The sound stopped him, one foot just lifting, so that he stood heronlike, poised, unable to move. A howl. A strangled paean of fury or hunger or … A guttural sound, a coughing roar. What?
Westward, whatever it was. Where silence was now, not even echoes to tell him he had really heard it.
Sam ran his hands over himself, taking inventory. Sword belt, helmet, work clothes, lantern. Tools on his belt: spy-light, knife, memorizer, trouble-link. His hands lingered on the link. If he triggered it, Africa and Jebedo Quillow would be alerted to his location. Both of them would arrive within minutes.
Not yet. He took off the sword belt and helmet, placing them carefully beside the trail. The memorizer went in the helmet, along with the spy-light. It wasn’t good for anything except disclosing the innards of machinery. Knife he would keep. Trouble-link he would keep. Lantern he would keep, though, just now, he would turn it off.
When his eyes had adjusted to the starlit surfaces around him, the faint glimmer of water, the barely discernable trail, he went westward once more. Up a tiny slope and down a tiny slope, the streamlet cutting through, between dwarf banks, edged with white flowers. The scent rose from them, dizzying. He had never seen them before.
At the foot of the slope, the stream dropped, suddenly and shockingly, over a bank. The sound of falling water alerted him before he stepped off into air, and he lit the lantern to find the source of the sound. It lay beneath him, the height of two tall men, a pool at the head of a … a canyon?
Hobbs Land had no canyons, Sam told himself, quite seriously. Therefore, he was dreaming, sleep walking, or in some other place.
The sound came again, closer. A coughing roar. A growl of fury. He turned off the light and scrambled over the edge of the bank, dropping onto a soggy patch beside the pool. More of the white flowers bloomed beside the pool, filling the canyon with their sweet smell, spicy, faintly resinous. A trail led along the stream, a larger stream than the one above, augmented from some source, some spring or underground brook which had joined it at the pool. The canyon grew deeper and wider as he walked. The little stream became a small river. There were holes, large and small, in the canyon walls, the smaller ones full of the flutter of wings. Trees rustled along the banks. Large stones stood blackly in the water, making it purl and chuckle as it roiled around them, starshine gleaming on the curved ripples.
The thing attacked him from behind. Sam fell forward, dropping the lantern, feeling teeth at the back of his neck, rolling frantically to get out from under it. It stank. It held on with clawed feet, clawed hands. Sam rolled into the water, and the thing broke from him, choking, then roaring, ready to attack again.
Sam had the knife in his hand. He didn’t remember getting it there, but it was there, open, sharp, something better than teeth, though not much. It was only a tool, something to cut vegetables with, in the fields, something to cut fruit from a tree or bush. Not a weapon, not intended as a weapon.
He felt claws rake his arms, smelled the breath of the thing, hot and stinking. He struck out with the knife and was rewarded with a howl, not so much of pain as of surprise. He leapt forward, knife out, slashing it, trying to wound. The knife encountered something hard, bone perhaps, and the howls increased in fury.
The thing came at him again, brushing his knife hand aside. Sam ducked, getting under the clutching arms, feeling the heavy body go by him. He whirled, grabbed, touched the head, lunged forward to get his arm around the creature’s thick, muscle wrapped neck.
He was whipped from side to side, knocked against the stones. His knife flew away, somewhere; he thought he heard a splash. He had his hands locked, arm around the throat of the thing, pressed tight as he hung on. Warm, metal-smelling blood ran over his chest. His own? The thing’s? He couldn’t tell.
Time crawled. He was dizzy and weak. He held on as long as he could and then let go. The thing went away from him, or fell, perhaps. He couldn’t tell. After a time, he struggled to his feet and staggered back the way he had come. When he came to the pool, the high bank defeated him. He couldn’t climb it, A star shining through a notch showed him the way to get out, a rocky defile, like a flight of monster stairs. He was barely able to climb them.
• Sal just happened to be up around dawn—little Sahke had had a stomach ache, which had kept her restless through the night—when Sam came home. She saw him in the street, covered with blood, as though he had been run through a harvester. She screamed and ran to him.
“All right, all right,” he said, pushing her hands away.
“But Sam, you’re cut, you’re bleeding, you’re … come inside, let me wash … call the medical techs …” And all the time he was pushing her hands away.
She got him into the kitchen of the brotherhouse and went at him with a wet towel, finding to her astonishment that it wasn’t all his blood he was covered in. Oh, there were one or two cuts and tears, nothing too serious, as though something had sliced at him with a knife, or fangs. One tear on his arm might need closing up, but most of the thick, horrid blood wasn’t Sam’s. It didn’t even smell like human blood.
She took his helmet and sword belt and put them away. No need for the med-tech to see those.
“What … how?” she cried into his peaceful face. “What did you …”
“Something out there in the dark,” he said at last. “I was walking, and it attacked me.”
“But what was it, Sam?”
He sighed, blinking at her sleepily. “It had teeth and claws and bad-smelling breath. It came at me from behind. It was dark. I’m pretty sure I killed it. At least I hurt it, I know that.”
“Why didn’t you use the link, Sam?” She slapped it with her hand, angry at him. “Why didn’t you use the link?”
He only blinked at her, not answering as she used it, summoning Africa and Jebedo Quillow, who went to get the Tharby men up. The settlement had no sniffers or dogs or anything like them, but Jebedo Quillow was a good tracker. Meantime the med-tech had arrived and was busy sealing up the long tears on Sam’s arm with coag and body glue.
Jebedo and his group returned midmorning, saying they’d found where the attack took place right enough, blood all over everything and the bones of something biggish, the size of a big man. But the birds and ferfs and pocket squirrels had been at it, and nothing was left but the bones, and they didn’t look mannish, somehow. Not quite.
“Where?” she asked.
“Out in that strange canyon with the little river and the caves,” they told her.
“What little river? What strange canyon with the caves?” she demanded, never having heard of any such thing.
“That one,” said Jebedo Quillow, “that funny little old one that’s out there.”
Sam slept peacefully, a slight, wondering smile on his lips.
• Saturday Wilm wanted her cousin Jep to go fishing with her. Jep was as determined to spend the off-day playing scissor hockey with the first level team as a possible substitute player.
“They won’t take you until you’re fifteen, Jep,” she told him. “No matter how good you are.”
“They haven’t seen how good I am, yet,” her cousin announced. “I’m really very good. I’m better than Willum R.”
“You could be the best they’ve ever seen, but they still won’t let you on the team until you’re fifteen.”
“Who told you that?”
“Mam. It’s a Settlement Rule.”
“A big rule, or a little one?” Big rules had to be changed by CM; little rules could be changed by the Topman or by settlement vote.
“It’s a big rule. It’s part of the child labor prohibitions.”
“Playing scissor hockey isn’t labor!” he objected hotly, his voice squeaking in disbelief.
“It is if you play a lot of games against bigger people and your bones aren’t grown yet. That’s what Mam said.”
“Crap,” said Jep. “Why didn’t they tell me that when they said I could come around and play?”
“Bec
ause you’ve been pestering them for ages, and they figure if they let you play with them once and get knocked around a little, maybe you’ll get some sense and quit bothering them.”
“Why didn’t they just tell me about the rule, for shish sake. I’m not about to waste time with them if there’s no chance they’ll let me play.”
“Well, there’s no chance until you’re fifteen, I’m telling you. And if you don’t believe me, you can go ask Africa.”
“I believe you,” he mumbled furiously, angry mostly at himself for not checking. His own mam would have told him if he’d asked. And he wouldn’t soon forgive the coach who hadn’t told him, either. Just wait until next year when they asked him to be on the team and he told them no. He’d switch to Settlement Four, that’s what he’d do. “What do you want to fish for.”
“Creelies. Mam said she’s been hungry for creely legs for ages.”
“That means climbing all the way up to the Gobbles.”
“Doesn’t take any more energy to climb the Gobbles than it does to play scissor hockey all afternoon,” she told him sarcastically.
“Maybe that monster that got Sam is up there. Have you thought about that?”
“Sam killed it, Jep. And everybody’s looked everywhere for more of them, and there aren’t any. If anybody thought there were more of them, we’d be confined to settlement, and nobody’s said one word about that.”
Jep scowled at her, conceding the point. “Have you got bait?”
“I’ve got half a poultry-bird, cut up in pieces, then left out for a couple of days.”
Jep made another face and went to get his jacket, thinking about creelies. In the Archives, creelies were listed somewhere between octopuslike and lobsterlike animals, in that they had both tentacles and a jointed exoskeleton—which they sometimes left to wander around in the nude—but they were fishlike, too, for they had fins and scales and almost an endoskeleton as well. The finned, scaled, tentacled critter moved around under the banks of mountain streams, sometimes in its hinged, legged shell, and sometimes, sans shell and sans legs, it just swam off naked while the legs and shell stayed under the bank. A neuropad at the top of each leg matched up to a neuropad on the body, and when the animal entered its exoskeleton, it simply reestablished neural contact. The legs had a separate heart-lung system as well, to protect them during long separations. There was some controversy among the biologists as to whether the creelie was actually one animal or two, acting in symbiosis.
Whether one or two, the object in creely fishing was to attract the creature, naked or housed, to a blob of half rotted meat. If the creely was in its shell, one pulled it out of the shell and dropped the tentacled creature back into the stream while retaining the shell and legs. If one caught it nude, one tied a thread to it and let it flee back to its legs, then pulled it out and stole the legs. A nude creely was inedible, but the detached legs were delicious. Those arguing that there were two animals involved used this fact to telling effect. Those arguing for one animal pointed out that the nude creely soon grew new legs and a new shell. Those not bothering to argue ate the steamed legs with butter and a touch of sour juice from the thick leaves of the cit tree, amid much gourmandish delight.
Bringing the spice of danger to the sport of creely fishing was the possibility of fishing up a creelylike creature that, when separated from its legs, sprayed an unpleasant and foul-smelling irritant in all directions. This creature, differing from the creely only in insignificant details of tentacle arrangement, was called a bomber. Both Jep and Saturday had been sprayed, more than once, but not for several years.
“What you’ll do today is catch a bomber,” Jep announced as they went toward the mushroom house to fetch the half-rotted poultry-bird. “Only, you won’t get it all over you. You’ll get it all over me.”
“I haven’t done that since we were ten,” Saturday protested. “And I didn’t do it purposely.” She opened the door to the mushroom house and took a lantern from the rack by the door.
“You got it all over Willum R., too.”
“He forgot about it. He doesn’t keep reminding me all the time the way you do. Willum R. is a true friend,” she said loftily.
“I only remind you to focus your mind, Saturday Wilm. That’s what you need, focus.” He followed her down the aisle, stepping in the puddle of light she allowed him from her lantern.
“I don’t need any more focus than you do,” she said, throwing a fresh-picked mushroom at him, which bounced harmlessly off his head and rolled away down the stone-floored aisle between the beds. “Your mom tells my mom all the time that you’re a scatterhead.”
“Who’s a scatterhead?” He leapt at her in a low tackle, knocking her down and sitting on her. “Now, who?”
“You.”
“Not me.”
“Let me up, you loader-bottom. You weigh a ton.”
“One kiss, that’s the price.”
“Oh shit, Jep.”
“One.”
“I’m not old enough for kissing.”
“That depends who wants one.”
“Just one.”
He took his toll chastely, not trying for any ardent effects. He liked kissing Saturday and didn’t want her offended at him. He liked hugging her even better, because she was soft and sort of supple in ways he wasn’t. He tried a hug when he’d finished with the kiss, then let her up.
“If my mom knew you were all the time kissing me, Jep Wilm, she’d baby-proof me so fast …”
“Kissing!” he cried, red-faced. “That’s all.”
“Well, just don’t get any ideas.”
He glared at her. “Saturday Wilm, I’ve had that idea about you ever since I was about nine, but I’m not going to do anything about it yet.” He helped her up. “And when I do, we’ll both know about it in advance, believe me.
She flushed, not willing to tell him she’d had the same idea. She had gone so far as to consult the Archives from the information stage at the school, to determine whether there was any genetic problem with the Wilm family, and to consult her own birth records to determine whether, by any chance, she and Jep had the same progenitor. They didn’t. Jep was Sam Girat’s get, which everyone more or less knew, but she was the get of the man from CM named Spiggy Fettle.
Spiggy was very, very smart, Africa had said, despite being a rather ugly man. “Which is no handicap as I have enough beauty for both of us,” she had announced, wrinkling her nose at her daughter. “I know that for a fact because you turned out fine.” Spiggy was also a manic-depressive, but Africa had checked to be sure Saturday was okay before she continued the pregnancy. Fixing MD was no harder than fixing other developmental errors. The doctor just fiddled with the DNA and injected it into the growing fetus. What Saturday couldn’t understand is why Spiggy got born without that being done, though Africa said it was something religious.
She turned left at the next comer, tripping over something and almost sending herself sprawling, catching herself on the side of a planting bed. In the lantern light she could see one of the heavy floor slabs heaved up a hand’s breadth.
“What in hell did that?” murmured Jep.
They peered beneath the stone, seeing a pallid fungus piled beneath the stone, shoving up. “I didn’t know they could do that! A little thing like that!” Saturday exclaimed. “When it dies, will the stone fall back down?”
“Maybe it’ll just keep growing,” suggested Jep. “Maybe it’ll push the stone through the roof.” He stepped over the raised stone and asked, “Why’d you leave the creely bait in here?”
“Because nobody would smell it in here,” she replied. “The whole house smells sort of decayed.” She found the sack, picked it up, and led the way back to the door.
Both of them sighed with relief when they reached the open air. The mushroom house was entirely too wet and cavelike. They galloped out of the settlement, keeping up the pace until they were well on the trail to the Gobbles.
Saturday had returned to her t
houghts about Spiggy Fettle. She didn’t mind being smart as he was, but she didn’t want to look like him.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” she asked Jep.
Jep turned to examine her brown face, the curly black hair that surrounded it, her dark glowing eyes, the imperious beak of her straight, delicate nose, her olive-rose mouth, which was usually open, usually full of words. “Sats, I think you’re beautiful. How about me? Am I pretty?” He grinned at her.
Jep always reminded her of one of the little settlement tractors, square and tough and unstoppable. His eyes were pebble-colored, like rocks seen in shallow water, but his eyelashes were long and thick and brown, and there was nothing stony about the neat, full curve of his lower lip. He looked quite a lot like Sam, and Sam was a very handsome man.
Satisfied both with his response and with the way he looked, she gave him a kiss. Jep was surprised, but not displeased, and he returned the kiss. The result astonished them both. They drew apart, unable to catch their breaths, and took up their climb again.
The way to the Gobbles was not interesting. It was a steady ascent among uniformly blobby bushes, which had neither a particular scent nor any discernable blossom or fruit. The path was littered with round, ankle-breaker rocks, too, and the smart climber kept his eyes on his feet. It was the dullness of the trip which made the climb laborious, rather than the physical effort required. Therefore, when Jep looked up from the path to find himself confronted with an enormous tree in a place where no such tree had ever been, he was startled into absolute immobility.
Saturday ran into his back with a whoof.
“Clummox,” she growled, before looking up, and then, “Ohowee, oh my. Where did that come from?”
“Them,” said Jep. “There’s about a hundred of them, plus little ones.”