West Of The Sun, Edgar Pangborn [world of reading txt] 📗

southwest though nearly a hundred miles off; it would be a clear sweet night, he thought, with no clouds and many stars. They should go at least fifteen miles due west; then the course would be southwest rather than south, to miss the hills....

In the crowding darkness Mister Johnson's leading was again a thing of wisdom; his lifted trunk and sensitive eyes avoided dense growth and drooping vines that could endanger the riders. From each necessary detour he came back willingly to the course, under guidance of Abara's sense of compass direction, and the other four followed him as the arm follows the hand. Tonight Paul rode old Susie—she seemed to feel happier for it—carrying Nisana again; Wright was on Miss Ponsonby, with Pakriaa. Tejron, unfamiliar with the beasts but ready to learn, had climbed on Millie's back and kept her balance without trouble, holding the wounded Vestoian, who stirred and whimpered but was not truly conscious. Behind Paul was the more nervous bull Mister Smith without a rider, and Elis and Mijok walked beside him, Mijok with his shield, Elis holding Brodaa's hand. The thirty who had dared to choose the forbidden unknown trailed behind Brodaa with linked fingers,[154] nine bowmen among them; there were few weapons, no wounded except on Mijok's shield, and this held only two, for one of the women had died. The wounded archer was yellow-faced with loss of blood from a hip injury, but that was clean and closed; he was free from the signs of fear, almost cheerful. The woman was a sturdy black-skirted soldier of the ranks, gashed in the face and with a leg torn from knee to ankle.

Another night of silence and of drifting—for a while. Wright's voice floated back: "I am thinking of Dorothy and Ann, and your daughter."

"And not of Ed Spearman?"

"Oh.... The fuel must have been getting low, Paul. Nothing the boat could do for us after we were back in the woods. He must be at the island."

Paul could only say, "I hope so." The thing Spearman had almost said when his anger and disappointment were high, the hint at joining forces with Lantis in abandonment of everything thus far achieved—nothing could be gained by speaking of that now. But some of Spearman's words murmured on in darkness: "Lantis—terrific organization ... monetary system ... whole world for the taking ... pretty idealism that never worked even on Earth...."

There had always been strain and mutual exasperation in argument with Ed Spearman—long ago, on the ship Argo. The Collectivist Party, surviving as an innocuous political group after the horrors of the Civil War of 2010-13, lived strongly in Spearman's mind, not only because his father had fought for it. Lacking the frenzied dogmatism of the antique communism it resembled, it was nevertheless communism's natural heir, a party of iron doctrines simplified for minds that resented analysis and magnified Man out of a dislike for men. Like communism, it needed to imagine a class war and felt that it had a tight vested monopoly of the underdog. The C.P., said one of its late twentieth-century prophets as humorless as his predecessors, "believed in Man." You could always fluster a collectivist by asking for a logical breakdown of that—and make an enemy: they were usually good haters and made a virtue of it. The years following the Civil War had[155] been troubled though materially prosperous, darkened by the build-up of yet another monolithic state under Jenga the Mongol, who had inherited the desolation of the Russo-Chinese war of 1970-76; in those years the Collectivist Party in the Federation, unsupported by any conveniently foreign deity, had become not much more than a serio-comic decayed socialism with a dash of bitters. But it was alive; at the time Argo left the spaceport it had had ten senators and a larger handful of delegates in the Federation Congress. It was respectable, no longer subversive, and owned a small hard core of the aggressively sincere.... Not Wright nor Sears nor anyone had ever been able to convince Edmund Spearman that evil means breed a further evil, which swallows up any good that may have been imagined in the beginning. Spearman could admit that (himself in no way an evil man) he would not do evil—if he could help it. But in the region of theory Spearman held quite simply that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and that settled it....

"They should be safe," Wright said. "You and Jocko saw the island."

"It's beautiful. I know they're all right."

"Yes.... Would you say it was a place where Ann might—oh, how shall I say it?—might attain tranquillity? Not cry too much for the moon?"

"If there is any such place in the Galaxy."

"Time," Elis said. "Little Black-Hair needs time. She is like grass I have seen growing in too much shade. She is not like our Mashana Dorothy who will make sunshine if the other sun is clouded."

"Listen!" Brodaa's voice. "Listen..."

Paul heard nothing, at first. Up ahead Abara sputtered: "Mister Johnson—hoo-hee—be quiet. Is nothing—be quiet—"

Nisana came broad awake in Paul's arms. Wright's mount halted, as did Susie, but Susie was trembling, raising and swinging her head in a way to make balance difficult; Paul saw the white writhing of her trunk lifted to explore for a scent.... He heard it then: a long rustling, like a repeated tearing of paper behind a closed door; nothing else.... A wet howl from Mister Johnson[156] sent a spasm through Susie's mass; her muscles bunched; Abara's voice wailed back: "Mister Joh—I cannot hold him—kaksmas!"

Transition from realization to stampede was a flash like the pain of a blow. Paul heard Mijok: "My shield—it will hold more." Elis cried something to Brodaa. Then Susie had plunged ahead, uncontrollable; Paul could only bend low above the clinging of Nisana, hold on with hands and knees, hope that no trailing vine or branch would sweep them off into death. Mister Johnson could make no careful choice of a trail now—he would be parting the jungle like a six-ton bullet. "Don't be afraid, Nisana—we can outrun them—"

"My people—"

"Elis and Mijok can outrun them too. They'll carry all they can." In spite of the agony of mere hanging on, mere straining to stay alive, he had to think: They were loyal and we got them into this.... Branches slashed across his back, stinging and scraping. Once Susie stumbled and recovered as the group went splattering across some invisible mud, and Paul wondered if Mister Johnson in his terror would run them into quicksand or marsh.

That ended; there was more thick jungle whipping his back for—five minutes?—an hour...? This too ended.

Crazed or purposeful, the beasts charged out into open land through a soft roaring of torn grass. Paul could twist his head to glance upward at a field of stars. He could not win a backward look for Elis and Mijok: his neck and arm muscles were stiffened in his grasp of Susie's ears, and he dared not risk disturbing Nisana's clutch of him. But to left and right he could make out other shapes under starlight and hear a frantic thudding of hoofs—fleeing asonis, other innocent woodland cattle with a hunger to live. Once he glimpsed a long-bodied thing pass off to the left in wild leaps lifting it above the grass tops: uskaran, he thought, the huge tiger cat, no enemy but a brother in panic.

The open ground ended at water; here at last the olifants slowed to a halt, unlike the lesser desperate brutes, for Mister Johnson was still wise, considering the stream, aware of his leadership. Paul could shout to the others[157] now, and they all answered. But his backward staring found only the stars, the white mass of Mister Smith, the disturbed darkness that must be meadow. "Elis! Mijok!"

No answer could have reached him above the bleating and thunder of terrorized harmless things crossing the field and hurtling blindly into the river. Mister Johnson was wading in deliberately. There was splashing at first, then silence, as cool water came up around Paul's knees and Susie's motion changed to a smooth throbbing and heaving; he saw small foam where the curve of her lifted trunk cut the water. He whispered to Nisana, "We're safe, dear. Big river. Kaksmas won't cross it...." Mister Johnson was leading them in an upstream slant, bearing well to the right while the bobbing frantic heads of other creatures let the moderate current press them away to the left. This way—whether by Mister Johnson's wisdom or Abara's guidance—they might be able to come ashore clear of the dangerous passage of the stampede.

"My people cannot go through the water. We never—"

"Elis and Mijok can swim. They'll get them across somehow. Maybe the shield will float, Nisana."

The madness behind them dwindled into the faraway. In growing quiet, Wright's voice came back, not loudly: "I am a murderer."

Paul wondered what insight made him call out words not his own: "'What's the profit of any effort if the result is thrown away in a time of weakness?'"

The even motion became a clumsiness of wading in mud. Then there was solid ground. Paul said, "Halt them here if you can, Abara." Mister Johnson must have shared the sense of safety; they all calmed, heads drooping, shaken breathing slowing to sighs. "Down, Susie...." All but Abara descended. This was still open grassland, but there was a black velvet curtain of jungle not far off. "Doc—still got your flashlight?"

"Eh? No—lost somewhere." The old man spoke vacantly; he stumbled to the edge of the water, sat with his head on his knees. "Mijok-Mijok...."

Tejron still had her Vestoian, but now the pygmy woman was panting, fully conscious in Tejron's arms and witless with fear. Tejron said, "She's trying to break away. Can't someone talk to her?"[158]

"Pakriaa!" Paul searched for the princess. "Here—please."

Nisana whispered, "I will talk to the Vestoian—yes?"

"Not yet. If Pakriaa—"

Pakriaa said thickly, "I am here. What to say? She is nothing."

"She is nothing to you, Pakriaa? Then Sears chose a poor student. Brodaa would have spoken to her. I ask you to tell her the war is over and she is among friends."

"Friends? She is Vestoian." Pakriaa approached Wright, who did not look up. "Tocwright—I must speak to the Vestoian kaksma? I owe you my life—will obey you."

He groaned: "I do not want you to obey me. If there is nothing inside to tell you what you should do, then I have nothing to say to you."

Pakriaa flung up her arm across her eyes as if struck. Tejron muttered, "I can't restrain her much longer without hurting her." It was Nisana who gave the Vestoian the message in the pygmy tongue, a ripple of sound that must have conveyed some reassurance, for the struggling ceased.

"Look!" Paul dug his fingers in Wright's shoulder. "Over there—"

The dark spot under starlight was surely the floating shield; behind it, another purposeful splashing, rise and fall of a driving arm.

"Mijok!" Wright was on his feet. "This way! A little upstream—"

Both giants were bleeding from small double stab wounds of the kaksma teeth. There were four pygmies on Mijok's shield. Elis had carried Brodaa and another in his arms and one on his back; they had clung to his fur as he swam the river. Mijok plucked a sodden thing from his thigh; its jaws had clenched in flesh when he smashed its body. He flipped the ratty thing into the water and remarked like a Charin, "Damned if I could ever care for 'em."

"The others—"

"We tried to help them into the trees," said Elis. "Could be some safety in that if the swarm passes by. But most of them ran blindly, so—beyond that, Doc, don't ever ask us.[159] We must forget some things. We've all done what we could, so—let's rest a while and go on."

"Oh, we go on," Wright said. "Chaos, or maybe a little bit of light from time to time. What—sixteen of us now...? Which way was the swarm going?"

"North. Our flight was west. I think this place is safe."

Abara called down: "Mister Johnson says it is safe."

Paul said, "No more travel tonight. Wait here for daylight. This is not the river we wanted, but we know it reaches the sea somehow. Let's think about that in the morning. And—if you will, Doc—I'd like to make that my last order. Let Elis be our commander till we reach the island."

"I!" Elis was shocked. "But Paul.... I am a big baby, I wonder and wonder and never find the answer to anything."

Wright laughed; it sounded like laughter. At any rate when his voice found words it was warm, relieved, more like his own than it had been at any time since the drums sounded on Lake Argo. "That doesn't matter, Elis. Paul has done all anyone could, done it well, and leadership's a wearing thing. But