it.
I must have slept for hours. I awoke with a start, disoriented, frantically blinking my eyes to force an image to come to them. None came. My throat was dust, my body a network of communicating pains.
Nonetheless, I sat up abruptly. I thought I had heard something. The scrape of a shoe, maybe?or the click of talons against stone. The thing that wasn't a Boojum? A thing that was?
A tiny beam of light reached my retinas, piercing them like a knitting needle. I shielded my eyes with one hand.
'Susan!'
'Jake! Oh, my God, Jake, darling!'
I got up and stumbled forward. Light grew around me until I had to shut my eyes. Susan slid into my arms and crushed me with hers.
We both babbled for a minute. Susan said she loved me, several times, and I informed her that it was mutual. A great deal of hugging and kissing went on between utterances. I had my eyes closed the whole time, thinking that more light could not have been attendant at the Creation. Had I been in the dark that long?
'… I looked and looked and looked, and then I realized I was lost myself,' Susan was saying. 'I sat dawn and cried, feeling horrible, just horrible! I'd lost you, and the food and all the gear, and I was thinking to myself, God, this is just typical behavior on my part, panicking when I should be thinking, letting my fears control the situation, and I?'
'It's okay, Suzie, it's okay.'
'?said to myself, goddammit, I've got to get a handle on things, this simply will not do, you've got to?' She drew back a little, 'Jake, what are you doing? Can't you see who's here?'
l had been taking off her shirt. I stopped, looked up, opening my eyes.
'Felicitations, my friend Jake,' Ragna said, tilting his powerful torch slightly upwards so as to illuminate his blue face. His long white hair streamed down from the edge of his helmet. Behind him, other lights were moving toward us in the darkness.
'Is it that you are wishing to undertake sexual congress at this moment?' Ragna asked. 'Being that this is perhaps the case, my companions and I are happily withdrawing. However on the contrary, I am saying that we would be immensely of interestingness for us to be observing you, if by and large to have us doing this would not be of inconvenience.'
He smiled with thin pink lips, pink eyes glowing in the torch light. 'Perhaps yes?' he said after a moment. Then he frowned, greatly disappointed. 'No?'
Chapter 12
We were vulnerable in our immobile state. The caves were dark and warm and womblike, but I didn't want to be lulled into a false sense of security, so I was glad that the Time of Finding Deeper Levels was over. I wanted to finish the repairs and get moving.
The trip to the faln complex was on. Ragna would go along with Tivi, and both would act as interpreters and guides.
Everybody wanted to come, but I put my foot down. Then Susan stomped on my toe.
'I need to do a little shopping,' she contended. 'What's so hard to understand about that?'
'But what could you possibly??'
'I left my backpack and most of my camping gear in that damn hotel. That was the third pack I've lost since this crazy business started. Clothes I don't expect to replace, but alien camping gear is as good as human.'
'I really doubt we'll be doing much camping, Susan.'
'Look, I'm a starhiker, albeit an unwilling one, and I want a complete starhiker kit. I need it. Besides, I haven't been shopping in a month of Sundays.'
'But it's not fair to the others.'
'Let her go, Jake,' Roland said. 'If she's left behind she'll bitch and bitch all day and we'll all be miserable.'
I stiffened. 'See here. Everybody's been telling me I'm the leader of this expedition. So, by God, I'm ordering you?'
She brushed by me. 'Oh, shut up and let's go.'
'Yes, dear.' I slunk after her.
I had expected the faln to be immense structures, and they were… real big.
We were well off the Skyway on a local extension, riding in one of the Ahgirr's collectively owned vehicles, a low-slung four-seater with a clear bubble top. Endless stretches of desert rolled past. We had been chatting pleasantly but I had gradually drifted off into a reverie. I was gazing moodily into Ragna's side rearview mirror. A vehicle was following some distance back, a tiny blue-green dot almost at the road's vanishing point. I hypnotized myself for a while, watching it. Something about it rang a bell-just the color of the thing. I'd seen that exact color before… but no. The road swung away from the sun and the color changed. Just a reflection, I guessed. Just paranoia on my part. Presently, I looked away.
Susan gave a little gasp as the faln took form in the wavering veils of heat out on the plain. From a distance they had looked like mountains; now they were almost too big to be compared to anything.
I leaned forward and spoke over Ragna's shoulder. 'What's the average population of those things?'
'Oh, several of millions. They were being very crowded even with respect to their immensehood.'
Tivi said, 'We were not meant to be living in this manner that is to say, we of our species. Yet Ahgirr are the very few of whom it may be said that they are in agreement with this statement.'
'Yeah,' I said, and sat back.
'My God,' Susan whispered. 'If they have this kind of population level on a colonized planet, and on a backwater one at that'
'Right, think of what the home world must be like.'
'Look. There are more of them on the horizon. Tivi told me there were at least fifty faln complexes on this world alone.'
'These people couldn't have stayed in caves,' I said. 'They would've been trodding on each other's faces.'
'And ganging together into arcologies was the only way to keep from totally destroying the environment.'
I noticed Ragna eavesdropping as he drove.
'Sorry, Ragna,' I said. 'Susan and I were just speculating.'
He laughed. 'Oh, all of what you are saying is being of indubitable truth, partly. Ahgirr have always been believing in rational control of the population. Not so of many cultures. Alas and shit.'
We came to the edge of a vast parking area crammed with vehicles. Ragna swung off the road and entered it.
'Now we are being faced with the heartrending task of finding a space in which to insert this conveyance for purposes of parking therein. I heave a great sigh.'
I was surprised how crowded it was. 'Where do all the people come from?'
'Oh, all from over the place,' Tivi said. 'Many aliens too. This is being a major shopping and commercial faln.'
'A shopping mall!' Susan laughed. 'I haven't walked a mall in a coon's age.' She turned to me. 'It's in my blood, you know. I spent my childhood as a mall brat.'
'Oh, you're a maller? You never told me.'
'Didn't think it was anything special. There are millions of us.
'You were born in one?'
'Born and raised. South Gate Village, very near Peoria, Central Industry.'
I sat back. 'You know, at one time people only used to shop in those things.'
'I know. Then they became arcologies, just like these. Lots of factors contributed. I can go on and on about
