West of Eden. Chapter 24, 25, 26, 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The fargi was eager to deliver her message—a message to the Eistaa herself!—but in her eagerness she had moved too fast in the heat of the day. When she reached the ambesed her mouth gaped so wide and she breathed so fast that talking now was impossible. In an agony of indecision she lurched forward into the sun, then fell back into the cool shadows. Was there a waterpool nearby? In her confused state she could not remember. None of the fargi nearby paid any heed to her moving fingers and the play of colors across the palms of her hands. They were selfish, thinking only of themselves, never helping another fargi. She grew angry, ignoring the fact that she would have done exactly the same thing herself in a similar situation. In desperation she looked into nearby corridors and finally found a drinking fruit. She sucked the cool water from it, then squeezed the rest of its contents over her arms and body. Her breathing finally slowed and she hazarded an attempt at speaking.
“Eistaa… I bring you a message…”
Rough but understandable. Walking slowly now, keeping to the shadows, she circled the ambesed, pushing her way through the clustered fargi to the empty space before the Eistaa. Once there she stiffened her body into the position of expectant-attention, lowest to the highest.
It was Vanalpè who noticed her after some time and drew Vaintè’s attention to the silent figure.
“Speak,” Vaintè ordered.
The fargi shivered with apprehension and had to force herself to speak the carefully memorized words.
“Eistaa, I bring message. Message is from she who feeds the raptor. The bird is returned.”
“Returned!” Vaintè was delighted and the fargi writhed with joy, believing in her simplicity that the pleasure was directed at her. Vaintè summoned another fargi with a quick motion. “Find Stallan. She is to attend me at once.” She turned back to the fargi who had brought the message.
“You. Return to the ones with the bird. Stay with them until the pictures are ready for me to see then come and inform me. Repeat.”
“Return to those with the bird. Stay. Return to the Eistaa when ready are the…”
“Pictures, views, landscapes.” Vaintè said it three different ways so the stupid creature could understand. “Repeat, akayil.”
Akayil, disgust-in-speech. The watching fargi whispered the terrible expression to each other and felt fear, moving away from the messenger when she left as though afraid of some contamination.
“Vanalpè, how long will the process take?” Vaintè asked.
“To start with, the information is available now. The memory store of the bird’s ganglion array will have been dumped into a larger memory bank. I have done this myself when recording growth patterns. The first pictures and the last pictures may be seen at once—but finding one’s way through the information in between is the time-consuming part.”
“Your meaning is not clear.”
“I am stupid in my explanations, Eistaa. The bird has been gone for very many days. All of this time, night and day, a picture has been memorized every few moments. The memory creature may be instructed to remove all the black pictures of the night, but countless more still remain. Then each picture must be brought to the liquid-crystal screen, to be ignored or recorded. This will take days, many days.”
“Then we will be patient and we will wait.” She looked up and saw the stocky, scarred figure of Stallan approaching and signaled her close.
“The bird has returned. We will soon know if the ustuzou have been found. Are we ready to mount an attack?”
“We are. The fargi now shoot well, the hèsotsan are well-fed. More dart-bushes have been planted and many darts have been gathered. The boats have been breeding and some of the young ones are big enough for service.”
“Ready them. Load food and water, then attend me. You, Vanalpè, your experience with pictures will be put to good use now. You will go at once to aid those who do that work.”
For the rest of that day, and all of the next, Vaintè guided the city and put all thought of ustuzou from her mind. But on every occasion when she relaxed and there was no one close to speak to, instant memory returned. Had the ustuzou been found? If they had been found they must be killed, sought out and destroyed. Her nose flaps whitened with anger when she thought of the ustuzou. When she felt like this she took no pleasure from eating, while her temper was so short that one frightened fargi died after her savagely curt dismissal. It was a good thing for the well-being of the city that word finally reached Vaintè on the third day.