Cobra Strike

  The analyzer remote, looking for all the world like a large double starfish with gripper treads, crawled up the bololin's flank to where the heart would be on most earthstock animals. A scalpel extended from one arm to slice a neat incision in the dark hide. Pyre paused long enough to make sure the analyzer's camera units were firmly mounted to nearby trees and then headed out to walk a sentry circle around the area. They couldn't afford to have either scavengers or

  Qasamans stumble onto the post-mortem now... and besides, it wasn't really something he wanted to watch. It was three hours before the remote's return to the ground signaled the operation was at an end-and the bololin was no longer recognizable as such. Averting his eyes, Pyre again put on the headset. "Pyre."

  "Ah, you're back." If Telek was at all tired, it wasn't evident from her voice.

  "You want to open up the freeze boxes and get me one of the tarbines? Better start with the unimpregnated one."

  "You sure you want to do it out here?" he asked doubtfully.

  "I've got as much sensitivity with the remote as I do with my hands," Telek assured him, "and I'd just as soon start getting some answers before we have to leave. Or at least have the questions I'll want Yuri to ask."

  "You're the boss." Finding the proper box. Pyre opened it and set the chilly tarbine down on a patch of bare ground. The remote skittered over to it and Pyre resumed his walk.

  He returned twice more, replacing the mess first with an impregnated tarbine and then with the mojo, wondering each time how long Telek could continue to handle delicate surgery without sleep. But she kept at it, and the eastern sky was starting to glow when the remote's operating light finally flicked out. "Well?" he asked into the headset as he started collecting the gear together.

  "I'm not sure," Telek said slowly. "The data seem clear enough... but I'm not really sure if I believe it. Mojos and tarbines appear to be entirely different species... and the mojos don't seem to impregnate the tarbines as much as they inoculate them."

  "They what?"

  "Well... the mojo's only external sex organ is designed like an organic hypodermic needle. What it does is inject a seminal fluid that contains virus-like nuclei instead of more complete sperm cells. The nuclei... well, this is still preliminary, but it looks like they invade some of the cells in the tarbine's back and turn them into embryo mojos."

  Pyre stared down at the mutilated mojo on the ground, already beginning to crawl with insects in the growing light. "That's-weird."

  "That's what I said," Telek agreed with a sigh. "But the more I think about it the more sense it makes. This way the mojo relegates both the nourishment and protection of its young to another individual-an entirely different species, in fact-and therefore doesn't have to make that sacrifice itself."

  "But what incentive does the tarbine have to live until the embryo kills it?"

  Pyre objected. "And what about the training most young have to receive from their parents?"

  Christopher's voice came on the circuit. "You're thinking of the usual insectean pattern where one species lays eggs in the body of another, which becomes the larvae's food when they hatch. But the young mojo doesn't have to kill its host.

  If you look closely at the way the skin and muscle are arranged in the tarbine's back, it looks very much like the critical area could be split open and resealed with a minimum of damage and no real loss of flight capability."

  "Assuming the mojo doesn't exceed a maximum size," Telek added. "And as to post-natal instruction, the mojo's brain seems to have a larger proportion of the high-neural-density 'primary programming' structure than earthstock or

  Aventinian animals I've studied. That's an assumption, of course; Qasaman biochemistry doesn't have to be strictly analogous to ours-"

  "And you fried part of the brain shooting the thing down-" Christopher put in.

  "Shut up, Bil. Anyway, it looks very possibly like the mojo young can simply poke through the tarbine's skin, fly its separate way and take up housekeeping in the forest."

  "Or on somebody's shoulder," Pyre frowned as a sudden thought struck him. "On somebody's shoulder... the same way the tarbines ride bololins?"

  "So you noticed the similarity, did you?" Christopher commented. "What makes it even more intriguing is that the tarbines have the same organic hypo organ the mojos do."

  "As do the bololins themselves," Telek added, "though God only knows what species they use as embryo-hosts. Maybe each other; the top of the size chain has to do something different."

  " 'Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,' " Pyre quoted the old saying.

  " '-and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum,' " Telek finished for him. "You're the third person who's brought that up tonight. Starting with me."

  "Um. Well... the contact team still going sightseeing tomorrow?"

  "Yes. I think I'll clue them in on all this as soon as they wake up-maybe Yuri will be able to worm out some more information from Moff." Telek paused and Pyre could hear, faintly, the sound of a jaw-cracking yawn. "You'd better get under cover and get some sleep, Almo," she said. "I think under the circumstances you can skip that riverside fauna survey we talked about yesterday-I've got enough data to keep me busy for quite a while."

  "No argument," Pyre agreed. "I'll call in when I wake up."

  "Just be careful you're not seen. Good night-or morning."

  "Same to you." Shutting down the laser comm, Pyre spent a few moments rearranging its camouflage and hiding his other equipment. A dozen meters away was his shelter tree; tall and thick, its lowest branches a good five meters above the ground. A servo-powered jump took him the necessary height, and a few branches higher he reached his "shelter," a waterproof one-man hammock bag slung under a particularly strong branch and surrounded by a glued-stick cage sort of arrangement. It made Pyre feel a little strange to sleep inside such a barrier, but it was the simplest way to make sure no carnivore could sneak up on him, no matter how quiet it was or how deeply asleep he was.

  Entering, he sealed the cage and worked himself into the hammock with a sigh.

  For a minute he considered setting his alarm, ultimately decided against it. If anything came up, the Dewdrop had one-way communication with him via his emergency earphone, and if they were careful how they focused the beam, it was unlikely even a snooper set in the airport control tower could pick it up.

  The control tower. His drift toward sleep slowed as he remembered the men who'd charged out of that dark and supposedly deserted building for bololin target practice. Certainly their presence didn't mesh with the building's assumed main function-no aircraft had so much as shown its nose since the Dewdrop's arrival.

  But if they weren't in there to handle planes, then what were they doing there?

  Monitoring the visitors' ship? Probably. Still, as long as they were just watching they weren't likely to bother anyone.

  Closing his eyes, Pyre put the image of silent watchers out of his mind and slid into oblivion.

  Chapter 13

  For the drive to the outer villages Moff exchanged their usual open-air car for a small enclosed bus. The reason wasn't hard to figure out; barely a kilometer out of Sollas the road began passing in and out of the patches of forest that had been visible from orbit. "Just a normal precaution," Moff explained about their vehicle at one point. "Cars are rarely attacked, even by krisjaws, but it does happen occasionally." Joshua shuddered a bit at the thought, wondering for the hundredth time what had possessed Pyre to go out into the forest alone-and what had possessed Telek to let him go. The Dewdrop had been maddeningly uninformative on everything dealing with Pyre's mission; and Joshua, for one, found it uncomfortably suspicious. He and Justin had discussed in some length the mystery behind Pyre's presence here during the trip from Aventine, though without finding any good answers. The possibility that Telek might have brought

  Pyre along solely because his political view made him expendable wasn't one that had occurred to Joshua before; but i
t was occurring to him now, and he didn't care for it at all.

  But for the moment, at least, it was a low-priority worry. Pyre had demonstrated his ability to survive the Qasaman wilderness... and, besides, the biological breakthrough he and Telek had made last night was just too fascinating to ignore. Joshua's schooling had included only a bare minimum of the life sciences, but even he could see how radically different the Qasaman ecology was from anything known either in the Worlds or the Dominion and could guess at some of the implications. The contact team hadn't had a safe chance to discuss it among themselves yet, of course-as far as their hosts knew, they should have no inkling of any of this. But Joshua could see the same thoughts and speculations in their eyes. Watching the brightly colored foliage outside the bus, he waited impatiently for Cerenkov to start the gentle probing Telek had suggested.

  Cerenkov's grip on his curiosity was apparently stronger than Joshua's, however, and he waited until the fifty-kilometer trip was nearly over before nudging the conversation in that direction. "I've noticed a fair sprinkling of smaller birds flying among the trees," he said, gesturing toward the window beside him, "but nothing that seems to be the size of the mojo or its female form of tarbine. Do they nest in trees in the wild, or do they raise their young in those quill forests on the bololins' backs?"

  "There is no need of nests or the raising of young," Moff told him. "A mojo's young are born with all the necessary survival skills already present."

  "Really? Doesn't the tarbine at least have to nest long enough to hatch the eggs?"

  "There are no eggs-mojo young are born live. In this sense most of the bird-like

  Qasaman creatures are not true birds, by the old standards."

  "Ah." Joshua could almost see Cerenkov casting about for a question that wouldn't reveal that he knew Moff was being deliberately misleading. "I'm also interested in the relationship between the tarbines and bololins. Is the tarbine merely a parasite, getting a free ride but not contributing anything?"

  "No, the relationship is more equal than that. The tarbines often help defend their bololins against predator attack, and it's thought that they also help locate good grazing sites from the air."

  "I thought the bololins liked to travel along magnetic field lines," Rynstadt put in. "Can they just get off that path any time they want to go foraging?"

  Moff gave him an odd look. "Of course. They only use the magnetic lines as a guide to and from the northern breeding areas. How did you deduce the mechanism?"

  "The layout of Sollas was the major clue," Cerenkov replied before Rynstadt could do so. "Those wide avenues all point along the field lines, with no real provision for bololin herds going any other direction. I think Marck's question refers to the fact that when the herd we saw was coming through the city the people stood just barely inside the cross streets, as if they knew the bololins wouldn't stray even slightly their path. One of those still aboard the ship had wondered whether they were actually constrained to follow their individual lines pretty closely."

  "No, of course not." Moff's quizzical look was edgy and sliding toward suspicion. "Otherwise many would crash into buildings instead of finding their way into the streets. But how did your companion know where the people were standing?"

  Joshua's heart skipped a beat. The Qasamans hadn't the slightest indication that they knew about implanted sensors, but he still abruptly felt as if eye in the bus had turned in his direction. It kicked him back to childhood, to all the times is mother had easily penetrated his innocent expression to find the guilt bubbling up beneath it-

  But Cerenkov was already well on top of things. "We told them about it, of course," he said, his tone of genuine puzzlement. "We described the whole thing while you were up there shooting. They were interested in the odd mojo mating pattern, too-and what I was able to tell them about it seemed odd to them. Was there some kind of ritual dance or pattern that I missed?"

  "You seem excessively interested in the mojos," Moff said, his dark eyes boring into Cerenkov's.

  Cerenkov shrugged. "Why not? You must admit your relationship with them is unique in human history. I know of no other culture where people have had such universal protection-defensive protection, I mean, not just a widespread carrying of weapons. It's bound to have reduced every form of aggression, from simple assault all the way to general warfare." Joshua frowned as that fact suddenly hit him. So busy had he been observing the details and minutiae of

  Qasaman life that he'd missed the larger patterns. But Cerenkov obviously hadn't... and if he was right, perhaps the Trofts had cause to worry after all.

  A human culture that had had the will power to break the pattern of strong preying on weak would be long on cooperation and short on competition... and a potential threat to its neighbors no matter what its technological level.

  Moff was speaking again. "And you think our little mojos deserve the credit?" he asked, stroking his bird's throat. "You give no credit to our people and philosophy?"

  "Of course we do," Rynstadt said. "But there've been countless cultures throughout history who've paid great lip service to the concepts of justice and freedom from fear without doing anything concrete for their citizens. You-and in particular the generation which first began taming the mojos-have proved humanity is capable of truly practical idealism. That achievement alone would make contact between our worlds worthwhile, certainly from our point of view."

  "Your world has difficulties with war, then?" Moff's gaze shifted to Rynstadt

  "So far we've avoided that particular problem Rynstadt answered cautiously. "But we have our share of normal human aggressions, and that occasionally causes trouble."

  "I see." For a moment they rode in silence, and then Moff shrugged. "Well, you'll see that we aren't completely without aggression. The difference is that we've learned to direct our attention outward, toward the dangers of the wild, instead of inward toward each other."

  Dangerous indeed, Joshua thought; and even Cerenkov's eyes seemed troubled as conversation in the bus drifted into silence.

  A few minutes later, they reached the village of Huriseem.

  Joshua could remember arguments aboard ship as to whether the rings around the villages were actually walls; but at ground level there was no doubt whatsoever.

  Made of huge stone or concrete blocks, painted a dead black, Huriseem's wall was a stark throwback to ancient Earth history and the continual regional warfare of those days. It seemed gratingly out of place here, especially after the discussion of only a few minutes earlier.

  Beside him, York cleared his throat. "Only about three meters high," he muttered, "and no crenels or fire ports."

  Moff apparently heard him. "As I said, there is no war here," he said-a bit tartly, Joshua thought. "The is to keep out bololins and the more deadly predators of the forests."

  "Why not build along the same open lines as Sollas?" Cerenkov asked. "That works well enough for the bololins, and I didn't see any predators getting in there."

  "Predators are rare in Sollas because there are many people and there is a wide gap between city and forest. Here such an approach would clearly not work."

  So clear back the forest, Joshua thought. But perhaps that was more trouble than a single village was worth.

  The bus followed the encircling road to the southwest side of the village, where they found a black gate set into the wall. Clearly they were both expected and observed; the gate was already opening as they came within sight of it. The bus turned in, and Joshua glanced back to see it close behind them. The wall and the forest setting had somehow led Joshua's subconscious to expect a relatively primitive, thatched-hut scene, and he was vaguely disappointed as he left the bus to find the buildings, streets, and people as modern as those they'd seen in

  Sollas. Three men waited off to the side, and as the last of the Qasaman escorts left the bus they stepped forward. "Mayor Ingliss," Moff nodded in greeting,

  "may I present to you the visitors from Aventine: Cerenkov, Rynst
adt, York, and

  Moreau."

  Where Mayor Kimmeron of Sollas had been almost cheerful, Ingliss was gravely polite. "I welcome you to Huriseem," he said with a nod. "I understand you seek to learn about village life on Qasama. To what end, may I inquire?"

  So Qasaman suspicion isn't limited to the big cities. Somehow, Joshua found that more of a disappointment than the lack of thatched huts.

  Cerenkov went into his by-now familiar spiel about trade and cultural exchange, and Joshua allowed his gaze to drift around the area. Huriseem seemed to have none of the taller six-story-plus buildings of Sollas, and the colorful abstract wall paintings were also absent, but otherwise the village could have been a transplanted chunk of the larger city. Even the wall's presence was not intrusive, and it took him a moment to realize the structure's inside surface was painted with effectively camouflaging pictures of buildings and forest scenes. So why is the outside painted black? he wondered-and with a flash of inspiration it hit him. Black-the same color as the tree trunks. A charging bololin must see the village as a giant tree and therefore goes around it. And that meant-