He shaded his eyes and looked beyond the nearest purple peaks to the high slopes where he would have to make his camp tonight. There would be streams all right, but no lush rain forests like on the wet northern side of the Mulun. And he would have to think about hunting for food soon, before’ he sallied forth onto the dry savannah.
Apache braves could run from TQOS to the Pacific in a few days and not eat anything but a handful of parched corn along the way.
He wasn’t an Apache brave, of course. He did have a few grams of vitamin concentrate with him, but for the sake of speed he had chosen to travel light. For now, quickness counted more than his grumbling stomach.
He skirted aside where a recent landslide had broken the path. Then he set a slightly faster pace as the trail dropped into a set of tight switchbacks.
That night Robert slept in a moss-filled notch just above a trickling spring, wrapped in a thin silk blanket. His dreams were slow and as quiet as he imagined space might be, if one ever got away from the constant humming of machines.
Mostly, it was the stillness in the empathy net, after months living in the riot of the rain forest, that lent a soft loneliness to his slumber. One might kenn far in an empty land such as this — even with senses as crude as his.
And for the first time there was not the harsh — metaphorically almost metallic — hint of alien minds to be felt off in the northwest. He was shielded from the Gubru, and from the humans and chims for that matter. Solitude was a strange sensation.
The strangeness did not evaporate by the dawn’s light. He filled his canteen from the spring and drank deeply to take the edge off his hunger. Then the run began anew.
On this steeper slope the descent was wearing, but the miles did go by quickly. Before the sun was more than halfway toward the zenith the high steppe had opened up around him. He ran across rolling foothills now — kilometers falling behind him like thoughts barely contemplated and then forgotten. And as he ran, Robert probed the countryside. Soon he felt certain that the expanse held odd entities, somewhere out there beyond or among the tall grasses.
If only kenning were more of a localizing sense! Perhaps it was this very imprecision that had kept humans from ever developing their own crude abilities.
Instead, we concentrated on other things.
There was a game that was often played both on Earth and among interested Galactics. It consisted of trying to reconstruct the fabled “lost patrons of humanity,” the half-mythical starfarers who supposedly began the Uplift of human beings perhaps fifty thousand years ago and then departed in mystery, leaving the job “only half done.”
Of course there were a few bold heretics — even among the Galactics — who held that the old Earthling theories were actually true, that it was somehow possible for a race to Uplift itself… to evolve starfaring intelligence and pull itself up by its bootstraps out of darkness and into knowledge and maturity.
But even on Earth most now thought the idea quaint. Patrons uplifted clients, who later took their own turn uplifting newer pre-sentients. It was the way and had been ever since the days of the .Progenitors, so long ago.
There was a real dearth of clues. Whoever the patrons of Man might have been, they had hidden their traces well, and for good reason. A patron race who abandoned a client was generally branded as an outlaw.
Still, the guessing game went on.
Certain patron clans were ruled out because they would never have chosen an omnivorous species to raise. Others were unsuited to living on Earth even for short visits — because of gravity or atmosphere or a host of other reasons.
Most agreed that it couldn’t have been a clan which believed in specialization either. Some uplifted their clients with very specific goals in mind. The Uplift Institute demanded that any new sapient race be able to pilot starships, exercise judgment and logic and be capable of patron status itself someday. But beyond that the Institute put few constraints on the types of niches into which client species might be made to fit. Some were destined to become skilled craftsmen, some philosophers, and some mighty warrior castes.
But humanity’s mysterious patrons had to have been generalists. For Man, the animal, was very much a flexible beast.
Yes, and for all of the vaunted flexibility of the Tymbrimi, there were some things not even those masters of adaptation could even think of doing.
Such as this, Robert thought.
A covey of native birds exploded into the air in a flurry of beating wings as Robert ran across their feeding grounds. Small, skittering things felt the rumble of his approach and took cover.
A herd of animals, long-legged and fleet like small deer, darted away, easily outdistancing him. They happened to flee southward, the direction he was going anyway, so he followed them. Soon Robert was approaching where they had stopped to feed again.
Once more they bolted, opened a wide berth behind them, then settled down again to browse.
The sun was getting high. It was a time of the day when all the plains animals, both the hunters and the hunted, tended to seek shelter from the heat. Where there were no trees, they scraped the soil in narrow runnels to find cooler layers and lay down in what shade there was to wait out the blazing sun.
But on this day one creature did not stop. It kept coming. The pseudo-deer blinked in consternation as Robert approached again. Once more, they arose and took flight, leaving him behind. This time they put a little more distance in back of them. They stood atop a small hill, panting and staring unbelievingly.
The thing on two legs just kept coming!
An uneasy stir riffled through the herd. A premonition that this just might be serious. Still panting, they fled once more.
Perspiration shone like oil on Robert’s olive skin. It glistened in the sunlight, quivering in droplets that sometimes shook loose with the constant drumming of his footsteps.
Mostly, though, the sweat spread out and coated his skin and evaporated in the rushing wind of his own passage. A dry, southeasterly breeze helped it change state into vapor, sucking up latent heat in the process. He maintained a steady, even pace, not even trying to match the sprints of the deerlike creatures. At intervals he walked and took sparing swigs from his water bag, then he resumed the chase.
His bow lay strapped across his back. But for some reason Robert did not even think of using it. Under the noonday sun he ran on and on. Mad dogs and Englishmen, he thought.
And Apache… and Bantu… and so many others…
Humans were accustomed to thinking that it was their brains which distinguished them so from the other members of Earth’s animal kingdom. And it was true that weapons and fire and speech had made them the lords of their homeworld long before they ever learned about ecology, or the duty of senior species to care for those less able to understand. During those dark millennia, intelligent but ignorant men and women had used fires to drive entire herds of mammoths and sloths and so many other species over cliffs, killing hundreds for the meat contained in one or two. They shot down millions of birds so the feathers might adorn their ladies. They chopped down forests to grow opium.
Yes, intelligence in the hands of ignorant children was a dangerous weapon. But Robert knew a secret.
We did not really need all these brains in order to rule our world.
He approached the herd again, and while hunger drove him, he also contemplated the beauty of the native creatures. No doubt they were growing rapidly in stature with each passing generation. Already they were far larger than their ancestors had been back when the Bururalli slew all the great ungulates which used to roam these plains. Someday they might fill some of those empty niches. Even now they were already far swifter than a man.