And his own grandson, Berdan!
“Is it safe?”
“Hunh!” Geanar was startled by a sudden whisper close beside him which seemed to come from nowhere—until he remembered the radio transceiver lying on the next seat.
“Is it safe?”
Geanar leaned over, wrestled with a coiled cord, and keyed the microphone. “What do you mean, ‘is it safe’? And why is your output so low? This is inverse-square stuff. Are you further away than before? Are you backing out of this meeting?”
Although it wasn’t audible, Geanar somehow sensed an ironic chuckle buried in the reply.
“We are closer to you than ever before, closer than you would imagine. You would do well, human, to cut your own output to avoid detection. We have reason to believe the source of electromagnetic leakage which you unwisely and unsuccessfully attempted to deal with is within a short distance of your location.”
“Marvelous,” the man replied, “and you’re risking everything by telling them the whole story now!”
The voice betrayed irritation. “We would not have called had we detected the leakage at the present moment. We ask you to observe. See whether it is likely the source will soon be operating again.”
“All right,” Geanar muttered, “hold on.”
He set the microphone aside and powered up his vehicle. Unlike earlier machines of its type, it had no ducted fan or any other moving parts. A light touch on the feed controls of the fusion-electric hovercraft set torrents of air in motion through its electrostatic impellers and raised the top two inches of its windshield above the general level of the leaves. On arriving at this spot, Geanar had cut and attached foliage all over the vehicle to disguise it. He adjusted the windshield for the current distance and light conditions.
Not far away, his grandson and one of the aliens seemed to be busy with camp chores. They were several yards from the alien’s sledlike contraption where Geanar presumed the creature kept its radio equipment. No sign of an antenna.
Leaving his machine computer-controlled and hovering where it was, he reclaimed the microphone.
“All right, Hooded Seven,” he told his own radio set, “you can relax. It’s safe enough, and looks like it’ll remain so for some time yet to come. I’ll keep a lookout as we talk, just to make sure. It’s only a fifteen-year-old kid and a bemmie from some dust-bowl planet, anyway. What are you so frightened of?”
Several heartbeats went by before the voice replied. “Earthman”—an undertone of weariness colored the words—“we, too, have traveled far to meet you in this place. For you, the local environment, while differing in various insignificant details from that which you would regard as most comfortable, is at least somewhat familiar. For us it is extreme, harsh, alien, and dangerous. We would find it taxing to attempt coping with discomfort, disorientation, and the necessities of self-defense, all at the same time.”
Aha, thought Geanar, the mysterious Hooded Seven reveal one more detail about themselves. He wondered how he could use the information to his advantage.
Aloud, he asked a question. “All right, granted the environmental problems, which I find quite uncomfortable enough, thank you, what do you mean self-defense? Self-defense against what?”
Again a pause of several heartbeats. “Very well, human, since you insist upon hearing the naked truth: aside from the ever-present dangers represented by savages and the many voracious nonsapient life-forms dwelling within the Sea of Leaves, there happens to be you, yourself.”
Geanar’s jaw dropped, but his expression of wounded innocence was lost over the radio. “Me? Of all people? Listen to me carefully, Hooded Seven, this is strictly a business proposition for me. Value for value, as the materialistic expression would have it: you’re going to pay me for something you find more useful than money; I’m going to accept in exchange for something I value a great deal less than your money. Granted, the entire affair’s crass and sordid and of no higher spiritual significance whatever, but what conceivable reason would I have to injure or betray you? How could that possibly be in my interest?”
This time the wry amusement was undisguised. “By your own account, you have injured or attempted to injure many others in pursuit of this business proposition, human. Why should we be exempted? Precisely because you are as alien to us as the environment, we cannot know what your interests may embrace. And there is another, better proven danger.”
“Yes?”
“Not long ago our instruments detected an energy pulse of impressive magnitude. It lingered only for a nanosecond, but its output peaked at five million watts.”
Geanar started. “Five million—five megawatts! Why that dirty little sneak thief! Not gone a day and he rifled through my closet and found his father’s…ahumm. I begin to see. The source, Hooded Seven, is essentially the same as the radio leakage, and maybe I can do something about it. If that’s what’s delaying you.”
“We are not delayed, human. As we have unmistakably implied, we are on our way and on schedule. Keeping your earlier failure in mind, do as you will about potential interference.”
It was Geanar’s turn to laugh. “And potential witnesses, as well?”
“As you have said, human, would the presence of witnesses be in your interest?”
Geanar shook his head, another gesture which the radio was incapable of conveying. “No, and there you’ve a point—that it wouldn’t. Nor, I suppose, would it be in your interest, considering all the trouble you’ve taken to conceal yourselves and the fact of your existence from the Galactic Confederacy.”
“We are not entirely unknown to others, human, only to those whose potential for interfering with our interests we have not yet been able to assess. In the meantime, we suggest, for optimal mutual satisfaction, that you leave us to look to those interests, and we will leave you to look to your own. Is this agreeable?”
Geanar grinned, this time fully aware his emotions were unknown to his listener. “Indeed it is, Hooded Seven, indeed it is. Both agreeable, I’d say, and inevitable.”
“Far be it from us to disillusion you in that regard, human, but we feel obligated to point out that we—and our motivations—must surely be as alien and incomprehensible to you as you and yours are to us. But enough of this for now. Do whatever you think best about the presence of other parties at our meeting ground. When we speak again, it will be, as the saying goes, face-to-face.”
“I shall,” Geanar replied, feeling a sudden chill again and wondering why, “be looking forward to it.”
Chapter XIX: An Illuminating Experience
An early, overcast darkness had begun to descend over the Sea of Leaves, and even at the modest speed of which it was capable, the Compassionate had disappeared over the horizon when Middle C found Mac and Pemot trying to relax in their little camp.
For Mac, the vegetation beneath his moss-shoed feet had an uneasy feeling of anticipation, as if something dwelling deep within it were somehow restless tonight. Given that Pemot’s inflatable sand-sled represented the only solid footing he could place between himself and six miles of unknown horror that stopped only at the bedrock core of the planet, it wasn’t a comforting thought.
The taflak had departed a short time after the persuasive display he’d put on for the captain-mother, for another of his hunting trips and to scout around. Somehow, the Majestan had understood both of his alien friends would soon be hungry, and with the weather closing in it was important to move. In almost no time, he’d returned with a fat brace of Parthian-transplanted sea-fed hare.
Mac didn’t care.
He’d found his opportunity to hide behind a bush—not difficult when the entire planet was made up of bushes—and, as a result, hadn’t felt quite so comfortable and contented in a long time. He was going to have to do something about his malfunctioning suit, however, and given the level of technology the lamviin seemed to operate on, he was hesitant to ask Pemot for help.
While Middle C skinned and gutted his kill, a process much neater and quicker t
han the boy had ever imagined it could be, and started one of his minuscule and almost flameless camp fires, less easy than it looked as a scattering of raindrops began to fall all about them, the lamviin had resumed fiddling with his radio receiving gear again, taking elaborate care to keep it covered and dry.
“Well,” he asserted, removing the earphones from his knee joint for a moment, “I believe we’ve now empirically established that neither the Antimacassarites nor the Securitasians are the source of those signals which I recorded earlier.”
“Oh yeah?”
His other physical needs attended to, Mac had wandered nearer the lamviin, the sled, and the taflak’s fire where the brace of spitted hare had begun sizzling, beginning to have some interest in food after all. Somewhere far away on the horizon an enormous and dazzling bolt of lightning leaped from the clouds, now a solid purple-black overhead, into the Sea of Leaves.
A loud crackle issued from Pemot’s earphones, audible even where Mac stood. Mac counted a slow twenty-five before he heard a distant growl of thunder, and found himself hoping it had zapped Captain-Mother b’Tehla right in her bustle.
“Good thing you weren’t wearing those contraptions. How have we established that?”
Pemot attempted to wipe moisture from his carapace with a reflexive, almost uncontrollable shudder, much the same way a human being might react to finding a large, hairy spider crawling up the back of his neck. When it rained in the Fodduan capital city of Mathas, perhaps once every dozen Sodde Lydfan years—a fine, almost invisible mist adding up to a full hundredth of a lamviin finger’s-width of precipitation—all traffic stopped, businesses and schools shut down for the duration, and uneducated peasants, trembling and fearful, who still believed water was a poisonous acid which would eat straight through their exoskeletons into their brains, muttered prayers to Almighty Pah.
They were sometimes joined in this by scientists, scholars, and college professors.
Trembling and fearful.
“In the first place,” the lamviin answered, “because I’m receiving the elusive and mysterious carrier wave this minute—or would be, if I dared put these contraptions, as you call them, back on—which would be a handsome feat for the Intimidator to accomplish. In the second, because it appears to come from a different direction than the Compassionate. And in the third, because out of fear of being detected by the loathsome and dreaded Confederacy, no Antimacassarite commander would tolerate a radio set aboard her vehicle.”
“If you believe the captain-mother.” Mac watched with concealed amusement as his Sodde Lydfan friend seemed to twitch with every raindrop that struck his fur. The boy’s own hair wasn’t even damp.
“If you believe the captain-mother,” Pemot agreed. “One of the few emotions I trust absolutely to translate one to one among sapients, be they human beings, lamviin, taflak, or what have you, is good old-fashioned paranoia. Speaking of which, would you kindly hand me that tarpaulin? At an intellectual level I know better, but this downpour’s beginning to threaten my sanity.”
Mac laughed, reached for a folded sheet of transparent plastic tucked into one of the bundles on the sand-sled, unfolded it, and draped it over the lamviin, tucking the corners in beneath the six feet he happened to be standing on.
Captain-Mother b’Tehla had a great paranoia, all right,” the boy suggested, “between her fear of the Confederacy’s influence and her bigoted distaste for the taflak.”
“Ha, ha!” Pemot exclaimed without humor, pointing a plastic-draped finger at the boy. “Pair-of-noia: an English pun, no better than the Fodduan variety.”
“Shee no leek taflak?”
Mac shook his head to clear his ears. “Latin, actually—or maybe Greek. Maybe we could both switch to limericks, instead. And can’t we do something constructive about Middle C’s vowels, Pemot? Another few days of his dog-whistle accent, and I’ll be stone deaf.”
“What would you suggest?” asked Pemot. “Just talk, to him, to me. He’ll eventually catch on.”
He addressed the native. “No, my trusty warrior friend, Captain-Mother b’Tehla doesn’t like taflak at all, and now, thanks to you and your spear thrower, she’ll like them even less in future, I believe. She respects them, however, which was more than sufficient to our needs at that particular moment. Thank you, indeed, Middle C.”
He repeated the native’s real name.
Mac tried repeating it after him.
The native cringed and reeled off several paragraphs of high-frequency taflak chatter.
Pemot looked at Mac. “He asks whether he and I can’t do something constructive to improve your accent.”
The boy had never heard a lamviin giggle before.
Lightning struck again, this time much nearer by.
The lamviin’s earphones crackled, thunder answering almost at once.
In a few seconds, rain began falling in a manner which even Mac would have agreed was a downpour.
Something screamed.
Before any of the three knew what had happened, the rainy night was filled with a different kind of roaring, as a hurricane seemed to begin to blow. Mac had a brief glimpse of a polished fiberplastic hull blurring by, leaped backward, and was missed by no more than inches when the hovercraft streaked past.
Inside the machine, a man-shaped figure raised a fist and shook it at them.
“Pemot! Are you all right?”
The sudden mechanized assault had destroyed their camp fire and dinner with it—the aroma still lingered, even in the rain—plunging them all into darkness.
“Quite.” The calm voice issued not a foot from the boy’s elbow. “What in the name of Romm was that?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure.” Mac drew his plasma gun as he answered, this time making sure it carried a full charge. “But I believe that was my grandfather.”
Lightning flared.
No more than a hundred yards away, the boy could make out the familiar outlines of a popular early-model Preble Trekmaster, turning for another pass at them. It had been covered with some dark, open-meshed fabric and a layering of leaves and branches which were blowing off behind it in the slipstream.
Middle C was nowhere to be seen.
What tracks the Trekmaster had left lay straight across the spot he’d been standing on.
Beneath the steady rolling of thunder and the maniacal hiss of rain, Mac could hear the Doppler-distorted thrumming of high-powered electrostatic impellers, their baritone pitch whining higher and higher up the scale until it reached tenor. Blackness slammed down about them once again, bringing with it dense sheets of cold, hard-driven water. Mac ignored the blue-green dazzle spots before his eyes, and raised his five megawatt Borchert & Graham, pointing the massive, tapered barrel at the last place he’d seen the hovering machine.
“Here he comes again!”
Mac took up trigger slack. His pistol’s designator beam sprang into scarlet life, splashing across something other than leaves—much nearer than a hundred yards, now—connecting it in a hard, bright line to the muzzle of Mac’s pistol.
Ignoring an important point of marksmanship—for the sake of avoiding the worse consequence of flash blindness—he squeezed the trigger, closing his eyes just beforehand.
Even through his tight-shut eyelids, he could see a ball of sunlike fury roar away into the night. It struck the hovercraft the slightest grazing blow and bounced into the foliage, burning its way down toward the surface of the planet.
As Mac opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was a yellow-white searchlight shaft, striking upward into the murky sky from where the plasma ball had begun tunneling. From somewhere within those violated depths, a horde of small, furry shapes poured up and outward, shoulder to shoulder, spreading across the sodden leaves and disappearing into them again. The hovercraft was spinning around and around like an insane top, still headed for them.
Pemot had begun firing now as well, holding his quaint reciprocating chemical-powered projectile pistol in all three ha
nds, rested on one of the bundles in the sled.
Unnoticed, his protective tarpaulin had slipped off his rounded, shoulderless form.
Oblivious to the rain, which seemed to increase in volume every second he rocked back and forth, hands lifting with the recoil of each shot, keeping up a steady pulsing rhythm of gunfire—his weapon’s muzzle flashes were short-lived globes of pale blue-pink in the inky darkness—until the magazine was empty. He ejected it with one hand, replaced it with the other, all the while keeping the gun trained on the vehicle with the third, and recommenced shooting.
Mac closed his eyes and fired again.
And again.
When he opened them, he saw the attacking machine had veered off at last. It still appeared to be out of control, spinning about its axis, but was slowing.
Off to one side, the shaft of plasma light winked out.
That, for the moment, at least, was the last he saw of the car, although he thought he heard it shudder to a stop with a groan of mechanical weariness and injury.
He jumped.
Something small and quick had scurried across his foot.
Beware of the rats.
When the next bolt of lightning illuminated the Sea of Leaves, the damaged hovercraft was nowhere to be seen, although that meant nothing in itself. By now, visibility had been reduced to nothing at all—perhaps six feet, perhaps seven—by what seemed to be a solid wall of water all about them.
Seeing no sensible alternative, they bent and felt the moss for yards around, at last retrieving Pemot’s plastic tarpaulin, both amazed it hadn’t blown away. The emergency energy of adrenaline—and its lamviin counterpart—had begun draining from their bodies, leaving them limp. Between the intermittent thunder and the steady roar of wind and rain, they were forced to communicate at the tops of their lungs and could still scarcely hear each other.
Fighting storm winds as well as their own fatigue, they draped the plastic over their shivering bodies and huddled together under the inadequate lee of the uptilted Fodduan sand-sled that every moment kept threatening to tear loose from where it had been tied to the vegetation and sail high and free over the distant and invisible horizon in mindless pursuit of the Compassionate.
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