The Rebel Worlds

He wanted, he needed one of his few remaining cigarets; but he couldn’t reach the case without disturbing her clasp, and she might let go. “Well,” he said in his awkwardness, “I imagine we can push on, day after tomorrow. They put Lightning Struck The House together for me after you left.” All heesh’s units had at various times combined with those that had been in Cave Discoverer; among other reasons, for heesh to gain some command of pidgin.

“We discussed things. It’d take longer to return, now, than finish our journey, and the incomplètes can handle routine. The boys have gotten good at trailsmanship themselves. We’ll bear today’s lesson in mind and avoid places where bushwhackers can’t be spotted from above. So I feel we can make it all right.”

“I doubt if we’ll be bothered any more,” Kathryn said with a return of energy in her tone. “News’ll get ’round.”

“About that ruka we took prisoner.”

“Yes? Why not set the poor beast free?”

“Because … well, Lightning isn’t glad we have the potential for just one full entity. There’re jobs like getting heavy loads down steep mountainsides which’re a deal easier and safer with at least two, especially seeing that rukas are their hands. Furthermore, most of the time we can only have a single krippo aloft. The other will have to stay in a three-way, guiding the incomplètes and making decisions, while we’re in this tricky mountainland. One set of airborne eyes is damn little.”

“True,” He thought he heard the rustle of her hair, which she had let grow longer, as she nodded. “I didn’t think ’bout that ’fore, too shocked, but you’re right.” Her fingers tensed on his. “Dominic! You’re not pla

“Why not? Lightning seems to like the idea. Been done on occasion, heesh said.”

“In emergencies. But … the conflict, the — the cruelty—”

“Listen, I’ve given these matters thought,” he told her. “Check my facts and logic. We’ll force the ruka into linkage with the noga and krippo that were Cave Discoverer’s — the strongest, most sophisticated entity we had. He’ll obey at gun point. Besides, he has to drink blood or he’ll starve, right? A single armed man alongside will prevent possible contretemps. However, two units against one ought to prevail by themselves. We’ll make the union permanent, or nearly so, for the duration of our trip. That way, the Thunderstone patterns should go fast and deep into the ruka. I daresay the new personality will be confused and hostile at first; but heesh ought to cooperate with us, however grudgingly.”

“Well—”

“We need heesh, Kathryn! I don’t propose slavery. The ruka won’t be absorbed. He’ll give — and get — will learn something to take home to his communion — maybe an actual message of friendship, an offer to establish regular relations — and gifts, when we release him here on our way back to Thunderstone.”

She was silent, until: “Audacious but decent, yes, that’s you. You’re more a knight than anybody who puts ‘Sir’ in front of his name, Dominic.”

“Oh, Kathryn!”

And he found he had embraced her and was kissing her, and she was kissing him, and the night was fireworks and trumpets and carousels and sacredness.

“I love you, Kathryn, my God, I love you.” She broke free of him and moved back. “No … ” When he groped toward her, she fended him off. “No, please, please, don’t. Please stop. I don’t know what possessed me … ”

“But I love you,” he cried.

“Dominic, no, we’ve been too long on this crazy trek. I care for you more’n I knew. But I’m Hugh’s woman.”

He dropped his arms and stood where he was, letting the spirit bleed out of him. “Kathryn,” he said, “for you I’d join your side.”

“For my sake?” She came close again, close enough to lay hands on his shoulders. Half sobbing, half laughing: “You can’t dream how glad I am.”

He stood in the fragrance of her, fists knotted, and replied, “Not for your sake. For you.”

“What?” she whispered, and let him go. “You called me a knight. Wrong. I won’t play wistful friend-of-the-family rejected suitor. Not my style. I want to be your man myself, in every way that a man is able.” The wind lulled, the river boomed. “All right,” Flandry said to the shadow of her. “Till we reach Port Frederiksen. No longer. He needn’t know. I’ll serve his cause and live on the memory.”

She sat down and wept. When he tried to comfort her, she thrust him away, not hard but not as a coy gesture either. He moved off a few meters and chainsmoked three cigarets.

Finally she said, “I understand what you’re thinkin’, Dominic. If Snelund, why not you? But don’t you see the difference? Startin’ with the fact I do like you so much?”

He said through the tension in his throat, “I see you’re loyal to an arbitrary ideal that originated under conditions that don’t hold good any more.”

She started to cry afresh, but it sounded dry, as if she had spent her tears.

“Forgive me,” Flandry said. “I never meant to hurt you. Would’ve cut my larynx out first. We won’t speak about this, unless you want to. If you change your mind, tomorrow or a hundred years from tomorrow, while I’m alive I’ll be waiting.”

Which is perfectly true, gibed a shard of him, though I am not unaware of its being a well-composed line, and nourish a faint hope that my noble attitude will yet draw her away from that bucketheaded mass murderer Hugh McCormac.

He drew his blaster and pushed it into her cold unsteady clasp. “If you must stay here,” he said, “keep this. Give it back to me when you come down to camp. Goodnight.”

He turned and left. There went through him: Very well, if I have no reason to forswear His Majesty Josip III, let me carry on with the plan I’m developing for the discomfiture of his unruly subjects.

XIII

The group spent most of the next day and night sleeping. Then Flandry declared it was needful to push harder forward than hitherto. The remaining Didonian(s?) formed several successive entities, as was the custom when important decisions were to be reached, and agreed. For them, these uplands were bleak and poor in forage. Worse lay ahead, especially in view of the hurts and losses they had suffered. Best get fast over the mountains and down to the coastal plain.

That was a Herculean undertaking. The humans spent most of their time gathering food along the way for the nogas. When exhaustion forced a stop, it likewise forced sleep. Kathryn was athletic, but she remained a woman of thirty, trying to match the pace and toil of men in their teens and twenties. She had small chance to talk, with Flandry or anyone, on trail or off.

He alone managed that. His company looked mutinous when he a

“Look, you’ve seen the Old Man in action. You may not like him, but he’s no shirker and no fool. Somebody has to get that xeno cooperating. If nothing else, think how we need a guide through this damned arse-over-tip country … Why not Kathryn? Well, she is the wife of the man who got us dumped where we are. It wouldn’t improve our records, that we trusted her with something this critical … Sure, you’d better think about your records, those of you who plan on returning home.”

Flandry had given him a confidential briefing.

At the outset, talk between man and Didonian was impossible. The personality fought itself, captive ruka pouring hate and fear of the whole troop into a noga and krippo which detested his communion. And the languages, habits, attitudes, thought patterns, the whole Weltanschauungen were at odds, scarcely comprehensible mutually. Linked under duress, the entity slogged along, sometimes sullen, sometimes dazed, always apt to lash out on a half insane impulse. Twice Flandry had to scramble; the noga’s horn missed him by centimeters.