Spots scarcely bothered to flap his ears; Bigs was morosely silent again. Last night he had even turned down the evening poker game, a very bad sign.
“Your turn,” the human wheezed.
Bigs squeezed past him and began chopping methodically. From the way his lips moved and the slight murrling sounds from his chest; he was fantasizing each bush as an enemy to be killed. Hans was to their right and a thousand meters upslope, up in the open. Hotter up there, no shade, but at least there was some wind, a little air The olive gloom around Jonah seemed as airless as the bottom of the sea; sweat clung and curdled, drying in the creases of his body, chafing at the small sores the thorns had left on his arms and face. Even the tough synthetic of his clothing was starting to give way, and the zitragor leather of his boots had begun to wear thin in a place or two. He was leaner by about ten kilos than he had been at the beginning of the trip, and tough as the strip of dried meat he chewed at mechanically as he marched. The kzinti had lost weight too, and their pelts were so matted with tangles and burrs that even their obsessive nightly grooming could scarcely keep pace.
So much for the mighty hunters, he thought snidely. That was a little unfair; whatever their instincts, Wunderland kzin were the descendants of space travelers. Their immediate ancestors came from Hssin, a sealed-habitat colony on a world with poisonous atmosphere. Spots and Bigs had hunted in their father’s preserves, but their home environment was as artificial as any human’s.
“I begin to dream of talcum powder and blowdriers,” Spots said unexpectedly. Bigs grunted. “And of kzinretti. My palazzo will be in chaos.”
Jonah grunted in his turn. Thinking about women was a bad idea out here; easier for a kzin, since their responses were so conditioned on smell. They turned upslope to avoid an outcrop of granite and emerged blinking onto the steep brushy slopes of the bill; they were in an interior depression of the Jotuns, with eroded volcanic peaks on all sides, and it focused the summer heat like a lens. Wearily they all sank to the ground, letting the mules browse for a moment. The kzin had taken to wearing conical straw, hats the humans wove for them, and now they fanned their dangling tongues. Jonah shook his canteen and decided half-full was still enough to warrant a drink; he sipped at the water, letting each drop soak into his tissues. Far above a contrail streaked across the sky, some vacationer in an aircar off to the beaches of Heleigoland Island. Sitting under an umbrella, sipping at drinks with fruit in them. Watching girls diving into the surf…
“There’s not much point in going on,” he said wearily. It was only the thought of retracing his steps that had kept him from saying it until now. Going forward with some hope was bad enough; going back with none was unbearable. “We’ve got those tigripard hides, that’ll cover most of our expenses. We could sell the gear.”
Bigs was lost in his brooding. “I begin to think you are correct, Jonah-human,” his sibling said sadly. “My nose is dry with worry at what will befall our households—but still, we—”
Hans jumped down from a boulder near them. “Ready to give up, are we? The valiant Heroes, the UN Navy hotshot?” He cackled laughter, his ancient leathery face crinkling. “You’re so stupid you don’t know a fortune when you’re standing on one. You’re so stupid you’d shit on a plate and call it steak!” The Wunderlander was practically dancing around his bewildered companions. “Jonah, you’re sitting down, you’ve got your thinking apparatus jammed on money-can’t you tell when you’re rubbing your cheeks on wealth?”
“Something hit so hard the planet splashed,” Hans said, leaning on his pick.
They had been working up the side of the hill, following the gullies and taking samples. The gold was patchy, but the deposits caught in folds and ripples in the ground were increasingly rich. Off to their left a waterfall stretched down the surface of a cliff; a thread-thin line of silver against the pink granite rock; where it struck down in the valley bottom an explosion of mist blossomed, amid a great circle of whipstick and jacaranda trees, with tall silver-gums towering over all. Ahead the slope was jagged and eroded, soft crumbly rock and clay streaked with bright mineral colors, The scent of the scrub under their feet was dry and intense, like a perpetual almost-sneeze, cut occasionally by a drift of cooler air and mist from the falls. Kermitoids peeped and croaked, and a red-tailed hawk dove down the slope after a rabbit and then rose with the struggling beast in its claws, skree-skree as it flapped off heavily toward the cliffs.
“Ja, big astrobleme—way, way back. Punched right through the crust Wunderland’s got slow continental drift, you know, ja? Starts and stops. This made a hotspot, kept burning through every time the crust moved across it. The whole line of the Jotuns, east-to-west across the Aeserheimer Continent is here because of it—this is the active part. Erosion… that’s why you get pockets of metallic’s here. None very big, but by Herr Gott, they’re rich.”
“Where do we dig?” Spots asked. He was drooling slightly, always a sign of impatience in a kzin.
“Not down here,” Hans said; the beatific smile still quirked at the edges of his mouth. “No, no use digging down here. Oh, there’s gold, but we need water to set up the ripple membranes and get it out.” He used the haft of his pick as a pointer. “Up there. We can cut a furrow ‘cross the hillside from the creek.”
“Tanj,” Jonah said, measuring distances. Trivial by spatial terms, but he’d acquired a whole new perspective on “kilometer” since he started spending so much time dirtside. “That’s quite a job, without any equipment.”
“We’ve got cutter bars and thirty kilometers of mono-filament,” Hans said cheerfully. “My brains, and you three for strong backs and simple minds, plus four mules. That’s plenty of equipment for what we’ll need.”
“There ain’t no justice,” Jonah muttered, dragging a forearm across his face. Still, it wasn’t much harder than the contracting job, and promised to pay a good deal better.
“You said it, son. You said it,” Hans chuckled.
“Hrreeeaaaww,” Bigs groaned, rising from all fours with a gut-straining effort; their flexible spines made a straight lift harder for a kzin than for a man. The timber across his shoulders was ten meters long, and even on Wunderland it weighed three times his body mass. The other three hauled on the cable rigged over a wood-frame block and tackle, and the long gum-tree timber rose slowly in swaying jerks until it settled into the predug hole with a rush and stood nearly upright, vibrating. The two kzin took turns bracing it upright and hammering rocks into the hole to hold it so. Three more of equal size stretched in a line across the gully; up on the lip the humans returned to slicing other trunks into square-cut troughs with the cutter bars. When the line of supports was complete, they would swing the troughs out and lash them to the poles with monofilament.
“We’re doing the slave’s part of this,” Bigs complained to his brother, as they climbed down the boulders to where the next upright waited to be dragged up to its hole.
“Suck sthondat excrement,” Spots said.
They set themselves on either side of the massive timber and braced themselves, securing a good hold on the oozing slab-cut timber with their claws. The sharp medicinal scent of eucalyptus sap was over-whelming.
“Strike!”
The kzin heaved in unison, lifting the end of the beam and running it half a dozen steps upslope before letting it fall.