“Krims! No, but you’ll want to hear what’s going on, won’t you?”
“If I only had some sort of a magnifier …” Portegin was muttering under his breath. “Lunzie, you must have something? …”
She handed him a loupe but warned Portegin of the dire consequences of chipping or breaking one of her precious few medical aids.
When Kai volunteered to help Triv and Portegin, Lunzie would have none of it. She forced him to alternate bathing his injured hands in the sap with wringing out cloths for his face wounds. Then she made Varian lie down for an hour’s rest before having her go on a provisions hunt. With all the ravenous appetites she had to satisfy, Lunzie needed more raw vegetable matter for the synthesizer, and she also wanted to locate more of the edible fruits, pods, and herbs nearby.
Varian thought she’d be unable to sleep with Triv’s and Portegin’s murmuring and swearing, the sound and rustle of the wind through the vine screen, and the odd sounds made by Kai and Lunzie, but it seemed she’d only closed her eyes when Lunzie was shaking her awake again.
Since Triv seemed to have little to do while he watched Portegin assembling a matrix comb, Varian was a bit grumpy when Lunzie hustled her to the sled. Varian’s temper was not much improved by the drizzling rain that made visibility poor, but Lunzie pointed curtly to the brighter skies to the southwest and told Varian to make for a spot where they could see what they picked without getting drenched in the process.
Immediately three giffs curved away from those few idly circling the caves. It was well past the return of the fishers, and most adult fliers were already inside their caves, sleeping off their meal, or what ever they did.
“Do they do any more than follow?” Lunzie asked after observing them for a time.
“Not when I’m airborne …”
“When they consider you safe?” Lunzie asked with a wry grin.
“Come to think of it, when the scavengers began to circle in on that dead beast, the giffs were picking up speed.”
54
Anne McCaffrey – Dinosaur Planet II – The Survivors
“That could be useful.”
Something in her idle tone, that of a woman not much given to chit chat, warned Varian that Lunzie had several purposes in the flight.
“How seriously ill is Kai, Lunzie?”
“Hard to say with no way of testing. Feeling is returning to his hands and the skin of his face isn’t as numb, or so he tells me. There’s no question that he’s suffered some motor impairment in his hands. I’m hoping that will pass once the last of the toxic fluid is flushed out of his system. I want to get more of that moss if we can find it, and I want a store of those succulent leaves around at all times.” Lunzie showed Varian a long red weal on her hand. “The sap is analgesic. I’m not used to dealing with raw fire.”
“How long, then, before Kai is well?”
“He’s not going to be physically fit for several weeks. I’d prefer to keep him from any exertion at all for four or five days, then a slow convalescence.” Varian digested that in silence.
“Triv can accompany you and Portegin if he’s finished patching. But I must watch Kai.”
“Yes, he’s likely to try something stupid because he feels responsible for us all.”
“What is it about this meeting that worries you, Varian?”
“I wish I could answer that. There was something about Aygar’s attitude …”
Lunzie chuckled in high amusement. “I’ll bet there was.”
“Lunzie! You said yourself, I’m not at my best—”
“At your very worst, you’d be a joy to a man deprived of a woman.
And one hell of an acquisition to their gene pool.
Varian didn’t dismiss that notion but it was not, she was certain, the entire answer to the enigma of Aygar’s cryptic expression.
“Sexuality could have been part of it, Lunzie, but it’s more as if … as if he had a surprise for me.
And he did mention their beacon. Yes, the beacon had something to do with it and something that would, in his mind, neutralize my ability to throw him.”