Masters of Everon (23 page)

There was one... two... three ... Jef counted fifteen mature maolots lying scattered separately on the cliff-edge over some three hundred meters of distance. There were more, Mikey said, out of sight behind rocks or trees.

"But what are they all doing here?" Jef asked.

His gaze was drawn down into the woods. Once more he had trouble finding anything there but the natural elements of the scene. Then, urged on by whatever direction from Mikey was guiding his attention, he located a single, light, ducted-fan aircraft, pulled in under the cover of one of the large, elmlike trees, at the edge of a clearing just big enough to land in. As he watched, a human figure came out from under the tree, shaded its eyes and looked away into the sunset sky, out over the grassland.

The figure gazed for a second or two, then turned and went back under the tree again.

Something, his feeling from Mikey told him, would be happening soon.

"What's going to happen?" Jef asked. Jef got an impression of other humans on their way here. "What are they coming here for?" Jef asked. They were coming, the realization took shape in his mind, to destroy a part of the forest and let the grass take over that area. Jef felt a cold, growing sense of shock that left his empty-stomached body feeling a little giddy. It was true, then, what Jarji had said. There had indeed been illegal clearing of forest land. This, that Mikey had brought him here to see, had to be illegal or else why would it be taking place in such secrecy? The aircraft hidden from overhead view under the trees, the solitary watcher looking for others that he gathered through Mikey were just now arriving with the beginning of night to do their work, all this pointed toward an action that would not bear the light of day or the open gaze of the law.

He looked again for the human under the tree with the plane; but in the waning light Jef could not be sure any longer that he was making the watcher out of the shadows that surrounded him and his vehicle. Jef looked for the other maolots distributed along the ridge and found them lost also in the gathering obscurity. On the cliff the light was better than in the woods below. But the dimness was enough so that the watching maolots had blended into their surroundings.

I can help you see them, he felt Mikey informing him.

The bond between the two of them intensified. It was as if the maolot was taking Jef's mind on to the back of his own, as he had taken Jef on to the back of his body to carry him away from Beau leCourboisier's headquarters. As it had been with that physical carrying, it was not something he could make happen by himself. His mind offered a ride to Jef's, and Jef, with an effort equal to that with which he had scrambled up behind the shoulders of Mikey, had to stretch his new capacities for rapport to take advantage of what was now being made possible to him.

It was a small but indescribable struggle that ended with Jef triumphantly riding the current of Mikey's perceptions. Once sure that Jef was solidly with him, Mikey reached out to look at the maolots below, one by one, through the viewpoint of some creature or object near them.

To Jef, the feeling was like riding a roller coaster. He felt himself swoop down into a viewpoint that showed him, from a body-length away, the side view of a majestic, mature maolot female, gazing out impassively between two tall boulders. The image was faintly distorted, as if he looked through the multifaceted eyes of some insect. There was a moment of watching, then another swoop to a new point of view; and now he was looking at one more of the massive watchers, a male lying with paws together and head up, gaze fixed on the distant grassland beneath the sunset area of the sky. This watcher turned his head, as though aware of being observed, until he faced whatever point of view Mikey was using to watch him. But as he did, his eyes closed, so that when Jef became able to look directly at them, they were as blind-appearing as Mikey's.

Jef felt chilled. Clearly, the impression came to him, the large male knew Jef was looking at him; and, equally clearly, he had deliberately closed his eyes to keep Jef from seeing them. There was distancing in that action, a shutting-out. Jef found himself feeling more lonely than he had thought it possible to feel.

Another swoop, and Jef was looking at another large female. Then another male, and another mature female. Mikey moved Jef's point of view along the cliff top, stopping at each of the silent sentinels. Some of these ignored the observation that was being made of them, some turned to look; but all who looked closed their eyes before Jef could see into them.

At last Mikey returned their point of view to his own body behind the divided spire and his mind released Jef's point of view. Jef sat back against the face of rock that supported him, dazed. Once—it seemed like months ago, now—he had thought that it was probably as well Jarji had not been able to supply him with a crossbow; because, inexperienced as he was with such a weapon and powerful as a full-grown maolot must be, he would probably only anger such a creature by trying to defend himself with it. He had been thinking then only of the physical size and power of the adult. Now he faced the fact that if one of these he watched had stepped out then from between the trees of the forest through which he had been traveling, and done no more than look at him with closed eyes, he would still have been as helpless as a small bird charmed by a snake.

Slowly the emotional effect of what he had just seen receded.

Look, Mikey told him. Now they come.

He turned to stare out over the forest and the grassland. The sun was just winking below the horizon; and, as he watched, it went. Now that it was gone he was able to see other little winks of light, several hundred feet above the grasslands and approaching. As these grew closer, he saw they were the last of the last daylight, caught by planes high enough in the air to still be able to do so, and reflected off the shinier underparts of their wings and bodies.

There were four of them. They came in, circled, and went down, one by one, to land in the clearing where the single human and his craft already waited. After gazing at the still-bright sky, the shadow in the clearing below seemed night-dark to Jef. But plainly there was enough light for craft to land safely. As Jef continued to watch, his eyes adjusted to the dimmer scene and he saw them all settle in the clearing. There were figures moving around them on the ground; but it was now literally too dim to make out any details. Without warning, the dazzle of a guide beam for an industrial laser flickered into life at the edge of the clearing, and one of the tall, dark fingers that were the elmlike native trees, began to lean, further and faster as it went, until it came crashing to the ground.

It's begun, Mikey informed Jef; and Jef had a sudden image of the trees and bushes all cut down and the new open ground sown with fertilizer. By dawn the low moss-grass in the cleared area would begin putting up microscopic stems. In a week the grass here would be almost as tall as that full grown in the rest of the grasslands and humans like himself would hardly be able to tell where forest had used to be.

Jef stared as more dazzles of lights appeared and other trees began to fall.

Now the older ones go, Mikey said.

Startled, Jef looked down at the clifftop. It had become too dim, even up here, to see the shapes of the adult maolots; but through Mikey Jef felt that they had indeed gone.

"Where?" Jef asked.

Mikey showed him.

Jef found himself loping through the night forest. The men with the industrial lasers were close, but the adult whose point of view he was now inhabiting mentally paid no attention to them. Ahead was the edge of the grassland. A moment later and he was plunging through the grass with the same gait but much faster than Mikey had traveled in bringing Jef to the cliff.

The grassland was dark. The cloudless sky overhead was a darkness in which only a few first points of stars shone. There was nothing to be seen; but the maolot which was Jef could feel his fellows spread out in a skirmish line five hundred meters wide, sweeping out into the grasslands at a steady pace of better than fifty kilometers an hour.

Come, Mikey told Jef. We need to get started too, so we can meet them afterwards.

"Afterwards—what?" Jef asked, as he remounted Mikey.

Afterwards, said Mikey. Jef would see.

With Jef on his back, Mikey began to move once more along the line of the rocky ridge. It ran for several kilometers before it either lowered to a level with the surrounding land, or the land rose to join it. At first it was dark going, but then a moon rose. Its rising was seen first by the adults out in the sea of grass some moments before Mikey and Jef could see it. Above the waving grass-tops it produced as spectacular a picture as had the daybreak Jef had seen. Only this was a picture painted all in silvers and greys and blacks. Seeing it through the mind of Mikey to the mind of the particular maolot with which he was in direct contact, Jef found himself caught up in the identity of the older alien—to the point where his ride on Mikey became the dream and his sensations of coursing through the tall grass on his own four legs, the reality. He snorted the night air deep into his enormous lungs. The moonlight intoxicated him. His feet seemed to barely touch the earth at the end and beginning of each leap, and his limbs felt as if they could keep carrying him so forever. With ten-meter strides he spurned the planet beneath him, sending it spinning with his pads. Ahead were those he sought.

Ahead, Jef became aware, was a darker line against the moonlit grass. It was a darkness that grew until it became recognizable as a mass of animals—a mass of wisents. It was a herd of three thousand of the Earth variform animals, his maolot knew, feeding and jostling each other, with females and young in toward the center of the herd, males toward the outside, their eyes watching, their horns ready, an uneasiness in their dim minds making them alert for possible attack. Not an attack from maolots, but from bulky, oiled-metal things that patrolled around them, keeping them in one tight herd. Riding wisents, the herd animals were used to—though these faster-legged, lighter-weight, close cousins, genetically tailored to be a riding animal for the Everon settlers, were regarded as an enemy tribe by the herd beasts and attacked whenever they could be cornered. Aircraft overhead, they were also used to. But never in their lives had any of them seen one of Everon's few, valuable prototype trucks with their noisy and smelling internal combustion engines, and these filled them with uneasy fears.

The adults were close now. They were no longer bounding forward, but sneaking through the grass below its feathery surface. The adult that Jef's mind rode with was now circling the circling trucks, passing close enough to the men in the bed of one truck, sitting around the industrial laser mounted there on a swivel base like a heavy duty military rifle, so that their talk could be plainly heard. Heard, and by Jef, understood.

"...how the hell much longer?"

"Four hours, radio says."

"Four hours, and then four hours to make the drive in. Why we got to lie this far out? No sense..."

"...the maolots."

"Hell, we cut one in half, he shows up. Four hour drive! We could lay one hour out and have the trees down and the herd in by midnight."

"Wait'll you made more'n one of these drives. Maolots are smart."

"What good's smart against an industrial laser? Ten script against the first one I see getting away."

"That's no bet. You see one, of course it's not getting away."

"Put or shut..."

"Besides, the satellite pictures don't have to show wisents already on the land. Just helps in court, if they do."

"Sure, tell us, Holbert. How many thousand head do you own? How many new patches you open up before now?"

—Somewhere, on the far side of the herd, the deep, carrying call of an adult male maolot droned in the night.

The wisent grunted and milled. In a couple of seconds the outer ring was solidly composed of bulls, their horns lowered. Their unease over the unknown trucks was drowned now in their certain awareness of the maolots.

Searchlights were on in each of the vehicles. Bright beams were sweeping the grasstop. Voices were calling and speaking by intercom from truck to truck.

"What do you see?"

"Damnall, that's what I see. What do you see?"

"There's only one of them."

"How come you're so smart, Harlie?"

"Get that light over here! I thought I saw something—"

"Use your own light!"

"—Damn, he was moving too fast..."

Slowly, gradually the talk lowered in pitch and became less excited. The wisent calmed.

From another quarter a mature male sounded not a full roar, but a droning, hunting call.

Alarm rose again. The wisents stamped and tried to gather into an even tighter bunch. The trucks put on speed, waving the beams of their searchlights around energetically. Slowly, much more slowly this time, things calmed once more in the silence of the night.

"What the hell, Harlie, one maolot's not going to attack five trucks—"

A drone sounded beyond the side of the herd that faced the recently risen moon. Another answered almost immediately from the other side of the herd.

"There's two of them! I told you, I told you there was more than just one—"

"Shut up! Listen!"

A series of uneasy waves of movement, like waves in the ocean from some underwater disturbance, were rippling through the close-packed wisents. Individual animals in the herd were trying to turn from one threat to face horns-out at another, and finding the herd so tightly pushed together that turning was impossible. Instinct to face danger, head down, warred with instinct to huddle together as tightly as possible.

"—Do something!" a voice from one truck was shouting. "Those maolots keep getting this herd worked up and half of them'll run themselves to death when we finally start moving them into the new patch! Harlie! Ty! Your two trucks break circle! See if you can run those bastards down!"

Two of the circling trucks—one on each side of the herd-turned out from their patrol route and began to swing back and forth in figure eights outside the circle the other trucks were making around the herd. Within the identity of his maolot, crouched now in the grass with heavy jaws open as if laughing while he watched, Jef felt triumph.