Shannach—the Last
Copyright© 2024 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 3
Instantly everyone in the cave fell silent. They watched the places in the cave wall where the sunlight came in, the little cracks in the cliff face. Trevor thought of the hawk-creatures, and how they would be wheeling and slipping along the ravine, searching.
Outside, the rough rock looked all alike. He thought that in that immensity of erosions and crevices they would have a hard time finding the few tiny chinks that led into the cave. But he watched, too, tense with a feeling of danger.
No sound at all came now from the ravine. In that utter stillness, the frightened whimper of a child came with the sudden loudness of a scream. It was instantly hushed. The shafts of sunlight crept slowly up the walls. Jen seemed not to breathe. Her eyes shone, like an animal’s.
A black shadow flickered across one of the sunlight bars—flickered, and then was gone. Trevor’s heart turned over. He waited for it to come back, to occlude that shaft of light, to slip in along it and become a wide-winged demon with a sun-stone in its brow. For a whole eternity he waited, but it didn’t come back, and then a man crept in through the entry hole and said, “They’re gone.”
Jen put her head down on her knees. She had begun to tremble all over, very quietly, but with spasmodic violence. Before Trevor could reach her, Hugh had her in his arms, talking to her, soothing her. She began to sob then, and Hugh glanced at Trevor across her shoulders.
“She’s had a little too much.”
“Yes.” Trevor looked at the shafts of sunlight. “Do the hawks come very often?”
“They send them every once in a while hoping to catch us off guard. If they could find the cave they could hunt us out of it, drive us back into the valley. So far they haven’t found it.”
Jen was quiet now. Hugh stroked her with big awkward hands. “She told you, I guess. About yourself, I mean. You’ve got to be careful.”
“Yes,” said Trevor. “She told me.” He leaned forward. “Listen, I still don’t know how you people got here or what it’s all about. After we got away from the Korins, Jen said something about a landing, three hundred years ago. Three hundred Earth years?”
“About that. Some of us have remembered enough to keep track.”
“The first Earth colonies were being started on Mercury about then, in two or three of the bigger valleys. Mining colonies. Was this one of them?”
Hugh shook his head. “No. The story is that there was a big ship loaded with people from Earth. That’s true, of course, because the ship is still here, what’s left of it. And so are we. Some of the people on the ship were settlers and some were convicts.”
He pronounced the word with the same hatred and scorn that always accompanied the name “Korin.” Trevor said eagerly,
“They used to do that in the early days. Use convict labor in the mines. It made so much trouble they had to stop it. Were the Korins...?”
“They were the convicts. The big ship crashed in the valley but most of the people weren’t killed. After the crash the convicts killed the men who were in charge of the ship, and made the settlers obey them. That’s how it all started. And that’s why we’re proud we’re slaves—because we’re descended from the settlers.”
Trevor could see the picture quite clearly now, the more so because it had happened before in one way or another. The emigrant ship bound for one of the colonies, driven off its course by the tremendous magnetic disturbances that still made Mercury a spaceman’s nightmare.
They couldn’t even have called for help or given their position. The terrible nearness of the Sun made any form of radio communication impossible. And then the convicts had broken free and killed the officers, finding themselves unexpectedly in command of a sort of paradise, with the settlers to serve them.
A fairly safe paradise, too. Mercury has an infinite number of these Twilight valleys, all looking more or less alike from space, half hidden under their shallow blankets of air, and only the few that are both accessible and unmistakable because of their size have permanent colonies. Straight up and down, by spaceship, is the only way in or out of most of them, and unless a ship should land directly on them by sheer chance, the erstwhile prisoners would be safe from discovery.
“But the sun-stones?” asked Trevor, touching his forehead. “What about the sun-stones and the hawks? They didn’t have the use of them when they landed.”
“No, they came later.” Hugh looked around uneasily. “Look, Trevor, it’s a thing we don’t talk about much. You can see why, when you think what it’s done to us. And it’s a thing you shouldn’t talk about at all.”
“But how did they get them in their heads? And why? Especially, why do they waste them on the hawks?”
Jen glanced at him somberly from the circle of Hugh’s arm. “We don’t know, exactly. But the hawks are the eyes and ears of the Korins. And from the time they used the first sun-stone we’ve had no hope of getting free from them.”
The thing that had been buried in Trevor’s subconscious since last night’s questioning came suddenly to the surface.
“Thought-waves, that’s it! Sure!” He leaned forward excitedly, and Jen told him frantically to lower his voice. “I’ll be damned. They’ve been experimenting with sun-stones for years on Earth—ever since they were discovered, but the scientists never thought of...”
“Do they have the stones on Earth, too?” asked Jen, with loathing.
“No, no, only the ones that are brought from Mercury. Something about Mercury being so close to the Sun, overdose of solar radiation and the extremes of heat, cold, and pressure while the planet was being made, that formed that particular kind of crystal here. I guess that’s why they’re called sun-stones.”
He shook his head. “So that’s how they work it—direct mental communication between the Korins and the hawks, by means of the stones. Simple, too. Set them right in the skull, almost in contact with the brain, and you don’t need all the complicated machines and senders and receivers they’ve been monkeying with in the labs for so long.” He shivered. “I’ll admit I don’t like the idea, though. There’s something repulsive about it.”
Hugh said bitterly, “When they were only men, and convicts, we might have beaten them some day, even though they had all the weapons. But when they became the Korins—” He indicated the darkling alcoves of the cave. “This is the only freedom we can ever have now.”
Looking at Hugh and Jen, Trevor felt a great welling-up of pity, for them, and for all these far-removed children of Earth who were now only hunted slaves to whom this burrow in the rock meant freedom. He thought with pure hatred of the Korins who hunted them, with the uncanny hawks that were their far-ranging eyes and ears and weapons. He wished he could hit them with...
He caught himself up sharply. Letting his sympathies run away with him wasn’t going to do anybody any good. The only thing that concerned him was to get hold of that sun-stone again and get out of this devil’s pocket. He’d spent half a life hunting for a stone, and he wasn’t going to let concern over perfect strangers sidetrack him now.
The first step would be getting away from the cave.
It would have to be at night. No watch was kept then on the ledges, for the hawks did not fly in darkness, and the Korins never moved without the hawks. Most of the people were busy in those brief hours of safety. The women searched for edible moss and lichens. Some of the men brought water from the stream at the canyon fork, and others, with stone clubs and crude spears, hunted the great rock-lizards that slept in the crevices, made sluggish by the cold.
Trevor waited until the fourth night, and then when Saul’s water party left, he started casually out of the cave after them.
“I think I’ll go down with them,” he told Jen and Hugh. “I haven’t been down that far since I got here.”
There seemed to be no suspicion in them of his purpose. Jen said, “Stay close to the others. It’s easy to get lost in the rocks.”
He turned and went into the darkness after the water party. He followed them down to the fork, and it was quite easy then to slip aside among the tumbled rock and leave them, working his way slowly and silently downstream.
After several days in the dimness of the cave, he found that the star-shine gave him light enough to move by. It was hard going, even so, and by the time he reached the approximate place where Saul had tried to kill him he was bruised and cut and considerably shaken. But he picked his spot carefully, crossed the stream, and began to search.
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