Part 6 (1/2)
”Promise?”
”I promise. Now, are we going to get on with this, or not?”
”O-Okay.”
Dar produced his laser knife, set the beam on minimum dispersion. ”Don't be scared, it's not going to hurt.”
”I'm not scared,” Kev protested. Still, he was glad that Dar was going first.
”All right, here we go.”
Carefully, Dar nicked his thumb with the hairline beam, then did the same to Kev's.
Alone in the moonlight, the two boys sealed their friends.h.i.+p in a manner that was old as Humanity.
Kev returned to the treehouse the next afternoon with a heavy heart. Dar was gone; a shuttle had called at the s.p.a.ceport for him, and before Kev knew, the s.h.i.+p had vanished into the sky.
He sat at the edge of the platform, his legs dangling into empty air and his chin in cupped hands, and sighed heavily.
His sigh echoed for a moment in the movement of leaves, then blended into the quiet music of the tree around him. Slowly, despite his sadness and loneliness, Kev stretched out a hand until he touched the nearest branch. It was smooth and its touch oddly comforting.
Sing with me, Kev Mathis....
PART THREE: Elder.
From my place, I can see into the courtyard of the Human settlement. I stand tall against the mountainside, my many trunks reach high into the clear, cold sky of Sebya. I am old, old even as the Hlutr count time, old enough to have felt the continents move beneath me, old enough to have seen Sebya's lone moon grow ever more distant in the night sky. The Humans have been here not even seventy times seventy of their years; yet I have watched them well. Of their seaside towns and vast ocean farms I know little, for we Hlutr seldom grow in or near the sea. Yet since they arrived from the sky, I have watched the Humans in their mountain settlement and their gambols through this marvelous wood that we call the Forest of The Dawn.
The Human settlement grew slowly, slowly as even the trees; there has been plenty of time for me to adjust my deep roots around their changing foundations, to send up offshoots of myself in their gardens, even to crack the mountain's hard stone and reach their secret underground fastnesses.
However much I know the Humans, they are not my real love. I have another study, one which has been my steady joy for all my seasons. For Sebya is fortunate among worlds; this globe is one of the few to have sp.a.w.ned its own native race of sapients. You, Little Ones, who in your still-primitive language of grunts and whistles call yourselves the Dawn People- you are my devotion and my chiefest study. Humans came to us already formed in the biological cauldron of their own unfortunate Terra; but the Dawn People sprang from Sebya life in the ceaseless and beautiful Hlutr adjust-ment of the very basis of life itself. Humans are interlopers- you, my Littles, are ours.
Ours. And in truth, Little Ones, you are mine, as much as any Hlut can be presumptuous enough to make such a claim. I have nursed you along in your growth, I have directed the twining of your very genes, since long before you were a separate species. When your distant ancestors were still learning to live in the hostile environment of dry land, when the very weeds and grains were taking their form...then I was a sapling, growing slowly and taking my lessons from the great Hlutr masters beyond the sky.
Do not believe, Little Ones, those who tell you that the Hlutr have made you what you are. You have made yourselves. True, only the Hlutr can fas.h.i.+on and re-fas.h.i.+on the tiny spirals of matter that carry your heredity and your ident.i.ty as a species. This is power, and it is also curse; for only by dying can Hlutr spread our modifications of the very form and basis of life. Seventies upon seventies of Hlutr have died for you, Dawn People, each at a crucial stage of your growth, each to give you a nudge along the path of your destiny. But you, Little Ones, have made your way across nearly seventy million generations: living, dying, adapting, struggling for existence against all the chances of that long, long span. The dead ends, the wrong turnings, the setbacks and disasters- these have numbered more than the stars in Sebya's nighttime sky. Yet you have persisted, and you have responded to Hlutr guidance until you are the gentlest and most profound of creatures.
And now, it appears, the Humans are hunting you.
All through the Forest of the Dawn and beyond, the Hlutr watch...and listen. We listen to one another with the First Language, which is the subtle s.h.i.+ft of colors in our leaves and trunks. We listen with the Second Language, which is the soft soughing of trees on a gentle breeze. And we listen with the Inner Voice, which is the song that sings in the hearts and minds of every living thing. All over the planet, we listen: to each other, to thousands of those in the lesser orders who tell us what they know, to the strong, steady beat of life and death in the soil, in the sea and in the air.
You, my Little Ones, are the chief object of our concern. Not a Dawn Person falls, that the Hlutr do not know. And not a Hlut knows, who does not tell me at once.
Lovanideth of the Blue Hills Tribe had been missing for nearly two sevens of days. I paid little attention to her departure...the Dawn People are always wandering off for long stretches to be alone, and with seventy-times-seventy-times-seventy of them on Sebya, it is difficult to attribute significance to only one individual. I told my brethren to search for her, then went back to contemplating the flow of the Hlutr plan for her people. This is a crucial time for the Dawn People, when they must adjust to the most powerful changes in their history. In the next few seventies of years, they will take the first steps along the road of civilization; while their genes have predisposed them toward success, so much depends upon their character and environmental factors. So many races have failed at this point, that we Hlutr have learned to be careful.
I watch the Human settlement especially closely. The sons and daughters of Terra cannot be allowed to interfere with the work of a Hlutr lifetime.
Yet interfere they do.
Sea-birds first located Lovanideth's body where it lay on the northern sh.o.r.es. They knew that the Dawn People did not belong so far north, and carried the news to one of my brethren. He, in turn, sent word to me on the invisible waves of the Inner Voice. Lovanideth of the Blue Hills has been found.
She lies dead on the sands of the Cold Sea.
My reply raced north, carried on prevailing winds by the murmurs and rustles of the Second Language. ”Have her brought to you immediately. Inform me as soon as her body arrives. Sing nothing more of this in the Inner Voice.” We have built you, Dawn People, to be very sensitive to the Inner Voice, and I do not want you to know of Lovanideth's death. Not yet.
My brother in the north sends large beasts, the scavengers and runners, to bring Lovanideth to him. It is easy for us, when we wish, to control such creatures with the waves of the Inner Voice; the Hlutr will overpowers that of the lower orders. We do not do this often, for it is distasteful to us.
After two days, Lovanideth lies before my brother. He bends low over her body, and tells me all that he sees.
”She has been dead for many days. Her tissues are waterlogged. There are minor wounds on her skin, and her crown fronds are withered.” He stops, focussing his attention on the tiny chemical traces that still linger on her and in her. ”Salts, and the taste of the sea. The sands. The beasts who bore her hither.” There is silence for a moment, and I am acutely conscious of the tortuous chain that brings his meaning to me: nearly seventy single Hlutr who relay his words across the mountains to the place where I stand, just outside the Human settlement. ”And wait, Elder...upon her is the scent of the Humans. She has recently been in their custody.”
I need not hear more. ”Continue your investigation, and tell me all you learn,” I sing. Then, I turn my full attention to the settlement below.
Seventy thousand Humans live here, perched in their fortress of granite and iron on the mountain's side. Seventy thousand, doing what Humans do- dancing, eating, sleep-ing and working, their minds a hubbub of images and activity. I examine them all, and I find no reason to believe them hostile to the Dawn People.
Perhaps, then, Lovanideth's death was an accident. A hunting party whose bolts went astray, or a mistake by ignorant tourists. Human law protects the Dawn People much as it protects the Hlutr- those who killed Lovanideth must have panicked, attempted to hide her body, and then dropped her on the northern beaches in the dark of night.
So I tell myself; but I find no memory of her in the Human minds I touch, no counterpoint of guilt sounding in the medley of Human thought and emotion in the settlement.
The guilty ones may be in one of the seaside towns...if they were tourists, they may even have left Sebya entirely. This once, I grant Humans the benefit of my conjectures.
Three days later, it happens again. This time, the Dawn People come to us themselves: the Elders of Riverbank Tribe appeal to the Hlutr because three of their fellows are missing. The previous night, they saw the lights of a Human air vehicle above the forest.
The Hlut who hears their plea contacts me at once. Go back to your Tribe, he tells them, And carry on your work. The Hlutr will search for your lost ones. Then his call is carried to me along soundless waves of color, the hues of the First Language outracing the wind upvalley through Hlutr leaves and trunks until it reaches my place.
You have been told, Little Ones, that the Hlutr are distant, cold and unfeeling...that they do not concern themselves with the doings of the lesser orders. Yet now I give lie to those sayings, for I feel a surge of almost-animal rage. One accidental murder I will overlook- but when one murder is followed by three kidnappings, it is certain that something is afoot in the Human community. After nearly twenty-nine Human centuries of peace, some great upheaval must be taking place in order to bring hostility to Sebya.
I have to know more.
Ordinarily, when a Hlutr Elder needs information, it is readily available. The waves of the Inner Voice permeate s.p.a.ce just as they fill the atmosphere of Sebya; my brethren Elders beyond the sky are only a simple song away. And at their disposal are all the resources of the Free Peoples of the Scattered Worlds- the great archives on Nephestal as well as the ma.s.sed databanks of Aveth.e.l.l and the Iaranor. The Daamin scholars of Nephestal, for example, were studying the sons of Terra even before Humans left that fair world. Most of their information is available to the Free Peoples.
However, one must know the questions to ask. And I do not know enough.
Among Humankind, there are always those to whom we can turn for aid. Many there are, whose minds are open to the Inner Voice: children, madmen, dreamers, fools...and all those of compa.s.sionate heart and the ability to feel wonder. The children and madmen are no use to me now, but the others may help.
Night falls, as clouds boil up from the south to hide the stars. The forest sleeps, Dawn People and Humans alike. I am already living as fast as the small animals live, even faster than Humans. Slowly, carefully, I catch the melody of Human dreams...and I match that song in the Inner Voice, guiding slumbering minds along the path I choose. Tell me, I sing, What is new in the Human community. Tell me why Humans hunt the Dawn People. My informants will not remember this night; at most, they will have vague recollections of dreams in which the trees sang and they joined the chorus. They will awake happy and refreshed, and will imagine that they dreamed of being one with the world around them.
This is the gift I leave them in return for their information.
That night, then, I tour Human minds and when the cloudy sky lightens in the east, when the Dawn People awake and stretch their fronds toward the hidden sun, then I withdraw my attention and stand alone, pondering what I have learned.
Human politics s.h.i.+ft like Sebya's tides; we Hlutr pay little attention to it. Thus far, the changing course of Mankind's statecraft has left Sebya virtually untouched. At best a minor member of the Terran Empire, Sebya became independent soon after that dominion dissolved nearly three Human millennia ago. Since then Sebya has pa.s.sed out of the main flow of Galactic events. This suits us well, for the world's isolation has given us peace to conduct our important work with the Dawn People.
Now, it seems, Sebya's seclusion is over.
Dream-images from my informants are misleading- or perhaps the Hlutr will never truly understand animal behavior. It is unclear whether Sebya was conquered, traded or simply purchased. Whatever the terminology, whatever the motivation, our world has a new governor. I know nothing of the man, only his Human name: Darineb Khria. Yet I tremble in the early morning cold, while moist wind carries the scent and sound of my discomfort northward across the mountains.
Sebya's new owner, I fear, may have found the Hlutr's most precious secret.