第61节

took another deep breath and lay there for a good ninute, ears

cocked, straining to catch the slightest sound of movement. All he

could hear was his own heartbeat.

Reaching forward, Steve carefully pulled out one of the branches that

had been stuck in the ground. The end had been cut at an angle by a

machete. Pushing it gently aside, he peered through. A Mute hut stood

in a small clearing enclosed by a circular screen of leaves. The

doorway to the hut faced a gap in the screen on the opposite side to

where Steve lay, making it impossible to see if the hut was occupied.

There was no sign of smoke coming from the ring plate in the roof and

none of the usual living debris scattered around. Even so, Steve's

sixth sense told him that someone was inside. Wait a minute! He could

hear something. Was that somebody, humming a - tune? She was there!

It had to be her. There was no one else it could be.

With rising excitement, Steve crawled round through the ferns towards

the gap in the surrounding screen and stopped a yard from the

opening.

Moving with the stealth of a praying mantis, he eased another cut

branch out of the ground and gingerly poked his head and shoulders in

under a curtain of withered leaves. Steve found himself confronted not

by the hoped-for view of matchless beauty, but by the decomposing heads

of Naylor and Fazetti spiked on poles on either side of the doorway. A

large, dark bird of prey was perched on Fazetti's head, tearing a

sinewy strand of flesh out of one of the gaping eye-sockets. Steve

recoiled in horror. The bird, startled by the sudden movement,

flapped

away with a harsh cry of alarm.

Steve swallowed hard and collected his thoughts.

According to Mute tradition, the heads of his fellow-wingmen were the

battle trophies of whoever occupied the hut. But didn't Fazetti go

bananas in mid-air? How could she, if indeed it was she who... ?

Another more pressing thought struck Steve. If whoever owned the hut

had downed the two wingmen maybe they had taken more than their

heads.

Maybe some of their gear was inside. Like a map, air pistol, flame

grenade, con-food pack. Useful things that someone planning to escape

would need. Nerving himself to face his two spiked friends, Steve

pushed his head back through the curtain of leaves. As he did so, the

flap over the doorway, framed by the two headpoles, was pushed aside

and the owner of the face that had haunted his dreams emerged, stood

up, and stretched with the grace of a waking cat.

It was Clearwater. Steve, of course, did not yet know her name but, in

the few seconds that she stood there in full view, Steve's eyes roved

over every detail of her naked body; the long, straight-boned, supple

limbs, the slim-hipped torso with its firm, rounded breasts, strong

shoulders and small waist, the smooth skin free of the disfiguring

tree-bark patches and the tumour-like bone growths that afflicted other

Mutes; her whole body unflawed - apart from the swirling pattern of

pigments - from head to toe. Since art, in the generally accepted

sense of the word, did not exist within the Federation, Trackers were

not overly susceptible to its attendant qualities such as the harmony

of form and colour, the gracefulness of line and proportion. But

something deep within Steve responded; made him aware that the Mute

female in front of him was-an object of great beauty even though he

could not express himself in those words. He was seized simultaneously

by two totally conflicting emotions; an irrational desire to possess

her and a sense of shock, disgust even, at feeling thus. In 20th

century terms, his reaction was akin to a founder member of the

ultra-right wing Afrikaaner Broederbond - that bastion of white

supremacy - discovering within himself a secret prediliction for 'dark

meat'. What passed through Steve's mind in those few seconds was

unthinkable. Allowing Night-Fever to serve as a bed-warmer was bad

enough but to actively contemplate ... Come on! he urged himself.