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Kickaha said, "Take my word for it, this is a hell of a big place. I've traveled a lot in the twenty-three
years I've been here, but I've seen only a small part. I have a lot ahead of me to see. If I live, of course."
The machine had descended swiftly and now hovered about ten feet above the rolling waves of
Okeanos. The surf shattered with a white bellow against the reefs or directly against the butt of the
monolith. Kickaha wanted to make sure that the water was deep enough. He had Anana fly the craft two
miles further out. Here he dumped the four caskets and bell-shaped contents into the sea. The water was
pure and the angle of sunlight just right. He could see the caskets a long way before the darkness
swallowed them. They fell through schools offish that glowed all hues of all colors and by a
Brobdingnagian octopus, striped purple and white, that reached out a tentacle to touch a casket as it
went by.
Dumping the bells here was not really necessary, since they were empty. But Anana would not feel easy
until they were sunk out of reach of any sentients.
"Six down. Forty-four to go," Kickaha said. "Now to the village of the Hrowakas, the Bear People. My
people,"
The craft followed the curve of the monolith base for about seven hundred miles. Then Kickaha took
over the controls. He flew the craft up and in ten minutes had climbed a little over twelve miles of
precipitousness to the edge of the Amerind level. Another hour of cautious threading through the valleys
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ranges and half an hour of reconnoitering brought them to the little hill on top of which was the village of
the Hrowakas.
Kickaha felt as if a warlance had driven into his skull. The tall sharp-pointed logs that formed the wall
around the village were gone. Here and there, a blackened stump poked through the ashes.
The great V-roofed council hall, the lodge for bachelor warriors, the bear pens, the horse barns, the
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granary storage, the smokehouses, and the log-cabin family dwellings all were gone. Burned into gray
mounds.
It had rained the night before, but smoke rose weakly from a few piles.
On the hillside were a dozen widely scattered charred corpses of women and children and the burned
carcasses of a few bears and dogs. These had been fleeing when rayed down.
He had no doubt that the Black Bellers had done this. But how had they connected him with the
Hrowakas?
His thoughts, wounded, moved slowly. Finally, he remembered that the Tishquetmoac knew that he
came from the Hrowakas. However, they did not know even the approximate location of the village. The
Hrowaka men always traveled at least two hundred miles from the village before stopping along the
Great Trade Path. Here they waited for the Tishquetmoac caravan. And though the Bear People were
talkers, they would not reveal the place of their village.
Of course, there were old enemies of the Bear People, and perhaps the Bellers had been informed by
these. And there were also films of the village and of Kickaha, taken by Wolffand stored in his palace.
The Bellers could have run these off
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and so found the Hrowakas, since the location was shown on a map in the film.
Why had they burned down the village and all in it? What could serve the Hellers by this act?
With a heavy halting voice, he asked Anana the same question. She replied in a sympathetic tone, and if
he had not been so stunned, he would have been agreeably surprised at her reaction.
"The Sellers did not do this out of vindictive-ness," she said. "They are cold and alien to our way of
thinking. You must remember that while they are products of human beings" Kickaha was not so
stunned that he did not notice her identification of Lords with human beings at this time "and were
raised and educated by human beings, they are, in essence, mechanical life. They have
self-consciousness, to be sure, which makes them not mere machines. But they were born of metal and in
metal. They are as cruel as any human. But the cruelty is cold and mechanical. Cruelty is used only when
they can get something desired through it. They can know passion, that is, sexual desire, when they are in
the brain of a man or woman, just as they get hungry because their host-body is hungry.
"But they don't take illogical vengeance as a human would. That is, they wouldn't destroy a tribe just
because it happened to be loved by you. No, they must have had a good reason to them, anyway for
doing this."
"Perhaps they wanted to make sure I didn't take refuge here," he said. "They would have been smarter
to have waited until I did and then move in."
They could be hiding someplace up on the mountains where they could observe everything.
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139
However, Kickaha insisted on scouting the area before he approached the village. If Bellers were spying
on them, they were well concealed indeed. In fact, since the heat-and-mass detector on the craft
indicated nothing except some small animals and birds, the Bellers would have to be behind something
large. In which case, they couldn't see their quarry either.
It was more probably that the Seller machine, after destroying the village, had searched this area. Failing
to find him, it had gone elsewhere.
"I'll take over the controls," Anana said softly. "You tell me how to get to Podarge."
He was still too sluggish to react to her unusual solicitude. Later, he would think about it.
Now he told her to go to the edge of the level again and to descend about fifty thousand feet. Then she
was to take the craft westward at 150 MPH until he told her to stop.
The trip was silent except for the howling of the wind at the open rear end. Not until the machine
stopped below an enormous overhang of shiny black rock did he speak.
"I could have buried the bodies," he said, "but it would have taken too long. The Bellers might have
checked back."
"You're still thinking about them," she said with a trace of incredulity. " I mean, you' re worrying because
you couldn't keep the carrion eaters off them? Don't! They' re dead; you can do nothing for them."
"You don't understand," he said. "When I called them my people, I meant it. I loved them, and they
loved me. They were a strange people when I first met them, strange to me. I was a young, mid-twentieth
century, Midwestern
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American citizen, from another universe, in fact. And they were descendants of Amerinds who had been
brought to this universe some twenty thousand years ago. Even the ways of an Indian of America are
alien and near-incomprehensible to a white American. But I'm very adaptable and flexible. I learned their
ways and came to think something like them. I was at ease with them and they with me. And I was
Kickaha, the Trickster, the man of many turns. Their Kickaha, the scourge of the enemy of the Bear
People.
"This village was my home, and they were my friends, the best I've ever had, and I also had two [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]