“They were overloaded,” she said, fingering the small, black flight recorder. Emotion obviously made it hard for her to bring forth words. “They were tryin’ to carry too many humans to Port Helenia, the day just after th’ hostage gas was first used. Some were already sick, and it was their only transport.
“The flitter didn’t clear th’ peak, up there.” She gestured at the fog-shrouded heights to the south. “Must’ve hit th’ rocks a dozen times, to fall this far.
“Shall… shall we leave a couple chims, sir? A … a burial detail?”
Robert scuffed the ground. “No. Mark it. Map it. I’ll ask Athaclena if we should photograph it later, for evidence.
“Meanwhile, let Garth take what she needs from them. I…”
He turned away. The chims weren’t the only ones finding words hard right now. With a nod he set the party going again. As he clambered higher, Robert’s thoughts burned. There had to be a way to hurt the enemy worse than they had so far!
Days ago, on a dark, moonless night, he had watched while twelve selected chims sailed down onto a Gubru encampment, riding the winds on homemade, virtually invisible paper gliders. They had swooped in, dropped their nitro and gas bombs, and slipped away by starlight before the enemy even knew anything was happening.
There had been noise and smoke, uproar and squawking confusion, and no way at all to tell how effective the raid was. Nevertheless, he remembered how he had hated watching from the sidelines. He was a trained pilot, more qualified than any of these mountain chims for a mission like that!
But Athaclena had given firm instructions to which the neo-chimps all adhered. Robert’s ass was sacred.
It’s my own damn fault, he thought as he scrambled through a dense thicket. By making Athaclena his formal consort, he had given her that added status she had needed to run this small insurrection… and some degree of authority over him, as well. No longer could he do as he damn well pleased.
So, she was his wife now, in a fashion. Some marriage, he thought. While Athaclena kept adjusting her appearance to look more human, that only served to remind him of what she couldn’t do, frustrating Robert. No doubt that was one reason why interspecies consortions were rare!
I wonder what Megan thinks of the news … 7 wonder if our messenger ever got through.
“Hssst!”
He looked quickly to his right. Elsie stood balanced on a tree branch. She pointed upslope, to where an opening in the fog exposed a view of high clouds skimming like glass-bottomed boats on invisible pressure layers in the deep blue sky. Underneath the clouds could be seen the tree-fringed slope of a mountain. Narrow curls of smoke spiraled upward from shrouded places on its flanks.
“Mount Fossey,” Elsie said, concisely. And Robert knew, at once, why the chims felt this might be a safe place… safe enough even for their precious gorillas.
Only a few semi-active volcanoes lay along the rim of the Sea of Cilmar. Still, all through the Mulun there were places where the ground occasionally trembled. And at rare intervals lava poured forth. The range was still growing.
Mount Fossey hissed. Vapor condensed in shaggy, serpentine shapes above geothermal vents, where pools of hot water steamed and intermittently burst forth in frothing geysers. The ubiquitous transfer vines came together here from all directions, twisting into great cables as they snaked up the flanks of the semi-dormant volcano. Here they held market in shady, smoky pools, where trace elements that had percolated through narrow trails of hot stone finally entered the forest economy.
“I should’ve guessed.” Robert laughed. Of course the Gubru would be unlikely to detect anything here. A few unclothed anthropoids on these slopes would be nothing amid all this heat, spume, and chemical potpourris. If the invaders ever did come to check, the gorillas and their guardians could just melt into the surrounding jungle and return after the interlopers left.
“Whose idea was this?” he asked as they approached under the shade of a high forest canopy. The smell of sulfur grew stronger.
“Th’ gen’ral thought of it,” Elsie answered.
Figures. Robert didn’t feel resentful. Athaclena was bright, even for a Tymbrimi, and he knew he himself wasn’t much above human average, if that. “Why wasn’t I told about it?”
Elsie looked uncomfortable. “Um, you never asked, ser. You were busy with your experiments, findin’ out about the optical fibers and the enemy’s detection trick. And …”
Her voice trailed off.
“And?” he insisted.
She shrugged. “And we weren’t sure you wouldn’t ever get dosed with th’ gas, sooner or later. If that happened you’d have to report to town for antidote. You’d be asked questions — and maybe psi-scanned.”
Robert closed his eyes. Opened them. Nodded. “Okay. For a moment there I wondered if you trusted me.”
“Ser!”
“Never mind.” He waved. Athaclena’s decision had been proper, logical — once again. He wanted to think about it as little as possible.
“Let’s go see the gorillas.”
They sat about in small family groups and were easily distinguished at a distance — much larger, darker, and hairier than their neo-chimpanzee cousins. Their big, peaked faces — as black as obsidian — bore expressions of peaceful concentration as they ate their meals, or groomed each other, or worked at the main task that had been assigned them, weaving cloth for the war.
Shuttles flew across broad wooden looms, carrying homespun weft over warped strands, snicking and clicking to a rhythm matched by the great apes’ rumbling song. The ratcheting and the low, atonal grunting followed Robert as he and his party moved toward the center of the refuge.
Now and then a weaver would stop work, putting her shuttle aside to wave her hands in a flurry of motion, making conversation with a neighbor. Robert knew sign-talk well enough to follow some of the gossip, but the gorillas seemed to speak with a dialect that was quite different from that used by infant chims. It was simple speech, yes, but also elegant in its own way, with a gentle style that was all their own.
Clearly, these were not just big chims but a completely different race, another path taken. A separate route to sentience.
The gorilla groups each seemed to consist of a number of adult females, their young, a few juveniles, and one hulking silver-backed adult male. The patriarch’s fur was always gray along his spine and ribs. The top of his head was peaked and imposing. Uplift engineering had altered the neo-gorilla’s stance, but the bigger males still had to use at least one knuckle when they walked. Their huge chests and shoulders made them too top-heavy still to move bipedally.
In contrast, the lithe gorilla children moved easily on two legs. Their foreheads were rounded, smooth, without the severe sloping and bony brow ridges that would later give them such deceptively fierce countenances. Robert found it interesting how much alike infants of all three races looked — gorillas, chims, and humans. Only later in life did the dramatic’ differences of inheritance and destiny become fully apparent.
Neoteny, Robert thought. It was a classic, pre-Contact theory that had proven more valid than not — one proposing that part of the secret of sapiency was to remain as childlike as possible, for as long as possible. For instance, human beings retained the faces, the adaptability, and (when it was not snuffed out) the insatiable curiosity of young anthropoids, even well into adulthood.
Was this trait an accident? One which enabled pre-sentient Homo habilis to make the supposedly impossible leap — uplifting himself to starfaring intelligence by his own bootstraps? Or was it a gift from those mysterious beings some thought must have once meddled in human genes, the long-hypothesized missing patrons of humanity?