by C. L. Moore
And yet, she thought, if it were true—if she herself had set into motion the juggernaut that would destroy all her hopes—a part of it was still good. Egide’s life was forfeit to pure chance now, through her doing alone. But if she had not imperiled it, she might never have valued the life or the man. Meeting that faint softening of a smile that touched his face, she knew he was sharing a thought like hers. Thanks to that one terrible error, they would at least live each measured moment that remained to them with a vividness that should pack a lifetime’s awareness into every hour.
Still clasping hands, they rode down the hill slowly, Mists were thick now, and they could see almost nothing of the turmoil below, but Jair’s great brazen voice, rich with the vibrating warmth of his spurious humanity, came rolling up to them in brief snatches. A juggernaut of brass. Egide’s juggernaut. Perhaps mankind’s last and coldest and most ardently worshiped god.
In the temple of the Ancients a small figure stood before the high, dark altar like a wall, too high for it to see the gods. It clasped and unclasped the facile, fingery paws, like a sea-anemone’s tendrils—so many-fingered, so dexterous, so nervously eager to be about the great task of testing the limits of their skill.
Its mind was not here in the temple. It was seeing the warm, sand-floored caverns of its people, lit by a garden of colored windows, multi-shaped in the twilight of the cave. It was not alone, though it sat here nervously twisting those eager, impatient fingers. No llar is ever alone. The warm awareness of its unity with its city lies behind that poise and quiet pride. It looks out of the strange round eyes with a wisdom and benignity which is of the race, not the individual. This race alone, of all thinking species, finds deity in itself, in the warm closed circle of its own unity. Once it gains the little foothold it needs on which to found its soaring possibilities, this race alone need not depend upon the gods.
Serene in its own confidence, in its own warm knowledge of identity with its race, the llar sat clasping and unclasping those eager fingers and listening to the oracle it knew it could not trust.
Paradise Street
* * *
Loki planet rolled its wild ranges and untrodden valleys up out of darkness toward morning under Morgan’s thundering ship. Morgan was in a hurry. His jets roared out ice-plumes in the thin, high air, writing the scroll of his passage enormously in vapor across half Loki’s pale sky. There was no other visible trace of man anywhere in the world.
Behind Morgan in the cargo bin there were three kegs with sehft washing about oilily inside them. They made the tiny cabin smell of cinnamon, and Morgan liked the smell. He liked it for itself, and for the pleasant memories it evoked of valley canebrakes and hillside forests where he had gathered his cargo in discomfort, danger and perfect freedom. He also liked it because it was going to be worth fifty thousand credits at Ancibel Key.
Either fifty thousand, or nothing.
That depended on how soon he reached Ancibel Key. He had caught a microwave message back there in the predawn over Great Swamp, and he had been pushing his ship to top speed ever since. He had been muttering angrily, kicking the ship along her course, cursing her and Loki planet and mankind in general, after the fashion of men who are much alone and talk to themselves for company.
Radar patterns pulsed noiselessly across the screen before him, and ahead under a blanket of morning fog he knew Ancibel Key lay sprawled. Around the edges of the fog he could see the telltale marks of civilization spread out upon the soil of Loki—carbon-blacked fields with neat straight roads between them, racks of orchards checkering the sides of the valleys he remembered wild and lonely. He thought of old days not very long ago when he had hunted the bearded Harvester bulls across these meadows and trapped sehft-rats where the orchards grew.
The sky was a little soiled already, above Ancibel Settlement. Morgan wrinkled his lean, leather face and spat.
“People!” he said with fierce contempt to the pulse of the radar pattern. “Settlers! Scum!”
Behind him in the clear morning the vapor-trail of his journey swept in one enormousume clear back to the horizon, back over Wild Valley, over Lookout Peak and Nancy Lake and the Harvester Range. He decelerated above the invisible landing field, and the soft gray fog closed over him. The plume of the passage he had scrawled over half a planet dissipated slowly above the peaks and the lakes that had been his alone for a long time now, grew dim and broad, and vanished.
Morgan stamped into the assay office with a carboy of sehft swashing on his shoulder. He moved in a haze of cinnamon. The assay office was also general store now. Morgan scowled around the too-neat shelves, the laden bins and labeled barrels. Toward the back a redheaded youngster with the dark tan of Mars on his freckled face was waiting on—yes, Morgan looked twice to make sure—a parson. A parson on Loki!
The Mars-tanned boy was belted into a slick silver apron. So was the storekeeper himself. Suppressing a snort of contempt, Morgan gazed past the heavy, bent shoulders of a settler in brown knitted orlon and met the keen and faded blue eyes of Warburg, assay agent turned storekeep.
Morgan’s eyes flicked the silver apron. And then he grinned thinly. The settler straightened his heavy shoulders and glanced from the list in his hand up along the shelves. He was a youngster in his twenties, thick-muscled, tall, fair as a Ganymedan, with flat, red-flushed cheeks.
“Need some more of that hormone spray, Warburg,” he said. “Same as last time. And what about this new fungus? My potatoes aren’t doing so good. Think actidione might do the trick?”
“It did with Laany’i,” Warburg said, evading Morgan’s gaze. “And his fields are right next to yours. Actidione’s a good antibiotic. O.K., Eddie. Had any trouble with rats lately?”
“Just a little. Not enough to mention.”
“Stop it right there,” Warburg advised. “I got some compound forty-two just in—the dicoumarol stuff. It fixes rats better than squill. Those critters breed too fast to take chances.”
“Not as fast as settlers,” Morgan said.
The young settler looked up sharply. He had mild brown eyes under sunbleached brows that drew together with suspicion as he regarded the lean newcomer. Morgan ignored him. Shouldering forward, he thumped the carboy on the counter.
“Forty gallons, Joe,” he said.
“In a minute,” Warburg said.
“I haven’t got a minute. I’m in a hurry.”
“It’s late for that, Jaime,” Warburg said, looking at him.
Morgan’s hand tightened on the neck of the carboy. His eyes drew up narrowly. He swung his gaze to the young settler and jerked his head doorward.
“Take a walk,” he said.
The settler straightened to his full height and looked down on the slighter man. The red deepened in his flat cheeks.
“Who’s this, Warburg?” he demanded. “One of the fast-money boys?”
“Easy,” Warburg said. “Easy, now.” His hand moved toward the gun on the counter. It was a Barker ultrasonic—it barked before it bit, uttering loud threats before its frequency slid up into the killing range. Morgan sneered at it.
“Up till lately, before the rats moved in,” he said, “when a man pulled a gun he used it. I guess people scare easy around here these days.”
“Who is he?” the settler demanded again. “Gunman?”
“I carry one,” Morgan said.
Warburg came to a decision. Smoothing down his silver apron, he said, “I’ll send Tim over with your stuff, Eddie. Do me a favor and—” He nodded toward the door. “Here,” he added, shoving a cellobag into the settler’s big hand. “For the kids. Go on now, git.”
But the settler, scowling at Morgan, didn’t move.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “The rats didn’t come till the settlers were here already. Your kind isn’t wanted in Ancibel, mister. We don’t need any more hoodlums or gambling houses or—”
Morgan’s whole lean body, moving very slightly, tightened forward in a barely perceptible crouch. Perhaps t
he settler didn’t know what that meant, but Warburg was an old Loki frontiersman himself. He knew. His hand closed on the butt of the Barker gun.
Feet grated on the dusty black floor. From the back of the store the parson came forward, nodding casually at Morgan, moving equally casually between the two men. Behind old-fashioned lenses his mild eyes regarded them. He took the cellobag out of the settler’s hand.
“What’s this?” he asked. “Candy? Well, we’d better make sure your kids get it, Eddie. Be a pity if a bullet went through the bag. Might mash the candy.”
Warburg said quickly, “I’ve got some news for you, Jaime. The—”
“Shut up,” Morgan said. He looked from the parson to the settler, shrugged, spat on the black floor and turned away. He was ready to let the quarrel drop. He knew he’d have to talk to Warburg alone. Behind him he heard retreating footsteps and a door thudded shut.
Warburg bent and lifted a roped carton from under the counter. Lettering on its side in three languages said, “Micrografting Kits.”
“Tim,” Warburg called. “Get this over to Eddie’s. And don’t hurry back, either.”
The boy came forward, unbelting his slick apron. His eyes regarded Morgan with a sort of grave wariness. His freckles scarcely showed under the deep Martian tan. Morgan grinned at him a little and said in hissing Middle-Martian, “What do you hear from the cockeyed giant, young one?”
The boy’s sudden smile dazzled in the dark face, showing missing teeth. He was about eighteen, but he made a child’s gesture, holding up both hands, making a wide circle in front of one eye and a narrow one in front of the other. It was the old, childhood legend of the watching giant with Deimos and Phobos for eyes.
“All right, Tim,” Warburg said. “Get at it.”
The boy hoisted the carton to his shoulders and staggered out with it. Morgan’s grin faded. The store was silent when the door had closed.
Morgan slapped the carboy on the counter.
“Forty gallons of sehft,” he said. “Fifty thousand credits. Right?”
Warburg shook his head.
Morgan snarled soundlessly to himself. So he was too late, after all. Well, that just made it harder. Not impossible, he thought, but harder. Surely Warburg couldn’t refuse him. Not even the Warburg who faced him now, plump and soft in a storekeeper’s apron. Warburg had been here almost as long as Morgan himself, from the days when Loki was as wild as the men who trapped and hunted here. And it was wild still, of course. He told himself that fiercely. Most of Loki was still untrodden. Only here at Ancibel Key the spreading disease called civilization fouled the planet. So long as Morgan could find a market for sehft, so long as he could buy the few things he needed from that disease-source, it wouldn’t matter how many settlers swarmed like flies around Ancibel.
“How much?” he asked grimly.
Warburg snapped open a transparent sack, set it on the little scale at his side, and began weighing sugar with a rustling noise. He pinched the top of the first sack tight to seal it before he spoke.
“Five hundred for the lot, Jaime,” he said, not looking up.
Morgan didn’t move a muscle. The store was very still except for the hiss of sugar into the cellobag. Softly Morgan said:
“Sure your authorization on the price-cut came in before I did, Joe?”
“It came in,” Warburg said, “a couple of hours ago. Sorry, Jaime.”
“Don’t be,” Morgan said. “I came in four ho. Smember? It’s four hours ago now. That means you can still pay me fifty thousand.”
“Sorry, Jaime. I had to turn in a spot-check inventory.”
“All right! You overlooked this—”
“Nobody overlooks forty gallons of sehft,” Warburg said, shaking his head regretfully. “I’ve got a license to worry about, Jaime. I can’t do a thing. You should have got here faster.”
“Look, Joe—I need the money. I owe Sun-Atomic nearly ten thousand on my last fuel grubstake. I can’t get more until I—”
“Jaime, I can’t do it. I don’t dare. I guess you caught the broadcast about the price-cut, but you didn’t go on listening or you’d know who’s here to enforce it.”
“Who?”
“Old friend of yours. Major Dodd.”
“Rufus Dodd?” Morgan asked incredulously. “Here?”
“That’s right.” Warburg snapped open a fresh sack noisily and shoved it under the sugar spout. The glittering white torrent hissed into the bag, expanding it to plump solidity. The two men regarded it in silence.
Morgan was thinking fast. Coincidence has a long, long arm. Dodd and he had grown up together in a little town on Mars. Dodd went into the Jetborne Patrol and Morgan had hit for the empty places as soon as he was big enough to work his way aboard a freighter, but the two ran into each other now and then in spite of the vastnesses of space. It wasn’t too unlikely. Space is wide and deep, but men tend to congregate in big centers of civilization on central worlds, and those with like interests inevitably seek out like spots.
“Funny thing, isn’t it?” Morgan said reminiscently. “Last time I saw Rufus I was running furs on Llap over in the Sirius range. A bunch of Redfeet ganged up on the Jetborne and I helped Rufus hold ’em off till relief came. A long time ago, that was. So now he’s here on Loki. What for, Joe? He didn’t come in just to play nursemaid to a new set of export rules. What’s up?”
Warburg nodded at the big Barker on the counter.
“You ought to guess. Happens often enough. That’s why young Eddie wouldn’t back down when you tried to start something. He took you for one of the easy-money boys. Town’s swarming with ’em. They follow the settlers. Grab a ripe world and squeeze it dry, quick, before the law moves in. You know. The town’s wide open and there’s been a lot of trouble already, killings, stores looted, crops damaged if the settlers won’t pay protection. The usual thing. Some of us sent in a petition, and we got Major Dodd and his boys by return ship. He’ll clean the place up—I suppose. Sooner or later.” Warburg looked obscurely troubled he>
“What do you mean?” Morgan demanded. “Rufe’s honest, isn’t he? You couldn’t buy Rufe with all the credits Sun-Atomic ever issued.”
“No, not him, I guess.” Warburg looked dubious. “But his higher-ups, maybe. All I know is, there’s been too much delay. Pay-offs to political bosses have happened before now, you know. My guess is there’s some routine dirty work going on, and Major Dodd’s hands are tied. Or maybe he’s taking a cut direct. Who knows?” Warburg slapped the Barker lightly. “One of these days we’ll take things into our own hands.”
“What’s this ‘we’, Joe?” Morgan asked sharply.
Warburg shrugged. “I have a living to make.”
Morgan snorted noisily. “You’re soft, Joe. I never thought I’d see you with a potbelly and an apron around it. Old before your time.”
“I show it,” Warburg said. “You don’t. I know when it’s time to slow down. You’re not much younger than I am, Jaime. Remember what happened to Sheml’li-hhan?”
“He got careless.”
“He got old. Just once, he was too slow, and the stagbison got him. Oh no—I like it here. Times change, Jaime. We change, too. Can’t help it. I’m glad of a little store like this to keep me going now. Maybe some day you’ll—”
“Not me!” Morgan snorted again, an angry sound. “I’m a free man. I depend on nobody but Jaime Morgan! And a good thing, too. If I tried to depend on my friends I’d starve. Look at you—scared out of your senses by the Trade Control. I’ll go on forever, getting tougher and tougher as the years go by. Just like old leather.” He grinned and slapped his chest. But the grin faded.
“What’s the matter with the Trade Control, Joe?” he demanded, tapping his carboy of sehft. “Why did they cut the price? Why? If the bottom’s out of the sehft market you might as well plow up the whole planet and plant it with wheat so far as I’m concerned. I can’t live here.”
“They’ve synthesized sehft,” Warburg said sto
lidly.
Morgan whistled a low, angry note. Then he said, “All right, they’ve synthesized it. But there’ll always be a market for the natural oil, won’t there?”
“Maybe. But the Settlers’ Council asked for an extermination order, Jaime.” Warburg spoke reluctantly. “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. You see, the sehft-rats are pests. They destroy crops. They’ve got to be wiped out, not milked of their throat-sac secretions and let go to secrete more sehft.”
Morgan’s face went deep red under the leathery tan. He showed his teeth and swore in the hissing Martian vocables of his boyhood. A tall crate beside the counter caught his angry eye and he brought his fist down hard on its lid. The wood splintered, releasing a pungent fragrance and showing glints of bright golden fruit inside.
“Settlers!” Morgan said savagely. “So the sehft-rats spoil their orchards! Who was it got here first, Joe? You and me, that’s who! And now you’re siding with them.” He kicked the crate. “Fruit orchards! Fruit orchards on Loki! Mooing livestock! Settlers stink up every world they land on!”
“I know, I know,” Warburg said. “Careful of the goldenberries, Jaime. I paid hard cash for those.”
“Sure you did! You’ll be out there grubbing in the dirt, too, next thing you know. Joe, I don’t understand it.” Morgan’s voice grew gentler. “Have you forgotten Deadjet Range and the time the wild Harvester bulls stampeded? Remember when young Dain and I came in with our first load of sehft? Joe, I passed over Chocolate Hill today, where we left Dain. The moss grows fast there, Joe, but you can still see the Martian Circle we cut for him, to mark the place.”
Warburg snapped another sack open.
“I know, Jaime. I remember Dain. I land there now and then myself and cut the Circle clean again. I remember Wild Bill Hennessy, and old Jacques, and
