Part 54 (1/2)

”That's it. Break time. I'm puttin' a T on it. Enough.”

Gailet blinked, her eyes unfocusing as the rude voice drew her back out of her reading trance. The library unit sensed this and froze the text in front of her.

She looked to her left. Sprawled in the beanbag, her new ”partner” threw his datawell aside and yawned, stretching his lanky, powerful frame. ”Time for a drink,” he said lazily.

”You haven't even made it through the first edited summary,” Gailet said.

He grinned. ”Aw, I don't know why we've got to study this s.h.i.+t. The Eatees will be surprised if we remember to bow and recite our own species-name. They don't expect neo-chimps to be geniuses, y'know.”

”Apparently not. And your comprehension scores will certainly reinforce the impression.”

That made him frown momentarily. He forced a grin again. ”You, on the other hand, are tryin' so hard-I'm sure the Eatees will find it terribly cute.”

louche, Gailet thought. It hadn't taken the two of them very long to learn how to cut each other where it hurt.

Maybe this is yet another test. They are seeing how far my patience can be stretched before it snaps.

Maybe . . . but not very likely. She had not seen the Suzerain of Propriety for more than a week. Instead, she had been dealing with a committee of three pastel-tinged Gubru, one from each faction. And it was the blue-tinted Talon Soldier who strutted foremost at these meetings.

Yesterday they had all gone down to the ceremonial site for a ”rehearsal.” Although she was still undecided whether to cooperate in the final event, Gailet had come to realize that it might already be too late to change her mind.

The seaside hill had been sculpted and landscaped so that the giant power plants were no longer visible. The terraced slopes led elegantly upward, one after another, marred only by bits of debris brought in by the steady autumnal winds. Already, bright banners flapped in the easterlies, marking the stations where the neo-chimp representatives would be asked to recite, or answer questions, or submit to intense scrutiny.

There at the site, with the Gubru standing close by, Irongrip had been to all outward appearances a model student. And perhaps it had been more than a wish to curry favor that had made him so uncharacteristically studious. After all, these were facts that had direct bearing upon his ambitions. That afternoon, his quick intelligence had shone.

Now though, with them alone together under the vast vault of the New Library, other aspects of his nature came to the fore. ”So how 'bout it?” Irongrip said, as he leaned over her chair and gave her a cyprian leer. ”Want to step outside for some air? We could slip into the eucalyptus grove and-”

”There are two chances of that,” she snapped. ”Fat and slim.”

He laughed. ”Put it off until the ceremony, then, if you like it public. Then it'll be you an' me, babe, with the whole Five Galaxies watchin'.” He grinned and flexed his powerful hands. His knuckles cracked.

Gailet turned away and closed her eyes. She had to concentrate to keep her lower lip from trembling. Rescue me, she wished against all hope or reason.

Logic chided her for even thinking it. After all, her white knight was only an ape, and almost certainly dead.

Still, she couldn't help crying inside. Fiben, I need you. Fiben, come back.

80 Robert His blood sang.

After months in the mountains-living as his ancestors had, on wits and his own sweat, his toughened skin growing used to the sun and the scratchy rub of native fibers-Robert still had not yet realized the changes in himself, not until he puffed up the last few meters of the narrow, rocky trail and crossed in ten long strides from one watershed to another.

The top of Rwanda Pa.s.s. . . . I've climbed a thousand meters in two hours, and my heart is scarcely beating fast.

He did not really feel any need to rest, however Robert made himself stow down to a walk. Anyway, the view was worth lingering over.

He stood atop the very spine of the Mulun range. Behind him, to the north, the mountains stretched eastward in a thickening band, and westward toward the sea, where they continued in an archipelago of fat, towering islands.

It had taken him a day and a half of running to get here from the caves, and now he saw ahead of him the panorama he would have yet to cross to reach his destination.

I'm not even sure how to find what I'm looking for! Athaclena's instructions had been as vague as her own impressions of where to send him.

More mountains stretched ahead of him, dropping away sharply toward a dun-colored steppe partially obscured by haze. Before he reached those plains there would be still more rise and fall over narrow trails that had only felt a few score feet even during peacetime. Robert was probably the first to- come this way since the outbreak of war.

The hardest part was over, though. He didn't enjoy downhill running, but Robert knew how to take the jolting, fall-stepping so as to avoid damaging his knees. And there would be water lower down.

He shook his leather canteen and took a sparing swallow. Only a few deciliters remained, but he was sure they'd do.

He shaded his eyes and looked beyond the nearest purple peaks to the high slopes where he would have to make his camp tonight. There would be streams all right, but no lush rain forests like on the wet northern side of the Mulun. And he would have to think about hunting for food soon, before' he sallied forth onto the dry savannah.

Apache braves could run from TQOS to the Pacific in a few days and not eat anything but a handful of parched corn along the way.

He wasn't an Apache brave, of course. He did have a few grams of vitamin concentrate with him, but for the sake of speed he had chosen to travel light. For now, quickness counted more than his grumbling stomach.

He skirted aside where a recent landslide had broken the path. Then he set a slightly faster pace as the trail dropped into a set of tight switchbacks.

That night Robert slept in a moss-filled notch just above a trickling spring, wrapped in a thin silk blanket. His dreams were slow and as quiet as he imagined s.p.a.ce might be, if one ever got away from the constant humming of machines.

Mostly, it was the stillness in the empathy net, after months living in the riot of the rain forest, that lent a soft loneliness to his slumber. One might kenn far in an empty land such as this-even with senses as crude as his.

And for the first time there was not the harsh-metaphorically almost metallic-hint of alien minds to be felt off in the northwest. He was s.h.i.+elded from the Gubru, and from the humans and chims for that matter. Solitude was a strange sensation.

The strangeness did not evaporate by the dawn's light. He filled his canteen from the spring and drank deeply to take the edge off his hunger. Then the run began anew.

On this steeper slope the descent was wearing, but the miles did go by quickly. Before the sun was more than halfway toward the zenith the high steppe had opened up around him. He ran across rolling foothills now-kilometers falling behind him like thoughts barely contemplated and then forgotten. And as he ran, Robert probed the countryside. Soon he felt certain that the expanse held odd ent.i.ties, somewhere out there beyond or among the tall gra.s.ses.

If only kenning were more of a localizing sense! Perhaps it was this very imprecision that had kept humans from ever developing their own crude abilities.

Instead, we concentrated on other things.

There was a game that was often played both on Earth and among interested Galactics. It consisted of trying to reconstruct the fabled ”lost patrons of humanity,” the half-mythical starfarers who supposedly began the Uplift of human beings perhaps fifty thousand years ago and then departed in mystery, leaving the job ”only half done.”

Of course there were a few bold heretics-even among the Galactics-who held that the old Earthling theories were actually true, that it was somehow possible for a race to Uplift itself... to evolve starfaring intelligence and pull itself up by its bootstraps out of darkness and into knowledge and maturity.

But even on Earth most now thought the idea quaint. Patrons uplifted clients, who later took their own turn uplifting newer pre-sentients. It was the way and had been ever since the days of the .Progenitors, so long ago.

There was a real dearth of clues. Whoever the patrons of Man might have been, they had hidden their traces well, and for good reason. A patron race who abandoned a client was generally branded as an outlaw.

Still, the guessing game went on.

Certain patron clans were ruled out because they would never have chosen an omnivorous species to raise. Others were unsuited to living on Earth even for short visits-because of gravity or atmosphere or a host of other reasons.

Most agreed that it couldn't have been a clan which believed in specialization either. Some uplifted their clients with very specific goals in mind. The Uplift Inst.i.tute demanded that any new sapient race be able to pilot stars.h.i.+ps, exercise judgment and logic and be capable of patron status itself someday. But beyond that the Inst.i.tute put few constraints on the types of niches into which client species might be made to fit. Some were destined to become skilled craftsmen, some philosophers, and some mighty warrior castes.

But humanity's mysterious patrons had to have been generalists. For Man, the animal, was very much a flexible beast.

Yes, and for all of the vaunted flexibility of the Tymbrimi, there were some things not even those masters of adaptation could even think of doing.

Such as this, Robert thought.

A covey of native birds exploded into the air in a flurry of beating wings as Robert ran across their feeding grounds. Small, skittering things felt the rumble of his approach and took cover.