Short Fiction by Poul Anderson (free ebook novel .txt) 📕

we can cross unaided. Yet though we have captured many spaceships and have them intact at Drogobych, we cannot operate them. The principles learned from the humans don’t make sense! When we have tried to pilot them, it has only brought disaster.”

“But why do you want to leave?”

“It is a recent decision, precipitated by your arrival, but it has been considered for a long while. This sun is old, this planet exhausted, and the lives of we few remnants of a great race flicker in a hideous circumscribed drabness. Sooner or later, the humans will fight their way here in strength too great for us. Before then we must be gone.”

“So⁠—” Donovan spoke softly, and the wind whimpered under his voice. “So your plan is to capture this group of spacemen and make them your slaves, to carry you⁠—where?”

“Out. Away.” Valduma’s clear lovely laughter rang in the night. “To seize another planet and build our strength afresh.” She gripped his waist and he saw the white gleam of her teeth out of shadow. “To build a great army of obedient spacegoing warriors⁠—and then out to hunt between the stars!”

“Hunt⁠—”

“Look here.” Morzach edged closer, his eyes a green glow, the vague sheen of naked steel in his hand. “I’ve been polite long enough. You have your chance, to rise above the human scum that spawned you and be one of us. Help us now and you can be with us till you die. Otherwise, we’ll take that crew anyway, and you’ll be hounded across the face of this planet.”

“Aye⁠—aye⁠—welcome back, Basil Donovan, welcome back to the old king-race.⁠ ⁠… Come with us, come with us, lead the humans into our ambush and be the lord of stars.⁠ ⁠…”

They circled about him, tall and mailed and beautiful in the shadow-light, luring whispering voices, ripple of dark laughter, the hunters playing with their quarry and taming it. Donovan remembered them, remembered the days when he had talked and smiled and drunk and sung with them, the Lucifer-like intoxication of their dancing darting minds, a wildness of magic and mystery and reckless wizard sport, a glory which had taken something from his soul and left an emptiness within him. Morzach, Marovech, Uboda, Zegoian, for a time he had been the consort of the gods.

“Basil.” Valduma laid sharp-nailed fingers in his hair and pulled his lips to hers. “Basil, I want you back.”

He held her close, feeling the lithe savage strength of her, recalling the flame-like beauty and the nights of love such as no human could ever give. His whisper was thick: “You got bored last time and sent me back. How long will I last now?”

“As long as you wish, Basil. Forever and forever.” He knew she lied, and he didn’t care.

“This is what you must do, Donovan,” said Morzach.

He listened with half his mind. It was a question of guiding the army into a narrow cul-de-sac where the Arzunians could perform the delicate short-range work of causing chains to bind around them. For the rest, he was thinking.

They hunt. They intrigue, and they whittle down their last few remnants with fighting among themselves, and they prey on the fringe stars, and they capture living humans to hunt down for sport. They haven’t done anything new for ten thousand years, creativeness has withered from them, and all they will do if they escape the Nebula is carry ruin between the stars. They’re mad.

Yes⁠—a whole society of psychopaths, gone crazy with the long racial dying. That’s the real reason they can’t handle machines, that’s why they don’t think of friendship but only of war, that’s why they carry doom within them.

But I love you, I love you, I love you, O Valduma the fair.

He drew her to him, kissed her with a terrible intensity, and she laughed in the dark. Looking up, he faced the blaze that was Morzach.

“All right,” he said. “I understand. Tomorrow.”

“Aye⁠—good, good, well done!”

“Oh, Basil, Basil!” whispered Valduma. “Come, come away with me, now.”

“No. They’d suspect. I have to go down to them or they’ll come looking for me.”

“Good night, Basil, my darling, my vorza. Until tomorrow!”

He went slowly down the hillside, drawing his shoulders together against the cold, not looking back. Helena rose when he approached her campfire, and the flimmering light made her seem pale and unreal.

“Where have you been, Basil? You look so tired.”

“Just walking around. I’m all right.” He spread his couch of stiff and stinking animal hides. “We’d better turn in, eh?”

But he slept little.

VI

The Highway curved between great looming walls of cragged old rock, a shadow tunnel with the wind yowling far overhead and the sun a disc of blood. Men’s footfalls echoed from the cracked paving blocks to boom hollowly off time-gnawed cliffs and ring faintly in the ice. It was cold, their breath smoked from them and they shivered and cursed and stamped their feet.

Donovan walked beside Helena, who was riding Wocha. His eyes narrowed against the searching wind, looking ahead and around, looking for the side track where the ambush waited. Drogobych was very near.

Something moved up on the ridge, a flapping black thing which was instantly lost to sight. The Arzunians were watching.

There⁠—up ahead⁠—the solitary tree they had spoken of, growing out between age-crumbled fragments of the road. The highway swung west around a pinnacle of rock, but here there was a branch road running straight south into a narrow ravine. All I have to do is suggest we take it. They won’t know till too late that it leads up a blind canyon.

Helena leaned over toward him, so that the long wind-whipped hair blew against his cheek. “Which way should we go?” she asked. One hand rested on his shoulder.

He didn’t slacken his stride, but his voice was low under the whine of bitter air: “To the right, Helena, and on the double. The Arzunians are waiting up the other road, but Drogobych is just beyond that crag.”

“Basil! How do you know⁠—”

Wocha’s long hairy ears