Jem

  Although, he admitted to himself as he climbed out of the dome, the chances that anyone would try a straightforward frontal attack were very small. Maybe an attack from the sky. Maybe by long-range rocket fire. Maybe not at all. This whole fucking shoot-up was crazy, if you asked Sergeant Sweggert. What the fuck was there to fight about in this asshole place without a bar or a town or even, for God's sake, a decent tree or field? If you had asked him, that was what he would have said, in total sincerity, but it would not have stopped him from fighting for it.

  And inside he was swearing. The colonel wouldn't have kept him waiting like this a week ago. If she was going to shaft him, what was she waiting for? . . . "Sarge." He looked up. "They're calling you from the orderly room." He turned idly and saw the corporal waving.

  "Aggie, take over," he ordered. "If I come back and that ammo isn't restowed, it's all your asses."

  He strolled back toward the HO tent and walked in. Marge Menninger was eating out of a mess kit, reading from a small-screen viewer. She didn't look up. "The perimeter's looking good, Sweggert," she said. "Got that machine gun back in place?"

  "Yes'm. Colonel? There's a bunch of gasbags around, and that one we been using is about used up. We'll be relieved in a couple of minutes. Can we get a fix from the new ones?"

  She put down her spoon and looked at him. After a moment, she said, "Just who do you mean by 'we,' soldier?"

  "Oh, no, ma'am!" Jesus, she was touchy! He knew he was close to trouble. "I don't mean nothing, ma'am, just that the detail's been working hard and they need a little break. We'll—they'll come out of it in an hour, and the relief'll be there anyway."

  She studied him for a moment. "That's four-oh, Sweggert, but only half the detail. Keep the rest sober."

  "Sure thing, colonel. Thank you, colonel." He got out of there as fast as he could. Shit, he should've been more careful, knowing how she felt and all. Not that she was all wrong. If he hadn't been drunk he wouldn't have done it. But, shit! It was worth it. Remembering the way she had been with a skin full of the balloonist mist, his groin grew heavy.

  When he got back to the detail he looked at them with some disapproval. Corporal Kristianides was skinny and had sideburns all down her cheeks, but she was the best he had to pick from. "Aggie, take Peterson and four others; you're on duty till the relief shows up. Kris, you and the rest come along with me. We're gonna take ourselves a jizzum break. Anybody don't want to come, switch with somebody don't want to stay. Let's move it."

  The balloonists were out over the ocean-lake now, half a kilometer away and low. Sweggert marched his dozen troops across the camp to the empty tents at the end of the company street; he would do it in the open if he had to, but damned if he wouldn't take a little privacy when he could get it. The tethered balloonist, further than ever from recuperating, had been moved there days since, along with the strobe light.

  Sweggert stopped, swearing. Nan Dimitrova and Dalehouse were talking to the balloonist, and only a few meters away the Russian pilot, Kappelyushnikov, was complaining about something to Colonel Tree. Privacy, shit. But it didn't matter; he had Colonel Menninger's permission, and she was the one who counted. He retrieved the strobe and pointed it toward the hovering swarm.

  Predictably, Dalehouse butted in. "What do you think you're doing, Sweggert?"

  Sweggert took time to aim the strobe and flash it to bring them in before he answered. "Gonna have a little fun. The colonel said it was okay."

  "Hell she did! Anyway—"

  "Anyway," Sweggert interrupted, "why don't you go check with her if you don't believe me? Would you move a little, sir? You're getting between them and the light."

  Ana Dimitrova laid her hand on Dalehouse's arm to keep him from replying. "It is not fun for the balloonists, Sergeant Sweggert. To experience sexual climax is very painful and debilitating. As you can see, this one is seriously affected. It may die."

  "What a way to go, hey, Ana?" Sweggert grinned. "Take it up with the colonel—hey, Dalehouse! What are you doing?"

  Dalehouse had switched on his radio and was singing softly into it. Colonel Tree, beginning to pay attention, walked toward them, and Sweggert turned to him. "Colonel! We have Colonel Menninger's permission to get the Loonies in for a fix, and this guy's telling them to screw off!"

  Tree stopped with his hands clasped behind his back and nodded gravely. "A dilemma," he said in his soft child's voice. "It will be quite interesting to see what they do."

  What they were doing was spreading themselves all over the sky, some dropping lower to catch the onshore breeze, others hesitating. They were singing loudly and discordantly, and the sounds came distantly from the sky and tinnily from the radio in Dalehouse's hand. Sweggert stood rock-still, controlling the rage that was building up in him. Fucking Cong! When you had the CO's permission, that was all you were supposed to need! Why wouldn't Tree back him up?

  "Gimme that," he growled, reaching out for Dalehouse's radio.

  But Dalehouse's expression had changed. "Hold it," he snapped, and sang a quick phrase into the radio. The answer came back as a cascade of musical phrases; Dalehouse looked startled and Ana Dimitrova gasped, her hand to her lips. "Tree," he said, "according to Charlie, there's some Krinpit down the beach, and they're eating a couple of people."

  "But Krinpit do not eat human beings," objected Colonel Tree, and Sweggert chimed in:

  "There's nobody down there. Nobody's gone through the perimeter all day."

  Dalehouse repeated his question into the radio and shrugged. "That's what he says. He could be wrong about the eating part, I guess—he doesn't have a very clear concept of killing, except to eat."

  Sweggert put down the strobe. "We better tell the colonel," he said.

  Colonel Tree said, "That's correct. You do so, Dalehouse. Sergeant, form your squad on the beach in thirty seconds, full combat gear. We're going to see what's happening."

  Half an hour later Marge Menninger herself, with thirty armed grunts behind her, met the first party coming back along the beach. There were no casualties, or at least none from the Food Bloc, but they were carrying two people. One was in a sort of sling made from two jackets knotted together, the other on Sergeant Sweggert's shoulder, fireman-carry. They were both dead. When Sweggert put his burden down it was obvious why he had been easy to carry. Both legs were missing, and so was part of his head.

  The other body was less mutilated, so that Marge Menninger recognized her at once.

  It was Tinka.

  Marge stood numbly while Sweggert made his report. No Krinpit in sight; they had got away, so far that they couldn't even be heard. Both people were dead when they got there, but recently; the bodies were still warm. For that matter, they were still warm now. And the man had had a packet in a waterproof wrapping inside his shirt. Margie accepted it and tore it open. Microfiches—scores of them. The man's ID card, which showed that he was the Indonesian Tinka had gone to contact. A pair of child-sized spectacles—flat glass, not optically ground. Why glasses? For that matter, how had the two got here? Had they been caught as spies and then somehow escaped? And how had they come the long distance from the Greasy camp to the beach where they died?

  By the time they got back to the base, she had an answer to at least part of the question, because Dalehouse reported that the balloonists had spotted something farther down the beach that looked like the remains of a deflated rubber boat. She swung the tiny glasses from their elastic band as she listened, nodding, taking in all of it as information to process, not quite ready to take in the information of Tinka's death as a pain to feel.

  She looked down at the glasses. They were now almost opaque.

  "That's interesting," she said in a voice that was very nearly normal. "They must be photosensitive glass. Like indoor-outdoor sunglasses." She glanced up at the sullen red coal of Kung overhead. "Only what in the world would anybody want with them on Jem?"

  SEVENTEEN

  Six KILOMETERS down the shoreline from where he had
slain the Poison Ghosts, Sharn-igon paused in his flight to scratch out a shallow pit under a bluff. He needed to hide because he needed to rest.

  Digging was always dangerous for a Krinpit because of the Ghosts Below. But here it was unlikely they would be near— too close to the water. They did not like to risk their tunnels flooding. And the many-tree on the bluff above him was a good sign. The roots of the many-tree were distasteful to them.

  As he settled himself in, Sharn-igon wondered briefly what had become of his cobelligerent, the Poison Ghost Dulla. He did not feel concern, as one might for a fellow being. He did not think of Dulla in that way. Dulla was a weapon, a tool, without "being-ness." After they had slain the Poison Ghosts Dulla called "Greasies," they had both fled, and of course Dulla had fled faster and farther. Sharn-igon did not think of that as a betrayal. If he had been the nimble one and Dulla the slow-moving, he would certainly have done the same. Dulla's utility as a tool lay in his speed and in the way he was able to speak words to other Poison Ghosts that caused them to hesitate, to be uncertain, while Sharn-igon had time to come in upon them and kill. It was so very easy to kill Poison Ghosts! A few slashes, a blow with the club-claw—it took no more than that. Sometimes they had weapons, and Sharn-igon had learned to respect some of those weapons. But the two on the beach had had so little—a bright-sounding popgun whose tiny bullets bounced off his shell, a thing that squirted some sort of foul, stinging smell that made him feel queer and unpleasant for a moment but did not slow him in the kill. Such as they he could kill with or without his tool, the Poison Ghost Dulla.

  He switched his carapace back and forth to wedge himself deeper in his pit and rested, his hearing receptors watchful toward the water, his feelers drilled deep into the soil to listen for vibrations from any approaching Ghosts Below. It was the burrowers he feared, more than any danger from the water or the beach.

  Of course, in normal circumstances an adult Krinpit in shell was a match for a dozen of the Ghosts Below—as long as he could stay on the surface, or at least in sound of it. In the open, Ghosts Below seemed deaf, running almost at random. But these were not normal circumstances. Sharn-igon was not only weary; he felt sick. He felt irritable, tense, bloated— ready, he would have said to his he-wife (but Cheee-pruitt was months dead, his carapace dry), to stridulate and jump out of his shell. But it was not the right time for that. He was not due for many months yet, so it couldn't be normal pre-molt tension.

  Abruptly his sphincter loosened. He regurgitated everything he had eaten in a great flood—meat of deafworm, scraps of chitin of crabrat, half-digested fruits and fungi and leaves.

  Vomiting left him weak but calm. After resting for a moment, he covered the mess over and then methodically began to clean his shell. No doubt the Poison Ghosts were taking revenge for being killed on the beach. It had to be their scraps of flesh still caught in Sharn-igon's chelae that were making him ill. That—and the inner sickness that had claimed him when the Poison Ghosts first came to his city and began the remorseless chain of circumstance that had taken all joy from his life.

  Krinpit did not cry. They had no tear ducts; they had no eyes to have tear ducts in. They did have the emotion of sorrow, and no culture-driven taboos against expressing it in their own way. That way was stillness. A quiet Krinpit—or as close to quiet as a Krinpit could get—was a weeping Krinpit.

  For most of an hour, once he had polished the last dried particle of alien blood off his tympanum, Sharn-igon was nearly soundless: a rasp of claw against carapace, an occasional respiring moan, little else.

  Unbidden, sounds of happier times echoed in his mind. He heard Cheee-pruitt again, and the little female—what was her name?—whom they had impregnated and who bore their young. She had been a dulcet creature. She had had almost a personality of her own, along with the bittersweet appeal of any mated female, her young growing and eating inside her until too much was destroyed and she died, and the brood polished her carapace clean and emerged to the loud, exciting world of their wife-father's back.

  But everything was changed now.

  It was all the fault of the Poison Ghosts! Ever since the first of them had arrived and Cheee-pruitt—dear, lost Cheee-pruitt—had had the unwisdom to try to eat it, Sharn-igon's world had fallen apart. Not just Cheee-pruitt, all of it. The Krinpit he had mobilized against the Poison Ghosts Dulla called Greasies had been punished severely. His own village-mates had been attacked from the air in reprisal, and so many of them were dead. And how many had he succeeded in killing in return? A few. Hardly any. The two on the beach, the handful that he and Dulla had surprised at the outpost—not enough! And all of Dulla's plans had come to little: the Krinpit village nearest to the Fats had wavered and wobbled, promised to join in an attack and withdrawn the promise; and meanwhile all he and Dulla could do was skulk around like crabrats, looking for strays to attack and finding none. Until the two came out of their sinking vessel—

  There was a sound from the water.

  Sharn-igon froze. It was not possible for him to be wholly silent while he breathed at all, but he did his best.

  He listened out of his shallow cave and heard a small, almost inaudible, blurred echo from the water. A coracle. And in it what seemed to be a Poison Ghost.

  Another to kill? It was approaching. Sharn-igon thrust himself out of the cave and reared up to defend himself; and then he heard his own name shouted across the beach: "Sharn-igon!" And then those barbarous sounds that were the name of his mistrusted ally, or his truced foe: "OCK-med doo-LAH."

  He scuttled across the sand, half to greet Dulla, half still ready to kill, as Dulla yelled and pleaded. "Hurry! The Fats will be searching this whole coast. We must get out!"

  With Sharn-igon aboard, the coracle rode very low in the water. It could not easily sink. Its cellular shell entrapped too much air for that. But it could swamp.

  Crossing Broad Water it often did, and then both of them splashed and bailed and kept a watchful eye or ear for Ghosts Above until they could get under weigh again. The little sail helped them when the wind blew fair, but there was no keel. When the wind shifted, the sail had to come down and they had to paddle. It seemed to take forever; and Sharn-igon felt increasingly ill; and at every stroke or splash the grim recriminations continued.

  "But for you, my he-wife would still be alive."

  "You are foolish, Sharn-igon. He tried to kill us; it is not our fault he died of it."

  "And my village was attacked, and another village destroyed entirely, and I myself am ill."

  "Speak of something else, Sharn-igon. Speak of the promises your Krinpit made to join in the attack on the Fats and how they broke them."

  "I will speak of my sorrow and my anger, Ahmed Dulla."

  "Then speak also of mine! We too have suffered in fighting with you against the common enemy."

  "Suffered?"

  "Yes, suffered! Before my radio was destroyed—by you, Sharn-igon, by your clumsiness!—I could hear no voice from my camp. They may be dead, all of them!"

  "How many, Ahmed Dulla?"

  "A dozen or more!"

  "A dozen or more of you have then died. Of us, how many? Of persons, two hundred. Of females, forty. Of backlings and infants—"

  But it was not until they had crossed Broad Water and Sharn-igon heard the silence from his city that he perceived the immensity of the tragedy. There was no originated sound! There were only echoes—and what echoes!

  Always before, when he crossed Broad Water, the city had presented a bustling, beautiful sound. Not this time. He heard nothing. Nothing! No drone of immature males at the waterfront shredding the fish catch. No songs from the mold-eaters on the Great White Way. No hammering of stakes to build new palisades on the made land on the point. He heard the echo of his own sounds faintly returning to him and recognized the shadowy outline of the mooring rocks, a few sheds, one or two boats, some structures half destroyed, a litter of empty carapaces. Nothing else.

  The city was dead.


  The Poison Ghost Dulla chattered worriedly to him, and Sharn-igon made out the words. "Another attack! The place is empty. The Greasies must have come back to finish the job."

  He could not reply. Stillness overcame him, a great, mourning silence so deep that even the Poison Ghost turned toward him in wonder. "Are you ill? What is happening?"

  With great effort Sharn-igon scratched the words out on his tympanum. "You have killed my city and all my back-mates."

  "We? Certainly not! It could not have been the People's Republics; we have not the strength anymore. It must have been the Greasies."

  "Against whom you vowed to protect us!" roared Sharn-igon. He rose on hind legs to tower over Dulla, and the Poison Ghost cringed in fear. But Sharn-igon did not attack. He threw himself forward, out of the coracle, with a broad splat that sent the waves dancing. The water was shallow here. Sharn-igon managed to keep some of his hind feet on the oozy bottom, while enough of his breathing pores were above the surface to keep him from drowning. He charged up the shoreline, scattering the littered water in a V of foam.

  The tragedy made him still again, at every step and at each fresh echo. Dead! All dead. The streets empty except for abandoned carapaces, already dry. The shops untended. The homes deserted. Not a living male, not a female, not even any scrambling, chittering young.

  Dulla waded through the stink of dead and floating marine animals, towing the coracle and staring about. "What a horror!" he exclaimed. "We are brothers now more than ever, Sharn-igon."

  "All of my brothers are dead."