by Jo Clayton
Muttering in his guttural Kliubre, the guide plunged ahead, turning corners until Shadith was dizzy with the circles she was being led in; finally, though, he slowed, slapped at something on the broad belt where his horny torso joined the horizontal portion of his body. The thing let out a blat like a hungry tantser calf and repeated the blat at fifteen-second intervals as he went stumping down a broader corridor.
Shadith followed, her annoyance increasing. She didn’t think much of being treated like the carrier of multiple plagues.
Her guide waved at a door, shut off the blatter, and settled into the Kliu equivalent of parade rest. She exoed past him, the metal sponge pads of her soles clinking and scraping against the metacrete floor, the ’hot mule humming beside her.
The Kliu subadministrator inspected her in heavy silence. His speaking mouth made a few preliminary twitches; the sound that came out was a musical tenor that made her want to giggle at the absurd contrast with that mass of muscle and armored skin. “We have few facilities for srin in the Island Chains.”
Srin, she thought. Small itchy pests that infest the anal glands. That’s not what the book says, but it’s what you mean. I can see you sniggering with your peers at how you’ve got over on those stinking aliens.
“The prisoners we get here are a dangerous, desperate lot,” he said. “Lifers, all of them. Many of them are political with very little concern for the lives of those who do not share their particular beliefs or belong to their genetic group.”
Takes one to know one.
“You must understand, we do not guard the prisoners. We guard the world. Those who refuse the work we offer are provided with materials and tools so they can build their own shelters, and with adapted seedstock so they can raise their own food. We have a series of satellites watching them to stop any activities we consider dangerous to us and we do occasional ground checks for various reasons. Otherwise we leave them alone. It will be difficult, if not impossible to protect you in these circumstances.”
Bite your tongue, Shadow. You don t want to tell ol’ crocface he lies in his fangs. That’s not tactful. “Come now, Exalted Cheba, I’m sure you don’t mean that the island where you harvest the crystals is unguarded.”
His ears crumpled, the edges rolling inward, and a film dulled his large black eyes, nocturnal eyes, unused to strong sunlight. “That is another difficulty, Desp’ Searcher. The exact location of the island and the Taalav beasts is a security matter. You’re a pilot, a view of the night sky, even a strange sky, would yield sufficient data for you to work out the island’s location.”
Shadith blinked at him; she found that degree of idiocy in a subadministrator rather hard to swallow. “It may have been a secret before now,” she said as mildly as she could, “but it has certainly lost that status with the departure of the thief. Right? In any case, I need to study everything the thief left behind, and of course, the physical requirements of a Taalav array. That last will set important parameters to the search for the world where they were taken. I’m sure you understand that.”
“You’ll need living quarters. That will take time to arrange.”
“I assume you have a new xenobiologist in place by now. Is that person Kliu?”
“The Kliu do not concern themselves with such matters.”
Why was 1 so sure what your answer would be? Halt/ “Another prisoner? Or have you gone outside this time?”
“It is not necessary for you to know that.”
“In any case, you will have set up accommodations for this person and his aides. It should not be difficult to find a spare room for me in that facility. Especially since you’ve known I was coming for over a month standard. And that I was female-if that is to be your next objection.”
She read his burst of anger with no difficulty, the overtones of petulance and distaste. Her exoed hands clasped in her lap, she waited with stiff patience for him to realize that stalling to the point of forcing her to walk out on him would win him nothing but a reprimand from his superiors.
He ignored her last response as if she hadn’t spoken, tapped a sensor with the longest of his eight fingers. When her erstwhile guide shuffled in, he flung a spate of Kliubre at him in the expectation that Shadith wouldn’t understand what he was saying. She listened carefully. A lot of cursing and nasty epithets, but basically he was doing what should have already been done, ordering a flier and pilot to take her to Glin Paran which was apparently the name of the island in question.
2
The dot in a semicolon of islands trailing across one of Pillory’s southern seas, Glin Paran was a wheel with a lake at the hub and a high jagged rim around the periphery. It was a big island, almost a subcontinent.
Shadith suppressed a sigh as the flier dipped from the-scatter of clouds and fought the choppy winds; the trip had been as rough as the Kliu pilot could make it and Pillory cooperated with his malice by throwing storm after storm at them. Despite the support of the exo, she was battered and exhausted; some of her bruises felt as if they went to the bone.
The Kliu slammed the flier down, waited only long enough for Shadith, the ’bot mule, and her sullen guard to disembark, then he shot away, vanishing into those clouds they’d left such a short time before.
Shadith glanced at the guard, but he had his eyes nearly shut against what was for him the glare of the sun, though the reddish light was more like a cloudy twilight to her. He was radiating stubbornness and revulsion and his speaking mouth was pressed shut with such determination that she didn’t bother saying anything to him. She looked around.
They were standing on a gritty landing pad, wind whipping debris against their legs and into their faces. On every side there were tangles of squat trees. Several stands of reeds taller than the trees grew out of the water, a cross between rules and bamboo with short stubby leaves like knife blades, tough enough to stab with. Each reed was different from its neighbor in color and configuration, a red like dried blood, a green so dark it was almost black, fire orange, a deep sapphire blue, plus blends and shades of all these colors, mottling and stripes; a few had feathery sprays of seed pods bursting from their tops.
In the open spaces between the tree clumps there were patches of low brush with brown, dead-looking leaves clinging to branches that were as crooked and knotty as arthritic fingers.
The xeno settlement was sited a short distance into the lake with only a spidery catwalk joining it to the bank. The buildings were constructed from those reeds and took some getting used to because whoever supervised the construction seemed to have been colorblind. Apart from that, though, they were simple boxes with peaked roofs made from the leaves of the reed, overlapping like shingles. The area where the catwalk reached the bank had been cleared though she could see new sprouts just breaking the surface of the water; apparently the reeds had to be cut back again and again. She wondered about the catwalk and why the Kliu had gone to so much inconvenience with their building. It seemed to suggest that the Taalav arrays were hostile and dangerous. If not them, then some other predator flourished here. Which made the guard rather more useful than she’d supposed. Or maybe it was simply because they didn’t want to harm the juvenile body parts of the Taalav.
Reasoning without data was a singularly futile process, so she gave it up and followed the guard toward the settlement.
A man in an exo stood on the platform at the end of the catwalk. He had a shaggy black beard and heavy eyebrows, so his face seemed mostly hair. Despite that there was something familiar about that face. She didn’t know him, but she’d seen his phot recently. Ambela? University?
She tapped the mule with her toe, sent it humming onto the narrow walk, followed it. Halfway across, she remembered when and where she’d seen him and nearly misstepped off the edge.
It was a big scandal around the middle of her first year at University. His picture was everywhere. Saklavaya. That was his name. He’d been skimniing and selling exotics from expedition stocks-which would have been bad enough, bu
t he had the misfortune to be caught pinching off genetic material from the rarer of the alien sentients he had access to and selling these interesting bits to one of the Gray Market meatfarms. The uproar when this was discovered nearly destroyed the Xeno School. The Regents Board fined him all his voting stock and convinced Helvetia to freeze his accounts; then they barred him from ever returning to University or using University services. If he was here as a result of some further predations and not just hired, she suspected the Kliu had better keep a close eye on their crystals.
She’d gotten to watch his hearing. Her friend Aslan was a member of the Xeno Department and went every day to glare her fury at this man who’d polluted everything she believed in. Shadith wasn’t afraid he’d recognize her. She was in the Music School and the various Departments of University were self contained units.
She stopped in front of him. “You are?” ’
“Vannar. I run this place. What’n pyag you think you’re going to learn here? The last xenobi is long gone and I’ve got his rooms. There’s nothing there.”
“Desp’ Vannar. If you’ll show me where I’ll stay while I’m making my investigation, I can get on with it and out of your hair.”
3
“That’s all?” She looked at the small stack of printed readouts. “I asked for every offworld contact for the past three years. I was very careful to specify that proprietary data could be privacy blanked, but I wanted the contacts and context.”
Vannar shrugged. “Don’t ask me. None of my doing, I passed on the request as you framed it. You should have taken care of that while you were still at Base. If you don’t mind, I have work I need to do.” He sauntered out of the room.
Shadith wrinkled her nose. One of the drawbacks at having a touch of empathic intake, you had to endure silent snickers like that one. She had to concede, though, that Saklavaya/Vannar was right. There wasn’t much here. It was as if they fumigated the place once the former xenobi took off with the array. As she leafed through the skimpy pile of printouts, she grinned at the thought of a gigantic vacuum hose chasing down fugitive glyphs and sucking them up.
She noted the business entities addressed, but didn’t expect them to lead anywhere. Digby’s right, she thought, we’re strictly backup and will only get leftovers and things the Kliu consider last hopers.
She leaned back when she was finished and stared at the wall. All the aides had been changed, there was not a single individual left who’d worked with the old xenobi. He must have had some rep outside Pillory, if they were that reluctant even to name the man. She’d requested interviews with the prisoners involved, but was told they were not available. Dead or gaga, she thought. Probed to their backteeth, and not daintily. Hmp. Smells like this is a lost cause gambit. I’m on my own, Digby said. 1 thought it was a compliment then. Right now 1 suspect what that mainly means is you don’t get no support no way, Shadow. Ah spla! 1 hate letting these fugheads win. Well, there’s no point in putting this off. One more step, then I pack it in. We go out and take a look at an array on site tomorrow. No more stalling out of ol’ Saklavaya. If I have to call the boss and put a rocket under his tail… She giggled at the thought of the subadministrator’s double gape at fireworks popping in his anal orifice. Give him a new appreciation of srin.
4
The creepler was an Todd vehicle with six articulated legs on each side, each leg moving independently, lifting and setting a broad foot down with slow care, guided by a thick array of visual sensors so it wouldn’t step on any of the juvenile forms. It followed a preprogrammed path with all the alacrity of an arthritic land tortoise.
The Kliu guard propped himself into the arrangement that Kliu used as chairs, a complicated mix of bellybands and stout rods. Shadith rode in the reed chair that had belonged to the former xenobi, an unpadded contraption that ground against her exo straps.
The area near the lakeshore was fairly deserted, but after the creepier picked its way through a stand of low, broad trees, climbed up a hill covered with grass tall enough to brush its frame, grass that looked capable of stabbing through solid wood, she saw a grove of taller trees, widely scattered, with clumps of vines growing about dryland reeds. Under those trees a score of odd creatures moved in a loose herd. ’
“Red Riding Hood,” she said aloud, remembering a child’s tale from a world she visited in her first incarnation.
The bodies of adult Gestalts looked approximately like mottled green and black grasshoppers the size of a large dog, long insectile legs bending through a sharp angle, six knees raised above the carapace. A flexible nose tube brushed along the ground, sucking up bits and pieces of plant stuff. There were two eyepits on the subsidiary head at the base of the nose tube, but these had either grown over or like a viper’s pits collected heat rather than light. Above the first set of shoulders the chitinous material that covered the body turned a bright cherry red and rose into a sort of hood with the main head of the Gestalt tucked into the hollow of the open front. This head was round and soft, with huge dark green eyes, a doughy greenish tint to the skin; it had a button nose and a handsome, mobile mouth. There was a fringe of tentacles around the body head, their skin sharing its consistency and color.
These tentacles were in constant movement like a nest of snakes; she watched their movements for a short while, decided that they might be sense organs as well as graspers.
Under the feet of the adults in this array dozens of tiny body replicas were skittering around, whistling and making small chuckling sounds, chasing each other, playing with a cheerful intensity that brought a smile to Shadith’s face. Tiny blobs pulled themselves along by nests of tentacles growing beneath their rudimentary chins; these were the infant heads. There were fugitive movements in the litter of grass and old leaves, but she never got a good look at any of these bits of the array.
The adults were hosing up seeds and insects from the ground, nuzzling at the trees, and poking among the leaves of the vines. She watched one of them fooling about a bush for several minutes, the neck tentacles busy about something. It was only when the Taalav moved on that she saw it had been tying stray canes to smaller reeds it had thrust into the ground.
All this while the adults were silent, going about their activities as if they were alone, though they sneaked glances at the creepier as they moved about.
The largest Taalav moved closer, scuttling sideways on those long, bent, tippy-toe legs. It stopped a body length away and stared at her, ignoring the Kliu almost as if it considered the guard a part of the machine.
It started making noises. Excited noises. Exchanging noises with the other Taalavs as they gathered around. Noises that blending into song, complex and lovely music.
Sudden pain jagged behind her eyes; intensified by the itch from the distorters in the exo.
Shadith clutched at the chair as she sought to make sense of what was happening. The translator didn’t work on animal sounds, only on organized speech. And that meant the Taalav were not animals, they were sentient beings.
The more they chattered, the worse her head felt. This langue had to be a mass of peculiarities because she’d never felt the translator labor so hard. I’ve got to get out of here. Now
She slapped at the controller, got the creepier moving once more on its programmed path, this time turning round to head back to the lake.
As soon as the machine began moving, the Taalavs.backed cautiously away, then stood watching as the creepier picked its careful way up the slope and into the trees.
5
She lay in semidarkness, a damp compress spread across her eyes and dripping into her pillow. Despite the exo’s support, the days she’d spent on this world kept layering exhaustion on exhaustion so even in the best of circumstances, thinking would have been difficult. Now she had a moral dilemma to complicate matters.
If the nu didn’t know the Taalav Gestalts wereintelligent beings rather than beasts, they had to suspect it. So if she piped up like a good little phenom with her discov
ery, the least she could expect was a sudden accident that would leave her a grease spot on some mountain between here and Base. No wonder they wanted to erase all instances of the Taalav outside their control. Discovery of the Gestalt’s intelligence would complicate their lives enormously. And it wouldn’t help the Taalav all that much either. Instinct said this is slavery and it has to stop. Instinct was an ass.
Even if she managed to get them taken from the Kliu, how long would they last without an equally powerful protector? Protector? Call it what it was. Exploiter. Once they’re discovered, they’re going to be exploited. The only big weapon that small people have is Helvetia’s adamant stance against slavery. Getting that evoked would take a whole lot of proof not just her word.
There were a few comforting things she’d noticed. They seemed healthy enough, and the abundance of the tiny body forms meant that reproduction was continuing. She’d felt no rage or fear or frustration from that lot. And loathsome exploiters as the Kliu were, they were also protection as long as the Taalav kept producing their crystals.
Well, Digby, I think I’ve just quit. 1 can’t do this, but I can’t not do it either. Can’t take your pay and work against you. Can’t let the Taalav array be murdered. Because that’s what it would be. How do I I.
hmmm… I’m going to keep working to find that smuggler and hope I get to him before the Kliu. 1 wouldn’t put it past them to use a planet cracker on the place just to make sure they eradicated the array. Can’t leave them with that thief either. He’s no better than the Kliu… get them away… take them somewhere… they’ll need looking after for a while… Sar! What do I do with them? I have to think… hunk! Maybe I’d just better ask them what they want. If my head ever settles down…