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Bird of Prey
by Marion Zimmer Bradley
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Science Fiction
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Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust
www.mzbworks.com
Copyright ©1957, 1985 by Marion Zimmer Bradley
First published in Venture Science Fiction, 1957
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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Bird of Prey
Marion Zimmer Bradley
It would be an hour before I could board the starship. Straight ahead, an open gateway led to the spaceport, and the white skyscraper which was the Headquarters of the Terran Empire on Wolf; behind me. Phi Coronis was dipping down over the roofs of the Kharsa—the Old Town—which lay calm in the bloody sunset, but alive with the sounds and the smells of human, nonhuman and half-human life. The pungent reek of incense from an open street-shrine made my nostrils twitch, and a bulked form inside, not human, cast me a surly green glance as I turned aside into the cafe at the spaceport gates.
It wasn't crowded inside. A pair of furred chaks lounged beneath the mirrors at the far end. One or two spaceport personnel, in storm gear, were drinking coffee at the counter, and a trio of Dry-towners, rangy lean men in colorful shirtcloaks, stood at a wall-shelf, eating Terran food with aloof dignity. In my neat business clothes I felt more conspicuous than the furred and long-tailed chaks; an Earthman, a civilian. I ordered, and by unconscious habit, carried my food to a wall-shelf near the Dry-towners, the only native humans on Wolf.
They were tall as Earthmen, weathered by the fierce sun of their parched cities of dusty salt stone—the Dry Towns which lie in the bleached bottoms of Wolf's vanished oceans. Their dialect fell soft and familiar on my ears. One, without altering his expression or his easy tone, had begun to make elaborate comments on my entrance, my appearance, my ancestry and probable personal habits, all defined in the colorfully obscene dialect of the Dry Towns.
I leaned over and remarked, in the man's own dialect, that at some future and unspecified time I would appreciate an opportunity to return their compliments.
By custom they should have apologized, and laughed at a jest decently reversed on themselves. Then we would have bought each other a drink, and that would have been that. But it didn't happen that way. Not this time.
Instead, to my dismay, one of them fumbled inside the clasp of his shirtcloak; I edged backward, and found my own hand racing upward, seeking a skean I hadn't carried in six years. It looked like a rough-house.
The chaks in the corner moaned and chattered. Then I became aware that the three Dry-towners were gazing, not at me, but at something, or someone, just behind me. Their skeans fumbled back into the clasps of their cloaks, and they surged back a pace or two.
Then they broke ranks, turned and ran. They ran—blundering into stools as they went, leaving a havoc of upset benches and broken crockery in their wake. I let my breath go, turned, and saw the girl.
She was slight, with waving hair like spun black glass, circled with a tracery of stars. A black glass belt imprisoned her waist, like clasped hands, and her robe, stark white, bore an ugly sprawl of embroidery across the breasts—the hideous toad-god, Nebran. Her face was all human, all woman, but the crimson eyes held a hint of alien mischief.
Then she stepped backward, and with one swift movement she was outside in the dark street. A smudge of incense from the street-shrine blurred the air; there was a little stirring, like the rising of heat waves in the salt desert at noon. Then the shrine of Nebran was empty, and nowhere in the street was there a sign of the girl; she simply was not there.
I turned toward the spaceport, slowly, walking through a dragging reluctance, trying to file the girl away in memory as just another riddle of Wolf that I'd never solve.
I'd never solve another riddle on Wolf. I'd never see it again. When the starship lifted at dawn, I'd be on it, outbound from Phi Coronis—the red sun of Wolf.
I strode toward the Terran H.Q.
No matter what the color of the sun, once you step inside an H.Q. building, you are on Terra. The Traffic Division was efficiency made insolent, in glass and chrome and polished steel. I squinted, readjusting my eyes to the cold yellowness of the light, and watched myself stride forward in a dozen mirrors; a tall man with a scarred face, bleached by years spent under a red sun. Even after six years, my neat civilian clothes didn't fit quite right, and, with unconscious habit, I still walked with the lean stoop of the Dry-towners I had impersonated. The clerk, a rabbitty little man, raised his head in civil inquiry.
“My name's Cargill,” I told him. “Have you a pass for me?"
He stared. A free pass aboard a starship is rare except for professional spacemen, which I obviously wasn't. “Let me check my records,” he hedged, and punched scanning buttons on the mirror top of the desk. “Brill, Cameron—ah, yes, Cargill—are you Race Cargill of the Secret Service, sir? The Race Cargill? Why, I thought—I mean—everybody took it for granted that you were—"
“You thought I'd been killed a long time ago because my name never turned up in the news? Yes, I'm Race Cargill. I've been working upstairs on Floor 38 for six years, holding down a desk any clerk could handle."
He gawped. “You, the man who went to Charin in disguise and routed out The Liess? And you've been working upstairs all these years? It's—hard to believe, sir!"
My mouth twitched. It had been hard for me to believe while I was doing it. “The pass?"
“Right away, sir.” There was respect in his voice now, despite those six years. Six years of slow death since Rakhal Sensar had left me a marked man, my scarred face making me a target for all my old enemies, and ruining my career as a Secret Service man.
Rakhal Sensar—my fists knotted with the old, impotent hate. And yet, it had been Rakhal Sensar who had first led me into the secret byways of Wolf, teaching me a dozen alien languages, coaching me in the walk and step of a Dry-towner, perfecting a disguise which had become deep second nature to me. Rakhal was a Dry-towner from Shainsa, and he had worked in the Terran Secret Service, my partner since we were boys. Even now I was not sure why he had erupted, one day, into the violence that ended our friendship.
Then he had simply disappeared, leaving me a marked man, my usefulness to the Secret Service ended ... a bitter man tied to a desk ... and a lonely man—Juli had gone with him.
With a small whirring noise, a chip of plastic emerged from a slot on the desk. I pocketed the pass, and thanked the clerk.
I went down the skyscraper steps, and across the vast expanse of the spaceport, avoiding or ignoring the last-minute bustle of cargo loading, process crews, curious spectators. The starship loomed over me, huge and hateful.
A steward took me to a cabin, then strapped me into the bunk, tugging at the acceleration belts until my whole body ached. A long needle went into my arm—the narcotic that would keep me safely drowsy during takeoff. Doors clanged, men moved and talked in the corridors with a vague excitement. All I knew about Theta Centaurus, my destination, was that it had a red sun, and the Legate on Megaera could use a trained Secret Service man. And not pin him down at a desk. My mind wandered and it was a pair of crimson eyes, and hair like spun black glass, that tumbled down with me, down to the bottomless pit of sleep.... someone was shaking me.
“Ah, come on, Cargill. Wake up, fella."
<
br /> My eyes throbbed, and when I got them open I saw two men in the black leather of spaceforce guards, mingled with some vague memory of a dream. We were still inside gravity. I came all the way awake with a rush, swinging my legs out of the bunk, flinging aside the belts somebody had unfastened.
“What the devil—Is something wrong with my pass?"
He shook his head. “Magnusson's orders. Ask him about it. Can you walk?"
I could, although my feet were a little shaky on the ladders.
I knew it made no sense to ask what was going on. They wouldn't know. I asked anyway. “Are they holding the ship for me?"
“Not that one,” he answered.
My head was clearing fast, and the walk speeded up the process. As the elevator swooped up to Floor 38, my anger mounted. Magnusson had been sympathetic when I resigned; he'd arranged the transfer and the pass himself. What right did he have to grab me off an outbound starship at the last minute? I barged into his office without knocking.
“What's this all about, chief?"
Magnusson was at his desk, a big bull of a man who always looked as if he'd slept in his rumpled uniform.
He said, not looking up, “Sorry, Cargill, but there was just time to get you off the ship—no time to explain."
There was somebody in the chair in front of his desk; a woman, sitting very straight, her back to me. But when she heard my voice, she twisted around, and I stared, rubbing my eyes. Then she cried out, “Race, Race! Don't you know me?"
I took one dazed step forward. Then she had flown across the space between us, her thin arms tangling around my neck, and I caught her up.
“Juli!"
“Oh, Race, I thought I'd die when Mac told me you were leaving tonight, it was the only thing that kept me going, the thought of seeing you,” she sobbed and laughed at once. I held my sister at arm's length, looking down at her. I saw the six years that divided us, all of them, printed plain on her face. Juli had been a pretty child; six years had fined her features into beauty, but there was tension in the set of her shoulders, and the gray eyes had looked into horrors.
I said, “What's wrong, Juli? Where's Rakhal?” I felt her shiver, a deep thing that I could feel right up through my own arms.
“I don't know. He's gone. And—oh, Race, he's taken Rindy with him!"
“Who's Rindy?"
She didn't move.
“My daughter, Race. Our little girl."
Magnusson's voice sounded low and harsh. “Well, Cargill? Should I have let you go?"
“Don't be a damned fool!"
“Juli, tell Race what you told me—just so he'll know you didn't come for yourself."
I knew that, already. Juli was proud, and she had always been able to live with her own mistakes. This wouldn't be any simple complaint of an abused wife.
She said, “You made your big mistake, Mac, when you turned Rakhal out of the Service. He was one of the best men you had."
“Matter of policy. I never knew how his mind worked. Do you, Juli? Even now? That final episode—Juli, have you taken a good look at your brother's face?"
Juli raised her eyes, and I saw her wince. I knew just how she felt; for almost three years I'd kept my mirror covered. Then she said, almost inaudibly, “Rakhal's face is—is just as bad."
“That's some satisfaction,” I said.
Mac looked baffled. “Even now I don't know what it was all about."
“And you never will,” I said for the dozenth time. “Nobody could understand it, unless he'd lived in the Dry Towns. Let's not talk about that. You talk, Juli. What brought you here? And what about the kid?"
“At first Rakhal worked as a trader in Shainsa,” Juli began. I wasn't surprised. The Dry Towns were the core of Terran trade on Wolf. “Rakhal didn't like what the Empire was doing. But he tried to keep out of it. There were times—they'd come to him and ask for information, information he could have given them, but he never told anything—"
Mac grunted, “Yeah, he's an angel. Go ahead."
Juli didn't, not immediately; instead, she asked, “Is it true what he told me—that the Empire has a standing offer of a reward for a working model of a matter-transmitter?"
“That offer's been standing for five hundred years, Terran reckoning. Don't tell me he was going to invent one!"
“I don't think so, no. But he heard rumors—he knew about one. He said he was going to try to find it—for money and Shainsa. He started coming in at odd times—wouldn't talk to me about it. He was queer about Rindy. Funny thing. Crazy. He'd brought her some kind of nonhuman toy from one of the inland towns, Charin, I think. It was a weird thing, scared me. He'd talk to her about it and Rindy would gabble all kinds of nonsense about little men and birds and a toymaker—it changed him, it—"
Juli swallowed hard, twisting her thin fingers in her lap. “A weird thing—1 was afraid of it, and we had a terrible fight. He threw it out and Rindy woke up and shrieked, she screamed for hours and hours. Then she dug it up out of a trashpile, she broke all her fingernails but she kept on digging for it, we never knew where or why, and Rakhal was like a crazy man—” abruptly Juli checked herself, and visibly caught at vanishing self-control.
Magnusson broke in, very gently. “Juli, tell Race about the riots in Charin."
“In Charin—oh. I think he led the rioting; he came back with a knife cut in his thigh. I asked him if he was mixed up in the anti-Terran movements, and when he wouldn't answer—that was when I threatened to leave him, and he said if I came there—I'd never see Rindy again. The next day he was gone—"
Suddenly the hysteria Juli had been forcing back broke free and she rocked back and forth in her chair, torn and shaken with great strangling sobs. “He—took Rindy! Oh, Race, he's crazy, crazy, I think he hates Rindy, he took—he smashed her toys, Race, he took every toy she had and broke them one by one, smashed them into powder, every toy she had—"
“Juli. Juli, please—” Magnusson pleaded. I looked at him, shaken. “If we're dealing with a maniac—"
“Mac, let me handle this. Juli. Shall I find Rakhal for you?"
A hope was born in her ravaged face, and died there, while I looked. “He'd have you killed. Or kill you."
“He'd try, you mean,” I amended. I stooped and lifted Juli, not gently, my hands gripping at her shoulders in a sort of rage.
“And I won't kill him—do you hear? He may wish I had, when I get through with him—hear me, Juli? I'll beat the living daylights out of him, but I'll settle it with him like an Earthman."
Magnusson stepped toward me and pried my crushing hands off her shoulders. He said, “Okay, Cargill. So we're all crazy. I'll be crazy too—try it your way."
A month later, I found myself near the end of a long trail.
I hadn't seen an Earthman or a Dry-towner in five days. Charin was mostly a chak town; not many humans lived there, and it was the core and center of the resistance movement. I'd found that out before I'd been there an hour.
I crouched along the shadow of a wall, looking toward the gypsy glare of fires, hot and reeking at the far end of the Street of the Six Shepherds. My skin itched from the dirty shirtcloak I hadn't changed in days—shabbiness is wise in nonhuman parts, and Dry-towners from the salt lands think too highly of water to spend much of it in washing, anyway.
It had been a long and difficult trail. But I'd been lucky. And if my luck held, Rakhal would be somewhere in the crowd around those fires.
A dirty, dust-laden wind was blowing up along the street, heavy with the reek of incense from a street shrine. I took a few steps toward the firelight, then stopped, hearing running feet.
Somewhere, a girl screamed.
Seconds later, I saw her; a child, thin and barefoot, a tangle of dark hair flying loose as she darted and twisted to elude the lumbering fellow at her heels. His outstretched paw jerked cruelly at one slim wrist.
The girl sobbed and wrenched herself free and threw herself straight on me, wrapping herself around my neck with
the violence of a stormwind. Her hair got in my mouth, and her small hands gripped at my back like a cat's flexed claws. “Oh, help me,” she sobbed, “don't let him, don't—” And even in that broken cry, I took it in; the brat did not speak the jargon of the slum, but the pure, archaic Shainsa dialect.
What I did then was just as automatic as if it had been Juli; I pulled the kid's fists loose, shoved her behind me, and scowled at the pig-eyed fellow who lurched toward us. “Make yourself scarce,” I advised.
The man reeled; I smelled sour wine and the rankness of his rags as he thrust one grimy paw at the girl.
I thrust myself between them and put my hand on the skean quickly.
“Earthman!” The man spit out the word like filth.
“Earthman!” Someone took up the howl; there was a stir, a rustle, all along the street that had seemed empty, and from nowhere, it seemed, the space in front of me was crowded with shadowy forms, human and—otherwise.
“Grab him, Spilkar! Run him outa Charin!"
“Earthman!"
I felt the muscles across my belly knotting into a hard band of ice. I didn't believe I'd given myself away as an Earthman—the bully was using the old Wolf tactic of stirring up a riot in a hurry—but just the same I looked quickly round, hunting a path of escape.
“Put your skean in his guts, Spilkar!"
“Hai-ai! Earth man! Hai-ai!"
It was that last sound that made me panic, the shrill yelping Hai-ai of the Ya-men. Through the sultry glare of the fires, I could see the plumed and taloned figures, leaping and rustling; the crowd melted open.
“Hai-ai! Hai-ai!"
I whirled, snatching the girl up, and high-tailed it back the way I'd come, only faster. I heard the yelping shrieks of the Ya-men behind me, and the rustle of their stiff plumes; I dived headlong around the corner, ducked into an alley, and set the girl on her feet.
“Run, kid!"
“No, no! This way!” she urged in a hasty whisper, and her small fingers closed like a steel trap around my wrist; she jerked hard, and I found myself plunging forward into the shelter of a street-shrine.
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