Heaven's Reach (7 page)

Anyway, his real task was to look for less exotic interlopers.

Most of his ship sightings were of hydrogen breathers, easily identified because their balloonlike vessels looked the same in any continuum. For some reason, members of that order liked taking shortcuts through E Space on their way from one Jupiter-type world to another, even though A and B levels were more efficient, and transfer points much faster.

On those rare occasions when Harry spotted anyone from his own order of oxygen breathers—the great and mighty Civilization of Five Galaxies—none of them approached his sentry position, defending a proscribed route to a forbidden place.

No wonder they hired a low-class chim for this job. Even criminals, trying to sneak into a fallow zone, would be fools to use allaphor space as a back door.

As I'm a fool, to be stuck guarding it.

Still, it beat the dry, windy steppes of Horst.

Anything was better than Horst.

He and his parents were the only members of their species on the planet, which meant the long process of learning speech, laborious for young neo-chimps, came doubly hard. With Marko and Felicity distracted by research, Harry had to practice with wild-eyed Probsher kids, who mocked him for his long, furry arms and early stammer. With painted faces and short tempers, they showed none of the dignified patience he'd been taught to expect from the elder race. By the time he learned how different humans were on Horst, it didn't matter. He vowed to leave, not only Horst, but Terragens society. To seek the strange and unfamiliar.

Years later, Harry realized a similar ambition must have driven his parents. In youthful anger, he had spurned their pleas for patience, their awkward affections, even their parting blessing.

Still, regret was just a veneer, forgiveness a civilized abstraction, devoid of pang or poignancy.

Other memories still had power to make his veins tense with emotion. Growing up listening to botbian night wolves howl across dry lakes under patch-gilt moons. Or holding his knees by firelight while a Probsher shaman chanted eerie tales—fables that Marko and Felicity avidly studied as venerable folk legends, although these tribes had roamed Horst for less than six generations.

His own sapient race wasn't much older! Only a few centuries had passed since human beings began genetic meddling in chimpanzee stock.

Who gave them the right?

No permission was needed. Galactics had followed the same pattern for aeons—each “generation” of starfarers spawning the next in a rippling bootstrap effect called Uplift.

On the whole, humans were better masters than most … and he would rather be sapient than not.

No. What drove him away from Earthclan was not resentment but a kind of detachment. The mayfly yammerings of Probsher mystics mattered no more or less than the desperate moves of the Terragens Council, against the grinding forces of an overwhelming universe. One might as well compare sparks rising from a campfire to the stars wheeling by overhead. They looked similar, at a glance. But what did another incandescent cinder really matter on the grand scale of things?

Did the cosmos care if humans or chims survived?

Even at university this notion threaded his thoughts. Harry's natural links elongated till they parted one by one. All that remained was a nebulous desire to seek out something lasting. Something that deserved to last.

Joining Wer'Q'quinn and the Navigation Institute, he
found something enduring, a decision he never regretted.

Still, it puzzled Harry years later that his dreams kept returning to the desolate world of his youth. Horst ribbed his memory. Its wind in the dry grass. Smells that assailed your nose, sinking claws into your sinuses. And images the shaman painted in your mind, like arcs of multicolored sand, falling in place to convey
deer
, or
loper-beast
, or
spearhunter.

Even as an official of Galactic civilization, representing the oxygen order on a weird plane of reality where allaphors shimmered in each window like reject Dali images, Harry still saw funnels of sparkling heat rising from smoky campfires, vainly seeking union with aloof stars.

Lark

N
OT THAT WAY!” LING SHOUTED.

Her cry made Lark stumble to a halt, a few meters down a new corridor.

“But I'm sure this is the best route back to our nest.” Lark pointed along a dim, curved aisle, meandering between gray ceramic walls. Strong odors wafted from each twisty, branching passageway aboard the mazelike Jophur ship. This one beckoned with distinct flavors of
GREEN
and
SANCTUARY
.

“I believe you.” Ling nodded. “That's why we mustn't go there. In case we're still being followed.”

She didn't look much like a star god anymore, with her dark hair hacked short and pale skin covered with soot. Wearing just a torn undertunic from her once shiny uniform, Ling now seemed far wilder than the Jijoan natives she once called “savages.” In a cloth sling she carried a crimson torus that leaked gore like a wounded sausage.

Lark saw her meaning. Ever since they had tried sabotaging the dreadnought's control chamber, giant Jophur and their robot servants had chased them across the vast
vessel. As fugitives, the humans mustn't lead pursuers to the one place offering food and shelter.

“Where to then?” Lark hated being in the open. He grasped their only weapon, a circular purple tube. Larger and healthier than the red one, it was their sole key to get past locked doors and unwary guardians.

Ling knew starships far better than he. But this behemoth warship was different. She peered up one shadowy tunnel, a curled shaft that seemed more organic than artificial.

“Just pick a direction. Quickly. I hear someone coming.”

With a wistful glance toward their “nest,” Lark took her hand and plunged away at right angles, into another passageway.

The walls glistened with an oily sheen, each passage or portal emitting its own distinct aroma, partly making up for the lack of written signs. Although he was just a primitive sooner, Lark did know traeki. Those cousins of the Jophur had different personalities, but shared many physical traits. As a Jijoan native, he could grasp many nuances in the shipboard scent language.

Despite the eerie hall curvature, he was starting to get a mental picture of the huge vessel—an oblate spheroid, studded with aggressive weaponry and driven by engines mighty enough to warp space in several ways. The remaining volume was a labyrinth of workshops, laboratories, and enigmatic chambers that puzzled even the star sophisticate, Ling. Since barely escaping the Jophur command center, they had worked their way inward, back toward the tiny eden where they had hidden after escaping their prison cell.

The place where they first made love.

Only now the greasy ring stacks had shut down all the axial drop tubes, blocking easy access along the
Polkjhy
's north-south core.

“It makes the whole ship run inefficiently,”
Ling had explained earlier, with some satisfaction.
“They can't shift or reassign crew for different tasks. We're still hurting them, Lark, as long as we're free!”

He appreciated her effort to see a good side to their
predicament. Even if the future seemed bleak, Lark felt content to be with her for as much time as they had left.

Glancing backward, Ling gripped his arm. Heightened rustling sounds suggested pursuit was drawing near. Then Lark also heard something from the opposite direction, closing in beyond the next sharp bend. “We're trapped!” Ling cried.

Lark rushed to the nearest sealed door. Its strong redolence reminded him of market days back home, when traeki torus breeders brought their fledglings for sale in mulch-lined pens.

He aimed the purple ring at a nearby scent plate and a thin mist shot from the squirming creature.
Come on. Do your stuff
, he silently urged.

Their only hope lay in this gift from the former traeki sage, Asx, who had struggled free of mental repression by a Jophur master ring just long enough to pop out two infant tubes. The human fugitives had no idea what the wounded red one was for, but the purple marvel had enabled them to stay free for several improbable days, ever since the battleship took off from Jijo on its manic errand through outer space.

Of course we knew it couldn't last.

The door lock accepted the coded chemical key with a soft click, and the portal slid open, letting them rush through acrid fumes into a dim chamber, divided by numerous tall, glass partitions. Lark had no time to sort impressions, however, before the corridor behind them echoed with
human
shouts and a staccato of running feet.

“Stop! Don't you stupid skins know you're just making things worse? Come out, before they start using—”

The closing door cut off angry threats by Ling's former commander. Lark pushed the purple traeki against the inner sense-plate, where it oozed aromatic scramblers—chemicals tuned to randomize the lock's coding. From experience, he knew it could take half a midura for their pursuers to get through—unless they brought heavy cutting tools to bear.

Why should they bother? They know we're trapped inside.

He found it especially galling to be cornered by Rann. The third human prisoner had thrown in his lot with the Jophur, perhaps currying favor for the release of his Rothen patron gods from frozen internment on Jijo. It left Lark with no options, since the purple ring would have nil effect on the big Danik warrior.

Turning around, Lark saw that the glass walls—stretching from floor to a high ceiling—made up giant vivariums holding row after row of wriggling, squirming things.

Midget traeki toruses!

Clear tubes carried brown, sludgelike material to each niche.

Refined liquid mulch. Baby food.

We're in their nursery!

By itself, no traeki ring was intelligent. Back on the world where they evolved, slithering through fetid swamps as wormlike scavengers, they never amounted to much singly. Only when traeki began stacking together and specializing did there emerge a unique kind of presapient life, ripe for adoption and Uplift by their snaillike Poa patrons.

This is where the
Polkjhy
crew grows special kinds of rings, packed with the right skills to be new members of the team.

A potent kind of reproduction. No doubt some of the pulsing doughnut shapes were
master rings
, designed millennia ago to transform placid, contemplative traeki into adamant, alarming Jophur.

Lark jumped as a human scream clamored down the narrow aisles. Pulse pounding, he ran, shouting Ling's name.

Her voice echoed off glass walls. “Hurry! They've got me cornered!”

Lark burst around a vivarium to find her at last, backing away from two huge Jophur workers, toward a niche in the far wall. The nursery staff, Lark realized. Each tapered pile consisted of at least thirty component toruses—swaying and hissing—two meters wide at the bottom and massing almost a ton. Their waxy flanks gleamed with an opulent vitality one never saw in traeki
back home on Jijo, flickering with meaningful patterns of light and dark. Colored stenches vented from chemsynth pores, as manipulator tendrils stretched toward Ling.

She moved lithely, darting left and right. Seeking an opening or else something to use as a weapon. There was no panic in her eyes, nor did she give Lark away in her relief to see him.

Of course, Jophur vision sensors faced all directions at once. But with that advantage came a handicap—slow reaction time. The first stack was still swaying toward its victim when Lark dashed up from behind. Somehow, Asx's gift knew to send a jet of sour spray, striking a gemlike organ that quickly spasmed and went dim.

The whole stack shuddered, slumping to quiescence. Lark wasted no time spinning toward the other foe—only to find his right arm suddenly pinned by an adamant tentacle! An odious scent of
TRIUMPH
swirled as the second Jophur pulled him close, coiling tendrils and commencing to squeeze.