Contents
Chapter 1. 2
Chapter 2. 6
Chapter 3. 10
Chapter 4. 14
Chapter 5. 18
Chapter 6. 22
Chapter 7. 27
Chapter 8. 31
Chapter 9. 35
Chapter 10. 40
Chapter 11. 44
Chapter 12. 48
Chapter 13. 52
Chapter 14. 56
Chapter 16. 64
Chapter 17. 68
Chapter 18. 73
Chapter 1.
Void, cold. Fold in the legs—do not move.
Cold — pain — the big one was using the prod again — pain.
Stand — jump — but it is cold — so — cold.
The small body edged between the two large woven baskets uttered a mewing cry. Then one claw hand flew to provide a gag against any more sound. But shivers continued to shake the too thin body.
Cold — where is cold — where is pain?
The curled body jerked as if a tormenting lash had been applied to the wrinkled greenish skin only too visible through the tatters which were not true clothing. No one had shouted those words. Yet they had come as clear and loud as if Russtif his ugly self were standing over the hider. In the head—not in the ear. Talking in the head! The small one tried to wedge even more out of sight, and now the shudders of fear were worse.
Where is cold? Where is pain?
The demand came again, imperative — to be obeyed. Wrinkled hands covered ears, but that did not keep the questions from opening like dry and curled leaves under the touch of water — an opening in the head. Once more the body jerked—
Pain — Russtif was using the prod on the other side of the tent wall, using it with the skill of a trained showman to stir up a sulky or frightened beast. And, like the words out of the air, the pain reached the lurker with a hot burst that brought a second whimper.
"Here!"
There were legs beyond the crack where the small one crouched — two pairs of them in space boots. "No harm — there is nothing to fear."
A pallid tongue licked cracked lips. But there was something that made the fear less, lulled it a little. Beyond the wall Russtif growled and spat threats. His anger and love of tormenting that which could not fight back was like a spurt of fire.
"Nothing to fear." Again the words spun into a mind that had to listen even if the ears were stoppered against sound. Nor did either pair of boots move toward or away from the lurker. Crouch, wait for a hand to reach down and jerk out the small body, perhaps cuff hard for being there — for existing at all.
But this was not Russtif and the boots did not move. Slowly the head, covered with dry tangles of thick hair, came up, drawn against all will by the new note — the very strange note — in that mind voice. Large eyes looked up and out.
Very far from Russtif these two. There were always strangers about, some of them as odd in their way as Russtif's imprisoned performers. So it was not their difference, rather the way they stood shoulder to shoulder looking down. Not with disgust nor cruel curiosity but in another way the lurker could not understand.
"Do not be afraid." It was the male who spoke now, uttering words in the trade lingo that was common speech all through this quarter which catered to the entertainment of ship people.
He was very fair of skin and his hair was white — though he was not an old man. Those eyebrows so pale even against his skin ran up at the temples to join the hairline, and his eyes were green, luminous as if there were tiny fires behind each.
"There is nothing to fear." That was the other one, the female, who spoke now. Beside the fairness of her companion she was a fire glowing — hair as red as one of Russtifs oil lamps was braided and looped about her head to look like a heavy crown. She was — The small body uncoiled. Claw hands went out to the big basket and drew the hunched body up as far as nature would let it. For it was a very crooked body, hunched forward by a misshapen burden at shoulder level, so that the head had to be raised to an uncomfortable angle to see the other two at all.
Arms and legs were thin, their greenish skin encrusted with dirt. The mass of uncombed hair was black, gray with dust at places, but black underneath.
"A child." It was the spaceman who said that aloud. "What—" The woman made a gesture with one hand. There was a listening look about her. Could she hear Toggor, too?
"This one, yes," she said. "But also another. Is that not so, little one?"
The answer was pulled out by the intent gaze of her eyes — coming before thought muffled it with caution.
"He — Russtif — he would make Toggor play. It is cold — too cold. Toggor hurts from the cold — from the pain whip."
"So?"
She stooped to set a hand beneath the chin of the small, bent and maimed figure. From her touch, from the tips of her fingers, something warm and good flooded right into the shaking body.
"Toggor is what?"
"My—my friend." That was not quite the way of it either, but they were the closest words could be found.
There was a hiss of breath from the man; the woman's lips fitted tightly together. She was angry — not like Russtif, all noise and quick to aim a blow — but neither was her anger turned toward the one before her.
"We may have found what we seek." She spoke above the bowed head to her companion. "And who are you?"
Again warmth flowed from her.
"The Dung one." Long ago had that name of the lowest been accepted. There was no other. "I run errands. I do what I can." A pride which was seldom felt made shoulders hunch a little higher.
"For Russtif?" The man indicated the tent behind.
Dung shook his head. "Russtif has Jusas and Sem."
"Yet you are here."
"It is Toggor. I — I bring him —" The claw hand rumbled in the front of the single ragged garment. Once more truth was pulled forth by that warmth of the other. "I bring this." He held an unwholesome - looking lump of stuff. "Russtif does not feed Toggor enough. He wants him to fight for food. Toggor will die" — the sharply pointed chin quivered — "there!"
They could all hear the crackle of the prod and a rising mutter of obscenities from beyond the tent wall.
"Toggor fights and they bet on him. Russtif never had so good a clawed one before."
"So," the man said, "let us see this fighter, Maelen. Also Russtif. He interests me." The woman nodded. She dropped her hand from beneath the pointed chin to lace a hold in the tatters which crossed the bowed shoulder hump.
What did she want with Dung?
"Come." Her hold unchanging, she urged him forward just behind the man who walked with the swing of one who has spent most of his years in space, and who was now heading toward the entrance to Russtif's domain at the other end of the tent. Whether or not the lurker wished to accompany them was not asked. There was no breaking that hold which was drawing Dung along. Somehow the thought of fighting for freedom had vanished.
There was the thick and nasty smell which was Russtif's — one of uncleaned cages with weak and sickening captives — to fill the nose as soon as they had pushed past the open flap. Things rustled and squeaked until Russtif roared and the silence of fear snapped down.
He was a big man who had once been proud of his strength but now was entombed in rolls of greasy fat. His bare skull shone with oil in the light of the lantern he had set on the table where there was also a cage — Toggor's place of prison. Now he looked up with a sullen scowl. Then that changed, by a visible effort, into a showman's ingratiating grin.
"Gentle Fern, Gentle Homo, how can I serve you?" His back was to the table now, and he had dropped the prod on it. It was then he caught sight of Dung.
"Has the trash made some trouble?" He took a ponderous step forward, his hand lifted as if to aim a blow at the hunchback.
"What trouble is this one noted for making?" asked the woman.
"A thief, a piece of walking dung, a monster like that? Why, whatever comes to hand to upset honest people — "
"Such as Beastmerchant Russtif perhaps?" asked the man. Russtifs smile slipped and slid but still he caught it.
"Such as me and everyone else. 1 caught this sewer scum tampering with a cage just two eves ago. Luck was with him then, or else he would have smarted for a good lessoning. Trash should be thrown away and not come to annoy others."
"Opening a cage? Is perhaps the cage that one?" The man pointed to the one on the table.
Russtifs smile did vanish then. With the hand in sight he made a fist which might have fallen like a hammer blow on the hunchback.
"Why do you wonder that. Gentle Homo? Has the trash been spewing out some vomit that you would believe?"
"You have a fighting smux is what 1 believe," the woman cut in, and Russtif hastened to draw on his showman's smirk again.
"The best. Gentle Fern, the best! There have been stellars wagered on this one—not just market coppers—and stellars won!" He moved along the edge of the table now so they could better view his possession.
The woman stooped a little so she could see most of what looked like a ball of hairy rags squatting in the center of the cage. Under her hold Dung gave a quick start and then stood very still. She was mind speaking to Toggor. The smux did not answer. It was as if he did not or would not listen.
"These be — good." Unknowingly at first. Dung's mind reached out to become a part of that other steady stream of reassurance. Toggor's answer never came in words such as those that had struck Dung. Rather it was feeling: pain, fear, and sometimes but very seldom, a rough kind of contentment. Thus Dung thought "good," even "help," which Toggor somehow seized upon avidly, as if Dung had indeed flung open his place of hopeless captivity.
The handful of legs folded tightly to the haired body was visible. Those vicious-looking claws at the end of the first four were clamped together as the creature answered Dung's reassurance rather than the more concise broadcast of the woman.
The smux was no tiling of beauty. Had he grown larger he might have been such a monster as to set human kind to flight. His body, covered with spiky hairs thick enough to look like quills, was a grayish red like a fire coal smoldering in ashes. Each quill was tipped also with a darker red as if blood-dipped. There were eight of the long hairy legs, the fore pairs equipped with claws which were sawtoothed on the inner sides.
His body was two ovals attached, the smaller fore one to larger hind one with a waist no thicker than two of his legs held side by side. His eyes — all six of them — were now retracted into his ball of head, concealing the stalks on which they were mounted. All in all he was ugly, and, with that ugliness, he gave off the promise of quick and vicious attack.
Now his abdomen dragged on the floor of the cage, and Dung knew Toggor was both filthy and hungry. To be dropped into a rounded half sphere with another of his kind and a piece of raw meat flung in for a victory prize should arouse every fighting instinct of the smux. At Dung's thrust of thought he raised one foreleg and clicked the claw there in entreaty — a friend had food.
Russtif kept his hand well away from the prod. Would he dare to move when these two strangers were here? Dung did not know, but breaking the long-held rule of his own survival, he wadded together the bit of offal he had sneaked from behind the butcher's and, measuring the distance carefully, while Russtif was watching the woman, his small eyes leering. Dung threw the bit of food into the cage. Toggor was on it in an instant, grasping the unwholesome-looking piece and bringing it to his mandibles.
Russtif roared and swung one of those hammer fists at Dung, but it did not crash against the side of the hunchback's head as he expected. It was the woman who swung her lightly held captive out of the way, and it was the man whose hand came down in a sharp chop across the beast seller's wrist, bringing an angry cry out of him.
"What you do?" Russtif seemed to swell as if his bulk had suddenly increased.
"Nothing."
"Nothing? You let this trash throw poison to my smux and it is nothing? Ho, let the wardens decide whether this is nothing."
That Dung had not expected. That Russtif would allow the law such interference was unheard of. Yet the beastmerchant was slipping farther along the edge of the table, his eyes turning from the spaceman standing at quiet ease, to Toggor, to the woman, almost as if he expected they were about to unite against him. Dung made a second attempt to wring free of the grasp which had brought his misshapen body into the tent, fruitlessly. Though that hand twisted in the rags across the hump did not tighten, yet moving away was impossible.
"The smux — quote a price on it." That was not the man but the woman who said that quietly. Russtif grinned a little, showing broken, black, rotted teeth.
"There is no price for good fortune. Gentle Fern." He had stopped his crabwise retreat from the two, standing now at the end of the table with Toggor's cage between them. The smux had finished the bit of near-carrion Dung had scraped out of a discarded E tube and had closed himself once more into ball form which was his only protection, since Russtif had soaked the poison from his claws only an hour ago.
"There is always an end to good fortune," said the woman, standing tall so that only the tips of her fingers touched Dung, yet light as that touch was now, captivity remained. "Also for everything there is a price. You have fought that smux ten—double ten—triple ten times, starving it between so that it will come to battle as you wish. There is a flicking of life force in it now. Would you kill it rather than profit?"
Dung's dark tongue swept across pale lips. "Toggor." He was not aware that he had spoken aloud until he heard his own word.
The spaceman moved his wrist out into the open, closer to the lantern. That light showed a cal dial, its light steady. As Russtif saw that, his small eyes held a new glitter. Everything this off-worlder said was true. The smux was — or had been — a strong contender, the best he had ever been able to find. He had marked the day he had had it out of the hands of the drunken crewman who had wanted to raise a stellar to see him back to his ship, as a fortunate one for him. But who knew how long the thing would continue to live? Russtif was greedy, but there was an undercurrent of sly profit sense in him, too.
"Off-worlders cannot run gaming," he pointed out. He was absentmindedly rubbing the wrist the spacer had struck with the fingers of his other hand.
"We have a license to buy," the woman cut in. "We do not choose fighters as such, but only strange beings or creatures."
Now Russtif made a wide gesture that took in the other cages and prisoners. "Take then your choice. Gentle Fern; we have such in abundance here. There is a hopper from Grogon, a dry tongue sucker from Basil, a — "
"Smux from — from where, Beastmerchant? From which world comes your lucky fighter?"
Russtif s thick shoulders arose in a shrug. "Who knows? By the time such come — and they come seldom — they have been traded perhaps a dozen times. And surely the thing itself is not prepared to snicker out its home world. It fights — fights to eat. It sleeps. It lives after a fashion, but no one can bring charges that Russtif deals in a thinking species. These are all below the official recording, and the records will tell you so."
Dung could have protested. Alone among Russtif s captives had the hunchback made contact with Toggor. The creature's mind pattern was different, very hard to follow. It wove in and out when he tried to communicate more than the most primitive messages or emotions. Yet he was sure that smux had more powers of thought than Russtif believed.
The spaceman tapped the edge of his cal dial with a forefinger, the small click-click underlining the restlessness of the caged creatures about. Russtif's own cal dial showed.
"The thing brings in a stellar — "
Now the woman laughed, and there was a note of scorn in that sound. "A stellar a battle? And for how much longer? It is weakening, is it not? At the last fight did it not nearly lose a claw?"
Russtif s eyes narrowed. He stared at her insolently, though he was careful to keep his voice at a respectful pitch as he answered.
"I did not see you there among the wagerers. Gentle Fern."
"Nor would you," she replied. "But I speak the truth."
Again Russtif shrugged. "A stellar this bit of ugliness did win. And he will win again."
"Two stellars." That was from the spaceman and it came crisply.
Dung gasped and then raised his stick-thin fingers to cover his betraying mouth. Two stellars — it was a fortune beyond imagining in the haunts of the outcasts where the hunchback sheltered.
"Two stellars, um?" Russtif rolled the words around in his mouth as if he could taste the sweetness of such an offer. "Three." A brainsick fool who would make such an offer could perhaps be edged upward yet again.
"Do not bargain." The woman's voice was not raised. It was neither harsh nor threatening. Yet Dung shivered and sunk his head lower, not wishing to see her face. Though the hunchback had scurried away from threats all the years of harsh memory he had never heard such a tone before. What was this woman? Certainly some great lady, such as one would never think might venture into such a hole. She should come carried on the shoulders of stout chair veeks with outrunners and speakers-for-the-great in attendance. Who or what was she?
The effect her order had on Russtif was made plain in the way his fists fell upon the table and his eyes took on a reddish glare. Dung expected to hear foul words ordering these two out of the trader's sight. Yet no words came. Instead, a purplish flush covered the beastmerchant's oily jowls and he looked as one who might be choking on his own spittle.
"Two stellars," the man said again, and his speech was as quiet as the woman's, although with none of that compulsion in it. Yet it was also not to be denied.
Russtif made a noise like the honk of an enraged grop, the purpling color still in his cheeks waxing deeper. He gave a sharp shove to the smux's cage, sending it skidding along the greasy tabletop.
"Two stellars." He choked out the words with the same enthusiasm he might have given had the offer been only copper.
The man began tapping out on his cal the transfer from his own holdings to Russtif's.
The skidding cage was about to dive over the edge of the table. Dung's skeleton hand caught it, and for the first time the hunchback dared to try to reach Toggor again.
"These are good." Anyone would be better than Russtif, to be sure, but there was the additional promise in the mind touch of the woman. One could not lie with thoughts as one could with words.
The woman did not try to take the cage, but neither did she loosen her hold on Dung's rags. Instead, she gave a slight pull which brought him around and started him for the open tent flap. Then they were out in the twilight where other tents' smoky torches and impulse lamps gave a measure of sight.
A moment later the man joined them.
"Trouble?" The woman did not use speech, but had mind touch that Dung found easy to catch.
The man could not laugh in that mind-to-mind communication, but there was something in his answer which was light as laughter.
"Trouble? No, he will be slightly puzzled perhaps for a space, and then congratulate himself on a bargain that he made. I wish we could clear out that whole den of his."
"Think freedom?"
Dung caught not only words but a picture — a picture that showed paws, and insectile legs, and tentacles looping through wire, mastering the catches on the cages in the tent behind. "Bend so - push. Go, little ones, go!"
Dung felt a touch on his own grime-blackened hand. The smux had thrust a foreleg through the wire netting, was grasping with a claw the catch of the cage. Like those in the tent, Toggor had caught that message and was following the promise that was like an order.
Gasping, Dung held the cage against his body. But that gesture came too late. Toggor had already freed himself and caught with all four claws at the rags across the pinched chest of the hunchback. Dung dropped the cage, then nearly stumbled over it, except a strong hand caught at his bony shoulder, pulling the small figure back on balance.
Dung cupped both hands about Toggor, having no fear of any cutting slash from those claws, for the smux fitted itself into the hollows of his palms as if those were a safe home nest. Now those hands swung out to the man who stood so straight and tall that Dung had to stretch his neck painfully to see his face, offering Toggor to him who had paid that unbelievable sum to free the smux.
"Hold him well, little one. Bring him that we may tend him — he still hungers and thirsts. And " — the mind speech was softer than any Dung had ever heard in a short hard life — " so do you."
Thus one who had always slunk through shadows now walked as straight as an ungainly and broken body would allow, a friend sheltered in hand and a stranger on either side acting as if one was as tall and well formed as themselves. It was beyond belief yet it was the truth!
Chapter 2.
Twice when they passed some patrolling guard, sent to keep the peace among the dealers in the strange and rare who gathered like an untidy fringe about any space port. Dung hung back, and would even have dived for the shadows, but for that grip on the rags across his hump, steering him straight ahead until they passed the invisible boundary which kept those in the Limits from the respectable portions of town.
The lingering twilight was enough for Dung to see the stares which greeted their party. Passersby, used to strange sights issuing from the Limits, seemed to judge their small group even stranger. Yet neither of the spacers appeared aware of the comment they caused, and Dung was brought along as one who had every right to walk there.
They came to one of the large shelters for travelers, light beaming richly from its wide doorway, house guards on duty. Dung, straining his neck upward, ready to twist away from a blow or kick, saw that the guard on the right did move forward a step as if to question their passage, but retreated again when the spacers paid him no attention.
Together the three crossed the wide lobby with its ring of luxury shops, its throngs of people, making for one of the transport plates Dung had heard of but had never seen. They had it to themselves, other people drawing back as they approached. Their carrier whirled upward and then sped into one of the open hallways three stories above the lobby. It was stomach-turning for Dung, who gulped and gulped again. The invisible plastaglass sides did not give any suggestion of protection.
Dung swallowed hard for the third time as they stopped before a door and the spaceman put out a hand to press against the lockplate, letting the door withdraw into the wall to give them entrance. Toggor stirred and pushed against the sudden involuntary tightening of Dung's hold. This was such luxury as trash from the Limits had never seen. His misshapen feet sunk into a thick carpet that was a lush green and gave forth a tangy, spicy smell.
There was no smoking torch or lantern here. The walls themselves glowed, and that glow grew more brilliant as the door rolled shut behind them. A wide couch heaped with cushions ran along the left-hand wall, and other cushions were piled one upon the other at various points here and there — each flanked by a low table or double sets of shelves on which were a number of things Dung did not have time to study, for that grasp on his rags drew him to one table which the spaceman swept free of tapes and a queerly shaped bowl.
"Put the smux here." The woman did not use the mind touch but the trade tongue, and loosed Dung to gesture to the now clear surface. "Or will it run?"
Dung licked lips dry with that never-ending fear. They had bought the smux. Perhaps Dung had only been necessary in its transportation here. Now there might be no longer any need for this one misshapen and twisted body.
Obediently his thin fingers uncupped and set the spike-covered body in the place the woman had indicated.
"Stay," Dung thought. "These are good." Though how he could be sure of that!
Toggor crouched, drawn into a ball with legs hugging his pulpy body. The eyestalks on his bristly head extended a fraction with all the eyes facing outward and around, ready for attack from any direction.
The man went to the wall and tapped on a row of buttons there. There moved out a section on which sat a tray with a number of small covered boxes and dishes. He brought the tray to the table on which Toggor crouched.
"What does it eat?" Trade speech again.
Dung's own mouth watered and his belly pinched with longing as the spaceman snapped off the lids of the dishes and showed a variety of food.
"Meat," Dung said and stood, hands behind his own body lest they move of themselves and snatch some of that bounty.
"Well enough." The spaceman moved two of the dishes a fraction closer to the smux, but Toggor made no attempt to try their contents. That in-and-out pattern which could reach Dung spelled out the smux's wariness.
"Toggor wishes to know where he must fight," Dung interpreted.
"There is no fighting, only eating. Tell him so!" The woman no longer had any hold on Dung, but her hand moved to the upbent head, touched lightly between and above the reddened eyes.
"No fight — eat." Dung strove to fit his thoughts to the pattern Toggor could catch.
For a long moment it seemed the smux did not understand, or, understanding, did not believe. Then a claw flew, with a speed which made it hardly visible, to the nearest dish to seize upon a cube within and transfer it to clashing mandibles.
When the smux had fed a second time and was now using both foreclaws to empty the dish, the woman spoke again, this time no trade talk but words that were clear in Dung's head.
"Eat you also. If there is other which you want, just say it so."
Dung felt as Toggor must have moments earlier: that there might be a threat to come. Why had he been brought here and offered — But also, as it had with Toggor, hunger got the better of wariness and he grabbed for a flat round of bread-cake already spread with lumpy gor-berry jell. It was crammed swiftly into mouth. His eyes were not on stalks, able to watch all sides of the room, but Dung used them as best he could while he ate, ate so fast that the taste of the food was lost in the swift chewing and swallowing.
There seemed to be no trick. He ate more slowly when no hand came forth to snatch away food, no foot raised to boot his bag-of-bones body. In all the seasons Dung could remember never had he been offered freely such a wealth of food.
None but well-cleaned dishes were on that tray when smux and Dung were done. The smux balled up, his legs wrapped about his body. He might doze now for several hours. Dung eyed the piles of cushions and wished he could do likewise. But those who had brought him here were not yet through.
This time the spaceman caught Dung's shoulder and drew his captive to a wall, over which he passed his hand. A second door opened. There was a tight little room therein — no cushions, nothing but bare walls and floor.
Ah, rightly had Dung feared them. He was to be shut up in there. Twisting his body did no good; there was too strong a hold on him. His rags tore as the spaceman stripped the rotten cloth away from the hump, away from Dung's body. Bare so that all the bruises mottling the greenish flesh could be seen, the hunchback was placed well inside, and the door closed before he could throw himself at it in one last despairing attempt to escape imprisonment.
Out of the wall shot streams of water, warm against the skin. Two metal arms unfolded from the shining surface of the cell and caught him. To hold him under that flood to drown? No, they were brushing down the small body, rubbing to dislodge the grime which had always been a part of Dung. No more struggle. Standing still, a faint pleasure grew within him — clean as never any such as Dung could be. Even the wild matted hair was washed and combed back, its wet and curling ends brushing the hump.
The skin of the hump was different from the rest of the grimed hide which covered his body. He had never seen himself in any mirror, but his fingers had long ago told him it was thick and hard, almost like the covering on his nails, with a ridge down the middle of the back which only by painful contortion Dung could touch. Through it he had little or no feeling.
The water shower died away, and the door which had sealed came open again. But the spaceman did not drag Dung forth. Rather, he stretched an arm above Dung's head and pushed a thumb tight to the wall.
Water had come before, now it was wind, warm and drying. Dung swung slowly around as he realized its purpose. Even the hair which had lain so lankly back arose and answered, to fly up and out.
Then the wind was cut off, and when Dung looked up in disappointment the hand of the spaceman reached inside the place of water and air, holding toward him a folded piece of cloth. Dung took it and shook out a small robe, clean and white and of a soft wooly texture unknown to any beggar in the outer Limits.
To be fed, and clean, and wearing a whole garment — Dung's wildest dreams had never taken him ...
zenek.szlachetny