by David Brin
Athaclena concentrated. She tried localizing the faint brush of emotions.
“It … it is gone,” she sighed at last.
Robert radiated nervousness. “Are you sure it wasn’t just a chim? There are lots of them up in these hills, seisin gatherers and conservation workers.”
Athaclena cast a palang glyph. Then, recalling that Robert wasn’t likely to notice the sparkling essence of frustration. She shrugged to indicate approximately the same nuance.
“No, Robert. I have met many neo-chimpanzees, remember? The being I sensed was different! I’d swear it wasn’t fully sapient, for one thing. And, there was a feeling of sadness, of submerged power.…”
Athaclena turned to Robert, suddenly excited. “Can it have been a ‘Garthling’? Oh, let’s hurry! We might be able to get closer!” She settled in around the center post and looked up at Robert expectantly.
“The famed Tymbrimi adaptability,” Robert sighed. “All of a sudden you’re anxious to go! And here I’d been hoping to impress and arouse you with a white-knuckler ride.”
Boys, she thought again, shaking her head vigorously. How can they think such things, even in jest?
“Stop joking and let’s be off!” she urged.
He settled into the plate behind her. Athaclena held on tightly to his knees. Her tendrils waved about his face, but Robert did not complain. “All right, here we go.”
His musty human aroma was close around her as he pushed off and the plate began to slip forward.
It all came back to Robert as their makeshift sled accelerated, skidding and bouncing over the slick, convex caps of plate ivy. Athaclena gripped his knees tightly, her laughter higher and more bell-like than a human girl’s. Robert, too, laughed and shouted, holding Athaclena as he leaned one way and then the other to steer the madly hopping sled.
Must’ve been eleven years old when I did this last.
Every jounce and leap made his heart pound. Not even an amusement park gravity ride was like this! Athaclena let out a squeak of exhilaration as they sailed free and landed again with a rubbery rebound. Her corona was a storm of silvery threads that seemed to crackle with excitement.
I only hope I remember how to control this thing right.
Maybe it was his rustiness. Or it might have been Athaclena’s presence, distracting him. But Robert was just a little late reacting when the near-oak stump—a remnant of the forest that had once grown on this slope—loomed suddenly in their path.
Athaclena laughed in delight as Robert leaned hard to the left, swerving their crude boat wildly. By the time she sensed his sudden change of mood their spin was already a tumble, out of control. Then their plate caught on something unseen. Impact swerved them savagely, sending the contents of the sled flying.
At that moment luck and Tymbrimi instincts were with Athaclena. Stress hormones surged and reflexes tucked her head down, rolling her into a ball. On impact her body made its own sled, bouncing and skidding atop the plates like a rubbery ball.
It all happened in a blur. Giants’ fists struck her, tossed her about. A great roar filled her ears and her corona blazed as she spun and fell, again and again.
Finally Athaclena tumbled to a halt, still curled up tight, just short of the forest on the valley floor. At first she could only lie there as the gheer enzymes made her pay the price for her quick reflexes. Breath came in long, shuddering gasps; her high and low kidneys throbbed, struggling with the sudden overload.
And there was pain. Athaclena had trouble localizing it. She seemed only to have picked up a few bruises and scrapes. So where …?
Realization came in a rush as she uncurled and opened her eyes. The pain was coming from Robert! Her Earthling guide was broadcasting blinding surges of agony!
She got up gingerly, still dizzy from reaction, and shaded her eyes to look around the bright hillside. The human wasn’t in sight, so she sought him with her corona. The searing painflood led her stumbling awkwardly over the glossy plates to a point not far from the upended sled.
Robert’s legs kicked weakly from under a layer of broad plate ivy caps. An effort to back out culminated in a low, muffled moan. A sparkling shower of hot agones seemed to home right in on Athaclena’s corona.
She knelt beside him. “Robert! Are you caught on something? Can you breathe?”
What foolishness, she realized, asking multiple questions when she could tell the human was barely even conscious!
I must do something. Athaclena drew her jack-laser from her boot top and attacked the plate ivy, starting well away from Robert, slicing stems and grunting as she heaved aside the caps, one at a time.
Knotty, musky vines remained tangled around the human’s head and arms, pinning him to the thicket. “Robert, I’m going to cut near your head. Don’t move!”
Robert groaned something indecipherable. His right arm was badly twisted, and so much distilled ache fizzed around him that she had to withdraw her corona to keep from fainting from the overload. Aliens weren’t supposed to commune this strongly with Tymbrimi! At least she had never believed it possible before this.
Robert gasped as she heaved the last shriveled cap away from his face. His eyes were closed, and his mouth moved as if he were silently talking to himself. What is he doing now?
She felt the overtones of some obviously human rite-of-discipline. It had something to do with numbers and counting. Perhaps it was that “self-hypnosis” technique all humans were taught in school. Though primitive, it seemed to be doing Robert some good.
“I’m going to cut away the roots binding your arm now,” she told him.
He jerked his head in a nod. “Hurry, Clennie. I’ve … I’ve never had to block this much pain before.…” He let out a shivering sigh as the last rootlet parted. His arm sprang free, floppy and broken.
What now? Athaclena worried. It was always hazardous to interfere with an injured member of an alien race. Lack of training was only part of the problem. One’s most basic succoring instincts might be entirely wrong for helping someone of another species.
Athaclena grabbed a handful of coronal tendrils and twisted them in indecision. Some things have to be universal!
Make sure the victim keeps breathing. That she had done automatically.
Try to stop leaks of bodily fluids. All she had to go on were some old, pre-Contact “movies” she and her father had watched on the journey to Garth—dealing with ancient Earth creatures called cops and robbers. According to those films, Robert’s wounds might be called “only scratches.” But she suspected those ancient story-records weren’t particularly strong on realism.
Oh, if only humans weren’t so frail!
Athaclena rushed to Robert’s backpack, seeking the radio in the lower side pouch. Aid could arrive from Port Helenia in less than an hour, and rescue officials could tell her what to do in the meantime.
The radio was simple, of Tymbrimi design, but nothing happened when she touched the power switch.
No. It has to work! She stabbed it again. But the indicator stayed blank.
Athaclena popped the back cover. The transmitter crystal had been removed. She blinked in consternation. How could this be?
They were cut off from help. She was completely on her own.
“Robert,” she said as she knelt by him again. “You must guide me. I cannot help you unless you tell me what to do!”
The human still counted from one to ten, over and over. She had to repeat herself until, at last, his eyes came into focus. “I … I think my arm’s b- busted, Clennie.…” He gasped. “Help get me out of the sun … then, use drugs.…”
His presence seemed to fade away, and his eyes rolled up as unconsciousness overcame him. Athaclena did not approve of a nervous system that overloaded with pain, leaving its owner unable to help himself. It wasn’t Robert’s fault. He was brave, but his brain had shorted out.
There was one advantage, of course. Fainting damped down his broadcast agony. That made it easier for her to drag him backw
ard over the spongy, uneven field of plate ivy, attempting all the while not to shake his broken right arm unduly.
Big-boned, huge-thewed, overmuscled human! She cast a glyph of great pungency as she pulled his heavy body all the way to the shady edge of the forest.
Athaclena retrieved their backpacks and quickly found Robert’s first aid kit. There was a tincture she had seen him use only two days before, when he had caught his finger on a wood sliver. This she slathered liberally over his lacerations.
Robert moaned and shifted a little. She could feel his mind struggle upward against the pain. Soon, half automatically, he was mumbling numbers to himself once again.
Her lips moved as she read the Anglic instructions on a container of “flesh foam,” then she applied the sprayer onto his cuts, sealing them under a medicinal layer.
That left the arm—and the agony. Robert had mentioned drugs. But which drugs?
There were many little ampules, clearly labeled in both Anglic and GalSeven. But directions were sparse. There was no provision for a non-Terran having to treat a human without benefit of advice.
She used logic. Emergency medicines would be packaged in gas ampules for easy, quick administration. Athaclena pulled out three likely looking glassine cylinders. She bent forward until the silvery strands of her corona fell around Robert’s face, bringing close his human aroma—musty and in this case so very male. “Robert,” she whispered carefully in Anglic. “I know you can hear me. Rise within yourself! I need your wisdom out in the here-and-now.”
Apparently she was only distracting him from his rite-of-discipline, for she sensed the pain increase. Robert grimaced and counted out loud.
Tymbrimi do not curse as humans do. A purist would say they make “stylistic statements of record” instead. But at times like this few would be able to tell the difference. Athaclena muttered caustically in her native tongue.
Clearly Robert was not an adept, even at this crude “self-hypnosis” technique. His pain pummeled the fringes of her mind, and Athaclena let out a small trill, like a sigh. She was unaccustomed to having to keep out such an assault. The fluttering of her eyelids blurred vision as would a human’s tears.
There was only one way, and it meant exposing herself more than she was accustomed, even with her family. The prospect was daunting, but there didn’t seem to be any choice. In order to get through to him at all, she had to get a lot closer than this.
“I … I am here, Robert. Share it with me.”
She opened up to the narrow flood of sharp, discrete agones—so un-Tymbrimi, and yet so eerily familiar, almost as if they were recognizable somehow. The quanta of agony dripped to an uneven pump beat. They were little hot, searing balls—lumps of molten metal.
… lumps of metal …?
The weirdness almost startled Athaclena out of contact. She had never before experienced a metaphor so vividly. It was more than just a comparison, stronger than saying that one thing was like another. For a moment, the agones had been glowing iron globs that burned to touch.…
To be human is strange indeed.
Athaclena tried to ignore the imagery. She moved toward the agone nexus until a barrier stopped her. Another metaphor? This time, it was a swiftly flowing stream of pain—a river that lay across her path.
What she needed was an usunltlan, a protection field to carry her up the flood to its source. But how did one shape the mind-stuff of a human!
Even as she wondered, drifting smoke-images seemed to fall together around her. Mist patterns flowed, solidified, became a shape. Athaclena suddenly found she could visualize herself standing in a small boat! And in her hands she held an oar.
Was this how usunltlan manifested in a human’s mind? As a metaphor?
Amazed, she began to row upstream, into the stinging maelstrom.
Forms floated by, crowding and jostling in the fog surrounding her. Now one blur drifted past as a distorted face. Next, some bizarre animal figure snarled at her. Most of the grotesque things she glimpsed could never have existed in any real universe.
Unaccustomed to visualizing the networks of a mind, it took Athaclena some moments to realize that the shapes represented memories, conflicts, emotions.
So many emotions! Athaclena felt an urge to flee. One might go mad in this place!
It was Tymbrimi curiosity that made her stay. That and duty.
This is so strange, she thought as she rowed through the metaphorical swamp. Half blinded by drifting drops of pain, she stared in wonderment. Oh, to be a true telepath and know, instead of having to guess, what all these symbols meant.
There were easily as many drives as in a Tymbrimi mind. Some of the strange images and sensations struck her as familiar. Perhaps they harkened back to times before her race or Robert’s learned speech—her own people by Uplift and humans doing it the hard way—back when two tribes of clever animals lived very similar lives in the wild, on far separated worlds.
It was most odd seeing with two pairs of eyes at once. There was the set that looked in amazement about the metaphorical realm and her real pair which saw Robert’s face inches from her own, under the canopy of her corona.
The human blinked rapidly. He had stopped counting in his confusion. She, at least, understood some of what was happening. But Robert was feeling something truly bizarre. A word came to her: déjà vu … quick half-rememberings of things at once both new and old.
Athaclena concentrated and crafted a delicate glyph, a fluttering beacon to beat in resonance with his deepest brain harmonic. Robert gasped and she felt him reach out after it.
His metaphorical self took shape alongside her in the little boat, holding another oar. It seemed to be the way of things, at this level, that he did not even ask how he came to be there.
Together they cast off through the flood of pain, the torrent from his broken arm. They had to row through a swirling cloud of agones, which struck and bit at them like swarms of vampire bugs. There were obstacles, snags, and eddies where strange voices muttered sullenly out of dark depths.
Finally they came to a pool, the center of the problem. At its bottom lay the gestalt image of an iron grating set in a stony floor. Horrible debris obstructed the drain.
Robert quailed back in alarm. Athaclena knew these had to be emotion-laden memories—their fearsomeness given shape in teeth and claws and bloated, awful faces. How could humans let such clutter accumulate? She was dazed and more than a little frightened by the ugly, animate wreckage.
“They’re called neuroses,” spoke Robert’s inner voice. He knew what they were “looking” at and was fighting a terror far worse than hers. “I’d forgotten so many of these things! I had no idea they were still here.”
Robert stared at his enemies below—and Athaclena saw that many of the faces below were warped, angry versions of his own.
“This is my job now, Clennie. We learned long before Contact that there is only one way to deal with a mess like this. Truth is the only weapon that works:”
The boat rocked as Robert’s metaphoric self turned and dove into the molten pool of pain.
Robert!
Froth rose. The tiny craft began to buck and heave, forcing her to hold tightly to the rim of the strange usunltlan. Bright, awful hurt sprayed on all sides. And down near the grating a terrific struggle was taking place.
In the outer world, Robert’s face ran streams of perspiration. Athaclena wondered how much more of this he could take.
Hesitantly, she sent her image-hand down into the pool. Direct contact burned, but she pushed on, reaching for the grating.
Something grabbed her hand! She yanked back but the grip held. An awful thing wearing a horrid version of Robert’s face leered up at her with an expression twisted almost out of recognition by some warped lust. The thing pulled hard, trying to drag her into the noisome pool. Athaclena screamed.
Another shape streaked in to grapple with her assailant. The scaly hold on her arm released and she fell back into the boat. Then t
he little craft started speeding away! All around her the lake of pain flowed toward the drain. But her boat moved rapidly the other way, upstream against the flow.
Robert is pushing me out, she realized. Contact narrowed, then broke. The metaphorical images ceased abruptly. Athaclena blinked rapidly, in a daze. She knelt on the soft ground. Robert held her hand, breathing through clenched teeth.
“Had to stop you, Clennie.… That was dangerous for you.…”
“But you are in such pain!”
He shook his head. “You showed me where the block was. I … I can take care of that neurotic garbage now that I know it’s there … at least well enough for now. And … and have I told you yet that a guy wouldn’t have any trouble at all falling in love with you?”
Athaclena sat up abruptly, amazed at the non sequitur. She held up the three gas ampules. “Robert, you must tell me which of these drugs will ease the pain, yet leave you conscious enough to help me!”
He squinted. “The blue one. Snap it under my nose, but don’t breathe any yourself! No … no telling what para-endorphins would do to you.”
When Athaclena broke the ampule a small, dense cloud of vapor spilled out. About half went in with Robert’s next breath. The rest quickly dispersed.
With a deep, shuddering sigh, Robert’s body seemed to uncoil. He looked up at her again with a new light in his eyes. “I don’t know if I could have maintained consciousness much longer. But it was almost worth it … sharing my mind with you.”
In his aura it seemed that a simple but elegant version of zunour’thzun danced. Athaclena was momentarily taken aback.
“You are a very strange creature, Robert. I …”
She paused. The zunour’thzun … it was gone now, but she had not imagined kenning that glyph. How could Robert have learned to make it?
Athaclena nodded and smiled. The human mannerisms came easily, as if imprinted.
“I was just thinking the same thing, Robert. I … I, too, found it worthwhile.”
13
Fiben
Just above a cliff face, near the rim of a narrow mesa, dust still rose in plumes where some recent crashing force had torn a long, ugly furrow in the ground. A dagger-shaped stretch of forest had been shattered in a few violent seconds by a plunging thing that roared and skipped and struck again—sending earth and vegetation spraying in all directions—before finally coming to rest just short of the sheer precipice.