Part 11 (2/2)

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 a.s.sault 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 pa.s.sed, 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 father 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 s.h.i.+fted 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. ”h.e.l.lo,” she said carefully in Anglic.

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

The ma.s.sive 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-cla.s.s 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 a.s.sured that the threshold could only be pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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 Inst.i.tutes 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 pa.s.sing so long ago.

<script>