James H. Schmitz Dangerous Territory

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here for his studies. He d known his use of the term would tell her exactly
where to look.
She discovered the stand presently and discovered also that chaquoteels had
built a colony nest above it since she d been here last. The tiny kesters
greeted her with a storm of furious whistlings. Nile ducked quickly into the
sestran, but not quickly enough. The chaquoteels were on her in a darting
rainbow swarm, and her back smarted from dozens of jabs before they decided
she d been sufficiently routed and left her alone in the vegetation. Then the
racket quieted quickly again.
Her search was a short one; Ticos had done what she d expected. The tiny
script recorder was in weatherproof sealing, taped to the side of one of the
thickest sestran stems. Nile freed herself of her prisoner and laid the bundle
down where she could watch it. The midget hadn t stirred yet, but that didn t
mean he wasn t awake.
She considered briefly. There was cover all about. If Parahuans, or the tarm,
showed up, she could fade away in any direction without stepping into the
open. And with a few hundred bad-tempered chaquoteels scattered around the
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vicinity, she couldn t be taken by surprise.
Yes as good a place as any to find out what Ticos had to tell her. . . .
Nile settled down, fitted the recorder to her eye, and started it.
Chapter 5
Long before she put the recorder down for the last time Nile had decided that
Ticos Cay ranked among the great liars of history.
He was still alive. At least he d been alive less than a week ago when he left
the last of the four recorder disks which contained his report here for her.
She sat still, sorting over the information.
Some seventy years ago the Parahuan leadership had been smarting in defeat and
trying to understand how defeat could have been possible. In their minds they
were the race which had achieved perfection at all levels, including
individual immortality for those with the greatness to attain it. They were
the Everliving. None could match them. The water worlds of the galaxy which
met their requirements were destined to be their own.
Since they first moved out from Porad Anz, their home world, the Sacred Sea,
they had encountered nothing to contradict that assumption.
But now an inferior land-dweller which was in possession of a number of such
worlds had flung back and almost completely destroyed the Parahuan forces sent
to occupy them. The experience stunned the Everliving. It affronted logic.
Before the attack they had made what seemed a sufficiently comprehensive study
of the Federation of the Hub. This human civilization was huge. But it was a
heterogeneous, loosely organized, loosely governed mass of individuals quite
normally in serious conflict among themselves. The analysis of captured humans
confirmed the picture.
That muddled, erratic, emotionally swayed creature had routed the disciplined
Parahuan forces. Something was
wrong it simply shouldn t have happened.
What had been overlooked?
They went back to studying the enemy in every way they could. The creature was
blocking the orderly procession of the goals of Porad Anz. That was
intolerable. The secret of its ability to do it must be found and then means
devised to destroy the ability.
Presently, in the creature s relatively recent history, a clue was discovered.
It developed into the Tuvela Theory. . . .
Nile made a snorting, incredulous sound. Not much more than two centuries
ago not many decades before Ticos Cay was born the Hub still had been one of
the bloodiest human battlegrounds of all time. It was the tail end of the War
Centuries. A thousand governments were forming and breaking interstellar
alliances, aiming for control of the central clusters or struggling to keep
from being overwhelmed.
The Tuvelas belonged in the later part of that pre-Federation period. They
were a sophisticated equivalent of ancient warlords. Some believed they arose
from well-defined genetic strains at a high genius level. Legends clustered
about their activities. But the fact was that the records of those muddled
times were contradictory and thoroughly unreliable. In any event, the Tuvelas
were long gone.
The Parahuan Palachs, searching for an explanation of their own defeat,
decided they weren t long gone. The mysterious superhuman Tuvelas not only
were still around, they were now the true secret rulers of the Federation of
the
Hub. They had organized and guided the operation which resulted in the defeat
of the Parahuan expeditionary forces. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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