sweating. Ahra the Nahali man stood there, redneyed and laughing.
'You are frightened,' he whispered.
I didn't deny it.
'I can help you stop the cansins.' His eyes glittered like wet rubies and his teeth were white and sharp. 'It may not work, and you may die. Will you try it?'
He was daring me. He was hardly more than human than the brutes themselves, and he belonged with the rain and the hot indigo
I said, 'You don't want to help, Ahra. You want us to die.'
I could see the pale skin throbbing under his bony jaw. He laughed, soft alien laughter that made my back hair stir and prickle.
'You humans,' he whispered. 'Trampling and spoiling. The middle swamps have suffered you, greedy after oil and plumes and ti. But you we can fight.'
He jerked his round, glistening head toward the sound of destruction. 'The death from the deep swamps, no. You deserve to die, you humans. You went meddling with something too big even for your pride. But because the cansins killed my mate and our first young....'
He hunched up. I thought he was going to flop on his belly like a cayman in the mud. His teeth gleamed, sharp and savage.
'Legend says the cansins were once the wisest race on Venus. They were worshipped as gods by the little pre-human creatures of the swamp edges. They were going to be the reasoning lords of a planet.
'But nature made a mistake. Perhaps some mutation that couldn't be stopped. I don't know. Anyway, the females grew until their one thought was to find enough food. The males tried to balance this. Most of their strength was in their minds, anyway. But they couldn't.
'The cansins took to eating their worshippers. At the same time the number of eggs they laid grew smaller and smaller. Finally, the swamp-edgers drove them out, back into the deep swamps.
'They've been there ever since, going farther and farther on the path of evolution, dwindling in numbers, always hungry, and hating the humans who robbed them of their future. Even us they hate, because we go erect and have speech.The females are not independent. The female controls the community mind – they must have unity to exist at all.
'If you could control the female....'
I thought of the little creature in the ball of green fire. I shivered, and the pit of my stomach pinched up. I said,' Yeah? How?'
He chuckled at me. 'It may mean death. Will you risk it?'
I didn't have to. I could beat it back to the ship, maybe even rescue some of the gang, with Jaris's help. Then I thought about Beccie and the way she cried down my neck that night in the tank and what would happen to us if we didn't get the animals rounded up. I thought – oh, hell, why does a guy ever do anything? I don't know. Maybe I thought I'd never get across the field to the ship anyhow.
I said, 'Spill it, you she-snake. What do I do?'
'Get Quera,' he said, and went off through the hot rain, back into the plastic shack. The door slammed shut. Jaris and I were alone in the dark.
I said, 'Will you help me?'
'Of course.'
I looked down the street toward the landing field. I felt tired, suddenly. Gone in the knees and weak, and sick to vomiting with fear.
'Here comes Gow,' I said. 'She's got seven or eight guys with guns. Just keep the critters off us until we get through with the cansins, and try not to kill any more than you can help.'
Good old Jix, thinking about money even then. Gow came up.We talked a minute, just the things that had to be said, and then I asked, 'Anybody have an idea where Quera might be?'
'Yeah,' said Gow slowly. 'She was in the ginmill next to the one we was in. Drunk. I heard her singin' when I went by. I think the big apes wrecked it.'
WE started off up the muddy street, more as though we'd been wound up to go somewhere and couldn't stop than like women with a purpose. The cansins were close. Awful close. You could hear them sucking and slopping in the muck. The rain fell straight down, almost solid, and the air was thick and hot.
We did a lot of shouting. Some women came out of the shacks to join us, but nobody had seen Quera since the trouble started. We had trouble with the animals in the streets. The vapor snakes got one woman, and an Ionian hru poisoned one guy so bad she died the next day. We had to kill a couple of big babies that wouldn't scare off.
And we found the ginmill. Gow was right. It was wrecked, and there were things scattered around amongst the splinters. I was glad it was dark.
'Well,' I said, 'that's that. We'll just have to do what we can with the blasters.' It wouldn't be much.We didn't carry any heavy artillery, and a cansin is awfully hard to stop.
'Any you guys wanta scram, do it now. The rest of you come on.'
I took a step. Something squirmed under my foot, squeaked, and began to curse in a voice like a katydid's.
'My God,' I said. 'It's Quera.'
I picked her up. Her rubbery little body was slick with mud. She spat and hiccoughed, and snarled.
'Of course it's Quera. Fine thing, leaving me in the mud like that. I might ha' drowned.' She started cursing again in Low Martian, which is her native tongue. She's a Diran from the sea-bottom pits of Shun.
Somebody laughed. It sounded hysterical. 'The little lush! She don't even know what's happened!'
And she didn't. The cansins hadn't even seen her. She'd just been tromped into the mud and left there, unharmed.
Gow caught her breath suddenly, and somebody whimpered. I looked up. I couldn't see much, in the rain and the indigo dark, but I didn't have to see. I knew what was coming.
A little vicious splotch of living green against the darkness, and underneath it four huge shadows, trampling knee-deep in mud, making toward a plastic hut filled with human beings.
I said softly, 'Quera, I never thought you were such a hell of a wonderful hypnotist.'
She twinged in my hands. Her anger almost burned me. She started to speak, but I stopped her.
'Here's your chance to prove it, chum. See that little green light floating there? Well, go to it, Quera. And it had better be good, or it's curtains – for Nahru and all of us.'
I walked over toward the cansins, holding Quera in my hands.
THE brutes must have sensed us.They stopped and wheeled around. Quera shivered. She was beginning to understand things. She snarled, 'How do you expect me to do my act? No platform – nothing! You're crazy, Jix! Let's get out of here.'
I shook her. 'Put that baby to sleep. Make her and her harem go out of town, north. There's quicksand there. Go on, damn you!' She cursed me. You could smell the fear rising hot from us all. I heard feet running behind me, and then more, going away. Quera said, 'All right, you crazy fool. Raise me up. Hold your hands flat.'
I made a platform out of my palms. And the cansins started our way
Gow whispered, 'Don't shoot. Don't anybody shoot.' I don't think she knew then, that there wasn't anybody left to shoot but herself and Jaris.
The cansins were huge and solid, behemoths carved from the night. They towered over us, and the green light pulsed. My jaw hung open and I couldn't breathe, and I'd have run only my joints were all water.
Quera went into her act.
She began to show color. Out of nothing her body started to glow, from inside. You could see the round blurred shape of her, and the phosphorescence of her guts, showing through. First red, savage as a punch in the face, and then all the rest of the spectrum, sometimes one color, sometimes a swirl of them.
Her body changed shape. I could feel the queer rubbery movement of it on my hands. I remembered the rubes I'd seen standing around Quera's platform, their eyes drawn half out of their heads by the shifting lines and colors. It worked with them. But not here. The cansins came on. The green light flared a little brighter, and that was all. Habit and control were so strong that not even the females paid much attention to Quera. I could see the rain smoking
I I heir huge black shoulders.They were right on top of us.
Quera gasped, 'I can't do it!' Her glow deadened. I shook her. I
/>
'I knew you were a phony! You two-bit yentzer! Jaris, slow 'em down, can't you?'
Quera began to shimmer again. Jaris faded in, hardly visible in the darkness. I heard her tentacles whiplashing across hard flesh.
One of the cansins screamed. The green light did a sharp dip and swirl. And I yelled, 'Gow! Speak to Gerty!'
The terrifying forward march slowed a little. Quera was churning colors out of her guts as though her life depended on it – which it did. Gow stepped forward a little.
'Gerty,' she said. 'Gerty, you ugly, slab-sided, leftnhanded –'
She cursed him, affectionately. I never heard anything like her voice. I wanted to cry. In Quera's faint hypnotic glow I saw the green eyes of the nearest male watching, looking wide and queer.
The female was angry, now. Angry and scared.You could tell by the vicious brightness of her. We decided afterward that her light was the same kind a glownworm carries around, only stronger. She was fighting. Fighting to hold those four minds against the attraction of Quera's shifting glow.
She'd have done it, too, it it hadn't been for Gow. Gow, standing in die hot rain and cursing Gerty with tears in her voice.
Gerty screamed. Suddenly, for no reason, a strange uncertain ry. He moved. A sort of shudder ran through the other three. It was a little like a wall cracking. The female burned savagely.
The females were watching Quera, now. Gerty had made the breach. Now the community mind was fastened on the hypnotic little Martian. I could see their green eyes, wide and glassy, their snaky heads nodding a little, trying to follow the flowing outlines.
The female began to dim. She shivered, and lurched a couple of times, still trying to fight. Gow's voice went on, hoarsely, and Gerty whimpered. The female floated a little closer. I could see, suddenly, what kept her up. Wings, like a hummingbird's, blurred with motion.
They slowed, and the green light dimmed. She began to bob a little in the hot rain, watching Quera.
Quera shivered. 'They're under,' she sighed. 'They're under.'
'Send them out. North, to the quicksands.' My arms and shoulders ached and I was swaying on my feet. I hardly heard Quera's I dreamy voice. I did hear the slow, obedient noise of their great feet slogging away, the last female cansin a dull green mote above them.
And I heard Gow crying. We got the last of the animals back by noon of the next day. We did what we could for Nahru. Thank god our own beasts hadn't done much damage. We left a lot of Beamish's credits to help out, and took the old tub off away from there. Beccie Shannon recovered nicely. I'm still herding her Imperial Washout around the Triangle. We're not doing so hot without Gerty, but what the hell – we're used to the sewage lock.
And if anyone has a cansin she wants to sell.... Thanks, chum, but we're not in the market. Now, or ever.
I sometimes wonder if there are any more of them in the deep swamps, waiting for their mate to come back.
THE END
Artwork by Mark Sebastian
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JEKKARA PRESS
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Coming Soon
The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn
Slave Ship of Space – Tara Loughead
The Saturn Mistress – Tara Loughead
The Gender Switch Adventures
The Misplaced Battleship Retargeted – Harley Harrison
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