The Children Star (8 page)

As they rode deeper into the forest, the singing-trees grew larger, and their voices swelled till they drowned his own. At one point the trail headed straight under the arch of a giant, perhaps a thousand years old. Were the “masters” really watching, as Khral had said? If so, they gave no sign. At last the trees began to thin out, and the ground became more sodden, sprouting orange loops of ring-fungus. Stagnant pools appeared, full of slime, and oddly flattened helicoids whirled along the surface.

The travelers emerged into the next band of wheelgrass. Blinking in the sun, Rod scanned the horizon. Mount Anaeon rose larger than before; but just ahead, the wheelgrass was full of four-eyes. Hundreds of the creatures pressed together at the riverside. These four-eyes were blue-and-brown-striped, and larger than the breed he saw close to home.

“We don't want to get caught in that herd,” he told Chae. Reluctantly he turned away from the river, hoping to get around the herd without losing too much time. There were four-eyes of every age, including paler young ones, and parents with a baby firmly seated in the inner hole, where it would feed on special polyps that grew on the parent's hide. One pair were actually coupling together, like two stacked donuts, each extending its germ cell donors into the receptacles of the other.

As the travelers were coming around the herd, a commotion erupted, nearer the river. The four-eyes started to roll, forward in one direction, then suddenly backward. Back and forth they zigzagged, the wheelgrass springing up behind them, their pungent alarm hormones filling the air. Then the ground rumbled, vibrating with the weight of some very heavy object coming near.

From across the plain rolled a megazoöid, one of the largest that Rod had ever seen, like an elephant doubled over. Four-eyes scattered before it, except for the unlucky ones who ended up in the giant's path. Two more of the megazoöids appeared, surprisingly fast once they gathered momentum. They seemed to be trying to trap the four-eyes by the river.

“Watch out!” shouted Chae behind him. “Freeze!” The boy pulled his mount to stop.

In that instant Rod realized that he had told Chae to do absolutely the worst thing. He pulled his own mount
around and rode back to the boy.
“Run for it,”
he shouted.
“Or the herd will run us down.”
He slapped Chae's llama on the rump and sent him pacing, and prayed that T'kun could hold on. Then he followed, dodging the frantic four-eyes that already were charging into their path. His own llama stumbled once in the loopleaves. The dust and the powerful scent had him choking and his eyes streaming. Rod thought he would never get out alive.

At last he broke free of the herd. Ahead rose the next band of singing-trees. But where were Chae and T'kun? For a few agonizing minutes, he was convinced the boys lay trampled beneath the stampeding four-eyes. Then he saw the llama, standing still, with one rider.

In an instant he was at their side. Chae was seated on the llama, dazed, while T'kun lay crying on the ground where he must have fallen off. Rod helped him up and checked out the little boy's limbs as best he could.

“You said to freeze,” Chae whimpered.

“I was wrong. But you did well, Chae.” Rod inspected T'kun's cast, which was intact. “You saved your brother's life.”

“I want to go home now.”

Soon Gaea's wailing joined the chorus.

In the distance, several giant megazoöids gathered to suck the guts out of all the squashed four-eyes. One of the giants had an offspring attached snugly inside its donut hole, eating the polyps off its parent.

The travelers at last camped for the night at the edge of the singing-trees, by the river. Rod pulled a piece of solar nanoplast off his pack where it had charged all day, then he gathered it into a lump and set it glowing. Chae caught a hydrazoöid to fry; Rod thought it looked and smelled like
a rubber hose, but the children devoured it. Far above in the canopy, light flashes streaked between the luminescent loopleaves in hues of yellow, green, and blue. The light show, even more than the “singing” of the singing-trees, attracted scientists in search of hidden masters.

Rod set out a nanoplastic tent stick, which promptly shaped itself into a shelter. Already the nightly drizzle was falling. The wind came up, and the trees keened so loudly that he thought he would never sleep. But he was dead tired, and, with his arms across the three of them, the night passed.

He awoke to hear Chae screaming.
“Help!
We're trapped!”

Still half-asleep, Rod tried to extricate himself from his sleeping bag. His limbs were sore from the hard ground, and besides there were long filaments of some sort stretched out like a curtain over him and the children. He yanked the filaments out and tried to stand. The smell of glue was overpowering, and whirrs buzzed deafeningly around his head. Something huge towered over him—

It was a tumbleround. There was no mistaking its filaments and the whirrs swarming over its stinking hide.

Rod lost no time extricating the children and as much of their camping gear as they could salvage. The llamas remained tethered nearby, feeding placidly as if the commotion was nothing to them. The tumbleround itself made no sound or rapid movement. It had no eyes, or ears; so the scientists said. It must have been rooted nearby, near enough to migrate gradually over during the night. But why? Did it need some essential nutrient from the human bodies? Or did it seek something deeper?

“Who are you?” Rod demanded aloud. “What do you want from us?” Hearing himself, he felt foolish. But it was odd how the tumbleround had migrated exactly to the
point where the human travelers lay—and no farther. It could have crushed them, or sucked them dry, but instead all it wanted was . . . a touch? A look in at the window?

They saddled the llamas, Rod taking one last look backward at their nocturnal visitor. Perhaps Sarai might know more about tumblerounds.

Now the trail grew much steeper, for this stretch of forest extended onto the foot of Mount Anaeon, where the bands of “controlled” habitat at last gave out. Here was where the true wilderness began; where even the weather might be unpredictable, where flora and fauna seemed to obey no master save the creator of the universe.

The travelers approached the fork of Fork River, where Mother Artemis's holographic map led them up the steepest of the three tributaries. Now the water was rushing swiftly, gurgling, eddying around stones worn smooth. The trail continued along the left bank, rising ever higher above the stream itself. There stretched a vast U-shaped valley between Mount Anaeon and Mount Helicon, carved by a long-departed glacier. Now in the valley grew singing-trees even taller than those on the plain. The rising mountainside became so steep that to his right Rod looked down upon the tops of the singing-trees, while to his left, where the trailblazers had blasted through, the root systems of trees were exposed, their double-roots clinging to rocks about to fall at any moment. From far below in the valley the roar of the stream echoed upward.

Then the singing-trees shrank and thinned out, replaced by bushes of tough loopleaves, full of scarlet and golden flowers that cascaded hundreds of meters down toward the river. Above jutted rocks like the teeth of dead giants. At one point the rocks had broken and slid down onto the trail, where the llamas had to pick their way painfully
across. The sun was rising, but the air grew cold. On the cliffs above clung diamond-shaped patches of snow.

A bend around the mountain, and there it was: the waterfall. Millions of tongues of foam falling, falling forever to the Fork River tributary below, from a hanging valley cut off by the ancient glacier. The waters roared on, sending billows of mist upward. Above the falls piled layers of stone, up to the snow-covered peaks.

Rod's map box chirped at him. Inside the box, the bright line took a turn off the trail, somewhere near here. Sure enough, there appeared a footpath, half-overgrown with bushes that made wheelgrass seem like a paved road. Undaunted, the travelers took the side path, heading down toward the midst of the waterfall.

Now he remembered. There would be a hole in the mountain, an opening to a tunnel behind the waterfall which powered Sarai's laboratory. “It's all right, keep up,” he urged Chae, who hung back, reluctant to get soaked in the mist from the falls.

Rod dismounted, and bade Chae do likewise while they felt their way. At their left, they met sudden darkness.

An invisible cavity seemed to open. The llamas stumbled into the dark, whining in complaint. Gaea whimpered, and Rod took her out of the pack to comfort her. As his eyes adjusted, patches of green light glimmered, revealing a low ceiling. They were plants that glowed in the dark, plants with real leaves—Sharer plants.

A large long-legged insect swirled about their heads, making a clicking noise. It was a clickfly. The Sharer insect veered back down the tunnel, whose ceiling bristled with dog-tooth calcite crystals as big as Rod's thumb. “It's a messenger,” Rod told Chae. “Let's follow it.”

Suddenly the cavern filled with light.

“Messenger indeed.” Sarai appeared, several clickflies perched on her scalp and arms. Smoothly purple from head to toe, she had not a stitch on; Rod felt embarrassed, for he had forgotten to warn the children. But Sharers somehow look clothed enough as they are. Sarai added, “I've had reports of you for the past half hour, driving those miserable beasts of yours across the rocks.”

Rod sketched a star. “Thanks so much for seeing us.” He introduced the children. “T'kun is the one you need to see. We are forever in your debt.”

Sarai flexed her fingerwebs, and a clickfly flew off. “Bother all that.” She eyed him sharply. “It's the one in your arms I need to see. What lamentable shape she's in. Child abuse.”

Rod held Gaea tighter. “She needs help, too,” he admitted.

Sarai turned and headed down the tunnel. “I don't know,” she muttered, “I just don't know about you clerics. Raising children you can't afford.” Her scalp had a fine down of hair, suggesting a Valan ancestor back a generation or two. She led them to chamber full of tangled vines, like a greenhouse. She gestured at T'kun to sit here, and Gaea there. The vines sneaked over and twined around each of them unnervingly; undomesticated varieties could be carnivorous.

Rod patted their shoulders gently. “Sit very still.” These vines, lifeshaped for their task, would sample minute traces of their tissues and body fluids. The children kept still, as if awed by their strange surroundings, their wide eyes casting around them.

Sarai flicked her webbed hand at Chae, and she pointed to a bowl of fruit. “Eat something; you're too small for your age.”

The messenger insect hovered above T'kun, watching.
It nestled amongst the vines for a while, then it went to the ceiling, where it started to weave an intricate web. Sarai watched the web intently as it grew.

“The boy is full of bruises,” Sarai announced. “What have you done to him?”

Rod's hands clenched. “The journey is not easy, as you know. He could only hold on with one arm.”

“His bone is fine,” she announced. “The bruises will also be fine.”

Rod let out a long sigh. “Thanks so much. We won't trouble you any further.”

“The girl will take me longer.”

He blinked. “You mean—you can help her?”

Sarai fed a bit of what smelled like fish to her vines. “She needs to regenerate her spinal cord.” Sarai nodded toward a particularly large vine straggling over the wall, whose blooms spanned the length of his arm. “She'll hatch from the bud in about a month.”

His heart overflowed with hope, then turned cold. He watched Gaea, as Sarai's meaning sank in. Gaea must have sensed it, for suddenly she pulled out the vines and dragged herself over the floor to his feet.

“A month . . . here?” he repeated. “Inside a . . . flower?” Of a carnivorous plant? He wanted to snatch the child back.

“From the chest down. Well, what do you want? Why didn't you get her here sooner? Machines and ignorant clerics, raising infants—there ought to be a law.”

“You didn't answer our calls,” Rod snapped. “What do you know of children, holed up alone on this damned mountain?”

“Bro-der Rod,” Gaea's voice quavered. “Gaea go home now.”

Sarai was chuckling as she rearranged her scattered
vines. “So the Spirit Caller has a temper. Well, well. Should I treat every impoverished infant in the Fold? Even my Sharer sisters let the Elysians drag the L'liite ships off
Shora,”
she observed, using the ancient Sharer word for their home world.

“Better one than none.” Rod took Gaea up in his arms.
This ocean has no shore . . . the Spirit should grant me a world
.

“Let them come here, then,” said Sarai. “Let them find me.”

“They try. A new student from Science Park tried to reach you.”

“ ‘Hidden masters' again,” she replied with contempt. “They call themselves scientists, yet all they want to prove is that some great father rules the world after all.”

“Do you think the singing-trees communicate?” he asked suddenly. “What about tumblerounds?”

Sarai froze still. Her inner eyelids came down like pearls. They protected Sharers' eyes underwater, but Sarai used them to hide her inner thoughts. “Why should I share my data?”

“Go home now,” insisted Gaea.

Rod held the child tight, sickened by what he had to do. “Gaea, you'll have new legs when you come home.”