The warriors leveled spears at Chinchee and forced him to stop. Jindigar kept on marching, even when Threntisn halted.
He brought the Oliat to a stop just a few paces behind the Historian and sent Krinata ahead to whisper to Threntisn, "//The rustlemen have Krinata's Fever.//"
Threntisn pierced her with a glance, flicked his eyes over the Oliat, and then silently acknowledged the datum.
Chinchee danced up to the barrier where a section was a bit lower than the rest—the erstwhile doorway—and deposited his hivebinder on the beaten-down soil. The hive sent one of its own hivebinders forward. The little carapaced beings walked on two limbs toward one another, waving their clumsy hands at each other.
//Listen!// prompted Zannesu suddenly, and brought them a lilting melody, a whisper on some other plane of awareness.
Jindigar seized the linkages and chased that elusive signal, bringing the Formulator and Emulator to bear on the meaning of it. //A mindtune—another way they have of communicating,// identified Trinarvil. //Not hostile.//
//It's not information,// volunteered Darllanyu.
//Content is emotional,// reported Llistyien. She brought it through, flooding them with the hive's inarticulate apprehension, sharp skepticism, and feelings of betrayal, desperation, despair, and a rabid determination to fight to the last life for this final resting place.
Krinata, who had remained forward, just behind Threntisn,
glanced at Cyrus as he stirred deliriously. //Center, may an.
Outreach make a suggestion?//"
//For communicating—certainly.//
Ill once overheard you playing the whule in mourning for Lelwatha—his last composition. Do you think the hive would understand that?//
Jindigar studied the hive. Llistyien, who had captured a fair semblance of an all-hive Emulation, rendered her verdict. //They have a sense for tonality that doesn't seem very alien– for ephemerals.//
//There doesn't seem to be any way to make them understand that we can cure the disease if we can get inside the ship,// mused Jindigar. //So we'll try this. Krinata, get Chinchee's attention and see if he'll let you pick up his hivebinder– but be careful. Their sting is lethal to humans.//
Ill know.// She advanced to where the Herald squatted, watching his hivebinder.
//Try to relax your throat, Krinata, or this may hurt,// Jindigar warned, then piped softly in Cassrian, explaining what they wanted but not why.
Chinchee turned as Krinata spoke, his huge saucer eyes wide in his stark white face, his ears standing straight up on top of his skull, giving him an attentive look. Seeing that his hivebinder was not making much progress, Chinchee plucked him from the humped dirt barrier and deposited him in Krinata's arms.
Krinata stroked the sleek shell of the hivebinder. She'd handled him before, but few of those memories were pleasant. Jindigar felt the small creature reaching toward Krinata, throbbing with loneliness and despair. Even though Krinata held him, the tiny being was lost in the mindsong of his fellows, a lament for their brothers in fullsong.
The Oliat automatically began to pursue that odd concept, but Jindigar restrained them. He settled them onto the ground behind Krinata, sitting cross-legged, as if to play the whule. He fetched the tangible memory of his whule, its satiny urwood finish, the long fretboard that lay just so, the perfect balance, the bow that fit his hand as if made for him. He had to vanquish the feel of it smacking into his arms and smashing into Dar's face.
Then, quite deliberately, he pulled Darllanyu into the memory. She, too, had exulted in that treasured antique whule, its tone, its obedient response to the musician's every whim. She Formulated it for the Oliat, and Llistyien Emulated the playing, holding the whole-hive Emulation as well.
Jindigar expanded the deep contact with the rustlemen to include the other three species of the hive, seeing that they were not yet affected by the plague. But they were so exhausted and despondent that general vitality had reached a critical ebb. This hive had been set into its spring reproductive cycle before they were flooded out. Now those pressures forced them to stay and fight a hopeless battle with their new neighbors, with no time to grieve their dead.
He brought that knowledge into the music welling up from his memory, just the way Lelwatha had taught him, and he channeled that music out through Krinata just as he would speech but high up in that band where the mindtunes wafted to and fro, lamenting the inevitabilities of life and death.
At first the Oliat's music clashed with the Natives' silent , song. But then Krinata became lost in her own memory—that first time she'd heard Jindigar play.
Every bow stroke evoked in her an echo of the pain he'd felt at the loss of so many zunre, at the loss of Kamminth's Oliat, of Lelwatha, Kamminth's Emulator. With every delicately plucked string, with every strummed chord, Krinata recreated every response Jindigar had put into the piece, that one time he'd played it in farewell to Lelwatha.
Jindigar's losses, Krinata's losses, the Oliat's loss of hope for survival, the colony's bleak acceptance of wholesale death blended and became one with the hivebinders' lament. Obliquely Jindigar chided himself for never suspecting how well Krinata read his music that day. He had unknowingly turned himself out naked before her. Now they must do the same before four alien species that might not understand.
Unashamed, Krinata bent forward and, as she had hardly dared when she'd first heard Jindigar play, she let herself cry for the one who suffered so, for anyone and everyone who suffered—for Lelwatha and Jindigar and the colony and the hive. The Oliat rode her wave of emotion.
Lelwatha had gauged the length of that exquisite passage so perfectly that just when none of them could tolerate it another moment, the piece moved into the final segment, one rising arpeggio bringing them up over the peak of agony and down into the quietude of forever. Spent, they rested with Lelwatha in the radiant peace beyond Completion where hope need not be, painful, nor joy etched out of the knowledge that it must be followed by despair.
Jindigar dwelled on the final note, letting it sound through the linkages, refining the Oliat's balance.
For a long time the hive's mindtune was silent, and Llistyien, still a little breathless, judged, III don't think it meant anything to them.//
The afternoon shadow of the cliff had long since covered them. Threntisn shifted, obviously tiring of holding the weight of the human in his arms. He knew only that the Oliat had tried something, but his patience was wearing through.
"//Wait,//" the Oliat cautioned him through Krinata.
As if that were a signal, the hive warriors parted, opening a narrow lane into the hive. Chinchee confidently retrieved his hivebinder from Krinata's lap and marched forward into mat opening, urging Threntisn to follow with a Cassrian command.
Jindigar scrambled to his feet. //Let's see if they'll let us
in too.//%
As Trinarvil and Ruff, her Outrider, crowded up behind Threntisn, the warriors narrowed the opening, clearly excluding the Outrider. //Jindigar?// she asked.
//They distinguish between Oliat and guards—and they don't want guards.// Through Krinata he said to Ruff, "//Let's not make an issue of it.//" No Center in his right mind would take an Oliat in without any Outriders. But they had already commended their lives to the community.
One by one the officers passed through the lane and followed Threntisn to the lab ship.
ELEVEN
Hiveheart
The two piols scampered up the ship's ramp, threading between the feet of two warriors who followed Threntisn and Chinchee. One of the warriors tripped over the animals. Their squeals of surprise stopped everyone. Handing his throwing spear to his comrade, the warrior bent to capture the two animals, and Jindigar's breath caught in his throat. These piols had been all he had to cling to during some of the hardest times of his life.