She could pontificate almost as well as Quild, but Maeve’s Security had known as much the previous night. Of course, it might keep up to date by reading Quild’s publications; that was entirely possible.
“It’s answering!”
Good. Let us talk, by all means.
“Now we’re starting the introduction. The professor has transcribed some greetings from other thickets he has visited.”
Quild himself was still spinning and leaping and waving like a maniac. Vaun could hear his breath. Strenuous work, talking to pepods…but there did seem to be something to it. The oversize bundle of kindling itself had stopped moving around, although its individual twigs were all still rustling and writhing. All right—so it was listening. That was a small part of what the big ape had claimed he could do.
Give him his due, though; he had the courage of his beliefs. That monster was terrifyingly close to him. But suppose this meeting did get down to business? Just suppose, for example, that the thing asked a question? Then Quild’s flunkies would have to translate it, and tell him, and he would have to think of an answer, and send it all the way back through the control room for transcription and transmission…How patient were pepods? Did a pepod interpret a long silence as a rudeness?
Quild slowed to an exhausted stop and doubled over, panting hard, and also trying to speak instructions to his assistants off in their control room. That might be half a world away, or up at the house. Somehow they would be patched into Valhal’s Security.
Elan said, “They’re responding now, in chorus.”
If the pepod didn’t get Vaun, then the cold would. This nonsense should have been put off until Angel rose, around midnight, this time of year. God of fools and innocents…
The monster began to wander away, seemingly more interested in gravel than people. Quild straightened, and renewed his dancing, although less exuberantly than before.
“This is the main question now,” said Elan’s whisper. “We’re asking them to notice you standing behind him. He is saying that you are one of several…Seek others like you…”
When Nivel died
, Vaun thought,
I fell in a ditch. There are no ditches here
.
Quild was slowing, out of breath.
“We have asked them to look for another like you.” Elan’s voice began to sound distracted. “We are getting a reply now…Negative, of course.”
The pepod’s writhings became more agitated, its rustle louder. Was it creeping closer? Quild began to dance faster.
“Now we are asking them to look farther—look far away, look for another like you. I do wish they had a better idea of
tense
. I think…Yes, the other thickets are melding in!”
A long, painful pause…
“Admiral? Elan, still. Sorry to neglect you like this. The quasi-sentients are definitely asking a question. We’re having a little trouble relating the content to known semantic packages.”
You don’t know what it wants, you mean
.
The girl’s voice faded, as if she had turned away to speak to someone else. “No, Dik, that grouping definitely refers to aggression….”
The pepod lurched into motion. It scurried right past Quild, heading for Vaun. His legs jellied. He wanted to run, to grovel, dance like Quild…mostly to pee. Anything!
A squeak from his invisible guide…“It’s all right, Admiral! It’s just coming to inspect you. At least, I think it is. Just stay still.”
Easy for her! This was it, Vaun thought, as the rustling, clicking monster writhed over the beach toward him.
Then it veered, and stopped alongside him, so close he could have reached out and touched it. He could not stop his shaking, and his throat was as dry as the sand under his toes.
Chitter
, said the pepod.
Click! Chitter! Chitter!
A twig reached out and stroked his head. Another reached toward his groin, and his flesh crawled.
“Yes, it’s all right,” the girl said weakly.
Vaun heard faint voices beyond hers, as if an argument was raging. “And definitely the emission is increasing…I think…yes…” She faded again. “Dik, see? We have a continuum!” Then she was back. “Beg pardon, Admiral. This is very exciting. We have some unique patterns developing here in the higher frequency bands.”
Vaun hoped they knew what they were doing. He didn’t think they did, though. The venomous mass beside him fidgeted and rustled; tendrils waved and peered, and occasionally touched him, very tentatively. He had a horrible certainty that it was shouting at him in frequencies he could not sense and of course wondering why he did not respond. How patient was a pepod? How long until it decided he needed a lesson in manners?
“And now we are picking up the mainland!” Elan was squeaky with excitement. “The fugue is expanding at an incredible rate…Dik, do you see
that
? Tell Quild!”
Vaun felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. The rest of the pepods were certainly doing something, dancing maybe. He could hear them, even if he could barely see them.
Without warning, the pepod beside him scuttled away in a spray of sand, heading for the distant audience.
Elan shouted a warning. The rest of the thicket was moving, vague in the dark, but definitely advancing, rolling forward in a shapeless rush, following their leader.
Quild cried out briefly, and spun around to flee, and shrieked as he was overrun.
Vaun took to his heels, angling toward the sea, hearing Elan wailing senselessly in his ear. The darkness ahead came alive with the green flashes of small arms fire. Screams of terror or pain from the distant audience told him the first pepod had arrived.
He wasn’t going to make it. From the corner of his eye he saw the rest of the thicket almost on top of him. He whirled to face them, fell on his knees, and pressed his face to the ground.
“WASH MY FEET,
Wash my hands.
Put me back in
The ditching bands…”
The air is hot enough to bake bread. The mud is thick and heavy and putrid. In the distance girls are singing.
Late summer is ditching time in the delta. No matter that the sun is a torturer and Angel its apprentice. Eclipse Day is a holiday, when the sun is closest to Angel—and it is said that long ago Angel would hide behind the sun on that day—but for weeks before and after Eclipse Day the two blaze side by side in the sky, and it is ditching time. The water is low then, and the ditches must be dug out, ready for autumn flood and next year’s eels.
Vaun works alone, shoveling just as hard as any—harder, so no one will accuse him of shirking, off here by himself, and he stays in clear sight for that same reason. If he tries to join a band, sooner or later a shovelful of mud will come down on the top of his head, just by accident, oops, sorry, very funny. Mud is full of leebs, and it is bad enough to be bitten raw up to the knees, but get leebs in your hair or your ears and they drive you crazy. He knows.
This morning he started out with Nivel, and they kept each other company for a while. But Nivel’s withered foot slows him, and Vaun has drawn so far ahead that it isn’t worth shouting to and fro. He’s twelve now, and can throw mud as fast as any grown boy in the village. Even last year he could dig a full boy’s lot, and this year he’s bigger and stronger. Soon he’ll go back to Nivel and suggest they change ditches, and he’ll dig enough so that by night they’ll have two lots dug, one for him and one for Nivel, even if Vaun has dug most of both of them. He did it yesterday and the day before and the day before. He’ll show them! It feels good, except for the blisters.
The mud squelches around his ankles, the pozee grass waves overhead, but the only shade in the delta comes from the bugs; everyone knows that. They’re not quite thick enough today to cast a shadow, but not far off.
He swings his shovel relentlessly, throwing muck up on the bank, wash my
feet
, wash my
hands…slurp…slurp…slurp…
Somebody screams.
And somebody else, even before he is up on the bank, dancing on tiptoe to see over the pozee. People running, shouting.
Nivel’s head and shoulders appear over the grass…not as far back as Vaun had thought…and then the terror takes on a name—
pepod
. There is nothing to see except the people, though. People running, and yelling, and throwing their hands up and vanishing in earsplitting screams as the thing in the grass gets them.
Nivel shoots a wild-eyed look at Vaun, and shouts, “Down, lad!” And disappears. But Vaun sees Shil fall, and then Lonaham, and two others are running toward him, and he turns and takes to his heels.
He hears Nivel shouting his name.
He catches his foot in something and pitches headfirst into a ditch…
A moment of sheer terror, and then he hears Nivel screaming also.
I
T HAD HAPPENED again. The day Nivel died, the pepod had gone right by Vaun. The trail of crushed pozee had been quite clear to see afterward—Nivel had jumped up and run also. He had drawn the monster away from Vaun, because it had gone right by where he had been lying, within a couple of feet of him. It had caught Nivel easily, of course.
And last night, even—how close had that brute of Maeve’s come to Vaun?”
As the explosions began brightening the night, Vaun rolled over and sat up, and reflected that it had happened again.
This time a whole thicket of pepods had gone by him, over him, and around him. His ears had been full of their clatter, and he had sniffed a dry, fruity odor. Sand had been thrown up, he had felt a few gentle, probing touches stroke his hair, nothing hostile.
They could see to the cellular level, Quild had said, perhaps to the molecular…Quild was still screaming…
Meaning, obviously, that they could see Vaun wasn’t human. Did they know he was an artifact, and one of many? Did their group mind respect replicates more than randoms? More likely they just recognized that he was a freak and not one of the too-numerous, dangerous majority. To a pepod, he obviously did not look/smell/ sound/feel human. He wasn’t one of
them
. If there really was a group mind, then it had been battling the human race, on and off, for ten thousand years. Humans kept making threatening approaches that must be resisted. Over the centuries, a group mind might have developed very specific ideas about what constituted a human being. Forty-six chromosomes, for instance.
Nivel had died in vain. Oh,
God
!
Security had joined in the battle, gouts of fire erupting among the trees and even in the sea. The racket was astonishing, but it did not drown out the screaming. The human guards had not lasted long—at least Vaun could not recall hearing their weapons in use for long, but, of course, at the time he had been underneath a stampede of pepods, and not paying quite as much attention as he should. Red and orange fire detonated in deafening tattoo, and the sea bursts were yellow and steam-white.
Apparently pepods did not mind water. Vaun had never known them to go into the sea before, and had always assumed that it would be a refuge in case of attack. Others had made the same mistake that night, and not been as lucky. He could see bodies rolling among the waves, and fragments of pepods being washed up. The beach was bright with bonfires of burning pepods, shedding a cheerful glow and streaming pale smoke. But there had been no party, and those prone figures were not drunks.
More flashes up the hill located the other two thickets, which would certainly have attacked at the same instant, and Valhal was full of God knew how many people that Roker had been ferrying in.
And the mainland would have caught it, too.
What an unmitigated fuck-up!
He heaved himself to his feet, and went over to inspect Quild. His thrashing had almost stopped, and he was beyond screaming now, his whole body striped with poisoned welts and starting to swell. He was conscious, his eyes as big as fried eggs with the pain. He tried to speak, but the whisper was lost between the sound of the sea and the blood in his mouth.
Vaun could do nothing for him except perhaps choke him to death, and—he reflected wryly—he reserved such lethal mercies for his friends. Serve the murdering bastard right! He turned and trudged back to where they had left their clothes.
Even when he had dressed, he was still shivering. Reaction and shock. Brethren were tough, but not immune to adrenaline.
The battle was dying down, the bursts of green fire becoming less frequent. A fair part of the forest was burning. Security could work out what to do. Security was totally immune to adrenaline, and therefore should be left to cope.
How far had the carnage spread? Valhal was free of pepods now until they reseeded, but elsewhere the vermin were probably still on the rampage, and might stay that way for days. What had gone wrong? And why?
Here came the first of the torches now. There would be no medical help from the mainland for a while—in most areas, civilian resources would collapse completely if the casualties were high. One of the Patrol’s few genuinely useful functions was the organization of disaster relief in cases of natural catastrophe like earthquakes. That it could handle, and handle well, but the Patrol must have its own problems this time.
Vaun started to run. The first torch was touching down on the beach among the bodies. Some of those bodies were still thrashing, and two survivors came running out of the trees, hand in hand, also heading for the torch.
A pepod emerged from the woods behind them and streaked in pursuit. Security let it scurry clear of the bushes, until it offered a clear shot, and blasted it in a bright violet flash. The pepod bounced, rolled a few steps, and then remained in place, burning with smoky orange flames. That must’ve been just about the last of them. The barrage rumbled among the hills for a moment longer, and died away.
Vaun went by at least a dozen victims, some moving and screaming, some not. A few were struggling to rise. So much for Roker’s cronies. So much for Roker’s armed bodyguards. How about Roker himself? Was he injured, or even dead?
The pilot of the torch was standing beside it, staring all around and muttering, “Oh, my God!” over and over. The two survivors from the woods were half carrying, half leading one of the wounded forward—Admiral Lepo, blood-soaked and barely conscious. All three were staggering whenever he was seized by muscle spasms. The rescuers were Blade and Feirn, which was not too surprising, because they had been back near the trees. Feirn lacked the weight and strength needed, though.