He stopped short as they approached Moon's workshed, where she cared for injuries to the livestock—and where, sometimes, her brothers had dehorned and castrated young bulls.
She thought she understood what was in his mind. "No, Thrayl," she explained in annoyance. "Don't be afraid. I'm not going to do—that—to you. I've just got to remove your brand—or, better, change it to something else. Do you understand? It's just in case anyone sees us."
He stood silent, his head swaying as his sweetly glowing horns thrust this way and that, listening to his songs. In the Taur tongue he rumbled softly, "The song is not of fear."
"What then, Thrayl?"
"The song is of a terrible loss," he hummed.
She peered at him with sudden fright. Standing in the shadow of the twisted old redfruit trees, lit with the glow of his own horns, he looked so wonderful and splendid that she was trembling with love and worry. "What loss, Thrayl?" she whispered. "Have I lost something?"
His huge hand pressed her shoulder, hard and reassuring. "The song is not of humans," he said. "The song is full of faraway pain."
She sighed in relief. "Oh, it's just that Turtle thing that had you so worried today. Well," she said practically, "we can't deal with things that are far away, can we? But we've got to get moving. Mother locked the truck, so we're going to have to do a lot of walking before daylight, Thrayl. But I'll be with you."
The great, hard hand stroked her head. "I sing of being with you," he rumbled. "But I sing too of terrible loss and pain."
Beyond the hedge they came into the redfruit grove where they used to play. Past their best years, some of the trees were gnarled and dying, with weeds grown tall in the shadows under them.
Moon led the way by the light of Thrayl's horns. They were walking more slowly now, close together but not touching.
Moon said suddenly, "Thrayl? Your horns are so bright now."
"Bright," he rumbled, solemnly agreeing.
"Do they—do they feel any different?"
He was silent for a moment, considering. "Power," he said at last. "Ears when they shine. Eyes when they shine."
"You mean you, well, hear and see through them?"
"No," he said flady. "Only the songs. Nothing on Earth— only the great sad pain from far away."
"Where?" she whispered. "How far away?"
"Nowhere far," he said mournfully. "No far, no when. Nowhere."
Then he stopped short, the horns casting this way and that.
Alarm suddenly flooded through Moon Bunderan. "What is it, Thrayl?" she asked. "Is there someone there?"
"Friend. Yes."
"A million miles away?" she asked bitterly—worriedly.
"No. A good smallsong, Moon, but also sad—and, yes, very near."
Half a kilometer away, Captain Francis Krake was sleeping badly that night.
It wasn't that his mission had failed. Indeed, he had met with more success than he could have hoped for. Certainly he had found the place where the little town of Portales used to be, though it was only the weed-ground mound in the middle of the old courthouse square that proved he was in the right place. Nothing else survived. No buildings—unless you counted something that looked curiously like a great bomb shelter, in the general area of the old college. Only that, and the stones of an old burying ground between the redfruit groves.
Krake had not lingered in the old cemetery. He did not want to find a stone with a name he might know. So he had made a quick trip to town to call the pretty memmie doctor back in Kansas City—no news; but at least no bad news—and then back to his campsite.
The trip was a waste, he told himself. But what difference did it make? He decided to start back the next morning. There was nothing to keep him here any longer.
He had stopped to rent a video set in the town, more to help him waste this wasted time than because of any curiosity about what was going on in this strange, foreign, human world that was no longer his own. But then he had been caught by the news stories. They had upset him. Turtles failing at their jobs, neglecting their assignments—total confusion, it seemed to Krake. And what wild rumors!
Could it be true that the Mother had somehow disappeared?
The thought was incredible. Krake tried to imagine the feelings of the Turtles if anything happened to their Mother. Yes, of course, sooner or later even a Mother would die— though the Turtles had never been willing to speak much on that subject, at least they had admitted that. But nothing would change, really. The death of a Mother was a time of great, complex ritual. One of the nymphs would be allowed to mature—a male would be selected to father the next brood— and the Turtle ownership of the galaxy would go on unperturbed once more.
That would always go on. Nothing, Krake told himself, would ever interfere with Turtle commerce . . . and wondered whether the thought made him pleased or depressed.
He did not really want to think about the Turtles.
He wished them no particular ill—but no particular well, either. True, they had not harmed him in any physical way. Indeed, they had certainly saved his life, for that had surely been lost on that rubber raft in the Coral Sea if their scout ship had not come along. But the price he had had to pay was high.
Every night since then, Francis Krake had gone to sleep with the consciousness of guilt on his mind.
He turned over, trying to put these matters out of his thoughts. There was no reason, he told himself, why he should be wakeful. If he had been disappointed at finding so little left of the town that had been his home, he had had no real hope of finding more than that. And he lacked nothing for his comfort. The rented camping gear was high-tech stuff that made him—at least, that should have made him—as cozy in the tent as he had ever been in his ship. The pop-up tent's memory fabric had immediately assumed the shape best fitted for his comfort. He had cooked a meal with self-heating pans, and if he had also built a fire outside the tent, that was more for the pleasure of looking at it than for any need. There was an incinerating toilet, and a thermo-constant blanket that made night chill irrelevant.
Moreover, you didn't need a memo disk to operate any of it.
Fretfully, Krake scratched the side of the tent. Where his touch stirred to life the phosphors built into the fabric of the tent, a gentle glow sprang up, softly illuminating the inside of the tent.
He slid his feet into his boots, rose and stepped outside, looking fretfully around. A gentle sighing of breeze in the redfruits, a faint purring from the stream down the hill—apart from that the woods were silent. Overhead the Moon was ivory-bright. Squinting, Krake thought he saw a glint of metal in the Moon's lower hemisphere—was it, he wondered, the human Moon base that the Turtles said had been abandoned there? It was still wonderful to Krake to think that his own race had somehow stretched out into space on its own, with no help from Turtles or anyone else—but, of course, that was all history. There was nothing left of that human presence in space. Krake knew that once there had been all sorts of human-built communications and surveillance satellites in orbit —but the Turtles had removed most of them, because they endangered the elevator cables of their skyhook.
Given a choice, Krake told himself justly, between a scattering of satellites and the entry to the galaxy that the Skyhook offered, obviously the Skyhook was a better bargain. But, all the same, he wished something important still remained in space that was entirely, and independently, human.
He craned his neck toward the south and east, hoping for a glimpse of the Turde orbital station at the top of the Skyhook, where his crew were waiting for their next tour of duty. He couldn't see a thing. He knew, though, that the Turtles had their own remote orbiters and that they could certainly see him—see his campfire, at least; just as they had seen his downed plane and life raft, and so much else, all those years ago.