She put her hands over her mouth and breathed quietly. The sound of the sea came as a series of flat slaps, no susurrus, no following hush. The world trembled again. She counted the steps, one, two, three, four. Five, six, seven. Eight, nine. Coming or going?
And then the stars bloomed in heaven and the sound of the sea was there once more, the soft rolling shush of waves on the gravelly beach. Down in the camp, the lamps made sparkling stars of refracted light.
Lutha was wide-awake when they returned laden with blankets, charged solar stoves, and camp lights plus a number of prepacked emergency kits full of food and other necessities.
“Did you hear?” Leelson whispered to her. “Did you feel?”
Snark said, “It’s happened before.”
“How often?” demanded Leelson.
In the light of her lantern they saw the shrug, the twisted mouth, the fear in her eyes. Still, her voice retained its usual offhand manner.
“A few times. Just a few times.”
Deeply troubled, they straggled off again, uphill to a ridge spiked by stone fragments, scraggy as broken teeth, where—so Snark said—a natural dike had fallen. The remnants lay behind the ridge in a tumble of chunks and pillars, like a child’s blocks dumped from their box. Among this rubble were the clefts and shelters Snark had described, places where the hunted could go to ground.
They found a room deep inside, roofed by huge pillars that had come to rest across a dozen rounded boulders, the floor cushioned by a few centuries of dust but no bird droppings. It was large enough for all six of them and their stack of provisions. Snark, very subdued, was nearest Lutha when they variously knelt or flopped or fell onto spread blankets.
“Really, have you counted how many times that thing happened?” Lutha asked her quietly, wanting to know but not wanting a general conversation about it.
“Once just before the first time I saw the Rottens,” she said through her teeth. “And maybe three or four times since. There were times I thought it was maybe happening, but I wasn’t sure.”
“So it isn’t the Rottens that do it?”
“You didn’t taste Rottens when it happened, did you? So, if that means anything, it means they don’t do it.” She gave Lutha an almost friendly look. “You wanna know the truth, I’m glad it happened with you here. Those other times, I thought I was losing what little brain I’ve got left.”
Mitigan approached them, his mouth full of questions about the Rottens. While he and Snark talked Lutha went to wrap Leely against the chill.
Snark said, “I’ll hang around close. I got a hole up the hill there. You sleep. You all look like hell.”
And with these helpful words she departed while Mitigan stood looking admiringly after her. At least Lutha assumed it was admiration that kept him standing there in the dark while the rest of them settled in like so many marmots, gathering close together to share warmth and wishing at that moment only to be safe, at least for a time.
They slept restlessly on the rocky floor with a fair share of grunting and turning—all but Mitigan and Leely, both of whom were able to sleep anywhere, under any conditions. By the time enough gray light pried its way through the stone pile to make a few dim puddles on the floor of our shelter, they were all awake, aware of the morning’s chill, coveting the warmth of the stove and something hot to drink.
All, that is, but Saluez, who had lain closest to Lutha during the night. At intervals she’d moaned softly, but she had not responded to Lutha’s touch or voice, any more than she responded to Leelson, who bent over her in the early light, shaking his head.
“She’s lost in something fearful and ugly. I sense feelings of betrayal and guilt. Hard to say what it may be.”
Lutha thought that Saluez’s feelings of betrayal were much the same as her own. Even now Leelson went past Leely as though the child did not exist.
“How cruel,” said Jiacare Lostre.
Lutha turned, startled, but he wasn’t talking to her. He was kneeling beside Saluez, holding her hand.
“A cruel joke on all of us,” he said with a grimace, gesturing at the rocks around them. “Perhaps Saluez simply prefers to be out of all this.”
She was lying supine, the melon swell of her belly rising above the slackness of her body.
Lutha said, “She’s never mentioned how long she had left in her pregnancy. Poor Saluez.”
“Why say ‘poor Saluez’?” Mitigan demanded angrily from his corner, over the wheep, wheep, wheep of his sharpening stone. “She will soon have a child. All women want children. Bearing is what they are good for!”
“Thus speaketh a Firster,” Lutha growled, deeply offended. “I suppose your god came roaring out of a whirlwind to tell you the universe was made for man, and so were women!”
“I received the visitation from the Great Warrior, yes! At my coming-of-age.” He glared his disapproval, then went scrambling off among the stones in the direction Leelson had gone a few moments earlier.
Lutha muttered, “Why is it all Firsters have to talk about their visitation. Even Leelson does it, though he dresses it up in philosophical language.”
“And what did Leelson’s god look like?”
“Like a Fastigat.” She laughed grimly. “Of course.”
Jiacare drew the blanket closer around Saluez’s shoulders. “Mitigan was right about one thing. We can’t assume she regrets her pregnancy. Most of us humans seem to find one excuse or another for increasing our numbers.”
“Oddly enough, that didn’t seem to be true on Dinadh. Trompe and I were surprised to see how many vacant hives there were. Dinadh’s population is evidently decreasing.”
He thought about this, his mouth pursing, his eyes squinting. “That would fit the pattern. The Ularian reproductive cycle would start with a growing human population and few Kachis, and the proportions would reverse by the end of the cycle.”
Lutha shuddered. “Through predation?”
“It is a
