Golden Dream: Fuzzy Odessey Read online

  It was too big and tough to be killed with such instruments. The Gashta knew that. But it didn’t like being hurt, and that was the thing they counted on. After a dozen or so charges that ended with bruised ribs and sore hide, the thing howled and leaped into the forest. The warriors could hear the rapid patter of its paws, as it ran toward the mountain that flanked their valley.

  Breaks-Twigs had been flung down in the act of prodding the animal in its flank. Its break for freedom had caught him unaware, and the heavy body had flattened him as it turned. Now he lay there, panting. One of the young warriors came to hunker beside him.

  “Is it that you are hurt, Old Teacher?” he asked. “Is it that I might help you to rise up?”

  “This one is unhurt, Fire-Bringer. This one is merely old and very tired. It would be well if you helped me back to the young ones. They will be frightened. It is well that this was a toshki-washa. The gotza are not so easily discouraged.”

  The old Gashta struggled to sit up, and Fire-Bringer caught his hand and tugged him to his feet. Now that the danger was over, Breaks-Twigs felt as if his strength had turned to water and drained away through his toes. The quiver in his bones was a reminder…and a warning.

  “Our ways change, young one,” he said as they trudged through the brushy ways again. “We, who are old, die, and you who are younger must keep the people safe apd feed us and yourselves. Already, the ship is only a tale, even to us who are old. The old skills are dying, even among the Haigun-sha. And the Kampushi-sha, who were never trained in the ship-ways, are beginning to look away from the valley, even though we have been taught that we must stay near it.”

  He paused, his big green eyes narrowing against some internal pain, and the younger Gashta looked at him with concern.

  “It is that you are hurt!” he said firmly. “It is that you must be taken to Speaks-Well. One of the hunters will watch the young.”

  Breaks-Twigs had begun to suspect that this might be true. He made no protest, but he called to Sun-Blossom, who ran to follow them to their hut beneath the thorns.

  They followed the maze-like pathways, hidden here from any flying creature, and long before they neared their hut, they could hear Speaks-Well singing.

  “Oho!” said Breaks-Twigs. “That is the proper use for the high-mode. In the old days, I was taught, it was used only for music, never for speech. Hear how she trills! Though she does indeed speak well, my mate sings even better.”

  The singing broke off abruptly. The rounded shape of Speaks-Well appeared in the opening of the hut. She was of a height with her mate, but her eyes were a darker green, her silky fur a more sunlit gold. Now those big green eyes darkened with worry, raking over the approaching group, assessing the reasons that might have brought her mate back from his duties so soon.

  Fire-Bringer helped Breaks-Twigs into the wicker-like house and stood over him, his face concerned. Breaks-Twigs sank onto his bed-pile and sighed. Then he smiled up at his wife and daughter and friend.

  “This one is not really injured, I think. Though a pain sits in the breast, it is only a bruise. One gets old. One cannot bounce up from the ground as the young ones do. I am grateful, Fire-Bringer. As you go to join the other hunters, will you tell Stargazer that I would talk with him?”

  The younger Gashta nodded, accepted the thanks of Speaks-Well, and left about his errands. Speaks-Well, freed of the need for dignity before one not of the household, knelt beside her wounded mate and touched him gently, probing for broken bones. At the center of his chest, she found a spot that brought a gasp of agony from him.

  “Ribs,” she said, forgetting and speaking in the older, deeper, speech-tones. “It is that they might be cracked. It is that they might be broken or crushed. It is that you will remain quiet for a time to let them heal. Aki-noho-so/”

  When she used that tone, he knew that obedience was the easiest way. He and their children and her children by the other male Gashta that the Haigun had assigned to her over the years of her fertility understood fully the extent of her flexibility. Once she spoke with this firmness, appeal was useless.

  “When you tell me, I always heed,” he said mildly, though that was by no means entirely true. Only when he heard that particular note in her voice did he agree so readily. “But one must watch the young. Hunters cannot be spared for long. Is it that you could watch on this, my day, instead of waiting for tomorrow, your own?”

  She rose to her feet. Only then could it be seen that she was as old as her mate, for she moved with some stiffness, and the faint popping of her joints was quite audible to the quick ears of her family. She took her own zatku-hodda from the corner set aside for their tools and returned to his side.

  “Sun-Blossom will stay,” she said. “If there is a need, she can come into the forest and call. I will watch this day and tomorrow also. And the day after, if it seems that there is cause. Meat-Bringer came early. Fire-Bringer will come before I return, and Sun-Blossom can set the meat over the fire-pile and strike the spark. Do not move!”

  Her small form darkened the door-hole for a moment, and Breaks-Twigs gasped his dry chuckle. She knew quite well that he knew the household schedules and methods as well as she. After all, on alternate days those duties were his, as his were hers. She was the sort of Gashta who worried about small things and large ones, things that needed worry and things that did not. Yet she was his choice, and they had spent their adult lives together, interrupted only by the mandatory periods of her matings and his own with those the Haigun assigned to them.

  Lying upon his pile of dried grasses, he considered the lives that his people now led. Far different…oh so far different from those that the ancestors had thought to establish for their descendants. The traditions that he had been taught and that he, in turn, taught to the young ones were taking on, even for himself, the dimness of dreams and legends. Yet he could remember the cavern in the mountainside. He had seen with his own eyes those instruments and machines that his ancestors had rescued from the ship, after it had crashed into the mountain.

  His own family had been ship-people. For that reason he and his mate, together with Stargazer mid his, had inherited the tasks of teacher and watcher-of-the-stars. Even after so many generations it was easy to see which of the Gashta of the valley had descended from the ship’s crew, and which from the colonists who had been its passengers.

  Already the Kampushi-sha, inheriting the restlessness that had sent their ancestors out to colonize other worlds, were pushing outward from the valley. There had been no word from those who had gone southward. The group that went north sent messengers to the valley, from time to time, giving word of their progress and inquiring after family and friends. The last two such communications had not been cheerful. They were not prospering as they had hoped. And too many of their young were stillborn.

  The descendants of the ship-people clung stubbornly to the valley. They had been told to remain here. Help would come. A message had been sent, out into space, that would bring their own to their rescue. “You must watch the stars,” the old ones had said. “Stay in the valley and watch!”

  But it had not been easy.

  He turned on his bed, and the pain of his chest brought a moan from him. Sun-Blossom, his Fe’ha-Hok’e, came and knelt beside him. “Pa-ha-izza,” she shrilled in the high mode, “Can bring you waji? You have thirst?”

  He patted her little hand, and the warm fingers closed about his. “I would like water,” he answered, more to make her feel useful than because he was thirsty. He heard her take the shell from beside the door and make her way down the path outside to the pot that Water-Bringer kept filled from the stream.

  Even though the maze of paths beneath the thorn-trees was hidden from the air and inaccessible to the big predators of the forest and the grasslands, he listened with attention until she was inside the hut again. There were so many things that hunted the Gashta and savored their flesh!

  That had been one of the things that made life more than dif
ficult for the survivors. Sometimes he thought that those who had been trapped inside the caves, buried along with all the supplies of food and equipment and weapons and tools, had been more fortunate than those who had been hunting and gathering roots and watching the young ones play and romp in the sunlight. They, at least, had not been left to cope with a hostile world filled with predators many times their size and weight. Aside from a few tools and weapons that the food-gatherers and the hunters had had with them, there had been nothing left but the stunned Gashta.

  He could remember standing with his father, gazing at the dusty rubble that made a long slant where the steep cliff had been. They had known, without any doubt, that there was no way in which to clear away half a mountainside in time to save those trapped in the caverns. Or, indeed, any way to clear it at all. They were few. They had no tools. If there had been ten times their number, the task could not have been accomplished.

  The pain of that moment of understanding had never left him. His mother had been inside, as had his siblings, except for the one now known as Stargazer. Then he had been Root-Digger.

  Sun-Blossom touched his shoulder, and he sat up with a groan. The water was cool to his lips and his throat. He must be fevered, though he had not thought so at first. It was best, perhaps, that he lie here quietly for a day or so.

  As he settled back into the bed-pile, he heard Stargazer’s distinctive footfall on the path. Soon he would come, and they would sit together and talk, remembering things that they alone were old enough to recall.

  “The Haigun, my uncle, comes!” said Sun-Blossom, going to the door-opening to look out. “I may sit on the path and make shokka-washa, when he is here?”

  “You may,” he said. He closed his eyes. Even then, he could see the glint of the sunlight on her fur, her small, smooth face amid the bright waves of her mane. She was so beautiful, his daughter. He wondered what time held in store for her.

  ii.

  Stargazer found Sun-Blossom beside the door, busy with her patterning. He bent to touch her sunny head as he passed. As always, he marveled at the accuracy of her racial memory. The Spiral of her design was a duplicate of that on the star-maps that he had seen in his youth. He shook his head. The Way of Things was always a puzzle. That was the one thing that did not change.

  He found his brother lying on his bed-pile. The fact that he had not risen to sit, once Sun-Blossom’s watchful eyes were turned away, told him much about the pain of Breaks-Twigs’s injury.

  Stargazer squatted comfortably on the floor beside the bed-pile. “The toshki-washa treated you badly, then?” he asked. “And what can you expect? Those as old as we cannot go attacking such big beasts with only a zatku-hodda and expect to come out of the encounter without a scratch!” Though his words were stern, he found his heart warmed by the bravery of this brother, who, though unsuited for such work, did not hesitate when there was necessity.

  A dry chuckle rose from the quiet figure. “Indeed, my brother, I forgot for the time how very old I am. For that short while I was young again, my blood hot in my veins and my heart full of lust for the blood of anything that threatens our young. I was reminded quite soon that things are no longer exactly so.” He coughed a bit, and Stargazer lifted the water-filled shell to his lips and helped him drink.

  “I was thinking,” the teacher said, once he was settled again, “of all the ways in which our lives have changed. What sort of world do you think it might have been…that one the ship was supposed to find? Could it have been as hostile to our kind as this? I dream, sometimes, of what might have been, if…”

  Stargazer looked sharply at the face, dimly lit by the light from the doorway. His brother looked very thin, very fragile, as he lay on his bed-pile. The aura of strength and competence that had always surrounded him seemed thinned to nothing. The Haigun felt a jolt of sorrow beneath his chest-fur. But he answered calmly.

  “I have so little time for dreaming. Life is so hard, so dangerous. I cannot seem to glance away, even for a moment. At night I look up at the stars, watching for the promised configuration. By day I worry about the Gashta. And about my foolish brother, who attacks toshki-washa.”

  The Teacher sighed. “It would have been so much easier, if only the caverns had not been covered over. The Oldest Ones knew many things that we lost when the side of the Mountain collapsed upon them. The tools and the weapons, there in the caves…they would have given us some defense against toshki-washa and gotza and even, perhaps, so-shi-fazzu. Though it might, indeed, have been worse. If our father, the Haigun, had been inside the caves—even the star-secrets would have been lost. The memories of the ship’s crashing into the mountain, the sending of the signal for help…all those would have been wiped away from the memory of our people. And you would not have known all the things that a Stargazer must know.”

  Breaks-Twigs pushed with his arms, sitting up in his pile of grass, his breath coming in gasps. “But I am wandering. Fever, perhaps. I did not call for you to take you with me into the past.”

  “It is a good thing to go back, at times,” Stargazer said. “There is need for this one to sit quietly and to talk with his only brother about the things we remember. The things that only we two remember. But what did you want to tell me?”

  The Teacher sighed. “We are losing so much, day by day. The young ones must work so hard for food, must watch so closely for danger. Survival takes so much of their time and strength that they are losing the skills that made our people able to travel between stars. There is no time to teach them the difficult things that we learned in the caverns, when we were young. Our children are forgetting how to count beyond the fingers of their hands. The calculations that guided our Ship are lost even to you and to me. Even the mathematics to begin forming them has been lost to the young of our kind.

  “And the ways our people lived, before the catastrophe…they also are being forgotten. The young ones think that Gashta have always mated as directed. When I try to explain genetics and the facts of inbreeding to them, they fidget and make patterns with stones. I find that nothing that I have said enters their heads, for they are watching zatku in the clearings or scanning the sky for gotza. It pains me that we are losing our heritage.”

  Stargazer grunted. “Other things are vital now. We have taught them so well the need for speaking in the high modes that the youngest have lost the ability to talk in lower registers. Yet it is a necessity, if we are to survive. This one has thought much on these things, my brother. What is lost is the culture that formed us and sent us here. What is developing is a set of habits and abilities that may keep our descendants alive. When old things are lost, it is a sad thing. But better that they be lost than that the Gashta themselves die away.”

  “But how tragic it would be for those from the home world to come after us, only to find…primitives… savages?…in the place of their kin!” Breaks-Twigs had a mental image of those would-be rescuers standing appalled at the thing that had overtaken their own kind.

  Stargazer moved his fingers, drawing a pattern in the dust of the floor. His gaze was not upon that, however, but on the face of his brother.

  “There was a thing that our father told me,” he said, his voice set low in the deep mode. Almost a whisper, in fact. “It is not for the ears of those who do not lead. I have kept it from you, for I disliked removing hope from your heart, but if you are so troubled about what might be in time to come, then you must know.

  “That signal that we were told of, in our youth…the signal that keeps my eyes set on the night sky and your efforts concentrated upon teaching our past to those who must go into the future…was sent, it is true. It went out from the ship, just before the forces of this planet caught us and brought us down. But the power of the engines had failed. The signal could not be sent in the swift way it would have gone, had there been the power for that.

  “I know nothing of the ways they had of such sendings. Our father told me that our people always had a second and a third method at hand,
if their best should fail. That signal is still traveling upon its way. Not for generations will it reach that hoksu-mitto that was the birthplace of our people. Not for many-many years can any of our number expect another ship to come after us.”

  Breaks-Twigs pressed his hands together in his lap. Tears brimmed in his pale-green eyes. “It is so?” he breathed. “The hope that I have nourished in myself and in others is a thing so slender and frail that it is almost nonexistent?”

  Stargazer looked down at his pattern in the dust. “It is true. Our father told me that this is not a thing to tell the Gashta. They need the strong hope that our knowledge of the signal gives them. And by the time it becomes clear that no answer may come for long—or at all—perhaps the people will be settled into this land and able to survive here.”

  “What of those who have gone outside the valley? Have they survived and prospered?” The teacher’s tone was bitter.

  His brother brushed the dust, erasing the Spiral that his fingers had drawn.

  “No.”

  “I think that they will not. Do you recall what we were told about the years just after the ship crashed? Those first brave ones who moved out of the caverns into the valley and worked to live independently found that their young ones were born dead…dead, or so deformed that they died. Only when they asked the Haigun-sha in the caverns for food from our own supplies did they return to normal.

  “Our father believed that there is something that our bodies need that this world does not supply. Those who have gone north are having stillbirths. You have told me this. Those who went south—who knows? We have had no word from them in the time since their leaving. I believe that they are all dead. Do our minds walk together?”

  The Haigun shifted uneasily, his fur rippling in the dim light.