The Game of Stars and Comets

by Andre Norton

  Chapter 10

  Nor was it a pillar we faced. For, as the last of the foliage melted away, I heard Illo's breath go out in a hiss and I was startled into raising my weapon to give another blast which was not needed. What stood in our path, slightly larger than life size, was a statue carved of dull black stone, but with such fidelity to detail it might have been a living creature frozen by some means to act as a guard against further intrusion.

  It was humanoid in contour though there were differences. The hands which had been raised to cross on the breast had six fingers, the face was more markedly oval than any Terra-human's, while the nose extended well out, having a definite hook of the broad tip. There was no sign of any representation of hair save on the very top of the head where there stood erect a crest looking not unlike flaps of skin a lizard might own.

  Though the whole of the body was done in exacting detail, there were no eyes represented in that face, only dark pits where such should have been. Also there were no sexual characteristics such as were common to my own kind. It could have been masculine, feminine, or neither. But that it had been fashioned to represent in mirror-exact fashion a living or once living creature I had not the least doubt.

  As I continued to study the face, that impression of menace which had been born in my mind from its sudden appearance and its being set in that alien form faded. I felt instead a brooding sadness, as if it had been placed as a memorial, rather than intended to warn off those who managed to enter the Tangle this far.

  The stone of which it had been carved had no counterpart in any I had seen on Voor. The entwined mass of vegetation, the passing of what must be an untold number of seasons, had done nothing to dull or erode the work. It stood now uncovered, as clear in all its lines as if it had been only recently set in place by the artist who had conceived it. It was not beautiful by our standards, no, but still it had a power—a purpose—for it conveyed stronger and stronger that hopeless feeling of what I now believed to be defeat, resignation to extinction.

  "They knew—" Illo's voice was hardly above a whisper.

  I understood her meaning. Yes, whoever had wrought this monument had known that there would be no future—no way to go except to an ending. The more I looked upon it the more my own spirit sank, the greater appeared our folly in trying to penetrate a wilderness of the alien which was never meant to be invaded by our kind.

  "No!" Illo caught at my arm. "Do not let it do that to you! Do not let it make you think-feel failure!"

  She could not have read my emotions, she must have judged them entirely by her own reaction to that sombre, brooding monument to despair. Perhaps that was its weapon! Perhaps it formed a trap, not for our bodies, or even our minds, but our spirits. Still it took almost all the determination I could summon to walk forward, approach that silent statue.

  More and more it did not appear to be a work of art, rather something which had once lived and now had been left, unable to completely die. I found myself staring mainly, as I advanced, at those pits in which eyes should have rested, half fearing, half believing, that I might see there sparks of life, even if such had withdrawn from all the rest of the frozen body.

  The dead black color—had that been selected because the creature itself had been that color in life? For that it represented a living species, even a living or once living person, I no longer doubted. I found myself passing to the right while Illo broke her grasp on me and went to the left, the statue for an instant between us.

  Heat—a surge of warmth reached me from that stone. I had no wish to put out a hand and touch it—I could not have forced myself to make such an investigation. Only the black figure might have been a torch radiating heat outward.

  I heard the grunting of the gars. They had come to a stop. I swung around, to blast with the stunner the growth on one side, giving them greater room to pass the figure by. They seemed reluctant to move on for the first time since they had so followed us into the Tangle. Witol raised his head and bellowed, as he might when delivering a challenge to some audacious bull intruding on what he considered his own territory.

  Would the animals turn back? I felt that no urging of mine would influence them, that now they moved by their own volition and could not be controlled by my commands. So I waited.

  Witol challenged for the second time. There was something in the massed walls about the small space the stunner had cleared which gave back, in odd, hollow echoes, his cry. Reluctantly the bull lowered his head and paced on, his two companions falling in single file behind. I saw him swing his head to one side so that even the tip of his horn might not touch the figure. However, he had chosen—and in our favor. Once more I began my task of raying open a way before us. Still the vegetation answered with withering, crumbling of limb, curling of leaf.

  "Forerunner—surely—" Illo kept her voice low. She might have feared some listener. "Have you heard of or seen its like before?"

  I tried to remember the tapes which my father had collected and poured over. There had been many Forerunner civilizations; men realized that as they spread outward to take over planets which had once been colonies, or the homes of unknown races now vanished. There were worlds which were nothing but one huge, deserted city, the tall buildings based on every inch of available land—their original populations too great for us to fathom—all emptied by time. There were worlds which had been burnt off, turned into radioactive cinders, or half devastated, with glassy craters where cities or points of military installation had stood.

  Wars which had been perhaps galactic-wide in that remote past had swept away races, species. It must have happened over and over again—civilizations which built, reached for the stars, grew powerful, established federations or empires, then fell apart in wars, in plagues, in slow decay when stellar commerce failed and no star ships came.

  My own species was very young compared to stellar time. Though we were spreading fast, building, trying to wrest from the reminders of the past we found more and more of their secrets. There were many Forerunners, yes, and at different times, on different worlds, or in different sectors.

  The Zacathans with their great storage banks of historical knowledge might have a clue to that figure, but if so it was on a tape my father had never found. Only, and now a new excitement came to life in me, a Forerunner find—a big one—that would mean complete freedom for both Illo and me. For the finder's fee for such was untold credits. We could go anywhere, do whatever we willed—if this was Forerunner.

  "They faced certain death—" Illo's thoughts had not swung so wide or in such a selfish direction as mine. "They had and expected no hope—"

  I had tried not to think what that mourning figure had meant—its defeat was too plain, enough to dishearten us.

  "In their time," I commented. "Their time is past."

  She did not answer me at once. I think she was still caught up by the emotion that lost statue had engendered. Perhaps because she was a healer, trained to be attuned to the ills of others, it had struck far more deeply with her than with me. For a loper learns early that good and ill both exist, and sometimes the ill outweighs the good, but both must be accepted and dealt with to the best of one's ability.

  As the stunner cleared our path I half expected to uncover more such relics of the unknown. But we were well beyond that statue, which was either a warning or the monument to the death of a people, before the growths melted away to disclose now the beginnings of walls. What we had come upon by chance was a gateway, one which lacked any sign of door or barrier, while the walls stretched away on either side to be swallowed up quickly by the Tangle. There was an arch overhead, a shallow one with only a slight upward curve.

  Illo once more caught at my arm. "Look!" Her other hand swept up toward that arch. That had been fashioned of the same dead black stone—as were the walls—but it was not smooth. Instead it was carved in a twisted, intricate design, one in which you could distinguish nothing but curves and lines which led nowhere. Save that the longer you studi
ed them the more the idea grew upon you that this was no abstract adornment but had a meaning. Perhaps it was an inscription in a language which expressed its symbols in a way totally alien to those we could ever understand.

  "The necklet!" My companion reached up to catch the edge of my skin shirt, dragging that down and away from the ornament I had so reluctantly put on that morning.

  "There is a sameness—" she declared.

  I fumbled one-handedly, the stunner still at ready in the other, trying to loose the clasp so that I might compare. Only that fastening would not yield.

  "Unfasten it—" I ordered Illo.

  She slipped the chain about, as I bent my head and stooped a little, so that she might be able to more speedily find the clasp.

  "It—it is gone!"

  "No it isn't—I can feel it—" I objected.

  "Not the necklet—the fastening!"

  "What!" I rammed the stunner into her nearest hand and began feeling along the chain for that clasp. There were no slightly larger links—nor did I feel the place where she had mended the chain so that it could be worn—that place where she had squeezed two of the broken links together. It was as smooth as if it had been sealed on me.

  I caught my fingers in it then and strove to tear it off. All that happened was that the links cut into my neck with knife-edge sharpness and I had to stop.

  "You can't see the clasp, or the mended place?" I demanded.

  I could feel the chain once more slipping about, this time in her touch.

  "Neither is there! But I don't understand—"

  What I understood was an impossibility. There was no way for the clasp and the repaired breakage to so meld into the chain as to be now undetectable. Yet I could not believe that she was deceiving me, and certainly my own fingers had not been able to locate any irregularity in the necklet either.

  "Perhaps it was made to respond so—to body heat or the like," Illo said slowly. "I have heard of the Koris stones—is it not true that they only come alive and take on their jewel brightness and fragrance when worn against bare skin? Might there not be an unknown alloy of metal which fastens of itself under the same conditions?"

  True or not, I was unhappy that the alloy had answered so to me. I had not been easy when she had first suggested my wearing the chain. I was really disturbed now.

  "Take my belt knife and see if you can cut through it," I ordered.

  She drew back from me and her answer was blunt and instant.

  "No!"

  "No? Why? Do you think I am going to keep wearing something I can't rid of—"

  "Which you must not get rid of."

  Her voice held such authority that I simply stared at her in open disbelief.

  Since I could not very well use the knife myself, I was to go collared to her pleasure. My resentment, fed by fear as I will freely admit, then flared.

  "Explain to me why—" I strove to keep my voice even, not to let explode the anger building in me.

  "I cannot. I only know that in some way, which we shall learn, you must bear this—"

  My teeth snapped together, I would not allow her to guess my fear. Instead I thumbed on the ray of the stunner which I snatched back from her, spraying ruthlessly and recklessly ahead at what lay beyond the arch, clearing a way for us within the only partly visible walls.

  The ray diminished with my continued attack, until I realized that, in my rising fury, I had exhausted the current charge. That sobered me. For we had no idea how far this mass extended, nor how much longer we would have to call upon the stunner for service.

  I snapped in a new unit, but did not look at or speak to her. With every breath I drew I was aware of that chain making me, as I believed, a slave to some force which was the worse because I did not know what it was or in what way it would next show that it was master.

  There was a nudge against my shoulder, imperative, delivered with a force which nearly sent me sprawling forward to land face down in the wrack of the plants I had mown down. Witol's mighty bellow, the loudest I had ever heard from his thick throat, echoed about our ears. He edged by me, his burden of the water tanks on which we depended scraping, pushing me, sending me against Illo.

  Head down, the bull pawed the ground, sending bits of wilting leaves, slimy under soil, flying behind him. His eyes glinted redly and he was the picture of growing rage, as if he had caught fire from the same emotion which had earlier possessed me.

  Bru echoed his bellow with her higher call, striving to draw even with her mate. While Wobru momentarily arose on his hind legs as if longing to lunge forward, but found no way he could make room for himself beyond the broad backs of the two older gars.

  What had so aroused Witol and the others I could neither see nor guess. To my closest survey the unsheared brush ahead still presented exactly the same appearance as it had all along. Nor, when the echoes of the gars' cries died away, was there anything to be heard. Only Witol and his mate had passed under that archway and there was nothing left for us to do but follow.

  Without realizing until after I had made the gesture, my hand went again to the chain about my throat as I passed under that arch. What warning or greeting did that fanciful involved script hold? What relation might such have to the badge I wore now in spite of myself?

  The gars had paused, Witol's nose near touching the bank of Tangle which had not yet yielded to the stunner. I worked my way around the side of the gar, trying to avoid touching any unwithered stuff, any thorns. Once more I sprayed ahead, widening the ray to the farthest extent the weapon would allow, then, in turn, swinging it back and forth to make a broader path.

  So on we went, nor did there appear as yet anything else which that growth concealed. If the wall was guarding a village, or even the buildings of a holding—then where did such stand? The vegetation fell to reveal nothing but a mass of the same beyond.

  Witol halted so suddenly that I bumped against his massive shoulder. He did not yield and now I could not push past. His head swung low, and one of his horns caught in the matted stuff which lay dead or dying on the ground. He tossed and the vegetation flew, he pawed and earth glistening with slime appeared. Only that broke also as he deliberately dug one horn down into it, tossed, pawed. Great chunks of tainted soil flew out and away. There arose so putrid and foul a smell from his efforts that I gasped. Illo held one hand to close off her nose.

  There was something—under that coating of diseased soil (for all I could think of was that the very earth itself here bore no relation to the clean dirt of the plains). Witol's efforts uncovered a smooth surface, one which was still streaked, it was true, with greasy, evil smelling clay—but one which certainly was not normal ground.

  Witol worked industriously, first with one large cloven hoof, and then the other. Wobru shouldered aside his mother and came behind the greater bull, beginning in turn to paw at earth his sire had already disturbed. While Illo and I watched with amazement, the gars, laboring together as if they were teamed, cleared a space which was growing larger by the instant. Now and then Witol turned his head to me to grunt. His meaning was so plain that I, who had always commanded the beasts, now obeyed his orders, sweeping the stunner—killing and then stepping aside to let the gars clear away the debris.

  We were no longer in a tunnel of vegetation. Rather we stood in a clearing which was roughly square, swept nearly clean through the efforts of the animals, floored with a metal which I judged to be the same as that of the necklet I wore.

  Though the poisonous and foul growths of the Tangle had covered it perhaps for eons of time, the surface showed no sign of rust or erosion. What might be its purpose and what had led the gars to act as they did were both mysteries I did not attempt to solve. Illo stooped but did not quite touch that flooring.

  "It is not pavement, I believe—" she studied the expanse carefully. To my eyes there was not a single sign of any break in it—the whole piece was a giant plate.

  The gars had finished their cleanup and now stood quiet, the h
eads of all three hanging low, their noses near touching the plate. Were they in search of a scent? Were they looking for something? I had passed the point of amazement now; I was not sure of anything. Before my eyes the beasts I had always taken for animals, of some intelligence, but still animals, had engaged in action which suggested that all our estimates concerning them were very wrong, that they were far more than prize stock to serve settlers on Voor. It was at that moment I began also to wonder whether they were not, as a species, far older and longer evolved than we had ever guessed. Had their long-ago ancestors indeed known the race who had set this plate they now revealed to us?

  Illo cried out, stumbling a step or two towards me. I met her and we clung together. That platform which had appeared so intact, so solid, was sinking, and we were being carried downward with it.

  I tried to reach the edge, drawing the girl with me. Witol took a ponderous step or two, setting his large body broadside to cut me off from any escape. Before I could push around him we were already too deep, so that even a leap would not have allowed me to catch the edge of the break.