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"No one could say what would happen if many stones were conjoined. No one
would be responsible for the consequences."
"Are you so sure there would be consequences?" Pulickel watched the native
unswervingly. Jorana looked up sharply but said nothing.
Fawn turned the conversation to more prosaic and less controversial matters,
and soon had their host relaxed again. By the time the two humans were ready
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to leave, he was once more his usual composed, affable self.
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They stood outside the entrance to the longhouse, squinting in the bright
light of midday.
"We thank you for taking the time to answer our many questions." Fawn
underlined her words with the appro-priate gestures. "You have been a great
help to us and we appreciate it."
Jorana's fingers fluttered complaisantly. "The sharing of knowledge is never a
burden, always a pleasure. You are welcome anytime."
As they turned to depart, Pulickel switched to terran-glo. "This isn't enough.
Somehow we have to obtain a stone for examination."
Fawn's gaze narrowed as she shouldered her pack. "Didn't you learn your lesson
last time? No stone master is going to willingly relinquish possession of his
or her specimen, and because of your little escapade neither one of us is
going to be allowed near one unsupervised. For-get it, Pu'il. We're going to
have to study them from a distance and do the best we can."
He looked up at her as they made their way out of the village, heading for the
trail that would take them over the barrier ridge and back to base. "You know
that's in-adequate, Fawn."
"Yeah, I know. Put I'm damned if I can think of a way around it." As they
entered the jungle she turned her shirt evaporator up a notch. "Watch that
cluster of vines. Shelath stingers sometimes nest in those." At her urging, he
gave the dense knot of yellow‑brown foliage a wide berth. "I don't think
even the ever‑courteous, ever- understanding Parramati will be as
forgiving if we're caught trying to steal stones a second time."
"Not stealing," he reminded her with that familiar fey smile. "Borrowing."
"I wouldn't count on that to save me again, either," she warned him. "The
Parramati have fought plenty of wars with their neighbors, some of them in
recent times. They're quite capable of violence."
He stepped over a narrow gully. Small spotted crea-tures peeped querulously in
the shallow water below. "I don't see that we have any choice. The alternative
is to call in a full‑scale research team. If we can't bring the
necessary equipment to a stone, we have to bring a stone to the equipment."
"I know, I know. Don't you think I'd love to run Ululi-apa's earth stone
through the station's geoscope?" She jumped over a fallen log that he ducked
beneath. "I
don't want a hundred specialists in here, crawling all over the archipelago."
"We've already discussed what would happen to the stones in that case," he
reminded her. "The Parramati would take them to sea in their outriggers and
dump them in the nearest oceanic trench. Our choices are limited."
"What choices?" she muttered. "All we can do is wait for them to use some of
the stones, try to wangle an invi-tation to the relevant ceremony, and make
what record-ings we can."
"There has to be another way. Somehow we have to convince, bribe, or frighten
a stone master into letting us borrow a stone. Surely there's one who's
willing to bend kusum just a little. A young one, perhaps, not yet as steeped
in tradition as senior big persons like Jorana and Ascela. What if we offered
to let them participate in the process of analysis, brought them right into
the station?
That way their stone would never be out of their sight."
Fawn looked doubtful. "Won't work. Remember, stone utilization is a tandem
process. No stone master does anything with a stone without consulting at
least one col-league. Sure, we might tempt a young stone master. But they
won't do anything without first seeking advice from another."
He pushed leaves aside. "How can you be so sure, if it's never been tried?"
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She looked back at him. "You never give up on a line of reasoning, do you?
When you find one you like, you worry it like a dog. Not only do you still
think you can borrow a stone, now you want to borrow a stone master, too."
"I'm always glad when my aims are perceived so readily." He grinned up at her.
"You know this trail as well as I do by now. How come you always let me lead?"
"Because you're bigger, are more familiar with the po-tentially dangerous
flora here than I am, and can push all the vegetation out of the way for me."
"Ah." She frowned uncertainly, then set the matter aside. He was being
truthful, of course. She just wasn't sure he was enumerating all the truths.
Chapter Sixteen
Essasu RRGVB looked around the meeting room. Piarai was present, along with
the
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expedition to Torrelau. The memory of that fail-ure still burned in his mind,
as he knew it must in theirs.
Since returning, he'd immersed himself in everything the staff xenologists had
been able to find about the sacred stones of the Parramati. Taken together,
this con-stituted a singularly uninformative and inadequate body of work.
"You've all seen the latest report from our native con-tacts on Torrelau. What
do you make of this talk of the male human using stones to take a journey to
far‑off places?"
The assembled underlings exchanged glances and ges-tures. It was Yaarinda who
spoke. "We now know that certain so‑called sacred stones, when
manipulated by those Parramati trained in their use, can displace indi-viduals
in space. What the extent of this displacement may be we still do not know,
but it is real."
Her hands gestured second‑degree importance colored with danger.
"Several of us saw this happen."
Piarai continued. "It appears that at some unknown time in the past, historic
Parramati acquired the use of advanced technology whose origins remain for us
to dis-cover. I admit that these stones do not look like much, but in this
instance it clearly is dangerous to confuse ap-pearance with function. Through
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