Up on the branch, Tuuvatem groomed the front of her furry muzzle and executed a startlingly humanoid shrug. “Well—maybe half a person.”
The one called Moomadeem emitted a snort of satisfaction. Retreating slightly, it drew back a powerful, clawed foot. Flinx flinched, but the blow wasn’t intended for him. Instead, the sharp claws snicked through the air just above his head, cleanly severing a couple of the numerous creepers engaged in hoisting the plant’s intended prey. Flinx felt himself drop a few centimeters and bounce to a stop.
“That’s it! Keep going, don’t stop now. I am a person! A—visiting person. A person from elsewhere.”
“See?” Moomadeem looked back. “He is a person from a faraway tribe.”
“Makes sense.” Tuuvatem conceded the point grudgingly. “But very stupid.”
Flinx knew they were intelligent because, to his great surprise, he found that both were generating emotions strong enough and developed enough for him to detect. Primitive and childlike they might be, but they were far in advance of anything else he’d encountered on this world.
But how had they come to learn the Commonwealth lingua franca?
Displaying an agility all the more astonishing for the indifference with which it was employed, the solemn skeptic jumped off the upper branch and latched effortlessly onto another vine on the side opposite Moomadeem. With both of them methodically ripping and tearing at the creepers, Flinx found himself jostled about like a preadolescent in a stim-can.
When a pair of tendrils reached for Tuuvatem, Flinx shouted a warning. Showing no reaction, the creature used the claws on its front feet to shred the futile counter-strike. Trailing glutinous sap, shards of shorn creeper spun in ever-increasing lengths down into the green depths.
Finally, the plant responded to the ongoing devastation of its underside by releasing its intended prey. Thus freed, Flinx would have offered his heartfelt thanks except for the fact that he was now plunging downward, grabbing futilely at inadequate lianas and branches as he fell. Pip followed, hissing helplessly.
From above, his lugubrious saviors followed his descent with interest. “Maybe less than half,” declared Tuuvatem. “Can’t climb worth a crap.”
Flinx would have argued with them had he been close enough to overhear. He let out a yelp as he struck something unyielding yet comparatively soft. Dazed, he felt himself being turned upright and gently set on a solid surface. Pip immediately landed on his shoulder and began caressing his cheek with her tongue.
Shaking his head in an attempt to clear it, he turned to confront the creature who had caught him. It was identical in most respects to the two who had freed him from the grasp of the creepers while simultaneously debating his personhood. The most notable difference was in size. This one was many, many times larger than his original rescuers, massing as much as the Kodiak bears that still roamed protected islands in Terra’s chill northern hemisphere.
He noted the same six legs and massive claws, the three eyes and twin tusks, and a slightly higher, more intelligent brow. While the two who had saved him from the carnivorous plant had done effective combat with the inimical growth, this was an altogether more formidable creature.
The three eyes regarded him thoughtfully, the head tilted slightly to its right. While the posture duplicated the quizzical aspect of a curious dog, it was clear this was a far more intelligent animal. For one thing, its perceived emotional state was much more complex.
It snorted, and the exhalation washed over Flinx; warm, moist, and pungent. Pip reacted with spread wings, but Flinx put out a hand to restrain her.
“Take it easy, girl. I think these are friends. Unless I’ve been saved to make a meal.”
“You can cook?” rumbled the huge green shape.
A choice slice of the surreal, Flinx decided. “That’s not what I meant. Are you a friend?”
“Have to be,” grunted the creature. “You a person, I a person. All persons are friends.”
Flinx wasn’t about to argue the point. A crashing from above revealed the two much smaller animals descending toward him with casual abandon. For such burly creatures, their agility was astonishing. He found himself wondering if the smaller pair were the offspring of the adult who’d caught him. They certainly acted like a family group. But a family of what?
Answers were to be forthcoming from still another and even more unexpected source. “Moomadeem, Tuuvatem—behave yourselves! Be nice to the new person.”
“See?” Flinx watched as Moomadeem, clinging to a thick maroon vine, took a playful swipe at its companion. “Told you was a person!”
“Three-quarters,” argued back the other, conceding points only with the greatest reluctance.
A rustling behind him prompted Flinx to turn. When the first of the creatures had spoken to him, he’d believed himself immune to any greater shock. He was wrong.
The woman and two children didn’t so much emerge from the vegetation as silently manifest themselves. They’d been standing just behind him for some time, blending in perfectly with their surroundings as they took the measure of the strange visitor. He’d been concentrating so hard on the emotions of his alien rescuers that he hadn’t sensed the human feelings immediately behind.
Now he adjusted his perception and felt the jar in his mind of familiar yet very different emotions. There was curiosity, concern, and wariness all mixed up together. The emotions of the children were less intense, not as complicated by experience. All three likewise projected that same feeling of internal warmth he had been experiencing since he’d first stepped off the landing site and made his way down into the hylaea.
All three were clad in a minimum of clothing woven from some dark green fiber. Each wore a cloak fashioned of similar material as well as a backpack and belt made from something sturdier and darker. In addition, a green pipe or tube of some kind was strapped to the woman’s back.
She approached him without fear, perhaps due to the presence of the massive animal next to Flinx. It was evident from her call to the two small ones that all six were traveling together. Her next words confirmed it.
“Thank you for catching him, Saalahan. He could have been seriously hurt.”
The creature grunted softly. “Very strange person. Very strange and very clumsy.”
The young woman looked up at Flinx. Though well-proportioned, she was quite short, and the children shorter still. “Why didn’t you catch a vine after Moomadeem and Tuuvatem freed you?”
Flinx knew there was no reason for him to be embarrassed, but he felt himself flushing anyway. “It’s not like I didn’t try.”
She considered this. “I am Teal.” When she extended her hand, he reached out to shake it. Instead, her palm rubbed against his. He memorized the greeting and made no move to inflict the more traditional one on her.
The children crowded closer. “This is Dwell,” she said, indicating the boy. Flinx guessed him to be about ten. “And Kiss.” The girl was perhaps a year younger.
Certainly they came from the same stock. All three had long brown hair and green eyes, a deeper green than Flinx had ever seen. His own were pale by comparison. Their skin was a uniform light coffee color. Most remarkable of all were their feet. The toes were long and flexible, longer even than their fingers.
Except for that and their short stature, they were as human as anyone who walked the streets of Terra or Moth or any of the other humanx-colonized worlds. That they or their forbears had originated on one of those worlds he didn’t doubt for a moment. Either that or he was witness to the most extraordinary instance of convergent evolution on record.
Besides, there was their use of familiar and easily understandable symbospeech, even if their accent was sharp enough to qualify as archaic.
“What are these?” He gestured back at the enormous green shape that had saved him from an uncomfortable landing. It blinked at him once before turning away.
The woman gawked at him. “You mean you don’t know? Saalahan is a furcot, of cou
rse. My furcot.”
“Let me guess. The others belong to your children.”
“Belong?” Her brow furrowed. “Furcots don’t belong to people any more than people belong to furcots. At least, not in the way you are meaning. Moomadeem is Dwell’s furcot, and Kiss is Tuuvatem’s person.”
“Fur coat?” said Flinx.
“Furcot.” She leaned to look past him. “Where is yours?”
“Mine? I don’t have one.”
Tuuvatem was sniffing his leg. “Who ever heard of a person without a furcot?”
Flinx didn’t feel deprived. “I have Pip.” He caressed the flying snake as it slithered forward on his shoulder, straining for a better look.
The two children tensed. Apparently his winged pet and companion bore a resemblance to something local and dangerous. Considering some of the life forms he’d encountered in the short time he’d been on this world, he could only sympathize with their caution.
“She’s not a furcot,” he told them, “but she is my friend. It’s all right; she won’t hurt you.”
“She?” Teal rose on tiptoes to see better.
“Yes. Like you and Kiss and Saalahan.”
“Like Kiss and I,” she corrected him. “Saalahan is not female.”
“Oh. He’s the father of the other two, then.”
“Saalahan is not male, either.”
Flinx made no effort to hide his confusion. “I don’t understand. Then what is—it?”
“I told you. Saalahan is a furcot.” And that was all the explanation he could get out of her. The creature’s sex organs, assuming it had any, were not readily in evidence, and Flinx wasn’t about to venture any requests that might be construed as impolite. Not after he’d seen what those claws could do. It was a quandary that could be resolved later.
“You should know that,” the woman told him. “Can’t you emfol them?”
“Emfol? I don’t know that word.”
Teal’s look was pitying. “You are a strange person indeed. Any person should be able to emfol their furcot along with everything else.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” He didn’t see any harm in revealing a little of himself to these abandoned, isolated people. “I can sense what Pip is feeling and she can do the same to me. Is that kind of what your relationship to your furcots is like?” He didn’t say anything about being able to sense her emotions or those of her children.
“Emfoling is different.” She shook her head slowly, registering bafflement. “How different you are.”
Odd little lady Teal, he thought, you don’t know the half of it.
“And ignorant.” Tuuvatem stalked fearlessly up to Flinx. “Stepped right into a mistyr, he did. And that after almost sticking his arm in a spiralizer.”
Flinx thought back to the breathtakingly beautiful flower with the razor-edged petals. “You were watching me then?”
“Been watching you long time,” the furcot informed him. “Trying to decide what you were.”
“I’m human. A person,” he corrected himself. “Just like Teal and her children. They are your children?” Teal nodded and smiled.
He extended his open palm. Dwell ignored it, while his sister put a finger to her lips and gazed up at him in wonder.
“You’re awful tall,” the boy proclaimed.
“Am I?”
“Yes,” put in Teal. “Very.” Quite unexpectedly, her eyes grew wide and she retreated several steps, pulling the children with her. Flinx tensed immediately, until it finally struck him that he was the source of her sudden distress.
“What is it, what’s the matter?”
“Skyperson. You are a skyperson, from beyond the Upper Hell!”
A low growl rose from the giant furcot behind him. It was echoed by Tuuvatem and Moomadeem. Responding to the growing emotional upheaval, Pip rose from Flinx’s shoulder to interpose herself between the big carnivore and her master. Her wings buzzed furiously.
Instinctively he reached toward the needler holstered at his waist—and hesitated. The emotions he was sensing were fear and uncertainty, not anger.
“It’s true that I’m not from this world,” he confessed, “that I’m from up there.” He stabbed a finger in the direction of the distant sky. “Why does that frighten you? I mean you no harm, and I owe you my life.”
She relaxed somewhat, still watching him guardedly and keeping the children behind her. “There is a well-known tale oft told around the night fires. Of tall persons with different-colored hair and eyes and stunted feet who came among us long ago. But—you have the right eyes.”
“Go on,” he encouraged her.
“They came to hurt the forest, and none of them could emfol. Like you.”
“I may be wrong about that,” he replied. “I think I can do a little of this emfoling. We may just be using different words to describe the same thing. What happened to these skypeople who looked like me?” Evidently he had been preceded here, and if Teal’s account was to be believed, some time ago.
“They died,” she replied simply. “It was inevitable. They hurt the forest and the forest hurt back. They wanted the persons to help them, and of course the persons helped the forest instead.”
“How did these skypeople get here? Do you know?”
“The story says they fell from the Upper Hell in big pieces of metal. They brought more metal with them.” She pointed into the trees. “They fell in that part of the world.”
Flinx checked a sensor on his service belt. He was not surprised to find that both it and Teal were pointing in the direction of the metallic anomaly the Teacher had detected from orbit. So the anomaly that had drawn him to this location was an old shuttlecraft—or something more.
“How long ago did this happen?”
“The story does not say exactly. Several generations, at least. It was when there was only one tribe of persons. Now there are six. The Tallflower, the Sinvin, the Calacall, the Firsthome, the Seconds, and the Redflitter. We are Tallflower.”
Flinx searched for an analogy. “Since there are six tribes here, it shouldn’t be difficult for you to grasp the idea of there being many tribes of skypeople. Actually, there are hundreds.”
“Hundreds!” Kiss’s eyes grew even wider.
“Yes.” He smiled down at her. “And I come from a completely different tribe than the one that came here so long ago to cause trouble. In fact, I know less about them than you do.” He didn’t know that for a fact, but felt it was a reasonable enough assumption.
To his surprise, it was the big furcot who responded. He still wasn’t used to having the animals participate in the conversation.
“I think he may speak truth.” Saalahan snorted warningly at Pip, who darted past the massive skull. The furcot followed the warning by taking an irritated swipe at the minidrag, missing her completely.
“That’s enough,” Teal admonished the creature.
“Pip, get over here!” Making a reluctant landing on her master’s shoulder, the minidrag fixed the furcot with a wary eye.
Saalahan turned and, in a diffident demonstration of effortless power, leaped easily across to the next large branch. Moomadeem and Tuuvatem elected to remain with the humans.
“The cubs don’t go with their mother?” Flinx inquired.
“Moomadeem and Tuuvatem aren’t Saalahan’s cubs,” Teal corrected him.
He knew he was overlooking something vital. “They’re adopted, then?”
Dwell looked at his mother. “This man speaks strangely. And he sounds funny, too.”
Teal tried to explain. “Furcots don’t have children.”
Flinx blinked. “Then where do they come from?”
She continued as if lecturing an infant on the most obvious thing in the world. “When a person is born, their furcot comes to them. Person and furcot are always tied—here.” She put a hand over her heart. “What about your snake? Where did she come from?”
“She came—” He stopped, remembering. To this day he wasn’t sur
e if he’d found the minidrag or she’d found him. But at least he knew she’d been born. He’d seen her give birth himself.
“Never mind,” he told the woman. “You can explain it to me later.”
Dwell eyed Pip curiously and she returned the boy’s stare. “Does everyone in your tribe have one of those?”
“No. Among my tribe, Pip and I are unique.”
“It is good to be unique,” noted Teal approvingly. “You are fortunate—except that you have no furcot.” Again she shook her head. “It is a terrible thing for a person to be without a furcot. I cannot imagine how one would live.”
Flinx grinned as he nuzzled the back of Pip’s head with a fingertip. “We manage.”
“You say you are not of the tribe of skypersons that came before,” Teal pressed him. “Yet if you can emfol, how is it that you stepped into the mistyr?”
“I’m new to this place,” he replied. “I’ve only been here a little while.”
“That’s plain enough to see,” observed Dwell sardonically as he picked at a nearby branch. He had exposed a cavity in which tiny bright red creatures dashed about on pink legs. They hopped around energetically, refusing to abandon their little celluloid caldera as the boy teased them with a twig.
“You see, Mother? He can’t help us.” His eyes darted about rapidly. “We’ve been too long out in the open.”
“Dwell is right.” Moomadeem glanced upward with all three eyes. “Still very close to Hell.”
“You speak of the Upper Hell.” Flinx followed the antics of the tiny red hoppers with interest. “Does that mean there’s a Lower Hell?”
Teal sighed. “You are truly ignorant.”
“Thank you,” he replied cheerfully.
“There are seven levels to the world. Persons choose to live on the third. At the top is the Upper Hell, at the bottom the Lower. Very few persons have gone there and returned. More have visited the Upper, but it is nearly as dangerous. There are sky-devils and more.”
“If it’s so dangerous this near to open sky,” he asked, “then what are you doing here?”
“Trying to find a bearing,” she responded. “We are in bad trouble . . .”