Renard accompanied Mavra Chang into exile, but she drove him off. Even after all these years, he still worried about her. He occasionally received word of her from Ortega, although, because of his responsibilities he had never returned to see her. He felt guilty about that—and knew he should—but it just hadn’t happened.
Mavra had predicted the Agitar would welcome him back as a hero. Well, they hardly did that, but they had dropped the desertion charges because he was a new Entry and did, after all, owe Mavra Chang something. They’d been impressed with his odyssey on Doma, too, and his ability to walk the beast on mountain trails when flying was impossible.
And so the job and the new career. And, except for the lingering guilt about Mavra, so little and helpless and alone, he’d done just fine.
“Renard!” a female voice called to him from the office area. He turned and saw a junior clerk waving at him.
Female Agitar were upside-down males; they resembled a goat in the face and torso, and a more human type below. But that never bothered an Agitar, and it didn’t bother him, either. He’d had a lot of kids by a lot of them.
He ran briskly up to the office. “What is it, Guda?” he called good-naturedly. “Did they raise everybody’s pay?”
She shook her head. Like all Agitar females she was incapable of facial expression, but her eyes reflected something serious. She handed him a telegram just off the government wire. He read it, growing serious himself. He skipped the address and routing codes and read the message:
RENARD, MAVRA CHANG ATTACKED, PROBABLY KIDNAPPED. TRELIG SUSPECTED. SIGNS SHOW THEY MAY HAVE BOTCHED JOB. CAN YOU FLY SOUTH GLATHRIEL ASAP TO HELP SEARCH? CHECK AT ZONE GATES ALONG WAY FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. AM ALSO DISPATCHING VISTARU SAME LOCATION. GOOD LUCK. ORTEGA.
He was stunned. It was the last thing he expected. He hesitated a moment, thinking. Leaving the farm, perhaps for weeks—they weren’t going to like that back in the capital. But, then, it was for Mavra…
“Guda, honey, will you saddle Domaru with at least a two-week field pack? I’m going on a trip,” he said to her. “Tell Vili he’s in charge until I get back.”
He turned and trotted out, leaving Guda behind, her long mouth half-open.
Everod, off the Ecundo Coast
There had been fog through most of the night, and they had been drifting southward. They knew it, but decided to ride with the tide as long as there was deep water, at least until they could get a fix from the sun, which they hoped would burn through after dawn.
And the sun did cooperate a little—a barely visible splotch of light off to starboard and just ahead. After gently rubbing the tubular proboscis jutting from its middle, the captain decided to hoist sail and move a little westward, on the chance that the fog was hugging the coast of the Island. This was likely; land heats up and cools down faster than water, which caused early fogs over many seacoasts in warm weather.
Mavra was enjoying herself, was more animated than any of them could remember her. She spent a good deal of time pumping the crew for current information on Ecundo and Wuckl. Joshi, for his part, could not remember a time outside Glathriel and the compound. So after his initial misgivings, he welcomed the sea voyage as a great new adventure, and was all over the place, asking questions, examining the equipment, and enjoying the smell of the sea and the cool gentle caress of the fog.
The crew was especially helpful; the sailmaker had been working for two days on jackets that the Changs could use to carry with ease their most necessary supplies. Though the crew hadn’t neglected to remove Mavra’s valuables from their storehouse, they were really cooperating not because of the big bribe, but because they sympathized with the fugitives.
Tbisi worried constantly, not only about their impending overland journey but also about what would happen beyond that. He was a chronic pessimist, but Mavra endured his attitude because the concern was genuinely for them.
“All right, so suppose you make it through Ecundo, a remote possibility,” he argued, “and you also get through Wuckl and manage to link up with us or with one of the other packets we’ll alert. If we get you to Mucrol, you still have to cross that hex before you get to this Gedemondas. Then you have to climb into the cold mountains—for which you are not in any way prepared and for which, in any case, you have no provisions. Then what? What will it get you?”
She had thought about it often. “Perhaps help—they know me there, and they are sympathetic to me. They seem to regard me as the coming center of their mystical beliefs. Whether you accept that bullshit or not, they believe it. They will give us sanctuary. I feel certain of that. Once we get there, then I can plan for the future.”
She was adamant; Tbisi couldn’t talk her out of her plan, and eventually he stopped trying—partly out of a healthy respect for her mind and the resourceful ingenuity it represented. He secretly suspected that there was a streak of masochism in her, that she was only happy when surrounded by insurmountable obstacles and hopeless odds just so she could figure a way out.
An odd way to live, but it commanded respect, for she was alive and still going strong after a life filled with such challenges.
That not a single member of the crew regarded either of them as helpless or unnatural was a measure of her tenacity. They were simply another life form on this strange world of multiple liie forms, no more unusual than the others, and no less able to do what they needed to do.
The captain had guessed correctly about the fog; it was thinning, and a bright haze of thin swirling orange developed. The sun was still mostly obscured to the northeast, but it was possible to take a sextant reading. “Ship ho!” called a lookout from midway up the forward mast. Mavra and Joshi had the same thought: the pursuing Ambreza had been patrolling the edge of the fog, waiting for the inevitable emergence of the Toorine Trader.
They trimmed the sails until they were balanced against the strong southerly current and stood almost still in the water. Mavra and Joshi ran to the side and jumped up to the low ship’s rail. Their forelegs were near the top and they were almost vertical, supported by their hind legs. It wasn’t entirely comfortable, but it gave them vision.
Tbisi came up to them silently on his padded pipe-cleaner legs and looked out with them.
“A little ship,” he muttered. “A small black cutter. Fast, but no threat to us, I shouldn’t think.”
“Ambreza?” she asked nervously. Tbisi extended his long, impossibly thin neck and peered into the mists. “No, I think not. Not the kind of ship they use. Aluminum hull and armored, it looks like. The ship is Oglabanian—don’t ever see ’em over on the west side—but it’s been heavily modified. I’m afraid I don’t know exactly what it is.”
The small black ship suddenly seemed to explode in a series of bright, blue-white flashes.
“Signal to Trader!” yelled the lookout. “Stand to for board and search! They’re using standard customs codes, but it’s not a government ship for sure!”
The voice of the Trader’s strange captain came through its translator sounding like a cross between a foghorn and a steam whistle. “Board and search be damned!” it yelled. “Not my ship! Signaclass="underline" We are in mutually neutral waters. Go about your own business.!”
A huge lantern was mounted forward, filled with something that glowed brightly but didn’t melt the ulterior of the lamp. A weasellike creature perched to one side moved a lever back and forth several times, unmasking the forward section of the lamp and projecting a blazing glow into the haze. “Done, Captain!” it yelled.