World without Stars (10 page)

I couldn’t look straight into the nirvana of his eyes. The downdevils were clever, I thought. Sensing his weakness, they had
left me alone, holding my attention with talk, while through hours they studied him. Not that they had battered down any defenses
he had. He would have known, then, and appealed for my armed help. But they had watched his reactions as one subtle impulse
after another was tried. In the end, they had understood him so well that they had been able to—to what?

I asked him.

“It was a stroke of luck for them that you took me with you instead of someone else,” Rorn said impersonally. “They couldn’t
have operated on a well-developed personality. They’ve admitted to me it’s not possible to tame even a captured
savage through mentalistics; he has to be broken first by physical means. And we humans are less kin to them than any Azkashi.
But in my case, I didn’t have much ego strength. I was a bundle of uncoordinated impulses and poorly understood memories.
Galactic civilization had little to offer me.”

“What did they give you?”

“Wholeness. I can belong here.”

“As a nice, safe slave?”

“You don’t get any closer to the truth with swear words. I was shown something great, calm, beautiful, at peace with itself.
Then they took it away. I got the idea: they’d give it back to me if I joined them.”

“So you stopped being human,” I said.

“No doubt. What was the use of staying human? Oh, in a hundred years or so I’d have crystallized into your pattern again.
But it’s a poor one at best, compared to what I have
now
.”

I didn’t believe he had acted quite freely. Once the Ai Chun got past his feeble resistance, they could explore the neuronic
flows until they learned how to stimulate his pleasure center directly. (I wouldn’t have allowed them that far in; no normal
man would, at least not before techniques like sensory deprivation had made us disintegrate.) But there was no point in telling
Rorn that.

Defeat tasted sour in my mouth. “Why do you bother explaining to me?” I asked.

“They told me I should. They want your cooperation, you see.”

I made a last attempt. “Try to think,” I said. “Your reasoning ability can’t be too much impaired yet.”

“On the contrary,” he smiled, “you wouldn’t believe what a difference it makes, not to be insecure and obsessed any longer.”

“So think, blast you! I won’t remind you of what the rest of
us want to get back to, everything from friends and families to a decent yellow sunlight. You’ve dropped those hopes. But
you’ll live here for centuries, piling up data that can’t be removed, till you go mindless.”

“No. They can help me better than any machine.”

“They’re not supernatural! They can’t do everything—can’t do a fraction of what we can—why, we’ve personally outlived a dozen
of them, end to end.”

“So I’ve told them. They say it makes us still more valuable. They’re not jealous, being reborn themselves.”

“You don’t believe that guff. Do you?”

“A symbolic truth doesn’t have to be a scientific truth. As a race, at least, they’re more ancient than we dayflies can imagine.”

“But … but even in psychology, mentalistics—they’re primitive. They don’t speak directly to you, mind to mind, do they?” He
shook his head. “I thought not,” I went on. “There are human adepts back home who could. If that’s what you need, you can
get it better from them.”

“I tried them once. No good. Not the same as here.”

“No,” I said bleakly, “at home you weren’t offered any return to a womb. You weren’t presented with any self-appointed gods.
You weren’t tinkered with. Human therapists only tried to help you be your own man.”

His blandness was not moved. “Evidently I didn’t want that, down inside,” he answered. “Please understand. I don’t bear you
ill will. In fact, I love you. I love everything in the universe. I could never do that before.” He broke off for a moment,
then finished in a flat voice: “This is being explained to you so that you’ll see you’re beaten and won’t do anything foolish
that might get you hurt. We humans have an important role to play in this world.”

He turned and walked off.

My radio had been confiscated, of course. Rorn used his own set to call ahead. His message was exactly what our men
hoped for. The Niao were a civilized people who would be glad to supply us with workers in exchange for what we could teach.
The brief stay of the Yonderfolk had wakened an appetite for progress in them. I was remaining behind for the time being to
arrange details, and treated like an emperor. The Azkashi could easily be persuaded to release Valland. Rorn was bringing
the first work gang—a large one, for the initial heavy labor of salvage.

When the wild edge of Lake Silence hove in view, I was taken below. Tied to an upright, I heard snatches of what went on in
the following hours. The first exuberant hails, back and forth; the landing; the opened gates; the peaceful behavior, until
all possible suspicions were lulled; the signal, and the seizure of each man by three or four Niao who had quietly moved within
grabbing distance of him. I heard the Ai Chun wallow past my prison, bound ashore. I sat in darkness and heard the rain begin.

At last a soldier came to unfasten me. I shouldered my pack and went ahead of him, down a Jacob’s ladder to a canoe, through
a lashing blindness of rain and wind to the beach. Day had now come, tinting the driven spears of water as if with blood.
My goggles were blinkered with storm; I shoved them onto my forehead and squinted through red murk. I couldn’t see our spaceship.
The headland where our compound stood was a dim bulk on my left. No one was visible except my giant guard and the half dozen
canoe paddlers. We started off. My boots squelched in mud.

Well, I thought, hope wasn’t absolutely dead. After a while, getting no report from us, our company would send another expedition.
Presumably that crew would take less for granted than we had, and avoid shipwreck. In time, a human base might be founded
on this planet. They might eventually learn about us, or deduce the truth after seeing things we’d been forced to make for
the Ai Chun.

Only the downdevils, with Rorn to advise them, would
have provided against that somehow. And would probably, after we had gotten their projects organized for them, take time off
to give us a good brainwashing and shape us all into Rorns.

I stumbled. The guard nudged me with a hard thumb.

Rage exploded. I wheeled about, yanked his knife from the sheath, and slashed. The flint blade was keen as any steel. It laid
open the burly arm that grabbed at me. Yellow blood spouted under a yellow flare of lightning.

The guard roared. I broke into a run. He came after me. His webbed feet did not sink in the mud like mine and his strides
were monstrous. He overhauled me and made a snatch. I dodged. His tail swung and knocked me off my feet.

Rain slapped me in the eyes. He towered above me, impossibly huge. I saw him bend to yank me up again. He kept on bending.
His legs buckled. He went down on his belly beside me, trying to staunch the arterial flow with his good hand. His hearts,
necessarily pumping more strongly than mine which had hemoglobin to help, drained him in a few seconds.

The boat crew milled closer. They could have taken me. But they had been bred into peacefulness. I reeled erect and stabbed
the air with the knife I still held. They flinched away. I ran from them.

A glance behind revealed that one dashed off to report. The rest trailed me at a distance. I made inland. Thunder bawled in
my ears. Rain hissed before the wind. My pack dragged me and the breath began to hurt my throat.

The Niao would not leave me. They kept yelping so that when the soldiers had been alerted they could find us. I was no woodsman,
least of all on a strange planet. I belonged out among the clean stars that I’d never see again. There was not one chance
of my shaking pursuit, not even in the thickest part of the woods that now loomed before me.

I glanced down at my stone knife. There was a release. I stuck it in my belt and kept going.

The forest closed about me. My cosmos was leaves, trunks, withes that slapped my face, vines that caught at my ankles, as
I plowed through muck. My eyes were nearly useless here. Swamp rottenness choked my nostrils. I heard some wild animal scream.

It was following me. No … those were Niao voices … they wailed. A lupine baying resounded in answer. I stopped to pant. In
a moment’s astounded clarity I knew that of course the Pack had kept a suspicious watch on us. Beneath every fury and fear,
I must have remembered and hoped—

When the Azkashi surrounded me I could just see them, four who looked saurian in the gloom. Their weapons were free and the
rain hadn’t yet washed off every trace of the butchery they had done.

I summoned my few words of their language and gasped, “We go. Shkil come. Go … ya-Valland.”

“Yes,” said one of them. “Swiftly.”

Their pace was unmerciful. I’ve only the haziest recollection of that trip into the hills. Memory ends with a red sun in a
purple sky, well over the crags and treetops that surround the lairs. Hugh Valland meets me. He’s kept himself and his outfit
clean, but hasn’t depilated in some while. His beard is thick, Sol golden, and he stands taller than a god. “Welcome, skipper!”
his call rings to me. “Come on, let’s get you washed and give you a doss and some chow. Lord, you look like Satan with a hangover.”
I fall into his arms.

I woke on a bed of boughs and skins, within a painted cave. A native female brought me a bowl of soup made from my rations.
She howled out the entrance, and presently Valland came in.

“How’re you doin’?” he asked.

“Alive,” I grunted.

“Yeah,” he said, “I can imagine. Stiff, sore, and starved. But you aren’t in serious shape, far’s I can see, and we’ve got
a lot of talkin’ to do.” He propped me in a sitting position and gave me a stimulo from his medikit. Some strength flowed
into me, with an odd, detached clearness of thought.

I looked past Valland’s cross-legged form, through the cave obscurity to the mouth. There was considerable stir outside. Armed
males kept trotting back and forth; the smoke of campfires drifted in to me; I heard the barks and growls of a multitude.

“S’pose you tell me exactly what happened,” Valland said.

After I finished, he uttered one low whistle of surprise. “Didn’t think the downdevils had
that
much goin’ for them.” He extracted his pipe, stuffed and kindled it, while he scowled.

“We haven’t got much time,” he said. “I’m damn near out of tobacco.”

“I’m more concerned about food,” I said. “I remember what you took along and what I was carrying. Between us, we might last
till sundown.”

“Uh-huh. I was tryin’ to put the idea in a more genteel way.” He puffed for a bit. “The drums sent word ahead to us here,
about the Herd enterin’ our camp and then about you bein’ on your way to us. That last was the best thing you could possibly
have done, skipper. Ya-Kela couldn’t have protected me for long if the Pack figured my people had sold out. As was, I got
Rorn on the radio. He was pretty frank about havin’ taken over on behalf of the downdevils, once he knew I knew you’d run
off. He said I should try to escape from here, and he’d send a troop to meet me. I told him where he could billet his troop,
and we haven’t talked since. My guess was he’d turned coat out of sheer funk. I didn’t realize what’d actually happened to
him. The poor fool.”

Hopelessness welled beneath the drug in me. “What can we do except die?” I asked.

“Hadn’t you any notions when you cut out?”

“Nothing special. To die like a free man, maybe.”

Valland snorted. “Don’t be romantic. You haven’t got the face for it. The object of the game is to stay alive, and get back
our people and our stuff. Mary O’Meara’s waitin’ on Earth.”

That last sentence was the soft one, but something about it yanked me upright in my bed.
God of Creation
, I thought;
can a woman have that much power to give a man
?

“Relax,” Valland said. “We can’t do anything right now.”

“I gather … you’ve been busy, though,” I said.

“Sure have. I stopped bein’ a prisoner the minute ya-Kela got across to the Pack that my folk were now also downdevil victims.
He’d been ready to trust me anyhow, for some while.”

Afterward, when I knew more Azkashi, I was told that Valland had been along on a hunt in which a twyhorn charged past a line
of spearmen and knocked down the One. Before the animal could gore him, Valland had bulldogged it. Coming from a higher gravity
was helpful, of course, but I doubt that many men could have done the same.

“The problem’s been to convince ’em we aren’t helpless,” Valland said. “They still have trouble believin’ that. Throughout
their past, they’ve won some skirmishes with the Herd, but lost the wars. I had an ace to play, however. The Herd’s crossed
the lake, I said. They’ll build an outpost around our ship. Then, to support that outpost, they’ll call in their loggers and
farmers. If you don’t wipe ’em out now, I said, you’ll lose these huntin’ grounds too.” He blew a dragon puff of smoke. “We
got the other Packs to agree in principle that everybody should get together and attack this thing while it’s small.”

“Stone Age savages against energy guns?” I protested.

“Well, not all that bad. I’ve done soldierin’ now and then, here and there, so I can predict a few things. Rorn can’t put
guns in any other human hands. He’ll demonstrate their use to the Herd soldiers. But you know what lousy shots they’ll be,
with so little practice. Cortez had good modern weapons too, for his time, and men a lot better disciplined than the Aztecs;
but when they got riled enough, they threw him out of Mexico.” Thoughtfully: “He made a comeback later, with the whole Spanish
power behind him. We have to prevent that.”

“What do you propose to do?”

“Right now,” Valland said, “I’m still tryin’ to hammer into the local heads some notion of unified command and action under
doctrine. Fightin’ looks easy by comparison.”