If only there were a way to get more of them to come into the mountains, he pondered. Only under the trees did it seem possible to hurt the invaders.
The afternoon was aging. Time to finish the long jog home. Robert turned and was about to start down into the valley when he stopped suddenly. He blinked. There was a blur in the air. Something seemed to flutter at the edge of his vision, as if a tricky moth were dancing just within his blind spot. It didn’t seem to be possible to look at the thing.
Oh, Robert thought.
He gave up trying to focus on it and looked away, letting the odd non-thing chase him instead. Its touch laid open the petals of his mind like a flower unfolding in the sun. The fluttering entity danced timidly and winked at him … a simple glyph of affection and mild amusement. . . easy enough for even a thick-thewed, hairy-armed, road-smelly, pinkish-brown human to understand.
“Very funny, Clennie.” Robert shook his head. But the flower opened still wider and he kenned warmth. Without having to be told, he knew which way to go. He turned off the main trail and leapt up a narrow game path.
Halfway to the ridgetop he came upon a brown figure lounging in the shade of a thornbush. The chen looked up from a paperpage book and waved lazily.
“Hi, Robert. You’re lookin’ a lot better’n when.I saw you last.”
“Fiben!” Robert grinned. “When did you get back?”
The chim suppressed a tired yawn. “Oh, ’bout an hour ago. The boys down in th’ caves sent me right up here to see her nibs. I picked up somethin’ for her in town. Sorry. Didn’t get anythin’ for you, though.”
“Did you get into any trouble in Port Helenia?”
“Hmmm, well, some. A little dancin’, a little scratchin’, a little hootin’.”
Robert smiled. Fiben’s “accent” was always thickest when he had big news to downplay, the better to draw out the story. If allowed to get away with it, he would surely keep them up all night.
“Uh, Fiben …”
“Yeah, yeah. She’s up there.” The chim gestured toward the top of the ridge. “And in a right fey mood, if you ask me. But don’t ask me, I’m just a chimpanzee. I’ll see you later, Robert.” He picked up his book again, not exactly the model of a reverent client. Robert grinned.
“Thanks, Fiben. I’ll see ya.” He hurried up the trail.
Athaclena did not bother to turn around as he approached, for they had already said hello. She stood at the hilltop looking westward, her face to the sun, holding her hands outstretched before her.
Robert at once sensed that another glyph floated over Athaclena now, supported by the waving tendrils of her corona. And it was an impressive thing. Comparing her little greeting, earlier, to this one would be like standing a dirty limerick next to “Xanadu.” He could not see it, neither could he even begin to kenn its complexity, but it was there, nearly palpable to his heightened empathy sense.
Robert also realized that she held something between her hands… like a slender thread of invisible fire — intuited more than seen — that arched across the gap from one hand to the other.
“Athaclena, what is—”
He stopped then, as he came around and saw her face.
Her features had changed. Most of the humaniform contours she had shaped during the weeks of their exile were still in place; but something they had displaced had returned, if only momentarily. There was an alien glitter in her gold-flecked eyes, and it seemed to dance in counterpoint to the throbbing of the half-seen glyph.
Robert’s senses had grown. He looked again at the thread in her hands and felt a thrill of recognition.
“Your father… ?”
Athaclena’s teeth flashed white. “W’ith-tanna Uthacalthing bellinarri-t’hoo, haoon’nda!…”
She breathed deeply through wide-open nostrils. Her eyes — set as wide apart as possible — seemed to flash.
“Robert, he lives!”
He blinked, his mind overflowing with questions. “That’s great! But… but where! Do you know anything about my mother? The government? What does he say?”
She did not reply at once. Athaclena held up the thread. Sunlight seemed to run up and down its taut length. Robert might have sworn that he heard sound, real sound, emitting from the thrumming fiber.
“W’ith-tanna Uthacalthing!” Athaclena seemed to look straight into the sun.
She laughed, no longer quite the sober girl he had known. She chortled, Tymbrimi fashion, and Robert was very glad that he was not the object of that hilarity. Tymbrimi humor quite often meant that someone else, sometime soon, would definitely not be amused.
He followed her gaze out over the Vale of Sind, where a flight of the ubiquitous Gubru transports moaned faintly as they cruised across the sky. Unable to trace more than the outlines of her glyph, Robert’s mind searched for and found something akin to it in the human fashion. In his mind he pictured a metaphor.
Suddenly, Athaclena’s smile was something feral, almost catlike. And those warships, reflected in her eyes, seemed to take on the aspect of complacent, rather unsuspecting mice.
PART THREE
The Garthlings
The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal.
Natural selection won’t matter soon, not anywhere near as much as conscious selection. We will civilize and alter ourselves to suit our ideas of what we can be. Within one more human lifespan, we will have changed ourselves unrecognizably.
43
Uthacalthing
Inky stains marred the fen near the place where the yacht had foundered. Dark fluids oozed slowly from cracked, sunken tanks into the waters of the broad, flat estuary. Wherever the slick trails touched, insects, small animals, and the tough salt grass all died.
The little spaceship had bounced and skidded when it crashed, scything a twisted trail of destruction before finally plunging nose first into the marshy river mouth. For days thereafter the wreck lay where it had come to rest, slowly leaking and settling into the mud.
Neither rain nor the tidal swell could wash away the battle scars etched into its scorched flanks. The yacht’s skin, once allicient and pretty, was now seared and scored from near-miss after near-miss. Crashing had only been the final insult.
Incongruously large at the stern of a makeshift boat, the Thennanin looked across the intervening flat islets to survey the wreck. He stopped rowing to ponder the harsh reality of his situation.
Clearly, the ruined spaceship would never fly again. Worse, the crash had made a sorrowful mess of this patch of marshlands. His crest puffed up, a rooster’s comb ridged with spiky gray fans.
Uthacalthing lifted his own paddle and politely waited for his fellow castaway to finish his stately contemplation. He hoped the Thennanin diplomat was not about to serve up yet another lecture on ecological responsibility and the burdens of patronhood. But, of course, Kault was Kault.
“The spirit of this place is offended,” the large being said, his breathing slits rasping heavily. “We sapients have no business taking our petty wars down into nurseries such as these, polluting them with space poisons.”
“Death comes to all things, Kault. And evolution thrives on tragedies.” He was being ironic, but Kault, of course, took him seriously. The Thennanin’s throat slits exhaled heavily.
“I know that, my Tymbrimi colleague. It is why most registered nursery worlds are allowed to go through their natural cycles unimpeded. Ice ages and planetoidal impacts are all part of the natural order. Species are tempered and rise to meet such challenges.