The Candle of Distant Earth (19 page)

“Then it was all a sham.” Surrounded by his companions, a worn-out Walker stood mumbling to himself. “Just a charade designed to provide new material for saga-spinning.”

Braouk eyed his friend gravely, one eye hovering on either side of the human's head. “Your palpable fear, was while being chased, most inspiring. It will no doubt provide the basis for many stirring overtures.”

Settling his attention on one eye, Walker regarded the Tuuqalian hesitantly. “Then I was never in any real danger?”

“No.”

“What would have happened if I'd just stood still and waited? If I hadn't run or resisted?”

“Nothing,” Braouk admitted. “You and the others would have been granted the access to Tuuqalia that you seek. But many here today to pass judgment on you would have gone away disappointed.”

“Disappointed, hell!” Walker blurted abruptly. “I was scared to death! I thought that thing, the one who had challenged me, was going to tear me to pieces!”

“Yours was not, the only inspirational source, here today,” Braouk replied blithely. “The one who was chosen to challenge you was not only fortunate in being so selected, but played his part well. An eye can heal of its own accord, but the shock of your response provided inspiration that is rare. Ours is a civilized world, wherein the unforeseen is always a delight, because it is so uncommonly encountered.”

“You could have told me,” Walker grumbled. “You might have warned me.”

“Did I not say that everything would be all right?” Both eyes drew back, a gesture that made focusing on the Tuuqalian easier mentally if not physically.

“It's hard to trust anyone's opinion, Braouk, even yours, when you've just been challenged to combat by something ten times your size.”

Edging closer, the Tuuqalian placed a comradely tentacle thick as a tree root around Walker's shoulders. “If I had explained fully, and you had been made aware in advance of the purpose of the challenge, would you have reacted similarly? Would you have run as hard and fast as you did? Would you have fought back, to the point of lightly injuring your challenger?”

Braouk had him there, Walker had to admit. “No, of course not. I probably wouldn't have done anything.”

“Doing nothing is, a poor foundation for, saga-writing.” Like a lazy anaconda, the tentacle slid slowly off his shoulders. “Now, not only will you be able to visit Tuuqalia and confer with our astronomers and other scientists, your name and presence will go down in contemporary saga-telling.”

“I'm so pleased,” Walker commented dryly.

“Ask him if you're entitled to royalties.” George nudged his friend irreverently.

“I'll settle for being alive and in one piece.” He took a deep breath, finally at ease.

“I knew it all along.”

“What?” He turned in the direction of the familiar mocking voice.

Sque scrambled forward. “You are all of you blind as cave-dwelling
zithins.
The signs were present for anyone to see, and to interpret correctly.” She blew a single, disdainful bubble. “If any of you had taken the time to study the body language of the one Tuuqalian in our midst, you would have been able to apply that knowledge to the understated movements of the rank of adjudicators.” One tentacle tip cleaned the linear surface of a steel-gray eye. “To anyone who had troubled to do so, interpreting the gestures and tentacle twitches that were rampant among those deigning to pass judgment on us would have been a simple matter.”

“I've got a gesture you could try to interpret,” Walker groused. “If you had some idea what was going to happen, why didn't you say something? Why didn't
you
warn me?”

While the one tentacle tip continued with its eye cleaning, a different pair gestured in Braouk's direction. “My rationale for not doing so was similar, if not identical to, that of our overlarge friend. I could see no purpose in intervening in a custom that was so clearly important to those locals whose ultimate opinion would decide whether or not we would find assistance here. Also, even had I expressed my opinion to you, it would not have changed anything. The challenge would still have been issued, and would still have had to be met.”

Advancing toward him, she halted at his feet, her eyes and speaking tube at the level of his waist. He felt her grip his sides with first one appendage, then another, and another, until all ten had secured a firm grip. Climbing up his front like a logger ascending toward the top of a tree, she halted only when she was eye to eye with him. Though nowhere near as strong as Braouk, he was still sturdy enough to hold his ground even with her hanging onto him. He was more startled by the unexpected intimacy than by her modest weight. She had never before touched him with anything more than a tentacle tip or two. Now, unexpectedly, she was close enough for him to see the fine gray-pink cilia inside the end of her breathing tube. Those strange, horizontal black pupils gazed deeply into his own.

“You are my friend, Marcus Walker. We have been together for a very long time indeed. We have relied on one another to continue living. Despite your unyielding internal skeleton, your stiff and gangly movements, your awkward gestures, your deficiency of limbs, and an intelligence that even after much time spent in my company can still only properly be described as minimal, I would not let anything untoward happen to you that it was in my power to prevent.” So saying, she climbed back down off him, leaving only a faint scent of damp mustiness clinging to his clothes.

“You should know by now, if you have learned nothing else, that I do nothing without first considering all possible ramifications. Concerning your recent problematic confrontation, I think you will admit that it has all turned out for the best.” Drawing herself up to her full four-foot height, she made a show of adjusting several of the strands of reflective metal and crystal that decorated her body.

He stood staring at her, slightly stunned. In nearly two years of traveling together, it was the closest she had come to expressing anything deeper than wan tolerance for his existence. Sarcasm and the customary jibes about his appearance and mental capabilities aside, what she had just done and said bordered on actual affection. He hardly knew what to say.

Perhaps she sensed his shock, or his discomfiture. “I did not bite you, and even if I had, I suspect there is nothing in my saliva capable of inflicting paralysis on a lifeform so primitively resilient. You may, as soon as you wish, confirm the reality of this observation by moving one or more of your inadequate quartet of appendages, or if the effort of coordinating the requisite muscles and organs is not too much of a strain, by speaking.”

“I—thank you, Sque. I won't question your motives again. Either for doing something, or for not doing anything.”

Swelling up halfway, she exhaled a stream of aerial froth. “Does a modicum of intelligence begin to show itself? With much continued effort, you may in truth some day achieve an adequate level of common sense. At your current rate of maturation, I should estimate that you might reach that stage in only another two or three hundred of your years.” Pivoting on her central axis, she wandered over to ascend Braouk, in order to utilize him as a platform from which to address several of the remaining adjudicators.

George had been no less taken aback by the decapod's unanticipated affirmation. “Whataya know? The squid likes you.”

“I never suspected,” Walker mumbled, “I never
expected…
”

“Not exactly demonstrative, is she?” The dog snorted softly. “No wonder her kind don't mate very often. Aside from conversing via casual insult, if it takes one of them two years to admit to something as low-key as ordinary friendship, think how long it must take two of them to decide to mate.”

Ears erect and alert, he nodded in the K'eremu's direction. She was once more comfortably ensconced on one of Braouk's upper limbs, several of her appendages gesticulating in support of whatever edict of the moment she was currently handing down to a pair of attentive Tuuqalian adjudicators.

Everything she had said to him was all very nice, Walker told himself. Welcome, even. But he labored under no illusions. Her admission of friendship notwithstanding, he knew that if the opportunity to return to K'erem presented itself and required that he be sacrificed to make it possible, she would not hesitate to forfeit his hopes and dreams. That was the canny, experienced trader in him talking. He did not mind admitting it to himself.

Of them all, certainly Sque herself would have understood his caution, and no doubt approved.

While Sobj-oes, her young colleague Habr-wec, and the rest of the Niyyuuan astronautics team joined with members of the Iollth science caste in compiling a list of formal requests for information to be presented to the Tuuqalian astronomy establishment, a relieved and exuberant Broullkoun-uvv-ahd-Hrashkin reveled not only in the sights and sounds and smells of a homeworld he thought he might never see again, but in the opportunity to share them with the companions of his Vilenjji captivity.

“Come with me, we are going north, this dawning!” he boomed the following morning as he lumbered into the port facilities that had been made available for the visitors' use for the duration of their stay on Tuuqalia.

A sleepy George looked up from his oversized pillow and barked softly before adding, “What's ‘north'? If it isn't something unique and special, I'm staying right here 'til it's time to leave again.” Mumbling to himself, he rolled onto his other side. “Seen one alien world, seen 'em all.”

He let out a sharp bark of surprise as one massive tentacle, its grip gentle as a prehensile feather, picked him up and tossed him playfully into the air. Since Braouk was some nine feet tall, rather high into the air.

“Don't
do
that!” the dog yelped. Panting hard, he cast a reproachful eye on their hulking friend as Braouk set him carefully back on his pillow. “What do you think I am—a cat?”

As the Vilenjji implants could not translate subjects for which there was no viable counterpart, Braouk admitted that he was at a loss to answer. But his enthusiasm was undimmed.

“To the north, lie the fabled plains, Serelth-idyr.”

George refused to be impressed. “What's fabled about them?”

The massive, yellow-green torso bent toward George while both eyestalks dipped closer still. Each vertically pupiled eyeball was nearly as big as the dog. “Therein lies my home, that I have not seen since I was taken by the Vilenjji these all too many planetary revolutions ago. My family, all those I left behind, memories of whom were all that sustained me and kept me from going mad while I was alone in isolation aboard the Vilenjji ship.”

“Maybe you wouldn't have been left in isolation,” Walker pointed out judiciously, “if you hadn't gotten into the habit of trying to dismember everyone on the ship who made an attempt to talk to you. Remember?”

Both eyes arced in his direction. The multi-limbed giant was visibly abashed. “I was half-mad with despair for my situation and hardly to be held responsible for my actions.
You,
friend Marcus, should remember that.” As he straightened, the buoyant eagerness that had accompanied his arrival returned. “You please come, to meet my friends, in Serelth-idyr. My friends and my family, who when they hear all of the saga of our meeting and our traveling, will welcome each of you as one of their own.”

“Okay.” Hopping down off his pillow-platform, George trotted over to stand next to Walker. “But only on two conditions. One, we don't have to listen to you recite
all
of the ‘saga of our meeting and our traveling' that I don't doubt you've been slaving over ever since the Sessrimathe rescued us from the Vilenjji, and two, no matter how friendly your friends and family, no backslapping or hugging.” By way of emphasis, he arched his shoulders and back. “I have a particular fondness for my spine.”

Braouk gestured understandingly. “It is true, that Tuuqalian welcomings sometimes, become physical. I will see to it that you survive.” Pivoting on his under-tentacles, he turned to Sque. “Will you come, purveyor of practiced invective, to Serelth-idyr?”

The K'eremu peered out from beneath the small fountain that had been brought in to provide for her comfort. “While the notion of spending time on ‘plains' as opposed to a nice beach is not one that I would normally consider inviting, I confess that I am curious to see how oversized beings such as yourself coexist in a social environment. I will come and stay awhile, at least until the usual ennui begins to set in.”

“Then it is settled.” Braouk turned one eye on George and Walker and the other on Sque. “I will keep two of you safe and dry, and the other safe and wet. Prepare yourselves, my friends, for an outpouring of exorbitant good feelings the likes of which you have never experienced and cannot imagine. Because to our very good fortune, on all the plains of the north it is harvest time!”