“What the hell’s the matter with you, Kimi?” whispered Cohoma angrily. “If you’d just let me argue with them a little more I might have convinced them that we’re of no use to them. They could leave us on the nearest branch and we’d—”
“You shortsighted idiot! We’ve no choice but to cooperate. We might as well. If this defense of the tree fails, we’re as dead as if the Akadi had eaten us. Or do you think we can make it through this greenhouse Hades without help? You’ve seen what it’s like. We’d be dead a dozen times over by now if it weren’t for Born. Remember the false bromeliad I thought was full of water that turned out to be full of acid? We’ll fight, sure. If it begins to look as hopeless as Born makes it sound, why, then we’ll have plenty of time to skip clear.” She stepped carefully over a magenta and blue fungus. “Until then, we’d better do our best to see that they survive. Unless you’d prefer to strike out on your own.”
“Okay, I wasn’t thinking,” Cohoma admitted. “I’ll go along as long as they’re able. But I’m not dying for any damn tree. I’d rather take my chances in the hylaea.”
Born would have wondered at this strange talk, but at the moment his mind was filled with thoughts that drowned out any other sound. The Akadi were marching toward the Home, marching toward Brightly Go. He suspected the giants would not fight to the death, if it came to that. He did not bother to tell them that once the Akadi had their scent, they would follow the smell of an enemy until it dropped. Once the conflict was joined and the Akadi senses heightened, all within range of their olfactory sense were doomed to death, unless the Akadi died first. If they somehow managed to stop the ravaging column and the giants discovered this information, they could berate Born all they wished.
Brightly Go had hurried back from gleaning the Home when word of Born’s return reached her. She saw him talking excitedly with Sand and Joyla and started toward him, pleased and surprised at his sudden, unexpected safe return. Then she noticed that Losting was with them and talking easily with Born as well as with the elders. She slowed, stopped, stared for a long moment. Then she whirled and began walking slowly back toward the house of her parents. Now and then she would glance back over her shoulder, talk quietly to herself, and shake her head.
“How long?” asked Sand solemnly.
“Two days march for a man,” Losting told them, gesturing back into the forest.
“No chance they will pass to one side or the other?”
Born shook his head. “I think not.”
“They’ll cut right through the middle of your village.” Born turned as they were joined by the two giants and Reader. “You’re all seeing this cockeyed,” Cohoma continued. “You’re going to sacrifice yourselves trying to save a tree? Listen, how long would it take for the tree to die when the Akadi have finished with it, eaten their way through?”
It was Reader’s turn to respond. “By the old calendar, perhaps a hundred years.”
Cohoma’s face mirrored his feelings. “You could raise two or maybe three more generations here, be searching safely in small armed groups for a new tree. But if you stay and fight these Akadi, you’ll all die, it seems. What’s the point of that?”
“The Home will live,” explained Joyla with dignity.
“Right,” commented Cohoma bitterly. “Throw away your lives for a damned holy vegetable.” He directed his words to Logan. “They’re not human enough to be repatriated to the Commonwealth any more. They’ve regressed too far. The normal survival factor’s been bred and cut out of them by this dunghill.”
The chief shook his head sadly while both hunters simply studied the giants as they would a new variety of Chollakee.
“Giants who claim to come from another world, I do not understand you. It may be as you say, we are more different than we appear.”
“And it’s going to be left at that?”
Joyla and Sand nodded in unison.
“We don’t pretend to understand you completely,” Logan admitted in a conciliatory tone, while Cohoma cursed softly. “But some of our ways might be of some help to you.”
“We certainly will consider any suggestions you would like to make,” Sand replied politely.
“Okay,” she said enthusiastically, “the way I understand it, the only thing these Akadi will turn for is to defend themselves against an attacker, right?”
“That is so,” Born told her.
“Well then,” she continued brightly, “why not hit this column from the side. Once they turn to defend themselves, won’t they continue on the new pathway?”
Sand smiled, shook his head. “The Akadi remember. They would pursue and kill any creature foolish enough to assault them, then return to their original line of march.”
“Oh,” Logan murmured, crestfallen. “I’d wondered why nobody suggested a diversionary attack. All it would gain would be a little time.”
“A very little time,” Losting added.
“Swell, terrific,” a frustrated Cohoma put in. These people were getting on his nerves. Here they had actually found someone to guide them back to the station and safety, and now this ridiculous bit of logic demanded they kill themselves off trying to save a tree for the fourth generation, instead of simply picking up and moving for a day or so. It went against reason!
But despite his earlier outburst, Cohoma had no illusions about their chances in the jungle by themselves. They would end up in the grip of some cyanide-spitting cabbage, or something equally bizarre.
He took a deep breath. It was essential, then, that these Akadi be destroyed. To that end, both he and Logan were vocal in volunteering their full cooperation. If the fight was won, they would get credit for great bravery and comradeship. If it were lost, well, they would take their chances in the forest. Neither knew of the Akadi’s ability to follow the scent of their enemy down to the last straggler.
The two giants willingly helped raise the ramparts of sharpened ironwood stakes. These were wedged and then tied with woven vine into place on the side of the Home where the Akadi assault was expected to come. The bristling poisoned stakes and spines would blunt, not halt, the Akadi surge. The latter would overwhelm such pedestrian defenses by sheer weight of numbers, the living using their dead and impaled cousins as a bridge.
But the inhabitants of the great tree had other defenses, defenses which, despite their considerable experience in researching the vegetation of this world, Cohoma and Logan were unfamiliar with.
What, for example, was the purpose of the large nuts twice the size of a terran coconut that had been gingerly suspended over the cubbies the Akadi would use to enter the tree? Unlike the mountain of deadly jacari thorns and tank seed pods which had been gathered, there was nothing in the nuts to hint at concealed deviltry.
Cohoma came up with what he thought was an obvious, yet brilliant, solution. He overlooked something Logan did not—the fact that while Born’s people were primitive, they were not stupid.
“Why not,” he suggested to a small group of busy men, “just cut away all the vines and cubbies and lianas leading into the Home tree? Unless these Akadi can fly, too, they’ll be forced to go around.”
By way of reply, Jaipur, an elderly craftsman, handed Cohoma a finely honed bone axe and directed him to try it on the nearest big liana, which was about as big around as a man’s thigh. Cohoma proceeded to do just that, hammering away at the incredible substance for a good ten minutes. The axe blade was finally dulled to the point where it would no longer cut. All he had achieved was a notch barely a couple of centimeters deep in the protective bark.
“You might have guessed, Jan,” Logan reminded him, “that none of the natives would suggest deliberately hurting anything growing unless they knew you had no chance of success, even with a vine.”
Jaipur made an expansive gesture, grinning a crooked grin out of one side of his face. The other had been paralyzed by an encounter in childhood with a certain spiny plant. “There are many thousands of such pathways, twining and entwining, leading to
the Home from every direction. Many are far thicker than a furcot’s body. There are not enough axes in the Home, or enough time in the world to cut them all, could they be so cut.”
Before moving to sharpen yet another ironwood spear Jaipur also showed Cohoma how each cubble had six others supporting it. Cutting one or two without cutting its dozen or more supports would be a waste of time.
“You’d need a tripod rifle to make a start,” Logan observed. “Hell, the undergrowth here is so entangled you’d have to cut down half the forest to make a decent gap between it and the tree.”
Reader passed the group and regaled the two giants with tales of how the Akadi could cross considerable open spaces without any support by forming a living bridge of interlocked bodies. This story of rending alien limbs engendered a desire in both Cohoma and Logan for a little more instruction in the handling of available weaponry. Both had been presented with ironwood spears, plus bone axe and knife. Logan would have preferred a snuffler, but the bazookalike blowguns required time and skill to make. There weren’t enough for all who knew how to use them.
They would have been abashed to know that one reason they had not been offered snufflers was that Born had convinced the chiefs that in a difficult spot, they were more likely to prick themselves on one of the toxic thorns than kill Akadi.
Requests for a more detailed description of the enemy resulted in Born’s displaying an unexpected talent for illustration. Using a white chalklike substance, he drew on a plate of polished black wood. “You must try to strike here,” he instructed them, “between the forelegs, or here between the eyes. Each Akadi,” Born continued, “is about half the size of a man … myself.”
“About the size of a German shepherd,” Cohoma mused.
Born went on. An Akadi had a thick flexible body with no tail; it walked on six thin but very powerful legs, each leg terminating in a single long, curved claw that enabled the Akadi to scurry slothlike along any part of a branch or cubble. The front of the body tapered slightly, ending in double jaws with no neck, surrounded by muscle. The double jaw arrangement fascinated Logan. One set worked up and down in the usual fashion, while the opposing ones moved from left and right. Working in unison they created a biting phalanx which could cut through the toughest wood or bone as neatly as a laser could slice sheet metal.
The teeth set in the upper and lower jaws were triangular and razor-edged, while those on the side were square, serrated on top, and curved slightly backward to shove food into the ever-hungry gullet. Three eyes, spaced across the top of the head, lay just back of the jaws. There were three tentacles, one on either side of the head and another below that were equipped with jagged, tearing suckers on the tips for holding prey. In color the Akadi were a distinctive rusty orange, eyes and legs bright black. Despite the triple oculars their sight was rumored to be poor.
“This is countered somewhat by their sense of smell and of touch,” Born concluded, “which is very good indeed.”
“An eating machine in multiples,” Logan declared quietly. “Very well designed, very efficient.” She shook her head, murmured, “God on a seat, I wouldn’t care to tangle with one of them. And we have to fight thousands.” She looked evenly at Born. “You people really think you can stop something like this armed with a few glorified blowguns and spears?”
“No,” said Born, wiping the polished wood clean with a forearm. “I have things to do now.” He turned to leave.
“There’s no hope for them, no hope at all,” a disgusted Cohoma blurted when Born was out of earshot.
“I’m afraid there’s not much left for us, either, Jan.”
VIII
THEY HEARD THE SOUND while they were resting just outside the first ring of the Home’s pod-laden vines. Initially it was only a soft rustling in the distance, like wind moving through far-off branches. It grew steadily louder, became a hum, a buzzing like a billion bumblebees aswarm at a new nest.
It intensified, swelled, and resolved into a deafening crackling sound neither Cohoma nor Logan would ever be able to forget. The sound of hundreds of tons of organic matter vanishing down innumerable throats.
A familiar form bounded up from a liana below. “Be ready, giants. The Akadi near,” Losting advised them.
Logan’s grip tightened on the shaft of the ironwood spear and she checked to make certain bone axe and knife were still strapped securely to the belt of her rapidly disintegrating shorts, though she intended never to get close enough to one of the carnivores to use either. They would run before that.
Losting moved to go by them. Cohoma gestured at him to pause. “We haven’t seen Born for a couple of days now, Losting. I know he’s been busy. Is he manning another part of the line?”
“Born.” Losting’s face went through several changes of expression ranging from satisfaction to disgust. “You’ve not see Born for some days because he’s been gone for some days.” Losting clearly relished the shock on the faces of the two giants. “He left the Home one night and has neither been seen nor heard from since. It is certain he did not go toward the Akadi. We have had scouts out marking their progress toward the Home. His furcot has vanished with him.” The implication was clear—the hunter had run.
“Born, a coward?” Logan sounded confused. “That doesn’t make sense, Losting. When the rest of you were afraid, he was the only one who would come down to our skimmer.”
“Those who are mad act for reasons of their own, which no man can comprehend,” Losting countered. “Your sky-boat was an unknown quantity, unlike the Akadi, who are known too well. With them, one knows exactly what to expect. Death. Born is a hunter and a solitary person by habit. If the Home dies and the village dies with it, he could survive alone. There is no doubt he is the cleverest among us.” His expression darkened. “But he has not been clever in this, for if there is any village to come back to, he will not be allowed to live among us. The chiefs and the shaman have ordained this already.” He spun. Gripping the vine nearby, he pulled himself up to the branch immediately above to check on the readiness of the defenders there.
“I still don’t believe it,” Logan whispered, turning back to face the forest. “I consider myself a better judge of human nature than that.”
“I told you they’d abandoned their humanity in making concessions to this world,” Cohoma grumbled.
“Oh, come on, Jan! How could they have regressed so much in so short a time? The earliest colony ships only go back a few hundred years.” She quieted. “I could swear I had that Born figured.”
“There’s another possibility, you know, Kimi,” Cohoma ventured after a pause. He eyed her appraisingly. “Even someone like Losting, who doesn’t like him, admits he’s a smart boy. Maybe … maybe he’s figuring on us bailing him out.”
Logan looked at her companion curiously. “How do you mean?”
“Well, think a minute,” he said, warming to the subject. “He’s out there somewhere”—he gestured back through the palisade of sharpened stakes toward the other end of the village—“waiting for us to join him if the battle goes as badly as everyone expects. We circle clear as soon as the end is in sight. He joins us, we make it to the station, he gets that burning curiosity of his satisfied plus he saves his life.”
“That would imply,” she countered vociferously, “that he cares nothing for his Home or his friends. I don’t believe that. I think the tie is as strong, if not stronger, in Born than in any of these folk. I could understand such an attitude in some soldier-of-fortune, the kind of gun for hire you might meet in the back streets of Drallar or LaLa or Repler, but not in Born.”
Cohoma grinned. “I think you see a little too much of the noble savage in our stunted cousins. Our friend Born is just resourceful enough to make the break, just iconoclastic enough to—”
The first line of Akadi broke through the dense wall of green and all conversation died. The column measured seven or eight Akadi across and extended into the forest until it disappeared in verdure. They were packe
d body to body, so close that the front resembled a single monstrous snake, all woolly orange fur, clawed legs, weaving tentacles. Filtered green light shone on orbs like ebony cabochons, dark wells of unsapient malignance.
Tiny explosive pops sounded as the ring of carefully positioned hunters let loose with a dozen tank seeds at once. The Akadi crumpled, tentacles and clawed legs digging in blind fury at the pricking thorns, chewing at themselves. Even before the frantic flailings of legs and tentacles ceased, the first row had been shoved aside and tumbled and bounced off branches and epiphytes into the depths below.
A metropolis of scavengers was going to form beneath this place, Cohoma reflected.
While the first dozen hunters reloaded, the second group fired and more Akadi died. Then the first fired, and the second reloaded. Such elementary tactics were only temporarily effective. It was like fighting the sea, wave upon wave, a living red-orange ocean of suckers and teeth moving forward as though squeezed from a tube.
As the lesser hunters slowed, the firing of the snufflers grew more erratic, less deadly. Now men and women armed with long lances of ironwood moved forward to stab and cut at the furry bodies. Others holding axes and clubs stood ready around the spearmen, prepared to fend off any Akadi that tried to escape the spears on either side, above or below.
The blood of the Akadi, Logan noted with the eye of a trained observer, was a dark dirty green, like thick pea soup with streaks of brown in it. The spears were more effective than she would have thought. Each time one of them moved, an Akadi died, clutching briefly with tentacles and claws until the lance was drawn free.
Logan had to admire the efforts of the tribe, primitive or not. While the hunters high in the branches used their snufflers to pick off as many of the attackers as possible, the forward rank of the Akadi army, reduced in strength, ran into the wall of spears, were punctured and cut, and plunged in a steady rain of corpses to a green grave.
The spirited defense would have worked but for one overriding factor. There was an endless number of Akadi. The furry killers perished by the dozens, the hundreds. But the river of death never stopped, never slowed or rested, but bored steadily onward.