Starfist: Hangfire (12 page)

"Colonists aren't necessarily the best people to do an in-depth study of a new world's biota." Dr.

Angela Streeth, the chief botanist, jumped in before Hottenbaum could raise another objection. "They're too busy trying to make the planet habitable to expend resources on studying flora and fauna. A specially designated and designed scientific study group can do the job better." She grimaced. "My team hasn't found anything interesting yet, and more than half of my people are working at less than full capability."

She nodded at Marcks.

Dr. Horter Hottenbaum looked from face to face and sighed. Every department head was opposed to opening Society 362 for colonization. "Then there's no need..." He couldn't bring himself to finish asking the question.

"I recommend we go home now," said First Deputy Administrator Egon. "We can write our reports on the journey."

They left a month later on the next supply ship. The ship didn't take them directly back to the Bureau of Human Habitability Exploration headquarters on Earth, it first stopped at Kingdom, a colonized world just three light-years from Quagmire, to drop off a consignment of intestinal flora culture. Kingdom's theocracy wanted the world to be totally independent, but not all of the nutrients necessary for healthy human life were readily available yet. A recent plague had attacked the intestinal flora of the colonists, and they were facing famine from their reduced ability to digest food. Only crew who were needed to transfer the floral consignment and receive the minerals Kingdom used as trade goods were allowed off the ship during the two days it was in orbit. This wasn't by command of the ship's captain, it was by order of the theocracy. The monks of the Holy Regiment of the Shepherd's Crook, who served as customs agents inside the ship, permitted no unauthorized persons to debark. The monks looked like they were fully prepared to use the Confederation military blasters they carried. An armed shuttle hovering outside the transport's docking bay backed them up. No one on the ship to Kingdom objected, the planet was subject to frequent rebellions by those colonists who believed Kingdom should allow more individual freedom.

As the mission's shuttles took off from Quagmire, from the edge of the nearby rain forest a small group of centauroids unlike any the BHHEI mission had encountered in nine months of study watched quietly.

When the last of the shuttles vanished into the upper atmosphere, they regrouped into a circle.

"The monsters have gone," one said with relief.

"Have they truly gone or will they return?" another asked, watching the sky through his dorsal eyes.

The biggest centauroid lashed out to thump the worrier between his retracted primary eyestalks.

"Look at us when you talk," he snarled. "You are being rude."

The worrier instantly retracted his dorsal eyestalks and extended his primaries. He lowered his torso and pointed his primaries at the leader's mid-feet. "Those monsters frighten me. Four limbs are unnatural."

His voice was muffled by the mud inches below his mouth.

Another shuddered. "And those huge lumps where their primary eyestalks should be! They are uglier than any demon the shaman warns us about."

Others began babbling of their disgust at the appearance of the monsters. The leader ignored them. He extended his torso to its fullest height and aimed his primary eyestalks at the just-abandoned BHHEI base. He came to a decision.

"They had many tools and other objects," he said "Maybe they left something in those..." His vocabulary failed him. The centauroids didn't construct buildings or live in caves, their nests were roofed with living branches teased into place for that purpose, and had open sides. "We must search." He slapped one of the others on a forelimb. "Go. Bring back our females and young. Also more hunters."

The designated messenger dipped his torso and bounded up into a nearby tree. He used all six limbs to scramble along the branches from tree to tree—arboreal travel was far faster than slogging through the undergrowth.

A hunter who had been silent swiveled his primary eyestalks toward the base. "What if they set traps?"

"Our females and young will find them," the leader said firmly. Secretly he wasn't so sure his kind could find all the traps the monsters might have left. What sort of traps might monsters such as the ones who just left be capable of conceiving?

The humans hadn't set any traps; the vid, trid, and audio recorders left running didn't count. In any case, the record the vids, trids, and audios made would never be seen by a human unless another mission was sent to Quagmire. Even then, the next mission would have to visit Central Station and retrieve the recordings before the dank atmosphere degraded the storage media beyond recovery.

Neither had the mission left behind anything usable—usable to humans, that is. The centauroids, on the other hand, were fascinated by the decomposing foodstuffs in the composters. Even more interesting to them were the items they were able to dig out of the nonorganic trash pit: rapidly corroding broken screws, a cracked bubble matrix, the partly carbonized innards of a comm unit that had overloaded and burned out. One searcher thought she was caught by a trap when she squeezed a mostly used tube of adhesive and it stuck the phalanges of a forelimb together. She thought she was crippled for life, but a few days later the normal scaling of her dermis sloughed off enough surface cells to remove the adhesive.

Most fascinating of all were the few wrappers from consumable items that hadn't yet degraded. The wrappers were impervious to just about everything and could be torn only at their tear strips, which, of course, had already been torn. Because people found such wrappers useful for more than merely preserving consumables between manufacture and use, they were designed to not degrade until they had been buried in a landfill for several days. The leader gathered the wrappers to be tied together for use as ceremonial capes. He thought they would be far more impressive than the leaves normally used for that purpose. The centauroids moved on and eventually migrated away. Nothing else untoward happened for a dozen standard years. Then monsters came again.

The hunter hunched behind the foliage of a tree at the edge of a sluggish river. He watched the monsters on the island for a long time. Soft rain gently pelted his shoulders and back, and ran down his body to drip onto the ground below. Finally he decided to move closer to the monsters. He was too young to have seen the monsters that had visited earlier, but he'd heard all of the stories and thought these might be different. According to the tales, the earlier monsters were more uniform in size, about the same size as people. Some of the new monsters looked to be at least twice the size of people, and the smaller ones were the size of young people, not adults. He was pretty sure the smaller ones weren't immature monsters; it was always the small ones who seemed to be leaders and the big ones were workers. Were they different kinds of monsters? That was as peculiar a thought to the hunter as the monsters coming in different sizes: his kind had not domesticated animals. He had never heard of the earlier monsters striking each other. During the time he watched from the tree he had seen several monsters strike each other, sometimes smaller ones striking larger ones. The large ones never hit back.

He couldn't be sure, but the skin color of the monsters seemed different from what he had been told about those who had left half a lifetime earlier. Their outer coverings were all the same color and pattern.

He'd not heard that the earlier monsters all had the same coverings; the older hunters, who had seen them frequently, described them as wearing many different coverings, most in colors nobody had ever seen before. One thing he was sure of from his own experience: the nests the new monsters constructed were different from the nests the others had made; he had been one of the young who searched the monster camp after the others left.

He wasn't going to go closer in the open; two other hunters had come into this area in recent days.

They hadn't returned. The hunter suspected the monsters had killed them. He would get closer to the monsters, but they wouldn't see him. Then he would return to his clan and report what he learned.

Keeping foliage between himself and the island, he swiftly clambered to the ground. He lay his spear where he could find it easily on his return and lowered himself to his belly. He dropped his thorax as well, with his shoulders hunched high enough only to keep his mouth out of the mud, and slithered into the water. The patter of the rain on the river's surface masked the small wake he made entering the water.

Completely submerged, he paddled to the middle of the river to take advantage of the slight current.

There, next to a leafy branch drifting with the current, he buoyed upward enough to break the surface with his dorsal eyestalks and snorkeled his nostrils. If monsters on the island saw his eyestalks and snorkel, they would think the organs were leaves on the branch. Maybe when he got closer he would find a way to bend his body so he could raise a tympanum above the water and listen to the monsters. The sounds of the monsters might have meaning to the shaman and the elders.

The river ran very slowly and it took considerable time for the hunter to get appreciably closer to the island. He swiveled his dorsal eyestalks to take in as much detail as possible, but almost none of what he saw made sense to him. All of the monsters were doing something, none were simply relaxing on that fine, drizzly day. Most of them rushed from one nest to another, many hunched as though they disliked the rain. Why would monsters dislike rain? As one smaller monster went from one nest to another; a larger monster accompanied it, holding a large leaf over it so the drizzle didn't fall on it. Very peculiar.

Sometimes monsters moved objects from a nest into a smaller nest then climbed into the smaller nest.

Then the small nest moved! The first time he saw that, the hunter was so frightened he almost swam away. But the small nest didn't move toward him, so he stayed. None of the small nests moved toward him. Instead, one by one, they all went to the largest nest and entered it, so he stopped being afraid.

After he witnessed that phenomenon several times, he recognized a pattern to the movement: the small nests loaded objects from one particular small nest, went into the largest nest, then returned to the first nest and repeated the process. They must have been moving things into storage. But why move them if they were already in a nest? That didn't make any sense to him.

Then the nest from which things were being taken roared so loudly the hunter could clearly hear it even under the water. It was the loudest thunder the hunter had ever heard, and it terrified him even more than the small nests did when they first moved. His astonishment when he saw the nest lift into the sky was so great that he opened his mouth and forgot to breath through his snorkel. He choked on the water he swallowed and had to raise up to clear his breathing passage. As soon as he could breathe again, he ducked back down to expose only his dorsal eyestalks and snorkel. He quickly swept his gaze over the island, but none of the monsters seemed to have noticed him. He looked upward and saw the nest that roared shrink into the sky. Then he remembered hearing that the monsters from before had used flying nests to leave. He should have known immediately what was happening—but no one had told him about the roar. Briefly he asked himself, did this mean the monsters were leaving? But only briefly; the monsters had been removing things from the flying nest and putting them in a nest that was surely too big to move.

More likely the flying nest was on its way back to where the monsters came from to get more things to move into the large nest. He wondered again what the objects were and why they were being moved into one location.

The current drew him around the end of the island, and he saw that several of the smaller monsters were at the bottom tip of the island. They were naked and held spears. The worrisome thing was, they were wading in the water. Well, they wouldn't see him if he simply submerged completely and retracted his snorkel. He could easily hold his breath for the length of time it took to reach the bank along which he'd left his spear. He took a deep breath, retracted his dorsal eyestalks and snorkel, then headed toward the shore, with his pectoral eyestalks extended for guidance. His midlimbs and aft limbs stroked powerfully, but with an upward thrust; he moved his forelimbs in an opposite direction to keep from surfacing.

The hunter only got a short distance before he saw something that startled him. One of the small monsters was swimming along the bottom of the river.

The small monster held a short spear extended before him. The spear had a barbed point that glittered more than the sharpest stone. The hunter didn't know how the monsters perceived their surroundings without eyestalks, but he could make out nothing on the monster's dorsal surface that looked like a sense organ. He thought if he stayed well above it and didn't swim so powerfully, the monster might not notice him and he could pass by safely.

The monster suddenly did something with his spear and it shot forward to impale a fish. A cord so thin the hunter could barely make it out trailed from the spear to the monster's hand. The monster thrust forward with its aft limbs and reeled the cord in with its forelimbs. The hunter took advantage of the monster's distraction and kicked vigorously forward to pass it. The strength of his thrust carried him back to the surface and he extended his snorkel to take a deep breath. When he was nearly directly above the monster, it suddenly twitched around and the hunter saw glimmering spots on the front of the growth on the monster's shoulders. Had they stalks he would have known they were eyes; without them he could only guess they were. An opening on the front of the monster's shoulder-growth opened and closed rhythmically; it had to be the monster's mouth.

The monster had almost brought the spear back to its hand when it sensed the hunter. It twisted around to reach the spear. With the sharp point extended at the hunter, it pushed against the riverbed and shot upward.