The silver seedlet moved to another grazer and made noises at it. Confused, the grazer broke wind. The seedlet went to the animal’s rear end and started speaking loudly there.
Fropome clapped a couple of vines together to request respectfully the silver creature’s attention, and made to spread the same two leaf-palms on the ground before the seedlet, in a gesture of supplication.
The creature leapt back, detached a bit of its middle with one of its stubby upper limbs, and pointed it at Fropome’s vines. There was a flash of light and Fropome felt pain as his leaf-palms crisped and smoked. Instinctively, he lashed out at the creature, knocking it to the ground. The detached bit flew away across the meadow and hit a grazer cub on the flank.
Fropome was shocked, then angry. He held the struggling creature down with one undamaged vine while he inspected his injuries. The leaves would probably fall off and take days to re-grow. He used another limb to grasp the silver seedlet and bring it up to his eye cluster. He shook it, then up-ended it and stuck its top down at the leaves it had burned, and shook it again.
He brought it back up to inspect it more closely.
Damn funny thing to have come out of a seed pod, he thought, twisting the object this way and that. It looked a little like a grazer except it was thinner and silvery and the head was just a smooth reflective sphere. Fropome could not work out how it stayed upright. The over-large top made it look especially unbalanced. Possibly it wasn’t meant to totter around for long; those pointed leg-like parts were probably roots. The thing wriggled in his grasp.
He tore off a little of the silvery outer bark and tasted it in a nestrap. He spat it out again. Not animal or vegetable; more like mineral. Very odd.
Root-pink tendrils squirmed at the end of the stubby upper limb, where Fropome had torn the outer covering off. Fropome looked at them, and wondered.
He took hold of one of the little pink filaments and pulled.
It came off with a faint 'pop'. Another, muffled-sounding noise came from the silvery top of the creature.
She loves me…
Fropome pulled off another tendril. Pop. Sap the colour of the setting sun dribbled out.
She loves me not…
Pop pop pop. He completed that set of tendrils:
She loves me…
Excited, Fropome pulled the covering off the end of the other upper limb. More tendrils… She loves me not.
A grazer cub came up and pulled at one of Fropome’s lower branches. In its mouth it held the silvery creature’s burner device, which had hit it on the flank. Fropome ignored it.
She loves me…
The grazer cub gave up pulling at Fropome’s branch. It squatted down on the meadow, dropping the burner on the grass and prodding inquisitively at it with one paw.
The silvery seedlet was wriggling enthusiastically in Fropome’s grip, thin red sap spraying everywhere.
Fropome completed the tendrils on the second upper limb.
Pop. She loves me not.
Oh no!
The grazer cub licked the burner, tapped it with its paw. One of the other cubs saw it playing with the bright toy and started ambling over towards it.
On a hunch, Fropome tore the covering off the blunt roots at the base of the creature. Ah ha!
She loves me…
The grazer cub at Fropome’s side got bored with the shiny bauble; it was about to abandon the thing where it lay when it saw its sibling approaching, looking inquisitive. The first cub growled and started trying to pick the burner up with its mouth.
Pop… She loves me not!
Ah! Death! Shall my pollen never dust her perfectly formed ovaries? Oh, wicked, balanced, so blandly symmetrical even universe!
In his rage, Fropome ripped the silvery covering right off the lower half of the leaking, weakly struggling seedlet.
Oh unfair life! Oh trecherous stars!
The growling grazer cub hefted the burner device into its mouth.
Something clicked. The cub’s head exploded.
Fropome didn’t pay too much attention. He was staring intently at the bark-stripped creature he held.
…wait a moment… there was something left. Up there, just where the roots met…
Thank heavens; the thing was odd after all!
Oh happy day!(pop)
Descendant
I am down, fallen as far as I am going to. Outwardly, I am just something on the surface, a body in a suit. Inwardly…
Everything is difficult. I hurt.
I feel better now. This is the third day. All I recall of the other two is that they were there; I don’t remember any details. I haven’t been getting better steadily, either, as what happened yesterday is even more blurred than the day before, the day of the fall.
I think I had the idea then that I was being born. A primitive, old-fashioned, almost animal birth; bloody and messy and dangerous. I took part and watched at the same time; I was the born and the birthing, and when, suddenly, I felt I could move, I jerked upright, trying to sit up and wipe my eyes, but my gloved hands hit the visor, centimetres in front of my eyes, and I fell back, raising dust. I blacked out.
Now it is the third day, however, and the suit and I are in better shape, ready to move off, start travelling.
I am sitting on a big rough rock in a boulderfield halfway up a long, gently sloping escarpment. I think it’s a scarp. It might be the swell towards the lip of the big crater, but I haven’t spotted any obvious secondaries that might belong to a hole in the direction of the rise, and there’s no evidence of strata overflip.
Probably an escarpment then, and not too steep on the other side, I hope. I prepare myself by thinking of the way ahead before I actually start walking. I suck at the little tube near my chin and draw some thin, acidic stuff into my mouth. I swallow with an effort.
The sky here is bright pink. It is mid-morning, and there are only two stars visible on normal sight. With the external glasses tinted and polarized I can just see thin wispy clouds, high up. The atmosphere is still, down at this level, and no dust moves. I shiver, bumping inside the suit, as though the vacuous loneliness bruised me. It was the same the first day, when I thought the suit was dead.
'Are you ready to set off?' the suit says. I sigh and get to my feet, dragging the weight of the suit up with me for a moment before it, tiredly, flexes too.
'Yes. Let’s get moving.'
We set off. It is my turn to walk. The suit is heavy, my side aches monotonously, my stomach feels empty. The boulderfield stretches on into the edges of the distant sky.
I don’t know what happened, which is annoying, though it wouldn’t make any difference if I did know. It wouldn’t have made any difference when it happened, either, because there was no time for me to do anything. It was a surprise: an ambush.
Whatever got us must have been very small or very far away, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, still alive. If the module had taken any standard-sized warhead full on there would be only radiation and atoms left; probably not an
