This experiment—subtly changing her body shape to make it seem more humanlike—was one of the more fascinating aspects of her visit to an Earth colony. She certainly could not have moved among local crowds as inconspicuously on a world of the reptiloid Soro, or the sap-ring-creatures of Jophur. And in the process she had learned a lot more about physiological control than the instructors had taught her back in school.
Still, the inconveniences were substantial, and she was considering putting an end to the experiment.
Oh, Ifni. A glyph of frustration danced at her tendril tips. Changing back at this point might be more effort than it’s worth.
There were limits to what even the ever-adaptable Tymbrimi physiology could be expected to do. Attempting too many alterations in a short time ran the risk of triggering enzyme exhaustion.
Anyway, it was a little flattering to kenn the conflicts taking shape in Robert’s mind. Athaclena wondered. Is he actually attracted to me? A year ago the very idea would have shocked her. Even Tymbrimi boys made her nervous, and Robert was an alien!
Now though, for some reason, she felt more curiosity than revulsion.
There was something almost hypnotic about the steady rocking of the pack on her back, the rhythm of soft boots on the rough trail, and the warming of leg muscles too long leashed by city streets. Here in the middle altitudes the air was warm and moist. It carried a thousand rich scents, oxygen, decaying humus, and the musty smell of human perspiration.
As Athaclena trudged, following her guide along the steep-sided ridgeline, a low rumbling could soon be heard coming from the distance ahead of them. It sounded like a rumor of great engines, or perhaps an industrial plant. The murmur faded and then returned with every switchback, just a little more forceful each time they drew near its mysterious source. Apparently Robert was relishing a surprise, so Athaclena bit back her curiosity and asked no questions.
At last, though, Robert stopped and waited at a bend in the trail. He closed his eyes, concentrating, and Athaclena thought she caught, just for a moment, the flickering traces of primitive emotion-glyph. Instead of true kenning, it brought to mind a visual image—a high, roaring fountain painted in garish, uninhibited blues and greens.
He really is getting much better, Athaclena thought. Then she joined him at the bend and gasped in surprise.
Droplets, trillions of tiny liquid lenses, sparkled in the shafts of sunlight that cut sharply through the cloud forest. The low rumble that had drawn them onward for an hour was suddenly an earthshaking growl that rattled tree limbs left and right, reverberating through the rocks and into their bones. Straight ahead a great cataract spilled over glass-smooth boulders, dashing into spume and spray in a canyon carved over persistent ages.
The falling river was an extravagance of nature, pouring forth more exuberantly than the most shameless human entertainer, prouder then any sentient poet.
It was too much to be taken in with ears and eyes alone. Athaclena’s tendrils waved, seeking, kenning, one of those moments Tymbrimi glyphcrafters sometimes spoke of—when a world seemed to join into the mesh of empathy usually reserved for living things. In a time-stretched instant, she realized that ancient Garth, wounded and crippled, could still sing.
Robert grinned. Athaclena met his gaze and smiled as well. Their hands met and joined. For a long, wordless time they stood together and watched the shimmering, ever-changing rainbows arch over nature’s percussive flood.
Strangely, the epiphany only made Athaclena feel sad, and even more regretful she had ever come to this world. She had not wanted to discover beauty here. It only made the little world’s fate seem more tragic.
How many times had she wished Uthacalthing had never accepted this assignment? But wishing seldom made things so.
As much as she loved him, Athaclena had always found her father inscrutable. His reasoning was often too convoluted for her to fathom, his actions too unpredictable. Such as taking this posting when he could have had a more prestigious one simply by asking.
And sending her into these mountains with Robert … it hadn’t been just “for her safety,” she could tell that much. Was she actually supposed to chase those ridiculous rumors of exotic mountain creatures? Unlikely. Probably Uthacalthing only suggested the idea in order to distract her from her worries.
Then she thought of another possible motive.
Could her father actually imagine that she might enter into a self-other bond … with a human? Her nostrils flared to twice their normal size at the thought. Gently, suppressing her corona in order to keep her feelings hidden, she relaxed her grip on Robert’s hand, and felt relieved when he did not hold on.
Athaclena crossed her arms and shivered.
Back home she had taken part in only a few, tentative practice bondings with boys, and those mostly as class assignments. Before her mother’s death this had been a cause of quite a few family arguments. Mathicluanna had almost despaired of her oddly reserved and private daughter. But Athaclena’s father, at least, had not pestered her to do more than she was ready for.
Until now, maybe?
Robert was certainly charming and likable. With his high cheekbones and eyes pleasantly set apart, he was about as handsome as a human might hope to get. And yet, the very fact that she might think in such terms shocked Athaclena.
Her tendrils twitched. She shook her head and wiped out a nascent glyph before she could even realize what it would have been. This was a topic she had no wish to consider right now, even less than the prospect of war.
“The waterfall is beautiful, Robert,” she enunciated carefully in Anglic. “But if we stay here much longer, we shall soon be quite damp.”
He seemed to return from a distant contemplation. “Oh. Yeah, Clennie. Let’s go.” With a brief smile he turned and led the way, his human empathy waves vague and far away.
The rain forest persisted in long fingers between the hills, becoming wetter and more robust as they gained altitude. Little Garthian creatures, timid and scarce at the lower levels, now made frequent skittering rustles behind the lush vegetation, occasionally even challenging them with impudent squeaks.
Soon they reached the summit of a foothill ridge, where a chain of spine-stones jutted up, bare and gray, like the bony plates along the back of one of those ancient reptiles Uthacalthing had shown her, in a lesson book on Earth history. As they removed their packs for a rest, Robert told her that no one could explain the formations, which topped many of the hills below the Mountains of Mulun.
“Even the Branch Library on Earth has no reference,” he said as he brushed a hand along one of the jagged monoliths. “We’ve submitted a low-priority inquiry to the district branch at Tanith. Maybe in a century or so the Library Institute’s computers will dig up a report from some long-extinct race that once lived here, and then we’ll know the answer.”
“Yet you hope they do not,” she suggested.
Robert shrugged. “I guess I’d rather it were left a mystery. Maybe we could be the first to figure it out.” He looked pensively at the stones.
A lot of Tymbrimi felt the same way, preferring a good puzzle to any written fact. Not Athaclena, however. This attitude—this resentment of the Great Library—was something she found absurd.
Without the Library and the other Galactic Institutes, oxygen-breathing culture, dominant in the Five Galaxies, would long ago have fallen into total disarray—probably ending in savage, total war.
True, most starfaring clans relied far too much on the Library. And the Institutes only moderated the bickering of the most petty and vituperative senior patron lines. The present crisis was only the latest in a series that stretched back long before any now living race had come into existence.
Still, this planet was an example of what could happen when the restraint of Tradition broke down. Athaclena listened to the sounds of the forest. Shading her eyes, she watched a swarm of small, furry creatures glide from branch to branch in the direction of the afternoon sun.
/> “Superficially, one might not even know this was a holocaust world,” she said softly.
Robert had set their packs in the shade of a towering spine-stone and began cutting slices of soyastick salami and bread for their luncheon. “It’s been fifty thousand years since the Bururalli made a mess of Garth, Athaclena. That’s enough time for lots of surviving animal species to radiate and fill some of the emptied niches. Right now I guess you’d probably have to be a zoologist to notice the sparse species list.”
Athaclena’s corona was at full extension, kenning faint traceries of emotion from the surrounding forest. “I notice, Robert,” she said. “I can feel it. This watershed lives, but it is lonely. It has none of the life-complexity a wildwood should know. And there is no trace of Potential at all.”
Robert nodded seriously. But she sensed his distance from it all. The Bururalli Holocaust happened a long time ago, from an Earthling’s point of view.
The Bururalli had also been new, back then, just released from indenture to the Nahalli, the patron race that uplifted them to sentience. It was a special time for the Bururalli, for only when its knot of obligations was loosened at last could a client species establish unsupervised colonies of its own. When their time came the Galactic Institute of Migration had just declared the fallow world Garth ready again for limited occupation. As always, the Institute expected that local lifeforms—especially those which might some day develop Uplift Potential—would be protected at all cost by the new tenants.
The Nahalli boasted that they had found the Bururalli a quarrelsome clan of pre-sentient carnivores and uplifted them to become perfect Galactic citizens, responsible and reliable, worthy of such a trust.
The Nahalli were proven horribly wrong.
“Well, what do you expect when an entire race goes completely crazy and starts annihilating everything in sight?” Robert asked. “Something went wrong and suddenly the Bururalli turned into berserkers, tearing apart a world they were supposed to take care of.
“It’s no wonder you don’t detect any Potential in a Garth forest, Clennie. Only those tiny creatures who could burrow and hide escaped the Bururalli’s madness. The bigger, brighter animals are all one with yesterday’s snows.”
Athaclena blinked. Just when she thought she had a grasp of Anglic Robert did this to her again, using that strange human penchant for metaphors. Unlike similes, which compared two objects, metaphors seemed to declare, against all logic, that unlike things were the same! No Galactic language allowed such nonsense.
Generally she was able to handle those odd linguistic juxtapositions, but this one had her baffled. Above her waving corona the small-glyph teev’nus formed briefly—standing for the elusiveness of perfect communication.
“I have only heard brief accounts of that era. What happened to the murderous Bururalli themselves?”
Robert shrugged. “Oh, officials from the Institutes of Uplift and Migration finally dropped by, about a century or so after the holocaust began. The inspectors were horrified, of course.
“They found the Bururalli warped almost beyond recognition, roaming the planet, hunting to death anything they could catch. By then they’d abandoned the horrible technological weapons they’d started with and nearly reverted to tooth and claw. I suppose that’s why some small animals did survive.
“Ecological disasters aren’t as uncommon as the Institutes would have it seem, but this one was a major scandal. There was galaxy-wide revulsion. Battle fleets were sent by many of the major clans and put under unified command. Soon the Bururalli were no more.”
Athaclena nodded. “I assume their patrons, the Nahalli, were punished as well.”
“Right. They lost status and are somebody’s clients now, the price of negligence. We’re taught the story in school. Several times.”
When Robert offered the salami again, Athaclena shook her head. Her appetite had vanished. “So you humans inherited another reclamation world.”
Robert put away their lunch. “Yeah. Since we’re two-client patrons, we had to be allowed colonies, but the Institutes have mostly handed us the leavings of other peoples’ disasters. We have to work hard helping this world’s ecosystem straighten itself out, but actually, Garth is really nice compared with some of the others. You ought to see Deemi and Horst, out in the Canaan Cluster.”
“I have heard of them.” Athaclena shuddered. “I do not think I ever want to see—”
She stopped mid-sentence. “I do not …” Her eyelids fluttered as she looked around, suddenly confused. “Thu’un dun!” Her ruff puffed outward. Athaclena stood quickly and walked—half in a trance—to where the towering spine-stones overlooked the misty tops of the cloud forest.
Robert approached from behind. “What is it?”
She spoke softly. “I sense something.”
“Hmmph. That doesn’t surprise me, with that Tymbrimi nervous system of yours, especially the way you’ve been altering your body form just to please me. It’s no wonder you’re picking up static.”
Athaclena shook her head impatiently. “I have not been doing it just to please you, you arrogant human male! And I’ve asked you before kindly to be more careful with your horrible metaphors. A Tymbrimi corona is not a radio!” She gestured with her hand. “Now please be quiet for a moment.”
Robert fell silent. Athaclena concentrated, trying to kenn again.…
A corona might not pick up static like a radio, but it could suffer interference. She sought after the faint aura she had felt so very briefly, but it was impossible. Robert’s clumsy, eager empathy flux crowded it out completely.
“What was it, Clennie?” he asked softly.
“I do not know. Something not very far away, off toward the southeast. It felt like people—men and neo-chimpanzees mostly—but there was something else as well.”
Robert frowned. “Well, I guess it might have been one of the ecological management stations. Also, there are isolated freeholds all through this area, mostly higher up, where the seisin grows.”
She turned swiftly. “Robert, I felt Potential! For the briefest moment of clarity, I touched the emotions of a pre-sentient being!”
Robert’s feelings were suddenly cloudy and turbulent, his face impassive. “What do you mean?”
“My father told me about something, before you and I left for the mountains. At the time I paid little attention. It seemed impossible, like those fairy tales your human authors create to give us Tymbrimi strange dreams.”
“Your people buy them by the shipload,” Robert interjected. “Novels, old movies, threevee, poems …”
Athaclena ignored his aside. “Uthacalthing mentioned stories of a creature of this planet, a native being of high Potential … one who is supposed to have actually survived the Bururalli Holocaust.” Athaclena’s corona foamed forth a glyph rare to her … syullf-tha, the joy of a puzzle to be solved. “I wonder. Could the legends possibly be true?”
Did Robert’s mood flicker with a note of relief? Athaclena felt his crude but effective emotional guard go opaque.
“Hmmm. Well, there is a legend,” he said. “A simple story told by wolflings. It could hardly be of interest to a sophisticated Galactic, I suppose.”
Athaclena eyed him carefully and touched his arm, stroking it gently. “Are you going to make me wait while you draw out this mystery with dramatic pauses? Or will you save yourself bruises and tell me what you know at once?”
Robert laughed. “Well, since you’re so persuasive. You just might have picked up the empathy output of a Garthling.”
Athaclena’s broad, gold-flecked eyes blinked. “That is the name my father used!”
“Ah. Then Uthacalthing has been listening to old seisin hunters’ tales.… Imagine having such after only a hundred Earth years here.… Anyway, it’s said that one large animal did manage to escape the Bururalli, through cunning, ferocity, and a whole lot of Potential. The mountain men and chims tell of sampling traps robbed, laundry stolen from clotheslines, and str
ange markings scratched on unclimbable cliff faces.
“Oh, it’s probably all a lot of eyewash.” Robert smiled. “But I did recall those legends when Mother told me I was to come up here. So I figured, so that it wouldn’t be a total loss, I might as well take a Tymbrimi along to see if she could flush out a Garthling with her empathy net.”
Some metaphors Athaclena understood quite readily. Her fingernails pressed into Robert’s arm. “So?” she asked with a questing lilt. “That is the entire reason I am in this wilderness? I am to be a sniffer-out of smoke and legends for you?”
“Sure,” Robert teased. “Why else would I come out here, all alone in the mountains with an alien from outer space?”
Athaclena hissed through her teeth. But within she could not help but feel pleased. This human sardonicism wasn’t unlike reverse-talk among her own people. And when Robert laughed aloud, she found she had to join him. For the moment all worry of war and danger was banished. It was a welcome release for both of them.
“If such a creature exists, we must find it, you and I,” she said at last.
“Yeah, Clennie. We’ll find it together.”
8
Fiben
TAASF Scoutship Proconsul hadn’t outlived its pilot after all. It had seen its last mission—the ancient boat was dead in space—but within its bubble canopy life still remained.
Enough life, at least, to inhale the pungent stench of a six days unwashed ape—and to exhale an apparently unceasing string of imaginative curses.
Fiben finally ran down when he found he was repeating himself. He had long ago covered every permutation, combination, and juxtaposition of bodily, spiritual, and hereditary attributes—real and imaginary—the enemy could possibly possess. That exercise had carried him all the way through his own brief part in the space battle, while he fired his popgun weaponry and evaded counterblows like a gnat ducking sledgehammers, through the concussions of near-misses and the shriek of tortured metal, and into an aftermath of dazed, confused bemusement that he did not seem to be dead after all. Not yet at least.