Stardogs (38 page)

Martin Brettan cursed softly to himself. In his pocket rested Jarian’s original vial with the two leftover tablets. A few moments ago they’d been his insurance, and incredibly valuable. He grimaced. Well, perhaps a couple of doses of a knock-out could be useful too.

After about three hours of walking the canyon opened up. Ahead a ridge, a vast mountainous ridge, towered. Already heat shimmered it into a blue-purple vague massif. A plume of smoke could be seen off toward the one edge. This was a young mountain-ridge, and still growing.

“We’ll never get over that!”

“The water must come from this side, youngster.”

“But the vaults must be on the other side.” Juan’s other half saw the mountains and flooded Juan with images of a world he loved. A world where Himalayan heights were commonplace, and where flatter areas like the ancient tectonic-plate across which the canyon cut were rare. He was still looking up when he kicked something which clattered. He looked down and screamed.

He couldn’t entirely be blamed for this reaction. What he’d kicked were ribs, which had, until his foot struck them, still been attached to the rest of the skeleton. He had looked down straight into the empty eye sockets of the skull.

“A gorrilloid or something.” Martin Brettan poked at a long strip of hair with a stick he’d acquired from the dead tree.

“It looks human to me,” said Lila dubiously, edging away from it.

“It is too small.”

“A child perhaps? Castaways like ourselves?” Shari felt pity.

Tanzo had knelt down, next to the skull, and was examining it. She shook her head. “The teeth are very worn. And I’m no anthropologist but this skull doesn’t look right. I’d say ape…

She was interrupted. “Somebody stuck him, Tanzo. Stuck him in the back. Look here.” Sam pointed.

A three-quarter inch thick wooden shaft protruded from the lower rib-cage. If you looked past the ribs you could see the beautifully bevelled edges of an obsidian spear blade.

The party was silent, each locked in private thoughts and horrors. Finally Tanzo spoke. “They’ve been here a long, long time to learn to make spear-points like that.”

“And they don’t have anything against sticking them into people either,” Sam said looking at Shari. “Well, Capo. Now what?”

Shari shrugged. “We go on. What choice do we have? We’ve food for three more days, even rationing what little we have. We go carefully, that is all. With our weapons ready. We have an edge there.”

They walked on up the boulder-scattered valley cautiously, but met or saw nothing human. After an uneasy siesta period and a drink, they walked on. Desert-wise people would have seen signs of life, but the castaways were too busy looking for people with spears. They rounded yet another bend in the valley and saw the great grey-black igneous cliff-wall. From a hundred or so feet up, far from the top of the cliff, a silver-bright thread of a waterfall tumbled to scatter into rainbows before it reached the bottom. And around the base of the fall and a little way into the valley was something they all found fairer than rainbows: stunted
green
bushes.

The waterfall failed to reform into a stream at the base of the cliff. It would have taken skilled mountaineers to scale the spray-damped sheer rock to the top of the waterfall. But halfway up the left-hand slope a wide ledge cut across the cliff to the top of the waterfall.

Even if it was uphill and hot, and there might be savage people with spears waiting, everybody tackled the slope with a will. The sight of green and growing things had lifted their spirits.

The bowl in which the Bio-zoo had stood, so convenient to the Geosynch-line anchor, was worth the climb to see, even had it not been cloaked in greenery. It was a valley indented into the main cliff, being perhaps fifteen miles long by three wide. There was a turquoise lake and, perhaps five miles away, an enormous pyramid-structure of pylons and semi-transparent stuff which reflected the afternoon sun like some vast smoky-yellow diamond. A second look showed that a corner had been sheared away from the huge structure. Pylons stuck jaggedly from it like broken teeth. It explained a great deal to Juan’s other half. The organisms should have been self-repairing, but something had gone wrong. The creatures the Bio-zoo had held and nurtured in their artificial Eden had escaped. Some, it appeared, had flourished. It was a numbing and saddening thing for Juan-Denaari. He had somehow hoped, against all logic, that at least some of his kind had survived the Sil plague.

The pyramid was so compelling to the eye that they all failed to notice the patchwork of tiny fields by the lake-side until later.

Only Sam felt the frightened eyes that watched them from the fringe of trees, even if he could not see the watcher. The Dagger of the Goddess, however, heard the movement in the forest as the watcher slipped away.

Homo sapiens should be sued for fraud under the trade descriptions act and for contravening advertising standards in its choice of a name for itself. It is obvious that Earth is our ancestral land, from which we were forcibly removed. We want it back.

From the speech by Raintree Pig-ear’s-daughter to the UP congress of 2517.

Events wait upon each other. When
anything
happens it is a result of other, often minor incidents, eventually piling up. Thus, when things finally do start to happen they tend to cascade. The heat output of the fire of the previous night was so atypical of the normal geothermal events recorded by the eternally circling traveler-satellite and sent to Ground Control, that Ground Control eventually referred it to Central.

Central snappily demanded a reply to its earlier communication. Seven point two microseconds later it got it. Then it tied this to the tracking record that sector civil defense biocomputer had pestered it with. The analysis was so stunning that Central actually paused for .038 microseconds to re-analyze. Survivors. Or the ancient enemy or… a remote possibility, something else. It could effectively dismiss the last two possibilities. The probability of other aliens using a Stardog approached zero. It opened long-unused priority transmission frequencies to the sector Delat civil defense biocomputer, to Ground-Control, as well as to several other Command Centers. Depression was forgotten, along with the analysis in microscopic detail of Vault-data. Central had something to live for. Or was it something to die for?

Information from sector Delat civil defense biocomputer came in, without Central even reacting to the snippy ‘I-told-you-so-but-you-wouldn’t-listen’ tone from the unit. For the first time in millennia, Central had to plan a reaction which wasn’t pre-programmed.

It did something which no mechanical computing system could have done.

It dithered. Wasted 2.1 microseconds.

Central wasn’t the only being having trouble making up its mind. Shari had focused her effort on getting them all to water and food. She hadn’t really thought about what they’d do when they got there. Jarian was in some ways far ahead of her. He’d been stealing things against this moment. He had a headlight, a pipe-soldering blow-torch, Brettan’s lighter and a kitchen knife. It was pity he couldn’t get a gun, or even his poisons-case. But with what he had he was ready to set himself up as a God-king.

“I suppose we’d better go down to those fields. Try for a peaceful meeting with the locals. If you’re right Sam, they already know we are here.” Shari and the others were distracted, with no one chasing the ex-prince to front. He slipped to the back, and then away into the forest they were skirting. It was more than ten minutes before anyone noted his absence.

It was Una who noticed, and who pointed it out to Juan. He in turn pointed it out to Mark. The bodyguard called the rest of the party to a halt.

“Bugger the little snot.” Sam was irritated. He hadn’t got as much sleep as his body felt it needed the last few nights. If it was up to him Jarian would have been dead after they’d recovered the supposed antidote.

Shari felt much the same way. Still, she felt she had a duty to all of them. “Who saw him last, and where were we?”

“He said he needed to relieve himself, um… I think we’d just passed those tall trees there,” volunteered Johannes, the tail-ender.

They went back in a tight group, Johannes Wienan making absolutely sure that he was no longer tail-end Charlie. Lila, with her youthful experience of tracking strayed sheep on the ramshackle-fenced farm of her childhood, had no trouble following Jarian’s footsteps in the leaf mould. After a few minutes in the dense forest Shari called a halt. “We might as well go back to walking along the forest edge. This is hellish going, and it is obvious he ran off, and wasn’t ambushed or captured. Well, what I say is, if he wants to go, let him.”

Everybody agreed, some of them very forcefully.

Jarian found his journey to triumphal rule, even enlivened with graphic plans for the unpleasant demise of the rest of the castaways, harder than he’d imagined. Getting away had been easy. Walking through the forest was not.

The bio-zoo had obviously not held all the species of the visited worlds. This had been but one of fifty-two of these treasure houses. Its focus had been on carbon-based animal life. The plants were incidentals, cage furnishing. But the Denaari were master-ecologists. The cage furnishings had been remarkably complete. When the major quake and flooding had occurred many of the specimens had been killed. Others had had their numbers reduced to such an extent that they became extinct. The cage furniture however… ask any zoo-keeper. Such plants as are chosen for this role are tough. And natural selection had made the survivors even tougher. The jungle resultant from the escapee plant-survivors of fifty-two worlds was the stuff of nightmares. It was still tame compared to some of the beasts that stalked there. The first Denaari expedition to Earth had brought back the most deadly creature that the explorers had ever found. An animal more dangerous than wolverlope or archo-ligers.

These creatures ruled the forest now, with something far more deadly than any claw or fang: Brains.

Jarian’s previous experience of heavy forest had been the Imperial gardens. Not creepers laden with thorns, and worse, a creeper that slithered off when he put his hand on it. He was sure the others must have heard that shriek. That gave him impetus to push through the immense tangle of springy fireleaf underbrush. He of course didn’t recognize the nettle-equivalent from Sofala II. He didn’t even understand why his hands and face were coming up in burning angry red weals. He just knew it was all going wrong. He was menaced by an arachnodeltid, its upraised fangs dripping toxin, and ran backward straight into a hook-and-stab bush. Scratched, bleeding, burning from the fireleaf, Jarian would happily have rejoined the party he’d planned to abuse, torture and kill… except that he was already lost. Then he stumbled onto a game trail. This was easier to walk along, even if he still didn’t know where he was going. He kept it up for ten minutes, getting deeper into the forest.