Howling Stones (8 page)

“Like all the rest of it, the gift-giving rituals of their kusum are very elaborate. If I were to offer them something like a small, portable entertainment center, they’d have nothing equivalent with which to reciprocate and therefore, according to kusum, they couldn’t accept it. About all they’ll exchange readily are foodstuffs. There’s a soft drink concentrate from New Riviera that they’re particularly fond of. Swapping drinks doesn’t make for an instant treaty, but it’s a start. One of the few I’ve been able to make.”

“So that’s how you get your fruits and juices. Exotic tastes are always a good way to ingratiate oneself with natives, provided body chemistries are compatible, of course.”

“It isn’t the taste. The drink is carbonated, and the bubbles tickle their sensitive palates. They like the sensation.” Leaning forward, she resumed manual control and
turned the skimmer toward shore. “There’s something really important to be discovered here, Pulickel. Something that extends beyond treaties and trade agreements and adding to the general bulk of xenological knowledge. I’m just not sure what it is yet.”

“Pretty hard to verify something in the laboratory when you don’t even know what it is you’re looking for,” he commented.

“Maybe you’ll have better luck.” She shook her head, chasing blond strands from her face. “A new approach, intuition—you obviously have a lot of experience.”

“It would help if I knew what you were looking for.”

“I agree. All I can say is that it’s all tied up with what makes Parramat society so different from that of any of the other island groups and the Parramati different from the rest of the seni. They’re not evasive so much as they are obtuse.”

“Is obtuseness a component of kusum, too?” Pulickel braced himself as the skimmer slowed, approaching the shoreline.

“I don’t think so.” She eased the craft up on a narrow beach shaded by tall thin trees clad in striated blue bark and huge oval leaves that grew directly upon the trunk. Their coloring blended perfectly into the sky, an adaptive quality whose purpose he would have to discover at a later date. Near the crown of one bole small chittering things with eight legs hung upside down and gawked at him out of eyes like Persian turquoise. Each eye appeared to have three pupils.

“We have to stop here and walk.” She climbed out of the open cab. “It’s not far, but there’s a bit of a climb.”

He followed her over the side and studied the sloping terrain inland. “The skimmer should be able to negotiate this hill.”

“Probably, but some of the older Parramati don’t like
to be around it when it’s running.” She smiled knowingly. “Because it sucks in air and kicks it back out they’re afraid it might steal their breath.”

“And besides,” he grumbled as he studied the narrow trail that wound like a corkscrew through the dense vegetation, “no doubt it’s against kusum.”

“You got it. So I park it here.” Reaching into the stern of the skimmer, she removed a couple of small backpacks and handed one to him. Slipping the other over her shoulders, she started up the trail. “As you’ve probably figured by now, the Parramati consider everything in the light of kusum.”

“Who makes the interpretations? The local chief?”

“I told you,” she reminded him, looking back over her shoulder, “the Parramati have no chiefs.”

“Somebody has to make decisions.”

“They all do. It’s something like an Athenian-style democracy, only with internal gradations I’m still trying to sort out. There are big persons, and middle persons, and small persons, and the big persons have a greater say than the small persons, but if enough small persons get together they can override the opinion of the big persons.”

“So the voting is weighted?” He’d always had plenty of stamina and the climb wasn’t tiring him.

“It’s not that straightforward. You’ll see.”

The trail was well maintained. He glanced back the way they’d come. “They won’t bother the skimmer?”

“They’ll look at it and peek inside, but they won’t touch anything. They’ve seen what it can do, and no one wants to take the risk of it running off with them. I set the alarm anyway, just in case somebody’s curiosity overcomes their adherence to kusum.” She held up her right arm, showing him the communicator band encircling her wrist. “I can control basic functions from here. If some
native were to start monkeying around with it, I’d just send it scooting out into the lagoon. Believe me, any intruder would abandon it in a hurry. The Parramati are brave enough, but they have a healthy respect for our technology, even if they don’t want any of it for themselves.” She grinned and pushed aside the branch of a succulent that had grown across the trail.

“Also, they have a healthy respect for ghosts and spirits, and I’ve told them that one sleeps in the skimmer at all times.” She eyed him appraisingly. “You managing okay?”

“I’m fine,” he replied irritably. “Just lead on and I’ll be right behind you.” Which, he decided, even though he did his best to focus his attention on the surrounding alien jungle, was not a bad place to be—provided he could get her to stop patronizing him. He might not be able to match her stride for stride, but he’d run marathons and could hike all day without stopping.

The jungle was an extraordinary place, frantic with motion and sound, brilliant with exotic colors and shapes. Surrounded by dwarf trees and gigantic flowers, it was often hard to tell which was which. In contrast to the great Terran rain forests, which boasted a thousand different shades of green, the jungle on Torrelau was painted with all the colors of the rainbow. Alongside blue-black branches and silver stems, red roots and yellow bark, some of the flowers looked positively intimidated. He mentioned his observations to his companion.

“Many of the plants here have the ability to concentrate specific minerals in their phylose.” She indicated a brace of brilliant red-and-yellow bushes. “Colekoli. Sucks up cinnabar like a sponge. I hear that in the Puralyra Archipelago north of Ophhlia there’s scrub that concentrates platinum.” She grinned. “Makes me wish I had time to do a little gardening.”

He stepped over a protruding root. “What about the rare earths here that have the commercial interests so excited?”

“Nice thought, but so far I haven’t been able to find a flower with a passion for niobium. Too bad. Wouldn’t stop the mining interests, though. They’d still want to dig the place up. Picking flowers would be too slow. Insufficiencies of scale.” He reached for a loop of vine to help pull himself over a steep spot. “Don’t touch that.”

He withdrew his fingers. “Why not?” He studied the ropy liana. It looked innocent enough.

After she’d given him a hand up, she found a dead stick and carefully gave the section of vine he’d been about to grab a sharp whack. Instantly hundreds of small, hooked thorns that had lain flush with the smooth bark of the vine snapped erect, exactly as if she’d pulled a trigger. Which, effectively, she had.

She tossed the stick aside. “Not deadly, but extremely painful and difficult to shake off. Each thorn is lined with backward-curving barbs. If you’re not careful or you don’t know what you’re doing, the harder you struggle to free yourself the more seriously entangled you become. The plant itself isn’t carnivorous—the thorns’ design is entirely defensive—but there are plenty of scavengers in the forest ready to take advantage of any critter that gets hung up in them and exhausts itself trying to fight its way free.”

Pulickel leaned over to examine the vine, careful not to touch it. “I can see that you haven’t been devoting
all
your time to studying the Parramati.”

“They’ve taught me the characteristics of many plants. The teriasti vine is just one of them. Others I’ve learned about on my own.” Grabbing the hem of her shorts on her left leg, she pulled the fabric up almost to her waistline, adding to the enormous length of thigh that was already
visible. Each roughly eight centimeters long, two parallel stars were etched into her flesh, pale white against her deeply tanned skin. She let the hem fall back.

“Those haven’t healed completely yet. I’m not sure they ever will heal completely. I’ve tried half a dozen different reseptics.”

“Another vine?” he asked as they resumed climbing.

“No. A tree-dwelling arthropod about a hundred centimeters long. It’s got a dozen legs and a real interesting bite. I was picking jeru fruit and didn’t see it until it was right on my leg. I must’ve disturbed its lair, or nest, or maybe I just caught it in a bad mood. The pain was so severe I thought I was going to fall out of the tree.”

“Trouble in paradise.” After first checking them for occupants, he pushed leaves out of the way.

“Senisran isn’t paradise and neither is Torrelau. Since it was on me I couldn’t get a safe angle with my gun. Had to cut its head off with my knife. Then I had to dig the head out of my leg. Strong fangs.” She held up one little finger. “About half this long.

“Fortunately, the toxin works slowly. I’m sure that if I didn’t have access to modern adaptive antivenins I would’ve died, or at least lost the leg.”

“Sounds to me like you handled it admirably.”

“The hell I did. I was screaming and flopping around like a burned baby. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me all the way back in Ophhlia. I cried all the way back to the station and most of the rest of the day, until the analgesics started to bite. It felt like somebody was using my quadriceps for kindling. So watch where you put your hands and feet. This environment may look beautiful, but it isn’t entirely benign.”

“So even though indigenous dangers are abundant and modern weapons would help them cope, the Parramati won’t accept them?”

“That’s right.” She ducked beneath an overhanging cluster of vines. “The big persons say it would violate kusum. This isn’t a culture that allows for a lot of flexibility. Either you adhere to kusum or you abandon it. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.”

“Every primitive society hews to an inviolate set of moral imperatives. Flexibility comes in the interpretation. If we persist I bet that sooner or later we’ll run into a big person or two who’ll find a way to bend the absolutes to their advantage—and to ours.”

She shrugged. “I hope you have better luck than I have. I understand that alien semantics is a specialty of yours.”

He nodded. “There are times when I think that I get along better with aliens than with other humans.”

“Due, no doubt, to your carefully moderated sense of humor.”

He glanced up sharply, but she was turned away from him, her attention fixed on the trail, and he couldn’t gauge the amount of sarcasm just from her tone.

“If it’s any consolation,” she went on, “the AAnn are even more frustrated than I am. I don’t know that they’ve ever encountered aboriginals before who wouldn’t accept free weapons. They’re also frustrated because the Parramati don’t do things quickly. Everything takes time since all the big persons have to be consulted on any major decision.” She halted, took a deep breath, and gestured through the trees.

“We’re almost there. No more climbing.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied a little too quickly. “I’m not tired.”

The ground leveled off and the forest began to thin. Raising her voice, Fawn called out in the singsong Parramati dialect. Stepping up alongside her, Pulickel was rewarded with his first glimpse of a live seni.

It looked exactly like the recorded images he’d been studying for the past several months. Smaller than expected, it exhibited all the specified characteristics of a juvenile of the species.

“This is Kirtra’a.” Fawn made an elaborate rolling gesture of greeting with her forearms. “He’s a young male on the cusp of sexual maturity.”

“I can see that.” While Pulickel studied the young seni, it gazed back at him out of narrow, solemn eyes.

Not yet fully grown, Kirtra’a’s head barely reached Pulickel’s chest. To the young native, Fawn Seaforth must have seemed like a true giant. The average mature seni would just be able to look the newly arrived male xenologist in the eye.

Leaping into the air on its powerful hind legs, the native did a complete backflip, landing exactly where it had been standing. Taking into account regional variations, this was a fairly universal form of greeting on Senisran. It was the gesture Fawn had attempted to simulate by rotating her forearms.

So both she and the seni were more than a little surprised when Pulickel promptly duplicated the native’s athletic move. He staggered slightly when he landed back on his feet and attributed his unsteadiness to the presence of the small backpack. Without it he was certain he could have performed the flip perfectly. While Fawn could only gape, the young Parramati experienced a paroxysm of delight, barking and tootling excitedly.

“I couldn’t do that if I practiced for a year. I’d break my neck.” Fawn eyed him admiringly.

“You don’t have a gymnast’s body,” he explained modestly. “Poor size-to-strength ratio.” Kirtra’a continued to squeal and jabber in wide-eyed wonder. “Don’t feel diminished because of it.”

“I don’t—but I really wish I could do that.”

When the juvenile finally calmed down, Pulickel found he could understand it clearly. All the long hours spent listening to and mimicking language recordings paid instant dividends.

“My name is Pulickel Tomochelor.”

“Pu’il To’chor.” The youngster did his best to duplicate the sounds, many of which were more guttural than a seni could manage. “I am Kirtra’a. Welcomings to Torrelauapa, Pu’il. You do the Greeting!”

“A poor effort.” His back had begun to throb but he was damned if he was going to wince. “Not as good as I could do when I was younger, I’m afraid.”

The seni had long, narrow, blue, catlike eyes with slitted pupils. The meter-long tail that protruded from the back of the elegant woven skirt was naked as a rat’s. Exotic, intricate patterns decorated the skirt, which was worn by both males and females, the individual designs telling another Parramati all there was to know about the wearer, from age to family lineage to status within the wearer’s village.

Bipedal and completely hairless, the seni’s smooth, featureless skin was the color of finely milled raw cocoa. Each of the two short arms ended in delicate hands that terminated in the three fingers, the central one being considerably longer than the other two. In contrast, the three toes on each foot were thick, strong, and of equal length. There were no nails or claws, fingers and toes alike ending in blunt fleshy pads. Crouching on powerful legs, the seni rested with elbows bent and both hands held close to the chest in an attitude resembling that of a hunting praying mantis.