He was free to ignore the feeling; and, effectively, he had. Something else—a feeling of sadness and something like loneliness—was affecting him now. He had been thinking for some time about the puzzle of the mileposts, and the fact that they seemed to contribute nothing to the ecosystem; and from that his mind had veered off to consider the colonists, here and on other newly-planted worlds, and his fellow humans back on Earth.
In one sense he had been like an alien among the others of his own race all his life. He had spent his time as much as possible in the outdoors of the wild parks, and at the zoos, mingling with his fellow humans only as necessary to live, to get himself an education and to find a job. He had always felt, instinctively, that a life should be lived to some purpose; and, lost among the endless hordes of people on Earth, he could not believe that he would ever find any purpose to his own existence as long as he swam as one of their endless multitude, one minnow among countless other duplicate minnows.
He would not have minded being one of those uncountable billions if he could have found his own people something to like and admire. But, in the mass, they had never evoked those emotions in him. As individuals, they could be kind and sensitive and responsive; but the moment they banded together in anything from a community to a nation, they began to react according to the lowest common denominators. The impulse to kindness became the impulse to selfishness, sensitivity was lost under callousness, and responsiveness gave way to a frantic urge to compete, to survive at the expense of anything and anyone else. In his own lifetime the two giants of governmental bureaucracy—which employed sixty per cent of the work force—and organized crime, which dominated, if not employed, twenty per cent—had been locked in an endless power struggle on the battlefield created by the existence of the great mass of unemployed, living on citizen's benefits.
Only in the small fringe area of the international services, and in the research areas, could altruism and hope for a higher sort of humanity exist. And even here—as it had in the case of Will's death—the selfish concerns of governmental authority could step in and interfere.
Twenty-three years of life on Earth should, he told himself now, have taught him that the human race, transplanted to the other worlds, would be no better. But still he had come to Everon expecting just that. He should not be disappointed in the characters he had discovered in Martin, Armage, and the others he had met at the Constable's. Illogically, though, he was.
Moodily, now, he poked the fire with a branch; and a stream of red-gold sparks shot up into the dark like the rocket-trail of some tiny, invisible spaceship. Humanity, in the final judgment, was even worse than the milepost. Not only did it not give, it had no intention of doing anything but taking. Here on Everon, and back on Earth, where a whole world had been carved and altered to support a human race multiplied like a plague virus, his racial fellows offered nothing and planned to take everything.
Still, it need not be that way. In the midst of all that his race had done, down the red-dyed history of mankind, a spark of warmth and gentleness, like that Jef had found in the members of his own family, had continued to exist—chronicled in story and picture and music, taught in quiet comers, clung to in little corners of the mind. The other side of the coin from human selfishness had always been there, too. Only—it never seemed to gain the upper hand, never conquered—
Unexpectedly, Mikey, who had been lying still all this time, leaped to his feet. With one swing of his heavy head, he knocked Jef flat and stepped forward to stand over him, while for the first time since they had left Earth, from the maolot's throat came the deep, rumbling drone that was a true equivalent of a warning snarl.
"Mikey!" said Jef, and tried to get up. Mikey put one heavy forepaw on him and held him down, still staring blindly off into darkness, still rumbling his drone of warning.
Then, eerily, from the darkness came the sound of a high-pitched, human voice, shouting.
"All right!" it called. "Peace—nobody hurts nobody—I'm coming in. All right?"
Mikey took his paw off Jef and stood back. The droning in his throat ceased. Jef scrambled to his feet, staring at the maolot, and then off into the utter darkness of the forest into which Mikey was still facing.
There were a few seconds of waiting, and then a faint rustle from the obscurity was followed by the sudden appearance into the firelight of a slim figure a head shorter than Jef, dressed in leather jacket and green-brown check pants of thick-woven local cloth, with something slung on its back so that a gunstocklike end showed above the left shoulder. There was a quiver of what looked like short arrows at the belt. Jef blinked. It was some twelve-year-old: No—it was a young woman with close-cut brown hair and a lean, tanned face.
"Peace," she said again, stopping on the far side of the fire. "All friends—nobody hurts nobody like I said. But you're real lucky you've found how to make a watchdog out of a maolot. Before I saw that, I'd half a mind to put a bolt into you first and ask questions after."
"Put..." Jef shook his head. The words made no sense. "Why?"
"Why you're on my place—and no message sent you were coming through!" the girl said.
Jef blinked again. Her place? She looked to be somewhere between a dozen and sixteen years old.
"Strangers," she was saying now, "get shot on sight in these woods nowadays, when they show up without warning. Everybody knows that. Why don't you?"
Chapter Six
jef stared at her.
Her question was a good one. Why didn't he?
"Nobody told me," he said. The words sounded foolish in the quiet night above the crackling fire. There was that difference in her speech that he had noticed with the Constable and others, the faint pause in a sentence every so often. "Your place?"
"That's right," she said. "I'm Jarji Jo Hillegas; and this is my ranch—from Silver Meadow to Way Down Creek. I've got over six hundred head of eland running these woods. All the ranches around here are Hillegas ranches. My oldest sister's got the next one south, and my next-to-youngest brother's got his just north of mine. My dad's land backs us all up, eastways."
"Oh," said Jef. "You're an upland game rancher. But—" he hesitated, "you're young for that, aren't you?"
"I'm twenty-two—Standard."
"Oh." Jef continued to stare at her, uncertain as to whether she had simply taken him for an outsider who would believe anything, or not. In no way, he told himself, could she be only one Standard year younger than he was. Not the way she looked.
"And who the hell are you?" she was asking.
"Jef Aram Robini," said Jef automatically. "I'm—I'm here on a research project. I'm headed for the trading post—Post Fifty-right now. But I'm taking Mikey here—" He gestured at the maolot.
"—up to the mountains. He's been raised under observational conditions on Earth; and now I'm trying to find out how he'll adapt, back on his own world."
"The mountains? Why didn't you ride up with one of the supply-truck trains?"
"I wanted to get Mikey back into his natural environment as soon as possible. He's actually eight years old—"
"No, he isn't."
"As a matter of fact he is."
"I don't know who told you that, Robini, but anybody who knows maolots can tell you he's not more than four years, Local. If he was eight years old—"
"As it happens," Jef found an actual pleasure in interrupting her for a change, "he is. That's one of the reasons I brought him all the way back here. On Earth he didn't mature as he should have. If you'll let me explain..."
She listened while he talked, but without shedding the air of general skepticism that seemed to wrap her like an invisible poncho.
"Now, I didn't know I was trespassing on your territory, or that I was supposed to check with you first," he wound up. "But in any case, I'd have wanted to come this way. I've been hoping to find out about my older brother's death. He died here on Everon eight years ago—"
"Died? How?" An edge of hardness had come into her voice and Mi
key droned abruptly on a note of warning. "What do you mean—'died'?"
Jef felt the sad bitterness gathering in him. For too many years he had, suffered the misunderstandings of other people where William's death was concerned.
"I mean died!" He came down hard on the word. "There was a man named Beau leCourboisier who was there when it happened. I'm hoping he can tell me more about it than the E. Corps could. My brother was a Colony Representative for the E. Corps here on Everon—"
"He was, was he?" The hard edge in Jarji Jo Hillegas's voice sharpened. "Beau know you're looking for him?"
"No. But since he was a friend of Will's—"
"Oh... friend." The edge went out of Jarji's voice. The warning note singing in the back of Mikey's throat faded away. "Still, if you were coming through here, you should have radioed ahead."
"Nobody said anything about that, I told you," said Jef. "Do you shoot anyone at all who happens to come through here, if you don't know they're coming?"
"Now and then," said Jarji dryly. "But if your brother was a friend of Beau's I guess I might hold off—in your case."
"Thanks," said Jef grimly. "Weren't you the one who yelled 'peace' just now? I'm not going just to stand here if you try to use that thing you've got. Neither is Mikey."
"Oh, I think I might handle the two of you, if I had to—the maolot first, of course," she said. "It wasn't any doubt in my mind about being able to do that, that stopped me when I first saw you. It was trying to figure out why anybody from the city or the wisent ranches would come up here with a maolot as a pet. They make pig-food out of maolots on sight down in wisent territory."
Abruptly she came right to the edge of the fire so that only its flames were between her and Jef. With a single smooth motion she swung her weapon off her back and sat down cross-legged, laying the device out before her on the ground, beyond easy reach. Seated so, on the green moss-grass, painted by the red-yellow colors of the firelight, she seemed so much a part of this nighttime forest scene that she looked more like some creature of Everon herself, rather than a human, twenty-two-year-old, game rancher with a killing machine on the ground before her.
"I said peace, and I meant peace," she said. "Sit down. Let's talk."
Slowly, and more clumsily, Jef sat on his side of the fire. Mikey crouched beside him, one heavy shoulder against Jef's leg. Reaching out with one arm, Jarji picked up a dry branch of variform pine from the pile Jef had accumulated, and tossed it on the blaze.
"A little more light, here," she said.
The flames caught at once on the dry needles and flared up, pushing back the darkness of the surrounding forest. The scent of the burning wood rose into Jef's nostrils; and suddenly he was seized by the same faculty of acute observation he had experienced as he stepped off the spaceship. The smell of the fire, the dance of its flames licking against the night, the leaping illumination playing with the colors of Jarji's rough clothes and lining her face with moving shadows ... all these and the polished wood of the weapon and the movement of the night air made him feel as if he had fallen into a trance where everything about him was twice as real as reality—and twice as wonderful. This alone, he thought suddenly, was worth his coming to Everon to experience. This, alone—
He wrenched himself out of the moment of transport with an effort, and straightened his back, staring across the fire at Jarji. She sat still, the weapon lying a meter ahead of her, and less than that from the edge of the campfire. Jef's eyes focused on it. The dark wood of its polished stock and frame was of some kind he did not recognize. A backward-curving length of metal was set crosswise near the front of the frame; an arc of metal, like a short bow, with a wire for a bowstring.
The wire crossed the frame at a point where a metal groove ran down the length of the stock. There, guides caught it, and the guides seemed to be fixed to a pulley arrangement running back along the side of the stock to a drum holding eight metallic cartridges perhaps three centimeters in diameter, so that one cartridge at a time engaged one end of the pulley system through a slot in the cartridge's curved side.
"Never seen one of those before?" asked Jarji. "Called a crossbow."
"I... guessed that," Jef said, remembering illustrations of devices like this in his history books on the wars of the late middle ages in Europe. "But what are those?"
He pointed to the cartridges in the drumlike part of the weapon.
"Spring-pulls," she said.
As Jef watched, she leaned forward, picked up the crossbow and rotated the drum so that the next cartridge in line took the end of the pulley into its slot. She punched the outer end of the cartridge with a quick stab of her thumb, and the cartridge whirred abruptly, like an angry rattlesnake. The pulley wire spun back through the slot in the cartridge and out again; and the guides swiftly pulled the wire bowstring back the full length of the stock.
"Lucky for you I just rewound a full wheels' worth of spring-pulls," said Jarji. "Wouldn't want to spare one, otherwise."
She took one of the short arrows from her belt quiver, laid it in the groove along the top of the crossbow stock, and nocked its feathered end into the wire bowstring. Casually, she lifted the heavy weapon in one hand, pointed it off to one side, and fired.
There was the sharp, musical twang as the wire released, followed in almost the same instant by the sound of a solid impact.
"You see?" said Jarji, laying the crossbow down again. But Jef was still staring off in the direction the arrow had gone.
"What—what did it hit?" Jef managed to say.
"Hit? Oh, I shot the quarrel into a willy-tree trunk," she answered. "Don't mind showing it off to you; but I'm not going to go hunting all through the woods at night for a quarrel, just to demonstrate."
She got to her feet, walked off into the darkness and returned after a moment sliding the short arrow she had called a quarrel back into her quiver. She sat down again.
"Could you see that tree you shot it into?" demanded Jef unbelievingly.
"Of course not," said Jarji. "But I knew it was there. This is all my place, these woods. Didn't I tell you?"
She laid the crossbow down before her feet once more. Jef pulled his gaze away from it with an effort.
"Why do you use a thing like that?" he asked.
"Well, now—" Her voice was abruptly bitter and mocking. "You know none of us law-abiding upland woods ranchers would go using a real energy weapon."
Jef blinked across the fire at her. Jarji stared back, hard-eyed, for a moment. Then the tight line of her jaw relaxed.
"I guess you really don't know anything, do you?" she said. "There's a law against carrying regular weapons, any place but down in the city. Never mind... you were going to tell me about this brother of yours."
Jef pulled himself together. As briefly as he could, he told her essentially what he had told Martin about Will's death, disappearance and the difficulty his family had encountered getting details about it from the E. Corps.
When he was finished, Jarji sat without saying anything for a long moment, frowning and poking at the fire with a piece of pine branch from which the twigs and needles had been singed away. Finally she threw the stick aside, as if she had come to some decision, and raised her eyes to Jef across the fire.
"I guess I've got to say you're right, Jef," she said. The unexpected, familiar sound of his own first name jolted him after the formality of Martin and the Planetary Constable, down at Spaceport City. "I'd guess the chance is best your brother is buried up-country here somewhere. Might be, though, you're looking in the wrong place for him."
"Wrong place?" Jef stared at her.
"I mean—he might be buried down around the city, or on one of the wisent ranches," she said. "You see, I figure if Beau or one of us game people knew something about his dying, they'd have sent word to you and your family a long time since. That's maybe why you better be braced for Beau not being able to help you."
"But Beau's the only one I know to talk to, here on Everon," said Jef.
"Oh, sure. I don't mean you shouldn't try to talk to Beau. Just that you shouldn't go expecting too much from him right away. And that's another thing—" said Jarji. "You're going to have to find him first."
"Find him? But I thought he was at Post Fifty," said Jef.
"Had a ranch there, four years ago," she answered. "Wisent ranchers courted him out of it."
"Courted him?" said Jef. "I don't understand."
"Guess you don't," she said. She picked up again the stick she had been using to poke the fire and dug the stiff, charred end of it into the ground before him as she talked, watching the little tufts of earth she turned up, instead of Jef. "What do you know about wisent and eland ranching, here on Everon?"
"I know there were two large meat animals variformed to coexist in the Everon ecology, and that their embryos were imported to be raised here," Jef said. "The Ecolog Corps decided two species would be enough. The buffalo—I mean, wisents—"
"Call them buffalo, if you want," Hillegas said, frowning at the earth she was digging up with her stick, "we here call them wisents—but that's just Europe-type buffalo to someone like you from Earth."
"I meant to say wisents," said Jef. "I know they were brought in to graze the prairie and open country and the variform eland were brought in for wild-game ranching in forest areas like this. I don't remember how many were first brought in to seed Everon with the two species. But they were put here as part of your First Mortgage, weren't they?"
"Doesn't matter how many," Jarji said. "To start out, there was a balance of them—just enough wisent for the open land, just enough eland for the woods. Making allowance for natural increase, of course, as the human population increased and we moved beyond the boundaries for settlement that the E. Corps set up for us under the First Mortgage, wisent ranchers began crowding us wild-game raisers out."
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