Quaffer was not faking.
Returning to Ingrid’s side the meerkat leader looked up and let loose a stream of chatter. Immediately the flanks of the gully filled with members of her mob who easily handled walls so sheer that they would have defeated any human’s efforts to climb out. Swarming over Whispr and Ingrid they began chewing carefully and energetically. While a fascinated Ingrid observed the frenetic activity in silence, it moved her companion to be considerably more vocal.
“That’s it … get the ones on my ankles … hey, that’s a finger, not a strap …!”
Within moments they found themselves free to sit up. While the rest of the mob retreated to a safe distance the meerkat who called herself Nyala remained close to Ingrid, watching as the human rubbed her wrists to restore circulation. Blood flowing once again and their nemesis from Orangemund reduced to a harmless mass of dead flesh off to one side, she found herself in solemn conversation with the desert-dwelling mammal. The meerkat’s habit of standing on two legs while propping itself up with its tail gave it the incongruous appearance of a small, sunken-eyed, sharp-snouted primate. Recollection of her elemental zoology reminded her that it was not a primate but a member of the mongoose family. She did not wonder at its ability to speak: only at its comparative fluency.
Plainly, it had been expertly magified.
Animal magification was a long-established analog of human melding. Though it was only supposed to be applied to fully domesticated animals or those that had been specifically bred for the purpose, exotic animorph pets were widely available on the black market. Parrots that could sing as well as speak were all but ubiquitous. Cats that could respond to verbal commands with purring answers were a perennial holiday gift. Even some of the higher reptiles like the iguana responded well to advanced magification. And of course everyone knew of the famous and long-established Ciudad Simiano Reserva in Central America that was home to the descendants of true primates who had been illegally magified so that they possessed actual intelligence.
But the mongoose was no primate. Yet it displayed an intelligence level on a par with several of the old-world monkeys. Ingrid continued to rub at her left wrist.
“Why did you come to our aid? Where have you come from? How—how are you able to speak with intelligence?”
“Many questions.” Leaning back on her tail, Nyala checked the condition of her mob before replying. “Must go slow. Thinking makes—head hurt.”
Whispr let out a grunt. “Never thought I’d have something in common with a weasel.”
“They’re not weasels, Whispr,” an irritated Ingrid corrected him. “They’re mongooses.”
“I’ll tell you what they are.” Sitting on the sand he turned to face the nearest line of dark-eyed saviors. The movement caused a couple of blowguns to be raised part way in his direction. “They’re damn welcome, that’s what they are.” He eyed his left wrist. “I didn’t think anything had teeth sharp enough to bite through a restraint band.” Swiveling on his skinny backside he directed his gaze at the meerkat standing beside Ingrid. “Why did you help us out, furball?”
On the verge of responding, Nyala was momentarily distracted by the appearance of a small beetle that was attempting to make its way between her and the female human. Dropping to all fours she darted directly at it, snapped it up in her jaws, chewed briefly, and swallowed. Neither Ingrid nor Whispr was unsettled by the display. With the advent of worldwide food shortages, insects and their kin had become a major protein source for humankind. In a turnabout from thousands of years of history locust swarms were now looked forward to with eager anticipation by large segments of the planet’s population. Having finished her unexpected snack, the meerkat Nyala explained.
“Come—from Bethlehem.”
Their pint-sized rescuers were not through delivering shocks, Ingrid realized. “I can’t believe that. Bethlehem? All this way? You crossed the whole continent? And if you came from there why do you speak general English and not …?”
Having responded more judiciously to the claim, Whispr had crawled to his pack and extracted his communicator. To conserve its remaining power, in lieu of an energy-hungry projection he opted to study the small screen directly. When he found what he was looking for, he interrupted.
“They may be smart,” he explained, “but they’re not super-weasels. They can’t defy distance. Turns out there’s a Bethlehem in South Africa.” Lifting his eyes from the device he gazed admiringly at the row of curious faces staring back at him. “Still, it must have been a helluva hike from there to here.”
Nyala gestured at her companions. “Some run, some steal ride on machines. Namib our home, ever. Taken as infant cubs were we. Raised and …” She struggled to form the words for which she was searching, finally surrendered and settled for a single one. It was more than adequately expressive.
“Experiment,” she finished helplessly.
Ingrid nodded understandingly. It was just such illegal intelligence-enhancing gengineering that had produced the ancestors of the apes of Ciudad Simiano. Nyala’s limited ability to speak and think proved that such prohibited research was still being carried out. She gestured diplomatically in the direction of the alert and watchful mob that was arraigned around their leader. Bored by the hard-to-understand human chatter, a couple of them were taking tentative nibbles of the dead Quaffer’s fingers.
“But the others can’t talk?”
Proving that she had absorbed more than just minimal speech, Nyala responded with a negative shake of her head. “All can think. Some experiments more effective than others. Some others …” Her little voice trailed away. Ingrid kept very quiet. Then the meerkat straightened. “Others not have successful layright—larynx manip. Only me.” In a gesture Ingrid found inexpressibly touching, the meerkat tilted her head forward until she could place a small black paw between her ears. “One other thing also make difference. Experiment people say I—genius.”
Whispr nodded understandingly. “So because of that this, uh, tribe, they chose you to be their leader?”
“Meerkat mob leader always a female,” she snapped back at him. “I chosen because I best to help others survive. Not because can think far and speak human. This is Namib home. More useful here is meerkat chatter than human growling.”
“I could almost agree with you,” Ingrid murmured fervently. “You still haven’t said why you helped us.”
“Remember me being many times tied. Remember fighting back. Remember being—hurt.” Dropping to all fours Nyala padded over to Ingrid, stood up, and put a paw on the back of the doctor’s hand. It was tiny and soft. Small bright black eyes stared deep into Ingrid’s own. “Tying against will is wrong.” She glanced toward the lump of the freewalker’s body. “Hurt others is wrong. And—is important for species survival dominant females stick together.”
Ingrid found herself starting to choke up. Whispr was encumbered by no such emotional upwelling.
“Dominant fem …?” He shrugged. “Whatever.” Raising a hand, he pointed toward Quaffer’s body. “I’m guessing you punctured the subgrub with about fifty or sixty of those little needles. Even though the biggest of them is only maybe a couple of centimeters long, the freewalker dropped like a friend of mine who once ohdeed on redruzz.”
Slipping her paw off Ingrid’s hand Nyala turned toward the male human. “Needles are Codon spines dipped in scorpion venom. Meerkats eat scorpions. Poison is—strong, but we are immune.”
Whispr was nodding. “Okay. Now I know why he went down. Maybe you could let us have a few of those spines? They’d come in real useful in a close quarter fight and …”
“No!” Nyala dropped to all fours and scurried away from him. “Humans have enough things to hurt already.” She looked back up at Ingrid. “We make mistake in saving you?”
“No—no, you didn’t, and we’re more grateful than we can say.” Ingrid glared across at her companion. Perceptive enough to realize that he had stepped on some very small toes, this time Whi
spr offered no comment. “My friend—it’s just that there are so many dangers out here in the Namib and he likes to be prepared for anything.”
Standing up, Nyala indicated the freewalker’s carcass. “That is worst kind danger anywhere everyplace, and Namib is mostly safe from it. You stay in Namib, you avoid that kind worst danger.”
Ingrid smiled appreciatively. “If that’s an invitation, thank you. But we can’t stay. We have things to do. Places to go.”
“Death to meet,” Whispr muttered, breaking his brief silence.
Ingrid glared at him again, but Nyala was not disturbed. “We all have death to meet. Meerkat by cobra or leopard or jackal or bird. Human by gun or bomb or evil words. I prefer some day be taken by eagle. Is honest death and one creature feed another. When humans kill each other, no animal benefits from it—not even humans. You are wasters of the world.”
Ingrid felt compelled to demur. “I recycle religiously.”
“Other things. Not self. Only artificial doings, to make yourself feel better.” Nyala turned and barked something to her mob. “We will help you. We claim kill.”
As the two travelers looked on, the mob swarmed over Quaffer’s body and bent to work digging into a raised spot on one side of the soft ravine bed. Sand flew high and far enough to force Ingrid and Whispr to turn their heads away and shield their eyes with their hands. Occasional quick glimpses revealed what the meerkats were up to: they were preparing to bury the body.
“This—this isn’t necessary,” Ingrid told Nyala. “The desert scavengers will take care of him.”
“We desert scavengers, too,” the meerkat leader informed her. “We—recycle. Not for meat, but for body’s water. All fluid precious here.”
Ingrid had a vision of a dozen meerkats taking bites out of the sand-covered corpse’s back and lapping up the outflow from the fleshy maniped water sac. The image rendered Nyala and her companions somewhat less cuddly.
“I give you gift of participating. You may share,” the meerkat declared.
“Thanks.” Ingrid smiled wanly. “We have water with us, we know the location of the water holes ahead of us, and in an emergency we have devices that can pull water from the air.”
Nyala stared at her. The energy being displayed by her mob was truly prodigious. Already Quaffer was disappearing beneath a blizzard of expertly flung sand and soil.
“So much smart. So much stupid.” Turning away from the human, the meerkat matron scampered over to the guide’s corpse to supervise the final bits of the ongoing burial.
Normally, Nyala told Ingrid as evening descended, meerkats obtained all the moisture they need from the assortment of snakes, lizards, insects, arachnids, and the occasional small bird they consumed. But when other liquids became accessible they did not hesitate to avail themselves of the source. The stored water that flowed from the maniped back of the dead freewalker must have struck them as surprising as the flash flood did the two human visitors days earlier.
Having sipped from the fleshy storage sac of the nearly buried guide until their bellies bulged, they sprawled themselves out on the sand like so many miniature intoxicated guards. As it grew darker the only sound in the sheltered ravine was the occasional lap-lap of a tiny tongue, like a butterfly tap-dancing, as another of the mob took one last drink of the precious fluid that was of no further use to the intruding desert Meld.
Normally Whispr tried to sleep as close to his companion as she would allow. Not this night. Finding semi-shelter beneath a partial overhang he rolled himself up in his blanket with his back pressed tightly against the rock wall. Though he was loathe to admit it, while the weasels or mongooses or rats or whatever they were had undeniably saved them from Quaffer’s single-minded madness, he was more than a little mistrustful of the sharp-toothed little vampires. Anything that could bite through a restraint band could bite through a neck. The meerkats’ partial demolition and rapid interment of the freewalker had done nothing to mitigate his wariness.
So he lay awake watching for the unheralded approach of small eyes in the darkness. The only advantage their eerie bipedal presence conferred was that he was so busy keeping an eye on them that he forgot all about the possible presence of far more noxious natives such as scorpions and dancing white lady spiders.
Perhaps naïvely, perhaps out of empathy, Ingrid felt no such concerns. In the lonely vastness of the Namib where the only human beings they had encountered since leaving Orangemund were a half-mad hermit and an even madder diamond hunter, the magified meerkats seemed more human than any of their recent contacts. While only the leader of the mob could speak, all of them were imbued with a depth of compassion that arose from having been ripped from their homes and families and transported to a far-off research facility where their brains and nervous systems could be experimented upon for the ultimate amusement of other mammals boasting bigger bodies and smaller souls. Where they made Whispr nervous, they fostered in Ingrid Seastrom only empathy and curiosity. The former was the doctor in her, the latter the scientist.
“What will you do now?” she asked Nyala by the glow of a small portable light. Standing in its shadows, the leader of the mob was picking her teeth with an unpoisoned Codon spine.
“What we have done since returning here from Bethlehem. Raise our families, play, eat, survive. What our kind has always done.”
“You’re not afraid those who were experimenting on you illegally will try to track you down and take you back?”
Nyala let out a rapid chittering sound. It might have been meerkat laughter. “None of us embedded. No trackers planted in us. There was—no need. We could not escape. And if we escape, where we go? Certainly not all way back here. Not all way back—to the Namib.” Her tone grew darker. “It be easier for them collect innocent lives of others to destroy.”
Lying wrapped in her blanket, her head resting on one hand, Ingrid studied the dominant female. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Meerkats not like humans,” Nyala told her. “We fight all time. For territory, for hunting rights, for best burrow-digging places.”
“Sounds like humans to me,” Whispr called out from his chosen sanctuary on the other side of the gully.
Nyala ignored him. “What happen to other meerkats not concern me. Only my mob concern me. My mob and my children. Pass on genes.”
Ingrid considered thoughtfully. “I thought we were more alike than that, you and I.”
“Warm blood not everything.” In the most humanlike pose she had displayed since first putting in an appearance in the ravine, Nyala put her right paw over her heart. “What here is everything.” She looked around. “Not good be caught out at night outside burrow. Too many eaters of meerkat.”
“I’d think the presence of Whispr and myself would make anything smaller than a leopard hesitant to come close.”
“Yes, is true.” Nyala nodded agreement. “Human stink frighten off most everything. No burrows here. I go find patch of warm sand. I wish no moon to you, woman.”
“My name is Ingrid.”
“In-gred. Yes, Ingred. You sleep. Always good have nice sleep before sunrise. Maybe sun bring food, maybe sex, maybe fight. Maybe death.”
THE HEAT WOKE HER. Something was wrong. Constantly adjusting to both the ambient external temperature and that of her body, the biothermosensitive blanket was supposed to keep her comfortable even in extreme conditions. Blinking in the darkness, as her eyes adjusted to the starlight she quickly saw the problem. And smiled to herself. Lying back down she told herself firmly that there was nothing she could do. She would just have to deal with the increased temperature.
Smothered beneath thirty snoring meerkats, she soon fell back into a deep, contented, and very warm sleep.
FOR THE DOCTOR FROM Savannah the following morning dawned crisp, clear, and—except for her mercurial Meld of a companion—alone.
Sitting up fast she first checked the opposite ends of the gulch before letting her gaze travel to the winding rim above. There was
nothing. No piercing jet-black eyes, no quivering nostrils, no inquisitive stares returned her gaze. The only movement came from a speckled lizard poking its head out of a crack in the rocks. In the absence of warming sunshine it swiftly withdrew. Something large and black-winged soared past high overhead, checking to see if the two figures that had been slumbering on the sand were alive or dead. The reality of Ingrid’s movements sent it soaring away disappointed.
Across the way Whispr was also starting to wake up. When he saw her sitting up and intently scanning their surroundings he struggled to shrug off the last vestiges of a sleep that clung to him like old cobwebs.
“What is it, doc? Something the matter?”
“They’re gone.” Disappointment as well as resignation colored her reply. “All of them.”
Slipping free of his blanket Whispr rose to his feet and stretched, a human scarecrow pushing slow fists skyward. “The weasels—sorry, mongooses. They’re gone?” Scratching himself, he performed his own morning inspection of the narrow gulch. All was quiet, still, and exactly as might be expected of such a tranquil scene—provided one ignored the recently raised mound of freshly excavated sand and dirt off to one side. As he began fiddling with his gear he noted that a hopeful Ingrid continued to eye the ravine’s rim.
“You miss ’em, don’t you?”
She nodded. “They were—charming. And that Nyala: certainly the most interesting illegal experiment I ever met.”
He grunted as he pulled out a breakfast envelope and carefully added water from his pak. As the liquid reacted with the catalyst in the packaging material the dehydrated contents rapidly began to heat.