The Farpool (34 page)

Kloosee dropped the lead kip’t down to a half
beat above the mud, leaving a tail of silt behind him as he slowed
for a closer look at a suspicious slump in the area. The kip’ts
following behind had to dodge and weave through the silt clouds as
best they could to avoid collision, which led to great deal of
grumbling but fortunately, no accidents. The city portals were
supposed to be underneath a shelf which thrust out over the decline
and which was nearly invisible even a few beats away. Finding it
was going to be hard, Kloosee could see that already and Tulcheah,
murmuring and dictating over the comm circuit, wasn’t much help
either. This was the way the Ponkti wanted things. Kloosee imagined
that Ponkti kip’ts and repeaters had the benefit of knowing where
exactly to pulse. Uninvited visitors weren’t so fortunate.

“They have to know we’re coming,” Kloosee
said, to himself, as much as anyone. “The city has to be somewhere
along this ridge. “Maybe we passed over it.”

The comm crackled with Tulcheah’s snarly
voice. “If you’d listened to me, we would have turned at that last
ridge and headed south.”

Kloosee didn’t answer.
If I listened to you, I’d be your third
armfin.

Longsee was sullen, glowering out of the
cockpit bubble at the bleak surroundings. The waters were murky
with silt and the ooze seemed to extend forever in all directions.
Not a single ting bush or weed broke the monotony. He
shuddered.

“What a desolate wasteland. Can’t you pulse
through this stuff?”

“It’s too deep,” Kloosee told him. He let the
kip’t settle gingerly on top of the mud. It sank a bit before
holding. “I think it would be better if I got out and did a little
roaming. We must be near the city by now.”

“A little roam would do all of us some good,”
Chase said. “It’s cramped back here,”

Chase helped Kloosee lift the cockpit bubble
and the two of them emerged from the sled. Chase did a few spins
around, just to get the kinks out.

Kloosee wandered off, looking for some sign
of the Ponkti city. Behind them, the rest of the convoy had halted
as well. Others were getting out, stretching, chattering, pulsing
the strange surroundings. He had traveled three beats away and had
turned around to head back when he thought he saw something move,
not far from the kip’t. Chase was headed that way too…he hadn’t
seen it. When he pulsed more closely, the sediment moved again.

Kloosee pulsed around for a few seconds,
finding only echoes from a distant mountain range, then he rushed
over to the disturbance, wondering if it were a signal, or a door.
He probed the upper layers with his hands. Curious, Chase drifted
by and studied the scene.

“Find something, Kloos?”

“I’m not—“

In an instant, they were on him, on both of
them. Chase and Kloosee were both surrounded before Kloosee could
pull his hand out, entangled in a sticky web of white tendrils,
almost before they could take a breath. Longsee and Angie had been
caught too; through the tendrils, he saw them struggling
furiously.

“K’orpuh!” Kloosee yelled. “Get back…get
back--!”

“Kloosee…” it was Tulcheah, rushing up.
“—get…away!”

Kloosee could feel their fuzzy skin brush his
fins as they wove a cocoon around him, pulling the filaments
tighter and tighter. A choking cloud of silt swirled around him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Chase fighting and
flailing.

“Don’t struggle!” he told Chase. “They’ll
just pull tighter—“

“What the—“

Even through the murk, he occasionally caught
a quick glimpse of their snake-like bodies. They darted in and out
of his vision like fat, mobile weeds, slick and gray as the silt
itself. He knew they carried a fatal electric charge but so far he
had escaped any jolt. They could also extrude a tough fiber and
encase a prey in seconds. That seemed to be their goal.

Kloosee heard Angie’s voice, muffled
but terrified, somewhere nearby.
She’s
going to be stung
, he thought, crying out like that.
He tested the cords encircling him and found them pliant but
strong. There was nothing he could do for the others now. And with
their stingers primed and ready, it would have been suicide for
Tulcheah or Tamarek or any of the others to try to get him
out.

They had blundered into a k’orpuh hold and
had little choice for the moment. Soon enough, the snakes would
finish wrapping them up. After that—

A few minutes later, almost on command, two
of the k’orpuh slipped their tails through the cords and started to
pull. The cocoon lifted from the floor and he was on his way—where
he couldn’t say. He saw Chase in the same predicament and decided
to settle down for the ride.

Better
to wait for the right moment,
he thought. He hoped
Chase understood that too.

He couldn’t see where they were going and
could only hope it wouldn’t take long to get there. He pulsed other
k’orpuh nearby, dragging their cocoons with them.

“Angie! Longsee! Are you hurt? Where are
you?”

There was no reply; perhaps, they had only
been stunned. Kloosee made himself believe that. With any luck,
once in the hold, the k’orpuh would gnaw through the fibers and he
would be able to escape and help them. He tried pulsing to see what
was ahead but the k’orpuhs’ motion broke up his echoes.

For a long time, there had been rumors among
the repeaters and kip’t pilots that the Ponkti had found a way to
train the k’orpuh to act as guard animals around Ponk’t but Kloosee
had always discounted those stories as unproven. The k’orpuh were
notorious for being unreliable, not to mention deadly, much like
the Ponkti themselves. The only known breeders were the Eep’kostic,
who raised the snakes in the south polar waters for their skins and
for sport purposes. It didn’t seem likely they would trade their
secrets to the Ponkti.

The cocoon bobbed along for awhile until
Kloosee became fatigued. He should have been more careful…he should
have known better—he had led the convoy right into a feeding ground
of the snakes—but it was too late for that now.

Suddenly, he thought he saw shapes ahead of
them, moving shapes, just beyond pulsing, headed their way. Kloosee
struggled in the cocoon to find the leverage to probe the dim gray
more carefully. He wasn’t mistaken. Five bodies were approaching
and each pulse made him more certain they were Seomish—in fact,
probably Ponkti. In a few minutes, they came into view.

They
were
Ponkti soldiers—there was no question about
that. Each of them wore heavy harnesses behind their dorsals. They
were armed with prods. Two of them carried long metal prods as
well, insulated at the grip, and they used these to poke the
k’orpuh away from his sack. The k’orpuh buzzed and slithered around
the ends of the prongs for awhile, but at last, they sulked off,
burrowing beneath the sediment. Kloosee thought to explain their
mission to Ponk’t but it was clear the prodsmen were in no mood to
listen. He said nothing as one of the prong-carriers hooked his
device through the cords of the sack and dragged him along, much as
the k’orpuh had done. Through the veil of the sack, he saw Chase
getting the same treatment. And beyond, he pulsed others in the
convoy coming up. Maybe Tulcheah could explain—

But the prodsmen would not be dissuaded from
their duty. They had traveled perhaps ten beats or so when the
sediment beds that had seemed to stretch to infinity dropped away
abruptly. They drifted out over a precipitous slope that fell below
them into a deep canyon, buried under scores of beats of silt.
Slowly, they descended, the entire convoy now shepherded along by
more prodsmen, and Kloosee watched wide-eyed as the cliff
inexorably gave way to a row of dim recesses in the rock face, cave
mouths he presumed, all arranged in a ragged line across the
cliff.

The prodsmen bore all of them toward one of
the openings. They reached it and the prodsmen pushed the sacks
containing Kloosee and Chase through ahead of them.

It took a few minutes for Kloosee to adjust
his eyes to the darkness and while he did, he pulsed about the cave
to learn more.

It was more of a narrow tunnel, he soon found
out, roughly rounded at the ceiling and, not unexpectedly, filled
with baffles, false chambers and row upon row of slender metal
cones lining the walls. A stunning field, he surmised, to kill
anything that got this far into the city.

The prodsmen dragged and pushed the k’orpuh
sacks and the rest of the Omtorish convoy through several tortuous
turns, then up to the edge of a long sloping ramp. An oval of pale
amber light glowed at the foot of the ramp and Kloosee pulsed a
very large cavern down there, beyond it.

The soldiers nudged the sack down the ramp,
along with the others, and they came at last into the heart of the
city of Ponk’t.

Kloosee’s first impression was that he had
somehow made a complete circle and returned to the open sea. Yet it
couldn’t be for here was life in greater abundance than he had ever
seen before. Dense, teeming, raucous and restless, more crowded
even than Omsh’pont, before the coming of the Sound.

The light was low and pulses were
useless with so many people, but Kloosee could feel the size of the
place. Even as crushing as the mass of life was, he could still
sense the spacious dimensions. There had been rumors about this for
a long time. Longsee himself had told him once that Ponk’t was like
a great
vishtu
, a roam so
large it boggled the mind. And he had also said there were
cavernous chambers the size of small oceans here, dozens of them,
buried under the plateau, all connected like the radii of a
starfish. Pulsing as far as he could, Kloosee found that even
Longsee’s description didn’t do justice to the sight.

For his part, Longsee himself seemed
speechless as he bumped and bounced along behind Kloosee. Behind
Longsee, others from the convoy had been ordered out of their
kip’ts and were being herded further into the city by ever-vigilant
prodsmen.

As the prodsmen took them deeper and deeper
into the city, they passed through innumerable scent fields. The
presence of the Omtorish aroused considerable curiosity and the
soldiers had to fight to clear a path at times.

They were taken to the very bottom of
the cavern. They drifted down through layer after layer of roaming
citizens, through holds and berths made of sheer tissue that parted
for their passage, then closed again, through squabbling em’kels
and solemn lectures, prodigal feasts thick with the aroma of
tongpod
and
ertleg
, games of
kong’pelu
and
tonkro
, debates, sexual couplings,
tuk
matches, a fight and myriad
other scenes.

They followed the spine of a pillar
that buttressed one wall, passing in their descent, hundreds of
small, dark recesses, cavities, niches and hollows at every level,
all of them full to bursting with
kelke
. Kloosee, with Chase and Angie nearby,
never grew tired of the extraordinary diversity of life in Ponk’t,
even though they traveled for what seemed an hour or so. Always,
when he thought he had seen everything, another sight would replace
it almost immediately and he would have to watch that too and study
it. And there was no way they could take in the entire pageant at a
single glance; it was far too complicated, shifting, much too
spontaneous for that. Kloosee knew that Chase and Angie had many
questions. He also knew he didn’t have any answers. All he could
hope to do was see what came before him at the moment and let it
leave whatever impression it would on his mind. He couldn’t make
sense of it now.

But he also knew that somehow, some way, the
Ponkti and the Omtorish would have to overcome their mutual
suspicions and cooperate if there were to be any chance of
defeating the Umans and ridding Seome of the hated wavemaker.

They were bearing the convoy toward a group
of canopies at the bottom, delicate pastel structures that seemed
to drift slightly in the prevailing currents. As they approached,
Kloosee could see that the canopies were attached by cords to flat
stone foundations on the cavern floor. Hundreds of Ponkti streamed
in and out from beneath them and the entire area seemed to be the
focus of great attention.

His escorts let the k’orpuh sack hit the
floor with a hard bump, then cut the fibers of the sack with stubby
knives. While they sawed through the tough cords, Kloosee craned to
see what was happening beneath the canopies.

His first impression, confirmed with
Chase who was nearby, was that it was a fight, but a closer look
showed that such was not the case. Though it was difficult to see
through the swarming bodies that flitted in and out, Kloosee was
able to see enough to realize that he was witnessing the ancient
art of
tuk
, the ritual dance
discipline that was virtually unique to the Ponkti.

When he was finally free at last from the
sack, he saw Chase hovering a short distance away, flexing his
arms. Angie was there too. They spotted Kloosee and darted
over.

“Are you all right?” Kloosee pulsed them both
for injuries, until a burly prodsman separated them with an abrupt
wave of his weapon.

Kloosee backed away. “I’ll live,” he said.
“What about you?”

Chase was rubbing a pinkish welt on his left
arm. “Just a little sting—nothing serious. Where’s Longsee?”

A partially muffled voice replied, “Over
here.”

They all turned and saw him helping a
prodsman rip away the remnants of his cocoon. A head emerged and
stared in amazement at the scenery around them.