“No, I won’t do it,” he said. But a part of him had wanted to; still wanted to out of sheer frustration. Cloud’s face was a rigid mask of fear, big teeth showing, and Locklear slowed the scooter as he approached the encampment again.
Cloud did not wait for the vehicle to settle, but debarked as fast as painful old joints would permit and stood facing his followers without a sound.
After a moment, with dozens of Neanderthals staring in stunned silence, they all turned their backs, a wave of moans rising from every throat.
Ruth hesitated, but she too faced away from Locklear.
“Ruth! No hurt Cloud. Locklear no like hurt gentles.”
The moans continued as Cloud strode away. “Locklear need to talk to Ruth!” And then as the entire tribe began to walk away, he raised his voice: “No hurt gentles, Ruth!”
She stopped, but would not look at him as she replied. “Cloud say new people hurt gentles and not know. Locklear hurt Cloud before, want kill Cloud. Locklear go soon soon,” she finished in a sob. Suddenly, then, she was running to catch the others.
Some of the men were groping for spears now. Locklear did not wait to see what they might do with them. A half-hour later he was using the dolly in the crypt, ranking cage upon cage just inside the obscuring film. With several lion cages stacked like bricks at the entrance, no sensible Neanderthal would go a step further. Later, he could use disassembled stasis units as booby traps as he had done on Kzersatz. But it was nearly dark when he finished, and Locklear was hurrying. Now, for the first time ever on Newduvai, he felt gooseflesh when he thought of camping in the open.
* * *
For days, he considered a return to Kzersatz in the lifeboat, meanwhile improving the cabin with Loli’s help. He got that help very simply, by refusing to let her sleep in her stasis cage unless she did help. Loli was very bright, and learned his language quickly because she could not rely on telepathy. Operating on the sour-grape theory, he told himself that Ruth had been mud-fence ugly; he hadn’t felt any real affection for a Neanderthal bimbo. Not really . . .
He managed to ignore Loli’s budding charms by reminding himself that she was no more than twelve or so, and gradually she began to trust him. He wondered how much that trust would suffer if she found he was taking her from stasis only on the days he needed help.
As the days faded into weeks, the cabin became a two-room affair with a connecting passage for firewood and storage. Loli, after endless scraping and soaking of the stiff goathide in acorn water, fashioned herself a one-piece garment. She taught Locklear how repeated boiling turned acorns into edible nuts, and wove mats of plaited grass for the cabin.
He let her roam in search of small game once a week until the day she returned empty-handed. He was cutting hinge material of stainless steel from a stasis cage with Kzin shears at the time, and smiled. “Don’t feel bad, Loli. There’s plenty of meat in storage.” The more he used complete sentences, the more she seemed to be picking up the lingo.
She shrugged, picking at a scab on one of her hard little feet. “Loli not hunt. Gentles hunt Loli.” She read his stare correctly. “Gentles not try to hurt Loli; this many follow and hide,” she said, holding up four fingers and making a comical pantomime of a stealthy hunter.
He held up four fingers. “Four,” he reminded her. “Did they follow you here?”
“Maybe want to follow Loli here,” she said, grinning. “Loli think much. Loli go far far—”
“Very far,” he corrected.
“Very far to dry place, gentles no follow feet there. Loli hide, run very far where gentles not see. Come back to Locklear.”
Yes, they’d have trouble tracking her through those desert patches, he realized, and she could’ve doubled back unseen in the arroyos. Or she might have been followed after all. “Loli is smart,” he said, patting her shoulder, “but gentles are smart too. Gentles maybe want to hurt Locklear.”
“Gentles cover big holes, spears in holes, come back, maybe find kill animal. Maybe kill Locklear.”
Yeah, they’d do it that way. Or maybe set a fire to burn him out of the cabin. “Loli, would you feel bad if the gentles killed me?”
In her vast innocence, Loli thought about it before answering. “Little while, yes. Loli don’t like to live alone. Gentles alltime like to play,” she said, with a bump-and-grind routine so outrageous that he burst out laughing. “Locklear don’t trade food for play,” she added, making it obvious that Neanderthal men did.
“Not until Loli is older,” he said with brutal honesty.
“Loli is a woman,” she said, pouting as though he had slandered her.
To shift away from this dangerous topic he said, “Yes, and you can help me make this place safe from gentles.” That was the day he began teaching the girl how to disassemble cages for their most potent parts, the grav polarizers and stasis units.
They burned off the surrounding ground cover bit by bit during the nights to avoid telltale smoke, and Loli assured him that Neanderthals never ventured from camp on nights as dark as Newduvai’s. Sooner or later, he knew, they were bound to discover his little homestead and he intended to make it a place of terrifying magics.
As luck would have it, he had over two months to prepare before a far more potent new magic thundered across the sky of Newduvai.
* * *
Locklear swallowed hard the day he heard that long roll of synthetic thunder, recognizing it for what it was. He had told Loli about the kzinti, and now he warned her that they might be near, and saw her coltish legs flash into the forest as he sent the scooter scudding close to the ground toward the heights where his lifeboat was hidden. He would need only one close look to identify a kzin ship.
Dismounting near the lifeboat, peering past an outcrop and shivering because he was so near the cold force walls, he saw a foreshortened dot hovering near Newduvai’s big lake. Winks of light streaked downward from it; he counted five shots before the ship ceased firing, and knew that its target had to be the big encampment of gentles.
“If only I had those beam cannons I took apart,” he growled, unconsciously taking the side of the Neanderthals as tendrils of smoke fingered the sky. But he had removed the weapon pylon mounts long before. He released a long-held breath as the ship dwindled to a dot in the sky, hunching his shoulders, wondering how he could have been so naive as to forswear war altogether. Killing was a bitter draught, yet not half so bitter as dying.
The ship disappeared. Ten minutes later he saw it again, making the kind of circular sweep used for cartography, and this time it passed only a mile distant, and he gasped—for it was not a kzin ship. The little cruiser escort bore Interworld Commission markings.
“The goddamn tabbies must have taken one of ours,” he muttered to himself, and cursed as he saw the ship break off its sweep. No question about it: they were hovering very near his cabin.
Locklear could not fight from the lifeboat, but at least he had plenty of spare magazines for his kzin sidearm in the lifeboat’s lockers. He crammed his pockets with spares, expecting to see smoke roiling from his homestead as he began to skulk his scooter low toward home. His little vehicle would not bulk large on radar. And the tabbies might not realize how soon it grew dark on Newduvai. Maybe he could even the odds a little by landing near enough to snipe by the light of his burning cabin. He sneaked the last two hundred meters afoot, already steeling himself for the sight of a burning cabin.
But the cabin was not burning. And the kzinti were not pillaging because, he saw with utter disbelief, the armed crew surrounding his cabin was human. He had already stood erect when it occurred to him that humans had been known to defect in previous wars—and he was carrying a kzin weapon. He placed the sidearm and spare magazines beneath a stone overhang. Then Locklear strode out of the forest rubber-legged, too weak with relief to be angry at the firing on the village.
The first man to see him was a rawboned, ruddy private with the height of a belter. He brought his assault rifle to bear on Locklear, then snapped it to “port arms.” Three others spun as the big belter shouted, “Gomulka! We’ve got one!”
A big fireplug of a man, wearing sergeant’s stripes, whirled and moved away from a cabin window, motioning a smaller man beneath the other window to stay put. Striding toward the belter, he used the heavy bellow of command. “Parker, escort him in! Schmidt, watch the perimeter.”