POLYPHEMUS
The sunlight falls bright and strong on the wastes of Firebairn at noon, but the wind is fresh and cuts through the warmth of it. Consequently, murmions usually sun themselves in the lee of the buttes and the eroded volcanic cones that stud those plains. In the lee of one such cone—more like a ragged ringwall really, no higher on the average than a hundred meters, but more than four kilometers in the diameter of its enclosure—a murmion luxuriated on a patch of red sand.
The creatures are rather like baby seals in shape, though a bit smaller, which still makes them among the largest of Firebairn’s terrestrial fauna. The lakes (such as the one in the crater behind this murmion) and the sea contain the overwhelming majority of the planet’s animal life and all its most impressive forms. Indeed, the colonists there had recently established that the murmion evolved from an aquatic line, the same order to which the economically important and much larger delphs belonged. Members of this order were sometimes called “mammalian analogues,” based on their reproductive systems, lungs, and vascular organization, but there was something of the arthropod in all of them, perhaps most noticeably in this little pioneer of the dry land. It had a smooth chitinous hide and primitive eyes—ommatidia, really—like small black knobs, while its “flippers,” fore and aft, were rigid and three-jointed, though of an oarlike flatness that proclaimed their ancestral function.
This murmion had chosen an unfortunate spot for its nap. It was dark blue in color, and the reddish sand put it in sharp relief. This had not gone unnoticed by a second organism that now crouched upon the crater’s rim, still dripping from the lake within, whence it had just emerged. This, known colloquially by the colonists as a “gabble” (Sturtis atrox thomsonia), was batrachian in form, though morphologically a far simpler organism than any frog, being in fact more analogous to an immense rotifer or roundworm in its internal structure. Moving on four pseudopodia, it was a green viscid mass with a vast slot for a mouth and, above the mouth, a freckling of rudimentary eyes reminiscent of a spider’s. It found prey by a subtle discrimination of color contrasts, and since it frequently left the water to forage along the land fringes, one could not help feeling the murmion’s sunbathing habits were singularly maladaptive. The gabble was easily four times the size of the murmion, and swift and silent as liquid—properties it now demonstrated as it leapt and flowed down the side of the crater toward the sleeper. Its final lunge came from so high that the force with which it smacked down on the murmion imparted a paralyzing shock to the prey. The gabble stepped daintily back from the stunned creature, bobbed and weaved, seemed to shudder with delicate anticipation, and swallowed the murmion whole.
The gabble settled down for a digestive nap on the warm red sand. Had it possessed more highly evolved eyes, it might have been alarmed, for something of immense size was already quite near, grinding its slow way across the desert toward the crater. Perhaps not. The gabble had no natural land-dwelling predators larger than itself.
The wastelands of Firebairn would have inspired awe in anyone susceptible to nature’s grandeur. The genesis of this continent—and of the planet’s only other one—was now well understood. Both were immense tables of volcanic outflow produced by several primary magma vents in the sea floor, and augmented by a multitude of lesser vents.
The period of active vulcanism was a hundred million years past, and there had long been established a global weather cycle that seasonally scoured the land with hurricane winds and hammering rains. Erosion had burnished the buttes and cones, scoured the obsidian fangs and claws off them, till now they shone like glazed ceramics in the sun. Of the once-towering volcanic cones, only the stumps remained, like twisted pots and cauldron rims. Everything was red, black, olive green, ocher, and orange—not just the buttes and the glassy ramparts of the worn cones, but the rain-polished sands and gravels too. These formed threads, ribbons, whole fabrics of color, all woven and braided by the millennial winds.
And bejeweling this already jeweled terrain were the numberless lakes. Most of the lakes were in the craters, but many were on the flats as well, where their stark, cruel blue shone impossibly intense, framed by the polychrome mosaics of the plains. It was a world of inexorable beauty, through which a man might go in rapture, but only if borne in steel, only in a juggernaut harder than the harshness of that stern paradise.
The sand-hog was such a craft, a great tractor-transport, tank-treaded, that chewed across the gravel, gnawing it with a continuous fifty-ton bite. It bore three boats in its undercarriage, nine men and women in its upper decks. In its middle was a holding tank, a belly that whole schools of delphs could be swallowed into and carried off to sate the hunger of the growing colony. It was now farther from the colony than it had ever gone, not due to any shortage of delphs in the colony’s immediate vicinity, but in order to combine forage with exploration and mapping of the continent. As the vehicle drew near the landmark its captain had selected for inspection, Penny Lopez, watching from one of the ports, said:
“Look. There’s a gabble.”
Several of the others joined her at adjacent ports. The presence of a gabble indicated that the crater indeed contained a lake. More than this, it portended that the lake would contain delphs. Delphs and gabbles were ecological associates. Both inhabited only “ocean-rooted” lakes—those whose surrounding craters had still-open vent systems that connected their waters with subcontinental oceanic influxes.
“Why is it wobbling like that?” asked the group’s cartographer, Japhet Sparks. Nemo Jones, one of the two armorers, smiled within his ragged beard.
“He ate something nasty, I expect.” Penny looked at him sharply. The uncouth armorer had been a suitor of hers at one time. Repulsing his attentions had not sufficiently expressed Penny’s dislike of him, and the power of even his most innocent-seeming remarks to irritate her was a source of open humor among the colonists. But Orson Waverly, who was the expedition’s biologist, glanced at Nemo and shared his smile.
Indeed, the gabble did not look well. Pseudopodia spread, it seemed to be trying to brace itself, while spasms and tremors made it quake like a shaken plate of jelly. One of its sides bulged. From the bulge, something sprouted that looked like a blue, crooked knife blade, and even as it did so, a second identical one erupted from the creature’s opposite side. With a synchronized sweeping motion, like oars plied by a boatman, these blades began to cut two jagged incisions through the flanks of the gabble.
“Captain Helion,” said Waverly, “would you go at one-third for a moment for a field observation?”
The formality of the request was necessary, for the captain, a tall and statuesquely handsome man, disliked modification of any of his procedures. He arched an eyebrow, nodded coolly, and cut speed.
The observation required little time, for as the gabble ceased its impotent quiverings of resistance, a second pair of angled blades thrust from its sides. With an undulating swimming motion (not unlike a baby seal’s) these four trenchant protrusions completed a circuit of the froglike belly. Head and forelegs flabbily collapsed, and from the bloody-edged barrel of the gabble’s hindquarters, the snout of a murmion poked into the sunlight. It was a brief exulting gesture, such as a dolphin might make, breaking the surface out of sheer exuberance to dive again—and this the murmion did, greedily, into the nourishing pot of its prey’s stomach.
Penny gave the smiling Nemo Jones a brief scowl. She went over to the piloting console, where Helion was already steering a course along the crater’s perimeter, seeking an access to its interior negotiable by the tractor treads of the fishing craft the hog carried. She asked him the chances of finding such a break, and he cocked an eye at the crater and murmured a judicious reply. The captain’s normal manner of stalwart composure was always faintly heightened by Penny Lopez. To Waverly, who was making a journal entry, Jones said:
“You rarely see that happen on dark sand. Murms always lie upon red or yellow, to show up better for the gabbles.”
“Don’t tell me,” put in Jax Giggans, his fellow-armorer, who was readying the rifles. “You’ve hunted murmions on Katermand. Katermandian murmions. And you know all their tricks. And when they can’t find sand the right color to lie on, they make use of special polychromatic piss glands they have to dye it yellow.”
Nemo gave a single bark of laughter, practically a cachinnation from this rather solemn and formal man. Jax’s joke might have been offered by any of the colonists. The backward jungled planet of Jones’s origin, and his endless repertory of woodsman’s tricks and lore, were a favorite target for humor. Nemo’s normal reaction, however, would have been a courteous blankness—perhaps a blink of bafflement so straight-facedly feigned that many at first believed him slow-witted. But with Jax, he actually laughed, and riposted:
“No. They always piss green. Diet of gabbles.”
“A joke!” said Sari, one of the pilot-gunners. “Nemo Jones has made a joke! Check the ports—the sky may be falling.” There was a bitter edge to this sneer that was a little surprising to everyone who heard it, perhaps even to Sarissa Wayne herself. She didn’t like the way it rang; it made her sound jealous of Jax’s friendship with the Katermandian—which she was.
Sarissa considered punching Jones in the face. No, she would probably have to use some heavy blunt instrument to hurt him enough to get things started. In any case fighting him, as Jax had done, seemed to be the only way to get close to him.
Nemo Jones had been less well liked during his first year on Firebairn. For one thing, when he offered solutions to problems arising in the field, they were often bewilderingly irrelevant to the courses of action everyone else was debating—and just as often, they proved to be the best solutions. Combined with his curious solemnity and the definiteness of his opinions, this was an irritating pattern. And for another thing, while he obeyed most orders (though sometimes with an air of stoic compliance that subtly pronounced them stupid), he would every now and again immovably refuse an order. And not always a significant order—sometimes quite a routine one. But he could not be argued out of these strange fits of stubbornness and had spent quite a few weeks in the detention cubicle.
Senior staff had soon determined that his usefulness outweighed his recalcitrance and generally allowed him his quirks. And his fellow-colonists in general quickly worked out the same equation on the social level—but not before Jax Giggans, overhearing Jones refuse some commonplace order, had gotten “fed up with the hairy little primadonna.” Helion had been the officer in charge and had allowed the fight.
Jax was bull-bodied, over six feet tall. He shaved his scalp, and his head looked like a battering ram. Jones was a handsbreadth shorter, and lighter by fifteen kilos. He was not unimpressive—lean, wide-shouldered, his knot-muscled arms roped with veins, hairy as a goat. But still the smaller man by far.
It was an eventful fight, though not a long one. Jax lost an upper canine, had his nose broken and a rib cracked, and received a multitude of astonishingly large and vivid bruises all over his body. He was a man of courage and picked himself up no less than four times, but he fell five.
Afterward, he would unabashedly describe the fight to anyone who asked. He told Nemo that anyone who could fight as hard as he could had to have good and sufficient reasons for whatever he did.
And there they were—friends now in a way that Jones was with no one else. Sarissa was not averse by temperament to punching Jones in the face, but was ruefully aware that in any case she wanted something more than Jax had with him. First she wanted his friendship, his respect, and then she wanted to mate with him. The crazy phrase was his own, for ironically Jones had first made his suit to her. Back then, before she had known what to make of him, she had rejected his grotesquely formal gestures of courtship. He had gone on, in his methodical way, to woo the more conventionally beautiful Penny Lopez—with a similar lack of success.
“We’re approaching a likely entry point. Pilot-gunners belowdecks, please.” Helion, ever official, used the intercom, though he might have spoken over his shoulder and been heard by all. Sari went below with her friends Angela and Norrin, to check the chemical balance of the quarry tanks and see to their harpoon guns. Nemo helped Jax lay out the field kits of the party’s other weaponry while Orson Waverly and Japhet Sparks stood behind the captain, watching the terrain from the pilot’s port.
Erosion had broadened a crack in the cone wall, creating a gravel-floored defile that could be reached by a few meters’ climb from the desert floor. Helion stopped the sand-hog below the defile. “Reconnaissance party stand by to disembark,” he said, again through the intercom. He thumbed a switch. The door coughed open and the gang ramp creaked outward, downward to the bright sand. He gave the controls to Penny, took his rifle from Jax, and preceded Jax and Nemo down the ramp. The three of them set out to reconnoiter.
The defile appeared more than adequate for the boats. Before they were halfway through it, they saw the lake: a vast, brilliant arena of water, steep-shored save for a small beach at the defile’s foot. Near the water’s center, perhaps two kilometers offshore, was a small craggy island.
“There’s delph here. No doubt of it,” Nemo muttered. As was often his way on unknown ground, he moved tautly, “ready to drop to all fours” as Sarissa had once expressed it. Helion disregarded him, but Jax looked at his friend with an air of inquiry, not so much for the remark as for an undertone of unease he had heard in it.
The boats’ access assured, they climbed to the crown of the rim and moved along it. The island seemed to be a volcanic plug, an upwelling of magma that had succeeded the cone’s formation by a long time, for it was far less eroded than the wall they stood on, to a degree for which the wall’s shelter could not account. They had gone less than a mile when a deep cove in the island’s flank was revealed.
“Shit,” Jax growled in awe. The cove teemed with delphs, by far the biggest school the men had ever seen. Even at that distance, they didn’t need the glasses to see the beasts—scores of them sunning in the shallows, their backs bulging above the water looking like a nestful of silver eggs, and scores more where the cove deepened, playing the leaping game of tag characteristic of the younger members of the species. Helion gazed in silent satisfaction. Nemo Jones said:
“There’s something wrong with the way the water moves. Have you noticed it?”
The captain’s face changed as if a sourness had touched his palate. Jax asked, “How do you mean? Where?”
“Out in midwater, this side of the island. Twice now it’s looked jittery in a way the winds don’t account for.”
Helion sighed. “For God’s sake, Jones. Jittery? There’s some wind chop, a little swell, the sun dazzle . . . just what kind of ominous subtleties do you think you’re seeing?”
“It is subtle, Captain, and it’s not happening right now. But I’ve seen it twice since we’ve been up on the ridge here. Subtle but definite. At the least it means some kind of deep current.”
“Jones, you may be sincere, but you are also compelled to concoct frontiersman’s intuitions about even the most straightforward good luck. I’ve been watching the lake, and I saw nothing. What about you, Jax?”
“I can’t say I did, but I don’t make light of Nemo’s eye for things.”
“Nor do I make light of it, Jones. It’ll go in the log if you wish. Meanwhile our job here seems strikingly clear to me, and I think we’d better get to it.”
The Katermandian shrugged, staring not at the captain, but at the lake. “Maybe it’s meaningless—how can I say? But it wasn’t intuition. It’s something I saw.”
He didn’t immediately follow the other two back toward the sand-hog. He watched the water a few minutes more, then tensed.
“Again,” he murmured. “Yes, I see you. A convective eccentricity, from some magma vent? I think you’re too erratic for that. . . .”
He spat on the ground for luck and hurried to catch up to the others.
The boats, moored at the little beach, rode the soft heave of the waters, their armor-glass cockpit bubbles flashing in the sun. ...
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