Chapter Twelve

The Copsik Runners

Buws WERE RAISING AN INCREDIBLE RUCKUS. UNSEEN HANDS pulled the Grad headfirst through darkness and the rich smell of alien foliage. Branchlets no longer scratched his face; there must be open space around him.

He'd had no warning at all. Hands had grasped his ankles and pulled him down into another world. His yell was strangled by something stuffed into his mouth, something that wasn't clean, and a rag was tied to hold it in. A blow on the head convinced him not to struggle.

His eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom.

A tunnel wound through the foliage. It was narrow: big enough for two to crawl side by side, not big enough to walk in. No need, the Grad thought. You couldn't walk with no tide.

His captors were human, roughly speaking.

They were all women, though this needed a second glance. They wore leather vests and trousers, dyed green. The looseness of the vests was their only concession to breasts. Three of the five wore their hair very short, and they all had a gaunt, stretched-out look: two and a half to three meters, taller than any of Quinn Tribe's men.

They held implements: small wooden bows on wooden platforms, the bowstrings pulled back, ready to fire.

They were making good time. The tunnel turned and twisted until the Grad was entirely disoriented. His directional senses wouldn't give him an up. It presently opened into a bulb-shape four or five meters across, with three other tunnels leading off. Here the women stopped. One pulled the rag out of his mouth. He spit to the side and said, "Treefodder!"

A woman spoke. Her skin was dark, her hair a compact black storm cloud threaded with white lightning. Her pronunciation was strange, worse than Minya's. "Why did you attack us?"

The Grad shouted in her face. "Stupid! We saw your attackers. They've got a traveling box made of starstuff. That's science! We got here on a sheet of bark!"

She nodded as if she'd expected that. "An eccentric way to travel. Who are you? How many are you?"

Should he be hiding that? But Quinn Tribe must find Mends somewhere. Go for Gold-"Eight of us. All of Quinn Tribe, now, plus Minya, from the opposite tuft. Our tree came apart and left us marooned."

She frowned. "Tree dwellers? The copsik runners are tree dwellers."

"Why not? You don't get a tide anywhere else. Who're you?"

She studied him dispassionately. "For a captured invader, you are most impertinent."

"I've got nothing to lose." A moment after he said it, the Grad realized how true it was. Eight survivors had done their best to reach safety, and this was the end of it. Nothing left.

She had spoken. He said, "What?"

"We are Carther States," the black-haired woman repeated impatiently. "I am Kara, the Sherman." She pointed. "Lizeth. Hild." They looked like twins to the Grad's untrained eye: spectrally tall, pale of skin, red hair cropped two centimeters from the skull. "lisa." Usa's pants were as loose as her vest. That discrete abdominal bulge: Usa was pregnant. Her hair was blond frizz her scalp showed through. Long hair must be a problem among the branchiets. "Debby." Debby's hair was clean and straight and soft brown, and half a meter long, tied in back. How did she keep it that neat?

Sharman mean Shaman, an old word for Scientist. Could mean Chairman, except that she was a woman... but strangers wouldn't do everything the way Quinn Tribe did. Since when did the Chairman take a name?

"You haven't given us your name," Kara said pointedly.

There was something left to him after all. He said it with some pride:

"I'm the Quinn Tribe Scientist."

"Name?"

"The Scientist doesn't take one. Once I was called Jeffer."

"What are you doing in Carther States?"

"You'd have to ask a moby."

Lizeth snapped her knuckles across the back of his skull, hard enough to sting. He snarled, "I meant it! We were dying of thirst. We hooked a moby. Clave was hoping he'd try to lose us in a pond. He brought us here instead."

The Sharman's face didn't reveal what she thought of that. She said, "Well, it all seems innocent enough. We should discuss your situation after we eat."

The Grad's humiliation kept him silent... until he saw their meal and recognized the harpoon. "That's Alfin's bird."

"It belongs to Carther States," Lizeth informed him.

He found he didn't care. His belly was stridently empty. "That wood looks too green to make a cookflre-"

"Salmon bird is eaten raw, with falling onion when we can get it."

Raw. Yuk. "Falling onion?"

They showed him. Falling onion was a plant parasite that grew at the forks of the branchlets. It grew as a green tube with a spray of pink blossoms at the tip. The pretty brown-haired woman named Debby assembled a handful and cut the blossom-ends off. Usa's sword carved the scarlet meat in translucently thin slices.

Meanwhile Kara bound the Grad's right wrist to his ankles, then freed his left. "Don't untie anything else," she warned him.

Raw meat, he thought and shuddered; but his mouth watered. Hild wrapped sheets of pink meat around the stalks and passed one to the Grad. He bit into it.

His mind went blank. You learned to put hunger out of your mind during a famine... but he had definitely been hungry. The meat had an odd, rubbery texture. The flavor was rich; the onion taste was fiery, mouth-filling.

They watched him eat. I have to talk to them, he thought hazily. It's our last chance~ We have to join them. Otherwise~. what is there? Stay here and be hunted or let the invaders catch us, or jump into the sky .

The man-sized bird was dwindling. Lizeth seemed content to carve slices until they stopped disappearing; Debby was now cutting the falling onions to stretch them. The women had long since finished eating.

They watched with irritating smiles. The Grad wondered if they would consider a belch bad manners, and belched anyway, and had to swallow again. He'd learned while climbing the tree: a belch was bad news in free-fall, without tide to bring gas to the top of the stomach.

He asked for water. Lizeth gave it to him in a squeezegourd. He drank a good deal. The falling onion had run out. Feeling pleasantly full, the Grad topped off his meal with a handful of foliage.

Nothing could be entirely bad when he felt this good.

Kara the Sharman said, "One thing is clear. You are certainly a refugee. I never saw a starving copsik runner."

A test? The Grad took his time swallowing. "Cute," he said. "Now that that's established, shall we talk?"

"Where are we?"

"Nowhere in particular. I wouldn't lead you to the rest of the tribe until I knew who you were. Even here, the copsik runners might find us."

"Who are they, these... runners?"

"Copsik runners. Don't you use the word copsik?" It sounded more like corpsik when she said it.

He answered, "It's just an insult-word."

"Not to us or them. They take us for corpsiks, to work for them the rest of our lives. Boy, what are you doing?"

The Grad had reached for his pack with his free hand. "I am the Quinn Tribe Scientist," he said in freezing tones. "I thought I might find some background on that word."

"Go ahead."

The Grad unwrapped his reader. He had Carther States' undivided attention. The women were awed and wary; Lizeth held her spear at the ready. He chose the records cassette, inserted it into the reader, and said, "Prikazyvat Find copsik."

NOT FOUND

"Prikazyvat Find-" the Grad said and held the reader to Kara's face. The Sharman shied, then spoke to the machinery. "Corpsik."

CORPSICLE?

The Grad said, "Prikazyvat Expound."

The screen filled with print. The Grad asked, "Can you read it?"

"No," Kara said for them all.

"Corpsicle is an insult-term first used to describe people frozen for medical purposes. In the century preceding the founding of the State, some tens of thousands were frozen immediately after death in the hope of someday being revived and cured. This was fothid to be impossible.

The State later made use of the stored personalities. Memory patterns could be recorded from a frozen brain, and RNA extracted from the central nervous system. A brainwiped criminal could thus be fitted with a new personality. No citizenship was conferred upon these corpsicles. The treatment was later refined and used by passengers and crew on long interstellar voyages.

"'The seeder ramship Discipline's crew included eight corpsicles. The memory sets were those of respected citizens of advanced age, with skills appropriate to an interstellar venture. It was hoped that the corpsides would be grateful to find themselves in healthy, youthful bodies. This assumption proved-' I can't make sense of all that. One thing seems clear enough. A copsik isn't a citizen. He has no rights. He's property."

"That's right," said Debby, to the Sharman's evident annoyance.

So the Sharman doesn't trust me. So? "How do they find you in here? There must be cubic klomters of it, and you know it and they don't. I don't see why you fight at all."

"They find us. Twice now they have found us hidden in the jungle," Kara said bitterly. "Their Sharman is better than I am. It may be that their science enhances their senses. Grad, we would be glad to have your knowledge."

"Would you make us citizens?"

The pause lasted only seconds. "If you fight," said Kara.

"Clave broke his leg coming down."

"We make citizens only of those who will fight. Our warriors are fighting now, and who knows if they will repell the corpsik runners? If we can hurt a few, perhaps they will not seek out the children and old men and women who host guests."

Guests? Oh, the pregnant ones. "What about Clave and the women?

What happens to them?"

The Sharman shrugged. "They may live with us, but not as citizens." Not good, but it might be the best they could get. "I can't say yes or no. We'll have to talk. Kara...

"~Wbat is it?"

"I just remembered something. Kara, there are kinds of light you can't see. There used to be machines that could see the warmth of a body. That's how they find you."

The women looked at each other in dread. Debby whispered, "But only a corpse is cold."

"So light little fires all through the forest. Make them check each one."

"Very dangerous. The fire might..." she trailed off. "Never mind.

Fires go out unless fanned. The smoke smothers them. It might be possible after all, near the jungle surface."

The Grad nodded and reached for more foliage. Things were looking better. If some could become citizens, they could protect the rest. Perhaps Quinn Tribe had found a home...

"Three groups, and they're all going deeper. The traces are getting blurred," said the pilot's blurred voice. The carm hung behind Squad Leader Patry's shoulder, bow aimed at the jungle. "Are you going after them?"

"Groups how big?"

"Three and three and a bigger group. The big group started first. You probably won't catch them."

In the hands of Patry's men a mass of greenery rose from the rest and floated free. Patry reported, "We've found where they dug in. Okay, we're going after them." He joined the waiting men. "Mark, take the point. The rest of you follow me. Go wide of that yellow stufl it's poison fern."

Mark was a dwarf the only man in London Tree who could wear the ancient armor, and thus the only possible custodian of the spitgun. Ten years ago he had tended to shy back from an attack, until he gained confidence in his invulnerability. The men had called him Tiny until Patty himself raised hell about it. Mark was born to wear the armor.

He'd learned to wear it well.

He climbed past the severed bush and into the dark with London Tree's infantry behind him.

The agony was real, centered above Clave's knee, but spreading in flashes throughout his body. The rest faded in and out. He was being towed through a tunnel. Soon the Scientist's plant extracts would erase the pain. But hadn't the plants died in the drought? And... the tree was gone. There wasn't any Scientist, and the Grad had no drugs, and the Grad was gone too. Too few survivors followed the Grad through green gloom. dave's pitiful remnant of a tribe was split, and there was no medicine for an injured man.

Jinny and Minya stopped abruptly, jarring his leg. The pain shouted in his brain. Then they had plunged into the tunnel's branchlet walls, and dave tumbled in free-fall, abandoned.

His tumble turned him and the dream turned nightmare. He faced a bulky, faceless silver thing. The apparition raised something metal? A splinter stabbed into dave's ribs. He plucked it out. His mind was muzzy... was it a thorn? The metal-and-glass creature forced itself through the tunnel wall, ignoring Clave. Acolytes followed it in, blue men carrying huge, unwieldy bows.

The pain had gone and reality was fading. Here was medicine after all

"I see you've caught up with the first group," the pilot said. "The forward group has stopped. The middle group has joined them. Maybe you should quit."

"I sent Toby back with two copsilcs. The third had a broken leg, so we left him. We're almost at full strength. Let's just see what happens."

"Patty, is there something unusual about your mission?"

Classified... oh, what did it matter? "Catch some copsiks. Shoot some meatbirds. Collect some spices. Pick up anything scientific." That last wasn't usual. Maybe the First Officer wanted the Scientist to owe him a favor. Patty didn't comment, not with the Scientist's Apprentice listening.

"Fine. You've got copsiks. How many do you need? You don't really expect to find science here, do you?"

"There's a big group ahead. I'm going to at least look at the situation." Patty turned the volume down. Pilots tended to argue a point to death, and Patry wanted silence.

Gavving hadn't burrowed far before Jayan's line led them to a tunnel carved through the foliage. They moved faster then.

Despite its alien smell, Gavving was hungry enough to try the foliage.

The taste was alien too; but it was sweet and went down well. He ate more.

In fact, he felt almost at home here. His toes thrust into branchlets and pushed him down the tunnel in remembered rhythm. Cheeping and croaking rose from thousands of unseen throats. They wouldn't be birds, this deep in the thicket; but they chirped, and if need came they could probably fly. The sound was the sound of Gavving's childhood, before the drought killed the small life throughout the tuft.

It was an effort to remember that this wasn't Quinn Tuft; that he followed enemies who knew this thicket as Gavving knew his tree.

Minya, it seemed, didn't have that problem. She was snatching handfuls of foliage, but the hand she used clutched an arrow, and her bow was in the other.

They were moving faster than the line that slithered ahead of them. Merril wound it up as they went. The coil trailed from a thumb; she used both hands to move herself. When Gavving noticed, he said, "Let me do that for a while. Eat."

"Keep your hands free!" A little later, perhaps regretting her sharpness, she said, "I need my hands to move. You can fight with your hands. Where's your harpoon?"

"On my back. We're all right as long as Jayan is still pulling on the line," he said and immediately noticed that the line had gone slack. Gavving reached for his harpoon before he moved again.

A disembodied white arm thrust out of the tunnel wall and beckoned. Jayan looked out through a screen of branchiets. Her voice was a hoarse and frightened whisper. "They're ahead of us."

"Where?"

"Not far. Don't take the tunnel. There's a long, straight part, then it swells out. They'd see you. Go where I go, or they'll hear branchiets breaking."

They followed her into the thicket.

Jayan had broken a trail. Twice she'd had to cut thicker spine branches. In the end they watched from behind a screen of branchiets as the Grad spoke with the weird women.

They were lean and elongated, like exaggerated cartoons of the ideal woman, or like a further stage in human evolution. They looked relaxed. So did the Grad. His feet and one hand were bound, but he was casually eating foliage while they talked. The carcass of a bird was mostly bones.

Minya's breath was warm on his shoulder. She whispered, "It looks like the Grad may have talked them around. I can't hear, can you?"

"No." There was too much birdsong... and an occasional crackling as someone moved, making Gavving glad for the birdsong. Still, someone was making too much noise . .

Minya leapt through the branchiets in a hideous crackling, straight into the midst of the weird women, screaming, "Monster made of starstufli There!"

Gavving leapt after her, ready to do battle. He'd have appreciated some warning- The weird women didn't hesitate an instant. Five of them jumped toward other tunnels and were gone in three directions. The sixth jumped clumsily. She struck the edge of the opening and tumbled away unconscious. Had she struck that bard?

The Grad was struggling to free his hands. Gavving felt something sting his leg. He turned to fight.

To fight what? A thing of glass and metal! There were men behind it - ordinary men who floated free, sighting over their toes as they pulled huge bows taut with their hands-but they didn't fire. The thing of science pointed a metal tube at Minya, then at the Grad. Gavving's harpoon bounced off its mirror-glass face. It pointed at Gavving and stung him again.

You can't fight science, Gavving thought, and he drew his long knife and leapt at the monster. Then everything went dreamy.

"You're too deep," the pilot said. "I can't get individual readings on you. I've got a hot spot, a cluster of a dozen or so. You and the copsiks together?"

"Sounds right. We've got six copsiks here, one already tied up for us. We'll leave the one with no legs. That gives us seven total. A bunch went off through the tunnels. Can you locate them?"

"Yes. It looks like they're together again. There's you, and there's a tighter, brighter spot east of you. I'd say quit now. Kill some meatbirds on the way out."

"There's something here... I've got something scientific here, something I don't understand. Too scientific by half." Squad Leader Patty picked up a rectangular mirror that didn't reflect, a mirror that shone by its own light. With some trepidation he flipped an obvious switch. The light went out, to his relief. "You're right, we've got enough. We're coming out."