through mud until I hit a tree. I got shakily to my knees, holding bruised ribs, expecting a jawful of teeth to come crushing down.

ChristBuddha, let it be quick!

The pain would be a terrible passage to oblivion. Ginny could ask no more of me than that. But the ground shook as he turned and pounded after Christine.

“You motherless miscreant!' I beat the tree trunk with a muddy fist.

There came a shrill call as two members of the family topped a hill at a lope. A pair of silver-skinned mountain slaotees bounded by on slender limbs, their nimble paws spread, claws gripping the ground, pearl-scaled tails flung high as they cleared puddles, logs, in hot pursuit of fang. The female, Silk, tossed her lacy shoulder crest.

Far behind them came a single animal, tawny Trump. Built low to the ground, Trump was harder to roll over than a rooted tree. He plodded through streams of rainwater and over boulders, too stubborn to skirt them. His horned head barely cleared mats of leaves floating on puddles, and his modest brain, set beneath pineal eyes, was nothing a mudlumper would be proud of. But under that plated hide, Trump was all muscle and steel-minded tenacity. He wasn't the fastest or the proudest member of our family. He was just the deadliest.

I started after them. It seemed I was destined to suffer fortune's outrages a while longer. I looked for the rest of the family. They were probably close by, maybe ahead of fang. It was a bizarre cavalry that arrived in the nick, but I was grateful, for Christine's sake.

So was she.

I didn't get there in time to see the rout, but she gave me a graphic account when she decided to talk to me again. It had been close for her, breathing-down-the-neck close.

She was standing under a tree when I caught up, stroking Silk, who had a deep gash in her right hind leg and stood shaking.

Christine brushed soggy hair back from her face and glared at me. But not before I caught the look of startled relief. I repressed a smile as I thought of Venus, the way Venus would really look if she came in on a seashell, trembling with cold, water streaming down goose-bumped arms and dripping off the tip of her red nose.

Yeth F'Aron was already on his way to easier hunting grounds with Trump, and Pike, our swift long-jawed amphibian, coaxing him in the right direction.

Buj, our small nervous crotemunger, paced restlessly, tongue lolling as he sniffed the scent of blood which still oozed from Silk's wound. The pouch of stored liquid and fat beneath Buj's neck sagged and flapped thinly. We were all hungry. Silk's mate, Faun, kept a wary eye on Buj.

“We should get her out of the rain,” I told Christine. “Someplace warm and dry.” I looked at her deep wound and wished that I had the means to suture it.

“We can't leave here until Pike and Trump return. The family stays together.” There was an edge to her voice I could've shaved with.

I rubbed my cheek and was surprised at the heavy growth. A narctressus leaf fluttered down. I picked it up and sat with my back against the tree and spread the broad leaf on one knee. Beneath the waxy green skin were photosynthetic tissues composed of cells crowded with chloro…chloroplasts, I suddenly knew! The leaf had been partially ravaged by insects who favored the soft tissue. The red smear near the stem was an… an accumulation of sugar the plant would use for nourishment! I felt a burst of excitement. My finger shook as I traced green veins, carriers of water and food. I chuckled.

It must have been the pure water I'd drunk. Beyond the tree, rain silvered the view, but within my mind the vistas were clearing. Memories, thoughts, glimpses of incidents long past. I closed my eyes.

Walls of the birthing room dilate with pink and blue holos of children. Holo of a young mother singing lullabies to her nursing infant. Aroma of powder, spring flowers, emanating from floor vents. Althea doing breathing exercises, her pale cheeks hollowing as she purses them to pant out quick breaths. We could have birthed our child in an artificial egg, even watched the fetus develop.