Restlessly, he envisioned living cables, the spider’s own body, snaking across a tangled labyrinth, creeping ever nearer, closing an unstoppable snare. From each twisting rope there dripped heavy caustic vapors, or liquors that would freeze your skin numb on contact.
Around Dwer, the sand burrow felt like a ropy spiral of nooses, drawing tight a snug embrace that was both cloying and loving, in a sick-sweet way.
No one else could ever appreciate you as much as I do, crooned the serenely patient call of One-of-a-Kind. We share a destiny, my precious, my treasure.
Dwer felt trapped, more by a languor of sleep than by the enveloping sand. He mumbled.
“Yer just … my …’magination.…”
A crooning, dreamlike laugh, and the mellifluous voice rejoined—
So you always used to claim, though you cautiously evaded my grasp, nonetheless. Until the night I almost had you.
“The night you died!” Dwer answered. The words were a mere rolling of his exhaled breath.
True. But do you honestly think that was an ending?
My kind is very old. I myself had lived half a million years, slowly etching and leaching the hard leavings of the Buyur. Across those ages, thinking long thoughts, would I not learn everything there is to know about mortality?
Dwer realized — all those times he helped the Danik robot cross a stream, conducting its throbbing fields, somehow must have changed him inside. Sensitized him. Or else driven him mad. Either way, it explained this awful dream.
His eyes opened a crack as he tried to waken, but fatigue lay over Dwer like a shroud, and all he managed was to peer through interleaved eyelashes at the swamp below.
Till now, he had always stared at the two alien ships — the larger shaped like a silvery cigar, and the smaller like a bronze arrowhead. But now Dwer regarded the background. The swamp itself, and not the shiny intruders.
They are just dross, my precious. Ignore those passing bits of “made stuff,” the brief fancies of ephemeral beings. The planet will absorb them, with some patient help from my kindred.
Distracted by the ships, he had missed the telltale signs.
A nearby squarish mound whose symmetry was almost hidden by rank vegetation. A series of depressions, like grooves filled with algae scum, always the same distance apart, one after another, extending into the distance.
It was an ancient Buyur site, of course. Perhaps a port or seaside resort, long ago demolished, with the remnants left for wind and rain to dissolve.
Aided by a wounded planet’s friend, came the voice, with renewed pride.
We who help erase the scars.
We who expedite time’s rub.
Over there. Between the shadows of his own eyelashes, Dwer made out slender shapes amid the marsh plants, like threads woven among the roots and fronds, snaking through the muddy shallows. Long, tubelike outlines, whose movement was glacially slow. But he could track the changes, with patience.
Oh, what patience you might have learned, if only you joined me! We would be one with Time now, my pet, my rare one.
It wasn’t just his growing vexation with the irksome dream voice — that he knew to be imagined, after all. Dawning realization finally lent Dwer the will to shake off sleep. He squeezed his eyelids shut hard enough to bring tears and flush away the stickiness. Alert now, he reopened them and stared again at the faint twisty patterns in the water. They were real.
“It’s a mulc swamp,” he muttered. “And it still lives.”
Rety stirred, commenting testily.
“So? One more reason to get out of this crakky place.”
But Dwer smiled. Emerging from the fretful nap, he found his thoughts now taking a sharp turn, veering away from a victim’s apprehension.
In the distance, he still heard the noor beast bark and growl while toying with his prey — a carnivore’s privilege under nature’s law. Before, Mudfoot’s behavior had irritated Dwer. But now he took it as an omen.
All his setbacks and injuries — and simple common sense — seemed to demand that he flee this deadly place, crawling on his belly, taking Rety with him to whatever hideout they could find in a deadly world.
But one idea had now crystallized, as clear as the nearby waters of the Rift.
I’m not running away, he decided. I don’t really know how to do that.
A hunter — that was what he had been born and trained to be.
Alvin
ALL RIGHT, SO THERE WE WERE, WATCHING FARAWAY events through the phuvnthus’ magical viewer, when the camera eye suddenly went jerky and we found ourselves staring into the grinning jaws of a giant noor! Hugely magnified, it was the vista a fen mouse might see — its last sight on its way to being a midday snack.
Huphu reacted with a sharp hiss. Her claws dug in my shoulder.
The spinning voice, our host, seemed as surprised as we. That whirling hologram-thing twisted like the neck of a confused urs, nodding as if it were consulting someone out of sight. I caught murmurs that might be hurried Anglic and GalSeven.
When the voice next spoke aloud, we heard the words twice, the second time delayed as it came back through the drone’s tiny pickups. The voice used accented GalSix, and talked to the strange noor. Three words, so high-pitched I barely understood.
“Brother,” the voice urged quickly. “Please stop.”
And the strange noor did stop, turning its head to examine the drone from one side to the other.
True, we hoons employ noor beasts as helpers on our boats, and those learn many words and simple commands. But that is on the Slope, where they get sour balls and sweet umbles as pay. How would a noor living east of the Rimmers learn Galactic Six?
The voice tried again, changing pitch and timbre, almost at the limit of my hearing range.
“Brother, will you speak to us, in the name of the Trickster?”
Huck and I shared an amazed glance. What was the voice trying to accomplish?
One of those half memories came back to me, from when our ill-fated Wuphon’s Dream crashed into the open-mawed phuvnthus whale ship. Me and my friends were thrown gasping across a metal deck, and soon after I stared through agonized haze as six-legged monsters tromped about, smashing our homemade instruments underfoot, waving lantern beams, exclaiming in a ratchety language I didn’t understand. The armored beings seemed cruel when they blasted poor little Ziz, the five-stack traeki. Then they appeared crazy upon spying Huphu. I recall them bending metal legs to crouch before my pet, buzzing and popping, as if trying to get her to speak.
And now here was more of the same! Did the voice hope to talk a wild noor into releasing the remote- controlled drone? Huck winked at me with two waving g’Kek eyes, a semaphore of amused contempt. Star gods or no, our hosts seemed prize fools to expect easy cooperation from a noor.
So we were more surprised than anyone — even Pincer and Ur-ronn — when the on-screen figure snapped its jaws, frowning in concentration. Then, through gritted teeth came a raspy squeak … answering in the same informal tongue.
“In th’ nam o’ th’ Trickst’er … who th’ hell’r you?”
My healing spine crackled painfully as I straightened, venting an umble of astonishment. Huck sighed and Pincer’s visor whirled faster than the agitated hologram. Only Huphu seemed oblivious. She licked herself complacently, as if she had not heard a blessed thing.
“What do you jeekee, Ifni-slucking turds think you’re doing!” Huck wailed. All four eyes tossed in agitation, showing she was more angry than afraid. Two hulking, six-legged phuvnthus escorted her, one on each side, carrying her by the rims of her wheels.
The rest of us were more cooperative, though reluctant. Pincer had to tilt his red chitin shell in order to pass through some doorways, following as a pair of little amphibian creatures led us back to the whale ship that brought
