The girl, Hesper Positana, gazed at him with distaste. Her survival egg had come down a couple of miles away. She had been trying to make for what looked like some inhabited structures on a plain to the west, but hadn’t quite made it—the rotors had no power of their own but came down sycamore-seed style, using the early part of the drop to store energy in a flywheel. You were supposed to use this for a few miles of powered flight at a few thousand feet high.
In the end, when she started to lose height, she had spotted the smoke from the campfire. She was almost beginning to wish she hadn’t, because she had landed among a bunch of very odd people. First there was Lacey, some sort of psychological inadequate who she gathered was in the habit of wandering the grasslands that dominated this part of the planet, living off any small animals he could trap. Of the others, four seemed to be brothers who had been thrown out of their community for unspecified crimes, and were now looking for somewhere else to live. Only the boy, Sinbiane, appeared to be normal.
Most peculiar of all was the one who sat by himself in the gathering dark. He was a kosho. Very vaguely, she had heard something about koshos, but had never expected to see one.
Lacey had told her their leader was a chimeric ape called Pout. They had spoken of him with a sort of grumbling admiration, all except Sinbiane, who had said openly to her: “Pout is a bad creature, lady. You should go away. He holds these people under subjection with his gun.”
“I have a gun,” Hesper had said, patting her holster.
“The kosho’s got lots of guns, though,” one of the brothers had said. “Throw tubes, too.”
Just then Pout himself had turned up, and she couldn’t understand how even these people—like Lacey, the brothers didn’t strike her as being any too bright—could allow themselves to be dominated by him. The chimera stared at her, large eyes blinking.
“You come off a spaceship?”
“Yes.”
“From another world?”
“That’s right.”
The thought excited Pout. She prompted the same feelings in him the girl in the village had. He allowed his eyes to rove over her, and then to fix on her breasts. He imagined the stitches of the zen gun playing with them, her body writhing. His jaw became slack.
Hesper put a hand on her hip, and nodded westward. “There are some big towers or buildings or something in that direction. I’m making for them.”
“Cities. We are going there. You want to join us? First you give me that.” He pointed to the scangun in her belt.
She took a step back. “Oh no you don’t. That’s mine.”
“All right.” Pout gestured to the horizon. “Off you go, then. On your own.”
“Okay I will.” Hesper turned and pushed her way through the group to stalk away from the camp. She kept a wary eye on the chimera, but did not see him give a signal to one of the brothers. Before she had got very far she stopped, gasped, and whirled round, her hand on her empty gun holster.
“How did you do that?” she screeched frustratedly to the brother as he tossed the scangun to a delighted Pout. She hadn’t felt anything. Only when she put her hand on the holster out of concern for what the chimera might do had she discovered the flap was unfastened and the weapon gone.
“It’s our skill, lady. It’s what we do.” The brother, a youth in his early twenties, smiled broadly.
“Pickpockets,” she murmured. She stood nonplussed, while Pout crooned and chuckled over his new acquisition. Though it was but a toy compared with the zen gun, he had always wanted one.
He knew something about how to make it work. A modern scangun fired a needle-beam of coherent light which was refracted through an oscillating prism to scan a six foot by two foot rectangle—or whatever size of target it was set for.
With a scanning density of a thousand lines per inch, the effect was more or less total disintegration. Pout raised the gun and peered at the little screen that displayed whatever the muzzle was pointed at. His thumb moved a grooved wheel by the side of the screen. That was the focusing ring: when the target became unblurred and just filled the screen, you were ready to fire.
He pointed it at a twisted tree that stood on a knoll a little further off. Under his thumb, the tree shrank until its branches just brushed the edges of the screen and the picture became sharp. Pout pressed the firing stud. The brief blue ray was an odd sight: not parallel, like ordinary coherent light, but divergent because of the way it scanned.
The tree erupted momentarily and disappeared in a crackle of smoke and drifting ash.
Pout whooped for joy.
Hesper walked slowly back into the light of the campfire and stood boldly before him. “Are you going to give me my gun back?” she asked wearily.
He eyed her. “Why don’t you stay with us, lady? Travel to the plain cities with us. We’ll be good to you. Lacey knows how to catch animals for food. Do you know how to catch animals? You haven’t got enough eating sticks to last long. Better not to be alone.”
She hesitated, confused. She couldn’t fathom this set-up. But, apart from the half-animal, they seemed harmless—and even Pout hadn’t threatened her.
She needed to reach a town of some kind before she could get proper bearings and find out what to do next. The ape was right: it was probably better to have company, especially now she was unarmed.
“All right,” she sighed, “I’ll stay. But don’t get any ideas, ape.”
She helped gather more firewood for the night, then settled down, taking care to put a piece of ground between herself and the others—especially Pout. The repulsiveness of the creature was coming home to her, as she watched him prowl around the camp, and saw how the others cringed in his presence, all apart from the boy, that was.
Before falling asleep, she spent some while staring at the sky. This planet’s sky was clear, and the stars shone fairly brightly. She thought of the battle that had taken place there, in space’s vastness, and in which she had taken part. It all seemed so remote from here.
She didn’t even know this planet’s name, she reminded herself. What did it matter? There were so many planets. Suddenly she felt very, very tired (she had been awake about forty hours), and her eyes closed.
For Pout, too, sleep was preluded by daydreams. He thought about the girl not far away. He would like to be able to fondle such a girl, to prod with his fingers where the zen stitches prodded. And so he would, he promised himself.
His little band was growing, he told himself warmly. All thanks to the zen gun. It wasn’t just what it could do to maim and kill, he realised. It was its mental ability. While he had the gun it seemed to magnify his presence; people respected him.
His chief hold over his followers, however, was still fear. He had deliberately refrained from instilling that fear in the girl—for tonight. Pout had an instinctive understanding of the skill of dominance: first the girl had to grow used to him, to develop her own feelings for him, for or against. That way the relationship, when it came, would be binding.
That would be when he showed her that the zen gun had a facility for personalised targets. Once a target had been registered, it could be invoked any time. The target could not hide. Anywhere it was—anywhere on this planet, anyway—Pout had only to think of it and press the trigger stud. The stitch beam would go glowing out, wavering in the air, round corners, to anywhere in the world, to where that person was. He would prove it to her with one of the others, would send him half a mile away and fire while aiming in the other direction, so she could see the electric stitches bend around and find their mark.