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World That Couldn't Be, The

<h1>The World That Couldn't Be</h1>   <h2>By CLIFFORD D. SIMAK</h2>   <div class="blockquot">Like every farmer on every planet, Duncan had to hunt down anything that damaged his crops—even though he was aware this was— </div> <hr style="width: 65%;" /> The tracks went up one row and down another, and in those rows the vua plants had been sheared off an inch or two above the ground. The raider had been methodical; it had not wandered about haphazardly, but had done an efficient job of harvesting the first ten rows on the west side of the field. Then, having eaten its fill, it had angled off into the bush—and that had not been long ago, for the soil still trickled down into the great pug marks, sunk deep into the finely cultivated loam. <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image_001.jpg" width-obs="600" height-obs="539" alt="" title="" /></div> Somewhere a sawmill bird was whirring through a log, and down in one of the thorn-choked ravines, a choir of chatterers was clicking through a ghastly morning song. It was going to be a scorcher of a day. Already the smell of desiccated dust was rising from the ground and the glare of the newly risen sun was dancing off the bright leaves of the hula-trees, making it appear as if the bush were filled with a million flashing mirrors. Gavin Duncan hauled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face. "No, mister," pleaded Zikkara, the native foreman of the farm. "You cannot do it, mister. You do not hunt a Cytha." "The hell I don't," said Duncan, but he spoke in English and not the native tongue. He stared out across the bush, a flat expanse of sun-cured grass interspersed with thickets of hula-scrub and thorn and occasional groves of trees, criss-crossed by treacherous ravines and spotted with infrequent waterholes. It would be murderous out there, he told himself, but it shouldn't take too long. The beast probably would lay up shortly after its pre-dawn feeding and he'd overhaul it in an hour or two. But if he failed to overhaul it, then he must keep on. "Dangerous," Zikkara pointed out. "No one hunts the Cytha." "I do," Duncan said, speaking now in the native language. "I hunt anything that damages my crop. A few nights more of this and there would be nothing left." <hr style="width: 45%;" /> Jamming the bandanna back into his pocket, he tilted his hat lower across his eyes against the sun. "It might be a long chase, mister. It is the skun season now. If you were caught out there...." "Now listen," Duncan told it sharply. "Before I came, you'd feast one day, then starve for days on end; but now you eat each day. And you like the doctoring. Before, when you got sick, you died. Now you get sick, I doctor you, and you live. You like staying in one place, instead of wandering all around." "Mister, we like all this," said Zikkara, "but we do not hunt the Cytha." "If we do not hunt the Cytha, we lose all this," Duncan pointed out. "If I don't make a crop, I'm licked. I'll have to go away. Then what happens to you?" "We will grow the corn ourselves." "That's a laugh," said Duncan, "and you know it is. If I didn't kick your backsides all day long, you wouldn't do a lick of work. If I leave, you go back to the bush. Now let's go and get that Cytha." "But it is such a little one, mister! It is such a young one! It is scarcely worth the trouble. It would be a shame to kill it." Probably just slightly smaller than a horse, thought Duncan, watching the native closely. It's scared, he told himself. It's scared dry and spitless. "Besides, it must have been most hungry. Surely, mister, even a Cytha has the right to eat." "Not from my crop," said Duncan savagely. "You know why we grow the vua, don't you? You know it is great medicine. The berries that it grows cures those who are sick inside their heads. My people need that medicine—need it very badly. And what is more, out there—" he swept his arm toward the sky—"out there they pay very much for it." "But, mister...." "I tell you this," said Duncan gently, "you either dig me up a bush-runner to do the tracking for me or you can all get out, the kit and caboodle of you. I can get other tribes to work the farm." "No, mister!" Zikkara screamed in desperation. "You have your choice," Duncan told it coldly. <hr style="width: 45%;" /> He plodded back across the field toward the house. Not much of a house as yet. Not a great deal better than a native shack. But someday it would be, he told himself. Let him sell a crop or two and he'd build a house that would really be a house. It would have a bar and swimming pool and a garden filled with flowers, and at last, after years of wandering, he'd have a home and broad acres and everyone, not just one lousy tribe, would call him mister. Gavin Duncan, planter, he said to himself, and liked the sound of it. Planter on the planet Layard. But not if the Cytha came back night after night and ate the vua plants. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Zikkara was racing for the native village. Called their bluff, Duncan informed himself with satisfaction. He came out of the field and walked across the yard, heading for the house. One of Shotwell's shirts was hanging on the clothes-line, limp in the breathless morning. Damn the man, thought Duncan. Out here mucking around with those stupid natives, always asking questions, always under foot. Although, to be fair about it, that was Shotwell's job. That was what the Sociology people had sent him out to do. Duncan came up to the shack, pushed the door open and entered. Shotwell, stripped to the waist, was at the wash bench. Breakfast was cooking on the stove, with an elderly native acting as cook. Duncan strode across the room and took down the heavy rifle from its peg. He slapped the action open, slapped it shut again. Shotwell reached for a towel. "What's going on?" he asked. "Cytha got into the field." "Cytha?" "A kind of animal," said Duncan. "It ate ten rows of vua." "Big? Little? What are its characteristics?" The native began putting breakfast on the table. Duncan walked to the table, laid the rifle across one corner of it and sat down. He poured a brackish liquid out of a big stew pan into their cups. God, he thought, what I would give for a cup of coffee. <hr style="width: 45%;" /> Shotwell pulled up his chair. "You didn't answer me. What is a Cytha like?" "I wouldn't know," said Duncan. "Don't know? But you're going after it, looks like, and how can you hunt it if you don't know—" "Track it. The thing tied to the other end of the trail is sure to be the Cytha. Well find out what it's like once we catch up to it." "We?" "The natives will send up someone to do the tracking for me. Some of them are better than a dog." "Look, Gavin. I've put you to a lot of trouble and you've been decent with me. If I can be any help, I would like to go." "Two make better time than three. And we have to catch this Cytha fast or it might settle down to an endurance contest." "All right, then. Tell me about the Cytha." Duncan poured porridge gruel into his bowl, handed the pan to Shotwell. "It's a sort of special thing. The natives are scared to death of it. You hear a lot of stories about it. Said to be unkillable. It's always capitalized, always a proper noun. It has been reported at different times from widely scattered places." "No one's ever bagged one?" "Not that I ever heard of." Duncan patted the rifle. "Let me get a bead on it." He started eating, spooning the porridge into his mouth, munching on the stale corn bread left from the night before. He drank some of the brackish beverage and shuddered. "Some day," he said, "I'm going to scrape together enough money to buy a pound of coffee. You'd think—" "It's the freight rates," Shotwell said. "I'll send you a pound when I go back." "Not at the price they'd charge to ship it out," said Duncan. "I wouldn't hear of it." They ate in silence for a time. Finally Shotwell said: "I'm getting nowhere, Gavin. The natives are willing to talk, but it all adds up to nothing." "I tried to tell you that. You could have saved your time." Shotwell shook his head stubbornly. "There's an answer, a logical explanation. It's easy enough to say you cannot rule out the sexual factor, but that's exactly what has happened here on Layard. It's easy to exclaim that a sexless animal, a sexless race, a sexless planet is impossible, but that is what we have. Somewhere there is an answer and I have to find it." <hr style="width: 45%;" /> Now hold up a minute," Duncan protested. "There's no use blowing a gasket. I haven't got the time this morning to listen to your lecture." "But it's not the lack of sex that worries me entirely," Shotwell said, "although it's the central factor. There are subsidiary situations deriving from that central fact which are most intriguing." "I have no doubt of it," said Duncan, "but if you please—" "Without sex, there is no basis for the family, and without the family there is no basis for a tribe, and yet the natives have an elaborate tribal setup, with taboos by way of regulation. Somewhere there must exist some underlying, basic unifying factor, some common loyalty, some strange relationship which spells out to brotherhood." "Not brotherhood," said Duncan, chuckling. "Not even sisterhood. You must watch your terminology. The word you want is ithood." The door pushed open and a native walked in timidly. "Zikkara said that mister want me," the native told them. "I am Sipar. I can track anything but screamers, stilt-birds, longhorns and donovans. Those are my taboos." "I am glad to hear that," Duncan replied. "You have no Cytha taboo, then." "Cytha!" yipped the native. "Zikkara did not tell me Cytha!" Duncan paid no attention. He got up from the table and went to the heavy chest that stood against one wall. He rummaged in it and came out with a pair of binoculars, a hunting knife and an extra drum of ammunition. At the kitchen cupboard, he rummaged once again, filling a small leather sack with a gritty powder from a can he found. "Rockahominy," he explained to Shotwell. "Emergency rations thought up by the primitive North American Indians. Parched corn, ground fine. It's no feast exactly, but it keeps a man going." "You figure you'll be gone that long?" "Maybe overnight. I don't know. Won't stop until I get it. Can't afford to. It could wipe me out in a few days." "Good hunting," Shotwell said. "I'll hold the fort." Duncan said to Sipar: "Quit sniveling and come on." He picked up the rifle, settled it in the crook of his arm. He kicked open the door and strode out. Sipar followed meekly. <h2>II</h2> Duncan got his first shot late in the afternoon of that first day. In the middle of the morning, two hours after they had left the farm, they had flushed the Cytha out of its bed in a thick ravine. But there had been no chance for a shot. Duncan saw no more than a huge black blur fade into the bush. Through the bake-oven afternoon, they had followed its trail, Sipar tracking and Duncan bringing up the rear, scanning every piece of cover, with the sun-hot rifle always held at ready. Once they had been held up for fifteen minutes while a massive donovan tramped back and forth, screaming, trying to work up its courage for attack. But after a quarter hour of showing off, it decided to behave itself and went off at a shuffling gallop. Duncan watched it go with a lot of thankfulness. It could soak up a lot of lead, and for all its awkwardness, it was handy with its feet once it set itself in motion. Donovans had killed a lot of men in the twenty years since Earthmen had come to Layard. With the beast gone, Duncan looked around for Sipar. He found it fast asleep beneath a hula-shrub. He kicked the native awake with something less than gentleness and they went on again. The bush swarmed with other animals, but they had no trouble with them. Sipar, despite its initial reluctance, had worked well at the trailing. A misplaced bunch of grass, a twig bent to one side, a displaced stone, the faintest pug mark were Sipar's stock in trade. It worked like a lithe, well-trained hound. This bush country was its special province; here it was at home. With the sun dropping toward the west, they had climbed a long, steep hill and as they neared the top of it, Duncan hissed at Sipar. The native looked back over its shoulder in surprise. Duncan made motions for it to stop tracking. The native crouched and as Duncan went past it, he saw that a look of agony was twisting its face. And in the look of agony he thought he saw as well a touch of pleading and a trace of hatred. It's scared, just like the rest of them, Duncan told himself. But what the native thought or felt had no significance; what counted was the beast ahead. Duncan went the last few yards on his belly, pushing the gun ahead of him, the binoculars bumping on his back. Swift, vicious insects ran out of the grass and swarmed across his hands and arms and one got on his face and bit him. <hr style="width: 45%;" /> He made it to the hilltop and lay there, looking at the sweep of land beyond. It was more of the same, more of the blistering, dusty slogging, more of thorn and tangled ravine and awful emptiness. He lay motionless, watching for a hint of motion, for the fitful shadow, for any wrongness in the terrain that might be the Cytha. But there was nothing. The land lay quiet under the declining sun. Far on the horizon, a herd of some sort of animals was grazing, but there was nothing else. Then he saw the motion, just a flicker, on the knoll ahead—about halfway up. He laid the rifle carefully on the ground and hitched the binoculars around. He raised them to his eyes and moved them slowly back and forth. The animal was there where he had seen the motion. It was resting, looking back along the way that it had come, watching for the first sign of its trailers. Duncan tried to make out the size and shape, but it blended with the grass and the dun soil and he could not be sure exactly what it looked like. He let the glasses down and now that he had located it, he could distinguish its outline with the naked eye. His hand reached out and slid the rifle to him. He fitted it to his shoulder and wriggled his body for closer contact with the ground. The cross-hairs centered on the faint outline on the knoll and then the beast stood up. It was not as large as he had thought it might be—perhaps a little larger than Earth lion-size, but it certainly was no lion. It was a square-set thing and black and inclined to lumpiness and it had an awkward look about it, but there were strength and ferociousness as well. Duncan tilted the muzzle of the rifle so that the cross-hairs centered on the massive neck. He drew in a breath and held it and began the trigger squeeze. The rifle bucked hard against his shoulder and the report hammered in his head and the beast went down. It did not lurch or fall; it simply melted down and disappeared, hidden in the grass. "Dead center," Duncan assured himself. He worked the mechanism and the spent cartridge case flew out. The feeding mechanism snicked and the fresh shell clicked as it slid into the breech. He lay for a moment, watching. And on the knoll where the thing had fallen, the grass was twitching as if the wind were blowing, only there was no wind. But despite the twitching of the grass, there was no sign of the Cytha. It did not struggle up again. It stayed where it had fallen. Duncan got to his feet, dug out the bandanna and mopped at his face. He heard the soft thud of the step behind him and turned his head. It was the tracker. "It's all right, Sipar," he said. "You can quit worrying. I got it. We can go home now." <hr style="width: 45%;" /> It had been a long, hard chase, longer than he had thought it might be. But it had been successful and that was the thing that counted. For the moment, the vua crop was safe. He tucked the bandanna back into his pocket, went down the slope and started up the knoll. He reached the place where the Cytha had fallen. There were three small gouts of torn, mangled fur and flesh lying on the ground and there was nothing else. He spun around and jerked his rifle up. Every nerve was screamingly alert. He swung his head, searching for the slightest movement, for some shape or color that was not the shape or color of the bush or grass or ground. But there was nothing. The heat droned in the hush of afternoon. There was not a breath of moving air. But there was danger—a saw-toothed sense of danger close behind his neck. "Sipar!" he called in a tense whisper, "Watch out!" The native stood motionless, unheeding, its eyeballs rolling up until there was only white, while the muscles stood out along its throat like straining ropes of steel. Duncan slowly swiveled, rifle held almost at arm's length, elbows crooked a little, ready to bring the weapon into play in a fraction of a second. Nothing stirred. There was no more than emptiness—the emptiness of sun and molten sky, of grass and scraggy bush, of a brown-and-yellow land stretching into foreverness. Step by step, Duncan covered the hillside and finally came back to the place where the native squatted on its heels and moaned, rocking back and forth, arms locked tightly across its chest, as if it tried to cradle itself in a sort of illusory comfort. The Earthman walked to the place where the Cytha had fallen and picked up, one by one, the bits of bleeding flesh. They had been mangled by his bullet. They were limp and had no shape. And it was queer, he thought. In all his years of hunting, over many planets, he had never known a bullet to rip out hunks of flesh. He dropped the bloody pieces back into the grass and wiped his hand upon his thighs. He got up a little stiffly. He'd found no trail of blood leading through the grass, and surely an animal with a hole of that size would leave a trail. And as he stood there upon the hillside, with the bloody fingerprints still wet and glistening upon the fabric of his trousers, he felt the first cold touch of fear, as if the fingertips of fear might momentarily, almost casually, have trailed across his heart. <hr style="width: 45%;" /> He turned around and walked back to the native, reached down and shook it. "Snap out of it," he ordered. He expected pleading, cowering, terror, but there was none. Sipar got swiftly to its feet and stood looking at him and there was, he thought, an odd glitter in its eyes. "Get going," Duncan said. "We still have a little time. Start circling and pick up the trail. I will cover you." He glanced at the sun. An hour and a half still left—maybe as much as two. There might still be time to get this buttoned up before the fall of night. A half mile beyond the knoll, Sipar picked up the trail again and they went ahead, but now they traveled more cautiously, for any bush, any rock, any clump of grass might conceal the wounded beast. Duncan found himself on edge and cursed himself savagely for it. He'd been in tight spots before. This was nothing new to him. There was no reason to get himself tensed up. It was a deadly business, sure, but he had faced others calmly and walked away from them. It was those frontier tales he'd heard about the Cytha—the kind of superstitious chatter that one always heard on the edge of unknown land. He gripped the rifle tighter and went on. No animal, he told himself, was unkillable. Half an hour before sunset, he called a halt when they reached a brackish waterhole. The light soon would be getting bad for shooting. In the morning, they'd take up the trail again, and by that time the Cytha would be at an even greater disadvantage. It would be stiff and slow and weak. It might be even dead. Duncan gathered wood and built a fire in the lee of a thorn-bush thicket. Sipar waded out with the canteens and thrust them at arm's length beneath the surface to fill them. The water still was warm and evil-tasting, but it was fairly free of scum and a thirsty man could drink it. The sun went down and darkness fell quickly. They dragged more wood out of the thicket and piled it carefully close at hand. Duncan reached into his pocket and brought out the little bag of rockahominy. "Here," he said to Sipar. "Supper." The native held one hand cupped and Duncan poured a little mound into its palm. "Thank you, mister," Sipar said. "Food-giver." "Huh?" asked Duncan, then caught what the native meant. "Dive into it," he said, almost kindly. "It isn't much, but it gives you strength. We'll need strength tomorrow." <hr style="width: 45%;" /> Food-giver, eh? Trying to butter him up, perhaps. In a little while, Sipar would start whining for him to knock off the hunt and head back for the farm. Although, come to think of it, he really was the food-giver to this bunch of sexless wonders. Corn, thank God, grew well on the red and stubborn soil of Layard—good old corn from North America. Fed to hogs, made into corn-pone for breakfast back on Earth, and here, on Layard, the staple food crop for a gang of shiftless varmints who still regarded, with some good solid skepticism and round-eyed wonder, this unorthodox idea that one should take the trouble to grow plants to eat rather than go out and scrounge for them. Corn from North America, he thought, growing side by side with the vua of Layard. And that was the way it went. Something from one planet and something from another and still something further from a third and so was built up through the wide social confederacy of space a truly cosmic culture which in the end, in another ten thousand years or so, might spell out some way of life with more sanity and understanding than was evident today. He poured a mound of rockahominy into his own hand and put the bag back into his pocket. "Sipar." "Yes, mister?" "You were not scared today when the donovan threatened to attack us." "No, mister. The donovan would not hurt me." "I see. You said the donovan was taboo to you. Could it be that you, likewise, are taboo to the donovan?" "Yes, mister. The donovan and I grew up together." "Oh, so that's it," said Duncan. He put a pinch of the parched and powdered corn into his mouth and took a sip of brackish water. He chewed reflectively on the resultant mash. He might go ahead, he knew, and ask why and how and where Sipar and the donovan had grown up together, but there was no point to it. This was exactly the kind of tangle that Shotwell was forever getting into. Half the time, he told himself, I'm convinced the little stinkers are doing no more than pulling our legs. What a fantastic bunch of jerks! Not men, not women, just things. And while there were never babies, there were children, although never less than eight or nine years old. And if there were no babies, where did the eight-and nine-year-olds come from? <hr style="width: 45%;" /> I  suppose," he said, "that these other things that are your taboos, the stilt-birds and the screamers and the like, also grew up with you." "That is right, mister." "Some playground that must have been," said Duncan. He went on chewing, staring out into the darkness beyond the ring of firelight. "There's something in the thorn bush, mister." "I didn't hear a thing." "Little pattering. Something is running there." Duncan listened closely. What Sipar said was true. A lot of little things were running in the thicket. "More than likely mice," he said. He finished his rockahominy and took an extra swig of water, gagging on it slightly. "Get your rest," he told Sipar. "I'll wake you later so I can catch a wink or two." "Mister," Sipar said, "I will stay with you to the end." "Well," said Duncan, somewhat startled, "that is decent of you." "I will stay to the death," Sipar promised earnestly. "Don't strain yourself," said Duncan. He picked up the rifle and walked down to the waterhole. The night was quiet and the land continued to have that empty feeling. Empty except for the fire and the waterhole and the little micelike animals running in the thicket. And Sipar—Sipar lying by the fire, curled up and sound asleep already. Naked, with not a weapon to its hand—just the naked animal, the basic humanoid, and yet with underlying purpose that at times was baffling. Scared and shivering this morning at mere mention of the Cytha, yet never faltering on the trail; in pure funk back there on the knoll where they had lost the Cytha, but now ready to go on to the death. Duncan went back to the fire and prodded Sipar with his toe. The native came straight up out of sleep. "Whose death?" asked Duncan. "Whose death were you talking of?" "Why, ours, of course," said Sipar, and went back to sleep. <h2>III</h2> Duncan did not see the arrow coming. He heard the swishing whistle and felt the wind of it on the right side of his throat and then it thunked into a tree behind him. He leaped aside and dived for the cover of a tumbled mound of boulders and almost instinctively his thumb pushed the fire control of the rifle up to automatic. He crouched behind the jumbled rocks and peered ahead. There was not a thing to see. The hula-trees shimmered in the blaze of sun and the thorn-bush was gray and lifeless and the only things astir were three stilt-birds walking gravely a quarter of a mile away. "Sipar!" he whispered. "Here, mister." "Keep low. It's still out there." Whatever it might be. Still out there and waiting for another shot. Duncan shivered, remembering the feel of the arrow flying past his throat. A hell of a way for a man to die—out at the tail-end of nowhere with an arrow in his throat and a scared-stiff native heading back for home as fast as it could go. He flicked the control on the rifle back to single fire, crawled around the rock pile and sprinted for a grove of trees that stood on higher ground. He reached them and there he flanked the spot from which the arrow must have come. He unlimbered the binoculars and glassed the area. He still saw no sign. Whatever had taken the pot shot at them had made its getaway. He walked back to the tree where the arrow still stood out, its point driven deep into the bark. He grasped the shaft and wrenched the arrow free. "You can come out now," he called to Sipar. "There's no one around." The arrow was unbelievably crude. The unfeathered shaft looked as if it had been battered off to the proper length with a jagged stone. The arrowhead was unflaked flint picked up from some outcropping or dry creek bed, and it was awkwardly bound to the shaft with the tough but pliant inner bark of the hula-tree. "You recognize this?" he asked Sipar. The native took the arrow and examined it. "Not my tribe." "Of course not your tribe. Yours wouldn't take a shot at us. Some other tribe, perhaps?" "Very poor arrow." "I know that. But it could kill you just as dead as if it were a good one. Do you recognize it?" "No tribe made this arrow," Sipar declared. "Child, maybe?" "What would child do way out here?" <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/image_002.jpg" width-obs="400" height-obs="556" alt="" title="" /></div> "That's what I thought, too," said Duncan. <hr style="width: 45%;" /> He took the arrow back, held it between his thumbs and forefingers and twirled it slowly, with a terrifying thought nibbling at his brain. It couldn't be. It was too fantastic. He wondered if the sun was finally getting him that he had thought of it at all. He squatted down and dug at the ground with the makeshift arrow point. "Sipar, what do you actually know about the Cytha?" "Nothing, mister. Scared of it is all." "We aren't turning back. If there's something that you know—something that would help us...." It was as close as he could come to begging aid. It was further than he had meant to go. He should not have asked at all, he thought angrily. "I do not know," the native said. Duncan cast the arrow to one side and rose to his feet. He cradled the rifle in his arm. "Let's go." He watched Sipar trot ahead. Crafty little stinker, he told himself. It knows more than it's telling. They toiled into the afternoon. It was, if possible, hotter and drier than the day before. There was a sense of tension in the air—no, that was rot. And even if there were, a man must act as if it were not there. If he let himself fall prey to every mood out in this empty land, he only had himself to blame for whatever happened to him. The tracking was harder now. The day before, the Cytha had only run away, straight-line fleeing to keep ahead of them, to stay out of their reach. Now it was becoming tricky. It backtracked often in an attempt to throw them off. Twice in the afternoon, the trail blanked out entirely and it was only after long searching that Sipar picked it up again—in one instance, a mile away from where it had vanished in thin air. That vanishing bothered Duncan more than he would admit. Trails do not disappear entirely, not when the terrain remains the same, not when the weather is unchanged. Something was going on, something, perhaps, that Sipar knew far more about than it was willing to divulge. He watched the native closely and there seemed nothing suspicious. It continued at its work. It was, for all to see, the good and faithful hound. <hr style="width: 45%;" /> Late in the afternoon, the plain on which they had been traveling suddenly dropped away. They stood poised on the brink of a great escarpment and looked far out to great tangled forests and a flowing river. It was like suddenly coming into another and beautiful room that one had not expected. This was new land, never seen before by any Earthman. For no one had ever mentioned that somewhere to the west a forest lay beyond the bush. Men coming in from space had seen it, probably, but only as a different color-marking on the planet. To them, it made no difference. But to the men who lived on Layard, to the planter and the trader, the prospector and the hunter, it was important. And I, thought Duncan with a sense of triumph, am the man who found it. "Mister!" "Now what?" "Out there. Skun!" "I don't—" "Out there, mister. Across the river." Duncan saw it then—a haze in the blueness of the rift—a puff of copper moving very fast, and as he watched, he heard the far-off keening of the storm, a shiver in the air rather than a sound. He watched in fascination as it moved along the river and saw the boiling fury it made out of the forest. It struck and crossed the river, and the river for a moment seemed to stand on end, with a sheet of silvery water splashed toward the sky. Then it was gone as quickly as it had happened, but there was a tumbled slash across the forest where the churning winds had traveled. Back at the farm, Zikkara had warned him of the skun. This was the season for them, it had said, and a man caught in one wouldn't have a chance. Duncan let his breath out slowly. "Bad," said Sipar. "Yes, very bad." "Hit fast. No warning." "What about the trail?" asked Duncan. "Did the Cytha—" Sipar nodded downward. "Can we make it before nightfall?" "I think so," Sipar answered. It was rougher than they had thought. Twice they went down blind trails that pinched off, with sheer rock faces opening out into drops of hundreds of feet, and were forced to climb again and find another way. They reached the bottom of the escarpment as the brief twilight closed in and they hurried to gather firewood. There was no water, but a little was still left in their canteens and they made do with that. <hr style="width: 45%;" /> After their scant meal of rockahominy, Sipar rolled himself into a ball and went to sleep immediately. Duncan sat with his back against a boulder which one day, long ago, had fallen from the slope above them, but was now half buried in the soil that through the ages had kept sifting down. Two days gone, he told himself. Was there, after all, some truth in the whispered tales that made the rounds back at the settlements—that no one should waste his time in tracking down a Cytha, since a Cytha was unkillable? Nonsense, he told himself. And yet the hunt had toughened, the trail become more difficult, the Cytha a much more cunning and elusive quarry. Where it had run from them the day before, now it fought to shake them off. And if it did that the second day, why had it not tried to throw them off the first? And what about the third day—tomorrow? He shook his head. It seemed incredible that an animal would become more formidable as the hunt progressed. But that seemed to be exactly what had happened. More spooked, perhaps, more frightened—only the Cytha did not act like a frightened beast. It was acting like an animal that was gaining savvy and determination, and that was somehow frightening. From far off to the west, toward the forest and the river, came the laughter and the howling of a pack of screamers. Duncan leaned his rifle against the boulder and got up to pile more wood on the fire. He stared out into the western darkness, listening to the racket. He made a wry face and pushed a hand absent-mindedly through his hair. He put out a silent hope that the screamers would decide to keep their distance. They were something a man could do without. Behind him, a pebble came bumping down the slope. It thudded to a rest just short of the fire. Duncan spun around. Foolish thing to do, he thought, to camp so near the slope. If something big should start to move, they'd be out of luck. He stood and listened. The night was quiet. Even the screamers had shut up for the moment. Just one rolling rock and he had his hackles up. He'd have to get himself in hand. He went back to the boulder, and as he stooped to pick up the rifle, he heard the faint beginning of a rumble. He straightened swiftly to face the scarp that blotted out the star-strewn sky—and the rumble grew! <hr style="width: 45%;" /> In one leap, he was at Sipar's side. He reached down and grasped the native by an arm, jerked it erect, held it on its feet. Sipar's eyes snapped open, blinking in the firelight. The rumble had grown to a roar and there were thumping noises, as of heavy boulders bouncing, and beneath the roar the silky, ominous rustle of sliding soil and rock. Sipar jerked its arm free of Duncan's grip and plunged into the darkness. Duncan whirled and followed. They ran, stumbling in the dark, and behind them the roar of the sliding, bouncing rock became a throaty roll of thunder that filled the night from brim to brim. As he ran, Duncan could feel, in dread anticipation, the gusty breath of hurtling debris blowing on his neck, the crushing impact of a boulder smashing into him, the engulfing flood of tumbling talus snatching at his legs. A puff of billowing dust came out and caught them and they ran choking as well as stumbling. Off to the left of them, a mighty chunk of rock chugged along the ground in jerky, almost reluctant fashion. Then the thunder stopped and all one could hear was the small slitherings of the lesser debris as it trickled down the slope. Duncan stopped running and slowly turned around. The campfire was gone, buried, no doubt, beneath tons of overlay, and the stars had paled because of the great cloud of dust which still billowed up into the sky. He heard Sipar moving near him and reached out a hand, searching for the tracker, not knowing exactly where it was. He found the native, grasped it by the shoulder and pulled it up beside him. Sipar was shivering. "It's all right," said Duncan. And it was all right, he reassured himself. He still had the rifle. The extra drum of ammunition and the knife were on his belt, the bag of rockahominy in his pocket. The canteens were all they had lost—the canteens and the fire. "We'll have to hole up somewhere for the night," Duncan said. "There are screamers on the loose." <hr style="width: 45%;" /> He didn't like what he was thinking, nor the sharp edge of fear that was beginning to crowd in upon him. He tried to shrug it off, but it still stayed with him, just out of reach. Sipar plucked at his elbow. "Thorn thicket, mister. Over there. We could crawl inside. We would be safe from screamers." It was torture, but they made it. "Screamers and you are taboo," said Duncan, suddenly remembering. "How come you are afraid of them?" "Afraid for you, mister, mostly. Afraid for myself just a little. Screamers could forget. They might not recognize me until too late. Safer here." "I agree with you," said Duncan. The screamers came and padded all about the thicket. The beasts sniffed and clawed at the thorns to reach them, but finally went away. When morning came, Duncan and Sipar climbed the scarp, clambering over the boulders and the tons of soil and rock that covered their camping place. Following the gash cut by the slide, they clambered up the slope and finally reached the point of the slide's beginning. There they found the depression in which the poised slab of rock had rested and where the supporting soil had been dug away so that it could be started, with a push, down the slope above the campfire. And all about were the deeply sunken pug marks of the Cytha! <h2>IV</h2> Now it was more than just a hunt. It was knife against the throat, kill or be killed. Now there was no stopping, when before there might have been. It was no longer sport and there was no mercy. "And that's the way I like it," Duncan told himself. He rubbed his hand along the rifle barrel and saw the metallic glints shine in the noonday sun. One more shot, he prayed. Just give me one more shot at it. This time there will be no slip-up. This time there will be more than three sodden hunks of flesh and fur lying in the grass to mock me. He squinted his eyes against the heat shimmer rising from the river, watching Sipar hunkered beside the water's edge. The native rose to its feet and trotted back to him. "It crossed," said Sipar. "It walked out as far as it could go and it must have swum." "Are you sure? It might have waded out to make us think it crossed, then doubled back again." He stared at the purple-green of the trees across the river. Inside that forest, it would be hellish going. "We can look," said Sipar. "Good. You go downstream. I'll go up." An hour later, they were back. They had found no tracks. There seemed little doubt the Cytha had really crossed the river. They stood side by side, looking at the forest. "Mister, we have come far. You are brave to hunt the Cytha. You have no fear of death." "The fear of death," Duncan said, "is entirely infantile. And it's beside the point as well. I do not intend to die." They waded out into the stream. The bottom shelved gradually and they had to swim no more than a hundred yards or so. They reached the forest bank and threw themselves flat to rest. Duncan looked back the way that they had come. To the east, the escarpment was a dark-blue smudge against the pale-blue burnished sky. And two days back of that lay the farm and the vua field, but they seemed much farther off than that. They were lost in time and distance; they belonged to another existence and another world. All his life, it seemed to him, had faded and become inconsequential and forgotten, as if this moment in his life were the only one that counted; as if all the minutes and the hours, all the breaths and heartbeats, wake and sleep, had pointed toward this certain hour upon this certain stream, with the rifle molded to his hand and the cool, calculated bloodlust of a killer riding in his brain. <hr style="width: 45%;" /> Sipar finally got up and began to range along the stream. Duncan sat up and watched. Scared to death, he thought, and yet it stayed with me. At the campfire that first night, it had said it would stick to the death and apparently it had meant exactly what it said. It's hard, he thought, to figure out these jokers, hard to know what kind of mental operation, what seethings of emotion, what brand of ethics and what variety of belief and faith go to make them and their way of life. It would have been so easy for Sipar to have missed the trail and swear it could not find it. Even from the start, it could have refused to go. Yet, fearing, it had gone. Reluctant, it had trailed. Without any need for faithfulness and loyalty, it had been loyal and faithful. But loyal to what, Duncan wondered, to him, the outlander and intruder? Loyal to itself? Or perhaps, although that seemed impossible, faithful to the Cytha? What does Sipar think of me, he asked himself, and maybe more to the point, what do I think of Sipar? Is there a common meeting ground? Or are we, despite our humanoid forms, condemned forever to be alien and apart? He held the rifle across his knees and stroked it, polishing it, petting it, making it even more closely a part of him, an instrument of his deadliness, an expression of his determination to track and kill the Cytha. Just another chance, he begged. Just one second, or even less, to draw a steady bead. That is all I want, all I need, all I'll ask. Then he could go back across the days that he had left behind him, back to the farm and field, back into that misty other life from which he had been so mysteriously divorced, but which in time undoubtedly would become real and meaningful again. Sipar came back. "I found the trail." Duncan heaved himself to his feet. "Good." They left the river and plunged into the forest and there the heat closed in more mercilessly than ever—humid, stifling heat that felt like a soggy blanket wrapped tightly round the body. The trail lay plain and clear. The Cytha now, it seemed, was intent upon piling up a lead without recourse to evasive tactics. Perhaps it had reasoned that its pursuers would lose some time at the river and it may have been trying to stretch out that margin even further. Perhaps it needed that extra time, he speculated, to set up the necessary machinery for another dirty trick. Sipar stopped and waited for Duncan to catch up. "Your knife, mister?" Duncan hesitated. "What for?" "I have a thorn in my foot," the native said. "I have to get it out." Duncan pulled the knife from his belt and tossed it. Sipar caught it deftly. Looking straight at Duncan, with the flicker of a smile upon its lips, the native cut its throat. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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