Planet Of Exile

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Lost Day

IN HIS FEVERISH sleep, in the cold darkness of the dusty room, Agat spoke aloud sometimes, and once when she was asleep he called to her from his own sleep, reaching out across the unlit abyss, calling her name from farther and farther away. His voice broke her dreaming and she woke. It was still dark.

Morning came early: light shone in around the upturned tables, white streaks across the ceiling.

The woman who had been there when they came in last night still slept on in exhaustion, but the other couple, who had slept on one of the writing-tables to avoid the drafts, roused up. Agat sat up, looked around, and said in his hoarse voice, with a stricken look, "The storm's over ..."

Sliding one of the tables aside a little they peered out and saw the world again: the trampled Square, snow-mounded barricades, great shuttered facades of the four buildings, snow-covered roofs beyond them, and a glimpse of the sea. A white and blue world, brilliantly clear, the shadows blue and every point touched by the early sunlight dazzling white.

It was very beautiful; but it was as if the walls that protected them had been torn down in the night.

Agat was thinking what she thought, for he said, "We'd better get on over to the Hall before they realize they can sit up on the rooftops and use us for target-practice." "We can use the basement tunnels to get from one building to another," one of the others said.

Agat nodded. "We will," he said. "But the barricades have got to be manned"

Rolery procrastinated till the others had gone, then managed to persuade the impatient Agat to let her look at his head-wound again. It was improved or at least no worse. His face still showed the beating he had got from her kinsmen; her own hands were bruised from handling rocks and ropes, and full of sores that the cold had made worse. She rested her battered hands on his battered head and began to laugh. "Like two old warriors," she said. "O Jakob Agat, when we go to the country under the sea, will you have your front teeth back?"

He looked up at her, not understanding, and tried to smile, but failed.

"Maybe when a f arborn dies he goes back to the stars— to the other worlds," she said, and ceased to smile.

"No," he said, getting up. "No, we stay right here. Come along, my wife."

For all the brilliant light from the sun and sky and snow, the air outside was so cold it hurt to breathe. They were hurrying across the square to the arcades of the League Hall when a noise behind them made them turn, Agat with his dartgun drawn, both ready to duck and run. A strange shrieking figure seemed to fly up over the barricade and crashed down headfirst inside it, not twenty feet from them: a Gaal, two lances bristling out between his ribs. Guards on the barricades stared and shouted, archers loaded their crossbows in haste, glancing up at a man who was yelling down at them from a shuttered window on the east side of the building above them. The dead Gaal lay face down in the bloody, trampled snow, in the blue shadow of the barricade.

One of the guards came running up to Agat, shouting "Alterra, it must be the signal for an attack—" Another man, bursting out of the door of the College, interrupted him, "No, I saw it, it was chasing him, that's why he was yelling like that—"

"Saw what? Did he attack like that all by himself?"

"He was running from it—trying to save his life! Didn't you see it, you on the barricade? No wonder he was yelling. White, runs like a man, with a neck like—God, like this, Alterra! It came around the corner after him, and then turned back."

"A snowghoul," Agat said, and turned for confirmation to Rolery. She had heard Wold's tales, and nodded. "White, and tall, and the head going from side to side ..." She imitated Wold's grisly imitation, and the man who had seen the thing from the window cried, "That's it." Agat mounted the barricade to try and get a sight of the monster. She stayed below, looking down at the dead man, who had been so terrified that he had run on his enemy's lances to escape. She had not seen a Gaal up close, for no prisoners were taken, and her work had been underground with the wounded. The body was short and thin, rubbed with grease till the skin, whiter than her own, shone like fat meat; the greased hair was interbraided with red feathers. Ill-clothed, with a felt rag for a coat, the dead man lay sprawled in his abrupt death, face buried as if still hiding from the white beast that had hunted him. The girl stood motionless near him in the bright, icy shadow of the barricade.

"There!" she heard Agat shout, above her on the slanting, stepped inner face of the wall, built of paving-stones and rocks from the seacliffs. He came down to her, his eyes blazing, and hurried her off to the League Hall. "Saw it just for a second as it crossed Otake Street. It was running, it swung its head towards us. Do the things hunt in packs?"

She did not know; she only knew Wold's story of having killed a snowhoul single-handed, among last Winter's mythic snows. They brought the news and the question into the crowded refectory.

Umaksuman said positively that snowghouls often ran in packs, but the farborns would not take a hilf's word, and had to go look in their books. The book they brought in said that snowghouls had been seen after the first storm of the Ninth Winter running in a pack of twelve to fifteen.

"How do the books say? They make no sound. It is like the mindspeech you speak to me?"

Agat looked at her. They were at one of the long tables in the Assembly Room, drinking the hot, thin grass-soup the farborns liked; ti, they called it.

"No—well, yes, a little. Listen, Rolery, I'll be going outside in a minute. You go back to the hospital. Don't mind Wattock's temper. He's an old man and he's tired. He knows a lot, though.

Don't cross the Square if you have to go to another building, use the tunnels. Between the Gall archers and those creatures ..." He gave a kind of laugh. "What next, I wonder?" he said.

"Jakob Agat, I wanted to ask you ..."

In the short time she had known him, she had never learned for certain how many pieces his name came into, and which pieces she should use.

"I listen," he said gravely.

"Why is it that you don't speak mindspeech to the Gaal? Tell them to—to go. As you told me on the beach to run to the Stack. As your herdsman told the hann ..."

"Men aren't hann," he said; and it occurred to her that he was the only one of them all that spoke of her people and his own and the Gaal all as men.

"The old one—Pasfal—she listened to the Gaal, when the big army was starting on south."

"Yes. People with the gift and the training can listen in, even at a distance, without the other mind's knowing it. That's a bit like what any person does in a crowd of people, he feels their fear or joy; there's more to mindhearing than that, but it's without words. But the mindspeech, and receiving mindspeech, is different. An untrained man, if you bespeak him, will shut his mind to it before he knows he's heard anything. Especially if what he hears isn't what he himself wants or believes. Non-Communicants have perrio feet defenses, usually. In fact to learn paraverbal communication is mainly to learn how to break down one's own defenses."

"But the animals hear?"

"To some extent. That's done without words again. Some people have that knack for projecting to animals. It's useful hi herding and hunting, all right. Did you never hear that farborns were lucky hunters?"

"Yes, it's why they're called witches. But am I like a hann, then? I heard you."

"Yes. And you bespoke me—once, in my house—It happens sometimes between two people: there are no barriers, no defenses." He drained his cup and looked up broodingly at the pattern of sun and jeweled circling worlds on the long wall across the room. "When that happens," he said, "it's necessary that they love each other. Necessary ... I can't send my fear or hate against the Gaal.

They wouldn't hear. But if I turned it on you, I could kill you. And you me, Rolery ..."

Then they came wanting him out in the square, and he must leave her. She went down to look after the Tevaran men in the hospital, which was her assigned job, and also to help the wounded farborn boy to die: a hard death that took all day. The old bonesetter let her take care of the boy.

Wattock was bitter and rageful, seeing all his skill useless. "We humans don't die your foul death!" he stormed once. "The boy was born with some blood defect!" She did not care what he said.

Neither did the boy, who died in pain, holding onto her hand.

New wounded were brought down into the big, quiet room, one or two at a time. Only by this did they know that there must be bitter fighting, up in the sunlight on the snow. Umaksuman was carried down, knocked unconscious by a Gaal slingshot. Great-limbed and stately he lay, and she looked at him with a dull pride: a warrior, a brother. She thought him near death, but after a while he sat up, shaking his head, and then stood up. "What place is this?" he demanded, and she almost laughed when she answered. Wold's kin were hard to kill off. He told her that the Gaal were running an attack against all the barricades at once, a ceaseless push, like the great attack on the Land Gate when the whole force of them had tried to scale the walls on one another's shoulders. "They are stupid warriors," he said, rubbing the great lump over his ear. "If they sat up on the roofs around this Square for a week and shot at us with arrows, we wouldn't have men enough left to hold the barricades. All they know is to come running all at once, yelling ..." He rubbed his head again, said, "What did they do with my spear?" and went back up to the fighting.

The dead were not brought down here, but laid in an open shed in the Square till they could be burned. If Agat had been killed, she would not know it. When bearers came with a new patient she looked up with a surge of hope: if it were Agat wounded, then he was not dead. But it was never him. She wondered if, when he was killed, he would cry out to her mind before he died; and if that cry would kiU her.

Late in the unending day the old woman Alia Pasfal was carried down. With certain other old men and women of the farborns, she had demanded the dangerous job of bringing arms to the defenders of the barricades, which meant running across the Square with no shelter from the enemy's fire. A

Gaal lance had pierced her throat from side to side. Wattock could do very little for her. A little, black, old woman, she lay dying among the young men. Caught by her gaze, Rolery went to her, a basin of bloody vomit in her hands. Hard, dark, and depthless as rock the old eyes gazed at her; and Rolery looked straight back, though it was not a thing her people did.

The bandaged throat rattled, the mouth twisted.

To break down one's own defenses ...

"I listen!" Rolery said aloud, in the formal phrase of her people, in a shaking voice. They will go, Alia Pasfal's voice, tired and faint, said in her mind: They'll try to follow the others south. They fear us, the snowghouls, the houses and streets. They are afraid, they will go after this attack. Tell Jakob I can hear, I can hear them. Tell Jakob they will go—tomorrow—

"I'll tell him," Rolery said, and broke into tears. Moveless, speechless, the dying woman stared at her with eyes like dark stones.

Rolery went back to her job, for the hurt men needed attention and Wattock had no other assistant.

And what good would it do to go seek out Agat up there in the bloody snow and the noise and haste, to tell him, before he was killed, that a mad old woman dying had said they would survive?

She went on about her work with tears still running down her face. One of the farborns, badly wounded but eased by the wonderful medicine Wattock used, a little ball that, swallowed, made pain lessen or cease, asked her, "Why are you crying?" He asked it drowsily, curiosly, as one child might ask another. "I don't know," Rolery told him. "Go to sleep." But she did know, though vaguely, that she was crying because hope was intolerably painful, breaking through into the resignation hi which she had lived for days; and pain, since she was only a woman, made her weep.

There was no way at all of knowing it down here, but the day must be ending, for Seiko Esmit came with hot food on a tray for her and Wattock and those of the wounded that could eat. She waited to take the bowls back, and Rolery said to her, "The old one, Pasfal Alterra, is dead."

Seiko only nodded. Her face was tight and strange. She said in a high voice, "They're shooting firebrands now, and throwing burning stuff down from the roofs. They can't break in so they're going to burn the buildings and the stores and then we all can starve together in the cold. If the Hall catches fire you'll be trapped down here. Burnt alive."

Rolery ate her food and said nothing. The hot bhan-meal had been flavored with meat juice and chopped herbs. The farborns under siege were better cooks than her people in the midst of Autumn plenty. She finished up her bowl, and also the half-bowlful a wounded man left, and another scrap or two, and brought the tray back to Seiko, only wishing there had been more.

No one else came down for a long time. The men slept, and moaned in their sleep. It was warm; the heat of the gas-fires rose up through the gratings making it comfortable as a fire-warmed tent.

Through the breathing of the men sometimes Rolery could hear the tick, tick, tick of the roundfaced things on the walls, and they, and the glass cases pushed back against the wall, and the high rows of books, winked in gold and brown glimmerings in the soft, steady light of the gasflares.

"Did you give him the analgesic?" Wattock whispered, and she shrugged yes, rising from beside one of the men. The old bonesetter looked half a Year older than he was, as he squatted down beside Rolery at a study table to cut bandages, of which they had run short. He was a very great doctor, hi Rolery's eyes. To please him in his fatigue and discouragement she asked him, "Elder, if it's not the weapon-evil that makes a wound rot, what thing does?"

"Oh—creatures. Little beasts, too small to see. I could only show 'em to you with a special glass, like that one in the case over there. They live nearly everywhere; they're on the weapon, in the air, on the skin. If they get into the blood, the body resists 'em and the battle is what causes the swelling and all that. So the books say. It's nothing that ever concerned me as a doctor."

"Why don't the creatures bite farborns?"

"Because they don't like foreigners." Wattock snorted at his small joke. "We are foreign, you know. We can't even digest food here unless we take periodic doses of certain enzymoids. We have a chemical structure that's very slightly different from the local organic norm, and it shows up in the cytoplasm—You don't know what that is. Well, what it means is, we're made of slightly different stuff that you hilfs are."

"So that you're dark-skinned and we light?" "No, that's unimportant. Totally superficial variations, color and eye-structure and all that. No, the difference is on a lower level, and is very small—one molecule in the hereditary chain," Wattock said with relish, warming to his lecture. "It causes no major divergence from the Common Hominid Type in you hilfs; so the first colonists wrote, and they knew. But it means that we can't interbreed with you; or digest local organic food without help; or react to your viruses... . Though as a matter of fact, this enzymoid business is a bit overdone. Part of the effort to do exactly as the First Generation did.

Pure superstition, some of that. I've seen people come hi from long hunting-trips, or the Atlantika refugees last Spring, who hadn't taken an enzy^ moid shot or pill for two or three moonphases, but weren't failing to digest. Life tends to adapt, after all." As he said this Wattock got a very odd expression, and stared at her. She felt guilty, since she had no idea what he had been explaining to her: none of the key words were words in her language. "Life what?" she inquired timidly.

"Adapts. Reacts. Changes! Given enough pressure, and enough generations, the favorable adaptation tends to prevail... . Would the solar radiation work in the long run towards a sort of local biochemical norm ... all the stillbirths and miscarriages then would be overadaptations or maybe incompatibility between the mother and a normalized fetus ..." Wattock stopped waving his scissors and bent to his work again, but in a moment he was looking up again in his unseeing, intense way and muttering, "Strange, strange, strange! ... That would imply, you know, that cross-fertilization might take place."

"I listen again," Rollery murmured.

"That men and hilfs could breed together!" This she understood at last, but did not understand whether he said it as a fact or a wish or a dread. "Elder, I am too stupid to hear you," she said.

"You understand him well enough," said a weak voice nearby: Pilotson Alterra, lying awake. "So you think we've finally turned into a drop in the bucket, Wattock?" Pilotson had raised up on his elbow. His dark eyes glittered in his gaunt, hot, dark face.

"If you and several of the others do have infected wounds, then the fact's got to be explained somehow."

"Damn adaptation then. Damn your crossbreeding and fertility!" the sick man said, and looked at Rolery. "So long as we've bred true we've been Man. Exiles, Alterrans, humans. Faithful to the knowledge and the Laws of Man. Now, if we can breed with the hilfs, the drop of our human blood will be lost before another Year's past. Diluted, thinned out to nothing. Nobody will set these instruments, or read these books. Jakob Agat's grandsons will sit pounding two rocks together and yelling, till the end of time ... Damn you stupid barbarians, can't you leave men alone— alone!"

He was shaking with fever and fury. Old Wattock, who had been fiddling with one of his little hollow darts, filling it up, now reached over in his smooth doctorly way and shot poor Pilotson in the forearm. "Lie down, Huru," he said, and with a puzzled expression the wounded man obeyed. "I don't care if I die of your filthy infections," he said in a thickening voice, "but your filthy brats, keep them away from here, keep 'em out of the ... out of the City ..."

"That'll hold him down a while," Wattock said, and sighed. He sat hi silence while Rolery went on preparing bandages. She was deft and steady at such work. The old doctor watched her with a brooding face.

When she straightened up to ease her back she saw the old man too had fallen asleep, a dark pile of skin and bones hunched up in the corner behind the table. She worked on, wondering if she had understood what he said, and if he had meant it: that she could bear Agat's son.

She had totally forgotten that Agat might very well be dead already, for all she knew. She sat there among the sleep of wounded men, under the ruined city full of death, and brooded speechlessly on the chance of life.