by Linda Nagata
“So who needs a personal file?” Skye joked.
“Anybody who wants to find their file again,” Zia said, without a hint of her usual good humor.
Trees growing on the gully walls leaned over the stream, casting cool shadows that pressed against the water, smoothing its surface so that the pebbles and the tiny aquatic creatures that foraged on the bottom could be easily seen. Where the stream flowed into sunlight, the water glittered with bright, dancing reflections.
The first waterfall they came to boiled noisily over a broad, curved ledge only a meter high. A quiet pool fanned out from the base of the little fall; bubbles skated over its calm surface. The pool looked to be maybe two and a half meters deep. Skye could see through the green water, all the way to the boulder-strewn bottom.
Devi and Buyu were walking ahead, discussing biology and predators and annoying little wardens as they looked for a dry path around the side of the waterfall. Skye touched Zia’s elbow. “Hey, ado. Let’s swim.”
Zia looked at her, wide-eyed. “You’re kidding.”
“Be safe, Skye,” Ord said. “Check water first.” It lowered itself from her shoulder to the sun-warmed rocks. Then it scuttled to the edge of the water, dipping its tentacles into the pool.
Skye and Zia crouched beside it. “Clean?” Skye asked.
“There are many life forms, but they are not immediately hazardous—”
“Immediately?” Zia asked nervously.
“Zia Adovna,” Skye whispered. “You jump like a maniac off the elevator column. You can’t be afraid to go for a little swim.”
Zia stared at the water. “I’m not afraid.”
Devi and Buyu had reached the top of the waterfall. Buyu had gone on ahead, but Devi was looking back at them curiously. Skye put on her sweetest smile. “Zia, this is your last warning. I’m going to dive on three. One, two—”
Zia sprang first, diving into the quiet water, sending a green fountain bubbling into the morning air. Skye followed a second later, knifing beneath the surface, feeling the icy shock of the water against her face. Then she burst to the surface in the middle of the pool with a whoop that echoed off the gully walls.
Zia was already stroking for the little waterfall. Skye raced after her. They glided under the falling water, letting the cold stream pound against their backs. Kheth glinted through the trees, turning the falling drops diamond bright. She could see Ord following after them, a shimmering golden shape just beneath the surface, its tentacles whipping behind it like a long, sinuous tail.
“Skye!” Devi yelled from somewhere overhead, his voice almost lost within the noise of rushing water. “Get serious. You’re just wasting time!”
“Be an ado, ado,” she yelled back. “And stop worrying so much. I am not going to die.”
She crouched on a shelf of submerged rock, just under the fall. How strange—the way the water rippled, it looked as if the boulders on the bottom were moving. Skye watched the effect for several seconds, until she realized it wasn’t an illusion. Several large, submerged boulders were moving. They were slowly crawling away from the waterfall. “Zia … ?”
“I see it, ado. Maybe we should rejoin the boys?”
Skye stood up, craning to get a better view of the bottom. The boulder beneath her feet was slick and soft with a layer of brown algae. “But what is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only studied the planet from a microbiologist’s point of view. If it’s big enough to see with the unaided eye, I don’t know anything about it.”
Skye felt a lurch under her feet. She struggled to keep her balance on the slick, algae-covered boulder. Or was it a boulder?
Zia had felt the movement too. “What say we get out of here?”
“Swimming?” Skye asked uncertainly.
Zia looked over her shoulder, where a line of exposed rock broke the smooth curtain of the waterfall. “I’m climbing.”
The boulder under Skye’s feet shifted again. Then something soft and strong caught her ankle. It felt like a huge, powerful hand. Panic kicked in. With a yelp, she brought her other foot down hard against the thing that held her. Apparently it didn’t like that at all, because it let go. In fact, it shoved her hard. She lost her balance and plunged into the pool. With her eyes open, she spun around, and through the clear green water she watched the boulder glide away across the bottom.
She kicked hard, and shot to the surface, spluttering. Then she swam furiously for the waterfall. Zia was already clambering over the top. Skye got a hand on a slippery outcropping of rock just above the level of the pool. (This time, she made sure it was rock.) She climbed onto it, while the waterfall splashed around her. Then she looked back.
One of the “boulders” had glided into the shallow water on the farside of the pool. As she watched, it broke the surface. It did not look so much like a rock anymore. It glistened with a warm, brown, velvety texture—and it was big. Perhaps a meter high and a meter across. As it emerged from the water its surface split open, revealing folds of bright pink tissue … and a second later it let loose a horrible screech that sent a hundred hidden flyers leaping from the trees into the air. Skye scrambled over the little waterfall in a panic, hardly conscious of the treacherous nature of the slippery rock, or what would happen if she fell.
She rolled out over the top, into a three inch deep flow of water that swept across a shelf of grey rock. Devi and Buyu were laughing themselves silly, while Zia was sitting on the rocky bank, looking embarrassed and beaten. Down in the pond, three other boulders had poked their mouths above the surface, to raise their own ear-splitting cries of indignation. “What is that?” Skye snapped.
Devi only laughed harder. Buyu tried to catch his breath long enough to say. “Hungry rocks. They eat small water life. They may actually farm some of the more common species, but they definitely don’t like anything else hunting in their home pond.”
“It grabbed my foot!” Skye told him. “It tried to pull me under.”
“It can’t pull, Skye,” Buyu said. “It doesn’t have the necessary joints or muscles—”
“Like you know!” She climbed to her feet. “I felt it.”
“Hey,” Devi said. “Buyu’s just telling you the way it is. The hungry rock probably thought your foot was its usual prey. Its about at the upper size limit, wouldn’t you say, Buyu? If the rock didn’t realize your foot was attached to a much larger body—”
Skye’s eyes went wide in shock. “Ord!” she yelled. “Where did Ord go?”
She scrambled back to the edge of the waterfall along with Zia and Devi. They peered over the edge. Ord was nowhere to be seen.
Skye’s hands closed into helpless fists. “Oh no,” she whispered. “Ord would be prey-size, wouldn’t it?”
“Gutter dogs,” Devi muttered. “We’re helpless without Ord.”
Just then a stream of bubbles shot from the top of one of the hungry rocks that had remained underwater. A foul odor—worse than a gutter doggie’s dump tunnel—burst onto the air. Then through the green water, Skye saw the rock’s mouth open. A huge golden bubble erupted from it like a silent burp. It rose to the surface where it burst open, releasing a horrible scent-bomb of bad odor. Zia shrieked. Devi groaned. Skye felt her stomach churning … but there was Ord! It swam calmly toward the waterfall, propelled by the lash of its long tentacles.
“Ord!” Skye shouted. She climbed back down the waterfall, holding out a hand to the little robot. It swung its tentacle forward and caught her wrist. She hefted it up, laughing. “You scared me, you dumb little thing.”
“Good Skye,” it whispered. “Too cold for swimming, yes Skye?”
She laughed in giddy relief as she swung Ord up to the top of the fall. “You know, you may be right.”
Chapter 10
Skye’s mood cooled after that. She started thinking more and more about how they might get rid of the warden without getting Buyu in trouble, but the only idea that seemed at all promising was her original notion of using the wa
rden as bait for the acid dragon. She was about to suggest it again, when Devi suddenly stopped. He’d been out in front. Now he dropped into a crouch behind a waist-high boulder, peering over the top at something Skye could not see, while waving at the rest of them to keep down. He took one more look, then he crept back to meet them. “There’s a litter of viperlion pups in the next pool,” he whispered.
Viperlions?
Skye frowned. “Isn’t that some kind of a—”
“A predator,” Zia whispered. “I’ve heard of them.”
Devi nodded. He kept his voice low as he added, “It’s pretty common to find the pups along stream banks. They can slip into the water to avoid danger. They’re able to stay under for several minutes … assuming there aren’t any hungry rocks in the pool.” He looked at Skye with a self-satisfied smile. “They’re more common at higher elevations. I thought we might have to hike a long way to find some.”
“I’m not hearing this,” Buyu muttered. He backed several steps away. Then he gazed across the stream, as if he were alone in the wilderness and they were not plotting treason behind his back.
Skye looked at Devi. His cheeks were a rosy brown, flush with the equatorial heat. His eyes seemed to be asking her, Are you in it?
She thought she could guess his plan. Quickly she scanned the thickets, but she saw no sign of the warden. “Viperlions are pretty aggressive?” she whispered.
Zia had just caught on too. She looked suddenly frantic. Her head whipped around as she searched for the warden. “You two are crazy.”
“What else are we going to do?” Devi whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Will the parent be close by?” Skye asked.
“I hope so.”
Zia said, “How are we going to make sure it gets the warden and not us?”
Devi’s smile was apologetic. “I don’t know. Any ideas?”
Skye hefted Ord onto her shoulder. “Let you know in a minute. First I’m going to take a look.” She glanced at Buyu, but he was still staring off into the bushes, pretending he didn’t know what was going on.
They had come to a place where the stream ran fast and narrow. Skye waded into the water until it reached her waist. Then she made her way upstream, holding onto plants that grew along the bank to keep her balance. The streambed wound to the left, around a polished gray rock twice her height. She edged past it, to find a broad, shallow pool on the other side, formed behind a natural dam of melon-sized rocks. Seven little creatures, each no bigger than a dokey, chased and wrestled one another on the margin of the pool, where the water was only a few inches deep. Each one moved on six ribbon-like legs—legs that were much wider from front to back than from side to side—tapering to small, clawed feet, so that it looked as if each viperlion was walking on three pairs of oversized tweezers.
Most of the animal life of Earth was built on a lateral plan – in a line – so that mouth/brain/eyes were at one end, digestive and reproductive organs were in the middle, and waste was eliminated at the other end. In contrast, much of the animal life of Deception Well was built on a radial plan – in a circle – around central digestive organs … like a sea star from Earth … except the basic radial layout had undergone a lot of change. Evolution had led it to imitate the lateral plan, so that the viperlions had head and tail at opposite ends of a long, sinuous body. In fact they had two heads each, and two … maws. That was the proper word, Skye recalled. Not mouths, because viperlions did not swallow food through their long necks. Their “necks” were really just modified legs from the ancient circle of legs that was the basic plan of this clade of life. Each head had two eyes, and one set of grasping and tearing “jaws,” though the jaws might as well be called toothy pincers.
As Skye watched, one of the pups jumped thirty centimeters in the air. One of its heads darted out, its maw dropped open, and it snapped up a passing insect. It crunched hard. Then its snake-like neck swung under its belly, tucking the insect into its central stomach before its litter-mates could grab a share. Its tail waved proudly, looking like a thick noodle with a pom-pom on the end. Another viperlion pup leaped on its back. The four-heads dueled, before both pups went rolling through the water.
Skye grinned. These pups were the cutest things she had seen since dokeys.
A twitch of motion drew her gaze to the thickets beyond the stream’s gravel bank. She expected to see the warden there, watching, making sure all the rules were being followed, but if it was there, it was too well-camouflaged for her to see it.
Ord shifted restlessly. Skye looked around, to find that Devi had slipped up beside her. He was submerged to his neck, so she sank down beside him. “Have you seen the warden?” she whispered.
“No.”
“It might be over there”—She nodded toward the thickets across the stream— “but I’m not—”
She left her whispered sentence unfinished as a blue-winged bat dropped out of the sky. Or maybe it wasn’t a bat. It had wings that were bat-like – made of thin skin stretched between long bones – but its eyes were in its belly, and there were pincer-limbs attached to the front and back of its disc-like body, each midway between the glistening wings. It fell toward a pup that had wandered alone to one end of the gravel bank. It held its blue wings high as it reached with its pincer-limbs to grab the baby.
But just as it was about to strike, a snake-like head with glittering black eyes reared-up from the thickets where Skye had thought the warden might be hidden. The head looked like a quarter-sized model of a transit car. The neck that carried it was thicker than the posts that held up the footbridge at Vibrant Harmony. As the head darted out over the gravel bank—looking like the head of a giant, floating snake, unaffected by gravity—its jaw gaped open, exposing a bright red maw more than large enough to crunch Skye’s skull. It snapped up the blue flyer, crushing it instantly and smearing its wings into odd angles.
The parent viperlion.
Skye eased back into the shadow of the rock while Ord patted her cheeks. “Go home now, Skye?” it whispered.
As the viperlion’s head withdrew into the bushes with its prey, a second head emerged, sweeping protectively over the pups with the same dreamy floating motion.
Skye felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned to find Devi crooking a finger at her. He wanted her to slide back down the stream and behind the rocks. She shook her head. Instead, she started angling across the current, making for the far bank. “Skye!” Devi hissed.
She turned around and laid a finger over her mouth in a plea for silence. Then she held her palm up, urging him to stay. Quickly, she crossed the stream and climbed the far bank. She could see Buyu and Zia, watching her with puzzled faces. Devi was still standing in the stream, the water up to his waist, looking undecided. She reached up to touch Ord’s smooth side. “Hold on tight,” she warned, in a barely audible whisper.
“No good, Skye,” Ord whispered back. “Time to go home now, yes? Yes, it is. Go home. Go home now, good Skye.”
Skye patted it again. Then she ducked into the bushes and began creeping up the stream bank. A splash warned her that someone was following. Zeme dust! She wanted to yell at them to stay back, but when she turned to look, she found that everyone remained exactly where she had left them. Well good.
She crept through the bushes, trying to reach a point above the stream exactly opposite the half-hidden viperlion.
Suddenly, the warden appeared in front of her only half a meter away, blocking her path. It had been so well hidden, it seemed to materialize out of nowhere. At first its face was blank, with only a suggestion of eyes, nose, and mouth. Then its features shifted and deepened. She found herself looking at a petite copy of Buyu’s face. “Skye,” he growled, “don’t make me tell you again. Get back here now, or your right to visit the planet will be suspended for five years. You know it’s illegal to approach a predator like the viperlion.”
Skye grinned. She’d come up the stream bank hoping to make the warden nervous, s
o it would show itself, but this was more than perfect. Buyu had figured out how to control it, and he had written a script that would keep him looking like an honest and responsible guide.
Buyu, you are slick!
“Get back now,” the warden commanded, in stern imitation of Buyu’s voice.
“Sure!” Skye said, as loudly as she could manage. She stood up abruptly, rattling bushes. “I just wanted to get a closer look at those pups!”
Several things happened at once:
The adult viperlion’s two heads rose together above the thickets, both of them staring across the stream, straight at Skye.
A soft grunting arose from the brush and the pups responded, disappearing immediately among the swaying plants.
The warden slipped down to the water, its path marked by rustling bushes.
And Ord clung a little more tightly to Skye’s neck. “Bad, bad, bad,” it whispered. “See it? No good. Go home, Skye. Be silent. Be safe. Please good Skye?”
The viperlion glided out of the thicket. There was no other way Skye could think to describe it. Its snake-like heads floated out first, then its arched body followed, narrow and sinuous and mottled green, so that it might easily slip between trees or slide under logs and still match the background color of the forest. Its six ribbon legs balanced on tiny feet that hardly seemed to touch the ground. Its tail followed behind: a two meter whip with a tassel at the end.
Skye started backing away up the steep slope.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Devi and Zia floundering across the stream. Buyu remained on the far bank. The tall gray rocks still kept them all hidden from the viperlion’s gaze.