Nisana laughed again. She dropped her white-stone dagger on the ground
and slapped the thin witch in the face. The crowd gasped and shrank
back. Such a man, Paul knew, was altogether holy, never to be touched;
one must not even look him in the eye. But Nisana slapped him again
and shoved him sprawling. She caught a pole of Amisura's litter,
heaved at it, and he tumbled like a red melon. "_Now_ let them
choose!" She came back to Paul with grin and swagger, patting her
scarred chest. "I am little Spearman. I break images too."
And the pygmies were choosing, not as she or the witches had
hoped--choosing headlong retreat from this sacrilege, dissolving away
into the forest with sick-eyed backward looks. Paul saw Amisura
weeping, humping pitiably back to his litter on all fours, and heard
Pakriaa laugh. The two soldiers who had carried Amisura brought the
litter nearer, not daring to touch him; when he flopped on it they
bore him away. The other witch had run blindly, covering his insulted
face, and Wright said like a machine, "Let them go--let them--"
Sardonically, Pakriaa had watched the whole incident without rising;
now she seemed to want to catch Wright's eye, lifting a skinny
shoulder as if to say: "What can you do with fools?"
When the panic was over, thirty followers remained....
In the early evening Mijok reported, after another treetop survey,
that the last of the kaksma hills was about three miles southwest.
West of them the jungle was level; it was time to turn. Elis had
slipped away and returned with two heavy carcasses like wild boars.
Sears had named these stodgy animals pigmors. The _mor_ suffix, he had
insisted, was an intensely scientific shorthand for "more or less,
damn it." The meat was high-flavored and coarse but safe.... Hearing
Mijok's news, Brodaa sighed, thinking perhaps of the long history of
her people, the groping for a narrow path of survival among endless
perils. "We say the great uskaran hears a leaf fall to earth from a
thousand paces away but the kaksma hears the leaf divide the air as it
falls. Oh--three of your Charin miles, that is great length. Maybe
enough."
The tremendous sheer spires of the coastal range, Mijok said, were
visible in the 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, 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
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 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 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?"
"Pakriaa!" Paul searched for the princess. "Here--please."