After all, he was the leader. However, this was her territory. She would know more than he what to do there. In certain situations, anyway.
He waved her ahead. They went through some dense bush which suddenly gave way to a large open area. In its center was a cylinder about forty feet high with a diameter of thirty feet. Its walls were of some rough grayish substance. From its base the same substance spread out, paving the area and preventing the growth of any plants. Round holes perforated the walls of the cylinder, and to and from these holes large insects darted, whistling. These were honey beetles, greenish winged things that had built the edifice with a quick-hardening saliva which resisted the heaviest stone axe. The bite of one was painful but not fatal. The bites of a dozen could kill a man.
Deyv had seen honey-beetle buildings before. He'd assisted at attempts to smoke out the beetles, attempts he would just as soon forget. A wealth of delicious honey was stored in that structure, but very few men or beasts could get at it.
What was not familiar was the creature that had disturbed the beetles. The thing was huge, its head three feet higher than Deyv's. It had four massive legs ending in broad round pads. The body was shaped like a bean pod. That is, the main body was. From its front a trunk reared at a right angle. This was shaped like the torso of a man and had shoulders, two arms, a neck, and a head. The hands had a thumb and four fingers.
Vana turned and said, "Archkerri."
The 'word meant nothing to Deyv. He had never even heard of such a centaurial being.
Its body was enough to startle and frighten him. But it was not an animal. At least, it was not a thing which he could define as such. Instead of hair or fur or smooth naked skin, it was covered with leaves.
These were green, about the size of Deyv's hands, triangular and overlapping, the points downward.
They were all over the body and limbs, though the red hands lacked them. The head looked more like a cabbage than anything else. From its center protruded a long thin whitish tube from which the buzzing was coming. When the thing turned its head, it revealed two huge eyes with a black pupil and leaf-green iris and cornea.
If left to himself, Deyv would have departed with all possible haste. Vana, however, stepped out into the clearing and raised her bone whistle to her lips.
Deyv said, "Don't!"
He was too late.
A series of long and short whistles in groups of from two to five came from her bone. The thing immediately stopped trying to beat the honey beetles off with its red hands. It turned around slowly, its eyes fixed on Vana. Then its tube emitted buzzes, some longer than others and also arranged in groups.
8
THE beetles swarmed about the centauroid as it moved ponderously toward Vana. Their efforts to bite it were futile, the leaves apparently being tough and thick. Dozens of the insects fell off it, striking the pavement and kicking their legs feebly. Deyv assumed that its leaves contained a poison.
He didn't have any such protection, so he retreated as the creature entered the jungle. Jum and Aejip left even faster than he. Vana was following Deyv, the thing about twelve feet behind her. By the time Vana called a halt, all the beetles had dropped off. The others quit pursuing it as soon as it left the paved area.
Vana then resumed her peculiar conversation with it. After a minute of this, she turned and led all of them to the road. Deyv's back felt cold, and he was nervous. He assured himself, however, that Vana wouldn't be dealing with the thing if it was dangerous. Or maybe she felt secure, since it was friendly to her. That didn't mean that it was not a peril to him.
When they reached the highway, the woman and the Archkerri whistled some more at each other.
Finally Vana stopped, and she tried to explain to Deyv what was going on. He spread his hands out and hunched his shoulders in the age-old gesture of incomprehension. She shrugged and then started down the road. The thing slowly followed her. Aejip and Jum were even more nervous than Deyv, but they were willing to go wherever he wished.
When he could stand the suspense no longer, he stopped Vana. He made signs asking her why the thing was going with them. At first she didn't understand. When she caught on, she went up to the Archkerri and pointed at its chest. Or at what might be a chest under the foliage. Then she pointed at her chest and
Deyv's.
"You mean," he said, "that its soul egg has been stolen, too?"
She must have understood his tone if not his words. She shook her head. Yes.
His attitude changed somewhat. The thing was no longer a monster. Not entirely, anyway. If it had had a soul egg, then it had to be a human, even if it didn't exactly resemble one.
Deyv also got it across to her that he would like to know the creature's name.
Vana blew a series of groups of long and short whistles. By then his ear was becoming sensitive. There were five sounds of unequal length. If the shortest was 1, the next longest, 2, and so on, then its name was ... what? It was too hard to figure out at the moment. Besides, it wouldn't mean anything."
Vana appeared to be thinking hard on the problem. After some brow-wrinkling and lip-chewing, she said, "Sloosh."
He didn't ask her how she arrived at that. She couldn't have told him, anyway. But she had made some correlation between the sounds of her speech and of the thing's.
Deyv felt he was getting somewhere, though not very far. The time he'd spent teaching her his language was wasted. Now he had to learn hers so he could translate the buzzes of the Archkerri. It irked him to have to do this. Since he was the leader, he should teach them his speech.
They went on after Deyv had signed to Vana that she should speak to the plant-man as little as possible.
It was safe to converse in a low tone. Loud whistles were out. They carried too far. She shook her head and whistled at the thing. It came close to them and buzzed a series of groups in a very low tone. They could talk under these conditions.
Deyv set himself to the task of speaking her language. Sleeps went by, and he learned swiftly even if its structure wasn't at all like any of those of the nine tribes. After a while he understood that the Archkerri wasn't using his own language. It was the Trade Language of the tribes in Vana's area. The Archkerri had arbitrarily matched certain groups of buzzes with the sounds of the trading language. This enabled the Archkerri to carry on a fluent if simple conversation with the humans.
Deyv carved a whistle for himself from the leg bone of a dead bird. While he was learning Vana's tongue, he learned how to transpose it into the whistling. Later, he started learning Archkerri.
Meanwhile, they found no more footprints or campsites of the Yawtl. Deyv would have been worried except for one thing. The Archkerri had its—his, rather —infallible means for tracking the thief.
Vana said, "He is following its ghostly prints."
"What do you mean by that?" Deyv asked, turning pale. "It's a ghost?"
"No," she said scornfully. "Can a ghost carry a soul egg? Of course it can't. The egg would burn it, send it screaming."
"I never heard of that."
"Everybody knows that. At least, I thought they did until I met you. What I'm talking about is the ability of Sloosh, of all his people, to see what we humans can't. He says that every living thing leaves in its path the impress of its form. To him it is a reddish color which looks, vaguely, like the thing which left it behind."
After some more questioning, Deyv understood that the "tracks" were psychic impressions. When he could converse with Sloosh, he asked for more details.
"Yes. What Vana said is true. I feel sorry for you humans. Your world must be very pale and comparatively uninteresting. I not only see what you see—and, I don't mind saying, much more understandingly—but I see many more things.
"My world is filled with the forms not only of what is but of what has been. It glows with the designs made by these trails, designs of breath-taking beauty and complexity. Of course, that is redundant. I mean, complexity is beauty. Beauty is complexity."
<
br /> Sloosh paused, then said, "Vana is mistaken when she tells you that these forms are reddish. I told her that the thief's prints are reddish. But every form of life leaves its own color. I see hundreds of hues and shades of every color. The thief s impressions are not, as Vana said, tracks like footprints. They are one continuous impression, linked, like a thousand Yawtl standing in line, each one pressing closely against the next. A thousand Yawtl that are yet one. Shimmering with a pale-red fire. Transparent yet clearly visible.
"You and Vana, though, are pale red shot with threads of twisting green, scarlet, and black, each a generic design yet recognizably individual. Your forms trail behind you like giant caterpillars, getting paler near the end. Which, of course, I can't see because they drop below the horizon. But if I were to trace you back, I could go for many sleep-times before your impressions faded out.
"It is too bad that you can't see them. But that is the way things work out. Some forms of life have this ability. Some don't."
Deyv was a little irked by Sloosh's complacency, his sense of superiority. He didn't allow his irritation to show, however. He needed the Archkerri.
"Then we'll have no trouble catching up with the thief?"
"I didn't say that. I said we'd be able to follow his impressions. But he may go someplace where we can't follow him. Or we may be killed by some beast. Or we may be ..."
Deyv walked away. The Archkerri was so pickish about things that humans took for granted or didn't say because it wasn't necessary.
Nor was Sloosh as superior as he liked to think. For one thing, he was very- slow. He either couldn't or wouldn't walk as fast as his companions. He went at his own pace, a majestic elephantine amble. He ignored the requests of the others to speed up. This had made Deyv nervous for a while because at every sleep the Yawtl was gaining distance on them. However, after some thought, he had calmed himself.
Though it would take longer to run the thief down, the Archkerri made its capture inevitable. His presence assured them that they couldn't lose the trail.
Still, the time Sloosh took in finding and eating food continued to be a trial to Deyv. The Archkerri's mouth was concealed beneath the leaves on the "chest" of the upper body. Finding that out had been a shock to Deyv. It had seemed grotesque and also a little frightening. His grandmother had told him about a monster which was human-shaped, unlike Sloosh, but which had its mouth on its breast, and its diet was confined to human children. As a child, Deyv had been threatened with it when he didn't behave.
Sloosh would eat meat, including the rottenest carrion, when it was available. But mostly he ate fruit and vegetables, and he required great amounts of these. To speed up the search for food, the two humans would forage the edge of the jungle. They'd woven some large baskets from reeds, and they used them to store the fruit. Thus, they could walk faster, feeding Sloosh from the baskets. But collecting the food took much time, too.
"You are quite wrong about the Yawtl stealing my soul egg," Sloosh said. "We Archkerri don't have such things. Eggs are for humans only. Indeed, they're an ancient human invention. I don't know why the ancients made the soul-egg trees, but they must have had what seemed to them good reasons. My people wear a crystal which Vana's people call caqghwoonma. It is as large as your head but much better shaped. It's a prism included within six equal rhombic faces. It can be mined, since it grows underground, unlike the soul-egg trees, which grow mostly above the surface. These crystals are rare, which is one of fifteen reasons I was in the area of Vana's tribe area looking for them."
'Wait a minute," Deyv said. "Your tribe doesn't live in the same area as her people?"
"I don't have a tribe. That's a primitive social unit we Archkerri grew out of long ago. No, I was there to investigate. After a long time—"
"How long a time?"
Vana said, "He appeared when I was a child, shortly after I was weaned. But he left shortly before I did.
He couldn't find any caqghwoonma, and he'd found out everything else he wanted to know. Whatever that was. What I think is-"
"Impatience is the mark of a retarded mind," Sloosh said. "And interrupting a person is a mark of impatience and of a great ego. Let me continue. The crystal rhombohedron is an invention of my people.
It shows moving pictures. These are the electrical constructs of the thoughts of the vegetable world. You see —I hope you see—all plants contain ancestral impressions. And all the units of the vegetable world together constitute one body. One mind, I should say to be exact. Though so far the distinction between body and mind has not been satisfactorily made.
"But I must not give you the wrong idea. We Archkerri are not part of this mind. We're sentients, therefore individuals, though not in the same sense you are such. That is because, though of vegetable origin, we Archkerri are half-protein. If we weren't, we'd be as immobile as that tree there and dependent upon the radiation from the sky and—but I digress.
"The rhombohedra are our means for communicating, or, rather, I should say, for receiving the 'thoughts'
or impressions of the vegetable world. If we communicated, they, it, would also have to be sentient.
Communication is a two-way gate."
What Sloosh said, in essence, was that the crystals could tap and then process the ancestral impressions in the cells of vegetable life. The crystals showed visual interpretations of past and present events.
Deyv was staggered by this revelation. "You mean, if you had your crystal now, you could tell us exactly where the thief is?"
"Not exactly. But the general area, yes."
"Well," Deyv said, "if this crystal can show you such events, why didn't you know the Yawtl was going to steal your crystal?"
"An excellent question. But one characteristic of us Archkerri is that we tend to get wrapped up in certain problems. When that happens, we often don't notice what's going on around us. I did see the
Yawtl in my crystal, but I didn't pay him much attention. After all, the crystal doesn't read the minds of flesh people.
"Furthermore, I have to sleep, unfortunately, and the Yawtl crept up on me and removed the neck-cord, which was attached to my crystal. Of course, when I woke up, I knew everything about the theft. A lot of good that did me then."
"You have no idea why the Yawtl took our eggs and your crystal?" Deyv asked.
"I could find out if I backtracked the thief and if the backtrack didn't fade out too soon. That would be silly. It will be much faster to run him down and then ask him. I could also contact my vegetable brothers and find out. But that process would take a very long time. Besides, I don't have the crystal to do this."
The Archkerri then fell into a reverie from which he didn't want to be roused. Some part of his mind must have been conscious of the outside world, though. He didn't wander off the road. And when he was offered fruit, his hand came out and stuffed it into his mouth.
Deyv asked Vana why the tribes in her land hadn't attacked Sloosh when he first appeared.
"We thought he was a demon or perhaps a god or goddess in a strange form," she said. "By the time we found out he wasn't, we knew he wasn't dangerous. Besides, he told us a lot of things which we found interesting." She paused, then said, "Some of them were frightening. For instance, the world will soon end."
9
SHE said this so calmly that Deyv wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly.
"What do you mean? The world will end? How? When?"
"Ask Sloosh. He knows about it. I don't really understand it."
The Archkerri was quite willing to enlighten him. It -took, however, a number of conversations before
Deyv could visualize what he described. Even then, he wasn't sure that the pictures in his mind corresponded to reality.
He told Sloosh this, and Sloosh replied, "No one, not even I, can see reality. Our senses filter it out to make sense of it. We make constructs with which we can deal. To see the genuine reality, that is, the totality of it, requires the mind of one who made it. If any Pers
on did make it."
Deyv didn't understand this, and he wasn't sure that Sloosh did either. No matter. He was convinced that what Sloosh told him, the section of reality he described, was true. He had the good sense not to tell
Sloosh that, since the Archkerri would then have gone into a long disquisition on the nature of truth.
According to Sloosh, the world had started out as an unimaginably large ball of fire and an equally unimaginable amount of empty space. Really empty, with nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a speck of dust, in it. Or perhaps, Sloosh said, there was only the ball of fire, containing all the matter there was.
Which meant that there was only a tiny bit of empty space around it—if any. Then, when the ball exploded, its matter created space as it expanded outward. Or perhaps it expanded inward. Where there was no space, there was no "direction" out or in.
Whether the space was created as the ball blew out or in, or there was already a vast empty nothing for it to explode in, made no difference. Except to Sloosh and his kind. What did matter was that the ball of matter tore itself apart when it blew up.
"What was the ball before it was on fire?" Deyv asked.
"I'll get to that in due time. Please be patient."
The material ejected by the explosion thinned out as it flew through space. It cooled, and it became dust.
Some pieces of dust were larger than others. These attracted smaller pieces, and many of them began, to form larger bodies. These drew to them still more pieces. Eventually, dust pieces spread throughout the space and among these the bigger ones kept on collecting more matter until the space around them was emptied of most matter.
DARK IS THE SUN Page 6
