saved Sam's key for me, since I don't usually leave it lying around. I had whatever gods who were on my side to thank for the presence of mind to have put it in my pants pocket.
I walked down the other side of the hill and had a mild temper tantrum. Darla watched me kick sand, pick up a stick, and beat a poor patch of land-weed into pulp, then fling the stick away.
She walked over to me. 'Finally getting to you?'
'Merte!' I said. 'Shit! Piss!' I kicked more sand. 'Hell and goddamn,' I finished, done with it.
She thought it was very amusing. I did too, after a moment. I looked at her. She was in briefs and halter, wearing her knee-high boots, carrying the jumpsuit in a roll under her arm. Roland was carrying her backpack. If my mind had been less occupied, I would have had trouble not staring at her. Roland was staring, not that I blamed him. The briefs were very sheer. Susan was topless and was by any standard an eyeful as well, but she wasn't drawing a glance from him. But then, Susan was a known quantity, so to speak.
'Darla, how are those damn bugs following us?'
'I don't know. It's very strange, but they are a Snatchgang, aren't they?'
The others pricked up their ears. I wished Darla hadn't said it, but now they knew, if they hadn't before. Snatchgangs go after one quarry, and one only, so the Teelies weren't in danger, unless the Rikkis had a mind to use them to get to me ? which, when I thought about it, was indeed a possibility.
'Okay, they're a Gang, but how did they trail us through a potluck… and why?'
'Could they have scanned us?'
'They were behind Sam, and even he might have lost us. And Sam didn't shoot the portal, so they didn't follow him through. No, they're using some exotic tracking technique, known only to Gangers. But what is it?'
Darla considered it. 'Chemical trace? Pheromones?'
'Possibly. But can they detect minute quantities of the stuff over hundreds of kilometers of airless void?'
'Some Terran insects can be sensitive to a few molecules in a cubic klick of air, so maybe?'
'Yeah, but Rikkis aren't insects; they're highly evolved life forms. Even bear their young live, like us.'
'I was going to say that with the aid of technology, maybe they could do the same through vacuum.'
I stroked her shoulder. 'Sorry, love. I'm being testy, I know. Your point's well-taken. But…' I looked up at the sky and massaged the back of my neck. 'God, am I tired.' I yawned and got hung up in the middle of it, couldn't stop. 'Excuse me,' I said, finally recovering. 'One thing, though. When did they tag me?'
'At the restaurant? Sonny's?'
I'd been thinking about that for quite a while. 'Yeah, the restaurant. But I never got near the Rikki. If they were spraying the stuff at me, it would have landed on other people too. Muddled the trace.'
Darla bit her lip, shook her head. 'I dunno, but they must've done it somehow, Jake. We know it wasn't Sam they tagged. It was you, your person, somehow.'
'What were they doing at the farm, retagging me because the first one didn't take, or wore off?'
'Sounds plausible. Maybe they were just looking for the map. You asked why they followed us through a potluck. It could only be because now they're sure you have the map, or know where you can get it.'
'Yeah, everyone must be absolutely convinced of that now. I guess it did look like we deliberately ducked through that portal, with Petrovsky literally trying to drag us back. Okay, so maybe nobody saw that part of it, but we sure didn't hesitate any.'
'No, we didn't. And now the Roadmap myth is reality.'
I nodded. It was, and I had made it so by trying to debunk it. I sighed. 'Let's get moving.'
'Good. I'm going to wet my pants if we don't.'
Roland came down from the crest of the knoll, where he'd been watching the road. 'Another vehicle went by,' he reported.
'Ryxx?' I asked.
'No, a human driving, a man. Strange, the buggy looked familiar. I think I saw it back on Goliath, but I don't know where.' He scratched his head. 'Oh, I remember. It was in the dealership lot. An old piece of merte. The dealer tried to dump it on us, cash sale, instead of a rental.'
'One man, you say?' Now who the blazes could that be?
'Oh, the hell with it,' Darla said suddenly, and squatted in the weeds. 'I can't wait. Gentlemen, please…?'
I said, 'Huh? Oh.' I turned to John and Roland. 'Okay, troops, eyes front.'
'God, men are so lucky,' Susan said, taking her station near Darla.
Lucky? Okay, so we can write our names in the sand. It's not exactly an art form.
As we neared the harbor we found more aliens, most of them sealed up inside their vehicles, unable to step out on this planet without technological aid. Through the viewports we saw squidlike things swimming in a^ watery medium, blobs of gelatin sitting comfortably in a fog of yellow gas, many more forms mat we couldn't make out at all. Some beings motioned enigmatically to us as we passed, raising tentacles, claws. Others followed us with conical eyestalks, observing. From most there was no reaction.
The island was a trade-fair of vehicle design. There were objects lying about that didn't look like vehicles at all, odd geometrical shapes and flowing, melted things giving no clue as to how they moved. There were humans here too, waiting patiently like everyone else. And rigs as well, strangely enough. I asked one starrigger when the ferry was due in.
'She'll be in,' was all he said, and spat in the sand.
'Thanks.' I walked away.
The harbor was large but did not look deep, though the water's clearness may have been distorting. I was puzzled by the fact that there wasn't a dock or pier or anything in sight. Instead, at the apex of the deep indentation that formed the harbor, a graded section of beach angled steeply into the water. The sand looked packed and hard mere.
'What do you make of it?' I asked Roland.
'A hydroskiff?'
I rubbed the scratchy stubble of my beard. 'Funny, when I heard 'ferryboat' I thought of just 'that, a water- displacing vessel of some kind. Besides, you'd want flat beach to pull up on.'
'Right. Things seem primitive enough here, at least as far as humans are concerned. Maybe it is a boat.'
'Well,' I yawned, 'we'll see eventually.' I plopped myself down on the sand.
Winnie was drawing again, and this time I watched her. She made one big spiral figure, smaller ones nearby, and linked them with lines. I was intrigued, and asked Darla if Winnie had explained.
'Something to do with her tribal mythology,' Darla told me. 'Haven't figured out what it's all about.' Her answer gave me the ever-so-slight feeling that she was being evasive in some way. But no, she was just tired and didn't want to be bothered. Still, I wondered. Winnie now was drawing lines within the big spiral. I went over to her, knelt in the sand, and asked her as clearly as I could what she was doing.
'Twee, many twee,' she said, indicating the large figure. 'But not like twee… like light! Many big twee like light.' She pointed to the smaller spirals. 'Many light, many light, many light…' I couldn't follow the rest of it, but if she was talking about galaxies and the Skyway linking them, it'd be a remarkable mythology indeed, if it weren't for the fact that it could have been learned by osmosis from contact with humans. That was the most likely explanation. A more sensational interpretation was an old pitfall some anthropologists in the past had spent time at the bottom of. Many light, many light… Winnie had passed through the Great Trees at the Edge of the Sky and was now in the realm of the gods, plying the paths through a forest of stars. Or whatever. As I watched her I again felt some share of guilt for what humans had done to her natural habitat, and wondered if there could have been any way to avoid it. Surely there was more jungle on Hothouse than Cheetah homeland. I couldn't imagine the species' total population planet-wide as being anything over a few hundred thousand, if that, but I wasn't sure. Hothouse wasn't all jungle, of course. True, there were millions of square kilometers of rain forest, but the planet had more ocean surface man Terra, plus the usual assortment of climates. It boasted icy polar continents, though small ones, deserts, plains, everything. The problem was that a lot of the tropic regions were parched and uninhabitable, and temperate areas were scarce due to the fact that Hothouse's land masses were bunched up around the equator. Mulling it over, I soon had it figured out: Winnie's people had naturally settled in rich food-gathering areas. These same areas of jungle produced high yields of organic raw materials used for a wide range of products, including antigeronic drugs ? definitely the most lucrative cash crop ever. Hothouse was one of the few sources for
