Still, there was no hesitation in her heart. She reached for the mate-signal; then she stopped and stood quite still. It was true, then. She was receiving two signals.
It was unknown in the history of Zaran, but there it was. When she had said there was only one option, she had assumed that she would tune only to Kirk. There had been that affinity between them from the first moments in the clearing—the beginning of an imprinting which would deepen as choice became irrevocable until it was a band of force between them.
She had fought it, but it was not to be fought. She had even set the Vulcan against it. He had not known that it was not merely his need which she answered.
But that should merely have made it impossible to bond with either. To have this awareness of both was also not dreamed of in Zaran philosophy. But then, as Kirk had said of Spock, neither was she. Nor were they all.
She lifted her head and tried to sense which direction belonged to which. She found she could not be certain. The call was virtually equal. And the pull was in opposite directions. The Master of Totality had known how to turn the screws tightly.
"Spock!" she called silently. It was doubtful that the thin thread of connection would carry a mental message across distance, yet. But it was necessary to try.
She received no answer. But from one of the directions it was as if she sensed dimly some massive resistance. She knew then. It was one of the two men—sensing her also dimly and warning her to go after the other.
With some effort she turned away from it, to the opposite direction, and moved. It had to be the Vulcan who would send that message. And she firmly turned her back on him and went for Kirk.
There had always been only one option in that sense, too. The Vulcan was far better equipped to survive here unarmed. He was vastly stronger and raised to survive on a planet which could rival this one for danger. He would have survived Vulcan in the Kaswan trial—at the age of seven.
Kirk was a Starship Captain. What training and sheer wiliness and courage could do, he would do. But he was Human, and all of Starfleet's survival training was not equal to unaided Human survival here. Even her people would not survive long unarmed. Nor, for that matter, would the Vulcan. And only she was armed.
The only chance to save both men lay in a single direction. She moved quickly through the lower terrace. . . .
Chapter 20
Kirk found a small stand of what looked like blue bamboo. The shafts were long and straight and tapered toward the tip. He put his back against a tree and worried at one of the shafts until he was able to snap it at a joint across a rock. He hefted it experimentally. The ten-foot length would make a serviceable spear.
He would have preferred a cannon. There was nothing here which he wanted to touch with a ten-foot spear. And most of the local fauna looked capable of using it for a toothpick.
He picked out a short length which might be stabbed like a knife and tucked it into the robe belt. The stuff was too rigid to make a good bow, he decided, and he doubted he would have the leisure. He heard the coughing of the cat behind him still.
And this time he looked up again at the low branches where they had first found Sola. All right. She knew this territory. He doubted that the trees would help him against the cat, but they might keep down the werewolves and a few other things. He found a couple of low branches and swung up into them. Many were wide enough to stand on easily and from most he could reach some other interlocking branch before it narrowed to become a tightrope.
He brightened a little. Things were looking up. What worried him was that Sola and Spock would be frantically combing the planet for him. Or perhaps the Totality would have given her some place to start, and she, or they, would be down here, beating the bushes for him. Mate-hunt? Would she come for him if that were the only way she could come? There was, he realized, another danger. Perhaps the Totality did not merely wish to have her hunt him, but wanted to reduce him to some state where Totality would seem like a refuge. In which case the Totality was probably hunting him, too. . . .
He turned to look at his back-trail and found a saber-toothed black cat-bear, for want of a better description, looking at him from a branch twenty feet away. The cat-bear was about a dozen feet long. . . .
Spock moved through the upper terrace with a Vulcan concentration which excluded all else save the vine or balance-branch which he needed for the next forward progress. It was not unlike a balance skill taught to Vulcan children in infant school. The children were not, however, required to practice it some 20.3 meters above the jungle floor.
But there were no obstructions here. He had attempted the lower terrace of wide interlocking branches. It was safer, but the need to detour around various interlocked areas did not suit his need for haste. The ground, of course, was quite impossible. Therefore, he reached back into ancient skills once learned as play and adapted them to an alien environment. At this height he could often vault on a tall, thin sapling for ten or twenty meters. Speed was of the essence.
He was not certain what guide he was following. It was some directional sense which could span distance, but he was not certain whether it led to Sola, or whether it was the still more primitive sense which had once or twice led him to Kirk.
In either case he was certain that it would ultimately lead him to both of them. Sola would, of course, in all logic, go after Kirk—or she would have to answer to Spock. She would know that.
But huntress that she was, she could not be expected to cope with the trap which Spock expected the Totality to lay for them.
Wherefore the Vulcan hurled himself through the trees like a projectile, and there was little in him of Vulcan's thousand years of peace or of the disciplined Starfleet officer. This was jungle and desert, a million years old, and Spock of Vulcan and all his savage ancestors were at home here.
If he did not reach Sola and Kirk in time, this was where he would die. . . .
Chapter 21
McCoy turned on Gailbraith. He had brought the Ambassador to his own home turf, Sickbay, and now he meant to have an answer.
"Ambassador," he said, "I'm not sure how much soul I own, and you are just about the last buyer I would sell it to. But I consider that I am now left in effective command of this ship. I cannot know whether Mr. Scott or any other crew member is free of either the Totality or your Oneness and therefore fit to command. I don't know what you did to Jim Kirk in that link Spock pulled him out of. I don't like what you have evidently cooked up with the Totality. But I have to hold this ship together and find its Captain and First Officer. And Sola. If your price is my soul, I will make you the same offer the Captain made. If he joins you, I will, too. But you must leave me clear until that time and help me to hold the ship and to find them."
Gailbraith smiled. "That is rather a hard bargain, Doctor—considering that if I get your Captain's soul, I would almost certainly get yours, too."
McCoy faced him flatly. "Gailbraith, you don't hold all the cards. Under Code Seven as Senior Medical Officer I am empowered to take certain steps—including, if necessary, a destruct sequence. And even if you could get your people off, your Oneness could not survive on that planet, either. I suggest you accept my bargain."
McCoy did not describe the limits of his power or the depth of his reluctance to use it. He had played poker from Georgia to Jim Kirk.
Gailbraith smiled. "Doctor, you will never know whether it is to my immediate purpose to assist you, or whether I merely pretend to do so while waiting to take you off guard. However, within those limits—and in my own time—I will assist you for that price."
McCoy took a deep breath. He wasn't certain what you were supposed to do after you sold your soul to the Devil. But he had better get on with it.
"You will keep Mr. Scott and the command crew free of the Totality and your Oneness," he began. "Scott, Sulu, Uhura, Chekov, Chapel, a few others I'll name."
Gailbraith shook his head. "Three of those already belong to the Totality, or to me."
&
nbsp; McCoy felt his heart contract as if in a vise. Scotty? Chapel? Any of them. Dear God. Then, in fact, he was holding the fort, the last line of defense.
"You will tell me which ones," he said. "And then you will help me find the Captain."
Gailbraith shrugged. "Possibly. In my time."
Kirk backed warily along a branch, holding the cat-bear with his eyes, feeling his way with feet and one hand, until he backed up against the trunk of a life-tree.
He braced the spear against the trunk, but he did not expect it to help him much. Even if it impaled the cat-bear, he would probably be crushed by the great beast's weight and killed in its death-throes.
But it was the first rule of survival that you kept trying until you were already dead—and for some time after that.
The cat-bear looked at him as if at a rather interesting morsel, then charged.
He braced the spear, and as the point took the animal in the chest, he jumped. He was perhaps twenty feet off the ground, but he broke the fall slightly by grabbing at a branch or two on the way down.
He landed, hard, and rolled, and then the animal landed beside him, a snarling, spitting mass of claws and teeth, dying.
He scrambled away and backed up until he was trapped by the trunks of life-trees. He held the feeble short length of blue bamboo like a knife and waited while the animal towered up like a bear on two legs, twice his height.
Then as it reached him, it crumpled and he barely escaped its collapsing weight. He was surprised to find it dead at his feet.
He turned away, somehow shocked by the death of so large and beautiful a thing, and yet surprised to be alive.
He would not survive many more such encounters. And somewhere he had smashed the previously injured arm against a branch and knew that Gailbraith's healing was not perfect. It had restored the essential function, but not the bone-deep healthy strength. He was in pain again, and he felt the deep shock lying in wait for him. One ankle was sprained, and he doubted that he could make it in the trees now.
He moved out on the ground, limping, looking for more of the scarce blue bamboo. An unarmed man could not last long on the ground, but he must find another weapon, and he must keep going.
Somehow what disturbed him most was the thought of Sola, or Spock, finding his body under some cat-bear or werewolf.
Or—not finding it …
Chapter 22
Kirk found no more blue bamboo, but he picked up a hefty length of something like ironwood which might do as a serviceable club.
The jungle opened out suddenly into a wide clearing and above the trees on the other side he saw the top of a mountain. Spock's words came back to him: "Camouflaged power and intelligent life-form readings in a solitary volcano near the clearing where Sola landed."
Suddenly things made a little more sense. The Totality would be testing them all on more than one level. Soljenov would put Kirk down within range of a determined assault on his own fortress, to see if Kirk would take up the gauntlet—or take the bait.
He couldn't know Kirk very well, after all, if he had to ask the question. Or then again, perhaps he did know Kirk very well, and it was a sophisticated version of "Won't you come into my parlor?"
In any case, Kirk fixed the direction by the sun and plunged into the jungle in the direction of the mountain. He would take bearding the enemy in his den, any day, over wandering aimlessly in a jungle trying to avoid becoming dinner—or waiting to be rescued.
And, in truth, he could not wait. It was coming to him that he could not allow Sola to find him. Under conditions of mate-hunt she would doubtless have no choice but to mate, perhaps also to bond. And he could not allow himself that. There was Spock.
In fact, it was coming to him that there was no solution to that. He could not see the Vulcan make this effort to break free—only to slam him back into his chains.
No.
And at the same time, he could not change the fact that he would always be there as a threat to both of them. He could not leave. He could not deny the lightning which had struck him, too. Even if he said nothing, did nothing, he doubted that Sola could deny it indefinitely.
If she found him here, he doubted that she could deny it at all.
Some dim thought was coming to him of a radical solution to that and other problems. But he could not quite bring it into focus, yet. He knew that it had something to do with what he had experienced with Gailbraith in that brief encounter with Oneness. He could not fully remember it all, and he knew that his mind, or Gailbraith's, was blocking the remembrance. But he knew that the pull of Oneness had been strong. It was shockingly different—and yet he had lived his life exploring the different. There in the Oneness what was forbidden became the normal, and there was no more solitude or secret or separation.
There he could perhaps endure alone the separation which would have to come if the other two were to be free.
And suppose that instead of exploring Gailbraith's One, he went into Soljenov's Totality?
If the Totality could not be made to abandon conquest from without—maybe he could stop it from within?
Apparently he had become a major objective of both superentities, Gailbraith's and Soljenov's. And maybe something could be made out of that. Such as a lot of trouble …
He increased his pace toward the mountain.
And then something reached down from a tree and closed steely coils around him—coils as thick as his thigh.
He looked up to see what might as well have been a dragon—a fanged head on a thin neck, thick body, and a tail the size of a large python, which had wrapped around him.
He tried to get his club arm free, but it was hopeless. He was being drawn up toward the fangs. He thought that he screamed, mentally, to anyone who could hear. But he expected no answer …
Sola heard the scream of her mate.
There was no sound, but there was now the link between them which made him her life. She moved, and there was little left of the Free Agent of the Federation. She was the Zaran female, answering the cry of her mate across a million-year-old jungle.
She flew now, taking risks she would not have taken before, hurling herself across large open spaces to catch precarious handholds, then swinging up again to run along tightrope-thin branches or vault on the thin saplings.
And still she was certain that she would be too late.
She sent out the psionic hunting cry of the Zaran female—and now it had the power of a female in mate-hunt. It was a warning which could strike terror to the heart of prey or predator, and it might give some predator pause, just long enough.
Then she was there, and she saw Kirk crushed in the coils of a tree-serpent. He was all but unconscious, and the serpent's head was looking into his face. It had perhaps been stopped from crushing the life completely out of him, or using its poison fangs, by her cry.
She leaped across the last twenty feet to land on the serpent's woven bower. It was semi-intelligent and wove nests for itself, often in front of great tree-caves which were its lair.
She could not use the phaser. It would hit Kirk, too. And a stun heavy enough to stop the serpent might kill him. She lashed out with her wrist-coil, wrapping the energy coil around the serpent's throat just below the head and jerking the fanged head away from Kirk's face. The coil was not heavy enough to stun the serpent, but it made the beast pay attention.
It turned and came after her, dragging Kirk still in its tail. She made the coil flicker, striking it again, reaching for the vulnerable spot where the coil would have enough power to stun the small, active brain.
The fanged head struck at her, and she stepped inside it, threw herself on the neck, and finally reached a vulnerable spot behind the ear with her wrist-weapon at point-blank range.
The serpent began to collapse, stunned, and she saw that it would fall off the edge of the bower—taking Kirk with it.
She leaped to pull him out of the relaxing coils of the tail. The serpent poured limply over the edge of the bo
wer, and she heard the thud from below before she was quite certain that she had managed to hold Kirk with the strength of necessity.
The serpent would doubtless recover in an hour or so. She would not.
Kirt was semiconscious. She half-carried, half-guided him into the serpent's tree-cave. It was clean and quiet, and no other predator would come here.
She started to go over Kirk. The thin Sickbay outfit was in tatters. She found a scratch on a shoulder, not from the serpent but from his fight with the cranth. She had found the great animal which he would see as cat and bear. She saw his makeshift spear, and she did not know yet how he had survived.
He was conscious now, and he looked up at her with a faint smile. "So much for my theory," he said. "Thank you."
Her own voice was strained and low in her throat. "What theory?"
"I didn't want you to find me. At least, I didn't want to want it." He reached out and took her hand. "Sola, what I said on the ship still has to go for us. We can't give Spock back to the chains and the vultures. And now we can't give the Totality what it wants, either."
"Spock sent me back to you," she said. "He is stronger even than you know, and he will not be harmed by this. As for what the Totality wants, it may have overplayed its hand just now in setting one of you against the other. If I can keep some balance, perhaps I can stop short of bonding."
He frowned then. "Is that safe for you?"
She laughed low in her throat. "No. But it is safer than the alternative."
She leaned away from him and started to stand up. She was not certain whether or how long she could keep going without the ending which was necessary to the mate-hunt. But she could not trust herself to stop short of the bonding. And she would not override his resistance with the threat to her life.
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