fallow. A throng of egglike preservation beads lay scattered round the ashen lakeshore. Instead of dissolving all signs of past habitation, the local mulc spider had apparently chosen relics to seal away. Collecting them, if Lark believed the incredible story told by his half brother, Dwer.
The luminous coatings made him nervous. The same substance, secreted from the spider’s porous conduits, had nearly smothered Dwer and Rety, the wild sooner girl, the same night two alien robots quarreled, igniting a living morass of corrosive vines, ending the spiders long, mad life. The gold stuff felt queer to touch, as if a strange, slow liquid sloshed under sheaths of solid crystal.
“Toporgic,” Ling had called the slick material during one of her civil moments. “It’s very rare, but I hear stories. It’s said to be a pseudo-matter substrate made of organically folded time.”
Whatever that meant. It sounded like the sort of thing Sara might say, trying to explain her beloved world of mathematics. As a biologist, he found it bizarre for a living thing to send “folded time” oozing from its far-flung tendrils, as the mulc spider apparently had done.
Whenever Ling finished examining a relic, she bent over a sheaf of Lark’s best paper to make careful notes, concentrating as if each childlike block letter were a work of art. As if she never held a pencil before, but had vowed to master the new skill. As a galactic voyager, she used to handle floods of information, manipulating multidimensional displays, sieving data on this world’s complex ecosystem, searching on behalf of her Rothen masters for some biotreasure worth stealing. Toiling over handwritten notes must seem like shifting from starship speeds to a traeki’s wooden scooter.
It’s a steep fall — one moment a demigoddess, the next a hostage of uncouth sooners.
All this diligent note taking must help take her mind off recent events — that traumatic day, just two leagues below the nest of the Holy Egg, when her home base exploded and Jijo’s masses violently rebelled. But Lark sensed something more than deliberate distraction. In scribing words on paper, Ling drew the same focused satisfaction he had seen her take from performing any simple act well. Despite his persistent seething anger, Lark found this worthy of respect.
There were folk legends about mulc spiders. Some were said to acquire odd obsessions during their stagnant eons spent chewing metal and stone monuments of the past. Lark once dismissed such fables as superstition, but Dwer had proved right about this one. Evidence for the mulc beast’s collecting fetish lay in countless capsules studding the charred thicket, the biggest hoard of Galactic junk anywhere on the Slope. It made the noxious lakeshore an ideal site to conceal a captured alien, in case the returning starship had instruments sifting Jijo for missing crew mates. Though Ling had been thoroughly searched, and all possessions seized, she might carry in her body some detectable trace element — acquired growing up on a far Galactic world. If so, all the Buyur stuff lying around here might mask her presence.
There were other ideas.
Ship sensors may not penetrate far underground, one human techie proposed.
Or else, suggested an urrish smith, a nearby lava flow may foil alien eyes.
The other hostages — Ro-kenn and Rann — had been taken to such places, in hopes of holding on to at least one prisoner. With the lives of every child and grub of the Six at stake, anything seemed worth trying. The job Lark had been given was important. Yet he chafed, wishing for more to do than waiting for the world to end. Rumors told that others were preparing to fight the star criminals. Lark knew little about weapons — his expertise was the natural flux of living species. Still, he envied them.
A burbling, wheezing sound called him rushing to the far end of the tent, where his friend Uthen squatted like an ash-colored chitin mound. Lark took up a makeshift aspirator he had fashioned out of boo stems, a cleft pig’s bladder, and congealed mulc sap. He pushed the nozzle into one of the big qheuen’s leg apertures and pumped away, siphoning phlegmy fluid that threatened Uthen’s ventilation tubes. He repeated the process with all five legs, till his partner and fellow biologist breathed easier. The qheuen’s central cupola lifted and Uthen’s seeing stripe brightened.
“Th-thank you, L–Lark-ark … I am — I am sorry to be so — be so — to be a burden-en-en. …”
Emerging uncoordinated, the separate leg voices sounded like five miniature qheuens, getting in each other’s way. Or like a traeki whose carelessly stacked oration rings all had minds of their own. Uthen’s fevered weakness filled Lark’s chest with a burning ache. A choking throat made it hard to respond with cheerful-sounding lies.
“You just rest up, claw brother. Soon we’ll be back in the field … digging fossils and inventing more theories to turn your mothers blue with embarrassment.”
That brought a faint, gurgling laugh. “S-speaking-king of heresies … it looks as if you and Haru … Haru … Harullen-ullen, will be getting your wish.”
Mention of Lark’s other gray qheuen friend made him wince with doubled grief. Uthen didn’t know about his cousin’s fate, and Lark wasn’t about to tell him.
“How do you mean?”
“It seems-eems the raiders-raiders found a way to rid Jijo of at least one of the S-S-Six P-p-pests.…”
“Don’t say that,” Lark urged. But Uthen voiced a common thought. His sickness baffled the g’Kek medic resting in the next shelter, all four eyes curled in exhaustion. The malady frightened the militia guards. All knew that Uthen had been with Lark in the ruined Danik station, poking among forbidden things.
“I felt sorrow when-hen zealots-lots blew up the alien base.” Uthen’s carapace shuddered as he fought for breath. “Even when the Rothen tried to misuse our Holy Egg … sending false dreams as wedges-edges … to drive the Six Races apart-part.… Even that did not justify the … inhospitable-able murder of strangers.”
Lark wiped an eye. “You’re more charitable than most.”
“Let me finish-ish. I was-as going to say that now we know what the outsiders were up to all along-long … something worse than dreams. Designing-ing bugs to bring us down-own-own.”
So, Uthen must have overheard the rumors — or else worked it out for himself.
Biological warfare. Genocide.
“Like in War of the Worlds” It was one of Uthen’s favorite old novels. “Only with the roles reversed.”
Lark’s comparison made the gray qheuen laugh — a raspy, uneven whistle.
“I … always-ways did identify … with those … with those poor Martians-ans-ans.…”
The ribbon eye went foggy, losing the light of consciousness as the cupola sank. Lark checked his friend’s breathing, and found it no worse. Uthen was simply tired.
So strong, he thought, stroking the rigid shell.
We picture grays as toughest of the tough. But chitin won’t slow a laser ray.
Harullen found that out. Death came to Uthen’s cousin during the brief Battle of the Glade, when the massed militia of Six Races barely overcame Ro-kenn’s robot assassins. Only the advantage of surprise had carried that day. The aliens never realized that savages might have books showing how to make rifled firearms — crude, but potent at short range.
But victory came late for Harullen. Too dedicated or obstinate to flee, the heretic leader spent his last frenzied moments whistling ornate pleas for calm and reason, crying in five directions at once, beseeching everyone to lay down their arms and talk things over — until Harullen’s massive, crablike body was cleaved in uneven parts by a killer drone, just before the machine was itself blown from the sky.
There will be mourning among the gray matrons of Tarek Town, Lark thought, resting both arms across Uthen’s broad shell, laying his head on the mottled surface, listening to the strained labor of his friend’s phlegmy breathing, wishing with all his heart that there was more he could do.
Irony was but one of many bitter tastes in his mouth.
I always figured, if the end did come, that qheuens would be the last to go.
Emerson
JIJO’S COUNTRYSIDE FLOWS RAPIDLY PAST THEM now, as if the mysterious horsewomen fear any delay might turn faint hope to dust.
Lacking speech, Emerson has no idea where they are riding in such a hurry, or why.
Sara turns in her saddle now and then, to give an encouraging smile. But rewq-painted colors of misgiving surround her face — a nimbus of emotion that he can read the way he used to find meaning in letters on a data display. Perhaps he should find her qualms unnerving, since he depends on her guidance in this strange, perilous world. Yet Emerson cannot bring himself to worry. There are just too many other things to think about.
