Twenty-two
The grezzen felt them before it saw or heard or scented them. The strongest presence that the grezzen felt was so assured, so—the grezzen did not comprehend the concept of arrogance—so like itself that the grezzen at first assumed it had invaded the territory of another.
But there was in this other the strangeness of viewpoint common to humans. Also, the grezzen felt three more intellects in physical proximity to the strong one, and adult grezzen found physical proximity not merely superfluous but noxious. So the intruders were not its kind.
In that moment, the grezzen heard the distant bellow and scented the stench excreted by a human shell, the peculiar communal skin they fabricated, and in which they sheltered their frailty, when they moved about.
‘‘There! Step on it, Zhondro!’’ The strong one evidently had observed the grezzen, though the grezzen still did not see the humans or their shell.
Grezzenkind, perfectly adapted to the world that it dominated for thirty million years, had no need of tools, least of all translational computers. But throughout the thirty years since Grezzenkind had first noticed Mankind, grezzen had felt humans’ thoughts. Grezzen had compared those thoughts with the coordinated images and sounds that stimulated and followed human spoken language.
And so the collective grezzen intellect had functioned like a translational computer. The grezzen could eavesdrop on human conversation and understand the words. But he seldom grasped the communicative nuances.
The grezzen sorted through the other humans’ identities. One, it recognized. The female who called itself Kit.
The other two remained indistinct. Male, clever, dangerous in the way that a lemon bug, though puny, was dangerous if one was careless. But the males were subservient, most probably to the strong one.
The grezzen had no need to measure the speed at which its six great legs carried it, as it leapt and dodged among primeval tree boles, nor any concept of its own bulk.
So it didn’t care when it felt the female, Kit, say, ‘‘Cutler, don’t chase it! You’ve got no clue what a carbon-12–based organism’s capable of. Its skeletal architecture is so dense that it supports eleven tons of muscle. It can double back on you at seventy miles an hour, and it’s mean enough to do it.’’
Indeed. These humans had ventured beyond the protection of their ghosts-that-could-not-be-felt. They had invaded his domain. And so he would kill them.