The Game of Stars and Comets

by Andre Norton

  Yet he had found nothing, and he had been closer to the actual outrage than I was now. If he had only told me more! My blistered hand hurt as I formed a fist. I needed badly a spur for definite action, for a chance to fight back.

  Instead I turned at the end of the row of the dead and went back to the sled. I pulled this onto the barren earth where even my own boots had left no track. Carefully I lined up that improvised transport and its sealed burden with the rest who lay there.

  For the first time I wondered if my father had had another reason to send me here—not just to return him to lie among those with whom he had had some tie in years past—(which of those skeletons might be my mother? I flinched from that thought as if it were a blow). No, could it be that he meant me to confront the horror which had happened here and react just as I was doing, determining that, when he had been forced to relinquish the search, I would take it up? If that were so—then he was succeeding. Though I had heard of the Shadow Doom all my life, had seen its effect on my father and others, it had never been as real to me as it was at this moment.

  I hurried back the way marked by the torn vegetation, wanting to be out of the town. Still I was certain that I would return—I had to know! For the first time I could share with Illo the demands of her own search—if the woman she sought, this healer named Catha, could give me any answers, then those I must have!

  Illo had not been idle while I was gone. She had established a small camp at the nearest point the gars would advance towards the village, even hacking off armloads of the grass to form such beds as those we had rested upon the night before. The spread of the ever-present plains grass was not as thick, nor did it grow so tall here. There was evidence that these had once been fields and straggling through the choking grass, putting up a valiant battle for growing room, were clumps of grain now harvest yellow.

  Though the gars were at graze, devouring such clumps with greedy relish, I noted that they followed the pattern they always had used when we were encamped near ruins. Two would eat for a space, the third stand with head up and pointed towards the remains of the town. Though they exchanged the post of sentry through such timing and selection they appeared to agree upon among themselves, there was one ever on watch.

  I quickened pace as I saw the loads piled and Illo's work. The blisters on my skin were once more smarting and I wanted her verdict on my hurts. She was swift to see my injuries, and, when I told her how they had occurred, she searched her pack to bring forth a pot of greenish ointment which, after she had washed the blisters carefully once more with water, she spread over the burns leaving them free from pain with the redness of the skin beginning slowly to fade.

  Water was our need. We had that which had been carried in the wagon containers on gar back but it was not enough to last long for both the animals and ourselves. The settlement must have had some close and well-enduring source of water. Though that would have been pumped through pipes into the ruins (and I, for one, would not set to my lips any liquid which bubbled within that place of death) still the ultimate source should be beyond the village itself. I summoned Witol with my whistle and he came to me, a generous wisp of the grain stalks bobbing from his moving jaws.

  It was well known that gars could scent water where a man with his inferior senses could easily die of thirst, and what I asked of the lead bull now he had done many times before. Letting him scent the liquid left in my canteen I made the hand signal for "seek." After a moment of rumination, he swallowed his mouthful and began to trot to the east purposefully.

  I took Illo's canteen and one of the wagon cans—it now being light enough that I could carry it. We crossed the lines of more grown over fields where I could trace irrigation ditches, the kind used in plains settlements during the dry months of mid-summer. Witol held up his head, his nostrils wide open. Now he uttered a grunt from deep within his throat as we came upon what had once been a reservoir. The soil had been dug away and the deep pocket left, spread with several coatings of plasta, made a smooth bowl which cupped now enough water to reflect the sunset, and ran in a small stream through an underground duct which I believed entered the village.

  The source was partly rain and what else arose from a spring occupying an opening in the plasta on the side away from the ruins. I kicked off my boots so that I might better walk over the slick of the plasta and went to fill the containers, Witol drinking noisily from the pool. The water was cool near the spring and sweet. Since the gar showed no repulsion I could believe it good.

  I had been so immersed in my own thoughts since I had come out of Mungo's that I hardly realized that Illo and I had said very little to one another. Save that I had described to her the plants which had led to the poison effect on my skin, some necessary exchanges concerning matters of our camp, we had not spoken together. However, when I returned with the water container full resting on Witol's back, and twilight thickened, I resolved that I must tell her of my discovery.

  That night we dared a fire. There was no time in the past when there had appeared to be any danger beyond the ruins, as I could testify from my own experience, and anything stalking prey on the plains would not come near one of the Shadow-taken settlements. There is something about fires, that earliest weapon of our species against the power of darkness, which provides us with a comfort to the spirit as well as the body. Looking into the flames I could even imagine that all I had seen that day was part of a dream. Since that was not so Illo must have a full accounting.

  I spoke stiffly, bluntly, with an attempt at preserving a lack of emotional involvement. The bones, white, stripped, nameless could not convey to me as much of an impact that bodies would have. When I finished my story, my companion in this quest was quiet for a long moment. Then she asked, as if it was something she must do, though she hated the need:

  "You—you knew none? There was no return of memory?"

  "Nothing—I—" my hesitation was of a space of a breath only, "I looked—there was nothing, not even a bit of metal to identify one from the other. Though I think that all the villagers must have been there. Why not me? I saw what must have been other children—"

  Her face wore that impassive mask-like look. "How old would you guess?"

  I moved uneasily. "I could not say—none were very small."

  "And you were five," she mused aloud. "I must have been nearly four—there were two who were babies—and one woman—but she was brain hurt and disappeared into the Tangle. She broke the bonds the medics laid upon her and they later tracked her to that."

  "But the babies—what became of them?"

  She cupped her chin in her hand, rested the elbow of that arm upon her knee where she sat on a pack of the gear we had not needed to open. It seemed that she, too, looked now into the fire for comfort.

  "Brother and sister—twins. They had a kinsman who was off-world and who had come with the thought of staying at Voor's Grove. When he heard what had happened he took them and shipped out. I never heard what happened to them after."

  "There were eight settlements and holdings in all which were overrun," I totalled them up on my fingers. "Mungo's, Voor's—Stablish's in the far west and, a little south of that, an off-worlder one, only that was not a real settlement, rather a semi-permanent station set up to study vegetation cross-breeding. Then eastward, Welk's Town, Lomack's, Robbin's, Kattern's. We, my father and I, went to Welk's, Lomack's, Kattern's, the off-world station and Stablish's. How many others had survivors—children?"

  "Why—" her mask cracked and her eyes showed a flicker of astonishment. "Only—only you and I! That is all. You know, of course, of the birth lag—"

  That had been another peculiarity of Voor which I had half forgotten over the years since my father had had me read the records. The birth lag—colonists were encouraged to have children as soon as possible if the conditions on the settled world were favorable. But on Voor there had been a strange effect which had at first caused some concern, and then, as the years passed, and more settlers came, had bee
n accepted as the norm for this world. No children had been born during the first six years after landing. Then an established pattern of cycle births, for there would be a few years in which the number of births was approximately normal for our species on the home planets from which they had come. Again would follow birth lags of increasingly shorter intervals. Until now that oddity did not exist—at least not in the south. And since no one settled in the north now, if it still differed that did not matter.

  "What if ages five or six—and under—meant immunity—" Illo continued. "You may have been the youngest—the latest born at Mungo Town. I was the first of another grouping at Voor's. We have never known what caused the lag—just as we don't know what caused that—" She pointed through the twilight to the settlement. "All the other settlements and holdings could have been caught by chance during the long lag—so no survivors."

  Her reasoning made sense. Then our own chance of survival had indeed been very small; we were the only two of our kind. Whether that could mean anything or not, I was in no position to argue.

  "What are you going to do now?"

  I knew, though I had not yet put my resolve into words. "Try to find out."

  That had become the future for me. I could return to Portcity, yes—start over as a loper, back-packing on my three remaining gars—making the rounds as a small trader. Or I could join some holding—an extra pair of hands was welcome anywhere on the frontier. But I would not. I had to know—if such a thing was possible to learn at all.

  The girl regarded me steadily. "Your father had years of searching—what did he learn? You may be running now into something worse than you can remember—because you don't remember!"

  I thought of those ordered rows of the dead within the town—the suggestion in that of a reason, a definite pattern behind this depopulation of the north. There was something utterly dark and cruel in the way those bones lay along the wall—something I could not live with in my memory.

  "They were killed, deliberately, for some purpose. It wasn't an illness, or animals in attack, or—" I tried to reckon up the dangers which could wipe out a town. "The Survey reports all say that Voor has no intelligent life above the 6-plus level. If there has been a Jack outfit in hiding here that would have recorded, no matter how many distorts they tried to use. Even a distort records—something."

  Illo shook her head. The firelight flickered, sometimes seeming to make her eyes show with a spark of fire of their own, or so it seemed to me. I wanted to look at her just because she was alive, clothed in flesh, able to talk, to think, to be—not like that—I tried to shut down hard on the picture which kept creeping out of the dark into some line of vision which was in my mind and not directly before my eyes.

  "All of those explanations—they have been worn into tatters." She raised one hand and brushed back a wisp of hair from her forehead. "None of them, except perhaps a plague, would account for the radical change in vegetation. I know herbs, most of the wild grasses, the plants. The knowledge is part of my training. This afternoon, while you were gone, I went close enough to view what grows over there. It is all different—it reminds me of the Tangle in some ways—still it is not of that either. It is poisoned—you have your own experience with it to prove that." She gestured at my hand, shiny with the balm she had spread over it.

  "What about you—your calling?"

  She shook her head. "It—it is gone."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Just that. And I have never known a calling to end so before. I think—I think she is dead—"

  "Your Catha?"

  "Yes." The single word brought silence.

  "So you will go back then? I can give you Wobru—a water tank—"

  "No!" Her word of denial was emphatic as that "yes" had been earlier. "I must know—just as you must. There is some reason why we survived—"

  "You said it yourself—by chance we were the right age."

  "Beside that." She made an impatient gesture with one hand. "You are not a true believer, are you?"

  "A true believer in what?"

  "One of the Assembly of the Spirits," her voice was as impatient as her gesture had been.

  "No. But surely you aren't either." I knew the Assembly—they occupied three settlements in the south, keeping very much to themselves and having only necessary contact with others. Their lives were narrow, ruled by what my father had termed "taboos." His own acceptance of differences between men had been very liberal and his distrust of fanaticism had led him to impress upon me the fact that some of the worst disasters in the history of our species have been born from judging strangers by standards we held too rigidly. In my father's eyes there was a simple code of right and wrong which guided any man. And he had acknowledged some power beyond our knowledge at work in the universe.

  The Assembly in their rigid beliefs were, as the miners and other stations manned by off-worlders, the few places not welcoming healers. That she would mention them now startled me.

  "No," she agreed. "I am not one of them. How could I be, as you say? But they have certain interesting beliefs—such as the one that we are intended for specific roles in life, and, from what is so ordained, we cannot escape. We may deliberately turn aside from a road because we dislike what it entails for us, yet the side turning we choose will eventually curve back to bring us to the same end. In this matter—"

  "That is their belief!" I countered. "It is only chance that you and I are survivors—there is no mysterious 'spirit' or fate guiding us along." That was one idea I would not allow myself to accept. The decision which I had come to in Mungo's when I had seen that open graveyard had not been dictated to me; it was my own, or rather one I had taken up because of the man who had been the center of my world. Whatever had left the sign of its—or their—cruel passing must be made to answer—if it was humanly possible to make this so.

  In a way, though I believed in her story of Catha and the calling which had brought her to join us, I was glad that Illo was not to be our guide now. I accepted what I could see, hear, touch—I was not a healer, and if I were to succeed in finding the murderers of Mungo's it must be by my own senses and not depending on something which was not a part of me.

  "You believe in yourself?" Her question cut through my thoughts and surprised me.

  "As much as I can." I was honest with her. I had never really been placed on my own before, I realized that. Any decision I made now, any mistake in judgment or action, would be my own and I must face the results alone.

  "That was a fair answer," Illo nodded. "So do I also. I believe in my own training and say this much—we are meant to do this thing. Also, though the calling has failed, we should still point north. You returned to Mungo's and have made one discovery there which your father has not recorded. I say now let us go to Voor's Grove—No," she did not give me any time to protest. "Your story began here and returning has seemed of little use in unraveling it. Do not deny me the chance to return to my beginning; perhaps we may profit from it more than you can now guess."

  I had to admit that I had no other goal, and surely I could learn little more from Mungo's. Why not agree? Voor's Grove also my father had not visited, there was just a chance—

  So I agreed because I had nothing else to offer.

  Chapter 7

  That night I was not ready for sleep. Instead I unpacked the reader and my father's tapes. Though I had heard them all before—some many times, for when we were on the plains he oftentimes took out one or another and sat listening to his own words replayed, a frown of concentration on his face as if he must always bolster memory, make sure that there was no clue he had perhaps overlooked. Yes, I had heard them before, but now it was my turn to concentrate, to strive to find a loose thread that I might pull on to reduce this tangled web to order.

  Illo listened with the same absorption. We heard descriptions of just such plants as I had encountered that afternoon—of the fact that, though the buildings on the perimeter of each deserted site had seemed to be
in very bad condition, those farther in did not show the same signs of erosion. I waited eagerly for some mention of a central hall, or any indication that my father had found there evidences of massacre such as was at Mungo's. But there was nothing at all which suggested that he had ever discovered the remains of a single body.

  If he had done so, why had he registered all else in minute detail and left what was a most important discovery unvoiced? There was something else—

  Though he had spoken of the alien-seeming vegetation in detail, he had never described the nodding flowers. I played each tape to the end as the red moon climbed the night sky. The gars had come closer to the fire. Wobru and Bru were lying down, chewing their cuds rhythmically, but Witol was on his feet and disappeared at intervals. I knew that the bull was on sentry go and that I could trust his senses farther than my own.

  "You have learned anything?" Illo asked as the last of the tapes came to an end.

  "This much—if there were skeletons in other places my father did not mention them—or the flowers—"