The Loranth (Star Sojourner Book 1) (11 page)

I saw her and our animals ahead. “What the hell was that?” The caped tag, who clung to the bent bough of a lump tree and sobbed.

“Here!' she said, and thrust the dart rifle into my hands as I trotted up to her. We were near the lair. “You know how to use this. Shoot the bastard down!”

I gulped air, having just walked and trotted four kilometers, and kept a hand pressed to my side.

Below the caped tag, the animals watched and paced. Pike had the camera in his teeth and was shaking it, trying to break its neck, I think. The landslider's tracks led past the entrance, which was open, and disappeared over the lip of the canyon. Silk was by Faun's side as he grazed on a few green shoots.

Stanley was nowhere in sight.

I raised the rifle. Did I have a choice? “What do you intend to do with him?”

“Ask Sye Kor!”

A familiar feeling of oppression told me the Master was close. Kor pulled some mental strings and I was flooded with a sense of euphoria. I cancelled my thoughts as they arose and kept mental chatter to a subliminal murmuring stream. I even smiled at Christine as I released the rifle's safety catch.

Kor's power was not supernatural, just preternatural. There was a chance I could resist it and study him. I felt it as an easing of tension while blocking the actual thought, and stared at the hanging tag through crosshairs. He looked pathetic, dangling there.

“Christine!” he cried. “Don't you remember me? It's Thad. Thad Denning.”

“So what?” she said.

“Christine!” He tried to scurry up the pliable trunk. Amber fluid ran from rips in it. “How can you do this to me? Our talks. Our walks in the woods! Don't you remember? Oh, Jesus Lotus. It's me!”

She turned her back. “Shoot him down.”

I raised the rifle. There were too many lives at stake. Possibly all of Leone. Damn! I aimed.

“Tell me why,” he pleaded, “before you feed me to the beasts!”

I hesitated.

“Shoot the heathen bastard down, Jules!” She clapped her hands over her ears as he screamed.

I did.

He hung there like a ripening fruit, then finally dropped.

The family mulled around him. Buj growled, pushed the tag's limp body over to sniff and nudge his belly. But Kor had restrained their aggression and the two predators lost interest and drifted away. I held down a great sense of relief, then numbed my feelings entirely, ready to go to war with Sye Kor.

* * *

There's nothing like total dedication to a cause to give a person suicidal determination and a sense of lofty elitism worthy of a twentieth-century kamikaze pilot. I had a mission. An important one. I was going to save the community of Cape Leone from this monster all by myself.

I laid Thad's unconscious body at the pool's edge and scooped up the ritual mouthful of water which cements each family gathering. Home is the infiltrator… I let the water dribble down my chin while the others drank. Still, I felt a slight numbing of senses, a veil clouding my thoughts. The effect was temporary but I realized how potent this chemical was.

Sye Kor's domed head rose like a sudden growth on the sticky surface of the pond.

Study alien life forms in their natural environments without interfering with their behavior. My astrobiology professors would be pleased.

It was time to fill my mind with thoughts of love, peace, the rapture of being His slave.

How extensive was this race on Tartarus, and could they combine their psychic strength by linking telepathically? Those were questions to consider. But not while he could intrude in my mind with his laser telepathy.

“Master,” I said to block any thoughts my innocent subconscious might conjure up, “I've brought you this offering.” I nudged Thad with a foot.

The great head turned. I was confronted with those rows of sensory pits and his external gills that floated and spread on the surface like lacy mats of flesh. I felt his mindtouch as the stark chill of winter. Did Kor hate all Terrans? All aliens? Life itself? Was he a typical member of his race? I doubted it.

Then why this malevolence?

He sent an image of fat prey animals, the nauseating smell of warm blood and red bones. His feeding dish was empty and he was not happy. But it wasn't just hunger that made him this mean. Couldn't be.

“Prey was scarce,” I started, “and the rain didn't help, you know? Yeth F'Aron almost -“ I felt a slap across my brain. It left me with a headache.

“What do you mean,
your
offering?” Christine asked me. “Master, this is
my
offering.” She strode to the pool's edge. I hoped she'd fall in.

“There were three humans following us.” She flung out an arm that pointed at me. “And he tried to warn them away.”

“Christine,” I said. “I apologized for that mistake.”

“It was only through my efforts,” she continued, “that we captured this one. He drank tainted water, Master.” Her arm still pointed stiffly in my direction. “He talked blasphemy! He is not family!”

I strangled an impulse to run.

Again the image of food from Kor. Again, anger.

She stumbled back as though struck.

I lowered my head and smiled. Then food was the slug's number one priority. Was he totally dependent on his hunters, or just a compulsive eater? The underground river snaking through the depths of his pool must lead eventually to the open sea and fishes. Perhaps his race had degenerated to a state of total parasitism. Perhaps we could starve the bastard out.

“Would I have returned,” I asked Kor humbly, “if I were not family?”

A thick curved tail snaked out of water to flatten on rocks. I caught a glimpse of a stubby left arm. I assumed he had one on the right side, too, just long enough to stuff his blubbery mouth with food he'd never earned.

I watched Kor's blunt head turn toward wounded Silk and prayed he was not thinking what I thought he was thinking.

Faun nervously pawed the ground and laid his head protectively across Silk's back. She stood defeated, the wound in her flank still oozing and crusted. Buj paced furtively in his shadowed niche with his red rear skin inflated to a rude mock head.

A tentacle grew from Kor's flank and snaked among us, leaving a slime trail. Kor was full of surprises.

I froze with panic.

The newly hatched tentacle bypassed me, found Thad and touched his shoulder.

I have to admit I felt relieved that I was not the subject of his search.

Thad rolled his head. From his monologue in the tree I assumed he'd been Christine's friend or lover. She never even twitched as the tapered tentacle looped around Thad's neck. If Christine ever threw off the Loranth's spell, could she face her part in this tag's capture?

Oh, Great Mind!
I thought.
In his death?

Thad's eyes flew open. He screamed. What mind depths had Kor plumbed? The tentacle slid down and tightened around Thad's chest. Kor dragged him, screaming and kicking, to the water's edge.

I closed my eyes and lowered my head. Forgive me, whatever gods may be.

But it was only for a drink. That fatal drink. I watched Thad plunge his head into the pool, under Kor's mind control now, and drink.

Kor's tentacle slid off Thad and drew back into the folds of his flank. Our master sank into the pool. I exhaled the breath I didn't know I'd been holding. His grip on Thad was firmer now than with the tentacle.

I saw myself in Thad's reactions as he climbed unsteadily to his feet. It hadn't been that long ago for me either.

He looked around as though studying the jagged rock walls, slashed with glowing fungi, but it was an inner unraveling of self that held his attention, I knew. He stared at his curled fingers as though they were snakes about to strike. Then he threw back his head and laughed till the harsh sound echoed off high granite faults that had probably been mute for eons. Water lapped sand as Kor stirred. Christine threw Thad frightened glances, afraid, I think, that the Master would be displeased by this raucous display.

“What a waste!” Thad suddenly cried. “Here's the monster. Right here.” He wrapped his arms around himself and doubled over. Laughter lowered to racking sobs. “There are no noble causes, only glory hounds. I'm empty. Oh, God, I'm empty.” He collapsed, his head on his knees. “It hurts, Christie. Help me.”

“The Master will help you,” she responded.

I smirked as she kneeled beside him and began her welcome-wagon speech. “Just give yourself to Him.”

Thad nodded.

I moved away, nearer the edges of this drama, as Kor drifted toward them. I had a thought. Could Kor bounce some sort of waves, maybe sonar, off our internal organs and read our moods even if we didn't think? I felt worse than naked. But these were the possible mechanisms I'd returned to study. I realized with a start that I'd mentally verbalized the thought.

Crotes! A radio signal broadcasting directly to Kor. I went to Silk, as much to put something solid between myself and the slug as to check her wound.

“You were right,” I heard Thad wail to Christine. 'Oh, you were right! Just filling the empty spaces between commercials. I never brought my audience truths, only facts. How could I have been so callous, Christie, so unfeeling?” He pounded a fist on his knee. “What a waste!”

“It's all right, Thad,” she murmured. “The Master will fill the void and give you purpose. You'll see.”

I swallowed a cynical thought and wondered why Kor hadn't already filled his latest convert with an obsessive desire to serve. Then I tried to stop wondering, besides not thinking and feeling. What about dreaming? I wondered, wondering again. This was proving impossible! Find the still center of your mind, I told myself and ventured a glance over Silk's back. Kor's head was turned in my direction.

I filled my mind with a tune and patted Silk's neck, stroking shiny scales and trying to hold down sensations of fear, almost guilt, as Kor watched me. But I felt the Master's focus turn to Silk. Her crest was down. Her skin had mottled to a dark shade I couldn't distinguish in the green light. Even if I could, what causes mottling on a slaotee? There was an odor to the wound. I felt her tremble. “Silk?”

Her amber eyes, so wild and alert when she sniffed desert wind for prey, stared dully at me. Lines of dark fluid seeped from their inner corners. Faun nudged her, wanting her to walk, I think. She staggered and almost fell.

Silk. Of all the family's creatures, she was the gentlest. My mouth suddenly felt sand dry. I couldn't swallow. What the hell? I turned reflexively toward the pool, took a step, then stopped myself.

Kor's doing? Had to be.

I rubbed my lips. He was still facing me, if those pinhole patterns crossing his head substituted for “face.”

Christine was on her knees, praying as she lit floating wicks held by plugs in bowls of oil. Yellow flames leaped among rocks. I heard her beseech this alien slug to forgive poor Thad, to bless and save him. I could have kicked her, except that I'd known the sharp tug of his tel control myself.

I sat down, rubbed my forehead and summoned back the tune.

A pale tentacle floated up.

I scrambled to my feet and backed away as it drifted toward me. It touched sand and I felt Kor's mind tug. What did he want? I imagined mortar and bricks as I erected a mental barrier.

Think wall!

His pull deepened, forcing a pathway.

Come to me.

It was a command my brain interpreted as obsession.

Come to me.

I had an overwhelming desire to walk to his pool, no, run! To dive into His embracing love, to rock gently in warm blue depths. Let the cutting pain of my raked side, the weakness end, leap rocks, logs, free as I pursued todskimmers across wild - todskimmers?

He wasn't calling me.

“No, Silk!” I cried and threw my arms around her neck as she started forward. She dragged me to the pool's edge. “No!”

Faun blocked her path, finally nipped her shoulder to turn her away. The tentacle lifted, dripped water like a punctured hose and lashed Faun's hindquarters. He fell and could not raise himself.

I held onto Silk, my feet braced now against slippery algae-covered rocks, and hindered her final jump. But she plunged forward and water splashed my legs.

Silk was gone beneath the surface. An agitated surface now. A dark blot spread across the pool.

I felt warm breath on my shoulders as Buj and Pike huddled beside me, eyes locked on the pool.

Christine and Thad, who seemed composed now, held hands at the water's edge, and peered down like two swimmers held back by cold water.

Only poor Faun trumpeted and trotted around the pool as though to seek an entrance.

The only real question now was could humans block a level of tel power that could override the survival instinct?

* * *

I don't know how much time passed. I brushed sand off my scraped feet, tried to ignore the pain of the slashes in my side and rubbed my calves, which ached from holding Silk back. I leaned my cheek against cool rock and closed my eyes.

Claws clicked. Water dripped.

Christine and Thad talked quietly. Faun's elegy was a sad lowing call by the pool's edge. I think I had dozed. It was the only available release and I was so weary. There came a sense of foreboding, the uneasy pressure of storm fronts.

I opened my eyes as the surface broke and watched his head rise like a huge mushroom soaked in water. Tentacles lifted, grasped raw bones which still held rags of meat, skin, and silver scales. He flung them to rattle on rocks. One landed at my feet. By design? Its smell was sickening. I left it there. A high desolate keen pierced the tense silence as Faun trumpeted.

Buj and Pike growled and fought over the hollow-eyed skull.

Christine scooped up two meaty bones and tossed one to Thad. The family settled quietly into their respective corners. I heard shuffling behind me, felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. But Christine and Thad were in view! I swung around. The man who crouched on all fours behind me was thick-set and round-faced. He leered through a scraggly red beard.

“Stanley?”

His glasses, held on by one stem, were cracked. They slid down his nose as he nodded.