Damon Knight - Orbit 20

Hanna said bitterly, “We hardly know a thing about this place. We should spend two hundred years just studying it; and we have to leave it in three weeks because the government wants to shove colonists out here as fast as they can go.”

Jon said “Hurry up, can’t you?” He seemed impatient to get to work.

The Konans had changed no more than the weather. They still sat their horses apparently unwearying, and the horses themselves were as tall and white and lovely as ever. Every time it is a shock to see them, thought Hanna. I can’t even carry their image in my mind. Like trying to mount a 3-D projection on a 2-D screen. It suddenly seemed immensely frustrating that even in this, the Konans defeated her; she could not even make her ideals surpass their reality.

Still, she worked away steadily, eliciting small shreds of information from the group, and trying (in case Gerold’s preliminary report did its work too well) to explain the aims of Terran colonization to them. The latter attempt was not successful. The Konans listened, politely, but it made no impression on them.

Once Alissin said, “Jon’s group are moving off a bit.” Hanna, deep in the intricacies of Terran colonial policy, hardly heard her. After some time, Alissin said, “We should get back soon, and we have to call Jon. He’s breaking rule as it is, going so far from us.”

That made Hanna look round; and it was true. Jon’s group was now moving rapidly over the plain towards the shuttle.

“Where is Jon?” said Hanna. “I can’t see him.”

“He must be there, he was there just before.”

“I can’t see—”

Then suddenly the tight group broke into a ragged cluster, and the cluster into a line; and both Hanna and Alissin could see clearly a rider in the middle, looking small and out of place, bumping a little to the long stride of his horse. Behind him, another horse bore two Konan riders.

“The fool, the blasted fool! He’s gone and tried out his stupid Dixon-Ehrmann method—” Hanna turned to run after them.

“He may be all right. They’re only walking.”

“Oh, come on!”

Their own group was showing signs of moving in the same direction. Hanna began to run; the horses’ walk was a strenuous jog-trot for her and Alissin. Hanna felt her face stiffen with dried sweat.

But Jon rode on, not easily, but at least safely. His companions seemed in high spirits; Hanna could see some of them urging their horses to jump and rear, and sweated again to think that Jon’s mount might follow suit. But it continued to walk.

They were halfway to the shuttle by now, and Hanna could see Gerold and Erring and Biren come out to watch the approach. She saw, with alarm, that Gerold carried two pistols. She saw Jon wave to them, with proud affected carelessness, and cursed him more than ever.

All the horses began to trot, and then to canter. Hanna shouted, “Drop off you fool, get off while you can!” (knowing all the time that to fall from even a cantering Konanhorse would be very dangerous). But Jon, sliding and bumping perilously, took no notice; and Hanna saw suddenly that he had tied his right wrist to the mane of his horse, evidently to help him keep his grip. She felt her stomach muscles clench with panic.

Erring was shouting now, too: “Jon, are you all right?” Now they were all near enough to the shuttle for Gerold to see Jon’s tied hand, and Hanna heard him say, “They’ve tied him up—the bastards have tied him up!” and he raised one of his pistols. Hanna cried breathlessly, “No, they didn’t, Gerry, he did it himself—it’s his blasted Dixon-Ehrmann method.” But Gerold said, “How do we know that?”

The horses were very near to the shuttle now, and suddenly they began to gallop, past it and in a wide curve around it. They all saw Jon nearly slip, and he screamed. His head whipped back and forth, hitting his hands clenched in his horse’s mane; then in a moment the whole mass of horses had gone, streaming past like snowflakes in the wind.

Panic exploded like a bomb among the little group of Terrans. Gerold raised his pistol, and Erring knocked it out of his hand, crying, “You’ll hit him, he’ll be killed!” Biren and Alissin ran futilely after the horses, and back. Hanna dived for the pistol, and Gerold punched her away. “When they come back again I’m shooting them!” he yelled.

The thunder of hooves approached the shuttle again, and they all ran out to meet it. The Konans were leaning forward, shouting to each other, bringing their horses in a circle round the shuttle. For a moment they could not see Jon; then one horse ran by apparently riderless, but for two hands clasped in his mane, and they saw him dangling like a doll, with his feet rhythmically hitting the ground and bouncing crazily off it again.

A babble of voices. Gerold lifted his pistol and fired, but Jon’s horse was past, and the beam tore strips off the next horse and rider. Hanna found herself shouting, “They made us not to be and they are not!” in Konan, again and again. Gerold aimed his pistol once more, and Biren seized the other one; but the race of horses and riders never ceased, and Jon’s horse was untouched. Alissin cried, “They don’t know they’re going to die!” and the tears ran down her face. Some of the horses were slowing now, some running on three legs, and some riders were down. But their pale handsome faces never changed, and none of them cried out, and none fell over. “You can’t kill the bloody things,” panted Gerold desperately; and at the same time, Hanna heard the roar and whistle of a shuttle landing, and Erring called gladly, “They’ve come!” and waved wildly. The door of the relief shuttle opened, and a group of Terrans ran out, all armed with pistols, and deployed themselves neatly over the plain. Completely businesslike, they began firing into the mass of Konans, steadily and efficiently saving the stranded shuttle from attack.

Hanna sat down, because her knees folded up. It seemed as if a switch clicked in her brain, so that time went very slowly, and any number of images could parade through her mind simultaneously and without hurry. She saw the Konans galloping to meet them, white horses on a dark plain; and saw too a Konan in front of her stagger forward with half his leg shot off, and lose his other leg to a stray beam, and continue to crawl forward until another shot carved his chest open, all with no expression on his face. She saw gunfire arcing across the plains like flaming swords, a hundred and fifty years ago, and Jon as a little boy saying, “I can! I am big enough!” and the guarded words of the old report: “indigenous humanoids appeared nonaggressive.” She heard the Konans saying to her, “It is not to be understood,” Alissin commenting, “Try to kill some and see how difficult it is,” and heard, too, Gerold cry in anguish, “You can’t tell when the bastards are dead, they won’t die—” but many of them were dead, caught in crossbeams, and chopped into heaps.

Then the switch clicked back again, and she saw the last of the Konanhorses suddenly double their speed, with no visible effort, so that they raced across the plain faster than the mind could follow, the riders calling to each other in great echoing cries, and were gone behind the bluff like ships gone into hyperspace.

Erring and Alissin were bending over Jon, who lay wounded near what had been his horse.

One of the second shuttle crew came over and said to Gerold, “Too close for comfort. Thought the locals weren’t supposed to be dangerous?”

Hanna said, with a hysterical travesty of patience, “No, no, you’ve got it wrong. No one said they weren’t dangerous, they said they weren’t aggressive, and that was right, wasn’t it? Erring, wasn’t it? Gerold?”