by Brian Lowe
I yanked my foot free of the encroaching flesh-fingers and got out of there none too soon, as I practically felt the thunder lizard's hot breath on my back, and the combination of fried worm and garbage-smelling thunder lizard was nearly enough to knock me down by itself. I had barely made it out when I heard a loud sploosh! that could only be the lizard stepping into the worm's carcass. My shoulders hunched as I anticipated that hideous head descending toward me…
And the thunder lizard screamed twice as loud as before! The ground began to shake violently and randomly and I was thrown off my feet again, rolling to a stop facing back the way I had come, and witness to an incredible sight.
Both halves of the worm had come alive again and were attacking the nearest moving object, the thunder lizard. The worm--worms!--hadn't even finished growing back their heads, but they were rolling against the lizard and pounding it for all they were worth. When it tried to seize one in its jaws, the second would attack, and the lizard would turn to that side, only to open itself for attack again by the other.
The worms were both shredded, but the thunder lizard was off-balance, and the inevitable came quickly. The lizard lost its footing and went down. The worms, now featuring new fully-formed heads with fully-formed teeth, dove in. The ensuing struggle only lasted a few seconds.
I lay there on my side, panting, and hurt in pretty much every part of my body that had nerve endings. Then I got myself up and moving. I was not going to make the same mistake again. Now that the noise was over, the smell of blood and burnt meat was going to attract every scavenger within miles, and I didn't relish the idea of fighting off black wolves with my knife.
The cannon was down to one charge. I weighed the chances of meeting another thunder lizard against the extra speed I could make if I left it behind. In the end I kept it; gorillas aren't built for speed in any event.
I moved as quickly as I could, ducking behind trees any time I heard the noise of an approaching animal. They were mostly too focused on the carnage ahead to pay me any attention, and the two or three who slowed down to sniff my trail were sent on their way with a low growl. Gorillas can't run, but we can definitely growl.
The clearing holding the communications tower opened up before I knew it was there, and I was half-way across before I stumbled to a stop. The tower stood twenty feet high; I looked up, wondering if I was supposed to climb it. When my eyes reached the top, I paused. There was another animal in the clearing with me, and it was perched at the very top of the tower.
It was a gorilla.
"Oh, thank heaven! I thought you might be a wolf!"
It was a female gorilla.
XVIII
I could see even from that distance that she was pretty, with a well-shaped skull, wide shoulders, and trim hindquarters. She was wearing the kind of loose shift that apes had adopted from humans, mostly because they seemed to expect it.
After a several-second interval that would have proven fatal if any one of a hundred different predator species had chosen that moment to enter the clearing behind me, awareness of the girl's words penetrated my low-slung skull and I clumsily pulled my sidearm, trying to see in all directions around and behind me at once. Some small objective part of my brain said I must look like an idiot, and it was confirmed when the girl laughed.
"It's all right," she called down. "I can see everything from up here. We're safe." She paused to give me a meaningful look. "Now…"
Like I said, I hadn't seen another gorilla in almost a year. I thought I'd kept myself busy enough not to think about it, but plainly I hadn't, because I couldn't keep from hanging on her every word, and it was all I could do to keep from climbing up the tower to be closer to her.
"Why don't you come down, then?"
She shrugged and shimmied down the tower like climbing things was her career.
"Sorry," she said when she was almost level with me. She was hanging from the tower structure with one hand and one foot, giving me a frank assessment, and offering a toothy grin that almost made me drop my gun. "Catch me?"
I admit it. I'm young, I was lonely and hormonal. I holstered my pistol, held out my arms, and she hopped lightly into my grasp.
That was when the toothy grin became a feral snarl and she tried to tear my throat out.
The only thing that saved me was the very ruse she'd used to try to get close to me: I was holding her up, and when she lunged, I dropped her.
She cried out in frustrated pain when she hit the ground, and tried to kick me. I jumped back to avoid her, but she bounced up and came at me with ferocious speed. She had produced a knife from somewhere and I saw it glint in the sun.
That decided me. I pulled my pistol and leveled it at her. She stopped in her tracks, panting and staring at me with red-eyed hatred.
My gaze flicked to the tower behind her, and she grunted with another grin that held no flirtation. I needed to reach the tower, and she had no intention of letting me. We stood in a frozen tableau, my pistol the focus of all our attention. I had but to squeeze the handle.
Her hate-filled expression dared me to do it.
I holstered the pistol again and triumph flared in her eyes. But before she could gather herself for a charge, I pulled my own knife free. It was three times the length of hers, and I swung it like it was a twig. I began to circle around her, watching her all the while.
She waited too long, until we were equidistant from the tower and moving any further would put me closer than she. It was the last possible moment to attack, and I was ready. I blocked her blade with my own, knocking it from her fist, and when she would have used her hands and teeth, I met her with a blow Keryl had taught me that he called "boxing." She hit the dirt and did not move.
The moment I reached the tower, the entire jungle vanished and I was standing in the big laboratory--guns, earthworms, and she-apes all fading away.
My anger, on the other hand, was just starting to form.
Tierse and Avanya were smart enough to hail me from inside their office before I reached the door. I didn't blame them. It's fine to say you're okay having lunch with a gorilla, and pretending his fangs don't bother you, but when that gorilla outweighs you by three hundred pounds and he's headed your way with an unfriendly expression on his face, you suddenly start wondering if that two inches of glassteel between you and him is going to be enough.
Further in their favor was the fact that Tierse was smart enough to let Avanya do the talking.
"Timash? You can relax. The test is over."
"What the hell was that about?" Avanya tried to stutter out an answer but I didn't let her. "That was supposed to be a test to see how I handled the neutron cannon, not whether I was lonely for a girlfriend!"
"I said--" Tierse began, but I cut her off, too.
"You said there would be thunder lizards and earthworms, but you never said anything about gorillas! What the hell is going on here?"
"I said if you died in here you wouldn't die out there!" Tierse shouted back. "I--oh, the hell with this!" A second later the lab door parted and she came in, stalking straight up to me. "The point of this wasn't to see if you can handle the cannon--it was to see if you could handle everything else. We don't know what's out there; we only know what we've seen and some of our scouts have lived to talk about.
"Once we're outside the dome a few miles, that's unknown country. It could be desert, jungle, or a really big ice-cold lake. Nobody's ever done this before, and if you can't handle surprises, then you shouldn't be doing it at all."
I stared down at her, feeling my heart slow as my anger ebbed away. The truth was, half of my reaction had been the aftereffects of adrenaline. More than that, she was right.
"Okay, I'll give this you much," I said. "The one time I went outside with you I was almost eaten because I wasn't paying attention. But the one time I went outside without you, I was almost eaten because you didn't tell me what I was up against."
"Fair enough." She nodded. "So what's your point?"
&
nbsp; "My point is--" Actually, I hadn't thought that bit through. "My point is, how can I know if I'm ready for this if nobody will tell me what it is I'm supposed to do?"
"That," interrupted Avanya as she approached us, "is the most intelligent thing anyone has said all morning. So I suggest we adjourn to my office and I will give you some answers."
XIX
I had never been to Avanya's office, and now I could see why. Her walls were literally papered with maps, large-scale and small-scale computer-generated paper maps pinned to one wall, hand-drawn diagrams of various degrees of proficiency on another. A third wall was covered with one giant map that I guessed encompassed the entire Southern Valley. It bore three long, shaky lines in blue, red, and green originating from a single point at the bottom and branching off until they more-or-less converged at a point near the top. All three lines swerved at about the same point, two to the right and one to the left, to avoid a large oval blank spot in the middle.
It didn't take a genius to see that Avanya had been plotting alternative paths to get somewhere way on the other end of the Southern Valley. Nor did it take any greater intelligence to guess that those multi-colored lines were going to figure very prominently in my immediate future.
"I imagine you've already figured out what the maps are for," Avanya said.
I repeated what I had surmised. "You need to get to somewhere at the top of that map. Tanar is there at the bottom where all the lines meet. What I don't get is why they don't meet again at the top."
"Because," she said with a sigh, "we won't know exactly where we're going until we get there."
I turned to give Tierse a narrow look, but she just held up her hands and nodded at Avanya.
"Don't look at me; she's in charge."
I found a stool that looked as though it would hold my weight. It creaked, but it didn't pitch me over. Avanya and Tierse exchanged a glance. Maybe they were thinking about my shouting at them in the lab after the simulation, and how glad they were that they had stayed behind the glass.
"All right then," Avanya said. "This is all old news to Tierse, but I'm sure she won't mind listening to it again.
"As you know, the Southern Valley was once a research station. It was used for biological, botanical research, mining exploration, that sort of thing. When the Southern Valley was first discovered, it was just a large cavern with the roof partially collapsed. They enlarged it, using a force field dome to hold up the roof and prevent any more cave-ins. Over time, they terraformed the interior into the kind of landscape you see today."
I kept my face blank, but I knew already Avanya was hiding things from me. What kind of biological research required a neutron cannon on hand? And if you were going conduct botanical research, why would you go to the one place on the planet where there were no plants?
"Or at least this is what we think it looks like today. A lot of our information is thirty years old. This--" she pointed at the oval blank--"is a lake. It's sixteen miles long, seven miles wide, and over 300 feet deep. It connects below the surface with another lake ten miles away, but that one is under the ice.
"There were actually several different substations strung along the Southern Valley floor and in the caves in the walls, doing their own research, but it was easy to get from one to the next by air, and of course they had remote communication. It wasn't as good as the datasphere the Nuum have--"
"But they didn't have the Nuum, either," I said.
"Exactly. According to the records I've read, when the Nuum appeared, nobody knew what they had in mind; we thought they were peaceful visitors. By the time anyone figured out differently, it was too late to do anything about it. Fortunately, however, we had never had any contact with them, so the Nuum didn't know we were here. They had their hands full pacifying the cities; they didn't have time to explore every corner of the planet to see who was hiding there. We've simply stayed out of sight ever since."
I held up one finger. "Wait. Are you saying that this station was still operational when the Nuum arrived, three hundred years ago?" She nodded, and I acknowledged her with a simple grunt. Again, she was giving me a story. The gorillas hadn't had much to do with the Thorans, which was how we had escaped the Nuum and their ban on technology, but I had learned enough since I had come out of there to know that Thoran civilization had been in decline three hundred years ago, before the Nuum got here. They sure hadn't had the kind of weapons that Tierse and her friends were sporting, or they'd have given the Nuum a better fight. I didn’t know why she would lie to me, but it wasn't the time to push the issue. I apologized for interrupting and waited for Avanya to continue.
"Unfortunately, most of the staff were scientists, not administrators, and as a consequence, every one of them thought he knew best what to do and that everyone else should just shut up and follow his lead. You can imagine how that turned out. Pretty soon each of the teams was hunkered down in its own substation, waiting for the others to come to their senses. Which they never did. Over time, we developed into full-fledged independent settlements. We cooperated for resources, of course, since we were all stuck down here together, and other than a few small arguments, according to the official records, everyone got along as well as could be expected.
"Until about thirty years ago, when one of the other settlements, Kur, decided it was finally time to take charge. Of everything."
"Tierse was telling me about this. They used to grow food to sell, but then they stopped deliveries. When you sent out search parties to find out why, they never came back."
"Exactly right." Avanya turned to her map, reaching up to indicate a star-shaped point about three-fourths of the way up on the right, past the lake. "That's Kur. It's built right into the cliffs. We know from when we used to trade with them that they excavated pretty extensively, but we don't know what they've been up to for the past thirty years. We're pretty sure, though, that they've built high up enough that they have a good vantage point over the entire valley, so getting past them will not be easy."
"And we have to get past them because Udar is on the other side," Tierse added.
I tilted my head to look at her. "And we need to get to Udar because…?"
Tierse pointed at Avanya.
"Why we need to get to Udar is a big secret," Avanya said. "That's why we couldn't tell you. When you came here, we had no idea if you were really a lost traveler or someone who had been trying to reach Kur. They have access to the surface, just like we do. We suspect they've been trying to acquire Nuum technology for decades. You could've been part of that. We couldn't take any chances."
"And that's why Vollan told you to shove me out the door?"
Tierse shrugged. "Vollan is nothing if not practical. If you'd been down here before, you'd have known what it was like outside, and if you had any idea what it was like outside, you'd have fought to stay in." She gave me an appraising glance. "Thank God you didn't. Anyway, you passed that test, so Vollan let you stay. And of course he's been monitoring you telepathically since you got here, and he hasn't been able to learn anything negative about you. But we still weren't about to let you in on this."
So Vollan had been monitoring me and he hadn't learned anything bad about me? Not surprising, since I'd learned my mental defense techniques from Maire, and she was the about the best there was. Another thing I didn't mention out loud.
"And yet you are letting me in on it. Even after I failed the field test."
"Don't blame me," Tierse said. "I didn't want you. I still don't know if I want you. But I was overruled."
Figuring that this was all I was going to get out of Tierse, I turned back to Avanya. "So what exactly is going on? Or is that part still a secret?"
"What's going on," Avanya said, "is that we have been in contact with Udar for two years, trying to arrange a treaty whereby we can combine our forces and trap Kur between us. If we can remove Kur's leader, we can clear the monsters out of the Southern Valley and start living like Thorans again. And just after you arrived,
we had a breakthrough. We've reached an agreement.
"There's only one catch. We're pretty sure our communications haven't been intercepted, but we can't be certain. So I'm going to Udar to sign the treaty personally. Tierse is going to lead the expedition, and I want you along."
I took a moment to think on it. "Let me get this straight. Udar wants you to cross the entire Southern Valley, risking thunder lizards and earthworms and black wolves and who know what else, a trip that nobody has ever survived, just to get your personal signature on a treaty? I know you're head of diplomacy and all, but there's a good chance we won't make it. Why are they insisting you go at all?"
Avanya's face got all red. "It's not just that. I've been talking for the past two years with Zevi, the lead negotiator for Udar. We're in love. I'm going to Udar to get married."
My shoulders sagged and the extra pressure bent the stool even more. My Uncle Balu had told me once, "Son, the only thing more deadly than a Nuum blaster, is love."
On the other hand, I was pretty sure Uncle Balu had never seen a fifty-foot earthworm.
XX
We were not, amazingly enough, attacked the moment we set foot outside of Tanar. In fact, two hours later, we had encountered no significant opposition at all. I knew there had been talk about increasing the number of hunting parties before we left to try to thin out the local predators, but nobody had told me if the plan was ever put into place.
There were six of us: Tierse, Avanya, Qriss, Kevim, Bradr, and me, of course. Apparently our numbers were the result of a long strategy session covering speed, time, armament, and expendability. What they concluded I didn't know, because I hadn't been invited to that meeting, either.
As the heavy-weapons expert, I was second in line after Tierse. (The fewer people you have standing between your cannon and its target, the better.) Avanya was behind me, then Bradr, then our final two teammates side-by-side. Tierse didn't want to chance anything picking off the last person in line unnoticed.