Coerlis had rolled to his right, colliding with the engineer as she scrabbled backward on her hands and backside. Chaa had darted out the other side of the tunnel, while Peeler lay huddled against the far side of the cavity.
With an explosive whoosh half a dozen of the swollen creatures had sharply contracted. The compressed, expelled air had blasted each tiny horn free of its supporting face shield. Three protruded from the back of the startled Rundle’s reaching hand. Another had stuck in his forearm, two more in his shoulder, piercing the thick weave of the chameleon suit. He wrenched one from his forearm, leaving a spot of red behind.
Above him the furry shapes were starting to move.
Ignoring them, a disgusted Rundle plucked the remaining pair from the back of his hand. “Last time I try to be nice to anything on this planet,” he muttered. “Hey, how about giving me a hand with these?” His head tilted back, his expression malign. “I’m gonna fry every one of the little bastards. All I wanted was to pet one.”
Aimee helped him remove the rest of the horn darts, carefully working them free of his flesh. “How do you feel? Besides angry, I mean.”
“Little woozy. Not too—bad. Whoo!” He staggered, and it was all she could do to help him sit down. Peeler was too late to help.
Instead he rested a comforting hand on his associate’s shoulder. “How you feeling, man?”
“Pretty potent stuff.” Rundle blinked. “Spice it up a little and I think you could find a market for it.” When he looked up at them, a stupid smile dominated his expression. “Tried a couple o’ shots o’ kentazene once. Just for kicks, of course. Felt kind of like this.”
“There.” Aimee removed the last of the horn darts. Favoring it with a look of distaste, she flung it out into the rain.
Employing a very subdued beam, Chaa was cautiously studying the inhabitants of the ceiling. “I wonder how long it takes them to grow new ones? It seems to be an effective defense. It’s not necessary to kihll. Only to discourage. Any predator taking a couple of those in the face would most lihkely stagger off, stunned and destablized.”
The engineer nodded ceilingward. “Look,” she whispered.
It was clear now there were more than a dozen of the creatures. They had been so densely packed together that their true numbers had been effectively concealed. She counted twenty, thirty of them, making their laborious way down the sloping flanks of the cavity. Several simply rolled into balls, released their grip on the ceiling and dropped. They bounced a couple of times, unfolded themselves, and started crawling, their protruding, staring eyes fixed on Rundle’s seated form.
Aimee rose, nervously using her light to scan the floor near her feet. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here. Get up, Rundle.”
“Why?” He smiled happily up at her. “It’s the first night since we landed I haven’t been soaked through.”
Chaa was beckoning from out in the rain. “Outside, everyone. Now. We must get out of range.” Coerlis was standing next to him. Eyeing his friend reluctantly, Peeler hesitated. There was an explosive pop and a dart horn struck his service belt. He nearly fell over his own legs in his haste to get clear.
Covering her head with her hands, Aimee started to retreat. Rundle grinned at her as he scuttled backward on his hands and feet, and propped himself up against the wall.
“What’re you all afraid of? I can handle this.”
One of the little creatures was approaching his right boot. Contemptuously, he drew back his leg and kicked out, sending it spinning all the way across the cavity. Fetching up against the far side, it righted itself, fluffed out its fur, and started back in Rundle’s direction as if nothing had happened.
More of the fuzzballs were dropping from the ceiling and crawling down the walls. A wary Chaa inclined his neck for a better look.
“There must be another hollow high up inside the growth. There are many still emerging.” Peeler’s expression was grim. Coerlis peered inside enigmatically.
Aimee was pulling at Rundle’s shirt. “Come on, you’ve got to get out of here!”
A powerful arm flung her aside. “No way! This is our tree!” Fumbling at his waist, he drew his needler and began waving it about.
Coerlis flinched. “Shit! Put that thing away, Chet! Aimee, get out of there!” The engineer hesitated, then stumbled out into the rain.
“Go ahead and soak if you want.” Rundle returned his attention to the interior of the tree. “I’m stayin’.” Taking careful aim, he fired once.
Following the familiar sizzle, something burbled loudly. The stink of burnt flesh filled the interior of the growth. Rundle’s burst had caught one of the crawlers face-on, reducing it to a smoking shell.
Squinting, he fired again. Half its body gone, the crawler spun over and over, its long tongue uncoiling to flick futilely at its missing self.
Rundle grinned out at his wary, sodden onlookers. “Hell, this is fun!” Raising his aim, he neatly picked a crawler off the far wall. “You’re all missin’ out.” Another fuzzball nearing his right foot was sent flying, its torso carbonized.
“Chet’s right.” Peeler started back. “A couple of minutes and we can have this place cleaned out.”
“No!” Lunging forward, Chaa swept the man aside.
Peeler rolled over on the branch and climbed furiously to his feet. “Hey, what’d you do that for!”
“Look.” The Mu’Atahl pointed to the wooden surface just outside the entrance.
It was lined with horn hypos. At least twenty of the creatures must have fired in Peeler’s direction when he’d taken his step forward.
“Son of a bitch,” the bodyguard muttered as he eyed the spines sticking out of the wood.
Chaa had retreated another couple of steps down the branch. “They are swarmihng ihnside now, eager to protect their home. Without armor, no one can get back ihn.”
Aimee crouched down on the branch, struggling to see into the cavity through the darkness and steady downpour. “Chet, how’re you doing in there?”
“You hurtin’, man?” Peeler asked anxiously.
“Are you kidding?” They could hear the methodical sizzle of his needler above the downpour. “Maybe this juice freezes the local life, but it feels pretty swell to me. Blammo, got two with one shot that time! You just relax out there. I’ll have this place sterilized in five minutes.” Again the electronic surge of the needler flared above the drumming precipitation.
Water dripping from his long snout, Chaa glanced over at Coerlis. “We have no choihce. Anyone attempting to reenter rihsks an unknown number of punctures.”
“So what?” They turned to Peeler, a shadow brooding in the rain. “They don’t seem to be doing Chet any harm. He sounds higher than the ship. Hell, he sounds better than any of us has since we landed here.” He stared into the dry, inviting cavity. “He’s having such a damn good time in there I’m tempted to join him.”
“It’s a little early to draw any conclusions, Peeler. Hopeful or otherwise.” Coerlis was eyeing the tunnel thoughtfully. “Rundle seems convinced he has the situation under control. All well and good, but I don’t see any reason to expose any of the rest of us to potential danger at this time. We’ll stay out here and monitor the situation within.”
They stood or sat in the miserable rain, forced to listen to Rundle’s delighted whoops from within. One time he announced, hardly able to control his laughter, that he’d nearly shot his own boot off while picking a crawler off his toe. The smell of burnt flesh from within the hollow was strong enough now to reach them even out on the sodden branch.
After a while the steady hiss of the needler faded. Aimee rose and, disregarding Coerlis’s expression, cautiously approached the opening. The light from Rundle’s beam showed clear and strong.
“Rundle? Chet, have you finished your party yet?”
“Careful,” Chaa warned her.
“I don’t see anything moving.” She was very close to the entrance now. Bending, she scanned the interior, using
her own beam to supplement Rundle’s. “I don’t see anything on the ceiling, or around the edge here.”
“Maybe the fool’s done it, made it safe. And had a good time doing it to boot.” Coerlis moved to join her.
That’s when she screamed. She continued to scream as the others crowded around her. Chaa uttered a private outrage in his guttural tongue while Peeler started mumbling under his breath. Only Coerlis said nothing. His curses and self-admonitions were composed silently.
At least the alien narcotic that had been injected into the big man’s system seemed to have forestalled any discomfort. Rundle wore a broad smile of contentment. Much broader than usual because his head, like the rest of him, had collapsed into the remainder of his body. Only his skeleton retained any semblance of the human shape.
“Lihquification.” The Mu’Atahl stared stonily into the tree. “The soft parts of his body, everythihng except the hard endoskeleton, have been turned to lihquihd. Some powerful enzyme ihn the narcotihc. Prey that ihsn’t sufferihng struggles less.”
“Like with a spider,” Peeler whispered.
“Yes, like a spider.” Coerlis was equally mesmerized by the gruesome sight. “You might as well stop screaming, Aimee. It won’t do you or us any good, and Rundle can’t hear you.”
Her chest rising and falling violently, the engineer fought to calm herself.
The spongy, gooey mass that had recently been Rundle lay on the floor of the cavity like a blob of lumpy gelatin. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the brown-furred crawlers swarmed over it, thronging with turgid deliberation. Many had already embedded their coiled snouts in the gluey mound and lay quiescent, sucking contentedly. Their bodies expanded perceptibly as they drank, siphoning up the nutrients that had recently combined differently to form a human being. Rundle’s alien constitution was no inhibition. Protein, apparently, was protein.
“We may as well leave this place.” Chaa shook raindrops from his snout. “There’s nothihng more we can do here.”
Coerlis agreed. “The stupid shit.” A stirring in the night made him whirl. There was a shadow, a damp whisper in the leaves. He saw nothing more. His hands started to shake and he willed them steady, hoping that in the dark his moment of weakness hadn’t been noticed by any of the others.
There were four of them now. Only four. Seeing his engineer continuing to stare blankly into the hollow, he grabbed her arm and spun her toward him, getting right up into her face.
“Forget it, understand? You want to watch until there’s nothing left? Want to see if the bones dissolve, too? Think about it too much and it’ll be just as bad for you as it was for Rundle.”
She nodded jerkily. As his eyes challenged hers, he gave a gentle but unrelenting tug on her arm, turning her away from the secondary growth and back into the downpour. With Coerlis serving as guide, she allowed herself to be led away into the night. Peeler moved out in front, warier than ever, while Chaa placed himself between the rest of them and the tree. The light from Rundle’s flickering beam gradually vanished behind them, swallowed up by the deluge and the night.
Chapter Thirteen
Flinx awoke with a start. Prodigious concepts slipped rapidly from the grasp of consciousness, sudden wakefulness serving to nudge a procession of alien thoughts just beyond comprehension. Dream worlds became subsumed in reality, swept away like shells on a wave-scoured beach.
It was still dark out and the night rain continued its fall unabated. Watching and listening, he felt as if he could cast himself into the curtain of water and swim off into the sky. It was the day’s transpiration reversed, a kind of aerial communication between plant and atmosphere. Not privy to its subtler meanings, he was reduced to contemplating the poetry of it.
No thunder tonight, he realized, and not a breath of wind. He was aware of a warm and pleasantly rounded shape pressing up against him. Peering down in the dim light, he saw that Teal was awake and staring openly up at him. Her eyes were the hidden green of the forest, and when she smiled gently, her teeth flashed like the sun that had not yet risen. She had removed her cloak and simple, hand-woven garments and lay close, browned and open, her body adorned only by echoes of moonlight.
“Teal,” he began, “I don’t—”
She put a finger to his lips. She was older than him, but not by much, and her diminutive yet perfectly proportioned form made her appear younger. On this world he was the vulnerable one, not her.
Sensing the rising tide of conflicted emotions in her master, Pip stirred uneasily on his chest. Beginning with the jaws, a yawn passed through her, transformed into a muscular ripple that concluded with a last quiver of the tip of her tail. Half asleep, she slithered off his sternum and coiled peacefully against the very back of the cavity.
“I like your pet,” Teal whispered. “Sometimes perception is better than intelligence.”
Flinx found that he was trapped between her naked form and the slumberous green mountain that was Saalahan. Near their feet the children slept on, oblivious to the rest of the world. Moomadeem and Tuuvatem lay curled about one another like a pair of matching green salt and pepper shakers.
As near as Flinx could tell, his emotions and Teal’s were the only ones active.
“You were dreaming,” she whispered. “I know; I was watching you. What do you dream of, Flinx?”
“I can’t remember,” he replied honestly. “Different things. Big and small, bright and dark, green and black, cool and hot.”
Nearly as supple as Pip, her arms flowed across his chest to meet behind his neck. “I like hot.”
“Your mate—he just died,” Flinx reminded her, keeping his voice down.
She sighed. “Jerah is gone. He has returned to the world. If I were gone and he were here and you were a suitable woman, he would not have waited this long.”
“On my world it’s customary to wait a little while.”
“Then you must have time to waste on your world. Here life is threatened by too many things to lose it also to hesitation.” She lowered her head, resting it on his stomach. “I have two children to care for, a much simpler task when two adults are present. My own parents help, but they are old and cannot stray from the Home-tree. I am fortunate they are both still living.” She challenged his gaze with her own.
“Life here belongs to the quick, Flinx. Dwell and Kiss need a male parent. You have said that you are not mated.”
“That’s true.”
“You are very ignorant of many basic things.” This was uttered matter-of-factly, without any hint of insult. “But you learn quickly. And you are big, though not as strong as you might be. You are strong in other ways, and seem to me to be a good person.”
“Teal . . .” He struggled to find the right words. “I’m not interested in mating with you. I’m not interested,” he added swiftly, “in mating with anyone.”
Lifting her head, she studied him curiously. “Why? Where you come from is there a rule or law against it? Have you rites of maturity still to complete?”
“No, it’s nothing like that.” He thought of the women he’d known; Lauren Walder and Atha Moon, Raileen Ts-Dennis and most recently and especially, the wonderful Clarity Held. There were even fond memories of one called Sylzenzuzex, who had not been human. “It’s just that I’m not ready.”
Propping her chin in one palm, she regarded him intently. “How old are you, Flinx? How many years?”
“Twenty. I think.”
“Then you have been old enough for several years, and still have not mated.”
He knew that her night vision was better than his, and wondered if she could see him blushing. “Like I said, in my society we tend to wait a little longer.”
“We have no time to wait,” she informed him somberly. “Here it is important to mate and produce children as soon as possible. If we were to wait, every tribe would soon pass from being. Even on the third level people die frequently, and young.
“If anything were to happen to me, I know that Dwell and Kiss wou
ld care honorably for my place in the Tree. They would maintain the balance.”
“More talk of balance. If the human tribes increase, doesn’t that upset the balance here?”
She blinked at him. “Of course not. For each human there is a furcot.”
“Right I’d forgotten about that.” No need to tell her he still didn’t understand that special relationship between human and beast. She would just try to explain further, or think of him as more ignorant than she already did.
Her voice was as gentle as the rain dripping off the lip of the shelter. “One can mate without forswearing permanence, Flinx.”
He would have backed away, but there was nowhere to go. “What, here?” he stammered skittishly. As he pushed up against Saalahan, the big furcot grunted in its sleep. “Your children are right there. So are the furcots.”
Her smile enlightened the darkness. “What a strange place it must be where you come from, where people hide natural things from each other. To think of mating with me here makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”
She didn’t need any special talent to sense that, he knew. “We have something called privacy.”
“So do we, but mating is more important than privacy.”
“If we were at your Home-tree—” he began.
“But we are not,” she interrupted him. “We are here, where there is still some safety in numbers. So everything must be done in numbers.”
“Sorry. I do things in private, on a one-to-one basis. Not,” he added quickly, “that I find you unattractive.”
“Then you do find me worthy of mating with?” Her tone was at once ingenuous and coquettish.
“Of course.”
“Then that will have to be enough for now.” She contented herself with the small victory. “Tomorrow I will show you something that may make you not worry about such things so much. I saw them when we found this place but had no time to gather any. Tomorrow I will give you a treat, and you will not worry so much about privacy.”
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