But the warrior rose with one piol tucked gently under each arm, their claws neatly immobilized. He edged past the Oliat and deposited the animals on the muddy ground, giving each a firm, instructive pat on the rump that sent them off to dig happily in the mud. Jindigar didn't need Oliat awareness to see that the piols had already made themselves at home among the Natives.
They all resumed their climb toward the ship's lock. As they approached the opening a new mindsong intruded on the Oliat's awareness, different and deeply disturbing.
At the top of the ramp two warrior guards leveled then-spears, barring entry to the ship. Chinchee protested, and an animated discussion ensued, which was interrupted by a truly huge rustleman female, a Rustlemother, decked in harnesses and leathers covered with thousands of tiny polished jewels that rattled together musically with every movement she made. She came out of the interior of the ship, lit from behind by the ship's emergency lights. She moved jerkily and braced herself with one hand against the bulkhead when she reached the lock. It wasn't just her advanced age. She was not well.
Zannesu, as Receptor, wanted to search for her exact position in the hive's hierarchy, but Jindigar throttled that impulse and set the Oliat in ground-state awareness, pleased to feel the steady, sure beat of the shaleiliu hum confirming the balance of his Oliat. //We may have to respond to unpredictable events. Curiosity can be satisfied later.//
She parted the guards and admitted them, but then ordered the guards to follow. Apparently the hive had no idea of their goal or purpose but was simply standing aside to see what they'd do.
Threntisn led them through dirt-smudged corridors directly to the main lab where Jindigar had come to donate a blood specimen for Krinata. He stopped in the space between the door and the clerk's counter, fighting despair.
The place was a shambles. Clearly the technicians had defended themselves well. Movable lab equipment had been swept from the tops of fixed counters, and some portable tables had been overturned, chronometers smashed, but many of the drawers and bins had been locked, as had the doors to some of the side rooms. Dark stains that could only be blood were smeared on the sides of cabinets. The floor was strewn with fresh dirt ground in by many feet. A place had been cleared in the middle of the room and stones laid for a hearth fire, which now smoldered dully, coating everything with soot.
And the whole place stank—not the cozy hive redolence they'd encountered where they'd taken refuge on the plain, but burning synthetics, meat seared over open fire, suppurating wounds, illness, and the close pungency of unwashed bodies still reeking of terror, desperation, hope, grief, and something else that pierced through the rest insistently.
//This can never be replaced!// Trinarvil's despair nearly overwhelmed the Oliat.
Jindigar demanded more curtly than he intended, //Emulator, how does this look to the hive?//
The alien den had been made marginally livable, but there were few amenities. Yet it was the best shelter available for the hiveheart. The mind-gatherers in fullsong were desperately grateful for the shelter, even if they lacked food and water. In the other barely livable chambers of this deserted hive, the mind-singers were being tenderly cared for, though they called forlornly for the hivemothers, thwarted in their need to spur the hive's regeneration. Nothing could convince their bodies that the newhive had been displaced from the home they'd built, that it wasn't safe yet to make new life. And so the hive-mind allowed them a sparse few hivemothers to satisfy instinct, and curtailed their complaints with stern discipline.
//That explains the different mindsong we found here,// concluded Zannesu. //Jindigar, we don't belong in here.//
//Steady,// cautioned Jindigar. //We have to see this through. The pensone should hold for long enough.// He diverted their attention to evaluating the Rustlemother's status. She moved laboriously after Threntisn when he finally pushed through the gate in the counter and picked his way carefully over the slippery, dirt-covered floor. She was beyond the age where the fullsong could affect her, and so she exercised authority over the hiveheart. From the way her attendants fussed about her, they obviously knew she was deathly ill, and the hive could not afford to lose her.
Yet now a new hope glimmered in the depths of the hive-mind. This strange hive segment from their hostile neighbors seemed to be offering a truce of some sort.
Hoping to find a way to reinforce that impression, Jindigar focused on Threntisn. The Historian carried Cyrus straight across the lab to a small back room where he deposited the Outrider on a treatment table. Jindigar, ignoring the assortment of curious Natives gathering around them, assembled the Oliat around the doorway.
Checking the human's condition and securing the blanket lightly around him, Threntisn glanced toward Trinarvil as if hoping the medic would take charge. But, of course, Trinarvil could not function so in Oliat. He fixed on Krinata and asked, "Jindigar's, are they going to let me do it?"
"//They are waiting to see what you are going to do. Move slowly.//"
Threntisn edged out of the room and surveyed the useless mess in the main lab. His stance and expression showed that he was working an Archive access. He set off across the room, stepped around the fire, and punched a lock code to open another side-room door. On ship's emergency power, the door opened very slowly. It wouldn't be long before the power failed.
Threntisn glanced inside, then, satisfied that he had the right room, he turned and called to Chinchee in Cassrian, "Tell them to wait. I will show them something." Then, as Chinchee burst into twittering motion, he added, "Jindigar's, I think we can do it." And he disappeared inside, closing the door behind him.
Controlling evidence of her weakness, the Rustlemother settled next to the fire. Seven or eight of Chinchee's kind rushed to rekindle it for her comfort. The others burst into discussion both vocal and on some hive-mind level that leaked through to the Oliat along with the insistent call of the hivebinders in heat.
Jindigar's knew now what the hivebinders outside had lamented so. Their brothers were suffering, and because of their unfulfillment, the hive would die. But the hive was dying, anyway. They had no more strength to fight. They had admitted the strangers because they had nothing to lose and because the strangers' hive segment had seemed to understand what it was to lose all. Possibly Chinchee was right, and the strangers did wish to enter the hive to heal.
Threntisn took longer than the technician who had processed Jindigar's blood. Jindigar kept the Oliat standing around the door to Cyrus's room, concentrating on shutting out the ever more insistent hivebinders' fullsong, and consequently they lost track of the hive's reasoning.
Abruptly a mental silence descended, and a small group of htvebinders appeared in the hatchway, dragging Lelwatha's whule. They arrayed themselves before the Oliat, as if they intended to form a team to play the long, complex instrument laid before them.
Nut they didn't touch it. A whisper of another mindsong reached through the Oliat's defense. Jindigar asked Zannesu, //Can you filter that out of the fullsong background?//
It expanded to occupy their whole attention, and it was unmistakably Lelwatha's composition. Hesitantly, with many clumsy searchings for the right fingerings, the mind-gatherers arrayed before the whule plucked out a laborious, but accurate, rendition of the opening notes.
Clearly this was a bid for friendly dialogue. Jindigar itched to go to the whule and demonstrate the sounding of the piece. Instead he told his Emulator, //Llistyien, we must discover their motive for doing this.//