Then there was wafted through the moist air that hung under the larger trees such a putrid stench that the odor alone halted her mad flight. She eased back on her heels and sent a short mind call for Zass.
Deep within her mind something stirred. This was no longer the Elder One awakening—she was the Elder One—but that fragment of other memory was not hers by right. She gained a fleeting mind picture of what? Not a reptile, for it had no marked head, only a round pulpiness of wriggling grayish body. Then it raised one end of that body and she saw an opening, a dark red maw surrounded by two circles of crushing teeth.
“Wuul!” Not her own memory—that other’s wuul! She snatched at what that other knew concerning the loathsome crawler.
Killer—with no mind to be touched, to command, although those who had built the ruins behind were long gone, this creature of their own world was free and coursed the mangled planet left to it.
Panting, Simsa set her back to the nearest of the tree-sized plants, readied the rod. The smell was choking in its nauseating heaviness. She retched in spite of her fight for control.
“Wuul!” Frantically, she tried to gain more from those two who had accompanied her to this outpost—the Elder One, that far-faded remnant of the exiled flyer. All she received in return was the wariness of one, the stubborn desire to fight of the other.
She purposely tried to put the hum of the flitter out of her hearing and settle upon the here and now. The bushes were rent as a tree fell to her right. Small things skittered and ran blindly, most of them making for other trees. There was a sullen crunching as the tree that had been downed thrashed from side to side. Its root end was being furiously and thoroughly shaken.
Simsa slipped back, putting the bole of the growth under which she sheltered between her and the thing. Then she turned and ran back the way she had come, branches lashing at her, blood welling from cuts across her arms and legs. There came the crash of another tree just as she reached the end of the vegetation that lapped about the bottom ledge. She threw herself out and forward on the stone and scrambled somehow onto the next higher.
That blot in the haze hung just about her now, pulsating. Another tree went down—she gasped and made it up a third ledge. Of Zass there was no sign and she hoped that the zorsal would have intelligence enough to keep off from both the flyer and her own position.
Once before she had seen Zass and her two sons fight and kill a monstrous thing out of the wilderness. But that was on another planet and the thing was not a wuul. The stench of the creature preceded it as another tree, this time on the very edge of the opening where lay the bottom ledge, crashed.
Wuuls could eat anything, even rock that bore such lichens as she had seen before the other entrance to the ruins. But all would infinitely prefer meat—and she was meat!
She thought of the ruins, of that maze of hallways. No, to be trapped in there by a wrong turn or choice—that she dared not chance. Not in haste now, but as one making a last stand against impossible odds, Simsa stood ready. She held the rod tightly—it was her last hope. Yet both the Elder One who had carried this and the lost flyer feared the wuul.
Into the open pushed a mass of gray, unwholesome flesh, heaving as the jaws ground along the tree it had brought down. It had no eyes—
No, meat it hunted by heat, the other part of her memory supplied. There was no way she could shut off that kind of body radiation which was drawing the thing. She was a large section of meat raising in it a stronger call. The pulp of vegetation leaking down it, the thing raised the blind end that faced her. The roll of the jaws never stopped, though now they spat forth green sludge which had filled its mouth, preparing for the far more attractive prey ahead.
As it reared part of its forelength from the ground, the end weaving back and forth, Simsa could guess that it was near the length of four or five of her own kind, monstrous as the things that bedded in the sand river.
The things that bedded in the sand river?
No! Hadn’t her building of hallucinations failed drastically once with Thorn even after she had given her full stretch to their weaving? This thing had no eyes. It sensed by other means, although it seemed now to be in no hurry, as if it savored her disgust and strictly controlled fear as another part of the feast.
The things that bedded in the river—
Simsa ran a tongue across the dryness of her lips. That would not leave her mind! She could not be sure whether it was the last stupid thought of the Simsa who had been—or a part of the new Simsa who was.
The things that bedded in the river! But she must withdraw, put aside thought and fear of the wuul, if she would try this. And that might condemn her from the start.
Nevertheless—the people of the Elder One, her people if she believed that she was of a freak birth that brought into being one of the true Forerunners. If all Thorn had said was the truth—if that were so—and if she had passed the initiation by the pool, then—
Simsa deliberately closed her eyes to the weaving forepart of the wuul, to build in her mind the largest, the most active of those things that had threatened her from the fissures of the rocky plain or had crawled from the river. Its leprous yellow hide, so swollen of belly until it seemed all stomach and guts with only a vestige beyond, save for those sucker-pocked arms—many of them—reaching out.
“Come,” she demanded, putting into the order all the strength she could summon. If the fissure thing was as well-protected as Thorn—if she failed—
Something stirred. She touched and clung with her thought, prodded and pricked. It was not too far away! Perhaps there were fissures here as well as on the plain, having each their inhabitants.
“Come!” This time she reinforced her mental order with a shouted word.
Along the side of the slope, away from the ledges, there was a crumbling of earth. Lumps fell outward, there was a trickle of running sand which edged out and down.
Why did the wuul hold off its attack? She wondered for an instant or two, then realized that she must concentrate instead on that which she called.
More and more of the earth was slipping downward. Then, as if an inner dam had given way, a whole cascade of the running sand washed aside two lumps of earth near as large as her own body. From that hole which had hidden there waved the end of a tentacle.
Shock struck Simsa. Somehow she had not believed entirely, she had expected failure in one small part of her. Now her will soared like the battle cry of fresh troops sent in to make or mar the victory.
“Come!”
She waved the rod in a wide gesture as if she would clear the way for the creature. The bubbling, flowing sand was now a torrent. Tumbling rather than swimming in it came that which she had called. Big—the biggest she had seen.
It passed the ledge on which she stood, reached, with the flowing of sand, the small level space between the last step and the beginning of the vegetation. And either through some motion of its own or because it had been carried by the sand and strove now to fight its way loose, it crawled forth on the ground, hunching its fat bag of a body together, sending forth reaching arms.
The wuul moved at last, a slow, relentless descent of its head, the mouth extending open to the farthest extent, ready to engulf the sand-thing. Tentacles tossed, slapped across and around the pulpy gray body. There was no sound aloud, but the wuul projected a fury, a pain. The wuul was gone!
On the flattened vegetation the sand creature sprawled. Simsa could also sense its vast surprise and rage. There were the trees downed by its opponent. On the air still lingered the reek of the wuul—only it was gone as one might snuff out the flame of a lamp!
Then she knew!
Trick—someone in that hovering flyer had worked this trick, one as intricate in its way as the false memory she had so carefully built for Thorn. Something (she still believed in the expertise of these makers of machines) had been in her head!
Simsa snarled as might any cornered animal. In her head! Someone had learned the first fear of
the Forerunners and had turned that thread of memory against her—to hunt her into the open where she would be easy prey. They must have tested her in turn—for the wuul had waited, they had waited to see what she could command against their threat. And easily had she supplied them with that answer. She should have been aware that she was being fought with weapons close to her own, laughed at their wuul and kept in hiding.
A tentacle caught the edge below her. She doubted if she could send back this threat of her own, for it was real and its hunger was not a set part of any trap. As the wuul had seemed to do, it must have sensed or smelled her, for it was showing a surprising burst of speed, using its tentacles to draw itself up toward her, having reversed or perhaps never started the charge toward the wuul.
Raising the rod, Simsa felt more sure of herself. At least she had met this terror before and won past it. But as she strove to empower the rod, she realized that, once again, there was an end to the force she could summon to activate it. Her course of action since she had entered the ruins might have made the past clearer, but it also showed that the Forerunners—the Elder Ones—had not been invincible.
First, with all the force she could bring to bear, and then with mounting fear, the girl tried to confront the sand creature. There was no crackling lash of fire from the twin crescents—only a small glow. When she attempted to use her will, the thing seemed impervious to any mental contact. Although it had come to her call, it was too alien or perhaps even too far down in the scale of fire—or on another wave of contact—for her to reach it.
The puzzle of that she had no time to solve. She retreated to another ledge up as the thing drew itself along the rock surfaces below. Then, bursting into her mind like a thrust of spacer energy, came her name!
That sudden hailing unnerved her for an instant, almost too long, for a tentacle aimed to the farthest extent the creature could reach scraped just before her toes, and she scrambled back.
“Simsa—up—quick—”
Thorn? No, that had not been the spaceman. There was no clear picture in her mind, and still the communication was sharper, stronger than the young off-worlder had ever used.
This was someone who trained in the same methods she had so painfully learned from the Elder One at the beginning.
So forceful was that order that she turned and took the last two of the ledge steps, returning to the forefront of the ruins, at the swiftest pace she could muster. As she wheeled, for she had no intention of being driven back into the maze of the ruin’s corridors with a sand dweller at her heels, there struck straight down from that reddish spot in the sky, which marked the flitter, a spear of light such as she had seen enough of in the spacers’ records to recognize. It was a weapon much like her rod, yet not powered by will and concentration of personal energy but by units of captive force upon which the people of the star fleets depend.
It struck full upon the sand-thing, which writhed as smoke, black and evil-smelling, rose from it. The thing lost its hold on the ledge to which it had just pulled and fell back, its tentacles waving vainly, striving to bring its fall to an end. It crashed at last into the sand flow which had formed a shallow pool, puddling just at the foot of the ledges. There it lay, still heaving a little, only half within the flood.
Now! Simsa had no desire to stay for Thorn or this other and more forceful personage to land, if landing was what they intended. The ruins offered her a way out. The wuul—
She stopped within the overhang of the doorway. That brain—that stranger—had driven her, as a man drives fleexe does out of the pasture, out of the trees. What was to prevent him or her from driving again? Wuul in the open was one thing, but wuul underground—or in narrow hallways—hallucinatory or not, was something she could not bring herself to face.
16
Simsa placed her back against the stone wall of a square-cut pillar that sided the entrance to the ruins. She forced her breathing to slow, brought under uneasy control fear and anger. There had been too much heaped upon her. The experience in the initiation hall, her flight from the flitter overhead, and the supreme effort she had made to produce the sand dweller had weakened her. She need only look at the barely lit points of her moon rod to tell her how little she had in her to withstand whatever was coming.
Not Thorn—that last message had never come from the off-worlder. Then who? Certainly not that officer who had seen in her talents—or supposed talents—a chance to renew his fortunes. And Greeta was dead. Who?
Not to know the enemy was one of the worst things she faced. For if one knew, at least there was time for some preparation. She had none except her own stubborn wariness and realization that she must not yield to any off-worlder.
The flitter was going to land. That blot in the haze resolved into a definite shape of the exploratory machine as it was descending to the lowest of the ledges. She tried to see who was on board, but the bubble of the cockpit cover had been tinted so that it was like facing a blind thing which depended on other than human sense to attack.
As it touched down, the whir of the antigrav was stilled and the world about her lay in deep silence. There was no sound of bird or insect such as she might have expected from the growth spreading out from the foot of the staircase—and Zass had disappeared!
The bubble split in two and the first of the flitter passengers came out.
Thorn! But who else? That had been no talent of the spaceman which had produced a creature perhaps a thousand years dead to drive once more into the open. He did not even look at her after one quick glance, but rather stood to one side as if he played only servant or guard to his companion.
The body that clambered out and put a scaled and webbed hand with thin fingers on Thorn’s shoulder in a gesture of comradeship was humanoid in shape but manifestly not as human as the young man with him, or even Simsa. The clothing it wore was far more abbreviated than Thorn’s—short breeches that came just a fraction down green-gray scaled thighs, a sleeveless shirt over which were numerous straps supporting a number of things which could be either tools or weapons. Around the head with the goggle eyes was a ruff of frilled flesh which stood erect, over which rippled flashes of vivid coloring as the alien stepped forward. A Zacathan!
This was one of the pacific nonwarriors of the galaxy, whose struggle was not against men or worlds, but rather to unravel and record the past—and whose long lives were dedicated to the belief that one scrap of knowledge added to their store was worth all the discoverer had to give.
But a Zacathan! She had not been aware that there had been one on board the spacer before her escape. Why had Thorn not told her? Why had she not sensed such a brain when she had been able to pick up the dangerous musings of the officer and Greeta?
And what could they do? Build hallucinations—the wuul had been proof of that—and perhaps break such a memory block as she had put on Thorn. What else?
She stared down the ledges, her eyes searching out those of the Zacathan and locking with them swiftly, so swiftly she had no time to deny it, mind to mind.
“What do you fear?” The evenly spaced words formed in her mind.
She answered with the truth before she could think clearly, his very presence had surprised her so. “You.”
The saurian face was perhaps not constructed to easily form a smile, but she felt the gentle humor now in the other’s mind touch.
“Am I then so formidable, gentle fern?”
“I think . . . yes—” Her eyes had narrowed. She had yet to marshal all that had come to her in this place, to truly make herself one with that other and those who had once stood behind her. “I think you are a very formidable person.” She kept her voice low as she replied, not with mind touch (she wanted no more of that) but rather in the trade-lingo, aloud.
“As I think.” Now he spoke and there was a hissing accent to his words. “It seems”—now his eyes released hers as he lifted his head a little to view the mass of ruin behind her—“that we have found something long sought.”
> “Chan-Moolan-plu.” Out of the past she could no longer deny came that name, and immediately she knew what it stood for and why it was on this world.
“Chan-Moolan-plu,” the Zacathan repeated. “Your home, gentle fern—once?”
She shook her head. “An outpost—a training place—before the Baalacki came.” More and more the story awoke in her. No . . . home—home was—She shook her head again, not at any gesture or word from him, but because she knew that what she might say would mean nothing now. That planet which birthed the Elder One who was now a part of her was gone, vanished into a fog of time so great there was no reckoning it—in her own system of accounting years and seasons.
“And the Baalacki?” A little to her surprise, it was Thorn who raised the question.
“They made this world as you see it. They”—she shrugged—“are long since gone. Each people who rise, look to the stars, and roam the outer reaches have enemies, or acquire them along the way. And then a day comes where there is a final battle-locking. One may go down to the dust, but it is also true that the victor is left wounded, perhaps to death, and another empire falls apart.” She made a gesture as if shifting some of that sand still bubbling below between her fingers. “What are left . . .”
“What are left,” the Zacathan broke in as she hesitated, “are shards and pieces scattered here and there—which we strive to bring together so that we may understand—”
“Why?” Simsa interrupted him in turn. “To learn this or that trick of knowledge which will give you power so that again the wheel will spin and you and your ships and your alliances of planets be reduced in turn?”
“Some seek for that, yes. Others for knowledge which has nothing to do with that sort of power, gentle fern. We are many races, many species—surely it was so then, was it not?”
“The Sorkel, the Vazax, the Omer—” In her mind, she saw each she mentioned, scaled, winged, various-colored of flesh, different of brain patterns. “Yes, there were many of us and some who were always apart.” Now she stared at the Zacathan in sudden enlightenment. “From whom, Lordly One, did you take your first memories?”