Rerne’s lips twisted wryly. “We have learned very little, most of our species. I can name you half a hundred planets that have been wrecked by greed. No, not just those burned off during the war, but killed deliberately over a period of years. As long as we can keep Korwar as a pleasant haven for the overlords of other worlds, some of them the greed- wrecked ones, we can hold this one inviolate. One does not want such desolation in one’s own back yard. So far those of the villas have the power, the wealth, to retain Korwar as their unspoiled play place. But how long will it continue to be so? There may be other treasures here than those fabled to lie in Ruhkarv, and far more easily found!”
“You have had two hundred years,” Troy said, with an old bitterness darkening that elation of moments earlier. “Norden had less than a hundred—thanks to Sattor Commander Di!”
“No length of years will satisfy a man when he sees the end cf a way of life he is willing to fight for. What does the past matter when the future swoops for the kill? Yes, Sattor Commander Di—who died of poison in his own garden house and whose murderer is yet to be found—and even the method by which the poison reached him determined—has to answer for Norden.”
How did Rerne know all that about Di? The fact of poison had not been broadcast on the general corns. Troy felt like a sofaru rat over which the shadow of a diving fussel had fallen, powerless before the strike of an enemy not of his own element. Was this behind Reme’s talk, merely a softening-up process to prepare him for subtle questioning about the kinkajou? Or was his own half-guilty feeling suggesting that?
But the Hunter did not enlarge upon the case of Sattor Commander Di. His explorations into the past were not so immediate. Rather now he led Troy to talk about his own childhood. Though in another Korwarian Horan might have considered that questioning presumptuous, there was something about Rerne’s interest that seemed genuine, so that the younger man answered truthfully instead of with the evasions he had used so long for a shield—including the fact that his memories of Norden’s plains and the free life there were hazy now.
“There are plains here, too. You might consider that,” Rerne suggested cryptically as he arose in one lithe movement. “Given time, the right man might learn much. The bunk at that end is yours, Horan. No evil dreams ride your night—“ Again the phrase had some of the formality of a ritual dismissal. Troy looked in upon the fussel, saw that it was asleep with one foot drawn up into its under feathers after the manner of its kind, and then went to the bunk Rerne had indicated.
There was no foam plast filling its box shape. Inside dried grasses and leaves gave under him, then remolded about his body, and the fine scent of them filled his nostrils as he fell asleep easily. He did not dream at all.
When he awoke, the door of the big room stood ajar and from that direction he heard the calls of birds. Still rubbing sleep from his eyes, Troy rolled out of the bunk. The fire on the hearth was out and there was no one else in the room. But the clean smell of a new day in the Wild drew him out on the ledge, to stand looking down into the valley of the lake.
Something rose and fell with a regular stroke not far from the shore, and he realized he was watching a swimmer. A series of steps cut in the rock led down from the ledge, and Troy followed them. Then a loose sleeping robe draped over a bush beckoned him on and he shed his own in turn, testing the temperature of the water with his toes, plunging into it in a clumsy dive before he could change his mind because of that chill greeting.
Troy floundered along the shore, being no expert as was that other now heading, with clean arm sweeps and effortless kicks, back from the center. His threshings disturbed mats of floating blossoms shed by trees bordering a rill that fed the lake at this point, and the bruised petals patterned his wet skin as he found sandy footing and stood up, shivering.
“Storm-cold, Gentle Homo.” he commented as Rerne waded in. The other stopped to wring water from his braided hair knot and then, surveying Troy’s dappled body, he laughed,
“A new refinement—flower baths?” Troy echoed that laugh as he skimmed the wet masses from him. “Not of my choice, Gentle Homo.”
“The name is Rerne. We do not follow the paths of Tikil here, Horan.” The other was using his nightrobe as a towel, kicking his feet into sandals. With the robe now draped cloakwise about him, he stood for a moment looking out over the lake, and his face was oddly relaxed, much more alive than Troy had ever seen it.
“A fair day. We shall go to the plateau above Stansill and see just how good our feathered one really is.”
The flitter took them east and north again. And once more the vegetation beneath them thinned. But not to a waste scar such as that which held Ruhkarv, rather to open plains of tall grasses and scattered, low-growing shrubs. Twice Reme buzzed the flyer above herds of ruminants, and horned heads tossed angrily before the heavy-shouldered beasts pounded away, tasseled tails high in wrath.
“Pansta,” Rerne identified them. “Wild cattle of a sort.”
“But they are scaled—or at least they look so!” Troy protested, thinking of his own lost tupan that had grazed so and might have run from a buzzing flitter in the same pattern.
“Not scaled as a fish or a reptile,” Rerne corrected. “Those are plates of hardened flesh—something like an insect’s wing casing shell. The herds are dwindling every year, fewer calves born; we do not yet know why. We have reason to believe that they were once domesticated.”
“By those of Ruhkarv?”
“Perhaps. Though who or what those of Ruhkarv were—“ Rerne shrugged.
“Did they leave only one ruin behind them? I know only of Ruhkarv.”
“And that is another mystery. Why a single known city for a civilization? Were they only an outpost of some long-lost stellar empire vanished before man took to space? That was one theory Fauklow wanted to prove or disprove. There is one other trace of them on Korwar—north beyond the plains. But that is all—and that is a very small post. I do not think they were native here. Just as the pansta are so alien to the other animals of the Wild that they do not seem to be native either. The feral herds of a long-gone race, which have outlasted their unknown masters.”
The edge of the plains where the pansta ran dropped behind them, and now there were ridges and rising slopes once again, until the flitter climbed to a tableland open to the sky, seeming otherwise cut off from any contact with the lower stretches. Under the golden light of a perfect morning there spread a patched flooring of flowering grasses, a few scattered trees, so removed from any touch of man’s passing that Troy thought they might have been the first to find that place if his companion’s knowledge of it had not argued otherwise.
Reme brought the flitter down on a stretch of gravel beside quiet water that was neither as large as a lake nor as small as a pond. They climbed out and stood with the breeze pushing against their bodies. The fussel spread wings, gave voice.
“Let him hunt! Ollllahuuuu!”
Troy gave the wrist flex that was a signal of freedom to the bird he bore. And the fussel arose in great sweeps, beating into the topaz sky until neither man could see him clearly.
Seven
The sun was hot, and from under and around Troy as he lay, the smell of the grass flowers and the grass itself was heady in his nostrils, long pinched by the town and the Dipple. He was relaxed, drowsy, yet not ready to sleep.
It had been a wonderful morning on this piece of Korwar raised into the skies and kept inviolate. Now even the fussel had had enough of the freedom of the wind and the clouds and was content to perch on a tree limb Troy had trimmed and set in the ground for the bird’s comfort.
Here the insects seemed few or innocuous. There was no stinging or biting to plague the would-be sleeper. Yet a part of Troy argued that this was very fleeting and that it was a pity to waste a moment in such sloth.
He levered himself up from the warmth. Avoiding the fussel’s perch and Rerne’s chosen couch, he walked out alone into the open, away from the flitter and all intrusions of Tikil. And as he stood there, the wind trying in vain to pull at his close-cropped hair, pushing protestingly against his straight body, Troy suddenly had a mental picture of a far different place—an artificially lighted room ranked with cages, and the brown-furred back of a creature that had curled into a ball to escape.