Clifford Simak - A Heritage of Stars

"They aren't all that tough," said Rollo. "With a show of force.

Cushing shook his head. "Someone would get hurt."

Elayne rose to her feet. Her voice came to them, calm, unhurried, so precise it hurt. "You are wrong," she said to the wardens. "The things you have been telling us have no truth in them. There are no Sleepers and no danger. We are going on."

With that, she walked toward them, slowly, deliberately, as if there were no one there to stop her. Meg rose swiftly, clutching at her arm, but Elayne shook off the hand. Ezra came quickly to his feet and hurried to catch up with Elayne. Andy flicked his tail and followed close behind.

The wardens sprang up quickly and began to back away, their eyes fastened on the terrible gentleness of Elayne's face.

From off to one side came a coughing roar and Cushing spun around to face in its direction. A huge animal, gray and brown, humped of shoulder, great mouth open in its roar, had burst from a clump of plum bushes that grew beside the gully and was charging the wardens' huddled horses. The horses, for an instant, stood frozen in their fear, then suddenly reacted, plunging in great arcing leaps to escape the charging bear.

Rollo catapulted into action, at full speed with his second stride; his spear, held two-handed, extended straight before him.

"A grizzly!" he shouted. "After all this time, a grizzly!"

"Come back, you fool," yelled Cushing, reaching for an arrow and nocking it to the bowstring.

The horses were running wildly. Straight behind them came the bear, screaming in his rage, rapidly closing on the frightened animals. Running directly at the bear was Rollo, with leveled spear thrusting out toward it.

Cushing raised the bow and drew back the arrow, almost to his cheek. He let it go and the arrow was a whicker in the golden sunshine of late afternoon. It struck the bear in the neck and the bear whirled, roaring horribly. Cushing reached for another arrow. As he raised the bow again, he saw the bear, rearing on its hind legs, its face a foaming frenzy, its forelegs lifted to strike down, with Rollo almost underneath them, the spear thrusting up to strike. Out of the tail of his eye, Cushing saw Andy, head stretched forward, ears laid back, tail streaming out behind him, charging down at full gallop upon the embattled bear.

Cushing let the arrow go and heard the thud, saw its feathered end protruding from the bear's chest, just below the neck. Then the bear was coming down, its forearms reaching out to grasp Rollo in their clutches, but with Rollo's spear now buried deeply in its chest. Andy spun on his front legs, his hind legs lashing out. They caught the bear's belly with a sickening, squashy sound.

The bear was down and Rollo was scrambling out from underneath it, the bright metal of his body smeared with blood. Andy kicked the bear again, then trotted off, prancing, his neck bowed in pride. Rollo danced a wild war jig around the fallen bear, whooping as he danced.

"Grease!" he was yelling. "Grease, grease, grease!"

The bear kicked and thrashed in reflex action. The wardens' horses were rapidly diminishing dots on the prairie to the south. The wardens, running desperately behind them, were slightly larger dots.

"Laddie boy," Meg said, watching them, "I would say this broke up the parley."

"Now," said Elayne, "we'll go on to the butte."

"No,~~ said Cushing. "First we render out some oil for Rollo."

As the wardens had said, the living rocks were waiting for them, just outside the Trees. There were dozens of them, with others coming up from either side, rolling sedately, with a flowing, effortless, apparently controlled motion, moving for a time, then stopping, then rolling once again. They were dark of color, some of them entirely black, and they measured—or at least the most of them measured—up to three feet in diameter. They did not form a line in front of the travelers, to block their way, but moved out, to range themselves around them, closing to the back of them and to each side, as if they were intent upon herding them toward the Trees.

Meg moved close to Cushing. He put his hand upon her arm and found that she was shivering. "Laddie buck," she said, "I feel the coldness once again, the great uncaring. Like the time we found the rock on the first night out.

"It'll be all right," he said, "if we can make our way through

the Trees. The rocks seem to want us to move in toward the Trees."

"But the wardens said the Trees would not let us through."

"The warden~," he said, "are acting out an old tradition that may not have any meaning now or may never have had a meaning, something that they clung to through the centuries because it was the one reality they had, the one thing in which they could believe. It gave them a sense of continuity, a belonging to the ancient past. It was something that set them apart as special people and made them important."

"And yet," said Meg, "when the bear stampeded the horses, they left us and went streaking after them, and they've not been back."

"I think it was Elayne," said Cushing. "Did you see their faces when they looked at her? They were terrified. The bear, running off the horses, took them off a psychological hook and gave them an excuse to get out of there."

"Maybe, too," said Meg, "it was being without horses. To the people of the plains, a horse is an important thing. They're crippled without horses. Horses are a part of them. So important that they had to run after them, no matter what."

The Trees loomed before them, a solid wall of greenery, with the greenery extending down to the very ground. They had the look of a gigantic hedge. There was an ordinary look about them, like any other tree, but Cushing found himself unable to identify them. They were hardwoods, but they were neither oak nor maple, elm nor hickory. They were not exactly like any other tree. Their leaves, stirring in the breeze, danced and talked the language of all trees, although, listening to them, Cushing gained the impression they were saying something, that if his ears had been sharp enough and attuned to the talk that they were making, he could understand the words.

Shivering Snake, positioned in a halo just above Rollo's head, was spinning so fast that in one's imagination one could hear it whistle with its speed. The Followers had come in closer, smudged shadows that dogged their heels, as if they might be staying close to seek protection.

Ezra had halted not more than ten feet from the green hedge of the Trees and had gone into his formal stance, standing rigidly, with his arms folded across his chest, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. Slightly behind him and to one side, Elayne had flopped down to the ground, feet tucked beneath her, hands folded in her lap, and bowed, with the ragged elk skin pulled up to cover her.

Now there was a new sound, a faint clicking that seemed to come from back of them, and when Cushing turned to see what it might be, he saw it was the rocks. They had joined in a semicircular formation, extending from the forefront of the Trees on one hand, around an arc to the forefront of the Trees on the other hand, spaced equidistantly from one another, no more than a foot or so apart, forming an almost solid line of rocks, hemming in the travelers, holding them in place. The clicking, he saw, resulted when the rocks, each one standing in its place, but each one rocking slightly, first to one side, then the other, struck against the neighbors next in line.

"It's horrible," said Meg. "That coldness—it is freezing me.

The tableau held. Ezra stood rigid; Elayne sat unmoving; Andy switched a nervous tail. The Followers came in closer, now actually among them, blobs of shadows that seemed to merge with the others huddled there. Shivering Snake outdid itself in its frantic spinning.