“This pest hole has gone crazy!” He was drumming with his fingers on the edge of the table. “According to our instruments we are sitting over a blowhole now. We up ship, or we are blown out!”
I did not quite realize what he meant and it was not until we had spaced that he explained tersely; the readings of planet stability under the Big Pot had suddenly flared into the danger zone, and he had feared I would not get back before he would be forced to lift. That I had squeezed in by what he considered a very narrow margin he thought luck of a fabulous kind.
But that danger was not real to me, since I had not been aware of it until afterward. The realization of my trade failure was worse. I must lay better plans or lose out as badly as I would have, had we never raised from Theba.
Akki had mentioned crab pearls—which might or might not mean that his itinerary had been planned along the same course as mine. I laid out the poor results of my zoran dealing and considered them fretfully. Akki might have done two things: he might have boastfully warned me off the planet where he was going to trade (his ship had lifted, Ryzk informed me, at once upon his return), or he might just have said that out of malice to make me change my own plans.
I wondered. Eet could tell me. But straightaway I rebelled. I was not going to depend on Eet!
Where was my next-best market? I tried to recall Vondar’s listings. There was—Sororis! And it was not from Ustle’s notes that memory came, but from my father. Sororis had been an “exit” planet for years, that is, a very far out station in which outlaws could, if they were at the end of their resources and very desperate indeed, find refuge. It had no regular service of either passenger or trade ships, though tramps of very dubious registry would put in there now and then. The refuse of the galaxy’s criminal element conjoined around the half-forgotten port and maintained themselves as best they could, or died. They were too useless for even the Guild to recruit.
However, and this was the important fact, there was a native race on Sororis, settled in the north where the off-worlders found the land too inhospitable. And they were supposed to have some formidable weapons of their own to protect themselves against raiders from the port.
The main thing was that they had a well-defined religion and god-gifts were an important part of it. To present their god with an outstanding gift was the only real means of winning status among them. Such presentations gave the donor the freedom of their city for a certain number of days.
My father had been given to telling stories, always supposedly about men he knew during his years as a Guild appraiser. I believed, however, that some concerned his own exploits as a youth. He had told of an adventure on Sororis in detail, and now I could draw upon that for a way to retrieve the Lorgal fiasco.
To the inhabitants of Sororis these chunks of zoran would be rare and strange, since they would not have seen them before. Suppose I presented the largest at the temple, then offered the rest to men who wished to make similar gifts and thus enhance their standing among their fellows? What Sororisan products might be taken in exchange I did not know. But the hero of my father’s story had come away with a greenstone unheard of elsewhere. For there was this about the Sororisans—they traded fairly.
It was so wild a chance that no one but a desperate man would think of it. But the combination of my defeat by Akki and the need for asserting my independence of Eet made me consider it. And after I had finished the caff I went to the computer in the control cabin and punched the code for Sororis, wagering with myself that if I received no answer I would accept that as a meaning there was no chance of carrying through such a wild gamble.
Ryzk watched me speculatively as I waited for the computer’s answer. And when, in spite of my half-hopes, a series of numbers did appear on the small screen, he read them aloud:
“Sector 5, VI—Norroute 11—Where in the name of Asta-Ivista is that? Or what?”
I was committed now. “That is where we are going.” I wondered if he had heard of it. “Sororis.”
VI
“Where are your beam lasers and protect screens?” Ryzk asked in the voice, I decided, one used for addressing someone whose mental balance was in doubt. He even glanced at the control board, as if expecting to see such armaments represented there. And so convincing was his question that I found myself echoing that glance—which might not have been so fruitless had the ship still carried what scars proclaimed she once had.
“If you don’t have those,” he continued, his logic an irritation, “you might just as well blow her tubes and end us all right here without wasting the energy to take us to Sororis—if you do know what awaits any ship crazy enough to planet there. It’s a rock prison and those dumped on it will storm any ship for a way to lift off again. To set down at whatever port they do have is simply inviting take-over.”
“We are not going in—that is, the ship is not.” At least I had planned that far ahead, drawing on my father’s very detailed account of how his “friend” had made that single visit to the planet’s surface. “There is the LB. It can be fitted with a return mechanism if only one is to use it.”
Ryzk looked at me. For a very long moment he did not answer, and when he did, it was obliquely.
“Even a parking orbit there would be risky. They may have a converted flitter able to try a ship raid. And who is going down and why?”
“I am—to Sornuff—” I gave the native city the best pronunciation I could, though its real twist of consonants and vowels was beyond the powers of the human tongue and larynx to produce. The Sororisans were humanoid, but they were not of Terran colony stock, not even mutated colony stock.
“The temple treasures!” His instant realization of what I had in mind told me that his Free Trader’s knowledge of the planet’s people was more than just surface.
“It has been done,” I told him, though I was aware that I was depending perhaps too much on my father’s story.
“An orbit park for Sornuff,” Ryzk continued, almost as if thinking aloud, “could be polar, and so leave us well away from the entrance route for anything setting down at the real port. As for the LB, yes, there can be lift-off modifications. Only”—he shrugged—“that’s a job you don’t often tackle in space.”
“You can do it?” I demanded. I would admit frankly that I was no mech-tech and such adjustments were beyond either my knowledge or my skill. If Ryzk could not provide the knowledge, then we would have to risk some other and far more dangerous way to gain Sornuff.
“I’ll take a look—” He was almost grudging.
But that was all I wanted for now. Free Traders by the very nature of their lives were adept in more fields than the usual spacer. While the fleet men were almost rigorously compartmented as to their skills, the men of the irregular ships had to be able to take over some other’s duties when need arose.
The LB must have been periodically overhauled or it would not have had the certification seal on its lock. But it still dated to the original fitting of the ship, and so must have been intended to carry at least five passengers. Thus we were favored in so much room. And Ryzk, dismantling the control board with the ease of one well used to such problems, grunted that it was in better shape for conversion than he had supposed.
It suddenly occurred to me that, as on Lorgal, Eet had made no suggestions or comments. And that started a small nagging worry in my mind, gave me a twinge of foreboding. Had Eet read in my mind my decision for independence? If so, had he some measure of foreknowledge? For never yet had I been able to discover the limit of his esper powers. Whenever I thought I knew, he produced something new, as he had on Theba. So, possessing foreknowledge, was he now preparing to allow me to run into difficulty from which he alone could extricate us, thus proving for once and for all that our association was less a partnership than one of master and servant, with Eet very much in the master’s seat? He had closed his mind, offering no comments or suggestions. Nor did he now ever accompany us to the lock where Ryzk and I—I as the unhandy assistant??
?worked to give us possible entry to a hostile world where I had a thin chance of winning a gamble. I began to suspect he was playing a devious game, which made me more stubborn-set than ever to prove I could plan and carry through a coup which did not depend upon his powers.
On the other hand, I was willing enough to use what I had learned from Eet, even though it now irked me to admit I owed it to him. The hallucinatory disguise was so apt a tool that I systematically worked at the exercise of mind and will which produced the temporary changes. I found that by regular effort I could hold a minor alteration such as the scar I had worked so hard to produce as long as I pleased. But complete change, a totally new face for instance, came less easily. And I must labor doggedly even to produce the slurring of line which would pass me through a crowd unnoticed for a short space. It was Eet’s added force which had held that before, and I despaired of ever having enough power to do it myself.
Practice, Eet had said, was the base of any advance I could make, and practice I had time for, in the privacy of my own cabin, with a mirror set up on a shelf to be my guide in success or failure.
At the back of my mind was always the hope that so disguised I might slip through Guild watch at any civilized port. Sororis might be free of their men, but if I won out with a precious cargo, I would have to reach one of the inner planets and there sell my spoil. Stones of unknown value were only offered at auction before the big merchants. Peddled elsewhere, they were suspect and could be confiscated after any informer (who got a percentage of the final sale) turned in a tip. It did not matter if they had been honestly enough acquired on some heretofore unmarked world; auction tax had not been paid on them and that made them contraband.
So I spent our voyage time both acting as an extra pair of inept hands for Ryzk and staring into a mirror trying to reflect there a face which was not that I had seen all my life.
We came out of hyper in the Sororis system with promptitude, which again testified to Ryzk’s ability, leading me to wonder what had grounded him in the scum of the Off-port. There were three planets, two, dead worlds, balls of cracked rock with no atmosphere, close enough to the sun to fuse any ship finning down on them like a pot to fry its crew.
On the other hand, Sororis was a frozen world, or largely so, with only a belt of livable land, by the standards of my species, about its middle. It was covered by glaciers north and south of that, save where there were narrow fingers of open land running into that ice cover. In one of these Sornuff was supposed to exist, well away from the outcast settlement about the port.
Ryzk, whom I left at the controls, set up his hold orbit to the north while I packed into the LB what I judged I would need for my visit to the ice-bound city. Co-ordinates would be fed to the director, and that, too, was Ryzk’s concern. On such automatic devices would depend my safe arrival not too far from Sornuff and my eventual return to the ship, the latter being even less sure than the former.
If Ryzk’s fears were realized and a high-altitude conditioned flitter from the port raised with a pilot skillful or reckless enough to attempt a take-over of the Wendwind, it might be that the ship would be forced out of orbit in some evasive maneuvering during my absence. If so, I had a warning which would keep me planetside until the ship was back on a course the LB was programmed to intercept.
I checked all my gear with double care, as if I had not already checked it at least a dozen times while we were in hyper. I had a small pack containing special rations, if the local food was not to be assimilated, a translator, a mike call Ryzk would pick up if he were safely in orbit, and, of course, the stones from Lorgal. There was no weapon, not even a stunner. I could not have smuggled one on board at Theba. I could only depend upon my knowledge of personal defense until I was able to outfit myself with whatever local weapons were available.
Ryzk’s voice rasped over the cabin com to say that all was clear and I picked up the pack. Eet was stretched on the bunk, apparently asleep as he had been every time I had come in recently. Was he sulking, or simply indifferent to my actions now? That small germ of worry his unexpected reaction to my bid for independence had planted in me was fast growing into a full-sized doubt of myself—one I dared not allow if I were to face the tests of my resourcefulness below.
Yet I hesitated just to walk out and leave him. Our growing rift hurt in an obscure way, and I had to hold stubbornly to my purpose to keep from surrender. Now I weakened to the degree that I aimed a thought at him.
“I am going—” That was weakly obvious and I was ashamed I had done it.
Eet opened his eyes calmly. “Good fortune.” He stretched out his head as if savoring a comfort he was not in the least desirous of leaving. “Use your hind eyes as well as the fore.” He closed his own and snapped our linkage.
“Hind eyes as well as fore” made little sense, but I chewed angrily upon it as I went to the LB, setting the door seals behind me. As I lay down in the hammock I gave the eject signal to Ryzk, and nearly blacked out when the force of my partition from the ship hit.
Since I was set on automatics, using in part the LB’s built-in function to seek the nearest planet when disaster struck the ship, I had nothing to do but lie and try to plan for all eventualities. There was an oddly naked feel to traveling without Eet, we had been in company for so long. And I found that my rebellion did not quite blank out that sense of loss.
Still, there was an exultation born of my reckless throwing over of all prudent warnings, trying a wholly new and dangerous venture of my own. This, too, part of me warned against. But I was not to have very long to think about anything. For the cushioning for landing came on and I knew I had made the jump to planet-side and was about to be faced by situations which would demand every bit of my attention.
The LB had set down, I discovered, in the narrow end of one of those claw-shaped valleys which cut into the ice. Perhaps the glacial covering of Sororis was now receding and these were the first signs of thaw. There was water running swiftly and steadily from the very point of the earth claw, forming a good-sized stream by the time it passed the LB. But the air was so chill that its freezing breath was a blow against the few exposed portions of my face. I snapped down the visor of my helmet as I set the LB hatch on persona lock and, taking up my pack, crunched the ice-packed sand under my space boots.
If Ryzk’s reckoning had been successful I had only to go down this valley to where it joined a hand-shaped wedge from which other narrow valleys stretched away to the north and I would be in sighting distance of the walls of Sornuff. When I reached that point I must depend upon my father’s tale for guidance. And now I realized he had gone into exhaustive detail in describing the country, almost as if he were trying to impress it upon my memory for some reason—though at the time it had not seemed so. But then I had listened eagerly to all his stories, while my foster brother and sister had apparently been bored and restless.
Between me and the city wall was a shrine of the ice spirit Zeeta. While she was not the principal deity of the Sororisans, she had a sizable following, and she had acted for the hero of my father’s story as an intermediary with the priests of the major temples in the city. I say “she” for there was a living woman—or priestess—in that icy fane who was deemed to be the earth-bound part of the ice spirit, and was treated as a supernatural being, even differing in body from her followers.
I came to the join of “claw” and “hand” and saw indeed the walls of the city—and not too far away, the shrine of Zeeta.
My landing had been made just a little after dawn, and only now were thin beams of the hardly warm sun reaching to raise glints from the menace of the tall ice wall at my back. There was no sign of any life about the shrine and I wondered, with apprehension, if Zeeta had been, during the years since that other visitor was here, withdrawn, forsaken by those who had petitioned her here.
My worries as to that were quickly over as I came closer to the building of stone, glazed over with glistening ice. It was in the form of a cone, the tip
of which had been sliced off, and it was perhaps the size of the Wendwind. Outside, a series of tables which were merely slabs of hewn ice as thick as my arm mounted on sturdy pillars of the same frozen substance encircled the whole truncated tower. On each of these were embedded the offerings of Zeeta’s worshipers, some of them now so encased in layers of ice that they were only dark shadows, others lying on the surface with but a very thin coat of moisture solidifying over them.
Food, furs, some stalks of vegetable stuff black-blasted by frost lay there. It would seem that Zeeta never took from these supplies, only left them to become part of the growing ice blocks on which they rested.
I walked between two of these chill tables to approach the single break in the rounded wall of the shrine, a door open to the wind and cold. But I was heartened to see further proof of my father’s story, a gong suspended by that portal. And I boldly raised my fist to strike it with the back of my gloved hand as lightly as I could—though the booming note which answered my tap seemed to me to reach and echo through the glacier behind.
My translator was fastened to my throat and I had rehearsed what I would say—though the story had not supplied me with any ceremonial greeting and I would have to improvise.
The echoes of the gong continued past the time I thought they would die. And when no one came to answer, I hesitated, uncertain. The fairly fresh offerings spelled occupancy of the shrine, but perhaps that was not so, and Zeeta, or her chosen counterpart, was not in residence.
I had almost made up my mind to go on when there was a flicker of movement within the dark oblong of the door. That movement became a shape which faced me.