Rakki forced his expression to remain firm, fighting back his fear reflex. He raised an arm in the direction of the caves above. One of the dogs growled a warning at the movement. “Come in. Weary of killing land. Live with Cave People. Work hard. Fight for,” Rakki said. The crazy-eyed one emitted a screeching laugh and spat at the ground.
The darker Oldworlder leered, showing spaces among yellow teeth. One of his arms was heavily scarred and hung in an odd, stiff kind of way. “Jus’ a kid, Bo. What kind o’ work him good for? Mo’ food o’ ours he eat. Da’s all.”
“Bettah use for us if make him dawg food instead, maybe,” Lightskin said.
“Dog meat! Dog meat!” the crazy-eye screeched, obviously finding it hilarious.
“Juswait! Jusyouwait!” Rakki’s chest was pounding. What if he’d misjudged? He felt for the pouch inside his vest. Scar-arm pointed his Oldworld club at him. It made a clicking noise. “Easy now, jus’ easy, okay.” Rakki’s fingers found the four metal fingers that he had brought—yellow-brown at the flat ends, changing to gray where they rounded into points. He brought them out and showed them. “Look, more use than jus’ work. Know things and places. Make Cave People strong.”
Scar-arm took one of the fingers and examined it, then handed it to Lightskin. “Look like good bullet there, Bo,” he said. If that’s what it was called, Rakki didn’t know what it meant. But he’d been told that Oldworlders valued them highly.
“Wheah you get these heah, mud rat?” Lightskin demanded.
“There’s mo’ bullet like that, lots mo’.”
“Roun’ these part? You tell straight, now.”
Rakki pointed north and east, where dry heights of unclimbable walls and deep canyons gave way eventually to watery lowlands that connected via a roundabout route to the swamp lands south from the caves, where Rakki was from. “Three days, that way. You see, I know things. Know places. Rakki come live with Cave People. Can tell. Good for Cave People too.”
The two Oldworlders looked at each other. “Watch’ think, Bo?” Scar-arm asked, eyeing Rakki again dubiously.
Lightskin seemed to turn the proposition over before coming to a decision. “Maybe is so, could be,” he said finally. “Take him back up, talk to Mistameg. He know. He say what we do.”
The screecher took Rakki’s weapon and waved him on as the two Oldworlders turned to lead the way back up to the caves. The two Neffers fell in behind, keeping their spears still leveled, while the dogs stayed close by. The screecher seemed disappointed by the outcome.
CHAPTER SIX
Vicki Delucey had been enthralled by Kronian science long before Athena erupted out of Jupiter. Originally a radiation physicist at Harvard, she had met Keene when he was engaged in plasma dynamics research there. When he gave up trying to fight the politics that had come to dominate academic science, she had followed him south to Texas and partnered with him in founding a nuclear-space-propulsion engineering consultancy catering to the private sector. Keene’s dealings with the space business and his conclusion that Terran Establishment Science had taken on a role comparable to that of the medieval European Church brought him into early contact with Kronian scientists and their nondogmatic approach of following what appeared to be the facts wherever they led, regardless of preconceptions and hoped-for answers.
Kronian interest in science was general, pervading the culture as a deeply ingrained desire to know about their origins and understand better the nature of the universe they found themselves in. With the old, comforting picture of the heavens as eternally safe and stable now dead, one of their major endeavors was to reconstruct the history of catastrophic changes that had shaped the Solar System within the last ten or so thousand years. Their approach admitted a broader base of knowledge than had been recognized as “science” on Earth, in that it combined the findings of modern-day physics and astronomy with certain interpretations of the mythologies of ancient cultures that the Kronians accepted as attempts by nontechnical peoples to record cosmic events that they had actually witnessed. Along with this, the Kronians also sought new accounts of planetary origins and evolution, for in the chaos brought by Athena, the old notions of slow, gradual change as the guiding paradigm of geology had similarly died. These questions assumed the role of mysteries in what had become, in effect, the Kronian cultural religion. The need to answer them formed a drive of virtually spiritual dimensions, inculcated in the schools and echoed in every reach of working and domestic life.