by David Brin
“Uthacalthing!”
He swiveled, shifting to hide the artifact behind his back as he faced the big Thennanin. “Yes, Kault?”
“I…” Kault appeared uncertain. “Metoh kanmi, b’twuil’ph… I…” Kault shook his head. His eyes closed and opened again. “I wonder if you have tested these fruits for my needs, as well as yours.”
Uthacalthing sighed. What does it take? Do Thennanin have any curiosity at all?
He let the crude artifact slip out of his hand, to drop into the river mud where he had found it. “Aye, my colleague. They are nutritious, so long as you remember to take your supplements.”
He walked back to join his companion for a fireless supper by the growing sparkle of the galaxies’ light.
52
Athaclena
Gorillas dropped over both sharp rims of the narrow canyon, lowering themselves on stripped forest vines. They slipped carefully past smoking crevices where recent explosions had torn the escarpment. Landslides were still a danger. Nevertheless, they hurried.
On their way down they passed through shimmering rainbows. The gorillas’ fur glistened under coatings of tiny water droplets.
A terrible growling accompanied their descent, echoing from the cliff faces and covering their labored breathing. It had hidden the noise of battle, smothering the bellow of death that had raged here only minutes before. Briefly, the dinsome waterfall had had competition but not for long.
Where its fremescent torrent had formerly fallen to crash upon glistening smooth stones, it now splattered and spumed against torn metal and polymers. Boulders’dislodged from the cliffsides had pounded the new debris at the foot of the falls. Now the water worked it flatter still.
Athaclena watched from atop the overlooking bluffs. “We do not want them to know how we managed this,” she said to Benjamin.
“The filament we bunched up under the falls was pretreated to decay. It’ll all wash away within a few hours, ser. When the enemy gets a relief party in here, they won’t know what ruse we used to trap this bunch.”
They watched the gorillas join a party of chim warriors poking through the wreckage of three Gubru hover tanks. Finally satisfied that all was clear, the chims slung their crossbows and began pulling out bits of salvage, directing the gorillas to lift this boulder or that shattered piece of armor plate out of the way.
The enemy patrol had come in fast, following the scent of hidden prey. Their instruments told them that someone had taken refuge behind the waterfall. And it was a perfectly logical place for such a hideaway — a barrier hard for their normal detectors to penetrate. Only their special resonance scanners had flared, betraying the Earthlings who had taken technology under there.
In order to take those hiding by surprise, the tanks had flown directly up the canyon, covered overhead by swarming battle drones of the highest quality, ready for combat.
Only they did not find much of a battle awaiting them. There were, in fact, no Earthlings at all behind the torrent. Only bundles of thin, spider-silk fiber.
And a trip wire.
And — planted all through the cliffsides — a few hundred kilos of homemade nitroglycerin.
Water spray had cleared away the dust, and swirling eddies had carried off myriad tiny pieces. Still the greater part of the Gubru strike force lay where it had been when explosions rocked the overhanging walls, filling the sky with a rain of dark volcanic stone. Athaclena watched a chim emerge from the wreckage. He hooted and held up a small, deadly Gubru missile. Soon a stream of alien munitions found its way into the packs of the waiting gorillas. The large pre-sentients began climbing out again through the multi-hued spray.
Athaclena scanned the narrow streaks of blue sky that could be seen through the forest canopy. In minutes the invader would have its fighters here. The colonial irregulars must be gone by then, or their fate would be the same as the poor chims who rose last week in the Vale of Sind.
A few refugees had made it to the mountains after that debacle. Fiben Bolger was not one of them. No messenger had come with Gailet Jones’s promised notes. For lack of information, Athaclena’s staff could only guess how long it would take for the Gubru to respond to this latest ambush.
“Pace, Benjamin.” Athaclena glanced meaningfully at her timepiece.
Her aide nodded. “I’ll go hurry ’em up, ser.” He sidled over next to their signaler. The young chimmie began waving flapping flags.
More gorillas and chims appeared at the cliff edge, scrambling up onto the wet, glistening grass. As the chim scavengers climbed out of the water-carved chasm, they grinned at Athaclena and hurried off, guiding their larger cousins toward secret paths through the forest.
Now she no longer needed to coax and persuade., For Athaclena had become an honorary Earthling. Even those who had earlier resented taking orders “from an Eatee” now obeyed her quickly, cheerfully.
It was ironic. In signing the articles that made them consorts, she and Robert had made it so that they now saw less of each other than ever. She no longer needed his authority as the sole free adult human, so he had set forth to raise havoc of his own elsewhere.
I wish I had studied such things better, she pondered. She was unsure just what was legally implied by signing such a document before witnesses. Interspecies “marriages” tended to be more for official convenience than anything else. Partners in a business enterprise might “marry,” even though they came from totally different genetic lines. A reptiloid Bi-Gle might enter into consort with a chitinous F’ruthian. One did not expect issue from such joinings. But it was generally expected that the partners appreciate each other’s company.
She felt funny about the whole thing. In a special sense, she now had a “husband.” And he was not here. So it was for Mathicluanna, all those long, lonely years, Athaclena thought, fingering the locket that hung from a chain around her throat. Uthacalthing’s message thread had joined her mother’s in there. Perhaps their laylacllapt’n spirits wound together in there, close as their bond had been in life.
Perhaps I begin to comprehend something I never understood about them, she wondered.
“Ser?… Uh, ma’am?”
Athaclena blinked and looked up. Benjamin was motioning to her from the trailhead, where one of the ubiquitous vine clusters came together around a small pool of pinkish water. A chimmie technician squatted by an opening in the crowded vines, adjusting a delicate instrument.
Athaclena approached. “You have word from Robert?”
“Yesser,” the chimmie said. “I definitely am detecting one of th’ trace chemicals he took along with him.”
“Which is it?” she asked tensely.
The chimmie grinned. “Th’ one with th’ left-handed adenine spiral. It’s the one we’d agreed would mean victory.”
Athaclena breathed a little easier. So, Robert’s party, too, had met with success. His group had gone to attack a small enemy observation post, north of Lome Pass, and must have engaged the enemy yesterday. Two minor successes in as many days. At this rate they might wear the Gubru down in, say, a million years or so.
“Reply that we, also, have met our goals.”
Benjamin smiled as he handed the signaler a vial of clear fluid, which was poured into the pool. Within hours the tagged molecules would be detectable many miles away. Tomorrow, probably, Robert’s signaler would report her message.
The method was slow. But she imagined the Gubru would have absolutely no inkling of it — for a while, at least.
“They’re finished with the salvage, general. We’d better scoot.”
She nodded. “Yes. Scoot we shall, Benjamin.”
In a minute they were running together up the verdant trail toward the pass and home.
A little while later, the trees behind them rattled and thunder shook the sky. Clamorous booms pealed, and for a time the waterfall’s roar fell away under a raptor’s scream of frustrated vengeance.
Too late, she cast contemptuously at the enemy fighters.<
br />
This time.
53
Robert
The enemy had started using better drones. This time the added expense saved them from annihilation.
The battered Gubru patrol retreated through dense jungle, blasting a ruined path on all sides for two hundred meters. Trees blew apart, and sinuous vines whipped like tortured worms. The hover tanks kept this up until they arrived at an area open enough for heavy lifters to land. There the remaining vehicles circled, facing outward, and kept up nearly continuous fire in all directions.
Robert watched as one party of chims ventured too close with their hand catapults and chemical grenades. They were caught in the exploding trees, cut down in a hail of wooden splinters, torn to shreds in the indisciminate scything.
Robert used hand signals to send the withdraw-and-disperse order rippling from squad to squad. No more could be done to this convoy, not with the full force of the Gubru military no doubt already on its way here. His bodyguards cradled their captured saber rifles and darted into the shadows ahead of him and to the flanks.
Robert hated the way the chims kept this web of protection around him, forbidding him to approach a skirmish site until all was safe. There was just no helping it though. They were right, dammit.
Clients were expected to protect their patrons as individuals — and the patron race, in turn, protected the client race as a species.
Athaclena seemed better able to handle this sort of thing. She was from a culture that had come into existence from the start assuming that this was the way things were. Also, he admitted, she doesn’t worry about machismo. One of his problems was that he seldom got to see or touch the enemy. And he so wanted to touch the Gubru.
“The withdrawal was executed successfully before the sky filled with alien battlecraft. His company of Earthling irregulars split up into small groups, to make their separate ways to dispersed encampments until they received the call to arms again over the forest vine network. Only Robert’s squad headed back toward the heights wherein their cave headquarters lay.
That required taking a wide detour, for they were far east in the Mulun range, and the enemy had set up outposts on several mountain peaks, easily supplied by air and defended with space-based weaponry. One of these stood along their most direct path home, so the chim scouts led Robert’s group down a jungle crevice, just north of Lome Pass.
The ropelike transfer vines lay everywhere. They were wonders, certainly, but they made for slow going down here below the heights. Robert had had plenty of time to think. Mostly he wondered what the Gubru were doing coming up here into the mountains at all.
Oh, he was glad they came, for it gave the Resistance a chance to strike at them. Otherwise, the irregulars might as well spit at the enemy, with their vast, overpowering weaponry.
But why were the Gubru bothering at all with the tiny guerrilla movement up in the Mulun when they had a firm grip on the rest of the planet? Was there some symbolic reason — something encrusted in Galactic tradition — that required they reduce every isolated pocket of resistance?
But even that would not explain the large civilian presence at those mountaintop outposts. The Gubru were pouring scientists into the Mulun. They were looking for something.
Robert recognized this area. He signaled for a halt.
“Let’s stop and look in on the gorillas,” he said.
His lieutenant, a bespectacled, -middle-aged chimmie named Elsie, frowned and looked at him dubiously. “The enemy’s gasbots sometimes dose an area without cause, sir. Just randomly. We chims will only be able to rest easy after you’re safe underground again.”
Robert was definitely not looking forward to the caverns, especially since Athaclena wouldn’t be back from her next mission for several days. He checked his compass and map.
“Come on, the refuge is only a few miles off our path. Anyway, if I know you chims from the Howletts Center, you must be keeping your precious gorillas in a place that’s even safer than the caves.”
He had her there, and Elsie clearly knew it. She put her fingers to her mouth and trilled a quick whistle, sending the scouts hurrying off in a new direction, to the southwest, darting through the upper parts of the trees.
In spite of the broken terrain, Robert made his way mostly along the ground. He couldn’t dash pellmell along narrow branches, not for mile after mile like the chims. Humans just weren’t specialized for that sort of thing.
They climbed another side canyon that was hardly more than a split in the side of a mammoth bulwark of stone. Down the narrow defile floated soft wisps of fog, made opalescent by multiple refractions of daylight. There were rainbows, and once, when the sun came out behind and above him, Robert looked down at a bank of drifting moisture and saw his own shadow surrounded by a triply colored halo, like those given saints in ancient iconography.
It was the glory … an unusually appropriate technical term for a perfect, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree reverse rainbow — much rarer than its more mundane cousins that would arch over any misty landscape, lifting the hearts of the blameless and the sinful alike.
If only I weren’t so damn rational, he thought. If I didn’t know exactly what it was, I might have taken it as a sign.
He sighed. The apparition faded even before he turned to move on.
There were times when Robert actually envied his ancestors, who had lived in dark ignorance before the twenty-first century and seemed to have spent most of their time making up weird, ornate explanations of the world to fill the yawning gap of their ignorance. Back then, one could believe in anything at all.
Simple, deliciously elegant explanations of human behavior — it apparently never mattered whether they were true or not, as long as they were incanted right. “Party lines” and wonderful conspiracy theories abounded. You could even believe in your own sainthood if you wanted. Nobody was there to show yo.u, with clear experimental proof, that there was no easy answer, no magic bullet, no philosopher’s stone, only simple, boring sanity.
How narrow the Golden Age looked in retrospect. No more than a century had intervened between the end of the Darkness and contact with Galactic society. For not quite a hundred years, war was unknown to Earth.
And now look at us, Robert thought. I wonder, does the Universe conspire against us? We finally grow up, make peace with ourselves… and emerge to find the stars already owned by crazies and monsters.
No, he corrected himself. Not all monsters. In fact, the majority of Galactic clans were quite decent folk. But moderate majorities were seldom allowed to live in peace by fanatics, either in Earth’s past or in the Five Galaxies today.
Perhaps golden ages simply aren’t meant to last.
Sound traveled oddly in these closed, rocky confines, amid the crisscross lacing of native vines. One moment it seemed as if he were climbing in a world gone entirely silent, as if the rolling wisps of shining haze were folds of cotton batting that enveloped and smothered all sound. The next instant, he might suddenly pick up a snatch of conversation — just a few words — and know that some strange trick of acoustics had carried back to him a whispered remark between two of his scouts, possibly hundreds of meters away.
He watched them, the chims. They still looked nervous, these irregular soldiers who had until a few months ago been farmers, miners, and backwoods ecological workers. But they were growing more confident day by day. Tougher and more determined.
And more feral, Robert also realized, seeing them flit into and out of view among the untamed trees. There was something fierce and wild in the way they moved, in the way their eyes darted as they leaped from branch to branch. One seldom seemed to need words to know what the other was doing. A grunt, a quick gesture, a grimace, these were often more than enough.
Other than their bows and quivers and handspun weapons pouches, the chims mostly traveled naked. The softening trappings of civilization, the shoes and factory-made fabrics, were all gone. And with them had departed some illusions.
&n
bsp; Robert glanced down at himself — bare-shanked, clad in breechcloth, moccasins, and cloth knapsack, bitten, scratched and hardening every day. His nails were dirty. His hair had been getting in the way so he’d cut it off in front and tied it in back. His beard had long ago stopped itching.
Some of the Eatees think that humans need more uplifting — that we are ourselves little more than animals. Robert leaped for a vine and swung over a dark patch of evil-looking thorns, coming to land in an agile crouch upon a fallen log. It’s a fairly common belief among the Galactics. And who am I to say they’re wrong?
There was a scurry of movement up ahead. Rapid hand signals crossed the gaps between the trees. His nearby guards, those directly responsible for his safety, motioned for him to detour along the westward, upwind side of the canyon. After climbing a few score meters higher he learned why. Even in the dampness he caught the musty, oversweet smell of old coercion dust, of corroding metal, and of death.
Soon he reached a point where he could look across the little vale to a narrow scar — already healing under layers of new growth — which ended in a crumpled mass of once-sleek machinery, now seared and ruined.
There were soft chim whispers and hand signals among the scouts. They nervously approached and began picking through the debris while others fingered their weapons and watched the sky; Robert thought he saw jutting white bones amid the wreckage, already picked clean by the ever-hungry jungle. If he had tried to approach any closer, of course, the chims would have physically restrained him, so he waited until Elsie returned with a report.
“They were overloaded,” she said, fingering the small, black flight recorder. Emotion obviously made it hard for her to bring forth words. “They were tryin’ to carry too many humans to Port Helenia, the day just after th’ hostage gas was first used. Some were already sick, and it was their only transport.