The Forerunner Factor (47 page)

“But you shall have still the real memory and what if that is read?”

The Elder One drew up Simsa’s body proudly. “These are but children when it comes to forces of the mind—and memory—Great One. Do you believe that such as they stand any chance of winning of any thought I am not ready to supply fully?”

“And what do we know of you?” The Great Memory was far from being convinced.

“That I have helped. Ask your singer of storms what I did with her. Those who so labor cannot close evil thoughts and show only the good. So do I swear upon this—” She held the rod higher. Now from the tips of the horns there shot larger sparks of blue light which flew as might some insects into the air about them. “I swear that I mean you and your people all that is well—I swear that
my
memory shall be locked while I am with this one from the skies—and that when he is set among his people once again he shall forget all except what I shall allow him to recall. And—”

Once more the sound of flitter, this time nearer, beating steadily, not circling as the first one had done. Zass came out of the haze and sought a landing place on Simsa’s shoulder.

“Flying thing—bad sand—goes—” She lifted the words from the zorsal’s mind.

“They are centering in upon the place where the other flitter crashed,” she told the Great Memory. “We may have but little time. Shall I do this thing or will you tie here one so different that he will leave an ill memory behind him—of death when it should have been life?”

The Great Memory hunched herself together and the claws on her forelimbs clicked. She had closed the passage of communication between them and Simsa stood ready with the rod. That she must defend Thorn now was a duty she wished had not been laid upon her. Though she did believe that he had not been party to the exploitation that the others of his kind had wished for her.

“Your flitter,” she told him, “is centering in on where the other was sand-trapped. I trust that they are armed—”

“Yes. What are you going to do?”

“Return you to them,” she said promptly.

“And you?”

“That choice remains mine. I have not found such a welcome among your kind that I care to repeat a trip with them.”

“But you cannot stay here!” He looked around him. “There may not be another chance for you to go off planet.”

She glanced at the winged machine which had come to her call. There had been no escape for the one who had once used that to soar above the barren rocks of this trap. Yes, it was a trap, but it was a trap she could master after a fashion. The trap that was offered by his kind she doubly feared.

“You know nothing of this world,” she evaded him. “What have you seen of it? A small portion only.” She held the rod between them; those awakened tips sent their spill of sparks in his direction, forming a wheel about his head, spinning faster and faster until they made a ring of fire. She felt his instant response of fear, of danger signaling his body into action. But he only had time to jerk his head a little.

Then, he stood statue still and Simsa began her task. There was again the flitter sliding into the morass of the bubbling sand. This time, no compulsion of hers brought him out of the wrecked ship; rather, it was his own effort that led him to leap to the ground from that unsteady and perilous perch.

He wandered, he fought the blobs, but Simsa was not a part of the action which was all his. He had that implanted with a skill that haste did not destroy. He did not come into the valley—he had seen nothing of those who dwelt there. Instead, he had sheltered on that rock perch reaching out from the ramparts of the cliffs and there he had been successful in fighting off two attacks of the sand creatures.

Skillfully, the Elder One wrought and Simsa herself knew a chill of fear at that skillful weaving. She was sure that this was not the first time the other in her body had worked such a transformation of what had been into what she wanted it to be. Would she someday turn on Simsa and blot out all memory of the Burrows—of the real girl she had been? That was what she had feared from the first, after her exultation at finding the Elder One. She might resemble that other to the last fine silver hair springing from her black scalp, but she was not the Elder One—not yet.

Thorn stood quietly, staring straight before him. What he was seeing, she knew, was not the valley but that plateau of rock, and he would keep that in mind only until they were back at that point.

“You have changed his memory.” The Great Memory drew farther away from her.

“I have saved his life,” the girl answered. “But there is one thing more.”

She brought to mind another vivid picture—across the barren rock just below the height on which he perched was a broken body and though he tried fiercely to reach it, to beat off the two creatures who dragged it away under the sand, it was gone, all that black skin and silver hair swallowed up forever. To satisfy the valley dwellers, to end any more questing, Simsa gave him her death.

13

While Thorn was still bemusedly reliving the false memory, Simsa and two of the guards took him back up the valley stairs, sent him down cliff and across the rude dam of the fallen rocks by the uniting of their will. Simsa watched him stagger up and out upon the tongue of rock. Between him and her, now there swirled a thickening tongue of the haze. Those who found him would not seek farther, not after he had told his story. He was only a darker shadow in the haze this far away and yet she stood watching him.

By the beliefs of the valley folk she had done wrong. She refused to let herself think ahead to what the future might hold for her, another exile on the seared world as had been the one who had soared and flown in earlier, brighter days. Could those wings still bear one aloft—and, if they could, would she attempt such a flight once the skies were free of the flitter whose beat overhead sounded louder and louder? Zass descended to settle on the girl’s shoulder, but she did not need any message from the zorsal to realize that off-world aid was at hand for Thorn.

The mist distorted but it could not entirely hide the figure of the man on that rocky rise beyond the cliffs. Out of the haze, a flitter settled in a straight line from the sky. There was another aboard who swiftly lifted the overhead cabin cover and leapt from the machine to front the waiting spaceman. They were too far away for voices to carry, to know what Thorn reported. Would her conditioning hold the false memory? Simsa’s body was tense as she waited, half-expecting them to turn in her direction. But they did not. A moment or two later, Thorn, the pilot’s hand on his arm to guide him, returned to the flitter. With a rumble it rose from the rock.

As it was swallowed up by the haze, still Simsa waited, listening, telling herself that what she had done was the best for all concerned. Whether she had lost the favor of the valley ones or not did not matter. They had shown no desire yet to exile her from their refuge and thus she still had access to life-sustaining supplies.

She stroked Zass, taking comfort in the rubbing of the soft antennae-crowned head against her cheek. In so much she had this one to cling to. And—for a moment she hesitated, wondering if such a thing could be so, could she also by will alter her own memories—wipe from the past all that would make her restless and discontented with this cup in which she might well spend the rest of her life?

There was something within her—and it was not the Elder One—that suggested she had chosen wrongly, that her place was out there, no matter how suspicious she was of the motives of Thorn’s people, seeking new things ever. The Elder One? No, she could not now contact that one. Her fear of being bound in this prison was that of the real Simsa—and to it she could not yield.

Once more in the valley, she sought out that cave in which Thorn had been sheltered for a space. She curled on the mat bed place where he had rested, willing sleep. It came. The last thing of which she was truly aware was the nestling of Zass beside her, the small warm body against her own breast and the low, contented crooning of the zorsal lulling . . .

She must have dreamed, but none of that dream aroused her into the wakefulness. Her arms were about Zass so tightly that the zorsal protested and nipped at her hand. There was the dampness of sweat along her body and she was breathing in short gasps as if she had been running for her life before a hunt of vastly superior power.

Her mouth was parched—she might have been shouting for help for hours. Help against whom and why? Simsa did not believe that the valley dwellers had sent such a thing upon her. No, it was the old, old law which Ferwar had so often quoted to a heedless girl child. Use any power for the bemusement or ill of another and it recoils upon the sender a hundredfold. Only she had not meddled to Thorn’s hurt, but for his own safety!

She licked dry lips. Outside the narrow niche of cave the haze was that of day. Here, it was easy to lose all sense of time with no real night or sunlight to measure it for one. She might have slept for hours; the painful stiffness that hit her as she tried to move suggested that indeed a lengthy time had passed.

Zass was gone, doubtless to hunt. She herself was well-aware of a hunger pang like a knife thrust through her middle. Crawling out of her rough shelter, she rose to look about.

A short distance away, purple globes hung from the boughs of a tree scarcely more than her own height. She headed toward that, uncaring at the moment whether the fruit would be safe eating for an off-world digestion or not. It was full ripe, giving forth a good smell as she twisted a globe from the branch and mouthed it.

Sweet, but with an undertaste of tartness, its juice trickled down her dry throat. Nor did she hesitate or wait after the first mouthful to test safety. Having eaten a half-dozen of the fruit, she sought the water basin.

There were three of the valley dwellers there, drawing water into jars. At her coming, they each glanced once at her and then pointedly away, making it very plain that they intended no contact. Simsa waited until they were gone and then fell on her knees to draw her sticky hands back and forth in the water before drinking. Once more that liquid invigorated her.

When she had done, she started in the direction of the structure that was the heart of the valley. Twice more, she met the furred ones along the paths, both times having to take a hurried step out of the way when it became apparent they had no intention of giving any room to her. It was as if she had really become one of those illusions she had spun in the ship’s cabin to deceive those who would spy upon her.

So plain was this nonrecognition that Simsa found herself rubbing her left hand along her body in reassurance that she was indeed there and that this was not a very realistic dream. She never remembered eating or drinking in a dream before—but that was no promise that one did not indulge in such satisfactions for an ailing body. Perhaps, as Thorn, she was afevered and walked only in spirit. No, such a thought was foolishness—she was alive and awake. But that she was so overlooked meant trouble—trouble that could only come from what she had done to Thorn.

Memory meant much to those of the valley—so much that it would seem they bred or carefully trained their holders of recall. To force wrong memories on someone who could not withstand her power to do so . . . yes, to them that might be worse than the outright slaying of the prisoner. Yet she had done just that as much for them as for him. Surely, they did not want to have descend upon them those such as the officer and Greeta, greedy to learn the secrets of others. Now after Thorn’s false report, the ship would take off, and there would be no future exploration—they were safe.

“Not so!”

Simsa wheeled to face a wall of the thorn-bearing bush that walled the pathways before she realized that the words had not come to her ears but into her mind. And the thought, from the force and vigor, that was the Great Memory, or else she who had raised the whirlwind with the Elder One’s help.

Simsa hunted the first opening in the thorn bush and pushed through it into another of the clearings. No water basin here, no glittering shards of broken egg—only four of the people. There sat the Great Memory, the claws on her forelimbs turned into fists to better support her more upright stance, and beside her the priestess or chieftainess who had summoned the whirlwind. It was she who made an abrupt gesture with her right claw which brought Simsa to sit cross-legged facing them all.

“They are gone—back to their ship—back to the sky which gave them forth,” the younger leader thought with vigor. “Yet you remain and, from the memory of the one you favored, you took much. Why is this so?”

“That he and those with him would do as you have said—leave this world and seek no more. He now believes me dead.”

“As you showed to him—” the Great Memory came in. “Why?”

“Have I not said—some of those are my enemies.” Simsa was puzzled at that question. “Believing me dead, they seek no more, leave your world. Is this not what you have wanted, Great Memory?”

Leaning her weight heavily on her left arm and fist, the older one uncurled her claws and, on a patch of hardened clay before her, drew with claw tip a series of what looked like a mixture of coils, one slipping into another. Between these she then inserted deep holes, boring claw tip well into the ground. When she had done, she looked to Simsa almost triumphantly, the girl thought, if such faces could reveal any clear expression.

All four of them were still, waiting. Undoubtedly, she was expected now to answer and she did not even know the question. Was that muddle of lines and pits on the ground a message? If so, she had no chance of reading it and there was no value in suggesting that she did.

She pointed with the tip of her rod to the lines. “I do not know the meaning,” she thought slowly and, she hoped, with emphasis enough so that they would believe her.

But even as she tried such communication, the rod shifted in her hands, turning, with forces she could not fight, to interact with a portion of the pattern. And there uncoiled in her head—“Hav bu, san gorl—” The words were not only fiery pictures in her mind, she was speaking them aloud. The Elder One knew. This
was
a challenge, a contest of wits and of memories, something that had happened long and long ago and had never been forgotten. The rod trembled in a game of sorts, one in which the stakes were very high—even life or death. And it was a game that was not native here to this forgotten valley. Who had he been—what had he been—that lost, air-soaring one who had sheltered here until his years ran out?