Lion pulled himself over the top step, his flippers already altering to hands. He was gasping, blowing. It was a long trip, even for a sea lion.
The returning sea had surged up the steps and sloshed along the halls and into the rooms where Lion and his family dwelt. Lion shook his head. For a few days they must needs occupy the next level up: the inn, which was now empty.
The change to human form was not so great a change for Lion. He became aware of one last wisp of fog standing beside him.
“Well,” it said, “how’s the King?”
“Furious,” Lion said. “But after all, what can he do? I thank you for the warning.”
“I’m glad you could stop them. My curse on their crazy rebellion. We’ll all f-fade away in time, I guess, with the magic dwindling and dwindling. But not just yet, if you please!”
“War is bad for everyone,” said Lion.
• • •
• • •
From FOOTFALL
[with JERRY POURNELLE]
Bob Gleason was back in California, and we had returned to Mon Grenier. We were driving home. Bob, in the back of my car, was saying, “I think it’s time to write the Invasion novel. How soon can you do that?”
I worked it out in my head. “We’ve got a lot of outstanding contracts. Say five years.”
I heard a godawful strangling from behind me. Then, “I think I just saw my whole life pass before me!”
Hell, he could have had it years earlier.
We dug out the old outline. [Bob had looked through that and told us, “Forget the invasion. Do the giant meteoroid impact!”]
There was some nice stuff, half forgotten. I had written several scenes with aliens. This one changed enough that I miss it sorely—
Thousands of alien warriors pour out of ships that slow just enough to drop them, then accelerate back to orbit. The aliens come down on hang gliders. They’re wearing foam shoes that will collapse when they hit, so that the bones in their feet won’t.
What a Kansas farmer sees is a sky full of baby elephants wearing elevator shoes, dropping out of the sky under paper airplanes.
What he tells she Sheriff is, “I didn’t get a good look.”
We let the baby elephants think in terms of stomping an enemy. “Let’s stomp them a little and see what they do.” We gave them a surrender reflex: they roll over on their backs to surrender, and the victor puts his foot on the loser’s belly. They called their asteroid weapon the Foot. VISHNU’S FIST became FOOTFALL.
The Herdmaster’s Advisor is not even dead until halfway through the book. We took that long to put the reader in touch with the fithp. We take some pride in being able to embed a murder mystery in the larger tale. A reader should be able to solve the mystery before the Herdmaster can. It was up to the authors to help the reader understand the alien invaders to that extent, and to give him the clues he needs.
Del Rey Books doesn’t participate in auctions; they don’t believe in ’em. Fawcett won the auction for FOOTFALL. Then Del Rey bought Fawcett.
Jerry’s ambitions often exceed mine. Our intent was that FOOTFALL would cover all of Earth in present time, with characters numbering in the hundreds…as LUCIFER’S HAMMER did, but with a complex group of star-traveling aliens added too.
LUCIFER’S HAMMER had taken a year and a half. We’d promised it in a year. We thought we could do the invasion novel in a year and a half.
What stalled us was Russians.
Jerry knew the Soviets. He’d learned about them as a threat estimate; some of the work he did then is still classified. I waited for him to produce text on the USSR’s reaction to invasion by aliens.
Time dragged on. Niven’s precarious sanity slipped bit by bit. Pournelle was about to start work in a couple of weeks, every week, but first he had to do a little more research…
It’s obvious only in retrospect. Jerry knew the USSR as a threat estimate. This has nothing to do with writing about them as characters! If he’d said, “This is going to take me six months,” I might have gone off and done something else. I might even have volunteered to do it myself! I do understand aliens, after all. Then again, I’m lazy, and we’re talking about a lot of research…and he eventually got through it.
Since Jerry and I first began writing together, our tendency has been to meet to plot out the book, assign each other scenes, then go off to write them. Near the end of FOOTFALL we changed our habit. We wrote in my office, taking turns at the typewriter.
The mood became frenetic.
The more we wrote, the more we saw of scenes that needed to be written. Text in the beginning and middle needed rewriting. The end of the book receded before us like a ghost. Spring became summer…yet what we were writing was superb, it was needed, and the end was inching near.
Came the day we worked on the penultimate chapter. We planned a wrap-up-the-threads chapter to follow.
Jerry took his turn. Will the aliens honor a conditional surrender? The Threat Team dithers. The President makes his choice…
My turn, with the aliens. Surrender, or all will die! But the Herdmaster must have permission of the females…I was typing fast enough to break bones…set their feet on the Herdmaster’s chest. I jumped up. “If I don’t quit now I’ll go into Cheyne-Stokes breathing,” I said.
Jerry read it through. “I can improve this,” he said, and typed, “—30—” [The End.]
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
The Herdmaster had climbed a huge pillar plant. Like the humans themselves, in the minuscule gravity he had become a brachiator. He found the viewpoint odd, amusing. He watched.
In a forward corner of the Garden the human prisoners worked. The Herdmaster admired their agility, newly trained dirtyfeet that they were. They seemed docile enough as they planted alien seeds in alien soil. Yet the Breakers’ disturbing reports could not be ignored much longer. It was more than enough to make his head ache.
Yet here were smells to ease his mind: plants in bloom, and a melancholy whiff of funereal scent. The end of life for the Traveler Fithp was the funeral pit, and then the Garden. Twelve fithp warriors, wounded on Winterhome, had gone to the funeral pit after Digit Ship Six returned them to Message Bearer.
The Garden was in perpetual bloom. Seasons mixed here, created by differing intensities of light, warmth, moisture. The alien growths might require alterations in weather. He hoped otherwise. Winterhome would be hospitable to Garden life, if the humans actually persuaded anything to grow here.
The Herdmaster would have preferred to loll in warm mud, but Message Bearer’s mudrooms had been drained while her drive guided the Foot toward its fiery fate. He had sought rest in the Garden; and it was here that the Year Zero Fithp confronted him. In the riot of scents he had not smelled their presence. Suddenly faces were looking at him over the edges of leaf-spiral, below him on the trunk of the pillar plant.
He looked back silently, letting them know that they had disturbed his time of quiet.
Born within a few eight-days of each other in an orgy of reproduction that had not been matched before or since, the Year Zero Fithp all looked much alike: smooth of skin, long-limbed and lean. Why not? But age clusters didn’t always think so much alike. These were the inner herd that led the larger herd of dissidents.
One was different. He looked older than the rest. His skin was darkened and roughened, one leg was immobilized with braces, and there was a look. This one had seen horrors.
With the Advisor’s consent, the Herdmaster had chosen to divide the Year Zero Fithp. Half the males had gone down to Winterhome. They were dead, or alive and circling Winterhome after the natives’ counterattack. That injured one must be fresh from the wars.
The Herdmaster’s claws gripped the trunk as he faced nine fithp below him. For a moment he thought to summon warriors; then a sense of amusement came over him. Dissidents they might be, but these were not rebels. So. They sought to awe the Herdmaster, did they?
And they had brought a hero fresh from the wars. No, these were no rogues. They wanted only to increase their influence…
“You have found me,” he said mildly. “Speak.”
Still they were silent. Two of the smaller humans wandered toward the group, but were retrieved by Tashayamp. Now the humans worked more slowly. They watched, no doubt, though they must be out of earshot. What passed here might affect all the herds of Winterhome. Still it was an imposition, and the Herdmaster would have asked Tashayamp to remove them if he could have spared the attention.
Finally one spoke. “Advisor Fathisteh-tulk had said that he would gather with us. He said that he had something to tell us. He did not come. We are told that he has not been seen on the bridge in two days.”
“He has neglected his duties,” Pastempeh-keph said mildly. “He has avoided the bridge, and his mate, nor does he answer calls. I have alerted my senior officers, but no others. Is it your will that I should ask for his arrest?”
They looked at each other, undecided. One said firmly, “No, Herdmaster.” He was a massive young fi’, posed a bit ahead of the others: Rashinggith, the Defensemaster’s son.
“So you do not know where he is either?”
“We had hoped to find him through you, Herdmaster.”
“Ha. I have asked his mate. She has not seen him, yet she has a newborn to show.” The Herdmaster became serious. “There are matters to decide, and we have no Advisor. What must I do?”
They looked at each other again. “The teqthuktun—”
“Precisely.” Pastempeh-keph breathed more easily. They still worried about the Law and their religion. Not rogues, not yet. “I can take no counsel nor make any decisions without advice from the sleepers. It is the teqthuktun, the pact we made with them, and Fistarteh-thuktun insists upon it. Now I have no Advisor, and there are matters to decide. Speak. What must I do?”
“You must find another Advisor,” the wounded one said.
“Indeed.” This hardly required discussion. The Traveler fithp might continue on their predetermined path, but no new decisions could be made without an Advisor.
Fathisteh-tulk might be dead, or too badly injured to perform his duties. He might have shirked his duty, crippling the herd at a critical moment. He might have been kidnapped…and if some herd within the Traveler Herd had been pushed to such an act, it would be stripped of its status. But the Advisor would still lose his post, for arousing such anger, for being so careless, for being gone.
The Herdmaster had already decided on his successor. Still, he must be found. “You, the injured one—”
“Herdmaster, I am Eight-Squared Leader Chintithpit-mang.”
He had heard that name; but where? Later. “You must come fresh from the digit ship. Do you know anything of this? Or are you only here to add numbers?”
“I know nothing of the Advisor. What I do know—”
“Later. You, Rashinggith. If you knew where the Advisor might be, you would go there.”
His digits knotted and flexed. “I assuredly would, Herdmaster.”
“But you might not tell me. Is there a place known only to dissidents? A place where he might commune with other dissidents, or only with himself?”
“No. Herdmaster, we fear for him.”
There must be such a place, but the dissidents themselves would have searched it by now. “I too fear for Fathisteh-tulk,” the Herdmaster admitted. “I went so far as to examine records of use of the airlocks, following which I summoned a list of fithp in charge of guarding the airlocks—”
“I chance to know that no dissidents guard the airlocks,” Rashinggith said.
An interesting admission. “I was looking for more than dissidents. Did it strike any of you that what Fathisteh-tulk was doing was dangerous? Consider the position of the sleepers. In herd rank the Advisor is the only sleeper of any real authority. The sleepers could not ask his removal. Yet he consistently opposed the War for Winterhome. How many sleepers are dissidents? I know only of one: Fathisteh-tulk.”
They looked at each other, and the Herdmaster knew at once that other sleepers held dissident views. Later. “There are sleepers in charge of guarding the airlocks. The drive is more powerful than the pull of the Foot’s mass. A corpse would drop behind, but would not disintegrate. The drive flame is hot but not dense. Our telescopes have searched for traces of a corpse in our wake.” Pause. “There is none.
“Shall we consider murder, then? By dissidents seeking a martyr, or conservative sleepers avoiding future embarrassment? Or did Fathisteh-tulk learn something that some fi’ wanted hidden? Or is he alive, hiding somewhere for his own purposes? Rashinggith, what did Fathisteh-tulk plan to tell you?” The Herdmaster looked about him. “Do any of you know? Did he leave hints? Did he even have interesting questions when last you saw him?”
“We don’t know he’s dead,” Rashinggith said uneasily.
“Enough,” the Herdmaster said. “We will find him. I hope to ask him where he has been.” That was a half-truth, Fathisteh-tulk would cause minimal embarrassment by being dead. On to other matters. The Herdmaster had remembered a name.
“Chintithpit-mang, you had something to say?”
Nervous but dogged, the injured warrior got his mouth working. “The prey, the humans, they don’t know how to surrender.”
“They can be taught.”
“There was a—a burly one, bigger than most. I whipped his toy weapon from his hand and knocked him down and put my foot on his chest and he clawed at me with his bony digits until I pushed harder. I think I crushed him. Of the prisoners we brought back, only the scarlet-headed exotic would help us select human food! Even after we take their surrender they do not cooperate. Must we teach them to surrender, four billion of them, one at a time? We must abandon the target world. If we kill them all, the stink will make Winterhome like one vast funeral pit!”
Chintithpit-mang was one of six officers under Siplisteph.
Siplisteph was a sleeper; his mate had not survived frozen sleep, and he had not mated since. He had reached Winterhome as eight-cubed leader of the intelligence group. It was an important post, and Siplisteph had risen higher still due to deaths among his superiors. The Herdmaster intended to ask him to become his Advisor, subject to the approval of the females of the sleeper herd—and Fistarteh-thuktun, as keeper of the teqthuktun.
Chintithpit-mang was among those who might have Siplisteph’s post.
“Why did you seek me?” the Herdmaster demanded.
The response was unexpected: first one, then others, began a keening wail. The rest joined.
It was the sound made by lost children.
Frightening. Why do I feel the urge to join my voice to theirs?
“We no longer know who we are, Herdmaster,” Chintithpit-mang blurted. “Why are we here?”
“We bear the thuktunthp.”
“The creatures do not seek the thuktunthp. They have their own way.” Chintithpit-mang insisted.
“If they do not know the thuktunthp, how can they know they do not seek them?” Could this one be worthy of promotion? Are any? Shall I ask him to remain? No. Now is not the time to judge him, fresh from battle and still twitching, injured, and plunged suddenly into the scents of blooming Winter Flower and sleeper females in heat. “Chintithpit-mang, you need time and rest to recover from your experience. Go now. All of you, go.”
For one moment they stood. Then they filed away.
The Herdmaster remained in the Garden, trying to savor its peace.
Chintithpit-mang did not now seem a candidate for high office. Another dissident! Yet he had fought well on Winterhome; his record was exemplary. Give him a few days. Meanwhile, interview his mate. Then see if she could pull him together. He didn’t remember Shreshleemang well…though the mang family was a good line. At a Shipmaster’s rank the female must be suitable and competent.
Where was Fathisteh-tulk? Murdered or kidnapped. He had suspected the Year Zero Fithp, but that
now seemed unlikely. They were nervous, disturbed, as well they should be; but not nervous enough. They could not have hidden that from him. Who, then, had caused the Herdmaster’s Advisor to vanish? How many? Of what leaning? He might face a herd too large to fear the justice of the Traveler Herd; though the secrecy with which they had acted argued against it.
There were herds within herds within the Traveler Herd. It must have been like this on the Homeworld too, though in greater, deeper, more fantastical variety. Even here: sleepers, spaceborn, dissidents; Fistarteh-thuktun’s core of tradition-minded historians, the Breakers’ group driving themselves mad while trying to think like alien beings: the Herdmaster must balance them like a pyramid of smooth rocks in varying thrust.
• • •
A clump of cars and people was clustered around a big semi ahead. “We’re just about to Collinston,” Harry shouted. “That looks like trouble.”
He slowed, and drove the motorcycle up to the semi. A highway patrol cruiser was parked nearby, and a lieutenant of the highway patrol stood facing a knot of angry farmers and truckers. Most of them held rifles or shotguns.
“Oh, shit,” Harry muttered.
The lieutenant eyed Harry and Carlotta. Red beard, dirty clothes; middle-aged woman in designer jeans. He watched Carlotta dismount. “Yes, madam?”
“I am Carlotta Dawson. Yes, Dawson. My husband was aboard the Soviet Kosmograd. Lieutenant, I gather there is an alien here?”
“Damn straight,” one of the truck drivers shouted. “Goddam snout blew George Mathers in half!” He brandished a military rifle. “Now it’s our turn!”
“We have to take it alive,” Carlotta stated.
“Bullshit!” This one was a farmer. “I come out of Logan, lady. The goddam snouts killed my sister! They’re all over the fucking place.”