That afternoon Gailet took Fiben on a tour of Port Helenia—or as much of it as the invader had not placed off limits to the neo-chimp population.
Fishing trawlers still came and went from the docks at the southern end of town. But now they were crewed solely by chim sailors. And less than half the usual number set forth, taking wide detours past the Gubru fortress ship that filled half the outlet of Aspinal Bay.
In’ the markets they saw some items in plentiful supply. Elsewhere there were sparse shelves, stripped nearly bare by scarcity and hoarding. Colonial money was still good for some things, like beer and fish. But only Galactic pellet-scrip would buy meat or fresh fruit. Irritated shoppers had already begun to learn what that archaic term, “inflation,” meant.
Half the population, it seemed, worked for the invader.
There were battlements being built, off to the south of the bay, near the spaceport. Excavations told of more massive structures yet to be.
Placards everywhere in town depicted grinning neo-chimpanzees and promised plenty once again, as soon as enough “proper” money entered circulation. Good work would bring that day closer, they were promised.
“Well? Have you seen enough?” his guide asked.
Fiben smiled. “Not at all. In fact, we’ve barely scratched the surface.”
Gailet shrugged and let him lead the way.
Well, he thought as he looked at the scant market shelves, the nutritionists keep telling us neo-chimps we eat more meat than is good for us ... much more than we could get in the wild old days. Maybe this’ll do us some good.
At last their wanderings brought them to the bell tower overlooking Port Helenia College. It was a smaller campus than the University, on Cilmar Island, but Fiben had attended ecological conferences here not so very long ago, so he knew his way around.
As he looked over the school, something struck him as very strange.
It wasn’t just the Gubru hover-tank, dug in at the top of the hill, nor the ugly new wall that grazed the northern fringe of the college grounds on its way around town. Rather, it was something about the students and faculty themselves.
Frankly, he was surprised to see them here at all!
They were all chims, of course. Fiben had come to Port Helenia expecting to find ghettos or concentration camps, crowded with the human population of the mainland. But the last mels and ferns had been moved out to the islands some days ago. Taking their place had been thousands of chims pouring in from outlying areas, including those susceptible to the coercion gas in spite of the invaders’ assurances that it was impossible.
All of these had been given the antidote, paid a small, token reparation, and put to work in town.
But here at the college all seemed peaceful and amazingly close to normal. Fiben and Gailet looked down from the top of the bell tower. Below them, chens and chimmies moved about between classes. They carried books, spoke to one another in low voices, and only occasionally cast furtive glances at the alien cruisers that growled overhead every hour or so.
Fiben shook his head in wonder that they persevered at all.
Sure, humans were notoriously liberal in their Uplift policy, treating their clients as near equals in the face of a Galactic tradition that was far less generous. Elder Galactic clans might glower in disapproval, but chim and dolphin members deliberated next to their patrons on Terragens Councils. The client races had even been entrusted with a few starships of their own.
But a college without men?
Fiben had wondered why the invader held such a loose rein over the chim population, meddling only in a few crass ways like at the Ape’s Grape.
Now he thought he knew why.
“Mimicry! They must think we’re playing pretend!” he muttered half aloud.
“What did you say?” Gailet looked at him. They had ‘made a truce in order to get the job done, but clearly she did not savor spending all day as his tour guide.
Fiben pointed at the students. “Tell me what you see down there.”
She glowered, then sighed and bent forward to look. “I see Professor Jimmie Sung leaving lecture hall, explaining something to some students.” She smiled faintly. “It’s probably intermediate Galactic history. ... I used to TA for him, and I well recall that expression of confusion on the students’ faces.”
“Good. That’s what you see. Now loojc at it through a Gubru’s eyes.”
Gailet frowned. “What do you mean?”
Fiben gestured again. “Remember, according to Galactic tradition we neo-chimps aren’t much over three hundred years old as a sapient client race, barely older than dolphins -- only just beginning our hundred-thousand-year period of probation and indenture to Man.
“Remember, also, that many of the Eatee fanatics resent humans terribly. Yet humans had to be granted patron status and all the privileges that go along with it. Why? Because they already had uplifted chims and dolphins before Contact! That’s how you get status in the Five Galaxies, by having clients and heading up a clan.”
Gailet shook her head. “I don’t get what you’re driving at. Why are you explaining the obvious?” Clearly, she did not like being lectured by a backwoods chim, one without even a postgraduate degree.
“Think! How did humans win their status? Remember how it happened, back in the twenty-second century? The fanatics were outvoted when it came to accepting neo-chimps and neo-dolphins as sapient.” Fiben waved his arm. “It was a diplomatic coup pulled off by the Kanten and Tymbrimi and other moderates before humans even knew what the issues were!”
Gailet’s expression was sardonic, and he recalled that her area of expertise was Galactic sociology. “Of course, but—“
“It became a. fait accompli. But the Gubru and the Soro and the other fanatics didn’t have to like it. They still think we’re little better than animals. They have to believe that, otherwise humans have earned a place in Galactic society equal to most, and better than many!”
“I still don’t see what you’re—“
“Look down there.” Fiben pointed. “Look with Gubru eyes, and tell me what you see!”
Gailet Jones glared at Fiben narrowly. At last, she sighed. “Oh, if you insist,” and she swiveled to gaze down into the courtyard again.
She was silent for a long time.
“I don’t like it,” she said at last. Fiben could barely hear her. He moved to stand closer.
“Tell me what you see.”
She looked away, so he put it into words for her. “What you see are bright, well-trained animals, creatures mimicking the behavior of their masters. Isn’t that it? Through the eyes of a Galactic, you see clever imitations of human professors and human students . . . replicas of better times, reenacted superstitiously by loyal—“
“Stop it!” Gailet shouted, covering her ears. She whirled on Fiben, eyes ablaze. “I hate you!”
Fiben wondered. This was hard on her. Was he simply getting even for the hurt and humiliation he had suffered over the last three days, partly at her hands?
But no. She had to be shown how her people were looked on by the enemy! How else would she ever learn how to fight them?
Oh, he was justified, all right. Still, Fiben thought. It’s never pleasant being loathed by a pretty girl.
Gailet Jones sagged against one of the pillars supporting the roof of the bell tower. “Oh Ifni and Goodall,” she cried into her hands. “What if they are right! What if it’s true?”
The glyph paraphrenll hovered above the sleeping girl, a floating cloud of uncertainty that quivered in the darkened chamber.
It was one of the Glyphs of Doom. Better than any living creature could predict its own fate, paraphrenll knew what the future held for it—what was unavoidable.
And yet it tried to escape. It could do nothing else. Such was the simple, pure, ineluctable nature of paraphrenll.
The glyph wafted upward in the dream smoke of Athaclena’s fitful slumber, rising until its nervous fringe barely touched the rocky ceiling. That instant the glyph quailed from the burning reality of the damp stone, dropping quickly back toward where it had been born.
Athaclena’s head shook slightly on the pillow, and her breathing quickened. Paraphrenll flickered in suppressed panic just above.
The shapeless dream glyph began to resolve itself, its amorphous shimmering starting to assume the symmetrical outlines of a face.
Paraphrenll was an essence—a distillation. Resistance to inevitability was its theme. It writhed and shuddered to hold off the change, and the face vanished for a time.
Here, above the Source, its danger was greatest. Paraphrenll darted away toward the curtained exit, only to be drawn short suddenly, as if held in leash by taut threads.
The glyph stretched thin, straining for release. Above the sleeping girl, slender tendrils waved after the desperate capsule of psychic energy, drawing it back, back.
Athaclena sighed tremulously. Her pale, almost translucent skin throbbed as her body perceived an emergency of some sort and prepared to make adjustments. But no orders came. There was no plan. The hormones and enzymes had no theme to build around.
Tendrils reached out, pulling paraphrenll, hauling it in. They gathered around the struggling symbol, like fingers caressing clay, fashioning decisiveness out of uncertainty, form out of raw terror.
At last they dropped away, revealing what paraphrenll had become ... A face, grinning with mirth. Its cat’s eyes glittered. Its smile was not sympathetic.
Athaclena moaned.
A crack appeared. The face divided down the middle, and the halves separated. Then there were two of them!
Her breath came in rapid strokes.
The two figures split longitudinally, and there were four. It happened again, eight . . . and again . . . sixteen. Faces multiplied, laughing soundlessly but uproariously.
“Ah-ah!” Athaclena’s eyes opened. They shone with an opalescent, chemical fear-light. Panting, clutching the blankets, she sat up and stared in the small subterranean chamber, desperate for the sight of real things—her desk, the faint light of the hall bulb filtering through the entrance curtain. She could still feel the thing that paraphrenll had hatched. It was dissipating, now that she was awake, but slowly, too slowly! Its laughter seemed to rock with the beating of her heart, and Athaclena knew there would be no good in covering her ears.
What was it humans called their sleep-terror? Nightmare. But Athaclena had heard that they were pale things, dreamed events and warped scenes taken from daily life, generally forgotten simply by awakening.
The sights and sensations of the room slowly took on solidity. But the laughter did not merely vanish, defeated. It faded into the walls, embedding there, she knew. Waiting to return.
“Tutsunacann,” she sighed aloud. Tymbrim-dialect sounded queer and nasal after weeks speaking solely Anglic.
The laughing man glyph, Tutsunacann, would not go away. Not until something altered, or some hidden idea became a resolve which, in turn, must become a jest.
And to a Tymbrimi, jokes were not always funny.
Athaclena sat still while rippling motions under her skin settled down—the unasked-for gheer activity dissipating gradually. You are not needed, she told the enzymes. There is no emergency. Go and leave me alone.
Ever since she had been little, the tiny change-nodes had been a part of her life—occasionally inconveniences, often indispensable. Only since coming to Garth had she begun to picture the little fluid organs as tiny, mouselike creatures, or busy little gnomes, which hurried abou’t making sudden alterations within her body whenever the need arose.
What a bizarre way of looking at a natural, organic function! Many of the animals of Tymbrim shared the ability. It had evolved in the forests of homeworld long before the starfaring Caltmour had arrived to give her ancestors speech and law.
That was it, of course . . . the reason why she had never likened the nodes to busy little creatures before coming to Garth. Prior to Uplift, her pre-sentient ancestors would have been incapable of making baroque comparisons. And after Uplift, they knew the scientific truth.
Ah, but humans . . . the Terran wolflings . . . had come into intelligence without guidance. They were not handed answers, as a child is given knowledge by its parents and teachers. They had emerged ignorant into awareness and spent long millennia groping in darkness.
Needing explanations and having none available, they got into the habit of inventing their own! Athaclena remembered when she had been amused . . . amused reading about some of them.
Disease was caused by “vapors,” or excess bile, or an enemy’s curse. . . . The Sun rode across the sky in a great chariot. . . . The course of history was determined by economics. . . .
And inside the body, there resided animus. . . .
Athaclena touched a throbbing knot behind her jaw and started as the small bulge seemed to skitter away, like some small, shy creature. It was a terrifying image, that metaphor, more frightening than tutsunacann, for it invaded her body—her very sense of self!
Athaclena moaned and buried her face in her hands. Crazy Earthlings! What have they done to me?
She recalled how her father had bid her to learn more about human ways, to overcome her odd misgivings about the denizens of Sol III. But what had happened? She had found her destiny entwined with theirs, and it was no longer within her power to control it.
“Father,” she spoke aloud in Galactic Seven. “I fear.”
All she had of him was memory. Even the nahakieri glimmer she had felt back at the burning Howletts Center was unavailable, perhaps gone. She could not go down to seek his roots with hers, for tutsunacann lurked there, like some subterranean beast, waiting to get her.
More metaphors, she realized. My thoughts are filling with them, while my own glyphs terrify me!
Movement in the hall outside made her look up. A narrow trapezoid of light spilled into the room as the curtain was drawn aside. The slightly bowlegged outline of a chim stood silhouetted against the dim glow.
“Excuse me, Mizz Athaclena, ser. I’m sorry to bother you during your rest period, but we thought you’d want to know.”
“Ye ...” Athaclena swallowed, chasing more mice from her throat. She shivered and concentrated on Anglic. “Yes? What is it?”
The chim stepped forward, partly cutting off the light. “It’s Captain Oneagle, ser. I’m,. . . I’m afraid we can’t locate him anywhere.”
Athaclena blinked. “Robert?”
The chim nodded. “He’s gone, ser. He’s just plain disappeared!”
The forest animals stopped and listened, all senses aquiver. A growing rustle and rumble of footfalls made them nervous. Without exception they scuttled for cover and watched from hiding as a tall beast ran past them, leaping from boulder to log to soft forest loam.
They had begun to get used to the smaller two-legged variety, and to the much larger kind that chuffed and shambled along on three limbs as often as two. Those, at least, were hairy and smelled like animals. This one, though, was different. It ran but did not hunt. It was chased, yet it did not try to lose its pursuers. It was warm-blooded, yet when it rested it lay in the open noon sunshine, where only animals stricken with madness normally ventured.
The little native creatures did not connect the running thing with the kind that flew about in tangy-smelling metal and plastic, for that type had always made such noise, and reeked of those things.
This one, though . . . this one ran unclothed.
“Captain, stop!”
Robert hopped one rock farther up the tumbled boulder scree. He leaned against another to catch his breath and looked back down at his pursuer.
“Getting tired, Benjamin?”
The chim officer panted, stooping over with both hands on his knees. Farther downslope the rest of the search party lay strung out, some flat on their backs, barely able to move.
Robert smiled. They must have thought it would be easy to catch him. After all, chims were at home in a forest. And just one of them, even a female, would be strong enough to grab him and keep him immobile for the rest to bundle home.
But Robert had planned this. He had kept to open ground and played the chase to take advantage of his long stride.
“Captain Oneagle ...” Benjamin tried again, catching his breath. He looked up and took a step forward. “Captain, please, you’re not well.”
“I feel fine,” Robert announced, lying just a little. Actually, his legs shivered with the beginnings of a cramp, his lungs burned, and his right arm itched all over from where he had chipped and peeled his cast away.
And then there were his bare feet. . . .
“Parse it logically, Benjamin,” he said. “Demonstrate to me that I am ill, and just maybe I’ll accompany you back to those smelly caves.”
Benjamin blinked up at him. Then he shrugged, obviously willing to clutch at any straw. Robert had proven they could not run him down. Perhaps Jogic might work.
“Well, ser.” Benjamin licked his lips. “First off, there’s the fact that you aren’t wearing any clothes.”
Robert nodded. “Good, go for the direct. I’ll even posit, for now, that the simplest, most parsimonious explanation for my nudity is that I’ve gone bonkers. I reserve the right to offer an alternative theory, though.”
The chim shivered as he saw Robert’s smile. Robert could not help sympathizing with Benjamin. From the chim’s point of view this was a tragedy in progress, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
“Continue, please,’ Robert urged.
“Very well.” Benjamin sighed. “Second, you are running away from chims under your own command. A patron afraid of his own loyal clients cannot be in complete control of himself.”
Robert nodded. “Clients who would throw this patron into a straitjacket and dope him full of happy juice first chance they got? No good, Ben. If you accept my premise, that I have reasons for what I’m doing, then it only follows that I’d try to keep you guys from dragging me back.”
“Um ...” Benjamin took a step closer. Robert casually retreated one boulder higher. “Your reason could be a false one,” Benjamin ventured. “A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior. The sick person actually believes—“
“Good point,” Robert agreed, cheerfully. “I’ll accept, for later discussion, the possibility that my ‘reasons’ are actually rationalizations by an unbalanced mind. Will you, in exchange, entertain the possibility that they might be valid?”
Benjamin’s lip curled back. “You’re violating orders being out here!”
Robert sighed. “Orders from an E.T, civilian to a Terragens officer? Chim Benjamin, you surprise me. I agree that Athaclena should organize the ad hoc resistance. She seems to have a flair for it, and most of the chims idolize her. But I choose to operate independently. You know I have the right.”
Benjamin’s frustration was evident. The chim seemed on the verge of tears. “But you’re in danger out here!”
At last. Robert had wondered how long Ben could maintain this game of logic while every fiber must be quivering over the safety of the last free human. Under similar circumstances, Robert doubted many men would have done better.
He was about to say something to that effect when Benjamin’s head jerked up suddenly. The chim put a hand to his ear, listening to a small receiver. A look of alarm spread across his face.
The other chims must have heard the same report, for they stumbled to their feet, staring up at Robert in growing panic.
“Captain Oneagle, Central reports acoustic signatures to the northeast. Gasbots!”
“Estimated time of arrival?”
“Four minutes! Please, captain, will you come now?”
“Come where?” Robert shrugged. “We can’t possibly make the caves in time.”
“We can hide you.” But from the tone of dread in his voice, Benjamin clearly knew it was useless.
Robert shook his head. “I’ve got a better idea. But it means we have to cut our little debate short. You must accept that I’m out here for a valid reason, Chim Benjamin. At once!”
The chim stared at him, then nodded tentatively. “I—Idon’t have any choice.”
“Good,” Robert said. “Now take off your clothes.”
<*f 9”
S-serr
“Your clothes! And that sonic receiver of yours! Have everybody in your party strip. Remove everything! As you love your patrons, leave on nothing but skin and hair, then come join me up in those trees at the top of the scree!”
Robert did not wait for the blinking chim to acknowledge the strange command. He turned and took off upslope, favoring the foot most cut up by pebbles and twigs since his early morning foray had begun.
How much time remained? he wondered. Even if he was correct—and Robert knew he was taking a terrible gamble—he would still need to get as much altitude as possible.
He could not help scanning the sky for the expected robot bombers. The preoccupation caused him to stumble and fall to his knees as he reached the crest. He skinned them further crawling the last two meters to the shade under the nearest of the dwarf trees. According to his theory it wouldn’t matter much whether or not he concealed himself. Still, Robert sought heavy cover. The Gubru machines might have simple optical scanners to supplement their primary homing mechanism.
He heard shouting below, sounds of chims in fierce argument. Then, from somewhere to the north, there came a faint, whining sound.
Robert backed further into the bushes, though sharp twigs scratched his tender skin. His heart beat faster and his mouth was dry. If he was wrong, or if the chims decided to ignore his command . . .
If he had missed a single bet he would soon be on his way to internment at Port Helenia,’ or dead. In any event, he would have left Athaclena all alone, the sole patron remaining in the mountains, and spent the remaining minutes or years of his life cursing himself for a bloody fool.
Maybe Mother was right about me. Maybe I am nothing but a useless playboy. We’ll soon see.
There was a rattling sound—rocks sliding down the boulder scree. Five brown shapes tumbled into the foliage just as the approaching whine reached its crescendo. Dust rose from the dry soil as the chims turned quickly and stared, wide-eyed. An alien machine had come to the little valley.
From his hiding place Robert cleared his throat. The chims, obviously uncomfortable without their clothes, started in tense surprise. “You guys had better have thrown everything away, including your mikes, or I’m getting out of here now and leaving you behind.”
Benjamin snorted. “We’re stripped.” He nodded down into the valley. “Harry an’ Frank wouldn’t do it. I told ‘em to climb the other slope and stay away from us.”
Robert nodded. With his companions he watched the gasbot begin its run. The others had witnessed this phenomenon, but he had not been in much shape to observe during the one opportunity he’d had before. Robert looked on with more than a passing interest.
It measured about fifty meters in length, teardrop-shaped, with scanners spinning slowly at the pointed, trailing end. The gasbot cruised the valley from their right to their left, disturbed foliage rustling beneath its throbbing gravities.
It seemed to be sniffing as it zigzagged up the canyon -- and vanished momentarily behind a curve in the bordering hills.
The whine faded, but not for long. Soon the sound returned, and the machine reappeared shortly after. This time a dark, noxious cloud trailed behind, turbulent in its wake. The gasbot passed back down the narrow vale and laid its thickest layer of oily vapor where the chims had left their clothes and equipment.
“Coulda sworn those mini-corns couldn’t have been detected,” one of the naked chims muttered.
“We’ll have to go completely without electronics on the outside,” another added unhappily, watching as the device passed out of sight again. The valley bottom was already obscured.
Benjamin looked at Robert. They both knew it wasn’t over yet.
The high-pitched moan returned as the Gubru mechanism cruised back their way, this time at a higher altitude. Its scanners worked the hills on both sides.
The,machine stopped opposite them. The chims froze, as if staring into the eyes of a rather large tiger. The tableau held for a moment. Then the bomber began moving at right angles to its former path.
Away from them.
In moments the opposite hill was swathed in a cloud of black fog. From the other side they could hear coughing and loud imprecations as the chims who had climbed that way cursed this Gubru notion of better living through chemistry.
The robot began to spiral out and higher. Clearly the search pattern would soon bring it above the Earthlings on this side.
“Anybody got anything they didn’t declare at customs?” Robert asked, dryly.
Benjamin turned to one of the other neo-chimps. Snapping his fingers, he held out his hand. The younger chim glowered and opened his hand. Metal glittered.
Benjamin seized the little chain and medallion and stood up briefly to throw it. The links sparkled for just a moment, then disappeared into the murky haze downslope.
“That may not have been necessary,” Robert said. “We’ll have to experiment, lay out different objects at various sites and see which get bombed. ...” He was talking as much for morale as for content. As much for his morale as for theirs. “I suspect it’s something simple, quite common, but imported to Garth, so its resonance will be a sure sign of Earthly presence.”
Benjamin and Robert shared a long look. No words were needed. Reason or rationalization. The next ten seconds would tell whether Robert was right or disastrously wrong.
It might be us it detects, Robert knew. Ifni. What if they can tune in on human DNA?
The robot cruised overhead. They covered their ears and blinked as the repulsor fields tickled their nerve endings. Robert felt a wave of déjà vu, as if this were something he and the others had done many times, through countless prior lives. Three of the chims buried their heads in their arms and whimpered.
Did the machine pause? Robert felt suddenly that it had, that it was about to ...
Then it was past them, shaking the tops of trees ten meters away . . . twenty . . . forty. The search spiral widened and the gasbot’s whining engine sounds faded slowly with distance. The machine moved on, seeking other targets.
Robert met Benjamin’s eyes again and winked.
The chim snorted. Obviously he felt that Robert should not be smug over being right. That was, after all, only a patron’s job.
Style counted, too. And Benjamin clearly thought Robert might have chosen a more dignified way to make his point.
* * *
Robert would go home by a different route, avoiding any contact with the still-fresh coercion chemicals. The chims tarried long enough to gather their things and shake out the sooty black powder. They bundled up their gear but did not put the clothes back on.
It wasn’t only dislike of the alien stink. For the first time the items themselves were suspect. Tools and clothing, the very symbols of sentience, had become betrayers, things not to be trusted.
They walked home naked.
It took a while, afterward, for life to return to the little valley. The nervous creatures of Garth had never been harmed by the new, noxious fog that had lately come at intervals from a growling sky. But they did not like it any more than they liked the noisy two-legged beings.
Nervously, timorously, the native animals crept back to their feeding or hunting grounds.
Such caution was especially strong in the survivors of the Bururalli terror. Near the northern end of the valley the creatures stopped their return migration and listened, sniffing the air suspiciously.
Many backed out then. Something else had entered the area. Until it left, there would be no going home.
A dark form moved down the rocky slope, picking its way among the boulders where the sooty residue lay thickest. As twilight gathered it clambered boldly about the rocks, making no move to conceal itself, for nothing here could harm it. It paused briefly, casting about as if looking for something.
A small glint shone in the late afternoon sunshine. The creature shuffled over to the glittering thing, a small chain and pendant half hidden in the dusty rocks, and picked it up.
It sat looking at the lost keepsake for a time, sighing softly in contemplation. Then it dropped the shiny bauble where it had lain and moved on.
Only after it had shambled away at last did the creatures of the forest finish their homeward odyssey, scurrying for secret niches and hiding places. In minutes the disturbances were forgotten, dross from a used-up day.
Memory was a useless encumbrance, anyway. The animals had more important things to do than contemplate what had gone on an hour ago. Night was coming, and that was serious business. Hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, living and dying.
“We’ve got to hurt them in ways that they can’t trace to us.
Gailet Jones sat cross-legged on the carpet, her back to the embers in the fireplace. She faced the ad hoc resistance committee and held up a single finger.
“The humans on Cilmar and the other islands are completely helpless to reprisals. So, for that matter, are all the urban chims here in town. So we have to begin carefully and concentrate on intelligence gathering before trying to really harm the enemy. If the Gubru come to realize they’re facing an organized resistance, there’s no telling what they’ll do.”
Fiben watched from the shadowed end of the room as one of the new cell leaders, a professor from the college, raised his hand. “But how could they threaten the hostages under the Galactic Codes of War? I think I remember reading somewhere that—“
One of the older chimmies interrupted. “Dr. Wald, we can’t count’ on the Galactic Codes. We just don’t know the subtleties involved and don’t have time to learn them!”
“We could look them up,” the elderly chen suggested weakly. “The city Library is open for business.”
“Yeah,” Gailet sniffed. “With a Gubru Librarian in charge now, I can just imagine asking one of them for a scan-dump on resistance warfare!”
“Well, supposedly ...”
The discussion had been going on this way for quite a while. Fiben coughed behind his fist. Everyone looked up. It was the first time he had spoken since the long meeting began.
“The point is moot,” he said quietly. “Even if we knew the hostages would be safe. Gailet’s right for yet another reason.”
She darted a look at him, half suspicious and perhaps a little resentful of his support. She’s bright, he thought. But we’re going to have trouble, she and I.
He continued. “We have to make our first strikes seem less than they are because right now the invader is relaxed, unsuspecting, and completely contemptuous of us. It’s a condition we’ll find him in only once. We mustn’t squander that until the resistance is coordinated and ready.
“That means we keep things low key until we hear from the general.”
He smiled at Gailet and leaned against the wall. She frowned back, but said nothing. They had had their differences over placing the Port Helenia resistance under the command of a young alien. That had not changed.
She needed him though, for now. Fiben’s stunt at the Ape’s Grape had brought dozens of new recruits out of the woodwork, galvanizing a part of the community that had had its fill of heavy-handed Gubru propaganda.
“All right, then,” Gailet said. “Let’s start with something simple. Something you can tell your general about.” Their eyes met briefly. Fiben just smiled, and held her gaze while other voices rose.
“What if we were to . . .”
“How about if we blow up ...”
“Maybe a general strike ...”
Fiben listened to the surge of ideas—ways to sting and fool an ancient, experienced, arrogant, and vastly powerful Galactic race—and felt he knew exactly what Gailet was thinking, what she had to be thinking after that unnerving, revealing trip to Port Helenia College.
Are we really sapient beings, without our patrons? Do we dare try even our brightest schemes against powers we can barely perceive?
Fiben nodded in agreement with Gailet Jones. Yes, indeed. We had better keep it simple.
It was all getting pretty expensive, but that was not the only thing bothering the Suzerain of Cost and Caution. All the new antispace fortifications, the perpetual assaults by coercion gas on any and every suspected or detected Earth-ling site—these were things insisted upon by the Suzerain of Beam and Talon, and this early in the occupation it was hard to refuse the military commander anything it thought needed.
But accounting was not the only job of the Suzerain of Cost and Caution. Its other task was protection of the Gubru race from the repercussions of error.
So many starfaring species had come into existence since the great chain of Uplift was begun by the Progenitors, three billion years ago. Many had flowered, risen to great heights, only to be brought crashing down by some stupid, avoidable mistake.
That was yet another reason for the way authority was divided among the Gubru. There was the aggressive spirit of the Talon Soldier, to dare and seek out opportunities for the Roost. There was the exacting taskmaster of Propriety, to make certain they adhered to the True Path. In addition, though, there must be Caution, the squawk of warning, forever warning, that daring can step too far, and propriety too rigid can also make roosts fall.
The Suzerain of Cost and Caution paced its office. Beyond the surrounding gardens lay th« small city the humans called Port Helenia. Throughout the building, Gubru and Kwackoo bureaucrats went over details, calculated odds, made plans.
Soon there would be another Command Conclave with its peers, the other Suzerains. The Suzerain of Cost and Caution knew there would be more demands made.
Talon would ask why most of the battle fleet was being called away. And it would have to be shown that the Gubru Nest Masters had need of the great battleships elsewhere, now that Garth appeared secure.
Propriety would complain again that this world’s Planetary Library was woefully inadequate and appeared to have been damaged, somehow, by the fleeing Earthling government. Or perhaps it had been sabotaged by the Tymbrimi trickster Uthacalthing? In any event, there would be urgent insistence that a larger branch be brought in, at horrible expense.
The Suzerain of Cost and Caution fluffed its down. This time it felt filled with confidence. It had let the other two have their way for a time, but things were peaceful now, well in hand.
The other two were younger, less experienced—brilliant, but far too* rash. It was time to begin showing them how things were going to be, how they must be, if a sane, sound policy was to emerge. This colloquy, the Suzerain of Cost and Caution assured itself, it would prevail!
The Suzerain brushed its beak and looked out onto the peaceful afternoon. These were lovely gardens, with pleasant open lawns and trees imported from dozens of worlds. The former owner of these structures was no longer here, but his taste could be sensed in the surroundings.
How sad it was that there were so few Gubru who understood or even cared about the esthetics of other races! There was a word for this appreciation of otherness. In Anglic it was called empathy. Some sophonts carried the business too far, of course. The Thennanin and the Tymbrimi, each in their own way, had made absurdities of themselves, ruining all clarity of their uniqueness. Still, there were factions among the Roost Masters who believed that a small dose of this other-appreciation might prove very useful in the years ahead.
More than useful, caution seemed now to demand it.
The Suzerain had made its plans. The clever schemes of its peers would unite under its leadership. The outlines of a new policy were already becoming clear.
Life was such a serious business, the Suzerain of Cost and Caution contemplated. And yet, every now and then, it actually seemed quite pleasant!
For a time it crooned to itself contentedly.
“Everything’s all set.”
The tall chim wiped his hands on his coveralls. Max wore long sleeves to keep the grease out of his fur, but the measure hadn’t been entirely successful. He put aside his tool kit, squatted next to Fiben, and used a stick to draw a rude sketch in the sand.
“Here’s where th’ town-gas hydrogen pipes enter the embassy grounds, an’ here’s where they pass under the chancery. My partner an’ I have put in a splice over beyond those cottonwoods. When Dr. Jones gives the word, we’ll pour in fifty kilos of D-17. That ought to do the trick.”
Fiben nodded as the other chim brushed away the drawing. “Sounds excellent, Max.”
It was a good plan, simple and, more important, extremely difficult to trace, whether it succeeded or not. At least that’s what they all were counting on.
He wondered what Athaclena would think of this scheme. Like most chims, Fiben’s idea of Tymbrimi personality had come mostly out of vid dramas and speeches by the ambassador. From those impressions it seemed Earth’s chief allies certainly loved irony.
I hope so, he mused. She’ll need a sense of humor to appreciate what we’re about to do to the Tymbrimi Embassy.
He felt weird sitting out here in the open, not more than a hundred meters from the Embassy grounds, where the rolling hills of Sea Bluff Park overlooked the Sea of Cilmar. In oldtime war movies, men always seemed to set off on missions like this at night, with blackened faces.
But that was in the dark ages, before the days of high tech and infrared spotters. Activity after dark would only draw attention from the invaders. So the saboteurs moved about in daylight, disguising their activities amid the normal routine of park maintenance.
Max pulled a sandwich out of his capacious coveralls and took out large bites while they waited. The big chim was no less impressive here, seated cross-legged, than when they had met, that night at the Ape’s Grape. With his broad shoulders and pronounced canines, one might have thought he’d be a revert, a genetic reject. In truth, the Uplift Board cared less about such cosmetic features than the fellow’s calm, totally unflappable nature. He had already been granted one fatherhood, and another of his group wives was expecting his second child.
Max had been an employee of Gailet’s family ever since she was a little girl and had taken care of her after her return from schooling on Earth. His devotion to her was obvious.
Too few yellow-card chims like Max were members of the urban underground. Gailet’s insistence on recruiting almost solely blue and green cards had made Fiben uncomfortable. And yet he had seen her point. With it known that some chims were collaborating with the enemy, it would be best to start creating their network of cells out of those who had the most to lose under the Gubru. „
That still didn’t make the discrimination smell good to Fiben.
“Feelin” any better?”
“Hmm?” Fiben looked up.
“Your muscles.” Max gestured. “Feelin’ less sore now?”
Fiben had to grin. Max had apologized all too often, first fordoing nothing when the Probationers began harassing him back at the Ape’s Grape, and later shooting him with the stunner on Gailet’s orders. Of course both actions were understandable in retrospect. Neither he nor Gailet had known what to make of Fiben, at first, and had decided to err on the side of Caution. %
“Yeah, lots better. Just a twinge now and then. Thanks.”
“Mmm, good. Glad.” Max nodded, satisfied. Privately, Fiben noted that he had never heard Gailet express any regret over what he’d gone through.
Fiben tightened another bolt on the sand-lawn groomer he had been repairing. It was a real breakdown, of course, just in case a Gubru patrol stopped by. But luck had been with them so far. Anyway, most of the invaders seemed to be down at the south side of Aspinal Bay, supervising another of their mysterious construction projects.
He slipped a monocular out of his belt and focused on the Embassy. A low plastic fence topped with glittering wire surrounded the compound, punctuated at intervals by tiny whirling watch buoys. The little spinning disks looked decorative, but Fiben knew better. The protection devices made any direct assault by irregular forces impossible.
Inside the compound there were five buildings. The largest, the chancery, had come equipped with a full suite of modern radio, psi, and quantum wave antennae—an obvious reason why the Gubru moved in after the former tenants cleared out.
Before the invasion, the Embassy staff had been mostly hired humans and chims. The only Tymbrimi actually assigned to this tiny outpost were the ambassador, his assistant/pilot, and his daughter.
The invaders weren’t following that example. The place swarmed with avian forms. Only one small building—at the top of the far hill across from Fiben, overlooking the ocean -- did not show a full complement of Gubru and Kwackoo constantly coming and going. That pyramidal, windowless structure looked more like a cairn than a house, and none of the aliens approached within two hundred meters of it.
Fiben remembered something the general had told him before he left the mountains.
“If you get an opportunity, Fiben, please inspect the Diplomatic Cache at the Embassy. If, by some chance, the Gubru have left the grounds intact, there might be a message from my father there.”
Athaclena’s ruff had flared momentarily.
“And if the Gubru have violated the Cache, I must know of that, too. It is information we can use.”
It looked unlikely he’d have had a chance to do as she asked, whether the aliens respected the Codes or not. The general would have to settle for a visual report from far away.
“What d’you see?” Max asked. He calmly munched his sandwich as if one started a guerrilla uprising every day.
“Just a minute.” Fiben increased magnification and wished he had a better glass. As far as he could tell, the cairn at the top of the hill looked unmolested. A tiny blue light winked from the top of the little structure. Had the Gubru put it there? he wondered.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think—“
His belt phone beeped—another bit of normal life that might end once fighting began. The commercial network was still in operation, though certainly monitored by Gubru language computers.
He picked up the phone. “That you, honey? I’ve been getting hungry. I hope you brought my lunch.”
There was a pause. When Gailet Jones spoke there was an edge in her voice. “Yes, dear.” She stuck to their agreed-upon code, but obviously did not relish it. “Pele’s marriage group is on holiday today, so I invited them to join us for a picnic.”
Fiben couldn’t help digging a little—just for verisimilitude, of course. “That’s fine, darling. Maybe you an’ I can find time to slip into the woods for some, y’know, ook ook.”
Before she could do more than gasp, he signed off. “See you in a little while, sweetie.” Putting down the phone, he saw Max looking at him, a wad of food in one cheek. Fiben raised an eyebrow and Max shrugged, as if to say, “None of my business.”
“I better go see that Dwayne ain’t screwed up,” Max said. He stood and dusted sand from his coveralls. “Scopes up, Fiben.”
“Filters up, Max.”
The big chim nodded and moved off down the hill, sauntering as if life were completely normal.
Fiben slapped the cover back on the engine and started the groomer. Its motor whistled with the soft whine of hydrogen catalysis. He hopped aboard and took off slowly down the hill.
The park was fairly crowded for a weekday afternoon. That was part of the plan, to get the birds used to chims behaving in unusual ways. Chims had been frequenting the area more and more during the last week.
That had been Athaclena’s idea. Fiben wasn’t sure he liked it, but oddly enough, it was one Tymbrimi suggestion Gailet had taken up wholeheartedly. An anthropologist’s gambit. Fiben sniffed.
He rode over to a copse of willows by a stream not far from the Embassy grounds, near the fence and the small, whirling watchers. He stopped the engine and got off. Walking to the edge of the stream, he took several long strides and leapt up onto the trunk of a tree. Fiben clambered to a convenient branch, where he could look out onto the compound. He took out a bag of peanuts and began to crack them one at a time.
The nearest watcher disk seemed to pause briefly. No doubt it had already scanned him with everything from X-rays to radar. Of course it found him unarmed and harmless. Every day for the last week a different chim had taken his lunch break here at about this time of day.
Fiben recalled the evening at the Ape’s Grape. Perhaps Athaclena and Gailet had a point, he thought. If the birds try to condition us, why can’t we turn the tables and do it to the birds?
His phone rang again.
“Yeah?”
“Uh, I’m afraid Donal’s suffering from a little flatulence. He may not be able to make it to the picnic.”
“Aw, too bad,” he muttered, and put the phone away. So far, so good. He cracked another peanut. The D-17 had been put into the pipes delivering hydrogen to the Embassy. It would still be several minutes before anything could be expected to happen.
It was a simple idea, even if he had his doubts. The sabotage was supposed to look like an accident, and it had to be timed so that Gailet’s unarmed contingent was in position. This raid was meant not so much to do harm as to create a disturbance. Both Gailet and Athaclena wanted information on Gubru emergency procedures.
Fiben was to be the general’s eyes and ears.
Over on the grounds he saw avians come and go from the chancery and other buildings. The little blue light atop the Diplomatic Cache winked against the bright sea clouds. A Gubru floater hummed overhead and began to settle toward the broad Embassy lawn. Fiben watched with interest, waiting for the excitement to begin.
D-17 was a powerful corrosive when left in contact with town-gas hydrogen for long. It would soon eat through the pipes. Then, when exposed to air, it would have yet another effect.
It would stink to high heaven.
He didn’t have long to wait.
Fiben smiled as the first squawks of consternation began to emanate from the chancery. Within moments the doors and windows burst forth with feathered explosions as aliens boiled out of the building, chirping in panic or disgust. Fiben wasn’t sure which and he didn’t really care. He was too busy laughing.
This part had been his idea. He broke a peanut and tossed it up to catch in his mouth. This was better than baseball!
Gubru scattered in all directions, leaping from upper balconies even without antigravity gear. Several writhed on broken limbs.
So much the better. Of course this wasn’t going to be much of an inconvenience to the enemy, and it could only be done once. The real purpose was to watch how the Gubru dealt with an emergency.
Sirens began to wail. Fiben glanced at his watch. A full two minutes had passed since the first signs of commotion. That meant the alarm was given manually. The vaunted Galactic defense computers weren’t omniscient then. They weren’t equipped to respond to a bad smell.
The watch buoys rose from the fence together, giving off a threatening whine, whirling faster than before. Fiben brushed peanut shells from his lap and sat up slowly, watching the deadly things warily. If they were programmed to extend the defense perimeter automatically, whatever the emergency, he could be in trouble.
But they merely spun, shining with increased vigilance. It took three more minutes, by Fiben’s watch, for a triple sonic boom to announce the arrival of fighter craft, sleek arrows resembling sparrow hawks, which streaked in to pass low over the now empty chancery building. The Gubru on the lawn seemed too nervous to take much cheer in their arrival. They leapt and squawked as sonic booms shook trees and feathers alike.
A Gubru official strutted about the grounds, chirping soothingly, calming its subordinates. Fiben didn’t dare lift his monocular with the protector-drones at such high alert, but he peered to try to get a better view of the avian in charge. Several features seemed odd about this Gubru. Its white plumage, for instance, looked more luminous, more lustrous than the others’. It also wore a band of black fabric around its throat.
A few minutes later a utility craft arrived and hovered until enough chattering avians had stepped aside to give it room to land. From the grounded floater a pair of invaders emerged wearing ornate, crested breathing masks. They bowed to the official, then strode up the steps and into the building.
Obviously the Gubru in charge realized that the stench
from the corroded gas pipes posed no threat. All the noise
and commotion was doing much more harm to his command
of clerks and planners than the bad smell. No doubt he was
, upset because the work day was ruined.
More minutes passed. Fiben watched a convoy of ground vehicles arrive, sirens wailing, sending the agitated civil servants into a tizzy again. The senior Gubru flapped its arms until the racket finally cut off. Then the aristocrat waved a curt gesture at the supersonic fighters hovering overhead.
The warcraft swiveled about at once and departed as swiftly as they had come. Shock waves again rattled windows and sent the chancery staff shrieking.
“Excitable lot, aren’t they?” Fiben observed. No doubt Gubru soldiery were better conditioned for this sort of thing.
Fiben stood up on his branch and looked over toward other areas of the park. Elsewhere the fence was lined with chims, and more streamed in from the city. They kept a respectful distance back from the barrier guardians, but still they came, babbling to each other in excitement.
Here and there among them were Gailet Jones’s observers, timing and jotting down every alien response.
“Almost the first thing the Gubru will read about, when they study Library tapes on your species,” Athaclena had told him, “will be the so-called ‘monkey reflex’ . . . the tendency of you anthropoids to scurry toward commotion, out of curiosity.
“Conservative species find it strange, and this tendency of humans and chims will seem particularly bizarre to avian beings, which tend to lack even a semblance of a sense of humor.”
She had smiled.
“We will get them used to this type of behavior, until they grow to expect those strange Earthling clients always running toward trouble . . . just to watch.
“They will learn not to fear you, but they should . . . speaking as one monkey to another.”
Fiben had known what she meant, that Tymbrimi were like humans and chims in this way. Her confidence had filled him, as well—until he saw her frown suddenly -and speak to herself, quickly and softly, apparently forgetting that he understood Galactic Seven.
“Monkeys . . . one monkey to another . . . Sumbaturalli! Must I constantly think in metaphors?”
It had perplexed Fiben. Fortunately, he did not have to understand Athaclena, only know that she could ask anything she wanted of him and he would jump.
After a while more maintenance workers arrived in ground vehicles, this time including a number of chims wearing uniforms of the City Gas Department. By the time they entered the chancery, the Gubru bureaucrats on the lawn had settled into the shade just outside, chirping irritably at the still potent stench.
Fiben didn’t blame them. The wind had shifted his way. His nose wrinkled in disgust.
Well, that’s that. We cost them an afternoon’s work, and maybe we learned something. Time to go home and assess the results.
He didn’t look forward to the meeting with Gailet Jones. For a pretty and bright chimmie, she had a tendency to get awfully officious. And she obviously bore some grudge against him—as if he had gunned her down with a stunner and carried her off in a sack!
Ah well. Tonight he would be off, back into the mountains with Tycho, carrying a report for the general. Fiben had been born a city boy, but he had come to prefer the kind of birds they had out in the country to the sort infesting town of late.
He turned around, grabbed the tree trunk with both arms, and started lowering himself. That was when, suddenly, something that felt like a big flat hand slammed hard against his back, knocking all the breath out of him.
Fiben clawed at the trunk. His head rang and tears filled his eyes. He managed just barely to keep his grip on the rough bark as branches whipped and leaves blew away in a sudden wave of palpable sound. He held on while the entire tree rocked, as if it were trying to buck him off!
His ears popped as the overpressure wave passed. The rip of rushing air dropped to a mere roar. The tree swayed in slowly diminishing arcs. Finally—still gripping the bark tightly—he gathered the nerve to turn around and look.
A towering column of smoke filled the center of the Embassy lawn where the chancery used to be. Flames licked at shattered walls, and streaks of soot showed where superheated gas had blasted in all directions.
Fiben blinked.
“Hot chicken in a biscuit!” he muttered, not ashamed at all of the first thing to come to mind. There was enough fried bird out there to feed half of Port Helenia. Some of the meat was pretty rare, of course. Some of it still moved.
His mouth was bone dry, but he smacked his lips nonetheless.
“Barbecue sauce,” he sighed. “All this, an’ not a truck-load of barbecue sauce to be seen.”
He clambered back onto the branch amid the torn leaves. Fiben checked his watch. It took almost a minute for sirens to begin wailing again. Another for the floater to take off, wavering as it fought the surging convection of superheated air from the fire.
He looked to see what the chims at the perimeter fence had done. Through the spreading cloud of smoke, Fiben saw that the crowd had not fled. If anything, it had grown. Chims boiled out of nearby buildings to watch. There were hoots and shrieks, a sea of excited brown eyes.
He grunted in satisfaction. That was fine, so long as nobody made any threatening moves.
Then he noticed something else. With an electric thrill he saw that the watch disks were down! All along the barrier fence, the guardian buoys had fallen to the ground.
“Bugger all!” he murmured. “The dumb clucks are saving money on smart robotics. The defense mechs were all remotes!”
When the chancery blew up—for whatever ungodly reason it had chosen to do so—it must have taken out the central controller with it! If somebody just had the presence of mind to grab up some of those buoys . . .
He saw Max, a hundred meters to his left, scurry over to one of the toppled disks and prod it with a stick.
Good man, Fiben thought, and then dropped it from his mind. He stood up and leaned against the tree trunk while tossing off his sandals. He flexed his legs, testing the support. Here goes nothiri, he sighed.
Fiben took off at full tilt, running along the narrow branch. At the last moment he rode the bucking tip like a springboard and leaped off into the air.
The fence was set back a way from the stream. One of Fiben’s toes brushed the wire at the top as he sailed over. He landed in an awkward rollout on the lawn beyond.
“Oof,” he complained. Fortunately, he hadn’t banged his still-tender ankle. But his ribs hurt, and as he panted sucked in a lungful of smoke from the spreading fire. Coughing, he pulled a handkerchief from his coveralls and wrapped it over his nose as he ran toward the devastation.
Dead invaders lay strewn across the once pristine lawn. He leapt over a sprawled, Kwackoo corpse—four-legged and soot-covered—and ducked through a roiling finger of smoke. He barely evaded collision with a living Gubru. The creature fled squawking.
The invader bureaucrats were completely disorganized, flapping and running about in total chaos. Their noise was overwhelming.
Slamming sonic booms announced the return of soldiery, overhead. Fiben suppressed a fit of coughing and blessed the smoke. No one overhead would spot him, and the Gubru down here were in no condition to notice much. He hopped over singed avians. The stench from the fire kept even his most atavistic appetites at bay.
In fact, he was afraid he might be sick.
It was touch and go as he ran past the burning chancery. The building was completely in flames. The hair on his right arm curled from the heat.
He burst upon a knot of avians huddling in the shadow of a neighboring structure. They had been gathered in a moaning cluster around one particular corpse, a remnant whose once-bright plumage was now stained and ruined. When Fiben appeared so suddenly the Gubru scattered, chirping in dismay.
Am I lost? There was smoke everywhere. He swiveled about, casting for a sign of the right direction.
There! Fiben spied a tiny blue glow through the black haze. He set off at a run, though his lungs already felt afire. The worst of the noise and heat fell behind him as he dashed through the small copse of trees lining the top of the bluff.
Misjudging the distance, he almost stumbled, sliding to a sudden halt before the Tymbrimi Diplomatic Cache. Panting, he bent over to catch his breath.
In a moment he realized that it was just as well he’d stopped when he had. Suddenly the blue globe at the cairn’s peak seemed less friendly. It pulsed at him, throbbing volubly.
So far Fiben had acted in a series of flash decisions. The explosion had been an unexpected opportunity. It had to be taken advantage of.
All right, here I am. Now what? The blue globe might be original Tymbrimi equipment, but it also might have been set there by the invader.
Behind him sirens wailed and floaters began arriving in a continuous, fluttering whine. Smoke swirled about him, whipped by the chaotic comings and goings of great machines. Fiben hoped Gailet’s observers on the roofs of the buildings nearby were taking all this down. If he knew his own people, most of them would be staring slack-jawed or capering in excitement. Still, they might learn a lot from this afternoon’s serendipity.
He took a step forward toward the cairn. The blue globe pulsed at him. He lifted his left foot.
A beam of bright blue light lanced out and struck the ground where he had been about to step.
Fiben leaped at least a meter into the air. He had hardly landed before the beam shot forth again, missing his right foot by millimeters. Smoke curled up from smoldering twigs, joining the heavier pall from the burning chancery.
Fiben tried to back away quickly, but the damned globe wouldn’t let him! A blue bolt sizzled the ground behind him and he had to hop to one side. Then he found himself being herded the other way!
Leap, zap! Hop, curse, zap again!
The beam was too accurate for this to be an accident. The globe wasn’t trying to kill him. Nor was it, apparently, interested in letting him go!
Between bolts Fiben frantically tried to think how to get out of this trap . . . this infernal practical joke. . . .
He snapped his fingers, even as he jumped from another smoldering spot. Of course!
The Gubru hadn’t messed with the Tymbrimi Cache. The blue globe wasn’t acting like a tool of the avians. But it was exactly the sort of thing Uthacalthing would leave behind!
Fiben cursed as a particularly near miss left one toe slightly singed. Damn bloody Eatees! Even the good ones were almost more than anybody could bear! He gritted histeeth and forced himself to take a single step forward.
The blue beam sliced through a small stone near his instep, cutting it precisely in half. Every instinct in Fiben screamed for him to jump again, but he concentrated on leaving the foot in place and taking one more leisurely step.
Normally, one would think that a defensive device like this would be programmed to give warnings at long range and to start frying in earnest when something came nearer. By such logic what he was doing was stupid as hell.
The blue globe throbbed menacingly and cast forth its lightning. Smoke curled from a spot between the lingers and tumb of his left foot.
He lifted the right.
First a warning, then the real thing. That was the way an Earthling defense drone would work. But how would a Tymbrimi program his? Fiben wasn’t sure he should wager so much on a wild guess. A client-class sophont wasn’t supposed to analyze in the middle of fire and smoke, and especially not when he was being shot at!
Call it a hunch, he thought.
His right foot came down and its toes curled around an oak twig. The blue globe seemed to. consider his persistence, then the blue bolt lanced out again, this time a meter in front of him. A trail of sizzling humus walked toward him in a slow zigzag, the crackle of burning grass popping louder as it came closer and closer.
Fiben tried to swallow.
It’s not designed to kill! he told himself over and over. Why should it be? The Gubru could have blasted that globe at long range long ago.
No, its purpose had to be to serve as a gesture, a declaration of rights under the intricate rules of Galactic Protocol, more ancient and ornate than Japanese imperial court ritual.
And it was designed to tweak the beaks of Gubru.
Fiben held his ground. Another chain of sonic booms rattled the trees, and the heat from the conflagration behind him seemed to be intensifying. All the noise pressed hard against his self-control.
The Gubru are mighty warriors, he reminded himself. But they are excitable. . . .
The blue beam edged closer. Fiben’s nostrils flared. The only way he could take his gaze away from the deadly sightwas by closing his eyes.
If I’m right then this is just another damned Tymbrimi . . .
He opened them. The beam was approaching his right foot from the side. His toes curled from a deep will to leap away. Fiben tasted bile as the searing knife of light tore through a pebble two inches away and proceeded on to ...
To hit and cross his foot!
Fiben choked and suppressed an urge to howl. Something was wrong! His head spun as he watched the beam cross his foot and then commence leaving a narrow trail of smoky ruin directly under his spread-legged stance.
He stared in disbelief at his foot. He had bet the beam would stop short at the last instant. It hadn’t.
Still . . . there his foot was, unharmed.
The beam ignited a dry twig then moved on to climb up his left foot.
There was a faint tickling he knew to be psychosomatic. While touching him, the beam was only a spot of light.
An inch beyond his foot, the burning resumed.
His heart still pounding, Fiben looked up at the blue globe and cursed with a mouth too dry to speak.
“Very funny,” he whispered.
There must have been a small psi-caster in the cairn, for Fiben actually felt something like a smile spread in the air before him ... a small, wry, alien smirk, as if the joke had really been a minor thing, after all, not even worth a chuckle.
“Real cute, Uthacalthing,” Fiben grimaced as he forced his shaking legs to obey him, carrying him on a wobbling path toward the cairn. “Real cute. I’d hate to see what gives you a belly laugh.” It was hard to believe Athaclena came from the same stock as the author of this little bit of whoopee cushion humor.
At the same time, though, Fiben wished he could have been present when the first Gubru approached the Diplomacy Cache to check it out.
The blue globe still pulsed, but it stopped sending forth pencil beams of irritation. Fiben walked close to the cairn and looked it over. He paced the perimeter. Halfway around, where the cliff overlooked the sea only twenty meters away, there was a hatch. Fiben blinked when he saw the array of locks, hasps, bolts, combination slots, and keyholes.
Well, he told himself, it is a cache for diplomatic secrets and such.
But all those locks meant that he had no chance of getting in and finding a message from Uthacalthing. Athaclena had given him a few possible code words to try, if he got the chance, but this was another story altogether!
By now the fire brigade had arrived. Through the smoke Fiben could see chims from the city watch stumbling over stick-figure aliens and stretching out hoses. It wouldn’t be long before someone imposed order on this chaos. If his mission here really was futile, he ought to be getting out while the getting was still easy. He could probably take the trail along the bluff, where it overlooked the Sea of Cilmar. That would skirt most of the enemy and bring him out near a bus route.
Fiben bent forward and looked at the hatchway again. Pfeh! There were easily two dozen locks on the armored door! A small ribbon of red silk would be as useful in keeping out an invader. Either the conventions were being respected or they weren’t! What the hell good were all these padlocks and things?
Fiben grunted, realizing. It was another Tymbrimi joke, of course. One the Gubru would fail to get, no matter how intelligent they were. There were times when personality counted for more than intelligence.
Maybe that means . . .
On a hunch, Fiben ran around to the other side of the cairn. His eyes were watering from the smoke, and he wiped his nose on his handkerchief as he searched the wall opposite the hatch.
“Stupid bloody guesswork,” he grumbled as he clambered among the smooth stones. “It’d take a Tymbrimi to think up a stunt like this ... or a stupid, lame-brained, half-evolved chim client like m—“
A loose stone slipped slightly under his right hand. Fiben pried at the facing, wishing he had a Tymbrimi’s slender, supple fingers. He cursed as he tore a fingernail.
At last the stone came free. He blinked.
He had been right, there was a secret hiding place here in back. Only the damn hole was empty!
This time, Fiben couldn’t help himself. He shrieked in frustration. It was too much. The covering stone went sailing into the brush, and he stood there on the steep, sloping face of the cairn, cursing in the fine, expressive, indignant tones his ancestors had used before Uplift when inveighing against the parentage and personal habits of baboons.
The red rage only lasted a few moments, but when it cleared Fiben felt better. He was hoarse and raw, and his palms hurt from slapping the hard stone, but at least some of his frustration had been vented.
Clearly it was time to get out of here. Just beyond a thick wisp of drifting smoke, Fiben saw a large floater set down. A ramp descended and a troop of armored Gubru soldiery hurried onto the singed lawn, each accompanied by a pair of tiny, floating globes. Yep, time to scoot.
Fiben was about to climb down when he glanced one more time into the little niche in the Tymbrimi cairn. At that moment the diffusing smoke dispersed briefly under the stiffening breeze. Sunlight burst onto the cliffside.
A tiny flash of silvery light caught his eye. He reached into the niche and pulled on a slender thread, thin and delicate as gossamer, that had lined a crack at the back of the little crevice.
At that moment there came an amplified squawk. Fiben swiveled and saw a squad of Gubru Talon Soldiers coming his way. An officer fumbled with the vodor at its throat, dialing among the auto-translation options.
“…Cathtoo-psh’v’chim’ph…
“…Kah-koo-kee, k’keee! EeeEeEE! K…. “…Hisss-s-ss pop crackle!…
“…Puna bliv’t mannennering…”
“…what you are doing there! Good clients do not play with what they cannot understand!”
Then the officer caught sight of the opened niche—and Fiben’s hand stuffing something into a coverall pocket.
“Stop! Show us what . . .”
Fiben did not wait for the soldier to finish the command. He scrambled up the cairn. The blue globe throbbed as he passed, and in his mind terror was briefly pushed aside by a powerful, dry laughter as he dove over the top and slid down the other side. Laser bolts sizzled over his head, chipping fragments from the stone structure as he landed on the ground with a thump Damn Tymbrimi sense of humor, was his only thought as he scrambled to his feet and dashed in the only possible direction, down the protective shadow of the cairn, straight toward the sheer cliff.
Max dumped a load of disabled Gubru guard disks onto the rooftop near Gailet Jones. “We yanked out their receivers,” he reported. “Still, we’ll have to be damn careful with’em.”
Nearby, Professor Oakes clicked his stopwatch. The elderly chen grunted in satisfaction. “Their air cover has been withdrawn, again. Apparently they’ve decided it was an accident after all.”
Reports kept coming in. Gailet paced nervously, occasionally looking out over the roof parapet at the conflagration and confusion in Sea Bluff Park. We didn’t plan anything like this! she thought. It could be great luck. We’ve learned so much.
Or it could be a disaster. Hard to tell yet.
If only the enemy doesn’t trace it to us.
A young chen, no more than twelve years old, put down his binoculars and turned to Gailet. “Semaphore reports all but one of our forward observers has come back in, ma’am. No word from that one, though.”
“Who is it?” Gailet asked.
“Uh, it’s that militia officer from th’ mountains. Fiben Bolger, ma’am.”
“I might have guessed!” Gailet sighed.
Max looked up from his pile of alien booty, his face a grimace of dismay. “I saw him. When the fence failed, he jumped over it and went running toward the fire. Um, I suppose I should’ve gone along, to keep an eye on him.”
“You should have done no such thing, Max. You were exactly right. Of all the foolish stunts!” She sighed. “I might have known he would do something like this. If he gets captured, and gives us away ...” She stopped. There was no point in worrying the others more than necessary.
Anyway, she thought a little guiltily, the arrogant chen might only have been killed.
She bit her lip, though, and went to the parapet to look out in the direction of the afternoon sun.
Behind Fiben came the familiar zip zip of the blue globe firing again. The Gubru squawked less than he might have expected; these were soldiers, after all. Still, they made quite a racket and their attention was diverted. Whether the cache defender was acting to cover his retreat or merely harassing the invaders on general principles, Fiben couldn’t speculate. In moments he was too busy even to think about it.
One look over the edge was enough to make him gulp. The cliff wasn’t a glassy face, but neither was it the sort of route a picnicker would choose to get down to the shining sands below.
The Gubru were shooting back at the blue globe now, but that couldn’t last long. Fiben contemplated the steep dropoff. All told, he would much rather have lived a long, quiet life as country ecologist, donated his sperm samples when required, maybe joined a real fun group family, taken up scrabble.
“Argh!” he commented in man dialect, and stepped off over the grassy verge.
It was a four-handed job, for sure. Gripping a knob with the tingers and tumb of his left foot, he swung way out to grab a second handhold and managed to lower himself to another ledge. A short stretch came easily, then it seemed he needed the grasping power of every extremity. Thank Goodall Uplift had left his people with this ability. If he’d had feet like a human’s, he surely would have fallen by now!
Fiben was sweating, feeling around for a foothold that had to be there, when suddenly the cliff face seemed to lash out, batting away at him. An explosion sent tremors through the rock. Fiben’s face ground into the gritty surface as he clutched for dear life, his feet kicking and dangling in midair.
Of all the damn . . . He coughed and spat as a plume of dust floated down from the cliff edge. In peripheral vision he glimpsed bright bits of incandescent stone flying out through the sky, spinning down to hissing graves in the sea below.
The root-grubbing, cairn must’ve blown!
Then something whizzed by his head. He ducked but still caught a flash of blueness and heard, within his head, a chuckling of alien laughter. The hilarity reached a crescendo as something seemed to brush the back of his head, then faded as the blue light zipped off again, dropping to skip away southward, just above the waves.
Fiben wheezed and sought frantically for a foothold. At last he found purchase, and he was able to lower himself to the next fairly safe resting place. He wedged himself into a narrow cleft, out of sight from the clifftop. Only then did he spare the extra energy to curse.
Some day, Uthacalthing. Some day.
Fiben wiped dust from his eyes and looked down.
He had made it about halfway to the beach. If he ever reached the bottom safely it should be an easy walk to the closed amusement park at the northwestern corner of Aspinal Bay. From that point it ought to be simple to disappear into back alleys and side streets.
The next few minutes would tell. The survivors of the Gubru patrol might assume he had been killed in the explosion, blown out to sea along with debris from the cache. Or perhaps they’d figure he would have fled by some other route. After all, only an idiot would try to climb down a bluff like this one without equipment.
Fiben hoped he had it thought out right, because if they came down here looking for him his goose was as surely cooked as those birds in the chancery fire.
Just ahead the sun was settling toward the western horizon. Smoke from this afternoon’s conflagration had spread far enough to contribute brilliant umber and crimson hues to the gathering sunset. Out on the water he saw a few boats, here and there. Two cargo barges steamed slowly toward the distant islands—low, brown shapes barely visible on the decks—no doubt carrying food for the hostage human population.
Too bad some of the salts in the seawater on Garth were toxic to dolphins. If the third race of Terragens had been able to establish itself here, it would have been a lot harder for the enemy to isolate the inhabitants of the archipelago so effectively. Besides, ‘fins had their own way of thinking. Perhaps they’d have come up with an idea or two Fiben’s people had missed.
The southern headlands blocked Fiben’s view of the port. But he could see traces of gleaming silver, Gubru warships or tenders involved in the construction of space defenses.
Well, Fiben thought, nobody’s come for me yet. No hurry, then. Catch your breath before trying the rest of the trip.
This had been the easy part.
Fiben reached into his pocket and pulled out the shimmering thread he had found in the niche. It might easily be a spider web, or something similarly insignificant. But it was the only thing he had to show for his little adventure. He didn’t know how he would tell Athaclena that his efforts had come only to this. Well, not only this. There was also the destruction of the Tymbrimi Diplomatic Cache. That’d be another thing to have to explain.
He took out his monocular and unscrewed the lens cover. Fiben carefully wrapped the thread into the cap and replaced it. He put the magnifier away.
Yeah, it was going to be a real nice sunset. Embers from the fire sparkled, swept into whirling plumes by Gubru ambulances screaming back and forth from the top of the bluffs. Fiben considered reaching into a pocket for the rest of the peanuts while he watched, but right now his thirst was worse than his hunger. Most modern chims ate too much protein, anyway.
Life’s rough, he thought, trying to find a comfortable position in the narrow notch. But then, it’s never been easy for client-class beings, has it?
There you are, minding your own business in some rain forest, perfectly adequate in your ecological niche, then bam\ Some authoritarian guy with delusions of godhood is sitting on your chest, forcing the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge down your throat. From then on you’re inadequate, because you’re being measured against the “higher” standard of your patron; no freedom; you can’t even breed as you please, and you’ve got all those “responsibilities”—Who ever heard of responsibilities back in the jungle? -- responsibilities to your patrons, to your descendants. ...
Rough deal. But in the Five Galaxies there’s only one alternative, extermination. Witness the former tenants of Garth.
Fiben licked the sweat salt from his lips and knew that it was nervous reaction that had brought on the momentary wave of bitterness. There was no point to recriminations anyway. If he were a race representative—one of those few chims deputized to speak for all neo-chimpanzees before the Terragens and the great Galactic Institutes—the issues might be worth contemplating. As it was, Fiben realized he was just procrastinating.
I guess they forgot about me, after all, he thought, wondering at his luck.
Sunset reached its peak in a glory of color and texture, casting rich red and orange streamers across Garth’s shallow sea.
Hell, after a day like this, what was climbing down a steep cliff in the dark? Anticlimax, that was all.
“Where the devil have you been!” Gailet Jones faced Fiben when he slumped through the door. She approached glowering.
“Aw, teach.” He sighed. “Don’t scold me. I’ve had a rough day.” He pushed past her and shuffled through the house library, strewn with charts and papers. He stepped right across a large chart laid on the floor, oblivious as two of Gailet’s observers shouted indignantly. They ducked aside as he passed straight over them.
“We finished debriefing hours ago!” Gailet said as she followed him. “Max managed to steal quite a few of their watch disks ...”
“I know. I saw,” he muttered as he stumbled into the tiny room he had been assigned. He began undressing right there. “Do you have anything to eat?” he asked.
“Eat?” Gailet sounded incredulous. “We have to get your input to fill in gaps on our Gubru operations chart. That explosion was a windfall, and we weren’t prepared with enough observers. Half of the ones we had just stood and stared when the excitement started.”
With a “clomp” Fiben’s coveralls fell to the floor. He stepped out of them. “Food can wait,” he mumbled. “I need a drink.”
Gailet Jones blushed and half turned away. “You might have the courtesy not to scratch,” she said.
Fiben turned from pouring himself a stiff shot of ping-orange brandy and looked at her curiously. Was this actually the same chimmie who had accosted him with “pink” a fortnight or so ago? He slapped his chest and waved away plumes of dust. Gailet looked disgusted.
“I was lookin’ forward to a bath, but now I think I’ll skip it,” he said. “Too sleepy now. Gotta rest. Coin’ home, tomorrow.”
Gailet blinked. “To the mountains?”
Fiben nodded. “Got to pick up Tycho and head back to report to th’ gen’ral.” He smiled tiredly. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell her you’re doin’ a good job here. Fine job.”
The chimmie sniffed disgustedly. “You’ve spent the afternoon and evening rolling in dirt and getting soused! Some militia officer! And I thought you were supposed to be a scientist!
“Well, next time your precious general wants to communicate with our movement here in town, you make sure she sends somebody else, do you hear me?”
She swiveled and slammed the door behind her.
What’d I say? Fiben stared after her. Dimly he knew he could have done better somehow. But he was so tired. His body ached, from his singed toes to his burning lungs. He hardly felt the bed as he collapsed into it.
In his dreams a blueness spun and pulsed. From it there emanated a faint something that could be likened to a distant smile.
Amusing, it seemed to say. Amusing, but not all that much of a laugh.
More an appetizer for things to come.
In his sleep Fiben moaned softly. Then another image came to him, of a small neo-chimpanzee, an obvious throw-back, with bony eyeridges and long arms which rested on a keyboard display strapped to its chest. The atavistic chim could not speak, but when it grinned, Fiben shivered.
Then a more restful phase of sleep set in, and at last he went on in relief to other dreams.
The Suzerain of Propriety could not set foot on unsanc-tioned ground. Because of this it rode perched upon a gilded staff of reckoning, guided by a convoy of fluttering Kwackoo attendants. Their incessant cooing murmur was more soothing than the grave chirps of their Gubru patrons. Although the Uplift of the Kwackoo had brought them far toward the Gubru way of viewing the world, they nevertheless remained less solemn, less dignified by nature.
The Suzerain of Propriety tried to make allowances for such differences as the clucking swarm of fuzzy, rotund clients carried the antigravity perch from the site where the body had lain. It might be inelegant, but already they could be heard gossiping in low tones over who would be chosen as replacement. Who would become the new Suzerain of Cost and Caution?
It would have to be done soon. Messages had already been sent to the Roost Masters on the homeworld, but if need be a senior bureaucrat would be elevated on the spot. Continuity must be preserved.
Far from being offended, the Suzerain of Propriety found the Kwackoo calming. It needed their simple songs for the distraction they offered. The days and weeks to come would be stressful. Formal mourning was only one of the many tasks ahead. Somehow, momentum toward a new policy must be restored. And, of course, one had to consider the effects this tragedy would have on the Molt.
The investigators awaited the arrival of the perch amid a copse of toppled trees near the still smoldering chancery walls. When the Suzerain nodded for them to begin, they proceeded into a dance of presentment—part gesticulation and part audiovisual display—describing what they had determined about the cause of the explosion and fire. As the investigators chirped their findings in syncopated, a cappella song, the Suzerain made an effort to concentrate. This was a delicate matter, after all.
By the codes the Gubru might occupy an enemy embassy, yet they could still be held responsible for any damage done to it if the fault was theirs.
Yes, yes, it occurred, did occur, the investigators reported. The building is—has been made—a gutted ruin.
No, no, no purposeful activity has been traced, is believed to have caused these happenings, No sign that this event path was pre-chosen by our enemies and imposed without our will.
Even if the Tymbrimi Ambassador sabotaged his own buildings, what of it? If we are not the cause, we need not pay, need not reimburse!
The Suzerain chirped a brief chastisement. It was not up to the investigators to determine propriety, only evaluations of fact. And anyway, matters of expense were the domain of the officers of the new Suzerain of Cost and Caution, after they recovered from the catastrophe their bureaucracy had suffered here.
The investigators danced regretful apologies.
The Suzerain’s thoughts kept hovering in numb wonderment about what the consequences would be. This otherwise minor event had toppled the delicate balance of the Triumvirate just before another Command Conclave, and there would be repercussions even after a new third Suzerain was appointed.
In the short term, this would help both survivors. Beam and Talon would be free to pursue what few humans remained at large, whatever the cost. And Propriety could engage in research without constant carpings about how expensive it all would be.
And then there was the competition for primacy to consider. In recent days it had begun to grow clear just how impressive the old Suzerain of Cost and Caution had been. More and more, against all expectation, it had been the one organizing their debates, drawing their best ideas forth, pushing compromises, leading them toward consensus.
The Suzerain of Propriety was ambitious. The priest had not liked the direction things were heading. Nor was it pleasant seeing its cleverest plans tinkered with, modified, altered to suit a bureaucrat. Especially one with bizarre ideas about empathy with aliens!
No, this was not the worst thing to have happened. Not at all. A new Threesome would be much more acceptable. More workable. And in the new balance the replacement would start at a disadvantage.
Then why, for what reason, for what cause am I afraid? the high priest wondered.
Shivering, the Suzerain of Propriety fluffed its plumage and concentrated, bring its thoughts back to the present, to the investigators’ report. They seemed to be implying that the explosion and fire had fallen into that broad category of events that the Earthlings might call accidents.
At its erstwhile colleague’s urging, the Suzerain had of late been trying to learn Anglic, the wolflings’ strange, non-Galactic language. It was a difficult, frustrating effort, and of questionable utility when language computers were facile enough.
Yet the chief bureaucrat had insisted, and surprisingly the priest discovered there were things to be learned from even so beastly a collection of grunts and moans, things such as the hidden meanings underlying that term, accident.
The word obviously applied to what the investigators said had happened here, a number of unpredicated factors combined with considerable incompetence in the City Gas Department after the human supervisors had been removed. And yet the way Earthlings defined “accident” was wrong by definition! In Anglic the term actually had no precise meaning!
Even the humans had a truism, “There are no accidents.”
If so, why have a word for a nonexistent thing?
Accident ... it served to cover anything from unper-ceived causality, to true randomness, to a full level seven probability storm! In every case the “results” were “accidental.”
How could a species be spacefaring, be classified at the high level of a patron of a clan with such a murky, undefined, context-dependent way of looking at the universe? Compared with these Earthlings, even the devil trickster Tymbrimi were transparent and clear as the very ether!
This sort of uncomfortable line of thought was the sort of thing the priest had most hated about the bureaucrat! It was one of the dead Suzerain’s most irritating attributes.
It was also one of the things most beloved and valuable. It would be missed.
Such were the confusions when a consensus was broken, when a mating was shattered, half begun.
Firmly, the Suzerain chirped a word-chain of definition. Introspection was taxing, and a decision had to made about what had happened here.
Under some potential futures the Gubru might have to pay damages to the Tymbrimi—and even to the Earthlings -- for the destruction that occurred on this plateau. It was unpalatable to consider, and might be prevented altogether when the Gubru grand design was fulfilled.
Events elsewhere in the Five Galaxies would determine that. This planet was a minor, if important, nut to shell with a quick, efficient bill thrust. Anyway, it was the job of the new Suzerain of Cost and Caution to see that expenses were kept down.
To see that the Gubru Alliance—the true inheritors of the Ancient Ones—were not found failing in propriety when the Progenitors returned, that was the priest’s own task.
May the winds bring that day, it prayed.
“Judgment deferred, delayed, put off for now,” the Suzerain declared aloud. And the investigators at once closed their folders.
The business of the chancery fire being finished, the next stop would be the top of the hill, where there was yet another matter to be evaluated.
The cooing crowd of Kwackoo huddled close and moved as a mass, carrying the Perch of Reckoning with them, a flat ball of puffy clients surging placidly through a feathery crowd of their hopping, excitable patrons.
The Diplomatic Cache still smoked on top from the events of the day before. The Suzerain listened carefully as the investigators reported, sometimes one at a time, occasionally joining together to chirp in unison and then counterpoint. Out of the cacophony the Suzerain gathered a picture of the events that had led to this scene.
A local neo-chimpanzee had been found poking around the cache without first seeking formal passage by the occupying power, a clear violation of wartime protocol. Nobody knew why the silly half-animal had been present. Perhaps it was driven by the “monkey complex”—that irritating, incomprehensible need that drove Earthlings to seek out excitement instead of prudently avoiding it.
An armed detachment had come upon the curious neochimp while routinely moving to secure the disaster area. The commander had urgently spoken to the furry client-of-humans, insisting that the Earthling creature desist at once, and show proper obeisance.
Typical of the upspring of humans, the neo-chimp had been obdurate. Instead of behaving in a civilized manner it had run away. In the process of trying to stop it, some defense device of the cairn was set off. The cairn was damaged in the subsequent shooting.
This time the Suzerain decided that the outcome was most satisfactory. Subclient or no, the chimpanzee was officially an ally of the cursed Tymbrimi. By acting so, it had destroyed the immunity of the cache! The soldiers were within their rights to open fire upon either the chimp or the defender globe without restraint. There had been no violation of propriety, the Suzerain ruled.
The investigators danced a dance of relief. Of course, the more closely ancient procedures were adhered to, the more brilliant would be the plumage of the Gubru when the Progenitors returned.
May the winds hurry the day.
“Open, enter, proceed into the cache,” the priest commanded. “Enter and investigate the secrets within!”
Certainly the cache fail-safes would have destroyed most of the contents. Still, there might be some information of value left to be deciphered.
The simpler locks came off quickly, and special devices were brought to remove the massive door. This all took some time. The priest kept occupied holding a service for a company of Talon Soldiers, preaching to reinforce their faith in the ancient values. It was important not to let them lose their keen edge with things so peaceful, so the Suzerain reminded them that in the last two days several small parties of warriors had gone missing in the mountains southeast of this very town. Now would be a useful time for them to remember that their lives belonged to the Nest. The Nest and Honor—nothing else mattered.
At last the final puzzle bolt was solved. For famous tricksters the Tymbrimi did not seem so clever. Their wards were easy enough for Gubru lockpick robots to solve. The door lifted off in the arms of a carrier drone. Holding instruments before them, the investigators cautiously entered the cairn.
Moments later, with a chirp-chain of surprise, a feathered form burst forth holding a black crystalline object in its beak. This one was followed almost immediately by another. The investigators’ feet were a blur of dancing excitement as they laid the objects on the ground before the Suzerain’s floating perch.
Intact! they danced. Two data-stores were found intact, shielded from the self-destruct explosions by a premature rockfall!
Glee spread among the investigators and from there to the soldiers and the civilians waiting beyond. Even the Kwackoo crooned happily, for they, too, could see that this counted as a coup of at least the fourth order. An Earthling client had destroyed the immunity of the cache through obviously irreverent behavior—the mark of flawed Uplift. And the result had been fully sanctioned access to enemy secrets!
The Tymbrimi and humans would be shamed, and the clan of Gooksyu-Gubru would learn much!
The celebration was Gubru-frenetic. But the Suzerain itself danced only for a few seconds. In a race of worriers, it had a role of redoubled concern. There were too many things about the universe that were suspect. Too many things that would be much better dead, lest they by some chance someday threaten the Nest.
The Suzerain tilted its head first one way then another. It looked down at the data cubes, black and shiny on the scorched loam. A strange juxtaposition seemed to overlie the salvaged record crystals, a feeling that almost, but not quite, translated into a brooding sense of dread.
It was not a recognizable psi-sense, nor any other form of scientific premonition. If it had been, the Suzerain would have ordered the cubes converted to dust then and there.
And yet ... It was very strange.
For only a brief moment, it shuddered under the illusion that the faceted crystals were eyes, the shining, space-black eyes of a large and very dangerous snake
He ran holding in one hand a new wooden bow. A simple, homespun quiver containing twenty new arrows bounced gently against his back as he puffed up the forest trail. His straw hat had been woven from river rushes. His loincloth and the moccasins on his feet were made of native suede.
The young man favored his left leg slightly as he ran. The bandage on that thigh covered only a superficial wound. Even the pain from the burn was a pleasure of sorts, reminding him how much preferable a near miss was over the alternative.
Image of a tall bird, staring unbelievingly at the arrow that had split its breastbone, its laser rifle tumbling to the forest loam, released by death-numbed talons.
The ridge was quiet. Almost the only sound was his steady breathing and the soft rasp of moccasins against the pebbles. Prickles of perspiration dried quickly as the breeze laid tracks of goose bumps up his arms and legs.
The touch of wind freshened as he climbed. The slope of the trail tapered, and Robert at last found himself above the trees, among the towering hill-spines of the ridge crest.
The sudden warmth of the sun was welcome now that he had darkened nearly to the shade of a foon-nut tree. His skin had also toughened, making thorns and nettles less bothersome.
I’m probably starting to look like an oldtime Indian, he thought with some amusement. He leapt over a fallen log and slipped down along a lefthand fork in the trail.
As a child he had made much of his family name. Little Robert Oneagle had never had to take turns as a bad guy when the kids played Confederation Uprising. He always got to be a Cherokee or Mohawk warrior, whooping it up in make-believe spacesuit and warpaint, zapping the dictator’s soldiers during the Power Satellite War.
When this is all over I’ve got to find out more about the family gene-history, Robert thought. I wonder how much of it really is Amerindian stock.
White, fluffy stratus clouds slid along a pressure ridge to the north, appearing to keep pace with him as he jogged along the ridgetops, across the long hills leading toward home.
Toward home.
The phrase came easily now that he had a job to do out under the trees and open sky. Now he could think of those catachtonian caves as home. For they did represent sanctuary in uncertain times.
And Athaclena was there.
He had been away longer than expected. The trip had taken him high into the’ mountains as far away as Spring Valley, recruiting volunteers, establishing communications, and generally spreading the word.
And of course, he and his fellow partisans had also had a couple of skirmishes with the enemy. Robert knew they had been little things—a small Gubru patrol trapped here and there—and annihilated to the last alien. The Resistance only struck where total victory seemed likely. There could be no survivors to tell the Gubru high command that Earthlings had learned to become invisible.
However minor, the victories had done wonders for morale. Still, while they might make things a bit warm for the Gubru up in the mountains, but what was the use if the enemy stayed out of reach?
Most of his trip had been taken up doing things hardly related to the Resistance. Everywhere Robert had gone he found himself surrounded by chims who whooped and chattered at the sight of him—the sole remaining free human. To his frustration they seemed perfectly happy to make him unofficial judge, arbitrator, and godfather to newborn babies. Never before had he felt so heavily the burdens that Uplift demanded of the patron race.
Not that he blamed the chims, of course. Robert doubted that in their species’ brief history so many chims had ever been cut off from humans for so long.
Wherever he went, it became known that the last human in the mountains would not visit any pre-invasion building or, indeed, even see anyone wearing any clothing or artifact of non-Garth origin. As word spread how the alien gasbots found their targets, chims were soon moving whole communities. Cottage industries sprang up, resurrecting the lost arts of spinning and weaving, of tanning and cobbling.
Actually, the chims in the mountains were doing rather well. Food was plentiful and the young still attended school. Here and there a few responsible types had even begun to reorganize the Garth Ecological Reclamation Project, keeping the most urgent programs going, improvising to replace the lost human experts.
Perhaps they don’t really need us, he remembered thinking.
His own kind had come within a hair’s breadth of turning Earth-homeworld into an ecological Chelmno, in the years just before humanity awakened into sanity. A horrible calamity was averted by the narrowest of margins. Knowing that, it was humbling to see so many so-called clients behaving more rationally than men had only a century before Contact.
Do we really have any right to play god with these people? Maybe when this blows over we should just go away and let them work out their future for themselves.
A romantic idea. There was a rub, of course.
The Galactics would never let us.
So he let them crowd around him, ask his advice, name their babies after him. Then, when he had done all he could for the time being, he took off down the trail for home. Alone, since by now no chim could keep up with his pace.
The solitude of the last day or so had been welcome. It gave him time to think. He had begun learning a lot about himself these last few weeks and months, ever since that horrible afternoon when his mind had crumpled under pounding fists of agony and Athaclena had come into his mind to rescue him. Oddly, it had not turned out to be the beasts and monsters of his neuroses that mattered most. Those were easily dealt with once he faced them and knew them for what they were. Anyway, they were probably no worse than any other person’s burdens of unresolved business from the past.
No, what had been more important was coming to grips with what he was as a man. That was an exploration he had only just begun, but Robert liked the direction the journey seemed to be heading.
He jogged around a bend in the mountain trail and came out of the hill’s shadow with the sun on his back. Ahead, to the south, lay the craggy limestone formations concealing the Valley of Caves.
Robert stopped as a metallic glint caught his eye. Something sparkled over the prominences beyond the valley, perhaps ten miles away.
Gasbots, he thought. Over in that area Benjamin’s techs had begun laying out samples of everything from electronics to metals to clothing, in an effort to discover what it was the Gubru robots homed in on. Robert hoped they had made some progress while he was away.
And yet, in another sense he hardly cared anymore. The new longbow felt good in his hand. The chims in the mountains preferred powerful homemade crossbows and arbalests, requiring less coordination but greater simian strength to crank. The effect had been the same with all three weapons . . . dead birds. The use of ancient skills and archaic tools had turned into a galvanizing theme, resonating with the mythos of the Wolfling Clan.
There were disturbing consequences as well. Once, after, a successful ambush, he had noticed some of the local mountain chens drifting away from camp. He slipped into the shadows and followed them to what appeared to be a secret cook fire, in a side canyon.
Earlier, while they had stripped the vanquished Gubru of their weapons and carried off the bodies, he had noticed some of the chims glancing back at him furtively, perhaps guiltily. That night he watched from a dark hillside as long-armed silhouettes danced in the firelight under the windblown stars. Something roasted on a spit over the flames, and the wind carried a sweet, smoky aroma.
Robert had had a feeling there were a few things the chims did not want seen by their patrons. He faded back into the shadows and returned to the main camp, leaving them to their ritual.
The images still flickered in his mind like feral, savage fantasies. Robert never asked what had been done with the bodies of the dead Galactics, but since then he could not think of the enemy without remembering that aroma.
If only there were a way to get more of them to come into the mountains, he pondered. Only under the trees did it seem possible to hurt the invaders.
The afternoon was aging. Time to finish the long jog home. Robert turned and was about to start down into the valley when he stopped suddenly. He blinked. There was a blur in the air. Something seemed to flutter at the edge of his vision, as if a tricky moth were dancing just within his blind spot. It didn’t seem to be possible to look at the thing.
Oh, Robert thought.
He gave up trying to focus on it and looked away, letting the odd non-thing chase him instead. Its touch laid open the petals of his mind like a flower unfolding in the sun. The fluttering entity danced timidly and winked at him ... a simple glyph of affection and mild amusement. . . easy enough for even a thick-thewed, hairy-armed, road-smelly, pinkish-brown human to understand.
“Very funny, Clennie.” Robert shook his head. But the flower opened still wider and he kenned warmth. Without having to be told, he knew which way to go. He turned off the main trail and leapt up a narrow game path.
Halfway to the ridgetop he came upon a brown figure lounging in the shade of a thornbush. The chen looked up from a paperpage book and waved lazily.
“Hi, Robert. You’re lookin’ a lot better’n when.I saw you last.”
“Fiben!” Robert grinned. “When did you get back?”
The chim suppressed a tired yawn. “Oh, ‘bout an hour ago. The boys down in th’ caves sent me right up here to see her nibs. I picked up somethin’ for her in town. Sorry. Didn’t get anythin’ for you, though.”
“Did you get into any trouble in Port Helenia?”
“Hmmm, well, some. A little dancin’, a little scratchin’, a little hootin’.”
Robert smiled. Fiben’s “accent” was always thickest when he had big news to downplay, the better to draw out the story. If allowed to get away with it, he would surely keep them up all night.
“Uh, Fiben ...”
“Yeah, yeah. She’s up there.” The chim gestured toward the top of the ridge. “And in a right fey mood, if you ask me. But don’t ask me, I’m just a chimpanzee. I’ll see you later, Robert.” He picked up his book again, not exactly the model of a reverent client. Robert grinned.
“Thanks, Fiben. I’ll see ya.” He hurried up the trail.
Athaclena did not bother to turn around as he approached, for they had already said hello. She stood at the hilltop looking westward, her face to the sun, holding her hands outstretched before her.
Robert at once sensed that another glyph floated over Athaclena now, supported by the waving tendrils of her corona. And it was an impressive thing. Comparing her little greeting, earlier, to this one would be like standing a dirty limerick next to “Xanadu.” He could not see it, neither could he even begin to kenn its complexity, but it was there, nearly palpable to his heightened empathy sense.
Robert also realized that she held something between her hands . . . like a slender thread of invisible fire—intuited more than seen—that arched across the gap from one hand to the other.
“Athaclena, what is—“
He stopped then, as he came around and saw her face.
Her features had changed. Most of the humaniform contours she had shaped during the weeks of their exile were still in place; but something they had displaced had returned, if only momentarily. There was an alien glitter in her gold-flecked eyes, and it seemed to dance in counterpoint to the throbbing of the half-seen glyph.
Robert’s senses had grown. He looked again at the thread in her hands and felt a thrill of recognition.
“Your father . . . ?”
Athaclena’s teeth flashed white. “W’ith-tanna Uthacalthing bellinarri-t’hoo, haoon’nda! . . .”
She breathed deeply through wide-open nostrils. Her eyes—set as wide apart as possible—seemed to flash.
“Robert, he lives!”
He blinked, his mind overflowing with questions. “That’s great! But . . . but where! Do you know anything about my mother? The government? What does he say?”
She did not reply at once. Athaclena held up the thread. Sunlight seemed to run up and down its taut length. Robert might have sworn that he heard sound, real sound, emitting from the thrumming fiber.
“W’ith-tanna Uthacalthing!” Athaclena seemed to look straight into the sun.
She laughed, no longer quite the sober girl he had known. She chortled, Tymbrimi fashion, and Robert was very glad that he was not the object of that hilarity. Tymbrimi humor quite often meant that someone else, sometime soon, would definitely not be amused.
He followed her gaze out over the Vale of Sind, where a flight of the ubiquitous Gubru transports moaned faintly as they cruised across the sky. Unable to trace more than the outlines of her glyph, Robert’s mind searched for and found something akin to it in the human fashion. In his mind he pictured a metaphor.
Suddenly, Athaclena’s smile was something feral, almost catlike. And those warships, reflected in her eyes, seemed to take on the aspect of complacent, rather unsuspecting mice.