The X Factor

by Andre Norton

  Shadows flowed about the rocks, but he had no fear of those, saying quickly to the girl:

  "Don't be frightened. The furred ones are with us. They will give any alarm." The limp body he carried was heavy, but this night he felt as if he could do anything, that he now possessed all the strength and energy in the world!

  They wound among the rocks to the crest of the ridge.

  "Back in the city," Julha cried out. "That was a blaster. Who are they fighting? Our people—Mik?"

  "Each other," Diskan replied briefly.

  "Why?"

  "Because they discovered what they were hunting—"

  "The treasure! Oh, no!" She was distressed. "The High One, the finding should have been his—"

  "They found their treasure," Diskan corrected. "It was what they wanted of Xcothal. I believe that Zimgrald sought something else here. Xcothal has more than one treasure to offer—"

  It had—it had! He held that knowledge to him to warm, to strengthen, to arm him against anything that might come out of the night to try him now.

  And he was not really aware of the passing of time until the girl stumbled and fell, and he was alerted to that by the furred ones.

  "I cannot go on," Julha told him in a small voice. "Do you, and I shall catch up."

  "There is no need. For the time, we are safe. Here—"

  It was another rock pocket, but it did not face the marsh and the city; rather it faced that distant valley where the ship stood. The watchers were all about them in a protecting screen. Julha knelt by the Zacathan, her hands touching the beak-nosed face of the tranced man tenderly.

  "He still lives and sleeps," she said.

  "And while he lives, there is hope." Diskan repeated her own earlier words.

  "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 ZacSthan.

  "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 i
n 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!