Morning did not dawn; it rose like thunder. At least that was the impression that Lahks had of the sound that woke her. She turned slightly in Stoat’s arms and heard him mutter, “Damned droms.”
Since opening her eyes had brought no light, Lahks fumbled for the torch and flicked it on. Stoat grinned wickedly, his sharp teeth glittering through thin lips. “We were buried, I guess, but we’re being saved,” he remarked. “Only I wish the rescue squad didn’t get up so early.”
“Did you know they would come?” Lahks asked, laughing.
“I hoped without conviction,” he answered. “I heard of a man who had been dug out after a storm.” He glanced quickly at her and smiled. “I did not wish to raise false hopes. It was better to be prepared to dig out ourselves.” He broke off to listen to the sounds and then burst out, “Damn those droms, we’ll have to dig out, anyway. Those idiots are trying to get to us through the roof.”
While he spoke, Stoat was sliding into his stillsuit and windsuit in sinuous movements that awoke Lahks’ memory. She grinned and hurriedly put on her own garments. She had been too busy and then too tired to worry about being buried alive last night. Shom was now awake, too, and struggling with the door. Sand had been forced into the track and was keeping it from sliding.
Suddenly the growl of moving sand and rock was replaced by the screech of metal on metal. “They are not only trying to get in through the roof!” Lahks exclaimed, staring at a long dent that had appeared. “They are going to succeed! What are their claws made of?”
“The Power that Is doubtless knows—and their makers, but no one else. Men have taken everything else on this planet apart and analyzed it, but droms are invulnerable.”
“Look!” Lahks cried and moved to shelter near the wall,
A slit was now open in the metal and this was being widened rapidly into a tear. Almost immediately a drom’s silly head, eyes bobbing back and forth between the double lenses, poked through. Lahks and Stoat sighed resignedly in chorus. If the droms had decided they were to come out through the roof, they knew no way of changing that decision. The head was withdrawn. The rent widened quickly.
Half an hour later the silverfish hides and crab carapaces were loaded on the droms. Lasers loose in their holsters and packs on their backs, the three set out for the dead cup. One thing weighed heavily on Stoat’s mind and, for his sake, on Lahks’. It was obvious that all three of them could not appear at Tanguli’s cup. Whatever the relations between the Landlords, there was no question that all of them would look without favor on robbery and mayhem. The loss of a flyer on a world where all mechanical objects had to be imported was a major catastrophe. Tanguli would turn them over to Vogil as soon as they were recognized.
Of course, to avoid recognition was no problem at all for Lahks. She could change her coloring, her size, and her sex. Stoat was an ordinary-enough-looking man. A touch of gray in his hair, pads in his cheeks and lips, a more yellow cast to his dark skin, and no one would give him a second glance. Shom was the problem. Even if it had been possible to conceal his blue-eyed fairness and the massive size that would mark him in a world of small, dark people, his mental condition would have betrayed him. It was impossible to teach him to act a part, equally impossible to believe there would be two men in his condition wandering the deserts as hunters.
Shom must be left behind. There was agreement on that subject and even on the method to be used. Shom would not suffer. Lahks would drug him into stasis. Unfortunately, the equipment that ordinarily was used to keep the stasis-drugged alive indefinitely was lacking. For about ten days the only effect of the drug would be beneficial. Shom would react as if he had ten hours of healthy sleep. After that, degeneration would start. Death would supervene in about a month.
Stoat told himself that it would be no tragedy. In many ways, Shom had long been dead. But at least he had had some pleasures, and since he had been given the stone he had been truly and deeply happy.
The very night they arrived at the dead cup, Stoat adjusted the almech and said to Shom, “We have to bury the trade goods. Dig.”
By morning the space was wide enough and deep enough. The skins and clear carapaces were carefully piled together and covered with the dead earth of the cup. On one edge there was a hollow, padded by the slick silverfish hides, still uncovered. Shom stood at one end of this, lifting the almech, which would throw a stream of earth over the cache.
“Shom,” Lahks said compellingly.
He looked up, and she reached out and touched his throat not far from the angle of the jaw where the lifted face plate left the skin bare. There was just time for Stoat to catch him and ease him down. In the lurid red light—the light of late evening that was the best the dying sun of this dying planet could provide, even at morning—Stoat turned the stream of earth from the almech on the still form of his companion.
Lahks had lowered the face plate, composed Shom’s limbs so that they would not be bruised, slipped the breathing tube under the face plate, and covered all with another silverfish hide. She turned to comment on the neatness of the operation, but the words died in her throat. All intensity had gone from Stoat. His expression, his eyes, were as dead as the dust he was piling on his companion.
“He isn’t dead,” she offered experimentally.
Empty eyes, the feral flicker gone from them, met hers. “Do you know how many I have cast earth upon? Hundreds? Thousands? Long before you were born I lost count. I swore I would not, ever again. . . .”
The hole was full. Stoat checked to be sure it was not filled too evenly, readjusted the almech, then sprayed earth smoothly. Lahks watched. Certainly his efficiency was not impaired by the emotional shock—not grief. Stoat was not grieving over Shom—no one could; he was merely responding anew to a multiple memory of grief too often endured and overcome.
Lahks touched the black button. Coldness flowed in. The pure calculating mind—free of sympathy, empathy, all emotion—considered. It was unfortunate that there were too many variables—as was usually the case with single-entity behavior. For mass-entity situations, most variables canceled out, and the behavior of a population could be predetermined. It was funny—Lahks did not smile because she was incapable of smiling with the black button down. Funny, a good word comprising both odd and humorous, another section of the detached mind judged—that for single entities the reason-emotion response of the indweller’s body (the mind when free referred to itself as the indweller, to Lahks as a whole as the indweller’s body) was as adequate as the pure reason of the indweller. Conclusion: relinquish control to the indweller’s body. Lahks lifted her mental finger. Warmth lit her eyes as she watched Stoat methodically redistributing the necessary supplies into two packs. She did not rush him, but she was filled with a sense of urgency. If they could return in time and resurrect Shom undamaged, that act might be the key that could lock the door on Stoat’s past—on the lives he had lived while others, loved and unloved, even whole nations, had died and had earth cast over them.
“Do you think there is any part of you—ego, id, or superego—that doesn’t want to get to the radio in Tanguli’s cup?” Lahks asked as she shrugged into the pack Stoat handed her.
He stood for a moment considering her implication. The tense wariness was already coming back into his eyes, making his expression alive. “Ride the droms,” he mused, pursuing her thought, rather than her words. “We would save two days.” He paused a moment, looking at the waiting creatures, wondering briefly where the third had disappeared to, then nodded. “Yes. Let’s ride the droms.”
They saved more than two days. Apparently they had underestimated their desire to arrive. The droms did not stop at all. Day and night, outrunning the silverfish, avoiding the crabs, outclimbing the dragons through the mountain range, the droms drove onward. Travel in a flyer was swifter, but not much more comfortable. Nodding off to sleep, Lahks found that the backrest the drom provided curved around to grip her firmly so that she could not fall off. Only when they crossed a flat and the impact of the wind-driven sand seemed about to rip her windsuit from her body did Lahks think of the more sheltered vehicle.
She thought of it again as they crossed the flat leading to Tanguli’s cup, and she realized that no attempt had been made at disguise. Had they stopped for the night or been in a flyer, Lahks could have worked on Stoat. As it was, she dared not even raise her face plate to call to him. For herself there was no problem. She thought of—and became—a native youth. And she told herself she need not be concerned about Stoat. He had not survived millennia without facing similar situations.
What did concern her was that it soon became apparent the droms would take them directly to Tanguli’s manor. At that, she had again underestimated either the force of their desire to get at the radio or the warped sense of humor of the droms. When the guard opened the gates of Tanguli’s manor, the creatures stormed right past him, right between the domes, until they came to the side of the Landlord’s own building. Here they stopped, but only to begin tearing at the stone with their invulnerable claws.
The guard had lifted his stunner as they passed, but he had no chance to fire. Shouting a warning, he ran full-tilt up the street after the invaders. When he saw what was happening, his eyes bulged, but he was a well-trained young man. Without attempting to find out why two droms, who had never come into an enclosure within anyone’s memory, should dash in and try to tear down the Landlord’s home, he fired.
As Lahks and Stoat sagged limply into the projections the droms had extended to keep them from falling, the creatures stopped tearing away the wall and squatted peaceably. They made no objection to the guard and several others, who had rushed up to help, removing Lahks and Stoat from their backs, and, free of their burdens, they rose and ambled gently away. A replacement guard at the gate opened it for them in a somewhat bemused manner. He watched, but he dared not leave his post, so he could not tell what they did after rounding the bulge of the outer wall.
Meanwhile, Lahks and Stoat had been conveyed to carefully separated cells, stripped, and dropped unceremoniously on stone extensions that served as bunks. Recovery should have taken four to eight tu, but bodies that had learned to regenerate, even to change their basic structure, made nothing of absorbing and repairing the damage done by a stunner. Lahks was fully conscious before they had finished stripping her. Even so, she lay limp, an arm and leg twisted uncomfortably for a long time before she slitted her eyes open a hair. She knew there was no person near enough to watch her because there was no breathing, but she could not tell about electronic watchers.
Finally, in a series of small convulsive shudders, which might be taken as nervous twitching, she managed to switch on her interior scanning network.
The cell was clean. Lahks opened her eyes to make sure there were no mirrors or other spying devices and then sat up, giggling softly. All that effort to turn on her electronic equipment when she could have put out a pseudopod. . . . She did so now, making a cute little tentacle that turned off the scanners. It was nice to be a Changeling, Lahks thought warmly.
Now to find Stoat. The cell was very efficient. It was well lit by many clear plates set in the stone outer wall. The three inner walls were solid stone, except for the door. This had a grid window that a guard could look through and a small opening at floor level through which a food bowl and cup could be passed.
Lahks considered the grille and shuddered. In spite of what the heartstone had taught her, she did not fancy the notion of turning herself into a mass of separate strands like a bowl of spaghetti. She was not at all sure she would ever get the strands back together again. One long string was also impractical. It would take too long to ooze through the grille.
She touched the lock of the cell door. Her fingers thinned, extended into flexible rods, then retracted. As she had thought, there was a mechanical alarm attached to the lock. If the key was not left in it when the door was opened, it would betray tampering. Since Lahks was as naked as the day she was born and the cell was so empty it was dust-free, there was nothing with which to jam the alarm.
Well, there was the slot at the bottom of the door. If it was not ideal, it was better than the other possibilities. Lahks promptly became a rather oddly shaped snake and worked her way painfully out of the slot. In the corridor she lay still, gasping with effort. Her respect and admiration for the limbless reptiles had increased enormously. It was incredibly difficult to move by flexing muscles in your belly. Then she chuckled softly. It was, she supposed, like the old story about foreign children and how clever they were to be able to speak a foreign language so well so young.
For convenience Lahks added legs to the snake’s body. It needed ten pairs, but then moved quite swiftly and silently. She stuck her flattened and elongated human head through the slot of the next cell. It was empty, as were the second and third in the row. The fourth was at the corner. By now Lahks was sufficiently absorbed in her search that she did not hear the soft footsteps in the cross corridor. As she stuck her head into the slot, two shrieks rang out simultaneously.
Inside the cell, a man screamed, “I’m cured! I’m cured! I’ll never touch another drop!”
Outside there was a ululation of pure terror and a young voice yelled, “Monster! Monster!”
Lahks drew out her head, threw her long body upright against the wall, flattened still further, and made like a row of stones. Footsteps pounded as a guard tore down the corridor, rounded the corner, and ran up the other side. In a few moments he came back more slowly, peering suspiciously right and left. Lahks could hear sobbing in the cross corridor and the guard’s voice reassuring whoever it was that it must have been a trick of the light.
Fortunately, the youngster was so shaken that whatever errand the two had was put aside. They retreated in the direction from which they had come. Lahks, giggling with the irresponsibility that shape-changing bred in her, resumed her convenient, if peculiar, form. She could, of course, have chosen something else, but she had conceived an affection for the weird body shape. She hurried back down the corridor, past her own cell. The next was again not occupied; the second had a prisoner, but he was fortunately asleep; the third was empty, too.
When Lahks’ head slid into the fourth cell, her eyes met those of a black man. His mouth opened, as if to scream, the whites showed all around his eyes, and Lahks began hurriedly to ooze backward.
“Lahks!” It was a sharp hiss, and the thick black lips parted to emit Stoat’s chuckle. “In the name of my Nameless God,” he muttered as Lahks slid the rest of herself into his cell and then regrew her multiple legs, “I don’t know whether I should forswear drink or take to it. I think I preferred the snakes on your head. At least I could look at the rest of you.”
“Well, I could have been a pretty fancy dancing girl, but I’d like to see one get through that slot.”
Stoat glanced at her again, then resolutely turned his back and gazed through one of the clear plates. He could see nothing but a patch of gray stone wall, but that was better than Lahks.
“Maybe it’s practical,” he admitted, “but it does something to my stomach—on top of that stunner. Do you mind if 1 don’t look?”
“Never mind your stomach,” Lahks giggled. “What did you do to the rest of yourself? I didn’t recognize you.”
“Pills make my skin dark, and I dehaired my head in that last mountain range. I’ve got slots in my nose, cheeks, and lips to take plastic pads. Let’s get out of here fast, though. The damned pads hurt like hell and the pain-killer I took is wearing off.”