he needed to do now was scare off the female, then he could rest for a few lapses and think through the logistics of joining up with Lucia and extracting their two specimens from the forest.
The female halted, clinging to a branch just a stretch or so ahead of him. Carlo stopped too, waiting for his adversary to flee, but instead she turned and defiantly wrapped three arms around her insensate friend.
Carlo swung onto a closer branch. The female glared at him balefully, her eyes glinting violet. Surely she was intelligent enough to understand that she risked paralysis herself? He opened his slingshot pouch and checked the contents; despite everything it had been through, the sturdier version Lucia had given him hadn’t spilt any darts.
As he took out the slingshot he caught a blur of motion in his rear gaze, but before he could react there were arms encircling his chest, a hand tugging on the slingshot, a fist pounding his tympanum and teeth buried in the side of his neck. The worst pain by far was in his tympanum; he stiffened the membrane and managed to seize hold of the offending fist. The male tried to pull free, without success, then redirected all his effort into his jaws.
Carlo retained just enough presence of mind not to start cursing aloud. His upper hands were already fully occupied and his lower hands couldn’t reach the jaw clamped to his neck. There was an urgent, combative tension keeping his whole body rigid, and his first attempts to change his form faltered from the sense that any relaxation would mean surrender. He kept trying. Finally his lower limbs softened, and he extruded enough flesh into them to let them stretch up to the arborine’s mouth. He forced his fingers between the creature’s teeth, hardening his fingertips into wedges, and tried to prise the jaws apart.
Gradually the arborine yielded, but while Carlo was focused on that battle the thing pulled the slingshot out of his hand and tossed it away. Carlo quickly plunged his hand into the pouch again and got hold of a dart; with a flick of the thumb he unsheathed it. The arborine grabbed his wrist and refused to let him take his hand from the pouch.
Carlo’s skin was feverish, but the animal’s flesh against him felt hotter. The scent of it was overpowering, but horribly familiar: it reminded him of the smell of his father before he’d died. He still had his hands in the arborine’s jaws; he pulled them further apart and twisted the head back sharply. This felt satisfying, but however much pain he was inflicting it didn’t weaken the arborine’s grip on him.
Carlo tried to extrude a fifth limb, but nothing happened. He let go of the fist that he’d stayed from battering his tympanum, sharpened the fingertips of his newly freed hand and plunged them into the arborine’s forearm just above the pouch. He felt the muscles below twitch and slacken; he’d disrupted some of the motor pathways.
The arborine appeared confused; it didn’t bother resuming its assault on Carlo’s tympanum, but before it could make up its mind what to do Carlo tore his hand free from the pouch and plunged the dart into the arborine’s shoulder. He felt the body grow limp immediately, but he still had to prise the lower arms from around his chest and shake the thing off him.
The females were gone.
Carlo looked around; his slingshot was caught on a branch nearby. He dragged himself over and grabbed it, then set off toward the canopy as fast as he could.
As he ascended, the light from the flowers above him thinned and faded and was gone. Suddenly he was in open air, in the murk again, with nothing but the forest’s decaying litter between him and the cavern’s red ceiling. He searched for the females, hoping the one who’d carried her friend so far might have needed one last rest before launching the pair to safety, but then he saw them. They were in the air, a couple of stretches away, drifting straight toward the safety of a neighboring tree.
Carlo loaded his slingshot, took aim and released the dart. A breeze stirred the dust and obscured his view, but when he had clear sight again the projectile was nowhere to be seen.
He tried again. His second dart sliced through the detritus and miraculously struck flesh—but he’d hit the female that Lucia had already paralyzed.
“No, no, no!” he pleaded. The arborines vanished into the murk; he waited helplessly, and when they appeared again they’d almost reached their sanctuary. Carlo reloaded and released, reloaded and released, aiming through the grit and swirling dead petals by memory and extrapolation until a single dart remained.
He couldn’t bring himself to use the last one blindly. He waited for the air to clear. Lucia knew the forest better than anyone living, but she’d been a child the last time an arborine had been captured. There were no experts at this. How many people would he need to beg from Tosco in order to succeed at this task by force of numbers alone?
He finally caught sight of the arborines, silhouetted against the light of the adjacent tree. They had separated; their outlines were distinct. Carlo waited for his indefatigable nemesis to reach out and drag her friend to safety, but both animals remained motionless. She wasn’t just weary. He had hit her.
They hadn’t drifted far in among the branches, but they’d be within reach of any determined allies. If he descended to the floor of the cavern, crossed through the undergrowth and climbed up the neighboring tree, there’d be no guarantee that the arborines would still be waiting for him.
Carlo looked up toward the ceiling, wondering if he should go back and fetch Lucia. But even that might take too long.
He dragged himself out along the branch he was holding, then grabbed another one and pulled the two together to the test the way they flexed. They were loose and springy; maybe an arborine could judge exactly how they’d recoil, but the task was beyond him.
Then again, if he aimed low he might face a long climb to his target, but he probably wouldn’t find himself stranded.
Carlo glanced down at his torn skin. He’d come too far to give up on the chase now. He crawled to the end of the swaying branch, holding it only with his lower hands, then pushed himself away into the air.
33
“We’ve hit a dead end,” Romolo confessed. “Just when the Rule of Two was starting to look plausible, we checked it against the second set of spectra and it fell apart.”
Carla glanced at Patrizia, but she appeared equally dispirited. They had been toiling over the spectra from the optical solid for more than a stint, but the last time they’d reported to her they had seemed to be close to a breakthrough.
“Don’t give up now!” Carla urged them. “It’s almost making sense.” She had hoped that the problem would yield to a mixture of focus, persistence and brute-force arithmetic—and it was easier to free her two best students from other commitments than to achieve that state herself. Someone had to supervise the experiments the Council had actually approved.
“Making sense?” Patrizia hummed softly and pressed a fist into her gut, giving Carla a pang of empathetic hunger. When things were going well there was no better distraction than work, but the frustration of reaching an impasse had the opposite effect.
“Why should the Rule of Two depend on the polarization of the beams?” Romolo demanded.
“And why the Rule of Two in the first place?” Patrizia added. “Why not the Rule of Three, or the Rule of One?”
Carla tried to take a step back from the problem. “The first set of spectra
“Yes,” Romolo agreed. “But why? Once they’re this close together, luxagens simply attract each other. So how does a pair of luxagens get the power to push any newcomers away?”
“I don’t know,” Carla admitted. “But it would solve Ivo’s stability problem.” If each energy level could hold at most two luxagens, then beyond a certain point it would be impossible to squeeze more of the particles into each energy valley. That would be enough to prevent every world in the cosmos from collapsing down to the size of a dust grain.
Patrizia said, “For the first set of spectra, we made the field in the optical solid as simple as possible—using light polarized in the direction of travel for all three beams. With that kind of field, each luxagen’s energy only depends on its position in the valley. For the second set, we changed the polarization of one of the beams, so the luxagen’s energy depends on the way it’s moving as well as its position. But the strangest thing is that it looks as if
