Fiben stared at the blank door. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s grandson.”
He turned around and walked back to the wall where Gailet sat, muttering to herself, and leaned over to drape a blanket upon her shoulders. Then he returned to his own corner to collapse into a heap of sweet-smelling straw.
55
Uthacalthing
Scummy algae foamed in the shallows where a few small, stilt-legged native birds picked desultorily for insects. Bushy plants lay in clumps, outlining the surrounding steppes.
Footprints led from the banks of the small lake up into the nearby scrub-covered hillside. Just glancing at the muddy tracks, Uthacalthing could tell that the walker had stepped with a pigeon-toed gait. It seemed to use a three-legged stance.
He looked up quickly as a flash of blue caught the corner of his eye — the same glimmer that had led him to this place. He tried to focus on the faint twinkle, hut it was gone before he could track it.
He knelt to examine the impressions in the mud. A smile spread as he measured them with his hands. Such beautiful outlines! The third foot was off center from the other two and its print was much smaller than the others, almost as if some bipedal creature had crossed from lake to brush leaning on a blunt-headed staff.
Uthacalthing picked up a fallen branch, but he hesitated before brushing away the outlines.
Shall I leave them? he wondered. Is it really necessary to hide them?He shook his head.
No. As the humans say, do not change game plans in midstream.
The footprints disappeared as he swept the branch back and forth. Just as he was finishing, he heard heavy footsteps and the sound of breaking shrubs behind him. He turned as Kault rounded a bend in the narrow game trail to the small prairie lake. The glyph, lurrunanu, hovered and darted over the Thennanin’s big, crested head like some frustrated parasitic insect, buzzing about in search of a soft spot that never seemed to be there.
Uthacalthing’s corona ached like an overused muscle. He let lurrunanu bounce against Kault’s bluff stolidity for a minute longer before admitting defeat. He drew the defeated glyph back in and dropped the branch to the ground.
The Thennanin wasn’t looking at the terrain anyway. His concentration was on a small instrument resting in his broad palm. “I am growing suspicious, my friend,” Kault said as he drew even with the Tymbrimi.
Uthacalthing felt blood rush in the arteries at the back of his neck. At last? he wondered.
“Suspicious of what, my colleague?”
Kault folded an instrument and put it away in one of his many vest pouches. “There are signs …” His crest flapped. “I have been listening to the uncoded transmissions of the Gubru, and something odd seems to be going on.”
Uthacalthing sighed. No, Kault’s one-track mind was concentrating on a completely different subject. There was no use trying to draw him away from it with subtle clues.
“What are the invaders up to now?” he asked.
“Well, first of all, I am picking up much less excited military traffic. Suddenly they appear to be engaged in fewer of those small-scale fights up in the mountains than they were days and weeks ago. You’ll recall we were both wondering why they were expending so much effort to suppress what had to be a rather tiny partisan resistance.”
Actually, Uthacalthing had been pretty certain he knew the reason for the frantic flurry of activity on the part of the Gubru. From what the two of them had been able to piece together, it seemed the invaders were very anxious to find something up in the Mountains of Mulun. They had thrown soldiers and scientists into the rough range with apparent reckless energy, and appeared to have paid a heavy cost for the effort.
“Can you think of a reason why the fighting has ebbed?” he asked Kault.
“I am uncertain from what I can decipher. One possibility is that the Gubru have found and captured the thing they were so desperately looking for—”
Doubtful, Uthacalthing thought with conviction. It is hard to cage a ghost.
“Or they may have given up searching for it—”
More likely, Uthacalthing agreed. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the avians should realize they had been made fools of, and cease chasing wild gooses.
“Or, perhaps,” Kault concluded, “the Gubru have simply finished suppressing all opposition and liquidated whoever was opposing them.”
Uthacalthing prayed the last answer was not the correct one. It was among the risks he had taken, of course, in arranging to tease the enemy into such a frenzy. He could only hope that his daughter and Megan Oneagle’s son had not paid the ultimate price to further his own convoluted hoax on the malign birds.
“Hmm,” he commented. “Did you say there was something else puzzling you?”
“This,” Kault went on. “That after five twelves of planetary days, during which they have done nothing at all for the benefit of this world, suddenly the Gubru are making announcements, offering amnesty and employment to former members of the Ecological Recovery Service.”
“Yes? Well, maybe it just means they’ve completed their consolidation and can now spare a little attention to their responsibilties.”
Kault snorted. “Perhaps. But the Gubru are accountants. Credit counters. Humorless, selfish worriers. They are fanatically prim about those aspects of Galactic tradition that interest them, yet they hardly seem to care at all about preserving planets as nursery worlds, only about the near-term status of their clan.”
Although Uthacalthing agreed with that assessment, he considered Kault less than an,impartial observer. And the Thennanin was hardly the one to accuse others of being humorless.
Anyway, one thing was obvious. So long as Kault was distracted like this, thinking about the Gubru, it would be useless to try to draw his attention to subtle clues and footprints in the ground.
He could sense movement in the prairie all around him. The little carnivores and their prey were all seeking cover, settling into small niches and burrows to wait out midday, when the fierce heat of summer would beat down and it would cost too much energy either to give chase or to flee. In that respect, tall Galactics were no exception. “Come,” Uthacalthing said. “The sun is high. We must find a shady place to rest. I see some trees over on the other side of the water.”
Kault followed without comment. He appeared to be indifferent about minor deviations in their path, so long as the distant mountains grew perceptibly closer each day. The white-topped peaks were now more than just a faint line against the horizon. It might take weeks to reach them, and indeterminably longer to find a way through unknown passes to the Sind. But Thennanin were patient when it suited their purposes.
There were no blue glimmerings as Uthacalthing found them shelter under a too-tight cluster of stunted trees, though he kept his eye “peeled” anyway. Still, with his corona he thought he kenned a touch of feral joy from some mind hiding out there on the steppe, something large, clever, and familiar.
“I am, indeed, considered to be something of an expert on Terrans,” Kault said a little later as they made conversation under the gnarled branches. Small insects buzzed near the Thennanin’s breathing slits, only to be blown away every time they approached. “That, plus my ecological expertise, won me my assignment to this planet.”
“Don’t forget your sense of humor,” Uthacalthing added, with a smile.
“Yes,” Kault’s crest puffed in the Thennanin equivalent of a nod. “At home I was thought quite the devil. Just the sort to deal with wolflings and Tymbrimi pixies.” He finished with a rapid, low set of raspy breaths. It was obviously a conscious affectation, for Thennanin did not have a laughter reflex as such. No matter, Uthacalthing thought. As Thennanin humor goes, it was pretty good.