Doomstar Read online

  Jump time, there was nothing to see, nothing to do but watch the gauges, bear a hand with Glevan as he nursed the grumbling and uncertain unit, eat, sleep, and listen to the sounds of disintegration chattering along Grellah's seams. And hope.

  And think.

  He brought up the subject of the Doomstar.

  They were all in the bridgeroom, the only place in the ship where the lighting system worked adequately and where the energy-bleeders functioned well enough to keep the temperature down to a tolerable level. It tended to build up during jump; if your bleeder system failed, you fried. The subspace, or hyperspace, or whatever you chose to call the notness into which the FTL unit took you, apparently did not conduct anything away from a body passing through it. It was as though the ship were received encapsulated like a pill in its own skin and shot through an environment that hated and violently rejected it, passing it on and out of itself as quickly as possible. There were a lot of beautiful equations and theories to explain the phenomenon, but it still remained, like electricity, a mystery. The scientists knew how it worked, and they knew what they could do with it, but they didn't know why. For all practical purposes, it didn't matter.

  Even with the bleeder system working full blast, it was hot enough. They were all stripped to their sweating skins, except for Chai, who sat as close to Kettrick as she could get, her gray fur lank and her jaws wide open as she breathed.

  "I heard some talk," said Kettrick. "A couple of the hands on the Aldebaranian ship I came out in were full of something they called the Doomstar." That was not true, but he did not want to tell them the truth, at least yet. "Then Pedah mentioned it. What's it all about, anyway?"

  "Blibber blabber," said Boker. "Pedah's as good as they come, but she's female, and she waggles her tongue as hard as she does her behind. She's always coming home with some great tale the market women told her."

  Glevan, the little dark Pittanese, shook his head. The blue Hlakrans were a sanguine breed. Glevan was not. Around his village fires men spoke seriously of serious things. His monkey face was drawn with thinking, his eyes puckered from peering at mysteries.

  "I have heard the same story, and not from women in the marketplace. That little star out there, Johnny, that one with the ring around it…that was a sign."

  "Sign?" said Hurth. He was not as massively built as Boker and his crest was less impressive. On the other hand he had ten children, a fact he did not let Boker forget. Now he laughed at Glevan. "A sign of what? That things go wrong sometimes even with stars?"

  Boker said, "Oh, no. A deity will come forth, his feet straddling the Cluster, and his voice will be as thunder, crying 'Woe, woe!' Hey, Johnny, why don't they ever cry, 'Hooray,' or something pleasant? Eh? How about the ones you got on Earth?"

  "Deities," said Kettrick, "tend to be rather doleful everywhere. What kind of a sign, Glevan? Ignore these pigs."

  "A sign of trouble," answered Glevan darkly.

  "God-made? Or man-made?"

  Glevan stared at him in honest surprise. "Johnny, if a man could do that to a star he'd be a god."

  Boker and Hurth began to build on that idea a fantasy of such riotous obscenity that soon even Kettrick was laughing. But underneath it he thought that Glevan was right. And he thought that Boker and Hurth did laugh too much, as men will when they fear something and try to charm it away with ridicule, pretending that Medusa is really a clown.

  8

  Kettrick was glad when they came out of jump. It was always a dull, nerve-wrangling time, and he had been worried about Chai. She seemed better as soon as the heat abated, physically at least. She ate well again, and for the first time she began to groom herself, asking a brush from Kettrick and then spending hours brushing her coat to its old smooth gloss.

  And still…

  There was nothing he could put his finger on, except that ever since Khitu's death she had been quiet and withdrawn, and a broody Tchell was an unchancy thing to have around. Kettrick was well aware that they could become so morose as to be dangerous. The others were clearly unhappy in her presence, and he had nightmares about the possible consequences. He hoped that some relief from the confinement of the ship would help her.

  He stood with her at the bridge window, showing her the big orange sun ahead beyond the safety screens. You could see the fire fountains leap up, see the flames shoot in beautiful plumed arcs a thousand miles long. You could see the whirlwinds, golden red and shining, dance and bow to each other along the burning equator. After a while a tiny bright ball came whirling out of the sun glare, and Kettrick said, "Gurra. We land there."

  "Go outside?"

  "Yes."

  "Good," she said, and stretched her mighty arms as though she would break through the cramping iron walls. "We find Seri there?"

  "I don't know," said Kettrick, startled. "Why?"

  "You talk now, John-nee. Seri make Khitu die."

  Her big round eyes met his, uncannily intelligent, pathetically animal, direct and fierce. "Why you not talk true before?"

  "I was afraid you'd kill him."

  "Why not kill?" she said, with a curious softness. "You still love Seri?"

  This was what she had been brooding about. She had seen Kettrick's outburst in Boker's place, and she had heard them talk about Seri, recognizing the name even if she could not understand what was said. And all this time she had been puzzling in her half-human, half-animal mind, trying to make sense in her own way of the only partly understood behavior of the people around her.

  The conclusion she had come to was frightening.

  He said, "No, not love Seri. You forget. Seri make me die too, only you held me. But Chai, you listen. Man-law punish Seri. You try, they lock you in cage, for always. You hear?"

  She continued to study him. Gradually the fierce light died out of her eyes, and she nodded.

  "We catch Seri?"

  "We catch him."

  "You talk true?"

  "We catch him. Maybe not soon. His ship runs faster than ours. But we catch him: And you not kill."

  "Not kill." It was equivalent to a promise.

  Somehow Kettrick did not entirely trust it.

  The bright ball of the planet rushed to meet them, growing huge, blotting out the sun. Grellah stuck her blunt nose into the atmosphere and sank with a despairing shriek toward the midsection of the main land mass of the eastern hemisphere.

  There were two trading ports, one in the east, one in the west on the other side of the world. Sekma had mentioned the eastern one as a center of the Doomstar rumor. Starbird might have landed at either and there was no way of telling until they were down.

  Kettrick chose the east.

  The dark land opened up below them, clumped trees, jungle tracts, mountain, valley, broad savannah, a winding river, all in shades of brown and ochre, yellow and dull red, the colors turning drab and strange as clouds boiled up against the sun. Grellah slid her puny fires down the great black belly of a thunderhead, a pinprick against the lightning. Boker brought her tottering in to a landing on a dirt field scorched and bullied with rocket fire, steadied her on her tripod gear, and cut his switches.

  Chai was the first one out the lock. The men followed her, hurrying to try and beat the storm, and Kettrick saw her running in the wild gloom, a gray ghost stretched to the wind. Thunder rolled. Fat silver lightning threaded the sky. Except for Grellah and the rusting bones of an old wreck, the field was empty.

  They took the trail to the village, sweating in the heavy heat. The air reeked with the overrich perfumes of growing things. Tall red-leaved trees on either side of the path shook down showers of petals from their massed white blossoms, so that the men seemed to move through a fall of snowflakes. Chai came up from behind them, panting, her fur dappled with the swirling whiteness.

  The storm broke.

  Kettrick fought through a blind smother of wind and rain, yearning to be out from under the trees that he could hear but no longer see. Then as the first edge of the storm passed h
e saw movement ahead, and heard laughter, and a few moments later he and the others were in the midst of a crowd of small, bright-skinned people who stretched on tiptoe to throw robes of woven fibre about the men's shoulders, shaking their wet hair and skipping like children in the rain. They ooh-ahed at Chai and left her alone, but the men they half carried, pushing and hurrying along the trail.

  They came out into the broad square of the village, with the little high-peaked houses around it leaning their reed thatch into the wind, and they ran across it toward the Tall House where all strangers were brought because it was the only one built high enough to receive them comfortably.

  Inside it was dry, with a raised floor of earth and fiber beaten hard. The air still held the stale prestorm heat. The roof rattled and the walls rocked, but Kettrick had been in this house before in a storm and it was welcome shelter.

  He looked around and saw a small man coming toward them, wrapped in the red robe of office. There was no sign of age about him except that his boy's face was beginning to get a wizened look like a pink fruit kept past its time. Kettrick disengaged himself from the general laughing, shoving flurry and called out, "Whellan!"

  The little man gave him a startled look and then cried, "Johnny!" He began to hug Kettrick and pound him with his small fists, gabbling all sorts of questions. Over the top of his head Kettrick saw the girl staring at him, and he stared back.

  She had been little more than half as high the last time he had seen her. Her thin child's body had rounded into a slender miniaturization of womanhood, delicate and lovely as a sprite. But he knew her in spite of the change, and she had not forgotten him. Her amber eyes lighted up. She smiled and came to him, considerate of her new dignity, and put her hands in his.

  "Welcome back, Johnny."

  He wanted to pick her up and tousle her hair as he had used to do, just to spite her, but instead he bowed over her hands and said, "Thank you, Nillaine."

  Whellan, with a father's disregard for such affectations, smacked her affectionately across the lower drape of her garment. "Go and fetch food for our guests, and wine, lots of wine. This is a time for celebrating." He grinned at Boker and Hurth and Glevan. "I am always happy to see you, thieves though you are. But this is a special, a very special day."

  He turned again to Kettrick, looking puzzled. "But Johnny, how does this happen? Only three, four days ago Seri was here, your friend and partner. We asked him then about you, and he said it was the same as before, that the I–C would never let you come back."

  Kettrick said in a flat, mild voice, "Seri trades with you now?" He did not look at Boker.

  "Oh yes," said Whellan quickly. "In your place, Johnny, though it's not the same. Only I don't understand. Why didn't he…"

  "The I–C haven't changed their minds, Whellan. So I just didn't tell them that I was back. I didn't tell Seri either. No reason to get him in trouble." Kettrick smiled, just a little savagely. "Only my three thieving friends know, and now you."

  "Oh," said Whellan. He began to laugh delightedly. "Oh, ho! Good for you, Johnny! Good! We never loved the I–C here, you know that." Kettrick did indeed. Sekma's lads had been very firm about stopping the export of a certain drug that Whellan's people made and which had been their chief commodity. They had not forgotten it.

  Whellan led the way across the room, and Kettrick followed him, and Boker said in Kettrick's ear, "So your old friend and partner trades with them now in your place? That's interesting."

  "It is indeed. And obviously, this is not his first trip into space."

  Three years ago, Whellan had never heard of Seri Otku.

  Whellan waved them to the seats of honor on the wide bench that ran around the room. Kettrick sat cross-legged on the thick matting, feeling the house move at his back. Rain rattled like shot on the roof, and the thunder cracked. Chai settled herself tactfully close to the door, watching Kettrick. Whellan chattered.

  Kettrick said, "It's bad luck, though, coming just after Seri. I suppose he's traded you out."

  Whellan turned to take wine from his daughter's hands. "No," he said carelessly. "No, he offered poor prices. We didn't do much trade. Now, let's drink eh? We worry about business tomorrow."

  They drank. Nillaine brought food and served Kettrick herself, and then sat close by him, studying his face.

  "What are you looking for?" he asked her.

  "Myself," she said. "Three of our years ago. You looked at me differently then."

  "You were different then. Shall I rumple your hair and hold you on my knee, and feed you exotic sweets from other stars until you get the bellyache and your mother hates me?"

  "I thought you were a god then." She had an exquisite smile.

  "And what do you think now?"

  "You're too big, your hands are coarse and your chin is bristly. You are most certainly not a god. But it's all right, Johnny. I still love you." She laughed and poured him more wine.

  Much later, Kettrick asked if Seri had had a woman with him, and Nillaine said no.

  They feasted in the Tall House until long after the storm was gone. Kettrick got pretty drunk on wine and the happy feeling of being there, and the drunker he got the more a peculiar clarity affected his vision, so that he saw in the laughing faces of the beautiful little people who danced and sang and ate and drank with him a salting of new malice, a new excitement burning just beyond his sight, gleaming in the quick sidelong glances and secret smiles. Sometimes when the young men danced they made gestures like warriors, stamping their feet and tossing up their heads, and then the girls would run in and stop them and they would all laugh together and turn to some other dance, a little too ostentatiously. They reminded Kettrick of children who knew a big secret. They were keeping it from the adults…himself, Boker, Hurth, and Glevan.

  He wondered why.

  When it was quite late and he was quite drunk, and Whellan was drunker, Whellan leaned over and looked at him with deep affection and whispered, "Johnny, you stay here with us. Eh? Just a little while. After that, the I–C…"

  Nillaine interrupted. Whellan never finished what he was about to say. And Kettrick wondered.

  After that, the I–C what?

  9

  Next morning, Kettrick thought that perhaps he had heen imagining things. In the soft warm sunlight the village seemed as peaceful as it ever had. The child-sized houses steamed as last night's rain dried out of them. Children as tiny as dolls ran about the green, their little voices piping, sweetly shrill. The grownups woke late after the feast and began without haste to make ready for the trading. It would go on for several days, until all the people from the outlying villages had had time to come in. There was no hurry. There was never any hurry here.

  The peoples on the other side of Gurra were of different stocks, physically larger and temperamentally more aggressive. They were developing a more complex and technologically advanced society, readily assimilating ideas brought in by the traders and adapting them to their own uses. Quite a few of them had begun to migrate, anxious to see what wonders lay beyond their own sky.

  Whellan's people, on the other hand, were indolent, incurious, completely self-satisfied. They already had the best of everything and they were happy with it. Mountains and jungle protected them. They had no enemies. The soil, with a minimum of labor, provided them with ample food, clothing, and building materials. Comfort came to them naturally in the gentle air.

  Some articles, such as synthetic fabrics in brilliant colors, jewelry, cosmetics, metal knives and pots, and simple medicines, they were glad to get from the traders. Other things like electric generators and farm machinery they looked at with amused disinterest and total incomprehension, so that basically their culture had not been altered by the establishment of interstellar trade.

  Whether it ever would be depended entirely on them. The League of Cluster Worlds forbade missions of any sort to sell people on anything, and the I–C enforced the ban. The appurtenances of many cultures were displayed for all to se
e. If people wanted them and were willing to work for them, they were welcome to have them. If they did not, the things were useless to them anyway. All over the Cluster could be seen the rusting remains of water works, power stations, and what have you designed to improve the lot of local populations who could not possibly have cared less and who never bothered with the contraptions, Since those early days, technological advances had been put on a strictly do-it-yourself basis.

  Whellan's people had chosen not to do it. Some day, Kettrick supposed, their more energetic neighbors would swamp them under. But that was their lookout, and in the meantime they were blithe as babies playing in the sun.

  He decided that what he had thought he had seen last night at the feast was only a sort of fever dream brought on by excitement and too much wine in that hot and busy room.

  Then Chai, who had slept beside him on the floor and who had come with him now to stand outside the door of the Tall House, blew a long breath out through her nose and said, "Not like this place, John-nee."

  Surprised, he asked her why.

  She shook her head, peering slit-eyed at the sunny green. "Smell wrong," she said, and grunted, indicating that it was not possible to explain to a human why she felt that way.

  Then Kettrick remembered again the sly glances and the hushed triumphant laughter, and he remembered Whellan saying, "Stay here with us, a little while…"

  He went back inside and shook Glevan and the two Hlakrans awake.

  After that for four days they were busy. Kettrick took care of the trading. The others took care of Grellah, getting her ready for the next jump. All that time a singular nervousness stayed with Kettrick. Until she was ready for space, the planet-bound ship was a trap.

  He did not know why he felt this way. Everything went smoothly. The trading was good. The people were as friendly as ever, and Nillaine hung at his elbow like a cheerful sprite, just as she had used to. Whellan entertained them all royally each night. But he did not repeat to Kettrick his invitation to stay a while. And Kettrick did not refer to it.