Hunt the Space-Witch! Seven Adventures in Time and Space

by Robert Silverberg

  “Quite possibly.”

  “I am the duly elected High Priest, succeeding your father. I do not have possession. I assume, then, that your late father must have entrusted the secret to you—and I call upon you, as a loyal junior priest of this Temple, to turn the secret over to its rightful possessor.”

  “You?”

  “Yes.”

  Duyair eyed Holsp suspiciously. Something was exceedingly wrong here.

  It had been generally known for some time that Holsp would succeed the elder Duyair whenever the old priest’s time came. Ras had known that; his father had known that. In that case, then, why hadn’t Vail Duyair taken steps to see that the Hammer secret was given to Holsp?

  It didn’t make sense. The old man had frequently told his son of the existence of the secret—though never the secret itself. Ras Duyair did not know it. But he had assumed Holsp was party to it, and to find out that he was not—!

  Duyair realized his father must have had some good reason for denying Holsp the secret. Either the Hammer was a myth—no, that was inconceivable—or Holsp was in some way untrustworthy.

  “Your silence is overly extended,” Holsp said. “Will you turn over to me at once the secret?”

  Duyair smiled grimly. “The secret is a secret to me as well as you, Lugaur.”

  “What!”

  “My father never deemed me worthy of knowing it. I always assumed it was you he had told it to.”

  “This is impossible. Vail Duyair would never have let the secret die with him; he must have told you. I order you to reveal it!”

  Duyair shrugged. “Order me to slay the Emperor as well or halt the tides. The secret is not mine for the giving, Lugaur Holsp.”

  Holsp was openly fuming now. He rose from his graven seat and slammed his hand down on the table. “You Duyairs are stubborn to a fault! Well, the Emperor is not the only one who knows the art of torture.”

  “Lugaur! Are you crazy?” Duyair shouted.

  “Crazy? No, I merely object to defiance on the part of—Ras, will you yield the secret willingly to its rightful possessor?”

  “I tell you, Lugaur, I don’t know the secret and never did.”

  “Very well,” Holsp said bitingly. “We’ll pry it out of you!”

  Proconsul Fellamon Darhuel spent the better part of that morning on the dreary business of dictating a report to the Emperor. He covered the Duyair incident in full, describing how the most refined Imperial tortures failed to bring forth the desired secret, and philosophically concluded that these out-world peoples seemed to have hidden reserves of strength that some Imperials might do well to copy.

  Concluding his work, he activated the playback and listened to his words. The last few sentences jarred him; they sounded insulting and arrogant. He deleted them.

  Lifting his voicewrite again, he patched on a new ending: “The stubbornness of these religious fanatics is beyond belief.” That sounded much better, he thought. He punched the permanizer and a moment later the message sprang forth, inscribed on a coiled tape the size of his thumb, coded and ready to go.

  He took from a shelf a tiny crystalline capsule, inserted the message, sealed the capsule. He dropped the capsule in the diplomatic pouch being readied for the courier who departed for Dervonar that afternoon.

  There. The Emperor would have a full report of the matter, and Darhuel hoped it would do him much good.

  I wash my hands of the thing, he thought, turning back to the delicate acrostic verses of the long-dead Gonaidans.

  Gradually he regained his calm.

  But those who received the capsule felt no such calm. A hypership brought the courier across space from Aldryne to Dervonar in one huge gulp; later the same day the tiny crystal was delivered, along with three thousand similar crystals from three thousand other proconsuls scattered across the galaxy, to the main sorting room of the Imperial Diplomatic Clearinghouse.

  It lay at the bottom of a heap for the better part of an hour until a nimble-fingered, eager-eyed clerk, aware of the order that any messages from Aldryne were to receive top handling priority, found it.

  From there the capsule worked its way rapidly upward through the chain of bureaucrats of increasing authority until the Undersecretary for External Affairs brought it to the Assistant Secretary for External Affairs, who took it to the Minister of the Outer Marches, Corun Govleq.

  Govleq was the first one in the entire string with authority enough to read the message. He did, and promptly sought an audience with His Majesty, Dervon XIV.

  Dervon was busy listening to a new music tape brought him by an itinerant tonesmith of Zoastro; Govleq took the rare liberty of entering the royal presence without being announced.

  Clangorous tones thundered in the throne room as he entered. The Emperor glanced up wearily, unreproachfully, and sighed.

  “Well, Govleq? What crisis now?”

  “Word from Aldryne, Highness. A report from your Proconsul there has reached us.” Govleq proffered the message cube in his palm.

  “Have you heard it?” the Emperor asked.

  “Yes, sire.”

  “Well? What does it say?”

  “They have interrogated Vail Duyair—he’s the High Priest of that solar cult. The old man refused to yield the secret of the Hammer and died under interrogation!”

  The Emperor frowned. “How unfortunate. What is this Hammer you mention?”

  Govleq manfully refrained from swearing and set about tactfully refreshing the Imperial memory. Finally Dervon said, “Oh. That Hammer. Well, it was a fine idea, anyway. Too bad it didn’t work out.”

  “The rebellion on Dykran, sire—”

  “Bother the rebellion on Dykran! No, I don’t mean that. I’m very tense this morning; I think it’s that damned music. What of the rebellion, Govleq?”

  “Status remains quo so far. But word from Dykran is that an explosion is due almost momentarily. And now that a High Priest has been tortured to death on the neighboring world of Aldryne, we can expect the entire Aldryne system to rebel.”

  “A serious matter,” the Emperor said gravely. “These things have a way of spreading from system to system. Hmm. We’ll have to stop this. Yes. Stop it. Send special investigators to Aldryne and Dykran. Get full reports. Take care of it, Govleq. Take care of it. This could be bad. Very bad.”

  “Of course, sire,” Govleq said. “I’ll expedite the matter at once.” He rolled his eyes despairingly to the ceiling, wondering just how he was going to put down what looked like a noisy insurrection in the making.

  But he would find a way. The Empire would prevail. It always had, and it always would.

  “Turn up the volume,” the Emperor said. “I can hardly hear the music.”

  The vault of the Temple of the Suns was a cold, dank place, wet with ancient slime. Ras Duyair remembered vaguely having played here as a child, enjoying it despite his father’s reproaches; he also remembered being taken down to the vault for some hazily recalled indoctrination on his thirteenth birthday.

  But now he walked between two priests of the Temple, and Lugaur Holsp walked behind. They entered the vault.

  “It will be quiet down here,” Holsp said. “Ras, don’t be stubborn. Tell us where the Hammer is.”

  “I’ve told you. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know, Lugaur.”

  The High Priest shrugged and said, “As you wish. Thubar, we’ll have to torture him.”

  “A little on the primitive side, aren’t you?” Duyair asked.

  “No more so than the Empire. When information is needed, it must be extracted.”

  “That’s the theory they used on my father. Much good it did them.”

  “And much good it did him,” Holsp said. “If necessary, the same will befall you. Ras, why not tell us?”

  Duyair was silent for a moment. The two sub-priests appeared with sturdy rope to bind him, and he let them approach without protest. Then he shrugged away.

  “No.”

  “Bind him,”
Holsp ordered.

  “I’ll tell you where the Hammer is!” Duyair said. He took a deep breath. What he was about to do went against all his conditioning, all his beliefs. To strike a priest of the Temple—

  But Lugaur was no High Priest. Had he been, Vail Duyair would have given him the Hammer. Holsp frowned. “A change of heart, eh? All right. Let go of him. The Hammer is where?”

  “Right here,” Duyair said. He smashed a fist into Holsp’s pale face, and the High Priest staggered backward under the impact of the blow. The platinum sunburst fell from his throat and clinked hollowly against the stone of the floor.

  Ignoring Holsp for the moment, Duyair turned to the other two, Thubar Frin and Helmat Sorgvoy. Helmat was short and heavy; Duyair caught him by one fleshy arm and, using him as a battering ram, swung him crunchingly into Thubar Frin. Both priests grunted at the crash.

  Letting go of Helmat, Duyair sprang forward into the shadows. Now some of his childhood memories returned; he recalled passages, catacombs leading beneath the Temple grounds and into sunlight through a hidden exit.

  “After him!” he heard Holsp’s outraged voice call. But the sound was growing more distant with each moment. “Don’t let him escape!” came the echoing, half-audible cry.

  Duyair grinned at the thought of the growing blossom of red that had sprouted in Holsp’s pale, supercilious face. More than ever now he was convinced that Lugaur Holsp held the High Priest’s throne by fraud; Duyair would never have been able to strike down a true priest.

  Panting, he emerged at the border of the Temple grove. He realized he would have to flee Aldryne; having raised a fist against Holsp, he would have all men’s hands lifted against him.

  But where? Where could he go?

  He glanced up. In the gathering shadows of late afternoon the sky was growing dark. He saw the dull red globe that was Dykran, the sister world of Aldryne. To Dykran, he thought. Yes, to Dykran!

  Chapter Three

  He arrived at Aldryne Spaceport later that day, almost at sunset; the star Aldryne was mostly below the horizon. A bored-looking young man at the ticket window squinted at him when he requested a ticket for Dykran and said, “No more flights to Dykran.”

  “Eh? Last one’s left already? But it’s hardly sundown yet. There ought to be at least two evening flights, if not more—”

  “No more flights, period. By order of the Imperial Government for the duration of hostilities on Dykran.”

  “What sort of hostilities?” Duyair asked, surprised.

  The clerk gestured with his hands. “Who knows? Those miners up there are always striking for something or other. Anyway, I can’t give you passage to Dykran.”

  “Umm. How about Paralon? Any flights there tonight?”

  “Nope. Matter of fact, no flights anywhere tonight within the system. I can offer you half a dozen out system flights if you’re interested.”

  Duyair rubbed his chin perplexedly. He had only a hundred credits with him, hardly enough to pay for an out-system flight. And he did not dare return to the Temple for more cash. He had been counting on making an early flight to one of the other worlds in the Aldryne system.

  “Nothing at all in the system?” he asked again.

  “Look, friend, I thought I made it clear. You mind moving along?”

  “Okay,” Duyair said. “Thank you.” A look of bleak abstraction on his face, he left the line and walked away.

  No flights anywhere in-system? Why, that just didn’t make sense, he thought. Trouble in Dykran, maybe—but why couldn’t he go to Paralon, or Moorhelm, or any of the other three worlds?

  He felt a tug at his tunic sleeve. Quickly he turned and saw a short, space-bronzed young man at his side.

  “What do you want?”

  “Shhh! You want to get us jugged? I just heard your troubles at the ticket window, friend. You interested in going to Dykran tonight?”

  “Y-yes,” Duyair said tentatively. “What’s the deal?”

  “Private flight. Two hundred credits will get you there in style.”

  “I’ve only got a hundred,” Duyair said. “And I can’t take time to raise any more. I’m a priest,” he improvised. “I have to attend a special conference on Dykran tomorrow, and if I’m not there, it’ll be bad.”

  “Priest? What Temple?”

  “Temple of the Suns,” Duyair said.

  The spaceman thought for a moment. “Okay. A hundred credits will do it. But I want to be paid in advance.”

  Cautiously Duyair unfolded his five twenty-credit bills and showed them. “This ought to cover it, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. They’re yours the second we blast off for Dykran.”

  The flight was short, the ship cramped and uncomfortable. Duyair had made the interplanetary journey more than a dozen times, and so none of the phenomena of conventional ion-drive space travel was new to him. He weathered acceleration well, rather enjoyed the weightlessness of free fall, and once the ship began to spin to provide gravity, settled in a hammock and dozed.

  He had sized up the shipboard picture fairly quickly. The pilot was obviously a privateer running some illegal cargo between worlds. Just what, Duyair didn’t care. But it was apparent that the shrewd pilot had seized on a way of making a few extra credits by admitting passengers. There were perhaps a dozen on board, and doubtless each had some good reason for traveling to Dykran. They had all been caught short by the unexpected embargo.

  He was awakened by a bell—the signal for a shift to deceleration, pending planetfall. And the small ship dropped down to the surface of Dykran.

  They had landed, it seemed, in a bare, treeless plain somewhere far from civilization; a cold wind was whining, kicking up gray clouds of dust, as Duyair dropped through the open hatch and touched ground.

  He turned to the pilot, who was supervising the unloading of crates. “Are we supposed to find our way to the city by ourselves?”

  The pilot laughed. “You expect limousine service with an illegal flight? Wake up, boy. You’re on your own. For another hundred credits I’d drive you into town, but you don’t have the hundred, do you?”

  “No,” Duyair said bitterly, and turned away. He had come away too quickly; he was penniless and not dressed for the bitter Dykranian climate.

  But there were priests here, and Temples; he could find shelter. He started to walk across the barren plain. Some of his fellow passengers, grumbling disgruntledly, followed him.

  He had gone about half a mile and was shivering with every step when a jetcopter descended almost directly in front of him. Through the swirling dust he saw the emblem on the ’copter’s side: the purple and gold star-cluster insigne of the Imperial Police.

  He debated fleeing. The Imperial Police were a good deal more to be feared than the relatively easygoing local Dykranian police corps.

  But the sight of a blaster pointed unwaveringly at him changed his mind. He stood where he was, waiting for the Imperial policeman to draw near.

  The policeman was short and stubby, with a lined face that told of long service on this dreary planet. His opening gambit was the inevitable “Let’s see your papers!”

  “Certainly, officer.” Duyair handed over the sheets of identification. The corpsman read through them thoroughly, returned them, and said, “According to these you’re Ras Duyair of Aldryne. What are you doing on Dykran?”

  “Visiting, Officer. I’m a priest.”

  “So I noticed. I didn’t happen to see any spaceport verification on your papers, though. How’d you get here?”

  “By spaceship, of course,” Duyair said mildly. He towered more than a foot over the corpsman, but the blaster held steadily in his ribs did not encourage violence.

  “Don’t get wise,” the corpsman snapped. “Suppose you tell me how long you’ve been on Dykran.”

  “About half an hour.”

  “Half an hour? And you came by spaceship? Very interesting. There’s been an embargo on interworld transportation in the
Aldryne system in effect for the past eight hours. Suppose you come down to the Proconsul’s headquarters and explain yourself.”

  “Are you Ras Duyair?”

  “That’s my name, yes. It says so right there.”

  “No insolence,” said the questioner. He was Rolsad Quarloo, Imperial Proconsul on Dykran, a small, weather-beaten little man with a grim, doggedly tough look about him. “I want to know why you’re on Dykran when there’s an Imperial embargo on interworld traffic. How’d you get here?”

  Duyair was silent. The corpsman standing behind him said, “He came in on that smuggler’s ship. We picked up about a dozen that way.”

  “I know that, fool,” snapped the Pronconsul. “I want him to say it. It has to go down on tape.”

  “All right,” said Duyair. “I came in on a smuggler’s ship, if that’s what he was. I wanted to go to Dykran, and none of the ticket windows were selling tickets. Then this fellow came along and offered me transportation for a hundred credits. He brought me here, and then you picked me up. That’s all.”

  The Proconsul scowled. “You must have known the trip was illegal! Why did you want to come to Dykran so badly?”

  “To visit,” Duyair said. He had decided earlier that the safest course was to play the role of a simple bumpkin and let his questioners do most of the talking.

  “To visit! That’s all—just a visit? And you defied an Imperial embargo just for a visit? I give up.” Rolsad Quarloo touched a stud on his desk, and the door opened.

  A tall, stately-looking man, magnificent in his purple and gold robes, entered. He glanced contemptuously at the Proconsul and said, “Well? Did you get anything from him, Quarloo?”

  “Not a thing. You want to try?”

  “Very well.” The magnifico looked at Duyair. “I am Olon Domyel, Imperial Legate from the Court of the Emperor Dervon XIV. You are the priest Ras Duyair, of Aldryne in the Aldryne system?”

  “That’s my name, yes.”

  “Are you the son of the late Vail Duyair, priest, of Aldryne?”

  Duyair nodded.

  “Do you know how your father died?” Domyel asked.

  “At the hands of the Imperial interrogator. They were trying to find out a secret of our religion.”