She scrambled back along the branch under cover of the leaves, got to her feet as soon as she reached more solid support, and retreated hurriedly into the forest. In their first campaign the Parahuans had brought a formidable creature along with them which took part effectively in the fighting. It was animalic in behavior, though there was some evidence that it was a gigantic adaptation of the Parahuan life form. Reportedly it had sharp senses, was equally agile on land and in water, and very difficult to stop with ordinary weapons.
What she’d seen out in the lagoon just now was one of those creatures—a Parahuan tarm.
Eyes shifting quickly about as she moved on, she paused here and there for an instant. Her knife reached out, slashed stem, seed pod, blossom, fleshy leaf, chunky tentacle from one or another familiar tacapu or plant form. They bled tinted dust, tinted sap, quickly turning to streaks and blots of green, shadow blue, cinnamon, chocolate brown, gray and white on Nile’s body, arms, legs, face, hair, equipment. Breaking outline, blending form into background . . . a trick used in stalking floatwood species wary and keen-sighted enough to avoid undisguised human hunters.
It might not be sufficient disguise now. Humans had a variety of life detection instruments. No doubt, Parahuans had them. For many such devices, one human being in the floatwood became simply one life form blurred among many life forms. But the distinctive human scent remained, and sharp senses read it as well as instruments. She could take care of that presently. To do it, she’d have to get back to the area of Ticos’ laboratory . . .
Her mind halted a moment. Ticos’ laboratory! Nile made a sound of muted fury. If he’d left a clue for her anywhere, given any time to do it, he’d left it there! She’d felt she was overlooking something. She’d hesitated. If she hadn’t been in partial shock because of what she’d come upon—
She returned along the route she’d followed from the laboratory to the lagoon, staying some thirty feet above what should be her actual trail.
And presently: a special minor area of agitation in the mass of wind-shaken growth below and ahead. A shimmer of blue-gray.
Nile sank smoothly to the floatwood branch she was crossing, flattened herself against it, then carefully shifted position enough to let her peer down.
The Parahuan was coming out of a thicket beneath her, following another branch. He crept along on all fours. It looked awkward, but his motion was fairly rapid and showed no uncertainty. He came to a parallel bough, paused, took a short hop over to it, went on. He seemed indifferent to the fact that he was several hundred feet above the sea. So they were capable climbers. As he reached a curtain of secondary growth, another Parahuan appeared, trailing the leader by twenty-five feet, and vanished behind him. Nile checked two minutes off on her watch. No more aliens had showed up—the pair seemed to be working alone. She went up twenty feet, hurried back in the direction of the lagoon.
It had startled her that they’d been able to pick up her trail so promptly in this vast green warren. The odds seemed all against that, but there was no question that they were following it. Both carried guns, heavy-looking thick-barreled devices fastened to the web of straps about their trunks. The one in the lead had a curved box attached to the top of his head, a number of tubes projecting from its sides and twisting about in the air with a suggestion of sentient searching. The second Parahuan carried a much smaller instrument directly above the vocal slit in the upper part of his head. That probably was a communicator.
Nile dropped back down, found a place to wait. There’d been a practical detail in the information contained in the old war records—the lower half of a Parahuan’s head was the best point to aim at to put them out of action quickly. Second choice was the lower torso.
The leading Parahuan came into sight again on a lower branch, edging out of a wind-tossed cluster of great leaves she’d been watching. He paused there, staring about and ahead. Nile held her breath, wondering what signals he was getting from his tracking instrument, until he started forward along the branch. She let him pass below. Parahuan Number Two showed up punctually in turn. As he came within twenty-five feet, Nile sighted along the UW, squeezed the trigger carefully. The big body turned sideways, rolled off the branch without a sound.
Nile twisted left, aimed again. The leader had noticed nothing. Moments later he, too, plunged down into the waving vegetation and was gone.
The buti was an unremarkable shrublike growth in the inhis category, with lacy fronds and thick woody stems, living as a semiparasite on the floatwood. Its stems were hollow, and the creamy sap they oozed when cut had the quality of nullifying a wide variety of smells, though it had no pronounced odor of its own. Specifically, in this case, it nullified the scents of a human body. When floatwood was hunted over enough to make some of its harvestible life shy of human visitors, anointing oneself with buti sap, if it was obtainable, was a common move among experienced collectors.
The buti stand Nile had remembered from earlier visits was not much more than a hundred yards from Ticos’ laboratory, and somewhat above it. She let herself drop thirty feet into the center of the shrubs against the antigrav effect of the belt, then spent several minutes meticulously adding a coating of the sap to her color camouflage and to the various articles of her equipment. Her nerves were on edge; she did not like at all being in the immediate vicinity of the laboratory. They might know she’d been here before—the laboratory in fact was likely to be the point where their tracking instrument had picked up the fresh human trail and started them in pursuit. There might be a swarm of the creatures not far away at the moment.
But the job with the buti couldn’t be hurried too much. Nile finished it at last, cut off a two-foot section of the stem, seared its ends shut with the UW and added it to the items already attached to her climb-belt. Salt water dissolved the sap; and she should have swimming to do presently. Her scent trail ended now thirty feet above the buti shrubs. If they followed it that far and could not pick it up again, they might conclude she’d lost her footing and fallen through the forest into the ocean. At any rate, she’d become as nearly indectable as she could be.
She moved out of the stand, approached the laboratory with quick caution, conscious of a growing urgency to be out of this area. When she reached the platform, nothing inside changed. The interior looked undisturbed; she could make out no marks of webbed Parahuan feet on the floor.
She came in quietly, gun held out before her, eyes shifting about. The rigid human exhibits watched her walk past towards Ticos’ former work area. As she went by the tiny hooded idol, dreaming its dreams on the shelf, she glanced over at it. Two thoughts flashed simultaneously into her mind.
She was in abrupt motion almost before she became fully conscious of them—spinning around towards the shelf, dropping the gun. An instant later she had whipped up both ends of the leathery cloth on which the Parahuan mannikin sat, brought them together with a twist over the hooded head, gripped them hard in both hands and swept the bundled figure from the shelf.
By then there was a great deal of activity inside the cloth, a furious jerking and twisting, carried out with such amazing vigor that it nearly tore the cloth from her hands. But she swung the bundle up, slammed it down hard against the floor, brought it up, slammed it down again. The bundle stopped jerking. Nile scooped up her gun, spilled the inert thing inside the cloth out on the floor. She stood gasping and shaking in fright and hate, staring down at it.
It had shifted its position on the shelf since she’d seen it last. Not much; by perhaps three or four inches. As her mind recorded the fact, memory brought up another datum from the old records. Some rescued human prisoners reported that the Parahuan leaders were dwarfed creatures by comparison with their fellows.
She recalled no mention of their being dwarfed to this improbable extent. But if she hadn’t killed it, she might have a useful captive.
She dropped to her knees, pulled off the hood. Something attached to the thing’s chest—a flat dark disk with studs in it, meta
llic or plastic. Nile gripped the disk in her fingers, tugged, then slid the point of her knife in sideways between the device and the Parahuan’s body, pried upward. There was a momentary resistance. Then four prongs in the underside of the instrument pulled suckingly out of the wrinkled skin. A communicator? She turned it over quickly in her hand. That was how the first trackers had known how to start on her trail. And it probably had been used again as she appeared in the entrance a minute ago, to call other searchers back to the laboratory—
She opened the kit pouch with flying fingers. There was stuff in there ordinarily used to secure some vigorously active floatwood specimen which was wanted alive—and it should hold this specimen. She pulled out flat strips of tanglecord, taped the Parahuan’s small—wiry arms to the dumpy body, taped the webbed feet together, sealed the narrow vocal orifice above the eyes with a section of cord. She turned the midget quickly around, looking it over for other trick devices. Nothing but a few dozen brightly colored small jewels set in the wrinkled top of the head in what might be a symbol of rank or a decorative pattern. She bundled the captive back into the cloth, knotted the ends of the cloth together, spent another dragging minute nicking the buti stem and giving the bundle the sap treatment.
She left the bundle on the floor, went over to the section of Ticos’ work area and found his message to her almost at once, scrawled blandly and openly among the many notations that decorated the wall:
Nile note. The sestran stand should be carefully studied.
Now out of here—fast!
She nearly, very nearly, was not fast enough. She pitched the communicator, wrapped in the midget’s cloak, off the laboratory platform as she came out on it. The packaged midget himself rode her back, secured by a tanglecord harness. It was a minor nuisance; in the antigrav field his weight was nothing. Less than a hundred yards from the laboratory, she ducked quickly into cover.
It was a good dense thicket. From where she was crouched she could see only a limited section of the forest above. She watched that, waited for indications of anything approaching the thicket itself. A group of three Parahuans moved presently through the area above the thicket—then two more.
After that, Parahuans were simply around for a while. It was a large search party, congregating now on the laboratory. Nile kept on the move herself as much as she could, edging in the opposite direction. Most of them were climbing up from below, so she couldn’t simply drop down through the forest to get out of their way. They came close enough so that she heard their voices for the first time: an oddly mellow modulated hooting, interspersed with hissing sounds. Two swarmed up the line of a grapple gun a dozen feet from her. Then she saw none for a while. By that time she had worked the green blanket of an intermediate forest canopy between herself and the main body of the searchers. She decided she was clear of them and began to climb more quickly.
Something crashed down from the upper levels ahead—a great broken branch, accompanied by assorted litter torn loose in its descent. Nile looked up, and her mind went bright with terror. She took one slow step to the side, thumbed the antigrav up high. Nothing beneath her feet now . . . she was falling limply, bonelessly, turning over slowly, towards the shelter of the canopy below. No human motions. No voluntary motions of any kind. Be a leaf, an undefinably colored uninteresting small dead dropping part of the forest. She reached the canopy, settled through it, went drifting down until she touched a solid branch and motion stopped. She huddled there, clutching the growth on either side of her. Fear still stormed along her nerves.
The tarm had been like the tip of a fog bank swirling into sight around a floatwood bole above her. It was rushing by overhead as she dropped, so close that it seemed almost impossible she’d remained unnoticed—close enough, she thought, for one of its pale tendrils to have reached down and plucked her from the air. But it had moved on. She listened to the receding sounds of its passage through the forest long enough to make sure it wasn’t returning, then set off hastily, still shaking. She wasn’t nearly as far from the laboratory as she should be before the search fanned out again. They must have discovered by now that their midget was missing. Nile told herself they were least likely to come back to an area already hunted over by the tarm.
She might have been right. Ten minutes passed without further signs of her pursuers, and her nerves steadied again. If they’d shifted to the eastern areas of the forest, it could keep them futilely occupied until nightfall. Flashes of fading sunlight began to reach her. She wasn’t far now from the forest roof on the seaward side and should not be far from the sestran stand to which Ticos Cay’s note had directed her. Eight months before, they’d brought sestran shoots from another part of the island and established them here for his studies. He’d known his use of the term would tell her exactly where to look.
She discovered the stand presently—and discovered also that chaquoteels had built a colony nest above it since she’d been here last. The tiny kesters greeted her with a storm of furious whistlings. Nile ducked quickly into the sestran, but not quickly enough. The chaquoteels were on her in a darting rainbow swarm, and her back smarted from dozens of jabs before they decided she’d been sufficiently routed and left her alone in the vegetation. Then the racket quieted quickly again.
Her search was a short one; Ticos had done what she’d expected. The tiny script recorder was in weatherproof sealing, taped to the side of one of the thickest sestran stems. Nile freed herself of her prisoner and laid the bundle down where she could watch it. The midget hadn’t stirred yet, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t awake.
She considered briefly. There was cover all about. If Parahuans, or the tarm, showed up, she could fade away in any direction without stepping into the open. And with a few hundred bad-tempered chaquoteels scattered around the vicinity, she couldn’t be taken by surprise.
Yes—as good a place as any to find out what Ticos had to tell her.
Nile settled down, fitted the recorder to her eye, and started it.
V
Long before she put the recorder down for the last time, Nile had decided that Ticos Cay ranked among the great liars of history.
He was still alive. At least he’d been alive less than a week ago when he left the last of the four recorder disks which contained his report here for her.
She sat still, sorting over the information.
Some seventy years ago the Parahuan leadership had been smarting in defeat and trying to understand how defeat could have been possible. In their minds they were the race which had achieved perfection at all levels, including individual immortality for those with the greatness to attain it. They were the Everliving. None could match them. The water worlds of the galaxy which met their requirements were destined to be their own.
Since they first moved out from Porad Anz, their home world, the Sacred Sea, they had encountered nothing to contradict that assumption.
But now an inferior land dweller which was in possession of a number of such worlds had flung back the Parahuan forces sent to occupy them. The experience stunned the Everliving. It affronted logic.
Before the attack they had made what seemed a sufficiently comprehensive study of the Federation of the Hub. This human civilization was huge. But it was a heterogeneous, loosely organized, loosely governed mass of individuals quite normally in serious conflict among themselves. The analysis of captured humans confirmed the picture.
That muddled, erratic, emotionally swayed creature had routed the disciplined Parahuan forces. Something was wrong—it simply shouldn’t have happened.
What had been overlooked?
They went back to studying the enemy in every way they could. The creature was blocking the orderly progression of the goals of Porad Anz. That was intolerable. The secret of its ability to do it must be found—and then means devised to destroy the ability.
Presently, in the creature’s relatively recent history, a clue was discovered.
It developed into the Tuvela Theory . . .
Nile made a snorting, incredulous sound. Not much more than two centuries ago—not many decades before Ticos Cay was born—the Hub still had been one of the bloodiest human battlegrounds of all time. It was the tail end of the War Centuries. A thousand governments were forming and breaking interstellar alliances, aiming for control of the central clusters or struggling to keep from being overwhelmed.
The Tuvelas belonged in the later part of that pre-Federation period. They were a sophisticated equivalent of ancient warlords. Some believed they arose from well-defined genetic strains at a high genius level. Legends clustered about their activities. But the fact was that the records of those muddled times were contradictory and thoroughly unreliable. In any event, the Tuvelas were long gone.
The Parahuan Palachs, searching for an explanation of their own defeat, decided they weren’t long gone. The mysterious superhuman Tuvelas not only were still around—they were now the true secret rulers of the Federation of the Hub. They had organized and guided the operations which resulted in the defeat of the Parahuan expeditionary forces.
That was the Tuvela Theory.
The Everliving, or at least a majority of them, didn’t intend to let the matter rest there. They now had a rationalization of the past disaster, and it restored to some extent their shattered pride. To have been bested by a foe of abnormal ability whose existence hadn’t been suspected, that could be accepted. The human species as such was inferior to Porad Anz. Its apparent strength lay in the fact that its vast masses were directed and controlled by these freakish monsters.
To even the score with the Tuvelas, to bring them down and destroy them, became an abiding obsession with the Everliving—or again, at least with a majority of them. Some evidently felt from the beginning that the Tuvelas might be such dangerous opponents that it would be better not to come into conflict with them a second time. The view never became popular, but it was agreed that all reasonable precautions should be taken to avoid another debacle. The majority opinion remained that since a Parahuan Great Palach was the ultimate development of life, the human Tuvela could not possibly be his superior. The advantage of the Tuvelas had been solely that the Everliving hadn’t known they were there—and naturally hadn’t considered such a remote possibility in preparing the first attack.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 187