Midworld

  “I don’t like dogs,” Cohoma replied flatly. From his tone, one might almost believe he took the suggestion seriously.

  There was no sunrise to bring peace to the tiny knot of humans and furcots who rode the orange speck between wooden towers, beneath a black sky speckled with pseudostars. On what should have been the morning of the following day they were attacked twice in the space of fifteen minutes. They saw nothing till they were set upon. Fortunately, neither of the creatures was bigger than a man. They encountered nothing which approached the size of the armored colossus which had attacked the silverslith.

  The first assault came from the air, in the form of a four-winged flier equipped with a long mouth full of needlelike teeth. It dove silently at them from between the soaring roots of a great tree. Enormous goggling eyes gave Losting time to sound a warning. Its first dive missed completely and it hooked around, wheezing like an old man. Both hunters were readying their snufflers for the second swoop. They never had a chance to use them.

  Rearing up on hind legs, Ruumahum brought powerful forepaws together. They closed on one wing, and the flier screeched, crumpling to the raft. The long jaws snapped frantically till Geeliwan shattered its skull with a single swipe of a clawed paw.

  No sooner had the carcass been disposed of than something that resembled a pineapple with sixteen long thin legs tried to crawl onto the deck. Axes rose and fell on articulated limbs until the crippled carnivore slipped back into the slime.

  “Internal lights can attract others of the same species for purposes of mating,” Logan mused, “as with certain deep-sea fish on Terra and Repler. They can also draw predators. Born, Losting, put out your torches.”

  The, hunters looked doubtful. A man caught at night in the hylaea without light had no chance to see his enemy, but Logan and Cohoma managed to persuade them to try it. Reluctantly they removed the protective globes and dipped the torches in the water, but not before two fresh ones were readied just in case.

  They were not used. With the torches out, their eyes adjusted to the lesser light emanating from the glowing life around them. There was still enough to make out their course between the tree boles which supported the world above. And they were not attacked again.

  They had been traveling on the raft for several hours when Born discovered he was thirsty. He dropped to his knees and bent his head to the murky water.

  “Wait, Born!” Logan yelled. “It might not—”

  She need not have bothered. Born’s nose wrinkled as the noxious smell struck him. He had no advanced degrees, no knowledge of biochemistry to draw on. His nose was sufficient to tell him that the substance they were gliding on was not fit to drink. He told the others as much.

  “Hardly surprising,” Cohoma commented. He turned his gaze upward. “The bacterial count in this swamp must be nothing short of astronomical. When you consider how many tons … tons of already decomposing animal and vegetable matter fall on every square kilometer of the surface every day … Then consider the stifling heat down here.” He mopped his forehead. “And the daily rainfall. You can figure this world is built on a sea of liquefied peat and compost the Church only knows how deep!”

  “Obviously these trees, despite their enormous requirements, can’t handle all the rainfall,” Logan ventured thoughtfully. She leaned back on the drifting raft and stared at the bole of the growth passing on their right. It was not quite as big around as an interstellar cargo carrier. “I’d like to know how some of these half-kilometer-high emergents draw water from the surface and pump it to that height.”

  “I’d hate like hell to paddle this thing past the station before we climb again,” Cohoma suddenly mused. “We know our direction, but we’ve no way of estimating our daily progress.”

  “Born and Losting know how to judge distance.”

  Cohoma smiled. “Sure, through the treepaths. Not on this.” He indicated the raft, then turned to face Born. “What do you think?” he asked the hunter. “Don’t we stand a better chance in the canopy than down here, as long as we don’t chose the wrong hidey-hole the next time we feel like a nap!”

  “I have been watching for a good way up ever since we left the dwelling place of the surface demon,” he replied. “We must begin our return to the world soon anyway. See?” He pointed ahead and downward while Losting paddled on grimly, scanning the mammoth roots and buttresses for one the giants could climb.

  As Cohoma and Logan stared, Born dug down into the orange log with his heel. A shallow groove appeared. Then he drew his leg up and brought his heel down on the log. It disappeared, his foot vanishing up to the ankle in the orange punk. When he tugged it free, a yellowish-brown suppuration oozed from the break. The hole did not fill in.

  “What was it you said about bacterial action and decomposition here, Jan?” Logan muttered sardonically. She turned to survey the slowly passing, glowing dreamscape. “Born’s right; if we don’t find a place to land soon, this raft’s going to dissolve right under us.”

  The murky, thick soup of the surface was lapping their ankles when Losting finally located a possible stairway leading them upward. A wooden peninsula was formed by the twisting bulk of a great roof, which extended horizontally into the water before disappearing. Instead of shooting a hundred meters skyward in precipitous vertical assault, the root curved gently into the central trunk.

  Some hard paddling grounded the shaky craft on the hardwood beach. None too soon, for instead of resisting or splintering, the front fifth of the raft collapsed on contact. A quick study showed that it could not have carried them more than a kilometer or so further. Nearly all the logs were rotted at least half through. More damaging was the fact that most of the gray lashings Born had found were completely gone. Had they remained on the raft much longer, they would have come to an abrupt, not gradual, end, as the lashings gave out and the logs came apart beneath them.

  Once up the easy ramp provided by the great curved root there were knobs and protrusions which would make climbing manageable. Even so, going up was going to be quite a different proposition from their rapid descent.

  Cohoma voiced Logan’s sentiments as well as his own. “We’re going to climb that?”

  “All men can fly,” Born mused, “but sadly, only in one direction—down. I’m afraid we must. Losting and I will go first and search out the easiest way, so that even a child might ascend in confidence. You will follow.” He turned to the furcots. Geeliwan yawned noisily as he spoke. “Follow the friends closely. Do not let them fall,” he ordered.

  “Understand,” Ruumahum snorted. “Follow close. Will care for.” The massive skull swung around for a last thoughtful look, white tusks gleaming in the misty phosphorescence that surrounded them. “Go now. Something comes.”

  If either Logan or Cohoma had entertained thoughts of arguing for another avenue of ascent, perhaps one still less perpendicular, Ruumahum’s curt warning was enough to send them hurriedly up the chosen route.

  “We’ve been left alone since extinguishing our torches,” Logan puffed. “Why would anything suddenly attack us now? I thought we had made ourselves pretty inconspicuous.”

  “Your eyes have grown used to the light here,” Born shouted back to her. “Look down at yourselves.”

  Logan stared down at her protesting legs, and her breath drew in sharply. She was flickering like a thousand tiny lasers. Legs, feet, torso—all glittered crimson and yellow with light of their own. Life of their own. She held her hands out in front of her and even as she watched, the photonic effluence spread to her arms. Then she could feel a faint, feathery tickling spread across her face, and she brushed frantically at eyes, nostrils, and mouth.

  She fought down the panic when the feathery touch remained no more than that. Born was shining now, too, and Losting. She saw Jan staring at her, his electrified face a mirror of her own. Behind them, Ruumahum and Geeliwan were rippling streaks of light.

  A spine-quaking moan reverberated in the distance behind them. They redoubled their
efforts.

  Actually the climb was not that difficult from a technical standpoint, merely nerve-wracking and arduous. It seemed to Logan that they had been climbing for days instead of hours.

  Once it grew darker for long moments as the luminescent fungi and lichen and mosses grew fewer and fewer. Another dozen meters and the first light from above reached them, feeble, tenuous probing of a far distant sun. Their acquired illumination left them at the same time. Logan slowed long enough to examine her glistening palms. The infinitesimal lights shifted and flowed, then began fading in a cloud from the skin. Tiny, incredibly tiny fliers, living light specks. That single soul-freezing moan had now faded behind them, but it was no wonder they had suddenly become quarry for a while. For the billion glowmites that had slowly gathered to them must have turned the moving forms of man and furcot into fiery silhouettes in the darkness, flickering, brilliant beacons beckoning to photosensitive predators. Another symbiotic marriage, she mused. This world offered hundreds and hundreds of such, in places unexpected and unique.

  They rose into thicker and thicker growth, not fungi now, but the stygian precursors of real plants. The first pale shadows formed by sunlight were like answers to prayers.

  First they climbed the air-roots that dangled from the larger parasitic trees and vines, then those of the lesser epiphytes and bushes. Eventually they emerged into the first leaves—enormous disks barely kissed with green. Some were more than five and six meters wide, designed to catch even the slightest hint of sun from above.

  Fungi still flourished here, but reduced to a friendly, unthreatening size—not the nightmare colossi of the Seventh Level. Gigantic ferns, ivies, and unclassifiable bryophytes still crowded out flowering plants.

  “Please, let’s stop here,” pleaded an exhausted Cohoma, settling down on a wide vine overgrown with a diamond-patterned ivy. “For a minute, just a minute, please.” Logan collapsed alongside him.

  Born cast a questioning glance back at Ruumahum. The furcot was looking back along their precipitous path, long ears cocked forward and down, listening intently. Then he turned. “Not climber, not follow. Danger gone.”

  What seemed to Cohoma only seconds later, Born tested a dangling root. A gratifying tug and he was pulling himself up the helical formation. Losting followed behind, his snuffler clattering against his cape. Cohoma looked at his partner, muttered something else Born would not have understood, and started to follow. Logan sighed, stood up and tried to stretch the kink from her neck. She found it led only to strains in other muscles. She grabbed the root and began climbing. Ruumahum and Geeliwan chose their own path.

  Additional hours of hard climbing carried them into something approaching a foggy twilight, where one finally could see without squinting. This time it was Logan’s turn to announce she could not move a step farther. Born and Losting consulted as the two giants collapsed in a bed of rectangular leaves so thick they looked like little boxes.

  “Very well,” Born told them, “we will stay the night here.”

  “The night?” Cohoma wondered aloud. “But when the silverslith chased us out of that tree, it was already night.”

  “You must learn to read the light,” Born told him. “The sun is dying, not budding. We have traveled the rest of that night and run the following day. There is little enough time left for preparing a fire and shelter.”

  “Wait a minute. How do you know the sun’s going down and not rising?”

  Born waved at the surrounding forest. “One has only to emfol.”

  “Never mind,” Cohoma grunted. “I’ll take your word for it, Born.” His expression changed. “Are you and Losting going to hunt, or are we going to have to masticate that boot material you call dried meat again?”

  Born was unpacking his axe. “No time left to hunt, unless you would prefer fresh meat to shelter?”

  “No thanks,” Logan cut in. “I’d rather be dry—you have enough time?”

  “There are many dead branches and dying leaves here,” Born told them. “And as low as we are in the world, drip water will not penetrate till late at night. Besides, this is still a region unfamiliar to us, this Sixth Level. Some of the forest growth is familiar, but some is not. The same is true of the sounds, and probably of the sound-makers. Not a good time to go exploring, the evening.”

  “We will eat what we brought with us,” Losting said. “Tomorrow we can climb to the Third Level and hunt for fresh game, find fruit and nutmeats. For now, be glad of what you have.”

  “Look,” Cohoma explained, “don’t get the idea I was complaining or anything.” He remembered that they were here due to Born’s recklessness and curiosity, not Losting’s. “The steady change in our diet these past weeks has been kind of a shock to my innards.”

  “Do you think this is a feast for us?” Born reminded him, and he and Losting moved off to search for any of the platterlike green disks they had passed that showed signs of blight or disease.

  Cohoma leaned back in the foliage until the two hunters had disappeared into the green wall. Then he rolled over and watched Logan, who was busy with the compass. “Still on course?”

  She shrugged. “As near as I can tell, Jan. You know, what you said before is true. We have to hit the station dead on. We’ve got three chances to miss it—by going under it, too far right, or too far left.”

  He picked at the leaf they were sitting on. “I wish we hadn’t had to make that surface detour, damnit.”

  “Could hardly be helped. What’s the matter, Jan, didn’t you find it interesting?”

  “Interesting?” He let out a sinister chuckle. “It’s one thing to study alien aberrations from the skimmer in back of a laser cannon. Being eaten alive by an entry in the catalog is the kind of experience I can do without.”

  “We’re going to have a problem soon, you know.”

  “Oh, you’re full of surprises, Kimi, you are.”

  “Seriously. If we’re not going to risk missing the station, we’re going to have to convince our friends of the need of traveling near the treetops. With their sense of distance thrown off by our little raft ride, the sooner we move up in the world, the better.”

  “The station’s built only a little ways into the canopy, true.”

  “And Born and his people,” she continued, “are deathly afraid of the sky. Not as much as they are of the surface, though.” She looked thoughtful. “With that successfully survived now, maybe he’ll be a little less reluctant to move upward. Remember, he doesn’t know the station is located at the top of the First Level. He may have come to half believe we do come from a world other than this one. I think that’s more likely to find place in his imagination than the possibility we might chose to live here in his Upper Hell.”

  Cohoma shook his head. “I still wish I understood what this emfol business is all about. It would seem to be some kind of adaptive worship of the undergrowth.” Logan nodded.

  “Is it surprising they’d look underfoot for succor and supernatural aid? The bottom of their world is hell, and so is the upper. That leaves them neatly sandwiched in between, with no way out. Naturally their development would proceed along restricted, unorthodox lines. It’s too bad, in a way. Born, the chiefs Sand and Joyla, and several others have a kind of nobility about them.”

  Cohoma snorted, rolled over. “The biggest mistake an objective observer on a world like this can make is to romanticize the primitive. And in the case of these people, even that’s not valid. They’re not true primitives, only regressed survivors of people like ourselves.”

  “Tell me, Jan,” she murmured, “is it really regression, or is it progression along an alien path?”

  “Huh? What’s that you said?”

  “Nothing … nothing. I’m tired, that’s all.”

  XI

  THE MEAL OF TOUGH dried fruit and tougher meat was long concluded when the sleepless Logan finally edged over to where Born was sitting. The hunter was resting close to the fire, his back pushed up against the bulk of t
he snoring Ruumahum. Losting was already asleep at the far end of the large, crude lean-to. Wrapped awkwardly in his brown cloak, her partner dozed fitfully.

  There was one important question she wanted to resolve now. “Tell me, Born, do you and your people believe in a god?”

  “A god or gods?” he replied interestedly, at least not offended by the question.

  “No, a single god. One all-powerful, all-seeing intelligence that directs the affairs of the universe, that accounts for and plans everything.”

  “That implies the absence of free will,” Born responded, surprising her as he sometimes did with a very unprimitive reply.

  “Some accept that, too,” she admitted.

  “I accept nothing of it, nor do any I know,” he told her. “There is far too much in this world for any one being to keep account of it all. And you say there are other worlds as complex as this, too?” He smiled. “No, we do not believe such.”

  At least she could go to Hansen with that much, now. It was too bad. Belief in the existence of a single god would imply a fixed set of ethical and moral precepts on which to base certain proposals and regulations. Spiritual anarchy made dealings with primitive people more difficult. One couldn’t call on a higher authority to serve as a binding agency. Well, that was a problem for Hansen and whatever xenosociologists the company chose to send in to deal with Born’s people. She started to turn away, then hesitated. If she could at least plant that seed in Born’s mind …

  “Born, has it occurred to you that we’ve had incredible luck on this journey?”

  “I do not call sleeping in a silverslith’s tree good luck.”

  “But we escaped it, Born. And there’ve been any one of a dozen … no, several dozen times we could all have been killed. Yet we haven’t even suffered a minor injury, beyond the usual nicks and scrapes.”