Jem

THIRTEEN

FOR TWENTY KILOMETERS Charlie and his flock tried to follow the little biplane as it chugged and bounced through the sky of Jem. No use. The balloonists soared high, swooped low, found winds that carried them toward the heat pole, but never fast enough to keep up. Charlie sang a mournful farewell song into his radio as they turned away, and the sound penetrated even the noisy rattle of the little engine inside the plane. “Too much noise,” shouted Kappelyushnikov cheerfully into Danny Dalehouse’s ear. “Turn off, please?”

“Let me say good-bye first.” Dalehouse sang into the tiny radio, then switched it off. Far behind and half a kilometer overhead, the flock bobbed acknowledgment. Dalehouse craned his neck to see forward, but the camp of the Greasies was of course nowhere yet in sight. They were flying almost directly toward the Heat Pole — “southeast” by the convention of considering the poles of rotation as north and south, however irrelevant that was to compasses and sextants — and it was uphill almost all the way. How foolish of the Greasies to locate their camp in the least hospitable part of the planet! But who could figure why the Greasies did things?

Kappelyushnikov leaned over and slapped him on the shoulder. “You wish to puke?” he called encouragingly, pointing over the side of the cockpit. Dalehouse shook his head. “Is all right, you know,” Gappy went on. “Is little rough, yes. We are fighting winds, not making love to them like in balloon. But you have truly outstanding aircraft technician in charge!”

“I’m not complaining.” And in fact, he had no reason to complain. The biplane was a technological marvel on Klong — on Jem, as they were supposed to call it now, he reminded himself. At least they were flying! The Greasy camp was hard to reach any other way. There were no cars on Jem, because no roads. Only a tracked vehicle could go very far, and even the Greasies did not have them to spare. Because, in their pigheaded way, the Greasies had camped ten kilometers from the nearest usable water, boats were out. You could fly there for this semi-summit meeting that was supposed to make everyone on Jem friends again. Or you could walk. And Dalehouse spared a thought of compassion for the poor, proud, pedestrian Peeps, who were no doubt doing just that somewhere below.

So just to be flying was a triumph, although he wished Gappy had not brought up the subject of airsickness. It was not so much the motion that was bothering him as the food they had been eating. With twenty-two more mouths to feed, the old catch-as-catch-can meal style was down the drain. Unfortunately, the new people had brought their appetites, but they had forgotten to pack a chef to satisfy them. The food was unbearable. No one dared complain. The person who bitched would be the next cook.

Still, the community was growing. The third resupply ship had brought a great deal! This sputtering little two-winged airplane, folded and stacked and foolish-looking, but demon-strably workable, because it was working. The little plutonium-powered machines and instruments that had given Mor-rissey sensors to study the Creepies in their tunnels under the ground and Dalehouse himself radios to pass on to Charlie. A new Argus orbiter to photograph clouds and help them predict the weather. Or at least to guess at it a little more accurately.

It had even helped them in their attempts to make contact with sentients. Sort of. Charlie was delighted with his crossbow and his radio. Jim Morrissey had taken another tack. He had used the new power auger to make three widely spaced holes along a Creepy burrow. The end holes held soft charges of explosives, the center one a hose connected to the exhaust of the auger’s little gasoline putt-putt. When Morrissey blew the charges he sealed both ends of that section of the tunnel, and the carbon monoxide caught four burrowers before they could dig away. By then they were no good for Dalehouse’s purposes, of course, but they were a joy to Morrissey.

Even further marvels were on their way. The third resupply had brought eight metric tons of equipment, but according to the tactran messages the next would bring nearly fifty, plus maybe a hundred additional personnel. It would be a city! The summons to the meeting at the Fuel camp had not only been a welcome tour of Jem, it had been a reprieve from the tedium of erecting tents to receive the reinforcements.

What the tactran had failed to say was just what the reinforcements would be used for. They certainly needed any number of specialists they didn’t have. A real cook. A dentist. Some better-looking women. A better translator… reminded, Dalehouse leaned back to see how Harriet was faring behind him.

The translator was most uncomfortably curled up in a space no more than a meter square, and studded, at that, with bolts and levers that must have been tattooing Harriet’s hips and ribs indelibly. If she had been anyone else Dalehouse would have thought of some friendly, commiserating remark. For Harriet he could find none. Her eyes were closed. Her expression registered resignation to the palpable injustice of being the smallest of the three of them, and thus the one to be squeezed into the tiny rear compartment.

“Getting close,” Kappelyushnikov bawled in his ear.

Dalehouse leaned forward, rubbing at the glass as though the Jemman murk were on the inside rather than all around. There was nothing but maroon cloud -

Then the stark white rim of the Heat Pole glittered through a break. And something else. The clouds themselves were clearly bright. As the biplane tunneled out of the last of the cloud bank they were leaving, Dalehouse saw the cause before him.

“Jesu Crist!” cried Kappelyushnikov. “Have they no shame?”

The light was the Oily camp. It stood out on the horizon like a bonfire, penetrating Jem’s dour maroon murk with beacons, lighted windows — my God, Dalehouse marveled, even streetlamps! It was no longer an expeditionary camp. It looked like a small town.

The vertical beacon dipped and swept across the biplane to acknowledge their approach, then courteously away so that they were not dazzled. Kappelyushnikov muttered inaudibly into his radio mouthpiece, listened for a moment, and then began to circle.

“What’s the matter?” Dalehouse demanded.

“Is nothing the matter, only we are no longer in hurry,” said the pilot. “Peeps will be unavoidably one hour detained, so let us study this miracle before landing on it.”

A miracle it very nearly was. There were only about forty people in the Greasy camp, but they seemed to have almost that many buildings. Buildings, not tents or plastic huts. What had they made them out of? And what buildings! Some were barracks, some seemed individual bungalows. One looked more like a tenth-size copy of the Eiffel Tower than like a structure one could live or work in. Another was a good twenty-five meters in length. And — what was that curious, shallow, round petaled cone on the far side of the camp? It seemed to be constructed of bent strips of shiny metal arrayed around a central black cylinder. Could it be a solar generator? If so, it was almost megawatt size! And — that stubby tower with the horizontally rotating fan. Wasn’t that the exhaust from an air conditioner?

Harriet had roused herself and was leaning forward over Dalehouse’s shoulder to see. Her breath buzzed annoyingly in his ear as she said sternly, “That is a … lascivious waste!”

“Oh, yes, dear Gasha!” cried the pilot. “How wonderful would be if we, too, could afford one!”

Over the rattles and groans that came from his Krinpit escort, Ahmed Dulla heard a sputtering distant sound. “Put me down. Wait. Try to be quiet,” he called peevishly in the mixture of Urdu and their own language that made communication possible between them. Or sometimes did. He lowered himself from the litter in which they had been carrying him and climbed onto a knee of a many-tree, pushing aside the pinkly glowing fronds to stare around the sky. A tiny two-winged aircraft was chuttering along just below cloud level. “So. Another triumph of technology arrives,” he said.

The Krinpit, Jorrn-fteet, reared back to study him more carefully, its stubby claws waving. “Your meaning is not loud,” it rattled.

“No matter. Let us move on.” Dulla was in no mood for a nice chat with these grossly hypertrophied bugs, however useful they were to him. “Go carry the litter and my bag; I will walk,” he ordered. “It is too steep here for riding.” They were climbing from the shallow valley of the river now, up through the last of the forested slopes onto the dry highlands. The vegetation began to change from many-trees and ferns to things like succulents, stubby barrels with glowing, bright red, luminous buttons. Dulla looked at them all with distaste. Study the plants, find new products; it is in this way that my fathers became independent of the machines of the outside world. So Feng Hua-tse had advised before he left; but Dulla was an astrophysicist, not an herbal healer, and he had no intention of following the fool’s instructions.

There was no overhang between him and the sky now, and he could see the little biplane circling, far off toward the bright white line of the Heat Pole. So. The Greasies had their helicopter, the Fats now had a plane, and what did the representative of the People’s Republics have to take him to this meeting? A litter carried by animals that looked like squashed crustaceans. Dulla fumed. If Feng had listened to him, they would have insisted that the three-party meeting be held at their own camp. So they would have been spared this humiliation of arriving on a plastic frame carried by creatures out of some children’s nonsense fable — if not the humiliation of exposing to the Fats and the Oilies the meanness of their encampment. What a disaster! And all Feng’s fault, or Heir-of-Mao’s. The expedition should have been properly supplied and reinforced in the first place, but leave it to the Chinamen to hoard coppers to the ruination of the project.

Without warning the Krinpit stopped, and Dulla, lost in his thoughts, almost tripped over them. “What, what?” he complained. “Why are you standing here?”

“A very loud thing moves quickly,” rattled Jorrn-fteet.

“I do not hear anything.” But now that he was awakened from his reverie he did see something, a swell of dust behind the hills. As he watched, a machine topped the rise, coming toward him. It was still a kilometer away, but it looked like a half-track.

“Another triumph of conspicuous waste,” sneered Dulla. “How dare they come for me, as though I could not make the journey by myself?” The Krinpit rattled inquiringly, and he added, “Never mind. Put down the litter; I will carry my knapsack myself now. Hide yourselves. I do not want the Greasies to see you.”

But the words conveyed no meaning to the Krinpit. A Krinpit could never hide from another Krinpit as long as they were close enough to hear each other. Dulla struggled to explain. “Go back to the place behind the hill. The Greasies will not hear you there. I will return in the space it took us to come up from the river.” He was not sure they understood that, either. The Krinpit had a clear sense of time, but the vocabulary of terms to mark its units did not map well from one language based on a diurnal cycle to another which had evolved on a planet without easy temporal reference points. But they lurched away obediently, and Dulla walked steadily toward the approaching half-track.

The driver was a Kuwaiti, apparently a translator, because he greeted Dulla in flawless Urdu. “Would you like a lift?” he called. “Jump in!”

“You are very courteous,” smiled Dulla. “Indeed, it is a little warm for strolling today.” But it was not courtesy at all, he fumed internally, it was only more of their damnable arrogance! Ahmed Dulla was quite sure that he was the only person on Jem whose native language was Urdu, and here the Greasies had made sure they had someone who could speak to him! As though he himself were not already proficient in four other languages!

The time would come, he promised himself, when he would humble the ostentatious swine. So he rode up over the gullied hills toward the Greasy camp, chatting amiably with the Kuwaiti, remarking politely on the fine appearance of their camp, his face smiling and his heart swelling with rage.

The official host for the meeting was named Chesley Pontrefact, London-born but not of native roots that went many generations back. His skin was purplish brown and his hair white wool. Coded tactran messages had given Dulla a good deal of background on every member of the Greasy expeditions, as well as the Fats, and he knew that Pontrefact was an air vice-marshal and nominal commander of the Greasy expedition. But he also knew that real power belonged to one of the civilians from Saudi Arabia.

Pontrefact bustled about the long conference table (wood! shipped all the way from Earth!) offering drinks and smokes. “Brandy do you, Dr. Dalehouse?” he inquired solicitously. “And perhaps a Coca-Cola for you, sir? I’m afraid we don’t have orange juice, but at least there’s ice.”

“Nothing, please,” said Dulla, seething. Ice! “I suggest we begin our meeting, if that is convenient.”

“Certainly, Dr. Dulla.” Pontrefact sat down heavily at the head of the table and glanced inquiringly around. “Mind if I take the chair, just for form’s sake?”

Dulla watched to see if any of the Fats were going to object and spoke a split second before they did. “Not at all, Marshal Pontrefact,” he said warmly. “We are your guests.” But one should show courtesy to guests, and what was this seating arrangement but a deliberate insult? Pontrefact at the head, two of his associates at the foot — the Kuwaiti translator and a woman who could be no one but the Saudi civilian who was the Greasies’ decision maker. On one side of the table were all three of the Fats — Dalehouse, their Russian pilot, and their own translator; and on the other — only himself. How much more deliberately could they point out that he was alone and insignificant? He added diffidently, “Since we are all conversant, I believe, with English, perhaps we can dispense with the translators. It is an old saying of my people that the success of a conference is inversely proportional to the square of the number of participants.”

Quickly, “I shall stay,” said the Fats translator. Pontrefact raised his white-caterpillar eyebrows but said nothing; Dulla shrugged politely and gazed toward the chair, waiting for the proceedings to begin.

The Saudi whispered to the interpreter at some length. Across the table, Dalehouse hesitated, then got up to extend his hand to Dulla. “Good to see you looking fit, Ahmed,” he said.

Dulla touched his hand minimally. “Thank you.” He added grudgingly, “And thank you for assisting in returning me to my own camp. I have not had a chance to express my gratitude since.”

“Glad to help. Anyway, it’s good to see someone from your expedition — we don’t see many of you, you know.”

Dulla glared. Then, stiffly, “I have come a long way for this meeting. Can we not begin?”

“Oh, hell,” said Pontrefact from the head of the table. “Look, mates, the whole reason for this meeting is to try to work together better. We know what a balls-up our masters have made at home. Shall we see if we can do a bit better here?”

Dulla said happily, “Please limit your observations to your own people.” It was as he had suspected; the Greasies were going to insult everyone but themselves. Let this West Indian whose grandfather was a ticket collector on the London Underground make a fool of himself if he chose. Not of the People’s Republics.

“But I’m in dead earnest, Dr. Dulla. We invited you here because it’s clear we are all working at cross-purposes. Your own camp is in serious trouble, and we all know it. The Food people and our own lot are a bit better off, yes. But you don’t have a proper doctor, do you, Dr. Dalehouse? Not to mention a few other things. And we can’t be expected — that is, we don’t have limitless resources either. Under the UN resolution we are all supposed to cooperate and divide the responsibilities. Particularly the science. We undertook the geology, and you can’t say we haven’t played fair about that. We’ve done a great deal.”

“Indeed so,” put in Kappelyushnikov blandly. “Is pure coincidence that most is in personal vicinity and relates primarily to fissionables and to salt domes.”

“That is, to petroleum,” Dulla agreed. “Yes, I think we are all aware of that, Marshal Pontrefact.” How thoughtful of the Fats and the Greasies to begin quarreling among themselves so soon!

“Be that as it may,” the chairman went on doggedly, “there’s a hell of a lot to be done here, and we can’t do it all. Astronomy, for instance. We did orbit a satellite observatory, but — as I am sure you know — it ran into malfunctions. Let me show you something.” He got up and moved to a likris screen on the wall. When he had fiddled with it for a moment the crystals sprang into varicolored light, showing some sort of graph. “You’ve seen our solar generator. This shows the solar input for our power plant. As you see, there are spikes in the curve. This may not seem important to you, but our generator is a precision instrument. It isn’t going to do its job properly if the solar constant isn’t, well, constant.”

Dulla stared in black envy at the graph. That was what he was here for, after all — because he was a specialist in stellar studies! He hardly noticed when Dalehouse put in, “If Kung is acting up, it may mean more to us than a few wiggles in your power supply.”

Pontrefact nodded. “Of course it may. We notified this to Herstmonceux-Greenwich with a copy of the tape. They’re quite upset about it. Kung may be a variable star.”

“Hardly,” sneered Dulla. “It is known that a few flares are possible.”

“But it is not known how many, or how big; and that’s exactly what we need to know. What, if I may say, we confidently expected to know from the astronomical researches that were meant to be conducted by your expedition, Dr. Dulla.”

Dulla exploded. “But this is too much! How can one practice astrophysics when one is hungry? And whose fault is that?”

“Certainly not ours, old chap,” Pontrefact said indignantly.

“But someone blew up our ships, old chap. Someone killed thirty-four citizens of the People’s Republics, old chap!”

“But that was—” Pontrefact stopped the sentence in mid-syllable. He made a visible effort to control his temper. “Be that as it may,” he got out again, “the plain fact is the work’s got to be done, and someone’s got to do it. You have the instruments and we don’t, at least not until proper telescopes arrive from Earth. We have the manpower, and you evidently don’t.”

“I beg your pardon. Allow me to inform you of my academic standing. I am director of the Planetology Institute at Zulfikar Ali Bhutto University and have graduate degrees in astrophysics from—”

“But no one’s disputing your degrees, dear man, only your fitness to function. Let us send our own astronomer over. Better still, let Boyne airlift your equipment here, where there’s better seeing—”

“Certainly not! Not either!”

“I really don’t think that’s quite fair, do you? We’ve certainly cooperated in providing food, for instance—”

“Such food! For your people, not for ours: all flour, hardly any rice.”

Dalehouse said placatingly, “We’ll turn up some rice for you if that’s what you like.”

“How gracious of you!” Dulla sneered.

“Now, wait a minute, Dulla. We’ve done our best for you — and we have a couple of complaints of our own, if you want to know. Like shooting at me!”

Dulla grimaced. “That was only Hua-tse’s foolishness with fireworks. The People’s Republics have already expressed their regrets.”

“To whom? The dead balloonists?”

“Yes,” sneered Dulla with exaggerated humility, “of course, it is so; we do apologize to your close friends, the comic gasbags. And to yours too, sir, the vermin who dig in the earth and whom you find so useful!”

“If you mean the Creeps,” said Pontrefact, his control of his temper wearing thin, “at least we don’t use them as litter bearers.”

“No! You use them to help you exploit the mineral riches! Is it not true that there has been radiation disease among them?”

“No, it isn’t! At least, not here. We did use a few to dig samples for us in other areas, and yes, they did encounter some radiation, but I must say that I resent the imputation that we are exploiting the natives.”

“Oh, I am sure you would not do that, Marshal Pontrefact, especially as your own ancestors must have experienced so much of that from the other side, as it were.”

“Now, look here, Dulla!”

But Pontrefact was interrupted by the Saudi woman, who said: “I think we should recess for lunch. We have much to discuss, and shouting at each other will not help. Let’s resolve to try to do better in the afternoon.”

But the afternoon session, if quieter, did not seem very productive to Danny Dalehouse. “At least we got a decent meal out of it,” he said to Kappelyushnikov outside the long- house where they had met.

“Is as ashes in my mouth,” growled the Russian. “Oh, how many nice things they have here. Not just food.”

That was not to be argued. Across from the meetinghouse a new building was going up. A tracked dumpster deposited a scoop of earth into a hopper; the man running it shoved a lever forward, there was a high-pitched whine, and moments later, the sides fell away and the operator lifted out a finished panel of hard brick. The trick was in adding something to the compacted earth as a stabilizer.

“And have you seen what’s up on the hill?” asked Harriet with jealousy in her tone. On the slopes above the colony there were terraced rows of green seedlings. Green! The Greasies were using banks of incandescent plant lights to grow Terrestrial food!

“Feel like time when I was seventeen years,” said Kappelyushnikov. “Kid sailplane pilot, winner of All-Region Height and Endurance Contest, fresh from Nizhniy Tagil, walking down Kalinin-Prospekt first time in life, and oh, my God, how overwhelming was Moscow! Trams, skyscrapers, bookstores, restaurants.” He pointed to the plasma column of the solar generator, with its rosette of reflectors around it. “Is daunting, dear friends. No wonder Greasies call us here to issue orders of day. They have muscle to enforce!” He shrugged, then grinned as they rounded the last barracks and saw the little landing field. “Hoy! Boyne!” he shouted. “Come say good-bye to country cousins!”

The Irish pilot hesitated, then came toward them. “Hello,” he said noncommittally. “I’ve just been putting our friend Dulla on a jeep on his way home.”

“He didn’t seem in a very good mood,” Dalehouse observed.

The pilot grinned. “His feelings were hurt, I’d say. He didn’t want us to see that he was using Krinpit transportation to get here. You didn’t know that? They came up the river by boat, and then the Krips carried him up eight or ten kilometers until we picked him up.”

Harriet said spitefully, “He might have been in a better mood if you hadn’t gone out of your way to insult him, Dalehouse.”

“Me? How?”

“He thought you were making a joke about the fact that so few of the Peeps have survived. His face went all tight.”

Dalehouse protested. “I didn’t mean anything like that. He’s such a thorny son of a bitch.”

“Forget,” advised Kappelyushnikov. “He is such close friend of cockroaches, let them worry about his feelings.”

“Well, I don’t understand that either, Gappy. The Krinpit almost killed him.”

“Then how is possible they become native bearers for fine Pakistani sahib as he daringly marches through jungle?”

“I can explain that,” Boyne said gloomily, “although I can’t say I like it. That first Krinpit you and I carried here, Dalehouse, the one that calls itself Sharn-igon? It’s mad at all human beings. Apparently its girlfriend, or actually I think it was a boyfriend, died from the first contact with the Peeps, and it just wants to get even. Only its idea of getting even seems to be to make as much trouble for as many human beings as it can. It’s raised a hell of a fuss with the Krips near here; we can’t make any contact with them at all. I guess it thinks the Peeps are pretty well screwed, so it’s willing to help them screw the rest of us. Looks damn bad for the future, if you ask me.”

He was walking along with them toward the airstrip, but his manner seemed reserved; he made no eye contact with any of them, and what he said was more of a monologue than a conversation.

Kappelyushnikov said placatingly, “Hey, Boyne, you pissed about something?”

“Me? Why should I be?” But Boyne still did not look at him.

Kappelyushnikov glanced at the others, then back to the pilot. “Hey, Boyne,” he wheedled. “We two are members of great interstellar brotherhood of pilotry, should not be pissed at each other.”

“Look, it’s not you personally,” said Boyne angrily. “I got my ass eaten out for lending you chaps the backhoe, not to mention talking a little more openly than I was supposed to about what we were doing here.”

“But we’re all in this together,” Dalehouse put in. “It’s like Pontrefact said at the meeting. We’re supposed to share information.”

“Oh, Ponty’s got the right idea, but that’s supposed to go both ways. You didn’t see fit to mention some of your own little deeds, did you? Like arming the balloonists against the Krinpit?”

“We didn’t! I mean, that’s my own department, Boyne. We’ve given them a few simple weapons to protect themselves against the ha’aye’i, that’s all.”

“Well, they’ve been using them against everything they can catch. Not to mention that business with the Peeps’ supply ship.”

“That was an accident!” Dalehouse said.

“Sure it was. Same as it’s an accident that your plane—” He hesitated, then closed his mouth.

“Come on, Boyne, what are you trying to say?” Dalehouse demanded.

“Nothing. Forget it.” Boyne glanced back toward the camp, then said rapidly, “Look, this peace conference was a bust, right? Nothing got settled. And the way things are going — well, I’ve got a bad feeling. The local Krips are gassing our Creepies in their burrows every once in awhile — that’s Peeps’ doing, I suppose. The Peep ship gets blown up; you say it’s an accident, but the gen says CIA. You’re giving the Loonies weapons. And your plane — well, shit, man,” he said, glaring at Kappelyushnikov. “I’ve got eyes. So right now I don’t feel like having a heart-to-heart, all right? Maybe some other time. So, so long, and have a nice flight home.” He nodded briskly and turned back to the Greasy base.

Kappelyushnikov broodingly watched him go. “I too have bad feeling,” he said. “About dear friend and fellow pilot Boyne, too. Questions I would like to ask, but this is not good time.”

“I’d like to know more about what they’re using the Creepies for,” Dalehouse agreed. “And frankly, that bit about our being responsible for the Peeps’ accident is beginning to get under my skin. Do you think there’s any possibility it could be true?”

Gappy regarded him thoughtfully. “You are very nice person, Danny,” he said sadly. “Perhaps you do not wonder enough. Like, do you wonder why Greasies have landing strip when gillicopter lands anywhere?”

“That hadn’t occurred to me,” Dalehouse admitted.

“Occurred to me,” said the Russian. “Just like occurred to Boyne to wonder why strange little hatch dear Gasha rode on is in our plane. You and Gasha look at it, you say, ‘Oh, what a nuisance. Cannot understand purpose.’ But when pilot looks at it, Boyne or me, we say at once, ‘Oh, how strange that aircraft designed for peaceful exploration has built-in bomb bay.’ ”

Thirty meters below the airstrip, Mother dr’Shee woke with the smell of cyanide in her splayed nose, too faint to be dangerous, too strong to ignore. The Shelled Devils were at it again.

She yipped peremptorily for the brood-member on duty. It turned out to be t’Weechr, the runt of the litter and the one the others saddled with the least attractive jobs — including, she realized justly, attending to the wants of the Mother when she first woke up. There were only seven in this present brood of hers, and all of them male, and none of them the size or the strength or the wit of their father. It was a loose and unsettling time, and it spoiled her temper.

“Food,” she ordered harshly. “And drink. And someone to groom me while I am waiting.”

T’Weechr said humbly, “There is no one but me, Brood Mother. I will be quick with the food and groom you while you eat.”

“And why is there no one?”

“The New Devils are teaching, Brood Mother. All are commanded to be present.”

“Tssheee.” If dr’Shee had been a human, the sound would have been a grunt, written “Humph” for convenience’s sake. But she was not actually displeased, merely fretful; and when t’Weechr returned it was not only with tubers and a shell of water, but there were even some fresh leaves and fruits from Above.

“Taken or given?” she demanded, sniffing them suspiciously.

“These were gifts of the New Devils, Brood Mother,” the youth apologized.

“Tssheee.” They were, however, tasty, and she was hungry. She defecated neatly into the shell when she was finished, and t’Weechr folded it closed.

“Is there any other service, Brood Mother?” he asked, licking a final strand of her fur into neatness.

“No. Be gone.” He touched noses and wriggled away to deliver the package to the rotting rooms. The next brood would mix it with the planting mud and plaster it into the ceilings of the farm tunnels when they prepared the next crops. By then it would be well aged, and of great value in growing the tubers.

Runt or not, t’Weechr was a good child. She would miss him when the litter matured and scattered. And that time was not far off. At every awakening now, her dugs had been smaller and harder. The breeding males knew it, and every time she left her nest they wriggled close to touch her, nose to anus, testing to see how near she was to courtship. Only yesterday the male with the scarred leg had said, half-jesting, “What would you like next time, dr’Shee? Krinpit shell? A live Flying Devil? The head of a New Devil?”

“Your own head,” she had said, half-irritated, half-flirtatious. He had snorted laughter through the spreading folds of his nose and crept away, but he would be back. It was not an unpleasing thought. Dr’Shee’s brood-sister had mated with that one, two litters ago. A fine brood, three females! And the sister had said he was indefatigable at rut. Well. A proper courtship was a proper courtship, but she could not help hoping that he might turn out to be the male with the finest gift to lay before her.

Faint and distant vibrations in the earth set her whiskers to quivering. That was the New Devils, too. Time was when such tremors had meant only a particularly violent thunderstorm Above, or perhaps the crash of a falling many-tree. Now the New Devils scraped and shoved hillocks and boulders around at will, and the earth was no longer easy to her senses. As she moved around her chamber, sniffing and touching to make sure everything was in its place, it was touch and smell and taste that principally guided her. Sometimes her males had plastered bits of fungus and vegetation into the walls along with the secretions that made their tunnels hard and waterproof, and from the plant decay there was some faint glow. Dr’Shee appreciated the light but did not need it. For her people, eyes were almost a handicap, especially on their infrequent dashes to the Surface, when only the densest of clouds and worst of storms dimmed Kung’s radiance enough for them to bear.

“Greeting, dr’Shee.”

She sniffed in startlement and then recognized the female at the entrance to her chamber. “How are you, qr’Tshew? Come in, come in.”

The other female entered, and dr’Shee said at once, “I will send for food.”

“I have eaten,” said qr’Tshew politely. “What lovely courtship gifts.” She fondled dr’Shee’s collection. Six breedings, six fine gifts: a hard thing stolen from the New Devils that no one understood; the leg of a crabrat — that had been her first gift, and the least worthy, but in some ways the most satisfying of her courtship gifts; even the claws of a balloonist. Every one had been stolen from the Surface itself, at great risk, and delivered to her at a cost. Few males survived more than two or three mad, half-blind dashes to the Surface to steal courtship gifts. The enemies were everywhere.

Manners satisfied, qr’Tshew came to the point. “The father of my last brood has died of a bad breathing,” she said. “Also three young of other mothers.”

“What a pity,” said dr’Shee. She was not referring to the male, of course; once a male had achieved breeding he was done, for that female. But to have young die of the cyanide gas!

“I fear for our way of life,” said qr’Tshew primly. “Since the New Devils came, our litters have not been the same.”

“I have had the same thought,” dr’Shee admitted. “I have spoken of it to my sisters.”

“And I to mine. I and my sisters have thought something we wish to share. Our young are being taught things by the New Devils. Dr’Shee, shouldn’t we mothers learn what the litters are learning?”

“But they are learning ways of bringing death! You and I are mothers, qr’Tshew!” Dr’Shee was shocked.

“The Krinpit bring death to us, do they not? The broods in the upper galleries have blocked off the tunnels where the bad air came from, but is it not certain that the Shelled Devils will break through again and more bad air will come?”

“I cannot bring death, except of course for food.”

“Then let us eat them, shells and all,” said qr’Tshew grimly. “Touch closely, dr’Shee. There is a story—” She hesitated. “I do not know how true it is. It came from a Krinpit and might as well have come from a Flying Devil.” That was an old saying to indicate dubiousness, but in this case, dr’Shee realized, it was actually true. “This Shelled Devil taunted one of my sister’s brood by saying that New Devils had destroyed an entire city of our race. He said the New Devils thought of us as vermin and would not rest until we were all gone. That is why they have given the Krinpit the bad air.”

“But the New Devils are teaching our litters how to destroy Krinpit.”

“The next part of the story is puzzling, but I think it is so. The Shelled Devil says that there are three kinds of New Devils. One kind destroyed the city. Another kind gave them the bad air with which they harm us here. And the kind that teaches our litters is a third kind. They have destroyed Flying Devils and Krinpit, as well as persons of the two other kinds of their own race. But they do not destroy us.”

Dr’Shee thrashed her long, supple body in agitation. “But that is not true!” she cried. “They have taken several litters from their classes to some other place, and only a few have returned. And they have been weak and slow, and speak of their brood-mates dying!”

“My sisters and I have heard this also,” agreed qr’Tshew.

“Tssheee!” The petaled folds of dr’Shee’s nose were rippling furiously. “It feels,” she said at length, “as though the teaching of bringing death is not a bad thing. If we bring death to the Krinpit, then they will not be able to bring more bad air to us. If we help our New Devils to bring death to the others, then they will not be able to aid the Krinpit or the Flying Devils against us.”

“I have had this same thought, dr’Shee.”

“I have a further thought, qr’Tshew. Once we have brought death to these others, perhaps we can then bring death to our own New Devils.”

“And then our litters will be ours again, dr’Shee!”

“And our burrows will be safe and dark. Yes! Do not go away, qr’Tshew. I will summon t’Weechr and he will begin to teach us these lessons!”