Poul Anderson - Hunter's Moon

Then the Beasts arrived. Horror erupted. Somewhere a strange voice screamed for the avenging of her shattered bliss.

As she trotted along a bare ridge, Erakoum had thought, with a leap of her pulse, that she spied afar a faint blue ray of light in the air. She could not be certain, through the brilliance cast by Mardudek, but she altered her course in hopes. When she had scrambled a long while among stones and thorns, the glimmer disappeared. It must have been a trick of the night, perhaps moonglow on rising mists. That conclusion did nothing to ease her temper. Everything about the Flyers was unlucky!

Because of this, she was behind the rest of the pack. Her first news of quarry came through their yells. “ Hai-ay, hai-ay, hai-ay !” echoed around, and she snarled in bafflement. Surely she would arrive too late for a kill. Nonetheless she bounded in that direction. If the Flyers did not get a good wind, she could overtake them and follow along from cover to cover, unseen. Maybe they would not go further than she had strength for, before they chanced on a fresh upswelling of firemites and descended anew. Breath rasped in her gullet, the hillside struck at her feet with unseen rocks, but eagerness flung her on till she reached the place.

It was a glade, brightly lit though crisscrossed by shadows, cut in half by a small ravine. The firemites swirled about against the forest murk, like a glinting dustcloud. Several females crouched on the turf and ripped at the remnants of their prey. The rest had departed, to trail the escaped Flyers as Erakoum planned.

She stopped at the edge of trees to pant, looked up, and froze. The mass of Flyers was slowly and chaotically streaming west, but a few lingered to cast down their pitiful weapons. From the top of one, dim light beamed aloft. She had found what she sought.

“ Ee-hah !” she screamed, sprang forward, shook her javelin.

“Come, evilworker, come and be slain! By your blood shall you give to my next brood the life you reaved from my first!”

There was no surprise, there was fate, when the eerie shape spiraled about and drew nearer. More would be settled this night than which of them was to survive. She, Erakoum, had been seized by a Power, had become an instrument of the Prophet.

Crouched, she cast her spear. The effort surged through her muscles. She saw it fly straight as the damnation it carried—but her foe swerved, it missed him by a fingerbreadth, and then all at once he was coming directly at her.

They never did that! What sheened in his seaweed grip?

Erakoum grabbed after a new javelin off her back. Each knot in the lashing was supposed to give way at a jerk, but this jammed, she must tug again, and meanwhile the enemy loomed ever more big. She recognized what he held, a human-made knife, sharp as a fresh obsidian blade and more thin and strong. She retreated. Her spear was now loose. No room for a throw. She thrust.

With crazy glee, she saw the head strike. The Flyer rolled aside before it could pierce, but blood and gas together foamed darkly from a slash across his paleness.

He spurted forward, was inside her guard. The knife smote and smote. Erakoum felt the stabs, but not yet the pain. She dropped her shaft, batted her arms, snapped jaws together. Teeth closed in flesh. Through her mouth and down her throat poured a rush of strength.

Abruptly the ground was no more beneath her hind feet. She fell over, clawed with forefeet and hands for a hold, lost it, and toppled. When she hit the side of the ravine, she rolled down across cruel snags. She had an instant’s glimpse of sky above, stars and firemites, the Mardudek-lighted Flyer drifting by and bleeding. Then nothingness snatched her to itself.

Folk at Port Kato asked what brought Jannika Rezek and Hugh Brocket home so early, so shaken. They evaded questions and hastened to their place. The door slammed behind them. A minute later, they blanked their windows.

For a time they stared at each other. The familiar room held no comfort. Illumination meant for human eyes was brass-harsh, air shut away from the forest was lifeless, faint noises from the settlement outside thickened the silence within.

He shook his head finally, blindly, and turned from her. “Erakoum gone,” he mumbled. “How’m I ever going to understand that?”

“Are you sure?” she whispered.

“I… I felt her mind shut off… damn near like a blow to my own skull… but you were making such a fuss about your precious ouranid—”

“A’i’ach’s hurt ! His people know nothing of medicine. If you hadn’t been raving till I decided I must talk you back with me before you crashed your flitter—”

Jannika broke off, swallowed hard, unclenched her fists, and became able to say: “Well, the harm is done and here we are. Shall we try to reason about it, try to find out what went wrong and how to stop another such horror, or not?”

“Yeah, of course.” He went to the pantry. “You want a drink?” he called.

She hesitated. “Wine.”

He fetched her a glassful. His right hand clutched a tumbler of straight whiskey, which he began on at once. “I felt Erakoum die,” he said.

Jannika took a chair. “Yes, and I felt A’i’ach take wounds that may well prove mortal. Sit down, will you?”

He did, heavily, opposite her. She sipped from her glass, he gulped from his. Newcomers to Medea always said wine and distilled spirits there tasted more peculiar than the food. A poet had made that fact the takeoff point for a chilling verse about isolation. When it was sent to Earth as part of the news, the reply came after a century that nobody could imagine what the colonists saw in it.

Hugh hunched his shoulders. “Okay,” he growled. “We should compare notes before we start forgetting, and maybe repeat tomorrow when we’ve had a chance to think.” He reached across to their recorder and flicked it on. As he entered an identification phrase, his tone stayed dull.

“That is best for us too,” Jannika reminded him. “Work, logical thought, those hold off the nightmares.”

“Which this absolutely was—All right!” He regained a little vigor. “Let’s try to reconstruct what did happen.

“The ouranids were out after glitterbugs and the dromids were out after ouranids. You and I witnessed an encounter. Naturally, we’d hoped we wouldn’t—I suppose you prayed for that, hm?—but we knew there’d be hostilities in a lot of places. What shocked the wits out of us was when our personal natives got into a fight, with us in rapport.”

Jannika bit her lip. “Worse than that,” she said. “They were seeking it, those two. It was not a random encounter, it was a duel.” She raised her eyes. “You never told Erakoum, any dromid, that we were linking with an ouranid too, did you?”

“No, certainly not. Nor did you tell your ouranid about my liaison. We both know better than to throw that kind of variable into a program like this.”

“And the rest of the station personnel have vocabularies too limited, in either language. Very well. But I can tell you that A’i’ach knew. I was not aware he did until the fight began. Then it reached the forefront of his mind, it shouted at me, not in words but not to be mistaken about.”

“Yeah, same thing for me with Erakoum, more or less.”

“Let’s admit what we don’t want to, my dear. We have not simply been receiving from our natives. We have been transmitting. Feedback.”

He lifted a helpless fist. “What the devil might convey a return message?”

“If nothing else, the radio beam that locks us onto our subjects. Induced modulation. We know from the example of the glitterbug larvae—and no doubt other cases you and I never heard of—how shall we know everything about a whole world? We know Medean organisms can be extremely radio-sensitive.”