Voyagers III - Star Brothers by Ben Bova Read Free Book Online Page B

down the bile burning in her throat, she adjusted the straps of her heavy backpack and staggered up the steep wooded slope, pushing through brush and nettles that flailed at her from both sides of the narrow mountain trail. The sun was warm, but the cool mountain breeze chilled the perspiration that beaded on her dark, intent face.
    Her teachers, back at the university, had been doubtful about allowing Lela to do a field mission with a male gorilla. Even Professor Yeboa, who had been her advisor, her sponsor, her secret love, had expressed doubts.
    “The hills can be dangerous for a city girl,” Yeboa had said. He had smiled, as he always did when he reminded Lela of her urban upbringing.
    “City streets can be dangerous, too,” she had retorted, also smiling. “I am not afraid.”
    The aim of the project was to repopulate the area that had been set aside as a safe reserve for the mountain gorilla. Over the past half century the gorillas had been driven nearly to extinction, but now at last an ecologically viable tract of uplands had been set aside for them, thanks to Nkona. Three female gorillas had already been placed in the reserve by other students and rangers, waiting for a male to complete a viable group. Lela’s task was to guide Koku to the females, using the biochips to help control the young male.
    Lela had even met the Great Soul of Africa, Dhouni Nkona himself. He had come to the university to see personally how they were rearing the infant gorillas from the zoo population and teaching them to survive in the wild.
    As a graduate student, Lela had been concentrating on theoretical studies of ecological change and environmental protection. But once she looked into those fathomless eyes of Nkona she was swept up in an irresistible frenzy of dedication.
    “The work you do here is the best that human souls can achieve,” Nkona had told the eager students. He smiled at them, a sparkling bright smile in his deeply black African face. “You know that we must learn to control our behavior, to think before we act, to accept responsibility for the consequences of our actions. We cannot live by exterminating others, that much you have learned in your studies, I know. By saving the gorillas, you help humankind to save itself.”
    “Many oppose what we do,” said one of the students.
    Nkona closed his eyes briefly. Then, “All life is linked together, from the humblest forms to the most grandiose. Thirty-three years ago the human race made its first contact with an alien intelligence, a race from another world, another star. I say to you that our contacts with the life of this world are just as important—no, more important—than our link to other races in space.”
    He turned a full circle to sear each of the students crowded around him with his compelling gaze. “We are all links of the same chain, the chain of life, which extends out to the stars and the farthest reaches of creation. Your struggle to save the gorilla is the struggle to preserve that chain, to keep faith with all the forms of life that share this universe.”
    Theory could never be enough for Lela after that. Aflame with Nkona’s passion, she volunteered eagerly for the biochip operation that would allow her to maintain sensory contact with a selected gorilla. She battled the entire faculty and field staff for the right to work with one of the animals through its difficult transition from the human environment of its childhood to the wild mountain forests where it would live as an adult.
    For nearly two years Lela had trained hard, both physically and mentally. Out of a soft, self-indulgent adolescent cocoon there emerged a leggy, lean-muscled young woman with lustrous brown eyes and a smile that dazzled.
    She was not smiling now. Out here in the thick brush of the forest, with the early morning sunlight just beginning to filter down through the trees, with the sweat of near-exhaustion chilling her, Lela knew that Koku was in danger.
    She