And everything he learned here would help toward that ultimate victory. Easing his face through the outer skin of Doctor-Cavan-a's back, ready to drop into the grayworld if she turned around, he continued his study of her alien body.
12
"There it is," the transport pilot said, gesturing ahead and to the right. "In that hollow, up against that big rock face. See it?"
"Yes," Thrr-gilag said, peering down at the motley assortment of field shelters with a mixture of nostalgia and embarrassment. Nostalgia, because it looked just like the training expeditions they'd all gone on back when they'd been students. Embarrassment, because he hadn't realized until that beat just how much better than this he'd been faring lately. His Human-prisoner study group on Base World 12 had had top-mark laboratory and living facilities; even the archaeological expedition he'd been with on Study World 15 had had warrior-style perm buildings for their encampment. Clearly, funds for studying the Chig were distributed with a somewhat less lavish hand.
"We're only going to be here about a tentharc," the pilot said as he circled around toward the more or less flat stretch of ground that seemed to serve as the expedition's landing field. "We weren't actually scheduled to make this supply run for another few fullarcs. You're welcome to fly back up to the encirclement warships with us when we leave."
"I appreciate the offer," Thrr-gilag told him. He had no idea how he could possibly get through everything he wanted to discuss with Klnn-dawan-a in a single tentharc. But the pilot was right: it was indeed a long way back up to the encirclement warships orbiting overhead. "Let's see how things go, all right?"
"Fine by me," the pilot shrugged. "Hang on-this can get a little bumpy."
Bumpy was hardly the word for it; but they made it without injuries and with no direct evidence of structural damage to the transport. Unstrapping stiffly, thankful that the study group's director had had the sense not to set up on the absolutetop of the mountain, at least, Thrr-gilag made his way back to the doorway and opened it.
Three young Zhirrzh were waiting a short ways past the end of the landing ramp: typical eager-eyed student-searcher-assistant types, probably there to help the transport's crew unload the supplies. Thrr-gilag hardly noticed them. He certainly didn't give them any thought.
Standing in front of them, at the foot of the ramp, was Klnn-dawan-a.
"Hi," she breathed, favoring Thrr-gilag with one of those special smiles of hers as he walked down the ramp. "The Elders told me you were coming. I'm glad you're here."
"So am I," Thrr-gilag said, hearing a sudden slight trembling in his voice. With all that had happened lately, he'd almost forgotten how much he'd missed her. "I'm afraid I can't stay very long, though," he added as he reached her.
"I didn't expect you'd be able to," Klnn-dawan-a said regretfully as she looked up at him. "Still, even a little time is better than nothing."
"Yes," Thrr-gilag said, his hands trembling a little as he took her hands and squeezed them tightly. The strictures of propriety, not to mention the presence of the student assistants standing there three strides away, forbade the kind of greeting he really wanted to give her. He hoped they'd be able to find some time alone before he left.
Klnn-dawan-a, he could tell, was thinking along the same lines. "I was rather surprised to hear from the Elders that you were on your way down," she commented, taking his arm and turning them toward the encampment. "I'd assumed your work with the Overclan Seating would be taking all your time." She lowered her voice. "Especially with your group about to head out on a new expedition."
Thrr-gilag frowned at her. He'd been under the distinct impression that the Mrachani mission was going to be kept a fairly close secret. "How in the eighteen worlds did you hear about that?"
"Never underestimate the ingenuity of a trained searcher," Klnn-dawan-a said dryly. "As it happens, Director Prr-eddsi has had several long conversations back to Oaccanv in the past couple of fullarcs. Very serious, very secret-secure Warrior Command pathways and all that."
"And you just happened to be sort of leaning up against the shelter wall at the time?"
"Me?" Klnn-dawan-a asked with a good imitation of hurt pride. "I recoil at the very thought. No, Prr-eddsi brought me into the discussion at one point, and the wordMrachani came up. Then someone mentioned Nzz-oonaz's name, and the rest fell into place pretty quickly. Obvious, really-your people are certainly the current experts on everything regarding the Human-Conquerors and their territory."
Thrr-gilag grimaced. Human-Conqueror. The term had even made it out here. "They're hardly my people anymore," he told Klnn-dawan-a. "I've been demoted."
"I gathered as much," Klnn-dawan-a said quietly. "I'm sorry."
"My own fault," Thrr-gilag told her. "Apparently, the rule is you kill prisoners rather than let them escape."
She eyed him. "Do I detect a trace of bitterness?"
"More strong indignation than bitterness," Thrr-gilag told her. "And mostly on your behalf, actually. Speaker Cvv-panav pressured the Overclan Prime into putting a Dhaa'rr in the group; and because he was mad at me, he picked Gll-borgiv instead of you."
Klnn-dawan-a shrugged. "Gll-borgiv's not allthat bad."
"He's still nowhere near as good as you."
"I appreciate the vote of confidence," she said. "Still, I don't really think you should take the blame for my missed chance at glory."
Thrr-gilag looked at the encampment ahead. At the predator fence, the shelters... and the white tip of the pyramid sticking up over them. That was something else they hadn't had on those training expeditions ten cyclics ago. Nofsss cuttings with anchored Elders there to act as communicators.
Or to listen over your shoulder, whether you wanted them there or not. "Is there someplace where we can talk privately?" he asked Klnn-dawan-a.
"I'm sure we can find one," she said, her tone faintly amused. "I thought you didn't have much time."
"I'm not talking about that," Thrr-gilag said, feeling his tail speed up with both anticipation and a faint embarrassment. "I mean, not that I don't want to be close-but that's not what I meant. I meant talk. Really talk."
"Oh," she said, frowning up at him. She followed his line of sight to the pyramid. "Well... sure. I've been wanting to check out some of the farms around the other side of the ridge, anyway. And that would give me a chance to show you what we're doing here. Let's go see if Prr-eddsi will let me take out one of the floaters."
Ten hunbeats later they were in a floater, heading out from the encampment. Thrr-gilag waited until they were well outside the Elders' five-thoustride anchorline limit, and then told Klnn-dawan-a the bad news.
She listened in silence. "You're sure about this?" she asked when he'd finished.
"I don't know if you can ever be sure about Elder rumors," Thrr-gilag said, gazing out at the rocky Gree landscape flowing by beneath them. "All I know is that my father thought it was solid enough to warn me."
"Yes," Klnn-dawan-a said, her face set in hard lines as she stared out through the windscreen. "I notice that no one bothered to tellme about any of this."
"Maybe none of your Elders here have heard the rumors," Thrr-gilag suggested diplomatically.
She threw him a scornful look. "Oh, come on, Thrr-gilag. You get a rumor started anywhere in the eighteen worlds, and every Elder's going to hear about it. You know that better than I do-you wrote your searcher thesis on it. Our Elders here know, all right. They've just decided not to tell me about it."
Thrr-gilag shrugged uncomfortably. "I suppose you can hardly blame them. All your Elders here are Dhaa'rr, after all. They're probably less thrilled than even your leaders about having me in the clan."
"Well, that's just plain stupid," Klnn-dawan-a said angrily. "Stupid and unfair. No one can possibly blame you for the Human-Conqueror attack on your base-everyone agrees they were out looking for your prisoner. And as for your brother, so he's using his communicators as sentries. So what? We use our Elders here for that sort of thing all the time."
"Except that your pyramid's safely inside a predator fence," Thrr-gilag pointed out. "His aren't. Anyway, that's not really what they're mad at him about."
"They can't blame him for Prr't-zevisti, either," she said firmly. "I know he was my clan and I should be sorry he's dead; but what happened to him was at least as much his own fault as it was Thrr-mezaz's. No one ordered him to stay with his cutting-he could have gone straight to his family shrine and stayed there."
"Unless there's a link between the cutting and the mainfsss organ we don't know about," Thrr-gilag said doubtfully. "Maybe if you destroy afsss cutting, the Elder dies whether he's anchored there at the time or not."
"No," Klnn-dawan-a said. "Don't forget, it took them at least thirty cyclics of trying before they figured out how to take successfulfsss cuttings. If the destruction of a cutting section killed the Elder outright, then every Elder whosefsss was experimented on back then would have died. They didn't."
"You're right," Thrr-gilag said, a small fraction of the weight lifting from his shoulders. "I hadn't thought about that. Still, I doubt it's going to make much difference to the Dhaa'rr Elders."
"No, of course not," Klnn-dawan-a bit out. "Prr't-zevisti's death is a convenient excuse for the clan leaders to back out of something they didn't want to allow in the first place." She sighed, some of the anger and toughness seeming to drain out of her. "Oh, Thrr-gilag. What are we going to do?"
"We're not going to give up," Thrr-gilag told her. "That much is for sure. The only question is how to fight back."
"Yes," Klnn-dawan-a murmured, her pupils narrowed with thought. Thrr-gilag gazed sideways at her, smiling despite the seriousness of the whole situation. A beat ago her anger and indignation had dissolved almost instantly into depression and the hint of defeat; and now that too had promptly changed again to determination. Many of her friends and colleagues, he knew, found this rapid mood processing of hers to be intimidating. Personally, he found it rather endearing. "All right," she said. "What have we got? The clan leaders have already given permission for our bonding, so to renege now is to break their word. That makes them look bad unless they can show really good reasons. So what we have to do is show that their reasons are totally inadequate."
"We can point out how antiquated these prejudices are, too," Thrr-gilag suggested. "We've had open territorial borders for a hundred cyclics now-strictures on interclan bonding ought to be obsolete, too."
"Right-let's toss in a little shame and embarrassment," Klnn-dawan-a agreed. "I just wish one of our families had more political leverage. We'd stand a better chance if we could get some of the other clans interested in this, even just as observers."
"Yes," Thrr-gilag said, feeling a little shame of his own. He'd had that leverage once, after Svv-selic was demoted and he'd been made speaker of the Base World 12 group. And had proceeded to lose all of it. "You know, it occurs to me that there were a couple of times when the Overclan Prime seemed to be on my side. Making minor decisions in my favor against Speaker Cvv-panav. But I don't suppose that really counts for anything."
"I doubt it," Klnn-dawan-a said. "The Overclan Prime doesn't like the Dhaa'rr much-he'd rule against Speaker Cvv-panav just to keep in practice. Besides, this is too much an internal clan matter for him to stick the Overclan's tongue into it."
For a few hunbeats neither of them spoke. The floater glided smoothly over the rocks and ridges, its air cushion dampening out the smaller bumps and turning larger ones into gentle parabolic arcs. Ahead, the ground sloped toward a creek in the distance; beyond the creek the terrain turned sharply upward again, culminating in more of the towering, white-capped mountains.
"Uh-oh," Klnn-dawan-a muttered.
"What is it?" Thrr-gilag asked as the floater abruptly turned to the right.
"A Chigin whelp," Klnn-dawan-a said, pointing ahead toward the creek. "Over there."
"I see it," Thrr-gilag nodded. The whelp was standing stock-still beside a pile of boulders this side of the creek, its ears standing stiffly up, its full attention on the approaching floater. "You think it's lost?"
"Well, it certainly shouldn't be out here all by itself," Klnn-dawan-a said. "It could be the lead or tail of a grazing party, though. Let's take a closer look, see what family it belongs to."
"How do you tell them apart?" Thrr-gilag asked.
"Mountain families glitter-tag their whelps," Klnn-dawan-a explained. "Those little flashes of light at the edges of their ears-there; see it."
"Yes," Thrr-gilag nodded. "Do you know all the patterns?"
"Most of them," Klnn-dawan-a said. "We're going to have to get pretty close, though. You game?"
"I don't know," Thrr-gilag said dubiously. "I was under the impression that solitary Chig whelps weren't all that safe to approach."
"So the book says," Klnn-dawan-a agreed. "Our own studies indicate that that applies mainly to solitary whelps on their own family's territory. Solitary whelps on neutral territory seem to be actually less unpredictable than larger groups."
"The exact opposite, in other words, of how the book says they're supposed to behave."
"On home territory, anyway. You got it."
"Great," Thrr-gilag said. "Just how good are these studies of yours?"
"Oh, the studies are all wonderful, of course," Klnn-dawan-a said, slowing the floater down to a drifting crawl. The whelp was still standing there, still staring at them. "It's only the conclusions you ever have to worry about. No, seriously, I'm sure we'll be okay. Still, you'd better get the stinger out of the survival pack under the seat. Set on low, please; we don't want to really hurt it."
"If you say so," Thrr-gilag said, pulling the pack out and digging the stinger out of its pouch. He turned it on, grimacing at the vibration of filling energy capacitors. He'd never liked these things, not since his first time on the target range with one. They were awkward to hold, impossible to aim, and utterly absurd looking for something that was supposed to be a weapon. Thrr-mezaz, who dealt with real warrior laser weapons all the time, had laughed himself silly the first time he'd seen one. "So what's the plan?"
"I'll bring us as close to the whelp as I can without spooking it," Klnn-dawan-a said. "Then I'll go the rest of the way on foot, and you can cover me while I try to get a look at the glitter tag. Sound good?"