“Hey, dummy, look up!”
The boyish face grimaced. The panderer pointed overhead.
Fiben glanced upward… just in time to see a sparkling mesh start to fall from the rafters overhead! He leaped aside purely on instinct, fetching hard against another “rock” as the fringe of the falling net grazed his left foot. Electric agony stroked his leg.
“Baboon shit! What in Goodall’s name’…?” He cursed soundly. It took a moment for him to realize that part of the roaring in his ears was more applause. This turned into shouted cheers as he rolled over holding his leg, and thereby happened to escape yet another snare. A dozen loops of sticky mesh flopped out of a simulated rock to tauten over the area he had just occupied.
Fiben kept as still as possible while he rubbed his foot and glared about angrily, suspiciously. Twice he had almost been noosed like some dumb animal. To the crowd it might all be great fun, but he personally had no desire to be trussed up on some bizarre, lunatic obstacle course.
Below on the dance floor he saw bright zipsuits, left, right, and center. The Gubru on the balcony seemed interested, but showed no sign of intervening.
Fiben sighed. His predicament was still the same. The only direction he could go was up.
Looking carefully, he scrambled over another padded ridge. The snares appeared to be intended to be humiliating and incapacitating — and painful — but not deadly. Except in his case, of course. If he were caught, his unwanted enemies would be on him in a trice.
He stepped up onto the next “boulder,” cautiously. Fiben felt a tickling falseness under his right foot and pulled back just as a trap door popped open. The crowd gasped as he teetered on the edge of the revealed pit. Fiben’s arms windmilled as he fought for balance. From an uncertain crouch he leaped, and barely caught a grip on the next higher terrace.
His feet hung over nothingness. Fiben’s breath came in heavy gasps. Desperately he wished humans hadn’t edited some of his ancestors’ “unnecessary” instinctive climbing skills just to make room for trivialities such as speech and reason.
He grunted and slowly scrambled up out of the pit. The audience clamored for more.
As he panted on the edge of the next level, trying to see in all directions at once, Fiben slowly became aware that a public address system was muttering over the noise of the crowd, repeating over and over again, in clipped, mechanical tones.
… more enlightened approach to Uplift… appropriate to the background of the client race… offering opportunity to all… unbiased by warped human standards…
Up in its box, the invader chirped into a small microphone. Its machine-translated words boomed out over the music and the excited jabber of the crowd. Fiben doubted one in ten of the chims below were even aware of the E.T.’s monologue in the state they were in. But that probably didn’t matter.
They were being conditioned!
No wonder he had never heard of Sylvie’s dance-mound striptease before, nor this crazy obstacle course. It was an innovation of the invaders!
But what was its purpose?
They couldn’t have managed all this without help, Fiben thought angrily. Sure enough, the two well-dressed chims sitting near the invader whispered to each other and scribbled on clipboards. They were obviously recording the crowd’s reactions for their new master.
Fiben scanned the balcony and noted that the little pimp in the cowled robe stood not far outside the Gubru’s ring of robot guards. He spared a whole second to memorize the chim’s boyish features. Traitor!
Sylvie was only a few terraces above him now. The dancer twitched her pink bottom at him, grinning as sweat beaded on his face. Human males had their own “instant” visual triggers: rounded female breasts and pelvises and smooth fern skin. None of them could compare with the electric shiver a little color in the right place could send through a male chim.
Fiben shook his head vigorously. “Out. Not in. You want out!”
Concentrating on keeping his balance, favoring his tender left ankle, he scrambled edgewise until he was around the pit, then crawled forward on his hands and knees.
Sylvie leaned over him, two levels up. Her scent carried even over the pungent aromas of the hall, making Fiben’s nostrils flare.
He shook his head suddenly. There was another sharp odor, a cloying stink that seemed to be quite local.
With the little finger of his left hand he probed the terrace he had been about to climb upon. Four inches in he encountered a burning stickiness. He cried out and pulled back hard, leaving behind a small patch of skin.
Alas for instinct! His seared finger automatically popped into his mouth. Fiben almost gagged on the nastiness.
This was a fine fix. If he tried to move up or forward the sticky stuff would get him. If he retreated he would more than likely wind up in the pit!
This maze of traps did explain one thing that he had puzzled about, earlier. No wonder the chens below hadn’t gone nuts and simply charged the hill the moment Sylvie showed pink! They knew only the cocky or foolhardy would dare attempt the climb. The others were content to observe and fantasize. Sylvie’s dance was only the first half of the show.
And if some lucky bastard made it? Well, then, everybody would have the added treat of watching that, too!
The idea repelled Fiben. Private sharings were natural, of course. But this public lewdness was disgusting!
At the same time, he noted that he had already made it most of the way. He felt an old quickening in his blood. Sylvie swayed down a little toward him, and he imagined he could already touch her. The musicians increased their tempo, and strobes began flickering again, approaching like lightning. Artificial thunder echoed. Fiben felt a few stinging droplets, like the beginnings of a rainstorm.
Sylvie danced under the spots, inciting the crowd. He licked his lips and felt himself drawn.
Then, in the flicker of a single lightning flash, Fiben saw something equally enticing, more than attractive enough to pull him out of Sylvie’s hypnotic sway. It was a small, green-lit sign, prim and legalistic, that shone beyond Sylvie’s shoulder.
“EXIT,” it read.
Suddenly the pain and exhaustion and tension caused something to release inside Fiben. He felt somehow lifted above the noise and tumult and recalled with instant clarity something that Athaclena said to him shortly before he left the encampment in the mountains to begin his trek to town. The silvery threads of her Tymbrimi corona had waved gently as if in a breeze of pure thought.
“There is a telling which my father once gave me, Fiben. It’s a ‘haiku poem,’ in an Earthling dialect called Japanese. I want you to take it with you.”
“Japanese,” he had protested. “It’s spoken on Earth and on Calafia, but there aren’t a hundred chims or men on Garth who know it!”
But Athaclena only shook her head. “Neither do I. But I shall pass the telling on to you, the way it was given to me.”
What came when she opened her mouth then was less sound than a crystallization, a brief substrate of meaning which left an imprint even as it faded.
Certain moments qualify,
In winter’s darkest storm,When stars call, and you fly!
Fiben blinked and the sudden relived moment passed. The letters still glowed,
shining like a green haven.
It all swept back, the noise, the odors, the sharp stinging of the tiny rainlike droplets. But Fiben now felt as if his chest had expanded twofold. Lightness spread down his arms and into his legs. They seemed to weigh next to nothing.
With a deep flexing of his knees he gathered himself and then launched off from his precarious perch to land on the edge of the next terrace, toes grasping inches from the burning, camouflaged glue. The crowd roared and Sylvie stepped back, clapping her hands.