Already Among Us

by Unknown

  With two humans and half a dozen Hathis at work, the bodies had disappeared under their leafy shroud in ten minutes. Schurman took the lead on foot, with Granger riding Oberon. The young bull's load of medical supplies had been distributed through the whole length of the line. Kiombo brought up the rear on foot.

  All three humans wore translators and carried rifles, but most of the work would be done by the Hathis. The Hathis, and whatever Higher Powers, had not yet abandoned Logos.

  From the Book of the Clan-Mother Drina :

  THE BULLS MADE THE TRAIL BETTER THAN I KNEW THEY COULD DO SUCH WORK. THEY EVEN CUT BACK THE TREES TO MAKE RESTING PLACES. WHEN WE CAME TO THE FIRST ONE, THE CALVES AND THOSE CARRYING FOOD AND TOOLS WENT INTO THE TREES BEFORE THEY RESTED.

  THIS GAVE MORE ROOM TO THE OTHERS WHO STAYED IN THE OPEN SPACE. IF ANY OF THE SMALL ONES FROM THE SKY FLY OVER, THEY WILL SEE ONLY ANIMALS.

  GRANGER-BULL SAYS THIS HELPS US BUT MAY NOT BE ENOUGH. I ASKED HIM IF THE SMALL ONES FROM THE SKY WILL KILL FOR PLEASURE, OR MIGHT THEY WANT OUR TUSKS. HE SAID HE DOES NOT KNOW ABOUT THE SECOND. EVERYBODY SAYS THEY DO THE FIRST, BUT HE THINKS THEY SPEAK WITHOUT BEING CERTAIN.

  I KNOW ONE THING THAT IS CERTAIN. IT WILL BE BAD IF THEY COME WHEN WE ARE ON THE TRAIL. THE ONLY WAY WE CAN HIDE THE TOOLS IS BY THROWING THEM DOWN INTO THE VALLEY. THEY WILL BE LOST OR BROKEN. ALSO, THERE WILL BE NO PLACE FOR ALL OF US TO HIDE.

  WE HAVE RESTED LONG ENOUGH. IT IS TIME FOR US TO MOVE AGAIN.

  It happened on the steepest portion of the trail. Schurman had taken Drina's offer of a brief ride, so between the trail and the Hathi matriarch's height, the scientist could see everything.

  A gap opened in the line, behind Losha's calf on his cart. (He could walk now, but the mist was making the trail slippery; all six calves less than a year old were riding.) The Hathi next in line was a young bull—Schurman could not identify him, but he looked about eight or nine years old. He rushed uphill to close the gap, for no particular reason except maybe to demonstrate how sure-footed he was.

  Instead, he demonstrated how treacherous the trail had become. He slipped and landed on his side, sliding toward the edge of the cliff.

  Schurman saw his trunk flail the air and heard his scream of fear and anger. Then saw him coil his trunk hard against his chest and flatten his ears against his long skull.

  He could probably grab the back of the cart if he tried. But that might wreck the cart, letting not only him but the newborn calf slide over the edge. He would risk his own life rather than the calf's.

  The Hathi behind, an older matriarch, was hurrying to catch up with the helpless youngster. He gripped a bush, but it came out by the roots. His would-be rescuer reached out her trunk, screaming, sliding, falling half a meter short of gripping his hind leg.

  Then the rescuer had all she could do to save herself as the young bull let out a final long trumpeting. After that he was silent, as he vanished over the edge and plunged a hundred and fifty meters to the canopy of trees below. Branches crackled, then everyone heard the soggy thump as he struck the wet ground. After that was only silence, except for the fading echoes of two Hathis' cries.

  Schurman slung her rifle, which she had raised by sheer reflex, so that she had both hands free. With one she clung to Drina's harness, with the other she tried to wipe her eyes.

  “Damned mist,” she muttered.

  (“DID YOU SEE WHO IT WAS?”) Drina asked.

  (“NO. BUT I AM SURE THERE ARE THOSE WHO KNOW.”)

  (“YES. IT WAS A FINE THING. IT IS WELL TO KNOW WHO WAS HIS FATHER. HE GAVE US A BRAVE BULL.”)

  Schurman decided she wasn't going to cry, not really. She saw Granger watching her from his place on Oberon fifty meters ahead, and gave him a thumbs-up. He returned it.

  Not much of an epitaph for a Hathi, let alone the first one dead by accident in nearly two years. Those damned bulls could waltz up and down this trail like it was level savanna. I'm going to ask Drina to have them prove another trail, when this is over.

  But it wasn't over yet, half the Hathis still had to pass the steepest portion of the trail, and then they had a day of traveling in open country before they reached even the fringes of the forest. The young bull had been the first to die; he was unlikely to be the last.

  By sheer force of will, Schurman turned a sob into a sniffle, then blew her nose on her last clean handkerchief and held her face up to the mist. A few minutes later it turned to rain, but by then the last of the Hathis were past the most dangerous stretch, so she could let the rain wash her face with a clear conscience.

  Day Three

  From the Book of the Clan-Mother Drina

  WE LOST A SECOND ONE FROM THE CLAN BEFORE WE LEFT THE BULL-TRAIL. IT WAS NEYN, THE COW-CALF OE EUGOA, DAUGHTER OF SIMA, WHO DIED FIVE SEASONS AGO.

  THE TREES BELOW ARE SO THICK THAT THEY WILL COVER THE DEAD, AND THE SNAKES BELOW CAN NO LONGER HURT THEM. THE ROUGH GROUND ALSO DOES NOT MATTER TO THEM. THEY WALK WHERE THE RAINS NEVER FAIL.

  I ASKED CLAN-MOTHER ROBERTA TO USE THE SKY-SPEAKER TO CALL THE BULLS. SHE SAID THIS MIGHT NOT BE WISE, AND KIMBO-BULL AND GRANGER-BULL AGREED. IT SEEMS THAT THE OTHER SMALL ONES CAN LISTEN TO SKY-SPEAKER TALK EVEN WHEN IT IS NOT FOR THEM, AND LEARN WHERE THE SKY-SPEAKER TALKERS MAY BE FOUND.

  I SAID SHE HAD TOLD ME THIS BEFORE AND I BELIEVED HER. BUT DID SHE BELIEVE THAT THE BULLS COULD DO ALL THAT WE NEEDED THEM TO DO WITHOUT WARNING AND ADVICE?

  SHE AGREED, AND SAID THAT I COULD SEND A SHORT MESSAGE. I THINK ROBERTA IS REALLY ONE OF US WITHIN, SHE WILL PRETEND TO LET A BULL LEAD ONLY WHEN SHE WISHES TO MATE WITH HIM. SHE DOES NOT SEEM TO WISH TO MATE WITH EITHER OF THE BULLS WITH HER, SO SHE LEADS THEM, AS IS PROPER.

  NOW I SHALL GO TO THE FAR-SPEAKER AND SEND WORD TO TARRAN, FIRST BULL.

  Archer's Plain stretched seventy kilometers from the end of the Bull-Trail to the banks of the Rubin River. The last ten were downhill and rough, with plenty of cover and also plenty of places to fall or break legs. They would do that stretch in daylight.

  The rest they agreed to cover at night. Sixty kilometers was a reasonable night's march for healthy, well-fed, and well-rested Hathis, even carrying loads or drawing carts with calves.

  Also, night wouldn't hide the Hathis from non-visual sensors. But even Hivers needed the Mark One Eyeball to fine-tune sensor-acquired data. By night, they might develop terminal eyestrain before drawing dangerous conclusions from detecting too many artifacts among the Hathis.

  “They will also find it harder to count the number of humans with them,” Granger said.

  “We're only three, and none of us soldiers,” Schurman protested. She knew as soon as she said it that she might as well have tried casting a spell, for all the good it would do.

  Granger's pepper-and-salt eyebrows crept upward and together. “Soldier or civilian makes no difference to the Hivers. And it's not how many we are that worries me, it's how few. Only three humans for two hundred work animals is a very low ratio. It would take an idiot not to wonder if the 'animals' aren't something else, and the Hivers aren't idiots.”

  “No.”

  Kiombo was taking the first watch; Schurman crawled into her sleeping bag but didn't close it. She was sleeping fully dressed, and wanted to be able to get out and into action without delay. None of the other major predators would approach this big a group of Hathis, but sleeping by day risked snakes and insects.

  She checked that her rifle was in easy reach and rolled over on her side. The distant, rolling horizon was hazy again. The radiation detector didn't indicate any major use of fusers, but people had died from believing the readings of faulty detectors. Besides, Hivers could set all kinds of fires without using fusers. Their torch-bombs . . .

  Over among the Hathis, she heard rumbling and an occasional low call, just above the subsonic level. The matriarchs were having a conference; she recognized Drina's voice. That was another thing to worry about—not just the Hivers getting a fix on the call to the bulls, but how the bulls would respond. Drina seemed worri
ed about something Tarran had said, or maybe hadn't said.

  Sleep on it, Roberta. You have enough trouble understanding human males.

  Day Four

  From the Book of the Clan-Moher Drina:

  THE REPLY OF TARRAN MAKES ME UNEASY. HE SAYS HE WILL SEND YOUNG BULLS UNDER KAWOR TO MEET US IN THE LAST PART OF THE TREK TO THE RIVER.

  THEY MIGHT BE MOVING BY DAY, CARRYING TOOLS AND WEARING CLOTHING. ALSO, KAWOR IS VERY STRONG AND MANY YOUNG BULLS FOLLOW HIM, BUT HE HAS NEVER SEEMED AS WISE AS HE IS STRONG. IF HE DOES THIS WORK WELL, HE MAY CHALLENGE TARRAN. THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR THE BULLS TO CHANGE LEADERS.

  “Don't look now, but we're being followed.”

  Was that what Dr. Granger was actually saying or was it what she'd imagined him saying for so long that she now heard those words no matter what his real ones might be?

  She twisted around, gripping Voulo's neckstrap with one hand and raising her binoculars with the other. A tap switched them to night mode, and that was all she needed to see it.

  Six kloms behind the Hathis and two hundred meters above the plain, a Hiver attacker was ghosting along. It was overtaking the Hathis, but slowly-- it couldn't be doing more than fifty km/h.

  That smelled of curiosity about the Hathis, which was the smell of impending disaster.

  Granger waited while Schurman licked her lips and got her stomach and breathing under control. Thank Ganesh for that bit of good sense. She would need all the authority she had and a bit more.

  She spoke into her translator.

  (“DRINA. WE ARE BEING SPIED ON BY THE OTHER SMALL ONES. DO AS WE HAVE PLANNED.”)

  The reply was a trumpeting that needed no translation, and the Hathis began to regroup, with more trumpeting and much flapping of ears. Schurman scrambled along Voulo's back and then down his side, to tie herself in place on his harness at belly level. It was awkward, noisy, and smelly down there, but she would be practically invisible except from something hovering almost directly above.

  She hoped that Dr. Granger really was limber enough to do the same. She also hoped she hadn't doomed the clan instead of saving it, by ordering the baffle-formation before the Hivers attacked. For all she knew, the response itself might give them the final clue they needed about the intelligence of the Hathis--

  Panic is infectious, so don't work yourself into being the first case of it.

  Like a mass of floating logs hitting rapids, the Hathis were shifting position without stopping. In fact, they were moving faster.

  The baffle-formation was a variant of what wild elephants had done for millennia against predators, human and otherwise. All the cows of military age formed a circle around the youngsters, calves, and the sick, confronting the enemy with a solid wall of thrusting tusks, waving trunks, and flapping ears. Since an adult elephant of either sex had few natural enemies, it worked well enough against lions, the major non-human menace to the young elephants.

  Now the ones in the middle were not the calves and youngsters but those carrying suspicious amounts of gear. An overflight might still raise Hiver eyebrows—they did have eyebrows, from the pictures Schurman had seen. But on the outside all anybody could see was Hathis wearing nothing but the kind of collars and harnesses any draft animal might wear, if they wore anything at all.

  Schurman realized that her binoculars were still dangling, took them off, hooked them to Voulo's harness, then thrust her free hand through one of the harness loops. Now she wouldn't fall and be trampled if the tie broke. If she could just become invisible--

  The whine of a lift-field generator swelled loud enough to be heard above the rumble and thud of the moving Hathis. Schurman fought the temptation to look up. If anything went wrong, she wouldn't be able to fight it off by glaring at the Hivers. Humans were really badly equipped for threat displays, compared to Hathis, never mind the difference in size. If the Hivers responded to threats, or anything short of being killed outright . . .

  The galaxy rotated once. By the time it was into its second rotation, Schurman knew she was dead and the afterlife was riding a Hathi from nowhere to nowhere. Riding him slung like a water bottle on his harness, all the rest of existence an endless array of gray, wrinkled, dusty flanks, columnar legs moving steadily, an occasional trunk waving like a demented but preternaturally intelligent serpent.

  In the middle of the galaxy's third rotation, Schurman heard the all-clear from Drina. No, it was a translator—Nate's or Granger's?--and the reply was from Drina. The rest of the Hathis kept quiet, although Schurman caught the smell of urine as a few of them voided in sheer excitement or relief.

  No harm in that, she thought. In fact, she wasn't prepared to bet that her own panties were entirely dry.

  She waited until the clan slowed down, then asked Voulo to stop. He needed some persuading, to let the rest of the clan pass by and stand in the open long enough for Schurman to dismount. Two matriarchs finally came to the air of the small-one Clan-Mother, a mass of female persuasiveness (about nine tons, Schurman estimated) that no immature bull was ever likely to resist.

  For the first time in years, Schurman was conscious that her merely human proportions were a disadvantage in dealing with Hathis. Intelligence had not completely eradicated their habit of equating size with dominance.

  The herd remained slowed to a pace that let Schurman and Granger keep up with it on foot while they talked. Granger's hair and beard stood out in dust-caked spikes and he had sweated dark patches on all his clothes, but he was barely breathing hard as he strode along.

  Hope I can do half as well when I'm his age.

  “Nate reported that the attacker flew off to the northwest,” Granger said. “That's the good news.”

  Schurman felt no vast compulsion to hear the bad news, but knew duty when it bit her in the thigh, “What's the bad news?”

  “That was a light attacker. It can't reach orbit from this altitude. It can't even air-dock with an orbital-capable craft.”

  “The Hivers could be planning to abandon the attacker when its power runs out, then pick up the crew.”

  “Attackers don't grow on bushes for either side, this far from a major base. No, I think they have or are going to put in a secure LZ. Their recon attackers can land, change crews, and power up between missions.”

  “You said the reports were only of one cruiser!” She gripped a handful of Granger's bush jacket, wanting to claw at it as if the extra Hivers were his fault.

  “They were. But there may have been other reports I didn't hear before I evacuated. Or the station guards may have detected more Hiver ships and they didn't get a chance to report.”

  A glacial calm seemed to spread through Roberta Schurman's mind as she contemplated the possibility of a full-scale Hiver invasion. Even the sweat on her arms dried, she felt so cold.

  Knowing that there was nothing to do but sell your life as dearly as possible had a wonderfully soothing effect on the nerves.

  No, that wasn't knowledge. A hypothesis, with some evidence to support it, but not firm. Yet.

  And since it wasn't firm, her job was still the same—keep as many Hathis alive as possible, for as long as possible.

  Oberon loomed over the two humans.

  (“IS THE GRANGER-BULL IN MUSTH? WE THOUGHT HE WAS TOO OLD FOR THAT.”)

  (“YOU ARE TOO YOUNG TO KNOW MUCH ABOUT YOUR ELDERS,”) Schurman said. (“I WISH TO GO FORWARD TO SPEAK TO CLAN-MOTHER DRINA.”)

  That potent name got quick results. “What are you planning?” Granger asked when they were both mounted and working their way up through the clan's ranks.

  “I wish I knew,” Schurman said. “Play it by ear, I guess. Get the calves and supplies into the rear before we begin the last leg. Put out scouts—the smartest young cows who aren't yet matriarchs—ahead and on either flank.”

  “One of us with each patrol?” Granger said.

  “I think that would be best.”

  “It could mean using radio.”

  “That's why I want the smartest
of the young females. They can do everything we're likely to need with those high-decibel subsonic calls. It's not as if we needed to train the Hathis for staff work!”

  “A pity we couldn't,” Granger said, wiping the dust off his face. “They'd be better at it than some of the Regulars I've met. And if they could pull their weight in the war, the Priorities Board might not have sat on our assets so long over the contraceptive.”

  Schurman muttered something in Arabic. Granger shrugged. “My sentiments too, if the priorities Board people have enough pubic hair to provide a nest for even one flea.”

  Day Five

  From the Book of the Clan-Mother Drina:

  WE COME TO THE LAST PART OF OUR JOURNEY SO BUSY WATCHING FOR ENEMIES THAT WE CANNOT WATCH THE CALVES, HEALING FOOD, AND OTHER THINGS THAT ARE TO THE REAR.

  IT WILL BE WELL IF NO ENEMIES COME AT US FROM BEHIND. CLAN-MOTHER ROBERTA DOES NOT WANT US TO SKY-SPEAK THE BULLS AGAIN, SO WE CANNOT ASK THEM TO GUARD OUR REAR EITHER.

  I HOPE THE SKY-HOUSES OF THE SMALL ONES ARE SOON BUILT AGAIN, TO WATCH FOR THE OTHER SMALL ONES. LIFE WILL NOT BE EASY FOR THE PEOPLE, IF THE OTHER SMALL ONES WANDER ABOUT HUNGRY FOR US.

  They were halfway down the slope form the plain to the bank of the Rubin. It was full daylight and just as well considering the rough ground underfoot. That also meant full visibility for the Hivers to spot the Hathis tramping along in a formation anyone could recognize as military.

  Roberta Schurman pulled off her headscarf, finger-combed dust and dead insects from her hair, then tied it up again. Then she looked at the translator's screen. Now its minimal tactical programming had it showing a map of the area, with the Hathis's formation superimposed on it.

  So far, so good. The scouts were staying in signaling range, but not so close the main body wouldn't have some warning time. What they could do with the warning depended almost entirely on the threat, however, and that was something nobody could control.