Cycle of Fire

with his back against the ledge; Dar resumed his former position, using the pack for a pillow.

There are several ways to learn a language. Unfortunately, there was only one possible with the resources at hand and even for that the material was a trifle scanty. A lava field with an occasional cactus, a respectable number of shadows, and two suns shining on it furnishes demonstration material for very few nouns and practically no verbs. Plenty of adjectives may apply to it, but it is decidedly difficult to make clear just which one is being used at the moment.

Kruger thought of drawing pictures, but he had neither pencil nor paper and the sketches he made on the lava surface with a broken bit of rock didn’t look like much even to their author when he had finished. They certainly meant nothing to Dar.

Nevertheless a few sounds gradually acquired more or less the same meaning to both parties. To describe their exchange of ideas as a conversation would be rank deception, but ideas did get across. By the time the red sun had disappeared below the southeastern horizon it was mutually understood that they would proceed together to the edge of the lava field to find something more drinkable than cactus juice and more edible than the rather nauseating pulp of the plants.

Kruger was not too happy about this, as a matter of fact. In the months he had been on the planet he had walked some three thousand miles northward to get away from the periodically intolerable heat of the red sun, and in the last few hundred had realized that he was seeing progressively more of the blue one. The reason was obvious enough: the blue star was a “circumpolar” in the northern part of the northern hemisphere — or, as the Alphard’s navigator would have to put it, its declination seen from this planet was at least several degrees north. The trouble was that Kruger had not the faintest idea of the motion of the planet relative to the blue star; he could not even guess whether it would produce a noticeable seasonal effect or not and if it did, how long the seasons would last.

He had been toying with the idea of heading southward again for several weeks before he had seen Dar’s glider in flight. That was the first intimation he had had, other than the rather doubtful cases of lights seen from space by the Alphard’s observers, that there were people of any sort on the planet; he had set out in the direction the glider had been taking. It was sheer luck that he had been close enough to see Dar’s crash — or rather that the crash had occurred so close to the spot where Kruger had happened to be. He had followed the little pilot for several days; he had leaped the same crevasses as Dar had, taking an even deadlier risk with his greater weight and not-so-much-greater strength, but not daring to lose track of the being; and he had been shocked profoundly to discover his guide down and apparently helpless in the midst of the lava desert. He had hoped even then, somewhat illogically, that he could learn from the creature of some place to the south, out of the permanent glare of the blue sun, where he could find shelter and civilized company; after all, while the glider had been going north, it must have been coming from somewhere.

Still, if the pilot wanted to continue to the north there seemed nothing to do but string along. Presumably he was trying to reach a place where he would be comfortable; Kruger realized that he himself had no means of telling just what that would mean in terms of temperature, food, and water, but at least his companion did not enjoy the lava plain any better than a human being would. With that much in common the risk of staying with him seemed well worth taking.

It was a good deal cooler when the red sun finally set, and Kruger knew from past experience that it would be seven or eight earthly days before it rose again in this latitude. They were both hungry, but far from starving, and Dar Lang Ahn had recovered much of his strength in the sixty or seventy hours since Kruger’s arrival. The blue star had moved around to the southwest, but it would be quite a number of earthly days yet before it would hamper their travel by shining in their faces.

They traveled more slowly than Dar had when he thought he was alone. The principal reason lay in Kruger’s physical make-up; no human being can be as agile as the small, loose-jointed natives of Abyormen. Enough of the travel was climbing for Dar’s clawed hands and feet to make a good deal of difference, and weak though the native still was he had to hold back frequently for his bulkier companion.

Nevertheless they did make fair progress. No more major cracks were encountered, and after a few dozen hours of travel patches of soil began to appear here and there on the lava. Vegetation became thicker and from time to time pools of water stood in hollows in the lava. Evidently they were nearing the edge of the flow, since the lava itself was too porous to retain the liquid. The pools were scummed and crusted with rather smelly vegetation similar to the algae with which Kruger was familiar, and both travelers were willing to stick a little longer to cactus juice rather than drink from them; but their very presence improved morale. Dar hitched his pack of books a little higher and seemed to double his speed. The going became easier as more and more of the irregularities in the lava were filled with soil, though the soil itself was becoming more and more covered with vegetation. The plants at first were small in size, reminiscent to Kruger of lawn shrubs, but as the frequency of ponds increased and the amount of lava showing above the dirt grew smaller, the plants became larger, ranging finally to full-sized trees.

Most of these growths were as familiar to Kruger as to Dar, since the boy had seen them in profusion during his journey from the south; and he kept his eyes open for some whose stems or leaves he had learned were safe. He was in no mood to try any others; when Dar saw something he knew and offered it to his companion, Kruger shook his head.

“Nothing doing. Everything I’ve eaten on this world I had to try first, with no means of telling whether it would feed me or kill me. Out of five tries I got two bad bellyaches, and I’m lucky that was all. I’ll wait until we see something I know, thanks.”

Dar understood absolutely nothing of this except the refusal, which he filed in his mind as something else requiring explanation. He took as a working hypothesis the idea that the boy knew and disliked the leaf in question; that supposition at least fitted in with the theory that Kruger was a native of the lava region.

By the time the blue sun had moved around to the west the trees were thick enough to shade them from it most of the time, and the undergrowth dense enough to impede them both quite seriously. Neither had any cutting tools except for a small sheath knife which had been part of Kruger’s space-suit kit, and this was virtually useless for cutting a path.

The result was that they traveled very slowly. The impatience Dar felt did not show in his outward expression, at least to one as unfamiliar with his facial expression as Kruger was.

Language lessons continued as they traveled, with somewhat more speed because of the better supply of referents. Kruger felt that they should by now be getting ideas across to each other quite well and couldn’t understand why this didn’t seem to be happening. A lot of nouns were clear to both and a fair number of verbs. Adjectives, now that a great many articles were at hand for comparison, were increasing in supply. Once there are trees of various sizes the meaning of “big” and “little” can get across; if the attempt is made with a big rock and a small cactus there is no way to tell whether size, color, shape, or something entirely different from any of these is under discussion.

Nevertheless something was wrong. Kruger was gradually coming to suspect that his companion’s language contained only irregular verbs and that each noun belonged to a different declension. Dar, for his part, more than suspected that Kruger’s language was richer in homonyms than any useful tongue should be; the sound “tree,” for example, seemed to mean a vegetable growth with long, feathery, purplish leaves, and another with a much shorter trunk and nearly round leaves, and still another which actually varied in size from one specimen to the next.

They did not dare let the language problems occupy their full attention. The jungle contained animal life and not all of it was harmless. Dar’s sense of smell warned them of some flesh-eaters but by no means all; several times he had to resort to his crossbow while Kruger stood by holding his knife and hoping for the best. On one or two occasions animals apparently were frightened off by the alien human odor. Kruger wondered whether any of them would refuse to eat his flesh for similar reasons but felt no impulse to solve this problem experimentally.

In their first hundred hours in the jungle Dar killed a medium-sized creature which he proceeded to dissect with his companion’s knife and eat with great glee. Kruger accepted a piece of the raw flesh with some inner doubts but decided to take a chance. It was against all the rules, of course, but if he had obeyed the rules about testing all food before eating it he would have starved some months before. In the present case the stuff was edible if not delicious and after eight or ten hours of waiting he decided that he had added another item to his limited list of permissible foods.

When they first entered the jungle Dar had changed their course to the northeast. Kruger had endeavored to find out why and, as their stock of useful words increased, finally got the idea that his companion was trying to reach either a lake or sea — at any rate a great deal of water seemed to be involved. This seemed desirable,