The Game of Stars and Comets

by Andre Norton

  "Please, what happened? Did you find the cache, and who is that man who came with you?"

  Diskan cut the story to its bare framework, but when he came to the scene in the wedge chamber, when he had wrought the treasure of Xcothal for those determined to have it, Diskan hesitated. Who would believe unless they had seen, unless they had done as he had? Was all that, too, only an illusion? But he knew it was not! Only he could not tell that part of the story. It lay too close to the secret of his own treasure, which was not to be shared, could not be shared.

  "They thought they had found what they sought," he told her.

  "Part of the illusion." She nodded, and since she had made that a statement instead of a question, Diskan need only keep silence.

  "And that set them at one another," he continued, giving her the rest of it as it had happened.

  "Then"—her hand went out to smooth the covers about the Zacathan—"they did not really discover anything at all! It is still waiting for the High One. When this is over, he can take up his search!"

  Diskan tensed. More prying, more delving—to break open the heart of Xcothal?

  Not so, brother. To those who have no eyes, no ears, there is neither sight nor sound nor being. Perhaps later there may come those who have the sight and hearing—and to those Xcothal will open a door, many doors. But to others—nothing. And they will tire of their fruitless searching and go, ceasing to seek what may not be found—by them. The swift, wordless answer came.

  "Perhaps he may," Diskan agreed, but he thought that Zimgrald—even if he survived his hurt—might never return to Xcothal.

  "And if he does," he continued, "you will aid him?"

  Her hands moved as if she were shoving away some burden she could not bring herself to assume again. "If he asks—I will. But—"

  "But you hope he will not ask—that is the truth of it? Do you hate the city so?"

  "I—I think I fear it. Something slumbers there. To wake it—"

  "Would change a world!" Diskan said softly.

  "But I do not want that change!" she whispered.

  "Then for you it will not come. Do not fear; it will not come—"

  She raised her eyes. "You—you are different. And you know something, do you not?"

  Diskan nodded. "I know something. I have seen the world change—"

  "And you were not afraid." Again it was a statement, not a question.

  "Yes, in a manner I was afraid, very much afraid."

  "But you are not now."

  "No."

  Brother—from the sky—it comes!

  Diskan could see it, too, a star with no fixed position, making a fiery sweep across the sky. That was a ship, orbiting in, near to tailing down. The Patrol?

  "A ship!" Julha had seen it now and was on her feet. "Help for us?"

  "I think so—can you go on now?"

  "Yes, oh, yes!"

  Diskan took up the burden of the Zacathan. Now that it was so near the end, he was plagued by last wisps of doubt. What he was going to do was to close a door firmly, and once closed, that portal could not be opened again. In spite of the sorrows of the past, it was hard to make so radical a change in the future.

  Julha was half running, half trotting, but Diskan's pace was far slower. This could be the last walk he would ever take with his own kind.

  One comes!

  "Diskan?" A call out of the night.

  "Drustans—here!" That call had come from some distance away, giving him a few more moments.

  He put down Zimgrald. Perhaps of them all, the Zacathan could come the closest to understanding this—a twist of the X factor no man could control once it entered his life. But still there were those last-minute doubts, a feeling of being pulled in two directions, until he lost some of the brave certainty that had filled him most of this night.

  "Why are you waiting here?" Julha came running back. "The High One—is he worse?" She threw herself on her knees beside Zimgrald, her hands busy about his wrapped body.

  "He is the same—"

  Perhaps some tone of Diskan's voice drew attention away from the alien. Diskan was peeling off the parka, then unbuckling his belt, dropping them both beside the recumbent form of the Zacathan.

  "What—what are you doing?"

  "I am going. You are safe, Drustans will be here very soon. The Patrol ship is planeting—"

  "You mean—because you are an outlaw, you are afraid they will force you into rehabilitation? But they can't—they won't, not after we tell them all you have done here! We shall testify for you!"

  Diskan laughed. He had almost forgotten that he must be judged a criminal—unreliable, subject to punishment by his kind or by her kind. He had moved too far down another road.

  "I am not afraid of the Patrol," he said, still amused. "No, Julha, I am returning to Xcothal because that is now my world—"

  "But what you saw there is all illusion!" she cried. "An empty ruin is what it really is. You will die there of cold and hunger."

  "Perhaps"—one of his doubts came to the surface—"perhaps you are right and I am walking into an hallucination or dream. But it is mine, far more mine than this world of yours in which I now stand. I am going back, perhaps, as you say, to die among broken ruins and tumbled stones. But to me Xcothal is not dead—it lives and in it thal runs, sweet waters flow, there are things that can be shaped by the mind as your world shapes them by hands. And there are those who await me there with a welcome I have never known in your world—"

  "You can't! You'll be rayed by the Jacks—" She gave another argument.

  Diskan shook his head. In spite of the cold, he was fumbling with the catches of his tunic, pulling off the garment that had always seemed too confining to his big arms and wide shoulders.

  "I will not enter their Xcothal." He dropped the tunic. "Good voyaging, Julha. When the High One recovers, tell him he was very right. The furred ones—they are the key if one can use them. And there is a treasure in Xcothal that surpasses all the wealth of the worlds beyond. Tell him I have proved it!"

  "No!" She tried to catch him as he turned. But then he was running among the rocks, paying no heed to his footing even in the rough country, not aware of the cold about his bare upper body. And around him bounded in plain sight the furred ones, leaping and playfully springing upon one another in their exuberance.

  In time, Diskan came to the stair and descended it with great strides. Then he stood on the platform, impatiently tearing from him the last bits of clothing that were of the past, the last ties with what had been.

  Before him was a straight running stream of water, sweet water, which was the road, and through that moved the shadows. But these were shadows no longer, for he saw them at last for what they were—bodies like his own—not aliens—though even with different shaping they could not be strange. And in their eyes recognition, welcome for the unlocker of doors, the one uniting brothers-in-fur with brothers-in-flesh—who might lead also to the surmounting of still farther and stranger barriers—

  And with a shout of greeting, Diskan leaped forward, into the sweet water, the color, the life that was Xcothal, the Xcothal that had been and now was again!

  VOORLOPER

  Chapter 1

  The Shadow Death struck Mungo Town just after harvest, as if it had purposefully waited to give the greatest pain, the harshest of deaths. Perhaps there was a method in that time selection. What can an off-worlder know of a new colony's lurking dangers in spite of all the assurances from Survey testers that another planet is waiting free and open to settlers? No one knew of Voor's menace until the fiftieth year after first-ship landing, and then it was only a handful of outpost villages and holdings which were hit and the reasons given were practical and believable.

  Bad water, contaminated food, attacks of heretofore unknown dangerous animals—you can read these explanations all in the official files if you have a morbid interest in how part of a new colony began to die. The next year it was worse. Then death came to Voor's Grove a
few days after the planting. There were four survivors—two infants, one three-year-old girl, and a woman who never gave coherent answers to questions, but crooned unendingly to herself, until one night she managed to elude containment at the medic's center and disappeared. They tracked her as far as the edge of the Tangle and that was that. Once in the Tangle anyone must be written off.

  So it was on Voor. But colonists are a tough lot and people who are crowded off one of the League's Chain Worlds do not have much choice, after all. There were two whole years after the Grove strike when there was no trouble at all. People do forget—even after they have gone through the rigorous pre-settlement training. There were always the preferable believable excuses, as I have said.

  Those did not hold after Mungo. You can wipe out twenty or so people, but when the death toll comes to two hundred and twenty—it is not that easy to find logical explanations.

  That was how I came to be a Voorloper. I grew up in a trek wagon and could inspan the gar team before I could heft a shoulder weight of trade goods. I was second generation from first-ship. First-ship people always have a certain standing on any colonial world. They were those willing to gamble the most, and usually they end up either dead or prosperous enough to carve out their own holdings and make them pay. On most worlds that is true. On Voor those who survived became lopers—they knew the score.

  My mother died at Mungo's Town and my father, Mac Turley s'Ban, after he returned to find the ruin there, inspanned his smartest gars, loaded his trekker, threw me in on top of what he believed would best suit a loper's needs, and took off. I was about six then and now I can't even remember what it is like to live rooted and not as a loper. There are still holdings, but they don't push out northward any more—mostly they stick to the southern portion of the big land, on that side of the Halb Canyon river. The north has some settlements—mostly miners after Quillian Clusters. Those keep up forcefields at night, and that solution is too expensive a drain on any ag-man's credits. For some reason none of the brains the League has sent can understand why the Shadow doesn't spread south. For the last few years they have not sent out any "experts on X-Tee" any more. We aren't rich enough a world to pull such help. Our potential, my father once said, would not pay off fast enough.

  He always had that set to his jaw whenever he met a League man. In fact I've known him to sit lock-toothed all evening when a couple rode into our camp and tried to question him. He would even get up and disappear into the wagon and leave them there with their mouths half open, looking as slack brained as a goof-monkey. After a while he got a reputation and even a holdings man never mentioned Shadows when he was around.

  I don't know what he'd done before he earthed in on Voor in the beginning. He never talked about the old days, just as he never mentioned my mother. Once or twice, when I got old enough to really notice things, I wondered if he had been enlisted in Survey himself. He seemed to have a lot of strange scraps of learning about trekking. Then from the first he made notes on a recorder. In fact the only off-world thing he ever got for himself (except stunner shells) when we went Port Side once a year for our stock was a case of tapes.

  Though some of those were for me. Even though we were on the move all the time, he saw that I was not dirt stupid. I had to learn, and I will say this, I really liked it. First it was all practical stuff—filling in what he didn't show me. He listened to that, too. I learned to repair a stunner, a food synthesizer, a hand com. We did jobs like that at holdings now and then.

  Then there was history—of the League, and of several different worlds. I never understood why he picked those special ones and I knew better than to ask. They were a queer mixture—no two alike, and none near Voor as far as I could tell—at first. Later I began to see what they did have in common—Astra, and Arzor, and Kerdam, Slotgoth—they had all begun as Ag worlds—just like Voor. Only it turned out later that they had a lot of Forerunner remains on them—and some queer things had happened there as a result.

  I was not too good with the tech tapes. It took me a long time to become as competent a craftsman as my father demanded. He had a lot of patience, and it was as if he was making very sure that I was going to be able to use my hands well enough to make me a good living before he was through with me. I did learn, too. But I was better with animals. I could handle the gars, as I have said, when I was too little to climb onto one. Somehow they liked me—or else I had that kind of a gift—

  My father talked sometimes about natural gifts. He made sure that I understood men were not all alike. Of course, I don't mean just aliens and Terrans (that any one with a tenth of a brain in his head already knew) but men—Terrans themselves—had different talents they used—when they knew how. Once he started to talk about Psi, then shut up quick and got that locked look on his face. It had been healing he had been explaining to me then. I wished he'd go on—but he never mentioned that again.

  There were the healers. Mostly they were girls or young women. I had seen them do some things in the out-back which were not explained on any tape. My father appeared to dislike them, or else there was something about their talents he distrusted. He was always uneasy when one of them was anywhere near him. Once I saw him deliberately turn and walk away when a healer at Jonas Holding was going to speak to him.

  She was a nice looking young woman radiating a kind of peaceful feeling. Even being near a healer could make a person feel warm and comfortable inside. I saw her stand and look after my father and there was a sad look on her face. She even half raised her hand as if to lay a healer's touch on something which was not there at all.

  However there were other gifts my father did discuss—such as psychometry, where you could hold something in your two hands and tell through your own feelings about it who had made it—where it came from. Then there was foreseeing—though my father said that was rare and not always to be trusted. There were some people, too, who could read thoughts—tell what a person was thinking—though he had never met anyone like that—just knew about them from tapes, and things he had seen once or twice.

  Aliens had a lot of such powers, but they did not always work between Terran-human and them. Our brains were too different for that. Though sometimes those aliens who were the farthest from us in body structure seemed closest in mind.

  My father would never use any weapon stronger than a stunner, and he never had a blazer in the wagon. He was strong about that—but he made me a good marksman with both stunner and tangler. We did have times when we needed those. I had a sand cat charge me once and its foreclaws dug gouges out of the earth about a finger's length from my boot toes when I brought it down. We just left it sleeping there. My father never killed for pelts the way some lopers did. He was very firm about that even when the Portsiders wanted him to bring in jaz fur and he knew right well where a colony of jaz nested. It was not because jaz were too easy to kill—a jaz at nesting time was something a wise loper kept away from. They hunted men with a cunning which made them a nasty kind of danger if you got up among the Spurs.

  Yes, my father gave me an odd education—both by tape and by example. He had a different rep among the other lopers, too. About every two years or so, he deliberately crossed the Halb, he said to visit the mines. We did trade with one or two. But I got to know early that was not the main reason we took a chance most lopers did not care for—in spite of the mine transport paying off so well.

  Because we never headed straight for the mine territory. Instead we'd circle around, always stretching on each trip a little farther north. Then we'd visit dead holdings. Though my father told me early we were never to mention that. At first he would go in among the deserted buildings alone; he'd even suit up—he had a full Survey suit such as they wore on the first-in trips on other planets. He always ordered me to stay back at the trek wagon with the com. It was also his order that if he did not report every so many time units I was to inspan and get the hell out as fast as I could make it, making me swear on the Faith of Fortune I wouldn't try to come
in after him.

  My father was a true-believer and he raised me so. At least I was believer enough to know that you did not break that oath—ever—that a man's own faith in himself would rot and fade away if he ever did.

  After a while he did not suit up if the holding was one he had visited before, but he still did if it was a new one. When he came back he would dictate into a tape just what he had noticed—even the smallest things—such as what kind of weeds were growing now in the old gardens, and whether anything had been looted out of the houses—nothing ever was. The strangest thing was that there were never any animals or birds to be found anywhere near a holding which had been cleared out by the Shadows. But vegetation always grew very rankly there. Not the imported food stuffs which had been specially conditioned for planting on Voor, but weird things which were not even of the native Voor growth we knew. My father did drawings of that—only he wasn't too skilled at the job; but he described it carefully, though he never brought back any specimens.