“Much,” Sweeting assured her. “But found two Nile-friends. They tell you more.”
“Two—” Nile broke off. In the surging sea five yards below, two dark whiskered heads had appeared on the surface, were looking up at her.
Wild otters.
VI
The wild otters were a mated pair who’d selected the floatwood lagoon as their private preserve. The male would nearly match Spiff in size. The female was young, a smaller edition of Sweeting. They might be three or four generations away from domestication, but they used translingue as readily as Sweeting and much in her style. Interspersed were unfamiliar terms based on their independent oceanic existence, expressing matters for which no human words had been available. Usually Nile could make out their sense.
When the Parahuans arrived, the curious otters had made a game of studying the unfamiliar creatures and their gadgetry. There was a ship anchored to the island under the floor of the lagoon. It was considerably bigger than the average human submersible, chunky and heavily built—evidently a spaceship. Its lock was always open on the water. A second ship, a huge one, was also in the vicinity. Normally it stayed deep in the sea, but at times it had moved up almost to the island. Ticos had said that the headquarters ship of the Parahuan expedition seemed to be accompanying this floatwood drift.
Above sea level, the Parahuans had set up ten or twelve posts in the forest. Most of them were small, probably observation points or weapon emplacements. The exception was in the island section Jo which Nile wanted to go. “Big house,” Sweeting said. It was set near the edge of the lagoon, extending well back into the floatwood and completely concealed by it. Perhaps a fifth of the structure was under water. Nile got the impression of something like a large blockhouse or fort, a few hundred yards beyond the rookery of the sea-havals. She wouldn’t have selected the giant kesters as neighbors herself; the rookery was an evil-smelling and very noisy place. But alien senses might not find that disturbing.
The immediately important thing about the blockhouse was that it told her exactly where Ticos could be found, unless he’d been taken away after her arrival. He’d said his captors had shifted him and his equipment to such a structure and described its location.
The wild otters knew nothing of Ticos, but they did know about the tarm. When the Parahuans first came, there’d been two of the pale monsters in the lagoon from time to time. One of them evidently had been taken away again shortly afterwards. The description they gave of the other one matched that of the records. It was an aggressive beast which fed heavily on sea life and made occasional forays into upper forest levels.
“Have you had any trouble with it?” Nile asked.
The question seemed to surprise them. Then they gave her the silent otter laugh, jaws open.
“No trouble. Tarm’s slow!” Sweeting’s small kinswoman explained.
“Slow for you,” Nile said. Hunting otters had their own notions about water speed. “Could I keep away from it in the water?”
They considered.
“lets, heh?” the big male asked. “Sadly, no jets!” Sweeting made a stroking motion with her forelegs, flipped hind feet up briefly. “Human swim . . .”
“Human swim! Tarm thing eat you!” the female told Nile decisively. “You hide, keep no-smell, Nile! How you do the no-smell? Trick, heh?”
“Uh-huh. A trick. But it won’t work in the water.”
The male grunted reflectively. “Tarm’s back under big house. Might stay, might not.” He addressed the female. “Best poison-kill it soon?”
Poison-killing, it developed, involved a contraption put together of drift weed materials—hollow reeds and thorns chewed to fit the hollows and smeared with exceedingly poisonous yellow bladder gum. Wild otter tribes had developed the device to bring down flying kesters for a change of diet. The female demonstrated, rolling over on her back, holding an imaginary hole-stick to her mouth and making a popping noise through her lips. “Splash come kester!” They’d modified the technique to handle the occasional large predators who annoyed them too persistently—larger thorns, jammed directly through the hide into the body. Big sea animals didn’t die as quickly as the fliers, but they died.
“Many thorns here,” the male assured Nile. “Stick in ten, twenty, and the tarm no trouble.”
She studied him thoughtfully. Sweeting could count . . . but these were wild otters. Attempts had been made to trace the original consignment of laboratory-grown cubs to its source. But the trail soon became hopelessly lost in the giant intricacies of Hub commerce; and no laboratory was found which would take responsibility for the development of a talking otter mutant. The cubs which had reached Nandy-Cline seemed to be the only members of the strain now in existence.
For all practical purposes then, this was a new species, and evidently it was less than fifty years old. In that time it had progressed to the point of inventing workable dart blowguns and poisoned daggers. It might have an interesting future. Nile thought she knew the yellow bladder gum to which they referred. It contained a very fast acting nerve poison. What effect it would have on a creature with the tarm’s metabolism couldn’t be predicted, but the idea seemed worth trying.
She asked further questions, gathered they’d seen the tarm motionless under the blockhouse only minutes before Sweeting got the first caller signal. It was the creature’s usual station as water guard of the area. Evidently it had been withdrawn from the hunt for the Tuvela. Groups of Parahuans were moving about in the lagoon, but there was no indication they were deployed in specific search patterns.
“Waddle-feet got jets,” remarked the male.
“Slow jets,” said the female reassuringly. “No trouble!”
But armed divers in any kind of jet rigs could be trouble in open water. Nile shrugged mentally. She could risk the crossing. She nodded at the dark outlines of the distant forest section.
“I’ve got to go over there,” she said. “Sweeting will come along. The waddle-feet have guns and are looking for me. You want to come, too?”
They gave her the silent laugh again, curved white teeth gleaming in the dusk.
“Nile-friends,” stated the male. “We’ll come. Fun, heh? What we do, Nile? Kill the waddle-feet?”
“If we run into any of them,” said Nile, “we kill the waddle-feet fast—”
TO BE CONCLUDED
THE TUVELA
Conclusion. As a friendly social visit to the float-island, Nile’s visit flopped badly; the invading Parahuans were anything but friendly. But then—so was Nile! But the important thing in such an encounter is not what you think you are—but what the enemy thinks you are.
SYNOPSIS
Nandy-Cline is an ocean world displaying only one narrow continental land mass. Among its more unusual features are the floatwood islands—great buoyant forests drifting eternally with the sea currents about the planet. On one of these floatwood islands, Dr. Ticos Cay, a Federation scientist working for the Giard Pharmaceuticals company, is captured in his isolated research station by the high command of a secret invading force of alien Parahuans. The Parahuans are an amphibious species who made an attempt to occupy Nandy-Cline and drive out its human settlers eighty years before. The attempt ended in a decisive defeat for the Parahuans. They suffered heavy losses and were forced to retreat to their distant worlds.
The ruling caste of the Parahuans, which refers to itself as the Everliving, has evolved a form of individual immortality which includes a gradual shrinking of physical structure. They regard the human species as basically inferior to their own; and in an attempt to explain their defeat, they have developed what they call the Tuvela Theory. The Tuvelas were a semilegendary human strain of some centuries past, renowned as military geniuses. The Everliving reason that Tuvelas still exist and are now the secret rulers of the Federation. It is argued that a second, more carefully prepared and executed invasion of Nandy-Cline, which takes the opposition of Tuvelas into consideration, will be successful. The Everliving who fa
vor this approach form a group known as the Voice of Action. They are opposed by a group called the Voice of Caution which would prefer to avoid another hostile confrontation with the human species but which so far has been overruled by the majority of the Everliving.
Dr. Cay impresses his captors both because he is engaged in longevity research and has made a number of significant discoveries in it and by the fact that a form of mind training he has practiced enables him to withstand their nerve-torture devices. They regard him as an important prisoner who can provide them with valuable information and set up a laboratory in a concealed stronghold on the floatwood island, where he is to continue his research under their supervision. Here Dr. Cay learns about the Tuvela Theory and decides to use it against the invaders.
He is increasingly concerned about the safety of Dr. Nile Etland, a former student of his who is now laboratory head of the Giard Pharmaceuticals Station on the mainland. Nile presently will be coming out to the floatwood island on one of her periodic visits, and there is no way he can warn her off. If he does nothing, the Parahuans will kill her on her arrival. To prevent this, he indicates to them that she is one of the Tuvelas whose existence they have theorized—a member of the Federation’s secret rulers called the Guardians. This makes them determined to capture Nile alive and test her for Tuvela abilities. If they can prove a Guardian is inferior to the Everliving, they can go ahead with the planned conquest of Nandy-Cline.
Nile sets out on schedule from the mainland in an aircar, accompanied by Sweeting, one of her two mutant otters. She is looking for a reported large floatwood drift, which might include the island where Dr. Cay is established, and attributes her inability to get into communicator contact with him to the serious seasonal interferences produced by Nandy-Cline’s sun. Heavy typhoon weather hampers her search; and she turns for information to a group of sledmen, an independent and reserved breed of people whose permanent home is the planetary ocean and who have no more dealings with the mainland population than they can help.
Nile learns that the sledmen have designated the floatwood islands “gromgorru” that season. The term means something like the presence of malignant—possibly magical—unknown powers which must be avoided. Many sledmen have vanished lately while harvesting in the floatwood or simply when venturing too close to one of the islands. Nile reasons that the problem is due to some human criminal syndicate which has discovered a new biochemical treasure in the islands and wants to keep intruders frightened away while it completes its haul.
This is not a novel situation on Nandy-Cline, and she and Danrich Parrol, the manager of the Giard Station, have acquired a reputation for handling such criminals. She extracts a promise from the sledmen to get word through the communication interferences to Parrot for her, asking him to come out and help her get Dr. Cay off his island. Then she sets out again for the drift the sledmen have told her is south of her present position.
On her arrival, her aircar is brought down promptly to the island by a Parahuan weapon of unknown type. Nile, thoroughly familiar with the ways of surviving in the floatwood forests since childhood, eludes immediate capture with Sweeting. She sets the otter to scouting the waters to find out more about the situation, and makes her way alone to Dr. Cay’s hidden station, where she encounters one of the leaders of the Everliving, the Great Palach Koll. She stuns him, takes him along as a prisoner, and locates a set of reports Dr. Cay has prepared for her, which tell her in detail about the Parahuan invasion, the Tuvela Theory, and the role of Tuvela-Guardian he has assigned to her to keep her from being killed out of hand. Nile realizes she may be able to use the role to convince the Everliving they should abandon their plans and tries it out on her captive. She is too successful—Koll, believing that she is a Guardian and may in fact be able to persuade the Everliving to retreat from Nandy-Cline, attempts to kill her and is killed himself.
Sweeting meanwhile has encountered two wild mutant otters who agree to help her and Nile against the Parahuans. The wild otters have seen no sign of Dr. Cay but tell Nile about the Parahuan stronghold in an adjoining forest section. Nile wants to reach that section in any case, in order to set fire to an oilwood stand after nightfall, which will serve as a beacon to tell Danrich Parrol where she is when he arrives. She, Sweeting, and their new allies, prepare to cross the dangerous stretch of open sea between the forests.
Part 2
A few minutes later the three otters slipped down into a lifting wave and were gone. Nile glanced about once more before following. A narrow sun-rim still clung to the horizon. Overhead the sky was clear—pale blue with ghostly cluster light shining whitely through. High-riding cloud banks to the south reflected magenta sun glow. Wind force was moderate. Here in the lee of the forest she didn’t feel much of it. The open stretch of sea ahead was broken and foaming, but she’d be moving below the commotion.
In these latitudes the Meral produced its own surface illumination. She saw occasional gleams flash and disappear among the tossing waves—colonies of light organisms responding to the darkening air. But they wouldn’t give enough light to guide her across. Time to shift to her night eyes . . .
She brought a pack of dark-lenses from the pouch, fitted two under her lids, blinked them into position. A gel, adjusting itself automatically to varying conditions for optimum human vision—an experimental Giard product, and a very good one.
She pulled the breather over her face, fitted the audio plugs to her ears, and flicked herself off the floatwood. Sea shadow dosed about her, cleared in seconds to amber half-light as the dark-lenses went into action. Fifteen feet down, Nile turned and stroked into open water.
Open but not empty. A moving weed thicket ahead and to the right . . . Nile circled about it, a school of small skilts darting past, brushing her legs with tiny hard flicks. She brought her left wrist briefly before her eyes, checked the small compass she’d fastened to it, making sure of her direction. The otters weren’t in view. If the crossing was uneventful, she shouldn’t see much of them. They were to stay about a hundred feet away, one of the wild pair on either side, Sweeting taking the point, to provide early warning of approaching danger.
A cloud of light appeared presently ahead; others grew dimly visible beyond it . . . pink, green, orange. The Shining Sea was the name the sledmen gave the Meral as it rolled here down the southern curve of the globe towards the pole. Nile began to pass thickets in which the light-bearers clustered. Each species produced its own precise shade of water-fire. None were large; the giants among them might be half the length of her forearm, narrow worm bodies. But their swarms turned acres of the subsurface to flame.
The fins moved her on steadily. She listened to the sea through the audios, sensed its changing vibrations against her skin. Amber dimness of open water for a while; then she went turning and twisting through a soggy dark forest of weed. Beyond it, light glowed again. She avoided the brightest areas—too easy to be spotted there.
Sweeting came to her once, circled about, was gone, a flicking shadow. Not an alarm report; the otter had checked on her position.
Then there was a sound which momentarily overrode the myriad other sounds of the Meral—a deep, distant booming. Half a minute later it was repeated. Closer now.
Nile held her course but moved towards the surface, scanning the areas below and ahead of her. The giant sea-havals were hunting. An encounter with one of the great creatures in the open sea ordinarily brought no risk to a human swimmer or, in fact, to anything but a sizable skilt. Sea-havals hunted by scent and sight; and skilts were their only prey. But when they made that sound, they were driving a major school. To avoid accidents, it was best to keep well out of the way of such a school—
If possible, Nile added mentally.
And there came the first indications of trouble!
A dozen big torpedo shapes hurtled towards her, coming from a line of light-thickets ahead. Skilts—approximately in the three hundred pound class. Preferred size for a sea-haval.
Ni
le checked, moved quickly to the side, lifted farther towards the surface . . . near enough to feel the tugging surge of the swells—
The sea boomed like the stroke of a tremendous bell.
And the string of light-thickets exploded as the van of the skilt school bulleted through them—coming at her in a straight line. They were harmless creatures in themselves, but their panic, speed and weight made them deadly now. The impact of any of them would break her body apart. And the sea seemed an onrushing mass of thousands.
The scene was blotted from Nile’s vision as she broke the surface. She rolled herself into a tight ball. There was nothing else she could do. A great wave lifted her. Then came a vast, thudding sensation from below, streaming past, a racing river which threatened to drag her down. Skilts exploded from the sea in frantic thirty-foot leaps all about, came smashing back to the surface. Then two final tremendous surges of the water beneath her. A pair of sea-havals had gone past.
Sweeting was there an instant later. The wild otters arrived almost as promptly.
“Nile here, heh? Fun, heh?”
Nile had no comment. She’d pulled off the breather, was gulping long lungfuls of storm air. Dim and remote, more sensed by her nerves than heard, came an echo of the sea-havals’ booming. The hunt had moved on.
Moments later, she and the otters were underway again. For the next two hundred yards, weed beds were ripped and shredded by the passage of the fleeing school. Cleanly sectioned skilts, chopped by the big kesters, drifted about. Then things began to look normal . . .
Suddenly Sweeting was back, moving past Nile’s face in a swirl of water, dropping a dozen feet, checking to turn, turning again and gliding towards a great limp tangle of weeds below her. Nile followed instantly in a spurt of speed. “Come fast!” was what that had meant.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 189