LITMIR.BIZ

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The Ship held an ancient secret that meant life to the dying east-aways of the void. Then Wes Kirk revealed the secret to his people’s enemies—and found that his betrayal meant the death of the girl he loved.

      Wes Kirk shut his teeth together, hard. He turned his back on Ma Kirk and the five younger ones huddled around the box of heat-stones and went to the doorway, padding soft and tight with the anger in him.

      He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.

      The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk’s back. He said carefully,

      "I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their families."

      His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,

      "Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to freeze?" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking child. She added sharply, "Besides, that’s fool’s talk, Jakk Randl’s talk, and only gets the sucking-plant."

      "Who’s to hear it?" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.

      The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms, guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust that burst when touched.

      Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again.

      Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.

      Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.

      And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.

      The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.

      The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter. The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers’, but there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope. Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain’s metal-roofed place highest of all.

      Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.

      The Ship.

      Kirk’s voice was soft in his thick throat. "I would like to kill them," he said. "I would like to kill them all."

      "Yah!" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. "All but the Captain’s yellow daughter!"

      *

      Kirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.

      "Yah!" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. "I’ve seen you looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to her eyes. You wouldn’t kill her, I bet!"

      "I bet I’ll half kill you if you don’t shut up!"

      Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.

      She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had happened, "Ma says will you please not let so much heat out."

      Kirk didn’t say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil yelled, "Ma!"

      The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing stage.

      Ma Kirk said, "Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size."

      Kirk stopped. "Aw, I wasn’t going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!" He leaned forward to glare at Lil. "And I would so kill the Captain’s daughter!"

      The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close to the heat and said wearily:

      "You men, always talking about killing! Haven’t we enough trouble without that?"

      Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.

      "Maybe there’d be less trouble for us."

      Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk’s knee. Her big eyes glowed in the feeble light.

      She said, "You men! He’s no man, Ma. He’s just a little boy who has to stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields."

      The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil’s thin body was strung tight, quivering to move. "Besides," she demanded, "what have the Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to kill them—all but the Captain’s yellow daughter?"

      Kirk’s big heavy chest swelled. "Ma," he said, "you make that brat shut up or I’ll whale her, anyhow."

      Ma Kirk looked at him. "Your Pa’s still big enough to whale you, young man! Now you stop it, both of you."

      "All right," said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have his belly warm, even if it was empty. "Wish Pa’d hurry up. I’m hungry. Hope they killed meat."

      Ma Kirk sighed. "Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the heat-stones."

      "Maybe," said Kirk heavily, "it all goes to the same place."

      Lil snorted. "And where’s that, Smarty?"

      His anger forced out the forbidden words.

      "Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship."

      There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word "Ship" hung there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk’s eyes flicked to the curtain over the door and back to her son.

      "Don’t you say things like that, Wes! You don’t know."

      "It’s what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way they do? We can’t even get near the outside of it."

      Lil tossed her head. "Well neither do they."

      "Not when we can see ‘em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they haven’t got ways of getting into the Ship that don’t show from the plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don’t know about."

      He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands.

      "There must be something in the Ship that they don’t want us to have. Something valuable, something they want to keep for themselves. What else could it be but heat-stones and maybe dried meat?"

      "We don’t know, Wes! The Ship is—well, we shouldn’t talk about it. And the Officers wouldn’t do that. If they wanted us killed off they’d let the Piruts in on us, or the shags, and let ‘em finish us quick. Freezing and starving would take too long. There’d be too many of us if we found

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