[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]back to the brooding guard quickly convinced him that the edge of the hand is
indeed a far more dangerous weapon than the fist. Andbirds, no matter what
their size, have hollow bones.
The test evoked a silent yelp fromtheQvant which made Martels grin.Better and
better. Now, on deeper into igno-rance. The most important thing that the
Birds knew about human beings that was false was this:Men cantwtf4,.The very
circumstances of his present imprisonment testified to this deeply buried
error, buried almost surely since the end of the Qvant s era.
Page 40
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
His back still to theguard,Martels set Tiam s nimble fingers to work in the
moon-shadowed darkness, unknotting and slip-ping out laces from the nearest
hides.
It turned out not to matter a bit that Martels had never actually tried a
karate chop, let alone used one inanysort of combat. Tiam knew what it was,
whatever he called it, and the killing of the guard was satisfyingly and
expertly sudden. He also turned out to know that the edge of the hand is even
better at breaking canes than it is at breaking bones. Within a few minutes
after the guard s death, he had at hand five razor-edged bamboo knives.
The main body of the carcass was quickly cut away under the backbone, and the
head was discarded. The rest was lashed, pinions outspread, onto a bamboo
T-frame, using thongs that Martels had been chewing at some dumb urging of
Tiam s for most of the preceding night. Such was his hunger by now that he
almost enjoyed this part of the process.
Once the thongs were tied, again using Tiam s skills here, Martels directed
that they be liberally coated with the Bird sownblood. It would make a sort of
glue as it coagulated, though probably far from a good one. There was, of
course, nothing else at hand to serve the purpose.
The whole process was launched just before dawn, when Martels guessed that
the nocturnal sentinel would be at its most inattentive, and increasingly
unable to see well. The unpleasant machine was finished in something under an
hour, thanks to TIam s deftness, right down to loops for Mar-tels feet, hips,
chest, arms, and hands. While it dried, creaking as though in pain
underitsgathering stresses, he checked to see which side of the tower had the
strongest updraft; that proved, not much to his surprise, to be the northeast.
The Qvant had necessarily been watching all this, with what seemed to be
baffled amusement. Apparently the killing of the guard had taken him, too, by
surprise, and thereafter he had allowed himself to be bemused by Martels
crazy taxi-dermy. He came charging to the fore with alarm only when Martels
began to fit himself into the loops, but once again Tiam helped to oppose him,
though a good deal more hesi-tantly. Like a blood-smeared figure of Icarus,
Martels made a running broad jump on the surface of the drum. By the time the
Qvant knew what it was he was fighting, machine and man had bounded out the
northern window, tail and all.
The new conglomerate creature fell like a stone. It took all of Tiam s
whipcord strength to keep his arms rigid, with almost nothing left over for
wingtip warping. Martels bent
his knees slightly, then straightened them again. Nothing had happened; he
didn t yet have flying speed. The floor of the meadow, still dark, rushed up
at him.
Then there came that faint but unmistakable sensation ofliftwhich only the
pilot of a very small aircraft ever comes to know. Now it was not the meadow
that was swelling in his face, but the edge of the jungle; his fall had taken
on a slant. Once more he bent his knees. Shedding pinfeathers like a dowdy
comet, he found himself scudding just over the surface of a blurred, dark
green sea. Jungle-trapped, misty warmair rising to greet the sun caught him in
the chest; and then O miracle! he was actually soaring.
Page 41
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Entirely uncertain of how long his fragile glider would last, how long his
strength would allow him to fly it even if it stayed together, with his own
resolve being steadily undermined by something close to terror emanating from
the Qvant and inexorably changing the hormone balance of their shared bodies,
he banked and turned southward, seek-ing another thermal which would give him
more altitude. Before him in the early morning the wall of fog that marked the
boundaries of Antarctica, behind which someone might exist, only might, to
help him out of this extravagant night-mare, retreated,
toweringandindifferent.
During the day, mountains began to appear ahead and to his right, and before
long he was rising and falling precariously over ranges of foothills. Here he
was able to climb very con-siderably, more, in fact, than he could put to use;
shortly after a bleak noon he reached what he guessed to be close to seven
thousand feet, but up there the temperature was so close to freezing that he
had to go down abouttwothousand, stretching his glide as much as possible.
He used a part of this airline approach to nothing in particular to make a
complete turn;andsure enough, he
was being followed. A formation of large, cranelike Birds was visible to the
north, keeping pace with him.
That was probably all they could do, for they looked to be as albatrosslike
as he was gliders all. Without much doubt, though, they could remain in
theairlonger than he could, no matter how long he managed to stay up, or how
well his jury-rigged construction lasted. The machine wasalready showing
multiple signs of failure too many for him to essay an attempt at evasion by a
long dive-stall-recovery maneuver, which would surely rip it apart completely.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plkajaszek.htw.pl
