Collected short fiction, p.217
Collected Short Fiction, page 217
Upon that day, they had left the cattle penned, while they went together to stop the bloodthirsty depredations of a tiger. The new world was then not half explored, her wild life still bold.
Armed with bow and spear, they found the killer’s trail. Being simple folk, virtual serfs of the concessionary companies which exported foodstuffs to the mother planet, they possessed no such scientific weapons as neutron-blast projectors. Nevertheless, determined, they followed the wily marauder beneath the changeless, eternal silver light that filtered through the etheric sphere.
Hour after hour it evaded them. It sought to confuse them by doubling across lush meadows and stark, barren outcroppings. Once it crept back into the thickets of a stony ravine. Once it leaped out upon Ken Darren. Its savage claws marked his shoulder. His quick spear stopped it, however, and wounded its foreleg, so that it left thereafter a trail of blood.
They followed it into a canyon thick with ferns.
There they found the weakened, desperate creature had taken refuge in a narrow, hidden cavern, from which flowed a slender stream. Hastily, the friends prepared a torch. Dakkil Kun held it, while Ken Darren, claiming the right because of his scratch, went ahead and impaled the snarling, springing tiger upon his wooden spear.
The quivering, tawny carcass, he saw, was dead.
“Let’s go back,” said Dakkil Kun, uneasily. “We’re far underground.”
“Wait,” objected Ken Darren. “We can explore farther, through the crevice yonder.”
“I’m as brave as you are, when need be,” said Dakkil Kun, anxiously, “but I don’t like the feel of a mountain over me. And the tigress may be in there beyond. I’m going out.”
But Ken took the torch and squeezed himself, alone, through the crevice. Stooping, he ventured up the narrowing fissure, splashing in the cold runlet of water whose age-long toil had opened the cavern. Creeping at last on hands and knees, he entered a wondrous oval chamber.
His torchlight danced in the milky, prismatic crystals that incrusted roof and walls; it bathed the floor of hard sand, washed immaculately white. The discovery filled him with a curious elation, more intense than the delight of his victory over the great cat.
He waited there a little time, for there was no way to penetrate farther, and he was intoxicated by the age-hidden, scintillant splendor of the crypt.
Dakkil Kun began calling, his apprehensive voice distant and hollow. But Ken Darren was reluctant to go; disappointment and frustration rose oddly before him, at thought of leaving this new-found wonder.
However, regretful, he was at last about to depart from this chamber of elation when his eye caught a purer and more intense gleam of color, where his feet had disturbed the snowy sand.
Eagerly he bent; in a moment he had unearthed splendor beyond his dreams.
The object was a perfect globe, larger than his two fists, and heavy as iron. Its unmarred surface felt cool and curiously soapy to his hands. It revealed a world of limpid transparency. The torchlight kindled within it.
Fascinated, Ken Darren looked into abysmal depths of mysterious purple shadow, wherein pulsed a great heart of prismatic light. Luminous, throbbing streams wove webs of mystic splendor that cradled his mind in transcendent peace. His spirits rose and fell upon tides of colored radiance. He was bathed in a supernal joy which relaxed and soothed all his being.
He knelt, gazing into the crystalline sphere, enraptured with its amazing beauty, until its wonders began to dim with his flickering torch. Then he rose, holding it in hands that trembled with strange emotion.
What he had found, he did not know, save that its liquid, changing beauty gave him a surpassing joy that he had never known. But he knew that it must be precious. He was seized, now, by a quick fear that other men, seeing it, would take his treasure from him.
KEN DARREN had always been a subordinate, little better than a slave of the concessionary companies. He was used to moving his herds at the command of the agents, surrendering most of their fruit at the monorail station in return for his scanty supplies.
Always he had accepted this humble lot as a matter of course. But this great, flaming gem had somehow lighted a spark of independence in him. He knew abruptly that he would fight, die, rather than share its rich beauty with any man.
No, not quite—there was Dakkil Kun. Since boyhood—since the parents of both had been killed in the last revolt of the dark-skinned, apelike aborigines—they had shared everything: laughter and pain, rude shelter and unvaried food, all the weariness and peril of frontier life.
Dakkil Kun was a strange man, of wild violence and savage discontent. Often he distressed Ken with some unexpected cruelty, some bitter, brooding-hate. Dakkil Kun knew the fate, Ken suspected, of one harsh-dealing company agent who had vanished in the hills during the previous season.
Yet they were friends, partners; Dakkil Kun should share this blinding beauty.
His voice came again, a hollow, anxious tumult.
Ken Darren bent to his knees, clutching the jewel and the sputtering torch. Conquering a last impulse to bury the gem again in the white sand, for his own secret, selfish joy, he crept back down the passage.
“You were so long,” said Dakkil Kun, unquietly, when Ken Darren had brought the jewel into the thin, silvery light of the eternal day, “I thought perhaps the tigress——”
Then his voice was swept away; he had seen the crystal.
Both men stood there upon the sand, staring one at the other. It was a damp, shadowy place. Thick green of ferns pressed against them, and clear water fell with malicious, tinkling laughter from the blackness of the cave.
They stood of an even height. Both wore rough, leathern garments of their own making; they were armed alike. Each of them was alert and hard, tempered by the privations and perils of existence upon the borders of a new world.
Ken Darren was a slender man, muscularly lean. His eyes were somber, gray and glinting with green. His hair, roughly cut, was a copper-colored thatch above a thin face, cleanly cut, shadowed with loneliness.
Dakkil Kun was nearly twice as heavy, his swart skin bulging with tapered muscles. His eyes were black and quick and small, beneath heavy, jutting black brows. His hair was thick and very black, with an oily, bluish cast.
Dakkil Kun crouched a little when his quick eyes caught the shimmer of the crystal. Bunched muscles quivered in his massive shoulders and the heavy column of his neck. A sudden, overmastering cupidity, twisting his broad face, made Ken Darren step quickly backward.
“I found this,” said Ken. “It is ours, together.”
That look of cupidity was whisked away like a mask, so quickly that he could hardly believe that it had ever been. And Dakkil Kun came forward, smiling, betraying emotion only by the twitching of a little muscle, below one ferret eye.
He asked, huskily: “Ken, my friend, do you know what this is you have found?”
“No. Only that it is beautiful.”
“I—know,” said Dakkil Kun, with such a husky thickness in his voice that he could hardly speak. “An agent, last season, showed me a tiny one that he got from a man who found it in the bed of a stream.”
He reached out a thick-fingered, hairy hand, to touch the jewel.
“I know what it is,” he whispered. “It is more precious than all Pylos. It is worth more than all the palaces and riches of the Lhundar, our ruler on Nydron. The agent told me.”
With his hands still cupping the globe, Ken Darren asked: “What is it?”
“Let me see it,” grunted Dakkil Kun, and tore the jewel from him.
Ken Darren found himself gripping his spear, instinctively. He stopped himself, trembling. Dakkil Kun was his friend, his partner.
“It is ours, together,” he said, in a shaken tone. “We have always shared—— What is it?”
Dakkil Kun was crouching over the great sphere, locking it in his thick, dark hands, consuming it with his small eyes.
New life had burst into the huge globe when it came into the pale white light and fell unendingly from the entire heavens. Within it, depth opened into new depth of transcendent, pulsing color. Winged shafts of radiance sprang even from the touch of a hand against it.
“What is it?” Ken repeated, and Dakkil Kun raised his small black eyes, with a piercing sharpness in them that Ken had never seen.
“This is a crystal of okal,” said Dakkil Kun, his thick voice tense with suppressed emotion. “Okals are a form of carbon, the agent said. Like diamonds—but as different from diamonds as diamonds are from charcoal.
“Okals are heavier than diamonds, and harder, and no one knows how they were formed. Once they were worn for jewels—the richest nobles still give them to their women, in Kothri. But now, the agent told me, the strange radiance of them is used for a key to unlock the atom.
“Okals release the power from plates of copper, to drive the geodesic ships from world to world.
“They are precious. The one the agent had was like a large grain of sand. But it would make him rich, on Nydron, he said. It would buy him a palace in Kothri, and a geodesic flier, and all the luxuries he could want.
“The largest okal ever found, he said, was like the end of a woman’s thumb. The Lhundar owns it, and guards it more carefully than his daughter, Wyndonee. It unlocks the power for the fleet. But the one the agent had was large enough.”
WHEN DAKKIL KUN said that, in a voice of sinister complacency, his thick forearm pressed unconsciously against his breast. And Ken knew suddenly, with a cold sickness of dread, that Dakkil Kun had upon him one okal that had belonged to a murdered man.
Dakkil Kun was still crouching, holding the crystal in his hands. Surely, Ken thought, gazing into its transparent, flaming depths, no man could look upon such beauty and think of crime. His black suspicion fled. Softly he whispered: “It is beautiful.”
“It is more valuable than anything in any world.” Low and cruel was the voice of Dakkil Kun, gloating. “It will buy—anything. The Lhundar’s throne. And Wyndonee.”
“Give it back to me,” said Ken, shocked and troubled. “Let us hide it again in the cavern, where its beauty will be safe. And don’t speak so of—Wyndonee.”
Dakkil Kun’s thick lips curled into a grimace and he clutched the jewel to his side.
“It is half mine,” he snarled. “You said so.”
“It is ours, together. But let us keep it here. The company police would take it, if they knew. If it is so precious as you say, men would kill for it.”
“They would,” said Dakkil Kun. At the curious grimness of his dark face, Ken thought again of the secret murder.
“It is beautiful,” said Ken, still hoping that his suspicions and fears were unfounded. “Now that I have seen it, I could not live without its beauty near me. Give it back to me, please.”
Dakkil Kun’s small, dark eyes looked hard at him.
In a heavy voice, twisted and bitter with brooding hate, the big man began to speak.
“All my life I’ve been nothing but a slave,” he muttered. “Since I was half a man’s height, I’ve followed the herds. I’ve been drenched and frozen in storms, and wounded by wild beasts. I’ve been lonely and hungry and ragged. I’ve taken the orders of the agents, and given them all I made, all that has been mine, so that the Lhundar and his nobles in Kothri could feast and wine.”
An insane fury was twisting the brutish mask of his face; the small muscle under his eye twitched rapidly.
“Like parasites they have lived upon me. But now it will be changed. This jewel makes me greater than the Lhundar. I can choke out his proud life, and hang his body from his own palace. I can redden Kothri with the blood of his nobles. I can make Wyndonee—until I choose to kill her—my whipped slave to wash my feet.”
“No,” said Ken, with an unexpected hardness in his voice, “you won’t do that. You won’t touch Wyndonee.”
He tried to soften his tone, persuasively.
“You are mad, Dakkil, to say such things. We saw the Lhundar, with Wyndonee, upon the visigraph screen; we heard them speak. There was no cruelty in them. The Lhundar is a harmless, well-meaning man. Wrong there may be, but the system is to blame, not our ruler and his daughter.
“Look into the crystal. Doesn’t the beauty of it make you sorry for what you said? Let us take it back into the cavern.”
Dakkil Kun looked up; a calculating glitter was in his small eyes.
“We own the okal together,” he said, in a cold, grim voice. “Yet we can’t share it. You wish to keep it here; I wish to carry it to Nydron, to crush Lhundar and become great with its power. Therefore, it must belong to one or the other of us, alone.”
Ken tore his eyes from the crystal, looked up in mute, startled protest.
“One must take it, or the other,” said Dakkil Kun. “Let chance decide.”
Still clutching the okal in one great hand, he reached down and picked up a flat pebble from the sand. He spat upon one side.
“Wet, and the okal is mine,” he said. “Dry, and it is yours.”
The tossed pebble spun in the pale, silver light, and fell beside the mocking stream. Bending over it, Ken said, with quiet relief:
“Then it is mine.”
Then he looked up, to meet the return of his dark suspicions. Dakkil Kun was coming toward him. A mirthless smile was frozen across his thick lips. His small eyes were cold with a terrible frosty darkness.
Yet his rasped words were reassuring. “By the winged xyli in their worlds of flame,” he said, “you won. Take the okal.”
Ken read the treachery behind those bluff words in time to duck. He reached for his spear to defend himself. But a shocked incredulity stayed his hand. For the merest instant, the old, stubborn loyalty, which already had endured and forgiven so much, refused to let him strike.
The crystal in Dakkil Kun’s great hand, in that vital instant, cut his cheek to the bone. Blind with pain, he staggered forward, thrusting with the spear. A second, merciless blow exploded below his ear.
He spun into darkness.
Ken Darren’s face was stiff with dried blood when he woke. His head was reverberating with pain. He moved, and found his cruelly bruised body lying still within the ferns below the cavern, half washed in the little stream.
He tried with an aching throat to call out the name of his boyhood friend. But only silence answered.
And the jewel of okal was gone.
II.
THE OKAL had struck flame to Ken Darren’s heart.
Never, he knew, had he really lived until that burning moment when its strange radiance had warmed and lifted him. The loss of its transcendent beauty extinguished the light of his world and embittered the cup of his life.
Yet the jewel had awakened a power in him, stirred a dormant audacity. But for that communion with its living beauty, he might have lived out his days in the hills of Pylos, and the planets might have floated on within the solar photosphere, to be consumed again in flame with the inevitable secular weakening and collapse of their shielding etheric spheres.
Wyndonee came back to him as he woke, as he had seen her upon the visigraph screen at the monorail station.
On the screen, Wyndonee had stood demurely beside her father, the Lhundar. For all that he was supreme ruler of the human race, upon many planets, he was a scant-bearded, mild-faced, smiling little man, looking far less distinguished than many a herdsman of the hills of Pylos.
But Wyndonee was regal. Beneath a tower of lofty argent, against the vivid background of a hanging terrace garden, the princess had stood, tall as her father. She was slender, boyish. A vital, gracious beauty filled her like a precious vase. Her dancing eyes, even upon the screen, were rarest blue; her hair was a red-gold flame against the jeweled wealth of a scarlet gown.
When Ken Darren woke, aching and bruised amid the ferns, the proud loveliness of Wyndonee, and the cool caress of her limpid voice, lived again in his mind. And some barrier of awe had been removed, so that he knew that he loved her.
He wanted her peerless beauty to drink as he had drunk the wonder of the crystal. He wanted the softness of her satin skin beneath his reverent fingers. He desired the dancing light of her eyes in his, and the cool ripple of her laughter at his ear. He wanted the perfume of her red-gold hair richly intoxicating in his nostrils. He wanted to hold her close, her heart quickening in time to his.
And the great crystal might have given him Wyndonee.
That knowledge sickened him with hopeless despair. And back to taunt him came the gloating words of Dakkil Kun:
“The jewel makes me greater than the Lhundar. Lean choke out his proud life—I can make Wyndonee—until I choose to kill her—my whipped slave to wash my feet.”
Then a hot resolution flamed up in him, from the memory of the crystal, and the memory of Wyndonee, and hardened into invincible purpose.
“I will overtake Dakkil Kun,” Ken Darren told himself, “and stop his evil plan. I will take back the okal, which is now twice mine—— The okal will make a place for me, in Kothri, peacefully and justly. And then, if I meet Wyndonee——”
Limping from his bruises, he returned to the thatched shelter where he had lived with Dakkil Kun, and found another herdsman turning out the penned cattle.
“No, this herd is mine,” the man answered Ken’s challenge. “I bought it an hour ago, with the company patents upon these pastures. And cheaply enough.”
“From one Dakkil Kun?” demanded Ken, his heart sinking. “Where is he?”
“He has just gone, with his money, toward the monorail station. He is departing upon the next geodesic flier, he said, for far Nydron.”
Hardly crediting the completeness of this treachery, Ken said: “He left nothing for his partner?”
“No.” The man eyed Ken sharply. “But he told me that his partner, one Ken Darren, was gone mad. He is wandering in the hills, he said, and raving of a great okal. Dakkil Kun will send back the Company police, he said, to search for this Ken Darren. Do you know him?”
Thinking swiftly, Ken shook his head.
“No,” he said. “The two partners owed me a small debt. I will follow Dakkil Kun, and ask him for it.”
