The great brown hands went around the log, locked, and started to shift it; the boy let out a high sound from between his teeth.
The hands, roped with vein and ridged with ligament, strained the log upward; the sound became a howl.
The giant’s feet braced against the dirt, slid into the dirt, and the hands that had snapped tiny necks and bound sticks together with gut string, pulled; the howl turned into a scream. He screamed again. Then again.
The log coming loose tore away nearly a square foot of flesh from the boy’s leg. Then, Quorl went over and picked him up.
This is the best dream, the boy thought, from that dark place he had retreated to behind the pain, because Quorl is here. The hands were lifting him now, he was held close, warm, somehow safe. His cheek was against the hard shoulder muscle, and he could smell Quorl too. So he stopped screaming and turned his head a little to make the pain go away. But it wouldn’t go. It wouldn’t. Then the boy cried.
The first tears through all that pain came salty in his eyes, and he cried until he went to sleep.
* * * *
Quorl had medicine for him the next day (“From the priest,” he said.) which helped the pain and made the healing start. Quorl also had made the boy a pair of wooden crutches that morning. Although muscle and ligament had been bruised and crushed and the skin torn away, no bone had broken.
That evening there was a drizzle and they ate under the canopy. Tloto did not come, and this time it was Quorl who saved the extra meat and kept looking off into the wet gray trees. Quorl had told the boy how Tloto had led him to him; when they finished eating, Quorl took the meat and ducked into the drizzle.
The boy lay down to sleep. He thought the meat was a reward for Tloto. Only Quorl had seemed that night full of more than usual gravity. The last thing he wondered before sleep flooded his eyes and ears was how blind, deaf Tloto had known where he was anyway.
* * * *
When he woke it had stopped raining. The air was damp and chill. Quorl had not come back.
The sound of the blown shell came again. The boy sat up and flinched at the twinge in his leg. To his left the moon was flickering through the trees. The sound came a third time, distant, sharp, yet clear and marine. The boy reached for his crutches and hoisted himself to his feet. He waited till the count of ten, hoping that Quorl might suddenly return to go with him.
A last he took a deep breath and started haltingly forward. The faint moonlight made the last hundred yards easy going. Finally he reached a vantage where he could look down through the wet leaves onto the arena of stone.
The sky was sheeted with mist and the moon was an indistinct pearl in the haze. The sea was misty. People were already gathered at the edge. The boy looked at the priest and then ran his eye around the circle of people. One of them was Quorl!
He leaned forward as far as he could. The priest sounded the shell again and the prisoners came out of the temple: first three boys, then an older girl, then a man. The next one…Tloto! It was marble-white under the blurred moon. Its clubbed feet shuffled on the rock. Its blind head ducked right and left with bewilderment.
As the priest raised the long three-pronged knife, the boy’s hands went tight around the crutches. He passed from one prisoner to the next. Tloto cringed, and the boy sucked in a breath as the knife went down, feeling his own flesh part under the blades. Then the murmur died, the prisoners were unbound, and the people filed from the rock back into the forest.
The boy waited to see which way Quorl headed before he started through moon-dusted bushes as fast as his crutches would let him. There were many people on the webbing of paths that came from the temple rock. There was Quorl!
When he caught up, Quorl saw him and slowed down. Quorl didn’t look at him, though. Finally the giant said, “You don’t understand. I had to catch him. I had to give him to the old one to be marked. But you don’t understand.” The boy hardly looked at all where they were going, but stared up at the giant.
“You don’t understand,” Quorl said again. Then he looked at the boy and was quiet for a minute. “No, you don’t,” he repeated. “Come.” They turned off the main path now, going slower. “It’s a…custom. An important custom. Yes, I know it hurt him. I know he was afraid. But it had to be. Tloto is one of those who—.” (The word was some inflection of the verb to know.) Quorl was silent for a moment. “Let me try to tell you why I had to hurt your friend. Yes, I know he is your friend, now. But once I said that Tloto was malika. I was wrong. Tloto is more thanmalika—he and the others that were marked. Somehow these people know things. That was how Tloto survived. That’s how he knew where you were, when you were hurt. He knew inside your head, he heard inside your head. Many are born like that, more of them each year. As soon as we find out, we mark them. Many try to hide it, and some succeed for a long time. Can you understand? Do you? When Tloto showed me where you were, he knew that I would know, that he would be caught and marked. Do you understand?”
Again he paused and looked at the boy. The eyes still showed puzzled hurt. “You want to know why. I…we.… Long ago we killed them when we found out. We don’t any more. The mark reminds them that they are different, and yet the same as we. Perhaps it is wrong. It doesn’t hurt that much, and it heals. Anyway, we don’t kill them any more. We know they’re important.…” Suddenly, having gone all through it with this strange boy, it seemed twisted to the giant, incorrect. Then he gave the boy what the boy had been sent to the forest to get, what the Duchess had found and knew was necessary. “I was wrong,” Quorl said. “I’m sorry. I will speak to the priest tomorrow.”
They walked until the dawn lightened the sky behind the trees. Once Quorl looked around and said, “I want to show you something. We are very near, and the weather is right.”
They walked a few minutes more till Quorl pointed to a wall of leaves, and said, “Go through there.”
As they pressed through the dripping foliage, bright light burnished their faces. They were standing on a small cliff that looked down the mountain. Fog the color of pale gold, the same gold the boy had seen so rarely in the sunset, rolled across the entire sky. The center flamed with the misty sun, and way below them through the fog was the shattered traces of water, the color of magnesium flame on copper foil, without edge or definition.
“That’s a lake that lies between this mountain and the next,” Quorl said, pointing to the water.
“I thought.…” the boy started softly, his tongue rough against the new language. “I thought it was the sea.”
Beside them appeared the crouching figure of Tloto. Drops from the wet leaves burned on his neck and back, over the drying blood. He turned his blank face left and right in the golden light, and with all his knowing could communicate no awe.
CHAPTER IX
Clea Koshar had been installed in her government office for three days. The notebook in which she had been doing her own work in inverse sub-trigonometric functions had been put away in her desk for exactly fifty-four seconds when she made the first discovery that gave her a permanent place in the history of Toromon’s wars as its first military hero. Suddenly she pounded her fist on the computer keys, flung her pencil across the room, muttered, “What the hell is this!” and dialed the military ministry.
It took ten minutes to get Tomar. His red-haired face came in on the visiphone, recognized her, and smiled. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi, yourself,” she said. “I just got out those figures you people sent us about the data from the radiation barrier, and those old readings from the time Telphar was destroyed. Tomar, I didn’t even have to feed them to the computer. I just looked at them. That radiation was artificially created. Its increment is completely steady. At least on the second derivative. Its build-up pattern is such that there couldn’t be more than two simple generators, or one complexed on…”
“Slow
down,” Tomar said. “What do you mean, generators?”
“The radiation barrier, or at least most of it, is artificially maintained. And there are not more than two generators, and possibly one, maintaining it.”
“How do you generate radiation?” Tomar asked.
“I don’t know,” Clea said. “But somebody has been doing it.”
“I don’t want to knock your genius, but how come nobody else figured it out?”
“I just guess nobody thought it was a possibility, or thought of gratuitously taking the second derivative, or bothered to look at them before they fed them into the computers. In twenty minutes I can figure out the location for you.”
“You do that,” he said, “and I’ll get the information to whomever it’s supposed to get to. You know, this is the first piece of information of import that we’ve gotten from this whole battery of slide-rule slippers up there. I should have figured it would have probably come from you. Thanks, if we can use it.”
She blew him a kiss as his face winked out. Then she got out her notebook again. Then minutes later the visiphone crackled at her. She turned to it and tried to get the operator. The operator was not to be gotten. She reached into her desk and got out a small pocket tool kit and was about to attack the housing of the frequency-filterer when the crackling increased and she heard a voice. She put the screw driver down and put the instrument back on the desk. A face flickered onto the screen and then flickered off. The face had dark hair, seemed perhaps familiar. But it was gone before she was sure she had made it out.
Crossed signals from another line, she figured. Maybe a short in the dialing mechanism. She glanced down at her notebook and took up her pencil when the picture flashed onto the screen again. This time it was clear and there was no static. The familiarity, she did not realize, was the familiarity of her own face on a man.
“Hello,” he said. “Hello, Hello, Clea?”
“Who is this?” she asked.
“Clea, this is Jon.”
She sat very still, trying to pull two halves of something back together (as in a forest, a prince had felt the same things disengage). Clea succeeded. “You’re supposed to be…dead. I mean I thought you were. Where are you, Jon?”
“Clea,” he said. “Clea—I have to talk to you.”
There was a five-second silence.
“Jon, Jon, how are you?”
“Fine,” he said. “I really am. I’m not in prison any more. I’ve been out a long time, and I’ve done a lot of things. But Clea, I need your help.”
“Of course,” she said. “Tell me how? What do you want me to do?”
“Do you want to know where I am?” he said. “What I’ve been doing? I’m in Telphar, and I’m trying to stop the war.”
“In Telphar?”
“There’s something behind that famed radiation barrier, and it’s a more or less civilized race. I’m about to break through the rest of the barrier and see what can be done. But I need some help at home. I’ve been monitoring phone calls in Toron. There’s an awful lot of equipment here that’s more or less mine if I can figure out how to use it. And I’ve got a friend here who knows more in that line than I gave him credit for. I’ve overheard some closed circuit conference calls, and I’m talking to you by the same method. I know you’ve got the ear of Major Tomar and I know he’s one of the few trustworthy people in that whole military hodge-podge. Clea, there is something hostile to Toromon behind that radiation barrier, but a war is not the answer. The thing that’s making the war is the unrest in Toromon. And the war isn’t going to remedy that. The emigration situation, the food situation, the excess man power, the deflation: that’s what’s causing your war. If that can be stopped, then the thing behind the barrier can be dealt with quickly and peacefully. There in Toron you don’t even know what the enemy is. They wouldn’t let you know even if they knew themselves.”
“Do you know?” Clea asked.
Jon paused. Then he said, “No, but whatever it is, it’s people with something wrong among them. And warring on them won’t exorcise it.”
“Can you exorcise it?” Clea asked.
Jon paused again. “Yes. I can’t tell you how; but let’s say what’s troubling them is a lot simpler than what’s troubling us in Toromon.”
“Jon,” Clea asked suddenly, “what’s it like in Telphar? You know I’ll help you if I can, but tell me.”
The face on the visiphone was still. Then it drew a deep breath. “Clea, it’s like an open air tomb. The city is very unlike Toron. It was planned, all the streets are regular, there’s no Devil’s Pot, nor could there ever be one. Roadways wind above ground among the taller buildings. I’m in the Palace of the Stars right now. It was a magnificent building.” The face looked right and left. “It still is. They had amazing laboratories, lots of equipment, great silvered meeting halls under an immense ceiling that reproduced the stars on the ceiling. The electric plants still work. Most houses you can walk right in and turn on a light switch. Half the plumbing in the city is out, though. But everything in the palace still works. It must have been a beautiful place to live in. When they were evacuating during the radiation rise, very little marauding took place.…”
“The radiation…” began Clea.
Jon laughed, “Oh, that doesn’t bother us. It’s too complicated to explain now, but it doesn’t.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Clea said. “I figured if you were alive, then it obviously wasn’t bothering you. But Jon, and this isn’t government propaganda, because I made the discovery myself: whatever is behind the barrier caused the radiation rise that destroyed Telphar. Some place near Telphar is a projector that caused the rise, and it’s still functioning. This hasn’t been released to the public yet, but if you want to stop your war, you’ll never do it if the government can correctly blame the destruction of Telphar on the enemy. That’s all they need.”
“Clea, I haven’t finished telling you about Telphar. I told you that the electricity still worked. Well, most houses you go into, you turn on the light and find a couple of sixty-year-old corpses on the floor. On the roads you can find a wreck every hundred feet or so. There’re almost ten thousand corpses in the Stadium of the Stars. It isn’t very pretty. Arkor and I are the only two humans who have any idea of what the destruction of Telphar really amounted to. And we still believe we’re in the right.”
“Jon, I can’t hold back information.…”
“No, no,” Jon said. “I wouldn’t ask you to. Besides, I heard your last phone call. So it’s already out. I want you to do two things for me. One has to do with Dad. The other is to deliver a message. I overheard a conference call between Prime Minister Chargill and some of the members of the council. They’re about to ask Dad for a huge sum of money to finance the first aggressive drive in this war effort. Try and convince him that it’ll do more harm than good. Look, Clea, you’ve got a mathematical mind. Show him how this whole thing works. He doesn’t mean to be, but he’s almost as much responsible for this thing as any one individual could be. See if he can keep production from flooding the city. And for Toromon’s sake, keep an eye, a close eye on his supervisors. They’re going to tilt the island into the sea with all their cross-purposes intrigues. All I can do is start you on the right track, Sis, and you’ll have to take it from there.
“Now for the message. The one circuit I can’t break in on is the Royal Palace system. I can just overhear. Somehow I’ve got to get a message to the Duchess of Petra. Tell her to get to Telphar in the next forty-eight hours by way of the transit ribbon. Tell her there are two kids she owes a favor to. And tell her the girl she owes four or five favors. She’ll be able to find out who they are.”
Clea was scribbling. “Does the transit ribbon still work?” she asked.
“It was working when I escaped from prison,” Jon said. “I don’t see w
hy it should have stopped now.”
“You used it?” Clea said. “That means you were in Toron!”
“That’s right. And I was at your party too.”
“Then it was…” She stopped. Then laughed, “I’m so glad, Jon. I’m so glad it was you after all.”
“Come on, Sis, tell me about yourself,” Jon said. “What’s been happening in the real world. I’ve been away from it a long time. Here in Telphar I don’t feel much closer. Right now I’m walking around in my birthday suit. On our way here we got into a shadowy situation and I had to abandon my clothes for fear of getting caught. I’ll explain that later, too. But what about you?”
“Oh, there’s nothing to tell. But to you I guess there is. I graduated, with honors. I’ve grown up. I’m engaged to Tomar. Did you know that? Dad approves, and we’re to be married as soon as the war’s over. I’m working on a great project, to find the inverse sub-trigonometric functions. Those are about the most important things in my life right now. I’m suppose to be working on the war effort, but except for this afternoon, I haven’t done much.”
“Fine,” Jon said. “That’s about the right proportions.”
“Now what about you? And the clothes?” She grinned into the visaphone, and he grinned back.
“Well—no, you wouldn’t believe it. At least not if I told it that way. Arkor, the friend who’s with me, is one of the forest people. He left the forest to spend some time in Toron, which is where I met him. Apparently he managed to accumulate an amazing store of information, about all sorts of things—electronics, languages, even music. You’d think he could read minds. Anyway, here we are, through the forest, across the prison mines, and in Telphar.”
“Jon, what were the mines like? It always made me wonder how Dad could use tetron when he knew that you were being whipped to get it.”
The First Science Fiction Megapack Page 13
