Win, Lose, Draw

I took a deep breath. My voice was no more than the wind, rising and falling through shadowed branches.

“All streams run to the sea, yet the sea is not full;
To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.
All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
And what has been done is what will be done;
And there is nothing new under the sun.”

The Book of Words was right. The Founders and the guardian cybers knew that in the end it was all the same. They knew it was better to abolish even the hope of change.

The strings hummed beneath my fingers, glissandos flowing to the tremor of branches. Needles rustled. There were shadowy movements around me. Glimpses of peering, intent faces behind screens of clustered greenery. Amber eyes fixed on my harp in perplexity, fear, wonder. I didn’t care. The notes rippled on in a soothing rhythm, a numbing cycle of return and repeat.

Music ebbed into the forest hush. I sat holding the lyre, absently stroking the smooth wood. Above, below, around me, shadowy green. Silence.

The sharp cry of a hliu pierced it. And suddenly the green hush was ripped by shrill whistles and flying shapes. There was no time to jump to my feet. The clustered needles and concealing branches exploded with leaping, dropping forms, the flash of russet fur, amber eyes glinting, long arms reaching. The lyre was tom from my grasp as my ankles were seized, and I was falling backwards over a dizzy swoop of descending trunks.

“Hey! Careful with that! Wait! You don’t underst—”

Something pliant whipped across my jaw, gagging me. More strands looped around my arms. I caught a glimpse of a net held in long, limber toes.

They flung the net around me. I struggled, focusing for a vivid second on bright eyes and a flat, broad face pressed close to mine. My eyes widened. One of Heinck’s “tame” Andurans from the pub. The native was naked in his fur now, but I was sure of it. A trap. The net twisted, tugged tighter from behind.

“Mmmmrrph!” I shouted furiously against the gag, tumbling back and then abruptly lurching forward, throwing them off balance, lunging at the native I’d recognized. He scrambled back hastily, swinging up and out of sight. Tangled in the net, I whirled, pulling the smaller Andurans with me. A flash of startled faces. I recognized another of the men from Heinck’s band.

They pulled again, looping strands tighter. I lunged, pulling them on the cords as they fought me, then rolled suddenly with them, into them. I kicked out, connected with something that gave a bitten-off cry. I wrenched free, rolling along the branch and over a knobby shape that squirmed out from under me, making no noise but a short grunt. I rolled again, thrashing free and scrambling awkwardly to my feet, arms still bound, cords trailing behind me. I ran for the solidity of the tree trunk, something to get behind my back—

My feet were whipped out from under me.

And I was swooping through air, kicking upside down, dropped with a sickening plunge and then lurched up short by the stretching web of the net. Around me a whirling wheel of deep green, pale blue behind dark tracery, long bars of black trunks, branches reaching out to clutch with reddish fingers. Another sickening drop and sway. I was bobbing, dangling as the figures with the cords wrapped around their waists swarmed through, up, and down the branches, bearing me along.

In a flash of clarity it occurred to me they were carrying me off the same way Sarn and Garn had described the natives taking away the body of the man who'd “accidentally” fallen in the tourist enclave. The silent Andurans dragged me on.