by John Shirley
They walked on down the hill, wending between low, lichen-crusted boulders ( was it lichen?) to the flatlands, where a rutted blue-dirt road stretched in a straight line to what he supposed was the north. An animal yoked to a crude wooden cart, with wheels carved out of solid wood, was tethered to a ring carved into a roadside boulder. The wood of the cart looked like normal Earth wood, except it was turquoise. He was fairly sure it hadn’t been painted that way. They’ve gone to elaborate lengths to set up this bullshit, Zero thought.
And then, when he was closer to the animal yoked to the cart, he saw its tail and flanks—the rear of an ordinary black horse. He nodded to himself and snorted, “So the aliens are bringing horses here, too?”
“Nope,” Jamie said.
“Horses just happened to evolve here?”
“Come on,” she said, and led him around to the front of the horse. It snapped at him with a mottled red beak.
He yelped and stepped back. Jamie and Dennis laughed. The thing with the beak snapped at him again and took a few steps toward him. The cart creaked behind it.
“Hold up!” Jamie barked at it. It looked guiltily at at her and stopped, its head drooping.
“Okay,” Zero said. “It’s not Earth.”
It wasn’t a horse either. It’s neck was too long, its skull too small, and it had eight inches of horny red beak, bisected vertically. It had protuberant, sulky red-brown eyes with wrinkly white lids, A double string of drool hung from the slit in the beak. Its skin was slick and hairless, he saw now. Its legs ended in thick gray pads. It raised its head and gave out an “oh-rooooooh!” mournfully; the call echoed across the rolling plain. From somewhere far off came a faint answering call. It lifted its head and looked in that direction. He saw no ears—unless the damp, purplish membranes behind the eyes were for hearing.
“It’s an oruh,” Jamie said, pronouncing it or-ooh.
It took a step toward the horizon, in the direction the answering call had come from. The cart gave a tentative creak.
Jamie took hold of the crude gray leather harness around the oruh’s neck and tugged back on it. “Forget it, pal!” Its head drooped.
“Come on, mite,” Dennis said, climbing up onto the cart. Mechanically, Zero climbed up after him.
Zero sat between Dennis and Jamie. From a long box on the back of the cart, she took a piece of metal like an oversize carpet tack—three inches long. She bent over and thumbed it into the oruh’s rump. The animal didn’t seem to notice. She gathered up the reins, stretched her legs out on a wooden support, and pressed the tack with her foot as if it were an accelerator in a car. The oruh lurched forward, making a sulky horn sound like ” Oruhhhh … oruhhhh … oruhhh” deep in its throat. It had a tail that was superficially like a horse’s; but looking closer, Zero saw it was all of a piece, like a paddle.
The cart shuddered, creaked, and rolled after the oruh, bumping bone-jarringly along the rutted track. Things clanked in the box behind the seat. He held on to the bench between his legs and told his stomach to hold on, too.
He stared at the pockmarks on the swaying rump of the oruh. “Doesn’t that tack thing hurt it?”
“Needs a delicate touch,” Jamie admitted. “But it’s got a thick hide. Anyway, don’t waste sympathy on an oruh. If an animal can be a shithead son-of-a-bitch, that’s what the oruhs are.”
“Oh, I kinda like ‘em,” Dennis said. “This one ‘ere’s me chum.” He looked at Zero. “Int ‘e goin’ to ask about the Meta?”
Zero sighed. “I’m scared to ask. But you better tell me.”
Jamie said, “The Meta brought us here—everyone, every intelligent race on the planet. We were all brought here by the Meta. All abducted. They’re aliens, we assume, and I don’t mean wetbacks. We don’t know shit about them. We know they’re called the Meta—the High Clan and the others tell us that. But they don’t know much about them, either. They’re fairly sure the Meta aren’t native to this planet. We think they just sort of use it as their game board. We don’t know how they brought us here—we assume a starship, but we have no idea with what method of propulsion. One look at the stars at night tells you we’re not in the same damned solar system. We don’t know where we are, or where the Meta are now. We never see them, never have. We don’t know what they look like. We’ve seen their servants, ‘the Ed McMahons,’ we call ‘em.”
“Faces like artichokes?”
“Yeah. The High Clan rep tells us they’re not the Meta, they simply work for them. Entirely different race, they claim. After a while it becomes clear that’s what’s going on. As for why you’re here, why the Meta brought us all here—I mean, I assume you want to know.”
Zero glared impatiently at her.
“Okay. Well, the only thing we’re sure of is, they’re playing a game with us. It might be a game they’re playing for entertainment, a sport.”
“I love to ‘ear ‘er go on about this,” Dennis said, looking at Jamie in genuine admiration.
“It might be a game they’re playing for profit. How they profit by it is anybody’s guess. It might be a game they’re playing—or making us play—for scientific reasons. To learn about us.
“It might be a game they’re putting us through for—well, for spiritual reasons. The Meta Makers sect believes that. You know the sort of thing: the Meta are testing our spiritual development, spiritual potential, or trying to, um, augment it. Personally, I think that’s bullshit. I think they’re simply sadistic. Anyway, they’re playing a game with us.”
“It’s not a bad plice,” Dennis said, “not really. Quite livable in its own way. Air’s good, water’s fine. Not a lot of creepy-crawlies, at least durin’ the day. There’s a good deal of food we can eat, if we work at it. And”—he grinned at Jamie—“and it’s dead inner-restin’, int it, eh?”
“Oh, yes,” Jamie said with heavy irony, “it’s interesting.”
Zero didn’t like the sound of that. He felt a dron-ing anxiety, a swimming nausea of disorientation. He was going to hyperventilate. Calm down, he told himself. If it’s a dream, it’ll end. Hallucinations end, too, eventually.
Nothing you can do but adjust. More questions. Keep the mind busy, keep it coping. “How long you been here?” he asked.
“Me,” Jamie said. “Two and a half years, about. Seasons aren’t the same here, it’s easy to lose track, but the day is about the same length—we figure twenty-two hours. Dennis’s been here maybe eight months. There are about six hundred Earth people we know of, most of them male, but for all we know there could be a million more beyond the Stinking Bucket. Oh, we call the ocean the Stinking Bucket. But I doubt if there are any other Earthers. We’re mostly at a primitive technological level—you can see that. But we have decent shelter, food. I know what your next question will probably be, so I’ll answer it: there aren’t any intelligent natives that we know of, but there are a good many races on Fool’s Hope abducted from their home worlds. So far we’ve counted thirty-one intelligent species. And only one’s from Earth.”
He stared at her. “Thirty-one? Jesus!”
“Got ‘im, too,” Dennis said. “The Exodus sect worships ‘im, put up a bleedin’ griven image of bloody Jesus and Mary. But no one’s got a Bible, so they’re mikin’ up their own, mis-rememberin’ it and mikin’ it any way they want it, like.”
“Thirty-one alien races?” Zero looked around nervously. The blue vegetation stretched away to either side. Nothing moved but the mist.
“You won’t see them out here,” Jamie said. “Most ‘em are north of our settlement. But there’re some nomads who spook around it. And of course, the Murderers.”
“The what?”
“Something the Meta gave us to keep us on our toes. Randomly placed, completely hostile, homicidal aliens. Most of the aliens are more or less friendly, but the Murderers…” She shrugged. “Thanks to them and some of the local fauna, like the wheelers—well, there’s only a little less than half as many Earthers here as there were. Some of them did
n’t get a mile from the ruin. Some were killed by the Murderers or on expeditions. Or went crazy and killed themselves.”
Up ahead the road climbed gradually to the top of a ridge, maybe a half-mile off. “The settlement’s a little ways on the other side of that rise,” Jamie said.
“How’d you know I was out there?” Zero asked.
“We could see the ship coming down. The light of it, anyway. We know what that means. That’s they drop Earthers.”
Zero was studying the vegetation by the side road. It was one unbroken mat, about two feet high, looking like a lawn but thicker, or like the surface of a cauliflower, but flat and dull blue. It was faintly mist-beaded; its glossiness and regularity made him think of synthetic fabrics. “It looks kept up, like somebody mowed it.”
“It just grows that way. We call it the Rug,” Jamie said. “For more than one reason. But it—” She broke off, staring to the east. After a moment she said, “Dennis, it’s humping up over there!”
“Bloody ‘ell! They know we’ve got to pick up people! Ought to give us a safer plice to do it so we at least bloody compete. Bugger ‘em!”
Jamie pressed hard on the accelerator tack in the oruh’s rump; the animal squealed and lurched ahead, doubling its pace. The cart jounced, and its axles shrieked in protest.
“What is it?” Zero asked, looking at the thing Jamie had seen.
It was a humped place in the Rug, fifty feet ahead and to their right. As he watched, it humped more, as if a great balloon were being inflated, lifting the vegetation without breaking it; as if the vegetation were evenly planted in something that was all one piece.
The oruh had seen the hump now. It made a long, plaintive orrrrrr-ooooooooohhhhhhh, stretched out its long neck, hunched its shoulders, and hurried to get past. Its pads beat a sodden tattoo on the packed ground. It was hard to stay on the cart now.
The hump began to move toward them. Like a cartoon image of a mole burrowing just under the surface, the hump sweeping toward them—no, it was like a wave, a single narrow wave on an otherwise flat sea.
Dennis reached behind them and opened a box. He handed Zero something like the metal frame of a folded-up umbrella, without the umbrella fabric.
For himself he kept a sort of oversized blunderbuss with a harness instead of a gun butt. He crammed a cheesecloth bag down the bell-shaped muzzle with a stick and took a small metal instrument from his pocket. All of this Zero saw through the distorting jiggling of the cart as Jamie prodded the wailing oruh into greater efforts, and as the hump began to come parallel to them.
“What are they?” Zero asked, trying not to shout high-pitched but doing so anyway.
“Wheelers!” Dennis yelled, dumping powder into a hole in the back of the blunderbuss. “Bloody friggin’ wheelers! We’re usually way past ‘em by this time, but the—”
“Shit!” Jamie yelled. “They’ve got symmetry!” She pointed at a second hump on the side of the road opposite the first, coming hard at them. They were about to be caught between the two.
And then what’ll happen? Zero thought.
And then the straight edges of the Rug on either side of the road arched with a nasty ripping sound. The humps formed cave-mouths in the Rug, and from the caves came a sound that was like pushing a long rough needle through your eardrums, a yodeling cacophony given off by a mass of squealing ugliness. Zero’s scalp contracted when he saw them: hundreds of them.
Picture an eight-spoked wheel covered with slick black fur. Take the rim away from each furred wheel, and at the end of each spoke you put a body, a body like an oversize ferret, maybe three feet high, each with two little frantically pumping legs, each without arms, each with jaws far too big for its head, each with a double row of dagger teeth that look too big for the jaw, each with a single round adorable-brown eye in the middle of its furry head, each with long floppy ears horribly like a cocker spaniel’s, each with a wet pink tongue that extends from its mouth like a razzing New Year’s Eve party favor, fibrillating. Each body with a rigid, furry shaft in the middle of its back that extended behind to a furry globe containing the unifying brain. The globe was divided into two parts: the lower connected the spokes, the upper moved independently, spinning like a turntable for its faceted golden eyes. The legs on the spoke-animals frantically pumped, a blur, as they poured out of the Rug caves (Zero heard himself screaming) close beside the cart, coming at it from all sides. There was something repulsively unnatural in the way they moved, the way the backward-running parts and the forward-running parts cooperated, the way the things turned this way and that, pink tongues extended, ear-needling squealings sent in all directions and suddenly the cart was surrounded by black-furred wheel-things, jaws snapping, tongues darting in and out between snaps, the oruh’s wail going higher and higher in pitch, its black blood spraying where the things gnashed its flanks … the things would bite, spin about so the other mouths could take a bite while the ones who’d bitten would chew what they’d bitten off (Zero thinking, Now I know it’s not real, couldn’t be real, this is a nightmare), the furry spokes overlapping one another, the spoke-animals tangling in their haste, the nearer ones climbing onto the cart, their wheel-shapes crimping so that four spokes could cooperate in the climb, spiderlike … Zero dizzy from gulping air; black spots swarming in his eyes, reflexively whacking at the things with the naked umbrella in his hands—
Whump. Dennis’s blunderbuss thundered, its stock kicking Dennis in the middle of his chest, knocking him into the back of the cart. He forced himself up, swearing. Three wheelers were down, blown to twitching, wet-furred fragments. The oruh was somehow still running, bleeding from a dozen wounds, shrieking like a human child on fire. Jamie wrenched the umbrella-thing from Zero, yelling “Like this!” and pressed a trigger so the weapon’s barbed umbrella-spines opened, curving upward like an umbrella, wind-blown, inside out. There was a spike at the top of the center shaft that she drove down onto a wheeler’s brain-case from above, twisting the whole mechanism so that the jags on the umbrella-spines caught the furred spokes, ripping into them, clamping them. The thing fell back crippled. She twisted the instrument loose and went after another.
The cart stopped moving. The oruh sank to its knees in a voracious morass of snarling, squealing black fur and madly arachnidian wheel-shapes.
Dennis kicked another wheeler back off the cart as he crammed more shot and dumped more powder into the blunderbuss. Zero fought an impulse to run, just run in any direction. ( Wake up now, he told himself, wake up), pulled another barbed umbrella skeleton from the box, fumbled with it, trying to get it open as a squealing black-fur spoke-thing, horrible puppy-dog ears flapping, came over the side of the cart at him, thrusting three snapping faces at his eyes. And then it threw its rear four animals over its front four, so that suddenly the thing fell on him from above, making a cage of itself. The spoke-animals twisted on their shafts inward toward Zero, and the thing’s brain-case pressed down on him from above—he could feel it rotating … jaw-snapping cyclopean fur-faces everywhere he turned, their tongues lapping at his ears, rasping on his cheeks, the back of his neck, tasting him, preparing to take a bite—
He found the trigger on the ( Wake up!) umbrella-weapon, thrust it over his head at the furred brain-case, pressed the trigger. The thing flew open, its springs driving barbs into the squealing wheeler, which wrenched itself loose, raining blood on him. He twisted the thing away, off the cart.
Another began to climb toward him.
Whump-ump. Dennis’s blunderbuss blew four of the wheelers into fragments. Jamie tore another away from her; one of its spoke-animals took a piece of her thigh with it. Zero gagged at the sight.
Whump, whump, whump, and long echoes, and two more detonations, and more echoes. Zero looked up, panting. Sweat ran into his eyes. He saw men climbing off a newly arrived four-wheeled cart with smoking blunderbusses, swinging hooked pikes, driving the wheelers back into the cave-mouths of the Rug. The cart had come from the settlement to the north, prob
ably alerted by the sound of Dennis’s blunderbuss. The men on it scrambled to crush, stab, and chivvy the wheelers.
And the wheelers went back into the caves, and the caves closed up. The humps withdrew and began to sink out of sight in the Rug.
Zero found himself watching a sallow, prematurely bald man who might have been in his early thirties. He wore tattered corduroys, no shirt and no shoes, his feet blue with alien soil. He paused a few yards away and bent to pick up the limp body of a dying wheeler. One of the wheeler’s spoke-animals convulsively snapped its jaws at him. He drove the sharp end of a pike into the animal’s eye and twisted till it sagged. He smashed the skulls of two other spoke-animals—looking at Zero all the time, grinning—and then used his pike to pry open the thing’s brain-case. The upper hemisphere popped off and fell away, almost neatly. The man reached in, scooped out some of its pasty blue brain, and ladled it into his mouth as a small boy eats a cream pie with his fingers. He shivered and giggled.
“There’s a drug effect from eating their brains,” Jamie muttered, looking over. She winced as she used a strip of leather to make a tourniquet around her wounded leg. “God, I hope this doesn’t get infected.” After a moment she muttered, “He’s probably the one who did it.”
Wearily, Zero said, “You going to make me say, ‘Did what’?”
She looked up to see if the brain-eater was too far away to hear her.