“No one ever managed that on the home world.”
“Isn’t that what the Peerless is for? Anything too difficult for the home world?”
Over the next two days they saw the same four arborines coming and going: two males and two females. Carlo was fairly sure that the second female was the one he’d seen in the canopy. None of them would have been alive when Lucia’s father took one of their ancestors, to deliver to an enthusiastic anatomy teacher for dissection. They couldn’t know what Carlo was planning for them. But while they were curious enough, and organized enough, to take turns making their own observations, they were also sufficiently wary to ensure that they were never all in harm’s way at the same time.
On the sixth day in the forest the expedition ran out of food. Carlo sent Amanda to fetch provisions. He couldn’t blame Lucia for their lack of success, but he was beginning to wonder if he’d simply asked for the impossible.
Lucia was asleep when Carlo saw the first male joined in his lookout by the first female. This was not unprecedented, and she rarely stayed for long. Were they cos? Friends? Brother and sister from some quadraparous mating? Carlo swept the mites away from his face. He expected to die without learning the answer.
The female handed the male a dead lizard, and stayed to watch him chew on it.
“Wake up,” Carlo called softly to Lucia. She hummed irritably and stirred in her harness. “They’re sharing food.”
Lucia pulled herself over to Carlo and he handed her the spyglass.
“I can’t promise you anything from one incident,” she said. “But they probably are cos.”
“That will have to be good enough,” Carlo decided. “We have to take them.”
Lucia returned the spyglass, then scrambled back to the fork in the branches where she’d tied up her equipment. She left the compressed air cylinder where it was and began unreeling the hose with the gun. Her safety rope was beginning to get tangled; Carlo moved to another branch to give her room. “Quickly!” he urged her. The male was almost finished with the lizard. The dart gun had its own small sighting telescope; Carlo watched Lucia take aim, then turned his attention to her targets.
The gun could shoot a dozen darts in rapid succession. Two struck the male in the back; the female barely had time to look around before Lucia planted three in her chest. The arborines’ posture slackened, but they clung on to their branches. They might manage to drag themselves a few strides back into the trees before they were completely paralyzed, but once the toxin took full effect they wouldn’t be going anywhere for six or seven bells. Carlo considered waiting for Amanda to return before trying to retrieve the animals; the three of them working together would make the job easier.
A slender gray arm reached out from behind a clump of yellow flowers, grabbed the male by a lower wrist and yanked him out of sight.
Carlo was dumbfounded. “Did you see—?” Before he could finish speaking, the paralyzed female had gone the same way.
Lucia said, “It looks as if their friends are trying to hide them. We should—”
Carlo turned to her; she was struggling to untangle her safety rope. “Can you push me across first?” he begged her. She’d spent half her life in the forest, so she’d have no trouble following him unaided, but after his last misjudged leap he didn’t trust himself to aim his own body across the gap.
“All right.”
Carlo unhitched his own rope from the tree, tucked its coils into his harness, then crawled onto the branch in front of her. She took his lower hands in her upper pair, and they both bent their elbows, making a catapult of their arms. Carlo hadn’t done this with anyone since childhood, playing with Carla in some ancient weightless stairwell.
Lucia gripped the branch tightly with her lower hands, sighted their quarry and maneuvered Carlo’s body into alignment. They unlinked their fingers, leaving their hands flat, palm against palm.
“Now!” she said. Carlo pushed against her and she reciprocated, propelling him away from the tree.
His progress through the air felt painfully slow. Flurries of dead petals swirled out of his path; even inanimate matter could outrace him. But as he drew closer to the far side of the gap the onrushing branches began to look threatening. He reached out and grabbed them, twigs scraping his palms and his shoulder muscles jarring as he brought himself to an ungainly halt.
Carlo looked around to orient himself. He was clinging to a pair of jutting branches, and he recognized the yellow flowers in front of him; Lucia had sent him to exactly the right spot. He could see her preparing to launch herself, but he decided not to wait for her; there were twigs rebounding just a stretch or so ahead of him, and if he delayed giving chase he risked losing the trail. The arborines were agile, but their paralyzed companions would make unwieldy cargo. If he could pursue them closely enough to put them in fear of ending up in the same condition then they’d have no choice but to abandon their friends.
Carlo dragged himself toward the retreating animals, moving as fast as he could, dislodging whole bright blossoms and snapping small twigs as he advanced. The tree’s less yielding parts pummeled and lacerated him in revenge, but he persisted. It didn’t take long for him to lose all sense of his location, but he kept catching glimpses of the arborines, near-silhouettes against the floral light, deftly pushing branches aside and swinging their passengers this way and that to spare them the kind of punishment Carlo was receiving. Their gracefulness was as humbling as it was infuriating, impossible not to admire even as it mocked his own brutish efforts. If the animals had been unencumbered he would not have had the slightest chance of staying close to them, and as it was they were going to make him suffer.
“Carlo!” Lucia wasn’t far behind him.
“I still have them in sight,” he called back to her. “Just follow me!”
“Take it easy, or you’ll make yourself sick,” she warned him. “You haven’t been in a proper bed for days.”
The arborines hadn’t been in a bed, ever, but their smaller size made air cooling more effective. Then again, they were carrying twice their usual mass—and it was his ancestors who’d developed a way to store heat and discharge it later, letting them grow larger than their air-cooled cousins. The question was, had he already saturated that heat store?
Carlo pushed on, maintaining his pace, sure the gap was narrowing. He couldn’t tell how much of the stinging sensation in his skin was due to hyperthermia and how much to the thrashing he was getting from the obstacles in his path, but the arborines had to be tiring too.
He forced his way through a tangle of vines sprouting brilliant green flowers and almost collided with the paralyzed male, drifting alone between the branches. Carlo chirped in triumph. They’d made a hard choice and abandoned one friend, but the female they were still carrying was larger. And though they’d lightened their collective load, he couldn’t see it being much help to them: trying to share the burden as they moved through this painfully narrow labyrinth would only complicate the task.
“Lucia!” he called out. “They’ve left the male! Can you watch him? I’m going on.” He would not have put it past the arborines for one of them to double back and spirit the male away if he was left unattended.
“All right,” Lucia replied reluctantly.
Carlo couldn’t see his quarry. He waited, surveying the luminous forest around him, ignoring the mites that were starting to insinuate themselves into his broken skin. Then he caught the tell-tale twitch of a branch in the distance, and set off in pursuit once more.
The arborines had changed direction. Carlo had been more or less lost from the start, but at least he’d recognized when he’d been traveling from the outer tips of branches in toward the trunk. Now he was being led in some kind of arc, or possibly a helix, crossing from branch to branch around the axis of the tree.