Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  “You’re out in deep space, captain!” said the superintendent. “And you haven’t juice enough left even to travel back to the Border. You can’t expect Imperial prices here!”

  “It’s not what you charged them!” The captain angrily jerked his thumb at the Sirian.

  “Regular customers!” the superintendent shrugged. “You start coming by here every three months like they do, and we can make an arrangement with you, too.”

  It was outrageous—it actually put the Venture back in the red! But there was no help for it.

  Nor did it improve the captain’s temper when he muffed the take-off once more—and then had to watch the Sirian floating into space, as sedately as a swan, a little behind him!

  An hour later, as he sat glumly before the controls, debating the chance of recouping his losses before returning to Nikkeldepain, Maleen and the Leewit hurriedly entered the room. They did something to a port screen.

  “They sure are!” the Leewit exclaimed. She seemed childishly pleased.

  “Are what?” the captain inquired absently.

  “Following us,” said Maleen. She did not sound pleased. “It’s that Sirian ship, Captain Pausert—”

  The captain stared bewilderedly at the screen. There was a ship in focus there, it was quite obviously the Sirian and, just as obviously, it was following them.

  “What do they want?” he wondered. “They’re stinkers but they’re not pirates. Even if they were, they wouldn’t spend an hour running after a crate tike the Venture!”

  Maleen said nothing. The Leewit observed: “Oh, brother! Got their bow-turrets out now—better get those nova guns ready!”

  “But it’s all nonsense!” the captain said, flushing angrily. He turned suddenly towards the communicators. “What’s that Empire general beam-length?”

  “.0044,” said Maleen.

  A roaring, abusive voice flooded the control room immediately. The one word understandable to the captain was “Venture.” It was repeated frequently, sometimes as if it were a question.

  “Sirian!” said the captain. “Can you understand them?” he asked Maleen.

  She shook her head. “The Leewit can—”

  The Leewit nodded, her gray eyes glistening.

  “What are they saying?”

  “They says you’re for stopping,” the Leewit translated rapidly, but apparently retaining much of the original sentence-structure. “They says you’re for skinning alive . . . ha! They says you’re for stopping right now and for only hanging. They says—”

  Maleen scuttled from the control room. The Leewit banged the communicator with one small fist.

  “Beak-Wock!” she shrilled. It sounded like that, anyway. The loud voice paused a moment.

  “Beak-Wock?” it returned in an aggrieved, demanding roar.

  “Beak-Wock!” the Leewit affirmed with apparent delight! She rattled off a string of similar-sounding syllables. She paused.

  A howl of inarticulate wrath responded.

  The captain, in a whirl of outraged emotions, was yelling at the Leewit to shut up, at the Sirian to go to Great Patham’s Second Hell—the worst—and wrestling with the nova gun adjustors at the same time. He’d had about enough! He’d—

  SSS-whoosh!

  It was the Sheewash Drive.

  “And where are we now?” the captain inquired, in a voice of unnatural calm.

  “Same place, just about,” said the Leewit. “Ship’s still on the screen. Way back though—take them an hour again to catch up.” She seemed disappointed; then brightened. “You got lots of time to get the guns ready!”

  The captain didn’t answer. He was marching down the hall towards the rear of the Venture. He passed the captain’s Cabin and noted the door was shut. He went on without pausing. He was mad clean through—he knew what had happened!

  After all he’d told her, Goth had teleported again.

  It was all there, in the storage. Items of half a pound in weight seemed to be as much as she could handle. But amazing quantities of stuff had met that one requirement—bottles filled with what might be perfume or liquor or dope, expensive-looking garments and cloths in a shining variety of colors, small boxes, odds, ends and, of course, jewelry!

  He spent half an hour getting it loaded into a steel space crate. He wheeled the crate into the rear lock, sealed the inside lock and pulled the switch that activated the automatic launching device.

  The outside lock clicked shut. He stalked back to the control room. The Leewit was still in charge, fiddling with the communicators.

  “I could try a whistle over them,” she suggested, glancing up. She added: “But they’d bust some-wheres, sure.”

  “Get them on again!” the captain said.

  “Yes, sir,” said the Leewit surprised.

  The roaring voice came back faintly.

  “SHUT UP!” the captain shouted in Imperial Universum.

  The voice shut up.

  “Tell them they can pick up their stuff—it’s been dumped out in a crate!” the captain told the Leewit. “Tell them I’m proceeding on my course. Tell them if they follow me one light-minute beyond that crate, I’ll come back for them, shoot their front end off, shoot their rear end off, and ram ’em in the middle.”

  “Yes, SIR!” the Leewit sparkled. They proceeded on their course.

  Nobody followed.

  “Now I want to speak to Goth,” the captain announced. He was still at a high boil. “Privately,” he added. “Back in the storage—”

  Goth followed him expressionlessly into the storage. He closed the door to the hall. He’d broken off a two-foot length from the tip of one of Councilor Rapport’s overpriced tinklewood fishing poles. It made a fair switch.

  But Goth looked terribly small just now! He cleared his throat. He wished for a moment he were back on Nikkeldepain.

  “I warned you,” he said.

  Goth didn’t move. Between one second and the next, however, she seemed to grow remarkably. Her brown eyes focused on the captain’s Adam’s apple; her lip lifted at one side. A slightly hungry look came into her face.

  “Wouldn’t try that!” she murmured.

  Mad again, the captain reached out quickly and got a handful of leathery cloth. There was a blur of motion, and what felt like a smalt explosion against his left kneecap. He grunted with anguished surprise and fell back on a bale of Councilor Rapport’s all-weather cloaks. But he had retained his grip—Goth fell half on top of him, and that was still a favorable position. Then her head snaked around, her neck seemed to extend itself; and her teeth snapped his wrist.

  Weasels don’t let go—

  “Didn’t think he’d have the nerve!” Goth’s voice came over the communicator. There was a note of grudging admiration in it. It seemed that she was inspecting her bruises.

  All tangled up in the job of bandaging his freely bleeding wrist, the captain hoped she’d find a good plenty to count. His knee felt the size of a sofa pillow and throbbed like a piston engine.

  “The captain is a brave man,” Maleen was saying reproachfully. “You should have known better—”

  “He’s not very smart, though!” the Leewit remarked suggestively.

  There was a short silence.

  “Is he? Goth? Eh?” the Leewit urged.

  “Perhaps not very,” said Goth.

  “You two lay off him!” Maleen ordered. “Unless,” she added meaningly, “you want to swim back to Karres—on the Egger Route!”

  “Not me,” the Leewit said briefly.

  “You could still do it, I guess,” said Goth. She seemed to be reflecting. “All right—we’ll lay off him. It was a fair fight, anyway.”

  IV.

  They raised Karres the sixteenth day after leaving Porlumma. There had been no more incidents; but then, neither had there been any more stops or other contacts with the defenseless Empire. Maleen had cooked up a poultice which did wonders for his knee. With the end of the trip in sight, all tensions had relaxed; and Maleen, a
t least, seemed to grow hourly more regretful at the prospect of parting.

  After a brief study, Karres could be distinguished easily enough by the fact that it moved counterclockwise to all the other planets of the Iverdahl System.

  Well, it would, the captain thought.

  They came soaring into its atmosphere on the dayside without arousing any visible interest. No communicator signals reached them; and no other ships showed up to look them over. Karres, in fact, had all the appearance of a completely uninhabited world. There were a larger number of seas, too big to be called Lakes and too small to be oceans, scattered over its surface. There was one enormously towering ridge of mountains that ran from pole to pole, and any number of lesser chains. There were two good-sized ice caps; and the southern section of the planet was speckled with intermittent stretches of snow. Almost all of it seemed to be dense: forest.

  It was a handsome place, in a wild, somber way.

  They went gliding over it, from noon through morning and into the: dawn fringe—the captain at the controls, Goth and the Leewit flanking him at the screens, and Maleen behind him to do the directing. After a few initial squeals, the Leewit became oddly silent. Suddenly the captain realized she was blubbering.

  Somehow, it startled, him to discover that her homecoming had affected the Leewit to that extent. He felt Goth reach out behind him and put her hand on the Leewit’s shoulder. The smallest witch sniffled happily.

  “ ’S beautiful!” she growled.

  He felt a resurge of the wondering, protective friendliness they had aroused in him at first. They must have been having a rough time of it, at that. He sighed; it seemed a pity they hadn’t got along a little better!

  “Where’s everyone hiding?” he inquired, to break up the mood. So far, there hadn’t been a sign of human habitation.

  “There aren’t many people on Karres,” Maleen said from behind his shoulder. “But we’re going to The Town—you’ll meet about half of them there!”

  “What’s that place down there?” the captain asked with sudden interest. Something like an enormous lime-white bowl seemed to have been set flush into the floor of the wide valley up which they were moving.

  “That’s the Theater where . . . ouch!” the Leewit said. She fell silent then but turned to give Maleen a resentful look.

  “Something strangers shouldn’t be told about, eh?” the captain said tolerantly. Goth glanced at him from the side.

  “We’ve got rules,” she said.

  He let the ship down a little as they passed over “the Theater where—” It was a sort of large, circular arena, with numerous steep tiers of seats running up around it. But all was bare and deserted now.

  On Maleen’s direction, they took the next valley fork to the right and dropped lower still. He had his first look at Karres animal life then. A flock of large, creamy-white birds, remarkably Terrestrial in appearance, flapped by just below them, apparently unconcerned about the ship. The forest underneath had opened out into a long stretch of lush meadow land, with small creeks winding down into its center. Here a herd of several hundred head of beasts was grazing—beasts of mastodonic-size and build, with hairless, shiny black hides. The mouths of their long, heavy heads were twisted up into sardonic, crocodilian grins as they blinked up at the passing Venture.

  “Black Bollems,” said Goth, apparently enjoying the captain’s expression. “Lots of. them around; they’re tame. But the gray mountain ones are good hunting.”

  “Good eating, too!” the Leewit said. She licked her lips daintily. “Breakfast—!” she sighed, her thoughts diverted to a familiar track. “And we ought to be just in time!”

  “There’s the field!” Maleen cried, pointing. “Set her down there, captain!”

  The “field” was simply a flat meadow of close-trimmed grass running smack against the mountainside to their left. One small vehicle, bright blue in color, was parked on it; and it was bordered on two sides by very tall, blue-black trees.

  That was all.

  The captain shook his head. Then he set her down.

  The town of Karres was a surprise to him in a good many ways. For one thing, there was much more of it than you would have thought possible after flying over the area. It stretched for miles through the forest, up the flanks of the mountain and across the valley—little clusters of houses or individual ones, each group screened from all the rest and from the sky overhead by the trees.

  They liked color on Karres; but then they hid it away! The houses were bright as flowers, red and white, apple-green, golden-brown—all spick and span, scrubbed and polished and aired with that brisk, green forest-smell. At various times of the day, there was also the smell of remarkably good things to eat. There were brooks and pools and a great number of shaded vegetable gardens to the town. There were risky-looking treetop playgrounds, and treetop platforms and galleries which seemed to have no particular purpose. On the ground was mainly an enormously confusing maze of paths—narrow trails of sandy soil snaking about among great brown tree roots and chunks of gray mountain rock, and half covered with fallen needle leaves. The first six times the captain set out unaccompanied, he’d lost his way hopelessly within minutes, and had to be guided back out of the forest.

  But the most hidden of all were the people! About four thousand of them were supposed to live in the town, with as many more scattered about the planet. But you never got to see more than three or four at any one time—except when now and then a pack of children, who seemed to the captain to be uniformly of the Leewit’s size, would burst suddenly out of the undergrowth across a path before you, and vanish again.

  As for the others, you did hear someone singing occasionally; or there might be a whole muted concert going on all about, on a large variety of wooden musical instruments which they seemed to enjoy tootling with, gently.

  But it wasn’t a real town at all, the captain thought. They didn’t live like people, these Witches of Karres—it was more like a flock of strange forest birds that happened to be nesting in the same general area. Another thing: they appeared to be busy enough—but what was their business?

  He discovered he was reluctant to ask Toll too many questions about it. Toll was the mother of his three witches; but only Goth really resembled her. It was difficult to picture Goth becoming smoothly matured and pleasantly rounded; but that was Toll. She had the same murmuring voice, the same air of sideways observation and secret reflection. And she answered all the captain’s questions with apparent frankness; but he never seemed to get much real information out of what she said.

  It was odd, too! Because he was spending several hours a day in her company, or in one of the next rooms at any rate, while she went about her housework. Toll’s daughters had taken him home when they landed; and he was installed in the room that belonged to their father—busy just now, the captain gathered, with some sort of research of a geological nature elsewhere on Karres. The arrangement worried him a little at first, particularly since Toll and he were mostly alone in the house. Maleen was going to some kind of school; she left early in the morning and came back late in the afternoon; and Goth and the Leewit were just plain running wild! They usually got in long after the captain had gone to bed and were off again before he turned out for breakfast.

  It hardly seemed like the right way to raise them! One afternoon, he found the Leewit curled up and asleep in the chair he usually occupied on the porch before the house. She slept there for four solid hours, while the captain sat nearby and leafed gradually through a thick book with illuminated pictures called “Histories of Ancient Yarthe.” Now and then, he sipped at a cool, green, faintly intoxicating drink Toll had placed quietly beside him some while before, or sucked an aromatic smoke from the enormous pipe with a floor rest, which he understood was a favorite of Toll’s husband.

  Then the Leewit woke up suddenly, uncoiled, gave him a look between a scowl and a friendly grin, slipped off the porch and vanished among the trees.

  He couldn’t qu
ite figure that look! It might have meant nothing at all in particular, but—

  The captain laid down his book then and worried a little more. It was true, of course, that nobody seemed in the least concerned about his presence. All of Karres appeared to know about him, and he’d met quite a number of people by now in a casual way. But nobody came around to interview him or so much as dropped in for a visit. However, Toll’s husband presumably would be returning presently, and—

  How long had he been here, anyway?

  Great Patham, the captain thought, shocked. He’d lost count of the days!

  Or was it weeks?

  He went in to find Toll.

  “It’s been a wonderful visit,” he said, “but I’ll have to be leaving, I guess. Tomorrow morning, early—”

  Toll put some fancy sewing she was working on back in a glass basket, laid her thin, strong witch’s hands in her lap, and smiled up at him.

  “We thought you’d be thinking that,” she said, “and so we—You know, captain, it was quite difficult to find a way to reward you for bringing back the children?”

  “It was?” said the captain, suddenly realizing he’d also clean forgotten he was broke! And now the wrath of Onswud lay close ahead.

  “Gold and jewel stones would have been just right, of course!” she said, “but unfortunately, while there’s no doubt a lot of it on Karres somewhere, we never got around to looking for it. And we haven’t money—none that you could use, that is!”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do,” the captain agreed sadly.

  “However,” said Toll, “we’ve all been talking about it in the town, and so we’ve loaded a lot of things aboard your ship that we think you can sell at a fine profit!”

  “Well now,” the captain said gratefully, “that’s fine of—”

  “There are furs,” said Toll, “the very finest furs we could fix up—two thousand of them!”

  “Oh!” said the captain, bravely keeping his smile. “Well, that’s wonderful!”