by David Brin
The Suzerain’s assistants shared its satisfaction. At this rate, the irregulars should soon all be dead.
A pall fell over the celebration when it was reported that one of the troop carriers that had brought them here had broken down. Another casualty of the plague of corrosion that had struck Gubru equipment all over the mountains and the Vale of Sind. The Suzerain had ordered an urgent investigation.
“No matter! We shall all ride the remaining carriers. Nothing, nobody, no event shall stop our hunt!”
The soldiers chanted.
“Zooon!”
95
Athaclena
She watched as the hirsute human read the message for the fourth time, and could not help wondering whether she was doing the right thing. Rank-haired, bearded, and naked, Major Prathachulthorn looked the very essence of a wild, carnivorous wolfling … a creature far too dangerous to trust.
He looked down at the message, and for a moment all she could read were the waves of tension that coursed up his shoulders and down his arms to those powerful, tightly flexed hands.
“It appears that I am under orders to forgive you, and to follow your policies, miss.” The last word ended in a hiss. “Does this mean that I’ll be set free if I promise to be good? How can I be sure this order is for real?”
Athaclena knew she had little choice. In the days ahead she would not be able to spare the chimpower to continue guarding Prathachulthorn. Those she could rely upon to ignore the human’s command-voice were very few, and he had already nearly escaped on four separate occasions. The alternative was to finish him off here and now. And for that she simply had not the will.
“I have no doubt you would kill me the instant you discovered the message wasn’t genuine,” Athaclena replied.
His teeth seemed to flash. “You have my word on that,” he assured her.
“And on what else?”
He closed and then reopened his eyes. “According to these orders from the Government in Exile, I have no choice but to act as if I was never kidnapped, to pretend there was no mutiny, and to conform my strategy to your advice. All right. I agree to this, as long as you remember that I’m going to appeal to my commanders on Earth, first chance I get. And they will take this to the TAASF. And once Coordinator Oneagle is overruled, I will find you, my young Tymbrimi. I will come to you.”
The bald, open hatred in his mind simultaneously made her shiver and also reassured her. The man held nothing back. Truth burned beneath his words. She nodded to Benjamin.
“Let him go.”
Looking unhappy, and avoiding eye contact with the dark-haired human, the chims lowered the cage and cut open the door. Prathachulthorn emerged rubbing his arms. Then, quite suddenly, he whirled and leaped in a high kick landing in a stance one blow away from her. He laughed as Athaclena and the chims backed away.
“Where is my command?” he asked tersely.
“I do not know, precisely,” Athaclena answered, as she tried to abort a gheer flux. “We’ve scattered into small parties and even had to abandon the caves when it was clear they were compromised.”
“What about this place?” Prathachulthorn motioned to the steaming slopes of Mount Fossey.
“We expect the enemy to stage an assault here at any moment,” she replied honestly.
“Well,” he said. “I didn’t believe half of what you told me, yesterday, about that ‘Uplift Ceremony’ and its consequences. But I’ll give you this; you and your dad do seem to have stirred up the Gubru good.”
He sniffed the air, as if already he were trying to pick up a spoor. “I assume you have a tactical situation map and a datawell for me?”
Benjamin brought one of the portable computer units forward, but Prathachulthorn held up a hand. “Not now. First, let’s get out of here. I want to get away from this place.”
Athaclena nodded. She could well understand how the man felt.
He laughed when she declined his mock-chivalrous bow and insisted that he go first. “As you wish,” he chuckled.
Soon they were swinging through the trees and running under the thick forest canopy. Not much later, they heard what sounded like thunder back where the refuge had been, even though there were no clouds in the sky.
96
Sylvie
The night was lit by fiery beacons which burst forth actinically and cast stark shadows as they drifted slowly groundward. Their impact on the senses was sudden, dazzling, overwhelming even the noise of battle and the screams of the dying.
It was the defenders who sent the blazing torches into the sky, for their assailants needed no light to guide them. Streaking in by radar and infrared, they attacked with deadly accuracy until momentarily blinded by the brilliance of the flares.
Chims fled the evening’s fireless camp in all directions, naked, carrying only food and a few weapons on their backs. Mostly, they were refugees from mountain hamlets burned down in the recent surge of fighting. A few trained irregulars remained behind in a desperate rearguard action to cover the civilians’ retreat.
They used what means they had to confuse the airborne enemy’s deadly, precise detectors. The flares were sophisticated, automatically adjusting their fulminations to best interfere with active and passive sensors. They slowed the avians down, but only for a little while. And they were in short supply.
Besides, the enemy had something new, some secret system that was letting them track chims even under the heaviest growth, even naked, without the simplest trappings of civilization.
All the pursued could do was split up into smaller and smaller groups. The prospect facing those who made it away from here was to live completely as animals, alone or at most in pairs, wild-eyed and cowering under skies that had once been theirs to roam at will.
Sylvie was helping an older chimmie and two children climb over a vine-covered tree trunk when suddenly upraised hackles told her of gravitics drawing near. She quickly signed for the others to take cover, but something—perhaps it was the unsteady rhythm of those motors—made her stay behind, peering over the rim of a fallen log. In the blackness she barely caught the flash of a dim, whitish shape, plummeting through the starlit forest to crash noisily among the branches and then disappear into the jungle gloom.
Sylvie stared down the dark channel the plunging vessel had cut. She listened, chewing on her fingernails, as debris rained down in its wake.
“Donna!” she whispered. The elderly chimmie lifted her head from under a pile of leaves. “Can you make it with the children the rest of the way to the rendezvous?” Sylvie asked. “All you have to do is head downhill to a stream, then follow that stream to a small waterfall and cave. Can you do that?”
Donna paused for a long moment, concentrating, and at last nodded. “Good,” Sylvie, said. “When you see Petri, tell him I saw an enemy scout come down, and I’m goin’ to go and look it over.”
Fear had widened the older chimmie’s eyes so that the whites shone around her irises. She blinked a couple of times, then held out her arms for the children. By the time they were gathered under her protection, Sylvie had already cautiously entered the tunnel of broken trees.
Why am I doing this? Sylvie wondered as she stepped over broken branches still oozing pungent sap. Tiny skittering motions told of native creatures seeking cover after the ruination of their homes. The smell of ozone put Sylvie’s hair on end. And then, as she drew nearer, there came another familiar odor, one of overripe bird.
Everything looked eerie in the dimness. There were absolutely no colors, only shades of stygian gray. When the off-white bulk of the crashed aircraft loomed in front of her, Sylvie saw that it lay canted at a forty degree slope, its front end quite crumpled from the impact.
She heard a faint crackling as some piece of electronics shorted again and again. Other than that, there came no sound from within. The main hatch had been torn half off its hinges.
Touching the still warm hull for guidance, she approached cautiously. Her fingers traced the outli
nes of one of the gravitic impellers, and flakes of corrosion came off. Lousy maintenance, she thought, partly in order to keep her mind busy. I wonder if that’s why it crashed. Her mouth was dry and her heart felt in her throat as she reached the opening and bent to peer around the corner.
Two Gubru still lay strapped at their stations, their sharp-beaked heads lolling from slender, broken necks.
Sylvie tried to swallow. She made herself lift one foot and step gingerly onto the sloping deck. Her pulse threatened to stop when the plates groaned and one of the Talon Soldiers moved.
But it was only the broken vessel, creaking and settling slightly. “Goodall,” Sylvie moaned as she brought her hand down from her breast. It was hard to concentrate with all of her instincts screaming just to get the hell out of here.
As she had for many days, Sylvie tried to imagine what Gailet Jones would do under circumstances like this. She knew she would never be the chimmie Gailet was. That just wasn’t in the cards. But if she tried hard …
“Weapons,” she whispered to herself, and forced her trembling hands to pull the soldiers’ sidearms from their holsters. Seconds seemed like hours, but soon two racked saber rifles joined the pistols in a pile outside the hatch. Sylvie was about to lower herself to the ground when she hissed and slapped her forehead. “Idiot! Athaclena needs intelligence more than popguns!”
She returned to the cockpit and peered about, wondering if she would recognize something significant even if it lay right in front of her.
Come on. You’re a Terragens citizen with most of a college education. And you spent months working for the Gubru.
Concentrating, she recognized the flight controls, and—from symbols obviously pertaining to missiles—the weapons console. Another display, still lit by the craft’s draining batteries, showed a relief territory map, with multiple sigils and designations written in Galactic Three.
Could this be what they’re using to find us? she wondered.
A dial, just below the display, used words she knew in the enemy’s language. “Band Selector,” the label said. Experimentally, she touched it.
A window opened in the lower left corner of the display. More arcane writing spilled forth, much too complex for her. But above the text there now whirled a complex design that an adult of any civilized society would recognize as a chemical diagram.
Sylvie was no chemist, but she had had a basic education, and something about the molecule depicted there looked oddly familiar to her. She concentrated and tried to sound out the indentifier, the word just below the diagram. The GalThree syllabary came back to her.
“Hee … Heem … Hee Moog …”
Sylvie felt her skin suddenly course with goose bumps. She traced the line of her lips with her tongue and then whispered a single word.
“Hemoglobin.”
97
Galactics
“Biological warfare!” The Suzerain of Beam and Talon hopped about the bridge of the cruising battleship on which it held court and pointed at the Kwackoo technician who had brought the news. “This corrosion, this decay, this blight on armor and machinery, it was created by design?”
The technician bowed. “Yes. There are several agents—bacteria, prions, molds. When we saw the pattern counter-measures were instituted at once. It will take time to treat all affected surfaces with organisms engineered against theirs, but success will eventually reduce this to a mere nuisance.”
Eventually, the admiral thought bitterly. “How were these agents delivered?”
The Kwackoo pulled from its pouch a filmy clump of clothlike material, bound by slender strands. “When these things began blowing in from the mountains, we consulted Library records and questioned the locals. Irritating infestations occur regularly on this continental coast with the onset of winter, so we ignored them.
“However, it now appears the mountain insurgents have found a way to infect these airborne spore carriers with biological entities destructive to our equipment. By the time we were aware, the dispersal was nearly universal. The plot was most ingenious.”
The military commander paced. “How bad, how severe, how catastrophic is the damage?”
Again, a deep bow. “One third of our planet-side transport is affected. Two of the spaceport defense batteries will be out of commission for ten planetary days.”
“Ten days!”
“As you know, we are no longer receiving spares from the homeworld.”
The admiral did not need to be reminded. Already most routes to Gimelhai had been interdicted by the approaching alien armadas, now patiently clearing mines away from the fringes of Garth system.
And if that weren’t enough, the two other Suzerains were now united in opposing the military. There was nothing they could do to prevent the coming battles if the admiral’s party chose to fight, but they could withhold both religious and bureaucratic support. The effects of that were already showing.
The pressures had built until a steady, throbbing pain seemed to pulse within the admiral’s head. “They will pay!” the Suzerain shrieked. Curse the limitations of priests and egg counters!
The Suzerain of Beam and Talon recalled with fond longing the grand fleets it had led into this system. But long ago most of those ships had been pulled away by the Roost Masters to meet other desperate needs, and probably quite a few of them were already smoking ruins or vapor, out on the contentious Galactic marches.
In order to avoid such thoughts the admiral contemplated instead the noose now tightening around the shrinking mountain strongholds of the insurgents. Soon that worry, at least, would be over forever.
And then, well, let the Uplift Institute enforce the neutrality of its sacred Ceremonial Mound in the midst of a pitched planet-space battle! Under such circumstances, missiles were known to fall astray—such as into civilian towns, or even neutral ground.
Too bad! There would be commiseration, of course. Such a pity. But those were the fortunes of war!
98
Uthacalthing
No longer did he have to hold secret the yearnings in his heart, or keep contained his deep-stored reservoir of feelings. It did not matter if alien detectors pinpointed his psychic emanations, for they surely would know where to find him, when the time came.
At dawn, while the east grew gray with the cloud-shrouded sun, Uthacalthing walked along the dew-covered slopes and reached out with everything he had.
The miracle of some days back had burst the chrysalis of his soul. Where he thought only winter would forever reign, now bright shoots burst forth. To both humans and Tymbrimi, love was considered the greatest power. But there was, indeed, something to be said for irony, as well.
I live, and kenn the world as beautiful.
He poured all of his craft into a glyph which floated, delicate and light, above his wafting tendrils. To be brought to this place, so near where his schemes began … and to witness how all his jests had been turned around upon himself, giving him all he had wanted, but in such amazing ways …
Dawn brought color to the world. It was a winter land- and seascape of barren orchards and tarp-covered ships. The waters of the bay wore lines of wind-flecked foam. And yet, the sun gave warmth.
He thought of the Universe, so strange, often bizarre, and so filled with danger and tragedy.
But also surprise.
Surprise … the blessing that tells one that this is real—he spread his arms to encompass it all—that even the most imaginative of us could not have made all of this up within his own mind.
He did not set the glyph free. It cast loose as if of its own accord and rose unaffected by the morning winds, to drift wherever chance might take it.
Later came long consultations with the Grand Examiner, with Kault and Cordwainer Appelbe. They all sought his advice. He tried not to disappoint them.
Around noon Robert Oneagle drew him aside and brought up again the idea of escape. The young human wanted to break out of their confinement on the Ceremonial Mound and head of
f with Fiben to cause the Gubru grief. They all knew of the fighting in the mountains, and Robert wanted to help Athaclena in any way possible.
Uthacalthing sympathized. “But you underestimate yourself in thinking you could ever do this, my son,” he told the young man.
Robert blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that the Gubru military are now well aware of how dangerous you and Fiben are. And perhaps through some small efforts of my own they include me on their list. Why do you think they maintain such patrols, when they must have other pressing needs?”
He motioned at the craft which cruised just beyond the perimeter of Institute territory. No doubt even the coolant lines leading to the power stations were watched by expensive drones of deadly sophistication. Robert had suggested using handmade gliders, but the enemy was surely wise even to that wolfling trick by now. They had had expensive lessons.
“In this way we help Athaclena,” Uthacalthing said. “By thumbing our noses at the enemy, by smiling as if we have thought of something special which they have not. By frightening creatures who deserve what they get for having no sense of humor.”
Robert made no outward gesture to show that he understood. But to Uthacalthing’s delight he recognized the glyph the young man formed, a simple version of kiniwullun. He laughed. Obviously, it was one Robert had learned—and earned—from Athaclena.
“Yes, my strange adopted son. We must keep the Gubru painfully aware that boys will do what boys do.”
It was later, though, toward sunset, that Uthacalthing stood up suddenly in his dark tent and walked outside. He stared again to the east, tendrils waving, seeking.
Somewhere, out there, he knew his daughter was thinking furiously. Something, some news perhaps, had come to her. And now she was concentrating as if her life depended on it.
Then the brief, fey moment of linkage passed. Uthacalthing turned, but he did not go back to his own shelter. Instead, he wandered a little north and pulled aside the flap of Robert’s tent. The human looked up from his reading, the light of the datawell casting a wild expression onto his face.