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Deyv said, "Don't!"
He was too late.
A series of long and short whistles in groups of from two to five came from her bone. The thing immediately stopped trying to beat the honey beetles off with its red hands. It turned around slowly, its eyes fixed on Vana. Then its tube emitted buzzes, some longer than others and also arranged in groups.
8
THE beetles swarmed about the centauroid as it moved ponderously toward Vana. Their efforts to bite it were futile, the leaves apparently being tough and thick. Dozens of the insects fell off it, striking the pavement and kicking their legs feebly. Deyv assumed that its leaves contained a poison.
He didn't have any such protection, so he retreated as the creature entered the jungle. Jum and Aejip left even faster than he. Vana was following Deyv, the thing about twelve feet behind her. By the time Vana called a halt, all the beetles had dropped off. The others quit pursuing it as soon as it left the paved area.
Vana then resumed her peculiar conversation with it. After a minute of this, she turned and led all of them to the road. Deyv's back felt cold, and he was nervous. He assured himself, however, that Vana wouldn't be dealing with the thing if it was dangerous. Or maybe she felt secure, since it was friendly to her. That didn't mean that it was not a peril to him.
When they reached the highway, the woman and the Archkerri whistled some more at each other.
Finally Vana stopped, and she tried to explain to Deyv what was going on. He spread his hands out and hunched his shoulders in the age-old gesture of incomprehension. She shrugged and then started down the road. The thing slowly followed her. Aejip and Jum were even more nervous than Deyv, but they were willing to go wherever he wished.
When he could stand the suspense no longer, he stopped Vana. He made signs asking her why the thing was going with them. At first she didn't understand. When she caught on, she went up to the Archkerri and pointed at its chest. Or at what might be a chest under the foliage. Then she pointed at her chest and
Deyv's.
"You mean," he said, "that its soul egg has been stolen, too?"
She must have understood his tone if not his words. She shook her head. Yes.
His attitude changed somewhat. The thing was no longer a monster. Not entirely, anyway. If it had had a soul egg, then it had to be a human, even if it didn't exactly resemble one.
Deyv also got it across to her that he would like to know the creature's name.
Vana blew a series of groups of long and short whistles. By then his ear was becoming sensitive. There were five sounds of unequal length. If the shortest was 1, the next longest, 2, and so on, then its name was ... what? It was too hard to figure out at the moment. Besides, it wouldn't mean anything."
Vana appeared to be thinking hard on the problem. After some brow-wrinkling and lip-chewing, she said, "Sloosh."
He didn't ask her how she arrived at that. She couldn't have told him, anyway. But she had made some correlation between the sounds of her speech and of the thing's.
Deyv felt he was getting somewhere, though not very far. The time he'd spent teaching her his language was wasted. Now he had to learn hers so he could translate the buzzes of the Archkerri. It irked him to have to do this. Since he was the leader, he should teach them his speech.
They went on after Deyv had signed to Vana that she should speak to the plant-man as little as possible.
It was safe to converse in a low tone. Loud whistles were out. They carried too far. She shook her head and whistled at the thing. It came close to them and buzzed a series of groups in a very low tone. They could talk under these conditions.
Deyv set himself to the task of speaking her language. Sleeps went by, and he learned swiftly even if its structure wasn't at all like any of those of the nine tribes. After a while he understood that the Archkerri wasn't using his own language. It was the Trade Language of the tribes in Vana's area. The Archkerri had arbitrarily matched certain groups of buzzes with the sounds of the trading language. This enabled the Archkerri to carry on a fluent if simple conversation with the humans.
Deyv carved a whistle for himself from the leg bone of a dead bird. While he was learning Vana's tongue, he learned how to transpose it into the whistling. Later, he started learning Archkerri.
Meanwhile, they found no more footprints or campsites of the Yawtl. Deyv would have been worried except for one thing. The Archkerri had its—his, rather —infallible means for tracking the thief.
Vana said, "He is following its ghostly prints."
"What do you mean by that?" Deyv asked, turning pale. "It's a ghost?"
"No," she said scornfully. "Can a ghost carry a soul egg? Of course it can't. The egg would burn it, send it screaming."
"I never heard of that."
"Everybody knows that. At least, I thought they did until I met you. What I'm talking about is the ability of Sloosh, of all his people, to see what we humans can't. He says that every living thing leaves in its path the impress of its form. To him it is a reddish color which looks, vaguely, like the thing which left it behind."
After some more questioning, Deyv understood that the "tracks" were psychic impressions. When he could converse with Sloosh, he asked for more details.
"Yes. What Vana said is true. I feel sorry for you humans. Your world must be very pale and comparatively uninteresting. I not only see what you see—and, I don't mind saying, much more understandingly—but I see many more things.
"My world is filled with the forms not only of what is but of what has been. It glows with the designs made by these trails, designs of breath-taking beauty and complexity. Of course, that is redundant. I mean, complexity is beauty. Beauty is complexity."
Sloosh paused, then said, "Vana is mistaken when she tells you that these forms are reddish. I told her that the thief's prints are reddish. But every form of life leaves its own color. I see hundreds of hues and shades of every color. The thief s impressions are not, as Vana said, tracks like footprints. They are one continuous impression, linked, like a thousand Yawtl standing in line, each one pressing closely against the next. A thousand Yawtl that are yet one. Shimmering with a pale-red fire. Transparent yet clearly visible.
"You and Vana, though, are pale red shot with threads of twisting green, scarlet, and black, each a generic design yet recognizably individual. Your forms trail behind you like giant caterpillars, getting paler near the end. Which, of course, I can't see because they drop below the horizon. But if I were to trace you back, I could go for many sleep-times before your impressions faded out.
"It is too bad that you can't see them. But that is the way things work out. Some forms of life have this ability. Some don't."
Deyv was a little irked by Sloosh's complacency, his sense of superiority. He didn't allow his irritation to show, however. He needed the Archkerri.
"Then we'll have no trouble catching up with the thief?"
"I didn't say that. I said we'd be able to follow his impressions. But he may go someplace where we can't follow him. Or we may be killed by some beast. Or we may be ..."
Deyv walked away. The Archkerri was so pickish about things that humans took for granted or didn't say because it wasn't necessary.
Nor was Sloosh as superior as he liked to think. For one thing, he was very- slow. He either couldn't or wouldn't walk as fast as his companions. He went at his own pace, a majestic elephantine amble. He ignored the requests of the others to speed up. This had made Deyv nervous for a while because at every sleep the Yawtl was gaining distance on them. However, after some thought, he had calmed himself.