“Shhh,” he replied, eyes suddenly aware of some outside presence as he leaned against her, pressing her equally into himself and into the stone.
All of them were pressed into the stones, clinging to them, even Saluez, edging toward the crevices and cracks they’d made their own. A stupid place to choose when skies came down. As in a dream, they saw all the great stone slabs falling, obdurate shadows piercing reverie to become horrible reality, crushing them before they knew they were in danger. Little nutkins in the mighty vise of what? And yet, what other choice? They could be beneath the stone or beneath the sky, the vengeful sky, hearing that quiet!
“Listen,” Lutha whispered.
“No,” said Mitigan in a horrified voice.
“Don’t,” cried Saluez. “Don’t listen.”
They were children afraid of ghosts, pulling up the blanket to cover their eyes, pulling themselves into the stone and huddling there. Even Leelson! Even Mitigan! Where is your courage, Fastigat? Where is your honor, Asenagi? Why are you huddled with the rest while this silence goes on and on and on.
Slither of scales upon stone; scutter of hairy legs, silk filament trailing the wind; hear in the silence what is not there. Cry, cry, cry, a bird who hungers; cry, cry, cry, a bird seeking her young, who will never be again. All is desert, all is dry, all is dead and gone, not even a memory. All that is left is a set of symbols, a list of bases, a pattern stored away. The machine knows them as the machine knows everything, dryly, without blood or breath, but humans do not know them at all!
Leely came drowsily naked out of some crack or crevice where he’d been sleeping, cast them a sidelong look, and went past them toward a tilted arch of starlit stone, a window onto the night, where he stood waving his hands.
Lutha didn’t move. Lutha was lost among the animals. Oh, the colors of them. Oh, the sounds they make. The eyes of them, bright and quick and full of accusation. Who was Leely in the face of this … this!
Too battered by sensation even to be curious, she watched openmouthed as he turned, again, again, wearing his Leely face, swaying and waving, a familiar and aimless activity. Then his face took on a new expression. Not his usual quiet satisfaction. Not his hungry look or his chilly look or his sleepy look. Not any expression she had seen before. This was something else. A kind of wake-fulness.
He opened his mouth very wide, his tongue quivering in the midst of that round, red hole, deep as an abyss his throat. He screamed a sound that went endlessly out into the world. Not any sound they had ever heard him make before. Not a sound any child should be capable of making, a sound that fled unmuted across the moorlands like the shadow of a cloud, sweeping across the world, south, away: a trumpet, a roar, a shriek, a cry, a whistle, a bellow, a blast … They could almost watch it go!
Leelson grunted, “By my manhood!”
Mitigan shook Lutha by the shoulder. “What?”
She couldn’t tell him. She didn’t know!
And normal sound came back all at once, as though a finger had been snapped.
In the window Leely sucked his fingers, murmuring, “Dananana.”
He had exorcised the ghosts. He had driven them away. What right had he to do that?
They breathed deep into oxygen-starved lungs.
“Lutha!” Leelson demanded. “What is this?”
“Why ask me?” she cried. “How would I know?”
“You’re his mother!” he shouted.
“Bernesohn Famber was his mother and his father,” she yelled back. “Bernesohn designed him. Too bad Bernesohn isn’t around to give us the operating instructions.”
While babble broke out all around, she sat down and wept, feeling her face smart from the salt, feeling her nose swell and turn red, that familiar pain behind her breastbone like a swallowed stone. Obviously, Leelson hadn’t told them what they’d figured out about Leely. Well, neither had she. They were both … what? Ashamed of it? Probably. How can one tell friends and acquaintances that one’s great passion, one’s world-shaking romance is no more than a mating dance between ephemerids, that all one’s achievements count to nothing in the face of a biological destiny hoicked up by a runaway Fastigat in a makeshift laboratory on a very minor planet!
She wept while Leelson explained, as Fastigats do, unemphatically but in great detail and with all possible inferences.
It would have bored anyone. It bored Lutha. He talked so long she tired of sniveling and began wiping the wetness from her face.
“But what is he?” Jiacare Lostre demanded.
“A virus,” said Leelson, without emotion. “To all intents and purposes. Morphologically, he’s human, born of a normal zygote that carries a lot of something else—something Ularian. He’s a hybrid. He has enough brain to get along at the level of a …”
“A chicken,” Lutha said bitterly, feeling a new gush of tears. There were no chickens left, but the word remained. One of those sorts of words that did remain.
“Something like that,” Leelson admitted.
“Whatever he’s carrying, it gets around the Ularian immune system,” Snark supplied. “I found disrupted cells in the dropped tentacles, and in the dying shaggy.”
Leelson nodded heavily. “He’s also carrying an agent or genetic program that promotes rapid healing in humans. It’s in his saliva. Probably in his blood. Maybe he had to have that to retain human shape with all that Ularian stuff in him.”
“Or it was purposeful, so people would value him,” offered the ex-king. “Maybe Bernesohn was looking ahead. He would want his … virus to survive. He knew people would value something that could heal their ills.” He furrowed his brow, continuing in a doubtful voice: “Of course, that would have depended upon people knowing about it.”
“He prob’ly meant ’em to know,” breathed Snark. “Meant ’em to know about the whole business. He sure wouldn’t depend on it bein’ found out like this! By accident!”
Mitigan hoisted Leely high and presented his wounded arm,
