A calm, confident voice sounded in her ear, designed to encourage a forward-looking attitude in the egg's occupant. "Atmosphere. Please prepare to look out for a landing place."
She could hear thin upper air whistling past the eggshell now. There was a blip and a radar map of the terrain below appeared on the screen before her. She squinted and tried to make it out.
She heard, with a crack, the rotor blades opening.
Pout was quivering with pleasure and excitement. He had left his following, telling them to stay in one place until he got back, and had walked two or three miles through the savannah. His people were used to him wandering off and he knew they would wait for him; they had no choice.
The boy Sinbiane had told him there was a village here. Pout had seen the flat roofs of the houses from some distance off. Now, crawling on his belly atop a grassy bank, a perfect vision awaited him.
It was dusk. The air was mild and spicy. And down the other side of the bank, scarcely more than a few yards away, he was staring straight into a girl's bedroom.
She had her light on; all the cosy details of the room were visible through the open window with perfect clarity. The girl was sitting at a table with a mirror on it; he couldn't make out quite what she was doing. But now she rose, and in full view of where Pout was lying, pulled off her upper garment over her head. Underneath, she was bare to the waist. Her breasts were heavy and voluptuous, and they bounced when released from the garment.
Pout was only partly human. Sexually his libido was vague. A woman, various female apes, were all capable of arousing him, but to what end was blurry in his mind. His sense of the erotic had, however, found its object.
He brought out the zen gun from where he kept it in his bib, chuckling inanely in his throat. He cradled it to his cheek, crooning.
' I can maim and I can kill With my zen gun."
So ran the refrain that passed through his mind whenever he took the gun in his hand. He had learned many tricks with it by now. It did not have to kill every time it fired. Its power was variable. It could just cripple—or simply hurt.
Pout liked it when it hurt.
He had set the studs for pain. He pointed the gun. He squeezed the trigger stud. He did not have to aim with any accuracy. His thoughts did the targeting; he had learned that long ago.
The pink stitching wavered leisurely through the air. It entered the window, sparked on the girl's breasts. First the left breast, then the right breast, then the left breast . . . prodding at the nipples.
The girl doubled up, her mouth agape in a soundless grimace of agony, clutching at herself, hitting at her breasts as if she could strike off the pain. But she could not strike it off. Pout kept pointing the gun, directing the stitches with his mind. Left breast, right breast . . .
His sparse pelt became damp. Unlike other primates, Nascimento's chimera had both sweat glands and fur.
At last she managed to get her breath long enough to scream, and in a minute other people rushed into the room. Pout slid back down the bank, put away his gun, and began to lope towards the horizon, keeping low and hiding himself behind the tall tufts of coarse grass.
Once he paused. He thought he saw the glimmerings of a falling star in the sky overhead, but then it turned into a white dot which drifted down and finally disappeared.
When he was out of sight of the village he slowed his pace. It was an hour before he returned to his group of followers. Apart from the kosho, who as usual sat cross-legged off by himself, they were gathered round a wood fire.
It was not yet dark, and Pout saw straight away that a stranger sat among his half dozen slaves. He bared his teeth briefly, a reflex of uncertainty, and put his hand to his bib to feel the comforting stock of his gun.
At his approach, they rose. The stranger was staring at him. It was a female, a young woman with a pale, blunt face and black cropped hair. She had a restless, energetic way of moving, a way of looking at one directly, that disconcerted him a little. She wore a form-hugging body garment of sheened black and silver, calf-high black boots, and a wide waist belt that held, among other things, what looked like a scangun. Although bare-headed, she carried a transparent globe helmet in one hand.
"You're Pout," she said at once, not waiting for him to speak.
Lacey, the prairie bum who, after the kosho and the boy had been Pout's first convert, sidled close to Pout and spoke softly in his humble, apologetic way. "She just came in," he mumbled. "Some kinda shipwreck . . . dropped outa the sky in an escape capsule. She gave us some grub." He held out his hand, offering a stick of emergency rations. Pout took it, sniffed, then bit. It was chewy, if not too appetising. He gulped it down, then licked his fingers.
The girl, Hesper Positana, gazed at him with distaste. Her survival egg had come down a couple of miles away. She had been trying to make for what looked like some inhabited structures on a plain to the west, but hadn't quite made it—the rotors had no power of their own but came down sycamore-seed style, using the early part of the drop to store energy in a flywheel. You were supposed to use this for a few miles of powered flight at a few thousand feet high.
In the end, when she started to lose height, she had spotted the smoke from the campfire. She was almost beginning to wish she hadn't, because she had landed among a bunch of very odd people. First there was Lacey, some sort of psychological inadequate who she gathered was in the habit of wandering the grasslands that dominated this part of the planet, living off any small animals he could trap. Of the others, four seemed to be brothers who had been thrown out of their community for unspecified crimes, and were now looking for somewhere else to live. Only the boy, Sinbiane, appeared to be normal.
Most peculiar of all was the one who sat by himself in the gathering dark. He was a kosho. Very vaguely, she had heard something about koshos, but had never expected to see one.
Lacey had told her their leader was a chimeric ape called Pout. They had spoken of him with a sort of grumbling admiration, all except Sinbiane, who had said openly to her: "Pout is a bad creature, lady. You should go away. He holds these people under subjection with his gun."
"I have a gun," Hesper had said, patting her holster.
"The kosho's got lots of guns, though," one of the brothers had said. "Throw tubes, too."
Just then Pout himself had turned up, and she couldn't understand how even these people—like Lacey, the brothers didn't strike her as being any too bright—could allow themselves to be dominated by him. The chimera stared at her, large eyes blinking.
"You come off a spaceship?"
"Yes. '
"From another world?"
"That's right."
The thought excited Pout. She prompted the same feelings in him the girl in the village had. He allowed his eyes to rove over her, and then to fix on her breasts. He imagined the stitches of the zen gun playing with them, her body writhing. His jaw became slack.
Hesper put a hand on her hip, and nodded westward. "There are some big towers or buildings or something in that direction. I'm making for them."
"Cities. We are going there. You want to join us? First you give me that." He pointed to the scangun on her belt.
She took a step back. "Oh no you don't. That's mine."
"All right." Pout gestured to the horizon. "Off you go, then. On your own."
"Okay, I will." Hesper turned and pushed her way through the group to stalk away from the camp. She kept a wary eye on the chimera, but did not see him give a signal to one of the brothers. Before she had got very far she stopped, gasped, and whirled round, her hand on her empty gun holster.
"How did you do that?" she screeched frustratedly to the brother as he tossed the scangun to a delighted Pout. She hadn't felt anything. Only when she put her hand on the holster out of concern for what the chimera might do had she discovered the flap was unfastened and the weapon gone.
"It's our skill, lady. It's what we do." The brother, a youth in his early twenties, smiled broadly.
"Pickpockets," she murmured. She stood nonplussed, while Pout crooned and chuckled over his new acquisition. Though it was but a toy compared with the zen gun, he had always wanted one.
He knew something about how to make it work. A modern scangun fired a needle-beam of coherent light which was refracted through an oscillating prism to scan a six foot by two foot rectangle—or whatever size of target it was set for. With a scanning density of a thousand lines per inch, the effect was more or less total disintegration. Pout raised the gun and peered at the little screen that displayed whatever the muzzle was pointed at. His thumb moved a grooved wheel by the side of the screen. That was the focusing ring: when the target became unblurred and just filled the screen, you were ready to fire.
He pointed it at a twisted tree that stood on a knoll a little further off. Under his thumb, the tree shrank until its branches just brushed the edges of the screen and the picture became sharp. Pout pressed the firing stud. The brief blue ray was an odd sight: not parallel, like ordinary coherent light, but divergent because of the way it scanned.
The tree erupted momentarily and disappeared in a crackle of smoke and drifting ash.
Pout whooped for joy.
Hesper walked slowly back into the light of the campfire and stood boldly before him. "Are you going to give me my gun back?" she asked wearily.
He eyed her. "Why don't you stay with us, lady? Travel to the plain cities with us. We'll be good to you. Lacey knows how to catch animals for food. Do you know how to catch animals? You haven't got enough eating sticks to last long. Better not to be alone."
She hesitated, confused. She couldn't fathom this set-up. But, apart from the half-animal, they seemed harmless—and even Pout hadn't threatened her.
She needed to reach a town of some kind before she could get proper bearings and find out what to do next. The ape was right: it was probably better to have company, especially now she was unarmed.
"All right," she sighed, "I'll stay. But don't get any ideas, ape."
She helped gather more firewood for the night, then settled down, taking care to put a piece of ground between herself and the others—especially Pout. The repulsiveness of the creature was coming home to her, as she watched him prowl around the camp, and saw how the others cringed in his presence; all apart from the boy, that was.
Before falling asleep, she spent some while staring at the sky. This planet's sky was clear, and the stars shone fairly brightly. She thought of the battle that had taken place there, in space's vastness, and in which she had taken part. It all seemed so remote from here.
She didn't even know this planet's name, she reminded herself. What did it matter? There were so many planets. Suddenly she felt very, very tired (she had been awake about forty hours), and her eyes closed.
For Pout, too, sleep was preluded by daydreams. He thought about the girl not far away. He would like to be able to fondle such a girl, to prod with his fingers where the zen stitches prodded. And so he would, he promised himself.
His little band was growing, he told himself warmly. All thanks to the zen gun. It wasn't just what it could do to maim and kill, he realized. It was its mental ability. While he had the gun it seemed to magnify his presence; people, respected him.
His chief hold over his followers, however, was still fear. He had deliberately refrained from instilling that fear in the girl—for tonight. Pout had an instinctive understanding of the skill of dominance: first the girl had to grow used to him, to develop her own feelings for him, for or against. That way the relationship, when it came, would be binding.
That would be when he showed her that the zen gun had a facility for personalised targets. Once a target had been registered, it could be invoked any time. The target could not hide. Anywhere it was—anywhere on this planet, anyway— Pout had only to think of it and press the trigger stud. The stitch beam would go glowing out, wavering in the air, round corners, to anywhere in the world, to where that person was. He would prove it to her with one of the others, would send him half a mile away and fire while aiming in the other direction, so she could see the electric stitches bend around and find their mark.
Then he would register her and use the gun on her in the same way, would take his pleasure for a while, in making her suffer.
Then she would be his.
In the morning Hesper woke by the embers of the fire, rose and stretched. The air was slightly misty, the sun (a yellow sun, like her own at home) about twenty degrees off the horizon.
After weeks of being cooped up in the police cruiser and breathing its stale air, the freshness of the day was invigorating. She began to feel cheerful, a contrast to her mood of the night before. Lacey blew on the embers, adding dried grass and bleached wood. The fire started, and he began to cook a long-eared quadruped he had been saving for breakfast.
Pout squatted on the ground, watching the proceedings and blinking soporifically. He looked so pathetic Hesper felt she could have taken her scangun off him at any moment, but she did not try it. It had already become clear Pout was not as helpless as he looked.
The kosho did not seem to have moved a finger since she had seen him the night before. Still he sat cross-legged, spine erect, clad in all his accoutrements. The effect was weird. Curious, Hesper left the group and walked slowly towards him.
Sinbiane appeared by her side, strolling along with her. "Lady, what were you doing in space?"
She stopped, looking down at him. "Fighting a war," she said. "Escoria has rebelled against the Empire. Didn't you know?"
Wonderingly he shook his head. "So is Escoria free from the Empire now, lady?"
"No. We lost. The Simplex knows what will happen now."
"It won't make much difference here on Earth, lady."
Hesper stepped closer to the kosho and stared at him in fascination. His eyes were closed, as she presumed they had been since she arrived. The bony cast of his face was accentuated by the way his shiny black hair was swept back and tied in a bun at the back of his head. It was like looking at a statue.
But what was really striking was his collection of weapons, arranged all over the harness he wore over his simple white gown. At his waist, stretched out now along the ground, was a mortar tube which she recognised as capable of throwing a bomb a good few miles. On his back was a whole rack of rifles whose muzzles projected above the back of his head like railings (this puzzled her a little; she would have expected them to be carried stocks uppermost). She was also amused to see, half-hidden beneath the rifles, the flat shape of a curved sword scabbard.
At chest, belly and thighs he carried an armoury of smaller weapons, grenades, bombs, ammunition pouches and fletched hand-thrown darts. Hesper had never seen, even "imagined, such a warrior.
"Why does he stay like that?" she murmured to Sinbiane. "Is he asleep?"
"No, lady, he is not asleep. He has depersonalised his consciousness."
"What does that mean?"
"It is a state of perfect repose, lady, even deeper than sleep. But he is not oblivious."
"He's still aware of his surroundings, then?"
"Only as you are aware of your little toe, lady."
It was some sort of trance state, Hesper decided. "Does he stay like that all the time?" she asked.
"Whenever he does not need to act, lady. 'Between actions, timeless being.' I can do it too, but uncle says boys should stay active."
"Uncle?"
"This is my uncle. I may be a kosho one day."
"If koshos are such wonderful warriors," Hesper said bitterly, her voice rising, "why don't they fight with us against the Empire?"
"A kosho is a perfect individual, lady. He does not fight for causes. He fights because every act is a conflict with nature."
"What?" This mystical talk, especially coming from someone so young, confused and annoyed her. "Then why is he a camp follower of—that?" She jerked her thumb to indicate Pout. "Does the ape have him screwed down too?"
"He is beholden to the chimera, lad
y, that is true."
"Just what is it about that creature?"
The boy did not answer for a moment. He seemed to be hesitating over something. "Lady," he said suddenly, "was it your battle that interfered with the moon?"
"Moon? What moon?"
"We have a moon here, lady. I have lived on Earth all my life and it has always been the same size—about the size of the sun. Its phases have always been regular, too. But lately something had been going wrong. First, a few weeks ago, it shrank to only half its proper diameter. Then it started growing. The night before last it was about ten times as large as the sun; last night it was more like twenty time. It isn't following its proper cycle, either." She did recall a satellite, an unusually large one for the mass of the planet, registering on her egg's screen in the last few seconds of her approach. It had seemed disproportionately close to its primary, at that.
She hadn't seen it since landing. Presumably it was on the other side of the planet from the sun at present, only appearing at night when she had been asleep.
She frowned. The boy was talking nonsense, of course. He had either been dreaming or he didn't understand the satellite's orbit.
"No," she said slowly, "our battle didn't have anything to do with your moon. It was out among the stars."
"Then I wonder what is happening? Well, shall we have breakfast, lady?"
She accompanied him back to the fire, where Lacey gave her a piece of meat from the quadruped (which he called a rabbit). The flavour was novel to her; discovering she was ravenously hungry, she gulped it down and wished for more.
Pout himself then scattered the fire, stamping on flame and ember with his bare feet, and ordering the group to begin the day's march. In single file, Pout in the lead, they set out to the west.
Hesper glanced behind her. The kosho, who had not shared the breakfast, and to whom no one had spoken, rose from the ground, picking up a small mat which had protected his buttocks from the ground and tucking it away somewhere on his person. He walked well to the rear of the rest of the line, and shortly was joined by Sinbiane.
Bayley, Barrington J - Novel 10 Page 8
