“When I got the ship specs for the escape attempt I did wonder what else they were carrying on board. It seemed odd that they would keep us so crowded when the ship appeared to be so large. The Xeonsaur passed on only necessary information, like the location and the contents of some of the store rooms—“
“Xeonsaur!” She had Mikal’s full attention. “Surely you didn’t say Xeonsaur? An Xeonsaur on that ship!”
“That’s what my node and my young friend, Murra, who could communicate with him telepathically, called him. Murra told me that he was cold-blooded, a lizard.”
“Good Lord! He must be a prisoner, too! But how?”
“Tangle-juice. Murra said that it affects the Xeonsaur differently from how it affects us. He is physically immobilized but his mind is free, freer, I think, than Gorsh and his doctor realized. I don’t know how they get him to do what it is that they need him for, but I gathered that he was very unhappy about it and gave me all the help he could for the escape. He wants word sent to his world about his situation.”
“Yes, that will have to be done. Kati, you have no idea....” His voice trailed off. “We have to get off this planet. We have to find the beacon, that’s a fact.”
Map One – The Southern Continent Journey
CHAPTER FOUR
The Tunnel Dwellers took them prisoner while they were asleep.
*****
Sometime before it happened, Kati and Mikal had decided to move further into the tunnels, in case the slavers took it into their heads to check out the underground network. By then the bit of light that had been filtering down through the hole by which they had tumbled into the cavern, had dimmed, leaving them in the dark, except for the lights which they carried with them.
“They may well have interrogated your young friend by now,” Mikal had said. “Therefore they will know that he passed the world map to you from the Xeonsaur, and will have guessed that we made for the subterranean passages.”
“So are you suggesting that we find a place to hide, or what?” Kati had asked.
She had assumed that they could wait out the space ship, that Captain Gorsh had bigger fish to fry than they were, and would quickly give up looking for them. At first Mikal had seemed to agree with her but, clearly, he had changed his mind. She realized, with some chagrin, that his newer assessment of the situation was likely to be more accurate than the first one. For one thing, he had been off the mind-tangler longer, and for another, he had eaten food more nutritious than the liquid supplement that Ingrid and Roxanna had been feeding him. Very likely, his brain was working better now, than it had been, earlier.
“I would say that we should consult your map and figure out in which direction we should travel, so as to exit these caves in some area of sentient habitation. The beacon is going to be in an inhabited part of the world, if it, in fact, exists.”
Kati had turned her attention inward. The granda had been rather quiet for some time but as soon as she had made her request, the globe image had come to her mind’s eyes and the node had made the necessary calculations as to the direction that they should take.
“According to the granda we want to go in that direction.” She had pointed it out with her beam of light. “It takes us downwards, geographically, and the lowlands have a much more concentrated human—he did use that term, and since he claims to have been on this world in one incarnation, he ought to know—population than the mountains.”
That was the direction that they had taken. All nonsense about leaving a string trail for return was done with; if somebody was going to be looking for them, they did not want to be found.
“What sort of a capability would they have to look for us down here?” Kati had asked as they had walked along in the dark.
“I can promise you that they won’t be coming after us with a flit,” Mikal had said with a bark of a laugh. “But they may have a wheeled vehicle or two on board, small enough to be used in these tunnels, provided they can get one down here.”
“Yeah, a vehicle with wheels would work,“ Kati had answered. “These are remarkably even-floored caverns. I don’t know much about caves but I would’ve thought a person would have to scramble over rocks a lot.”
“I don’t think this is a natural cavern network. They may have started out that way but somebody’s done a lot of work on them, most likely a long time ago.”
Kati had walked in silence for a while. “I hope it was a long time ago,” she finally had said. “I’m not keen, right now, on running into tunnel-builders who could accuse us of trespassing.”
“Indeed,” Mikal had agreed. “Mind you, whatever’s to be, will be. We don’t have much in the way of choices.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
They had continued with the trek until they had grown tired. Kati had noticed it first; she realized she was stumbling on the even floor.
“I don’t think I can go much longer,” she had admitted wearily.
“Then we better find some nook or cranny and take a break,” Mikal had agreed, so readily that Kati could tell that he, too, was worn out.
She had allowed the granda to use her ESP ability to scout around for a nook, and it had directed her to one; she had grabbed Mikal’s arm to bring him along.
“I don’t know what this is,” she had said, after they had crawled into a small side cave, and had examined it with their lights. It had a trickle of water which ran down a wall and disappeared into a crack in the floor. “But it does look like a good place to rest. We can even get a drink of water.”
“It’s a place of rest, I don’t doubt,” Mikal had stated. “And we need rest.”
*****
Before falling into a deep sleep, Kati had remembered to request that the granda use her ESP senses to keep a least some small watch over her and Mikal. By then, Mikal had already rolled into the thin blanket from his pack and was breathing evenly, on the floor next to her.
Therefore she had had some warning of the attack, when it came, although not enough.
At first, she had incorporated her node’s attempts to wake her up into her dream, and thought that she was back in her rooms on the resort, trying to turn her alarm clock off, and could not; it kept beeping insistently. At last it had dawned on her dreaming self that something was wrong; she was not where she thought she was, and the insistent wake-up signal was sounding within her own head.
She struggled awake, and out of the blanket about her, while the granda fed information to her: there were a number of sentient beings outside the niche she and Mikal had found, and they were heading directly towards them, as if they had certain knowledge of their presence. Kati drew their packs close, shaking Mikal with one hand while groping for one of her lights with the other. Maybe she could blind whoever was coming with her light; that was her only idea for defence.
“Are they from the ship?” she subvocalized to her node. The answer was no: these ones were not from the space vessel.
“Mikal, wake up!”
Clearly he was as groggy as she had been moments earlier. She pinched him hard on an arm and he responded with an angry shout, struggling up into a sitting position inside his blanket.
And then she knew, through her sensitivity enhanced by the granda’s abilities, that the attackers were at the opening to the little side cavern. She clicked on her light beam, directing it to where she judged the first pair of eyes to be—and she yelped in shock and dismay.
The light was splashing onto a humanoid figure, white and furred. It was not reacting to the light as she had expected it to, because it had no eyes, and therefore was not aware of the beam directed at it! Where the eyes would have been had the creature been human, was only an expanse of furred flesh, with no hint that such things as eyes existed!
Before she had time to recover from the shock, the rest area swarmed with the creatures. She clung to her light while the eyeless creatures, with amazing co-ordination and skill, used the blankets and some kind of elastic cord to bundle her and Mi
kal up, too fast for either of them to protest. Then they and their belongings were lifted up unceremoniously, only to be tossed on to a wheeled cart of some kind which was waiting on the tunnel floor outside. After that, the cart started to move, and tied up in the dark as the two of them were, they could determine nothing else about what was happening to them. Outside of the fact that they were going somewhere—fast.
“Shit,” she heard Mikal mutter from beside her on the cart.
“Did you see what I saw?” Kati asked him a little shakily.
“You mean the lack of eyes? Yeah and the thought occurs that if they spend their whole lives down here, never going up above, they don’t have much use for eyes. Probably their other senses are acute enough to make up for it.”
“I should imagine that you’re right,” Kati said. “I’d be willing to bet that they have some sort of extra-sensory perception, too. I have some, although I’m untrained, and when I sensed them coming, after the granda finally managed to wake me up, they were coming directly towards us, as if they knew exactly where we were.”
“Are you saying that you are something of an esper yourself, Kati?” Mikal sounded thoughtful.
“Somewhat. It wasn’t a big thing on my home world. In fact a lot of people denied its existence, but I always was good with hunches—or at least I could be, when I took my own advice. Murra was a trained telepath and he recognized that I had the ability, if not nearly as honed as his. It meant that he and I could communicate without Gorsh and company being the wiser.”
“You might try to probe around us a bit with your talent, so as to maybe get some idea of where the creatures are taking us, and why.”
“It’s a thought, although I won’t make any promises. If Murra was here, he could establish rapport with these beings but, me, I’m far from his equal as a telepath. Likely the granda can be of use to extend what talent I have, but that still leaves me as no more than, maybe, two amateurs.”
“Still, it’s a heck of a lot more than I can do,” Mikal encouraged her. “And trussed up like we are, our options are rather limited.”
That was a fact. Kati shut her mouth and tried to get as comfortable as she could, considering that she was lying on a hard wagon floor, “trussed up”. She would have liked to have studied the aliens in order to pick one of them as her target, but in the dark that was impossible. Instead, she simply requested aid from her node, and tried to expand her mind outward, to reach the mental activity of the humanoids surrounding her.
At first, all she managed to do was touch the exterior of Mikal’s mind. She knew that it was him; there was a “flavour“ to his mentality that she immediately recognized from having spent time with him, but he was closed to her. There was no recognition of her presence; she might as well have not been “flowing” about him.
She extended her search. She pushed her immaterial being further out into the tunnel, trying to touch whatever sentiences might exist around her. She had been able to sense the eyeless ones when they had approached her and Mikal; she had known that they were coming, and at what speed. Surely she could feel them now, too, and perhaps touch their minds, gently, even as Murra had touched hers, the first time he had approached her!
Ah! Here was something, somebody!
She judged this one to be the alien on her side of the wagon, the one of them physically closest to her. There was a strangeness to this being that made her hesitate in her approach. She remained on the fringes of this mind, trying to “taste” it, to make sense of it, before approaching further. She realized that the oddness of the other frightened her a little; she recognized that she was afraid to push herself further into the other mind, even though there seemed to be no barriers to her entrance the way Mikal’s mind was barriered.
“Oh my God!”
She did not realize that she had gasped the words out loud. Nor did she know that her body was writhing in spasms on the wagon bed, frightening her companion who was quite unable to do anything to help, outside of calling her name.
Her mind had suddenly been over-laid by another—not the one she had been tentatively approaching, but a much larger, vastly more capable one! It felt to her that this vast mind was covering all of the mentality that she had extruded into the outside world, plus it had penetrated her inner being, too. Everything about her lay bare to this other mind, including everything to do with her node! She felt her measure taken—no doubt she was found wanting—and then there was a feeling of vast amusement around her, although she did not believe that she was being laughed at.
“Well, little one,” the newcomer mindspoke her, “aren’t you the strange one?”
She took a moment to compose herself before responding. She sensed her granda node at the back of her mind as a gaping figure, somehow more astonished at, and disturbed by, the turn of events than she herself was.
“I’m hardly strange to myself,” she replied at last. “To me you are the one who is strange, a strange vastness of mental reality that apparently can totally surround and overwhelm me.”
“Yes, it is true that this mentality is large and spacious. It is so because every one of the Kitfi contributes to it, although The Farseer is at the heart of it. We will bring you to The Farseer, to face her in person. It is understood that the Up-Aboves like to face The Farseer and look upon her with their physical sight organs when they address her, or she addresses them. Besides, there are those who want to harm you, looking for you and we do not tolerate sentients to do violence to one another within our domain. Therefore we are making sure that those others will not find you.”
“I thank you for that. Yes, we are running away from them, and your help is much appreciated.”
“I understand from studying your mind, that you come from outside this world. But, it is very curious to this entity that you have this other self inside your mentality, a self very unlike the rest of you, but feeding you immense amounts of knowledge. How is this possible? And what is this other self? Is it physical?”
“It so happens that I’m new to this kind of thing, and I don’t know much more than you do.” Kati laughed. (On the wagon Mikal heard the laugh and stopped worrying about her.) “Perhaps we can persuade the granda to explain himself to you.”
Graciously she allowed the granda to have the non-existent floor, while she retreated into the background. However, she kept her thoughts focused on the exchange between the new entity and the granda.
“I am in function a translation node,” the granda communicated grandly, to Kati’s amusement. “A translation node is a very special growth shed by what is called The Brain World, a planet inhabited solely and totally by a single sentient organism known as The Brain. The Brain finds the sentient beings of the galaxy fascinating and has made a deal with the part of them known as The Star Federation to provide them with these nodes, in order to ease their dealings with one another. A translation node is surgically implanted into the body of a sentient, usually on the neck, under the left ear. Immediately after implantation it connects with the host’s nervous system, and builds its own pathways into the brain and all other parts of the body, including the voice box. The node then helps its host to learn languages very quickly, and to speak them well. There are other things it translates as well, like distances and time, so that an individual can effortlessly fit himself or herself into a different culture.
“Now, it so happens that I am not an ordinary translation node, but of a variety the humans of the Star Federation call a granda node. Most nodes return home to The Brain Planet after spending time in a handful of human beings—a doctor or a healer will almost always remove a dead person’s node before the body is returned to its dusty origins—but some of us enjoy existing among the humans, and stay with them life after life. We gain a lot of knowledge, and hopefully, a little bit of wisdom, through such existences, and can do much more for a new host than a first-time node can.”
“Fascinating. And have you been able to help your host this time?”
“In
deed. A granda may choose whose neck it wants to be implanted in, and Kati suits me well. I wanted to get away from the criminals on whose space ship I found myself, and Kati seemed like the likeliest person to escape. It is true, as you have noted, that she and I are very different from one another, but I believe that we can be very useful to each other, and can learn to live harmoniously inside her head. Right now we have a common goal: to get to the Star Federation. Together we can make it happen.”
Kati decided that it was time for her to “speak up”.
“I have plans beyond that, and certainly the granda will have to go along with them. There are friends of mine on that star ship from which that we have escaped. They are to be sold into slavery, and I intend, eventually, to get them away from that fate; no failure allowed. The person accompanying me physically, happens to be someone whose job it is to fight slavery. I expect that I may get some help on that from him.”
“That is commendable. We will talk again once we have brought you to The Farseer, you and your companion both.”
Suddenly the presence around Kati was gone. She withdrew her mind back inside her skull, opened her eyes in the darkness, and lay on the wagon, feeling very tired.
Moments later she heard Mikal’s voice:
“Kati, did you reach anybody? Find out anything?”
She wished that she could rub her face. Or perform any other normal, silly action, like maybe scratch her nose. But her body was still bundled up, and all she could do is lie on her back. However, she could answer Mikal’s question.
“Yeah, I ran into somebody. A collective mind of some sort, but under the control of someone known as The Farseer. It seems that we are on our way to meet this Farseer face to face. The ship personnel are chasing us—you were right to think that they would—and these beings decided to whisk us away from being caught, because they expect Gorsh and company to commit sacrilege to their tunnels by doing violence to us, if they find us.”
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