by Andre Norton
Now—if an escape pod was loosed while the ship was in this no-time, no-space sea, would it indeed transfer those in it into real time, onto a real planet, or would it and its passengers be lost forever, to float in that place without future?
Still, it had been fashioned for escape. And all the accidents that could happen to the parent ship and make its use necessary—were they only to occur in normal space, in the orbiting of a planet, perhaps? If that were so . . . Simsa held the rod between her palms and it gave gentle heat to where the coldness of fear had begun to stiffen her body and send dark fingers of foreboding into her mind.
There was a sharp hiss from behind her—Zass had entered the lock and her message of warning was plain. Unconscious of what she did or why, Simsa slid into the Life Boat, the zorsal once more settling upon her, wide-held wings over her breasts.
Her entrance—what had she done!
Fear arose in a wave of harsh terror, which, once again, overflowed the ancient Simsa, leaving only the girl of the Burrows cowering against the padded resting place. Whether or not the Life Boat was meant to be used now, it was reacting to her entrance as it had not to that of the spaceman—
It was as if she had been felled by a blow struck by one of the slinking lawless males of the Burrows. Into dark Simsa whirled, both her selves cut off from light, thought, perhaps even life.
She awoke almost with the same speed as she had been struck down. How long had she lain there? Time had no meaning. But her thoughts stirred along with her body. There was no mistaking the vibration of this small craft which held her as tightly as a shell enclosed the shapeless form of ant-crab. The Life Boat was clearly set on its own voyage—into the place where space was not—or bound for the nearest planet, to a point where her recklessness had launched it.
There was nothing she could do but wait—and neither Simsa of the Burrows nor the ancient one she was twin to could lie easy under that curtain of the unknown. Zass hissed but she did not move, except to raise her head a fraction so that her large beads of eyes met directly those of the girl. There was no fear in them, and Simsa knew a spark of pain and guilt. To the zorsal she was the protector, the all-powerful, and the creature was content to await the girl’s action.
There was nourishment in containers within reach of Simsa’s hands as she lay. These held no threat of drugs so she shared with the zorsal a bulb to be squeezed so that a slightly sourish-tasting water refreshed them and she divided, amid falling crumbs, a cake of compressed dry rations.
Time did pass under a fashion. She slept and perhaps Zass did, too. There was no break in the vibration of the humming walls. Purposely, Simsa tried to wipe from her mind all but a single fact. The craft that bore her had been fashioned to preserve life. All the efforts of those who had formed it had been bent only to that one cause. Therefore, let her believe that she would emerge unharmed.
Three times the feeding procedure came and went and then there was a difference in the feel of the craft. Simsa was tempted to send out thought, but that needed another mind to link—and here there was none save herself and Zass.
The vibration’s thrum grew louder until the girl curled into a ball, her fingers thrust into her ears to deaden a sound that was as painful as any cut of a Guild Man’s lash back in the stews from which the Burrowers came.
Pain from that rousing whine—then a crash. Simsa’s body was driven back against the far wall of the craft by the force of that. Her head cracked against uncushioned metal above the bed place. But, through the agony of that blow, she saw that same door which had closed to entrap her raising in a series of jerks. Finally, it stuck and, on her knees Simsa now brought up both hands to push, for a moment forgetting the rod. Zass squeezed through the opened slit and a moment later, Simsa heard the zorsal give tongue in sheer fury and pain.
That brought her to her senses and she swung the rod upward, centering all her will on winning free. The door shuddered, began to glow. Heat from it fanned back against her own nearly bare body. Still she held until, with a last clang of protest, whatever had jammed it gave away and she was able to pull herself up and out—upon the refuge world.
That had been three days past. Simsa stirred within the cloak she had made from two stored coverings in the Life Boat. No moon, no sun—the haze would darken and so suggest night for a time, then flame again into this baking fury. The boat had landed close to this flowing stream of sand. Having no other guide, she had started to walk along that, well-aware that the downed craft would be broadcasting an alarm steadily. She had no mind to meet any would-be rescuers until she knew who—or what—such would be.
They had come a long way, she carrying Zass under the shelter of her enveloping cloak, for the zorsal could not stand the heat reflected from the rock. She had traveled by night and in the day, there was nothing in the way of shelter—only this ever-stretching rock and the moving river of sand.
Though she had dug a little into the river, she had found not a hint of moisture and she had no idea what moved it with a visible current. The bag of supplies from the boat were all that now stood between them and a death that would leave dried remains of girl and zorsal on the never-changing rock.
2
Though she had slept, or rather lost consciousness in an unquiet doze, Simsa was well-aware that she had near reached the end of her strength. There had been no change in the land, no sign that these plains of rock had ever supported life as she knew it. Still a feeling was also always with her, growing the stronger when she stopped to rest at the coming of greater heat, that she and Zass were not alone, that her shuffling advance was observed and weighed. She had searched the air uselessly for sight of a sharp-eyed flyer, glared back at rock until her eyes ached and teared. Nothing.
Nothing but the silent slip of the sand river. Not for the first time, Simsa put Zass gently to one side and, pulling the cloak well under her to shield her bare flesh from the heated stone, lay belly flat to stare at that strange ever-flowing current. There was something about the queer eddies that now and then troubled the yellow-gray surface that kept her from investigating by touch. Also, where could she find a branch or such to prod beneath that same scum-thick surface? Her rod she would not so defile.
She had no way of telling the passing of true time here, but she was sure that the haze was darkening and that soon it would be time to move on again. If she could force herself to rise, to set her feet on the still warm rock . . . But to go where? There was nothing ahead, certainly—at least she could see nothing. She did not even turn her head to look again.
Had she been an utter fool? There was still the craft down on a shelf of this same rock, and it would afford shelter of a sort, as well as the beacon calling for help. Simsa caught her lower lip between her teeth and bit down hard. To be forced to return, to be proven a failure—neither part of her welcomed that, as sensible as such a solution would be.
Below her, the sand eddied in a wider sweep. There puffed up into her face such a vile stench as set her coughing, gasping for air to clean her nostrils and lungs. Simsa raised herself on her hands but still did not withdraw from the stream side.
There was ancient rot in that puff of air. However, with it also a hint of moisture, befouled beyond belief, perhaps, but still moisture. Now she sat upright, allowed her cloak to slip away while her hands went to the single garment she wore. Since that Simsa of the deserted city had reached out to her, the Burrows Simsa, while standing alone in her gemmed crown, necklet, and bejeweled metal-strip kilt, she had taken the garb of that image from which the spark of life had come to mingle with her own. After, she had worn proudly the dress of that Elder who had ruled a people long since forgotten. Now she loosed one of the strips of the kilt, began to bend and twist it where it was made fast to the girdle until it snapped, giving her a silver metal strip studded with gems that could be cloudy or awake under certain lights to brightness. It was longer than her arm by a little. She held it firmly by the portion twisted free of the intricate linkage to p
lunge into the disturbance of sand which spread farther both up the river and down.
For a very long moment, she hesitated. Certainly that whiff of foulness was no invitation to investigate further. But the sliding sand was all that might stand between her and an impotent trip back to the Life Boat.
Her Burrows memory was wary, yet that also could give way to impatience. And now it did. As she might have used a short stabbing spear on some of the beshelled crawlers of Kuxortal’s faraway coast, so did she bring the gemmed strip down with all the force of her arm.
It entered the sand easily enough, but—
Simsa flinched. Somewhere below that curling of gray brown, she had struck opposition. Something she had attacked was moving, first threshing wildly about so that its frenzied struggle caused an upheaval not unlike a minor eruption. A bubble of the thick stuff broke in the parched air, releasing concentrated odor so foul that Simsa felt instant nausea.
There was nothing else moving, not even when she tried to draw forth her improvised probe. The metal held as stiff and straight and opposed to her strength as if it had pierced whatever it had first encountered, pinning it to the rock bed.
Simsa shrugged off the last part of the covering across her shoulders and arose to her knees, hands tightly clutching the strip. No strength she could put forth moved it. She began to weave the probe back and forth. At first, the obstruction was so great she could not stir her metal length no matter how hard she tried. Then it began to give. There was a sudden falling away on one side. Simsa answered that with as sharp a twist as she could deliver. Almost she lost her balance as the final release came. The strip popped up into view, scattering great sand droplets in all directions, bringing a miasma of the stomach-turning stench which it intensified to the hundredth part.
It did not come cleanly, though the sand of the stream did not cling to it. Rather, there was impaled on the tip, a thing as large as her two fists together. It was of that thick yellowish color shown by pus draining from a wound. And it moved constantly in a wild writhing, as if it strove to tear itself from the metal centered in its body.
In shape, it was an ovoid with no marked features nor any head or tail parts. From its underside spread, to lash in the air, eight tentacles all of the same size.
Simsa knew the dark spinners of the Burrows. But those were well-favored compared to this noxious blob. She held it well away from her and the rock shore, studying it as best she could. This was the first life she had seen since she had crawled out of the craft.
It was contracting those legs or limbs, wrapping them about its body as if, having found it could not escape through its original efforts, it was protecting itself as best it could.
Simsa blinked.
This nasty yellow blob was her captive. Had the constant heat, the lack of food or more than a sip or two of water so taken over her senses that she was seeing dream projections, like those the crax chewers were said to have haunt them in the latter stage of their addiction?
It was not true! Loosing the grip of her right hand, though still balancing the improvised spear with the other, she rubbed her fingers across the heat-tormented eyes in her seared face. There was now clinging to her rod a man! Fully humanoid, clothed, and no more than two fingers high. And when the man turned his face to look to her, she knew his face—too well.
To the credit of the toughness of the Burrows Simsa, and the command of the Elder One, she neither cried out nor dropped the rod. Instead, her wrist wavering a little in spite of all her efforts at strict control, she pulled the strip back from above the sand river and tossed it to the bare rock at a point as far from her as she could send it.
Zass’s hissing, which had begun when Simsa first probed into the opaque flood, arose to a scream. In spite of the heat, the zorsal took to the air, flying over the girl’s strange catch in the narrow circle of her species when attracted to some prey. Yet she made no move to launch herself into a swoop.
Simsa had to move the strip and shake it vigorously to detach her impossible catch. The little man lay on the rock, his chest heaving, his tiny hands pressed tight to his middle, the blood of a wound spurting a red flood over his body. His head turned so that he looked at her with such an accusing face that she dropped the strip, clasped her hands together so that her claws blood-scored her own skin. This was not the truth! Both Simsas clamored in her mind. She had not brought out of that sandy river this living miniature of Thorn!
Still the thing looked upon her as Thorn might have appealed for her help and she remembered all their wanderings and those days in the city of ruined ships, days in which, in a way she still did not understand, he had come to mean more to her than any one she had ever known—closer in a new way than even Ferwar, who had protected her since childhood.
“You are not!” She was not aware that she spoke aloud until she heard her own voice. Zass had fallen silent though she still circled in the air about the wounded thing which was not, Simsa insisted, real.
The Elder One within her now struggled for command. This once, Simsa of the Burrows did not instinctively brace herself in defense. Perhaps things as strange as this were common off-world, perhaps it was—
“It hides!” Again she spoke out loud, only now in the singsong that was the Elder One’s own tongue. “It bends the sight, taking from the mind some favorite image to hide behind. But it is a foolish thing, else it would know the difference—”
So far had the reasonable explanation of the Elder One proceeded when the shock of new happening hit the Burrower girl. Even she could not believe in a manikin as big as her flattened hand. But—that was gone! Here was a full-sized man no different from the Thorn she had known, save that he writhed on the rock where his blood pooled. And there was the glaze of coming death in his dark eyes.
“Small to large!” chattered Simsa, her body ashake. “I know,” she told herself, told the Elder One, “that this is not true!”
She grabbed at the strip of metal and used it fiercely to prod the dying man-thing—rolling it backward toward the river. It did roll—which, she told her dazed mind, no true man of proper size would do! So rolling, it was edged by a last push out over the sand flow, to strike the solid-appearing surface and be sucked under. While Simsa, breathing in deep gasps of the burning air, stared downward.
Illusion; both her memories, united, held to that stubbornly. Nothing but illusion. But what kind of thing could reach into her mind without her being aware and pick out such a memory, use it to protect itself? Was it in truth even that blob of yellow which she had first drawn forth? Or was its true body pattern something else again? Had it worked upon her with intelligence or by instinct? She thought of how she had kept so close to the sand river in all her travel across this barren world and felt more than a little sick. Her imagination was only too ready to paint for her what might happen to someone who lay asleep, who had no barriers. Suppose the projected Thorn had come across her in the early morning when she had made her rough camp here? Supposing he could have spun some tale of following her—yes, she would have been wary of him, of any spaceman now—but was wariness such as that enough?
Zass alighted on the rock not far from the puddle of blood left behind by the river-thing. It had been swift-flowing crimson when it had worn the seeming of Thorn. Now it was a dirty yellow, looking like rancid grease that had gone uncleaned from a pot far too long.
The zorsal extended her neck. Her feathered antennae pointed to the slight depression in the rock where that fluid had been cupped. Her pointed snout quivered. Then she gave a half-leap into the air, instantly stabilized by wing spread—and her hissing was sharp, so that she even seemed to spit in the direction of the congealing stain.
Simsa pulled up to her feet, drawing the cloak in folds over her shoulders. The place where the captured thing had rolled, to be once more hidden in the river, had not smoothed. There, the surface of the sand flow was troubled as a larger excrescence rose above the general level.
Bigger—larger—sand
sloughed away from it. A thatch of closely cut dark hair first and then a face with those curiously tilted eyes that had been the first strangeness she had marked in her initial sighting of Thorn. The head arose until the sand formed a frill about the throat. The mouth opened, something that might even be akin to a voice topped the swish of the flowing sand:
“Simsssa.” A hiss near in pitch to Zass’s one of anger, a slurred attempt at her name.
The girl dropped her hold on the cloak so it fell to the rock, and the heat generated by the haze above lapped the black skin on her back and shoulders. She forced herself a single step closer to that thing in the turgid flood. Between her hands, both tightly grasping it, the rod of Elder One’s near unknown, untested power pointed directly at the forehead of that illusion.
“Not!” She still had control of her voice. “You are not Thorn—you are not!”
As she began to concentrate her will upon action, she half-expected that the fire which the rod, the tips of the moon, the mirror of the sun, projected would come to her call and blast the sand creature into nothingness. Only there was no warming of the metal cradled so between her palms—no flash of energy. Once more, the mouth of the head worked.
“Simssssa . . .”
Her name—it could somehow have picked that out of her own mind. She held no wonder too unreal after what she had seen since she and the Elder One had fused, or not quite fused, into one. But she had not thought of Thorn, not that she could remember, since she had begun this journey across the endless furnace of the plain. If it drew upon her memories, old or new, why not Ferwar, or half a ten-ten of others she had known all her life, and known better than the spaceman with whom she had traveled so short a number of days?
The head—it blurred, as if her questions had somehow weakened the control of that which had set it—perhaps for bait. Still a man’s head, but the black hair had blanched to pure silver to match the long strains now sticky with sweat that lay on her own shoulders, sprang wiry and alive from her scalp. White brows, which lashed about dark eyes—the skin as dark as a starless sky.
