"So it'll give the wind plenty of area to push against," Sloosh said.
Deyv estimated that it was about one hundred and twenty feet long, thirty feet high, not counting the masts, and forty feet across, not counting the flared stern. It had three mastlike projections about ten feet high. On each side, at right angles, thin arms extended for about fifty feet The sails, so thin that light shone through them, were furled on the bottom arm. Threads ran down the arms to the sails. The whole ship was composed of very thin material, which was semiopaque.
Going closer to look, because the birds swarming over it were obstructing his view, Deyv saw knoblike swellings on the masts and arms. These, Sloosh said, were mechanisms for hoisting or lowering the sails. They also allowed the arms to swing out to a limited degree.
"It can sail against the wind if if s not more than a gentle breeze."
"How can it do that?" Deyv said. "It doesn't have the resistance against the hull that a water boat does."
"It creates a magnetic field which operates with or against the currents of the Earth. But that requires some power, so I suppose the tharakorm seldom does anything but go where the wind pushes it. It does, however, have sensors which detect both the strength of the wind and the alignment of earth currents. In former times, I believe, it could tack against stronger winds. But now that the Earth has a more feeble magnetic field, it lacks the power."
There were also round openings on the sides. Deyv couldn't see those on the bottom, but he knew they would be there.
From the top of the hill, he could see that there were three larger openings on the deck.
"Observe," Sloosh said. "The birds are disappearing into the hull. They're being tempted by a perfume even stronger, hence, more enticing, than that emitted by the liquid."
It was true. The avians were fighting to get through the openings.
"They'll be trapped and eaten belowdecks. The tharakorm then uses their bodies to generate the gas."
They waited until sleep-time. Sloosh told them they must appoint watches.
"Notice that more birds are settling on it. But a time will come when the birds will suddenly avoid it.
You'll smell another type of perfume then. This will drive the birds away. When this happens, the watch must wake everybody up. I can't smell that perfume, of course, but if I'm on watch then, I'll see that the birds are staying away from it."
Deyv didn't ask why this happened. He had figured out that the thing was repulsing the birds so that it could lift up. If it was covered by hundreds of them, it would never be able to get off the ground.
When all were awake, they saw that the time had not yet come for levitation. They sat under the bright hot sky or took short walks. The fruit and berries they'd brought in baskets were eaten. Jum and Aejip devoured some of the newly dead birds. When they wanted water, they went down to the shore and looked for relatively unpolluted water.
"What'll we do for food and water when we're aboard?" Deyv asked.
"We'll suffer until we can endure it no longer," the Archkerri said complacently. "Then we'll punch a hole in the gas containers of the tharakorm. It'll sink, and we'll get off when it grounds. That, I imagine, is what the Yawti will do."
Another sleep-time came. The humans and the Archkerri were getting hungry. But they went to bed, such as it was, with Vana standing watch. It seemed to Deyv he had just shut his eyes when he was awakened. Vana was shaking his shoulder. A very fragrant odor hung in the air.
"It must be time. The birds are gone."
He got up. The others were all awake. At least, he supposed the Archkerri was. He slept standing up.
"Now's the time," Sloosh said.
They went down the hillside and onto the sticky white-streaked mud at the bottom of the hollow. Deyv felt repulsion and some fear. Despite what the Archkerri said, or maybe because of it, he wasn't sure that the stuff wasn't fatal to humans.
Approaching the tharakorm, Deyv looked up one of the supports. Then he climbed up its curve, gripping with his hands and walking on his feet like a monkey. While Vana was ascending, he lowered his rope.
Sloosh tied the end around Jum, and Deyv hauled the dog up. He repeated the feat with Aejip, whose claws couldn't grip the smooth hard stuff.
Sloosh then tied the rope around the junction of his lower and upper torsos. He bent the latter until it was parallel to the ground, and he began inching up the support. His four thighs gripped the arch of the tharakorm and moved in coordination with his two hands. Meanwhile, the two humans pulled on the rope to relieve him of some of his weight. After much sweating and straining, they got the plant-man over the edge of the deck.
He stood up and said, "Now, we'll see if my weight added to yours is too much. I doubt it, since the pack of khratikl it carries must be more than our combined weights."
Deyv, Vana, and the cat went belowdecks to explore. Instead of ladders, the thing had grown ramps with corrugated surfaces. These allowed the claws of its symbionts enough purchase to ascend them. They were also good enough for the humans and the cat. But the dog and the Archkerri might have trouble.
There were four decks, each about seven and a half feet high. The tharakorm had a number of rooms and corridors, but most of the ship-creature was walled off. According to Sloosh, the space behind the walls contained the large cells for the gas, the gas-generating organs, the central nervous system, or what corresponded to such, and perhaps space for unknown "equipment" and ballast.
The illumination within was enough to see by. The portholes on the sides and bottom and the entrances on top admitted light The very thin though hard walls leaked light. Only in the innermost rooms was it so dark that the humans could barely make out their way. The khratikl, however, had catlike eyes, so they would have no more trouble seeing than Aejip.
Deyv and Vana went back up and described what they'd found to Sloosh.
"It's like all the others. I've examined a dead, or, to be exact, a nonoperating, one."
They waited. Deyv and Vana became more and more nervous as time passed. Finally, just as it was about sleep-time, the tharakorm began lifting. Its ascent was so gentle that they would not have noticed it if their eyes had been closed and if the supports hadn't fallen in the mud with a soft sound. The area around them receded below.
Deyv was frightened. He felt that he was in an unreal situation, one which he'd never experienced before and which shouldn't have ever happened. But there he was. The birds and the island they were on began to shrink, and presently they were over the lake, the island below and behind.
One of the strange sensations was that he didn't feel the wind.
"That's because we're going at the same speed as the wind," Sloosh said.
He was walking around the deck, so Deyv decided that he could get up. Evidently, the deck wasn't going to tilt if he went to one side of it.
The animals didn't seem to be bothered. Deyv felt somewhat ashamed of his near-panic. However,
Vana's paleness and tight voice indicated that she shared his reactions.
The powerful pleasant perfume had faded.
"Soon will come the hard part," Sloosh said.
He estimated they were about five thousand feet high. A thousand feet ahead was the pass. Deyv became alarmed then because it looked as if the tharakorm would come very near one side of a mountain.
"I wouldn't worry about that," the Archkerri said. "The two we saw ascend also floated close to that projection of the mountain. There's a reason for it The reason is wnat we have to worry about."
The trees along the edge of the outthrust were alive with khratild. Their squealdngs and chitterings reached Deyv before he saw them. Then, as the tharakorm drifted nearer, he saw the brownish shapes swarming everywhere along the lip. Now he understood what Sloosh had meant The dangerous animals were waiting for the tharakorm as it came along. There would be a race, and those who got there first would be its crew. If you could call them a crew, since they'd have nothing to do with the sailing. All the
y did was to provide food for the generation of gas. But that was a vital service. In return, the shipcreature gave the crew a splendid chance to feed themselves, to observe from above potential victims, and to swoop down on them. Their feeding territory was constantly changing, and so they couldn't deplete it
"The Yawti's impressions go as far as I can see," the Archkerri said. "Evidently, he made it to that point, and he had nobody to help him. However, the tracks of the khratikl also go as far as I can see. So perhaps they overcame him. Well, we shall see what we can do."
Before the tharakorm got to the nearer edge of the projection, a cloud of khratikl dropped off the outer tips of the tree branches. They fell toward the lake, their wings flapping. Presently, long before they neared the surface, they ceased to fall, and their wings caught hold of the air. Then they were coming up toward their intended berth.
Deyv counted about fifty of them.
They came in a closely packed group from ahead and below and then were around their would-be host.
Instead of attacking at once, as he had expected, they broke into a circle four deep. Around and around they flew, getting nearer as time went by. Then he could see the rattish faces, the wet dull-yellow incisors, the humanlike hands, the leathery wings, and the yellow eyes. Their cries came to him, and after a while he thought he could detect intonations and rhythms similar to human speech.
Whether they were actually using language or had a system of signals, they didn't sound angry or hostile.
They seemed more puzzled than anything else.
The vessel passed beyond the mountain, and soon they were over a broad plain. Beyond that were other peaks, but these seemed less tall. Now the calls from the wheeling beasts were plaintive. No doubt about that. Then one, probably the leader, headed back for the pass, and the others followed.
"By Tirsh, what happened?" Vana asked. She looked as relieved, but as astounded, as Deyv felt.
"I don't know," Deyv said.
"It's a revelation to me," Sloosh said. "But you can't blame me for not knowing what would happen. The crystal never showed me anything like that. And apparently the crystals of my predecessors and contemporaries didn't either. I think, though, that I know why we, and the Yawtl, survived."
There was a long pause while Sloosh stood with his eyes closed. Finally, Deyv, irritated, asked, "Why?"
The Archkerri opened his green eyes. "That opened a path to relevant exploration. Yes. What happened was that the khratikl came against a novel experience. They seem to be fairly intelligent, though they are not sentient, that is, capable of self-consciousness. Still, it might be possible that there could be an intelligence equal even to mine which could, at the same time, be without self-consciousness."
Sloosh closed his eyes again.
After a short while, Deyv said loudly, "Sloosh! Where are you?"
"I'm here, where I've always been. I was here when you last addressed me. Oh! I see what you mean.
These symbionts of the ship-creature, though they have a certain intelligence, are still primarily guided by instinct. They expect, guided by their evolutionarily programmed genes, to board an unoccupied tharakorm. So, when they encountered a tharakorm occupied by the Yawtl and one occupied by us, they were in a new situation. They didn't know how to handle it. Thus, instead of attacking us, as true sentients would have, they rejected the situation as outside their instinctual experience. And they returned to the ledge of the mountain to board the next tharakorm that comes along.
"However, their programs have been upset. What will happen to those who come back but who should have been comfortably situated? Will they then have to battle with those who expected that they would inhabit the third one? Is there a pecking order that determines who gets in the front of the line? Or is this determined entirely by the age of the khratikl? Or ... ?"
Deyv sometimes found the Archkerri's speculations interesting. Just now he wanted to know how they were going to survive. Everybody aboard was suffering from hunger, and soon they'd all be thirsty.
15
WITHOUT symbionts to supply food for gas generation, the tharakorm would slowly settle. At least, that was Sloosh's theory. However, if the cell walls did seep gas, they were not doing so swiftly enough for the present crew. Its members would be dead long before it touched the ground. At Sloosh's direction, they punched one spot on a wall with the sword and beat it with the tomahawks. The wall, though thinner than Vana's fingernail, was amazingly tough. It took all the time between two sleeps to break through. However, lack of food and water made the job longer. The labor also made them hungrier and thirstier than if they'd been resting. At its end they were utterly exhausted.
A strong wind came up and sped them along for at least a hundred miles. The Archkerri lost the red trail of the Yawtl then.
"We may never find him now," he said. "For one thing, he's alone. He may not be able to make a hole in the cell of his tharakorm. Even if he does, he won't be able to do it as quickly .as we did. Thus, his tharakorm will go much farther than ours. And it is undoubtedly traveling in a different direction from ours. The wind must have shifted and blown him off our path before this big wind came up."
"At the moment," Vana said in a dry, cracked voice, "I care only about getting water to drink. And then some food."
At last the ship-creature landed on the roof of the jungle in the midst of the tossing tops of the trees. The moment it struck, it tilted, and all its crew were rolled off the deck and into the trees. The second it was relieved of their weight, the tharakorm soared and was gone. Deyv, the last to be shed, saw it rise even as he pitched sideways into the foliage. Yelling with fright, he clawed outward. His hands caught liana, which broke, and he fell deeper. Something, probably a branch, struck him, knocking him half-senseless.
Somehow, he caught hold of a thin branch. It broke, and he fell flat on his back on a large branch.
The wind was knocked out of him. For a moment, he didn't know where he was. But once his wits were gathered, he knew that he was, for the time being, safe.
Miraculously, nobody was seriously hurt. Sloosh, by far the heaviest, had plunged deeper. A network of liana had finally held him. Jum had landed almost by the Archkerri's side a few seconds later. Unable to hold on to the branch above Sloosh, the dog had been precipitated, howling, onto the plant-man.
Vana was clinging to the end of a branch bending under her weight. She managed to crawl up it to a thicker part. Aejip was hanging on to the trunk, her claws digging in.
It took a long time for Deyv to work his way above the Archkerri and the dog. He tied one end of his rope to the junction of a smaller branch and to that on which he lay. Sloosh tied the other end of the rope to Jum, and Deyv lowered the dog to a big branch. Sloosh went down the rope then, his immensely strong hands and arms gripping it and supporting his six hundred pounds. Deyv expected the rope to break, but it held.
They rested on the branch a long time, eating fruit plucked from surrounding branches. Once his belly was filled and the juices had eased his thirst, Deyv slept for a while. On awakening, he and Vana began the work of getting the dog and the plant-man to earth. When the four of them had reached the ground, they found the cat devouring the decaying carcass of a 10-pound rodent. Deyv insisted that she share it with the dog. Though she snarled protest, she did as ordered.
Within two sleep-times, they'd healed their bruises, scratches, and contusions. They came out of the jungle onto a wide plain. This was covered with grasses of various kinds, none higher than three feet. It was populated by herds of herbivores, attendant predators, and vast numbers of birds and flying mammals. And, of course, the ever-present insects and quasi-insects.
Halfway across the plain they came across a strange object lying against two small trees. Its cylindrical shape and the cone at one end made Deyv think at first that it was a House of the ancients. It was a hundred feet long, had a diameter of thirty-five feet, and was of some hard greenish material. On seeing that it had no windows and on
ly one entrance, Deyv decided that it wasn't a House. How could anybody have entered it when it was upright? The doorway would be fifty feet above the ground.
"Very curious," Sloosh said. "I don't remember coming across anything like this in my studies."
The round door had no handle, but there was a plate that was slightly inset nearby. Deyv pushed the plate, and the door began to swing inward.
He and Vana jumped back, ready to run if anything dangerous-looking came out. But when the door stopped, it revealed a room empty except for some furniture.
Sloosh buzzed his equivalent of "Hmm!"
Jum growled, and Deyv looked at him. The dog was not facing the cylinder, as he'd expected. He was pointing back toward the direction from which they'd come.
"Oh, oh!" Deyv said. "Trouble. Maybe."
The others also looked. Trotting toward them was a pack of big ugly creatures larger than Jum. Their heads were somewhat doglike but they had two canines which extended at least a foot below the lower jaw. They were somewhat humpbacked, and their rears sloped downward. The bristly fur was gray and marked with small black crosses. Now and then one gave a peculiar high-pitched cry, half-snarl, halflaughter.
When they got about a hundred feet from the travelers, they stopped and seemed to go into a conference.
In the center of the ring they formed was the biggest and the ugliest one, and they seemed to be addressing their horrid cries at him. By now the strong wind carried their odor to Deyv's party, a stench like rotten flesh mixed with a light odor of skunk and garlic.
Vana said, "I don't like this at all. Are they actually talking?"
"I doubt it," Sloosh said. "Their foreheads aren't high enough for that kind of intelligence. It's just a behavior pattern. Which doesn't make them any less dangerous."
The plant-man went up to the doorway and looked inside. "The walls are even thinner than those of the tharakorm, but they're opaque. The furniture seems to be glued to the floor. Or perhaps it's just a formed extension of the material, a seamless extrusion design." He bent his knees and leveled his upper torso with the ground. He thrust his huge hands under the cylinder where it met the ground.
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