Mute (42 page)

Yet they had to pass the bind. “We’ll risk the rat folk.”

Mit advised them of a suitable ascent to the upper passages. It was amazing how the way developed from seeming blankness under the crab’s guidance. Knot had tended to forget that Mit, like Hermine, was a psi of the first rank, but it really showed here.

They achieved an opening in the sidewall that was large enough for them to walk through upright. The gross one carried Thea again. She had proved fairly adept at wriggling up the ledges; it was, she explained breathlessly, a bit like swimming. She was not helpless on land, merely crippled.

Mit directed them along those channels that would longest avoid contact with the rat folk. But, inevitably, they came to a pass where contact occurred.

Fire,
Hermine thought.
Mit says they don’t like fire. We must make some and carry it.

Knot no longer questioned the little crab’s pronouncements. “Fire? Show us how.”

Mit showed them where spark-striking stones were, and dried moss, and old fallen stalks carried in by the rat folk and discarded. It seemed the rats wended their way to the surface periodically to harvest green plants, lest they come down with scurvy from too restricted a diet, and threw away the stems. These made passable torches.

“The surface?” Thea inquired. “Could you escape the enclave here?”

It was not to be. There were terraces and slopes within the chasm, and these were the ones the rat folk reached. They had no passage to the exterior world of Macho.

When the party encountered the rat folk, Knot and Thea were armed with fire. The eyes of the rats glinted reflectively as they backed off and skulked away, not caring to approach, yet feeling the compulsion to protect their environs from intrusion. They closed in behind, noses quivering, arms reaching to the floor, squeaking. They were not extreme mutants; rather they were deformed in limbs and torso, so that normal vertical posture was not satisfactory to them. Some were more distorted than others, but their hunched attitude and slinking manner put a common stamp on them. The gross one, but for its magnitude and boldness, might have fitted well into these caverns.

All went well until the party encountered a water passage. Mit indicated that they had to pass through it—and that there were more rat-folk on the other side.

“But we have to dive under—and that will douse our torches!” Thea protested.

What do we do now?
Knot asked Hermine. The rats were getting bolder; they were not actually terrified of fire, they merely detested it.

Mental fire,
the weasel replied, surprised.
Mit says you must broadcast—

Right.
Knot explained the need briefly to Thea and the gross one. All three set about imagining raging flames. Holding that image in their minds, they dived into the water and swam through the nether passage. The gross one could swim, clumsily, and that was all that was necessary for this brief section. Thea now reversed their roles by helping the gross one along, for of course this swim was simple for her. They emerged on the other side, in a new cavern—and the mental fires Hermine relayed to the rats sent them scurrying.

It was that easy. Knot had privately feared a very difficult transit, but that never developed. They proceeded unhampered to the exit below the bind, and tediously scaled the ledges down to the water. The final section they did the easy way: jumping into the water. The height was daunting, but Mit assured them that all of them would survive unhurt, so long as they followed the instructions on positioning Hermine relayed. They believed—and it was so.

Thea went first, having most confidence about water. She balanced herself precariously upright on the ledge, then flexed her knees and jumped into a lovely arching forward dive. Knot knew he would never forget her smile of rapture as she floated toward the water. She was doing something only normals could do, this one time in her life, and she gloried in it. Then she splashed down, fairly cleanly; her tail slapped the surface. In a moment she reappeared from the turbulence and waved.

Then the gross one. For this trip, Hermine and Mit elected to go with him, not with Knot. They clung to his head as he made a running leap off the ledge and dropped into a champion belly-flop. It must have stung terribly, but the wide mouth emerged from the froth grinning. He, too, had accomplished something unique.

Finally Knot himself went.
Can I do a cannonball?
he thought hopefully. Hermine gave him leave, and he ran, sprang, and curled himself into the ball, letting the canyon spin around him as the world had done in Finesse’s dream of love. That was a delightful simile! Then the smash of the water, ending the dream, and the struggle to orient and reach the surface and snort the liquid out of his nostrils.

“You know, I’ll bet you have two of the finest psis in the galaxy, there,” Thea remarked as they collected on the shore. “Each has a double talent; thought reception and thought broadcast for the weasel, clairvoyance and precognition for the crab. And your own psi is an insidious, amazing thing—and in fact you, too, are a double mutant, counting your physical side. Strange that, from what you say, you three should have been assigned to work with a normal.”

“She’s a very skilled, competent and nice normal,” Knot said. “I love her.”

Thea laughed. “I could love you, if I could remember you! But I wonder—you told me the women is being tortured because the lobos believe she has a psi talent. Is it possible they are right? It would make sense for CC to sent a secret psi on a mission like yours.”

It would indeed! So much would become explicable, if Finesse were actually psi.
Are the lobos right?
Knot asked Hermine.

Mit says no,
the weasel thought.

The bubble of speculation burst. “Our clairvoyant says no,” Knot repeated. “At this stage I find it very hard to believe that he could be wrong. He either knows something or he doesn’t know it, but he is never wrong when he does know it. If you see what I mean. Mit has known Finesse longer than I have.”

“So they really are torturing her for nothing,” Thea said. “They can’t be very smart. Maybe the lobotomy distorts their thinking.”

“I understand lobotomy is pretty refined,” Knot said. “It eliminates only the psi talent and the memories immediately associated with the lobotomy itself, and leaves the rational powers intact. There is a period of a month or so of confusion, then that clears up. Clearly the lobos are well organized and represent an effective force, so there is a real chance they can bring down CC.”

“But they’re still trying to squeeze psi out of a normal,” she said. “Normals wouldn’t do that, would they? Well, let’s get on with the rescue.” The gross one had now climbed out of the water, having had to locate a place with a navigable slope.

Progress was now rapid, because the canyon broadened, and some shore line was present most of the way. By nightfall Thea was able to announce that one more day’s travel would bring them to the ocean.

“Which is where we part company,” she said. “I really can’t handle sea water. It stings my eyes.”

“But I still haven’t found you your man!” Knot protested.

“There’s a good sized enclave development at the estuary,” she said. “Somewhere in there must be my man.” But she did not sound supremely confident.

“I shall not go until we find him for you,” Knot said with conviction.

“Meanwhile, I will accept a substitute,” she said. “I don’t remember what happened upstream, but I suspect you have a way with women.”

“I do,” Knot agreed. “I did with you, twice.”

“Can you make me remember it this time?”

Knot had gone over this question many times with the people with whom he associated, since they seldom remembered his answer. “You need someone to remind you of me just after I leave. To shore up the memories as they are fading, and transfer them to permanent memory. My psi interferes with that transfer from temporary to permanent, in some fashion.” He had suggested, before, that she write it down, but she was largely illiterate and lacked the facilities. “If Strella had lived, she might have written notes.” He shrugged. “Thea, I don’t think it’s worth your effort. Once we find your man, you’ll have no need of any memories of me.”

“I want those memories!” she insisted, clouding up.

I could remind her,
Hermine offered. She was back in Knot’s hair, now that he was no longer cannonballing into the water, and Mit was with her.

“Hermine will remind you telepathically,” Knot said. “That won’t be perfect, because her sending range is limited, but it will help if you work at it. You will have to concentrate on her very hard, after we separate, to pick up her thoughts as we draw farther apart.”

“Does the crab say that will work?” Thea asked. Then she smiled. “Yes, Hermine tells me he says it will. Oh, thank you!” The mermaid clasped him with vigor and led him into one of the more delightful experiences of his recent life. Her feet might be fused together, but she could do a lot with her separated thighs when she wanted to, not to mention the rest of her body. He did like her, and that helped.

There was another transmission from Finesse in the night, a brief one. “Hermine, I think the picnic is over. There is a changed mood here. I think I know how it must have been in the death camps of history, when mass executions were coming up. Tomorrow—I am afraid. Something awful is going to happen.”

Knot suffered an ugly chill.
Hermine, do you think she’s right?

Yes,
the weasel responded tightly.
We cannot get there in time.

I should have been traveling by night, instead of dallying with the mermaid!
he thought with savage reproach.

No. Thea is part of our escape. We must do right by her.

That doesn’t sound like weasel ethics.

I am learning from you, complicated man. But Mit agrees. He says she will yet help us greatly.

So it was practical as well as ethical. That was comforting. Knot lifted a hand to stroke the cool, wet, sleekly full breast of the sleeping mermaid. Yes—it was necessary to do right by this fine woman. They had shared an evening that was well worth remembering, and that memory was part of what he owed her.

That reminded him.
The gross one—he never told me his message. When I asked, he just answered “soon.”

He will tell you tomorrow, Mit says. Now squeeze your woman some more, while you have opportunity.

With these reassurances, Knot pressed himself against Thea’s fine warm bosom, and slept.

•  •  •

They moved well again, in the morning, after introductions—until Finesse cut in with an anguished transmission.
It’s Lydia! They’re going to do something to Lydia!

Lydia—the fat woman who could boil water slowly. Knot did not care about her so much as about Finesse’s distress. “Thea,” he said to the mermaid swimming nearby. “Hermine is relaying information to me, and I must receive. Fish me out of the river if I fall in.” He was serious; he wanted to keep moving, but could not spare much attention for his personal activity at the moment.

Then Finesse came through again, compellingly.
Piebald has locked her in cage with a tigodile!

Now the full scene came, as it had when Knot had merged minds with Hermine to fight the rats. He was looking through Finesse’s horrified eyes at an arena in which sat a double cage about twelve meters in diameter. In one section was the frightened fat woman; in the other, the tigodile. This was one of a number of semi-mutant species developed in recent generations, not true crossbreeds between diverse species, but suggestive of it. The tigodile’s front portion resembled a huge cat, and the rear was like that of a crocodile. It looked deadly and ravenous, and this was surely an accurate impression. It pawed at the bars that separated them, salivating copiously.

Piebald spoke. Knot saw him as Finesse’s eyes oriented involuntarily on him. He was actually a min-mute, physically, with splotches of discolor on his hair and skin. Knot wondered what his psi power had been, before it was taken from him.

“Now the rules of this little exercise are marvelously simple. The intent is to evoke the psi power within you. You have the ringside seat, Finesse, and shall not be permitted to leave before the denouement. Very shortly I shall arrange to have the barrier between the party of the first part, the mutant Lydia, and the party of the second part, the tigodile, removed. The fat will encounter hunger, and there will follow what will follow. I dare say the two parties will quickly become one. Only you can avert the otherwise inevitable—by acting psionically to alleviate the maiden’s likely distress at the denouement. I dare say you could stun the animal with a mental blast, or kill it by telekinetically disrupting the action of its heart, or use clairvoyance to fathom the combination of the lock to the gate, so that the maiden might open it to escape. There are a multitude of things you might do—and I hope you will do one of them soon, because otherwise the lady could suffer a certain inconvenience.”

“I have no psi!” Finesse cried. “This is impossible!”

Piebald shook his head sagely. “I certainly hope you are wrong. The lady in the cage really is innocent of any wrongdoing, apart perhaps from overeating, and her psi talent is meager. It would be a shame to see her become the overeaten.”

“What do you want?” Finesse screamed, her voice breaking.

“I want your psi,” Piebald replied calmly.

“Then put
me
in the cage!”

“I think not. You might suffer grievously.”

“
I
might suffer! What about Lydia?”

“She is not a CC agent. Her psi is known. She is valueless to us. You, on the other hand, surely have a psi talent of the first magnitude. One readily capable of dealing with a simple situation like this.”

“If I had, I would use it on you!”

“That is a risk I take. My employment is regarded as hazardous because of it. Of course, my demise would trigger the release of stungas throughout this villa, and an alarm would summon others to collect the bodies. But don’t let that deter you, my dear; I want you to manifest your talent, believe me.”