“That’s it. Break time. I’m puttin’ a T on it. Enough.”
Gailet blinked, her eyes unfocusing as the rude voice drew her back out of her reading trance. The library unit sensed this and froze the text in front of her.
She looked to her left. Sprawled in the beanbag, her new “partner” threw his datawell aside and yawned, stretching his lanky, powerful frame. “Time for a drink,” he said lazily.
“You haven’t even made it through the first edited summary,” Gailet said.
He grinned. “Aw, I don’t know why we’ve got to study this shit. The Eatees’ll be surprised if we remember to bow and recite our own species-name. They don’t expect neo-chimps to be geniuses, y’know.”
“Apparently not. And your comprehension scores will certainly reinforce the impression.”
That made him frown momentarily. He forced a grin again. “You, on the other hand, are tryin’ so hard—I’m sure the Eatees will find it terribly cute.”
Touché, Gailet thought. It hadn’t taken the two of them very long to learn how to cut each other where it hurt.
Maybe this is yet another test. They are seeing how far my patience can be stretched before it snaps.
Maybe … but not very likely. She had not seen the Suzerain of Propriety for more than a week. Instead, she had been dealing with a committee of three pastel-tinged Gubru, one from each faction. And it was the blue-tinted Talon Soldier who strutted foremost at these meetings.
Yesterday they had all gone down to the ceremonial site for a “rehearsal.” Although she was still undecided whether to cooperate in the final event, Gailet had come to realize that it might already be too late to change her mind.
The seaside hill had been sculpted and landscaped so that the giant power plants were no longer visible. The terraced slopes led elegantly upward, one after another, marred only by bits of debris brought in by the steady autumnal winds. Already, bright banners flapped in the easterlies, marking the stations where the neo-chimp representatives would be asked to recite, or answer questions, or submit to intense scrutiny.
There at the site, with the Gubru standing close by, Irongrip had been to all outward appearances a model student. And perhaps it had been more than a wish to curry favor that had made him so uncharacteristically studious. After all, these were facts that had direct bearing upon his ambitions. That afternoon, his quick intelligence had shone.
Now though, with them alone together under the vast vault of the New Library, other aspects of his nature came to the fore. “So how ’bout it?” Irongrip said, as he leaned over her chair and gave her a cyprian leer. “Want to step outside for some air? We could slip into the eucalyptus grove and—”
“There are two chances of that,” she snapped. “Fat and slim.”
He laughed. “Put it off until the ceremony, then, if you like it public. Then it’ll be you an’ me, babe, with the whole Five Galaxies watchin’.” He grinned and flexed his powerful hands. His knuckles cracked.
Gailet turned away and closed her eyes. She had to concentrate to keep her lower lip from trembling. Rescue me, she wished against all hope or reason.
Logic chided her for even thinking it. After all, her white knight was only an ape, and almost certainly dead.
Still, she couldn’t help crying inside. Fiben, I need you. Fiben, come back.
80
Robert
His blood sang.
After months in the mountains—living as his ancestors had, on wits and his own sweat, his toughened skin growing used to the sun and the scratchy rub of native fibers—Robert still had not yet realized the changes in himself, not until he puffed up the last few meters of the narrow, rocky trail and crossed in ten long strides from one watershed to another.
The top of Rwanda Pass.… I’ve climbed a thousand meters in two hours, and my heart is scarcely beating fast.
He did not really feel any need to rest, however Robert made himself slow down to a walk. Anyway, the view was worth lingering over.
He stood atop the very spine of the Mulun range. Behind him, to the north, the mountains stretched eastward in a thickening band, and westward toward the sea, where they continued in an archipelago of fat, towering islands.
It had taken him a day and a half of running to get here from the caves, and now he saw ahead of him the panorama he would have yet to cross to reach his destination.
I’m not even sure how to find what I’m looking for! Athaclena’s instructions had been as vague as her own impressions of where to send him.
More mountains stretched ahead of him, dropping away sharply toward a dun-colored steppe partially obscured by haze. Before he reached those plains there would be still more rise and fall over narrow trails that had only felt a few score feet even during peacetime. Robert was probably the first to come this way since the outbreak of war.
The hardest part was over, though. He didn’t enjoy downhill running, but Robert knew how to take the jolting, fall-stepping so as to avoid damaging his knees. And there would be water lower down.
He shook his leather canteen and took a sparing swallow. Only a few deciliters remained, but he was sure they’d do.
He shaded his eyes and looked beyond the nearest purple peaks to the high slopes where he would have to make his camp tonight. There would be streams all right, but no lush rain forests like on the wet northern side of the Mulun. And he would have to think about hunting for food soon, before he sallied forth onto the dry savannah.
Apache braves could run from Taos to the Pacific in a few days and not eat anything but a handful of parched corn along the way.
He wasn’t an Apache brave, of course. He did have a few grams of vitamin concentrate with him, but for the sake of speed he had chosen to travel light. For now, quickness counted more than his grumbling stomach.
He skirted aside where a recent landslide had broken the path. Then he set a slightly faster pace as the trail dropped into a set of tight switchbacks.
That night Robert slept in a moss-filled notch just above a trickling spring, wrapped in a thin silk blanket. His dreams were slow and as quiet as he imagined space might be, if one ever got away from the constant humming of machines.
Mostly, it was the stillness in the empathy net, after months living in the riot of the rain forest, that lent a soft loneliness to his slumber. One might kenn far in an empty land such as this—even with senses as crude as his.
And for the first time there was not the harsh—metaphorically almost metallic—hint of alien minds to be felt off in the northwest. He was shielded from the Gubru, and from the humans and chims for that matter. Solitude was a strange sensation.
The strangeness did not evaporate by the dawn’s light. He filled his canteen from the spring and drank deeply to take the edge off his hunger. Then the run began anew.
On this steeper slope the descent was wearing, but the miles did go by quickly. Before the sun was more than halfway toward the zenith the high steppe had opened up around him. He ran across rolling foothills now—kilometers falling behind him like thoughts barely contemplated and then forgotten. And as he ran, Robert probed the countryside. Soon he felt certain that the expanse held odd entities, somewhere out there beyond or among the tall grasses.
If only kenning were more of a localizing sense! Perhaps it was this very imprecision that had kept humans from ever developing their own crude abilities.
Instead, we concentrated on other things.
There was a game that was often played both on Earth and among interested Galactics. It consisted of trying to reconstruct the fabled “lost patrons of humanity,” the half-mythical starfarers who supposedly began the Uplift of human beings perhaps fifty thousand years ago and then departed in mystery, leaving the job “only half done.”
Of course there were a few bold heretics—even among the Galactics—who held that the old Earthling theories were actually true, that it was somehow possible for a race to Uplift itself … to evolve starfaring intelligence and pul
l itself up by its bootstraps out of darkness and into knowledge and maturity.
But even on Earth most now thought the idea quaint. Patrons uplifted clients, who later took their own turn uplifting newer pre-sentients. It was the way and had been ever since the days of the Progenitors, so long ago.
There was a real dearth of clues. Whoever the patrons of Man might have been, they had hidden their traces well, and for good reason. A patron race who abandoned a client was generally branded as an outlaw.
Still, the guessing game went on.
Certain patron clans were ruled out because they would never have chosen an omnivorous species to raise. Others were unsuited to living on Earth even for short visits—because of gravity or atmosphere or a host of other reasons.
Most agreed that it couldn’t have been a clan which believed in specialization either. Some uplifted their clients with very specific goals in mind. The Uplift Institute demanded that any new sapient race be able to pilot starships, exercise judgment and logic and be capable of patron status itself someday. But beyond that the Institute put few constraints on the types of niches into which client species might be made to fit. Some were destined to become skilled craftsmen, some philosophers, and some mighty warrior castes.
But humanity’s mysterious patrons had to have been generalists. For Man, the animal, was very much a flexible beast.
Yes, and for all of the vaunted flexibility of the Tymbrimi, there were some things not even those masters of adaptation could even think of doing.
Such as this, Robert thought.
A covey of native birds exploded into the air in a flurry of beating wings as Robert ran across their feeding grounds. Small, skittering things felt the rumble of his approach and took cover.
A herd of animals, long-legged and fleet like small deer, darted away, easily outdistancing him. They happened to flee southward, the direction he was going anyway, so he followed them. Soon Robert was approaching where they had stopped to feed again.
Once more they bolted, opened a wide berth behind them, then settled down again to browse.
The sun was getting high. It was a time of the day when all the plains animals, both the hunters and the hunted, tended to seek shelter from the heat. Where there were no trees, they scraped the soil in narrow runnels to find cooler layers and lay down in what shade there was to wait out the blazing sun.
But on this day one creature did not stop. It kept coming. The pseudo-deer blinked in consternation as Robert approached again. Once more, they arose and took flight, leaving him behind. This time they put a little more distance in back of them. They stood atop a small hill, panting and staring unbelievingly.
The thing on two legs just kept coming!
An uneasy stir riffled through the herd. A premonition that this just might be serious.
Still panting, they fled once more.
Perspiration shone like oil on Robert’s olive skin. It glistened in the sunlight, quivering in droplets that sometimes shook loose with the constant drumming of his footsteps.
Mostly, though, the sweat spread out and coated his skin and evaporated in the rushing wind of his own passage. A dry, southeasterly breeze helped it change state into vapor, sucking up latent heat in the process. He maintained a steady, even pace, not even trying to match the sprints of the deerlike creatures. At intervals he walked and took sparing swigs from his water bag, then he resumed the chase.
His bow lay strapped across his back. But for some reason Robert did not even think of using it. Under the noonday sun he ran on and on. Mad dogs and Englishmen, he thought.
And Apache … and Bantu … and so many others.…
Humans were accustomed to thinking that it was their brains which distinguished them so from the other members of Earth’s animal kingdom. And it was true that weapons and fire and speech had made them the lords of their homeworld long before they ever learned about ecology, or the duty of senior species to care for those less able to understand. During those dark millennia, intelligent but ignorant men and women had used fires to drive entire herds of mammoths and sloths and so many other species over cliffs, killing hundreds for the meat contained in one or two. They shot down millions of birds so the feathers might adorn their ladies. They chopped down forests to grow opium.
Yes, intelligence in the hands of ignorant children was a dangerous weapon. But Robert knew a secret.
We did not really need all these brains in order to rule our world.
He approached the herd again, and while hunger drove him, he also contemplated the beauty of the native creatures. No doubt they were growing rapidly in stature with each passing generation. Already they were far larger than their ancestors had been back when the Bururalli slew all the great ungulates which used to roam these plains. Someday they might fill some of those empty niches. Even now they were already far swifter than a man.
Speed was one thing. But endurance was quite another matter. As they turned to flee him again, Robert saw that the herd members had begun to look a little panicky. The pseudo-deer now wore flecks of foam around their mouths. Their tongues hung out, and their rib cages heaved in rapid tempo.
The sun beat down. Perspiration beaded and covered him in a thin sheen. This evaporated, leaving him cool. Robert paced himself.
Tools and fire and speech gave us the surplus. They gave us what we needed to begin culture. But were they all we had?
A song had begun to play in the network of fine sinuses behind his eyes, in the gentle squish of fluid that damped his brain against the hard, driving accelerations of every footstep. The throbbing of his heartbeat carried him along like a faithful bass rhythm. The tendons of his legs were like taut, humming bows … like violin strings.
He could smell them now, his hunger accentuating the atavistic thrill. He identified with his intended prey. In an odd way Robert knew a fulfillment he had never experienced before. He was alive.
He barely noticed as he began overtaking deer who had collapsed to the ground. Mothers and their fawns blinked in dull surprise as he ran past them without a glance. Robert had spotted his target, and he projected a simple glyph to tell the others to relax, to slip aside, while he chased a big male buck at the head of the herd.
You are the one, he thought. You have lived well, passed on your genes. Your species does not need you anymore, not as much as I do.
Perhaps his ancestors actually used empathy-sense quite a bit more than modern man. For now he saw a real function for it. He could kenn the growing dread of the buck as, one by one, its overheated companions dropped aside. The buck put in a desperate burst of speed and leaped far ahead. But then it had to rest, panting miserably to try to cool off, its sides heaving as it watched Robert come on.
Foaming, it turned to flee again.
Now it was just the two of them.
Gimelhai blazed. Robert bore on.
A little while later he brought his left hand to his belt as he ran, and loosened the sheath of his knife. Even that tool he chose with some reluctance. What decided him to use it, instead of his bare hands, was empathy with his prey, and a sense of mercy.
It was some hours later, his stomach no longer growling urgently, that Robert felt his first glimmerings of a clue. He had begun making his way southwestward, in the direction Athaclena had hoped would lead him to his goal. As the day aged, Robert shaded his eyes against the late afternoon glare. Then he closed them and reached forth with other senses.
Yes, something was close enough to kenn. If he thought of it metaphorically, it came as a very familiar flavor.
He headed forth at a jog, following traces that came and went, sometimes cool and sentient and sometimes as wild as the buck who had shared its life with Robert so recently.
When the traces grew quite strong, Robert found himself near a vast thicket of ugly thorn bush. Soon it would be sunset, and there was no way he would be able to chase down the thing emanating those vibrations, not in this dense, hurtful undergrowth. Anyway, he did not want to “h
unt” this creature. He wanted to talk to it.
He was sure the being was aware of him now. Robert halted. He closed his eyes again and cast forth a simple glyph. It darted left, right, then plunged into the vegetation. There came a rustle.
He opened his eyes. Two dark, glittering pools blinked back at him. “All right,” he said, softly. “Please come on out now. We had better talk.”
There was another moment’s hesitation. Then there shambled forth a long-armed chim, hairier than most, with thick brows and a heavy jaw. He was dirty, and totally naked.
There were a few stains that Robert was sure came from caked blood, and it had not come from the chim’s own minor scratches. Well, we are cousins, after all. And vegetarians don’t live long on a steppe.
When he sensed that the comate chim was reluctant to make eye contact, Robert did not insist. “Hello, Jo-Jo,” he said softly, and with sincere gentleness. “I’ve come a long way to bring a message to your employer.”
81
Athaclena
The cage consisted of thick wooden slats bound by wire. It hung from a tree branch in a sheltered vale, under the leeward shoulder of a simmering volcano. Still the guy cables holding it in place trembled under occasional gusts of wind, and the cage itself swayed.
Its occupant—naked, unshaven, and looking very much the wolfling—stared down at Athaclena with an expression that would have burned even without the loathing he radiated. To Athaclena it felt as if the little glade were saturated with the prisoner’s hatred. She planned to keep her visit as short as possible.
“I thought you would want to know. The Gubru Triumvirate has declared a protocol truce under the Rules of War,” she told Major Prathachulthorn. “The ceremonial site is now sacrosanct, and no armed force on Garth can act except in self-defense for the duration.”
Prathachulthorn spat through the bars. “So? If we’d attacked when I planned, we’d have made it before this.”
“I find it doubtful. Even the best plans are seldom executed perfectly. And if we were forced to abort the mission at the last minute, every secret we had would have been revealed for nothing.”