Mid-Flinx (16 page)

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 would 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.”

Flinx started to explain that he not only enjoyed but needed his privacy, that he was in fact one of the most private people he knew, but he didn’t want to disappoint her any further. Since he didn’t know what she was talking about, he saw no point in prolonging the encounter.

But he didn’t object when she laid her head on his chest and closed her eyes.

The rain ceased early. It seemed that he’d just dropped back off to sleep when their overnight refuge was once again awash in yellow-green light.

One at a time they climbed out, Saalahan effortlessly giving Flinx a boost to the top of the branch. Their emergence was greeted by a flock of opportunistic aerial predators. Soaring low on silvered wings evolved to blind prospective prey, they beat in frustration with meter-wide wings at the curtain of protective vines.

Saalahan dismissed them with a derisive snort that was mimicked in comical fashion by the two younger furcots. Meanwhile Teal had leaped lithely from the broad branch on which they stood to a smaller one nearby and slightly lower down, indifferent to the thirty-meter drop between.

As Flinx looked on, she shinnied up a thigh-thick vine that was striped with blue, carefully avoiding several nearby that to his eye looked exactly the same. Reaching a knot formed by two woody creepers, she vanished into an explosion of enormous purple and red blossoms whose oversized stamens were a bright, metallic gold.

“What’s she doing?”

Saalahan only grunted, leaving it to Kiss to explain. “Mother is gathering something.” She toyed with her chestnut tresses.

“Food.” It struck Flinx that his stomach was not aching because Teal had spent some time resting her head against it, but from a demanding emptiness.

“No.” Morning muted Dwell’s gruffness. “No food in a Tolling bush. Maybe beyond.”

“Is that what those flowers are called?”

“Of course.” The boy’s sharp-edged tone returned. “Don’t you know anything?”

“Very little,” Flinx confessed.

Teal wasn’t gone long. She retraced her steps, making the same death-defying leap back to the main branch with the same casual aplomb as before. With a prideful smile she opened one of her gathering pouches, filled now with thumb-sized yellow fruit, and then found a place to sit. Saalahan chided her, urging that they move deeper into the forest before pausing to eat.

“Oh, hush, Saalahan. Set your big green backside down somewhere and relax. This is a special place. Maybe we’ll spend another night here.”

“Lazy.” The big furcot sniffed. It lumbered off into the arboreal veldt, the two younger ones following like a pair of six-legged green bears trailing their mother. Thanks to their coloring, they vanished from sight almost immediately.

Looking on, it was difficult for Flinx not to envision some sort of familial relationship existing between them. Once again Teal insisted it just wasn’t so.

Idly stroking Pip, he stared out through the curtain of vines across the valley in the forest. “Won’t we be in danger up here without the furcots?”

“People can look after themselves without furcots.” She gestured to her son. “Dwell, sit sentry.”

The boy beamed as his mother handed him the long tube she had been carrying strapped to her back. For the first time Flinx got a good look at the snuffler. Hewn from a special hardwood that remained green even after curing, the tapering weapon was a deft blend of half-remembered high-tech and determined improvisation. Keeping his fingers clear of the hand-tooled trigger, Dwell also took charge of a sack of gas-filled membranes and a quiver of poisoned darts.

Settling himself in a crook where a smaller branch met its parent, he steadied the snuffler on his legs, stuffed one of the globular membranes into the opening in the rear, closed the cover, and let his gaze rove the surrounding environment. Unless something in the way of an immediate threat manifested itself, the lethal darts would remain safely in their protective quiver.

Thus positioned, Flinx decided, the boy looked considerably older than his ten years.

Kiss wandered freely, studying crawlers and plants but never straying far from the two adults or her brother. No matter how focused she became on any object of curiosity, she always looked up to check and evaluate her surroundings every couple of minutes.

Sitting across from Teal, Flinx watched with interest as she removed a hand-carved wooden disk from her backpack. It looked as if it had been sliced whole from a benign gourd. From her water jug she poured a small amount of liquid onto the center of the disk. Instantly it began to swell and thicken, the sides curving upward. Once it had absorbed all the available moisture, the result was an impermeable bowl that, when dehydrated, could be packed flat for easier transport.

Taking the small yellow fruits from her pouch, she carefully squeezed them over the bowl one at a time, discarding the pulp. When she was through, she removed a small sack from her backpack and dumped the flourlike contents in with the juice. A small mixing stick stirred the combination to a thick paste.

When Kiss returned with a double handful of blue-black berries, her mother added them to the mash. The result was not only visually pleasing but smelled of a promising alien tartness.

“Now what?” asked Flinx when it seemed that no additional ingredients were to be forthcoming.

Teal smiled. “We wait.”

“For what?”

“For the sun to work its magic.”

It didn’t look much like magic to Flinx. As the morning wore on she added a second species of berry, this one orange and pear-shaped, and more water.

Eventually the furcots returned, the young ones exhibiting an unexpected delicacy of touch as they dumped two unbruised mouthfuls of some heavy cream-colored tuber on the branch. Saalahan’s contribution was a stubby-legged two-meter long tree-dweller that looked like a giant nude mink, which Teal expertly gutted and filleted.

The furcots then filled a space atop the branch with dried wood and tinder, and the mink fillet joined the tubers in an embracing fire. There was no fear of it spreading. Not when every centimeter of exposed vegetation existed in a condition of permanent damp.

Flinx found the meal nourishing if without excitement. After the first swallow, Pip downed choice bits of meat without hesitation, though she balked at the roasted tuber. A few unsoused berries completed her breakfast, leaving her bulging contentedly in the middle. The fact that the flying snake was an opportunistic omnivore surprised most who encountered her, but Teal and her children accepted the minidrag’s diet without question.

The moisture in Teal’s fermenting surprise kept the bowl hydrated and prevented it from returning to its original shape. Only when they had finished eating did she offer it to him, eyes shining.

“
Disiwin
,” she told him, as if that explained everything.

He eyed the syrupy red-orange liquid dubiously. “What’s it supposed to do?”

“Make you feel good. Help you to see clearly. Drink, and forget about silly privacies.” She giggled like a schoolgirl.

He wondered how he could politely refuse the local beer or whatever it was, and decided he couldn’t. Not after she had gathered the main ingredients and brewed it herself. Mindful as he accepted the bowl of the precipitous drop on either side of the branch, he prayed it didn’t contain a powerful hallucinogen, or if it did, that he’d retain sense enough not to see if he could fly.