"Do you mean that we've been blowing these whistles all this time and we didn't have to?"
"Yes," the Archkerri said. "I had thought that was obvious until you made that remark a moment ago. I didn't know you were so stupid."
"By Tirsh and her nameless sister!" Vana said. "Sometimes, sometimes—"
"I see you're angry again, and as usual I have no idea why. How could I have correlated my buzzes to the sounds of your language unless I could understand them? I thought you knew but just wanted to practice with the whistles so you could be fluent with them. So ... that's why Vana's tribe never spoke to me but always used their whistles."
Deyv suddenly broke into laughter. "He's right, Vana. We have been stupid."
Sloosh said, "I suggest, though, that when we get to a place where the whistling won't be so dangerous, that you resume it. You could get out of practice, and that might cause trouble in certain situations."
The three sleep-times passed with only one incident of note occurring. Going down the winding path which the Yawtl had taken, they came around a bend. And there, only forty feet away, was a thing-witha-
nose-like-a-snake. Deyv, who was in the lead, froze. Jum and Aejip came up close alongside him, but they made no move to continue. Nor were they growling. Vana gasped, but she made no noise after that.
Sloosh stopped. His buzzer was silent, but under its leaves his chest-mouth smacked its lips.
All of them had known for some time that something unusually perilous was in the vicinity. The uproar of birds and beasts had suddenly died down, and a tense, heavy silence prevailed. The party had gone on ahead, though they moved slower than usual. Here was the cause of the breathlessness.
The huge purple-skinned biped stood for a minute as fixed as they, except for its waving yellowish nose.
Its purple eyes were upon them. The strangely human hands were held out in front of it, the fingers bent, the yellowish claws glinting in a beam of light falling through a hole in the dark ceiling of the forest.
Then it snuffled, turned, and disappeared into the foliage. Though it stood twice as high as Deyv and must have weighed three times as much, it made no sound.
Deyv held up a hand to indicate that the others should keep on being statues. Slowly, he turned to look behind him. The thing might not be hungry. Its gorillalike belly looked as if it were stuffed. But it might be planning to leap upon them from the jungle.
Time passed, and then suddenly the clangor of animal life burst out. Deyv sighed with relief. It had passed on, and he hoped that it never came back this way again. At least not while he was in the area.
It took Deyv some time to get over his shakes, and Vana didn't get control of herself any sooner. Sloosh seemed unaffected, which meant nothing. Who could tell what was going on behind those leaves?
The tail-end of The Beast had a quarter of the sky to go before it disappeared. They came to the foothills. The long dryness had been overcompensated for by especially long hard rains. These had slowed down the Yawtl. But they had also made the going difficult for his pursuers. Nevertheless, they were keeping up with him until they came to the open end of what looked like a tunnel under the mountains.
13
THEY stood before the entrance in a driving rain that macfe all of them miserable. Aejip, as was the wont of cats, suffered the most. Somehow, she identified being drenched with humiliation, and it hadn't done any good for her temper. Deyv, long familiar .with the cat, knew better than to get near her during these times. So did Jum. Sloosh and Vana, however, had to learn the hard way. The woman still had a wound on her leg, not deep, which she'd gotten earlier when she had tried to console the cat. It had taken her some time to heal it. She'd sat down, and she'd closed her eyes and mentally explored her body, finding the exact healing agents, sending them to the location of the wound, urging them to fight the bacteria and to build up the flesh that would close the scratches.
Deyv tried to urge her to go on, to ignore the wound, letting the normal processes heal it Vana had said, with a validity against which he couldn't argue, that if she allowed the wound to go untreated, it might get to a point where she couldn't control it. The jungle swarmed with invisible evil agents, and they drifted near or brushed against every opening, looking for a way in.
Sloosh didn't object to the interruption in their chase. The Yawtl couldn't get away. His red trail would lead them to him; there was no way he could cover it up.
But now they stood before a pipe which was large enough for all but the plant-man to traverse. The humans could go through it at a slight crouch. He, however, would find it very hard to travel through.
He'd have to bend his upper trunk parallel to it, and his lower torso would have to bend its legs considerably.
"I can stand it for some time," the Archkerri said. "If the pipe extends a great distance, though, I'll become immobilized. My strength is much more than yours, but I am not capable of matching your suppleness. Sometimes, a big size is a disadvantage. This seems to be one of those situations."
"What is the pipe?" Deyv said.
"This pipe is a pipe," the Archkerri said. "I don't know what a pipe is. I can describe a pipe for you. You would understand a pipe, then, as an ideal, though the description might not fit what others would consider a pipe. The pipe is—what? Verbal equivalence—"
"Please, let me rephrase my question," Deyv said. "What is this metallic tunnel for? Who built it? And why?"
"I don't know. If I had my crystal ... Sometimes, I wonder if my brothers, the trees and the grass, are giving me the correct data. Or they might be giving the data correctly, but then they have their own ways of recording, and during the passing of data to them to me, something is distorted, lost, translated incorrectly."
"She who knows all knows nothing," Vana said.
"Is that a proverb of your tribe?" Sloosh asked.
"Who cares?" Deyv said angrily. "Evidently, you haven't the slightest idea where this pipe comes from, who built it, or why it was made. Really, it doesn't matter. What does is that you're as ignorant as we are."
"No," Sloosh said. "What matters is that we don't know where the other end comes out. Or if there are perhaps many branchings of it. What matters even more is that I can't go into the pipe. Rather, I should say, I can go into it. But will I be able to get out the other end? I know I won't be able to back out if I go too far into it."
Deyv felt good because the huge, very strong, very knowledgeable creature was inferior in some respects to him.
"What I see here," Deyv said, "is that we can go through this pipe. I mean, all of us except you. This pipe may have junctions, like the roads. But which path do we follow if it does? We won't know which to take, since you won't be present to follow the Yawtl's impressions."
"Excellently put," the Archkerri said. "So, you four enter this while I go over the mountains by myself and hope that I come to an area where I can pick up the Yawtl's impressions. But if the pipe has many branchings, you might come out in a place I won't be near. We might lose touch with each other. You might accidentally follow his trail, but I might not be where I could see it. After all, my psychic ability to see the impressions has, coincidentally or not, the same distance limits as my visual perception."
Vana said, "I think it's better for all of us to go over the mountains together. Then we can see the whole situation, see where the trail comes out. Nothing will be lost doing that. But if we go into the pipe alone, we may get lost And we don't even know if it does come out the other side. And if there are branches, we could get lost. Who knows where they go? They might lead us out of the mountain area, maybe back into a branch that comes out on this side of the mountain."