‘How could it?’ Deyv asked. ‘You have absolute recall.’
‘Oh, yes. I forgot I had a perfect memory.’
After the others had stopped laughing, Sloosh said, ‘We should study this creature. It would add to our knowledge, and my colleagues would be most happy to receive data about it. I’m amazed that we haven’t received reports about it via our prisms.’
‘You get reports about something only when you specifically ask about it,’ the witch said. She pointed at the pole to indicate that Jowanarr should replace the lens.
‘Still…’ Sloosh said.
They took a vote. The Archkerri was the only one who wanted to take the jungle road.
‘But Feersh can find out when we’re getting near these things by means of a junction light,’ he said. ‘Then we can detour around them. Remember, we’ll save much time on this road.’
Deyv smiled and said, ‘You aren’t planning to slip away to make your own investigation?’
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘We all knew,’ Hoozisst said. ‘And so, when the thing chased you, you’d bring it to us! No!’
They proceeded on the road by the beach. Six sleep-times passed, Phemropit making an average of ten miles after breakfast. They had to leave it to hunt until Sloosh and Deyv simultaneously had an idea. Why not let Phemropit use its cutting ray on the big herbivores? This could be done on the highway, since there were large herds eating the short grass by the road and long-necked or long-proboscised beasts eating fruit or leaves or stripping off bark and branches at the edge of the jungle. One of these would provide enough meat for three sleep-times. After which, it would become too corrupt for the humans, though not for the cat and the dog.
Vana suggested that they need not stop to sleep. They could expand the vessel on top of Phemropit, tie it down, and take refuge in it. The stone-metal creature could keep on going. All he had to do was follow the road.
After that they averaged about twenty-seven miles between sleep-times.
The plant-man didn’t like this method of travel. It kept him from communicating with Phemropit unless he walked backward ahead of it with the firefly in his hand. The Yawtl, not known for innovative ideas, surprised everybody by suggesting they find a smooth rock with lots of mica on it.
‘Sloosh can sit on the front end and hold the fly in front of Phemropit’s eyeholes,’ he said. ‘And Phemropit can bounce his speech-beams off the mica and up to Sloosh.’
‘Excellent!’ Sloosh said. ‘I could kiss you for that suggestion.’
Hoozisst backed away, saying, ‘No. I never cared for cabbage.’
One thing that bothered them was the absence of natives. They did not have to worry about being ambushed on the road or attacked when they passed through a village, though this had not happened before anyway. What did worry them was that there were plenty of population centres, but all had been destroyed. Something had smashed the stockade walls and the huts and trampled on the inhabitants. Old bones, broken and splintered, lay among the ruins. They looked for tracks of the destroyers, but the heavy rains had wiped them out.
Their questions were answered when they came to another junction. Feersh and Jowanarr consulted a signal-pole, and when they were finished they looked pale.
‘We should have gone on the shorter road,’ the witch said. ‘A Skinniwakitaw has left it and come to this road. It is ahead of us by about ten miles.’
‘Skreesh preserve us!’ the Yawtl said. ‘If it’s that thing that’s been stomping on the villages – and it must be – it could pick up Phemropit and throw it in the ocean. And us along with it.’
‘Luckily, we can take the road into the jungle,’ Sloosh said. ‘It would have been unfortunate indeed if there had been no junction here.’
Hoozisst said, ‘I don’t know. If its ears are as big as its feet, it’ll hear us. Then all it has to do is to cut through the jungle and it’s got us.’
Sloosh said that it would be better to be attacked on the beach than on the jungle road, he would not say why just now. He asked Feersh to ‘listen’ again to the data coming through the signal-pole. She reported that the thing was no longer on the highway. She had no way of knowing where it was now. The highway itself, properly interrogated, could give certain details about creatures or objects on its surface and at least twelve feet above it. But the highway could give nothing about anything off the road, unless it was in view of the eyes of the signals.
‘You mean that when you were monitoring us, you could see us?’ Sloosh said.
‘Not as I could with my eyes, when I had them. No. I could feel certain impressions, which I then interpreted. Just as you do not directly see the things shown in your prism, but you interpret them.’
‘How big was this thing?’
‘Its weight was more than the highway sensors could register.’
The Yawtl made a strangling noise. ‘What is the upper limit?’
‘A thousand or so tons, I believe.’
‘Is it bipedal?’
‘I think so.’
‘Skreesh!’ Hoozisst cried. He looked down the highway. ’Well, at least we ought to see its head while it’s a long way off. But it must have a hellishly long stride.’
‘And since The Beast now extends a little beyond the horizon ahead of us, we won’t be able to see his silhouette until he’s very close,’ Vana said.
Sloosh got down and used his firefly to talk to Phemropit. When he had finished, he said, I’ve explained the situation to it. It says that it can use its cutting ray on the thing. So why should we worry?’
‘That’s crazy!’ Hoozisst said. ‘What if it comes out of the jungle and takes us on the side? Phemropit might not be able to turn fast enough to use its ray.’
‘A good point,’ Sloosh said. ‘However, I suggest we go ahead anyway. This is what we should do.’
33
Deyv, Vana and the two animals went half a mile ahead of the others. The first carcass they found had been torn in half and most of the flesh had been savagely ripped or cut off. Not only that. The bones had been cracked and ground. There were pieces of meat and bones with meat sticking to them lying scattered over an area many yards wide. The skull looked as if teeth, each the size of an elephant’s head, had broken it open and then chewed on the bone. Deyv thought that the victim had been one of those colossal hairless animals with long necks and long tails. It must have weighed at least five hundred tons. Except for the insects, the usual scavengers were missing. In fact, there was none of the normal noises of the jungle. Its tenants were either keeping quiet or had fled.
There was, however, a sound. It seemed to be about half a mile down the road, though it was difficult to be sure. It seemed to be a heavy breathing mingled with occasional crashes, as if a mountain was being torn down.
They went on, though reluctantly, and then came across three other carcasses of the same kind as the first. These, too, were ripped apart and chewed and mangled with parts strewn on the road and along it.
They found tracks in the forest, prints at least two hundred feet long. They were deep enough to be clear, despite their size. They looked humanoid, but the toes were armed with claws.
Nearby were big trees that had been uprooted, probably by a kick, and others that had been broken off, as if the thing had stepped on them.
The breathing and the sound like a mountain being torn apart were much louder now. It was a mountain. No. A tall hill of stone. Boulders soared up from it and fell to earth in the jungle. And then one crashed onto the grass between the forest and the highway.
Jum whimpered. Or maybe, thought Deyv, he himself was whimpering. He certainly felt as if he would like to.
Aejip, glaring, crouched close to the ground. Vana was trembling.
‘I think we’ve gone close enough,’ she whispered.
‘Too close.’
In the darkness they could make out the hill, which was perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Or was that the monster?
A
nother rock, the size of Deyv, hurtled down and struck the highway itself. Jum yelped sharply. Deyv felt warm water trickling down his leg.
Suddenly, the tearing noise ceased. Now all they could hear was the enormous breathing. Was it listening?
Deyv took Vana’s hand and with his other hand pointed back down the road. They ran on the grass alongside the highway to soften the sound of their steps. From behind them came a bellow, so loud that it was as if the sky had split open. They ran faster than they had ever done in their lives.
A boulder smashed into the ground a few feet ahead of them. They ran around it. In the distance, a long way off, a light flashed off and on. Sloosh was signalling by firefly.
The long way became a short way, and they could see the plant-man and the others sitting on top of Phemropit. Deyv arrived with Vana close behind him. The cat and the dog had come in ahead by forty feet and were now sitting, panting. He threw himself down by them. He was too winded to speak for a minute. It was not necessary, anyway. The others could also see the gigantic dim hulk advancing towards them. The earth shook under its tread, or was it Deyv’s frightened imagination? He was not imagining the frightful roars issuing from the thing. Nor was his nose fooling him. That rotten odour, as of many long-decayed bodies carried by the wind, was all too real.
A beam shot from Phemropit, not the thin tight ray he used for piercing or communication, but a fan. It shone on gigantic feet and on very thin – relatively speaking – legs. The rest of the thing could not be seen clearly. But it looked as if it was a skeleton from whose bones hung various organs.
That was what it was, a structure of bones thinly wrapped in muscles and bearing bags which must be the stomach, intestines, liver, heart, pancreas, spleen and whatever other organs were necessary for its life. The wind whistled through the ribs, pelvis and chest-bones. And the organs, bags attached to the bones, were swinging with the thing’s stride.
The head was vaguely human-shaped, and it too was bone thinly sheathed in muscle naked to the air. There was no hair – at least, they could not see any. But then the darkness and their terror made them unable to see clearly. Where the eyes should have been were two black holes; it must have eyes, but at this distance the holes seemed to be empty.
Phemropit began swivelling, its left track moving faster than its right, the middle track elevated. Suddenly, the thin beam lanced out and drilled a hole in the Brobdingnagian left foot of the monster. There was a scream that deafened Deyv, and the thing stopped. Phemropit turned to the left, the ray stabbing out, and the two feet were sliced in half horizontally.
Blood spurted out, soaking the ground around it, some gushing out almost to Phemropit’s ‘nose’.
And the thing began to topple.
Luckily, it fell backward. Otherwise, its upper body would have struck Phemropit and those sitting around it. The stone-metal creature would have been undamaged, but Sloosh and the others might have been crushed. Or they might have been spared. There was plenty of empty space within the enormous skeleton.
It struck with a crash like a dozen large trees falling at once. Some organs were torn from the bones. The lungs did not come loose, but they ruptured. And the spinal cord was shattered just above the shoulder bones.
The thing lay on its back, staring upward.
Sloosh got down from Phemropit’s back and with a firefly in his hand led it to the thing’s head. If he had thought that the coup de grace was needed, he changed his mind. The monster would never again trouble anybody, including itself.
‘Most curious,’ the plant-man said. ‘I can’t believe that it would occur naturally. Surely, it’s descended from something that the ancients made in their laboratories. But why would they?’
He tried to cut out a section of the muscles wrapped around the finger bones. After he’d failed to make any impression with the edge of a stone tomahawk, he used his great metal axe. But he had no more success with the metal than with the flint.
‘Hmmm. It’s got veins and arteries, of a sort, but it’s not really muscular tissue. It looks like bands of thin film of some material I’m not familiar with. It’s extremely hard yet it has to be supple. And its strength must be many times that of genuine muscle. It would have to be to move such a gigantic and heavy body.’
Deyv called Sloosh’s attention to the two animals. They were sniffing at the blood from the severed feet but refusing to lick it. Deyv got down to smell it, too, and he wrinkled his nose.
‘It stinks of fish-oil, but it also has an odour that I can’t identify.’
‘Unfortunately, I can’t help you, since I have no sense of smell,’ Sloosh said.
Vana pointed out that the beetles and ants that should have been swarming over the blood and the carcass were absent.
‘It’s poisonous,’ Sloosh said. ‘Well, I would love to stay here and dissect this thing, but I lack the tools for that.’
Nevertheless, they were too shaken to push on immediately. They walked around the carcass, staring at it. After a while they saw the muscle-film begin to melt. The stuff dripped down from the bones and formed pools of red liquid. Then the pools began to evaporate.
It took much longer for the organs to melt, but they did. Eventually, all that was left was a skeleton that looked as if it had been picked clean by scavengers. Deyv hesitated about touching even this, but he finally went into the apish skull. It was big enough to house several human families. Now that the eyes, brain, and other organs had disappeared, the insects had lost their fear. Ants, beetles and spiders crawled around the interior of the skull. Presently, a huge scout of a bee swarm explored the skull, and then flew off. Some time later it came back, leading a horde of its fellows. They set to work at once covering the eyeholes and the bottom with a gelatine-like substance that quickly hardened. In time, the skull would contain enough honey to feed a whole village for many sleep-times.
The travellers decided to push on. They kept to the shoreline highway, and when they came to a junction, Feersh and Jowanarr listened to the signal-poles. The Dark Beast and the bright skies alternated. Phemropit’s riders came to an area where the skeletal monster had not been, not for some time at least, and they encountered sentients again. These gave the travellers little trouble, which caused Sloosh to congratulate himself on having insisted on obtaining ’food’ for Phemropit.
They came to a place where the grass, bushes and trees were pale and dry with approaching death. Yet there had been no dearth of rain.
Sloosh buzzed satisfaction. ‘The jungle is bleached, not from disease or drought but from lack of nourishment. The jewels have put out their long roots and are sucking up the minerals. We are very close to the edge of The Wasteland!’
A short time later, they came round the bend of a bay, and they were dazzled by The Jewelled Wasteland, The Shining House of Countless Chambers, The Bright Abomination. The light from the sky was reflected by an unimaginable number of faceted translucent stones. Those on the edge were as tiny as melon seeds. Others were as small as fingertips, as large as a man’s head, as huge as the skull of the bony monster dead on the road behind them. They covered the ground completely. They formed great masses, hills, columns, stalagmites, weird beautiful figures that looked beast-like or had vaguely human faces. The piles formed valleys, ravines, canyons and avenues that would sometimes run straight for a mile. Water had collected in small and large pools from a recent rain. Here and there were piles of stones which had been broken off from the main growths by severe earthquakes.
The swarming life of the jungle and the seashore stopped at the edge of The Wasteland. No birds sang, no monkeys chattered, no insects buzzed there.
Sloosh looked at the road, which ended abruptly, buried under the shining stony growths.
‘I can’t imagine The Shemibob letting this get out of control,’ he said. ‘I wonder why she has?’
No one had an answer. They set up camp by expanding the vessel of the ancients, and they began the work of storing up food. The hunting and fis
hing and the smoking of meat and fish occupied them for twelve sleep-times. During this time, some of them made short explorations into The Wasteland. They collected loose stones which Feersh said could be useful.
After the thirteenth sleep, they ate breakfast and all except Deyv and the animals got onto Phemropit’s back. Deyv walked ahead a quarter of a mile as a scout. His duty was not so much to warn of living dangers, which they probably would not encounter as yet, as to look for routes broad enough for Phemropit: to pass through.
The Beast came and went twice, and they travelled towards the stronghold of The Shemibob in a circuitous manner. Only three times were they stopped by barriers. Then Phemropit knocked down the walls of glittering jewels or, if it could not bulldoze its way through, it used its cutting ray. It did not like this latter method, though, since it used up too much energy.
Four times they came upon oases, areas about a mile square on which the stones could not grow. These held a rich soil on which were fruit-bearing trees and nut-bearing bushes. There were some songbirds and small animals here. The latter kept the birds from getting too numerous, and their own population was kept down by a periodic disease that killed all but a tenth of them.
Feersh explained that The Shemibob had established a number of the oases throughout the area. Sometimes she liked to leave her castle and holiday here. The oases had enabled the witch to survive when she had run away.
After resting here and adding to their provisions, the party went on. The Beast passed over ten more times. Once, Vana, whose turn it was to scout, was caught in a flash flood in a ravine and narrowly escaped drowning. Sloosh, warned by the rumbling, told Phemropit to get up onto a ledge before the full force of the water struck. Even so, the stones broke loose beneath the creature, and it rolled helplessly down the slope. Its passengers leaped to safety, but Phemropit disappeared into the stream.
When the flood had subsided, it was sitting at the bottom of the ravine, unharmed. Fortunately, it had landed upright. If it had been on its back, it would have had to be abandoned. It was too heavy to be uprighted without the necessary equipment.
The Lovers * Dark Is the Sun * Riders of the Purple Wage Page 46