Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

objective look at myself and I didn’t like what I saw. It took something like this to make me realize my egomania, my selfish drives, my all-consuming love affair with myself. But I wasn’t above love—I needed it. I needed them. And love, I now understood, wasn’t just something you received as a matter of right, but something you gave in. equal measure.

I was no longer the most important person in my life. Three others were now paramount, and I swore that I would never forget that again. And, with that sincere vow, I managed, finally, to drift back Into a fitful and uncomfortable sleep.

The next day dawned ugly. Gray clouds had moved in with relatively warmer air and there was the possibility of snow. Hono didn’t like it any more than the rest of us, but she was pragmatic about things.

“We have two choices,” she told us in a small group meeting that dawn. “Either we stay here another day or we press on to the Mountain. What do you say?”

Tyne, who usually said little, really decided for us. “That’s hard weather coming, perhaps a front of some kind. It’s been known to storm for days, even weeks, up here, once conditions are right. If that’s so, our chances are better on the solid mountain than staying here—no matter how lousy things may seem.”

“Then we go,” Hono declared. “Anyone want to do otherwise?” She looked around, but nobody else responded. Frankly, by this time we just wanted to get this thing over with. Even some of the most faithful could be heard muttering that morning that sacred places should be easier to get to.

As for me, Ching sensed the change inside me. I think I was successful in convincing her it wasn’t any back- from the-dead conversion but a genuine reassessment. My thoughts on the sacred mountain, however, were still all business. Hard to reach, yes, and terribly dangerous—a fluke that anybody on this planet ever found it. A perfect place for an alien base, perhaps an entire hidden alien outpost or city.

We started out under thickening clouds and were soon encrusted with ice particles, although the snow remained aloft for the moment. The last crossing was relatively smooth compared to the previous two days’ worth, but considering the landforms, its smoothness said that the ice was relatively thin, the water beneath warmer, and thus, far more dangerous.

Still, it was midday and the first snowflakes had begun to fall before anything happened.

It looked for all the world like another one of those damned holes, and we might have just put it down to that, except this time it happened right in front of me and I had a clear view.

What pulled Yorder down through the ice was not any natural soft spot, but something below. One moment she was walking there, then she stopped and turned to look back at me—and something, I couldn’t tell what, broke through right beneath her and just sucked her down with tremendous force.

The others came running, but there was nothing any of us could do. Nonetheless, I brought out my primitive bronze sword and crouched, looking around. “They’re under the ice!” I called. “Let’s keep moving! Don’t stop for anything or they’ll break through and grab us! Those suckers are fast!”

They sure were—I had no sooner pulled myself up and started on when the ice exploded around us in the building wind and snowstorm. The eight of us fixed our weapons and assumed a protective formation while continuing to move.

“They’re striking at random!” Hono shouted. “Tari’s right—move! And don’t stop for anything unless you can killit!”

We made our way across the ice as the enemy started playing a psychological game with us. Using the now swirling snow as a cover, they would pop up and break the ice at random points all around us, again and again, ahead and behind and on all sides, occasionally even showing large, dark shapes looming in the whiteness for brief periods.

They don’t like to be hurt…

They were really playing games with us, and I think we all knew it, A patrol, most likely, just a small roving guard detachment; they were bored, and now they had something to play with.

Several times the dark masses would hold on the surface long enough for one of our three remaining archers to get off a shot or two, but hitting anything under these conditions was nearly impossible.

Of course, game or not, these wretched conditions certainly didn’t help the “demon” patrol, either. I doubted whether they could see any better in this crap than we could, and if they had any kind of tracking devices below us they either didn’t work on us or were too scrambled by the weather conditions to allow any accurate mark. They were also, obviously, forbidden to use modern arms—almost certainly because such a report would eventually get back to others in the Free Tribes and blow their demonic cover.

Still, I wanted to see one. No wonder all our surveillance and all our monitoring hadn’t detected them—and no wonder they required a life zone very close to human requirements yet were physically unable to move among us without bulky suits. Air-breathing, water-dwelling mammals! How I’d like to see one!

I got my wish as the ice erupted just ahead of me and one overconfident creature pushed up halfway through the surface with a roar. It was so close I made a slash at it with the sword, and struck the tip of a waving tentacle. The air was suddenly filled with a terrible high-pitched scream of agony that echoed across the ice as it dropped back into the water with blinding speed. And I almost regretted getting my wish.

The pear-shaped head was ringed with extremely long tentacles, perhaps three meters or more, covered with thousands of tiny little suckers. Below the tentacles were two huge heart-shaped pads of some wet, glistening material that must have been eyes. Where the head met the body, there were at least two visible pairs of stalklike arms or legs or whatever that terminated in scissorlike claws from elbow to end. The skin itself looked almost like a thing separately alive, a mottled, sickly yellow and purple that seemed to me to be constantly in motion, although, I told myself, that could just be water draining from it. The creature certainly earned its demon reputation—it was the most grotesque living horror I’d ever seen. Whatever evolution had produced such creatures had been brutal indeed, and if they weren’t killing machines nothing in nature ever was.

Although I saw only a bit of the upper torso, there was no question that the old Elder had been right—the torso, at least, was covered by a metallic-looking suit of some kind, which resembled a chitinous exoskeleton. But I’d never seen an exoskeleton with a metal ring at the top and obvious vacuum connectors around it.

I didn’t stop to question the thing, or shout my impressions to anybody else, but all of a sudden I knew I was glad of the side I was on. I had seen no sign of a mouth or nose, but the roaring when they broke through indicated to me that they had a lot of their equipment elsewhere.

Their mouths are on top……

After I’d struck a glancing blow to the one, though, they stopped playing their game. Obviously they were not going to take any more risks now that their self-confidence was shaken a bit. That scream may have been just a normal yelp of pain to them, but if it translated at all into human terms, the emotion in it was unmistakable. They sure didn’t like to be hurt.

The attacks became more cautious and intermittent now, and, therefore, easier to fend off. At the same time the snow seemed to slack off for a moment, and we saw how close we were to the first outcrop of the mountain itself. With a shout we broke and ran for it, taking our chances, but running a cautious, zigzag pattern that gave the creatures less opportunity to preplan an opening. More than that, the ice was becoming thicker now as it packed up against the rock wall of the mountainside, and that made following us even more difficult. I wondered if the things could move on land at all, but finally decided that they must be able to do so.

When the last of us reached the solidity of the mountain itself, even though its ice-encrusted side was not distinguishable from the pack ice, we all dropped in sheer exhaustion from the tension of the run. “Safe!” Ching sighed.

A sudden buzzing sound, impossibly loud and ugly, came from the direction of the ice. Wearily, Hono and I crawled up to see what was making it.

“Archers!” Hono screamed. “They’re coming for us!”

All the tension flooded back as the archers jumped up and moved forward. There was still snow falling, but it was light, and we had about a kilometer’s visibility. Out there, on the ice, we could see four of the creatures rise from the ice and into the air, where they grouped, suspended as neatly as a neg-grav car or copter.

Ching joined us, saw them, and gasped. “Are they using some kind of flying belt or what?”

I shook my head in wonder. “I don’t think so, honey. The bastards have wings!”

She frowned. “Where are the tentacles? Those huge things.,.?”

Hono pointed. “They’re still there—see? But they retract, somehow, into the head, making a short ring of horns. Demon’s horns!”