The hunters slid their snufflers off their shoulders and stared, their eyes widening in shock as Born and Ruumahum walked slowly out of the tunnel. Born’s cautionary cry proved unnecessary. Everyone was too paralyzed to think of prematurely letting loose with a thorn. If the Akadi had rushed from the tunnel then, no one could have raised a hand against them.
Then there was a noisy, mass rush, and Born was surrounded by men and women, cursing and questioning him at once. Ruumahum loped off unnoticed. While the humans, including an excited and puzzled pair of giants clustered around Born, the furcot joined his silent brethren and commenced an explanation in his steady, grumbling tones.
“What happened … We thought you’d run … Where did you go … What of the Akadi … What of …?” the persons asked Born.
“Please, could I have a drink?”
A container of water was passed up to him. Ignoring the continuous babble of questions, he put the wooden cylinder to his lips and drank long and deep. Then he turned it upside down and let the rest of the tepid liquid cascade over him.
A deep, commanding voice finally rose above the noise—that of shaman Reader. “Hunters, to your posts. Re-form your spear line, people of the Home! The Akadi—”
Born shook his head tiredly. “I don’t think the Akadi will bother us again. Not for a long while, anyway.” He smiled softly as a fresh wave of astonishment passed over the crowd. “The idea was mine, the stimulation came from Ruumahum’s information.” He gestured over to where the furcots were gathered. “He’d been out hunting, ranging far to the north. I don’t know why, he isn’t sure why, but he brought back word of what he’d found, and that prompted a thought in my mind. I thought it might work.”
“What might work?” several people asked at once. “Why didn’t you tell—”
“Why didn’t you tell someone you were going, Born?” came the voice of Brightly Go. She pushed into the circle of people.
“Would it have mattered? There would have been loud objections, arguing, demands that I remain to lend my snuffler to the fighting. I would rather have you think me a coward and mad, and laugh at me. I’m used to being laughed at. If my scheme had not worked, nothing else would have mattered, would it?”
There was some uneasy shuffling among the assembled folk. Born had been respected in the village as the cleverest of hunters, and simultaneously derided as the maddest of thinkers. Now it seemed he might have produced a miracle, so there were some embarrassed stares.
“It was not far away, down on the mid-Fifth Level.”
“What was?” Joyla boomed, her penetrating voice not to be ignored.
“A way of stopping the Akadi.”
“Miracle or no miracle, this truly is madness,” Reader thought aloud. “Nothing stops the Akadi—nothing!” His voice was adamant. “In my youth I saw a column rip apart a herd of grazers. The furcot cannot stand before them. It is said even the demons of the Lower Hell respect a wandering column.” There were murmurs of respect from the crowd.
“What could you find, Born, on the Fifth Level, or any level, that could stop the Akadi?”
“Come, and I’ll show you,” he said, and he turned and started back down the tunnel. He had taken but a few steps when he realized no one was following. For the first time now, the exhaustion and effort of the past days was forgotten, and his face spread in a wide grin of satisfaction.
“Are you all afraid?”
Go into the tunnel? The tunnel from which the children of hell had poured only the evening before? On the word of a madman? It would take more than a little courage.
Losting was the first to step forward. He was as fearful as the rest, but he had no choice—Brightly Go stood there, watching. Then the crippled Jhelum followed, limping on his injured leg. Almost to the step, Reader and Sand and Joyla joined him. The little knot of humanity moved down the winding tunnel.
They walked down the green tube, its floor and walls and ceiling formed as if by a colossal drill. As they did so the noise of angry Akadi grew louder, loud to the point where one had to lean close to his neighbor and shout to be heard. There was a sharp bend in the tunnel, an unexpected bend unlike the usual paths of the Akadi. Born stopped and gave directions. A few chops with axes broke through the roof of saliva-cemented growth, and they emerged into _the open forest again. Born beckoned them first upward, and then on again. Finally he went on ahead, alone, then returned with an admonition to the others to be silent and to follow.
After carefully and silently crawling among a thick twisted limb, they were staring down at an eldritch carnival, an orgiastic celebration of death unrivaled except in legend.
A second roofed-over tunnel, its faintly translucent ceiling snaking back many meters into distant forest, intersected the tunnel they had just come through. Where the two tunnels joined, Akadi precision and order had become chaos.
The Akadi column from the north and lower level was composed of slightly smaller, redder horrors. They had dark stripes encircling their abdomen. Where they met the first column the tunnels were shattered, spilling the combat into surrounding foliage. The battle raged over a great circle dozens of meters in diameter. Within that circle, nothing existed save stripped wood and dead, dying, fighting Akadi. Green blood drenched everything.
“Ruumahum found the column,” Born told them softly. “And I had the thought. What could stop the Akadi, but the Akadi? We attacked before morning when they were sluggish and slow. We stayed within strong scent range and they followed. Now they will continue to fight till only a few of each column are left. These few will be too weak and disorganized to offer any threat to the Home. We can easily kill any who attack, and we have finished with not one, but two threats.”
“But how did you get them here so fast?” Reader wondered.
“I was afraid I would not have enough powder, but Ruumahum continued to fetch more and more dry wood to keep the torches going. I stayed close enough to the lead Akadi to keep them awake. They followed and the others blindly followed them even in the dark. I have neither slept nor rested for two days and nights. I think,” he finished, sitting down on the branch, “I had better rest now.”
Joyla and Reader grabbed him as his completely drained body fell from the branch.
IX
BORN OPENED HIS EYES, saw a monster Akadi staring down at him. He sat up like a bursting pod and blinked, rubbing at his eyes.
“About time you came around,” Logan commented, stepping back from his mat. “You don’t even recover slowly, do you?”
Born looked around. He was in one of the rooms in the chief’s multi-chambered quarters. “You’ve been out,” she added, “for about eighteen hours.”
“Hours?” He eyed her questioningly, his mind still fuzzy with sleep.
“A day and a half, and I don’t wonder, with what they tell me you went through.”
Born had only one thought. “Have I missed the Longago—the burying time?”
Logan looked confused, stared back to where Cohoma was sitting and sharpening a knife. “You know anything about a burying time, Jan?” Her companion shook his head.
Born sat up and grabbed her by the shoulder of her blouse and nearly fell. The tough material didn’t tear, supported him.
“No, Born,” a strong voice replied. “You have preserved too many lives for us to proceed with the Longago without you. Now that you are returned to us, it can be done tonight.”
“What’s this Longago—some kind of ceremony?” Logan asked, glancing behind her toward Joyla, who stood in the portal.
“It is a returning. Those who were killed by the Akadi must be given back to the world.” She looked over at Born. “There are many who must be returned. It has taken this long to find enough of They-Who-Keep to take so many. The boy Din is among them.” Seeing the sudden change of expression that passed cloudlike over his visage, she suddenly became solicitous. “How do you feel now? You have slept long, and sometimes—”
“All right … I’m all right,
” Born mumbled, letting go his grip on Logan. He tried to stand, staggered slightly, then sat down hard on the woven mat and held his head in both hands. This did not keep it from spinning, but it helped.
“I’m hungry,” he said abruptly. Since his head was proving uncooperative, he would concentrate on less intractable portions of his anatomy.
“There’s food,” Joyla said simply, beckoning him into the next room. “Do you need help to—”
“For half a Home fruit I would crawl on my belly, dragged by my nails,” he answered. Moving slowly, he rose from the bed. Logan got out of his way. Still weaving, he walked unaided into the room from which a host of smells issued. Joyla held him steady on the other side.
“Mind you do not overload your roots with too much nourishment too soon,” she advised him, and then she grinned. “Or I will have this room to clean yet again. And you will have to start afresh.”
Born nodded without really hearing her. He stumbled into the room, where fruit, fresh meat, and preserved pulp was laid out in abundance on the eating mat. Joyla beckoned to Cohoma and Logan, indicating they might as well eat too.
“Thanks,” Logan replied.
“You can watch him as he eats and restrain him.”
“Why don’t you?” Logan asked, as she sat down at the edge of the mat and selected a bright yellow gourd-shaped fruit with blue striping.
Joyla shook her head, studied Born, who was shoving food into his mouth at an appalling rate. “I have already eaten, and there is much to be done now that the Longago can proceed.” Her smile became sad. “Tonight I will return many old friends to the forest, and a daughter as well.” She started to say something else, reconsidered, and left through the leaf-leather curtain behind her.
Logan continued thinking on this Longago that now seemed of paramount importance to these people. She bit into the gourd, found it had a taste like sugared persimmon. How did Born’s people dispose of their dead, anyway, with no earth to bury them in? Cremation, maybe, in the firepit at the village’s center.
She said as much to Born. He mouthed contradictions through mouthfuls of food. “The earth? Would you offer up the souls of your own friends to hell? They will be returned to the world.”
“Yes, Joyla mentioned that,” she replied impatiently, “but what exactly does that mean?”
But Born had returned to his food. She continued to prod him, arguing that the rest between eating would do him good. Born still showed no inclination to talk, but the giant’s constant pestering compelled him to satisfy her. “It is plain,” he finally mumbled, “that you know nothing of what happens to people after they die. I cannot describe the Longago to you. You will see it tonight.”
Born had demonstrated a remarkable ability to recover from a totally debilitating experience, Cohoma mused. He avoided a hump in the tuntangcle, hard to see by torchlight.
The tribe was leading them through one turn after another in the black forest. Well, this was the kind of strength you could expect from people who lived in as harsh an environment as Born’s did. Only, such regression seemed impossible. He told Logan as much.
“These people,” he said, with a nod at the marching column ahead and behind, “aren’t that primitive. They’re the descendants of some long-lost colony ship. Physically, except for those prehensile toes, they’re as advanced as we are, but I don’t see how their proportions could change so much in a few centuries.” He stepped over a tiny dark flower growing in the tuntangcle. It held an explosive, poisonous spine. “In less than, oh, at the maximum, ten generations, they’ve lost a sixth of their size, developed those toes, undergone tremendous expansion of the latissimus dorsi and the pectoral muscles, acquired uniform coloration of skin, eyes, and hair. Evolution just doesn’t work that fast!”
Logan merely smiled softly, gestured ahead. “That’s fine, Jan. I agree. So, how do we explain this?”
“I refuse to believe it’s parallel development. The differences are too minor.”
“How about rapid mutation,” Logan finally hypothesized, “induced by consumption of local chemicals in their foodstuffs?” She eyed an exquisite grouping of globular chartreuse fruit surrounded by lavender blooms.
“Possible,” Cohoma finally conceded. “But the scale, and the speed—”
“Yes, that,” Logan interrupted, “coupled with the need to adapt rapidly or die, could force some extraordinary physiological accommodations. The body is capable of some remarkable changes when survival is at stake. Though I admit this would be the most radical case ever discovered. Still”—she waved a hand leisurely at the forest—“if you’d seen some of the reports coming out of Tsing-ahn’s or Celebes’ labs …” She shook her head wonderingly.
“This planet is a googaplex of new forms, unusual molecular combinations, combination proteins. There are structures of local nucleic acids that defy conventional classification. And we’ve only scratched the surface of this forest, barely probed at the upper levels. We’ve no idea what the surface itself is like. But as we dig deeper, I’m sure we’ll find—”
Cohoma silenced her. “I think something’s going to happen.”
They were approaching a brown wall, a monolithic trunk so vast as to belie its organic origin. Surely nothing so enormous could grow—it had to have been built.
The party was beginning to fan out along one of the big emergent’s major branches, torches flashing umber off the meters-thick bark.
“The trunk must be thirty meters thick at this point,” Logan whispered, impressed. “Wonder what it’s like at the base.” She raised her voice. “Born!”
The hunter turned from his place in the line of march and waited politely for them to catch up.
“What do you call this one?” She indicated the grandfather growth whose central bole was now behind them.
“Its true name is lost to the ages, Kimilogan. We call them They-Who-Keep, because they hold safe the souls of the people who die.”
“Now I see,” she declared. “I was wondering how you disposed of your dead, since you never descend to the surface, to the First Level. And I didn’t think you’d hold to cremation.”
Born looked confused. “Cremation?”
“Burning the bodies.”
Any of Born’s older associates, Reader, for example, or Sand, would have been openly shocked at this thought. But Born’s mind did not work like those of his friends. He merely regarded the question thoughtfully. “I had not imagined such a possibility. Is that how you dispose of those among you who change?”
“If by change, you mean die,” Cohoma responded, “yes, it is, sometimes.”
“How strange,” Born murmured, more to himself than to the giants. “We come of the world and believe we should return to it. I guess there are those among you who are not of the world and therefore have nothing to return to.”
“Couldn’t have put it better myself, Born,” Cohoma admitted.
They walked on in silence several minutes more, until the column began to spread out onto a slightly wider section of branch.
“We’ve come to the place?” Logan asked softly. “One of the places,” Born corrected. “Each has his place. A proper one must be found for every man.” He looked upward, considered the black branches in the sky. “Come. You will see better from above.”
After several moments of ascending the ever-present stairway of vines and lianas, they found themselves looking down on the wide section of branch below. Everyone was bunched tightly around a deep crack in the branch. It was several meters across and not many more long. The feeble light from the torches shielded against the rain made it impossible to tell how deep it went into the wood.
The shaman was murmuring words too fast and soft for either Logan or Cohoma to interpret. The assembled people listened in respectful silence. One of the men who had died fighting the Akadi and a dead furcot were brought forward from the heavily laden litters.
“They’re buried together, then,” Logan whispered.
Born st
udied her sadly, a great pity welling up in him. Poor giants! Sky-boats and other miraculous machines they might possess, but they were without the comfort of a furcot. Every man, every woman had a furcot who joined them soon after birth and went with them through life unto death. He could not imagine living without Ruumahum.
“What happens to those furcots whose masters die before they do?” Cohoma asked.
Born looked at him quizzically. “Ruumahum could not live without me, nor I without him,” he explained to the attentive giants. “When half of one dies, the other half cannot long survive.”
“I never heard of such a severe case of emotional interdependence between man and animal,” Logan muttered. “If we hadn’t observed any sign of it, I’d probably suspect some kind of physical symbosis had developed here as well.”
Their attention was diverted from this new discovery by the actions below. Sand and Reader were now pouring various smelly liquids over the two bodies, which had been lowered into the split in the branch.
“Some kind of sacred oil, or something,” Cohoma ventured. But Logan hardly heard him. Emfol … mutual burial…half of oneself … Thoughts were spinning around and around in her head without forming any pattern, refusing to mesh, to reveal … what?
The furcots pining away for their dead masters she could understand. But for a man to die of loneliness for his animal, probably Cohoma was right. Born’s people had been forced backward along the path of development by the sheer necessity to concentrate on surviving. This emotional entwining was a symptom of that sickness. One of the pounding thoughts swamping her brain suddenly demanded clarification.
“You said men and women,” she whispered, staring downward. “Do furcots and people match up by sex?” Born looked puzzled. “You know, female furcots to women, male to male? Is Ruumahum a male?”