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 all that 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. No fsss 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 tell me 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 main fsss organ we don't know about," Thrr-gilag said doubtfully. "Maybe if you destroy a fsss 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 successful fsss cuttings. If the destruction of a cutting section killed the Elder outright, then every Elder whose fsss 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.