“But a whole population of colonists!”
Lahks’ eyes twinkled. “First, it was a population of Homo sapiens, of which—as your God and my Power know—there are enough and more than enough of in the universe. Second, if you knew the colonists who were deliberately sent to Kssyssyk, you would have said good riddance. Third, it was not really quite so many who died. Those of Kssyssyk were pacifists, you know. It was necessary to give them some protection, and a reputation for ferocity is helpful.” She sobered. “But many did die, on both sides. There was no massacre; it was a war, brutal and bloody, but very nearly fair. The superior numbers and technology of Kssyssyk was balanced by the people’s lack of knowledge that many of their devices were marvelous weapons and, worse, their almost hysterical reluctance to use the weapons.”
“A whole population is not wiped out in a war,” Stoat snarled.
“In fact, it was not, but it would not have mattered if it had been. The Guardians do not protect the weak, nor do they disrupt worlds for some deep and long-laid plan of conquest, nor do they create havoc for amusement. The Guardians guard against stasis. Stasis is the enemy of intelligence, and stasis we battle—with kindness when possible, with blood and cruelty when needful.”
“And the institute, no doubt, is the Nameless God.”
“Oh, no.” Lahks laughed into Stoat’s angry face. “The Institute has been given many names and none of them is nice. Stoat, when I have found out why my father wishes me to come to him, we will go to Kssyssyk and squirm in the burrows with the white, slimy slugs. We will smell their science, taste their houses, and, if you like, visit those of the colonists who still live there.”
“Kssyssyk is a closed planet.”
“But I am Ghrey Mhoss’ daughter and a Guardian trainee. Do not misunderstand me. Kssyssyk happened to be an easy, cheap, sweet operation. It would have made no difference if billions had been slaughtered, so long as there remained sufficient people on Kssyssyk to breed. The intelligence of Kssyssyk was dying out because they thought they were happy as they were, and any means was valid to save it. That is the raison d’etre of the Guardians. We do not count cost in lives. We do not care if civilizations crash. We are Guardians only of types of intelligence. The people of Kssyssyk are not happy now. They are barbarians compared with what they were, but they remember greatness. Their technology has been smashed, and they are relearning and rebuilding with infinite pain and sense of loss.”
Stoat stared at her. Her face was alight, her eyes burning with enthusiasm, all laughter swallowed up in dedication.
“If they knew the Guardians had engineered their fate, they would hate us, as many do, but already there are signs that it is not
mere
rebuilding. New paths are being taken. Departures from old patterns. . .”
Suddenly Stoat nodded and interrupted her. “The curse of the immortal is to value individual life above all else. My inteligence tells me you are right. My emotions are revolted by the thought of inciting situations that could bring about death.”
Lahks smiled. “Well, if we do not get that flyer over the rolling rocks tomorrow, the conflict will have to remain unresolved. If we do . . . oh, perhaps we can reeducate your emotions.”
In fact, getting the flyer over the rolling rocks proved to be no feat at all—although it cost Stoat and Lahks both their dignity and their temper.
When the sand began to shift underfoot enough so that they staggered like drunkards and the wind was so strong that at times Lahks was lifted and shaken at the end of her leather tether, Stoat fixed on a rise in the sand that he thought suitable for takeoff. Neither Shom nor Lahks could hear him over the screaming gale, but eventually they made out his pointing arm in the haze of flying sand. Obediently they shifted so that the angle of their pull would make the droms push in that direction. And, promptly, the ship stopped dead.
For some time they did not notice this. The sand was moving; the air was little less solid than the ground underfoot. They pulled earnestly, huffing and puffing, until a slight easing of the wind’s pressure drew their attention. There, close on the right, blocking as much of the gale as possible, squatted three large silvery figures, their eyes rolling up and down, dizzily, their heads bobbing joyfully, their white teeth gleaming in idiotic grins.
Even then it took Lahks a while to realize what had happened. Her will was so fixed on getting the flyer up the rise that her mind was locked into her body’s effort. At first she felt mildly annoyed that the three additional droms did not help those that were pushing. Slowly it percolated into her brain that the three were squatting. Squatting! Sitting still! The ship was not moving. With a gasp of mingled rage and exhaustion, Lahks stopped pulling and squatted herself.
Stoat’s mental processes must have followed an identical path. Within amin, Lahks saw him struggling past Shom, stopping him, inching toward her in the lee of the ship. For one instant they were close enough so that she could see his face through the clear plate. It was distorted by rage; the eyes were narrowed, the lips curled back in a feral snarl.
Lahks understood far too well. They were so close to success, so close. Her own angry despair was kindled by his. Together they staggered and crawled toward the droms. Together they fought them, kicked them, dragged them by the ears. But neither Stoat nor Lahks, for all their rage, was an irresistible force, and the droms certainly approximated immovable objects very well.
Lahks knew she was screaming blasphemies, that tears were pouring down her face and leaking out of her face plate, depriving her of moisture she could ill afford to lose. It was the cheerful acceptance by the droms of their ill-treatment that was driving her over the edge of reason, and when one put out a long pink tongue and licked her with obvious affection, she collapsed, sobbing.
Perhaps that restored Stoat’s rationality. The next thing Lahks knew, he was tugging her toward the ship. At first she resisted, but sand had already started to build up against her where she lay and the fear of being buried alive made her crawl forward with him to seek shelter.
Inside they found Shom sitting quietly, cross-legged, staring at his stone. Wearily, Lahks lifted her face plate and wiped her face. Stoat was leaning back against the door breathing in great tearing sobs. After a strained silence, he lifted his face plate, too, and sighed deeply. His lips were thin and hard, his eyes bleak.
“I am sorry, Beldame. I think this must be my fault.”
“How can it be?”
He shrugged. “I must wish to die. I am not conscious of it.” For a moment a smile lit his eyes as they rested on Lahks. “In truth, for the first time in more years than I care to remember, I only feel a burning desire to live—but they read the id. Shom has no id. You—no, you are life. It must be me.”
“I doubt it, Twice-born. If you wished to die, we would never have come out of that camp after we first moved the ship.”
“Then, why? It must be me.” He moved restlessly to touch the controls and then to stare blindly out at the droms. They were barely visible, near the ship but somehow appearing smaller, as if they were shrinking. Stoat’s mind squirmed, seeking a loophole, but he was very tired and it seemed impossible to fool a creature that responded to your id. At last he sighed again. He had wanted the relationship with Lahks that seemed to promise for the future. She had sparked something in him that no woman had awakened for centuries.
“I will go out,” he began slowly. “One of the droms will follow me, but the others . . .” His voice checked suddenly and his body stiffened.
Lahks had repressed her instinctive protest, applied her training rather than her emotions to the situation, and was coldly considering her chances of lifting a ship with which she was totally unfamiliar in wind of such velocity. She even pushed the black button to be sure that personal preferences were not influencing her. The decision was, all factors considered, that it would be safer to have Stoat try to raise the ship from an unfavorable site than to make the attempt herself. As she opened her mouth to tell Stoat, his unnatural stillness dawned upon her. She had risen, her hand wavering toward her stunner, when she heard him speak again.
“Damned droms,” he muttered. Then he shrieked at the top of his lungs, “Damned droms!” And he launched a furious kick at the nearest object, which happened to be the pilot’s seat.
The immediate effect of this outburst of temper was a new string of obscenities, most of them in languages Lahks had never heard, while Stoat hopped around on one foot, holding the other. Lahks now had her stun-gun out. There was no room in the confined cabin for a fit of hysterics, however justifiable. Stoat slid himself into the pilot’s seat. Lahks took aim. She could not permit him to take off in a blind rage. He did not reach for the controls, however; he turned to her a face twisted by a weird mixture of pain, anger, frustration, relief, and laughter.
“Wait,” he gasped, his voice shaking in the roil of emotions, “wait until we find those who made the droms. If there is one left, I will slaughter that one with my own hands. If none is left, I will devote my eternity to the invention of a time machine so I can go back and kill them all.”
Lahks’ lips had begun to tremble with incipient giggles. Plainly, something Stoat had seen out the window had wiped away his fears. It was something he felt he himself should have known or guessed ahead of time, which was why he was so angry.
“I gather we are safe,” she remarked with unnatural gravity. To yield to the laughter that was shaking her inwardly would merely set Stoat off again, and with his penchant for kicking things. . . A little gurgle escaped her. Stoat cast a jaundiced eye in her direction. For a moment his passions struggled with one another.
“Damned droms,” he gasped, and he laid his head down on the control panel, shouting with laughter.
“But what did they do?” Lahks asked weakly when sobriety returned.
“Figured what I
should
have figured, that by the time we climbed it and were ready to lift off, the rise I selected would be a hollow. I suppose I’m tired. I didn’t realize how fast the sand was shifting. In fact”—Stoat peered through the window— “I had better prepare to fire the engines. This bit will reach its peak very soon.”
“Figured?” Lahks questioned, having scarcely heard the rest of Stoat’s remark. “To be able to ‘figure’ is to be able to reason. And reason implies intelligence. Stoat . . .”
“Don’t ask me,” he said sharply. “I don’t know. A computer ‘figures,’ too, but it has no intelligence.”
“A computer follows some kind of program, no matter how vague, and does not read minds or ids or whatever.”
“Then let us find those who created the drom and ask them.”
“Unless,” Lahks said slowly, “the droms are the intelligent life form on this planet and, for some reason of their own, choose to . . .”
“Let them be,” Stoat snapped, flicking switches. “Don’t tell me their life-style hasn’t changed. There’s plenty going on on this planet, and the droms are in it up to their silly eyeballs. It isn’t Guardian business.” He took a breath, made the cabalistic sign for luck, and pushed the starter.
The flight was tense, but they were never in any danger that Stoat’s skillful piloting did not avert. Lahks was frankly relieved. She knew that several times she could not have saved the flyer. Actually, their troubles began after they had run out of fuel and landed. Stoat made no move to leave the ship but looked anxiously through the windows, checking direction finder and wind gauge repeatedly. Finally he shook his head and turned to Lahks.
“Something is wrong, but, unfortunately, I do not know what it is. If our direction finder is right, we should be out of the belt of violent wind. In that case, we are caught in a storm. But our direction finder may be at fault. I would not be surprised, considering the knocking around this ship has taken. In that case, we may have gone around in circles or be far off our course or simply have traveled a shorter distance than I thought so that we are still in a high-wind area.”
Lahks was silent, probing within herself. Then she said surely, “We haven’t gone around in circles, and we have been traveling roughly north—but that’s all 1 can tell you. My sense of direction is firm, but vague. In any case,” she added, looking out of the window, “we had better get out of here. The sand is building up along the ship.”
“I know,” Stoat replied softly. “That’s why I said we were in trouble—and yet we are lucky, too, If the ship had been on skis, we would have been overturned and rolled around. Eventually the sand would have worn through the ship plate. As low as we are, the sand will cover us. There is the possibility we could dig out after the storm—if this is a storrn—but it would be impossible to live outside the shelter of the ship. Even if we could get the tent up—and I doubt we could or that it would stand up to a storm—it would be buried, too. We are safer here, where we have some oxygen.”
“I don’t like the idea of being buried,” Lahks said uneasily.
Stoat laughed without mirth. “I don’t like it, either.” He listened to the wind and the rasp of the sand on the metal of the ship. “I do not know whether we could walk in that wind as it is, but I do know that if it got any worse it would first rip off our suits and then our flesh. That’s a hell of a way to die. We are too tired to go far.” He shrugged fatalistically.
Lahks looked through the window again, but it was darkening so rapidly that she could not see the insidious rise of the sand along the ship. Silently she got out food packets and, a few amin later, a torch. Ghrey had certainly been right. The heartstones were not dangerous, but Wumeera was a planet to be treated with the greatest caution. Lahks was aware by the time they had finished eating that the sound of the wind and the hiss of the sand were much diminished. The windows were now pitch-black, utterly unrevealing, and she glanced toward Stoat. He was very busy adjusting the position of a small oxygen cylinder and attaching a valve to it—much too busy to catch her eye.
She stood quietly, wondering whether she wanted to know the answer to the question in her mind, then said uncertainly,
“Stoat?”
His hands became totally still for an instant and his eyes did not lift to hers. Then he said. “Shom, go sleep in the pilot’s seat.” And when the big man had settled himself, Stoat reached back and unfolded a silverfish skin so that it made a rug. Finally he turned toward Lahks, his hand at the closure of his windsuit.
It was enough of an answer. He was offering her all the comfort he had to give—the warmth of his body. Lifting the headband of her face plate and throwing back her hood, Lahks moved toward him.