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Thump and splash!
Sweeting slithered past Nile s feet, flowed down over the doorsill, vanished
into the lagoon without a sound. Nile pitched the clothing bag through the
door, swung about on the seat, slid out into cool water. Turning, she caught a
handgrip on the side of the car, reached up, slammed the door shut on its
lock.
She saw the bag floating beside her, caught its strap and went down. . . .
Chapter 4
The sea reeds, rising from layers of muck packed into the matted root system
of the island thirty feet below, grew thick and strong. Almost in moments
after leaving the car, Nile knew she was relatively safe from immediate
pursuit. On her way across the lagoon she d had a flashing glimpse of an
enclosed boat coming about in a tight circle among the pads to follow her. It
wouldn t be long before it reached the reeds, and it might have divers aboard.
In open water a jet diver advancing behind a friction-cutting field would have
overhauled her in seconds. But jet rigs gave little real advantage when it
came to slipping in and out of slime-slick dense growth; and if one had been
in operation within a hundred yards, her audio plugs would have distinguished
its thin hissing through the medley of sea sounds. She moved on quickly toward
the forest. Small life scuttled and flicked away from her gliding shape. A
school of eight-inch skilts exploded suddenly about her in a spray of silver
glitters. . . . Sweeting, out of sight but somewhere nearby, might have turned
aside for a fast snack. Something large and dark stirred ahead; a dorashen,
some five hundred pounds of sluggish ugliness, black armor half concealed by a
rusty fur of parasites, was backing off from her advance, pulling itself up
along the reed stems, multiple jaws working in menacing snaps.
Sudden darkening of the water told her she d reached the base of the forest.
The reed growth ended and thick twisted floatwood trunks appeared through
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murky dimness. She stroked up to them, paused to look back. A dim regular
rumbling had began in the audio pickups. The sound of engines. But they
weren t close.
Ticos Cay s hidden dwelling was less than a quarter-mile from here. Getting
there unobserved would be the next move. A few minutes later, deep within the
forest, in the maze of dark caverns formed by huge supporting trunks above the
submerged roots, Nile lifted her head above the surging ocean surface, pulled
off the breather. The otter s head appeared a dozen feet away.
 People here? Nile asked.
 Smell no people.
 Boats?
 Skilt boat. Coming slow.
 How big?
 Big as three cars, heh.
No divers, and nobody upwind of them in the forest. Sweeting used nostrils in
air, sensitive olfactories in the lining of her mouth in water. What she
couldn t scent usually wasn t there. Skilt boat meant a submersible. It might
have been the boat Nile had glimpsed in the lagoon. When Sweeting saw it, it
was approaching the reed bed under water. Its crew should discover the ditched
aircar in not too many minutes.
 Kill? the otter asked.
 Not yet. Go back and watch what they re doing till I call you.
Sweeting vanished. Nile moved on through dark shifting water, avoiding contact
with the giant trunks. They were coated with slime, heavily populated with
crawling things. Not a pleasant place to be; but this level provided a quick
route to the seaward side of the forest, and she intended to make her ascent
from there. Presently she saw daylight flash intermittently through the snaky
tangles of floatwood ahead.
Far enough. . . . She found a place to get out of the water, scrambled up to a
horizontal perch and knotted the strap of the bag containing her discarded
coveralls and other personal items around a spike of wood. The fewer clues to
the car s occupants left for investigators, the better. She exchanged fins for
grip sandals, fastened the fins to her climb-belt, switched the belt to its
quarter-weight setting and stood up on the trunk.
There was a partial gravity shield about her now. Ordinary progress in a
floatwood forest was an activity somewhere between mountaineering and tree
climbing. With a climb-belt and sufficient practice in its use, it became not
much more arduous than motion along level ground. Nile started up. The forest
had no true floor, but a thick carpet of parasitic growth, trailing drinking
roots to the sea, stretched out overhead. She pushed through the stuff, came
into a relatively open area.
She stood glancing about, letting senses and mind adjust again to what was
here. It was long-familiar territory. She d been born in one of the shallows
settlements of Nandy-Cline, halfway around the globe from the mainland; and
whenever one of the swimming islands moved near, her people had gone to
harvest from it what was in season, taking their children along to teach them
the floatwood s bounty and perils. Making the islands the subject of extensive
studies later on had been a natural consequence.
Though this was less densely growth-infested than the central forest levels,
vision was restricted to at most a hundred feet in any direction. In the
filtered half-light, the host organism was represented by -unbranched
reddish-brown boles, sloping and twisting upward enormously massive, as they
had to be to support all the rest. Sprouting or hanging from the trunks, or
moving slowly along their coarse-furred surface, was the many-shaped secondary
growth, in the inhis and tacapu categories, with plant or plant-animal
characteristics. Gliding and hopping through the growth, fluttering about it,
were small specimens of the animal population.
Nile s eyes and nostrils took it all in with only superficial conscious
responses. A definite conscious reaction would come if she encountered
something she didn t know or knew might harm her or if she detected any trace
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of the intruders who had forced her down from the sky. Listening was a waste
of -effort; the booming winds drowned minor sounds. She started up the
ascending curve of the trunk by which she had climbed from the sea. Presently
it branched, then branched again. Now the floatwood s great oblong leaves
began to appear among the other growth, -shifting green curtains which closed
vision down to the next few dozen steps ahead. It was more to her advantage
than not. In the constant stirring, her lean body, tanned almost to the tint
of the floatwood branches, would be next to impossible to detect if hostile
watchers were about.
She was nearly four hundred feet above the ocean before sunlight began to play
through the forest in wavering flashes, filtered through the canopy above. By
then Nile was moving along an interlaced network of lesser branches. She knew
she was somewhat above Ticos dwelling and had been watching for its
camouflaged outlines in the vegetation below. It was a sizable structure, but
anyone who didn t know it was there might stare at it for minutes and not
realize what he saw. It had been built of the materials growing about it and
blended into them.
A great wet mass of fernlike stuff, sadly bent and tattered by the typhoons,
caught at Nile s memory. The hideout should be thirty feet below, off to the
left.
She reached the soggy greenery, clambered through, found a spot where she [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]