The atmosphere sections of the Parahuan’s eyes were open. They watched her steadily. The tanglecord clamped about his arms and feet was tight and in place. Nile pulled the strip away from the vocal slit, set him upright against a clump of sestran, backed away eight or nine feet, and sat down, holding the gun loosely before her. She studied the alien for some seconds.
He didn’t look too formidable, but Ticos’ caution against underestimating Palachs of any grade probably was well founded. Their approach to immortality involved a progressive induced metamorphosis. The muscular structure became condensed and acquired extreme efficiency. Most of the thinking apparatus was buried inside the chunky torso; presumably it did not undergo physiological changes. Reduced to essentials, Ticos had said. Very well, she’d watch this Great Palach. . . .
What did he see in her? A Tuvela? Nile had a mental picture of herself—lean, next to naked, smeared with colorful plant sap. Hardly the most impressive image. But it couldn’t be helped. She was a Guardian of the Federation of the Hub, a Tuvela. To him, she was gromgorru. A mysterious, powerful being, with information sources beyond her captive’s knowledge. The last, at any rate, she had.
She said, “I believe I am addressing the Great Palach Koll.”
The manikin stared a long moment. At last the vocal slit moved. “And I believe” a voice like golden velvet told her, “that I address a Hulon named Etland.”
Hulon—Parahuan term signifying low-grade human. There’d been no suggestion of alien inflection in the words. They had studied humanity in patient detail.
“You have another name for us,” the Tuvela said indifferently. “Call me Hulon if you wish. Where are you holding Dr. Cay at present?”
“Not far from here. What is your interest in Dr. Cay?”
“Our interest in Dr. Cay,” Nile said, “is less than it was. He has not performed well in this test.”
“Test?” Koll’s voice had thinned. Nile regarded him a moment.
“Surely you must have wondered from time to time,” she remarked, “why no one came here to inspect Dr. Cay’s activities. Yes, a test. Not that it’s your concern, Great Palach, but Dr. Cay was a candidate for the true-life. I’m not sure he will remain one. When we saw you had discovered him, we waited to observe how capably he would handle this unexpected situation. I’m disappointed in him.”
Koll’s vocal slit opened and closed silently twice. The Tuvela scowled absently.
“However, I’m more than disappointed in the Everliving,” she resumed. “If you didn’t find Dr. Cay sufficiently persuasive, very moderate intelligence alone should have told you to be long gone from here . . . and glad to be away! Haven’t you felt the snare this world represents waiting about you? Has the Sacred Sea grown senile instead of immortal?”
She shrugged. A Tuvela, after all, was not greatly interested in the limitations of Porad Anz.
“You’ll be told to go now,” she stated. “You’ve been butchering the ones you call Hulons a little too freely. That disgusts me. It seems you fear even the human shape so much you revert to your animal beginnings when you meet it. We don’t choose to see our people wasted—and Dr. Cay has had time enough to demonstrate his present lack of satisfactory potential.”
Silence. Long silence. The sestran shrubs rustled. Wind roaring rose and ebbed in the distance. The air was darkening quickly. The wizened manikin sat motionless, staring.
Gromgorru, Nile thought. It had been weighing on both sides. It should weigh heavily on the Parahuans now. A Tuvela was about, an invisible ghost in the floatwood. It had plucked the Great Palach Koll from his grisly command post. Bear down on those fears. Yes, it might very well work. . . .
The velvet voice said suddenly, “I see and hear a creature lying in clever desperation to conceal its helplessness. You can’t escape and you can’t contact your kind. You did not come here to tell the Everliving they must leave. You’re here because you were trapped.”
Nile’s lips curled. “The sken beam? If the technicians who examined my car understood what they saw, they must know I could have blocked such a device. And by the true-life, I believe I can play the hunting game against a mob of Oganoon and stupid animals! Great Palach Koll, Voice of Action—look around! Who is trapped here, and who is helpless?”
She leaned forward. “The stupidity of Porad Anz! It tampered with our worlds and was thrown out. All it learned was to look for allies before it tried to come back. No doubt you’d need allies—more than you can find. But you’ve already found too many to make the Great Plan possible! Even if we’d had no other methods of information, your secret was spread too far to remain a secret—”
She broke off. Koll was quivering. The vocal slit made spitting sounds.
“We’d been minded to spare you,” the Tuvela began again. “But—”
“Guardian, be silent!” The voice was squeezed down to an angry whine. “Lies and tricks! The Everliving will not listen!”
The Tuvela laughed. “When I come to them with a Great Palach tied in a rag, dangling headdown from my belt, they won’t listen?”
Koll squealed—and became a blur of rubbery motion.
The long legs swung up, brought the fettered feet to his shoulder. Something projected in that instant from the shoulder, a half-inch jet of fire. It touched the tanglecord, and the tanglecord parted. The webbed toes of one foot gripped one of the jewels on Koll’s head, pulled it free. The other leg was beneath him again; it bent, straightened; and he came toward Nile in a long, one-legged hop, quick and balanced. The jewel-handled needle gripped in his foot leveled out. . . .
Nile was in motion herself by then, dropping back, rolling sideways—
The needle spat a thread of pink radiance along her flank as she triggered the UW.
And that was that. The UW’s beam was hot, and Koll was in mid-jump, moving fast, as it caught him. His lumpy torso was very nearly cut in two.
Nile got up shakily, parted the sestran stems through which he had plunged, and looked down from the floatwood branch. Nothing but the waving, shadowy greenery of the vertical jungle below . . . and no point in hunting around for the body of the Great Palach down there. Ticos had neglected to mention that the thick Parahuan hide could be used to conceal an arsenal, but after seeing the communicator Koll carried grafted to himself, the possibility should have occurred to her.
Why had he attacked at that particular moment? She hadn’t convinced him Porad Anz faced destruction unless the invading force withdrew—or else he had such a seething hatred for mankind that the fate of his own race was no longer of sufficient consideration. But apparently she had convinced him that a majority of the Palachs would accept what she said.
He should know, Nile thought. She’d lost her prisoner, but the Great Palach Koll dead, silenced, vanished, remained an impressive witness to the Tuvelas’ capability and stern ruthlessness.
Let the Everliving stew in the situation a while. She’d give them indications presently that she was still around the island. That should check any impulse to launch a hasty military operation. Meanwhile she’d try to find out where Ticos was held, and prepare to carry out other plans . . . And now it was time to check with Sweeting and learn what her water scouting had revealed.
Nile dropped quietly down out of the sestran thicket to lower branches to avoid arousing the chaquoteels, and slipped away into the forest.
Back down at the water’s edge, she looked out from a niche between two trunks at the neighboring island section. It was the largest of the five connected forests, a good half wider and longer than this one and lifting at least a hundred yards farther into the air. From the car she’d seen thick clusters of a dark leafless growth rising higher still from a point near the forest’s center, like slender flexible spear shafts whipping in the wind. Oilwood it was called. Weeks from now, when the island rode into the electric storm belts of the polar sea, the oilwood would draw lightning from the sky to let its combustible sheathing burn away and the ripened seeds beneath tumble down through the forest into the ocean.
Set ablaze deliberately tonight, it should provide a beacon to mark the island for Parrol and let him know where she was to be found.
The water between the two forests wasn’t open. The submerged root system extended from one to the other; and on the roots grew the floatwood’s aquatic symbiotes, pushing out from the central lagoon, though their ranks thinned as they approached the rush of the open sea. The Parahuans wouldn’t have stopped hunting for her, and ambushes could easily be laid in that area. The sea south of the forest seemed to offer a safer crossing, now that evening darkened the sky and reduced surface visibility. The Meral Current carried weed beds: dense moving jungles which provided cover when needed.