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Updated: June 8, 2025
Yet still Tau fronted that invisible wave, his head high. And between his sturdily planted feet the knife gleamed bright with a radiance of its own. "Ahhh " Tau's voice curled out, to pierce that creeping menace. Then he was singing again, the cadence of his unknown words rising a little above the pattern wrought by the drum.
Vaguely aware that the clamor at the other end of the camp had died away, Dane muted the sound of his drum. Over its round top he could watch the Khatkan outlaws; their heads bobbed and swayed in time to the beat of his fingers. He, too, could feel the pull of Tau's voice. But what would come in answer? That shadowy thing which had been loosed to drive them here? Or the man himself?
Dane sensed this, saw the men on the terrace likewise drawing back from the unseen tie between the medic and the bull he had so clearly summoned. Then Tau's upheld hands came together in a sharp clap and men held their breath in wonder. Where the great bull had stood there was nothing except rocks in the sun. As Tau swung around to face the cat-dog, that creature had no substance either.
And he wasn't dirt-side to any extent either. So Tau's running tests " He lapsed into silence. None of them wished to put their thoughts into words. Dane picked up the microtape he had brought with him and went on down the corridor to return it. The panel of the cargo office was ajar and to his relief he found Van Rycke out. He shoved the tape back in its case and pulled out the next one.
Dane guessed that Lumbrilo sent now against the Terran the harvest of the medic's own memories. He shut his eyes against this enforced intrusion upon another's past, but not before he saw Tau's face, strained, fined to the well-shaped bones beneath the thin flesh, holding still a twisted smile as he met each memory, accepted the pain it held for him, and set it aside unshaken.
He dared not look away from that gathering to see how the fight at the other end of the camp was progressing. But he did see Tau's advance. The medic came into the light of the fire, not with his ordinary loose-limbed spaceman's stride, but mincingly, with a dancing step, and he was singing to the drum beat of "Terra Bound."
Tau's hands closed about Sinbad. "There's a chance in that " He looked a little less beat and he drank thirstily from the mug Dane gave him for the second time. Then he hurried out with Sinbad under one arm bound for his lab. Dane slicked up the galley, trying to put things away as neatly as Mura kept them.
Tau's voice was a harsh croak, issuing out of a mask of green mud festooned with trailing weeds. "This ground is rising." Asaki smacked the stock of his needler against the surface on which he crouched. "I think perhaps there may be clean land soon to come." Jellico hitched his way up a sapling, now bending under his weight. Through the vision lenses he studied the route ahead.
Dane patted the drum with one hand while, with the other, he groped for his fire ray. He tried to shout in warning and found that he could not utter a sound. Tau's arm moved, raised from his side, made a circling motion. The creeping man, his eyes rolled up in his head until only the whites gleamed blindly in the limited light, followed that gesture.
The colony was founded by escaped prisoners and just one racial stock. They took off from Earth close to the end of the Second Atomic War. That was a race war, remember? Which made it doubly ugly." Tau's mouth twisted in disgust. "As if the color of a man's skin makes any difference in what lies under it!
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