At last they had found what they sought, what the Captives sent them to seek.
Clustering round Y Coyin with their knives out, the pack looked down at a place where the fibres had been neatly champed away in swathes, leaving a bare patch as far across as a human was long. In this patch was a round scab. Lily-yo stooped and felt it. It was immensely hard.
Lo Jint put his ear to it. Silence.
They looked at each other.
No signal was needed, none given.
Together they knelt, prising with their knives round the scab. Once the traverser moved, and they threw themselves flat. A bud rose nearby, popped, rolled down the slope and fell to the distant ground. A thinpin devoured it as it ran. The humans continued prising.
The scab moved. They lifted it off. A dark and sticky tunnel was revealed to them.
'I go first,' Band Appa Bondi said.
He lowered himself into the hole. The others followed. Dark sky showed roundly above them until the twelfth human was in the tunnel. Then the scab was drawn back into place. A soft slobber of sound came from it, as it began to heal back into position again.
They crouched where they were for a long time, in a cavity that pulsed slightly. They crouched, their knives ready, their wings folded round them, their human hearts beating strongly.
In more than one sense they were in enemy territory. At the best of tunes, traversers were only allies by accident; they ate humans as readily as they devoured anything else. But this burrow was the work of that yellow and black destroyer, the tigerfly. One of the last true insects to survive, the tough and resourceful tigerflies had instinctively made the most invincible of all living things its prey.
The female tigerfly alights and bores her tunnel into the traverser. Burrowing away, she stops at last and prepares a natal chamber, hollowing it from the living traverser, paralysing its flesh with her needletail to prevent it healing again. There she lays her store of eggs before climbing back to daylight. When the eggs hatch, the larvae have fresh and living stuff to nourish them.
After a while, Band Appa Bondi gave a sign and the pack moved forward, climbing awkwardly down the tunnel. A faint luminescence guided their eyes. The air lay heavy and green in their chests. Very slowly, very quietly, they moved – for they heard movement ahead.
Suddenly the movement was on them.
'Look out!' Band Appa Bondi cried.
From the terrible dark, something launched itself at them.
Before they realized it, the tunnel had curved and widened into the natal chamber. The tigerfly's eggs had hatched. An uncountable number of larvae with jaws as wide as a man's reach turned on the intruders, snapping in fury and fear.
Even as Band Appa Bondi sliced his first attacker, another had his head off. He fell, and his companions launched themselves over him in the dark. Pressing forward, they dodged those clicking jaws.
Behind their hard heads, the larvae were soft and plump. One slash of a sword and they burst, their entrails flowing out. They fought, but knew not how to fight. Savagely the humans stabbed, ducked and stabbed. No other human died. With backs to the wall they cut and thrust, breaking jaws, ripping flimsy stomachs. They killed unceasingly with neither hate nor mercy until they stood knee deep in slush. The larvae snapped and writhed and died. Uttering a grunt of satisfaction, Haris slew the last of them.
Wearily then, eleven humans crawled back to the tunnel, there to wait until the mess drained away – and then to wait a longer while.
The traverser stirred in its bed of celeries. Vague impulses drifted through its being. Things it had done. Things it had to do. The things it had done had been done before, the things it had to do were still to do. Blowing off oxygen, it heaved itself up.
Slowly at first, it swung up a cable, climbing to the network where the air thinned. Always, always before in the eternal afternoon it had stopped here. This time there seemed no reason for stopping. Air was nothing, heat was all, the heat that blistered and prodded and chafed and coaxed increasingly with height-
It blew a jet of cable from a spinneret. Gaining speed, gaining intention, it rocketed its mighty vegetable self out and away from the place where the tigerflies flew. Ahead of it at an unjudgeable distance floated a semicircle of light, white and blue and green, that was a useful thing to head towards.
For this was a lonely place for a young traverser, a terrible-wonderful bright-dark place, so full of nothing. Turn as you speed and you fry well on all sides... nothing to trouble you...
... Except that deep in your core a little pack of humans use you as an ark for their own purposes. You carry them unknowingly back to a world that once – so staggeringly long ago – belonged to their kind.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THROUGHOUT most of the forest, silence ruled. The silence seemed to carry as much weight as that deep mass of foliage which covered all the land on the day side of the planet. It was a silence built of millions upon millions of years, intensifying as the sun overhead poured forth more and more energy in the first stages of its decline. Not that the silence signified lack of life. Life was everywhere, life on a formidable scale. But the increased solar radiation that had brought the extinction of most of the animal kingdom had spelt the triumph of plant life. Everywhere, in a thousand forms and guises, the plants ruled. And vegetables have no voices.
The new group with Toy leading moved along the numberless branches, disturbing that deep silence not at all. They travelled high in the Tips, patterns of light and shade falling across their green skins. Continually alert for danger, they sped along with all possible discretion. Fear drove them with apparent purpose, although in fact they had no destination. Travel gave them a needful illusion of safety, so they travelled.
A white tongue made them halt.
The tongue lowered itself gradually down to one side of them, keeping close to a sheltering trunk. Noiselessly it sank, pointing down from the Tips whence it had come towards the distant Ground, a fibrous cylindrical thing like a snake, tough and naked. The group watched it go, watched its tip sink out of sight through the foliage towards the dark floor of the forest, watched its visible length paying out.
'A suckerbird!' Toy said to the others. Although her leadership was still unsure, most of the other children – all of them but Gren – clustered round her and looked anxiously from her to the moving tongue.
'Will it harm us?' Fay asked. She was five, and the youngest by a year.
'We will kill it,' Veggy said. He was a man child. He jumped up and down on the branch so that his soul rattled. 'I know how to kill it, I will kill it!'
' I will kill it,' Toy said, firmly asserting her leadership. She stepped forward, unwinding a fibre rope from her waist as she did so.
The others watched in alarm, not yet trusting to Toy's skill. Most of them were already young adults, with the broad shoulders, strong arms, and long fingers of their kind. Three of them – a generous proportion – were men children: the clever Gren, the self-assertive Veggy, the quiet Poas. Gren was the oldest of the three. He stepped forward now.
'I also know how to trap the suckerbird,' he told Toy, eyeing the long white tube that still lowered itself into the depths. 'I will hold you to keep you safe. Toy. You need help.'
Toy turned to him. She smiled because he was beautiful and because one day he would mate with her. Then she frowned because she was leader.
'Gren, you are man now. It is tabu to touch you, except during the courtship seasons. I will trap the bird. Then we will all go to the Tips to kill and eat it. It shall be a great feast for us, to celebrate that I now lead.'
Gren's and Toy's gaze met challengingly. But just as she had not yet settled into her role as leader, so he had hardly assumed – and was indeed reluctant to assume – the role of rebel. He disagreed with her ideas, but tried as yet not to show it. He fell back, fingering the soul that dangled from his belt, the little wooden image of himself that gave him confidence.