Richard had set his accurate wrist chronometer for precisely noon at High Vrazel and had carefully improvised a quadrant to measure the solar angle. Every day, the quadrant could be used to tell them local noontime, and the difference between this and p.m. noon shown on the watch could be used to calculate the longitude. When they reached the Ries meridian on the Danube, all they had to do was march due north to reach the crater . . .
One of the figures in the lead boat raised an arm. The craft pulled in to shore.
"There's a little break in the northern highlands there," Felice said. "Maybe Richard has decided it's our best bet." When they had beached their boat next to the other one, she asked, "What d'you think, guys? Is this it?"
"Pretty close, anyhow," Richard said. "And it doesn't look like too bad a hike, for all it's uphill. I calculate thirty kilometers north should hit the lower rim. Even if I'm a little off, we should be able to see the thing from the crest of those northern hills. Damn crater's supposed to be more than twenty kloms wide, after all. How about lunch, while I set up one more sun shot?"
"I've got fish," Martha said, raising a string of silvery-brown shapes. "Richard's excused for his navigating chores, and that leaves you two to dig the perishin' bulrushes while Madame and I get these to grilling."
"Right," sighed Claude and Felice.
They made their fire in a well-shaded spot near the edge of a large grove, clear water came trickling down a limestone ledge to disappear into a muddy depression that swarmed with little yellow butterflies. After fifteen minutes or so, the delectable smell of roasting young salmon came wafting to the tuber grubbers.
"Come on, Claude," Felice said, sloshing a net full of lumps up and down in the water to rinse them. "We've got enough of these things."
The paleontologist stood quietly, up to his knees in the river among the tall stalks. "I thought I heard something. Probably beavers."
They waded back to the bank where they had left their boots. Both pairs were still there, but something, or someone, had been messing about with them.
"Look here," said Claude, studying the surrounding mud.
"Babyfootprints!" Felice exclaimed. "Screw me blind! Could there be Howlers or Firvulag in this country?"
They hurried back to the fire with the tubers. Madame used her farsensing metafunction to scan the area and professed to sense no exotic beings.
"It is doubtless some animal," she said, "with prints that mimic those of children. A small bear, perhaps."
"Bears were very rare during the early Pliocene," Claude said. "More likely, ah, well. Whatever it is, it's too small to do us any harm."
Richard came back to the group and tucked map, note-plaque, and quadrant back into his pack. "We're near as damn all," he said. "If we really hump this afternoon, we might get there fairly early tomorrow."
"Sit down and have some fish," Martha said. "Doesn't the aroma drive you wild? They say that salmon is just about the only fish that's nutritionally complete enough to serve as a steady diet. Because it has fat as well as protein, you see." She licked her lips, then gave a strangled squeak. "Don't . . . turn . . . around." Her eyes were wide. The rest of them were sitting on the side of the fire opposite her. "Right behind you there's a wild rama."
"No, Felice!" Claude hissed, as the athete's muscles automatically tensed. "It's harmless. Everybody turn very slowly."
Martha said, "It's carrying something."
The little creature, its body covered with golden-tan fur, stood a short distance back among the trees, trembling noticeably but with an expression of what could only be called determination upon its face. It was about the size of a six-year-old child and had fully humanoid hands and feet. It carried two large warty fruits, greenish bronze streaked with dull orange. As the five travelers regarded it with astonishment, the ramapithecine stepped forward, placed the fruits on the ground, then drew back.
With infinite caution, Claude rose to his feet. The little ape backed up a few paces. Claude said softly, "Well, hullo there, Mrs Thing. We're glad you could stop by for lunch. How's the husband and kiddies? All well? A little hungry in this drought? I'm not surprised. Fruit is nice, but there's nothing like a bit of protein and fat to keep body and soul together. And the mice and squirrels and locusts have mostly migrated into the upper valleys, haven't they? Too bad you didn't go along with them."
He stooped and picked up the fruits. What were they? Melons? Some kind of papaya? He carried them back to the fire and took two of the larger salmon and wrapped them in an elephant-ear leaf. He put the fish down in the exact spot where the fruit had been and withdrew to his place by the fire.
The ramapithecus stared at the bundle. She reached out, touched a greasy fish-head, and put the finger into her mouth. Giving a low crooning call, she everted her upper lip.
Felice grinned back. She drew her dirk, hefted one of the fruits, and sliced it open. A mouth-watering sweet smell arose from the yellowish-pink flesh. Felice cut off a tiny slice and took a bite of it. "Yum!"
The rama clucked. She picked up the package of fish, everted her lips over her small teeth once again, and ran away into the trees.
Felice called out, "Give our regards to King Kong!"
"That was the damnedest thing," Richard said. "Smart, aren't they?"
"Our direct hominid ancestors." Claude stirred up the tubers.
"We had them for servants in Finiah," Martha said. "They were very gentle and cleanly little things. Timid, but they would work conscientiously at the tasks given them by torc wearers."
"How were they cared for?" Claude asked, curious. "Like little people?"
"Not really." Martha said. "They had a kind of barn adjacent to the house, where they lived in partitioned stalls, almost like the small cave rooms filled with straw. They were monogamous, you see, and each family had to have its own apartment. There were community areas, too, and dormitory nooks for the singletons. The childless adults worked for about twelve hours, then came home to eat and sleep. The mothers would care for their young for three years, and then put them in charge of 'aunties', old females who acted for all the world like schoolteachers. The aunties and other very old males and females played with the children and cared for them when the parents were absent. You could see that the parents were unhappy at having to leave the little ones, but the call of the torc couldn't be denied. Still, the rama-keepers told me that the auntie system was a variant of one used by the creatures in the wild. It generally produced well-adjusted individuals. The Tanu have raised ramas in captivity for as long as they've lived on this planet."
"Those sounds they make," Claude said. "Could ordinary bare-necked people such as yourself communicate with them?"
Martha shook her head. "They answered to their names, and there were perhaps a dozen simple voice commands they'd respond to. But the principal means of communicating with them was through the torc. They could grasp very complex mental commands. And of course they were trained with the pleasure-pain circuitry so that they required little supervision for routine tasks such as housework."
Madame shook her head slowly. "So close to humanity, and yet so far away from us. Their life span is only fourteen or fifteen years in captivity. Probably less in the wild. So fragile, so helpless-seeming! How did they ever survive the hyenas, the bear-dogs, the sabertooth cats, and other monsters?"
"Brains," Richard said. "Look at that one who came to us. Her family won't be hungry tonight. There's natural selection working right in front of us. That little ape is a survivor."
Felice looked at him with a wicked expression. "I thought I noticed a family resemblance . . . Here you go, Captain Blood. Have some of your great-great-et-cetera grandmother's fruit for dessert."
They left the Danube behind them and walked. It felt like the temperature was over forty in the September sun, but their adapted bodies could take it. Over the sunburnt grass, through thickets of brittle maquis, over boulders in the dry watercourses they walked. Richard had set their goal, the notch b
etween two long hills that lay due north beyond slowly rising land with hardly a patch of shade and no water at all. They stripped to shorts, backpacks, and broad-brimmed hats. Madame passed a precious squeeze-bottle of sunburn cream. Richard led and Felice took the rear, the athlete ranging out tirelessly to be sure that no animal stalked them and to search, without luck, as it turned out, for some spring or other source of water. Between the two marched Claude and Madame, supporting Martha between them. The engineer became weaker as the hot hours of hiking accumulated; but she refused to let them slow down. None of them wanted to stop, in spite of the fact that there seemed to be nothing ahead of them but the dry stubbly upland reaching to the undulating horizon. Above it hung a pale-yellow, pitiless sky.
At last the sun dropped low and the sky turned to a light green. Madame called a halt near a rock-choked ravine where they could at least relieve themselves in privacy. Madame led Martha off and when the two returned, the old woman's face was grim.
"She is hemorrhaging again," she told Claude. "Shall we stop here? Or shall we make again a litter from one of the cots?"
They decided upon the lifter. While there was still daylight, they wanted to press on. Just a few kilometers farther and they would reach the brow of the hills.
They continued on as they had done earlier in the journey, one at each corner of the modified cot Martha lay with her lower lip clamped between her teeth, twin spots of bright rose on her pale cheeks the badges of her mortification. But she said nothing. The heavens turned to ultramarine and then to indigo, and the first stars appeared. However, they could still see well enough to walk and so they kept going, higher and higher, closer to the notch.
At last they were at the summit. The four of them set the litter down and helped Martha to her feet so that she could stand with them and look northward. About five kilometers away and just slightly below the pass where they rested was a long rampart. It reared up from the countryside behind the line of hills in a virtual jungle of spiny maquis scrub and curved away on both sides in a great arc that eventually melted into the northern horizon. The bare lip of the crater gleamed pale in the dusk.
Felice took Richard's head between her hands and kissed his mouth, standing on tiptoe. "You did it! Right on the nose, buccaneer-baby, you did it!"
"Wen, I'll be damned," said the pirate.
"I don't think so." Claude's broad Slavic face wore an exultant smile. "Oh, Madame. The Ship's Grave!" Martha's voice broke her eyes spilled tears. "And now, now . . ."
"Now we will make camp," the Frenchwoman said practically. "We will rest well and recover our strength. For tomorrow, our work really begins."
The skeleton had been laid out in state in the belly compartment of the fifth flyer that they inspected.
Unlike the other craft, which had had their hatches closed, the sepulchre of Lugonn was wide open to the elements. For long years the mammals, birds, and insects of the maquis had made free with it. Felice had, as always, been first up the boarding ladder of the exotic craft. Her cry of triumph at finally finding the remains of the Tanu hero was followed by a tortured howl that raised the neck hairs of the other four members of the expedition.
"He has no torc! No torc!"
"Angélique!" Claude shouted in alarm. "Reach out and stop her doing any harm in there!"
"No . . . torc!" A shriek of diabolic rage echoed within the flying machine and there was a thudding sound. As Richard and Claude clambered up the ladder, Madame Guderian stood beneath the shadow of the metal bird's wings, eyes wide, mouth drawn into a strained grimace, both hands clenching the gold at her throat. It took every bit of her coercive metafunction to restrain Felice, to force the girl to back off from the instinctive urge to destroy the source of her frustration. Driven by furious disappointment, the athlete's latencies trembled on the brink of operancy. The old woman felt her own ultrasenses being tested to the limit. She held, pressed the volcanic thing that writhed within her mind-grasp while at the same time her telepathic voice cried: Wait! Wait! We will all search! Wait!
Felice let go her opposition so abruptly that Madame Guderian staggered backward and collapsed into Martha's frail arms.
"Okay!" Richard shouted from above. "I popped her one. She's out cold!"
"But did she ruin anything?" Martha called, easing Madame to the dusty ground.
"Doesn't look like it," Richard replied "Get up here Marty, and have a look at this frigger yourself. Like something out of a goddam fairy tale."
Felice lay in a heap on the far side of the flyer's belly compartment, which measured about three by six. She had managed to seize Lugonn's helmeted skull and dash it to the desk in a paroxysm of rage; but the interior of the ancient craft was so deep in dust, animal droppings, and other organic trash that the relic had come to no harm. Claude knelt down and restored the head to its place. Resting on his haunches, he studied the legend laid out before him.
Lugonn's armor, heavily jeweled and filmed with gold, was now so dimmed and crusted that his bones could barely be discerned within the articulated plates and scales of glass. The crystalline helmet, crested with a peculiar heraldic animal, was a baroque and incredibly intricate piece of craftsmanship, so gorgeous, even coated with grime, that one forgot that it had a utilitarian purpose: to deflect photonic beams. Carefully, Claude raised the visor and unfastened the overlapping gorget plates and hinged cheekpieces. Lugonn's skull was mutilated by a great wound, perfectly circular and a full twelve centimeters in diameter, which drilled through the naso-orbital region and obliterated the rear of the skull opposite the eyes.
"So that much of the tale was true," the old man murmured.
He could not resist inspecting the skull for nonhuman attributes. Most of the differences were subtle; but the Tanu had possessed only thirty teeth and he had been notably longheaded as well as massively built. Aside from anomalies in the positions of some cranial sutures and the mental foramina, the Tanu skull seemed almost completely humanoid.
Richard stared about the compartment, noting the adobe wasp nests that crusted almost every surface, the shredded bulkhead insulation, the exposed ceram framework of once luxurious cabin appointments. There was even a beehive in one of the open forward lockers.
"Well, we don't have a prayer of getting this sucker off the ground. We'll have to go back to one of the others."
Martha was digging in the mounds of rubbish on the left side of the skeleton in armor. She gave a satisfied cry. "Look here! Help me get it out of the garbage, Richard!"
"The Spear!" He helped her push away the moldy mess. In a few minutes the two of them had laid bare a slender instrument nearly a meter taller than the great skeleton, connected by a cable near the butt to a large jeweled box that had once been worn at Lugonn's waist. The box straps had now disintegrated, but the glassy surface of the box and the Spear itself did not seem to be corroded.
Martha wiped hands on hips. "That's it, all right. Zapper and powerpack. Careful of those studs there on the upper armrest, lovie. Even cruddled up as they are, they might still trigger the thing."
"But how," Claude marveled softly, "how did he ever pull the trigger on himself?"
"Oh, for chrissake," said Richard. "Forget that and help us get the thing outside before our little butch Goldilocks wakes up and goes bonkers again."
"I am awake," Felice said. She massaged the point of her chin, where a bruise was forming. "I'm sorry about that. I won't lose control again. And no hard feeling for the love-tap, Captain Blood."
Madame Guderian came slowly up the boarding ladder. Her eyes rested briefly on the glass-armored skeleton and then passed to Felice. "Ah, ma petite. What are we going to do with you?" A sadness weighted her voice.
The girl got up and displayed a gamine grin. "I didn't really spoil anything with my little temper fit. And I guarantee it won't happen again. Let's forget it." She prowled about the flyer interior, kicking at the trash. "I expect the torc's around here someplace. Maybe some critter carried it away from the skeleton
and stashed it in another part of the ship."
Claude took up the pack and started to descend the ladder while Richard and Martha followed with the still-tethered weapon, not wanting to risk disconnecting the cable.
Madame regarded the skeleton. "So here you lie, Shining Lugonn. Dead before the adventures of your exiled people had scarcely begun. Your tomb defiled by the little vermin of Earth, and now by us." Shaking her head, she turned to descend the ladder. Felice sprang to the old woman's assistance.
"I've a wonderful idea, Madame! I won't be any use working on the aircraft or the Spear. So when I'm not needed for camp chores or hunting, I'll come here and clean this place out, I'll make it all neat again and polish his golden glass armor, and when we leave, we can close the hatch."
"Yes." Madame Guderian nodded. "It would be a fitting work."
"I'd have to move all this rubbish anyway," Felice added, "when I was looking for the torc. It must be here somewhere. No Tanu or Firvulag would have dared to take it. I know I'll find it."
Standing on the ground now, Madame looked up at Felice, so small, so winsome, so dangerous. "Perhaps you will. But if you don't? What then?"