Masters of Everon (22 page)

Mikey, however, did not stop and put Jef down. He did, however, slow his pace to a much easier one; and Jef got the feeling, along that particular channel of communication between them, that Mikey was waiting for him to pull himself around and up on to the maolot's back. Mikey had grown unbelievably in just these last few days and now he was almost as large as a mature male of his kind. Such rapid growth should not be a physical possibility, but there it was. Clearly, he was not only large enough for Jef to ride, but had more than enough strength to carry a rider of Jef's weight. Jef kicked hard with his left leg, managed eventually to get a heel hooked over Mikey's broad backbone, and scrambled up into a position astride that back.

Somewhere in the process, Mikey had released his teeth from Jef's belt. The change of position could not have been managed otherwise, but without that firm hold on him, Jef felt the danger of being jolted off. He lay flat along the crest of Mikey's back, holding hard with his legs to Mikey's flanks and maintaining a tight grip around the neck of the maolot.

Happily, Mikey's back was broad enough so that he was not uncomfortable to ride and he was traveling now at a loose trot which, combined with the springy way the bones and muscle of his legs took up the jar of their impact against the earth, made staying on top of him less of a problem than it might have been otherwise. After a while Jef began to relax and trust himself not to fall off. For the first time he sat up and looked about to see where Mikey might be taking him.

He had not noticed when they had ceased to have treetops overhead, but they were no longer in the woods. They were out in the grassland. As far as Jef could see under a sky that was beginning to pale with dawn, there was nothing but the shoulder-to-head-high grass in every direction. He stared, finding it hard to believe that they had come this far from the tree-country, this quickly. It was true Beau's headquarters had not been found that far from the edge of the open country; but to get this far out of sight of the forest area this quickly was startling.

Jef stared at the thick carpet of tall vegetation whipping past them on either side and tried to estimate Mikey's speed.

Even half-grown, back on Earth, Mikey had been able to run for hours at thirty of forty kilometers an hour. In fact, he had done just that on weekends when Jef took him out to one of the State Parks, or wild areas, for exercise. Here, at double his Earthly size and with a stride probably twice as long, Mikey must be doing half again that pace, even though he was clearly not straining himself.

"Where are we going, Mikey?" Jef asked into the right ear of the maolot. There was no response. The ear did not even twitch; and the empathy between Jef and Mikey did not return any answer to Jef's question. Jef gave up. He was only a passenger after all. Off Mikey's back and alone out here, he would be helpless and scheduled for certain death. Out here in the grasslands there was no food—for him at least—and no water, barring the infrequent lakes that the variform wisent could smell from miles away, but which in Jef's case could be less than a hundred meters distant beyond obscuring grass stems, and go completely undiscovered.

On his own two feet Jef would be lost and beyond any hope of finding his way back to a wooded area. He could be walking in a circle within three minutes of heading off in what he thought was a certain direction, for among the grass stems all directions looked alike. So there was nothing to do now but ride wherever Mikey was intending to take him. Hopefully, it would not be too long a trip.

It was not—although it was not a short one, either. An hour and a half later, with the sun well up over the horizon and the green of the grass surface touched with rippling glints of gold, Jef saw a dark line ahead of them, which grew and resolved itself into a line of trees. Half an hour after that they loped once more into shade and the grass dwindled to moss height. A few seconds more and all view of the grassland was lost behind them.

"Mikey," said Jef, "I could drink a river dry. How about you?"

Through the voiceless channel of communication came an immediate sensation of agreement. Less than five minutes later they broke out between towering elm-like, native trees of an upland species Jef did not recognize, to stop at the bank of a shallow, fast-running stream tumbling between boulders and over gravel in a bed not ten meters across.

Mikey sat down on his haunches, and Jef slid off. Without any further delay they both drank, Mikey crouching at the edge of the stream, Jef lying full length beside him.

"That's better," said Jef at last, sitting up and wiping moisture from his lips. "Now, if you could just manage to turn up something I could eat."

He sensed concern and regret from Mikey.

"Never mind," Jef said. "I'm not going to starve to death in twenty-four hours. For that matter, I'm not going to starve to death in a couple of days—though I hope I get something to eat before that long. What did you bring me here for, Mikey?"

There was a response of some kind from Mikey, but it conveyed no useful understanding to Jef.

"I'm not reading you very well," Jef said. It occurred to him that there might no longer be any advantage in speaking out loud to Mikey. Perhaps all he would really need to do from now on was think of whatever he wanted to say. Then it struck him that since he had always been in the habit of organizing his thoughts verbally, they would probably be a lot clearer if he spoke them as well as thought them. Having worked this out, he remembered that back on Earth Mikey had also been in the habit of responding as if their communication was by voice alone. So, for that reason, even if for no other, it made sense to go on using sounded words to help out, at least until Jef himself got much better at their wordless, Everon-style conversations.

The strange thing, it occurred to him now, was the ease with which he had come to take it for granted that he and Mikey could converse non-verbally. Of course, the fact that he had always suspected something like this was going on between them, even back on Earth, played a part in his present easy acceptance of it. But all the same, actual communication of this sort had been a dream for centuries; and here he was the first one to use it as a routine skill. He should be more excited.

On the other hand, came a further thought following like one box on an assembly line belt after another, Mikey himself was apparently taking this wordless communication very much for granted; and a large part of what was being communicated between then had always been emotion rather than information. So if Mikey was not concerned about the ability, it was not surprising Jef was having trouble getting excited, himself.

Now that he had found some water to drink, his general fatigue, coming on top of the excitement of the night and the physical effort of the maolot-back ride, was beginning to make itself felt. For the moment his hunger had moved back into the realm of the unimportant. The morning sun was warming him pleasantly; and now that he had left the edge of the stream, he found himself sitting on a patch of moss-grass that seemed remarkably soft. He yawned.

"I think I'll take a nap, Mikey," he said. "Talk to you a little later. All right?"

He was lying back and stretching out as he said the words. The moss-grass was like a pleasantly sprung mattress. The warmth of the early sun lapped him like a soft blanket. He half-turned on his side and slid off into sleep. A last stray thought, just as he went under, was that it was more than a little providential that he should get this sleepy at a time when he ought to be hungry and irritable; and the faint wisp of a suspicion existed for a second that possibly—he could not think how, but possibly—Mikey had had something to do with it.

Then he was asleep and dreaming of a boat that sailed him over dark blue waters to a place desirable and exciting.

He woke after what felt like a very long slumber—and in fact the sun, far from just having risen, was now in late afternoon position. He lay where he was, comfortably drowsy, letting himself drift back to full consciousness. He had dreamed about many other things after the dream of the boat ride, he seemed to remember. He could not quite seem to fasten on what those other things had been, but the feeling within him was that they had been extremely pleasant, comforting and reassuring, something like the feeling of finding his way back into the home of his childhood and the company of his immediate family back when he had been very young. Pleasant as it had been, though, in some other way he also could not bring to mind right now it had also been very important. Important and full of things he needed to know.

He began to remember; not exactly what his dreams had been about, but generally with what they had been concerned. He had been busy discovering many things, getting straightened out on many matters, some of which were surprising. They possibly would have been so, even though he could not remember specifically what would make them that way—startling, if not repellent, to some other humans. But he had found them to be neither. It seemed that his long acquaintance with Mikey had prepared him to encounter them with a minimum of shock. He had found them different, that was all.

He was now almost fully awake. He rolled over on his other side and saw Mikey, apparently lying unmoved from the same place and position in which Jef had last seen him, his blind head turned as if to watch Jef.

And of course, thought Jef—now made wiser by his dreams—Mikey could see him perfectly well. He did not need his own eyes. He could use any other pair of eyes except human ones, or even a stone or a stick of wood that had been at a site he wished to observe for a certain critical length of time. That time varied from object to object, but essentially it was a matter of the minutes, days or years required for the stick to weather, the stone to settle into the soil it lay upon... and so forth. The concept of such seeing was not at all difficult to grasp, just outside the frame of ordinary human thinking. "Hello, Mikey," Jef said.

Mikey acknowledged the greeting; although, Jef now realized, from the maolot's point of view it was an entirely unnecessary response. After all, they had been together ever since Jef had spoken to him last, including through the dream itself. It struck Jef, not with suddenness but with a strong impact, that he was reading Mikey with much more clarity and understanding than he had before he had dropped off to sleep.

Jef got up, drank from the stream, stirred about and generally got himself back into full operating condition.

"Well," he said to Mikey eventually, "I'm wide awake. What now? I suppose I ought to go back and check on Jarji. You wouldn't think Beau and those others'd hold her responsible for what I did—"

Reassurance flooded from Mikey, together with something else, an image or a scene of some kind, that Jef was not able to resolve. The import was clear, however. Jarji was all right; and the impression Jef got was that she herself was away from Beau's camp and traveling by herself in his direction.

It was frustrating, in a way, he thought. He did not so much receive an impression from Mikey as become suddenly aware that he had already received an impression. It was more as if he heard something said to him in a completely unknown foreign language and following this, experienced his memory of the unfamiliar sounds melting into understandable words of his own native tongue. Not a good analogy to what he was experiencing, he thought to himself now, but the best he could do.

"I should wait here for her, then?" he asked Mikey.

Strongly negative impression from Mikey. He and Jef had things to do—now.

"What things?"

Mikey stood up and came over to him.

"Oh," said Jef. He climbed up on Mikey's back once more, wincing slightly. He had gone into training to prepare himself to hike the surface of Everon, not to ride that same surface on a maolot, bareback. The inner muscles of his thighs were stiff and sore from gripping Mikey's flanks.

But the moment he was on, Mikey was in movement.

Now, as they traveled on once more, the afternoon was waning and almost all of their route lay through forest. As far as Jef could judge, they were following a straight line that roughly paralleled the edge of the grassland, in an area where this edge ran north and south. They were headed north and the country was rough, becoming a landscape of little ridges and hollows. After an hour or so they finally came to a small cliff, very like the small cliff that had stood behind the clearing where Beau leCourboisier had his buildings. Mikey climbed up on the cliff and continued along the line of its top, a little way back from the edge of its vertical face that looked out toward the grassland.

In fact, from up here the grassland could be seen. Only a half kilometer of woods separated the cliff face from the sea of tall, green-gold stems. The ridge ran on at roughly this distance from the forest edge, and they followed it until at last, on one particularly high pinnacle behind a split spire of rock, Mikey finally came to a halt and sat down.

Jef slid off him, grateful to find himself on his feet again. Even with an easy mount, this much distance on maolot-back was making itself noticeable. Mikey lay down, settling himself in position where he could gaze out through the split in the spire of rock. Jef felt himself urged to do the same.

Jef joined him. The rock was not as comfortable as the mossgrass had been at their earlier stopping spot, but he finally found a smooth spot on which to perch cross-legged with his back against an outcropping.

"What are we looking for?" he asked Mikey.

Mikey turned his head toward him and then turned it back to point once more out through the split in the rock. Looking through in the same direction, Jef felt his gaze drawn to a more distant ridge of rock lifting up above the surrounding forest.

He ran his gaze over the edge of that cliff. It was cut and weathered into raggedness and fringed with small trees that were hardly more than meter-high bushes. At first Jef could see nothing but rock and vegetation. Then, little by little, with the pressure of Mikey's mind directing his attention, he began to pick out unmoving shapes, lying still, watching outward and down into the belt of forest lying between them and the edge of the grass.