Masters of Everon (24 page)

"Nothing!" one of the men in the closest truck was reporting by intercom to whoever had ordered the trucks out.

"Keep looking!" The radio voice over the intercom could be heard answering.

"Maybe we scared them off."

"You scared them off all right—like hell you did!"

The man in the nearest truck grumbled something Jef's maolot could not hear well enough for Jef to translate. But the truck kept moving.

A full chorus of maolot voices rang out, one after the other, so fast that the two outside cars gave up their figure eights automatically and simply cruised parallel to the circle the interior trucks were still making.

"That does it!" came the radio voice from the intercom. "Harlie, Ty, back to position. I don't give a damn whether they've got that patch cleared yet or not. I'm not losing money for half of this bunch dead on the way in. We're moving them now; and once we get the wiz there, they're not our responsibility anymore! Back to station, all trucks! Move them out—and keep your eyes open. Those cats may sing, but they're not going to show themselves when someone's awake on a laser. Keep your heads together and we'll get them all in safe—and us home by dawn!"

One truck moved directly into the wisents, and the others drew back. The herd began to move, at first almost grudgingly, but then rapidly speeding up to the trot which was a pace these animals could keep up day and night, if necessary. The trucks herded them, one before and one ahead, one on each side of the moving herd. Outside the protection of the trucks, the maolots also paced the traveling beasts, but without sound and without moving in on them.

Jef, lost completely in the identity of the maolot through whose eyes he was seeing this, felt frustration. The herd was traveling now, and there was no way the maolots could get at it, with the trucks between them and the shaggy herbivores. It was true enough that any one of the maolots could have made a quick dash into the dark mass of trotting animals and killed right and left before the gunners on any of the trucks could have laid their sights on him. But such a maolot would never have gotten back out of the herd alive.

Clearly, the adults, fierce and strong as they were, had too much intelligence to throw away even one of their own lives just to do token damage to the herd. Though short of such a sacrifice, Jef did not see now how they would have any real chance of interfering with the drive.

Then he became aware of an effort that his identity-maolot was making. It was a strange sort of effort because it was neither physical, mental, nor emotional. It was something deeper and older than such things and all the maolots following the herd were making it at once.

It was an effort that reached out to encompass, to touch everything. All things moved to it. The earth breathed, a billion microscopic things broke free to wander, the night winds patterned, and overall concentration wove this into a movement and a happening. It was part of blood and bone and soil and seed and air. It was like a great, silent medicine song in which the singer was the music and the music was everything.

The moonlight dimmed slightly. Jef's maolot glanced up and saw a thin veil blurring the light of the single, visible moon. About the trotting herd the grassland was not as clearly to be seen as before. The air was cooler now, with a slightly damp chill.

Something in Jef exulted. It was reaching him through Mikey and through his identity-maolot, but it was originating in him, also. It was a glory—the glory of what was right—the glory of feeling, of knowing and doing. It was as it always had been, always must be, and always would be until the final death. His head swam with feelings so strong it blurred his vision.

The wisent were trotting a little faster now, snorting uneasily. There were the beginnings of fear in them, but also being variforms, they were touched themselves by what was happening, what Jef was feeling. Only the men on the trucks did not feel it.

Their voices were low but steady in their talking. Jef's identity-maolot glanced upward again. The moon was almost invisible now—a cloudy blur of light, no more, and the grassland was becoming murky and dark, with little tendrils of mist clinging to the tops of the grass stems.

One of the other maolots sounded.

Another answered.

The searchlights flared out in all directions, but the mist baffled and broke their beams. The wisent coughed and trotted faster. There was a hint of panic in their going.

The maolot calls sounded again.

The herd's trotting broke at last into the beginnings of a run.

The mist thickened. Now the men on a truck at one side of the herd could not make out the truck on the other side of the herd. The truck leading could see none of the trucks behind it. The rearguard truck saw only wisents close before it.

Human voices were making themselves heard, but the sense of their words was lost in the increasing noise the panicking herd was making. Searchlights stabbed out and blunted themselves on the thickening mist, worse than useless beyond a few meters because the light from them spread in the hanging water droplets and blinded the men operating them. The wisent were now in a headlong run and the bass dronings of the maolot voices were sounding in the obscurity right alongside the trucks and among the fleeing herbivores.

Lasers crackled blindly and wildly in the darkness, finding no maolots. Men on the trucks were yelling at each other now, finally infected by the thick aura of fear rising from the terrified wisents.

The maolots sounded all together—and suddenly the attack was on. The maolot that was both himself and Jef came out of the mist like a silent thunderbolt, up and over the rear gate of one of the trucks. The men around the mounted laser saw a carnivore the size of a small horse climbing in among them, and fell over backward in a scramble to escape. The maolot landed in the center of the truck bed. One massive paw slapped down on the laser and beat it from its mount, smashing stock and mechanism—and the maolot leaped over the farther side of the truck in the same instant, landing among the herd.

Through the herd he ran, slapping right and left at the necks of the wisents as he passed. Each slap sent a wisent bowling with a broken neck. So he raged on, as around him the other adults were also raging, killing as they went until they had beaten their way through and over the mass of bodies, blindly struggling to escape.

Abruptly the maolots were on the other side of the herd and their job was done. The trucks were headed in all directions, the drivers now as panic-stricken as the wisents had been. The herd was a herd no longer. Instead it was innumerable tenor-ridden animals scattering out from the point of their terror, ready to run until they dropped and not to be gathered together again, even with trucks, in under a matter of days.

The mist was dissipating. It cleared and the moonlight came clearly to illuminate the scene again, picking out a few—surprisingly few for all that wild panic—motionless dark shapes that were the bodies of slain wisent. The small number that lay dead would be written off without thought by the owner of this particular herd. Not so easy to write off, however, Jef understood suddenly through Mikey, would be the surviving beasts, whom no combination of drovers would soon be able to drive again in a northerly direction toward the newly cleared patch of forest. If the new patch of cleared land was to be populated with grazing wisents to prove the herd owners' need for it, new stock that had not lived through this night with the maolots must be gathered from much further south and a new drive begun. And by that time the satellite passing daily over this part of Everon would have recorded on its cameras a newly cleared area that had gone untenanted for several weeks.

The work of the older maolots was done. They turned away on a line of march that would intersect in a few hours with the route along which Mikey was carrying Jef.

Emotionally drained beyond anything in his life by the experience of riding in the mind of the mature maolot, physically worn out by riding Mikey and hollow with hunger, Jef slipped into a state that was part-faint, part-doze, lying along Mikey's back. He kept waking momentarily with the fear that he was slipping off. Finally Mikey got through to him.

I'll keep your arms and legs tight, Mikey told him. You won't fall.

Relieved, he let his mind relax, and actual sleep overtook him.

He remembered how he had read about soldiers falling asleep on their feet while marching, but continuing to march. He had found it hard to believe, then. But now he accepted the fact that he could sleep while riding.

When he woke at last, it was to find Mikey descending a steep, sparsely wooded slope, apparently one wall of a small rocky hollow in what seemed to be mountainous terrain. The air was cold and thin and it was just about daybreak; bright enough to see, but with the sun not yet showing over the surrounding heights of rock. Below them a tiny stream ran through a hollow. They were approaching that stream and, in a moment, they came through a barrier of scraggly native trees and stepped into a small open space beside the stream.

A camp was waiting, sleeping bags laid out and a fire crackling. At the fire sat Jarji and Martin, Jarji facing Jef as he and Mikey arrived, and Martin with his back to them.

Jarji jumped to her feet, and Martin rose, turning about a fraction of a second later, as Mikey came to a halt and Jef slid off the maolot's back, trying to stand upright. His arms and legs were stiff and he had to struggle to stay on his feet.

"Jef—" began Jarji. She stopped and sat down again deliberately by the fire. "So there you are, Robini."

"There he is indeed, Jarji," said Martin, now facing Jef also. "Welcome, Mr. Robini. We've been most patiently waiting you."

Something popped in Jef.

"Damn you both to hell!" he exploded. "What's the matter with me? Am I the only one on Everon no one'll call by his first name?"

His knees gave way and he sat down, more or less cross-legged, on the ground where he had been standing. A sudden, warm, good feeling was flooding all through him. He was aware of the other two coming hastily toward him, helping him up, helping him over to a seat by the fire; but he paid no attention to what they were saying, his mind was so full of a new discovery.

So this was what it felt like, he was thinking to himself. He had actually done it. After being formally addressed and verbally kicked about by these two from his first meetings with them. This time his resentment had not merely once again been buried in the non-feeling of a dreary indifference. Nor had it turned in him, curdling into the acid of that sad loneliness that had been his substitute for proper outrage all these years. He had actually gone off like a bomb. Without thinking.

Of course, he had not been really angry. Just irritated. But he had reacted all the same—snapped back instinctively, just as anyone might do. Now they were fussing over him in reaction—if two such unlikely characters as Jarji and Martin could be imagined fussing—trying to make him feel better. He could not quite make out what they were saying because he was so woozy with exhaustion, but their words were unimportant. It was their intent that mattered and that was now coming through clearly.

Actually, he felt fine. Weak, of course—but in all other ways he felt wonderful. The truth was, the way he was feeling was almost too good—there was a terrible sensation of power in knowing he was able to blow up at people like that. Now that he knew he might take anybody's head off for no reason at all, he would have to watch himself, be careful not to let the tendency get out of hand. He would not want to get into the habit of riding roughshod over others at the slightest excuse...

He woke. He had never been so exhausted. Coming fully alert at last, Jef could not remember clearly past the moment in which he had been so ridiculously pleased with himself, on discovering he could lose his temper like anyone else. Beyond that there had been nothing but a dark valley of sodden sleep, interrupted only briefly by a few blurred periods in which he had woken for short, necessary moments and been helped out of his sleeping bag, then back into it again. But these had been only minutes at a stretch.

Meanwhile, time had moved—at least one day and one night had shuttered by—and around him the world had patiently waited. Martin and Jarji had tended the camp and occasionally got him to swallow some soup or hot drink made from one of the Everon herbs. Mikey had lain by the fire as if on guard, paws crossed, neck erect and blind head turned toward Jef. He had been in that position whenever Jef had been awake enough to notice. In effect, around Jef the universe in general had seemed to pause, waiting for him to wake and rejoin it.

He had never been so exhausted. It was as if his bones had been dissolved and a vast emptiness had taken the place of his normal interior organs. He had been as weak as a baby sparrow. And yet... now that this was all behind him, he felt a great and peaceful sense of achievement. He was warm with it, almost as if he had gorged himself on a great meal of learning and was now busy digesting it, finding out what it actually was he had taken in.

He was aware of knowing more than his conscious mind could handle. He had been exposed to a great deal more of information than he could have identified or expressed to anyone. He could feel it there, bulging against his awareness; but so far he had only the most limited understanding of what it could mean.

Awake, now, he lay watching Mikey and the other two moving about the camp. The light-headedness from his recent weakness was undoubtedly to blame, he told himself, but he found he was deeply enjoying the simple activity of lying and watching the others. It was as if their ordinary movements about the camp were parts in some intricate ballet, commissioned solely for his pleasure.

Martin glanced over and saw him watching.

"Well now, Mr. Robini—Jef," he said, coming over and sitting down cross-legged, facing Jef in the sleeping bag, "here you are, alive again."

Jef gazed at him for a long moment.

"Yes," Jef said. His voice emerged from his throat a little rusty and effortful, but he found he could talk comfortably enough. "And speaking of being here, what are you and Jarji doing in this place?"