Rod decided to stop for water. The llamas waded into the river, while he filtered some for the children. Out of the corner of his eye Rod saw something fall from a singing-tree. A little shriek broke the calm, followed by scuffling sounds. The shriek repeated, fading slowly. Curious, Rod took a step forward to look beyond through the arch of the tree. A hoopsnake had caught a smaller zoöid in its loop, then twisted into a figure eight to strangle it. It might take a while, especially if the prey had four lung systems, as a four-eyes did. But in the end the hoopsnake would have a meal to suck the juice from.
Chae came over and caught Rod’s hand. “Brother Rod, shouldn’t we help it?”
He meant the little one, Rod realized. “That’s nature, Chae. You wouldn’t want the whole forest overrun with zoöids.” He scanned the canopy, wondering what larger denizens might perhaps take aim at them. But only another hoopsnake wound itself along a branch.
As they rode deeper into the forest, the singing-trees grew larger, and their voices swelled till they drowned his own. At one point the trail headed straight under the arch of a giant, perhaps a thousand years old. Were the “masters” really watching, as Khral had said? If so, they gave no sign. At last the trees began to thin out, and the ground became more sodden, sprouting orange loops of ring-fungus. Stagnant pools appeared, full of slime, and oddly flattened helicoids whirled along the surface.
The travelers emerged into the next band of wheelgrass. Blinking in the sun, Rod scanned the horizon. Mount Anaeon rose larger than before; but just ahead, the wheelgrass was full of four-eyes. Hundreds of the creatures pressed together at the riverside. These four-eyes were blue-and-brown-striped, and larger than the breed he saw close to home.
“We don’t want to get caught in that herd,” he told Chae. Reluctantly he turned away from the river, hoping to get around the herd without losing too much time. There were four-eyes of every age, including paler young ones, and parents with a baby firmly seated in the inner hole, where it would feed on special polyps that grew on the parent’s hide. One pair were actually coupling together, like two stacked donuts, each extending its germ cell donors into the receptacles of the other.
As the travelers were coming around the herd, a commotion erupted, nearer the river. The four-eyes started to roll, forward in one direction, then suddenly backward. Back and forth they zigzagged, the wheelgrass springing up behind them, their pungent alarm hormones filling the air. Then the ground rumbled, vibrating with the weight of some very heavy object coming near.
From across the plain rolled a megazoöid, one of the largest that Rod had ever seen, like an elephant doubled over. Four-eyes scattered before it, except for the unlucky ones who ended up in the giant’s path. Two more of the megazoöids appeared, surprisingly fast once they gathered momentum. They seemed to be trying to trap the four-eyes by the river.
“Watch out!” shouted Chae behind him. “Freeze!” The boy pulled his mount to stop.
In that instant Rod realized that he had told Chae to do absolutely the worst thing. He pulled his own mount around and rode back to the boy. “Run for it,” he shouted. “Or the herd will run us down.” He slapped Chae’s llama on the rump and sent him pacing, and prayed that T’kun could hold on. Then he followed, dodging the frantic four-eyes that already were charging into their path. His own llama stumbled once in the loopleaves. The dust and the powerful scent had him choking and his eyes streaming. Rod thought he would never get out alive.
At last he broke free of the herd. Ahead rose the next band of singing-trees. But where were Chae and T’kun? For a few agonizing minutes, he was convinced the boys lay trampled beneath the stampeding four-eyes. Then he saw the llama, standing still, with one rider.
In an instant he was at their side. Chae was seated on the llama, dazed, while T’kun lay crying on the ground where he must have fallen off. Rod helped him up and checked out the little boy’s limbs as best he could.
“You said to freeze,” Chae whimpered.
“I was wrong. But you did well, Chae.” Rod inspected T’kun’s cast, which was intact. “You saved your brother’s life.”
“I want to go home now.”
Soon Gaea’s wailing joined the chorus.
In the distance, several giant megazoöids gathered to suck the guts out of all the squashed four-eyes. One of the giants had an offspring attached snugly inside its donut hole, eating the polyps off its parent.
The travelers at last camped for the night at the edge of the singing-trees, by the river. Rod pulled a piece of solar nanoplast off his pack where it had charged all day, then he gathered it into a lump and set it glowing. Chae caught a hydrazoöid to fry; Rod thought it looked and smelled like a rubber hose, but the children devoured it. Far above in the canopy, light flashes streaked between the luminescent loopleaves in hues of yellow, green, and blue. The light show, even more than the “singing” of the singing-trees, attracted scientists in search of hidden masters.
Rod set out a nanoplastic tent stick, which promptly shaped itself into a shelter. Already the nightly drizzle was falling. The wind came up, and the trees keened so loudly that he thought he would never sleep. But he was dead tired, and, with his arms across the three of them, the night passed.
He awoke to hear Chae screaming. “Help! We’re trapped!”
Still half-asleep, Rod tried to extricate himself from his sleeping bag. His limbs were sore from the hard ground, and besides there were long filaments of some sort stretched out like a curtain over him and the children. He yanked the filaments out and tried to stand. The smell of glue was overpowering, and whirrs buzzed deafeningly around his head. Something huge towered over him—
It was a tumbleround. There was no mistaking its filaments and the whirrs swarming over its stinking hide.
Rod lost no time extricating the children and as much of their camping gear as they could salvage. The llamas remained tethered nearby, feeding placidly as if the commotion was nothing to them. The tumbleround itself made no sound or rapid movement. It had no eyes, or ears; so the scientists said. It must have been rooted nearby, near enough to migrate gradually over during the night. But why? Did it need some essential nutrient from the human bodies? Or did it seek something deeper?
“Who are you?” Rod demanded aloud. “What do you want from us?” Hearing himself, he felt foolish. But it was odd how the tumbleround had migrated exactly to the point where the human travelers lay—and no farther. It could have crushed them, or sucked them dry, but instead all it wanted was…a touch? A look in at the window?
They saddled the llamas, Rod taking one last look backward at their nocturnal visitor. Perhaps Sarai might know more about tumblerounds.
Now the trail grew much steeper, for this stretch of forest extended onto the foot of Mount Anaeon, where the bands of “controlled” habitat at last gave out. Here was where the true wilderness began; where even the weather might be unpredictable, where flora and fauna seemed to obey no master save the creator of the universe.
The travelers approached the fork of Fork River, where Mother Artemis’s holographic map led them up the steepest of the three tributaries. Now the water was rushing swiftly, gurgling, eddying around stones worn smooth. The trail continued along the left bank, rising ever higher above the stream itself. There stretched a vast U-shaped valley between Mount Anaeon and Mount Helicon, carved by a long-departed glacier. Now in the valley grew singing-trees even taller than those on the plain. The rising mountainside became so steep that to his right Rod looked down upon the tops of the singing-trees, while to his left, where the trailblazers had blasted through, the root systems of trees were exposed, their double-roots clinging to rocks about to fall at any moment. From far below in the valley the roar of the stream echoed upward.
Then the singing-trees shrank and thinned out, replaced by bushes of tough loopleaves, full of scarlet and golden flowers that cascaded hundreds of meters down toward the river. Above jutted rocks like the teeth of dead giants. At one point the rocks
had broken and slid down onto the trail, where the llamas had to pick their way painfully across. The sun was rising, but the air grew cold. On the cliffs above clung diamond-shaped patches of snow.
A bend around the mountain, and there it was: the waterfall. Millions of tongues of foam falling, falling forever to the Fork River tributary below, from a hanging valley cut off by the ancient glacier. The waters roared on, sending billows of mist upward. Above the falls piled layers of stone, up to the snow-covered peaks.
Rod’s map box chirped at him. Inside the box, the bright line took a turn off the trail, somewhere near here. Sure enough, there appeared a footpath, half-overgrown with bushes that made wheelgrass seem like a paved road. Undaunted, the travelers took the side path, heading down toward the midst of the waterfall.
Now he remembered. There would be a hole in the mountain, an opening to a tunnel behind the waterfall which powered Sarai’s laboratory. “It’s all right, keep up,” he urged Chae, who hung back, reluctant to get soaked in the mist from the falls.
Rod dismounted, and bade Chae do likewise while they felt their way. At their left, they met sudden darkness.
An invisible cavity seemed to open. The llamas stumbled into the dark, whining in complaint. Gaea whimpered, and Rod took her out of the pack to comfort her. As his eyes adjusted, patches of green light glimmered, revealing a low ceiling. They were plants that glowed in the dark, plants with real leaves—Sharer plants.
A large long-legged insect swirled about their heads, making a clicking noise. It was a clickfly. The Sharer insect veered back down the tunnel, whose ceiling bristled with dog-tooth calcite crystals as big as Rod’s thumb. “It’s a messenger,” Rod told Chae. “Let’s follow it.”
Suddenly the cavern filled with light.
“Messenger indeed.” Sarai appeared, several clickflies perched on her scalp and arms. Smoothly purple from head to toe, she had not a stitch on; Rod felt embarrassed, for he had forgotten to warn the children. But Sharers somehow look clothed enough as they are. Sarai added, “I’ve had reports of you for the past half hour, driving those miserable beasts of yours across the rocks.”
Rod sketched a star. “Thanks so much for seeing us.” He introduced the children. “T’kun is the one you need to see. We are forever in your debt.”
Sarai flexed her fingerwebs, and a clickfly flew off. “Bother all that.” She eyed him sharply. “It’s the one in your arms I need to see. What lamentable shape she’s in. Child abuse.”
Rod held Gaea tighter. “She needs help, too,” he admitted.
Sarai turned and headed down the tunnel. “I don’t know,” she muttered, “I just don’t know about you clerics. Raising children you can’t afford.” Her scalp had a fine down of hair, suggesting a Valan ancestor back a generation or two. She led them to chamber full of tangled vines, like a greenhouse. She gestured at T’kun to sit here, and Gaea there. The vines sneaked over and twined around each of them unnervingly; undomesticated varieties could be carnivorous.
Rod patted their shoulders gently. “Sit very still.” These vines, lifeshaped for their task, would sample minute traces of their tissues and body fluids. The children kept still, as if awed by their strange surroundings, their wide eyes casting around them.
Sarai flicked her webbed hand at Chae, and she pointed to a bowl of fruit. “Eat something; you’re too small for your age.”
The messenger insect hovered above T’kun, watching. It nestled amongst the vines for a while, then it went to the ceiling, where it started to weave an intricate web. Sarai watched the web intently as it grew.
“The boy is full of bruises,” Sarai announced. “What have you done to him?”
Rod’s hands clenched. “The journey is not easy, as you know. He could only hold on with one arm.”
“His bone is fine,” she announced. “The bruises will also be fine.”
Rod let out a long sigh. “Thanks so much. We won’t trouble you any further.”
“The girl will take me longer.”
He blinked. “You mean—you can help her?”
Sarai fed a bit of what smelled like fish to her vines. “She needs to regenerate her spinal cord.” Sarai nodded toward a particularly large vine straggling over the wall, whose blooms spanned the length of his arm. “She’ll hatch from the bud in about a month.”
His heart overflowed with hope, then turned cold. He watched Gaea, as Sarai’s meaning sank in. Gaea must have sensed it, for suddenly she pulled out the vines and dragged herself over the floor to his feet.
“A month…here?” he repeated. “Inside a…flower?” Of a carnivorous plant? He wanted to snatch the child back.
“From the chest down. Well, what do you want? Why didn’t you get her here sooner? Machines and ignorant clerics, raising infants—there ought to be a law.”
“You didn’t answer our calls,” Rod snapped. “What do you know of children, holed up alone on this damned mountain?”
“Bro-der Rod,” Gaea’s voice quavered. “Gaea go home now.”
Sarai was chuckling as she rearranged her scattered vines. “So the Spirit Caller has a temper. Well, well. Should I treat every impoverished infant in the Fold? Even my Sharer sisters let the Elysians drag the L’liite ships off Shora,” she observed, using the ancient Sharer word for their home world.
“Better one than none.” Rod took Gaea up in his arms. This ocean has no shore…the Spirit should grant me a world.
“Let them come here, then,” said Sarai. “Let them find me.”
“They try. A new student from Science Park tried to reach you.”
“‘Hidden masters’ again,” she replied with contempt. “They call themselves scientists, yet all they want to prove is that some great father rules the world after all.”
“Do you think the singing-trees communicate?” he asked suddenly. “What about tumblerounds?”
Sarai froze still. Her inner eyelids came down like pearls. They protected Sharers’ eyes underwater, but Sarai used them to hide her inner thoughts. “Why should I share my data?”
“Go home now,” insisted Gaea.
Rod held the child tight, sickened by what he had to do. “Gaea, you’ll have new legs when you come home.”
FIVE
The return journey was easier, yet infinitely harder, for he could only wonder how Gaea fared after her last shrieking farewell. At home, Mother Artemis assured him that he had done the right thing. “I knew Sarai would help,” said Mother Artemis, “once she saw the dear little girl in front of her. When the Spirit offers, do not question.”
He still felt sick to think of it.
Haemum, now, was brimming with excitement at her new school. “‘There are all kinds of worlds to see!’” she exclaimed. She and Rod stopped in the garden, pulling out double-root weeds that clung like steel wire. “You can dive right into the ocean, or climb to the top of a volcano on Bronze Sky—the ground shakes when it erupts. You can learn how all the planets were made, how the rock flows under and over inside them. Some of them even have ‘weather’ that changes every day—did you know it can rain in the daytime? And then you can see a rainbow stretch across the sky!”
“Imagine—a rainbow.” Rod looked up from the garden with a smile. There was nothing like the magic of a young person’s first taste of the world.
“You can meet Fold Friends, too.” Haemum had brushed her curls neatly, and her voice had a new lilt in it. “Children from all different cultures. Even Elysian children in their fabulous shon. But of course, the most noble culture of all is that of our own L’liite people.” That was a line from her New Reyo teachers. “Our little ones should have more lessons, too, you know. Children belong in school eight hours a day.”
“We’ll see about that.” For the little ones, actually, Rod thought Mother Artemis’s lessons more effective than the school days he recalled. “What time in the morning are you due in class?”
“Our homeroom starts at seven.”
“Let’s head out at daw
n, then, to bag some four-eyes before school. Our meat supply is getting low.”
In the morning, as the sun peeked out between Mount Helicon and Mount Anaeon, Rod and Haemum rode south through the brokenhearts to hunt four-eyes. Bullets were of little use against zoöids; a four-eyes shot in one stomach would simply roll off and make do with three. Megazoöids did the same, as early explorers had learned the hard way. Lasers worked better, for a zoöid sliced clean through was stopped in its tracks. But lasers could start a fire, inducing a thunderstorm to put it out. How the planet managed this, no one knew.
What worked best was poison. Because Prokaryan biochemistry was so alien, a poison dart that killed four-eyes had no effect on humans consuming the meat. So Rod and Haemum rode up slowly toward the herd, singling out stragglers. Silently he mouthed a prayer to the spirits of the creatures whose bodies would give them food.
The four-eyes did not seem to recognize humans as a threat, either by sight or by smell, and appeared too stupid to learn. Not high on the list of candidates for “masters,” Rod thought as he aimed his dart gun.
The zoöid rolled off immediately, then zigzagged twice. Within a minute, it wobbled and fell. Rod and Haemum picked off half a dozen thus, then dragged the bodies some distance away to prevent the herd from running them over. By then the stomachs of the dead zoöids had emptied out, a last reflex. The air filled with a smell worse than skunk. It did make them easier to clean later, Rod thought as he hoisted the carcasses onto the backs of the llamas.
The rest of the morning Rod spent at the gravel pit with Pima and Pomu, training them to sort sapphires. When they returned, Diorite was at the door with Mother Artemis. He made the starsign for Rod. “Good to see you, Brother. As I told the Reverend Mother, I’ve brought a helping hand for your harvest.”
The Children Star Page 6
