“When did he get away from you the first time?” Geo said, coming over to the boy. “Let him go. Look, Snake, do you know what there was about the beach that was so important?”
Snake nodded.
“Can you tell?”
Now the boy shook his head and glanced at Urson.
“You don’t have to be afraid of him,” Geo said, puzzled. “Urson won’t hurt you.”
But Snake shook his head again.
“Well,” said Geo, “we can’t make you. Let’s get going.”
“I bet I could make him,” the giant mumbled.
“No,” said Argo. “I don’t think you could. I watched the last time somebody tried. And I don’t think you could.”
Late morning flopped over hotly in the sky and turned into afternoon. The jungle became damp, and bright insects plunged like tiny knives of blue or scarlet through leaves. Wet foliage brushed against their chests, faces, and shoulders.
“Why would they show you a film of something awful before taking you to the beach?” Iimmi asked.
“Maybe it was supposed to have made me more receptive to what we saw,” said Argo.
“If horror makes you receptive to whatever it was,” said Iimmi, “I should have been about as receptive as possible.”
“What do you mean?” asked Geo.
“I just watched ten guys get hacked to pieces all over the sand, remember?”
They walked silently for a time.
“We’ll come out at the head of the river. It’s a huge marsh that drains off into the main channel,” said Argo presently.
Late afternoon darkened quickly.
“I was wondering about something,” Geo said, after a little while.
“What?” asked Argo.
“Hama said that once the jewels had been used to control minds, the person who used them was infected—”
“Rather the infection was already there,” corrected Argo. “That just brought it out.”
“Yes,” said Geo. “Anyway, Hama also said that he was infected. When did he have to use the jewels?”
“Lots of times,” Argo said. “Too many. The last time was when I was kidnapped. He used the jewel to control pieces of that thing you all killed in the City of New Hope to come and kidnap me and then leave the jewel in Leptar.”
“A piece of that monster?” Geo exclaimed. “No wonder it decayed so rapidly when it was killed.”
“Huh?” asked Iimmi.
“Argo, I mean your sister, told me they had managed to kill one of the kidnappers, and it melted the moment it died.”
“We couldn’t control the whole mass,” she explained. “It really doesn’t have a mind. But, like everything alive, it has, or had, the double impulse.”
“But what did kidnapping you accomplish, anyway?” Iimmi asked.
Argo grinned. “It brought you here. And now you’re taking the jewels away.”
“Is that all?” asked Iimmi.
“Well,” said Argo, “Isn’t that enough?” She paused for an instant. “You know I wrote a poem about all this once, the double impulse and everything.”
Geo recited:
“By the dark chamber sits its twin,
where the body’s floods begin,
and the two are twinned again,
turning out and turning in.”
“How did you know?” she asked.
“The dark chamber is Hama’s temple,” Geo said. “Am I right?”
“And its twin is Argo’s,” she went on. “They should be twins, really. And then the twins again are the children. The force of age in each one opposed to the young force. See?”
“I see,” Geo smiled. “And the body’s floods, turning in and out?”
“That’s sort of everything man does, his going and coming, his great ideas, his achievements, his little ideas too. It all comes from the interplay of those four forces.”
“Four?” said Urson. “I thought it was just two.”
“But it’s thousands,” Argo explained.
The air was drenching. The leaves had been shiny before. Now they dripped water on the loose ground. Pale light lapsed through the branches, shimmered, reflected from leaf to the wet underside of leaf. The ground became mud.
Twice they heard a sloshing a few feet away, and then the scuttling of an unseen animal. “I hope I don’t step on something that decides to take a chunk out of my foot.”
“I’m pretty good at first aid,” Argo said. “It’s getting chilly,” she added.
Just then Geo slipped and sank knee-deep in a muddy pool. Urson raced to the edge of the quicksand bog and grabbed Geo by his good arm. He pulled till Geo emerged, coated to the thigh with gray mud.
“You all right?” Urson asked. “You sure you’re all right?”
Geo nodded, rubbing the stump of his arm with his good hand. “I’m all right,” he said. The trees had almost completely given out. Geo suddenly saw the whole swamp sinking in front of him. He splashed a step backwards, but Urson caught his shoulder. The swamp wasn’t sinking, though. But ripples had begun to appear over the water, spreading, crossing, webbing the whole surface with a net of tiny waves.
Then they began to rise up. Green backs broke the surface, wet and slippery. They were standing now, torrents cascading their green faces, green chests. Three of them, now a fourth. Four more, and then more, and then many more. They stood, now, these naked, green, mottled bodies.
Geo felt a sudden tugging in his head, at his mind. Looking around he saw that the others felt it too.
“Them …” Urson started.
“They’re the ones who carried us …” Geo began. The tug came again, and they stepped forward.
Iimmi put his hand on his head. “They want us to go with them. …” And suddenly they were going forward, slipping into the familiar state of half-consciousness which had come when they had crossed the river, to the City of New Hope, or when they had first fallen into the sea.
Wet hands fell on their bodies as they were guided through the swamp. They were being carried through deeper water. Now they were walking over dry land where the vegetation was thicker, and slimy boulders caught shards of sunset on their wet flanks, blood leaking on the gray, the wet gray, and the green.
Through a rip in the arras of vegetation, they saw the moon push through the clouds, staining them silver. A rock rose in silhouette against the moon. On the rock a
