Foundations Fear

Page 53

  Vaddo came forward a careful step at a time, holding the long lance between two claws now. He made the end move in a circle. Movement was jerky; claws were crude, compared with pan hands. But the raboon was stronger.

  It came at him with a quick feint, then a thrust. Hari barely managed to dodge sideways while he brushed the lance aside with his stick. Vaddo recovered quickly and came from Hari’s left. Jab, feint, jab, feint. Hari caught each with a swoop of his stick.

  Their wooden swords smacked against each other and Hari hoped his didn’t snap. Vaddo had good control of his raboon. It did not try to flee as it had before.

  Hari was kept busy slapping aside Vaddo’s thrusts. He had to have some other advantage, or the superior strength of the raboon would eventually tell. Hari circled, drawing Vaddo away from Sheelah. The other raboons were keeping her trapped, but not at­ tacking. All attention riveted on the two figures as they thrust and parried.

  Hari drew Vaddo toward an outcropping. The raboon was having trouble holding its lance straight and had to keep looking down at its claws to get them right. This meant it paid less attention to where its two hooves found their footing. Hari slapped and jabbed and kept moving, making the raboon step sideways. It put a big hoof down among some angular stones, teetered, then recovered.

  Hari moved left. It stepped again and its hoof turned and it stumbled. Hari was on it in an instant. He thrust forward as the raboon looked down, feet scrambling for purchase. Hari caught the raboon full with his point.

  He pushed hard. The other raboons let out a moaning sound.

  Snorting in rage, the raboon tried to get off the point. Hari made Ipan step forward and thrust the tip farther into the raboon. The thing wailed hoarsely. Ipan plunged again. Blood spurted from it, spattering the dust. Its knees buckled and it sprawled.

  Hari shot a glance over his shoulder. The others had surged into action. Sheelah was holding off three, screeching at them so loudly it unnerved even him. She had already wounded one. Blood dripped down its brown coat.

  But the others did not charge. They circled and growled and stamped their feet but came no closer. They were confused. Learn­ ing, too. He could see the quick, bright eyes studying the situation, this fresh move in the perpetual war.

  Sheelah stepped out and poked the nearest raboon. It launched itself at her in a snarling fit and she stuck it again, deeper. It yelped and turned—and ran.

  That did it for the others. They all trotted off, leaving their fellow bleating on the ground. Its dazed eyes watched its blood trickle out. Its eyes flickered and Vaddo was gone. The animal slumped.

  With deliberation Hari picked up a rock and bashed in the skull. It was messy work, and he sat back inside Ipan and let the dark, smoldering pan anger come out.

  He bent over and studied the raboon brain. A fine silvery webbing capped the rubbery, convoluted ball. Immersion circuitry.

  He turned away from the sight and only then saw that Sheelah was hurt.

  21.

  The station crowned a rugged hill. Steep gullies gave the hillside the look of a weary, lined face. Wiry bushes thronged the lower reaches.

  Ipan puffed as he worked his way through the raw land cut by erosion. In pan vision the night was eerie, a shimmering vista of pale greens and blue-tinged shadows. The hill was a nuance in the greater slope of a grand mountain, but pan vision could not make out the distant features. Pans lived in a close, immediate world.

  Ahead he could see clearly the glowing blank wall ringing the station. It was massive, five meters tall. And, he remembered from his tourist tour of the place, rimmed with broken glass.

  Behind him came gasps as Sheelah labored up the slope. The wound in her side made her gait stiff, face rigid. She refused to hide below. They were both near exhaustion and their pans were balking, despite two stops for fruit and grubs and rest.

  Through their feeble sign vocabulary, their facial grimacing, and writing in the dust, they had “discussed” the possibilities. Two pans were vulnerable out here. They could not expect to be as lucky as with the raboons, not tired and in strange territory.

  The best time to approach the station was at night. Whoever had engineered this would not wait forever. They had hidden from flyers twice more since morning. Resting through the next day was an inviting option, but Hari felt a foreboding press him onward.

  He angled up the hillside, watching for electronic trip wires. Of such technical matters he knew nothing. He would have to keep a lookout for the obvious and hope that the station was not wired for thinking trespassers.

  Pan vision was sharp and clear in dim light for nearby objects, but he could find nothing.

  He chose a spot by the wall shadowed by trees. Sheelah panted in shallow gasps as she approached. Looking up, the wall seemed immense. Impossible…

  Slowly he surveyed the land around them. No sign of any movement. The place smelled peculiar to Ipan, somehow wrong. Maybe animals stayed away from the alien compound. Good; that would make security inside less alert.

  The wall was polished concrete. A thick lip jutted out at the top, making climbing it harder.

  Sheelah gestured to where trees grew near the wall. Stumps nearer showed that the builders had thought about animals leaping across from branches, but some were tall enough and had branches within a few meters of the top.

  Could a pan make the distance? Not likely, especially when tired. Sheelah pointed to him and back to her, then held her hands out and made a swinging motion. Could they swing across the distance?

  He studied her face. The designer would not anticipate two pans cooperating that way. He squinted up at the top. Too high to climb, even if Sheelah stood on his shoulders.

  Yes, he signed.

  A few moments later, her hands holding his feet, about to let go of his branch, he had second thoughts.

  Ipan didn’t mind this bit of calisthenics, and in fact was happy to be back in a tree. But Hari’s human judgment still kept shouting that he could not possibly do it. Natural pan talent conflicted with human caution.

  Luckily, he did not have much time to indulge in self-doubt. Sheelah yanked him off the branch. He fell, held only by her hands.

  She had wrapped her feet securely around a thick branch and now began to oscillate him like a weight on a string. She swung him back and forth, increasing the amplitude. Back, forth, up, down, centrifugal pressure in his head. To Ipan it was unremark­ able. To Hari it was a wheeling world of heart-stopping whirls.

  Small branches brushed him and he worried about noise and then forgot about that because his head was coming up level with the top of the wall.

  The concrete lip was rounded off on the inside, so no hook could find a grip.

  He swung back down, head plunging toward the ground. Then up into the lower branches, twigs slapping his face.

  On the next swing he was higher. All along the top of the wall thick glass glinted. Very professional.

  He barely had time to realize all this when she let him go.

  He arced up, hands stretched out—and barely caught the lip. If it had not protectively protruded out, he would have missed.

  He let his body slam against the side. His feet scrabbled for purchase against the sheer face. A few toes got hold. He heaved up, muscles bunching—and over. Never before had he appreciated how much stronger a pan could be. No man could have made it here.

  He scrambled up, cutting his arm and haunch on glass. It was a delicate business, getting to his feet and finding a place to stand.

  A surge of triumph. He waved to Sheelah, invisible in the tree.

  From here on it was up to him. He realized suddenly that they could have fashioned some sort of rope, tying together vines. Then he could lift her up here. Good idea, too late.

  No point in delaying. The compound was partly visible through the trees, a few lights burning. Utterly silent
. They had waited until the night was about half over; he had nothing but Ipan’s gut feelings to tell him when.

  He looked down. Just beyond his toes razor wire gleamed, set into the concrete. Carefully he stepped between the shiny lines. There was room among the sharp glass teeth to stand. A tree blocked his vision and he could see little below him in the dim glow from the station. At least that meant they couldn’t see him, either.

  Should he jump? Too high. The tree that hid him was close, but he could not see into it. He stood and thought, but nothing came to him. Meanwhile Sheelah was behind him, alone, and he hated leaving her where dangers waited that he did not even know.

  He was thinking like a man and forgetting that he had the capab­ ility of a pan.

  Go. He leaped. Twigs snapped and he plunged heavily in shad­ ows. Branches stabbed his face. He saw a dark shape to his right and so curled his legs, rotated, hands out—and snagged a branch. His hands closed easily around it and he realized it was too thin, too thin—

  It snapped. The crack came like a thunderbolt to his ears. He fell, letting go of the branch. His back hit something hard and he rolled, grappling for a hold. His fingers closed around a thick branch and he swung from it. Finally he let out a gasp.

  Leaves rustled, branches swayed. Nothing more.

  He was halfway up a tree. Aches sprouted in his joints, a galaxy of small pains.

  Hari relaxed and let Ipan master the descent. He had made far too much noise falling in the tree, but there was no sign of any movement across the broad lawns between him and the big, lumin­ ous station.

  He thought of Dors and wished there were some way he could let her know he was inside now. Thinking of her, he measured with his eye the distances from nearby trees, memorizing the pattern so that he could find the way back at a dead run if he had to.

  Now what? He didn’t have a plan.

  Hari gently urged Ipan—who was nervous and tired, barely controllable—into a triangular pattern of bushes. Ipan’s mind was like a stormy sky split by skittering lightning. Not thoughts precisely, more like knots of emotion, forming and flashing around crisp kernels of anxiety. Patiently Hari summoned up soothing images, getting Ipan’s breathing slowed, and he almost missed the whispery sound.

  Nails scrabbling on a stone walkway. Something running fast.

  They came around the triangle peak of bushes. Bunched muscles, sleek skin, stubby legs eating up the remaining distance. They were well trained to seek and kill soundlessly, without warning.

  To Ipan the monsters were alien, terrifying. Ipan stepped back in panic before the two onrushing bullets of muscle and bone. Black gums peeled back from white teeth, bared beneath mad eyes.

  Then Hari felt something shift in Ipan. Ancient, instinctive re­ sponses stopped his retreat, tensed the body. No time to flee, so fight.

  Ipan set himself, balanced. The two might go for his arms so he drew them back, crouching to bring his face down.

  Ipan had dealt with four-legged pack hunters before, somewhere far back in ancestral memory, and knew innately that they lined up on a victim’s outstretched limb, would go for the throat. The canines wanted to bowl him over, slash open the jugular, rip and shred in the vital seconds of surprise.

  They gathered themselves, bundles of swift sinew, running nearly shoulder to shoulder, big heads up—and leaped,

  In air, they were committed, Ipan knew. And open.

  Ipan brought both hands up to grasp the canines’ forelegs.

  He threw himself backward, holding the legs tight, his hands barely beneath the jaws. The wirehounds’ own momentum carried them over his head as he rolled backward.

  Ipan rolled onto his back, yanking hard. The sudden snap slammed the canines forward. They could not get their heads around and down, to close on his hand.

  The leap, the catch, the quick pivot and swing, the heave—all combined in a centrifugal whirl that slung the wirehounds over Ipan as he himself went down, rolling. He felt the canines’ legs snap and let go. They sailed over him with pained yelps.

  Ipan rolled over completely, head tucked in, and came off his shoulders with a bound. He heard a solid thud, clacks as jaws snapped shut. A thump as the canines hit the grass, broken legs unable to cushion them.

  He scrambled after them, his breath whistling. They were trying to get up, turning on snapped legs to confront their quarry. Still no barks, only faint whimpers of pain, sullen growls. One swore vehemently and quite obscenely. The other chanted, “Baaas’ard…baaas’ard…”

  Animals turning in their vast, sorrowful night.

  He jumped high and came down on both. His feet drove their necks into the ground and he felt bone give way. Before he stepped back to look, he knew they were gone.

  Ipan’s blood surged with joy. Hari had never felt this tingling thrill, not even in the first immersion, when Ipan had killed a Stranger. Victory over alien things with teeth and claws that come at you out of the night was a profound, inflaming pleasure.

  Hari had done nothing. The victory was wholly Ipan’s.

  For a long moment Hari basked in it in the cool night air, felt the tremors of ecstasy.