Postmarked the Stars sq-4

by Andre Norton

  Just as the lake was green, a solid opaque green, so was the ice of that creeping wall blue—very, very blue. Yet its rough surface rose here and there in peaks that were frost-white, as if the mass had traveled in waves that had solidified.

  The color burst on them and then the quiet. Even when in hyper, there had been vibration in the fabric of the ship, a low purr to which they had long been accustomed and which, in its way, was reassuring to spacemen. Here, save for the noise of that breaking ice, was no sound at all. No wind blew, and Dane, looking to the ice across the water, was glad they did not have to face any blast carried across its frigid surface.

  Their landing on top of the plateau was far too open. With any rise of wind they could well freeze unless they stayed in the LB, and that craft was far too noticeable from the air. While Jellico had given them no explicit orders to keep under cover, the fact that he had landed them so was a warning to use common sense and draw no attention to themselves.

  They walked back from the lakeside to see what might lie to the south. There was an abrupt drop and then a more gradual slope, covered with dead grass tangles, before the rise of dark brush gave way to trees. Unlike the grass, which had died in the cold, the brush and trees were both thickly leaved, but that vegetation was very dark. Dane could not, from this distance, name it blue, green, gray, or a mixture of all three.

  “Can we take her down?” he asked.

  Rip looked back at the LB and then to the cliff edge where they stood.

  “She’s no flitter. But there is some raise power, meant to move her from a dangerous landing. I think it might be enough. What about it, Ali?”

  Kamil shrugged. “You can try anything—once,” was his unenthusiastic reply. “But the more you lighten her, the better. You lift; we’ll see about finding a landing down there.”

  The cliff face was rough enough to provide them with hand and toe holds. Once he had swung over to join Ali in that descent, Dane discovered that it was far less cold. Perhaps the bulk of the plateau kept some of the icy emanation of the glacier from this side—which was another small point in their favor, since he was sure that the brachs could not survive long in the cold, coming as they did from the much warmer Xecho.

  They reached the foot of the cliff and continued on toward the brush, seeking for an opening in the growth into which Rip might be able, with a great deal of luck besides his skill, to maneuver the LB. Dane thought the brush impenetrable directly ahead. He was close enough now to see that the leaves were a very dark blue-green, the colors mottled with sometimes one, sometimes the other, predominant. They were a thick, fleshy growth, marked by patches of gray hair, which also fringed their edges.

  Not trying to push into these thickets, Ali turned left, Dane right. Rip waited on the cliff top for a signal as the LB was no hover craft to be held off ground.

  The silence continued to grow more menacing as far as Dane was concerned. They had had little time for briefing on the Queen, and the instruction tapes about Trewsworld she had carried had naturally, for their purposes, dealt with the port and settlements they might visit in carrying out their duties. There had been little or no information about this wilderness.

  But surely life could not be limited to vegetation—yet there were no birds, no flying things, no animals to be sighted. Perhaps the landing of the LB had driven many to cover. Yet he kept hoping to see a single track, some evidence that they were not in a deserted world.

  The sound that did break that increasingly ominous silence was a whistle from Ali. He spun around to see Kamil waving to Rip, who disappeared then from sight. Dane did not at once retrace his way. The need to make sure that there was some life here pushed him on a short distance.

  What he did find was a bare, black section of ground, unmistakably once the site of a fire. Stones had been set in a rough circle, and in the midst of that lay charred lengths of nearly consumed wood. Sand had been blown across the stones, so that it was plain it had been some time since this campsite had been used. Surveyors from some holding? An exploring party? There might even be a chance that, as on too many frontier worlds, there was an outlaw element here that had taken to the wilderness, though the accounts they had of Trewsworld named it a placid, hard-working, and law-abiding planet.

  Dane went a little beyond the campfire and came across unmistakable evidence that the vegetation had been hacked away to clear passage for something larger than a party traveling on foot. In another bare spot that must have been soft clay and was now frozen into a sharp ridged rut, he saw the track of what could only be a crawler. The gashed growth and crushed tracks led on into the shade of the trees.

  If they did need a road later on, they might use that track. But for now—

  He heard the moan of displaced air and turned in time to see the LB slide from the cliff top and aim in Ali’s direction. Not for the first time he admired Rip’s skill as a pilot.

  They could not hide the marks of their own landing, for the LB smashed a passage into the brush, stopping only when it nosed into the beginnings of the forest. But the growth seemed to possess unusual elasticity, and where it had not been actually broken off, it began to rise slowly and cloak a little of that backtrail.

  Why Dane continued to think of some danger in their being seen, he could not explain, save that this whole affair was so bizarre and in a way menacing. And he knew that the captain thought they needed time on their side.

  They did not disturb the brach nest-cage. But Ali suited up and, moving ponderously in that shielded clothing, took the box, to trudge on into the woods. When he came back later, he taped directions as to its burial spot. They could not be sure even now that there was no leakage from the outer shell so hurriedly made in the Queen’s engineering repair cabin and that the dire influence of what was inside could not spread to the surrounding territory.

  “By rights we should have spaced it!” Rip declared as he brought out E-ration tubes and they sat, with their backs to the LB, sucking the contents.

  “Space it and you have no chance to pick it up again,” Ali returned. “After the captain reports in, there may be a lot of big brains wanting to beam in on it.”

  “There’re the brachs.” Dane had been only half listening to them, thinking along another path. “If they have degenerated, well, what’s the answer? Are we bound to use the box, or something like it, to return them to an intelligent race? There’s the code against interference—how would it work in such a case?”

  “Nice legal point.” Ali squeezed the last mouthful from his tube and rolled the now flaccid container into a small ball. “If you have a station on a planet marked no I life and then you discover you can produce native I life there, thus losing your contract, are you required to do just that?”

  “You mean Combine might fight any upgrading?” Dane asked. “Is Xecho worth a beam-out with the Council?”

  “Xecho,” Rip answered, “is a crossroads, a way station. In itself it is not important except for its port. So if the Combine were assured they could keep that, they might not fight upgrading. But it would be chancy. Brachs have been considered harmless, but these have been hostile—”

  “Suppose you suddenly woke up to the fact you were a prisoner of an alien race and you had your wife to defend and children—” Ali asked. “What would you do?”

  “Just what the brach did,” Dane agreed. “So it’s up to us, the three of us now, to make contact with the brachs and induce them to see we are friends.”

  “That we may be able to do. What I don’t like is that cargo of embryos,” Ali observed. “I think we had better get them out of the ship. They’re spoiled now for all purposes. And there’s this—the brach gave birth ahead of time. Suppose the radiation works the same way on the embryos, speeds up gestation? Stotz wasn’t able to rig any freeze unit to deter that.”

  “We don’t decant them,” Dane replied. “If you do, in this cold they’d be finished.” But it was only token resistance on his part. With the engineer apprentice, he
felt the need for getting those boxes and their nightmare cargo out of the LB. The sooner they were sure that what lay within would never develop further, the better.

  It was a wearying business, pulling the boxes out the hatch, tramping among the trees to stack them between two, piling stones around them. The ground here was ankle deep in powdery skeletons of the pulpy leaves, so these must fall at some time. They dug into the dust, using it with the stones to cover the boxes lest some native life try to investigate them, though what manner of tooth, fang, or claw could break them open, Dane had no idea.

  The dark had come by the time they had finished, and, tired, they dragged themselves wearily back to the LB, longing for rest in the hammocks. But Dane went first to the brach cage, lifting the lid and pulling aside some of the padding. There was a heaving, and something rose almost under his hand.

  A head poked out to regard him with unblinking eyes, by its size one of the kits. However, this was no helpless youngling. He could not mistake the intelligence in that steady gaze, and the fantastic growth rate of the creature astounded him. It was half, maybe two-thirds as big as one of its parents, and might have been a year or more older by brach development. Though the time in hyper followed a different rate than that of planet time, there was nothing to explain this but the effects of radiation.

  He was so startled that he was not ready for the next move of the young brach. Showing reaction to their confrontation, the small creature threw itself at the nearest side of the cage, hooked both front paws on the edge, and heaved up with a speed Dane had not seen before—save when the male had gotten out of the cage the second time in the ship.

  “Rip—the hatch!”

  Shannon jerked the door shut just in time, almost catching the long nose of the infant brach in the crack. Before he could stoop to lay a hand on the escapee, the animal turned and scuttled away, leaping to the nearest hammock, where it settled down, watching them warily, its lip wrinkling back under the horn to show teeth already well budded.

  Dane slammed the lid back on the cage just in time, for three more heads had arisen from the padding and other forepaws were reaching for the edge of their prison.

  He advanced to the cub in the hammock. “Come on—I won’t hurt you. Come on—” he tried to keep his voice low, coaxing, reassuring it as much as he could.

  It uttered a high-pitched chittering and tried to horn his hand. But Ali had slipped up behind, using the stuff of the hammock to net it, though he had a struggle on his hands, for the captured one kicked furiously, voicing screeches of mingled fear and rage, which were echoed loudly from the crate. In the end it took all three men to get the kit back with its fellows, and Dane was bitten during that process.

  “They have to be fed,” he said as he nursed his hand. “And we can’t put their food in there until we take out some of the packing—”

  “Explain it to them then, nice and slow,” Ali suggested. “But I don’t think—”

  “All right, I will.” Dane interrupted him. Just how intelligent the brachs now were was anyone’s guess. He was no specialist in wildlife, but he could not let them go any longer without food or water, and it was plain that if he opened the cage again, he would have a struggle.

  He wrapped a plasta strip about his hand to cover the bite and brought out the container of water and the bag into which Mura had packed a supply of brach food. Pouring the water into a shallow bowl, he set it on the deck of the LB, then opened the bag, shaking out into another dish a little of the mixture inside—dried insects, shellfish, and some slightly withered proten leaves—so that they could both see and smell it.

  All four heads turned in his direction, and they watched him carefully. All he could do now was to try primitive trade procedures. He touched the water bowl and the heap of mixed food with one hand, then pushed it a little toward the cage.

  “Is the hatch closed?” he asked without turning his eyes from the brachs, who met him stare for stare. “Dogged down,” Rip assured him.

  “All right. Get back, out of their line of sight if you can.”

  “How? By melting through the walls?” Ali wanted to know. But Dane heard the click of space boots on the deck and knew that they were moving as well as they could in that tightly confined space.

  “You’re not going to let them out?” Ali demanded a moment later.

  “If they are going to eat, I have to. But they ought to be hungry enough to want to get to this more than anything else.”

  He rose slowly to his knees from squatting on his heels, found the latch of the cover he had just slammed down, and shot it open, moving slowly and with as little noise as he could.

  Dane fully expected all four to shoot out the minute the crack was wide enough, with the same speed the kit had shown earlier. But they did not. Still moving with care, he laid the lid all the way back and then inched away himself.

  Their regard of him continued for a long moment. Then the kit that had been returned there with such effort made a move. But an adult paw swung, landing on the young nose slightly above horn tip, bringing an indignant squeal of protest. It was the male alone who drew himself up and out of the thick padding. He dropped down beside the food and touched nose to it and to the water pan. Then looking at his family, he made a small muttering sound.

  The two kits scrambled over with speed, but the female moved more slowly, and the male returned and balanced on the edge of the cage, cluttering to her encouragingly. Now and then he turned his long head to look at Dane and the other two who had backed away as far as they could.

  Neither kit had waited for the parents. Both were stuffing eagerly from the food dish, pausing only now and again to lap water, though one liked to put a forepaw into the bowl and lick the moisture from its pads.

  Pads? Dane dared not move closer, but he thought that the shape of forepaws for both kits differed from those of the adults—more handlike somehow. When the male had coaxed the female over the edge and to the dishes, he gave several low growls. And the kits, still chewing, one squealing resentfully, backed away so that the male could push his mate forward, standing guard while she—at first languidly and then with a show of greater interest—fed and drank. It was not until she turned away of her own desire that he finished up what remained.

  Now what, wondered Dane. They would have to get them back in the cage, though that would probably be a struggle. Just how intelligent were they? And if intelligent, how alien were their thought processes to those of his own species? Intelligence did not always mean ability to communicate.

  He would like their cooperation if he could possibly gain it. To use them as animals might only make them ever ready to escape and force the men to be constantly on guard.

  Now he tried to echo the small clucking noise the male had used to urge his mate out of the cage. He was successful in that the heads of all four brachs turned in his direction, and he saw that he did have their attention, but there was a tenseness about them that suggested they were ready for instant resistance. Still clucking, Dane moved, careful not to advance toward them. Facing the four, he edged along the wall of the LB, pushing aside the hammocks until he was on the opposite side of the cage from the brachs.

  He raised the lid. Instantly all cowered closer to the deck, the male rumbling deep in his throat, the female standing before the two kits, who in turn chittered.

  Dane stooped and felt along the edge of the lid. The cage had been improvised, and he hoped not too well. He held the screen up as a barrier between him and the brachs as he worked to loosen the fastenings.

  For a space the male continued to rumble. Then when Dane did nothing but work at the lid, he raised a little, manifestly wanting to see what the man was doing. A long moment more, and he jumped to the top of the box, edging along its rim until his head with its useful horn nudged against Dane’s fingers. The man jerked back in surprise, and straightway the horn fitted under the fastening and pried away until the hinge was loose and off. Then the brach swayed along the rim and follo
wed through with the other. Dane lifted the cover away and stood back, uncertain as yet as to whether this gesture could be understood, though the brach’s aid with the fastening was promising.

  The male brach continued to teeter on the rim of the cage, looking from Dane to the lid, now resting against the cabin wall. Dane dared to move, sidling around the cage, still leaving what he trusted would be a reassuring distance between him and the brachs. Then he stooped and pulled at the padding, pulling it out in chunks, until he left only enough to form what he hoped would be acceptable bedding. The brach balanced, still watching.

  Then the female brach moved, pulling up and over into the cage. She reached with forepaws and teeth to catch the last puff of padding Dane had loosened, drawing it determinedly out of his grasp and thumping it down with force on the floor of the cage. She called to the kits, who obeyed her, to Dane’s relief. And lastly the male brach jumped down to curl up with his family. Dane stepped away.

  “Does that mean that they are willing to stay if they aren’t shut in?” Rip wondered.

  “We can hope so. But we’ll have to keep the hatch locked. It is too cold out there.” Dane pushed the extra padding along the floor. Suddenly he was so tired that he felt he could not make another effort, no matter how needful, as if his struggle to communicate with the brach had been in some way as harrowing an ordeal as the one on Xecho. He wanted peace and quiet and sleep, and he only hoped that was what they could depend upon—with no more complications for a while.

  6.MONSTER FROM THE PAST

  “Rise and orbit!”

  Dane was jarred out of sleep, his hammock oscillating from a hearty push Rip must have delivered, for Shannon still had a hand raised as if to shove again if his first assault was not effective. Dane sat up groggily. For a second or two he was not oriented. This was not his cabin on the Queen.