The Uplift War u-3 Page 13

  In Benjamin she sensed a partial relief. . . and a counterpoint of dread.

  The three younger chims shouldered their packs. Solemnly they headed westward through the spine-stones, glancing back nervously until they passed out of sight.

  Athaclena let herself feel relieved for Robert’s sake. But underneath it all remained a nagging fear for her father. The enemy must certainly have struck Port Helenia first.

  “Come, Benjamin. Let’s see what can be done for those poor people down there.”

  For all of their unusual and rapid successes in Uplift, Terran geneticists still had a way to go with neo-dolphins and neo-chimpanzees. Truly original thinkers were still rare in both species. By Galactic standards they had made great strides, but Earthmen wanted even more rapid progress. It was almost as if they suspected their clients might have to grow up very quickly, very soon.

  When a good mind appeared in Tursiops or Pongo stock, it was carefully nurtured. Athaclena could tell that Benjamin was one of those superior specimens. No doubt this chim had at least a blue card procreation right and had already sired many children.

  “Maybe I’d better scout ahead, ma’am,” Benjamin suggested. “I can climb these trees and stay above the level of the gas. I’ll go in and find out how things lie, and then come back for you.”

  Athaclena felt the chim’s turmoil as they looked out on the lake of mysterious gas. Here it was about ankle deep, but farther into the valley it swirled several man-heights into the trees.

  “No. We’ll stay together,” Athaclena said firmly. “I can climb trees too, you know.”

  Benjamin looked her up and down, apparently recalling stories of the fabled Tymbrimi adaptability. “Hmmm, your folk might have once been arboreal at that. No respect intended.” He gave her a wry, unhinged grin. “All right then, miss, let’s go.”

  He took a running start, leaped into the branches of a near-oak, scampered around the trunk and darted down another limb. Then Benjamin jumped across a narrow gap to the next tree. He held onto the bouncing branch and looked back at her with curious brown eyes.

  Athaclena recognized a challenge. She breathed deeply several times, concentrating. Changes began with a tingling in her hardening fingertips, a loosening in her chest. She exhaled, crouched, and took off, launching herself into the near-oak. With some difficulty she imitated the chim, move by move.

  Benjamin nodded in approval as she landed next to him. Then he was off again.

  They made slow progress, leaping from tree to tree and creeping around vine-entangled trunks. Several times they were forced to backtrack around clearings choked with the slowly settling fumes. They tried not to breathe when stepping over thicker wisps of the heavy gas, but Athaclena could not help picking up a whiff of pungent, oily stuff. She told herself that her growing itch was probably psychosomatic.

  Benjamin kept glancing at her surreptitiously. The chim certainly noticed some of the changes she underwent as the minutes passed — a limbering of the arms, a rolling of the shoulders and loosening and opening of the hands. He clearly had never expected to have a Galactic keep up with him this way, swinging through the trees.

  He almost certainly did not know the price the gheer transformation was going to cost her. The hurt had already begun, and Athaclena knew this was only the beginning.

  The forest was full of sounds. Small animals scurried past them, fleeing the alien smoke and stench. Athaclena picked up quick, hot pulses of their fear. As they reached the top of a knoll overlooking the settlement, they could hear faint cries — frightened Terrans groping about in a soot-dark forest.

  Benjamins’ brown eyes told her that those were his friends down there. “See how the stuff clings to the ground?” he said. “It hardly rises a few meters over the tops of our buildings. If only we’d built one tall structure!”

  “They would have blasted that building first,” Athaclena pointed out. “And then released their gas.”

  “Hmmph.” Benjamin nodded. “Well, let’s go see if any of my mates made it into the trees. Maybe they managed to help a few of the humans get high enough as well.”

  She did not question Benjamin about his hidden fear — the thing he could not bring himself to mention. But there was something added to his worry about the humans and chims below, as if that were not already enough.

  The deeper they went into the valley, the higher among the branches they had to travel. More and more often they were forced to drop down, stirring the smoky, unraveling wisps with their feet as they hurried along their arboreal highway. Fortunately, the oily gas seemed to be dissipating at last, growing heavier and precipitating in a fine rain of gray dust.

  Benjamin’s pace quickened as they caught glimpses of the off-white buildings of the Center beyond the trees. Athaclena followed as well as she could, but it was getting harder and harder to keep up with the chim. Enzyme exhaustion took its toll, and her corona was ablaze as her body tried to eliminate heat buildup.

  Concentrate, she thought as she crouched on one waving branch. Athaclena flexed her legs and tried to sight on the blur of dusty leaves and twigs opposite her.

  Go.

  She uncoiled, but by now the spring was gone from her leap. She barely made it across the two-meter gap. Athaclena hugged the bucking, swaying branch. Her corona pulsed like fire.

  She clutched the alien wood, breathing open-mouthed, unable to move, the world a blur. Maybe it’s more than just gheer pain, she thought. Maybe the gas isn’t just designed for Terrans. It could be killing me.

  It took a couple of moments for her eyes to focus again, and then she saw little more than a black-bottomed foot covered with brown fur … Benjamin, clutching the tree branch nimbly and standing over her.

  His hand softly touched the waving, hot tendrils of her corona. “You just wait here and rest, miss. I’ll scout ahead an’ be right back.”

  The branch shuddered once more, and he was gone.

  Athaclena lay still. She could do little else except listen to faint sounds coming from the direction of the Howletts Center. Nearly an hour after the departure of the Gubru cruiser she could still hear panicky chimp shrieks and strange, low cries from some animal she couldn’t recognize.

  The gas was dissipating but it still stank, even up here. Athaclena kept her nostrils closed, breathing through her mouth.

  Pity the poor Earthlings, whose noses and ears must remain open all the time, for all the world to assault at will. The irony did not escape her. For at least the creatures did not have to listen with their minds.

  As her corona cooled, Athaclena felt awash in a babble of emotions… human, chimpanzee, and that other variety that flickered in and out, the “stranger” that had by now become almost familiar. Minutes passed, and Athaclena felt a little better… enough to crawl along the limb to where .branch met trunk. She sat back against the rough bark with a sigh, the flow of noise and emotion surrounding her.

  Maybe I’m not dying after all, at least not right away.

  Only after a little while longer did it dawn on her that something was happening quite nearby. She could sense that she was being watched — and from very close! She turned and drew her breath sharply. From the branches of a tree only six meters away, four sets of eyes stared back at her — three pairs deep brown and a fourth bright blue.

  Barring perhaps a few of the sentient, semi-vegetable Kanten, the Tymbrimi were the Galactics who knew Earth-lings best. Nevertheless, Athaclena blinked in surprise, uncertain just what it was she was seeing.

  Closest to the trunk of that tree sat an adult female neo-chimpanzee — a “chimmie” — dressed only in shorts, holding a chim baby in her arms. The little mother’s brown eyes were wide with fear.

  Next to them was a small, smooth-skinned human child dressed in denim overalls. The little blond girl smiled back at Athaclena, shyly.

  But it was the fourth and last being in the other tree that had Athaclena confused.

  She recalled a neo-dolphin sound-sculpture her fa
ther had brought home to Tymbrim from his travels. This was just after that episode of the ceremony of Acceptance and Choice of the Tytlal, when she had behaved so strangely up in that extinct volcano caldera. Perhaps Uthacalthing had wanted to play the sound-sculpting for her to draw her out of her moodiness — to prove to her that the Earthly cetaceans were actually charming creatures, not to be feared. He had told her to close her eyes and just let the song wash over her.

  Whatever his motive, it had had the opposite effect. For in listening to the wild, untamed patterns, she had suddenly found herself immersed in an ocean, hearing an angry sea squall gather. Even opening her eyes, seeing that she still sat in the family listening room, did not help. For the first time in her life, sound overwhelmed vision.

  Athaclena had never listened to the cube again, nor known anything else quite so strange… until encountering the eerie metaphorical landscape within Robert Oneagle’s mind, that is.

  Now she felt that way again! For while the fourth creature across from her looked, at first, like a very large chimpanzee, her corona was telling quite another story. It cannot be!

  Calmly, placidly, the brown eyes looked back at her. The being obviously far outweighed all the others combined, yet it held the human child on its lap delicately, carefully. When the little girl squirmed, the big creature merely snorted and shifted slightly, neither letting go nor taking its gaze from Athaclena. Unlike normal chimpanzees, its face was very black. Ignoring her aches, Athaclena edged forward slowly so as not to alarm them. “Hello,” she said carefully in Anglic.

  The human child smiled again and ducked her head shyly against her furry protector’s massive chest. The neo-chimp mother cringed back in apparent fear.

  The massive creature with the high, flattened face merely nodded twice and snorted again. It fizzed with Potential!

  Athaelena had only once before encountered a species living in that narrow zone between animal and accepted client-class sophont. It was a very rare state in the Five Galaxies, for any newly discovered pre-sentient species was soon registered and licensed to some starfaring clan for Uplift and indenture.

  It dawned on Athaclena that this being was already far along toward sentience!

  But the gap from animal to thinker was supposed to be impossible to cross alone! True, some humans still clung to quaint ideas from the ignorant days before Contact — theories proposing that true intelligence could be “evolved.” But Galactic science assured that the threshold could only be passed with the aid of another race, one who had already crossed it.

  So it had been all the way back to the fabled days of the first race — the Progenitors — billions of years ago.

  But nobody had ever traced patrons for the humans. That was why they were called k’chu-non… wolflings. Might their old idea contain a germ of truth? If so, might this creature also… ?

  Ah, no! Why did I not see it at once?

  Athaclena suddenly knew this beast was not a natural find. It was not the fabled “Garthling” her father had asked her to seek. The family resemblance was simply too unmistakable.

  She was looking at a gathering of cousins, sitting together on that branch high above the Gubru vapors. Human, neo-chimpanzees, and… what?

  She tried to recall what her father had said about humanity’s license to occupy their homeworld, the Earth. After Contact, the Institutes had granted recognition of mankind’s de facto tenancy. Still, there were Fallow Rules and other restrictions, she was certain.

  And a few special Earth species had been mentioned in particular.

  The great beast radiated Potential like … A metaphor came to Athaclena, of a beacon burning in the tree across from her. Searching her memory Tymbrimi fashion, she at last drew forth the name she had been looking for.

  “Pretty thing,” she asked softly. “You are a gorilla, aren’t you?”

  16

  The Howletts Center

  The beast tossed its great head and snorted. Next to it, the mother chimp whimpered softly and regarded Athaclena with obvious dread.

  But the little human girl clapped her hands, sensing a game. ”Rilla! Jonny’s a Villa! Like me!” The child’s small fists thumped her chest. She threw back her head and crowed a high-pitched, ululating yell.

  A gorilla, Athaclena looked at the giant, silent creature in wonderment, trying to remember what she had -been told in passing so long ago.

  Its dark nostrils flared as it sniffed in Athaclena’s direction, and used its free hand to make quick, subtle hand signs to the human child.

  “Jonny wants to know if you’re going to be in charge, now,” the little girl lisped. “I hope so. You sure looked tired when you stopped chasing Benjamin. Did he do something bad? He got away, you know.”

  Athaclena moved a little closer. “No,” she said. “Benjamin didn’t do anything bad. At least not since I met him — though I am beginning to suspect—”

  Athaclena stopped. Neither the child nor the gorilla would understand what she now suspected. But the adult chim knew, clearly, and her eyes showed fear.

  “I’m April,” the small human told her. “An” that’s Nita. Her baby’s name is Cha-Cha. Sometimes chimmies give their babies easy names to start ’cause-they don’t talk so good at first,” she confided.

  Her eyes seemed to shine as she looked at Athaclena. “Are you really a Tym… bim… Tymmbimmie?”

  Athaclena nodded. “I am Tymbrimi.”

  April clapped her hands. “Ooh. They’re goodguys! Did you see the big spaceship? It came with a big boom, and Daddy made me go with Jonny, and then there was gas and Jonny put his hand over my mouth and I couldn’t breathe!”

  April made a scrunched up face, pantomiming suffocation.

  “He let go when we were up in th’ trees, though. We found Nita an’ Cha-Cha.” She glanced over at the chims. “I guess Nita’s still too scared to talk much.”

  “Were you frightened too?” Athaclena asked.

  April nodded seriously. “Yeth. But I had to stop being scared. I was th’ only man here, and I hadda be in charge, and take care of ever’body.

  “Can you be in charge now? You’re a really pretty Tymbimmie.”

  The little girl’s shyness returned. She partly buried herself against Jonny’s massive chest, smiling out at Athaclena with only one eye showing.

  Athaclena could not help staring. She had never until now realized this about human beings — of what they were capable. In spite of her people’s alliance with the Terrans, she had picked up some of the common Galactic prejudice, imagining that the “wolflings” were still somehow feral, bestial. Many Galactics thought it questionable that humans were truly ready to be patrons. No doubt the Gubru had expressed that belief in their War Manifesto.

  This child shattered that image altogether. By law and custom, little April had been in charge of her clients, no matter how young she was. And her understanding of that responsibility was clear.

  Still, Athaclena now knew why both Robert and Benjamin had been anxious not to lead her here. She suppressed her initial surge of righteous anger. Later, she would have to find a way to get word to her father, after she had verified her suspicions.

  She was almost beginning to feel Tymbrimi again as the gheer reaction gave way to a mere dull burning along her muscles and neural pathways. “Did any other humans make it into the trees?” she asked.

  Jonny made a quick series of hand signs. April interpreted, although the little girl may not have clearly understood the implications. “He says a few tried. But they weren’t fast enough… Most of’em just ran aroun’ doin’ ‘Man-Things.’ That’s what Villas call the stuff humans do that Villas don’t understand,” she confided lowly.

  At last the mother chim, Nita, spoke. “The g-gas …” She swallowed. “Th” gas m-made the humans weak.” Her voice was barely audible. “Some of us chims felt it a little. … I don’t think the Villas were bothered.”

  So. Perhaps Athaclena’s original surmise about the gas was correct. Sh
e had suspected it was not intended to be immediately lethal. Mass slaughter of civilians was something generally frowned upon by the Institute for Civilized Warfare. Knowing the Gubru, the intent was probably much more insidious than that.

  There was a cracking sound to her right. The large male chim, Benjamin, dropped onto a branch two trees away. He called out to Athaclena.

  “It’s okay now, miss! I found Dr. Taka and Dr. Schultz. They’re anxious to talk to you!”

  Athaclena motioned for him to approach. “Please come here first, Benjamin.”

  With typical Pongo exaggeration, Benjamin let out a long-suffering sigh. He leaped branch to branch until he came into view of the three apes and the human girl. Then his jaw dropped and his balancing grip almost slipped. Frustration wrote across his face. He turned to Athaclena, licking his lips, and cleared his throat.

  “Don’t bother,” she told him. “I know you have spent the last twenty minutes trying, in the midst of all this turmoil, to arrange to have the truth hidden. But it was to no avail. I know what has been going on here.”

  Benjamin’s mouth clapped shut. Then he shrugged. “So?” he sighed.

  To the four on the branch Athaclena asked, “Do you accept my authority?”

  “Yeth,” April said. Nita glanced from Athaclena to the human child, then nodded.

  “All right, then. Stay where you are until somebody comes for you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes’m.” Nita nodded again. Jonny and Cha-Cha merely looked back at her.

  Athaclena stood up, finding her balance on the branch, and turned to Benjamin. “Now let us talk to these Uplift specialists of yours. If the gas has not completely incapacitated them, I’ll be interested to hear why they have chosen to violate Galactic Law.”

  Benjamin looked defeated. He nodded resignedly.

  “Also,” Athaclena told him as she landed on the branch next to him. “You had better catch up with the chims and gorillas you sent away — in order that I would not see them. They should be called back.