“Yessir, I’ll hurry back.”
“Very well, then. Take Lieutenant McCue with you. I want one of my own men to see the countryside. Show McCue how you accomplished your little coup, introduce her to the leaders of the more important chim partisan bands in that area, then return without delay. Dismissed.”
Robert came to attention. I think I know now why I hate him, Robert realized as he saluted, performed an about-face, and walked out through the hanging blanket that served as a door to the subterranean office.
Ever since he had returned to the caves to find Prathachulthorn and his aides moving around like owners, patronizing the chims and judging everything they had all done together, Robert had been unable to stop feeling like a child who had, until that moment, been allowed to play a wonderful dramatic role, a really fun game. But now the child had to bear paternal pats on the head—strokes that burned, even if intended in praise.
It was an embarrassing analogy, and yet he knew that in a sense it was true after all.
Robert blew a silent sigh and hurried away from the office and dark armory he had shared with Athaclena, but which now had been completely taken over by grownups.
Only when he was finally back under the tall forest canopy did Robert feel he could breathe freely again. The trees’ familiar scents seemed to cleanse his lungs of the dank cave odors. The scouts who flitted ahead of him and alongside were those he knew, quick, loyal, feral-looking with their crossbows and sooty faces. My chims, he thought, feeling a little guilty that it came to him in those words. But the feeling of proprietorship was there anyway. It was like the “old days”—before yesterday—when he had felt important and needed.
The illusion broke apart, though, the next time Lieutenant McCue spoke.
“These mountain forests are very beautiful,” she said. “I wish I’d taken the time to come up here before the war broke out.” The Earthling officer stopped by the side of the trail to touch a blue-veined flower, but it folded away from her fingers and retreated backward into the thicket. “I’ve read about these things, but this is my first chance to see them for myself.”
Robert grunted noncommittally. He would be polite and answer any direct question, but he wasn’t interested in conversation, especially with Major Prathachulthorn’s second in command.
Lydia McCue was an athletic young woman, with dark, well-cut features. Her movements, lithe like a commando’s—or an assassin’s—were by that same nature also quite graceful. Dressed in homespun kilt and blouse, she might have been taken for a peasant dancer, if it weren’t for the self-winding arbalest she cradled in the crook of one arm like a child. In hip pouches were enough darts to pincushion half the Gubru within a hundred kilometers. The knives sheathed at her wrists and ankles were for more than show.
She seemed to have very little trouble keeping up with his rapid pace through the criss-cross jungle mesh of vines. That was just as well, for he wasn’t about to slow down. At the back of his mind Robert knew he was being unfair. She was probably a nice enough person in her own way, for a professional soldier. But for some reason everything likable about her seemed to irritate him all the more.
Robert wished Athaclena had consented to come along. But she had insisted on remaining in her glade near the caves, experimenting with tame vines and crafting strange, ornate glyphs that were far too subtle to be kenned by his own weak powers. Robert had felt hurt and stormed off, almost outracing his escorts for the first few kilometers.
“So much life.” The Earth woman kept pace beside him and inhaled the rich odors. “This is a peaceful place.”
You’re wrong on both counts, Robert thought, with a trace of contempt for her dull, human insensitivity to the truth about Garth, a truth he could feel all around him. Through Athaclena’s tutoring he now could reach out—albeit tentatively, awkwardly—and trace the life-waves that fluxed through the quiet forest.
“This is an unhappy land,” he replied simply. He did not elaborate, even when she gave him a puzzled look. His primitive empathy sense withdrew from her confusion.
For a while they moved in silence. The morning aged. Once the scouts whistled, and they took cover under thick branches as great cruisers lumbered overhead. When the way was clear Robert took to the trail again without a word.
At last, Lydia McCue spoke again. “This place we’re heading for,” she asked, “this Howletts Center. Would you please tell me about it?”
It was a simple request. He could not refuse, since Prathachulthorn had sent her along to be shown things. But Robert avoided her black eyes as he spoke. He tried to be matter-of-fact, but emotion kept creeping into his voice. Under her low prompting Robert told Lydia McCue about the sad, misguided, but brilliant work of the renegade scientists. His mother had known nothing of the Howletts Center, of course. It was only by accident that he himself had learned of it a year or so before the invasion, and he had decided to keep silent.
Of course the daring experiment was over now. It would take more than a miracle to save the neo-gorillas from sterilization, now that the secret was known to people like Major Prathachulthorn.
Prathachulthorn might hate Galactic Civilization with a passion that bordered on fanaticism, but he knew how essential it was that Terrans not break their solemn pacts with the great Institutes. Right now, Earth’s only hope lay in the ancient codes of the Progenitors. To keep the protection of those codes, weak clans had to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.
Lydia McCue listened attentively. She had high cheekbones and eyes that were sultry in their darkness. It pained Robert to look at them, though. Those eyes seemed somehow to be set too close together, too immobile. He kept his attention on the crooked path ahead of him.
And yet, with a soft voice the young Marine officer drew him out. Robert found himself talking about Fiben Bolger, about their narrow escape together from the gas-bombing of the Mendoza Freehold, and of his friend’s first journey down into the Sind.
And the second, from which he never returned.
They crested a ridge topped with eerie spine-stones and came to an opening overlooking a narrow vale, just west of Lorne Pass. He gestured to the tumbled outlines of several burned structures. “The Howletts Center,” he said, flatly.
“This is where you forced the Gubru to acknowledge chim combatants, isn’t it? And made them give parole?” Lydia McCue asked. Robert realized he was hearing respect in her voice, and turned briefly to stare at her. She returned his look with a smile. Robert felt his face grow warm.
He swung back quickly, pointing to the hillside nearest the center and rapidly describing how the trap had been laid and sprung, skipping only his own trapeze leap to take out the Gubru sentry. His part had been unimportant, anyway. The chims were the crucial ones that morning. He wanted the Earthling soldiers to know that.
He was finishing his story when Elsie approached. The chimmie saluted him, something that had never seemed necessary before the Marines arrived.
“I don’t know about actually goin’ down there, ser,” she said, earnestly. “The enemy’s already shown an interest in those ruins. They may have come back.”
Robert shook his head. “When Benjamin paroled the enemy survivors, one condition they accepted was to stay out of this valley, and not even keep its approaches under surveillance, from then on. Has there been any sign of them breaking their word?”
Elsie shook her head. “No, but—” Her lips pressed together, as if she felt she ought to forbear comment on the wisdom of trusting the pledges of Eatees.
Robert smiled. “Well, then. Come on. If we hurry we can be in and back out by nightfall.”
Elsie shrugged. She made a quick set of hand gestures. Several chims darted out of the spine-stones and down into the forest. After a moment there came an all-clear whistle. The rest of the party crossed the gap at a brisk run.
“They are very good,” Lydia McCue told him softly after they were back under the trees again.
Robert nodded, recognizing t
hat she had not qualified her remark by adding, “for amateurs,” as Prathachulthorn would have done. He was grateful for that, and wished she wasn’t being so nice.
Soon they were picking their way toward tumbled ruins, carefully searching for signs that anyone else had been there since the battle, months ago. There did not seem to be any, but that did not diminish the intense vigilance of the chims.
Robert tried to kenn, to use the Net to probe for intruders, but his own jumbled feelings kept getting in the way. He wished Athaclena were here.
The wreckage of the Howletts Center was even more complete than had been apparent from the hillside. The fire-blackened buildings had collapsed further under wild jungle vegetation now growing rampant over former lawns. The Gubru vehicles, long ago stripped of anything useful, lay in tangles of thick grass as tall as his waist.
No, clearly nobody’s been here, he thought. Robert kicked through the wreckage. Nothing remained of interest. Why did I insist on coming? he wondered. He knew his hunch—whether it panned out or not—had actually been little more than an excuse to escape from the caves—to get away from Prathachulthorn.
To get away from uncomfortable glimpses of himself.
Perhaps one reason he had chosen to come to this place was because it was here that he had had his own brief moment of hand-to-hand contact with the enemy.
Or maybe he had hoped to recreate the feelings of only a few days ago, traveling unfettered and unjudged. He had hoped to come here with different female company than the woman who now followed him, eyes darting left and right, putting everything under professional scrutiny.
Robert turned away from his brooding thoughts and walked toward the ruined alien hover tanks. He sank to one knee, brushing aside the tall, rank grass.
Gubru machinery, the exposed guts of the armored vehicles, gears, impellers, gravitics …
A fine yellow patina overlay many of the parts. In some places the shining plastimesh had discolored, thinned, and even broken through. Robert pulled on a small chunk which came off, crumbling, in his hands.
Well I’ll be a blue-nosed gopher. I was right. My hunch was right.
“What is it?” Lieutenant McCue asked over his shoulder. He shook his head. “I’m not sure, yet. But something seems to be eating through a lot of these parts.”
“May I see?”
Robert handed her the piece of corroded ceramet.
“This is why you wanted to come here? You suspected this?”
He saw no point in telling her all the complex reasons, the personal ones. “That was a large part of it. I thought, maybe, there might be a weapon in it. They burned all the records and facilities when they evacuated the center. But they couldn’t eradicate all the microbes developed in Dr. Schultz’s lab.”
He didn’t add that he had a vial of gorilla saliva in his pack. If he had not found the Gubru armor in this state, on arriving here, he had planned to perform his own experiments.
“Hm.” Lydia McCue crumbled the material in her hand. She got down and crawled under the machine to examine which parts had been affected. Finally she emerged and sat next to Robert.
“It could prove useful. But there would still be the problem of a delivery system. We don’t dare venture out of the mountains to spray the little bugs over Gubru equipment in Port Helenia.
“Also, bio-sabotage weapons are very short term in their effectiveness. They have to be used all at once and by surprise, since countermeasures are usually swift and effective. After a few weeks, the bugs would be neutralized—chemically, with coatings, or by cloning another beastie to eat ours.
“Still,” she turned another piece over and looked up to smile at Robert. “This is great. What you did here before, and now this … These are the right ways to fight guerrilla war! I like it. We’ll find a way to use it.”
Her smile was so open and friendly that Robert couldn’t help responding. And in that shared moment he felt a stirring that he had been trying to suppress all day.
Damn, she’s attractive, he realized, miserably. His body was sending him signals more powerful than it ever had in the company of Athaclena. And he barely knew this woman! He didn’t love her. He wasn’t bound up with her, as he was with his Tymbrimi consort.
And yet his mouth was dry and his heart beat faster as she looked at him, this narrow-eyed, thin-nosed, tall-browed, female human.…
“We’d better be heading home,” he said quickly. “Go ahead and take some samples, lieutenant. We’ll test them back at base.”
He ignored her long look as he stood up and signaled to Elsie. Soon, with specimens stowed away in their packs, they were climbing once more toward the spine-stones. The watchful guards showed obvious relief as they shouldered their rifles and leaped back into the trees.
Robert followed his escort with little attention to the path. He was trying not to think of the other member of his own race walking beside him, so he frowned and kept himself banked in behind a brumous cloud of his own thoughts.
59
Fiben
Fiben and Gailet sat near each other under the unblinking regard of masked Gubru technicians, who focused their instruments on the two chims with dispassionate, clinical precision. Multi-lensed globes and flat-plate phrased arrays floated on all sides, peering down at them. The testing chamber was a jungle of glistening tubes and shiny-faced machinery, all antiseptic and sterile.
Still, the place reeked of alien bird. Fiben’s nose wrinkled, and once again he disciplined himself to avoid thinking unfriendly thoughts about the Gubru. Certainly several of the imposing machines must be psi detectors. And while it was doubtful they could actually “read his mind,” the Galactics certainly would be able to trace his surface attitudes.
Fiben reached for something else to think about. He leaned to his left and spoke to Gailet.
“Um, I talked to Sylvie before they came for us this morning. She told me she hasn’t been back to the Ape’s Grape since that night I first came to Port Helenia.”
Gailet turned to look at Fiben. Her expression was tense, disapproving.
“So? Games like that striptease of hers may be obsolete now, but I’m sure the Gubru are finding other ways to use her unique talents.”
“She’s refused to do anything like that since then, Gailet. Honestly. I can’t see why you’re so hostile toward her.”
“And I find it hard to understand how you can be so friendly with one of our jailers!” Gailet snapped. “She’s a probationer and a collaborator!”
Fiben shook his head. “Actually, Sylvie’s not really a probie at all, nor even a gray or yellow. She has a green repro-card. She joined them because—”
“I don’t give a damn what her reasons were! Oh, I can imagine what sort of sob story she’s told you, you big dope, while she batted her eyelashes and softened you up for—”
From one of the nearby machines came a low, atonal voice. “Young neo-chimpanzee sophonts … be still. Be still, young clients …” it soothed.
Gailet swiveled to face forward, her jaw set.
Fiben blinked. I wish I understood her better, he thought. Half the time he had no idea what would set Gailet off.
It was Gailet’s moodiness that had started him talking with Sylvie in the first place, simply for company. He wanted to explain that to Gailet, but decided it would do no good. Better to wait. She would come out of this funk. She always did.
Only an hour ago they had been laughing, jostling each other while they fumbled with a complicated mechanical puzzle. For a few minutes they had been able to forget the staring mechanical and alien eyes while they worked as a team, sorting and resorting the pieces and arranging them together. When they stood back at last and looked on the completed tower they had made, they both knew that they had surprised the note-takers. In that moment of satisfaction, Gailet’s hand had slipped, innocently and affectionately, into his.
Imprisonment was like that. Part of the time, Fiben actually felt as if he were profiting from the experienc
e. It was the first time in his life, for instance, that he’d ever really had time to just sit and think. Their captors now let them have books, and he was catching up on quite a few volumes he’d always wanted to read. Conversations with Gailet had opened up the arcane world of alienology. He, in turn, had spoken to her of the great work being done here on Garth, delicately nudging a ruined ecosystem back toward health.
But then, all too common, had been the long, darker intervals, when the hours dragged on and on. A pall hung over them at such times. The walls seemed to close in, and conversation always came back to the War, to memories of their failed insurrection, to lost friends and gloomy speculations over the fate of Earth itself.
At such times, Fiben thought he might trade all hope of a long life for just an hour to run free under trees and clean sky.
So even this new routine of testing by the Gubru had come as a relief for both of them. At least it was a distraction.
Without warning, the machines suddenly pulled away, opening an avenue in front of their bench. “We are finished, finished.… You have done well, done well, you have … Now follow the globe, follow it, toward transportation.”
As Fiben and Gailet stood up, a brown, octahedral projection took form in front of them. Without looking at each other they followed the hologram past the silent, brooding avian technicians, out of the testing chamber, and down a long hallway.
Service robots swept past them with the soft whisper of well-tuned machinery. Once a Kwackoo technician darted out of an office door, favored them with a startled look, then ducked back inside. At last Fiben and Gailet passed through a hissing portal and emerged into bright sunshine. Fiben had to shade his eyes. The day was fair, but with a bite that seemed to say that brief summer was now well on its way out. The chims he could see in the streets, beyond the Gubru compound, were wearing light sweaters and sneakers, another sure sign that autumn was near.