Midworld (29 page)

Losting had the snuffler up and was firing before the furcot fell. There was the distinctive soft phut of the tank seed bursting. In the near dark, someone screamed. Then it was quiet.

From behind a twisted, bent section of floor an unsteady figure rose—Logan. Swaying, she dropped her pistol and reached down with both hands to pull the jacari thorn from her right breast. A tiny blot of red appeared, staining her tunic. She stared at it dumbly. Losting had reloaded when the second beam caught him in the side, ripped through skin, bone, nerves, and organs. Usually the shock of such extensive, abrupt destruction was enough to kill instantly. Losting, however, was not a normal man. He dropped to his knees, then toppled onto his left side. Still alive, he clutched with both hands at his side. The snuffler clattered to the damp metal floor.

Logan staggered forward a couple of steps and tried to say something to the hunched-up figure on the floor. Her mouth worked but nothing came out. Then her eyes glazed over as the potent nerve poison took hold, and she fell like a tree. She lay there unmoving, a broken toy doll, one arm bent grotesquely under her.

From a black tunnel nearby two figures rose cautiously. Cohoma walked to the still form of Logan and knelt beside her. Hansen continued past with barely a glance at her, toward Losting. Behind him, finding neither pulse nor heartbeat, the scout pilot muttered bitterly, “He’s got you there, Kimi.”

The station chief kept his pistol trained on Losting as he approached. In the hollowness of the death-filled corridor, the hunter’s breathing sounded loud. Hansen had lost much of his clothing and all of his bureaucratic demeanor. He was panting heavily. Kinky gray hair formed a mat over the bulge of his stomach.

“Before I kill you, Losting, why?”

“Born knew,” the hunter gasped painfully. A profound numbness slowly blanketed him, creeping over his body from the burned side. “He told you. You take without giving. You take without asking. You borrow without returning. You do not emfol. Our … world.”

“It’s not your world, Losting,” Hansen said tiredly. Behind them, Cohoma suddenly looked thoughtful. He murmured something. about empathetic foliation and forced evolution. Hansen didn’t hear him. “But you refused to accept that. Too bad.” Hansen turned and called. “Muerta … Hofellow … check his animal.”

A man and woman, one armed with a pistol and the other with a machete, emerged from the side access-way. Taking no chances, the woman put another burst into the head of the supine furoot, but Geeliwan was already as dead as he would ever be.

“Damnation and hell!” Hansen roared, anger and frustration finally coming together within him at the same time. “No reason … no reason for any of this!” He gestured around, then looked back down at Losting, his voice full of sorrow at the waste. “Don’t you see—you didn’t stop us! I’ve got four people—” He glanced back at Logan’s motionless body. “No—three people left,”

Every word caused a sharp pain to shoot through Losting. Each one was a new surprise. “You are all dead. All your little sky-boats are broken and so is the big … shuttle. Your little weapons are dead and so are your walls and webs. The stormtreader beat the life from them. The forest will come for you, now.”

Hansen wore an expression of pity. “No, Losting. It was a good try you made. You almost did it. But we’ve plenty of food, and water from the sky every night. I know how fast this hylaea grows. It may very well obscure the station before our next relief ship arrives. It’s true our shuttlecraft can’t fly again. But its internal systems check out operational, including communications. I don’t believe those gas-bag prisms will come back, and I don’t think we’ll be attacked by anything else capable of penetrating a ship hull. This forest can bury us under an avalanche of green, but our distress signal will still be picked up.

“You’ve managed to cost some people a lot of credits and a lot of trouble. They won’t be pleased. But they’ll rebuild this station, start over again—because of the immortality extract, Losting. You can’t begin to imagine what ends people will go to to secure it.

“We won’t make the same mistakes again. We’ll rebuild halfway around this planet, far from your tribe. The new outpost will have aerial patrols, three times as many guns and bigger, with independent power-up systems. And we’ll make a clear space four times as wide and twice as deep.

“No, we won’t make the same mistakes again. You’re a brave man, Losting, but you’ve failed. A great pity. I’d rather have been your friend.”

“Grv … rbber …” Losting whispered.

Hansen leaned close, the muzzle of the pistol never wavering. “What’s that? I didn’t hear—?”

“You would steal everything,” the hunter rasped, “even a man’s soul, even a flower’s smell.”

Hansen shook his head slowly, sadly. “I don’t understand you, Losting. I don’t know if we could ever understand one another.”

He was still shaking his head when the jacari from Born’s snuffler punctured the side of his neck.

It was over quickly. Ruumahum brought down the pair bending over Geeliwan’s corpse. Born’s axe stopped Cohoma before the bigger man could pull his pistol.

The hunter cut at the fallen giants more than was necessary. He was still hacking away at the bodies long after most of the blood had drained away, until his fury had done likewise. Exhausted, he stumbled over to slump down by the body of the man he had hated most in all the world. Ruumahum was sniffing at Geeliwan’s flank, but there was no hope for the fallen furcot. That remarkable system was not invulnerable. Logan’s beam had cut the brain. A slow trickle of dark green seeped from a severed vein in the skull and stained the olivine fur.

The face of the fallen hunter was twisted with a pain that was more than physical. “No luck … not for Losting. You always…win, Born. Always one branch ahead of Losting, one word, one deed. Not fair, not fair. So much death … why?”

“You know why, hunter,” Born muttered awkwardly. “There was a disease, a parasite come new to the world. It fell upon us to cut it out. It would have killed the Home. You saved the Home, hunter.” His voice cracked. “I love you, my brother.”

Born sat there and conjured solemn images while Ruumahum squatted on hind legs and mourned with the weeping sky. They remained like that until time brought a new day and light.

The first wave of unchallenged cubbies, creepers, fom, and aerial shoots was already pimpling the once smooth edges of the clearing when Born and Ruumahum set on their way.

Two bodies—one human, one furcot— were secured to Ruumahum’s broad back. To think of returning all the way Home with such a burden was absurd. It would slow them, hinder them, endanger them. But neither Ruumahum nor Born for a moment thought of returning without them.

Born remembered the words of the Hansen-chieftain as he had crawled near enough to kill him, last night in the darkness and rain. The words were false. He did not think the giants would try another station elsewhere on the world—not now. Not with all their work here swallowed up whole, wordlessly, inexplicably. Even if they did, they could not find the burls they wanted. Not on the other side of the world. If they tried here, they would never get their light weapons and metals in place. The tribe would see to that. Other tribes would be told. The warning would be spread.

Brightly Go was the first to greet him on their return, when they staggered into the village exhausted and half dead many sevendays later. She did not stay with him for long after she saw Losting’s body. To his mild surprise, Born found he didn’t care.

Then he slept for two days, and Ruumahum a day longer.

The tale was told to the council.

“We will guard against their coming. We will not let them set their sickness in the world again,” Sand declared when the relating was finished. Reader and Joyla agreed.

Now there was only one last thing to be done.

The next night the people took their torches and children and moved into the forest with the bodies of Losting and Geeliwan. For this Longago they sought out the greatest of They-Who-Keep—the tallest, the oldest, the strongest. This tree was the final resting place for the Home’s most honored returnees. Ignoring the greater danger from nocturnal sky-demons and marauding canopy-dwellers, the procession climbed up to the First Level.

The ceremony was chanted then, the words recited in tones more solemn than any could remember. Then the bodies were treated with the oils and herbs and interred in the cavity, side by side. The humus and organic debris were set in place over them.

Losting would have enjoyed that eulogy. His prowess and skill as hunter, his strength and courage were expanded upon and praised. By his fellow hunters, by Sand and Joyla, by Born, especially by Born. So much so that the madman had to be led away by two others.

It was done.

The ceremony concluded, the double file of men and women and children began the long spiraling journey back to the Home, flanked on either side by their silent furcots.

The towering They-Who-Keep stood beneath wailing clouds as the last trailing torch was snuffed out by the all encompassing dark greenery. Dark forest, green and unfathomable—who knew what thoughts arose in. those malachite-colored depths?

Two days later a bud that grew near the base of the They-Who-Keep ripened to maturity. The tough skin shattered, and a small emerald shape spilled out, its bristling wet fur reaching for the faint streamers of sunlight. Three tiny eyes blinked open and small ivory tusks peeped out from the still damp edges of an as yet unopened mouth. Then the thing yawned and struggled to preen itself.

Fighting and twisting, the last green rootlets on its back pulled free from the lining of the seed-bud. They lay back and became fur, drinking in the sunlight. Photosynthesis began within the small body.

Mewling at the enormity of the world, the infant furcot looked around to see bright orbs gleaming at it in the day-shadows.

“I am Ruumahum,” the mind behind those eyes announced. “Come with me to the brethren and the people.”

The adult turned: Weakly, but with increasingly confident steps, the cub followed the elder up into the light.

Far above, a newborn child squalled at its mother’s breast.

Forces stirred within the greatest of the They-Who-Keep at the new intrusion. The tree reacted, secreting a tough woody sap around the two forms to isolate and shield the vulnerable organic material. The sap hardened quickly, forming an impenetrable barrier to bacteria, mold, and insects.

Within the high branch, sap and strange fluids flowed and worked, dissolving and adding, reconstructing and preserving, reviving and reconstituting. Minute derivatives of the new intrusion were distributed throughout the whole seven hundred-meter-high growth while tiny portions of other, older intrusions were carried to the new addition from other branches.

Bones were dissolved and carried off, flesh and needless organs disappeared. They were replaced by a network of patient black filaments—woody neurons. Old neural links of human and furcot were plugged into this vast network. New nutrients energized the metamorphosed cellular structures.

The process of blending Losting and Geeliwan into the soul-mind of the They-Who-Keep took forever and not long at all. The world-forest was unceasingly efficient. New sap moved, chemicals that should not have been were produced. Stimulus was applied to the new area. Catalyzation occurred.

Losting and Geeliwan became something more, something greater. They became a part of the They-Who-Keep matrix-mind, which in turn was only a single lobe of the still greater forest-mind.

For the forest dominated the world with no name. It evolved and changed and grew. It added to itself. When the first humans had reached it, the world-nexus saw their threat and their promise. The forest had strength and resilience and fecundity and variety. It was adding to its intelligence now, slowly, patiently, in the way of the plant.

Losting, feeling the last faint trace of no-longer-needed individuality fading away, feeling himself flow into the greater mind formed of dozens of human and many They-Who-Keep minds, all linked through the minds of the tree-born furcots, rejoiced.

“You didn’t win, Born!” he cried triumphantly as the greatness swallowed him. Then envy vanished and he was a part of the greater whole, such human moods and emotions sloughed off like a dead crysalis. The forest-mind grew a little more. Soon it would add Born and Ruumahum and the others. Soon it would reach the end of its Plan. Then humans and any others would not be able to come and kill and cut with impunity. Eventually, it would reach out across the vast emptiness it now was starting to sense dimly, and then …

In the forest, Born emfoled a struggling sprout and smiled with it at the goodness of the day. He glanced upward at his beloved strange sky and was unaware he was looking beyond it.

Universe! Beware the child cloaked in green bunting.