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======================Final Trophyby Harlan Ellison======================Copyright (c)1981 The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All rights reserved.Fictionwise ContemporaryFiction---------------------------------NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the purchaser. If you did not purchase this ebook directly from Fictionwise.com then you are in violation of copyright law and are subject to severe fines. Please visit www.fictionwise.com to purchase a legal copy. Fictionwise.com offers a reward for information leading to the conviction of copyright violators of Fictionwise ebooks.---------------------------------_It was the grisliest trophy of them all. Hanging there in the main club room of the Trottersmen, it was a grim reminder that not _all_ the members were idle playboys who had bought their memberships with animals shot from ambush in the interdicted _kraals_ of Africa or the blue mist-jungles of Todopus III.__It was a strange trophy, plaque-mounted between the head of a Coke's hartebeest and the fanged jaws of a szlygor. There was the damnedest _watchfulness_ in the eyes.__It had been Nathaniel Derr's final grant to his club. A visitor to the Trottersmen's gallery (invited down for the weekly open cocktail party) could walk through room after room filled with the bloody booty of two hundred hunting expeditions Derr had commissioned. A visitor (whether hip-booted spacer or effete dignitary) would surely marvel at the quantity and diversity of wildlife Derr had mastered. Photoblox showed him proudly resting one foot on the blasted carcasses of Mountain Gorilla and Cape Lion, butchered Hook-lipped Rhino and puma. Hides with the Derr emblem branded on them festooned every wall: cheetah and javelina, Huanaco and Sika Deer, deeler and ferrl-cat. The mounted heads were awesome: bull elephant and prestosaur, king cobra and desert wolf. The word _hunter_ seemed weightless when applied to Nathaniel Derr; perhaps agent of destruction might have approached the reality.__Even among the Trottersmen he had been _sui generis._ His fellow clubmen had called him a fanatic. Some even called him butcher -- but not publicly. Nathaniel Derr had left the Trottersmen almost thirteen million dollars.__And the final trophy.__But if the visitor was particularly trustworthy, and if they had all taken several stingarees too many, and if the visitor wheedled properly, the Trottersmen might just tell him the story behind that gruesome trophy.__The story of Nathaniel Derr's last kill. And of his visit to the planet Ristable._* * * *The day, like all the days since he had arrived on Ristable, was too placid for Derr. Had the planet sported thirty-two kilometer an hour gales, or freezing snowstorms, or unbearable heat as in the veldt ... then he would have gladly suffered, and even reveled in it. Discomfort was the hunter's environment.But this baby-bath of a world was serene, and calm, and unflurried.Nathaniel Derr did not care to have his hunter status challenged, even by the climate.He stared out of the slowly-moving half-track truck, watching the waist-high, unbroken plain of dull russet grass whisper past. He felt the faint stirring of the winds as they ruffled his thick, gray hair.Derr was a big man: big of chest, big of hand. Big even in the way he watched, and the way he fondled the stet-rifle. As though he had been born with the gun grafted to him.His eyes had the tell-tale wrinkles around them that labeled him a watcher. In a stand of grass, in the bush, or waiting for a flight of mallards to honk overhead, he was a watcher. Again, there was something else, less simple, in his face.A hunter's face......but something else, too."Hey, you!" he yelled over the noise of the truck's antique water-piston engine. The nut-brown native who drove the half-track paid no attention. The truck made too much noise. Derr yelled again, louder: "Hey, you! Dummy!" The native's oblong head turned slightly; he inclined an ear; Derr yelled, "What is this we're going to?"The native's voice was deep and throaty, a typical Ristabite tone. "Ristable, _shasir_ Derr." Nothing more. He turned back to the driving.Derr let his heavy features settle down into a frown. The word "ristable" seemed to mean many things on this planet. First, it meant "home," the name of the world; and now it was the name of a ceremony or something he was about to attend. He had heard it used several other ways during the past week.Nathaniel Derr turned his thoughts inward as the half-track rolled over the grassland. The past week; he dwelled on it sequentially.When he had applied to the Mercantile System for supercargo passage on a liner out to the stars, he had hoped for bigger hunts, better kills, finer trophies. But though it had cost him more for this one trip than all the safaris he had staged on Earth -- and they were many, many -- so far his appetite had only been whetted. The szlygor he had bagged on Haggadore was a puny thing ... even though it had gutted three of his bearers before he'd gotten the 50.50 charge into the beast's brain. The prestosaur was big, but too cumbersome to have been any real threat. The ferrl-cat and the deeler had been the roughest. The deeler was more an asp than a spider, but had exhibited the deadliest traits of both before he had slit its hood with his vibroblade. The ferrl-cat had dropped from a feathery-leafed tree on Yawmac; and it was proof indeed that Derr's age had not diminished his strength, for he had strangled the fearsome yellow feline. Even so, the vibrant surge of the _maximum kill_ had been absent. Perhaps he had expected too much.But Ristable was just _too_ dead, _too_ boring, _too_ unexciting.The planet was old; so ancient; all mountains had long since flattened away; undisturbed grassland swayed from one end of the single great continent to the other. The natives were simple, uncomplicated agrarian folk, who just happened to thresh from their grasses a sweet flour much enjoyed by gourmets on a hundred worlds, and worth all the plasteel hoes and rakes the merc-ships could trade.So here he was on Ristable, where the rubble of the glorious ancient cities lay at the edges of the grasslands, slowly dissolving into the land from which they had come.The past week had been one of utter boredom, while the natives went about their haggling, the merc-ship's crew stretched and mildly leched, and the big red sun, Sayto, burned its way across the sky.No hunting, too much sleeping, and a growing disgust of the slothful natives. It was true they were anxious to learn about civilization -- take the driver of this half-track -- but though they mimicked the Earthmen's ways, still they were farmers, slow and dull. He had watched them all week, tending their farms, having community feasts, and taking care of the animals that lived out on the plains.In fact, today had been the first break in the monotony. Nerrows, the captain of the merc-ship, had come to him that morning, and offered him a chance to see a "ristable.""I thought that was the name of the planet?" Derr had said, pulling on his bush-boots.Nerrows had thumbed his cap back on his crewcut head, and his slim face had broken lightly in a smile. "When these people come up with a good word, they don't let it go easily. Yeah, that's right. The planet _is_ Ristable, but so are the animals out there." He jerked a thumb at the grasslands lying beyond the hut. "And so is the ceremony they have once a week ... ristable, that is."Derr had perked up sharply. "What ceremony?"Nerrows smiled again, and said, "You know what the word 'ristable' means in this usage? I didn't think so; it means, literally, 'Kill Day.' Want to take it in? The ship won't be unsaddled here more than a couple days, so you'd better take in all you can."Derr stood up, smoothing out his hunt-jacket, slipping into it, sealing it shut. "Is it safe? They won't try to lynch me for observing the secret ceremony, or anything?"Nerrows waved away the worried comment. "Safest planet on our route. These people haven't had wars since before man was born. You're completely safe, Derr."The hunter clapped the captain on his thin shoulders, wondering inwardly how such a scrawny sample could get to be a merc-ship officer ... he'd _never_ make it where it counted ... as a hunter. "Okay, Captain, thanks a lot. Got someone who can direct me out there?"* * * *Derr tapped the native again. "How much farther?"The native's horny shoulders bobbed. "Ten, 'leven k'lometer, _shasir_ Derr. Big ristable today."Derr pulled a black cigar from the cartridge ring, one of ten in a broken row across his jacket. He lit it. Drew deeply. He never kept extra cartridges in the rings; if he hadn't bagged his quarry by the time the stet-rifle was empty, Derr felt he deserved to die. That was his philosophy. He drew down on the black cigar, let a heavy cloud of smoke billow up over his head.The ancient water-piston half-track rolled steadily out into the grasslands. They passed a pile of rubble; Derr recognized it as another of the lost cities. The faintly pink columns rose spiraling, then broke with ragged abruptness. Strangely-pyramidal structures split down the middle. Carved figures with smashed noses, broken arms, shattered forms ... forms which could not be understood ... humanoid or something else?As they came abreast of the ruined city with huge clumps of grass growing up in its middle, Derr crossed his legs in the back se... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]