Secret of the Stars

by Andre Norton

  “A scout named Ksanga had followed Marson’s earlier orbit and been attracted into the same pattern of cooperation. He came back as pilot of a ship which landed on the planet Kris, two passengers on board, a woman and her child. He dared to return even though he knew that he was outlawed as no other wolf-head since the beginning of time. Unfortunately, he was recognized on Kris, picked up by your police. He contrived to die before he was forced to betray those he had brought with him. How they escaped we shall never know. But eventually they reached Terra.

  “The woman, although fully armed against the dangers her people could anticipate, was not immune to terrestrial disease. She died in N’Yok, in JetTown, where she had found a temporary hideout. The child remained.”

  Joktar put down his empty cup. Now he was as fascinated as the commander by Kronfeld’s story.

  “By Terran standards, that child appeared to be about six years old, he was closer to twelve. And he had been provided with a mental block for his own protection. In JetTown, he found a place for himself, eventually fitted into the pattern of the streets. Neither he, nor those about him, knew how important he was.”

  Kronfeld picked up a paper, but he recited rather than read. “What was the driving motive behind Marson’s return, Ksanga’s sacrifice, and the woman’s? Oh, I’ve heard all the wild tales the services have fostered through the years since our first contact with the aliens—”

  “Wild tales?” Lennox spat between his teeth. “Just because you don’t believe the truth?”

  “What is the truth? That the aliens are immortal? That fact could be difficult for us to accept. But it isn’t true. Not only can they die by accident, but also, though their life span is immeasurably longer than ours, they are mortal in the ordinary fashion. That they are our superiors mentally and physically? Yes, that gives us a feeling of inferiority which many little men find impossible to face. But they have also one overwhelming disadvantage on their side of the scales.”

  Now Lennox actually did spit. The droplet of moisture beaded on the dark surface.

  “They want us!” his face flushed darkly. “They have to have us to breed.”

  Kronfeld regarded him somberly. “Fifty years ago,” he said in a remote tone, “a hysterical and perverted man put his own interpretation on a secret report. Perhaps he made an understandable human error, under the influence of his warped background; perhaps he had another reason for what he did. He slammed a door for his whole species. But it is an axiom that truth cannot be hidden forever. Other men have been searching for those hidden files, for the true meaning of that report ever since. Three years ago, the real story came to those who dared to believe. All the garbled nonsense which Morre fed his followers was sifted. Then the facts underneath and the monstrous crimes he fathered on the aliens were discovered to be something quite different. Yes, these galactic neighbors must have another species allied with them for breeding, but that act does not follow the unspeakable pattern Morre pictured out of the vileness of his own evil imagination.

  “The aliens are humanoid, but not human. They have voyaged the star lanes for a length of time we cannot measure. They were comrades-in-arms and good friends to other races who preceded us into space, those who built the ruins we now find on dead worlds, for we are new to come into an old, old region. But long ago, their species suffered a mutation which has almost doomed them to extinction. If they mate among themselves, the resulting children are female only. If they mate with a kindred humanoid race, the children are the Ffallian, and all male.

  “In turn, the Ffallian may mate fruitfully with either human or alien and produce children of both sexes. And the children of that second generation, as the Ffallian themselves, will have an increased life span, certain distinct physical and mental advantages over our kind. A long time has ensued since the aliens have found a race with whom they could have common offspring, and the Ffallian grow fewer every year. So they were overjoyed when they discovered that we were a species they could—”

  “Use to produce their half-breed monsters!” Lennox exploded.

  “Half-breeds, yes; monsters, no! Very far from monsters. Luckily all minds have not been corrupted by Morre’s poison. A woman of the aliens chose to mate with Marson. Their son is true Ffallian. She brought him to Terra after her husband’s death to prove that point, beg help for her people. Now, years too late, we may succeed in making her mission worthwhile. We do not have the gifts of the aliens, but our sons and daughters will. As human time is reckoned it may take many years, but the Ffallian will increase in number, linking us with the aliens in a pattern of sharing which will give us both something close to immortality.”

  “You’re mad!” There was horrified conviction in Lennox’s answer. “Try urging people to mate with monsters and see how quickly you’ll have a war on your hands!”

  “I said it would have to come slowly. We’ve already made a start. I head a colonization project in which we are educating a picked group. And we have pulled the whole subject out of hiding. The right kind of publicity is as good as the wrong kind, and we shall use the right.”

  “You can’t do it! They’ve fed you a pretty story and you’ve swallowed it. The real story is anything but pretty. Morre knew, he saw the results. You talk of supermen, he saw the devils that really issue from such cross-breeding.”

  “Devils? You have seen one of these ‘devils,’ too. In what way is he a monster? Does he resemble the ogres Morre dreamed up to support his edited records?”

  Lennox’s head turned, his hot eyes fastened on Joktar. And then, when none of them expected such a move, he launched himself straight at the younger man, his hands reaching for the Terran’s throat. Reflexes trained on the streets moved in Joktar’s defense. But he was borne back across the ledge until his head cracked against the unbreakable substance of the window. In a matter of seconds, the Terran knew that he was battling for his life against a man in a frenzy, a man who scratched, tore, snapped teeth in a hideous attempt to maim and kill. A little dazed by the madness of the other’s fury, Joktar fought back.

  Then Lennox’s dusky color deepened, he snarled and whined, as his head was forced back by an arm clamped under his chin, levering him away from Joktar. He clawed at the air, fought against that merciless bar of flesh and bone closing off his breath. Joktar raised a hand to dripping scratches on his cheek and watched Hogan choke the commander into submission.

  There was a scuffle as Cullan summoned patrolmen, had the half-conscious Lennox removed. But Joktar had turned his back on the room. He was trying to blot out what he had just heard. That old chill thrust of loneliness struck into him . . . spreading . . . walling him off from the men in the room behind him, and in a measure from the room itself.

  Monster . . . half-breed! Lennox had fastened those tags on him. And there would be hundreds . . . millions of other all around the galaxy to raise the same cry. He had been well-tutored on the streets. Since the beginning of the human species, there had been in them that dark and evil urge to turn upon and rend the one who was different, to hunt him down with a mob. And to be the hunted awoke in Joktar a wave of sheer terror which washed through his brain.

  Loki’s sun was up now. A blaze above the golden brown of the sea . . . warmer than the sun which touched snow drifts on Fenris. The life of the streets had existed at night, there were few times when he had really looked at the sun.

  A golden planet, a world where the sun was warm and kind . . .

  Joktar heard movements in the room, closed his ears to them. They were all men there and he was something else. In those few moments of speech, Lennox had raised a barrier between him and every living being he had ever known.

  Sun on the waves . . . a golden world . . . well, he would have to face those others, and his future some time. Joktar turned his back to the sun, his face to the room.

  Only Hogan stood there. He was studying the younger man with the same searching measurement he had once used on Fenris. He spoke softly.

  �
��But it isn’t that way at all, you know. Don’t let that poison Lennox spouted mean anything. You aren’t alone.”

  “Half-breed,” Joktar said the ugly word.

  “Ffallian,” Hogan corrected. “It is very different. I know believe me, I know.”

  “How?” challenged Joktar.

  “Do you think that your father and Ksanga were the only humans to join the aliens? Four years ago . . . I came back.”

  “But you were on Fenris . . . a trader!”

  “Hiding out . . . just as much of a wolf-head as if I were Ffallian. I was waiting for Kronfeld to move. He had to find you. That you existed, we knew. Where—that we had to discover. Yes, Lennox was wrong, pitifully horribly wrong. Do you believe me?”

  And Joktar, seeing what lay in the other’s eyes, was moved to a conviction which banished all the wariness he had learned from his father’s unpredictable breed.

  1

  Nahuatl’s larger moon pursued the smaller, greenish globe of its companion across a cloudless sky in which the stars made a speckled pattern like the scales of a huge serpent coiled around a black bowl. Ras Hume paused at the border of scented spike-flowers on the top terrace of the Pleasure House to wonder why he thought of serpents. He understood. Mankind’s age-old hatred, brought from his native planet to the distant stars, was evil symbolized by a coil in a twisted, belly-path across the ground. And on Nahuatl, as well as a dozen other worlds, Wass was the serpent.

  A night wind was rising, stirring the exotic, half-dozen other worlds’ foliage planted cunningly on the terrace to simulate the mystery of an off-world jungle.

  “Hume?” The inquiry seemed to come out of thin air over his head.

  “Hume,” he repeated his own name calmly.

  A shaft of light brilliant enough to dazzle the eyes struck through the massed vegetation, revealing a path. Hume lingered for a moment, offering a counterstroke of indifference in what he had always known would be a test of wits. Wass was Veep of a shadowy empire, but that was apart from the world in which Ras Hume moved.

  He strode deliberately down the corridor illuminated between leaf and blossom walls. A grotesque lump of crystal leered at him from the heart of a tharsala lily bed. The intricate carving of a devilish nonhuman set of features was a work of alien art. Tendrils of smoke curled from the thing’s flat nostrils, and Hume sniffed the scent of a narcotic he recognized. He smiled. Such measures might soften up the usual civ Wass interviewed here. But a star pilot turned out-hunter was immunized against such mind clouding.

  There was a door, the lintel and posts of which had more carving, but this time Terran, Hume thought—old, very old. Perhaps rumor was right, Milfors Wass might be truly native Terran and not second-, third-, nor fourth-generation star stock as most of those who reached Nahuatl were.

  The room beyond that elaborately carved entrance was, in contrast, severe. Rust walls were bare of any pattern save an oval disk of cloudy golden shimmer behind the chair at the long table of solid ruby rock from Nahuatl’s poisonous sister planet of Xipe. Without a pause he walked to the chair and seated himself without invitation to wait in the empty room.

  That clouded oval might be a com device. Hume refused to look at it after his first glance. This interview was to be person to person. If Wass did not appear within a reasonable length of time he would leave.

  And Hume hoped, that to any unseen watcher, he presented the appearance of a man not impressed by stage settings. After all he was now in the seller’s space boots, and it was a seller’s market.

  Ras Hume rested his right hand on the table. Against the polished glow of the stone, the substance of it was flesh-tanned brown—a perfect match for his left. And the subtle difference between true flesh and false was no hindrance in the use of those fingers or their strength. Save that it had pushed him out of command of a cargo-cum-liner and hurled him down from the pinnacle of a star pilot. There were bitter brackets about his mouth, set there by that hand as deeply as if carved with a knife.

  It had been four years—planet time—since he had lifted the Rigal Rover from the launch pad on Sargon Two. He had suspected it might be a tricky voyage with young Tors Wazalitz, who was a third owner of the Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz line, and a Gratz chewer. But one did not argue with the owners, except when the safety of the ship was concerned. The Rigal Rover had made a crash landing at Alexbut, and a badly injured pilot had brought her in by will, hope and a faith he speedily lost.

  He received a plasta-hand, the best the medical center could supply and a pension for life, forced by the public acclaim for a man who had saved ships and lives. Then—the sack because a crazed Tors Wazalitz was dead. They dared not try to stick Hume with a murder charge; the voyage record tapes had been shot straight through to the Patrol Council, and the evidence on those could be neither faked nor tampered with. They could not give him a quick punishment, but they could try to arrange a slow death. The word had gone out that Hume was off pilot boards. They had tried to keep him out of space.

  And they might have done it, too, had he been the usual type of pilot, knowing only his trade. But some odd streak of restlessness had always led him to apply for the rim runs, the very first flights to newly opened worlds. Outside of the survey men, there were few qualified pilots of his seniority who possessed such a wide and varied knowledge of the galactic frontiers.

  So when he learned that the ships’ boards were irrevocably closed to him, Hume had signed up with the Out-Hunters Guild. There was a vast difference between lifting a liner from a launching pad and guiding civ hunters to worlds surveyed and staked out for their trips into the wild. Hume relished the exploration part—he disliked the leading-by-the-hand of nine-tenths of the Guild’s clients.

  But if he had not been in the Guild service he would never have made that find on Jumala. That lucky, lucky find! Hume’s plasta-flesh fingers curved, their nails drew across the red surface of the table. And where was Wass? He was about to rise and go when the golden oval on the wall smoked, its substance thinning to a mist as a man stepped through to the floor.

  The newcomer was small compared to the former pilot, but he had breadth of shoulder which made the upper part of his torso overbalance his thin hips and legs. He was dressed most conservatively except for a jeweled plaque resting on the tightly stretched gray silk of his upper tunic at heart level. Unlike Hume he wore no visible arms belt, but the other did not doubt that there were a number of devices concealed in that room to counter the efforts of any assassin.

  The man from the mirror spoke with a flat, toneless voice. His black hair had been shaven well above his ears, the locks left on top of his skull trained into a kind of bird’s crest. As Hume, his visible areas of flesh were deeply browned, but by nature rather than exposure to space, the pilot guessed. His features were harsh, with a prominent nose, a back-slanting forehead, eyes dark, long and large, with heavy lids.

  “Now—” He spread both his hands, palm down and flat on the table, a gesture Hume found himself for some unknown reason copying, “you have a proposition?”

  But the pilot was not to be hurried, any more than he was to be influenced by Wass’ stage settings.

  “I have an idea,” he corrected.

  “There are many ideas.” Wass leaned back in his chair, but he did not remove his hands from the table. “Perhaps one in a thousand is the kernel of something useful. For the rest, there is no need to trouble a man.”

  “Agreed,” Hume returned evenly. “But that one idea in a thousand can also pay off in odds of a million to one, when and if a man has it.”

  “And you have such a one?”

  “I have such a one.” It was Hume’s role now to impress the other by his unshakable confidence. He had studied all the possibilities. Wass was the right man, perhaps the only partner he could find. But Wass must not know that.

  “On Jumala?” Wass returned.

  If that stare and statement were intended to rattle Hume, it was a wasted shot. To discover that he had just
returned from that frontier planet required no ingenuity on the Veep’s part.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Come, Out-Hunter Hume. We are both busy men, this is no time to play tricks with words and hints. Either you have made a find worth the attention of my organization or you have not. Let me be the judge.”

  This was it—the corner of no return. But Wass had his own code. The Veep had established his tight control of his lawless organization by set rules; and one of them was, don’t be greedy. Wass was never greedy, which is why the patrol had never been able to pull him down, and those who dealt with him did not talk. If you had a good thing, and Wass accepted temporary partnership, he kept his side of the bargain rigidly. You did the same—or regretted your stupidity.

  “A claimant to the Kogan estate—that good enough for you?”

  Wass showed no surprise. “And how would such a claimant be profitable to us?”

  Hume appreciated the “us”; he had an in now.

  “If you supply the claimant, surely you can claim a reward, in more ways than one.”

  “True. But one does not produce a claimant out of a Krusha dream. The investigation for any such claim now would be made by a verity lab and no imposture will pass those tests. While a real claimant would not need your help or mine.”

  “Depends upon the claimant.”

  “One you discovered on Jumala?”

  “No.” Hume shook his head slowly. “I found something else on Jumala—an L-B from Largo Drift, intact and in good shape. From the evidence now in existence it could have landed there with survivors aboard.”

  “And the evidence of such survivors living on—that exists also?”

  Hume shrugged, his plasta-flesh fingers flexed slightly. “It has been six planet years, there is a forest where the L-B rests. No, no evidence at present.”

  “The Largo Drift,” Wass repeated slowly, “carrying, among others, Gentlefem Tharlee Kogan Brodie.”

  “And her son, Rynch Brodie, who was at the time of the Largo Drift’s disappearance a boy of fourteen.”