“Cyrus, will you chance it with us?” asked the Historian.
“Don’t do it,” advised one of his human comrades.
“I would if I could walk that far,” said Cyrus, and coughed weakly. “Besides, I’m in quarantine.”
“We have a litter outside. We’ll carry you. The medics have authorized it. The quarantine isn’t working.” Outside, four Dushau waited with a litter. The rest of the yard was empty.
“What do you think, Storm?” asked Cyrus. “I can hardly see across the room, let alone think.”
“They’ll kill you. Remember what it’s like inside a hive? Chinchee couldn’t help us then. What can he do now?”
“This is a different hive. If they don’t kill us first, will the plan succeed?”
The four Lehiroh scrutinized Threntisn and agreed. “Very likely,” said Storm, but the Oliat picked up the unspoken undertone, If you had Oliat backing.
Cyrus pushed away from the doorjamb, steadying himself on Ruff’s shoulder. “All right. I’m ready.”
“I’m coming, then,” grunted one of the humans, and the other also prepared to leave.
“No,” said Cyrus and Threntisn in unison.
Storm argued, “The Oliat might want us.”
“Not likely,” said Threntisn. “But Cyrus and I will enter the hive alone. We must be no threat. We merely wish to demonstrate a point.”
“He’s right,” agreed Cyrus, making his way to the front door. “You all wait here. I’ll be right back.” Then he pulled away from Ruff and stood straight, facing them with a cocky grin. “Besides, I have nothing to lose.” And he fainted in a boneless heap.
//Cy!// Unable to restrain herself any longer, Krinata surged into the balanced linkages, filling them all with her sense of urgency.
Jindigar gathered control and snapped, //Outreach!//
Krinata struggled against herself until she once more occupied the delimited position of the Outreach. But her jaw was clenched against the need to seize control, to rush out and do something.
The linkages crackled with her human tension, and for the first time since his grieving of Eithlarin, Zannesu broke out,
//Jindigar! No—not again. Not to Krinata too. Don’t let it happen! She doesn’t deserve to lose a mate!//
He felt the same sympathy for Krinata in Darllanyu, as if all her hostility toward Krinata had gone. He could hardly bear the sudden yearning that seized him. Never in all his Renewals had he experienced such an overwhelming need for a particular mate, as if Dar promised some inconceivable delight. And now, before he had it, he had to relinquish it.
Then Darllanyu shifted awareness to his physical presence, returning his gaze. It was as if energy flowed from her into his innermost being. As he drew his next breath the Observing Priest he would soon become noted that this signaled the fulfilling of their marriage trial, for only in shaleiliu could two mate so.
Trinarvil, herself glowing with arousal, returned with the pensone and interrupted without apology. //I recommend a five-hour dose, which we can repeat if necessary. We all need it, except Krinata.//
They took the capsules she doled out and swallowed them hastily.
They caught up with Threntisn near the hive’s perimeter. As they approached, the Historian lifted Cyrus’s blanket-wrapped form off the litter and carried him draped across both arms like a child. Not noticing the Oliat, Threntisn paced behind Chinchee, who danced toward the hive’s guards, gyrating and hooting in the formalized Herald’s approach to a strange hive.
As he moved, two older piols—the pair that had come with Jindigar—scampered out of the new water-filled trench leading from the river and welcomed their old friend Chinchee by racing around his feet in a mating chase.
Ignoring the animals, the litter attendants fell back, turning to deal with Terab and the colonists who were gathering– apparently ignorant of Threntisn’s plan.
The Oliat, surrounded by their ephemeral Outriders–plus Krinata’s Dushau Outrider substituting for Cyrus—moved as a well-drilled marching unit, gathering stares until, finally, a cheer rose from a group of humans and quickly became a general chant. “Jindigar’s! Jindigar’s! Jindigar’s!”
Hearing that, Threntisn turned, registered astonishment, then acceptance of the Oliat as he resumed his progress.
Jindigar gathered the linkages to guide Zannesu’s Reception ahead to the hive boundary. As they watched, the hive’s warriors deployed in well-drilled order behind the mound that marked the hive’s perimeter. They bristled with spears and throwing hatchets. The air throbbed with one convulsive shiver of horror—a tentative warning, declaring that the hive’s spirit had not broken under the recent assault.
Behind the ranks of defenders a few rustlemen gathered, consulting with each other as they observed Chinchee. The Herald had led this hive to catastrophe and was no longer trusted. But there was something else.
//The rustlemen are moving too slowly,// noted Llistyien simultaneously with Jindigar.
//Inreach,// called Jindigar. //Emulator is correct. We need a microfocus on the rustlemen.// These beings were the key intelligence of the hive. Jindigar left the linkage pattern he’d already established in place and added another level of awareness focused on the rustlemen, with a time perspective several days deep into the past. Carefully protecting Krinata from the flow, he handed the second pattern over to Venlagar gingerly, dreading a fumble.
//Relax,// responded his Inreach. //I’ve got it.//
Jindigar turned his attention to Zannesu, who Received a clear picture of what had happened. Rustlemen, examining the corpses of the technicians, had also handled the virulent specimens they had been working on. The insidious offworld disease had promptly mutated to live in them. The rustlemen had absolutely no resistance. We’ve brought death to this world when we only meant to protect it from ruthless exploitation.
The warriors leveled spears at Chinchee and forced him to stop. Jindigar kept on marching, even when Threntisn halted.
He brought the Oliat to a stop just a few paces behind the Historian and sent Krinata ahead to whisper to Threntisn, “//The rustlemen have Krinata’s Fever.//”
Threntisn pierced her with a glance, flicked his eyes over the Oliat, and then silently acknowledged the datum.
Chinchee danced up to the barrier where a section was a bit lower than the rest—the erstwhile doorway—and deposited his hivebinder on the beaten-down soil. The hive sent one of its own hivebinders forward. The little carapaced beings walked on two limbs toward one another, waving their clumsy hands at each other.
//Listen!// prompted Zannesu suddenly, and brought them a lilting melody, a whisper on some other plane of awareness.
Jindigar seized the linkages and chased that elusive signal, bringing the Formulator and Emulator to bear on the meaning of it. //A mindtune—another way they have of communicating,// identified Trinarvil. //Not hostile.//
//It’s not information,// volunteered Darllanyu.
//Content is emotional,// reported Llistyien. She brought it through, flooding them with the hive’s inarticulate apprehension, sharp skepticism, and feelings of betrayal, desperation, despair, and a rabid determination to fight to the last life for this final resting place.
Krinata, who had remained forward, just behind Threntisn,
glanced at Cyrus as he stirred deliriously. //Center, may an.
Outreach make a suggestion?//”
//For communicating—certainly.//
Ill once overheard you playing the whule in mourning for Lelwatha—his last composition. Do you think the hive would understand that?//
Jindigar studied the hive. Llistyien, who had captured a fair semblance of an all-hive Emulation, rendered her verdict. //They have a sense for tonality that doesn’t seem very alien– for ephemerals.//
//There doesn’t seem to be any way to make them understand that we can cure the disease if we can get inside the ship,// mused Jindigar. //So we’ll try this. Krinata, get Chinchee’s attention and se
e if he’ll let you pick up his hivebinder– but be careful. Their sting is lethal to humans.//
Ill know.// She advanced to where the Herald squatted, watching his hivebinder.
//Try to relax your throat, Krinata, or this may hurt,// Jindigar warned, then piped softly in Cassrian, explaining what they wanted but not why.
Chinchee turned as Krinata spoke, his huge saucer eyes wide in his stark white face, his ears standing straight up on top of his skull, giving him an attentive look. Seeing that his hivebinder was not making much progress, Chinchee plucked him from the humped dirt barrier and deposited him in Krinata’s arms.
Krinata stroked the sleek shell of the hivebinder. She’d handled him before, but few of those memories were pleasant. Jindigar felt the small creature reaching toward Krinata, throbbing with loneliness and despair. Even though Krinata held him, the tiny being was lost in the mindsong of his fellows, a lament for their brothers in fullsong.
The Oliat automatically began to pursue that odd concept, but Jindigar restrained them. He settled them onto the ground behind Krinata, sitting cross-legged, as if to play the whule. He fetched the tangible memory of his whule, its satiny urwood finish, the long fretboard that lay just so, the perfect balance, the bow that fit his hand as if made for him. He had to vanquish the feel of it smacking into his arms and smashing into Dar’s face.
Then, quite deliberately, he pulled Darllanyu into the memory. She, too, had exulted in that treasured antique whule, its tone, its obedient response to the musician’s every whim. She Formulated it for the Oliat, and Llistyien Emulated the playing, holding the whole-hive Emulation as well.
Jindigar expanded the deep contact with the rustlemen to include the other three species of the hive, seeing that they were not yet affected by the plague. But they were so exhausted and despondent that general vitality had reached a critical ebb. This hive had been set into its spring reproductive cycle before they were flooded out. Now those pressures forced them to stay and fight a hopeless battle with their new neighbors, with no time to grieve their dead.
He brought that knowledge into the music welling up from his memory, just the way Lelwatha had taught him, and he channeled that music out through Krinata just as he would speech but high up in that band where the mindtunes wafted to and fro, lamenting the inevitabilities of life and death.
At first the Oliat’s music clashed with the Natives’ silent , song. But then Krinata became lost in her own memory—that first time she’d heard Jindigar play.
Every bow stroke evoked in her an echo of the pain he’d felt at the loss of so many zunre, at the loss of Kamminth’s Oliat, of Lelwatha, Kamminth’s Emulator. With every delicately plucked string, with every strummed chord, Krinata recreated every response Jindigar had put into the piece, that one time he’d played it in farewell to Lelwatha.
Jindigar’s losses, Krinata’s losses, the Oliat’s loss of hope for survival, the colony’s bleak acceptance of wholesale death blended and became one with the hivebinders’ lament. Obliquely Jindigar chided himself for never suspecting how well Krinata read his music that day. He had unknowingly turned himself out naked before her. Now they must do the same before four alien species that might not understand.
Unashamed, Krinata bent forward and, as she had hardly dared when she’d first heard Jindigar play, she let herself cry for the one who suffered so, for anyone and everyone who suffered—for Lelwatha and Jindigar and the colony and the hive. The Oliat rode her wave of emotion.
Lelwatha had gauged the length of that exquisite passage so perfectly that just when none of them could tolerate it another moment, the piece moved into the final segment, one rising arpeggio bringing them up over the peak of agony and down into the quietude of forever. Spent, they rested with Lelwatha in the radiant peace beyond Completion where hope need not be, painful, nor joy etched out of the knowledge that it must be followed by despair.
Jindigar dwelled on the final note, letting it sound through the linkages, refining the Oliat’s balance.
For a long time the hive’s mindtune was silent, and Llistyien, still a little breathless, judged, III don’t think it meant anything to them.//
The afternoon shadow of the cliff had long since covered them. Threntisn shifted, obviously tiring of holding the weight of the human in his arms. He knew only that the Oliat had tried something, but his patience was wearing through.
“//Wait,//” the Oliat cautioned him through Krinata.
As if that were a signal, the hive warriors parted, opening a narrow lane into the hive. Chinchee confidently retrieved his hivebinder from Krinata’s lap and marched forward into mat opening, urging Threntisn to follow with a Cassrian command.
Jindigar scrambled to his feet. //Let’s see if they’ll let us
in too.//%
As Trinarvil and Ruff, her Outrider, crowded up behind Threntisn, the warriors narrowed the opening, clearly excluding the Outrider. //Jindigar?// she asked.
//They distinguish between Oliat and guards—and they don’t want guards.// Through Krinata he said to Ruff, “//Let’s not make an issue of it.//” No Center in his right mind would take an Oliat in without any Outriders. But they had already commended their lives to the community.
One by one the officers passed through the lane and followed Threntisn to the lab ship.
ELEVEN
Hiveheart
The two piols scampered up the ship’s ramp, threading between the feet of two warriors who followed Threntisn and Chinchee. One of the warriors tripped over the animals. Their squeals of surprise stopped everyone. Handing his throwing spear to his comrade, the warrior bent to capture the two animals, and Jindigar’s breath caught in his throat. These piols had been all he had to cling to during some of the hardest times of his life.
But the warrior rose with one piol tucked gently under each arm, their claws neatly immobilized. He edged past the Oliat and deposited the animals on the muddy ground, giving each a firm, instructive pat on the rump that sent them off to dig happily in the mud. Jindigar didn’t need Oliat awareness to see that the piols had already made themselves at home among the Natives.
They all resumed their climb toward the ship’s lock. As they approached the opening a new mindsong intruded on the Oliat’s awareness, different and deeply disturbing.
At the top of the ramp two warrior guards leveled then-spears, barring entry to the ship. Chinchee protested, and an animated discussion ensued, which was interrupted by a truly huge rustleman female, a Rustlemother, decked in harnesses and leathers covered with thousands of tiny polished jewels that rattled together musically with every movement she made. She came out of the interior of the ship, lit from behind by the ship’s emergency lights. She moved jerkily and braced herself with one hand against the bulkhead when she reached the lock. It wasn’t just her advanced age. She was not well.
Zannesu, as Receptor, wanted to search for her exact position in the hive’s hierarchy, but Jindigar throttled that impulse and set the Oliat in groundstate awareness, pleased to feel the steady, sure beat of the shaleiliu hum confirming the balance of his Oliat. //We may have to respond to unpredictable events. Curiosity can be satisfied later.//
She parted the guards and admitted them, but then ordered the guards to follow. Apparently the hive had no idea of their goal or purpose but was simply standing aside to see what they’d do.
Threntisn led them through dirt-smudged corridors directly to the main lab where Jindigar had come to donate a blood specimen for Krinata. He stopped in the space between the door and the clerk’s counter, fighting despair.
The place was a shambles. Clearly the technicians had defended themselves well. Movable lab equipment had been swept from the tops of fixed counters, and some portable tables had been overturned, chronometers smashed, but many of the drawers and bins had been locked, as had the doors to some of the side rooms. Dark stains that could only be blood were smeared on the sides of cabinets. The floor was strewn with fresh dirt ground in by many feet. A
place had been cleared in the middle of the room and stones laid for a hearth fire, which now smoldered dully, coating everything with soot.
And the whole place stank—not the cozy hive redolence they’d encountered where they’d taken refuge on the plain, but burning synthetics, meat seared over open fire, suppurating wounds, illness, and the close pungency of unwashed bodies still reeking of terror, desperation, hope, grief, and something else that pierced through the rest insistently.
//This can never be replaced!// Trinarvil’s despair nearly overwhelmed the Oliat.
Jindigar demanded more curtly than he intended, //Emulator, how does this look to the hive?//
The alien den had been made marginally livable, but there were few amenities. Yet it was the best shelter available for the hiveheart. The mind-gatherers in fullsong were desperately grateful for the shelter, even if they lacked food and water. In the other barely livable chambers of this deserted hive, the mind-singers were being tenderly cared for, though they called forlornly for the hivemothers, thwarted in their need to spur the hive’s regeneration. Nothing could convince their bodies that the newhive had been displaced from the home they’d built, that it wasn’t safe yet to make new life. And so the hivemind allowed them a sparse few hivemothers to satisfy instinct, and curtailed their complaints with stern discipline.
//That explains the different mindsong we found here,// concluded Zannesu. //Jindigar, we don’t belong in here.//
//Steady,// cautioned Jindigar. //We have to see this through. The pensone should hold for long enough.// He diverted their attention to evaluating the Rustlemother’s status. She moved laboriously after Threntisn when he finally pushed through the gate in the counter and picked his way carefully over the slippery, dirt-covered floor. She was beyond the age where the fullsong could affect her, and so she exercised authority over the hiveheart. From the way her attendants fussed about her, they obviously knew she was deathly ill, and the hive could not afford to lose her.
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