Doomstar

foreheads to the ground. Then a sub-chief of ten heartstones bent and cried out, 'Lead us, Ghnak!' and the rest of the men followed, shouting, 'Ghnak! Ghnak!'

Pride swelled Ghnak's chest and brought his tail up in a stiff arc until the tip almost touched his shoulderblades. He still did not quite understand what he was about. But it is the business of a chief to lead his people, and the magnitude of the idea set his ego afire. He stamped his feet and pounded himself and roared.

'Ghnak will save the sun!'

He moved away quickly, with half the tribe at his heels, adding, 'The god will speak through the talking logs.'

'Suppose he doesn't,' said Boker under his breath to Kettrick. 'Suppose the People of the River don't have a thing to say about big noises and comings from the sky.'

'You won't live past morning, anyway,' said Kettrick, 'What difference does a few hours make?'

'Because of the vanity of man,' said Glevan, 'I will make a large prayer for a miracle.'

The flat rattling voices of the talking logs began to speak, calling up and down the river to the scattered tribes of the Krinn. Kettrick understood very little of the drum talk. He switched on the radio, but the lifeboat now seemed to be out of range and all he got was static. He turned it off.

The sun was higher. The heat increased. The needle of the counter crept toward the red. The clack of the primeval jungle telegraph halted and stuttered. A feeling of unreality came over Kettrick, a detachment psychotic in its cheerfulness. He was no longer afraid. He no longer worried. He looked across at the god who sat in his house beyond the sacred fire, and he said, 'If you let your brother down, friend, there will be no more offerings for you.'

In a semistupor he sat and waited and listened to the drums.

Boker shook him. 'Wake up,' he said. 'I think they've heard something.'

24

Kettrick started up. He could hear Ghnak's deep grunting bass crying out that the god had spoken. Other voices shouted 'Ghnak! Ghnak!' Women began to howl shrilly. There was a lot of stamping about, and the drums were still.

Kettrick and the others ran.

They met Ghnak between walls of fern and sawgrass, on the trail that led to the talking place and the bank of the river.

'The god my brother has told me,' he said. 'The tribe of Hhurr beyond the Many Hills has seen the magic of the sun-slayers.'

Kettrick said, 'Ghnak will lead us.' He looked at his companions, seeing their faces as blank as he knew his own must be. They did not believe it. He did not believe it.

They did not dare believe it.

'A volcanic upheaval,' said Hurth. 'Or an earthquake.'

Glevan said nothing. His lips moved without sound.

Ghnak was chanting. The tribesmen answered him. They stamped their feet and performed ritual obscenities of a defiant sort, their tails erect and quivering. In a moment there would be a rush to pick up weapons and then a surge back to the river bank. Kettrick stepped aside into the clearing where the talking log lay on its supports. It was hollow and had a long slit on its flattened top surface. The sticks were hung beside it. Kettrick switched on his radio and called the lifeboat.

After what seemed a moderate eternity the copilot answered, sounding very distant and rather peevish.

'Negative so far,' he said. 'Nothing but dust and volcanoes. This is a hell of a world. I've lost the cruiser now but her last transmission was negative.'

'I may have something,' Kettrick said, and explained rapidly, leaving out the supernatural embellishments. 'The Many Hills are the line of buttes west of where you dropped us. How far beyond them this tribe lives I don't know. The country is a mess seen from the air…'

'I know. I saw it this morning. We'll give it a closer look when we reach it.' Kettrick heard him talking to the pilot, and then he added, 'That will be our next westward sweep. We're almost at the terminus now and about to head east.'

Kettrick said, 'You don't think it would be worth your while to go a little bit out of your way.'

'We were assigned to a definite sweep pattern, Kettrick. We can't just drop out a few thousand miles of it because one of your apes down there saw a thunderstorm or an…'

'Volcanic upheaval,' said Kettrick. 'Sure. Suit yourself.'

He cut the switch. He was angry, though he knew he had no right to be. The copilot was completely correct.

The tribe came streaming back down the trail with their weapons slung over their shoulders, following Ghnak. Kettrick and the others joined them. At the edge of the water the tribe's two river craft were pulled up onto the mud. The Krinn, quite nonapelike, were fearless and expert in the water. They swam, hunting the aquatic mammals with great skill. For long voyages they built a kind of rude catamaran out of two long buoyant logs sharpened at both ends and lashed together with cross branches about four feet apart. The river was the great highway, and from it other rivers branched, and the Krinn traveled for astonishing distances, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of desire for conquest or sheer curiosity. They were a gutty, energetic breed. In another million years or so they might amount to something. If they lived.

The craft were pushed off. Holding long paddles, a dozen or so Krinn bestrode each log. The men found places among them and Chai, holding herself rigidly in check, climbed obediently up behind Kettrick. The Krinn had found it convenient to ignore her, but she was finding it not so easy to ignore them. Kettrick laid his head back against her and said, 'Soon over now. Be patient.'

The Krinn began to churn the water, one of them on each craft calling out, 'Ough! Ough! Ough!' rhythmically to mark the time. They picked up the beat and the logs shot away downstream, toward the Many Hills and the tribe of Hhurr who had seen the magic.

And here we go, thought Kettrick, a brave little band with our tails in the air, to save the sun.

Once more the strange feeling of unreality came over him, but this time the comfortable detachment was lacking. I have done this before, he thought. And he had. He had ridden a smooth log in the midst of a line of Krinn rowers, watching their hairy backs bend and the paddles swing, flashing in the sun. He had seen the banks of the river gliding past and felt the warm suck of the water on his legs and smiled at the way the tails of his fellow sailors were carried daintily aloft out of the wet.

Yet after a while he understood that this was not what he meant.

He understood that at last he was living the dream.

They went downriver with the current. They moved swiftly, but not so swiftly as the sun that hastened to reach its zenith, rushing toward its doom. A sick sun, a dying sun, and to Kettrick it seemed that a strangeness came into the light and turned all the landscape into such a place as one might see in fever. Dim shapes flopped and floundered and swirled in the tainted waters. The great buttes reared high, their flanks torn to the bleeding red rock, their foreheads shattered by lightning. The forest crept darkly along the banks, full of sounds and furtive motion, and far on the other side of the sink, atop the desert wall, the yellow curtain of a sandstorm blew and trailed its raggedness down and down across the treetops. The rowers, humped and fanged, churned tirelessly from nowhere into nothing, under the shining of the Doomstar.

The lifeboat, its delta wings extended, appeared high in the western sky.

The Krinn broke their rhythm, shouting that the sun-slayers had come. Kettrick, shaking off his daze, cried out that this was some of the help that the god and his brother Ghnak had sent for. He clawed at the radio.

The copilot still sounded peevish. But he said, 'We decided to come back this way, just to break the monotony. It is a high probability area. You said west of that line of buttes? And north of the river. How large an area do you suggest?'

'Not too large, if the visual and aurak phenomena could be detected from the river. But I don't know how far west the tribe is.'