Hugh Jook was messily dead, scattered in four pieces across the center of their clearing. Several meters away, Sally Krater crouched in fetal position with her hands locked around a tree limb. Fellah had disappeared.
The attack had broken Cuiller’s left arm, that much he could tell from its angle, although the onset of shock had spared him much pain yet. He also felt blood oozing from four puncture wounds in his upper chest. Possibly some cracked ribs, too.
Cuiller lifted himself and approached Krater slowly, not wanting to frighten her more. He spoke gently and touched her head, massaging her temples with his good hand.
“Lieutenant? Sally? Are you hurt?”
No response.
He began moving his palm in wide circles across the nape of her neck and shoulders.
“Sally. It’s all right. Time to wake up.”
“N-no-oh,” she moaned.
“Time to move, Sal.”
“It’ll come back!”
“No, no. The cat’s all gone. Come on now, wake up.” Cuiller reached for her hands, still clenched around the limb, and pulled on them gently. Reason began to return to her eyes. She straightened. Her fingers slipped loose. The hands fell inertly into her lap.
He lifted them with his good hand, and worked his stiff arm gently around her shoulders. He pressed it against her as much as he could without grating the ends of broken bone.
Sally slid close to him and nestled her face against his uniform collar. Her hands crept up, around his shoulders, locking behind his neck. Cuiller rubbed her back in slow, smooth circles, puffing her closer.
Sally’s mouth lifted. Her lips first touched the corner of his jaw, then moved south to find his own.
He kissed her for the first time, for a long time. Then the world began to catch up with them, and Cuiller pulled back just enough to look into her face.
“Hello,” he said, smiling.
“What happened?” She seemed newly awakened, disoriented, lost.
“We had a visitor. Kzinti kind. Are you hurt at all?”
“I—I don’t think so. You?”
“Some. Not a lot of pain yet.”
“Where’s Hugh?”
Cuiller glanced over his shoulder. “The kzin got him… He seems to be dead.”
Krater roused. “Seems to be…? Maybe I can—”
He pulled her back down and locked eyes with her. “You can’t, Sally.”
She sagged, leaning against his good arm. He caressed her once more.
“Come on,” he said. “We can’t stay here. That kzin may come again.”
“Where can we go?”
“Anywhere away from here. Back toward the ship. I don’t know.”
“Can you use the harness?”
“Not with this arm.”
Careful not to look directly at Jook’s remains, she began to feel for his pack and gather their scattered possessions and laser weapons.
“Then we’ll have to make slow time,” she said.
The two of them moved off quietly. Cuiller remembered to keep a hand over his chest wounds so as not to leave blood spoor.
The Elders of Pruntaquila, those inventors of language and studied readers of emotion, believed that bang is the process of becoming.
“And if I do not stay out of that orange monster’s reach,” Fellah muttered in himself, “then I will become lunch.”
He crept under and through the varied leaf layers, hiding after the kzin’s brutal attack. He spent a few solemn moments studying the remaining humans as they crouched in place, wasting time. Then he moved on, toward a place of greater distance and safety. And as he moved, Fellah considered all that the humans had been saying.
Clearly they did believe themselves the inheritors of the Thrintun Masters. In their own inverted language, this Interworld, they were both givers and receivers of Discipline. Their talk hinted at complex relationships and exchanges of Power in patterns that even a Balladeer had never contemplated. And yet they were not alone in their desire for control. That kzin had thought of himself as “free,” too.
Much had occurred in the “long, long time” since Guerdoth had packed Fellah away in the time-bending case. And that implied other things… If the Thrintun were all dead and these new creatures risen unpredictably in their place during these three-times-five unimaginable spans of time, then so were the Pruntaquila gone from this universe.
“I will have no mate,” Fellah said aloud, mournfully, in his native tongue. “I will leave none of my line. Nor any student. And I will make no mark on the future.” It was a dismal thought. For a brief span, Fellah considered offering himself up to the kzin’s claws.
Then something else occurred to him.
All his life he had known the straitjacket bindings of Thrintun Power and had endured the frivolous whims to which the Masters were prone. But in the few hours he had spent among these humans, even when they were threatened by the terrible kzin, he had felt uncertainty and… excitement! Fellah saw now that the iron course of Discipline, even when it was shaped as commands to love and respect, had been like a heavy weight on his mind. And that weight had been totally missing from his thoughts ever since the time-box was opened. Except for a brief moment when the Daff had used the Baton—or “Fiddle,” as it was called in Interworld—on him.
The only trace of Power now left in this universe was the Baton itself. And it was under control of the kzin. From what Fellah had seen, they were almost as clever as the humans. They certainly had the use of fire, metals, and other sophisticated technologies. And the awareness Fellah had tasted from mirrored a whole race, millions more like this one savage kzin, waiting beyond the distances between the stars.
They were intelligent enough to use the Baton, perhaps even to copy it, creating mind-weapons of unimaginable power. Although his experience of these creatures was limited, Fellah supposed it would not displease the kzinti to have worlds full of creatures such as the Sally and Cuiller commanded to jump on cue into their wide, waiting mouths.
Suddenly, Fellah’s mind firmed. There was indeed one thing he could do, one last gesture he could make, to leave his mark on the future.
Nyawk-Captain climbed quickly up into the canopy. He oriented himself on the remains of the one dead human.
No live ones presented themselves. He was sure, however, that at least one of the remaining two was wounded. How far could they have gone? He tried to smell them out, but the scent of the kill in the immediate area was too strong and distracting, the odors of the humans too similar and confusing. Nyawk-Captain had made a shallow box search of the area, and found nothing, before he remembered his carbon-pattern detector.
He returned to the ground, retrieved it, and sighted the locator back up into the leaf layer.
No return signal from any direction.
And that should not be surprising. By this time the humans, even slowed and wounded as they were, might have gone beyond the sensitivity of his locator. Though honor demanded an accounting, there was certain danger in carrying any plan of vengeance too far.
Nyawk-Captain decided to take his prize, the Thrintun artifact, and return to Cat’s Paw in order to continue his mission. Success, victory, and lasting honor were all still possible!
After a stumbling kilometer, Cuiller finally collapsed into the leaf layer, half-afraid—but only half—that his body would find its way through to the long fall. His arm throbbed now with the pain and swelling of the break. He could feel a raw heat creep up to his neck from the wounds in his chest. Was he developing a fever?
“Sally…”
“Wait here, Jared.” Krater settled him across a solid branch and dug the remains of their autodoc out of her pack. She held up a vial of painkiller. “I’m guessing about the dosage,” she said, breaking open a needle and injecting twenty cc’s of clear fluid.
A few minutes after the shot, Cuiller roused himself. Already he was feeling warm and gauzy and… better.