Chapter 22

Kirk found no more blue bamboo, but he picked up a hefty length of something like ironwood which might do as a serviceable club.

The jungle opened out suddenly into a wide clearing and above the trees on the other side he saw the top of a mountain. Spock’s words came back to him: “Camouflaged power and intelligent life-form readings in a solitary volcano near the clearing where Sola landed.”

Suddenly things made a little more sense. The Totality would be testing them all on more than one level. Soljenov would put Kirk down within range of a determined assault on his own fortress, to see if Kirk would take up the gauntlet-or take the bait.

He couldn’t know Kirk very well, after all, if he had to ask the question. Or then again, perhaps he did know Kirk very well, and it was a sophisticated version of “Won’t you come into my parlor?”

In any case, Kirk fixed the direction by the sun and plunged into the jungle in the direction of the mountain. He would take bearding the enemy in his den, any day, over wandering aimlessly in a jungle trying to avoid becoming dinner-or waiting to be rescued.

And, in truth, he could not wait. It was coming to him that he could not allow Sola to find him. Under conditions of matehunt she would doubtless have no choice but to mate, perhaps also to bond. And he could not allow himself that. There was Spock.

In fact, it was coming to him that there was no solution to that. He could not see the Vulcan make this effort to break free-only to slam him back into his chains.

No.

And at the same time, he could not change the fact that he would always be there as a threat to both of them. He could not leave. He could not deny the lightning which had struck him, too. Even if he said nothing, did nothing, he doubted that Sola could deny it indefinitely.

If she found him here, he doubted that she could deny it at all.

Some dim thought was coming to him of a radical solution to that and other problems. But he could not quite bring it into focus, yet. He knew that it had something to do with what he had experienced with Gailbraith in that brief encounter with Oneness. He could not fully remember it all, and he knew that his mind, or Gailbraith’s, was blocking the remembrance. But he knew that the pull of Oneness had been strong. It was shockingly different-and yet he had lived his life exploring the different. There in the Oneness what was forbidden became the normal, and there was no more solitude or secret or separation.

There he could perhaps endure alone the separation which would have to come if the other two were to be free.

And suppose that instead of exploring Gailbraith’s One, he went into Soljenov’s Totality?

If the Totality could not be made to abandon conquest from without-maybe he could stop it from within?

Apparently he had become a major objective of both superentities, Gailbraith’s and Soljenov’s. And maybe something could be made out of that. Such as a lot of trouble…

He increased his pace toward the mountain.

And then something reached down from a tree and closed steely coils around him-coils as thick as his thigh.

He looked up to see what might as well have been a dragon-a fanged head on a thin neck, thick body, and a tail the size of a large python, which had wrapped around him.

He tried to get his club arm free, but it was hopeless. He was being drawn up toward the fangs. He thought that he screamed, mentally, to anyone who could hear. But he expected no answer…

Sola heard the scream of her mate.

There was no sound, but there was now the link between them which made him her life. She moved, and there was little left of the Free Agent of the Federation. She was the Zaran female, answering the cry of her mate across a million-year-old jungle.

She flew now, taking risks she would not have taken before, hurling herself across large open spaces to catch precarious handholds, then swinging up again to run along tightrope-thin branches or vault on the thin saplings.

And still she was certain that she would be too late.

She sent out the psionic hunting cry of the Zaran female-and now it had the power of a female in matehunt. It was a warning which could strike terror to the heart of prey or predator, and it might give some predator pause, just long enough.

Then she was there, and she saw Kirk crushed in the coils of a tree-serpent. He was all but unconscious, and the serpent’s head was looking into his face. It had perhaps been stopped from crushing the life completely out of him, or using its poison fangs, by her cry.

She leaped across the last twenty feet to land on the serpent’s woven bower. It was semi-intelligent and wove nests for itself, often in front of great tree-caves which were its lair.

She could not use the phaser. It would hit Kirk, too. And a stun heavy enough to stop the serpent might kill him. She lashed out with her wrist-coil, wrapping the energy coil around the serpent’s throat just below the head and jerking the fanged head away from Kirk’s face. The coil was not heavy enough to stun the serpent, but it made the beast pay attention.

It turned and came after her, dragging Kirk still in its tail. She made the coil flicker, striking it again, reaching for the vulnerable spot where the coil would have enough power to stun the small, active brain.

The fanged head struck at her, and she stepped inside it, threw herself on the neck, and finally reached a vulnerable spot behind the ear with her wrist-weapon at point-blank range.

The serpent began to collapse, stunned, and she saw that it would fall off the edge of the bower-taking Kirk with it.

She leaped to pull him out of the relaxing coils of the tail. The serpent poured limply over the edge of the bower, and she heard the thud from below before she was quite certain that she had managed to hold Kirk with the strength of necessity.

The serpent would doubtless recover in an hour or so. She would not.

Kirt was semiconscious. She half-carried, half-guided him into the serpent’s tree-cave. It was clean and quiet, and no other predator would come here.

She started to go over Kirk. The thin Sickbay outfit was in tatters. She found a scratch on a shoulder, not from the serpent but from his fight with the cranth. She had found the great animal which he would see as cat and bear. She saw his makeshift spear, and she did not know yet how he had survived.

He was conscious now, and he looked up at her with a faint smile. “So much for my theory,” he said. “Thank you.”

Her own voice was strained and low in her throat. “What theory?”

“I didn’t want you to find me. At least, I didn’t want to want it.” He reached out and took her hand. “Sola, what I said on the ship still has to go for us. We can’t give Spock back to the chains and the vultures. And now we can’t give the Totality what it wants, either.”

“Spock sent me back to you,” she said. “He is stronger even than you know, and he will not be harmed by this. As for what the Totality wants, it may have overplayed its hand just now in setting one of you against the other. If I can keep some balance, perhaps I can stop short of bonding.”

He frowned then. “Is that safe for you?”

She laughed low in her throat. “No. But it is safer than the alternative.”

She leaned away from him and started to stand up. She was not certain whether or how long she could keep going without the ending which was necessary to the matehunt. But she could not trust herself to stop short of the bonding. And she would not override his resistance with the threat to her life.

He caught her wrist again and stopped her from moving. “What you are not saying,” he said, “is that it is almost what it was for Spock. It is your life-isn’t it?”

“No,” she lied.

But he reached up to catch her shoulder and pulled her down. “Your mistake,” he said. “Did you suppose either one of us would allow that?”

Then his lips found hers, and she knew that he was right, whatever danger or impossibility it might lead to, there was no way, even, that she could find Spock until she had finished with this-if it could be finished. This moment, at least, was theirs, and must be….