Midworld (21 page)

“Do you think this is a feast for us?” Born reminded him, and he and Losting moved off to search for any of the platterlike green disks they had passed that showed signs of blight or disease.

Cohoma leaned back in the foliage until the two hunters had disappeared into the green wall. Then he rolled over and watched Logan, who was busy with the compass. “Still on course?”

She shrugged. “As near as I can tell, Jan. You know, what you said before is true. We have to hit the station dead on. We’ve got three chances to miss it—by going under it, too far right, or too far left.”

He picked at the leaf they were sitting on. “I wish we hadn’t had to make that surface detour, damnit.”

“Could hardly be helped. What’s the matter, Jan, didn’t you find it interesting?”

“Interesting?” He let out a sinister chuckle. “It’s one thing to study alien aberrations from the skimmer in back of a laser cannon. Being eaten alive by an entry in the catalog is the kind of experience I can do without.”

“We’re going to have a problem soon, you know.”

“Oh, you’re full of surprises, Kimi, you are.”

“Seriously. If we’re not going to risk missing the station, we’re going to have to convince our friends of the need of traveling near the treetops. With their sense of distance thrown off by our little raft ride, the sooner we move up in the world, the better.”

“The station’s built only a little ways into the canopy, true.”

“And Born and his people,” she continued, “are deathly afraid of the sky. Not as much as they are of the surface, though.” She looked thoughtful. “With that successfully survived now, maybe he’ll be a little less reluctant to move upward. Remember, he doesn’t know the station is located at the top of the First Level. He may have come to half believe we do come from a world other than this one. I think that’s more likely to find place in his imagination than the possibility we might chose to live here in his Upper Hell.”

Cohoma shook his head. “I still wish I understood what this emfol business is all about. It would seem to be some kind of adaptive worship of the undergrowth.” Logan nodded.

“Is it surprising they’d look underfoot for succor and supernatural aid? The bottom of their world is hell, and so is the upper. That leaves them neatly sandwiched in between, with no way out. Naturally their development would proceed along restricted, unorthodox lines. It’s too bad, in a way. Born, the chiefs Sand and Joyla, and several others have a kind of nobility about them.”

Cohoma snorted, rolled over. “The biggest mistake an objective observer on a world like this can make is to romanticize the primitive. And in the case of these people, even that’s not valid. They’re not true primitives, only regressed survivors of people like ourselves.”

“Tell me, Jan,” she murmured, “is it really regression, or is it progression along an alien path?”

“Huh? What’s that you said?”

“Nothing … nothing. I’m tired, that’s all.”

THE MEAL OF TOUGH
dried fruit and tougher meat was long concluded when the sleepless Logan finally edged over to where Born was sitting. The hunter was resting close to the fire, his back pushed up against the bulk of the snoring Ruumahum. Losting was already asleep at the far end of the large, crude leanto. Wrapped awkwardly in his brown cloak, her partner dozed fitfully.

There was one important question she wanted to resolve now. “Tell me, Born, do you and your people believe in a god?”

“A god or gods?” he replied interestedly, at least not offended by the question.

“No, a single god. One all-powerful, all-seeing intelligence that directs the affairs of the universe, that accounts for and plans everything.”

“That implies the absence of free will,” Born responded, surprising her as he sometimes did with a very unprimitive reply.

“Some accept that, too,” she admitted. “I accept nothing of it, nor do any I know,” he told her. “There is far too much in this world for any one being to keep account of it all. And you say there are other worlds as complex as this, too?” He smiled. “No, we do not believe such.”

At least she could go to Hansen with that much, now. It was too bad. Belief in the existence of a single god would imply a fixed set of ethical and moral precepts on which to base certain proposals and regulations. Spiritual anarchy made dealings with primitive people more difficult. One couldn’t call on a higher authority to serve as a binding agency. Well, that was a problem for Hansen and whatever xenosociologists the company chose to send in to deal with Born’s people. She started to turn away, then hesitated. If she could at least plant that seed in Born’s mind … “Born, has it occurred to you that we’ve had incredible luck on this journey?”

“I do not call sleeping in a silverslith’s tree good luck.”

“But we escaped it, Born. And there’ve been any one of a dozen … no, several dozen times we could all have been killed. Yet we haven’t even suffered a minor injury, beyond the usual nicks and scrapes.”

That caused him to think a minute, as she had intended. Finally he murmured, “I am a great hunter. Losting is a good hunter, and Ruumahum and Geeliwan are wise and experienced. Why should we not have been as successful as we have?”

“You don’t think it strange, despite the fact that five days’ journey is the longest any of your people have ever traveled from the Home before and returned?”

“We have not yet reached our destination, or returned,” he countered quietly.

“That’s so,” she admitted, edging back toward her own sleeping place. “So you don’t think this implies the intervention of a guiding, watchful presence, like a god? One who always knows what’s good for you and watches over you?”

Born looked solemn. “It did not watch over us when the Akadi came, but I will think on it.” And he turned away from her.

She had planted the seed. Satisfied with that and with what Hansen would have to say about it, she rolled up in her cloak and closed her eyes. Not that there were any missionaries at the station who would thank her. The station was hardly a Churchblessed enterprise. The steady drip of rain trickling down to this level through a million leaves and petals and stems formed a lulling rhythm on the lean-to roof, allowing her finally to fall asleep.

“We’ve got to go up to the top of the First Level, Born,” Logan insisted the next day.

Born shook his head. “Too dangerous to travel so much in the sky.”

“No, no,” she went on in exasperation. “We don’t have to stick our heads out into open air. We can stay a good twenty-five meters,” and she translated that into percentage of level for him, “below the topmost leaves. No sky-demon is going to dive through that much brush to get at you.”

“The First Level has dangers of its own,” Born countered defensively. “They are smaller than those of the Home level, but faster, harder to find and kill before they strike.”

“Look, Born,” Cohoma tried to explain, “we could miss the station completely if we travel below that point. It’s constructed— like our skimmer—out of materials set down into the forest top, but not far into it. If we miss it and have to try and backtrack, we could get so confused as to direction that we’d never be able to find it. We could wander around in this jungle for years.” For emphasis, he grabbed the compass, showed it again to Bo and Losting as though they could comprehend its principle. “See this direction finder of ours? It works best the first time you hunt with it for a place. It grows less useful with each successive failure.”

Eventually Born gave in, as Logan suspected he would. Their iconoclastic hunter had only two choices—take their advice now, or abort the journey. After all they had been through, she did not think he would suggest the latter.

So they continued upward. Gradually this time, not in a muscle-killing vertical climb, but on a slant. In this manner they moved forward as well as higher, through the Fifth Level, the Fourth, and Third. She could sense their reluctance to leave those comforting, familiar surroundings for the danger and uncertainty of the upper canopy. Both she and Cohoma had grown so hylaeawise by now, however, that neither hunter attempted to fool them into believing they had reached a higher level.

Up they mounted, through the Second Level, where the sunlight was brilliant yellow-green, where it struck most vegetation directly and not with the aid of mirror vines. Where the day was bright enough to resemble the floor of a north temperate evergreen forest on Moth or Terra. Logan and Cohoma expanded, while Born and Losting grew steadily more cautious.

Then they were in the First Level itself, climbing amid a profusion of riotously colored flowers, etched and engraved and painted by a nature delirious with her own beauty. Logan knew that any of the botanists restricted to the station and to studying specimens recovered by the skimmer teams would give an arm to be here with them now. Company policy forbade it, given the inimical nature of this world. Botanists were expensive.

All the basic shadings and hues merged together with more exotic coloration. Logan passed a maroon bloom half a meter across, its pigment so intense it was nearly purple in places. The petals were striped with aquamarine blue, and it rested on a bed of metallic gold leaves.

Nor was drunken variation limited only to color. One blossom boasted petals which grew in interlocking, multiple spirals of pink and turquoise and almond. Cohoma promptly dubbed it the clown plant. There were flowers that grew like a phalanx of pikes, green flowers springing from green stems, and green branches that sprouted green graphs. There were flowers inside flowers, flowers the color of smoky quartz, flowers with transparent petals that tasted of caramel.

And these were matched in glitter and evolutionary exuberance by a swarming multitude of nonvegetable life, which crawled, hopped, glided, buzzed, and swung about like animated dreams before the spellbound gaze of the two skimmer pilots. Born was right—they were smaller and they moved faster, some darting across their pathway too rapidly to be seen as other then a blur.

Hunters and gatherers here would have to work four times as hard to gather the same amount of food. There was greater natural competition here and, according to the hunters, greater danger as well. Which explained why the survivors of the trapped colony ship had chosen to forego this aerial paradise for the less competitive regions of the Third and Fourth Levels. Having observed the thunderous nightly storms from the comparative safety of the station, Logan assumed the protection the depths offered from violent weather was another factor in the decision to descend.

The noise might have been still another factor. It was deafening here. Much of it seemed to emanate from huge colonies of little six-legged creatures about the size of a man’s thigh. About half-a-meter long, they were slimly built and moved rapidly through the thinner branches with six-clawed legs. Hard-shelled limbs joined to a furry cylindrical body, one end of which tapered into a long, whiplike tail, the other ending in a snout like an aardvark’s. The familiar triple oculars were set back of this, and behind them rose a single, flexible ridge of flesh, which appeared to be a sound sensor.

They were the mockingbirds of this world, the hexapodal kookaburras, uttering everything from a high-pitched whistle to a tenor cackle. Tribes of them accompanied the party as it made its way through the vinepaths, offering unintelligible insults and suggestions. Occasionally one of the furcots would snarl menacingly at them and they would scatter, only to reappear when communal courage grew strong enough, to berate and admonish once again. Only boredom drove them off.

Yet another reason for living lower down offered it self. Even here, many dozens of meters below the crowns of the trees, the branches and cubbies were thinner, less roadlike. Vines and lianas and creepers thinned in proportion. More often than they liked, Logan and Cohoma found themselves using their arms instead of their legs to move from one place to the next. When Born asked if they were tiring and wished to drop to more easily negotiable paths, both gritted their teeth, wiped the sweat clear from eyes and forehead, and shook their heads. Better to expend all one’s reserves here than risk passing below the station.

They continued on that way, now and then dipping downward when the forest top thinned too much for Born’s comfort, rising again where the hylaea bulged into the sky.

It rained early that night. For the first time since their skimmer had crashed, both giants were subjected to a thorough drenching before the two hunters could erect suitable shelter. Without hundreds of meters of intervening foliage to protect them, they caught the full force of the nightly downpour. The volume and fury they had anticipated from having observed similar storms from inside the station. It was the noise that was surprising—the station was effectively soundproofed against it. They had descended a good thirty meters more in hopes of securing a little protection. Even here the forest shook and rattled. Real, steady wind up here, not the lost, dallying zephyr they had encountered at the Home’s level.

There was no soundproofing to shut out the lightning and thunder, which rattled their brains in counterpoint to the flogging rain. Logan sneezed, reflected miserably that the first colonists here could have perished from pneumonia had they not chosen to live at more sheltered depths. It was only a momentary chill—the humidity and constant warmth made it hard to catch the serious cold she feared. But when the sun rose steamily bright the following morning, both pilots remained soaked to the skin.

Under the concerned directions of Born—and Losting’s more taciturn comments—they underwent a reeducation in the following days. This world nearer the sky was as deadly as Born had indicated; only here the methodology of murder was matched in deadliness by the subtlety of execution. Without the advice and protection of Born, Losting, and the furcots, both giants would have been dead within a day.

The danger which remained sharpest in Logan’s mind was a brilliant yellow fruit. Hourglass-shaped and about the size of a pear, its blossoms exuded a fragrance redolent of spring honeysuckle. The epiphytic bush was top-heavy with this fruit. Born pointed out how tokkers and other fruit-eaters assiduously avoided it.