The Game of Stars and Comets

by Andre Norton

  I turned, bringing handfuls of the table cloth in my grasp.

  What stood there—for the second time in my life I attempted to blot it out—but this time I could not do so.

  Those flowing, swirling outlines of the figure tightened, its substance became more opaque. Yet, though it had a pseudo-human form, it was not a person. Young as I was I knew a jolting terror of what I saw forming under my eyes, making its own body from bits of leaf, the flyaway seeds of plants I had played with in the garden, other seeds, some still in their pods, nuts in their shells and out—

  It stood hunched a little, and it had hands, now tightened, thickened so that the fingers, crooked like claws, were as solid as my own. Thorns instead of nails crowned each of those fingers. Only it was not just the threat of those reaching for me which caused me to scream, to back until my small body was flat against the wall so I flung up an arm to ward it off.

  I called for my mother, for my father. My throat was raw with the force of my screams. No one came—only that—that thing which had holes in its face where the eyes should have been. Still, even if there were no eyes, it could see me. It stretched forth one arm, that thorn clawed hand, but it did not try to touch me. Rather those fingers crooked in a beckoning gesture.

  I had folded my body closer to the floor, a small animal, nearly stark-crazed with fear. It did no good to scream any longer, I knew that dimly. Now I was so stricken with fright I was easy prey; still it came no closer. Twice it beckoned. I did not move. There was a prickling feeling in my head, I knew that it was calling me, expecting me to follow, to come to it.

  My body even stirred as if to obey. Now I balled myself, my face hidden on my knees, my arms wrapped about my head and shoulders. I was retreating from that horror, retreating into my own self, deeper and deeper. I would not look!

  The special horror of the thing which I felt dimly, even as I made the plunge into an inner darkness, was that it had made itself—made its form out of things I knew, had handled, had played with. It was to me as if the wall of a room had formed a mouth to suck me in—window eyes to watch me. All my world in those moments took on a fearsome otherness I was not prepared to face, and which was so utterly alien I had to blot it out of my mind as well as hide it physically from my sight. For to have the familiar change before one's eyes into a frightening otherness was such an ordeal that perhaps even an adult would have found hard to face.

  Darkness, and then suddenly it was light and I was under a warm sun, riding perched high on a gar's back. By the side of the beast paced my father, his face set, white under the weathering, the lines upon it the signature of some horror looked upon and never to be wholly faced. I had returned again to memory—my first memory. Yet now I had, at last, reached behind that to know a fraction of what shock had veiled from me all these years.

  Chapter 13

  I blinked and blinked again. There was no gar—nor my father. A sense of loss filled me for a long moment, then seeped away. I stood and watched liquid churn up and up in an opaline bowl of a pool. My past retreated farther and farther, to become a picture of something which had happened to another person long ago.

  Yet, though my memory was still incomplete, out of some hidden corner came answers—slowly—one by one. The colors in the pool met, mingled, became other shades, darker, lighter, took on patterns. I had seen such lines and swirls before—yes! My hand flew to my throat. Then I remembered that that alien chain was gone, that I had hurled it into that same pool where it had sunk into hiding. Only those lines of color were much like those which had patterned the foreplate, those which had been over the doorways through which we had passed.

  The designs had meaning. What they would tell was important, imperative for me to understand! Some buried emotion in me raged and fought for that understanding. I dropped to my knees and flung out my hands. Spatters of foam, raised by the faster and faster passage of the water being stirred around and around, struck my fingers, dripped from my outstretched palms.

  I withdrew those wet hands, brought them to my face, my forehead, pressed flesh against flesh with the water in between. Straightway I became aware of a sharp scent filling my nostrils, making even my closed eyes smart and begin to tear.

  However that same water—or the scent of it—cleared my head, shook me into such a sharp awareness as I had never quite known before. I dropped my hands, shook my head from side to side, yet again blinking my eyes to clear them of the tears that scent or strength in the liquid had induced.

  I stared down into the massing and the flowing of the color. This was part of a talent, or else some strange science of a race long forgot, utterly alien. So that the messages they had left—the warnings—came through to a mind such as mine only in fragments and broken phrases.

  Piece by piece I fought to catch a hint here, an almost entirely clear reading there. My people depended upon tapes for their records; what I was watching now was something like those in its results but very unlike in substance. There were so many holes that I had to bridge the message by leaps of imagination, by flights of guessing.

  Two races—one from space, a remnant fleeing some unexplained disaster out among the stars. Each of another culture, so divided in ways of logical thought pattern that communication between the natives and the star-rovers was near impossible.

  Yet those natives had taken in the refugees, tried hard to make their settlement prosper. Greed, drive for domination, were taints the star-rovers carried like foul diseases in their blood. The taking over of knowledge peculiar to the people of this planet consisting in the main of their extraordinary talents for shaping and control of plants, their oneness with all forms of life on their world. The newcomers seizing upon their knowledge, yes, but not learning the strict controls imposed by a high moral sense.

  Experimentation to adapt the growth of this new world to the service of the newcomers—experiments which were used in excess and misused. Plants which became like mind-changing drugs—an unruly and anarchic people addicted to them—the need for more and more—

  War, for the natives learned too late the manner of the race they dealt with, the horrors which could be loosed with forced mutation gone mad.

  Plants deliberately fed—on flesh, on blood, on living bodies. The result of such deaths—the Shadows. Things with tenacious life but which were greed, hunger, born from engorged plants as near wisps of nothingness, needing to build new bodies by their will from fragments of leaves, seed, even earth dust. Development of raging hunger, until that changed into a potent weapon to draw to the feaster, walking, living food!

  Immortality for the shadow being in a fashion. Development at last of creatures so alien that they had no possible contact even with that which had been their own source. Resting dormant between the feedings, yet awaking when the food, the rich feasting again landed in Voor. The gathering of energy—slow at first—then richer, fuller, stronger as the Shadows went forth, bursting from their seed cases where they had lain waiting for time, past our counting of years.

  Shadows who had no substance until they could make themselves bodies, but with wills so compelling that they could call to them, bring into their nesting boxes their food.

  The natives—so great had been their horror at what they had unleashed, they had chosen a final withdrawal, leaving only a record which might never be read—the record lying before our eyes—an accusation and a warning.

  "So—that is it!"

  Words startled me, broke the chain of communication between me and what was to be read in the pool. I looked to Illo. Her face was starkly pale beneath the weathering brown; there was such a sickness in her face that I moved quickly to steady her where she also had knelt to stare into the pool.

  "They—they—ate our—own people!" The horror in her voice was a sick cry. Her mouth twisted as I pulled her into my arms, her face now hidden against my shoulder.

  I felt my own stomach churn, a sourness rising in my throat, I could not put out of my mind that line of skeletons. Th
en they—they had been so long from food, so starving—they had not brought back their prey as they had done from other settlements but had—feasted there! I retched, fought my nausea. Illo was shuddering in my hold.

  "Don't!" her cry was muffled against my shoulder. "Don't!"

  I hoped she had not in some manner (nothing seemed impossible to me here and now) read my thoughts. Perhaps she was fighting terrible memories of her own.

  "Did you remember?" I asked between those waves of nausea which I battled.

  "Yes—" her voice was very faint. Her fingers dug into my shoulders, scraped together, in a frantic hold, handfuls of my jerkin.

  "Why not us—?" The one question which the pool had not answered. Why had we escaped?

  "We—we were—we were fed on the food of this world from birth, we were of Voor—there was a kinship—a faint kinship—between us and—them!"

  I shuddered. If her answer was the truth I could easily come to loathe myself.

  "No!" again it was as if she could read my thoughts. "Not for us in truth. They—they chose to change. But they could still recognize—maybe without knowing it—those bred here. Perhaps they wanted us to join them—to renew—to be with them!"

  I remembered that thing, its thorn-clawed hands which had not torn me but rather had beckoned. Dim kinship? A need to add fresh life to its dreadful company? Had that indeed moved it?

  "One of them could have taken me—easily," I said slowly. It had been a thing all shaped from bits and pieces of vegetation, but it had looked solid enough. And certainly the activities of it and its fellows—I swallowed once, and again, still fighting that need to vomit.

  "It had chosen." Illo turned her head a little so she could look up to me. There were tear tracks down her face. "In the past it had chosen—perhaps such a choice always had to be made. They could invite—but such as we had to make the choice." She spoke as if she had complete belief in what she said. Whether that was the truth or not we might never know.

  "This can't go on." I made myself turn from memories of the past. Sick as I was, resolve now filled me, pushing out the horror, stiffening my purpose.

  Blasters? No. Those had been already tried and had failed—The things which we had sought, perhaps must seek again, to fight, were indeed shadows. The stuff of their bodies—when they needed bodies—could be summoned at their wills. But who can blast a shadow? The whole of the Tangle perhaps might be rooted up and destroyed by some weapons from off world. I did not doubt that the Patrol could bring in superior devices we had not even heard of. But none would prevail against shadows.

  "Look—" Illo's grasp on me tightened, she drew me closer to the edge of the pool.

  The intertwining race of colors and shades there was thinning. There remained only one bright thread clear running—the blue of the necklet's glow.

  "Watch—" but she did not have to tell me that.

  In and out, convolutions and spirals, in loops and double loops, it wound and unwound. Again there was so much I could not understand, that I could only guess.

  Those who had withdrawn to their gem-bright city, had locked their gates, and then chosen of their own will to pass on into another existence, had left this message. Warning? Suggestion? It was both, though I could be sure of so very little of it.

  Then it had been beyond their abilities to do this thing themselves without becoming like the vile things they fought. Long dead now, they could not be degraded, used—Yet the Shadows retaining wisps of memory, their abiding hate for those who had defeated them, sentenced them to a long dormant waiting until our own people had come—the Shadows would answer a call, catch at a chance avidly, thirsting to feast on what was no longer there but which to them was no memory, still existed.

  Swarming in upon this last safe citadel so long inviolate they could be—eliminated. Or so the message came to me as I watched, more quickly to Illo—perhaps because her talent made her far more sensitive, while the necklet had in a measure built a lesser bridge of communication for me.

  The girl pulled free of me and sped across the innermost chamber, back the way we had come. I followed her, not catching up until she stood on the top of those two wide steps which led to the pillared chamber.

  "Look!"

  The gars had come up to us, turned, their heads low, tossing from side to side as they do when about to defend themselves against attack. Her gesture pointed beyond them.

  There was a swirling in the air, visible only because some particles of glittering dust, perhaps all that time had shaken from the jewel buildings, writhed and danced in the air. There were no leaves, no bits of vegetation here which the invisibles could draw to them, yet they fought to shape something with what little did exist.

  I could not number them, for there was no one swirl completely apart from the other. Illo hesitated only a moment and then swung about—I knew what was in her mind—there had been a final defense which the natives had set to protect their death sleep.

  "The pool!"

  That defense must have been activated by now, I realized that perhaps we would be caught in what was to come. What Illo would do I had no idea. That instinct which is in all of us to search for some way out when danger faces one did awake in me.

  "Witol!" I caught at the nearest horn of the bull, "In!"

  He bellowed, pawed the stone underfoot as if determined to stand his ground, then came, herding his mate and Wobru before him. We fairly fled between the rows of pillars back to the pool.

  There were no longer any blue streamers racing across it. Still the liquid had not sunk back into the small cupfuls we had found there at our first coming. Rather the whole was taking on a red hue, a red shot through with sparks of orange and yellow—if fire could become water, then that was what we saw.

  The flow reached the rim of the pool, the center going higher, forming a great bubble. Those orange and yellow lights disappeared, the stuff was thicker, viscid, darker red. I could think only of a giant welling of blood—

  "Watch Witol!" Illo drew my attention from that terrible flood with a cry.

  The gar bull had not paused at the pool, but was trotting on, still herding his two companions before him, uttering short bellows. I caught Illo by the hand and ran after the gars who now broke into the gallop which they could show when there was need, my strides lengthening as I attempted to catch up. All my Voorloper sense returned to me then. "Trust your gars" was the old and well-attested cry of the plainsmen.

  We passed down another line of pillars, were in the street once more on the other side of that central shine. Witol galloped, Illo and I ran. The gars were mute now as if they did not want to waste their breath.

  More of the gem houses flashed by us. What goal Witol might have I could not guess. Having no solution myself I was content to trust his instinct, always so much sharper than my own.

  We came to another gate, another door. This time I had no necklet to guide me. But that same cry I had uttered to bring us here came to my lips again.

  "Iben Ihi!"

  The grating noise was louder, the portal showed only a few inches of opening then froze. Witol seemed to go mad. Lowering his head, the bull drew back a little and charged, the sound of the impact of his horns against the door ringing in echoes and re-echoes through the city of the dead.

  The force which he had used must have jolted free the ancient mechanism for the door sprang open just as I thought his assault might have jammed it past any further effort. Witol whipped through that aperture with a speed one would not expect from his bulk, the other two crowding behind him. Illo raced, her one hand twisted in the lashing of the gear on Wobru's back; I was only seconds behind.

  I looked back; the door was snapping shut even as I watched, once more sealed. We were on a ramp, a stepped ramp, leading up. The gars strained to take that incline at the same burst of speed.

  Their instinct was keener than mine, yes, but now I, too, felt that warning. I had no idea what fate the long dead had left to be visited upon the en
emy should they reach this final stronghold. But that it was drastic and complete I could well guess.

  We scrambled and climbed. This had been no easy entrance nor exit such as the other ways. Here the smooth metallic coating had become rough stone, the stuff of Voor itself which acted to our advantage, for I doubt whether we could have climbed so fast on a smooth surface at such a sharp rising angle.

  What light showed us the way ahead was very faint, once the gate was shut and the glittering of the city gone. There were only some grayish gleams at the head of the ramp. Witol had been forced to slacken speed by the steepness of the incline; he was snorting and panting now, but he did not falter.

  Even as he had charged the gate, so now he drew a little ahead and butted at a mass of fallen stone which near sealed us in, except for crevices which allowed daylight through. Stones and earth flew, fell back on us. Witol made a last lumbering leap and was gone, the other two gars after him, bringing us along as we clung to the pack lashing.