Trying desperately to think of something clever to say by way of parting, she failed miserably. “Be careful out there, Seth. Some of the more radical Sakuntala have crossed the line and attacked our people.”
He was at the door. “Thanks for the thought, good-looking, but don’t worry. I’m not concerned about the Sakuntala. They won’t bother me.”
Then he was gone, the sharp perfume of the stim stick and of his body lingering teasingly in the room.
She found that she was breathing hard, for no discernible reason. Speaking softly, she opened a drawer and drew herself a carbonate drink. The feel of the cold liquid sliding down her throat helped to shock her back to reality.
Damn the man! He was far too attractive. Indecently so. The way he looked through her eyes instead of into them, the play of muscles beneath his clothing, that damnable cocksure grin of his, as if he knew everything you were thinking—it was unfair! She knew she ought to ban him from her office. Every time he showed up, she told herself it would be the last time. There had been a lot of last times.
Pandusky needed something. Forcing away thoughts of Sethwyn Case, she admitted her assistant. She listened intently to everything he had to say, commenting where appropriate, authorizing where necessary. Anyone observing the discussion would have believed that her attention was focused entirely on her assistant and the matter at hand.
Even if she did glance more than seemed reasonable at one particular corner of her desk.
15
The lingering stink of vatulalilu sap stayed with them as they made camp in a jam of floating fallen logs on the other side of the river. It would not wash off even with the aid of the constant rain. The enduring smell didn’t seem to faze the by now acclimated Hasa or trouble Jemunu-jah, but Masurathoo felt as if he would never be clean again.
The jackstraw jumble of rotting wood made for uncertain footing. One log would provide a solid base, while the one jammed up alongside it could be composed entirely of disintegrating punk shot through with millions of mycelium. Hasa found this out the hard way when one foot went completely through what appeared to be an unyielding bouloutu trunk and plunged him into the soupy water up to his waist. It was while they were pulling him out, cursing and complaining, that Jemunu-jah first heard the humming. Leaving Masurathoo to help the fuming human the rest of the way, the tall Sakuntala turned to the south, both ears alert and aimed in the direction of the rising noise.
“What is it?” Upset with himself for having taken the misstep, Hasa was wiping fragments of decomposing wood from his rain-slicked lower extremities. After first trying to help, Masurathoo backed off and left the human to his own devices. Those flat, many-fingered hands were swinging a little too wildly for him to get close enough to assist without risking a swipe across his own face.
Jemunu-jah flicked his tongue backward and fluttered the tip. The human knew enough of Sakuntala tongue language to recognize the request for silence. Neither he nor Masurathoo had to repeat the query, because the humming soon grew loud enough so that they could hear it for themselves.
To Hasa, it sounded like a chorus of male tenors warming up for a Magnificat. Masurathoo found it alien but not surprising. The depths of the Viisiiviisii were as full of new sounds as they were of new sights.
By the time the drifting shapes finally came into view, emerging out of the rain, their deep-throated purring was louder than anything else in the forest. Jemunu-jah’s eyes grew almost as wide as a Deyzara’s.
“Mokusinga!” he yelped. Turning, he leapt into a gap between several trees and began frantically ripping at what appeared to be some black-striped reeds that were growing out of the water. “Hurry, quickly!”
Masurathoo joined the Sakuntala without thinking. When in the deep varzea, it was always best to do so. But Hasa hesitated, standing his ground on an unwavering log. He had just struggled up out of the organic gumbo underlying the logjam and was in no hurry to submerge himself all over again.
Studying the approaching mokusinga, a species new to him, he failed to see anything sufficiently intimidating to spook someone like Jemunu-jah. Certainly they were not as ferocious-looking as a nougusm or casoko. In fact, he decided as he unholstered his pistol, they looked downright benign. He felt something striking at his backside through the material of the rain cape. Turning, he saw that the Sakuntala was repeatedly tapping him with the tip of his tongue in order to get his attention.
“Hurry, Hasa! Come into the water and do as I am.” Demonstrating, he placed one end of a hollow reed to his lips and began to breathe through it. Floating alongside him, Masurathoo did not need to make use of a reed. The breathing trunk on the top of his head would allow him to respirate freely while completely submerged.
Frowning, Hasa took another look at the oncoming mokusinga. The closest was a hovering head-sized ball of glistening winged cilia. Near the front he could make out a semblance of a face buried within: several eyes, a dark round spot that might be a mouth, nothing resembling nostrils. Half a dozen wings kept each of the unlikely and somewhat preposterous-looking quintet aloft. They flew slowly, picking a careful path through the trees, weighed down by the constant rain.
“Don’t look like much to me.” Drawing his pistol, he raised the muzzle and took aim at the nearest flyer. At the same time, something wrapped several times around his ankles and brought him crashing to the surface of the log. Rolling fast, he aimed his weapon at the source of the upset.
Jemunu-jah gazed unflinchingly down the barrel as he withdrew his tongue from the human’s legs. “Stay there and die, then.” With that, Jemunu-jah ducked down under the surface. All that was visible was the single reed through which he was respirating and, nearby, a motionless Deyzaran breathing trunk.
Idiot aborigine, Hasa thought as he sat up. He was used to defending himself, not hiding in the muck. As he started to rise, he caught sight of the tree directly behind him. In addition to its own lower branches it now sported perhaps fifty finger-length shimmering spines. Embedded firmly in the wood, they sparkled like spines shaved from a crystalline cactus. Whirling, half crouching on the log, he confronted the approaching mokusinga. They continued to advance slowly. They didn’t have to move fast, he saw, because they weren’t covered with cilia. They were covered with needles.
As the pair nearest him began to swell anew, filling their bodies with the air they utilized to propel the thousands of spines that covered their bodies, he spun and dived for the watery gap that concealed his friends. Landing with an awkward splash, he tore a pair of reeds off at the waterline, took a deep breath, and ducked under the surface. Behind him, an irregular black splotch appeared on the log on which he had been standing. It had been comprehensively needled. The black hole spread rapidly, eating its way into the thick bole. When it reached the heartwood, it spread explosively. By the time the mokusinga had arrived at the spot where the three travelers were submerged, the tree behind them was dead from crown to roots, eaten away from the inside out by the caustic liquid contained within the forcefully flung spines.
Peering up through the dim water while continuously wiping swirling organic debris from his eyes, Hasa could just make out the ominous hovering shapes of the mokusinga. Exhibiting a menacing awareness, the threatening spheres showed no inclination to move from where they had paused. Next to him, Jemunu-jah was gesturing with one hand while securing his breathing reed with the other. Hasa could only shake his head in response. He had no idea what the Sakuntala was trying to tell him. And it was hard work trying to suck enough air down through the thin reed to keep his lungs going.
How long would the mokusinga linger overhead? he found himself wondering. How hungry were they? Were they clever enough to make the connection between their submerged prey and the couple of reeds and one trunk that poked above the surface? If so, what could they do about it? Could their air-propelled spines be driven with enough thrust to skewer quarry hiding in the water?
A sudden thought made Hasa wonder if, after all, it was
not possible to perspire while underwater. All the lurking mokusinga had to do, he realized, was drop down far enough to rest their bulk on top of the reed through which he was breathing in order to force him to the surface. He began searching his immediate surroundings, looking desperately for a better hiding place beneath a semisubmerged log or clump of weeds. In water rich with decaying vegetation it was difficult to see more than a meter in any direction.
Abruptly he felt something inside his mouth. Small and with multiple legs, it either had been living inside the reed when he had ripped it from its stalk or else had crawled down from outside after the stem had been plucked. Now whatever it was, was crawling around inside him.
Would it bite? Was it poisonous? The itching from the moving legs was quickly becoming unbearable. If the tiny visitor started down his throat, he would choke and have to shoot to the surface. Where the mokusinga would be waiting for him. The tickling and scratching of tiny feet inside his mouth was driving him crazy. He twisted, he wriggled his lower jaw back and forth, he tried to think of something, anything, he could do to rid himself of the unbearable itching, tickling sensation inside his mouth, but it was no use. He was going to have to—
Something struck the water directly in front of him. Startled, he drew back, found himself tangled up with the hysterical Masurathoo. But the mokusinga that had landed in front of him did not attack. It just bobbed gently in the water for a moment as its lightweight body settled in place.
A glance upward showed that the other patrolling mokusinga were no longer hovering threateningly overhead. Hesitantly Hasa rose upward. As soon as he broke the surface he spit out something small, green, and confused. While it raced speedily away, relieved to be free of the prison of his mouth, he sucked in a long, delicious draught of warm rain and fresh air. The mokusinga were still there, but they were no longer airborne. Except for the one that had landed in the water in front of him, they were all lying on the punky logs of the jam, deflating slowly, their ominous humming stilled.
Jemunu-jah was climbing out of the water. Cautiously he drew near a pair of the stranded needle throwers. They showed no reaction to his approach. Hasa noted that the Sakuntala was careful not to make physical contact with the quiescent creatures.
“I think they dead,” Jemunu-jah announced in amazement. “It safe to come out.”
Hasa joined him in studying the unmoving predators. Coughing and snapping water away from his trunks, Masurathoo was slow to emerge from the turgid water’s protective embrace.
The bioprospector leaned as close to one of the motionless organisms as he dared. There were no visible wounds on any of the bodies, no signs of injury. Yet they were not sleeping, had not suddenly opted for instant estivation as opposed to trying to kill the three people they had chased into the water. They were manifestly deceased.
“I don’t get it,” he muttered. “I can see maybe one of them just dropping dead. But six? Simultaneously?”
It was Masurathoo, fumbling with his badly torn rain gear, who pointed out the powder. “Look there, my friends. No, not by the spines, please. At the area around the mouth.”
His companions did as they were instructed. A dark maroon residue clung to the outer edges of the round suckerlike oral cavity. Inspecting the others, they found the same substance lining every mouth.
Jemunu-jah looked around uneasily, his ears in constant motion, his tongue ball shifting nervously from one cheek to the other. “Something kill them while they are waiting to kill us. But whatever it was, it not eat them.”
“Yet.” An equally uneasy Hasa found himself looking from left to right, turning a slow circle to closely search their immediate surroundings. Forest noises filtered through the rain. Small brightly colored shapes flitted here and there among the branches and the raindrops. After assuring himself that nothing massive and threatening was moving through the varzea nearby, he turned his attention back to the inert forms of the mysteriously deceased mokusinga.
They were surrounded by the usual phantasmagoria of plants, molds, rusts, and fungi. At the base of a twisted trunk, a carnivorous blue plate fungi snapped shut over a crawling tinworm. That was the only evidence of nonmotile predation occurring in their immediate vicinity. Nothing was emerging, either rapidly or slowly, to consume the bodies of the dead mokusinga except for a few dirty whitish-yellow filaments of some opportunistic subsurface fungi.
There it was again, he thought. That feeling that something was watching them. Was it what had exterminated the mokusinga? If so, he had decidedly mixed feelings about making its acquaintance.
But whatever it was, it had chosen to kill the mokusinga and then ignore them. That suggested either extraordinary good luck on the part of the greatly relieved travelers or something even more improbable and fantastic.
Choice.
Why would anything in the Viisiiviisii choose to slay mokusinga and ignore them? Perhaps, he mused, because he and his companions were not the natural prey of whatever had done the killing? Or maybe they had nothing to do with it. Maybe whatever had slain the spine-armed flyers had only been reacting defensively, protecting itself from a perceived threat. That conjecture made a lot more sense. He voiced his opinion to his companions.
“Forest spirits,” muttered Jemunu-jah as he took a drink from his rainwater collector, using his strong tongue to draw the pouch up to his mouth.
“I say that it does not matter.” Masurathoo’s trunks both bobbed nervously. The Deyzara was still recovering from the narrowness of their escape. “What is important is that we are still alive and unharmed.” He glanced apprehensively at the enfolding forest. “Whatever killed the mokusinga may still be here, either rooted in place or lurking about. All the more reason for us to be on our way.”
“Nice to hear you say that for a change.” Hasa looked briefly to the east before choosing a likely course and starting off. His companions followed, Masurathoo taking middle position as always.
Behind them, the white tendrils of decomposing forest fungi continued with their work, entering the bodies of the dead.
Two days later the travelers were far more tired. Since they had left the place where they had encountered the mokusinga it had rained especially hard. In addition to obstructing their vision, the severe downpour rendered the already sodden surfaces underfoot even more treacherous than usual. The slippery footing did not inconvenience Jemunu-jah, who progressed as much by the use of his long arms and six-digited hands as by his feet, but it slowed human and Deyzara considerably.
The slower they advanced, the more discouraged they became. Furthermore, despite repeated checks of the global positioning gear that was included with the survival packs they carried, neither Hasa nor Jemunu-jah was even sure they were still traveling in the right direction.
“We should have reached the village by now.” Hasa sat beneath the shade of an enormous spray of striped gray shelf fungi. Every time he shifted his backside, a small puff of spores rose prematurely into the air, only to be washed away as they were knocked down by the rain. A distant burst of uncommon thunder rolled through the varzea, and Jemunu-jah flinched involuntarily.
“I understand.” Masurathoo had folded himself into the darkest, driest corner of their temporary mycorrhizal refuge. “Forest spirits. There is most assuredly no need to be afraid.”
“I not afraid.” Jemunu-jah glared at the Deyzara. “Childhood stories are always with one.” He looked over at the human. “What about you, Hasa? You have no cubling fears of darkness and sky shouting?”
Hasa shrugged, staring moodily out at the downpour. “Natural phenomena never scared me. I’ve always found my own kind much more frightening. Especially when you’re a kid.”
Though he found this line of inquiry insightful and interesting, something in the human’s voice told Jemunu-jah it would be best not to pursue it, even under more climactically favorable circumstances. They sat in silence beneath their fungoid shelter, watching the rain.
By the morning of the next day
the deluge had finally slackened, giving way to the more customary steady drizzle. As they were packing up their gear, wordless with fatigue, Hasa noticed a small fist-sized herbivore attacking a clump of mushroomlike basidiocarps growing on a fallen log just outside their resting place. The fruiting bodies were very distinctive, with handsome three-sided purple caps that shaded to dark red basidia underneath. Using two sets of blunt projecting teeth, the herbivore rose up on stumpy hind legs and began to chew into the thick body of the cap.
Protruding from the decaying wood close to the stem of the fruiting body were several jet-black tendrils. As the small herbivore gnawed deeper into the basidiocarp, one of these tendrils, shivering slightly, rose upward. Its tip quivering, it sprayed something in the direction of the plant eater. The intruder promptly shuddered, gave several violent spasms, leapt into the air, and landed on its side. In a moment, all ten legs had ceased kicking.
Interesting defense mechanism, Hasa mused as he fastened his service belt around his waist and prepared to don his rain cape. Interesting, but not surprising. The plant life of the Viisiiviisii had evolved hundreds of ways of defending itself, from protective mimicry, to concentrating toxins in leaves and fruiting bodies, to throwing caustic spines and other more active means of repulsing would-be browsers. There was nothing remarkable about the little drama he had just witnessed. The black tendrils would likely be defensive rhizomorphs, specialized bodies that in this instance were designed to defend the spore-holding basidiocarps. Both were part of the same largely hidden underground life-form.
Jemunu-jah was already dressed and ready to be on their way. Though visibly discouraged with their lack of progress, Masurathoo was not about to give up and lie down in the moss and muck. They were both waiting for him.