Shadow's End (48 page)

Could it smell her? Hear her?

She held her breath. The tip quested, erect, turning this way and that, cilia up. Almost she saw it raise its eyebrows, almost she heard it say in a grumpy voice, “Now, where did the thing go!”

She could hold her breath no longer. She gasped. The questing tip turned toward her. “There she is!”

Damn it, she told herself hysterically, the thing was not talking and she could not go forever without breathing!

She picked up a pebble and tossed it away, toward the entrance.

The questing tendril turned that way.

She tossed another pebble, breathing as quietly as possible. Then another one. The tendril was moving faster, extruding blobs of itself forward, then pulling itself toward them, moving across the rocky floor like a lumpy snake.

She heard a blatting, a muffled roar.

“They burn!” cried Snark.

The Lutha-seeking tendril stopped, its end waving, as Lutha heard what the tendril evidently also heard, a high-pitched weeping noise, a whine, not quite organic sounding. The sound of a wounded one?

The questing tendril went into a fury, lashing itself against the ground in a circle. Finding nothing, it grew
longer, lashed again, and grew still longer. It was in a temper, no longer willing to spend time to find Lutha. If it went on doing what it was doing, it would touch her.

Reluctantly, she took out the heat gun and pointed it. When the lashing tendril came closest, she pushed the button.

Nothing. She stared at it in disbelief. Pushed it again. Still nothing. It bore an indicator dial just above the button. A red dial,
charge level minus.
Nobody had bothered to check.

No. Not nobody. She. She hadn't bothered to check!

She thrust the useless thing into her pocket to free her hands. There was something else in the pocket. Saluez's knife. She took it out, her hands trembling so that she almost dropped it. Not a big knife. Sharp, though. Sharp enough, maybe, to cut through that questing tendril. If she could hold it down with something while she cut it.

Knife between teeth. Large rock in both hands. Person, not herself, some other idiot, making small noise. Tendril turning purposefully in her direction. Sneaking, sneaking. End up, questing. Another small noise from idiot. Tendril coming faster, extended, thinner and thinner.

Then, smash down rock. Kneel on rock. Saw at tendril, fast, bulges coming down it in this direction, quick, before bulges got there!

Put foot on rock to hold it down on severed tendril. Decapitated tentacle slithering outward, making weeping noises …

Something else screaming louder somewhere. Lutha?

Leelson saying, “You did that very nicely.”

Lutha, idiot Lutha, making stupid noises with tears all over her face, flinging herself at the man.

“What did she do?” asked Mitigan.

“Cut the tip off the thing,” said Leelson with equal parts accusation and admiration. “She forgot her heat gun.”

“Did not!” she screamed. “Damn thing hadn't any charge.” She took it from her pocket and threw it at him.

He looked at the indicator, pressed it. It turned blue. “You have to turn it on first,” he said. “Then you press the button.”

“Snark said—” Lutha said.

“I said,” Snark said, “you turn it on then press the button.”

Maybe Lutha hadn't been listening, Lutha thought.

Snark shook her head wonderingly, then crouched over the chopped-off tentacle tip, scraping it into a collection bag. “I got samples of the body parts along the shore, but I was wondering how we'd get a sample of a live one,” she said. “Like they used to say at the home, fools rush in.”

“You did very well,” Leelson assured Lutha. “Heat gun or no heat gun.”

“How many of them came after us,” Lutha murmured.

“One each,” Snark said. “And there's a shaggy dying over near where I was. I want samples of that one.”

O
f course they went to look, at the shaggy and for the ex-king, who seemed to be missing. This time they did not talk, they did not make noise, they did not breathe loudly. They sneaked, insofar as it was possible to do so. The dying shaggy lay behind the south end of the outcropping, its tentacles spread around the end of the stone, almost to the hole Snark had taken cover in. The tentacles quivered as they approached. Each time they moved, they quivered anew. All up and down the tentacles, ragged little holes had appeared and the same inky runnels they had seen bled away from the thing.

Mitigan reached down and picked something up from beside a tentacle. He held it out to Lutha.

A fragment of striped fabric. Her eyes refused to see it.

“This your kid's?” he asked.

“Maybe this shaggy picked it up from outside the cavern. Leely might have lost it there.” Snark said it. She
didn't believe it, but she said it because believing anything else was insane.

Lutha took the scrap and turned it in her hands. On one side was a series of circular impressions, made up of small, individual eaten or burned dots.

Mitigan had already rolled the tentacle with his boot heel, exposing the line of circular structures beneath, made up of individual pores. He took the scrap and held it close. They matched.

“Can't get hurt,” whispered Leelson, his eyes on Lutha. “Can't get lost.”

He was quoting Saluez, of course, but his eyes questioned Lutha. What did Lutha know?

Lutha told herself she didn't know a damned thing!

“He's pure poison to these,” said Mitigan thoughtfully.

“And to Kachis,” Leelson mused. “That's why they died.”

Lutha screamed at him. “You don't think …?”

“Hush.” He gripped her arm, glancing upward. “Don't yell. I don't know what I'm thinking. Not yet. Keep your voice down.”

They stayed where they were for a few moments, watching the shaggies to see if Lutha had alerted them. Evidently not. Even the one she had wounded had returned to its place and was fishing, unconcernedly.

They went in single file along the limp body, for the first time getting an accurate idea of its size. Even flattened as it was, the creature had an ominous bulk. Snark knelt beside the mantle and began cutting at a puffy area, which collapsed with a whoosh of escaping gas and a momentary stink.

“Hydrogen,” murmured Snark, carving off a piece of the body before turning to the tentacles. “I'm betting it uses bioelectrics to separate hydrogen from salt water. The analyzer in the lab at the camp will figure it out.”

“Jellyfish,” said the ex-king, who at that moment came
from behind a brush pile and wandered over to them. “It's a huge, aerial jellyfish.”

“I thought they got you,” Leelson remarked to the ex-king.

Jiacare shook his head slowly. “No, actually I dallied a bit behind you when you all went down to the shore. You seemed to be moving rather precipitously. And then, of course, you were making a foolhardy amount of noise.”

He nudged the dead or dying shaggy with one toe. “What killed it? It's too far up the slope to have washed in.”

Leelson handed him the scrap of cloth; Snark displayed her flesh samples; there was a consequent babble babble. The ex-king looked shocked, then intrigued.

Lutha refused to join in the talk. What they said wasn't true. It couldn't be true.

“It doesn't make sense,” Leelson said. “Evolution takes countless generations to come up with things like this. Poisoned leaves that dissuade leaf-eating insects. Thorny seedpods that are not eaten, allowing them to germinate. Poisoned flesh, brightly colored, that warns off predation.”

“Might not be poison,” said the ex-king. “Might be … oh, a virus.”

Lutha blurted, “Leely's been examined by experts. He doesn't have a virus.”

“He doesn't have a virus harmful to him, you mean,” said the ex-king. “I doubt anyone looked for viruses harmful to other things. Especially exotic things.”

Lutha admitted to herself he was probably right. Why would they? Leelson had hired people to analyze Leely, and she'd fought them every step of the way. She'd let them inventory Leely's genetic material, but she'd stopped there. No one had done a complete cell inventory.

“How could he have a virus I don't have?” she demanded. “The two of us are always together.”

Leelson shushed her. “Leely went off alone and touched them. You didn't. Maybe you have it, too, and don't know it.”

“Fine,” she snarled. “Next you'd be suggesting I be staked out as bait, just to find out!”

In this mood of mixed apprehension and annoyance, she followed the others to the camp, where Snark put the specimens into the analyzers, and then back to the rock pile. They had been under cover only briefly when the Rottens returned. Everyone but Lutha went to spy upon them, but she remained in their sleeping chamber where Saluez and Leely were sleeping. Though Saluez drooled unconsciously, Leely did not. He did not respond to the presence of the Rottens in any way. He just went on quietly sleeping while Lutha bent her head over the sand and waited for it to be over.

As, eventually, it was. Lutha was washing her face when the others returned.

“There were five big Rottens,” Leelson told her. “They found the dead shaggy. It seemed to upset them a good deal.”

Lutha turned, the wet cloth still in her hand. “Why be upset at one dead one? Millions of them tore each other apart this morning!”

Leelson made an equivocal gesture. “I know. The Rot-tens paid no attention to the piles on the shore, but they did hover over the dying shaggy. One of them touched it, then they all drew in their tentacles and made pictures at it.”

His voice held a hint of strain, of puzzlement.

“What is it, Leelson?”

“They grieved, Lutha. I could feel it. The one there on the slope, it has an identity. It has a name. They called it by name.”

“Maybe it wasn't a name as such,” she suggested. “Maybe it was a classification. A label, like
little one
, or
child.”

“It was a name,” he said. “I could feel the grief, the pattern in it, singularity addressing singularity. If it wasn't a name, what was it?”

Lutha folded the cloth and put it away. “How could it have a name? There were millions of the damned things in the vortex; there are still hundreds of thousands of them. Do ants have names, or bees?”

“Numbers aren't really the issue,” said the ex-king. “There are billions and billions of men. We all have names.”

Lutha flushed. He was right. Given the Firster attitude toward animals, however, how awkward for them to have names!

A point that Leelson made at once. “They aren't men, damn it. I suppose it's possible there might be a kinship with some sensory way of identifying members of their own group. I wonder how we'd …”

Lutha sat down on the nearest rock. “You said the Rottens made pictures to the dying one. It would help to know pictures of what?”

“We couldn't see,” Snark replied. “We were looking down at the beach, and the angle was wrong. I just knew that's what they were doing, making pictures at the dying one.”

“If you could have seen the pictures, you might have caught some clue to the language.”

“Ants and bees communicate,” said Mitigan. “But we don't call it a language. Only men have language!”

Jiacare Lostre challenged this in his usual mild manner. “Oh, mighty warrior, it has to be a language.” He put up a hand as Mitigan growled. “Hear me out! Didn't the Ularians arrange this world for the benefit of the shaggies? Don't we assume the shaggies are the offspring of the Ularians? Wasn't it a Ularian who went to the people of Breadh to tempt them away from their former home? Didn't that tempter need language to do so? Am I the only one here surprised at our not having been killed or
transported by the Ularians, since, according to the Alliance, that's what Ularians do.”

Snark disagreed. “The tempter wasn't the same! If Ularians are the same as the tempter on Breadh, then the Rottens are not Ularians. The tempter was mighty and mysterious, wonderful and terrible, so my mother said. He wasn't a blob that made people drool all down their chins while they listened.”

Leelson murmured, “Or, if both Rottens and tempter are Ularian, then tempter is some kind of ultimate Ularian, some other race, or evolved type.”

Jiacare rubbed his hands together thoughtfully. “An ultimate Ularian. Interesting thought. And both you and Saluez are sure about this tempter?”

Snark nodded in vehement agreement. “The sisterhoods on Dinadh kept alive a lot of the old forbidden stories and songs. The original sisterhood, so my mother said, was made up of women who actually remembered what happened on Breadh.”

“So”—the ex-king threw his arms wide—“if the Rot-tens aren't Ularians, where are the Ularians?”

“Don't ask me,” said Lutha. “If Snark is right, then the ones here are just … nannies. Caretakers. They fret over a sick or dying shaggy; they come and go, minding the young; but they don't or can't clear planets or transport humans. What we call a Ularian crisis, from our point of view, may be just nannies tidying up, from the Ularian point of view.”

“We've got three layers of beings already, and you're extrapolating another?” Leelson at his most supercilious.

As usual, Lutha found his tone infuriating. “I'm extrapolating from what Saluez and Snark have told us and what we've found out, Leelson! We don't know for sure that the Rottens even know we're here, and neither they nor the shaggies have been proven capable of vanishment. Therefore, as Snark says, there's a chance that our local Rottens are not Ularians, or at least, not the ‘ultimate
Ularian.' Besides, Snark says she's seen … how many big Rottens all together?”

Snark made a face. “A hundred, maybe. Mostly I just see the same ones, over and over, about thirty or forty of 'em.”