"Keenly. But there is plenty of time to hear every detail of your adventure. If you have more urgent matters to tell, do so."
Deyv sighed, and he related how the Yawtl had managed to snatch the bag from him. "And don't tell me," he said, "that we should have taken the time to hang the eggs around our necks. We're painfully aware of that."
"Then I won't. But I'll point out that you should also have removed my crystal so you could have brought it to me."
Vana said angrily, "You walked out on us, left us on our own. Why should we bother to chase you down just to give you the crystal when you wouldn't bother to go after it yourself?"
"I mistakenly thought you didn't have a chance of getting the eggs. I supposed that you'd be killed in the attempt or, seeing the futility of it, would give it up. In a sense, I wasn't mistaken. I lacked the data to form a proper conclusion. I didn't know that you two had such determination and vigor. Nothing in your behavior and attitudes had evidenced such strong characteristics.
"As for your returning my prism to me, well, that would have expressed your gratitude. You humans are always talking about gratitude, you know. Maybe it's just talk; maybe you lack it to any great degree but feel that you should exhibit it. A moral trait which is satisfied by being discussed but not practiced.
However, since you could not have tracked the Yawtl without me, just as you can't in the future, you could have thanked me by bringing my crystal to me."
"We might have," Deyv said. He didn't believe it, though.
"Does the Yawtl know that you can see his ghostly tracks?" Vana asked.
"I don't know. That would depend upon whether or not he's had extensive contact with my people."
They came to another junction of the highway. Vana got down on her knees and bowed three times.
Deyv followed her example. The Archkerri, however, just walked through. Deyv, watching him, was amazed that nothing happened to him. There was no lightning nor any terrible pain transmitted through the surface of the road. He arose and hurried after Sloosh.
"Do you have a pact with the gods?" he said. "Or are you yourself a demigod?"
Sloosh didn't have to ask him what he meant. That brain in the cabbage-head had figured it all out. That is, if his brain was in his head. Since his mouth was in his chest, his brain could be there, too, or perhaps in the lower body.
"Why should I make obeisance to light signals for traffic that ended twenty thousand or so generations ago?"
Deyv was so flabbergasted he couldn't whistle for a moment.
"You mean that the ancients made these signals that long ago?"
"Yes."
"But they're still operating?"
"Why do you insist on commenting on the obvious?" Vana had overheard most of the conversation. She said, "Then the poles are not gods and their flashing eyes are not really eyes?"
"In a sense, they are eyes. They detect traffic, and when there is a chance of collision they emit the red lights to stop traffic on one road so that traffic on the other may go through unimpeded! But the poles have other means of detection than visual ones."
"What kind of traffic did the ancients have?" Deyv asked. "Why should the ancients worry about people on foot? Or did they ride animals, as the legends say?"
"They rode in great metal vehicles which were suspended above the road by a power which you wouldn't understand without a great deal of explanation. Though I'll be happy to explain. They went at speeds unmatched even by the swiftest of birds. As fast as the greatest of winds."
"By Tirsh!" Vana swore. "Why didn't you tell me what they were instead of letting me make obeisance to them?"
"You didn't ask me about them."
Vana threw her hands up in disgust.
Deyv, using his own language, said, "You are a cabbageheadl"
If Sloosh was affected by their gestures and inflections of disgust, he didn't show it. He merely ambled ahead, leaving them standing, looking at each other.
Two sleep-times passed. Except for a pride of spotted lions, they came across nothing disturbing. The lions, however, had just eaten a large animal, and so they only roared at the travelers to keep their distance.
After the third sleep-time, they came to another junction. The Archkerri and Deyv walked through the signals as if they didn't exist. Deyv was amused, though, when he saw Vana start to get down on her knees, then, with a shamefaced look at him, resume walking. Old habits were hard to break.
By then Sloosh had described, in general terms, the kind of power the ancients' vehicles had used to float and to propel themselves. Sloosh also gave as his opinion that the power source for the signals came from the core of the Earth. There was still enough heat there to supply the power.
"But sometime in the future the heat will be gone, and the lights will cease operating. Or the highway will break someplace, and the circuit through which the power flows, that is, the highway itself, will be severed."
Deyv asked why he had gotten a shock from the highway near the flashing lights.
"I suspect that the quake caused a malfunction. Or perhaps something else did. Whatever caused it, a shock, something like that which a lightning bolt gives, was transmitted for a certain distance along the road. Or perhaps ..."
Sloosh listed ten other possibilities, none of which Deyv wholly listened to. It was the shock itself, not its reasons, that concerned him.
Slowly, The Dark Beast passed over them and then dipped beyond the horizon. They were thrown to the ground four times by quakes. They came to an intersection where the road had been so violently twisted that the lights were parallel to the ground.
"Amazing stuff the ancients used to make these highways," Sloosh said. "Its stretching capabilities are incredible. Moreover, it has a built-in self-straightening quality. Within thirty sleep-times, this junction will have righted itself, and the signals will be in their normal position. That is, they will be if they're not further disturbed. Which isn't likely."
Deyv asked if the ancients who'd made the roads were the same as those who'd made the Houses.
"No. The House-Makers preceded them. By the time the most recent ancients started to ascend from savagery to civilization, the Houses were deeply buried. Most of them, that is. But the Earth's upheavals and the effects of erosion have exposed many."
Deyv wondered which ancients had made the sword his father had given him.
"I could tell you if I had my crystal."
The rains ceased, and the clouds ceased to drift over. The blazing jampack above made every sleep-time hotter. Their eyes began to suffer from brightness, so they made wooden protectors with narrow slits for their eyes. Now the leaves of the plants stayed curled up longer, the tough thick undersides reflecting the heat and preserving the moisture inside.
"This is the longest time without rain that I can remember," Vana said.
"Not I," Sloosh said.
"How old are you?"
"About six of your generations. If nothing happens to me, I should live about ten more."
The two humans were awed. In his eyes they could be only children. Perhaps he couldn't be blamed for his attitude of superiority. It would be nice, however, if he would not be so frank about it. But then a plant-man couldn't be expected to understand human feelings.
Meanwhile, the Yawtl's pace had slowed. Though he left no tracks on the highway, the color of his linked impressions was getting deeper. According to Sloosh, he could not be more than a sleep-time and a half ahead of them.
"Either he thinks we have given up, which is doubtful," the Archkerri said, "or the heat is fatiguing him.
Unfortunately, it is also weakening us. We're pushing harder, but I don't know how long you two can keep this pace up. Your animals are suffering even more than you. And, to tell the truth, I'm not as energetic as I'd like to be."
Finally, the snout of The Beast poked over the horizon behind them. A cooling wind raced ahead of it, and several light showers wet them. As this happened, the leaves and petals of t
he plants unfolded.
"We're only three-quarters of a sleep-time behind the Yawtl now," Sloosh said. "If only he would decide to take a long rest, we might catch up with him."
"I could stand a long, long rest, too," Vana said.
They were walking toward another junction then. They had to stop for a while because a herd of strange animals was passing through it. These stood about twelve feet high at the shoulders, had four massive legs, and long thick tails. Their necks were very long, terminating in relatively small sleepy-eyed heads about twenty feet from the ground. Their hairless skins were pale gray.
"They look like some of the herbivorous monsters that lived when the Earth was young," the Archkerri said. "Those were warm-blooded, too, but, unlike these, they were not mammals."
The herd passed, and the party resumed their walk, glad for the enforced rest. However, when they got to the junction, Sloosh turned onto the road to the left. The humans didn't ask him why. Evidently, the
Yawtl had also taken this direction.
After half a sleep-time, the Archkerri left the road and headed for the jungle on the right.
"His impressions don't come back out," he said. "So he didn't go in there just to sleep. Perhaps he is getting close to his home."
There were high mountains straight ahead. If the thief was headed for them, he had about three sleeptimes before getting to the foothills. Traveling in the jungle was not so swift as on the open roads.
Before they had gone a few steps into the foliage, Deyv said, "Sloosh, we'll have to quit using the whistles so much. Their sound carries farther than voices. Even though you can buzz softly, you should do so only when it's absolutely necessary."
"In that case," Sloosh said, "why don't you quit using your whistles? I can understand you when you speak Vana's language, you know."
Deyv gritted his teeth, and Vana's face and body grew red.
"Do you mean that we've been blowing these whistles all this time and we didn't have to?"
"Yes," the Archkerri said. "I had thought that was obvious until you made that remark a moment ago. I didn't know you were so stupid."
"By Tirsh and her nameless sister!" Vana said. "Sometimes, sometimes—"
"I see you're angry again, and as usual I have no idea why. How could I have correlated my buzzes to the sounds of your language unless I could understand them? I thought you knew but just wanted to practice with the whistles so you could be fluent with them. So ... that's why Vana's tribe never spoke to me but always used their whistles."
Deyv suddenly broke into laughter. "He's right, Vana. We have been stupid."
Sloosh said, "I suggest, though, that when we get to a place where the whistling won't be so dangerous, that you resume it. You could get out of practice, and that might cause trouble in certain situations."
The three sleep-times passed with only one incident of note occurring. Going down the winding path which the Yawtl had taken, they came around a bend. And there, only forty feet away, was a thing-witha-
nose-like-a-snake. Deyv, who was in the lead, froze. Jum and Aejip came up close alongside him, but they made no move to continue. Nor were they growling. Vana gasped, but she made no noise after that.
Sloosh stopped. His buzzer was silent, but under its leaves his chest-mouth smacked its lips.
All of them had known for some time that something unusually perilous was in the vicinity. The uproar of birds and beasts had suddenly died down, and a tense, heavy silence prevailed. The party had gone on ahead, though they moved slower than usual. Here was the cause of the breathlessness.
The huge purple-skinned biped stood for a minute as fixed as they, except for its waving yellowish nose.
Its purple eyes were upon them. The strangely human hands were held out in front of it, the fingers bent, the yellowish claws glinting in a beam of light falling through a hole in the dark ceiling of the forest.
Then it snuffled, turned, and disappeared into the foliage. Though it stood twice as high as Deyv and must have weighed three times as much, it made no sound.
Deyv held up a hand to indicate that the others should keep on being statues. Slowly, he turned to look behind him. The thing might not be hungry. Its gorillalike belly looked as if it were stuffed. But it might be planning to leap upon them from the jungle.
Time passed, and then suddenly the clangor of animal life burst out. Deyv sighed with relief. It had passed on, and he hoped that it never came back this way again. At least not while he was in the area.
It took Deyv some time to get over his shakes, and Vana didn't get control of herself any sooner. Sloosh seemed unaffected, which meant nothing. Who could tell what was going on behind those leaves?
The tail-end of The Beast had a quarter of the sky to go before it disappeared. They came to the foothills. The long dryness had been overcompensated for by especially long hard rains. These had slowed down the Yawtl. But they had also made the going difficult for his pursuers. Nevertheless, they were keeping up with him until they came to the open end of what looked like a tunnel under the mountains.
13
THEY stood before the entrance in a driving rain that macfe all of them miserable. Aejip, as was the wont of cats, suffered the most. Somehow, she identified being drenched with humiliation, and it hadn't done any good for her temper. Deyv, long familiar .with the cat, knew better than to get near her during these times. So did Jum. Sloosh and Vana, however, had to learn the hard way. The woman still had a wound on her leg, not deep, which she'd gotten earlier when she had tried to console the cat. It had taken her some time to heal it. She'd sat down, and she'd closed her eyes and mentally explored her body, finding the exact healing agents, sending them to the location of the wound, urging them to fight the bacteria and to build up the flesh that would close the scratches.
Deyv tried to urge her to go on, to ignore the wound, letting the normal processes heal it Vana had said, with a validity against which he couldn't argue, that if she allowed the wound to go untreated, it might get to a point where she couldn't control it. The jungle swarmed with invisible evil agents, and they drifted near or brushed against every opening, looking for a way in.
Sloosh didn't object to the interruption in their chase. The Yawtl couldn't get away. His red trail would lead them to him; there was no way he could cover it up.
But now they stood before a pipe which was large enough for all but the plant-man to traverse. The humans could go through it at a slight crouch. He, however, would find it very hard to travel through.
He'd have to bend his upper trunk parallel to it, and his lower torso would have to bend its legs considerably.
"I can stand it for some time," the Archkerri said. "If the pipe extends a great distance, though, I'll become immobilized. My strength is much more than yours, but I am not capable of matching your suppleness. Sometimes, a big size is a disadvantage. This seems to be one of those situations."
"What is the pipe?" Deyv said.
"This pipe is a pipe," the Archkerri said. "I don't know what a pipe is. I can describe a pipe for you. You would understand a pipe, then, as an ideal, though the description might not fit what others would consider a pipe. The pipe is—what? Verbal equivalence—"
"Please, let me rephrase my question," Deyv said. "What is this metallic tunnel for? Who built it? And why?"
"I don't know. If I had my crystal ... Sometimes, I wonder if my brothers, the trees and the grass, are giving me the correct data. Or they might be giving the data correctly, but then they have their own ways of recording, and during the passing of data to them to me, something is distorted, lost, translated incorrectly."
"She who knows all knows nothing," Vana said.
"Is that a proverb of your tribe?" Sloosh asked.
"Who cares?" Deyv said angrily. "Evidently, you haven't the slightest idea where this pipe comes from, who built it, or why it was made. Really, it doesn't matter. What does is that you're as ignorant as we are."
"No," Sloosh said. "What
matters is that we don't know where the other end comes out. Or if there are perhaps many branchings of it. What matters even more is that I can't go into the pipe. Rather, I should say, I can go into it. But will I be able to get out the other end? I know I won't be able to back out if I go too far into it."
Deyv felt good because the huge, very strong, very knowledgeable creature was inferior in some respects to him.
"What I see here," Deyv said, "is that we can go through this pipe. I mean, all of us except you. This pipe may have junctions, like the roads. But which path do we follow if it does? We won't know which to take, since you won't be present to follow the Yawtl's impressions."
"Excellently put," the Archkerri said. "So, you four enter this while I go over the mountains by myself and hope that I come to an area where I can pick up the Yawtl's impressions. But if the pipe has many branchings, you might come out in a place I won't be near. We might lose touch with each other. You might accidentally follow his trail, but I might not be where I could see it. After all, my psychic ability to see the impressions has, coincidentally or not, the same distance limits as my visual perception."
Vana said, "I think it's better for all of us to go over the mountains together. Then we can see the whole situation, see where the trail comes out. Nothing will be lost doing that. But if we go into the pipe alone, we may get lost And we don't even know if it does come out the other side. And if there are branches, we could get lost. Who knows where they go? They might lead us out of the mountain area, maybe back into a branch that comes out on this side of the mountain."
Deyv said, "What you're saying is that Sloosh might go to the other side and see nothing. He needs to be on both sides but he can't."
What a wily person the Yawtl was! He must have known the dilemma he posed when he went into the pipe. Or did he? That depended on whether or not he knew the tracking abilities of the Archkerri. And also if he knew this pipe. If he was familiar with it, then he would know where its branchings—if any—
were.
"You can see the Yawtl's impressions whether or not they're in the dark?" Vana asked.
DARK IS THE SUN Page 9
