Star City

by Tully Zetford

Hook could hear them moving off quite clearly, and he recognised that they were moving with exquisite care and silence. No ordinary mortal would have heard them. Now if he was Boosted he could do the job in a hundredth of the time — and yet — and yet would being Boosted help him now? Ryder Hook had no wish to worry through the implications of that as he set out to follow the Voydun. All he knew was that he'd give a very great deal — a very great deal indeed — to be Boosted.

  He had to win the confidence of these Voydun. He was damned hungry. They'd have food. If he couldn't win their trust before his hunger got out of control he'd stand little chance of ever winning them over if he stole their food. He had to work carefully and quickly and keep a watchful eye out for the spear in the back.

  Someway down the trail he heard the beast roar again.

  This was no ruby-eyed bat-shape nor was it a reptile flier from the treetops. This was a predator adapted to hunting among the ferns. The Voydun went swiftly and silently along, and Hook followed circumspectly in their rear, his preternaturally sharp ears pricked.

  By this time Stellopolis would have been circling the planet in its eternal orbit and be well on the way to another pass. Hook wasn't too worried over star city. There must be many thousands of possible routes for the city to take across the planet and they'd have arranged to come over this ferny section as often as necessary. From what Hook knew of the Exper game there were only a few areas on planet where the Voydun congregated, and all the chances were that they were not native to the planet but had been brought in as a suitable life form to inhabit this dreary place. The rest of Voydun would possess seas and deserts and ice caps and be capable of great beauty. The Curlmen needed an environment of basic unpleasantness to act as a catalyst in their equally unpleasant games.

  The beast roared again. Hook caught an echoing roar.

  Another night-time predator, up ahead, on the route of the Voydun, coughed menacingly. Hook hurried.

  He moved with caution but he could not help making one silly big splash as he crossed a pool. A snag below the surface caught his foot. At once three spears flew to plunge with a hiss and a splash into the water. He went on fast, dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into a frondy cover. He peered ahead. The darkness now was only just above absolute, so that he could make out the forms of the Voydun as they shrank back on the pathway leading to a dimmer distance of shadows and ferns and trees. Something large and lethal coughed again on that alleyway between the ferns. Here the overhang had been sliced back and the stars shone down. They glittered in the sky — and they glittered in two spots of light fronting the alleyway through the ferns. The Voydun were trapped between monster ahead and monster in rear. They had allowed themselves to stay out too late in this terror-fuelled place because they had sought to capture a starman.

  Hook shouted. "Keep your heads down, Voyduns!"

  He slapped the Tonota back into the holster, slung the Zable-White off his shoulder and up. He took a single quick snap shot and pressed the trigger. The gun sighed.

  The bullet sped true.

  A violent splash of orange light lit all the sodden ferns and dependent greenery and blotted out the stars.

  The beast howled.

  Hook fired again.

  The monster screeched and the third shot finished it.

  Many a man would have stood up, elated that he had pulled it off. Ryder Hook swung about, hearing the deadly slither from the mud at the edge of the pool, and slammed four quick and raking shots into the greenly-black mass that rose onto six powerful hindlegs and reached a hungry snout and claws towards him. He fairly tore the thing's head off.

  The huge body splashed backwards into the pool.

  Then Voyduns were everywhere about him, carrying torches of twisted stems, dried against this use. The flaring lights spilled over the scene; over the bloodied water, over the crushed ferns, over the two dead monster bodies, and over Hook who slowly stood up, the Zable-White in his hand, staring at them all. He tried to smile. It was an effort; but he managed some kind of grimace they accepted.

  "I told you I meant you no harm," Hook said. "And these beasties wanted you for their supper."

  "You speak the truth, by the Sap of Life!" The Voydun who had been prodding Hook in the net nodded with great satisfaction. "You are a starman who is a fernman, may the Sap of Life fill you with joy."

  "I'll take that the way you mean it. By Dear Old Dirtie Bertie Bashti! Look at this fellow's teeth!"

  That monstrous alligator snout repelled. Hook could quite imagine an elegant Curlman in his lounger thrilling to the emotions of the monster as it chomped on a Voydun, and equally shuddering with a dread joy as he experienced the horror of being thus chewed up.

  "You are welcome," said the spokesman. "We do not understand why you have come to visit the fernmen, but you are welcome."

  "You've always lived here?" said Hook as they went with the torches flaring along the alleyway and so up into a rock outcrop in which deep caves provided dryness and shelter and warmth, for the night grew chill.

  "Yes. Where else is there to live? We cannot pass the great waters, for we have tried."

  Hook realised that this whole area had been walled off by sea and marsh and river. The Curlmen had themselves a planetary compound here, in which they ran the Voyduns for their pleasure. And if the star city had been in orbit around Voydun for two hundred years, that would be beyond the memory of the oldest of these people, for they had a shorter life span than interstellar man. Hook went into the caves, and marvelled at what he saw and the way the ferns dominated the culture, and ate red meat that tasted so rich he had to be careful, and drank water flavoured with a crushed berry, and began to talk to the Voydun, who called themselves fernmen.

  After a time he found their abominable smell grow less repulsive. He had taken one sniff at the berry-flavoured water, and had thereafter figuratively held his nose as he drank. It tasted reasonable, quite refreshing after a time, and he supposed philosophically that the berry gave the Voydun their smell and that he'd be stinking like a cesspit also by now.

  Over the other side of the rocks lay a ravine which carried water away into the ferns and bogs. Beyond that grew a kind of grass, against which the ferns had no chance in reproductive success despite the masses of spores lining the undersides of their fronds. Here extended land a little fitter for hunting and living; but the fernmen stayed on the limits of the ferny country, for this was an environment to which they had adapted, and two hundred years was microscopically small in the scale of evolution. If they stayed here for a good long evolutionary time they might develop running feet and venture onto the plains; as it was, their great splayed flat feet chained them to the swamps.

  Evolutionary adaption served here as gaoler as well as physical boundaries.

  The two great beasts of the fern swamps brought fresh meat to the Voydun. Hook could go to sleep on a bed of dried ferns secure in the knowledge that he had begun the outlines of his plan. It was not much to start with, a few scared flat-footed stinking fernmen and a bog; but it was a beginning.

  On the morrow they demonstrated that they accepted him, and he set about setting a flame to the fuse that was going to blow star city out of the sky.

  The beasts were cooked and some set aside for preservation. The task of collecting wood from the forest presented the fernmen with great dangers; Hook threw himself into giving as much help as he could. He knew the plan would take time; but just so long as the Boosted Men did not happen by, time was a commodity with which he was well-stocked.

  The days passed.

  He began to grow a grudging respect for the skills of these people; grudging because they were not Homo sapiens and smelled and had tusks and flat feet — and yet they were possessed of a primitive culture he had to recognise as being of value, a basic primordial culture far removed from the refinements of the cultures that flowered along the starlanes.

  Contacts were maintained on a loose basis with other groups of fernmen in the swam
ps. The story came in some time later of a tribe that had been miraculously healed after a hunt by the accursed starman.

  "May the Sap of Life run true, Hook," said old Fernmaster Torca, he who had prodded Hook in the net. "They are growing new arms and legs. It is something unheard of. I do not believe it."

  "You can, Torca. It's true. But don't think the gonils from star city have gone soft. They hated having to do that."

  On another day a mammoth-drawn cart came in with the news that a hut encampment had been burned and the Voydun burned along with their huts.

  Hook noticed the way the fernmen greeted stories of the horror surrounding them. There was no glee that some other tribe had been stricken, so that one might feel a little safer.

  "When one suffers, Hook, we all suffer. The starmen hunt us with weapons of fire, like those you have. We do not know why they do this. They must have reasons we do not understand."

  Hook had to work carefully. He did not want to get the fernmen to go off half-cocked. He contented himself with saying enough to begin the indoctrination process.

  Soon there would be the summer solstice gathering when all the tribes congregated in the heart of the swamps. Here marriages would be contracted, different products would be bartered, those tribes famed for work in one particular art or craft exchanging their work for essential items they did not produce. There was even a rudimentary thing, a parliament; but it seemed to Hook merely a talk-session, and all the talk of the starmen and their latest atrocities. The Voydun married and bred and there were many children. The summer solstice gathering would see the genes of the tribes spread throughout the area they occupied.

  "And do you not fight among yourselves?"

  Hook had to explain what he meant, and even as he did so he wondered if he might not be a snake introducing evil into a garden which did not, at least, harbour that old evil.

  Fernmaster Torca took it in his stride.

  "We used to fight together. But now we fight the beasts and we reserve our energies to run from the starmen. If we fight each other we reduce our own strength."

  Hook felt particularly delighted with that.

  He no longer found the smell of the Voydun offensive, and the crushed-berry drink tasted palatable. He sure missed a drink of tea. But when he'd dealt with Stellopolis he'd drink tea until it came out of his ears.

  They were chased a number of times, and hid in the ferns and in the mud and under the rocks. A few friends were killed. Hook did not shoot at the arrogantly flying Curlmen up there, firing down, relishing death and agony, and storing it all away in the memory banks of the Exper for their later degrading excitation. He remembered though, and, to his shame, Ryder Hook was a man who knew how to carry a grudge.

  "Tell the other fernmasters," he said to Torca, as they trudged back to the caves, bearing the mutilated body of their friends killed in the last hunt. "At the summer meeting it will be necessary to talk long and to think exceedingly hard — and to plan. I wish to speak to the fernmasters assembled together ... I want you all to assist me in doing away once and for all with the evil of the starmen."

  He called the Curlmen starmen, did Ryder Hook, thinking now as a fernman.

  "Are they not sent by the shrivelled Sap of Death to punish us for our sins, Hook?"

  "No!"

  Torca's ugly snouted face with the upturned tusks showed surprise and bafflement at Hook's vehemence. But Hook had

  been accepted as a fernman now. Torca said: "You are angry, Hook."

  So where was this famous cool of Ryder Hook's?

  "Yes, I am angry, Torca. There are evil reasons for what the starmen do to you. I know. I will tell you — but it is important that everyone of the fernmen know the truth at the summer solstice meeting. You are not being punished for some supposed sins." He went striding on in those old black boots of his, with an assist every now and then from the ag-pak which would discharge completely very soon. "You are a people singularly free of sin. You do not make war on one another, and that rates you pretty high in primitive — ah, that is, my friend, in cultures like yours." He'd almost blown it there. He was very wroth, was Ryder Hook. "You seek to assist each other. Against the starmen you have before had no means at all to resist —"

  "But would not resistance itself be a sin?"

  "My God!" said Ryder Hook. "Those bastards have you really brainwashed! I'll tell you —" Then he realised what he was doing, and simmered his anger until it came sufficiently off the boil for him to say in a calm tone: "Would not life be far more pleasant without the starmen's hunts, Torca?"

  "That is an impossibility."

  "But suppose."

  "We-ell — yes, supposing. We could live our lives free from fear."

  "Fear. That is the clue — yes, and the key."

  They didn't have keys in the caves. But Torca took his meaning. There were slabs of rock on which records had been written down in long painful hours of scoring with stone styli; the fernmen had their own ideas of right and wrong. Their culture might be primitive; it had strengths the Curlmen could not suspect. Hook broke open one of the secret pouches in those old boots of his and handed the cavemaster's scribe a picklock of beryl-steel which would last a hundred years of stone-scoring. Everyone oohed and aahed as the scribe wrote down a record of the gift. Hook wondered what cultural taboo he'd broken now and what serf-slave-syndrome he might have set in operation. But it gave him pleasure to see the scribe writing away furiously without having to curse and fling away stone after stone that had broken or grown blunted. That pleasure was selfish, he knew that; but then — what pleasure in a gift was other than selfish, if you looked too hard at it?

  One of the women came in crying on a day in which they had been out collecting fresh ferns to be dried on the sunbaked rock. Her son was dying, and no-one knew why. At once all the Voydun began congregating around the youth where he lay on a pallet at the mouth of the cave. They had a doctor who could cure wounds and stomach aches and use his ferny herbery; against the death reaching out for this young man he could do nothing. Hook noted how everyone shared the mother's grief. They felt a part of themselves slipping away with the decline of the youth. Hook diagnosed an internal injury. His med-pak was programmed to handle emergencies of a similar nature in the body of a Homo sapiens. Could the med-pak cure this Voydun?

  "It is the shrivelled Sap of Death," said Torca. "The Sap of Life is over."

  Tears streaked the faces of the Voydun clustered around. Every time death struck them they suffered all, every one, for the grief of the bereaved. Hook unstrapped the med-pak and set it to what he figured would give the best chance. If these people had an appendix — maybe that would be it ... He placed the med-pak over the youth's stomach and let the probes go to work. Medicines and chemicals were being pumped in, triggered by the analysis of the probes. Red blood — well, Hook knew the fernmen had red blood right enough. He'd seen plenty of it.

  The people gathered were singing a long crooning sad song.

  The sun slipped beyond the ferntops and the torches were lit and pooling orange lights filled the caves with a radiance. Presently the youth moaned. Women had taken turns in bathing his forehead. Now his mother gave a shriek, and fell to her knees, and clasped the boy's hands in hers. He opened his eyes.

  "Mother," he said. "Whatever is the matter?"

  Everyone sent up a stupendous cheer of triumph.

  The boy was saved. They took the Sap of Life as a symbol and the symbol and the sap had not deserted them. Hook was so far gone in their cultural beliefs that he didn't care if they were calling him a sap. He turned to Torca and everyone fell silent and listened as the fernmaster lifted a hand.

  "We have been privileged to witness a great deed," said Fernmaster Torca. "Our friend Hook has destroyed the destroyer."

  "You are all glad the boy lives," said Hook. "You grieved when death approached." He took a breath. When he spoke he made the words roll out, brave and full in the torchlight illuminating the caves.

 
; "What would you think of a man or a woman who delighted in another's death? Who laughed with glee to see another person die in agony?"

  "No! It is impossible! It is not one of us!" Their shouts racketted up.

  The boy's mother, dazed with happiness, shouted over them all.

  "I hate death with all my heart. To dream one could gloat over another dying — perhaps that one should be the one to die!"

  "That is not worthy of you," said Torca.

  "No." The woman lowered her head, her tusks gleaming it the torchlight. "No, I am ashamed. No one should seek death wantonly."

  "Would you feel sorrow for such a one?" demanded Hook "Would you feel contempt for him? Pity? Defilement?"

  "Aye!" they shouted. "He would be a pitiable object, contemptible, and yet hardly, worth contempt."

  Yes, decided manipulator Ryder Hook, they were coming to the boil very nicely.

  On the morrow a hunting party was out, for Fernmaster Torca's tribe would barter the flesh and scales of lizard-like monsters of the swamps for the more refined products of other tribes at the summer meet. The scales would be hardened off and the girls and young boys would puncture holes in them and thread them up into necklaces. The work was arduous, but everyone took their fair share, and Hook was in there helping.

  Because they had to travel farther from the ferns around the caves they might be late returning. Each day of departure Torca would go through a long rigmarole designed to prophesy if a visit of the starmen might be expected.

  "The devils will come when they wish, Torca."

  "I would have said they came to punish us for our sins, for our waywardness, for not keeping to the path of friendship and help. We do not like them in a way difficult to explain, for we sought to slay you when we thought you were one of them. That was a sin, I see that now. But we had never before seen a starman alone in the ferns — we betrayed the Sap of Life —"

  "You did what any man would do who didn't stop to think." Hook only then realised what Torca was trying to say. He had talked about not liking the starmen. Strange attitude to take, a man would say, to the beings who slaughtered friends, women and children. Now Hook realised, with a humility that angered him, that the fernmen did not hate. Hatred was not a part of their way of life. Dislike, fear — ah, yes, fear! They crept about in mortal fear of the Curlmen from star city.