Oomphel in the Sky | Page 4

Miles was in his
seat. "Where now, boss?" he asked.
"Qualpha's Village. We won't let down; just circle low over it. I want
some views of the ruins. Then to Sanders' plantation."
"O.K., boss; hold tight."

He had the car up to ten thousand feet. Aiming it in the map direction
of Qualpha's Village, he let go with everything he had--hot jets,
rocket-booster and all. The forest landscape came hurtling out of the
horizon toward them.
Qualpha's was where the trouble had first broken out, after the bug-out
from Sanders; the troops hadn't been able to get there in time, and it
had been burned. Another village, about the same distance south of the
plantation, had also gone up in flames, and at a dozen more they had
found the natives working themselves into frenzies and had had to
sleep-gas them or stun them with concussion-bombs. Those had been
the villages to which the deserters from Sanders' had themselves gone;
from every one, runners had gone out to neighboring villages--"The
Gone Ones are returning; all the People go to greet them at the
Deesha-Phoo. Burn your villages; send on the word. Hasten; the Gone
Ones return!"
Saving some of those villages had been touch-and-go, too; the runners,
with hours lead-time, had gotten there ahead of the troops, and there
had been shooting at a couple of them. Then the Army contragravity
began landing at villages that couldn't have been reached in hours by
foot messengers. It had been stopped--at least for the time, and in this
area. When and where another would break out was anybody's guess.
The car was slowing and losing altitude, and ahead he could see thin
smoke rising above the trees. He moved forward beside the pilot and
pulled down his glasses; with them he could distinguish the ruins of the
village. He called Bluelake, and then put his face to the view-finder and
began transmitting in the view.
It had been a village like the one he had just visited, mud-and-wattle
huts around an oval gathering-place, stockade, and fields beyond.
Heshto brought the car down to a few hundred feet and came coasting
in on momentum helped by an occasional spurt of the cold-jets. A few
sections of the stockade still stood, and one side of the khamdoo hadn't
fallen, but the rest of the structures were flat. There wasn't a soul,
human or parahuman, in sight; the only living thing was a small
black-and-gray quadruped investigating some bundles that had been

dropped in the fields, in hope of finding something tasty. He got a view
of that--everybody liked animal pictures on a newscast--and then he
was swinging the pickup over the still-burning ruins. In the ashes of
every hut he could see the remains of something like a viewscreen or a
nuclear-electric stove or a refrigerator or a sewing machine. He knew
how dearly the Kwanns cherished such possessions. That they had
destroyed them grieved him. But the Last Hot Time was at hand; the
whole world would be destroyed by fire, and then the Gone Ones
would return.
So there were uprisings on the plantations. Paul Sanders had been lucky;
his Kwanns had just picked up and left. But he had always gotten along
well with the natives, and his plantation house was literally a castle and
he had plenty of armament. There had been other planters who had
made the double mistake of incurring the enmity of their native labor
and of living in unfortified houses. A lot of them weren't around, any
more, and their plantations were gutted ruins.
And there were plantations on which the natives had destroyed the
klooba plants and smashed the crystal which lived symbiotically upon
them. They thought the Terrans were using the living crystals to make
magic. Not too far off, at that; the properties of Kwannon biocrystals
had opened a major breakthrough in subnucleonic physics and initiated
half a dozen technologies. New kinds of oomphel. And down in the
south, where the spongy and resinous trees were drying in the heat,
they were starting forest fires and perishing in them in hecatombs. And
to the north, they were swarming into the mountains; building great
fires there, too, and attacking the Terran radar and radio beacons.
Fire was a factor common to all these frenzies. Nothing could happen
without magical assistance; the way to bring on the Last Hot Time was
People.
Maybe the ones who died in the frenzies and the swarmings were the
lucky ones at that. They wouldn't live to be crushed by disappointment
when the Sky Fire receded as Beta went into the long swing toward
apastron. The surviving shoonoon wouldn't be the lucky ones, that was
for sure. The magician-in-public-practice needs only to make one really

bad mistake before he is done to