For Love of Mother-Not - Alan Dean Foster [78]
They hesitated before approaching the skimmer, circling the landing area once. The quick search revealed that their hiding place had remained inviolate. Once aboard, Lauren took the craft up. She did not head toward the camp; instead, she turned south and began to retrace their course over the treetops. Very soon they encountered the long, open gash in the woods. Lauren hovered above it for several minutes as she studied the ground, then decisively headed west. Flinx kept to himself, trying to shut the memory of that emotional deluge out of his mind. Then, quite unexpectedly, the open space in the trees came to a dead end.
“Damn,” Lauren muttered. “Must have picked the wrong direction. I thought sure I read the surface right. Maybe it’s the other way.”
Flinx did not comment as she wheeled the skimmer around and headed southeast. When the pathway again ended in an unbroken wall of trees, she angrily wrenched the craft around a second time. This time when they encountered the forest wall, she slowed but continued westward, her gaze darting repeatedly from the darkened woods below to the skimmer’s instrumentation.
“Maybe if you were a little more specific, I could help you look,” he finally said, a touch of frustration in his voice.
“I told you. Weapons. Allies, actually. It comes to the same thing. No sign of them, though. They must have finished eating and entered semidormancy. That’s how they live; do nothing but eat for several days in a row, then lie down to sleep it off for a week. The trouble is that once they’ve finished an eating period, they’re apt to wander off in any direction until they find a sleep spot that pleases them. We haven’t got the time to search the whole forest for the herd.”
“Herd of what?” Flinx asked.
“Didn’t I tell you? Devilopes.”
Enlightenment came to Flinx. He had heard of Devilopes, even seen a small head or two mounted in large commercial buildings. But he had had no personal experience of them. Few citizens of Drallar did. There was not even one in the city zoo. As Flinx understood it, Devilopes were not zooable.
The Demichin Devilope was the dominant native life form on Moth. It was unusual for a herbivore to be the dominant life form, but excepting man, a fairly recent arrival, they had no natural enemies. They were comparatively scarce, as were the mounted heads Flinx had seen; the excessive cost of the taxidermy involved prevented all but the extremely wealthy from collecting Devilope.
The skimmer prowled the treetops, rising to clear occasional emergents topping ninety meters, dropping lower when the woods scaled more modest heights. Occasionally, Lauren would take them down to ground level, only to lift skyward again in disappointment when the omens proved unhelpful. There was no sign of a Devilope herd.
Meanwhile, another series of sensations swept through Flinx’s active mind, and Pip stirred on his shoulder. He had continually tried to find Mother Mastiff’s emotions, without success. Instead, his attempts seemed to be attracting the feelings of everyone but his mother-not. He wondered anew at his heightened perception since he had acquired his pet; though it was likely, he reminded himself that here in the vastness of the northern forests where minds were few and scattered, it might be only natural that his receptivity improved.
These latest sensations carried a female signature. They were also new, not of Mother Mastiff or Lauren. Cool and calm, they were vague and hard to define: whoever they belonged to was a particularly unemotional individual. He felt fear, slight but unmistakable, coupled with a formidable resolution that was cold, implacable—so hard and unyielding that it frightened Flinx almost as much as Mother Mastiff’s own terror. Save for the slight overtones of fear, they might have been the emotions of a machine.
The feelings came from the camp where