by Brian Daley
I can't let Pokesnout lose. I've got a White Ship to win!
One of the more assertive beta bulls had broken from the group and was trotting closer to the fight, not wanting to warn his victim with a ground-shaking charge just yet. Alacrity shouted and shouted to Pokesnout, but the undersize challenger was busy finishing off Treeneck with unauthorized butts and kicks; there was no hope of getting his attention.
Alacrity crouched lower in the vermilion lichen-grass, hoping the beta's gawkish singlemindedness would work to his advantage. The ambusher came cantering in Alacrity's direction; Alacrity scurried into a better position, keeping well down. He made a frantic calculation between speed and surprise and gathered himself, moving into the beta's path, praying the thing wouldn't start going any faster.
And when the beta was almost on him, Alacrity sprang at it, thrusting his brolly up out of the grass into its face, opening the umbrella with a sudden pop.
The gawkleg got a brief glimpse at the brolly and nearly piled up on top of himself in a chop-hoof, hysterical attempt to reverse field, kicking up grass and soil. He came to a sliding stop partway on his rump, chin almost in Alacrity's lap, thrashing for a frantic retreat.
Alacrity partway closed the brolly and popped it again as the beta, his sneak attack forgotten, galloped off the way he'd come. The conventions of herd behavior gave every indication of having gone into the converter, and Floyt wondered if it wasn't due in part to Pokesnout's Shadow Verities as well as the situation and doctrinal conflicts. Alacrity's strategem had given Pokesnout's supporters a chance to position themselves to stop any more intervention by the dominant bulls. Some very rough jostling was going on, vicious ram-jousts really, Pokesnout's adherents barely holding their own against the betas. Alacrity heard yells behind him and turned to see Paloma and Floyt racing downslope at him, pell-mell, astounded that he hadn't been trampled into pasture carpeting.
Alacrity looked to where the dominance fight still raged. Pokesnout was using his iconoclastic style still; he had Treeneck reeling.
Cheating sometimes pays, Alacrity decided. As he watched, Pokesnout charged, reversed field just short of the alpha's lower horns, and kicked him in the head again with hind hooves, side on. Alacrity suspected that the runt male could've shattered the alpha's jaw and muzzle but chose not to; certainly, accuracy didn't strike Alacrity as one of Pokesnout's problems.
Treeneck's knees wobbled and he keeled over in a cloud of dust shaken loose from the long lichen-grass. "It looks like we're going to town!" Alacrity grinned, as Floyt and Paloma Sudan bore down on him with every sort of imprecation and accusation, too short of breath to do it right.
"Moron! You almost—"
"Of all the dipshit stunts! What were you—"
Alacrity held up a hand stained wheyberry green for silence, then casually opened his brolly for them. He'd decorated it in a passable imitation of a scare-flare's wattle in warning display. The color was a pretty good match; not surprising since the predators often hid among the vines. It stood out dramatically against the vermilion lichen-grass.
The other two stared at it in mute shock, still panting. "What if … it didn't work?" Paloma huffed out at last. "What if … that big bull didn't fall for it, or couldn't stop? You'd be dead, and you're even more worthless to me and Hobie dead than you are alive!"
"I'm too busy to die," Alacrity told Paloma. "At least for the immediate future. Long enough to reach Spica, at a minimum." He raised his shoulders and dropped them carelessly, smiling his most maddening smile, closing the brolly slowly because the berry stain was drying and starting to flake away; nothing stuck to the shiny metallic fabric of the Viceroy Imperial for long.
Pokesnout, satisfied he was the victor, sniffed at his fallen opponent, threw his head back, then bugle-grunted to the herd. The gawks looked confused and immobilized now that their Verities were all in disarray. Paloma swung her proteus's pickup, aligning it on the runt, non-breeding male victor.
"The Verities won't keep the herd alive," Pokesnout was saying. "The Shadow Verities might. This is not an unclear decision."
"I'd say they're buying it," Paloma said in a hushed voice. "Or else they would have hopped him flat by now."
"And, after all, he does have the monopoly on Shadow Verities," Floyt reminded her.
"Well, anyway; there's too much to do for me to die," Alacrity said cheerily. "It's fate and that's all there is to it." He started off to talk to Pokesnout.
Floyt and Paloma Sudan looked at one another. "Tempting to prove him wrong, isn't it?" she snarled, whacking her wooden spear against her palm.
"Constantly," Floyt said, flat-toned.
Chapter 12
At The Risk Of Sounding Foolish
"Listen, Fitzhugh, I'll only tell you this one more time: it's not worth the effort," Paloma said yet again. "The exertion of building deadfall traps will use up more calories than we'll get out of them. The bigger life forms are especially wary."
"Not if we build barriers along the game runways, twiff brain! We could nail one of those leaf-eaters that looks like a boilerplate badger, or even catch ourselves a scare-flare. Unless you're becoming fond of larvae pudding."
Paloma Sudan made an exasperated noise. "We're eating well enough. But I thought your first order of business was making every possible preparation for the Long Trek?"
"It is, it is," he grumbled. "But I am getting a little sick of roots, grub stew, roasted nuts, and the occasional side order of ringwing or snakefish!" He rubbed his shrunken middle, which, given his height, nearly touched his backbone. Paloma didn't look much better. All three humans had lost weight and acquired real and dangerous medical problems out beyond civilization in the Lebensraum wilds.
"Well, graylock, if you're not happy with what we're getting from the hanging snares and figure-fours, you're free to dig yourself a pitfall big enough to catch a gawk for all I care. Only don't whine to me when the Long Trek's postponed!"
"Lay off, lay off," he chanted. "So now you know how to win any argument. I surrender. But where's Pokesnout? I thought he was gonna be here with the rest of his advance party."
The first major obstacle to the Long Trek was a narrow stretch of high desert that lay a day's gawk-march along their route. The Verities and the Shadow Verities referred to something there that translated as "scuttle-death." Alacrity had convinced all parties that a reconnaissance was in order, and Pokesnout was doing his best to bring one together.
To his credit and the credit of the gawklegs' intelligence, the little nonbreeding male was maintaining his leadership—more by his special knowledge of Verities and Shadow Verities and innovative thinking than by his combat victory. At another time he'd have been killed or made outcast at the very least for it. But in time of danger to the herd, necessity took priority over custom.
"Hobie went to find him," Paloma said. "It's surprising how your sidekick's warmed up to the gawks; it takes him a while to get around that Earth upbringing, doesn't it?"
"Yup. He didn't exactly hit if off with me at first either, but—" He reached out and took her hand in his. She didn't fight it. "I have this winning personality … "
For a second he thought she was finally going to let him kiss her, but then she drew back, turning her head aside, dropping her eyes. Alacrity threw down her hand in mock disgust.
"Hey, Hot 'n Cold! Lemme know when you make up your mind!"
Paloma laughed and struck another of her model poses. Even in the wilds she could be a beguiling, high-style performer. Her hair was drawn back into a tight, high horsetail, gathered with a clip from her pouch, and she smelled great again, now that the humans could use the river to bathe under gawk protection.
"All this attention is very flattering, Amber Eyes, but why do I wonder about your sincerity?" She dropped the act a little. "If you want try again once we're out of this jam, we'll see. But not here; I just refuse to feel … convenient. Maybe you'll look at things a little differently when we're free to go our separate ways,
hmm? And I'll see the back of you?"
Alacrity thought about what the future held for him, thought especially that somewhere there was Heart, whom he loved so much that there was very little room for any other woman, really. But of desire there was plenty, at least in Heart's absence.
So he counterattacked. "What about you? If you don't want me at all, just say so and we won't ever talk about it again, you have my word."
She gave him a long look. "For now I think I'll file that one under 'creative evasions.' "
He thought she was opening the way for him to press her about it, but the chance slipped by as Pokesnout trumpeted and they saw him trotting their way. On the gawk's back, struggling to keep his seat, rode Floyt. Vermin eaters circled, birring angrily at his invasion of their domain.
"Well, here's me with my mouth open!" Alacrity cried, jumping to his feet.
Paloma let him give her a hand up. "It looks like he's pretty adaptable," she said, meaning Floyt.
"Comes from a big gene pool, I guess."
They gave Floyt a little cheer as Pokesnout drew to a halt. "See me after the Long Trek if you want to go into show business," Paloma added.
Floyt bowed, speaking into Pokesnout's ear via Paloma's proteus, which he wore on his left wrist. The runt male clumsily bent his front legs, nearly unseating Floyt, but eventually achieving a dismount position. Floyt swung down with exaggerated care, his fatigue jacket pockets bulging with some cargo.
"I'm gratified that you enjoyed the act," he said. "Pokesnout caught on to horsey-ride right away." He reached into his pocket carefully. "He also helped me get these." Floyt drew out an egg nearly the size of an ostrich's, with a shell like green delft.
"Scare-flare," he explained. "The gawks know how to find them; they just don't care, because they don't eat them and scare-flares don't bother them much."
He pulled out his survival gadget and, holding the narrow end of the egg uppermost, hacked it open. It took some doing. Floyt had a cautious sip, then passed it to Paloma. "The first cache I found was pretty far gone toward hatching," he explained while she sampled it, "so I recovered it and went on to the next."
He angled a thumb at Pokesnout's big hooves. "It helps to have an excavating team with you. They're as good at kick-digging egg caches as they are at roots and tubers." He pulled another egg from a bellows pocket.
Paloma had taken a good swig at the scare-flare egg. "Maybe it's just hunger talking, but this doesn't taste bad!" She passed it along to Alacrity, wiping her lips on the back of her hand. "Are there many more?"
Floyt had an egg in each hand and another weighting a breast pocket. "All we can eat. Evidently the flares have a year-round laying season. Rock-eels and so forth get most of the hatchlings, so the females deposit a lot of eggs."
Alacrity got the green yolk, high-concentration protein, along with the ochre "white." It was faintly chalky, but still wonderful and rich.
Paloma took two more eggs from Floyt. "I'm going to boil these," she decided. She and Alacrity had already improvised a cooking vessel from a large joint of plia-bamboo. "It'll probably take forever, but then we can throw on some of this and that for seasoning."
"Here, try this." Floyt held out a large-denomination Lebensraum Company scrip that he'd twisted to form a crude pouch. Inside was a palmful of coarse, dirty, large-grain salt. "Pokesnout showed me a big lick by a hot spring."
Paloma kissed Floyt's cheek soundly. "Hobie, you're such a treasure!"
"Oh, well," he said, face rosy. "There really wasn't much I could contribute while you two were debating Apache foot-snares and twitch-up traps and poisoning fish and all."
"So you went and got the straight goods from Pokesnout, which is what we should've been doing from the start!" Paloma bussed him again while Alacrity did his best to mask the sound of grating teeth.
Then Paloma accepted her proteus back and set off, the eggs clutched to her chest, her spear held ready. Pokesnout said something; by now it was second nature for Alacrity to hold up his proteus and listen for the translation.
"So you Other Male and Female like the eggs as much as Digger?"
"Digger, Ho?" Alacrity puzzled.
"Well, 'Hobart' didn't translate, and 'Digger' is close enough to 'Delver.' " That was Delver as in Delver Root-nose, Floyt's alias among the Foragers of Luna.
"So I'm just 'Other Male'?" Alacrity asked Floyt.
" 'Alacrity' doesn't translate so well either. I would suggest 'Speed.' "
"Mmm. All right."
Pokesnout had been absorbing the running translation, looking from one to the other, his semiprehensile upper lip curling, flapping, and everting. "Speed, eh? A good name. I will tell everyone, and that will be your name for always. Does Female have a name, too?"
Alacrity gazed after Paloma. She was moving lithely up the hill, very much aware of her svelte, glamorous appeal, secure in it and proud of it.
"Her name's 'Babyfat,' " Alacrity said spitefully. "Make sure everybody knows. That will be her name for always."
* * * *
"So, Digger, that is why Babyfat was trying to hit Speed in the head with her wooden branch and kill him? Because of her name?" Pokesnout snorted a vast breath and rolled around in the mud some more. He was a lot more confident and relaxed now that he was a breeding male.
Floyt lay stretched out on his back on the warm boulder, head pillowed on his arms, basking in the sunlight after a chilly bath in the river, gazing up at the peaceful Lebensraum sky. All around him, his rock-pounded clothing was drying. Alacrity's proteus was loose around his lower forearm.
"I don't think she was really going to kill him, Pokesnout. But yes, she was quite angry about the name he gave her."
Pokesnout tossed his tail, flinging mud droplets into the air. "That is what I thought, although it is very hard for us to understand. I could try to get the herd to call her something else, but 'Babyfat' is woven into the New Verities now, and it would probably only confuse things; it would muddle everyone's mnemonics terribly and disorder their thinking and, in the end, not work."
Actually, Floyt didn't much care to think about troublesome sociodynamics just at the moment. With gawklegs having accepted them and begun helping them, the humans had a much easier life, and he felt like enjoying it. Using the swift-moving part of the river to bathe, for example, where there was no danger from sliverworms, bloodflukes, and similar perils, and not having to worry about manglejaws because he had a gawk for a bathing companion, was a luxury to be savored singlemindedly.
Preparations for a recon were going well. The Verities weren't much use in guessing what the scuttle-death was, and both Pokesnout and the humans wanted to know before the main herd moved up into the high desert. Floyt had worked hard helping gather food and fashion equipment, and intended to enjoy his restful interlude.
Except that the problem of the Lake Fret, the last major barrier along their way, still bothered him. Neither Alacrity nor Paloma had come up with a workable way to negotiate it. Floyt had been accessing the subject, a large body of water in the middle of a region of Karst topography—limestonelike substrata. There was a tiny drone substation racking-and-launching point not too far from their route of march, stocked with seismic charge robos, but it was of no use to the strandees; shaped explosive charges weren't much good as weapons, and the drones were much too small to use as transportation.
But he didn't want to think about that anymore either. He answered Pokesnout lazily, "Oh, I'm sure she'd be grateful if you'd see what you can do about it, but not if it's going to make communications all mixed up."
"Hobie, you wouldn't be so casual if you were the one being slandered!"
Floyt rolled over onto one elbow and Pokesnout shot to his feet in the mud. Seeing it was only Paloma, the gawk sank back down, grunting and sending out waves. "Greetings, Babyfat!"
"Hi, Poke," she said dispiritedly, her proteus putting it into gawk for her. "And relax, Hobie; don't throw a vertebrae being body-shy on my account. I grew up on
a ranch."
Floyt realized he looked silly trying to cover himself with contortions and damp clothes. He stopped, and settled for rolling onto his stomach on his boulder, a few meters out in the river. Paloma seated herself under a cirrous tree on the bank. Her hair was combed out and she looked more bewitching than ever.
"Anyway, thanks for trying to straighten things out," she said, digging her heel at the turf. "But this Babyfat business has a life of its own." She smiled cheerlessly. "That vindictive filho-puta! It's just like Alacrity to be at his most inventive at a thing like this!"
"Actually, that's true. Um, I was right, wasn't I? You didn't kill him, did you?"
"I might have, except those damn climbing spikes gave him an edge. It'll serve him right if he sits up in that tree until the drillbugs drain him dry. Damn him and his White Ship and his damn Precursors!"
Floyt was toying with an Inheritor's belt warmed by the rays of Invictus, studying the strange symbols that had saved his life from Hecate. "I never asked you this, Paloma, but what do you think the Precursors were? Or who?"
She'd been frowning at the water; even that expression looked tantalizing on her. But she brightened, looking back to Floyt.
"Us."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The Precursors. They're us, Hobie. And sweet old Poke there, and the grass and trees. And even that treacherous cazzo sitting back up there in his tree. See what I'm getting at?"
"I suppose." Neither of them paid any attention to Pokesnout, who lay there in the mud waggling his ears and listening to the running translations the humans had come to ignore as background noise.
"Now I get to ask you one, Hobie. What's Heart like? The Nonpareil? In the news she always looks friggin' killer-gorgeous."
"She's—sometimes I find myself looking at her and I think, 'I'll memorize her, so that I won't stare so much.' And then I look away, but when I look back, I find that the memory's pale by comparison, and she bowls me over again. I end up staring—"
"I'm sorry I asked."
"No, no; I was going to say—it's the same with you." His face reddening, he averted his eyes. "And she's bright and courageous and compassionate like you, too."
