The Soul Eater Page 7

  They moved through the cloud together for hours, separated by the same three thousand miles, and bit by bit the terror began to disappear. After half a day the creature was totally unafraid of Lane, and he took that opportunity to move in closer.

  At one thousand miles he began to feel the creature's apprehension again, and by the time he was within three hundred miles he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life. He took his eyes from the screen and the panel long enough to look at the Mufti, which seemed totally unaffected, reinforcing his conclusion that the little animal was either unintelligent or else mad as a hatter.

  He turned all of his sensing devices onto the creature again, trying to learn something more about its makeup. It was no use. Possibly it was intelligent, possibly not. Perhaps it had the analog to a flesh-and-blood being's internal organs, perhaps it didn't. Conceivably it had some special mechanism by which it moved through space, conceivably it had none. The sensors were totally useless.

  Lane aimed his laser cannon about twelve degrees of arc above the creature and fíred it. The Starduster felt no greater apprehension or fear, and didn't alter its course. Lane fired another beam, kept the cannon on, and lowered the beam until it pierced right through the center of the creature. There was no response.

  He increased the Deathmaker's speed, and the creature did likewise, so quickly that he made up only about one hundred yards, which led him to the tentative conclusion that it might very well be a two-way empath.

  He moved his hand to the vibrator. If the creature could read his mind, or even his emotions, it should be increasing its speed now—but it did no such thing, and he was forced to rethink his analysis of it.

  Of course, he reasoned, he'd had no intention of setting off the vibrator, and perhaps the creature knew it. The only way to find out whether it could anticipate his actions was to actually open fire.

  A little thrill of excitement surged through him as he realized that of course this was what he had to do. He strapped himself into his seat, debated whether to make some protective arrangement for the Mufti, decided not to, and pressed the firing mechanism.

  The feeling was as intense as the first time he had fired on the creature, months before. An emotional wave struck him with the power of a thunderbolt, jerked his head back, sent spasmodic tremors through his limbs. There was remorse, and an almost religious fear of the unknown, and something that might be a pain analog, and other things, deep and dark and mysterious and totally alien. Almost as strong, though not quite, was the feeling of shock and surprise.

  He took his hand off the firing mechanism almost instantly and remained rigid, panting, glassy-eyed. When at last he gathered his senses about him the Starduster had vanished, but he found it on his panel and began tracking it again. As he did so, he began taking a mental inventory of his body: his heartbeat was returning to normal, the twitching and jerking of his muscles had almost ceased, his vision was still somewhat impaired but functional, his breathing remained slightly irregular, his associative powers seemed unimpaired.

  Then he checked out the Starduster's readings. There was no way to measure its mass, but its volume seemed constant, and certainly there was no diminishing of its speed.

  He spent four days in all-out pursuit without appreciably closing the gap between them. During that time the Mufti seemed to crave more affection and attention than usual, and he concluded that it must have felt something, however mild, when he had fired on the Starduster.

  Lane ate nothing at all, slept only fitfully, and spent almost every waking moment with his eyes glued to the panel. He was almost five million miles behind the creature, which seemed to feel that this was a safe margin, for though he was sure it could have pulled even farther ahead of him it made no effort to do so.

  It was harder and harder to keep track of the Starduster on his panel, which simply wasn't designed for this kind of work at greater-than-light speeds, and, on the fífth day of the chase, he lost all trace of it.

  He spent the next three months trying to find it again. His mood ranged from black to blacker, and even the Mufti gave him a wide berth after the fourth week. Finally a couple of the carcasses began disintegrating, and he realized that he'd have to put in to a port very soon or risk losing his income from the entire hunt.

  He lingered another day or two, hoping against hope that he might chance across the creature again, but at last he laid in a course for Lodin XI, the largest shipping world in the vicinity.

  As the Lodin system came into view he was still thinking about the Starduster. He'd gotten closer to it this time, so close he could almost have reached out and touched it. And yet all he had received for his time and his trouble was another tiny taste of death, a sharing of something so strange and grotesque and eerie that no rational man would ever want to experience it again. Not Tchaka, with his exuberant lust for life; not the Mariner, with his yearning for the unknown; not Lane, with his emotions wiped clean after a quarter century of bloodletting.

  And yet he had spent three months in pursuit of the strange, flowing, pulsating creature. He was still asking himself why as his ship passed by the orbiting fuel and shipping docks and prepared to set down on the dry, arid surface of Lodin XI.

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  * * *

  CHAPTER 9

  Lodin XI had about as much in common with Northpoint as a laser cannon had with a slingshot. The first hint of its complexity was the orbiting fuel stations; no world of Tradertowns out on the frontier had the money, or the volume of business, to erect such complex structures, which was why the Deathmaker, like almost all the ships of the frontier, was built for landing on planets.

  But the fuel depots were only the first inkling of the sophistication of the planet. It was divided into seventeen different nations—also unheard of on the Tradertown worlds—each of which possessed from ten to fifty cities. At last count the native humanoid population spoke in eleven different languages and perhaps twice that many dialects. Democracy, republic, monarchy, and dictatorship all existed side by side with no visible discord. The race of Man had set up business and housekeeping quarters too, and now totaled almost four percent of Lodin XI's population.

  The native structures were ... alien. There seemed to be no logical progression to them. Where a street might be expected to widen, it vanished. Some one-floor structures were entirely transparent, while a number of the skyscrapers possessed no windows at all. Business districts were nonexistent. Huge stores and factories sprouted up in the midst of wildly discordant residential neighborhoods, which in turn were infringing on the spaceport and the open-air zoos. In the midst of all this architectural hodgepodge was an occasional acre or two that nobody had bothered to build on at all. Boulevards wound in and out of totally dissimilar areas with no apparent rhyme or reason, while some of the more important government agencies possessed no means of access other than unpaved desert.

  Lane set the Deathmaker down in Freeport, a human colony on the outer edges of Belarba, the planet's largest center of commerce. He spent the remainder of the day making connections for his animals, deciding that the cost of shipping entire preserved carcasses would come to less than the price that native skinners and taxidermists would charge. He estimated that he'd be stuck on Lodin XI for at least a week before all his vouchers arrived, and he set out to find a suitable dwelling for the duration of his enforced stay.

  Freeport was a large settlement, housing almost 150,000 humans, and as a result it was too specialized to offer a catch-all business of the type Tchaka ran. Lane picked the largest, most impressive-looking hotel he could find, was told that the Mufti would not be allowed inside his room, and settled for a somewhat lesser hotel with somewhat lesser restrictions.

  Restrictions seemed to be the order of the day. No Lodinites were allowed inside Freeport without incredibly complex identification papers, and the Lodinites responded in kind, both toward the humans and—to a slighter degree—toward the numerous other colonies of se
ntient off-worlders that had grown up around Freeport.

  There was a middle ground, an oddly-shaped sector which seemed to have a completely international—or interplanetary—aspect to it. It was kind of a no-man's-land between Freeport and Belarba, composed largely of cultural centers, restaurants and black-market dealerships. It was rumored that one could buy a slave of almost any race in the galaxy there; no one took the rumor seriously, which is doubtless why both the rumor and the practice persisted.

  Lane had a lot of time on his hands, so he decided to visit such sights as the no-man's-land area offered him. First, as always, he sought out the museum.

  Here, in brilliant imitations of life, were hundreds upon hundreds of strange, exotic creatures, almost all of them killed by men like himself to assuage the curiosity of those who didn't care or dare to follow him as he went out past the limits of the frontier.

  The first thing that caught his eye was a Devilowl. Huge, horned, red-eyed, teeth jutting in all directions, truly Satanic in appearance, it had been masterfully stuffed and sewn together, but the taxidermist had obviously never seen Devilowls in action. The head was cocked at the wrong angle, and its legs were completely extended, which almost never occurred in nature.

  He walked on to the aquatic exhibition, and stopped in front of a pair of Baffledivers. They had the familiar screen-like snouts that siphoned the water past their enormous bodies like jet engines, and the huge, razorlike fins and tail that could propel them so swiftly through the sea and slice their prey to ribbons. As he looked at the exhibit he wondered at the sanity of any man who would hunt them at the bottom of a sea where neither visibility nor maneuverability existed.

  Then he saw the little plaque, written in eight of the major languages of Lodin XI, as well as Terran and Canphorite:

  He shook his head in amazement, wondering how the hell he had ever survived the encounter.

  He entered the Hall of Sentient Beings, where numerous signs told him repeatedly that none of these exhibits had been killed by hunters, but that all had been freely donated to the museum by the home worlds of the deceased. The display case for Man was empty, and the one for inhabitants of Lodin XI showed a little scene in which all the characters were clothed. All other sentient displays—and there were upward of fifty of them—contained unclad and awkwardly posed figures.

  He continued walking, and every now and then came across more empty cases. Occasionally repair work was going on, but usually the cases had brasslike plates stating what would soon be on display.

  At last he came to an enormous empty case, almost sixty yards across and half as high, and looked at the plaque:

  He wondered if anyone at the museum had the slightest idea of the creature's proportions or makeup. He became convinced that it was just a publicity gimmick when he came across four more empty cases, all much smaller, each reserved for the Deathdealer or some other of the creature's plethora of names.

  “Lots of luck,” he muttered to himself. Then, tiring of the museum, he walked out into the hot dry air and went to the art gallery, which was about two hundred yards away down a crazily winding street which broadened and narrowed even more insanely than it curved.

  Taxidermy didn't differ much from world to world, but conceptions of art were as different as things ever got to be. The Lodinites used no paint or paint analogs. Almost all of their works were bas-relief sculptures, not quite abstract, but bearing no relationship to anything Lane had ever experienced. The colors were rather dull and tedious, but that was to be expected from a race whose perception of the color spectrum ranged only from yellow to blue. Lane lingered for a few minutes, trying to understand what he was looking at, but finally gave it up as a lost cause and went to the section of the building that housed human art.

  There were the usual landscapes, seascapes, spacescapes, plump nudes, still lifes and imitation-Michelangelo sculptures. (Renaissance art was coming back into style again in the Deluros system, which meant that most other human worlds would be copying it just in time to be outmoded.)

  Soon Lane grew restless. He had no more true interest in paint and canvas than he had in animals once they had been stuffed and mounted. He'd spent five hours trying to let a little culture seep in and was finally ready to admit that he was bored with it.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon and the next two days in the library, trying without success to find some more information on the Starduster. He then spent another day browsing in Freeport's two book/tape shops—one new, one antiquarian—with no success.

  When he returned to his hotel from the second store he found a radio message waiting for him, to the effect that William Campbell Blessbull XXIII was terribly displeased with the condition of the shipment he had received from Lane. Four of the eleven animals were in stages of partial decomposition, and until they were replaced, no payment would be made on any portion of the order.

  Lane had the message confirmed, then sent a message of his own, instructing his lawyer to sue Blessbull for the money due him on the seven acceptable specimens and to check out the condition of the other four.

  Then, bored and fidgety, he went back to no-man's-land, looking for a little illicit excitement. Nothing there appealed to him, so he stopped by a black market dealer's shop and picked up forged papers giving him entry into Belarba.

  The sun had just set when he walked into Belarba proper. He wasn't quite sure what he had expected—perhaps something like some of the more exotic native quarters he had been to on the frontier worlds—but Belarba was just another city. Different, to be sure, but not what he craved.

  For one thing, he was intensely conscious of numerous unsubtle and unfriendly stares as he walked down the patternless streets. He stopped to eat in a native restaurant, but couldn't read the menu and, through a painfully embarrassing attempt at sign language, finally informed the waiter to order for him. He became very uncomfortable waiting in a chair that had been fashioned for beings that stored all their fat in their buttocks and had arms jointed almost at the shoulder. The arms of his chair seemed to enclose him like a cage, his back ached, and his legs were numb. He took only one brief look at the food that was finally slapped on his table by a surly busboy, paid his bill, and left without having eaten a mouthful.

  A Lodinite bar was next on his agenda. The liquor was drinkable but packed no kick, and when a couple of natives began edging toward him he decided that discretion was the only reasonable part of valor.

  After that he just wandered through the streets, trying to fathom the mentality that had created such patternless buildings and thoroughfares. It was like a bad dream. The Lodinites were just enough like Man so the structures and artifacts of their civilization bore a superficial resemblance to what he was used to. But upon closer scrutiny none of it made any sense. There were buildings without any means of ingress, stores that seemed to be giving their goods away to any passersby who looked mildly interested, factories constructing small wooden and metallic devices that seemed to be totally without function.

  Finally his mind could assimilate no more, and he decided to return to no-man's-land. It was then that he discovered, much to his disgust, that the hunter who had footslogged through a thousand jungles was completely lost.

  He spent the next two hours following twisting streets that doubled back into themselves or came to abrupt stops against buildings or in empty fields. Finally he saw another member of his race walking on the opposite side of the throughfare and rather shamefacedly admitted his problem.

  “Just ask one of the Lodinites,” said the man.

  “I can't,” said Lane. “I don't know their language.”

  “Then how did you get your papers cleared, unless...?” His expression hardened. “Being in Belarba illegally is a felony. You know that, don't you?”

  “Mister, as far as I'm concerned, just being a Belarban is a felony. All I want to know is how to get the hell out of this madhouse.”

  The instructions were very complex, for Lane had wandered q
uite a distance from no-man's-land. It took him until an hour after sunrise to find his way back to his hotel.

  He slept for the remainder of the day, bothered only by the now-familiar nightmares, then arose in the cool of the evening. He shaved, showered, dressed, and tried to decide where to go. He still hadn't sampled any of Freeport's whorehouses or drug dens, and he'd heard talk of a freak show presenting endless perversions, but he couldn't work up any great enthusiasm for any of them. He ordered a bottle of Cygnian cognac from room service and sat on his bed, staring out the window with dark, brooding eyes.

  He looked out past the boundaries of the city, into the vast red-brown desert beyond. Then his gaze rose, until he was looking into the clear night sky.

  It was up there somewhere, feeding off the dust cloud, glowing a dull reddish-orange, floating effortlessly through the void. In its own way it was a thing of beauty, flawed here and there as only true beauty can be.

  It was also a thing of immense power. Not the power to move mountains or build cities or destroy planets—that power was reserved for Man. But it had power nonetheless, the power to assimilate a million little deaths and hurl them back into the face of its attacker, the power to return every hint of doom to its doombringer. No, no sane man, having experienced that once, would ever willingly subject himself to it again.

  And, with an honesty that was almost too painful to bear, he finally acknowledged what he had known for months.

  He enjoyed it.

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  * * *

  CHAPTER 10

  Lane walked across the campus, trying not to feel too much like a living antique. He stopped a couple of students, asked directions, and finally came to the office building he sought.

  He took an escalating ramp to the sixth level, got off, and walked down a long, shiny, well-lighted corridor, counting the doors as he did so. When he came to the office he wanted, he knocked once and entered.