The Final Planet Page 13

  The Zylongi troops were young, most of them new recruits. Many had never been on a horse (not that he had ever ridden one either—St. Patrick, how he ached!). They couldn’t maintain a line of march for more than a half hour; they had a hard time setting up their tents; they went to bed even though they were in a dangerous situation; they probably couldn’t fire a gun to save their lives—which they might have to do.

  Washouts, Seamus suspected, that the high command wants to eliminate. Along with Honored Poet Seamus Finnbar O’Neill, God be good to him.

  They had left the Military Center, just down the street from the main square of the City, while it was still dark, arriving at the departure station at dawn of the second day. Though all the baggage had been prepacked, it still was well into mid-morning before Pojoon, Marjetta, and Retha, a frightened little-girl Cadet who looked like she was about eleven years old, managed to get the horses loaded. They proceeded out the Gate of Departure in something less than a trim line, with a small chorus of lame farewells from the garrison sounding behind them.

  They would not make the trip to Fort Hyperion by hovercraft, first because there were only a few such vehicles and secondly because none of them had the range required for the trip to the other end of the World Island.

  Seamus wasn’t sure he believed either claim. He suspected that those who ruled Zylong wanted to keep control of all the long-range transportation on the planet.

  The ride across the desert was hot but uneventful. By sunset of the second day, the weary and dispirited troopers arrived at the foothills of the vast mountain spine of Zylong. They saw the snow-capped peaks at the lower end of the chain far off in the distance. Although sunset behind the mountains was glorious, O’Neill paid little attention since he was preoccupied with the hapless efforts of the three officers to get their expedition settled for the night. They were not much of a command staff—a stupid Captain, a Lieutenant preoccupied with problems of her own, and a terrified girl-child Cadet. Seamus wondered who she had offended.

  If the Committee were sending out an expendable expedition, they didn’t have to make it so obvious. Of course, they didn’t know they had a Commandant of the Wild Geese on their hands. Or did they?

  The heat lessened as dusk settled. Everyone continued to wear the hooded flowing garments that replaced the wraparound robe on desert marches. While it protected one from sun and sand, it gave little freedom of movement in a fight. These folks know nothing about fighting. Then why have an army? O’Neill left his cloak in the tent and went out to prowl in his lentat, a knife stuck in its belt.

  The moons began to edge over the horizon. Marjetta was so unlike Samaritha. The latter was tense and businesslike on the surface but warm, sensuous, and yielding underneath. Margie was apparently pure rock all the way through, though delectable rock.

  There must be some kind of military tradition in Zylong. She was every inch a sophisticated, tough, and resourceful soldier—high-quality officer material even by Wild Geese standards. He wondered what she thought of her own army.

  The first news of this trip to the desert came two evenings after the fight at the monorail station.

  Seamus was trying to talk with the young serving hordi. She could understand him, but he could get nowhere with her clicks and grunts. Like most women, however, she found him hugely amusing.

  “You admire the good Dr. Samaritha?” he began the conversation.

  The little creature clicked and grunted enthusiastically.

  “All these people?”

  She shook her head in a vigorous negative.

  “Uh-huh. They kind of push around your people, don’t they?”

  The small one looked anxiously to either side, bowed her head and clicked once.

  “The day of the hordi will come, won’t it?”

  The servant chattered with terror, pointed at him, and ran from the room.

  The legend again. Why is she afraid? Of course, when the wild hordi come in from the desert, it may be rough on the collaborators. This scene gets worse and worse.

  The normally dormant video screen in his room crackled and came alive. There was Marjetta on the screen, looking coldly at him. “Poet O’Neill,” she intoned, “the Committee thinks it proper to offer you the possibility of a journey to our mines at Fort Hyperion. My senior officer, Captain Pojoon, will lead a convoy there in three days. It should give you an opportunity to observe the countryside of our planet before the time comes for you to leave. Will it please you to accept the invitation?”

  It didn’t please Poet O’Neill very much at all. The Committee was serving notice on him that his days on Zylong were numbered. Also, it was sending him out on a dubious expedition only two days after someone had tried to kill him. The Committee was issuing an order, not an invitation.

  If Marjetta noticed his suspicion about the journey to Fort Hyperion—Odd name. Greek, wasn’t it?—she didn’t comment on it. “You will come to the Military Center tomorrow at the third hour after the zenith and ask the guard to conduct you to my office for a preliminary briefing. Try to be punctual.”

  “Bitch,” sighed O’Neill, as she signed off. “But so lovely.” He had gone at once to seek Samaritha’s reaction to the invitation.

  He found her reading on a couch in her own room, the water steaming in the bath next to her. O’Neill was still not able to get used to seeing the good doctor naked to her flat luscious belly. Every time he saw her he felt he wanted to run—though he wasn’t quite sure whether to run toward her or away from her. Her body invited him into the depths of her selfhood, an invitation that attracted and frightened him. She luxuriated in his admiration. “Ought not one to enjoy friends?” she had asked him once with a mixture of naiveté and coquettishness.

  “Is there something wrong with me, Geemie?” she asked, putting aside the book.

  “Uh … no, nothing at all.” If only his eyes wouldn’t widen embarrassingly every time he saw her.

  “Come, Geemie,” she said invitingly, extending the tiny fingers of her right hand, “join me in a serenity bath. You will find it most restful. I think you’re afraid of me. You must know me well enough to realize I would do nothing improper. My mate himself suggested that you might need the relaxation.” She peeled off his robe and led him unresisting into the warm waters of the pool. “Is it really true that on Tara you hug friends instead of holding their fingers? It would surely be proper for you to hug me, would it not?” She laughed merrily and put his arms around her. She fit nicely; there was surrender in her body. Glory be to God, Deirdre, the woman’s trying to seduce me!

  Though there was no reply from Deirdre, Sammy wasn’t trying to seduce him. The serenity bath had the same effect as la-ir. It produced intimacy from which all passion was drained. The temperature of the bath varied subtly, shifting patterns of coolness and warmth over his body—passion fulfilled rather than passion aroused. One more of the Zylongian techniques for sexual control.

  “Geemie,” she said after a long time. Her eyes were filled with tears.

  “Musha, now,” he said. “There’s nothing to cry about.”

  “Why don’t you take Marjetta with you and leave this planet? Go back to Tara. Have a life of joy and peace with your own people.” She buried her head against his chest.

  “Well now, to tell the truth, that’s not a bad idea, but I don’t think the young lady would be all that eager to step into my battered spacecraft. Sure, the old Dev is not the sort of thing to attract a woman with a career ahead of her like Marjetta.” He didn’t want to get mixed up with that one. Besides, had she dragged him into the intimacy of her bath to sell Marjetta?

  “No, you are wrong, Geemie. She will go with you. I know she will. You two would be very happy. You would find love much younger than I and my dear mate did. You must go. You must go soon.” She dug her fingers into his arms, desperately pleading with him to leave.

  While she spoke to him urgently, she was holding his head on her breast, gently stroking his hair. The rest
of the universe slipped away; there was only himself and this beautiful woman who had admitted him into the sanctuary of her love. He touched her face; the jaw muscles were still stiff, but under the gentleness of his fingers they became soft. He was falling, falling back into childhood. He was a little boy and she was a tender and loving mother.

  On the low hill in the desert, O’Neill realized he was perspiring despite the cool night air. There had been no aroused passion while he was in her soothing embrace but the memory of it made his body twist in pain. I am going to pieces. Wild Geese do not fantasize about women when they’re on battle alert.

  There was a sound down the hill from him. Instantly he tensed his finger on the gun. Perhaps only a stone sliding into the plain.

  The plan for the journey to the desert was straightforward. A transport column of forty rather stodgy horses (their ancestors, probably not thoroughbreds to begin with, must have come here with the original settlers) and twenty soldiers with supplies would be conveyed to the edge of the jungle beyond the cultivated region by large transport (bigger versions of the hovercraft on which he had been brought out of the jungle). They would move out across the desert to the mountain foothills, following them around to the fort on the southern tip of the continent. There they would unload the supplies, rest for a few days, collect the concentrated minerals used in alloy construction, and retrace their route home. The whole journey would take no more than two weeks—three at the most, should there be storms on the desert. Which was the first O’Neill had heard of any storms. Podraig, you goofed again. The trip could be completed several weeks before the harvest.

  It was simple enough—especially in a society which deliberately but capriciously limited its technology. On the one hand it used computers that were as good as any on the Iona, and provided electricity for the City from an old-fashioned nuclear reactor in the Energy Center; it could produce an elaborate monorail system inside the City and alloy metals, rock-hard, for buildings and walls. But it brought in raw materials and supplies on horse-drawn carts. The only large hovercraft, capable of any distance, belonged, he had been told, to “the Committee” and was used only for “official purposes.”

  Ernie explained that it would “violate” the harmony of the land to use big machines outside the City. The explanation was delivered in what Seamus had come to recognize as the “civic” tone of his host’s voice—a tone reserved for the “party line,” which the good Musical Director did not necessarily believe.

  Seamus guessed that banning technology from the country kept its resources under control of the Committee and protected ordinary Zylongi (For their own good, of course, he thought bitterly) from contact with the wild hordi or the other “monsters” (Carina’s word, spoken in the only sentence that Sammy’s sullen little future daughter-in-law had spoken to O’Neill) who lived in the wilderness.

  “And Narth!” the angry little child had added.

  “Who’s he?”

  She shook her pretty head disdainfully and walked to her impatiently waiting young man.

  The day after the “invitation” he went to the Body Institute for inoculation against diseases on the trip. The Zylongi had brought disease under control in the area around their City and in the cultivated region; in the desert it was another matter. Sammy was very businesslike. She had no idea what the diseases were; the Inoculation Department was not connected with hers. Their research was not published. Still, everyone knew the serums were very effective. There was no need to worry about infection on the journey.

  “Do people like you and Ernie really like the Festival?” he asked abruptly, remembering that he was supposed to be on an intelligence mission. “Don’t you hate sharing your mate with others?”

  Sammy turned her back and put one of the bottles of vaccine into the refrigerated wall safe from which she had taken it. She stood ramrod-straight.

  “Of course we hate it. Do you think I like to feel the crude hands of the workers paw me? Do you think I enjoy those foolish young women … who take my mate? It is unbearable. It happens. There is nothing to do. The Festival is part of our culture. It is in our bodies; we are prisoners to it. We must endure it.”

  She whirled around, her eyes blazed with fury. “Are you satisfied now, Seamus O’Neill?” she screamed at him. “Do you know everything about us that you wanted to know?”

  Relentlessly he probed on. “Then the time you have with one another during the second half of the Festival must be very unsatisfying. People like you and Ernie, who really care about each other, will cheat. I bet you break the rules no matter how virtuous you claim to be. I bet you broke them the night I saved your lives down in the underground.”

  She threw the empty syringe at him and ran sobbing from the room. Seamus sighed. Well, it does indeed look like they are coming apart at the seams. I hope you folks up there with Her Ladyship are happy about finding that out. I hate myself for doing it.

  Sammy and Ernie were mournful when it came time to say farewell. “They cannot do it,” she wailed. “We had an agreement.…”

  “They can do what they want, my dear,” Ernie replied grimly, wiping his hands nervously against his robe. “You know that.”

  “Ah, don’t be after worrying about me.” Seamus waved his hand airily. “Sure this space tramp can take care of himself. Why, did I ever tell you about what happened in the bar on Halley Number Three when the wee gombeen man…” He went off on another one of the stories, utterly fictional, like the one with which he had calmed his friends after the rumble in the monorail station.

  “You certainly displayed your ability to defend yourself the other night.” Ernie raised his la-ir glass respectfully. “I was not, ah, in a condition to observe, but from what my Honored Mate tells me, you are not without warrior skills.”

  “He is a fearsome fighter.” Sammy eyed him keenly. “Are poets also warriors in Taran culture, Geemie?”

  “Not at all, at all,” Seamus lied flatly. “I’m not much of a fighter. You should see our real warriors. They’re called Wild Geese. There was a time when one of them and I were in a tight spot on Kerry and…”

  So it went.

  He had been quickly forgiven for the scene in the Body Institute. Sammy embraced him fiercely and kissed him passionately when she dropped him off at the Military Center. “If you are gone three weeks, Geemie, I will owe you sixty kisses when you return.”

  “At least. In our culture, the rate goes up when the patient is away from the doctor.”

  She doesn’t believe, she never did. She merely likes to kiss me. Well, isn’t that interesting.

  His reflections were abruptly ended when he realized that a grimly frowning Marjetta had watched the farewell embrace.

  Well, it’s your own fault, woman, for not staying in your office, like you said you would.

  He covered up his embarrassment by striding over to the younger woman and demanding the “truth” about the dangers in their trip.

  “There are no dangers.” She would not look at him. “It’s a routine mission.”

  “Wild hordi?”

  “Some. They are not a threat.”

  “How many?”

  “Officially there are only a couple of thousand of them in the whole world.”

  “I don’t want the official line.” He grabbed her arm roughly. “I want the truth.”

  “Most of them are unarmed and afraid of us.” She wrenched away from him. “I suppose that there may be tens, even hundreds of thousands of them, but they are not dangerous, save to cowards who are afraid of the child’s tale that they eat humans.”

  “And monsters?”

  “Who has been talking to you?” she glared at him contemptuously. “A few harmless mutants.”

  “Armed?”

  “A couple of old-fashioned weapons.”

  “Zylongi?”

  “You have no right to question me, Poet O’Neill. I will protect you. Let go of my arm. I thought I made it clear that I found physical contact with you di
stasteful.”

  “That’s a new song.”

  “Very well, there are some exiles out there and some descendants of earlier civilizations. I do not discuss such matters. Now if you’ll excuse me?”

  “After you tell me who Narth is.”

  “He does not exist.” She turned on her heels and strode away.

  All of it, Seamus told himself that night in the desert, while he tried to guard the camp, was lies. She had lied to me and did not even bother to hide the fact that she was lying.

  Lulled by the images of two beautiful women, O’Neill dropped off to sleep in a small ravine on the hillside. Something like an alarm bell sounded in his head. He woke with a start and threw the illumination grenade. The scene that was revealed in the split second before he began to fire the carbine was like a stop-action film. The hordi band and their Zylongi allies were caught just after the moment of attack.

  The startled aborigines, clicking and grunting in terrifying rhythms, raced toward the camp, waving long, deadly spears as they charged. Behind them rumbled huge hairy creatures, bent, misshapen, terrible, with big flat broadswords. The monsters moved slowly but they were so large that one blow could wipe out three or four Zylongi kids.

  Behind them came the cavalry, smartly uniformed soldiers on excellent horses carrying long, heavy lances, right out of one of the very old films about the West from the Earth film museum.

  What the hell are these troopers doing out here? The woman didn’t tell me a bit of truth.

  Exploding light and O’Neill’s rifle fire surprised the attackers. The lancers turned tail immediately —under orders, no doubt, to avoid organized conflict.

  The hordi raced into the fringes of the camp, where they were met by a devastating volley of carbine fire.

  I woke them up, O’Neill thought grimly. In the nick of time. He tossed another illumination grenade and continued to fire into the ranks of the attacking warriors. He was sympathetic to their cause, but such attacks would not bring peace to Zylong. Besides, somehow, the troops in the camp were his, almost as much as was his squadron of Wild Geese. Disoriented into panic by the flaring lights and the unexpected resistance, the hordi fled, leaving their taller and more frightening allies to withdraw in slightly better order, carrying off armloads of equipment from the camp. The carbines of the camp were silent.