Soon a pair of hooked beaks poked out of the shadows. Yellow eyes watched him unblinkingly. One of the disheveled Gubru rubbed its dented head frill.
Fiben pressed his lips together to fight back a smile. He dismounted and approached until he was even with the bunker, puzzled when neither the aliens nor the machines spoke to him.
He stopped before the two Gubru and bowed low.
They looked at each other and twittered irritably to each other. From one there came something that sounded like a resigned moan. The two Talon Soldiers emerged from under the disabled machine and stood up. Each of them returned a very slight but noticeable nod.
Silence stretched.
One of the Gubru whistled another faint sigh and brushed dust from its feathers. The other simply glared at Fiben.
Now what? he tried to think, but what was he supposed to do? Fiben’s toes itched.
He bowed again. Then, with a dry mouth, he backed away and took the horse’s tether. With affected nonchalance he started walking toward the dark fence surrounding Port Helenia, now visible just a kilometer ahead.
Tycho nickered, swished his tail, and cut loose an aromatic crepidation.
Tycho, pu-lease! Fiben thought. When a bend in the road at last cut off all view of the Gubru, Fiben sank to the ground. He just sat and shook for a few moments.
“Well,” he said at last. “I guess there really is a truce after all.”
After that, the guard post at the town gate was almost anticlimactic. Fiben actually enjoyed making the Talon Soldiers acknowledge his bow. He remembered some of what Gailet had taught him about Galactic protocol. Grudging acknowledgment from the client-class Kwackoo had been vital to achieve. To get it from the Gubru was delicious.
It also clearly meant that the Suzerain of Propriety was holding out. It had not yet given in.
Fiben left a trail of startled chims behind him as he rode Tycho at a gallop through the back streets of Port Helenia. One or two of them shouted at him, but at that moment he had no thought except to hurry toward the site of his former imprisonment.
When he arrived, however, he found the iron gate open and untended. The watch globes had vanished from the stone wall. He left Tycho to graze in the unkempt garden and beat aside a couple of limp plate ivy parachutes that festooned the open doorway.
“Gailet!” he shouted.
The Probationer guards were gone too. Dustballs and scraps of paper blew in through the open door and rolled down the hall. When he came to the room he had shared with Gailet, Fiben stopped and stared.
It was a mess.
Most of the furnishings were still there, but the expensive sound system and holo-wall had been torn out, no doubt taken by the departing Probies. On the other hand, Fiben saw his personal datawell sitting right where he had left it that night.
Gailet’s was gone.
He checked the closet. Most of their clothes still hung there. Clearly she hadn’t packed. He took down the shiny ceremonial robe he had been given by the Suzerain’s staff. The silky material was almost glass-smooth under his fingers.
Gailet’s robe was missing.
“Oh, Goodall,” Fiben moaned. He spun about and dashed down the hall. It took only a second to leap into the saddle, but Tycho barely looked up from his feeding. Fiben had to kick and yell until the beast began to comprehend some of the urgency of the situation. With a yellow sunflower still hanging from his mouth, the horse turned and clomped through the gate and back onto the street. Once there, Tycho brought his head down and gamely gathered momentum.
They made quite a sight, galloping down the silent, almost empty streets, the robe and the flower flapping like banners in the wind. But few witnessed the wild ride until they finally approached the crowded wharves.
It seemed as if nearly every chim in town was there. They swarmed along the waterfront, a churning mass of brown, callipose bodies dressed in autumn parkas, their heads bobbing like the waters of the bay just beyond. More chims leaned precariously over the rooftops, and some even hung from drainage spouts.
It was a good thing Fiben wasn’t on foot. Tycho was really quite helpful as he snorted and nudged startled chims aside with his nose. From his perch on the horse’s back, Fiben soon was able to spy what some of the commotion was about.
About half a kilometer out into the bay, a dozen fishing vessels could be seen operating under neo-chimpanzee crews. A cluster of them jostled and bumped near a sleek white craft that glistened in cliquant contrast to the battered trawlers.
The Gubru vessel was dead in the water. Two of the avian crew members stood atop its cockpit, twittering and waving their arms, offering instructions which the chim seamen politely ignored as they tied hausers to the crippled craft and began gradually towing it toward the shore.
So what? Big deal, Fiben thought. So a Gubru patrol boat suffered a breakdown. For this all the chims in town had spilled out into the streets? The citizens of Port Helenia really must be hard up for entertainment.
Then he realized that only a few of the townfolk were actually watching the minor rescue in the harbor. The vast majority stared southward, out across the bay.
Oh. Fiben’s breath escaped in’a sigh, and he, too, was momentarily struck speechless.
New, shining towers stood atop the far mesa where the colonial spaceport lay. The lambemV monoliths looked nothing like Gubru transports, or their hulking, globular battleships. Instead, these resembled glimmering steeples — spires which towered high and confident, manifesting a faith and tradition more ancient than life on Earth.
Tiny winklings of light lifted from the tall starships — carrying Galactic dignitaries, Fiben guessed — and cruised westward, drawing nearer along the arc of the bay. At last the aircraft joined a spiral of traffic descending over South Point. That was where everyone in Port Helenia seemed to sense that something special was going on.
Unconsciously Fiben guided Tycho through the crowd until he arrived at the edge of the main wharf. There a chain of chims wearing oval badges held back the crowd. So there are proctors again, Fiben realized. The Probationers proved unreliable, so the Gubru had to reinstate civil authority.
A chen wearing the brassard of a proctor corporal grabbed Tycho’s halter and started to speak. “Hey, bub! You can’t …” Then he blinked. “Ifni! Is that you, Fiben?”
Fiben recognized Barnaby Fulton, one of the chims who had been involved in Gailet’s early urban undergound. He smiled, though his thoughts were far across the choppy waters. “Hello, Barnaby. Haven’t seen you since the valley uprising. Glad to see you still scratchin’.”
Now that attention had been drawn his way, chens and chimmies started nudging each other and whispering in hushed voices. He heard his own name repeated. The susurration of the crowd ebbed as a circle of silence spread around him. Two or three of the staring chims reached out to touch Tycho’s heavy flanks, or Fiben’s leg, as if to verify that they were real.
Barnaby made a visible effort to match Fiben’s insouciance. “Whenever it itches, Fiben. Uh, one rumor had it you were s’pozed to be over there.” He gestured toward the monumental activity taking place across the harbor. “Another said you’d busted out an’ taken to the hills. A third …”
“What did the third say?”
Barnaby swallowed. “Some said your number’d come up…”
“Hmph,” Fiben commented softly. “I guess all of them were right.”